14 Comments
Mar 28Liked by Matthias C. Rillig

I'll push back a bit that Global Change must inherently include human driving forces (I would add a modifier to GC for those cases). I've been reading histories of Roman empire and medieval times and there are multiple cases where human migrations / differences in productivity are hypothesized to have been driven by (natural) changes in climate. "Geological" time scale connotes to me at least thousands if not millions of years, whereas natural forces have impacted plant and animal communities over a century or so and this has had a knock-on effect upon human societies.

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I think your circumscription of the term is adequate. There's an unspoken aspect of inexorability about 'global change'. That idea need to be dispelled. A large dollop of fatalism ill behoves human intervention for betterment.

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To me, Beyond Global Warming: Ecology and Global Change by P. Vitousek is the standard definition of the term.

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But many times I had rejected mss in GCB, on the basis it was not a global study. Hope this trend has changed recently.

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