Our respect and deep condolences to the whanau and friends of Will Steffen. We are with you all in our feelings of compassion, sadness, loss and love. His passing is a sea change for our group as having come to know Will as a herald, beacon, friend and ally - Tears on the faces of many, are our tears.
Dr. Steffen leaves a legacy of exceptional research that has greatly impacted our understanding of the Anthropocene and the role of humanity within it. He pioneered Earth System Science at the Australian National University and was the former executive director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre. He was a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and co-founded the Climate Council in response to the disbandment of the Australian Government’s Climate Commission in 2013. His work deepens our understanding of how human activities affect the Earth's natural systems and the need for urgent action to mitigate the effects of climate change.
Dr Will Steffen
25 June 1947 - 29 January 2023
Meeting Will is a story about seeking knowledge and finding a collaborator who was available, especially when our project was in its infancy. He inspired, guided and provided courage to challenge norms as if there is no tomorrow and walk into the ‘Fires of No Return’ - James K Baxter. I want to pay our respects by sharing some of Will’s life work that we know and how we met. I hope this allows for the sharing of his ideas, that you may also begin a journey to understand humanity’s place with ‘The Rest of Nature’ - a beautiful expression of his.
Earth as A Single System
Above: "The Blue Marble" is a famous photograph of the Earth taken on December 7, 1972, by the crew of the Apollo 17 spacecraft en route to the Moon at a distance of about 29,000 kilometres (18,000 mi). It shows Africa, Antarctica, and the Arabian Peninsula.
Will is the father of Earth System Science and used this perspective to illustrate Earth working as a single system. His book ‘Global Change and the Earth System: A Planet under Pressure’, published in 2004, looks at the sub-systems within and how they relate to one another in continuous feedback cycles.
Our story began in 2017, listening to an excellent Podcast by Radio New Zealand’s Kim Hill. I heard Will’s clarity as a calm semi-American, partly Australian voice explaining how Human activity shortened the Holocene by around 20,000 years, followed by practical information about what is needed and when. In summary, we are rapidly exiting from the extended period of climatic stability into an exorable uncertainty, the Hothouse Earth.
My niece sent the link after discussions we had not long after I had returned from the Horse River Fire aftermath in Northern Canada. This fire is also referred to as “The Beast” by the people of Fort McMurray that encountered it directly. The remote town had suffered at the hands of the global scaling to unearth minerals from the geological past and eject them into the geological future as if without consequence. We began to consider possible alignments with the scientific community that thought holistically about the challenges ahead by connecting the seemingly disparate worlds of human consumers & producers with the living Earth.
As Will’s work makes global interrelationships clear. I wrote to Will not long after reading about his Planetary Boundaries (see below) research and mapping Canada’s Boreal Forest where ‘the Beast’ occurredwith 16 other sub-systems as `tipping point of collapse’. He replied…
‘Yes, there is quite a bit of concern about the future of boreal forests, and, if fact, it is one on the carbon feedbacks we cite in our 2018 Hothouse Earth. A lot more work needs to be done to determine how much carbon could be lost from these forests and what level of forcing would be required to drive this carbon loss.’
And away we went…
PLANETARY BOUNDARIES
Above: Current status of the control variables for seven of the planetary boundaries. The green zone is the safe operating space, the yellow represents the zone of uncertainty (increasing risk), and the red is a high-risk zone. The planetary boundary itself lies at the intersection of the green and yellow zones.
Planetary Boundaries states that there are critical limits or boundaries in the Earth's environment beyond which human activities could severely alter the planet's functioning and negatively impact its ability to support life. Nine planetary boundaries were identified, including climate change, loss of biodiversity, ocean acidification, and others, and human activities have already exceeded several of these boundaries. The theory calls for a new paradigm in human development that recognizes the limits to growth imposed by the Earth's environment and seeks to maintain these boundaries for sustainability.
His ability to respond to emails almost immediately was a delight. Eventually, in the pursuit of understanding Landscape Fire, I was in Australia, sitting a Gus’s Cafe in Canberra, discussing ways to visualise tipping points and feedbacks.
During the Black Summer fires, we corresponded by exchanging photographs of the South Eastern Australian Landscape from my 5,000-kilometer journey from Queensland to Gippsland. He replied on the 26th of January 2020 about his well-being with precise information at hand.
“I'm OK and so far Canberra has escaped any serious impacts. We had a fire last week close the airport but it was brought under control before any serious damage could be done. Our biggest concern, though, are the fires to the south in the Snowy Mountains region. They have the potential to move north along the mountain ranges and threaten Canberra from the south and west. This is where the disastrous 2003 fires came from.
The statistics around these fires are horrific, and casualties continue to mount. So far, over 10 million hectares of forest have been burnt (the area of England is around 13 million hectares), 32 people have been killed and around 3,000 properties destroyed. Over 1 billion animals (mammals, birds, reptiles) have been burnt to death. Over 900 million tonnes of CO2 have been emitted to the atmosphere and that will surely rise to over 1 billion tonnes. By comparison, Australia's annual emissions from fossil fuel combustion and land-use change is around 530 million tonnes.”
Kooraban National PArk, Jan 2020.
The landscape near the township of Cobargo, NSW, recorded temperatures of over 1300C. Hot enough to shatter granite boulders and bake stone. Clean-up crews at the time explained that it was equivalent to a thermo nuclear device.
Photograph by Alan McFetridge January 2020.
As many of us are saddened by the loss of Will, his work has provided a platform for the next generations to rethink and reshape what life can be about.
Ngā mihi,
Alan