Anthropocene

Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made

by Gaia Vince  · 19 Oct 2014  · 505pp  · 147,916 words

. For a full listing of Milkweed Editions supporters, please visit www.milkweed.org. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Vince, Gaia. Adventures in the anthropocene : a journey to the heart of the planet we made / Gaia Vince. pages cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-57131-357

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CONTENTS Geological Time Map Maps Introduction 1Atmosphere 2Mountains 3Rivers 4Farmlands 5Oceans 6Deserts 7Savannahs 8Forests 9Rocks 10Cities Epilogue Acknowledgements Notes Index GEOLOGICAL TIMESCALE ADVENTURES IN THE ANTHROPOCENE INTRODUCTION: THE HUMAN PLANET Four and a half billion years ago, out of the dirty halo of cosmic dust left over from the creation

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in fresh-water availability, food production, climate change and ‘ecosystem services’, the immeasurable functions that the biosphere performs to enable our survival. In the Anthropocene, we have already started to push global processes out of whack. In some cases, just tiny further changes could spell disaster for humans; for others

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metres of fresh water per year and 40% of the global land area for food. It has become a super-organism, a creature of the Anthropocene, a product of industrialisation, population expansion, globalisation and the revolution in communications technology. The intelligence, creativity and sociability of this humanity super-organism is

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to consumables, all come with environmental and social consequences that affect us. How we struggle to resolve this issue will determine the trajectory of the Anthropocene for years to come. We are pioneers in this era, but we have a superior understanding of science, excellent communication and connectivity that breeds

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, most of which demand literacy and numeracy. Globalisation favours those who speak international languages, and the people who will shape our lives in the Anthropocene will be those whose understanding and experience goes far beyond small village life, and those who are able to negotiate the accumulated learning, wisdom and

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election fraud by 60%.4 In Afghanistan, the police receive their government salaries through mobile phone banking because it cuts down on fraud. Into the Anthropocene, mobile phones could even start to democratise markets. Enterprising individuals using crowd-funding tools like Kickstarter have a way to access markets that have

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governance and regulated private industry with access to markets, as is occurring elsewhere. The democratisation of online information, education, communication and markets, means that the Anthropocene has the potential to lead to a more equal global society – a ‘flatter Earth’, in which the dominance of Europe, the United States and

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dirty industries will become obsolete and be replaced by newer ones, providing an opportunity to design pollution avoidance from the outset. The atmosphere of the Anthropocene is remarkable not because it is infused with a range of chemicals and particulates – natural events such as volcanic eruptions can produce that – nor

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glaciers around the world fluctuated with changes in temperature or precipitation, but in recent decades, glacier melt has increased rapidly and become global. In the Anthropocene, humans are steering natural processes and cycles. We have pushed the planet beyond its natural state and crippled its capacity to self-regulate or to

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with concrete tubs of water. Ideally, reservoirs would be built underground to reduce evaporative loss, but that only makes them more expensive. Nevertheless, the Anthropocene will surely experience a vast programme of reservoir-building. However, there is another option. I’ve come to Ladakh to meet a remarkable man, who

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, Almería in southern Spain has developed the greatest concentration of greenhouses in the world, covering 26,000 hectares. Dubbed the ‘sea of plastic’, this Anthropocene landscape is remarkable not only because Europe’s driest desert now produces millions of tonnes of fruit and vegetables, but also because the greenhouses reflect

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, in many places conflict is being averted by water-rich countries trading with their less-endowed neighbours, and this will become increasingly important into the Anthropocene. Nearly the entire Paraguayan economy depends on selling hydroelectricity to Brazil. The two neighbours share the Paraná River, which is dammed at Itaipu. Other

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by his comment that since the project’s success, not a single national government minister has visited. And yet, to feed 10 billion in the Anthropocene, schemes like this must be replicated in a coordinated way. The agricultural Green Revolution, which boosted crop production across Asia through irrigation and fertilisers,

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a vast area to perform and could realistically only provide a fraction of our fuel needs. Even without biofuel production, the agricultural footprint of the Anthropocene is vast and currently unmanageable. Agriculture is transforming the nitrogen cycle, emptying rivers and lakes, and sucking out so much groundwater that cities are

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population by 2050. The demographic shift, already under way, will force rich societies to rely increasingly on migrants from the developing world, hastening the Anthropocene’s mix-up of people around the globe. The decline in population growth is not fast enough for many environmentalists, who see reducing human numbers

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hundreds of years. And they found new continents. Their explorations would join together the world’s people and begin the process of globalisation. In the Anthropocene, humanity is transforming oceans. Where the oceans separated landmasses, we have joined them with bridges and tunnels. In the process, endemic biodiversity has been

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. We are selectively culling entire species, upsetting marine ecosystems even as we discover new species and habitats, exploring at previously inaccessible depths. In the Anthropocene, oceans are our food larder and our transport passage, but increasingly also our power supply and our source of oil and gas. They provide livelihoods

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– offer sun shelter and a hard surface for molluscs, crabs and invertebrates, creating a new ecosystem that scientists are calling the plastisphere. In the Anthropocene, the plastic has effectively added hundreds of millions of hard surfaces to the Pacific Ocean (other floating structures, like seaweed, do not naturally occur there

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acres when I visited, and cultivated a flourishing fruit garden. Will we see a range of artificial islands or even floating cities further into the Anthropocene? Perhaps – artificial islands are already being created everywhere from the Maldives to Dubai to accommodate bigger populations on purpose-built land, and it is

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sea. Billionaire Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal, is funding the Seasteading Institute, which hopes to create entirely floating autonomous city states. In the Anthropocene, we need to radically rethink our relationship with the ocean. Until recently, the vast, wild seas, with their seemingly inexhaustible buffet of fish, were

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help make deserts more hospitable. Solar-powered desalination, for example, has the potential to enable agriculture in places where it was previously impossible. In the Anthropocene, humankind has invaded and transformed deserts, turning these alien landscapes into cities and parks, green fields and massive lakes. From space, such places are

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and a condenser, something that could be scaled up to support communities elsewhere. Wind turbines could provide a significant proportion of global electricity in the Anthropocene – in theory, 4 million turbines around the globe could easily produce 7.5 terawatts annually (nearly half the eighteen terawatts humans use) – but they

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river, most desert countries remain desperately short of water. Theoretically, water shortage is something humanity shouldn’t suffer on this blue planet. In the Anthropocene, we have the technology to desalinate the oceans; the only thing holding us back is energy. Desalination plants are already being built across the planet

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potential to transform the deserts of the Holocene from barren fearsome places to agricultural hubs, supporting thriving cities – the sustainable Las Vegases of the Anthropocene. In the Anthropocene, clearly not everywhere can become a Las Vegas, though. Poor desert communities will continue to rely on local solutions, such as sand dams

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Now, the sheer number of people, their spread and incredible harvesting of natural resources, means that Holocene ecosystems throughout the world are tipping into new Anthropocene states that have never been seen before. The megafauna extinctions that occurred at the end of the Pleistocene were small, insignificant happenings compared to what

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to how it would have been if humanity hadn’t taken over. One of the most remarkable ways that humans are altering biodiversity in the Anthropocene is through the great homogenisation of ecosystems – what Barnosky describes as the ‘McDonaldisation of nature’. Many animals and plants have evolved to occupy specific

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our human-dominated world. In the Galapagos Islands, Ecuador, celebrated as a ‘living museum’, scientists are battling the ecological – and emotional – challenges of the Anthropocene, as they work out how best to conserve one of the world’s most unique ecosystems. ‘As scientists and conservationists, we need to recognise that

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losing the battle against the ‘McDonaldisation’ of nature. From the Galapagos to Hawaii, conservationists are switching tack and starting to embrace the introduced species of Anthropocene ecosystems, while focusing their efforts on routing out the more harmful invasives that out-compete unique flora or fauna. Thus, in the Galapagos, the

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road through the Serengeti, the Interoceanic Highway promises development opportunities for poor people, but threatens entire ecosystems. Road-building is a defining characteristic of the Anthropocene, and roads are planned across the world’s rainforests. In the Brazilian Amazon alone, 7,500 kilometres of new paved roads are under construction.

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extraordinary biodiversity that exists in other ecosystems. Meanwhile, researchers are trying to learn more about what we can expect the natural rainforests of the future Anthropocene to look like. I head further north to the Brazilian Amazon, near the grand jungle city of Manaus, where experimenters aim to discover whether

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moved from one place to another – the kind of terrestrial shift that would only otherwise result from a volcanic eruption or tectonic jolt. In the Anthropocene, humanity is incrementally reshaping the planet with earth-moving machinery. The rock beneath our feet has been drilled and plundered, and injected with waste

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transport goods, trade at greater distance, and practise more efficient agriculture. Oil is also the basis for that essential, yet problematic, material of the Anthropocene, plastic, although a remarkable Japanese inventor has achieved the alchemy of turning plastic back into oil and gasoline in a neat desktop machine, making a

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, many of which have unresolved issues, such as how to store and distribute energy for when the supply fails and demand is high. Into the Anthropocene, countries will need to cooperate better on efficient energy generation, distribution and storage. Grids will transcend national borders, becoming regional networks that, like a

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is largely to blame for the ongoing fear, and perhaps even the extent of the disaster itself. Nuclear power will certainly play a part in Anthropocene electricity generation, to provide essential energy to those who currently don’t have access. The options being explored include integral fast reactors, which use conventional

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generating biogas from guinea-pig poo and using it to light their homes, cook their food, grow their vegetables and power their televisions. Into the Anthropocene, humanity’s quest for new low-carbon alternatives to fossil fuels will mean electrification of heating, lighting and transport, with vehicle fuel tanks replaced

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where residents are prey to exploitative ‘landlords’ and left to fend for themselves at the margins of prosperous society. But the sheer size of this Anthropocene urban migration, the sophisticated tools like smartphones that even poor people have at their disposal, and the globalisation of culture and commerce means that citizens

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health reason to discard the vast volumes that cities currently waste. Recycling, efficiency of resource use and decentralised generation will characterise the cities of the Anthropocene. Citizens are likely to generate their own supplies of water, electricity and fuels to supplement the increasingly expensive municipal provisions. Many buildings will harvest

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or streets and use the solar energy generated during the day. Innovations in solar paint and roof tiles will help ensure that buildings of the Anthropocene become net energy producers rather than users. The technology is currently expensive compared with grid-produced electricity from fossil-fuel power stations, but innovations

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by energy-intensive industries such as cement works, which prefer baseload power plants. Energy storage and distribution solutions are becoming increasingly urgent in the Anthropocene. Storing the energy locally that buildings produce for later use will eventually be far more efficient than feeding it into the grid and using the

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domestic appliances has doubled since the 1970s, even while products have become more efficient. While suburbia was built around the automobile, the city of the Anthropocene needs to be built around efficient, low-emitting mass transit. In central areas, it makes sense to ban private cars altogether – something that is

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. But cities are also where humans most clearly define their relationship with nature, allowing select bits in and banishing others. The cities of the Anthropocene will incorporate the natural world in new and innovative ways. Parks and green spaces will be multiplied from ground level upwards, attracting birds and wildlife

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environment on regular multistorey plots is likely to increase as hobby farmers, beekeepers and specialist growers take advantage of cleaner air, water and soils of Anthropocene cities, and vacant sites are used more effectively. In Berlin, rooftop fish farms have been started, with the waste going to feed agricultural plots

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.1001127. 4.Great Acceleration: IGBP, at www.igbp.net/globalchange/greatacceleration.4.1b8ae20512db692f2a680001630.html. 5.Zalasiewicz, J., Williams, M., Haywood A., & Ellis M., ‘The Anthropocene: a new epoch of geological time?’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A (2011), 369, 833–4. 6.Gurney, K. R. et al., ‘Quantification of

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mankind’, Nature 415 (6867) (2002), 23. doi:10.1038/415023a. 8.Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy, ICS Working Groups, at http://quaternary.stratigraphy.org/workinggroups/anthropocene/. 9.TS.2.1.1, ‘Changes in Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide, Methane and Nitrous Oxide – AR4 WGI Technical Summary’, at www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data

Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States

by James C. Scott  · 21 Aug 2017  · 349pp  · 86,224 words

ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 For my grandkids headed deeper into the Anthropocene Lillian Louise Graeme Orwell Anya Juliet Ezra David Winifred Daisy Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote thus: Writing appears to be necessary for the centralized, stratified state

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the earth’s environment in this last era. Just how massive that impact has become is captured in the lively debate swirling around the term “Anthropocene,” coined to name a new geological epoch during which the activities of humans became decisive in affecting the world’s ecosystems and atmosphere.1 While

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in dispute. Some propose dating it from the first nuclear tests, which deposited a permanent and detectable layer of radioactivity worldwide. Others propose starting the Anthropocene clock with the Industrial Revolution and the massive use of fossil fuels. A case could also be made for starting the clock when industrial society

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centuries old and the other two are still virtually within living memory. Measured by the roughly 200,000-year span of our species, then, the Anthropocene began only a few minutes ago. I propose an alternative point of departure that is far deeper historically. Accepting the premise of an

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Anthropocene as a qualitative and quantitative leap in our environmental impact, I suggest that we begin with the use of fire, the first great hominid tool

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our transformation of the landscape. If our concern is with the historical footprint of hominids, one might well identify a “thin” Anthropocene long before the more explosive and recent “thick” Anthropocene; “thin” largely because there were so very few hominids to wield these landscaping tools. Our numbers circa 10,000 BCE were

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how the natural world works, one might say that the effort has been more abundant in unintended consequences than in intended effects. While the thick Anthropocene is judged by some to have begun with worldwide deposit of radioactivity following the dropping of the first atomic bomb, there is what I have

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termed a “thin” Anthropocene that dates from the use of fire by Homo erectus roughly half a million years ago and extends up through clearances for agriculture and grazing

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and the resulting deforestation, and siltation. The impact and tempo of this early Anthropocene grows as the world’s population swells to roughly twenty-five million in 2,000 BCE. There is no particular reason to insist on the

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label “Anthropocene”—a term both in vogue and in much dispute as I write—but there are many reasons to insist on the global environmental impact of

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BC.” In Crawford, The Sumerian World, 462–475. McNeill, J. R. Mountains of the Mediterranean World: An Environmental History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. ———. “The Anthropocene Debates: What, When, Who, and Why?” Paper Presented to the Program in Agrarian Studies Colloquium, Yale University, September 11, 2015. McNeill, W. H. Plagues and

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amygdala, 81 Anatolia, 11, 245 Andes, 260 n. 14 anemia, 84, 109 Angkor Wat, 186, 202 An Lushan Rebellion, 251 Annales School, 5 antelope, 88 Anthropocene epoch, 2–3, 19–20 Antonine plague, 21, 99 ants, 69 aphids, 111 Aristotle, 29, 156, 180, 182, 221 arthritis, 81–82 arthropods, 105 Art

Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy

by Adam Tooze  · 15 Nov 2021  · 561pp  · 138,158 words

arc whose origin is to be found in the 1970s. It might also be seen as the first comprehensive crisis of the age of the Anthropocene to come—an era defined by the blowback from our unbalanced relationship to nature.78 But rather than trying prematurely to sketch the continuities of

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to the era of the oil crises, mapping a prehistory of the Green New Deal. Like so many others, I had become preoccupied with the Anthropocene, a transformation driven by capitalist economic growth that puts in question the very separation between natural and human history.79 In February, as the virus

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—the historical transformation of nature and its implications for our history—written from the safety of an Upper West Side apartment could seem remote. The Anthropocene remained an abstract intellectual proposition. The coronavirus crisis has stripped even the most sheltered of us of that illusion. Part I DISEASE X Chapter 1

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of a dangerous new strain of H7N9 avian flu across large parts of provincial China barely made the news.56 For those preoccupied with the Anthropocene, what was “top of stack” was climate. And then there was the Trump factor. With hindsight, it is hard to avoid focusing on the glaring

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the coronavirus was not ominous enough, the news in 2020 supplied a constant stream of natural disasters. It turned out that the shocks of the Anthropocene did not arrive in a neat sequence.53 In 2020 they were arriving all at once. In the Bay of Bengal, Cyclone Amphan was the

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been foreshadowed, the coronavirus cruelly exposed the deep incapacity of most modern societies to cope with the kinds of challenges that the era of the Anthropocene will throw up with ever-greater force. As the fumbling efforts to contain the second wave of the virus demonstrated, this was every bit as

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be to revise our world view. The Green New Deal was brilliantly on point, but it imagined climate as the most urgent threat of the Anthropocene. It too was overrun by the pandemic. Such revisions do not imply a lack of intellectual or political principle. They are simply the openness commensurate

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, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (SAGE Publications, 1992). 39. On the agnotocene, see “agnotology,” C. Bonneuil and J.-B. Fernbach, The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us (Verso, 2016). 40. A. Tooze, “The Sociologist Who Could Save Us from Coronavirus,” Foreign Policy, August 1, 2020. 41. L

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Media Onslaught Against Democratic Front-Runner Bernie Sanders,” CNBC, February 24, 2020. 78. A. Tooze, “ ‘We Are Living Through the First Economic Crisis of the Anthropocene,’ ” Guardian, May 7, 2020. 79. The best compact introduction is C. Bonneuil and J.-B. Fressoz, trans. D. Fernbach, The Shock of the

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Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us (Verso, 2016). 80. B. Croce, History: Its Theory and Practice (Russell & Russell, 1960). CHAPTER 1. ORGANIZED IRRESPONSIBILITY 1. Institute for

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-content/uploads/2019/02/Janet-Yellen-on-monetary-policy-currencies-and-manipulation.pdf. 11. J. R. McNeil, The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene Since 1945 (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014). 12. M. E. Mann, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Lines

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China, 57 American Families Plan, 289, 299–300 American Jobs Plan, 296 American Rescue Plan, 289, 299–300, 302 Angola, 156, 161, 256, 258–59 Anthropocene, 22–23, 47, 189, 292 Argentina, 156, 158, 163, 171, 260, 265 Armenia, 267 artificial intelligence (AI), 235 Asian financial crisis (1990s), 3 Asian flu

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

by Elizabeth Kolbert  · 11 Feb 2014  · 308pp  · 94,447 words

Note Prologue I: The Sixth Extinction II: The Mastodon’s Molars III: The Original Penguin IV: The Luck of the Ammonites V: Welcome to the Anthropocene VI: The Sea Around Us VII: Dropping Acid VIII: The Forest and the Trees IX: Islands on Dry Land X: The New Pangaea XI: The

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way to get around and distribute the species? Yet here, in the end, it may well have been their undoing.” CHAPTER V WELCOME TO THE ANTHROPOCENE Dicranograptus ziczac In 1949, a pair of Harvard psychologists recruited two dozen undergraduates for an experiment about perception. The experiment was simple: students were shown

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these terms owe their origins, indirectly at least, to Lyell, who, back in the eighteen-thirties, coined the words Eocene, Miocene, and Pliocene.) The word “Anthropocene” is the invention of Paul Crutzen, a Dutch chemist who shared a Nobel Prize for discovering the effects of ozone-depleting compounds. The importance of

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his wife, “The work is going well, but it looks like it might be the end of the world.”) Crutzen told me that the word “Anthropocene” came to him while he was sitting at a meeting. The meeting’s chairman kept referring to the Holocene, the “wholly recent” epoch, which began

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stop it,’” Crutzen recalled blurting out. “’We are no longer in the Holocene; we are in the Anthropocene.’ Well, it was quiet in the room for a while.” At the next coffee break, the Anthropocene was the main topic of conversation. Someone came up to Crutzen and suggested that he patent the

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term. Crutzen wrote up his idea in a short essay, “Geology of Mankind,” that ran in Nature. “It seems appropriate to assign the term ‘Anthropocene’ to the present, in many ways human-dominated, geological epoch,” he observed. Among the many geologic-scale changes people have effected, Crutzen cited the following

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natural behavior for many millennia to come.” Crutzen published “Geology of Mankind” in 2002. Soon, the “Anthropocene” began migrating out into other scientific journals. “Global Analysis of River Systems: From Earth System Controls to Anthropocene Syndromes” was the title of a 2003 article in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society

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B. “Soils and Sediments in the Anthropocene” ran the headline of a piece from 2004 in the Journal of Soils and Sediments. When Zalasiewicz came across the term, he was intrigued. He

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and also William Whewell and John Phillips once presided over. At a luncheon meeting, Zalasiewicz asked his fellow committee members what they thought of the Anthropocene. Twenty-one out of the twenty-two thought that the concept had merit. The group decided to examine the idea as a formal problem in

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geology. Would the Anthropocene satisfy the criteria used for naming a new epoch? (To geologists, an epoch is a subdivision of a period, which, in turn, is a division

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behind a “stratigraphic signature” that is still legible today. Among other things, the members of the group observed in a paper summarizing their findings, the Anthropocene will be marked by a unique “biostratigraphical signal,” a product of the current extinction event on the one hand and of the human propensity for

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anthropogenically relocated) stocks.” Or, as Zalasiewicz would have it, rats. By the time of my visit to Scotland, Zalasiewicz had taken the case for the Anthropocene to the next level. The International Commission on Stratigraphy, or ICS, is the group responsible for maintaining the official timetable of earth’s history. It

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to 2.6 million years ago.) Zalasiewicz had convinced the ICS to look into formally recognizing the Anthropocene, an effort that, logically enough, he himself was put in charge of. As head of the Anthropocene Working Group, Zalasiewicz is hoping to bring a proposal to a vote by the full body in

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2016. If he’s successful and the Anthropocene is adopted as a new epoch, every geology textbook in the world immediately will become obsolete. CHAPTER VI THE SEA AROUND US Patella caerulea Castello

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pumped into the air has been absorbed by the oceans. This comes to a stunning 150 billion metric tons. As with most aspects of the Anthropocene, though, it’s not only the scale of the transfer but also the speed that’s significant. A useful (though admittedly imperfect) comparison can be

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of the journal Oceanography devoted to acidification. Continuing along this path for much longer, the pair continued, “is likely to leave a legacy of the Anthropocene as one of the most notable, if not cataclysmic events in the history of our planet.” CHAPTER VII DROPPING ACID Acropora millepora Half a world

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come seeking protection or food. This coevolutionary venture has been under way for many geologic epochs. Researchers now believe it won’t last out the Anthropocene. “It is likely that reefs will be the first major ecosystem in the modern era to become ecologically extinct” is how a trio of British

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with, or exceeding, the slightly ‘lesser’ extinction events” of the past. “The potential impacts,” he concluded, “support the notion that we have recently entered the Anthropocene.” * * * “THE Brits like to mark everything in plastic,” Silman told me. “We think it’s kind of gauche.” It was our third day on the

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, much of Siberia and northern Canada, and significant expanses of the Sahara, the Gobi, and the Great Victoria deserts, they call “wildlands.” But in the Anthropocene it’s not clear that even such “wildlands” really deserve to be called wild. Tundra is crisscrossed by pipelines, boreal forest by seismic lines. Ranches

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a forest fragment—even a very large fragment—is a species that isn’t likely to make it. One of the defining features of the Anthropocene is that the world is changing in ways that compel species to move, and another is that it’s changing in ways that create barriers

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derided during his lifetime, was, of course, to a large extent vindicated by the discovery of plate tectonics. One of the striking characteristics of the Anthropocene is the hash it’s made of the principles of geographic distribution. If highways, clear-cuts, and soybean plantations create islands where none before existed

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driving virtually any large mammal species extinct, even though they are also capable of going to great lengths to guarantee that they do not.” The Anthropocene is usually said to have begun with the industrial revolution, or perhaps even later, with the explosive growth in population that followed World War II

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end to decades of political unrest has led to a surge in logging, both legal and not. One of the many unintended consequences of the Anthropocene has been the pruning of our own family tree. Having cut down our sister species—the Neanderthals and the Denisovans—many generations ago, we’re

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been the pattern they participate in. What I’ve been trying to do is trace an extinction event—call it the Holocene extinction, or the Anthropocene extinction, or, if you prefer the sound of it, the Sixth Extinction—and to place this event in the broader context of life’s history

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grateful to Dan Condon and Ian Millar for a memorable (if wet) expedition, and to Paul Crutzen for explaining to me his idea of the Anthropocene. Ocean acidification is a daunting topic. I never would have been able to write about it without the help of Chris Langdon, Richard Feely, Chris

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rules of the survival game”: Paul D. Taylor, Extinctions in the History of Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 2. CHAPTER V: WELCOME TO THE ANTHROPOCENE Others were completely flummoxed: Jerome S. Bruner and Leo Postman, “On the Perception of Incongruity: A Paradigm,” Journal of Personality 18 (1949): 206–23. I

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anthropogenic emissions”: Paul J. Crutzen, “Geology of Mankind,” Nature 415 (2002): 23. “as future evolution”: Jan Zalasiewicz et al., “Are We Now Living in the Anthropocene?” GSA Today 18 (2008): 6. CHAPTER VI: THE SEA AROUND US the tally they came up with was very different: Jason M. Hall-Spencer et

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After Us: What Legacy Will Humans Leave in the Rocks? Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Zalasiewicz, Jan, et al. “Are We Now Living in the Anthropocene?” GSA Today 18 (2008): 4–8. Zalasiewicz, Jan, et al. “Graptolites in British Stratigraphy.” Geological Magazine 146 (2009): 785–850. PHOTO/ILLUSTRATION CREDITS © Vance Vredenburg

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Natural History ammonites Discoscaphites minardi Discoscaphites iris Discoscaphites jerseyensis Eubaculites carinatus amphibians Andes ankylosaurs Anning, Mary Antarctica antbirds rufous-throated scale-backed white-plumed anthromes Anthropocene epoch ants army (Eciton burchelli) leaf-cutter APASD (Asian-Pacific Alien Species Database) apes, great aragonite Arctic Circle Arctic willow Aristotle Ármannsson, Halldór Arrhenius, Olof

Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence

by James Lovelock  · 27 Aug 2019  · 94pp  · 33,179 words

. I think that Newcomen's invention should be heralded not just as the start of the Industrial Revolution but also as the beginning of the Anthropocene – the age of fire, the age in which humans acquired the power to transform the physical world on a massive scale. Humans had made machines

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stores of solar energy, millions of years of sunlight captured in black stone. At this point I want to stress that the evolution of the Anthropocene – which has so massively changed the Earth – was driven by market forces. Had there been no economic gain from using Newcomen's steam engine, we

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Revolution’ is accurate enough, it neither catches the wider significance of the moment, nor does it encompass its full duration. The better name is the Anthropocene because it covers the full 300 years from Newcomen's installation of his steam pump until now and it captures the great theme of the

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States. He coined it to describe the effect of industrial pollution on the wildlife of the lakes. It was one more sign that, in the Anthropocene, human activity could have global effects. My own contribution to this insight came in 1973. In the late 1950s I had invented – using non-

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banned. Analytical chemistry provided evidence that we had entered a world where human inventions or innovations could affect the entire planet, the world of the Anthropocene. There are arguments about when this epoch began. Some put it as long ago as the first appearance of Homo sapiens, others as recently as

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the Novacene may only last 100 years, but I shall come back to that. For me, the key point that justifies the definition of the Anthropocene as a new geological period is the radical change that took place when humans first began to convert stored solar energy into useful work. This

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makes the Anthropocene the second stage in the planet's processing of the power of the Sun. In the first stage the chemical process of photosynthesis enabled organisms

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chemical energy. The third stage will be the Novacene, when solar energy is converted into information. But if you really need more evidence that the Anthropocene is truly a new age – first, look around you at the spreading cities, the roads, the glass towers of offices and flats, the power stations

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is an explosive transformation of the world, a massive increase in the intensity of life on Earth. Nothing like it has ever happened before. The Anthropocene may not have been officially recognized; it is, nevertheless, the most important period in our old planet's long history. 8 Acceleration Gilbert White's

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new age fully took hold with the opening of the Stockton and Darlington Railway; thereafter, railways spread rapidly around the world. The story of the Anthropocene in the nineteenth century was about this global development. In China, now the world's primary industrial economy, the first railway was built in 1876

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and, by 1911, there were 9,000 kilometres of track. The advent of the railways introduced another of the great themes of the Anthropocene – acceleration. Soon after the Anthropocene began, we became like the boy racer, carried away by the power of acceleration. We have kept our foot on the accelerator for

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numbers of people around the world, extending the cultural homogenization and global reach of the new age. Such developments signal another form of acceleration. The Anthropocene brought with it a new means of rapid evolution. The seabird, with its graceful flight, took more than 50 million years to evolve from its

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are likely to be carbon-based; a diamond chip would have speed beyond anything we can now envisage. 9 War Sadly, the power of the Anthropocene has manifested itself most forcibly in war. It has been an age made for increasingly bloody conflict, thanks to the ingenuity of our new machines

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lasted from 1861 to 1865 and cost over a million lives, was the first occasion when war was powered also by the products of the Anthropocene. Richard Gatling's rapid-fire ‘rotary cannon’, the forerunner of all future machine guns, was first used in this conflict. Trench warfare also came of

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that their existence has been enough to deter great wars and their sheer deadliness has had the benign effect of severing the link between the Anthropocene and war. The technological triumphs in space travel and in weapons development proceeded almost blindly, and many of the space scientists, including me, were unaware

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energy for warfare. The misuse of science surely is the greatest form of sin. 10 Cities Cities have been the most spectacular development of the Anthropocene. Very few people used to live in cities, but now more than half the world population does; in the more developed world the figure may

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warming; urban neuroses that led to disgust with and anxiety about life in the city. All these combined to create a widespread belief that the Anthropocene had been a wrong turning, that we had cut ourselves off from our natural place in the world, that we had expelled ourselves from the

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Garden of Eden. Once again, William Wordsworth, the greatest critic of the Anthropocene, captured this sense of spiritual loss, of severance from nature: The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending, we lay

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sentiments are now commonplace. Many people casually assume that any man-made change to the natural environment is a bad thing and that the pre-Anthropocene world was always ecologically better than the present. Indeed, the Paris Conference on Climate Change of 2016 was mostly about the harm we have done

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is less vulnerable to accidents that might disable Gaia's cooling mechanisms. 13 Good or Bad? There is a fierce contemporary debate about whether the Anthropocene has been a good or a bad thing. As I have shown, the evidence that it is bad is strong – warming and therefore weakening of

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to hunter-gathering, they would need twenty times the land area of North America. Lynas's point is not, however, negative. He believes that the Anthropocene could turn out to be a wonderful era for humanity. ‘As scholars, scientists, campaigners, and citizens,’ runs his Ecomodernist Manifesto, ‘we write with the conviction

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that knowledge and technology, applied with wisdom, might allow for a good, or even great, Anthropocene. A good Anthropocene demands that humans use their growing social, economic and technological powers to make life better for people, to stabilize the climate, and protect the

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natural world.’ This, say the believers in a bad Anthropocene, is madness. They see ecomodernism as a humanist superstition. They claim that, like religions of the past, it is a way of pacifying the people

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in politics. For Hamilton and many others, the ecomodernists are doing the dirty work of global capitalism; for Lynas and other believers in the good Anthropocene, their opponents are like the early nineteenth-century Luddites who smashed machines to prevent them destroying their jobs. This is a simple summary of a

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. The first problem with the antis is their reliance on a view that also has religious overtones. Their longing for a better time before the Anthropocene is a fantasy, first because there was no golden age free of want and suffering, and, secondly, because in order to get back to

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religion. The replacement of facts with faith will not resolve the threat of environmental catastrophe. But what are the facts? First, we must view the Anthropocene as a period in which humans have the power to make globally significant decisions – the use of CFCs was one, as was the imposition of

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, but the crucial point is that we have the power to make them. Secondly, we must abandon the politically and psychologically loaded idea that the Anthropocene is a great crime against nature. This is understandable to the extent that neither Newcomen's engine nor a nuclear power plant looks or behaves

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or an oak tree; they appear to be utterly different in every respect. Nevertheless, the truth is that, despite being associated with mechanical things, the Anthropocene is a consequence of life on Earth. It is a product of evolution; it is an expression of nature. Evolution by natural selection is often

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process went on to become the Industrial Revolution and gave us a century of technical and scientific glory. Of course, through its technological advances, the Anthropocene produced cruel competition for those whose only means of sustenance was selling their physical work. And it is certainly true that our present civilization has

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should not entail a rejection of hospitals, schools and washing machines, which have made our lives so much better. So here are a few late-Anthropocene thoughts on contemporary environmental issues, taking into account the demands made of us by Gaia. The mistakes the Greens make arise from their politically motivated

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simplifications, which appear to reject all the good things the Anthropocene has brought us. We must always remember that Gaia is all about constraints and consequences. This was especially true in the story of CFCs. The

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thinking about the harmful consequences of climate change, especially change attributable to the ever-increasing pollution of the surface and atmosphere of the Earth. The Anthropocene, especially in its later years, has also produced a massive growth of available information. This is obvious to anybody who uses a mobile phone or

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. This flood of information would have been unimaginable a few years ago. Having started out by harvesting the power of sunlight by mining coal, the Anthropocene now harvests the same power and uses its energy to capture and store information. This is, as I have said, a fundamental property of the

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of the age of fire, we have taken the first step. We now stand at a critical moment in this process, the moment when the Anthropocene gives way to the Novacene. The fate of the knowing cosmos hangs upon our response. PART THREE Into the Novacene 15 AlphaGo In October 2015

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guide the process, but in new ways. It was the market worthiness and practicality – both favourable evolutionary attributes – of Newcomen's engine that started the Anthropocene. We are about to enter the Novacene in a comparable way. Some AI device will soon be invented that will finally and fully start the

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. Indeed, in certain ways, such as the ubiquity of personal computers and mobile phones, we are already at a stage similar to that of the Anthropocene in the early twentieth century. In the 1900s we had internal-combustion-powered cars, basic aircraft, fast trains, electricity available for homes, telephones and even

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the poet Lord Byron. If the Novacene were no more than an idea, it was born 200 years ago. In reality, the Novacene, like the Anthropocene, is about engineering. The crucial step that started the Novacene was, I think, the need to use computers to design and make themselves, just as

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hand construct something as intricate and complex as the central processing chip of your mobile phone. Live cyborgs will emerge from the womb of the Anthropocene. We can be almost certain that an electronic life form such as a cyborg could never emerge by chance from the inorganic components of the

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Earth before the Anthropocene. Like it or not, the emergence of cyborgs cannot be envisaged without us humans playing a god-like – or parent-like – role. There is no

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life as it is now. 17 The Bit First, I need to explain why this moment is not simply a continuation or amplification of the Anthropocene, but rather a radical transformation worthy of being defined as a new geological epoch. As I have said, there have been two previous decisive events

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the third phase in which we – and our cyborg successors – convert sunlight directly into information. This process really began at the same time as the Anthropocene. By the year 1700 we had unknowingly banked enough information to start that age. Now, as we approach 2020, we have enough to release it

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environmental hazard. We should be concerned about the military developments of AI. At the turn of the eighteenth century we made our entry into the Anthropocene, through the invention of a practical and economic steam engine. We took this step without the slightest understanding of the powerful force we had unleashed

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technical or scientific expertise. Given the possibilities I outlined in the previous section, how do we plan our diplomacy in the last years of the Anthropocene, so that flesh-and-blood humans, together with the wet chemical life of Gaia, can enjoy a peaceful retirement during the first stage of the

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here on England's south-western coast and my independent career as a scientist, engineer and inventor connect me to both the founder of the Anthropocene and of the Novacene. If Thomas Newcomen, that ‘sole inventor of that surprising machine for raising water by fire’, can be seen as a founder

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the curvature of the Earth. He was, like Newcomen, the first man of a new age. The intelligence that launches the age that follows the Anthropocene will not be human; it will be something wholly different from anything we can now conceive. Its logic, unlike ours, will be multidimensional. As with

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can hope that our contribution will not be entirely forgotten as wisdom and understanding spread outwards from the Earth to embrace the cosmos. Index acceleration Anthropocene 41–4 of global warming 65, 72 Novacene 119–20 Adams, Douglas: Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books 23 AI see artificial intelligence air

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107 AlphaGo (computer program) 79–80 AlphaGo Zero (computer program) 80 AlphaZero (computer program) 80, 82, 84, 117 anthropic principle 25–7, 75, 89, 123 Anthropocene acceleration 41–4 changes of planetary significance 23, 37–40; see also climate change cities 50–53 debate over good or bad nature of 67

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, 109, 114, 118 cyborgs, see cyborgs exoplanet possibilities of 9–10 European Geophysical Union 17 evolution 27, 28, 129–30 of adaptive computer systems 114 Anthropocene 35–6, 43, 70 chance, necessity and 85 cybernetic 29–30, 94–5, 101, 118, 123 and entry to the Novacene 83–6 of the

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128 helium 11 Hiroshima 46 Hooke, Robert 33 human race age of species, Homo sapiens 3 aloneness of 3–5, 121, 122 and the Anthropocene, see Anthropocene at edge of extinction 6–13 guilt feelings over achievements 56 as prime understanders of cosmos 5 temperature tolerance 62, 63–4 hunter-gatherers 21

Deep Time Reckoning: How Future Thinking Can Help Earth Now

by Vincent Ialenti  · 22 Sep 2020  · 224pp  · 69,593 words

Finland. | Radioactive waste repositories—Finland. | Environmental policy—Finland. | Nature—Effect of human beings on—Forecasting. | Global environmental change—Forecasting. | Human ecology. | Social planning. | Geology, Stratigraphic—Anthropocene. | Time—Social aspects. | Finland—Environmental conditions—21st century. Classification: LCC TD898.13.F5 I25 2020 | DDC 363.72/89094897—dc23 LC record available at https

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projections. This rigorous, multiscale interdisciplinarity is a refreshing counterpoint to the myopic, reductionist thinking that has produced many of the intractable environmental problems of the Anthropocene. There is some irony in studying Finns as exemplars of future thinkers: as Ialenti points out, the Finnish language has no future tense. Instead,

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Marcia Bjornerud Lawrence University October 2019 PREFACE This book is a response to two overlapping crises—one ecological, the other intellectual. The first is the Anthropocene: a name proposed for a troubled time in Earth’s history ushered in by human transformations of our planet’s climate, erosion patterns, extinctions, atmosphere

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change mitigation, city planning, natural resource extraction, infrastructure security, digital technology obsolescence, landscape architecture, human mobility planning, land management, and beyond. After all, as the Anthropocene and the deflation of expertise take hold, we all have something to teach and something to learn. We all must embark, each in our own

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approach to expertise more generally? How could the Safety Case experts plod forward so steadily—undeterred by this growing, worrying, global intellectual crisis? During the Anthropocene, the silence of complacent experts can be as dangerous as the speeches of any political demagogue. During the deflation of expertise, experts cannot remain fearful

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Can organizations that employ deep time reckoning experts adopt new policies, programs, and workplace norms to better put their talents into the service of preventing Anthropocene collapse? Can these initiatives help us work against the deflation of expertise by making long-termist expertise more salient among skeptical publics, media pundits, and

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so profoundly that it has become a formidable geological force has gained considerable ground. The atmospheric chemist and Nobel Prize–winner Paul Crutzen revived the Anthropocene concept in 2000, advocating for it at an International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme conference in Mexico. In 2012, the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS)

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established an Anthropocene Working Group to vet the proposal, and in 2019, the taskforce voted to recognize it as a formal geological epoch that originated around 1950. However

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theories of globalization, and Marxist critiques of capitalism scarcely prepared him to grasp this geo-history’s significance. Literature scholar Timothy Morton has cast the Anthropocene as emerging from the “logistics of agriculture” that arose in the Fertile Crescent ten millennia ago.25 Anthropologist and philosopher Bruno Latour has argued that

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between the social and natural sciences.27 Sociologist Nikolas Rose has called for a “critical friendship” between the social and life sciences.28 In the Anthropocene, collaborations between anthropologists and long-sighted hard scientists like Finland’s Safety Case experts are essential. So, the Economist’s 2011 proclamation “Welcome to

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adopted the steam engine, why not call it the Chthulucene—referencing H. P. Lovecraft’s “misogynist racial-nightmare monster”?35 Finally, does presenting the Anthropocene as a new revelation let past polluters off the hook too easily? They have, after all, systematically ignored environmental warnings from the nineteenth century and

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they reckoned deep time by calculating, estimating, and drawing conclusions about far future Finlands. The second refers to what I do: I reckon with the Anthropocene planetary crisis and the deflation of expertise intellectual crisis by concluding each chapter with reckonings: “opinions or judgments,” “ways of thinking,” and “considerations” about

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secure better ecological tomorrows never ceased to shine through. Theirs was a more cautious, measured, reserved techno-optimism than that of, say, proposals to fix Anthropocene problems using geoengineering. Geoengineering proposals have included plans to put fertilizers into oceans to raise their carbon dioxide uptake, or to pump reflective particles into

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we agree. Closing our minds by assuming the world is just a postmodern abyss of meaninglessness, chaos, and power-politics can never liberate us from Anthropocene darkness. But adopting a spirit of adventurous learning can be enriching. Fieldwork showed me how a subtle, abiding, guarded optimism about technological advancement, intellectual

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human, ecological, and geological futures (near and distant). Performing these intellectual journeys across time by zooming in and out across time spans is a crucial Anthropocene skill. Mimicking these experts’ intellectual adventurousness, the chapter begins by zooming out from the Safety Case: it approaches the entire project as only one momentary

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shortsighted organizations of today to embrace more sophisticated multiscale, multiangle, or multiperspective sensibilities. These sensibilities must be widely cultivated if we are to survive the Anthropocene. The reckonings also ask how today’s communities of deep time reckoners can achieve greater solidarity—pursuing a shared mission to recalibrate experts’ and citizens

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J. Grinevald, R. Leinfelder, J. McNeill, C. Poirier, D. Richter, W. Steffen, D. Vidas, M. Wagreich, A. P. Wolfe, and A. Zhisheng, “When Did the Anthropocene Begin? A Mid-Twentieth-Century Boundary Level Is Stratigraphically Optimal,” Quaternary International 383 (2015): 204–207. 24.  Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History: Four Theses

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the Atomic Scientists 74, no. 4 (2018). 43.  Peter Galison and Robb Moss, directors, Containment (film, 2015). 44.  Gabrielle Hecht, “Interscalar Vehicles for an African Anthropocene: On Waste, Temporality, and Violence,” Cultural Anthropology 33, no. 1 (2018). 45.  K. M. Trauth, S. C. Hora, and R. V. Guzowski, Expert Judgment

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-Level Nuclear Waste Repository Project at Yucca Mountain,” Science & Technology Studies 27, no. 2 (2014). 50.  Isabelle Stengers, “Accepting the Reality of Gaia,” in The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis: Rethinking Modernity in a New Epoch, ed. C. Hamilton, F. Gemenne, C. Bonneuil (London: Routledge, 2015). 51.  Breakthrough Institute, “

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Breakthrough Dialogue 2015: The Good Anthropocene” (2015), https://thebreakthrough.org/articles/breakthrough-dialogue-2015. 52.  Shawn Lawrence Otto, “Antiscience Beliefs Jeopardize U.S. Democracy,” Scientific American, November 1, 2012, http://www

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publics, politicians, and social and news media. It must be elevated from its current obscurity and popularized; it must be broadcast widely, helping others resist Anthropocene shortsightedness. Analogue research must not be drowned out by today’s widespread deflations of optimism, trust, and confidence in international expert collaboration. To more fully

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stratigrapher living in the far future, would I see “technofossils” of twentieth-century human activity—the distinct human-altered strata layers that mark the proposed Anthropocene epoch?12 Long-termist expertise can sharpen our abilities to answer these questions. Analogue studies can provide resources for more accurately visualizing the present-day

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we defamiliarize our surroundings by making long-termist analogies or following objects across time, we not only lengthen our thinking’s time horizons during the Anthropocene; we also broaden our intellectual horizons by finding inspiration in analogue experts’ research during the deflation of expertise. The question is: How can we

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horizons of time, training our intuitions to adopt the long-termism necessary to think more clearly about climate change, biodiversity, and sustainability during the Anthropocene. But we must remember to perform these personal fact-finding quests and intellectual workouts with a self-questioning attitude. That can help us adopt the

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from analogue sites got input into the Safety Case’s models—which I explore in chapter 2. 8.  Gabrielle Hecht, “Interscalar Vehicles for an African Anthropocene: On Waste, Temporality, and Violence,” Cultural Anthropology 33, no. 1 (2018): 115, 134. 9.  Hecht, “Interscalar Vehicles,” 131. 10.  Stefan Helmreich, “Waves: An Anthropology

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Washington Post, November 18, 2005). 12.  J. Zalasiewicz, C. N. Waters, M. Williams, A. D. Barnosky, A. Cearreta, P. Crutzen, et al., “When Did the Anthropocene Begin? A Mid-twentieth-century Boundary Level Is Stratigraphically Optimal,” Quaternary International 383 (2015): 204–207. 13.  The Conservation Fund, “Ice Age National Scenic Trail

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geophysical history of our planet can make our lives seem instantaneous. When contemplating Big History, we can be overcome by a sense of meaningless. Our Anthropocene visions of tomorrow can be filtered by guilt-ridden despair about resource extraction, privilege, nuclear weapons, population growth, capitalism, biodiversity loss, climate change, future

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can serve as a foundation for developing the more multidimensional, multitimescale form of deep time reckoning that the next chapter argues becomes imperative during the Anthropocene and the deflation of expertise. NOTES 1.  G. N. Bailey, “Time Perspectivism: Origins and Consequences,” in Time and Archaeology: Time Perspectivism Revisited, ed. S.

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ecological, and geological pasts (near and distant) and human, ecological, and geological futures (near and distant). As in many other lines of thinking during the Anthropocene, distinctions made between these timescales tend to blur into one another. Learning to better perform these intellectual gymnastics in zooming in and out across time

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experts. Casting long-sighted physical scientists, social scientists, and humanities scholars as professional mentors for lifelong learning can do more than just raise awareness about Anthropocene perils; it can also help empower the virtues of careful and rigorous expertise. This empowerment, if accepted by the wider public, can help counter the

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nudge employees at all levels and positions toward approaching problems from multiple timescales, which would help the workforce think in spans more in sync with Anthropocene challenges. Enriching one’s time consciousness can be eye-opening for any employee. This includes high-level executives, accountants, administrative staff, communications professionals, and

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training programs on their own, voters can still push for laws requiring them to do so. DAYS, DECADES, CENTURIES, AND MULTIMILLENNIAL DIVISIONS During the Anthropocene, many private companies have long-term impacts on the planet. These range from plastics manufacturers to fossil fuel extractors to those in the chemicals industry

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experts start working in tandem can a more holistic and united front against ecological and intellectual degradation take root. This means tens of thousands approaching Anthropocene problems from different time spans, perspectives, and disciplines. PERSPECTIVE EXCHANGING PARLORS The Deep Time Reckoning Association could set up social clubs or conference rooms

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Court justices. If a new merit-based club focused squarely on long-termist expertise were to establish its own interdisciplinary network, what sort of Anthropocene breakthroughs could emerge? The Safety Case experts showed how cross-pollinating many different kinds of long-termist expertise can help an organization reckon deep time

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If this practice were to be widely adopted, it would not only help lay more multidimensional intellectual, institutional, and societal foundations for tackling long-term Anthropocene threats; it could also help reinvigorate enthusiasm, among skeptical members of the public, for interdisciplinary expert engagement during the deflation of expertise. NOTES 1.  Edmund

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options. It has no concept of them. Their significances died with the humans. Nor does the microbe grasp the suffering they faced when succumbing to Anthropocene collapse. Humans’ past technological feats, grand civilizations, passionate projects, intellectual triumphs, wartime sacrifices, and personal struggles are now moot. And yet, the radiological safety

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hope, nightmare and dream, destruction and creation, dystopia and utopia,” which often accompany futures thinking.16 It would help us feel less paralyzed by overwhelming Anthropocene pessimism and feel less “abstracted out of significance” by deep time’s harrowing breadth.17 It would provide counterpoints to the sensationalized deep time aesthetics

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Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). 15.  Simon Nicholson and Sikina Jinnah, New Earth Politics: Essays from the Anthropocene (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016). 16.  Kathleen Stewart and Susan Harding, “Bad Endings: American Apocalypsis,” Annual Review of Anthropology 28 (1999): 286, 291. 17.  

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technology, Becoming Good Ancestors: How We Balance Nature, Community, and Technology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 20.  Gabrielle Hecht, “Interscalar Vehicles for an African Anthropocene: On Waste, Temporality, and Violence,” Cultural Anthropology 33, no. 1 (2018). 21.  Bjornerud, Timefulness, 163. 22.  Edmund Husserl, The Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness (

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approach of actively seeking out scientifically informed knowledge while embracing an anthropologically informed openness to careful, skeptical, critical listening to all sorts of diverse perspectives. Anthropocene A name proposed for a troubled epoch in Earth’s geological history ushered in by human transformations of our planet’s climate, erosion patterns, extinctions

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(Bechtel Corporation), 24 Husserl, Edmund, 151 Hutton, James, 17 Ice Age, coming, 12 “Imagining Deep Time” (National Academy of Science), 3 Industrial Revolution, and the Anthropocene, 15 Infinition, 64, 159 Input/output patterns, 77–79 International Atomic Energy Agency, 21 International Commission on Radiological Protection, 21 International Commission on Stratigraphy, 14

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Soini, Timo, 35 Somalia, refugees from, 9 Soviet Union, 74 Stoermer, Eugene, 167n20 Stoppani, Antonio, 167n20 Strathern, Marilyn, 64 Strategic redundancy, 57 Stratigraphy, and the Anthropocene, 14–15 Successor stewardship, 140–141, 162 Sun Tzu, xiv Suomen Atomiteknillinen Seura, Young Generation Working Group, 73 “Suomi ilmiö” (Eppu Normaali), 34 Suuret nälkävuodet

The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World

by Oliver Morton  · 26 Sep 2015  · 469pp  · 142,230 words

Population Bomb 184 Defusing the Population Bomb 189 Far from Fixed 195 How to Spot a Geoengineer 201 8 Carbon Past, Carbon Present 209 The Anthropocene 219 The Greening Planet 229 9 Carbon Present, Carbon Future 243 Ocean Anaemia 251 Cultivating One’s Garden 259 10 Sulphur and Soggy Mirrors 268

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planet; it is to changed states of the earthsystem that the human world finds itself responding. When the change that humans bring to this new Anthropocene state of the earthsystem is deliberate, I see it as geoengineering; in this book, that term will cover any deliberate technological intervention in the earthsystem

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the fact that atmospheric testing ended less than twenty years after the first nuclear explosion, one that is very tightly constrained in time. If the Anthropocene ever becomes an officially sanctioned geological term – although it was conceived more as a rhetorical prod, the meticulous boundary setters of the geological profession are

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strict official definition – it will need, as all geological periods do, a stratigraphic marker, a boundary layer before which the Earth had not entered the Anthropocene, and after which it had. The sediments enriched in fallout during the 1950s are often offered up as a candidate.* The global spread of fallout

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continuing research that built on what Johnston and Paul Crutzen – a wily and astute atmospheric chemist who, a couple of decades later, introduced the term ‘Anthropocene’ into science’s vocabulary – had discovered about NOx showed that a fleet of 500 supersonic airliners would reduce stratospheric ozone levels by 10–20 per

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appreciable level of human influence. This is as strong an argument as any for thinking it reasonable to talk about the Earth having entered the Anthropocene. The amount of sunlight that a planet, or part of a planet, reflects back into space defines the property known as albedo. As we

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a host, or of subjects to a law, or indeed of a cancer to a body. The fingers-in-every-arrow idea of the Anthropocene is that human enterprise is now part of most of the earthsystem’s flows and cycles, and that more and more of the earthsystem is

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idea that human ingenuity can deliver the same impact as Vulcan’s wrath seems implausible, even impious. But it is an everyday truth of the Anthropocene. Humans outstrip nature all the time in ways that just a few centuries ago – at the time, say, of Tambora – would have shocked all

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to distinguish astronomical observation from sociological explanation, if nothing else, he prefigured the hybridization of the human world and the earth-system that characterizes the Anthropocene. Lowell’s canal dreams inspired many further speculations. H. G. Wells suggested that if the Martians could remake one planet in their quest for

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good? But the noble struggle had an air of tragedy, too. Robert Sherlock’s Man as a Geological Agent, published in 1922, prefigures more recent Anthropocene discussions with its impressive account of the sheer scale of the Earth’s mines, cities and canals. At its conclusion, the canal builders of Mars

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a feeling for the stuff that mattered and for how to get people to see that it mattered – hence his successful introduction of the term ‘Anthropocene’ into the scientific lexicon in the early 2000s. In 2006 he announced, in an essay in Stephen Schneider’s journal Climatic Change, that climate geoengineering

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a millennium was a dramatic claim at that time, even if today it is an underestimate. It could be done in a century. The Anthropocene That humans can, in lifetimes, make changes over which the Earth unaided would labour for millions of years is at the heart of the idea

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conversations about the earthsystem need to find a new way of talking about the intermingling of the human and the previously-seen-as-inhuman; the Anthropocene, the very name of which makes human action central to the sciences of the current planet, looks like an arena in which that great realignment

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to the idea as legitimizing the level of human interference in the earthsystem when the aim must be to reverse it. If talking about the Anthropocene shifts environmental debates towards the best strategies for managing human dominance over the earthsystem and away from a steadfast refusal to countenance such an idea

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fundamental back-to-nature strand in environmental thought would seem to be sundered. To the extent that there is any point in talking about the Anthropocene, in this analysis it is in the context of retreating from it and back into some more natural epoch as quickly as possible. And

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some see the Anthropocene as a category mistake; shoehorning the enormity of what humans are doing to the planet into the strict and objective confines imposed by the

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of an asteroid. Again, it’s not a bad point. The fact that there is much to be said both for the adoption of the Anthropocene and for various arguments against it underlines the degree to which the idea is both important and paradoxical. The paradox, in a nutshell, is

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force of nature – and forces of nature are those things which, by definition, are beyond the power of humans to control. Proponents of the Anthropocene can point to all sorts of ways in which humans now outstrip nature: their dominance of the nitrogen cycle; the amount of soil they move

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fossil record for as far into the future as their lithified remains exist. But if there is an Exhibit A in the case for the Anthropocene, it is the carbon-dioxide level. Before the Industrial Revolution came along, the carbon cycle was pretty much in balance. Terrestrial plants were taking

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the Industrial Revolution and the end of the most recent ice age 12,000 years earlier – a period customarily known, before the idea of the Anthropocene started confusing things, as the Holocene – carbon-dioxide levels stayed between 250 parts per million and 280 parts per million. In the 100,000-year

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thousands of years before the Industrial Revolution. His ideas also have a political dimension; Ruddiman did not conceive them that way, but that’s the Anthropocene for you – it makes ideas about how the earthsystem changes political more or less from the get-go. If you accept the idea that

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climate change brought about by the spread of agriculture constitutes an early Anthropocene, you dilute the shock of what is happening to the earthsystem today; the industrial changes of the climate become an extension of what was

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done unwittingly by farmers just by farming. The Anthropocene becomes an unwitting and more or less unavoidable consequence of there being people on the planet, and thus a rather friendlier concept. It is no

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of Naomi Klein’s book This Changes Everything, that capitalism is at war with the climate, you will not want a good Anthropocene – you will hold out for no Anthropocene at all. This is not a subject where people can simply agree to disagree – or impose their wills on each other

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through the more general mechanisms of politics. The Anthropocene derives a significant part of its rhetorical power from the idea that it can be defined with the same sort of procedures and precision as

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particular location – that mark the beginnings of the periods that define their world. Such a committee is currently discussing both whether there should be an Anthropocene and, if so, where it should begin. They could conceivably just choose to set a date. Thus some argue for fixing the beginning at 1750

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the last gasp of the most recent ice age. There would be a pleasing technical consistency in finding a similar ice-core marker for the Anthropocene. In 2015, Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin, both at University College London, made use of recent work on the history of the carbon cycle

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clearly defined ice-core marker of a human effect on the carbon cycle. That in itself probably makes them a plausible starting point for the Anthropocene.* The case becomes stronger when you consider what it is that is being marked. Human contact between the Americas and the rest of the

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degree to which so many things now grow so widely across the Earth has led some ecologists to talk about the present not as the Anthropocene, but as the Homogenocene. The ecological homogenization was a symptom of greater shifts that came about as Europe imposed its will on the newly

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at once historical and geophysical, is recorded in Antarctic ice-core records of the late sixteenth century, its claim to mark the beginning of the Anthropocene is the best that there is. The Greening Planet The events of human history, and to some extent prehistory, have left their mark on the

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happening 2,500 or 5,000 years ‘before present’ (BP), they actually mean before 1950. If 1950 were chosen as the beginning of the Anthropocene, then the Anthropocene would, by definition, all be happening after the present – it would be in a condition of permanent futurity, hanging unsupported in the air like

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to, as well as being more questionable, are a lot less sharp; he himself would not advocate using them to define the base of the Anthropocene. * It is also worth noting that the most economically advanced part of China was a few thousand kilometres from the country’s coalfields (a

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an ice-age ocean some 20,000 years past the peak of the ice age would mark a huge new step into a cobbled-together Anthropocene. Humans have already given the earthsystem an atmosphere that looks like that of twenty million years ago – importing the carbon needed for the job

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been right when he wrote in 1938 that industrial carbon dioxide might postpone the return of the glaciers indefinitely. The Holocene was an interglacial. The Anthropocene could be post-glacial. Or it could not be. It is the fact that there are two possibilities which makes this long-term speculation so

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then provided.* It was a typically cunning bit of rhetoric. Rather than making climate geoengineering a radical novelty, it made it a sanitized version of Anthropocene business-as-usual. The cooling emissions were going on already; the proposed geoengineering was a way to shape them so that their beneficial effects were

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see it helping in a renegotiation of what it is for things to count as natural that may ease some of the contradictions of the Anthropocene. I can even see it as an inspiration. As the previous chapter showed, it is easy to imagine catastrophes. It is much harder to

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, David Keith and John Latham for a level of support for the project that went beyond helpful. Other members of the geoclique, fellow travellers and Anthropocene thinkers – as well as critics of some or all of the above – to whom I owe particular thanks for stimulating conversations, good fellowship, helpful

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of Ruddiman’s views include Bala et al. (2007) and Singarayer et al. (2011). The idea that 1610 might mark the beginning of the Anthropocene is developed in Lewis and Maslin (2015), and a sense of the great gulf in human history that was opened up at that time can

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be found in Pomeranz (2001) and Mann (2011); the idea that such an analysis makes Anthropocene change the result of a specific economic and political system, rather than being caused by the species at large, is developed in Malm and Hornborg

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V. ‘Anthropogenic Aerosols and the Weakening of the South Asian Summer Monsoon’ Science 334 502–505 Bonneuil, Christophe and Fressoz, Jean-Baptiste (2013) L’Evenement Anthropocene: La Terre, l’Histoire et Nous Seuil Boyd, Philip et al. (2007) ‘Mesoscale Iron Enrichment Experiments 1993–2005: Synthesis and Future Directions’ Science 315 612

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‘Presidential Address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science’ Chemical News 78 125–139 Crutzen, Paul J. and Stoermer, E. F. (2000) ‘The “Anthropocene”’ Global Change Newsletter 41 17–18 Crutzen, Paul J. (2006) ‘Albedo Enhancement by Stratospheric Sulfur Injections: A Contribution to Resolve a Policy Dilemma’ Climatic Change

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Foundations of Capitalism’ Theory, Culture and Society doi: 10.1177/0263276413488960 Horton, Joshua (2015) ‘The Emergency Framing of Solar Geoengineering: Time for a Different Approach’ Anthropocene Review (in press) House, Joanna I., Prentice, I. Colin and Lequéré, Corinne (2002) ‘Maximum Impacts of Future Reforestation or Deforestation on Atmospheric CO2’ Global

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(2011) SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance HarperCollins Lewis, Simon L. and Malin, Mark A. (2015) ‘Defining the Anthropocene’ Nature 519 171–180 Liu, Zhengyu et al. (2006) ‘On the Cause of Abrupt Vegetation Collapse in North Africa During the Holocene: Climate Variability vs

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(1972) The Doomsday Syndrome: an Attack on Pessimism McGraw Hill Malm, Andreas and Hornborg, Alf (2014) ‘The Geology of Mankind? A Critique of the Anthropocene Narrative’ Anthropocene Review 1 62–69 Mann, Charles C. (2011) 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created Knopf Marchetti, Cesare (1977) ‘On Geoengineering and the CO2

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Climate: Science, Governance and Uncertainty Ruddiman, William (2005) Plows, Plagues and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate Princeton University Press Ruddiman, William (2013) ‘The Anthropocene’ Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences doi: 10.1146/annurev-earth-050212-123944 Ruderman, Mal E. (1974) ‘Possible Consequences of Nearby Supernova Explosions for

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–326 Victor, David G. (2011) Global Warming Gridlock: Creating More Effective Strategies for Protecting the Planet Cambridge University Press Vince, Gaia (2014) Adventures in the Anthropocene Chatto & Windus Von Neumann, John (1955) ‘Can We Survive Technology’ Fortune June 1955 Vogt, William (1948) Road to Survival William Sloane Associates Vonnegut, Kurt (

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Antarctica: ice as record of earlier climates, 222, 227, 321; ozone layer over, 53, 93, 110, 111; protecting the icecap, 372; see also Southern Ocean Anthropocene: attitudes to, 219–21, 225–9; definition, 25–6; and greenhouse gases, 222–9; origins of term, 52; start date, 44–5, 225–9

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–5; and volcanic eruptions, 95 counter-geoengineering, 341–2 Cox, Peter, 240 Crookes, Sir William, 178–84, 194, 201–2, 210 Crutzen, Paul: and the Anthropocene, 52, 153, 219, 220; and effects of nuclear war, 305–7; and geoengineering, 152–6, 280, 286; and nox, 52; ozone layer studies, 152

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with, 125, 139–47; as hierarchy, 77; historical attitudes to, 41, 101, 125–35; human relationship with, 77, 79, 80, 220, 311, 337; see also Anthropocene; earthsystem NCAR see National Center for Atmospheric Research negotiations see climate negotiations and agreements; UNFCCC Netherlands, 184 Neukermans, Armand, 287–8, 323 New York University

The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us

by Diane Ackerman  · 9 Sep 2014  · 380pp  · 104,841 words

DIANE ACKERMAN THE HUMAN AGE THE WORLD SHAPED BY US W. W. NORTON & COMPANY NEW YORK LONDON CONTENTS I.WELCOME TO THE ANTHROPOCENE Apps for Apes Wild Heart, Anthropocene Mind Black Marble Handmade Landscapes A Dialect of Stone Monkeying with the Weather Gaia in a Temper Brainstorming from Equator to Ice Blue Revolution

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He Lends Me Cyborgs and Chimeras DNA’S Secret Doormen Meet My Maker, the Mad Molecule Conclusion: Wild Heart, Anthropocene Mind (Revisited) Acknowledgments Notes Further Reading Index PART I WELCOME TO THE ANTHROPOCENE APPS FOR APES On a blue-sky day at the Toronto zoo, flocks of children squired by teachers and

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, then touches the first chapter. When he does, a snowstorm opens up, with college students dashing between buildings, books clutched inside their parkas . . . WILD HEART, ANTHROPOCENE MIND Knee-deep in the blizzard of 1978, when wind-whipped sails of snow tacked across Lake Cayuga, and the streets looked like a toboggan

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of our epoch from its rocky designation, Holocene (“Recent Whole”), to one that recognizes, for the first time, our unparalleled dominion over the whole planet, Anthropocene—the Human Age. By international agreement, geologists divide Earth’s environmental history into phases, based on ruling empires of rock, ocean, and life; it’s

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seemed ours to do with as we wished. Yet we were never as distant as we thought, and if we are learning anything in the Anthropocene, it is that we are not really separate at all. An important part of the landscape, our built environment is an expression of nature and

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bones that future geologists will ponder, but an altogether different kind of evidence. Not our bones but our residue will signal the beginning of the Anthropocene, a point delineated by a “golden spike”—a marker scientists pound into the rock strata to denote an internationally agreed-upon start of a geological

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from their native shores, in a worldwide flux binding us all together. She and her colleagues have argued some about the exact start of the Anthropocene—Agriculture? Industry? Nuclear bombs?—but they all agree that our world dramatically changed around the year 1800. That’s when the Industrial Revolution, powered by

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to repair infrastructure and damage in place, not to help with relocation after slow-motion disaster. Our humanitarian laws aren’t keeping up with the Anthropocene’s environmental realities. Robin Bronen, an Anchorage-based human rights lawyer and a frequent visitor to Newtok, is working tirelessly to change them. “This is

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flowing back together, we’re finally merging into a handful of colossal, metal-clad spheres of civilization. Among the many shocks and wonders of the Anthropocene, this is bound to rank high: the largest mass migration the planet has ever seen. In only the past hundred years, we’ve become an

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brains to find newer ways to capture and enslave the sun to power the rest of our lives. We’ve been exploiting it throughout the Anthropocene whenever we’ve burned fuel—really a form of buried sunlight—to warm ourselves and power our empires. The Industrial Revolution always was about solar

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so visible, and wildlife and fresh water so much scarcer, that fewer people are foolish enough to deny the evidence. As we wade into the Anthropocene, we’re trying to reinsert ourselves back into the planet’s ecosystem and good graces. Unlovely as the word “sustainability” may be, it’s sashaying

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fed, serving a smorgasbord of delicacies easily within a deer’s reach. In the process we keep fashioning new niches, most often without meaning to. Anthropocene cities have created pools of a limited number of species, the ones that coexist well with humans—mainly deer, rats, cats, birds, foxes, skunks, raccoons

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of our technology? Will they become new species? Or are they just new citizens of our age? What makes nature natural? It’s a quintessentially Anthropocene question. Nature thrived long before cities did, long before we coated the Earth with an immensity of humans. Wild animals live among us. Our toil

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success. It seems obvious that a city, or a cage in a zoo, is not what we mean by a “natural” environment, but in the Anthropocene, it can be hard to say what is. IF WE DON’T want even more animals living with concrete sidewalks and feeding off human garbage

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few couples courting, there are stones abounding, but less food for the orcas (killer whales) and leopard seals that prey on the penguins. Yet the Anthropocene (like nature itself) rarely tells simple stories. In Alaska, our bestirring of the weather is good for the nearly extinct trumpeter swans, who are using

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one never knows what calamity might descend, which crops might fail, and what seeds—whether heirloom or genetically engineered—might offer a solution in the Anthropocene world. The key may be a relic from a bygone era. As Paula Bramel, assistant executive director of the seed vault, explains: “The environment is

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the early days of brain imagery, we’re tagging invisibles like butterflies; we’re learning life-altering truths. What will this mean for a new Anthropocene ethics? How might our knowledge influence how we choose to relate to our spouse, children, friends, coworkers? As such knowledge trickles through society, will it

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electric pilot light) keeps us warm, and an electric fan or air conditioner cools us. In the summer we live in an electric igloo. How Anthropocene that we “condition” the very air we breathe, flavoring its essence. For most of human history, we simply breathed the air that surrounded us, whatever

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, and did other close work, but not for the entire day. Close work now dominates our lives, but that’s very recent, one of the Anthropocene’s hallmarks, and we may evolve into a more myopic species. Studies also show that Google is affecting our memory in chilling ways. We more

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the senses, lost a visceral sense of being one life form among many on a delicately balanced planet. A big challenge for us in the Anthropocene will be reclaiming that sense of presence. Not to forgo high-speed digital life, but balance it with slow hours of just being outside, surrounded

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a text from your disgruntled poinsettia that reads: “With fronds like you who needs anemones?!” WHEN ROBOTS WEEP, WHO WILL COMFORT THEM? It’s an Anthropocene magic trick, this extension of our digital selves over the Internet, far enough to reach other people, animals, plants, interplanetary crews, extraterrestrial visitors, the planet

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will soon revolutionize medicine with clean, healthy organs on demand. A touch of mental whiplash is to be expected. It’s a hallmark of the Anthropocene that science and technology are galloping at such a pace that Bonassar’s field didn’t even exist when he was in high school or

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Parkinson’s-stricken monk. What to do with cells is increasingly more a question of imagination than material. Spearheaded by pioneers like Bonassar and Lipson, Anthropocene engineering has penetrated the world of medicine and biology, revolutionizing how we regard the body. In these vistas, electricity, architecture, and chemistry slant together and

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to picture as the seamless web of nature. This is part of the new natural. It slips beneath our radar for things weird, experimental, nonhuman. Anthropocene humans can merge with technology and not be regarded as alien. Not only humans. When a puppy called Naki’o fell asleep in a puddle

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and bioengineering would not appear for a hundred years, but Wells foresaw some of the ethical dilemmas they might pose a little later in the Anthropocene. Suppose, by accident or design, a subhuman chimera emerged, something more intelligent than other animals, but less so than humans? What purpose would it be

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we use, and the wars we wage, really change our DNA and rewire the human species? She knows they can, because in her college curriculum, Anthropocene Studies, she’s read research linking exposure to jet fuel, dioxin, the pesticides DEET and permethrin, plastics, and hydrocarbon mixtures to cancer, and not just

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evolutionary sidestep happens is the focus of epigenetics, a new science that puts all the old-fashioned college debates about nature or nurture on the Anthropocene scrap heap of outmoded ideas. It also lays a heavier burden on the shoulders of would-be parents. Apparently, it’s never too soon to

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other aerosols, dust particles, and pollutants. All suspended and wafting around the planet, tromboning and floating, interacting with life. In this panoramic new portrait, the Anthropocene body is no longer an entity that’s separate from the environment, like a balloon we pilot through the world, avoiding obstacles, but an organism

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headlines, but more often silent as the glide of silk over glass, how we relate to our own nature is subtly changing. CONCLUSION: WILD HEART, ANTHROPOCENE MIND (Revisited) NASA’s “Blue Marble” photograph of Earth from space gave us an eye-opening image of the whole planet for the first time

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driving. In the Industrial Age we found it thrilling to try to master nature everywhere and in every way we could think of. In the Anthropocene, we’re engineering ways to help the most vulnerable people adapt, and designing long-term solutions to blunt global warming. Humans are relentless problem-solvers

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as well as her bounty, and we’re trying to grow into the role of loving caregivers. I’m all for renaming our era the Anthropocene—a legitimate golden spike based on the fossil record—because it highlights the enormity of our impact on the world. We are dreamsmiths and wonder

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the enemy, and the kingdom of animals didn’t include humans (who attributed to other animals all the things about themselves they couldn’t stand). Anthropocene: Nature surrounds, permeates, effervesces in, and includes us. At the end of our days it deranges and disassembles us like old toys banished to the

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oil–laced products, and dozens of multinational companies (McDonald’s, Pepsi, et al.) have agreed, for the sake of the rainforests. Wild Heart, Anthropocene Mind 11The term “Anthropocene” was coined by the aquatic ecologist Eugene Stoermer (Emeritus, University of Michigan), who used it at a conference, and Paul Crutzen, who currently works

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. Drexler, K. Eric. Radical Abundance: How a Revolution in Nanotechnology Will Change Civilization. New York: PublicAffairs, 2013. Dukes, Paul. Minutes to Midnight: History and the Anthropocene Era from 1763. New York: Anthem Press, 2011. Dunn, Rob R. The Wild Life of Our Bodies: Predators, Parasites, and Partners That Shape Who We

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Lightman. New York: Bantam Dell, 2005. White, Lynn, Jr. Medieval Technology and Social Change. London: Oxford University Press, 1962. Williams, Mark, et al., eds. The Anthropocene: A New Epoch of Geological Time? Theme issue, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 369, no. 1938 (March 13, 2011): 833–1112. Williams, Terry Tempest

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, 210 Amenhotep II, 257 amino acids, 179–80 Anatomage, 197 animals, in war, 141–48 Antarctic, 22 ice cores in, 9 Antarctica, 237 anteaters, 132 Anthropocene, 9 beginning of, 32–33 antibiotics, 300, 301 ants, 273 Apollo 17, 17–18 Appalachian Trail, 123–24 Apple, 210 Apps for Apes, 5–6

Origin Story: A Big History of Everything

by David Christian  · 21 May 2018  · 334pp  · 100,201 words

7 Humans: Threshold 6 Chapter 8 Farming: Threshold 7 Chapter 9 Agrarian Civilizations Chapter 10 On the Verge of Today’s World Chapter 11 The Anthropocene: Threshold 8 PART IV: THE FUTURE Chapter 12 Where Is It All Going? Appendix: Statistics on Human History Notes Further Reading Glossary Acknowledgments Follow Penguin

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how new Goldilocks conditions accumulated, eventually preparing the way for the astonishing burst of innovation that would create today’s world, the world of the Anthropocene. The World Six Hundred Years Ago By 1400 CE, human populations had grown from about five million at the end of the last ice age

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despite the fact that he had helped launch the next chapter of the fossil-fuels revolution. Chapter 11 The Anthropocene: Threshold 8 We’re no longer in the Holocene. We’re in the Anthropocene. —PAUL CRUTZEN, OUTBURST AT A CONFERENCE IN 2000 Man the food-gatherer reappears incongruously as information-gatherer. In

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equivalent of a new geological force. That is why many scholars have begun to argue that planet Earth has entered a new geological age, the Anthropocene epoch, or the “era of humans.” This is the first time in the four-billion-year history of the biosphere that a single biological species

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trying to land. This is new territory for humans, and for the entire biosphere. The Great Acceleration If we stand back from the details, the Anthropocene epoch looks like a drama with three main acts so far and a lot more change still in the works. Act 1 began in the

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, first advocated in the Enlightenment, to “improve” the world, to make it a better, richer, and more civilized place for humans. Act 2 of the Anthropocene was exceptionally violent. It began in the late nineteenth century and lasted until the middle of the twentieth century. During this act, the first fossil

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energy and resources on such an unprecedented scale that they began to transform the biosphere. That is why many scholars date the dawn of the Anthropocene epoch to the middle of the twentieth century. Transforming the World: Technologies and Science Innovation, propelled by cheap energy, was the main driver of change

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and used cars or flew in planes. Global trade was transformed by oil tankers, container ships, and large planes. Information lies at the heart of Anthropocene technologies. Information technologies were transformed when governments invested in a massive expansion of education and research, and businesses and corporations funded research to develop and

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populations. Transforming the World: Governance and Society The very nature of society and government was transformed by the new energy flows and technologies of the Anthropocene. Once, all humans had been foragers, and government really meant family relationships. After farming appeared, more and more people lived in peasant villages and supported

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the entire biosphere in just a few hours, weapons with the destructive power of the asteroid that did in the dinosaurs. Measuring Change in the Anthropocene New flows of information and energy have woven humans, animals, and plants, as well as the chemicals of the earth, seas, and atmosphere, into a

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own species. This system depends on huge flows of energy from fossil fuels. We can roughly measure the impact of these energy flows in the Anthropocene using figures in the statistical appendix. The first thing that stands out is the sheer scale of change in recent centuries. In the past two

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years and primarily during the Great Acceleration of the second half of the twentieth century. This is the face of the Good Anthropocene (good from a human perspective). The Good Anthropocene has generated better lives for billions of ordinary humans, for the first time in human history. (If you doubt the improvement

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, think again about having surgery without modern anesthesia.) But there is also a Bad Anthropocene. The Bad Anthropocene consists of the many changes that threaten

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the achievements of the Good Anthropocene. First, the Bad Anthropocene has generated huge inequalities. Despite colossal increases in wealth, millions continue to live in dire poverty

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modern world has abolished slavery, the 2016 Global Slavery Index estimated that more than forty-five million humans today are living as slaves. The Bad Anthropocene is not just morally unacceptable. It is also dangerous because it guarantees conflict, and in a world with nuclear weapons, any major conflict could prove

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catastrophic for most of humanity. The Bad Anthropocene also threatens to reduce biodiversity and undermine the stable climate system of the past ten thousand years. The flows of energy and resources that support

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take notice. The challenge we face as a species is pretty clear. Can we preserve the best of the Good Anthropocene and avoid the dangers of the Bad Anthropocene? Can we distribute the Anthropocene bonanza of energy and resources more equitably to avoid catastrophic conflicts? And can we, like the first living organisms

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no guarantees. The crash really could happen. We could mishandle the intricate global machine we humans have built and lose the benefits of the Good Anthropocene. That is particularly likely if different drivers try to steer the machine in different directions or if we ignore the red warning lights appearing on

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qualities we humans will need as we face an unpredictable future full of both dangers and opportunities. Our discussion of the Good and the Bad Anthropocenes tells us what the goals of the human quest are right now. The first is to avoid a crash. If we can do that, there

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are two further goals: to ensure that the benefits of the Good Anthropocene are available to all humans, and to ensure that the biosphere continues to thrive, because if the biosphere fails, no quest can succeed. Our challenge

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cynicism is appropriate. Nevertheless, for someone who grew up in the mid-twentieth century, when there was little understanding of the dangers of the Bad Anthropocene, it is remarkable to read such declarations from a body that represents most nations on Earth. Soon after the sustainable-development goals were published, another

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settle into a period of dynamic stability, having crossed a new threshold and built a new world society that preserves the best of the Good Anthropocene. Perhaps the idea of endless growth is completely wrong. Perhaps the disruptive dynamism of recent centuries is a temporary phenomenon. After all, living life within

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panels of the global machine we humans have built. If, despite all the challenges, we humans are successful in our quest, what will a “mature Anthropocene” look like?6 It will not be a perfect world, of course. But it is important that we try to imagine such a world as

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architect’s sketch. Nevertheless, we can describe some of the main features of a world that preserves the best of the Good Anthropocene while avoiding the dangers of the Bad Anthropocene. Population growth will slow, eventually, to zero, and perhaps start falling. Rates of population growth are already falling in most parts

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countries. Many economists warn about the dangers of slowing population growth, but a biospheric perspective shows why continued population growth is unsustainable. In a mature Anthropocene, poverty will be largely eliminated by better welfare systems and checks on the accumulation of extreme wealth. As we have seen, in relative terms, extreme

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, Germany: Copernicus, 1998), with a foreword by Lynn Margulis. For a short summary of the history of the biosphere, see Mark Williams et al., “The Anthropocene Biosphere,” Anthropocene Review (2015): 1–24, doi: 10.1177/2053019615591020. 2. Christian, Brown, and Benjamin, Big History, 46. 3. Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature: The

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. Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (New York: Free Press, 1991), chapter 1. 19. Ibid., 16. Chapter 11. The Anthropocene: Threshold 8 1. Graham Allison and Philip Zelikow, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, 2nd ed. (New York: Longman, 1999), 271. 2. Angus

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, based on figures from the World Bank. 5. Lenton, Earth Systems Science, 82, 96–97. 6. The scientist was Wally Broecker. Cited in David Christian, “Anthropocene Epoch,” in The Berkshire Encyclopedia of Sustainability, Vol. 10: The Future of Sustainability, ed. Ray Anderson et al. (Barrington, MA: Berkshire Publishing, 2012), 22. 7

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. Jan Zalasiewicz and Colin Waters, “The Anthropocene,” in The Oxford Research Encyclopedia, Environmental Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 4–5. Chapter 12. Where Is It All Going? 1. Kim Stanley Robinson

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: Guiding Human Development on a Changing Planet,” Science (January 2015): 1–15. 5. Steffen et al., “Planetary Boundaries,” 1. 6. The idea of a mature Anthropocene is explored in David Grinspoon, Earth in Human Hands: Shaping Our Planet’s Future (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2016). I have borrowed some of

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humans to maximize the energy flows and resources available to them by manipulating the environment to increase production of plants and animals they found useful. Anthropocene epoch: The most recent period of human history in which humans have become a dominant force for change in the biosphere; proposed as a new

Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made

by Vaclav Smil  · 2 Mar 2021  · 1,324pp  · 159,290 words

critics would dismiss these prefatory remarks concerning environmental changes as being fundamentally insufficient because we now live in the Anthropocene, a new geological era supposedly characterized by the dominant role of humans: The Anthropocene concerns human impacts on the Earth System, not on the environment, and one cannot understand the emergence of

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the concept of the Anthropocene without an understanding of the radically new conception of the Earth System that emerged with Earth System science in the 1980s and 1990s. . . . The Earth

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); work on the formalization of a new geological time unit began in 2009. In 2016 a majority opinion within a working group was that the Anthropocene was stratigraphically real and the recommendation was to formalize the distinction by using a mid-20th-century boundary with anthropogenic radionuclides associated with nuclear arms

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in the global phosphorus cycle were fast approaching. A revised assessment extended the time span to 2010 and adjusted some definitions. The trajectory of the Anthropocene was called “The Great Acceleration” and the analysis confirmed that safe boundaries were surpassed for several key variables (Steffen et al. 2015a). The most worrisome

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gains, and that the intensity and the extent of these impacts might be now reaching levels justifying the label of a new geologic era, the Anthropocene. Nowhere is an acknowledgment that this process has accelerated to such an extent that we are approaching several boundaries that should not be crossed in

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additional 4 billion people, more than the total projected by the UN’s medium-version population forecast. The EAT–Lancet Commission on food in the Anthropocene quantified the extent of agronomic and dietary changes that would be necessary to eliminate unsustainable production of unhealthy food and replace it with healthier, environment

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. Crow, J.F. 1998. 90 years ago: The beginning of hybrid maize. Genetics 148:923–928. Crutzen, P.J. and E.F. Stoermer. 2000. The “Anthropocene.” Global Change Newsletter 41:17–18. Csereklyei, Z. et al. 2016. Energy and economic growth: The stylized facts. The Energy Journal 37:223–255. Cui

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. et al. 2005.The 20th Century Transformation of U.S. Agriculture and Farm Policy. Washington, DC: USDA. Dirzo, R. et al. 2014. Defaunation in the Anthropocene. Science 345:401–406. Dobbs, R. et al. 2011. Urban World: Mapping the Economic Power of Cities. Washington, DC: McKinsey. Dominish, E. et al. 2019

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total flying insect biomass in protected areas. PLoSONE 12(10): e0185809. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0185809 Hamilton, C. 2015. Getting the Anthropocene so wrong. The Anthropocene Review 2:102–107. Hanemann, T. and M. Huotari. 2017. Record Flows and Growing Imbalances: Chinese Investment in Europe in 2016. Berlin: Mercator

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Dutch elm disease. Forestry Chronicle 75:265–273. Hughes, T.P. et al. 2018. Spatial and temporal patterns of mass bleaching of corals in the Anthropocene. Science 359:80–83. Hugo, G. 2015. Urban Migration Trends, Challenges, Responses and Policy in the Asia–Pacific. Grand Saconnex, Switzerland: International Organization for Migration

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in older adults: The Cardiovascular Health Study. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 108:1–9. Otto, S.P. 2018. Adaptation, speciation and extinction in the Anthropocene. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 285: 20182047 Owen, R. 1861. Palaeontology, or, a Systematic Study of Extinct Animals and Their Geological Relations. Edinburgh: Adam

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. Rojstaczer, S. et al. 2001. Human appropriation of photosynthesis products. Science 294:2549–2552. Roosevelt, A.C. 2013. The Amazon and the Anthropocene: 13,000 years of human influence. Anthropocene 4:69–87. Rosen, E. 2019. The 2019 list of the longest flights in the world. https://www.forbes.com/sites/ericrosen

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. 2005. Plows, Plagues & Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ruddiman, W. 2017. Geographic evidence of the early anthropogenic hypothesis. Anthropocene 20:4–14. Saga, J. 1987. Memories of Silk and Straw: A Self-Portrait of Small-Town Japan. Tōkyō: Kōdansha International. Sánchez-Bayoa, F. and

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, A. and M. Zeigler. 2017. Global Agricultural Productivity Report. Washington, DC: Global Harvest Initiative. Steffen, W. et al. 2015a. The trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration. The Anthropocene Review 2:81–98. Steffen et al. 2015b. Planetary Boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet. Science 347(6223):1259855. Stein, Z

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. Willekens, F. 2014. Demographic Transitions in Europe and the World. Rostock: Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research. Willett, W. et al. 2019. Food in the Anthropocene: The EAT–Lancet Commission on healthy diets from sustainable food systems. Lancet 393:447–492. Williams, M. 1982. Great Tractors. Poole, UK: Blandford Press. Williams

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Zalasiewicz, J. et al. 2016. The geological cycle of plastics as a stratigraphic indicator of the Anthropocene. Anthropocene 13:4–17. Zalasiewicz, J. et al. 2017. The Working Group on the Anthropocene: Summary of evidence and interim recommendations. Anthropocene 19:55–60. Zarfl, C. et al. 2011. Microplastics in oceans. Marine Pollution Bulletin 62

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, 79–80, 115, 125–33. See also draft animals The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 139 Antarctica, wilderness area, 221 Anthropocene, 207–8 anthropogenic change, hyperbolists’ ignoring of, 259 anthropogenic environmental interventions, 205 anthropogenic land-use changes, extent of, 217–22 anthropomass, estimates of, 236–37

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zones, 111–12 Eastern Europe croplands, 214 double-cropping, 215 East India Society, 187 eating out, 102–3 EAT-Lancet Commission on food in the Anthropocene, 271 economic transitions, 152–204 consumer societies, transition to, 188–93 economic growth, prospects for, 162–67, 163f economic growth, sources of, 156–59 economic

Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Stories to Help Us Understand the Modern World

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Humankind: Solidarity With Non-Human People

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The God Species: Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans

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The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions

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The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity

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Dark Laboratory: On Columbus, the Caribbean, and the Origins of the Climate Crisis

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Ecovillages: Lessons for Sustainable Community

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The Techno-Human Condition

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Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World

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There Is No Planet B: A Handbook for the Make or Break Years

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The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty

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New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future

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Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet

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Origins: How Earth's History Shaped Human History

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The Moon: A History for the Future

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The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming

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Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason

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The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism

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Everything Under the Sun: Toward a Brighter Future on a Small Blue Planet

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A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet

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Hope Dies Last: Visionary People Across the World, Fighting to Find Us a Future

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This Will Make You Smarter: 150 New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking

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The Frayed Atlantic Edge: A Historian’s Journey From Shetland to the Channel

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On the Future: Prospects for Humanity

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Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers

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Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies

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Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization

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Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

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Squid Empire: The Rise and Fall of the Cephalopods

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The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth

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Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future

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The Ministry for the Future: A Novel

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New York 2140

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Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming

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How to Blow Up a Pipeline

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Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism

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The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View From the Future

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Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet

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Cities: The First 6,000 Years

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Unsustainable Inequalities: Social Justice and the Environment

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Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet

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When the Forest Breathes: Renewal and Resilience in the Natural World

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The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning

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On Time and Water

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Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking

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Water: A Biography

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Fully Automated Luxury Communism

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How to Do Nothing

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Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World

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The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives

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Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm

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Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet

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Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together

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Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures

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Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All

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A Short History of Humanity: How Migration Made Us Who We Are

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Life as We Made It: How 50,000 Years of Human Innovation Refined--And Redefined--Nature

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How to Spend a Trillion Dollars

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The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality

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Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out?

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The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma

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Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

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When It All Burns: Fighting Fire in a Transformed World

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Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension

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Affluence Without Abundance: The Disappearing World of the Bushmen

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Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time

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Four Futures: Life After Capitalism

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Green and Prosperous Land: A Blueprint for Rescuing the British Countryside

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Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves

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The Dark Cloud: How the Digital World Is Costing the Earth

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The Smart Wife: Why Siri, Alexa, and Other Smart Home Devices Need a Feminist Reboot

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The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall

by Mark W. Moffett  · 31 Mar 2019  · 692pp  · 189,065 words

Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth?

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A New History of the Future in 100 Objects: A Fiction

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Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

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Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves From the Tyranny of the Automobile

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The Rough Guide to Bolivia: Travel Guide eBook

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A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution

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Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration―and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives

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The New Nomads: How the Migration Revolution Is Making the World a Better Place

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Built: The Hidden Stories Behind Our Structures

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What to Think About Machines That Think: Today's Leading Thinkers on the Age of Machine Intelligence

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Life's Greatest Secret: The Race to Crack the Genetic Code

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Utopia or Bust: A Guide to the Present Crisis

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The Government of No One: The Theory and Practice of Anarchism

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Growth: From Microorganisms to Megacities

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Peers Inc: How People and Platforms Are Inventing the Collaborative Economy and Reinventing Capitalism

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The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move

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A Paradise Built in Hell: Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster

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Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World

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12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next

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Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand

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Everyday Utopia: What 2,000 Years of Wild Experiments Can Teach Us About the Good Life

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Player One

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The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President

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Why We Can't Afford the Rich

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The Fourth Industrial Revolution

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The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-First Century

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Who Owns England?: How We Lost Our Green and Pleasant Land, and How to Take It Back

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Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest

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Ways of Being: Beyond Human Intelligence

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The Stolen Year

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The Day the World Stops Shopping

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These Strange New Minds: How AI Learned to Talk and What It Means

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2312

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Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong-And the New Research That's Rewriting the Story

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This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate

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Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice

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New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI

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Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places

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Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto

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City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age

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Because We Say So

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How to Survive a Pandemic

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The Life and Death of Ancient Cities: A Natural History

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Covid-19: The Pandemic That Never Should Have Happened and How to Stop the Next One

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The COVID-19 Catastrophe: What's Gone Wrong and How to Stop It Happening Again

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The Great Wave: The Era of Radical Disruption and the Rise of the Outsider

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Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture

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The Road to Conscious Machines

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The Startup Wife

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The Dream of Europe: Travels in the Twenty-First Century

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The Peripheral

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Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming

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The Corona Crash: How the Pandemic Will Change Capitalism

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Covid by Numbers

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Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To

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The Rough Guide to Brazil

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Apollo's Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live

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Protecting Pollinators

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A World on the Wing: The Global Odyssey of Migratory Birds

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Calling Bullshit: The Art of Scepticism in a Data-Driven World

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The Big Ratchet: How Humanity Thrives in the Face of Natural Crisis

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Primates of Park Avenue: A Memoir

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Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet

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The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution

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The Art of Statistics: Learning From Data

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The Ice at the End of the World: An Epic Journey Into Greenland's Buried Past and Our Perilous Future

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The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World

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The Deepest Map

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The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century

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Machine: A White Space Novel

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Open Space: From Earth to Eternity--the Global Race to Explore and Conquer the Cosmos

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After Nations: The Making and Unmaking of a World Order

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