Developing a systematic "science of the past" to create our future

Over the last 50 years, the ‘‘great acceleration’’ in human development (Hibbard et al., 2007) has impacted our social systems, ecosystems and climate in unprecedented ways, simultaneously escalating and exposing the global interconnectivity of humans and the rest of nature. In academia, researchers have observed, documented and debated dimensions of these changes— but largely within their own disciplines. We now face a profound failure of knowledge: most people are unaware of their most basic ecological dependencies. As we look ahead and consider what continuing on this pathway would mean for life as we know it, the limitations of our knowledge systems are becoming uncomfortably evident. Yet meeting the challenge of providing a new integrative understanding means we need to do unfamiliar and even uncomfortable things.