Dark clouds: regulatory possibilities

This book arises at a time when our skies are dark, and are becoming darker. There is now irrefutable evidence that the temperate era of the last 12,000 years, the Holocene era, is drawing to a close. We are moving towards a series of tipping points that could well bring an end to the nurturing ‘ecological assemblages’ and Schumacher's ‘natural capital’, which provided humans and many other species with the provision of essential ‘ecosystem services’. During this now vanishing era, the earth has been characterised by what Rockström et al. have termed ‘planetary boundaries’ that provide a ‘safe operating space for humanity’.