By Akshat Rathi | Quartz | December 3, 2019
Among the millions of species that inhabit our planet, Homo sapiens is one of the most resilient. Since we first evolved some 200,000 years ago in Africa, we’ve created habitats for ourselves in every corner of the world: from the frozen depths of the Canadian Arctic to the scorching heat of the Australian desert.
We’ve survived all those wild variations in the Earth’s climate because we are exceptionally good at changing our surroundings to fit our needs. To do that, humanity has looted the natural world. Over the past 250 years in particular, that pace has hastened as we have extracted more and more of the planet’s fuel stores and burned them to support our increasingly comfortable lifestyles.
