This paper distinguishes three major “revolutions” in the socio-environmental interactions that reflect growth in the extent to which human beings invest in and modify their environments. As people settled in villages during the Neolithic, interactions between more people became an important element in survival strategies, shifting the emphasis in survival strategies from mobility to sociality. The emergence of cities changed human societies by: i) creating dependencies between more and more distant regions, ii) increasing the degree of aggregation of human populations, iii) narrowing the range of subsistence resources on which people depended, and iv) increasing further their investment in the natural environment and in material culture. Altogether, urbanization drove human social systems further and further away from flexibility and rapid adaptation to environmental change, while increasing the demands on the social system, including major increases in energy and matter to support urban populations. This was achieved by linking together larger and larger hinterlands for these cities, in effect creating Empires. The fundamental change is one from humans responding to environmental change and disruption by migration to humans investing in the environment, and therefore responding to environmental change by problem solving. One therefore needs to look at the combined socio-environmental systems over the longer term that reflect the buildup and culmination of the shifts in the social and environmental risk spectra due to the human-environmental interactions in periods before the “crisis” occurs, which are a fact of life in any society's interaction with its environment, and should be seen as "social" challenges rather than “environmental” ones. These are generally due to the fact that the society in question has invested so much in a particular way of life that it cannot innovate itself out of difficulty before time runs out. This implies that we have to shift our thinking about socio-environmental issues, from “population thinking” to “organization thinking.” In this perspective, a crisis does not imply the disappearance of the people involved, but a transformation of the organization that links them.

Humanity has always lived under the threat of disasters such as famine. Now that these threats have diminished considerably in the West, it seems like people need a new scare that can be shared, thereby having a uniting effect. The possible impact of an increased atmospheric greenhouse gas concentration seems to have taken over this role. However, new dating techniques and numerous new studies have now added information that can bring about a reevaluation of the opinion that it is only human activity that can explain recent climatic changes. A distinction between trends and variability in climate is only possible if long-term records can be studied. Greenland ice core data yield well-dated information about climate over an extended period that, seen together with other data series, indicates that large, probably global scale changes have occurred at numerous times in the past. The warming during the past 100 y is not likely to be unique.

Modern concerns with climate change often overlook the extensive history of both climate change and human adaptation over the millennia. While questions of human–climate system causation are important, especially to the extent that our current behavior is driving environmental change, human societies have experienced multiple climate changes in the past, independent of causation. The histories of cultural adaptation to those changes can help us understand the dynamic interaction between climate and society, expanding the possibilities for “proactive adaptation” that may be available to us today. The underlying principles of cultural adaptation are generally independent of the source of the climate change, and the lessons of the past can suggest social and economic paths that can lead toward sustainability and away from collapse.

The forest hunter-gatherers of the middle Yangtze River basin, who were the first to invent pottery and led a sedentary lifestyle, may have begun to cultivate rice during the Bølling-Allerød interstadial global warming period. The earliest rice cultivation may have dated back to 14 000 calibrated (cal.) years before present (YBP). The global warming at 9000 cal. YBP in the early Holocene brought the development of the rice cultivation to the middle Yangtze River basin. On the other hand, ancient rice-cultivating and piscatorial society met a crisis at 4200–4000 cal. YBP that was characterized by a significant cooling of the climate. This climate deterioration led the northern wheat/barley-cultivating pastoral people to migrate to the south and invade, ultimately bringing about the collapse of the rice-cultivating and piscatorial society in the Yangtze River basin.

The emergence of climate change as a central political issue around the world, along with growing concern for the environment more generally, has raised the challenge to achieve sustainability as a high order social goal. Yet over the 20 y since the publication of the landmark Brundtland Report on sustainable development, humanity has moved further away from sustainability in many important aspects, particularly at the global scale. This paper provides an overview of the current understanding of how the human-environment relationship has evolved through time, analyzes the quest for sustainability in contemporary society, and briefly explores the implications of these analyses for the trajectory of the human-environment relationship in the twenty-first century. The focus is on an Earth systems perspective. Exploration of the human-environment relationship through time shows a fundamental switch about 200 y ago, when human society shifted from being largely the recipient of changes in Earth system functioning to becoming a global geophysical force itself, rivaling the great forces of nature in magnitude. Contemporary human societies are now on a demonstrably nonsustainable trajectory, especially with regard to climate change, with no sign at the global scale of any change in trajectory. An analysis of the sustainability gap suggests that a crucial missing component in our quest for sustainability is a failure to engage the humanities, along with the biophysical and social sciences, economics, and technology, in the search for solutions. An examination of the ways in which past civilizations have responded to external stresses and the analysis of the contemporary sustainability gap have come to the same conclusion. Those societies that respond to environmental and other stresses by transformation rather than collapse have the capability to question their core values if they become dysfunctional and to drive fundamental shifts in those values, leading to more adaptive and resilient societies.

Greenland, and more specifically the present-day south west coastal district, is that exact spot on the world map where humankind completed its conquest of the Earth. As Norsemen coming over the Atlantic from Iceland and Norway encountered first North-American natives in present-day Labrador around year 1000, and about 150 years later the Inuit coming in from Baffin, slowly occupying the Greenland west coast, humankind had finally encircled the globe, unaware of the extraordinary aspect of the situation. The first few encounters in Labrador were violent, but later, cohabitation in South West Greenland had a mainly peaceful character. Present-day Narsaq district is the precise area where archeology gives witness to peaceful cohabitation between Inuit and Norsemen in the first half of the 15th century.