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Roughly forty years ago, a small group of scientists and policy makers began to realize that humanity was on a dramatic collision course, as the rapidly growing world economy and population threatened to collide with the planet’s finite resources and fragile ecosystems. The danger was first highlighted globally at the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment (UNCHE) in Stockholm. A famous and influential book that same year, Limits to Growth, warned that business as usual could lead to an economic collapse in the twenty-first century.

Back in 1972, as the core idea of planetary boundaries was first being understood, the kinds of boundaries that would turn out to be the most important were not yet very clear to the scientific community. The big concern in 1972 was that humanity would run out of certain key minerals or ores and that the resulting scarcity would make it difficult to maintain the level of economic …