The 'age of the human' may not become the age of destruction | David Suzuki

Our dominance on Earth comes with great responsibility. The Paris climate deal proves that there is hope for our planet - as long as we remember that

Homo sapiens has become so dominant a force shaping the properties of the biosphere that scientists now refer to the past two centuries as the Anthropocene Epoch - the age of the human. This role comes with a huge responsibility; one that, it seems, we have lived up to in the climate deal recently agreed in Paris.

We are an infant species, evolving perhaps 150,000 years ago in Africa. For most of our short existence, we were nomadic hunter-gatherers, carrying our possessions while in search of food and anything useful. Compared to the vast herds of mammals in parts of the world, human numbers were small, our technology simple and our ecological impact readily absorbed by the biosphere.