The Anthropocene. Christian Schwägerl

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A few hundred agricultural pioneers in the Middle East have become a billion farmers who produce an inconceivable assortment of edible crops. The first fields and pastures have changed into a gigantic agricultural area of approximately 20 million square miles, which is larger than the entire surface area of the whole American continent. From scattered herds of sheep, goats and cattle, a global herd of livestock has grown, consisting of more than 50 billion animals, making up 90 per cent of the biomass of all the mammals on the Earth.³⁴

      Where once there were small villages, megacities have now grown; from the simplest tools, there are now coal excavators, 3D printers and plasma screens; from characters and symbols scratched on tablets, the World Wide Web. However, spears have evolved into missiles and combat drones. In amongst our anthropogenic burgeonings some very dark flowers have also sprouted.

If we fast-forward past the first cities, the culture of Imperial China, the great empires of antiquity, the development of global trade routes, the European conquest of the world, scientific breakthroughs and medical and technological progress—then the Holocene appears to be one extended, magnificent gift to humanity.³⁵

      No matter how tough the Holocene may have been for many people, it was characterized by boundless natural resources that could be discovered, extracted and utilized. Despite thunderstorms and weather extremes, earth’s climate during the Holocene has been astonishingly stable, permitting us to build villages, towns and cities, and to farm. The last glaciation left behind wonderfully fertile soils like loess. Nature’s services, by the thousand, providing water, soil or the air we breathe, have been available free of charge, without requiring any favor in return. Imagine if we were merely the second intelligent primate species and had to earn our living and obtain our resources in fierce competition with an entire civilization of other technology freaks, But we were lucky: the gold seams in California, the emeralds in India and the diamonds in Russia were all found untouched, for the first time, by humans. Our civilization has been one big treasure hunt.

      All this came to a head in the eighteenth century, at another civilizational watershed, when people learned how to use the energy made available by earlier members of the Club of Revolutionaries: energy from the sun that led to the formation of coal and crude oil or natural gas. This is the moment Paul Crutzen suggests represents the transition from the Holocene to the Anthropocene—the emergence of humans as a veritable geological force.

      When our great-great-great-grandparents discovered how to use this energy to power machines, humanity’s potential increased, at a stroke. It was as if people had been given a collective potion that harnessed the strength of millions of horses and workers in the form of black chunks of coal and viscous oil. So much is taken for granted these days that we hardly notice. But if you’ve ever sweated to shovel a cubic meter of soil and then watched a backhoe do the same job, you too have experienced the Industrial Revolution, in one instant. Using fossil-based fuels and machines that could be powered by them, humanity really started to accelerate.

And this is why Paul Salopek’s “Out of Eden Walk” confronted him with an entirely new reality just a few days after leaving the origins of humanity behind him: “Moving north and then east, we abandon the desert and stub our toes on the Anthropocene—the age of modern humans. Asphalt appears: the Djibouti-Ethiopia road, throbbing with trucks. We drift through a series of gritty towns. Dust and diesel. Bars. Shops with raw plank counters. Garlands of tin cups clink in the wind outside their doors. Then, near Dubti: a sea (no, a wall) of sugarcane. Miles of industrial irrigation. Canals. Diversion dams. Bulldozed fields. Levees crawling with dump trucks.”³⁶

^24. Recommended literature on the evolutionary history of consciousness: Giulio Tononi, Phi: A Voyage from the Brain to the Soul, New York: Pantheon, 2012.

^25. Eva Bianconi et al., “An estimation of the number of cells in the human body,” Annals of Human Biology, 5 July 2013.

^26. Excellent further reading on this subject in: Jan Zalasiewicz, The Planet in a Pebble: A Journey into Earth‘s Deep History, Oxford University Press, 2010.

^27. See also Erle Ellis’ article “Conserving a Used Planet: Embracing Our History as Transformers of Earth,” Snap Magazine, http://www.snap.is/magazine/embracing-our-history-as-transformers-of-earth/.

^28. For a general depiction of the history of the climate, see Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams, The Goldilocks Planet: The Four Billion Year Story of the Earth’s Climate, Oxford University Press, 2012.

^29. For a comprehensible description of human evolution, see Alice Roberts, Evolution —The Human Story, Dorling Kindersley, 2011.

^30. On the first modern humans in Europe, see Stefano Benazzi et al., “Early dispersal of modern humans in Europe and implications for Neanderthal behaviour,” Nature, vol. 479, no. 7374, November 2 (2011): 525–528. On the first modern humans in Australia, see Morten Rasmussen et al., “An Aboriginal Australian Genome Reveals Separate Human Dispersals into Asia,” Science, vol. 334, no. 6052, October 7 (2011): 94–98.

^31. Dálen, Love, “Partial genetic turnoverbin neandertals,” Molecular Biology and Evolution, February 23, 2012.

^32. David R. Montgomery, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.

^33. Andrew Moore et al., Village on the Euphrates: From Foraging to Farming at Abu Hureya, Oxford University Press, 2000.

^34. See Gowri Koneswaran and Danielle Nierenberg, “Global Farm Animal Production and Global Warming: Impacting and Mitigating Climate Change,” Environmental Health Perspectives, vol. 116, no. 5 (January 2008):578–582 and Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), “World agriculture–towards 2015/2030,” Rome, 2002 and FAO and OECD, “Agricultural Outlook 2009–2018”, Rome, 2009.

^35. A very good overview of the ascent of human civilization in Asia and Europe can be found in Ian Morris’s book with the slightly misleading title, Why the West Rules for now: The Patterns of History and What They Reveal About the Future, Profile Books, 2011.

^36. Paul Salopek keeps a fascinating online journal about his project, see www.outofedenwalk.com.

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