The Anthropocene. Christian Schwägerl

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      The time dimensions with which stratigraphers deal are formidable, especially compared to a non-geologist like me, who works on the nanoscale of daily life’s rounds of meetings, deadlines, invitations, children’s birthdays, and is delighted to have a handle on next week. Presumably, stratigraphers also have to deal with such mundane things but somehow they manage to live in two temporal zones at the same time. And so, over the past decades, they have created an impressive color-coded chart to show the geological eras, the names of which are stacked on top of each other much like the layers of rock.⁸⁷

      This chart depicts great eons like the Archean, the phase 1.5 billion years ago marked by the advent of bacteria, immediately after the creation of life; it depicts the Cenozoic or “new animal” Era, which encompasses the entire 66-million-year rise of mammals from the dinosaurs’ extinction to the present day. It shows periods such as the Jurassic (that has become better known since the film Jurassic Park), and vast epochs covering many millions of years like the Pleistocene or the current Holocene, a smaller unit on the geological timescale. Even this smallest scale is beyond normal human imagination.

      So, this is another reason why Paul Crutzen’s declaration of the Anthropocene, at that conference in Mexico back in February 2000, was such a huge statement. What he did was tantamount to driving humanity out of its ancestral geological home in the Holocene, and resettling it in new chronological territory, the Anthropocene. He effectively remapped the various timescales in which our existence is recorded—from the nanoseconds of stock exchanges to the four-year rhythm of politics—to much longer geological timescales. In doing so, he enabled human history to become the subject of geological examination. Human history became a part of deep earth history, an area that had previously been almost exclusively the realm of biologists and geologists.

      After the conference in Mexico, it quickly became apparent that there were hundreds and thousands of extant observations, studies and analyses showing that modern humans were indeed changing the Earth in a radical, long-term manner within a very short space of time, so much so, that future geologists will notice these changes. Scientists had been gathering evidence of the traces left behind by humanity for quite a while. Examples of these include artificially created elements, radioactive fallout from atom bomb tests, an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide, plastic waste, and the colorful assortment of archaeological substrata beneath cities.

      What had been missing up until then was a term to summarize these changes and someone sufficiently prominent to make such a term popular. To his surprise, after the conference, Paul Crutzen found out that another scientist, Eugene F. Stoermer, a limnologist at the University of Michigan, had already used the term Anthropocene back in the 1980s. In a book written in 1992, journalist Andrew Revkin of the New York Times claimed: “We are entering an age that might someday be referred to as, say, the Anthrocene.”⁸⁸ Andrew certainly earns a warm round of applause for almost nailing the magical new word.

      In 2000, Crutzen contacted Stoermer, as is proper when two scientists have arrived at the same conclusions independently of one another. He suggested that they publish the Anthropocene idea together. Stoermer agreed, later saying: “I began using the word ’Anthropocene’ in the 1980s, but I never formalized it until Paul contacted me.”⁸⁹

      Starting with a short article in the newsletter of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP), the Anthropocene idea was born.⁹⁰ Two years later Crutzen called for the renaming of the Holocene to Anthropocene, in an article entitled “Geology of Mankind” published in the influential scientific journal, Nature. “Unless there is a global catastrophe—a meteorite impact, a world war or a pandemic—mankind will remain a major environmental force for many millennia.”⁹¹

      Together with the renowned environmental researcher Will Steffen and historian John R. McNeill, Crutzen clarified his idea in 2007, and made a suggestion as to when the start of the Anthropocene might have been.⁹² According to them, the “pre-phase” of the Anthropocene ran from the time of the first human-made fire to the first fire inside a steam engine. The Anthropocene really began in 1800 because that is when scientific enlightenment and technology-driven industrialization produced measurable geological, chemical, and biological changes on earth.

      This pioneering article by Steffens, McNeill, and Crutzen contained an illustration that attracted a lot of attention: it showed various developments since 1945, from world population and energy consumption, to international tourism and the number of McDonald’s restaurants. All parameters showed a steep increase. The illustration captured in a nutshell what Crutzen and his colleagues call the “Great Acceleration.” This process, they wrote, “took place in an intellectual, cultural, political and legal context in which the growing impacts upon the Earth System counted for very little in the calculations and decisions made in the world’s ministries, boardrooms, laboratories, farmhouses, village huts, and for that matter, bedrooms.”

      Since the first papers describing it, the Anthropocene idea itself has undergone a “Great Acceleration,” СКАЧАТЬ