May 2023 - New Ways of Seeing the World: Big History and Great Transition

At stake now is not just the fate of particular communities or nations, but the fate of humanity as a whole, and of the many other life forms with which we share biological kinship and a common home. [...] By the end of the last ice age, almost twelve thousand years ago, humans could be found from the Arctic to the tropics, along the world’s shorelines, and in its savannas, river lands, and deserts. [...] In the post-ice-age era of agricultural technologies, human numbers and impacts on the biosphere increased faster and faster, building to the explosive changes of modern times, as new technologies and social arrangements gave us more and 3 | Big History and Great Transition | GTI FORUM more power to manipulate our fellow creatures and transform the earth’s surface, oceans, and atmosphere. [...] “Big History” courses adopt the radical strategy of setting human and planetary history within the much larger history of the whole Universe, to construct a modern origin story based on the best recent research and scholarship.3 That story could not have been told even a century ago. [...] It drives much of the work of the United Nations, framing the Sustainable Development Goals formally adopted by all members in 2015; it lies behind the work of charities such as Médecins sans Frontières; and it shapes global events such as the annual broadcasting of New Year’s Day fireworks displays, or the Olympic Games, in which nations compete in friendly ways within a larger world community.