The article, led by Carl Folke of the Anthropocene Laboratory at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and co-authored by an international team spanning ecology, microbiology, hydrology, economics and the arts, argues that the notion of ‘people and nature’ being intertwined is not merely a philosophical or ethical stance. It is a hard biochemical reality. The human body, the authors contend, is an open living system in continuous exchange with the chemical elements of the Earth, and the movement of those elements into and out of our bodies is mediated at every step by living organisms: bacteria, fungi, plants, plankton, insects, birds, fish and mammals. To be alive, in the most literal sense, is to be threaded through with the web of life.

The evidence begins with the periodic table itself. The human body contains at least sixty detectable chemical elements, of which roughly twenty are essential for basic metabolism. Six elements—oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, calcium and phosphorus—constitute ninety-nine percent of body mass, forming the scaffolding of bones, tissues and cells. Five more—sulphur, potassium, sodium, chlorine and magnesium—are critical for nerve conduction, muscle contraction and fluid balance. Trace elements such as iron, zinc, copper, iodine, selenium and cobalt act as cofactors in enzymes, enable oxygen transport, support immune defence and drive DNA transcription. Crucially, the body cannot manufacture any of these from scratch; they must be acquired from external sources, which means from the biosphere.

But the acquisition is rarely direct, and this is where the paper’s technical depth becomes remarkable. Consider the gut microbiome. Over half the cells in a healthy human body belong to microbes, and these communities perform functions integral to whole-organism health. The gut is dominated by obligate anaerobic bacteria whose metabolisms mirror those of Earth’s earliest life forms, which emerged some 3.7 billion years ago in oxygen-poor environments using sulphur and nitrate as electron acceptors. In our large intestine today, their descendants ferment dietary fibre into short-chain fatty acids such as butyrate, a primary energy source for intestinal epithelial cells and a signalling molecule in the gut-brain axis. These metabolites influence immune responses, hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis activity and even the synthesis of serotonin. In parallel, gut microbes synthesise B vitamins—including up to thirty-seven percent of a healthy adult’s daily folate requirement—and mediate the bioavailability of minerals such as calcium, magnesium, iron and phosphorus, competing with our own cells for limiting metals in a dynamic the authors call the human-microbiome-element symbiosis.

Extending outward, the paper traces how planetary-scale biogeochemical cycles deliver those essential elements to the human body through air, water and food. Roughly half of the oxygen in every breath is produced by oceanic photosynthesis, much of it by microscopic phytoplankton such as diatoms and the cyanobacterium Prochlorococcus marinus, a single species responsible for as much as five percent of global photosynthesis. On land, tropical forests account for about thirty-four percent of terrestrial oxygen production. Yet the authors stress that current biomes collectively produce and consume approximately the same amount of oxygen, meaning today’s atmospheric oxygen is a legacy of geological burial processes, predominantly in the ocean, accumulated over millions of years. In this sense, humanity is entangled not only with contemporary ecosystems but with the metabolic work of life across deep time.

Water, described by the authors as the ‘flowing bloodstream’ of the biosphere, offers another vivid illustration. Humans require a continuous turnover of one to six litres of water daily, and the patterns of freshwater circulation that make this possible are not simply physical. Terrestrial ecosystems store soil moisture, sustain evaporation and generate downwind rainfall. Around forty to fifty percent of precipitation over land is recycled by evapotranspiration from plants and soil, and a barren planet would generate less than a third of that moisture flux. The freshwater we drink dissolves calcium, magnesium and iron from rocks and soils, delivering them into the body. Meanwhile, food production depends on even larger volumes of green water: an adequate daily diet requires three thousand to four thousand litres of evapotranspiration per person, with croplands in as many as 155 countries receiving up to forty percent of their annual precipitation from forests located in other nations through atmospheric moisture transport.

Soil and marine ecosystems complete the picture. Soil organisms, representing nearly sixty percent of Earth’s species, decompose organic matter and mineralise bound nutrients into plant-available forms. A single gram of soil can contain up to ten billion microorganisms. Earthworms deepen rooting zones, nematodes stimulate bacterial mineralisation, and mycorrhizal fungi extend the foraging reach of plant roots through hyphal networks, trading soil nutrients for plant sugars in a mutualism stabilised by reciprocal rewards. Because our DNA depends on phosphorus, and most plants require mycorrhizal fungi to acquire it, a substantial portion of the phosphorus in human genetic material has likely passed through a fungal network. In the ocean, upwelling systems supply trace metals that constrain marine productivity, and seafood acts as a concentrated route through which marine biogeochemistry becomes human micronutrition—iodine from seaweed and fish, selenium and omega-3 fatty acids concentrated through trophic levels.

Animals also function as what ecologists call ‘mobile links’, redistributing nutrients across landscapes and ecosystems in ways that directly affect human food security. Baleen whales recycle iron into surface waters, supporting phytoplankton blooms. Seabird guano transfers between ten thousand and one hundred thousand tonnes of phosphorus to land each year, and in Greenland the guano of thirty-three million pairs of little auks fertilises soils that sustain hares, geese, foxes, reindeer and muskoxen relied upon by local human communities. Salmon returning from the sea carry marine-derived nutrients into freshwater and forests, while insect pollinators were found to be directly responsible for more than twenty percent of vitamin A, folate and vitamin E intake in vulnerable smallholder communities in Nepal.

Against this backdrop, the paper delivers a stark warning about the Anthropocene. Human activity—industrialisation, fossil-fuel combustion, synthetic fertiliser use, monoculture farming, pesticide application and the proliferation of novel entities such as plastics and PFAS—is reshuffling the life-element relationships upon which human bodies depend. Soil micronutrient deficiencies are spreading, marine fish biomass and their cycling rates have been nearly halved by fisheries, and microbial communities are being compositionally and functionally altered by antibiotics, urban infrastructure and intensified agriculture. Eighty percent of people in low-income countries now live with degraded land, unhealthy air and water stress. Six of nine planetary boundaries have been exceeded, and the technosphere—the sum of human-made material—has, as of 2020, exceeded the dry weight of all living biomass on Earth. Yet none of this, the authors insist, implies independence. It implies disruption.

The synthesis concludes with a call for what the authors term ‘stewardship of life-element mediation’: a form of biosphere stewardship that is not merely cognitive or ethical but embodied—a set of lived practices and institutions that sustain the living relations making human existence materially possible. They point to emerging domains such as microbiome health, agroecology, rewilding, marine protected areas and nature-based solutions as evidence of a growing practical knowledge base that works with living mediators of elemental flow rather than treating food, water, health and biodiversity as separate concerns. Being human, the authors argue, means being an open system threaded through with bacteria, fungi, plants, plankton, birds, whales and the chemical elements they mobilise. Life keeps us alive. Recognising this as a biogeochemical fact, rather than a metaphor, may be among the most consequential scientific reframings of our time.

Subject of Research: The biochemistry of human interdependence with life-mediated chemical element cycles in the Anthropocene biosphere

Article Title: Humans: Intertwined with life and the basic elements in the Anthropocene biosphere

Article References: Humans: Intertwined with life and the basic elements in the Anthropocene biosphere. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-026-02474-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s13280-026-02474-z

Keywords: Anthropocene, biosphere, biogeochemical cycles, human microbiome, gut-brain axis, photosynthesis, water cycle, soil health, mycorrhizal fungi, phytoplankton, planetary boundaries, biosphere stewardship

The Anthropocene concept was coined in recognition that human activities have ended the unusually benign environmental regime that characterized the Holocene, the epoch that encompassed the entire history of agriculture, cities and written civilization. But as the term migrated from stratigraphy into economics, politics, museum curation, education and the arts, it accumulated divergent and sometimes contradictory definitions. Some scholars stretch the Anthropocene back thousands or even tens of thousands of years to capture the cumulative footprint of early farming, mining and land clearance. The authors argue that while such extended interpretations portray the totality of anthropogenic change, they obscure the quantitatively established, dramatic rupture in Earth system behavior that began in the mid-twentieth century, and they cannot be defined in formal chronostratigraphic terms.

The technical case for the 1952 boundary rests on the stratigraphic record. Sediments deposited from the mid-twentieth century onward carry a distinctive and globally synchronous suite of signals: radionuclide fallout from atmospheric nuclear weapons testing, spheroidal carbonaceous fly-ash particles from fossil fuel combustion, a sharp rise in plastics and microplastics, and profound shifts in fossil assemblages driven by global species translocations and industrial agriculture. High-resolution analyses of archives such as the varved sediments of Crawford Lake in Canada have demonstrated that these markers appear together within a narrow time window, providing the kind of precise, correlatable geological evidence that formal epoch boundaries require. Human-driven environmental change of earlier millennia, by contrast, is diachronous and regionally variable, leaving no single globally synchronous horizon.

The authors emphasize that the distinction is not merely academic. A formally defined Anthropocene epoch enables quantitative and qualitative comparison between the stable Holocene and the increasingly unstable Anthropocene, a comparison already embedded in influential frameworks such as the planetary boundaries concept. That framework, which assesses how far humanity has pushed Earth system processes beyond safe operating limits, depends on a Holocene baseline against which modern departures can be measured. Six of nine planetary boundaries are currently judged to have been transgressed, and the annual Planetary Health Check tracks the deterioration. Without a stabilized Anthropocene definition, the authors warn, the conceptual foundation for such comparisons becomes blurred, weakening the scientific signal that policymakers most need to hear.

The Perspective also documents how deeply the Anthropocene idea has already penetrated institutions beyond geology. Dedicated research centers, policy programs and educational initiatives now bear its name. The United Nations Development Programme has framed new threats to human security in Anthropocene terms, the European Environment Agency has explored what it would mean to exit the Anthropocene, and the OECD’s PISA 2025 science framework incorporates agency in the Anthropocene as an educational goal. International law is grappling with the concept as well: the International Law Association’s committee on sea level rise has traced the implications of moving from Holocene assumptions of stable coastlines to an Anthropocene reality of rising seas, and the International Court of Justice issued a landmark advisory opinion on states’ obligations in respect of climate change in July 2025.

Underlying all of these applications is a single, consequential insight: the Earth system transformation of the Anthropocene is systemic, not piecemeal. Greenhouse gas accumulation, ocean warming and acidification, biodiversity loss, sediment cycle disruption, nutrient overloading and the spread of novel materials such as plastics and concrete are coupled processes, each amplifying the others. The authors argue that because the disruption is systemic, political responses must also be systemic rather than ad hoc. A unified Anthropocene epoch, they contend, would facilitate systematic, actionable climate and environmental policies by giving scientists, lawyers, economists and politicians a shared, precisely bounded reference point for what has changed and how quickly.

The geological evidence for that change is now overwhelming in its breadth. Humans have become the most significant global geomorphological driving force of the twenty-first century, moving more material than all natural erosion processes combined. The physical technosphere, the sum of human-made structures, machines and waste, has reached planetary scale, and its discarded products, from broiler chicken bones to concrete and plastics, are forming recognizable technofossils that will persist in the rock record. Earth’s sediment budget has been fundamentally reorganized, deltas and coastal wetlands are being transformed faster than they can adapt, and palaeontological signatures of the Anthropocene, including global species translocations and mass mortality assemblages, are demonstrably distinct from those of any previous epoch. Meanwhile, monitoring shows the acceleration continuing: record ocean temperatures in 2024, record-low Antarctic sea ice, warming-intensified drought, and documented declines in insect populations and wild mammal biomass.

The authors do not dismiss the value of broader, extended uses of the term. Environmental historians and archaeologists have shown that human reshaping of landscapes stretches back millennia, and understanding that deep history matters for questions of responsibility, equity and long-term change. But they insist that these interpretations represent a concept distinct from the Anthropocene epoch. Conflating the two, they argue, produces the worst of both worlds: the dramatic mid-twentieth-century rupture, which is the clearest and most politically urgent signal, gets diluted into a diffuse background of ancient impacts, while the genuine achievements of pre-industrial societies are recast as the origin of a crisis they did not cause. Clarity, they maintain, serves both scholarship and justice.

Looking forward, the Perspective maps out a research agenda in which a stabilized Anthropocene definition becomes a working tool across disciplines. In Earth science, it would sharpen the study of the anthropoclastic rock cycle, legacy contaminants re-released by melting glaciers, and the fate of microplastics as planetary markers. In law and governance, it would underpin efforts to adapt maritime boundaries, environmental obligations and international institutions to a planet no longer governed by Holocene assumptions. In education, it would anchor curricula that teach Earth system thinking and futures literacy. In the arts and humanities, it would provide a common chronological anchor for museums, exhibitions and imaginative work that seeks to make planetary change perceptible. The central purpose of a clear, formalized definition, the authors conclude, is to enable unified communication across the Earth sciences, social sciences, humanities, society and political and legal fora, so that the scale of the transformation can be grasped, debated and addressed with the seriousness it demands.

Subject of Research: Definition and interdisciplinary applications of the Anthropocene epoch

Article Title: Future directions for Anthropocene research and its applications

Article References: Zalasiewicz, J., Thomas, J. A., Cohen, K. M., Vidas, D., Sörlin, S., Waters, C. N., Head, M. J., Summerhayes, C. P., Leinfelder, R., Wallenhorst, N., Syvitski, J., McNeill, J. R., Robin, L., Williams, M., Cearreta, A., Ivar do Sul, J. A., Park, B. S., McCarthy, F. M. G., Han, Y., … Kuwae, M. (2026). Future directions for Anthropocene research and its applications. Nature Reviews Earth & Environment, 7(9), 633-646. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43017-026-00820-z

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s43017-026-00820-z

Keywords: Anthropocene, Holocene, Great Acceleration, chronostratigraphy, planetary boundaries, Earth system science, Crawford Lake, technosphere, microplastics, geological epoch, environmental policy, international law

The intellectual stakes are considerable. Current fiscal practice across most advanced economies remains anchored in the New Economic Consensus, an offshoot of neoclassical economics that treats budget deficits as inherently inflationary, subordinates fiscal policy to central bank interest rates, and largely ignores the environmental damage generated by economic activity. Sustainability researchers have sharpened their critique of this orthodoxy, arguing that its core assumptions fail to capture ecological limits, nonlinear dynamics, and distributional realities. Dimitrieva’s analysis instead draws on post-Keynesian traditions and Modern Monetary Theory, which hold that currency-issuing governments are not financially constrained in the way households are, and that the true limits on public spending are real resources, productive capacity, and inflation risk.

The six frameworks differ profoundly on the desirability of growth itself. Green Growth, championed by the OECD, the UN Environment Programme and the World Bank, rests on the hope of decoupling GDP expansion from environmental harm through technological innovation, carbon pricing and circular economy practices. Yet critics, most prominently in work questioning whether green growth is possible at all, point to the speculative nature of absolute decoupling and the stubborn problem of rebound effects, where efficiency gains simply fuel more consumption. Degrowth takes the opposite stance, insisting that wealthy nations must democratically and deliberately scale down energy and material throughput without compromising wellbeing. Post-Growth, grounded in Herman Daly’s steady-state economics, envisions the destination: an economy of constant stocks and flows operating within the planet’s regenerative and absorptive capacities, where knowledge and culture may flourish even as material extraction stabilises.

Doughnut Economics, developed by Kate Raworth, supplies the study’s normative compass. Its visual logic is elegant: an inner ring of social foundations, from water and housing to gender equality and political voice, derived from the Sustainable Development Goals, and an outer ring of planetary boundaries drawn from the Earth-system science of Johan Rockström and colleagues, whose recent work shows humanity has already breached six of nine boundaries. The band between the rings is the safe and just space where humanity can thrive. Notably, the analysis highlights a structural weakness of the SDGs themselves: their economic assumptions remain largely neoclassical, and Goal 8’s pursuit of GDP growth can directly conflict with the climate and biodiversity goals, a tension researchers have quantified as a sustainable development oxymoron. The paper argues the Goals need recalibration to incorporate distributive and biophysical insights from the more transformative paradigms.

Modern Monetary Theory plays the operational role in the proposed synthesis. Because monetarily sovereign governments, such as those of the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Japan, spend in currencies they issue, they need not wait for tax revenue or bond markets to fund transformative investment. Taxes, in this framing, create demand for the currency, manage inflation, and redistribute income; they are not the financing precondition for spending. This insight, the paper notes, became impossible to ignore after the 2008 financial crisis and the pandemic, when governments ran large deficits without fiscal collapse. MMT therefore unlocks what the author calls fiscal space: the capacity to finance universal public services, renewable infrastructure and a Job Guarantee, an employment buffer stock first proposed by Hyman Minsky that stabilises both prices and livelihoods.

The crucial move is differentiation. The study argues that Green Growth strategies are best suited to low-income countries and sectors naturally amenable to greening, such as renewable energy, transport and tourism, where expanding access to public goods remains essential and clean-technology leapfrogging offers genuine development gains. Degrowth-oriented policies, by contrast, fit high-income, high-consumption economies, where deliberately downscaling throughput is vital for staying within planetary boundaries. These differentiated pathways then converge on a Post-Growth steady-state economy, anchored in the Doughnut’s vision of a safe and just space. The paper’s conceptual pathway diagram traces this progression: MMT-enabled fiscal space at the start, context-specific Green Growth or Degrowth transitions in the middle, and Doughnut-guided steady-state convergence at the end.

The comparative analysis is conducted across five dimensions: vision of the economy, relation to growth, role of the state, role of money, and concrete use of fiscal tools. On money, the frameworks split revealingly. Green Growth treats green finance, green bonds and climate-adjusted central bank operations as instruments within capitalist structures, a critique voiced by degrowth scholars who see financialisation commodifying nature. Degrowth and Doughnut Economics propose more radical redesigns, including full-reserve banking, complementary currencies, and the democratisation of money creation, treating money as a social relationship rather than a neutral medium. MMT reframes money as a sovereign public utility limited only by inflation and real resources. The Sustainable Development Goals camp promotes sovereign green bonds and retooled central bank mandates to close the vast financing gap, particularly the pandemic recovery gap widening between rich and poor nations.

On fiscal instruments themselves, the convergences are striking. Nearly every framework endorses progressive, equity-oriented taxation: shifting the tax base away from labour and toward wealth, resource extraction, rent, inheritance and ecologically harmful consumption. Degrowth scholarship adds minimum and maximum income thresholds, universal basic income, and shorter working weeks, though a systematic review of fifteen years of degrowth research found concrete, empirically grounded proposals remain scarce. Here the author identifies a critical blind spot: mainstream degrowth and post-growth literature often defaults to orthodox fiscal framing, assuming wealth taxes must precede public spending. MMT dissolves that sequencing problem. Eco-social policies can be funded directly through sovereign monetary capacity, with taxation serving afterwards as the instrument for demand management, inflation control and redistribution, tools of governance rather than prerequisites for action.

The paper is candid about limits. Monetary sovereignty is not universal: Eurozone members, low-income countries and states burdened by foreign-currency debt cannot simply spend their way to sustainability, raising urgent questions about how non-sovereign nations can expand fiscal space without deepening vulnerability. The author also acknowledges omitting important perspectives, including the Wellbeing Economy, commons-based approaches, the care economy, and Latin American Indigenous frameworks such as Buen Vivir, and points to the Porter Hypothesis tradition in arguing that well-designed environmental regulation can enhance, rather than erode, competitiveness and innovation.

The implications, if the synthesis gains traction, are significant. Fiscal policy would be repositioned as the central engine of socio-ecological transformation: public investment steered toward renewables, low-carbon infrastructure and social services; subsidies and taxes aligned with throughput limits rather than GDP targets; democratic oversight and international cooperation securing coherence between national development needs and planetary ceilings. The Sustainable Development Goals, recalibrated to shed their internal contradictions, could serve as the institutional scaffold for a global consensus. What emerges is not a single doctrine but a pluralist meta-framework, one that treats Green Growth, Degrowth, Post-Growth, Doughnut Economics, MMT and the SDGs as complementary lenses on a shared problem: how to raise and allocate public resources so that economies serve people and planet alike, within the biophysical limits of a finite Earth.

Subject of Research: A comparative analysis of six sustainability-oriented economic frameworks and their integration into a meta-framework for sustainable fiscal policy

Article Title: Sustainability and fiscal policy: bridging economic frameworks for global equity and ecological balance

Article References: Sustainability and fiscal policy: bridging economic frameworks for global equity and ecological balance. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12232-026-00549-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12232-026-00549-7

Keywords: fiscal policy, green growth, degrowth, post-growth, doughnut economics, modern monetary theory, sustainable development goals, planetary boundaries, steady-state economy, just transition, ecological macroeconomics, monetary sovereignty