While, for most of its history, mankind constituted a relatively insignificant category of life on Earth, in the recent time anthropic impacts are the cause of a new era called the Anthropocene. Historically speaking, the human-nature relation has always been determined by an interplay between technology, the economy, and our numbers. Since in the last years, the societal body is growing, we should consider that human costume, which is the core of the sustainability problem cannot be changed easily. People want to maintain a high standard of living, without considering environmental qualities and functions. As highlighted by the authors, the sustainability problem cannot be separated from ethical issues today. What is worth noting is that the human expansion and almost complete dominance of Earth is a threat and that the causes of this threat are found in our own understandings and priorities. Present levels of control, domestication, and exploitation contradict ecological balance, and a crucial part of the necessary change is the subordination of economic activities and systems under a realistic and ethically generous model for sustainability. Evolutionary coexistence forms such a model and could become a framework for sustainable human decision-making. Within this framework, the suggested changes in economic conceptualization and practice would form the basis for an economy which would serve the planet and its inhabitants over many generations instead of maximizing output and consumption for a temporary human elite. The smaller role of human societies in terms of sheer size and dominance would be well compensated also with anthropocentric points of departure. When economic activity focuses on basic needs, quality of life and profound relations, well-being could be improved on material levels somewhere in-between today’s extremes. To conclude, contrary to conventional ‘sustainable development’, the strategy of evolutionary coexistence gives human society the possibility to survive and prosper in a just and peaceful way. To avoid the crises and conflict, which will intensify if we continue our journey towards the tyranny of the circumstances, we ‘just’ need to prove that we are morally and biologically apt to change.
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