Anthropocene: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

by Erle C. Ellis

By the mid-1930s, ecologists were describing these global patterns as ‘biomes’, or ecosystem patterns at the global scale, one step below the largest scale of all, the biosphere.

Even though only 40 per cent of Earth’s land is used directly for crops, pastures, and settlements, this has transformed another 35 per cent into novel ecosystems with biotic communities and ecological processes long departed from any ‘natural’ historical baselines.

Human societies are far more than a disturbance to an otherwise natural world. Human social systems have emerged as a planetary force within the Earth system—an anthroposphere that is actively shaping and sustaining an anthropogenic biosphere.

Already, more than 90 per cent of Earth’s total mammal biomass is composed of humans and domesticated animals.

Concern over limits to human carrying capacity on Earth came to a head in 1968 with Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich’s book The Population Bomb, which predicted that ‘hundreds of millions would starve to death’ in the 1970s from overpopulation. In 1972, an influential book, The Limits to Growth, used early computer simulations to explore the grave consequences for the ‘natural ecological balance of the earth’ when populations grew beyond a ‘global equilibrium’. In 1994, Ehrlich stated that ‘the present population of 5.5 billion … has clearly exceeded the capacity of Earth to sustain it’. Paul Ehrlich has made major contributions to the science of ecology, but the famines he predicted have yet to occur.

It is possible that human populations might reach 16 billion by 2100 and continue growing, but the mainstream prediction of demographers is that populations will level off at about 11 billion in 2100.

For example, one environmental group has claimed that humans now use the equivalent of 1.6 Earth’s worth of resources to sustain themselves—an unsustainable ‘overshoot’ of Earth’s biological carrying capacity.

In 2009, a group of scientists, including Will Steffen and Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, identified nine such Earth system changes in Nature, highlighting their ‘planetary boundaries’, which, ‘if crossed, could generate unacceptable environmental change’ (Figure 40).

Yet the question remains: if human societies are now operating as a global force that is transforming Earth to the detriment of both humanity and non-human nature, what, if anything is to be done about it? Who is responsible? Who shall act?

In an influential 2009 paper entitled ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’, historian Dipesh Chakrabarty asked, ‘is the Anthropocene a critique of the narratives of freedom?’

whether the Anthropocene is more of a political statement than a scientific imperative.