Living in the Anthropocene Read online

  © 2017 by the Smithsonian Institution

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Published by Smithsonian Books

  Director: Carolyn Gleason

  Managing Editor: Christina Wiginton

  Project Editor: Laura Harger

  Edited by Juliana Froggatt

  Ebook design adapted from printed book design by Jody Billert

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Kress, W. John, editor. | Stine, Jeffrey K., editor.

  Title: Living in the anthropocene : earth in the age of humans / edited by W. John Kress and Jeffrey K. Stine; foreword by Elizabeth Kolbert; afterword by Edward O. Wilson; essays by Richard B. Alley [and others].

  Description: Washington, DC : Smithsonian Books, in association with Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016059274 | ISBN 9781588346018 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781588346025 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Human ecology. | Nature—Effect of human beings on. | Global environmental change.

  Classification: LCC GF75 .L575 2017 | DDC 304.2—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2016059274

  Ebook ISBN 9781588346025

  For permission to reproduce illustrations appearing in this book, please correspond directly with the owners of the works, as seen in the captions. Smithsonian Books does not retain reproduction rights for these images individually or maintain a file of addresses for sources.

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  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Foreword

  ELIZABETH KOLBERT

  Introduction

  W. JOHN KRESS AND JEFFREY K. STINE

  I | A Changing Planet

  The Advent of the Anthropocene

  J. R. McNEILL

  Thinking Like a Mountain in the Anthropocene

  SCOTT L. WING

  The Underwater Anthropocene

  DOUGLAS J. McCAULEY

  What Will It Mean to Be Human?

  RICK POTTS

  Rethinking Economic Growth

  PAULA CABALLERO AND CARTER J. BRANDON

  II | Drivers of Change

  The Fire That Made the Future

  STEPHEN J. PYNE

  A New Dream of the Earth

  WADE DAVIS

  Locating Ourselves in Relation to the Natural World

  LINDSAY L. CLARKSON

  Temperate Forests: A Tale of the Anthropocene

  SEAN M. MCMAHON

  Urban Nature / Human Nature

  PETER DEL TREDICI

  Atmospherics and the Anthropocene

  KELLY CHANCE

  Beyond the Biosphere: Expanding the Limits of the Human World

  LISA RUTH RAND

  III | Responding to Change

  Archaeology and the Future of Our Planet

  TORBEN C. RICK

  Living on a Changing Planet: Why Indigenous Voices Matter

  IGOR KRUPNIK

  Black and Green: The Forgotten Commitment to Sustainability

  LONNIE G. BUNCH III

  Forest Succession and Human Agency in an Uncertain Future

  ROBIN L. CHAZDON

  Ocean 2.0

  J. EMMETT DUFFY

  The Earth Is a Garden

  ARI NOVY, PETER H. RAVEN, AND HOLLY H. SHIMIZU

  Human Health in the Anthropocene

  GEORGE E. LUBER

  IV | Visual Culture

  The City in the Sea: Alexis Rockman’s Anthropocene Imaginings

  JOANNA MARSH

  African Art and the Anthropocene

  KAREN E. MILBOURNE

  Why Polar Bears? Seeing the Arctic Anew

  SUBHANKAR BANERJEE

  The Return of the Boomerang

  LUC JACQUET

  Filmmaking in the Anthropocene

  JOHN GRABOWSKA

  Picturing Planetary Peril: Visual Media and the Environmental Crisis

  FINIS DUNAWAY

  V | The Way Forward

  Dragons in the Greenhouse: The Value of Knowledge and the Danger of Uncertainty

  RICHARD B. ALLEY

  Why Scientists and Engineers Must Work Together

  G. WAYNE CLOUGH

  Hazards to Our Heritage: Choices and Solutions

  CORINE WEGENER

  The Unequal Anthropocene

  ROB NIXON

  The Global Commons

  NAOKO ISHII

  Can We Redefine the Anthropocene?

  THOMAS E. LOVEJOY

  Photo Insert

  Afterword

  EDWARD O. WILSON

  Notes

  Further Reading

  List of Contributors

  Acknowledgments

  FOREWORD

  ELIZABETH KOLBERT

  Credit for coining the word Anthropocene is usually given to the Dutch chemist Paul Crutzen, whose other accomplishments include, quite literally, saving the world. Back in the 1970s, Crutzen was one of the first scientists to recognize the dangers of ozone-depleting chemicals; for his work in this area, he shared a Nobel Prize in 1995. A few years later, he was attending a meeting at which the chair of the session kept referring to the Holocene, the geologic epoch that began with the end of the last ice age, roughly twelve thousand years ago. It occurred to Crutzen that the term no longer made sense.

  “Let’s stop it,” he remembers blurting out. “We are no longer in the Holocene; we are in the Anthropocene.” The immediate reaction to this comment was a sort of stunned silence. Afterward, when the group took a coffee break, someone suggested that Crutzen patent the term.

  Whether or not geologists officially recognize Anthropocene—they are still debating whether textbooks should be altered—the word clearly captures something essential about our time. We live in a world dominated by humans. Possibly people already began changing the atmosphere thousands of years ago, with the invention of agriculture. Quite certainly, we started to do so once we figured out how to burn coal and oil. We are, in effect, now running geologic history backward, taking carbon that was buried underground over the course of tens of millions of years and pouring it back into the atmosphere in a matter of decades. As a result, we are rapidly changing the climate and altering the chemistry of the oceans. At the same time, we are draining freshwater aquifers, mowing down forests to plant monocultures, altering the global nitrogen cycle, and driving other creatures extinct at rates hundreds or thousands of times higher than the geologic norm. The legacy of the Anthropocene will be, in human terms at least, permanent. Once you lose a species, you do not get it back.

  The more we understand about our impacts, and our impacts’ impacts, the more urgent the questions become. What should we do with this knowledge? Should we scale back our influence? Can we? What do those alive today owe to future generations? What about to the millions of other species with which we share the planet?

  The essays that follow take up these great questions. They are written from a wide range of perspectives—scientific, social, artistic, and economic—by men and women who have thought deeply about living in the Anthropocene. Although people created this new age, it does not follow that we control it. We find ourselves in the unfortunate situation of being more powerful than we ought to be and, at the same time, not as powerful as we might wish. What we are belatedly realizing is that turning away from the problem—or, really, problems—is not an option. The b
est hope we have is to acknowledge the enormity of the challenge and try to fashion responses that are commensurate in scale.

  Crutzen once told me that the act of naming the Anthropocene was intended to serve as an alarm. “What I hope,” he said, “is that the term Anthropocene will be a warning to the world.” As this volume demonstrates, in this he succeeded.

  INTRODUCTION

  W. JOHN KRESS AND JEFFREY K. STINE

  At a rate unprecedented in the recent past, our planet has been experiencing a multitude of dramatic and far-reaching changes—in the vegetation covering the land, in the chemistry of the oceans, in the concentration of atmospheric greenhouse gases, and in global temperatures. Most disturbing is that these transformations, with their profound effects on plants, animals, and natural habitats, are primarily the result of human activities. Earth, our Earth, has, of course, always been a planet in flux, with the scope and pace of its changes varying dramatically over its 4.55-billion-year history. In the narrative of this deep geologic timescale, the evolutionary forebears of humans are very recent arrivals, appearing roughly six million years ago, while the history of our own species, Homo sapiens, extends back a mere two hundred thousand years. Fortuitously, as the last ice age came to an end some twelve thousand years ago, Earth entered a period (known today as the Holocene) characterized by a relatively warm and stable climate and with conditions well suited to humans. Profiting from such hospitable circumstances, our ancestors developed agriculture, which served as a precursor to large settlements, eventually to civilizations, and then to the Industrial Revolution, which began around the year 1800.

  Modern societies—and the technological systems that sustain them—thus arose entirely within the benign envelope of the Holocene, encouraging a false assumption that such conditions would endure, unaffected by the presence and actions of humans. By the late twentieth century, however, that assumption had started to fray. Signs of serious, large, and rapid global environmental change were increasingly evident—from climate disruption and ocean acidification to deforestation and biodiversity loss—and the rate and scale of those alterations have attained levels unseen since the origin of humans. Agricultural, industrial, and other human activities have conjoined to modify atmospheric, geologic, hydrologic, biospheric, and other Earth systems to such an extent that scientists have proposed our time as the beginning of a new geologic epoch: the Anthropocene, or Age of Humans. From altering the migrations of plants, animals, and people to exacerbating the rise and spread of infectious diseases, the environmental impacts of human activity have never been greater. And continuing growth in population, urbanization, and societal conflict will intensify those impacts, reinforcing the fact that nature can no longer be viewed in isolation from the human world.

  Thanks to research in many fields of study, the contours of these planetary impacts are becoming clearer, making it incumbent upon all of us to consider the implications of what we know (and do not know) about the trajectory of Earth’s future.

  Living in the Anthropocene presents thirty-two original essays by a roster of distinguished authors from a wide range of disciplines. By blending the diverse perspectives and expertise of environmental scientists, historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, economists, art historians, and documentarians, this book seeks to advance understanding of the complex causes and consequences of human-induced environmental change. After describing the current state of our planet, Living in the Anthropocene proceeds to address the drivers of that change, the adaptations of both humans and nature to that change, and the depictions of that change by visual artists. The book concludes with critical perspectives on paths forward as the rate of global change increases.

  The authors converge upon several themes, such as the necessity of adopting a deep-time perspective to grasp the geologic significance of the Anthropocene. The use of geologic and evolutionary timescales helps to clarify both how human-driven impacts, such as refashioning the planet’s carbon and nitrogen cycles, parallel past alterations that marked major transitions in Earth history and how the biogeochemical effects of anthropogenic changes will persist for thousands, if not tens of thousands, of years. Paleontological knowledge of Earth’s five previous mass extinctions raises awareness of just how difficult it is for life to survive rapid planetary change, which argues for the importance of curbing the rate at which human activities are diminishing global life-support systems. This broader temporal perspective also highlights how earlier periods of high environmental variability shaped human evolution, honing our keen ability to adapt.

  Many of these essays explore the Anthropocene’s cultural, social, political, and economic dimensions. Drawing from a wide range of past and present examples, they explain that the whole human species is not responsible for the negative effects of global environmental change, just as not all groups are equally threatened by the ramifications of those changes. Indeed, it is a cruel irony that social groups that have contributed the least to such planetary effects are often those most seriously harmed by the consequences. In today’s world, the links among economic inequality, social injustice, and environmental degradation are unmistakable. Indigenous peoples, disproportionately jeopardized by global environmental change, also hold deep-seated knowledge of their homelands and of expressions of the early effects of climate change. Their plight presents the world with a moral challenge, while the manners in which they have adapted offer examples of viable options for the future.

  Throughout human history, visual representation has helped to record environmental change as well as spark imagination. Getting people to recognize and understand the defining characteristics of the Anthropocene often involves translating science to general audiences in countless settings around the world. Both visual culture and history can play important roles here. The impact of art, including the emotions it invokes, will be decisive in how our societies will exist in the midst of global change.

  All of the authors here take a frank look at humanity’s future, refusing to downplay the difficulties. Their use of the term Anthropocene is not a proxy for saying that the world is facing an environmental crisis. Instead it is meant to suggest something far more profound and lasting; crisis, after all, denotes a temporary situation potentially remediable through sacrifices and coordinated efforts. Earth has already entered a new epoch, one in which the effects of many human-induced alterations will continue for generations. The current ten million species, including our own, are the descendants of the billions of species that have existed in the past, and new species will eventually evolve to take our place. Until then, we must learn how to live in the Anthropocene.

  As the name Anthropocene suggests, the impact of human activities has reached global proportions. The physical and biological transformations now taking place may be equivalent in magnitude to the major environmental transitions that marked significant geologic turning points in the distant past, such as the start of the Eocene, the Paleocene, and the Holocene. The biogeochemical consequences of anthropogenic change are both far reaching and profound, as are its social, cultural, political, and economic effects. Gaining a full understanding of the complex causes and implications of these planetary alterations therefore requires a blending of perspectives from many fields of study. The start of the Anthropocene remains a matter of debate, although the mid-twentieth century—which witnessed a phenomenal escalation of a wide spectrum of environmental indicators (the so-called Great Acceleration)—is widely acknowledged as a significant turning point in human-induced environmental change.

  The most obvious transformations have taken place within terrestrial habitats, but the oceans have also been intensely affected by acidification, warming, mass extinctions of marine mammals, depletions of wild fish, industrialization of undersea landscapes, and intensification of plastic pollution. Natural environments, whether terrestrial or marine, may never be restored to anything resembling their prehuman conditions. Our evolutionary success as the most recent bipedal hominid species
has been fostered by our ancestors’ exceptional ability to adapt to changing environments, often by altering our surroundings through the use of technology and social organization. Since the Industrial Revolution, economic growth has become an end in itself for much of the world, and the ramifications of this worldview can be seen in the environmental challenges characteristic of the Anthropocene.

  THE ADVENT OF THE ANTHROPOCENE

  J. R. McNEILL

  In 1944, the Hungarian-born social scientist Karl Polanyi published a turgid, difficult, and detailed book entitled The Great Transformation. In it he showed that markets, as the chief means of distributing goods and services among populations, had not dominated any societies before 1700. They were not in any sense natural or the reflection of innate human desires. Alternative arrangements had flourished in the past, even if, by 1944, it was hard for most people to conceive of a functional economy not based overwhelmingly on markets. Polanyi showed that the prevalence of markets was comparatively recent and had required certain changes in societies and politics to triumph.

  An homage to Polanyi, the term Great Acceleration refers to the sharp mid-twentieth-century uptick in the rate of ecological change around the globe. To most of us, it now seems normal, almost natural, that humans should exert vast influence over the biosphere and basic biogeochemical systems. That is because we cannot remember a world in which this was not true. But in fact that condition is novel and a bizarre departure from the arrangements that governed the human place in the biosphere for the first two hundred thousand years of Homo sapiens’s career. The concepts of the Great Acceleration and the Anthropocene can help put into high relief the uniqueness of modern times and remind us that what we easily misunderstand as normal and natural is indeed anything but.