Kindle Notes & Highlights
Started reading
January 1, 2019
Crutzen was not alone. Ecologist Eugene Stoermer had been using the term Anthropocene informally with students and colleagues since the 1980s.
With such an abundance of evidence, the proposal to recognize the Anthropocene as a new interval of geologic time, the Anthropocene epoch, would seem without issue. Yet the opposite is true.
Proposals for the start of the Anthropocene range from early human control of fire, to the rise of agriculture more than 10,000 years ago, to the peak year of nuclear fallout in 1964, supported by evidence ranging from gas bubbles trapped in ice cores and widespread deposits of soot and radionuclides, to the appearance of domesticated maize pollen in sediment cores
around the world.
Does an age of humans mean the end of nature? Who is responsible for the Anthropocene? Homo sapiens? The first farmers? Wealthy consumers of the industrial age? And is the Anthropocene necessarily a catastrophe—an environmental disaster and the end of humanity—or could there be a ‘good Anthropocene’ in which both humans and nature might thrive together into the deep future?
The significance of the Anthropocene resides in its role as a new lens through which age-old narratives and philosophical questions are being revisited and rewritten. The Anthropocene is both a new narrative relating humans and nature and a bold new scientific paradigm—a ‘Second Copernican Revolution’—with the potential to radically revise the way we think of what it means to be human.
But how and why did humans become planet shapers?
According to Bishop Ussher, 23 October 4004 bc was the precise date and moment of creation. Based on his dating, made in 1650, the universe was exactly 6,008 years old.
Bishop Ussher used the Bible to produce his chronological narrative.
There is no role for an all-powerful God or any other mystical force. Humans play no central role in the universe. The Anthropocene goes even further, not only by confronting these traditional beliefs, but also by revising the classic origin story of contemporary science. In the Anthropocene, humans are put back into a central role on Earth, as planet shapers.
a system of horizontal layers—‘strata’—
formed one on top of the other.
the science of stra...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Charles Lyell published his Elements of G...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Putting these together in 1867, he made one of the first scientifically based estimates of Earth’s age, 240 million years.
Darwin nearly twenty years and the fear of being scooped by Alfred Russel Wallace before he finally published his theory of evolution by natural selection in 1859.
The claim that species originated over time through evolution—no divine act required—would not reconcile easily with the origin story of Genesis. He worked for years to strengthen it.
Reception for Darwin’s theory continued to gain strength. In 1871, he took this a step further, focusing evolutionary theory on the story of human origins in the Descent of Man. Human origins were no different from those of any other animal. Our story was that of a ‘Naked Ape’ descended from other apes over a very long span of geologic time.
In scientific circles, geologic time soon replaced biblical time, and evolution by natural selection overturned the origin story of Genesis.
And unlike the story of Genesis, humans played no special role—just one species among many others evolving in no particular direction on a changing planet.
After Darwin, and following rapid developments in astronomy, the position of humans in the history of the universe was rewritten.
the first species in our direct lineage, the genus Homo, about 2.8 million years ago. These early human species, the hominins, were the first to shape stone tools, control fire, and migrate out of Africa and across Eurasia. Not us.
Homo sapiens emerged among other tool-making, fire-controlling, hominin species only about 300,000 years ago.
For most of human time on Earth, our species was just one of several in the genus Homo, among millions more species living on an ordinary planet orbiting a typical star in a typical galaxy in a vast universe.
Carl Sagan,
Humans were not just another primate, but a profoundly disruptive force like no other on Earth.
George Perkins Marsh, whose book Man and Nature
Ancient human societies of the Mediterranean cleared forests and tilled the land for agriculture, dramatically changing vegetation, soils, and even climate across large regions, bringing ‘the face of the earth to a desolation almost as complete as that of the moon’. Humans were a destructive force capable of changing Earth permanently for the worse. In 1873, little-known geologist Antonio Stoppani went even further by defining a new time interval based on these changes, the ‘Anthropozoic era’.
In 1895 Svante Arrhenius, building on work by John Tyndall, demonstrated that carbon dioxide and water vapour in Earth’s atmosphere trapped heat energy, in a ‘greenhouse effect’ that warmed Earth’s surface enough to support liquid water—a prerequisite for life as we know it. Moreover, he suggested that changes over time in carbon dioxide and other ‘greenhouse gases’ in the atmosphere could help to explain ice ages and other long-term changes in Earth’s temperature. Combustion of coal might further increase this ‘greenhouse warming’ of the planet. This might be a good thing, he thought, at
...more
In 1965, scientists warned of the dangers of anthropogenic global warming in a report to US president Lyndon Johnson.
The scientific message was clear: human activities were driving Earth in a new and potentially catastrophic direction. Scientists called for action.
In 1988, a new scientific institution was formed to assess the risks of anthropogenic global warming, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
For some, it was time to rewrite the story of humans and nature.
1989,
Bill Mc...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
The End of ...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Humans are indeed changing Earth in unprecedented ways. There are good reasons to accept that a new chapter of Earth history might indeed be unfolding, with humans playing a leading role.
This is why the Anthropocene has gained such great attention.
No other species is recognized with its own interval of geologic time. Why did humans, alone among species, gain the capacity to transform an entire planet? When did this capacity emerge—and by what mechanism? Are all humans equally a part of this transformation? What evidence is needed to answer such questions? More broadly, what does it mean to be human when this means to be part of a global force that changes everything—even the future of an entire planet? What does nature even mean in an age of humans?
‘Are humans now overwhelming the great forces of nature?’ asked Will Steffen, Paul Crutzen, and historian John McNeill in their classic 2007 article on the Anthropocene. It was a rhetorical question. To these authors, the answer could only be a resounding yes.
functioning as a complex dynamic system.
To confirm that humans have altered Earth’s functioning as a system, the causal mechanisms behind these alterations must be demonstrated.
Vladimir Vernadsky developed the first modern scientific model of Earth as a complex system based on dynamic interactions among the ‘spheres’, in his 1926 book, The Biosphere
In the mid-1960s, Carl Sagan and other astrophysicists had a problem. Earth’s climate was known to have been remarkably stable over the past 4 billion years.
Living organisms, acting collectively as the biosphere, were themselves responsible for regulating Earth’s climate and sustaining the conditions necessary to support life. Life gave birth to life itself. Gaia was reborn in the landmark hypothesis that sparked the rise of Earth system science.
To understand Earth’s remarkable long-term stability and ability to sustain life, this must be understood as the product of a complex system of interacting positive and negative feedbacks which shape the flows of matter and energy among the spheres.
Life appears to have begun as single cells in the sea about one billion years after Earth solidified as a planet.
Keeling had observed the biosphere ‘breathing’.
his longer-term measurements revealed a striking trend beyond the seasonal cycles of the terrestrial biosphere (Figure 5).
mass combustion of fossil fuels was in fact causing carbon dioxide to accumulate in Earth’s atmosphere.
