The term ‘Anthropocene’ has been floating around for a few years now. It’s the idea that humans have altered the Earth so significantly that we’ve entered an era defined by humans. Scientists are currently deciding whether we really have entered the Anthropocene, and have officially left the current epoch, the Holocene.
The Holocene began 11,650 years ago, as the glaciers of the last ice age retreated. In this ice-free environment, we humans rapidly expanded, and as our population grew, so did our impact on the world around us. The question is whether this impact is now so significant that humans are defining global environmental systems, and crossing planetary boundaries of no return.
Many people say yes. There are 7.6 billion of us, 50% of habitable land is used for agriculture, and the total weight of livestock and humans is 24 times greater than that of all wild mammals combined. CO2 has risen from 280ppm to over 400ppm, causing climate change, sea level rise and ocean acidification. We have dramatically altered global and local nitrogen cycles through synthesised fertilisers and combustion of fossil fuels (which release nitrogen oxide as a waste product), and novel entities, such as plastic, are invading even the remotest habitats. All in all, humans are a ‘globally significant force of nature’, pushing Earth’s systems far beyond natural variability.
That all seems fairly conclusive, so why are scientists still deliberating? In order to scientifically recognise the Anthropocene as an era, there needs to be a start date, and this question poses more of a challenge. It could be 50,000 years ago, when human migration coincided with megafauna extinction, or 8000 years ago when Neolithic peoples began large scale deforestation for agriculture. Perhaps the expansion of paddy fields 5000 years ago marks the boundary between Holocene and Anthropocene, or is it the mid-nineteenth century, when the industrial revolution began? Although we cannot pin-point exactly where the transition occurred, we do know that the industrial revolution sparked the beginning of the world we know today. With fossil fuels providing seemingly limitless energy and Nitrogen fertilisers increasing crop yields, the population went from 1 billion in 1850 to 7 billion in 2013, and consumption sky rocketed.
Having established that we humans are having a huge impact on Earth’s systems, and that this could spell the dawn of a new epoch, what are people doing about it? Gaia Vince’s book ‘Adventures in the Anthropocene’ is a good place to start. It takes the reader around the world to hear the stories of ‘people on the frontline of the planet we’ve made’, armed with
ingenious solutions. In Northern India, the trans-Himalayas, climate change has pushed glaciers to above 5500m altitude. People rely on these glaciers to irrigate their crops during the brief summer, but because they are now so high up and far away, the melt water arrives too late in the season. Faced with a life or death situation, a solution was found; painting mountains white and turning ‘barren, high-altitude deserts into a field of ice that supplies perfectly times irrigation juice to some of the world’s poorest farmers’. Vince then continues on her travels, finding Rosa Maria Ruiz in Bolivia, who after years of campaigning created a 4.7 million Ha reserve in the Amazon, covering Andean glaciers, cloud forest, dry forest, pampas and rainforest, and protecting over 1000 species of bird. In New York she finds the sustainable skyscrapers of the future in the Bank of America Tower, which is made largely from recycled materials, captures rain-water and is highly energy efficient. These are just three stories of amazing creativity and resilience, but there are many, many more in this book alone.
Whether or not we officially class today as the Anthropocene, it cannot be denied that humans are impacting every corner of this planet, and that this is already putting peoples’ lives at risk. However, with hope comes ingenuity. We see this across the globe, in the countless communities that have found innovative solutions to the man-made problems they are faced with.
If you want to find out more there is some great information out there about the Anthropocene and what it means. Watch this short video for a brief introduction, and check out these for more information:
- Stunning yet heartbreaking photos from The Anthropocene project
- a slightly older article that still rings true from the Economist: A man made world