Fairfield Osborn’s Our Plundered Planet is a scathing critique of humans relationship with Nature written in 1947. It strikes me as remarkably in-tune with early-21st century ecoapocalyptophilia.

Osborn beat the rest of us to talking about the world’s new human-centered geological era by a good four decades.  The third chapter of his book is titled, “The New Geologic Force: Man,” and it focuses on the truly global reach of humankind. As the inside flap puts it, “This book demonstrates brilliantly and unsparingly that we are following a course which one day may render our good earth as dead as the moon.”

Note that in the wake of the horror and suffering of World War II, Osborn raises the possibility humans could actually kill of all life on the planet, not just themselves. We could antiterraform the planet.

The impulse to write this book came towards the end of the Second World War. It seemed to me, during those days, that mankind was involved in two major conflicts — not only in the one that was in every headline, on every radio, in the minds, in the hearts and in the sufferings of people the world over… This other world-wide war, still continuing, is bringing more widespread distress to the human race than any that has resulted from armed conflict. It contains potentialities of ultimate disaster greater even than would follow the misuse of atomic power. This other war is man’s conflict with nature.

Osborn, writing at the very beginning of the post-WWII revolution in energy and materials use, began to glimpse the global — not just local or regional — impact that humans had begun to have on the Earth.

“…now, with isolated and inconsequential exceptions, there are no fresh lands anywhere. Never before in man’s history has this been the case,” he writes.

And that, unlike local agriculture, which did transform the globe a bit at at time, modern systems of commerce and distribution linked each and every plot of land and person.

“Further, due to the existence today of world-wide systems of commerce, combined with new and so-called higher standards of living, all nations are dependent upon others in varying degrees for products, materials or goods that have become a necessary part of everyday living for most of hte people on the face of the earth.”