Eighteen Ways of Looking at the Anthropocene: Part One

4/29/21

Apr 30, 2021

For the next three weeks I’m offering a collection of thoughts on the Anthropocene concept: What is it? How should we understand it? Does it matter, and if so, why?

My original plan was to throw all of it at you in two long letters, but given its heaviness I’ve decided instead to break it into three parts and end each section with a good-idea story.

These thoughts on the Anthropocene are the start of a conversation – made up of definitions and propositions – that underlies this entire newsletter. Many of these propositions are ideas or questions I’ve been thinking about for years. My point, though, is not to wrap up the concept of the Anthropocene into a tidy package, but rather to open it up for examination. Much more could be proposed here by way of perspective, and each notion could be expanded upon. I intend to do both in the months to come while writing about the odds and ends of planetary transformation, drawing portraits of affected species and ecosystems, and describing the many ways we can make things better.

DEFINITIONS

1. The basic idea of the Anthropocene is this: Humans have already transformed the Earth significantly enough that we can safely predict that millions of years from now our impacts will be visible in the planet’s sedimentary rocks. Those impacts – our “geological signature” – are not so much to the stony foundation of the Earth’s surface, though that’s happening, but to all of life on Earth, which is itself a geological force. If we rewrite the book of life, we rewrite geology too.

Here’s an elegant definition from the Oxford Dictionary online: “The current geological age, viewed as the period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment.”

Let’s add some vigor and imagery, courtesy of the brilliant writer Robert Macfarlane:

“What a signature it will be. We have bored 50 [million] kilometres of holes in our search for oil. We remove mountain tops to get at the coal they contain. The oceans dance with billions of tiny plastic beads. Weaponry tests have dispersed artificial radionuclides globally. The burning of rainforests for monoculture production sends out killing smog-palls that settle into the sediment across entire countries. We have become titanic geological agents, our legacy legible for millennia to come.”

Finally, here’s my own two cents: Life on Earth has been irreversibly altered by humans. When I say “altered”, I mean diminished. An odd, top-heavy primate, we’ve recently begun to breed like bacteria and have, particularly in the last century, transformed broad swathes of the continents, scoured the oceans, and now, catastrophically, destabilized the atmosphere upon which all life relies. Animal populations across the globe dropped by 70% in the last fifty years. 85% of wetlands are gone. Over two thirds of ocean environments are compromised by human activity. The planet is on the path toward its sixth mass extinction, and we are the cause. The scientists who have spent careers identifying periods in Earth history now reluctantly look to the future and acknowledge that the Holocene has ended and we have crossed a threshold into a different epoch. The proposed name is the Anthropocene, the “New Age of Humans.”

(To better understand references to the Holocene and geological ages more generally, see the link to the geological time scale below.)

PROPOSITIONS

2. Yes, the planet is irreversibly diminished. But how bad things get is still mostly up to us. We’re no longer working to recover the Earth that our great-grandparents and their ancestors would recognize. That Earth, the one which nurtured our species under a benevolent sky and amid an extraordinarily rich and beautiful diversity of life, is vanishing. Our plan must be - as soon as possible - to reduce the harm, save and restore what we can, and create new cultures rooted in respect for life on Earth. As much as we may individually love nature, we are all participating in a system that treats it with a contempt and indifference so ingrained that even when we know that, for example, 85% of the planet’s wetlands are gone, we do little more than wish it wasn’t true. But these facts, and the connections between our actions and their consequences, are the story of the Anthropocene. We need to hear the story, repeat the story to others, and then rewrite the story together.

3. If humans are now “managing” the entire planetary biosphere, which humans are we putting in charge? Science is politely raising its hand but industry and politics are holding the mic.

Should scientists become activists? What good is the data if too few people are paying attention? It seems to me that the larger question is: What is the role of science in culture, and how should that role change in the Anthropocene?

4. None of us grew up talking about the Holocene – ever, really – so why fixate on its replacement, the Anthropocene? Partly because it is as much a useful confession as a scientific certainty. The Anthropocene identifies a geological shift, sure, but it’s also us owning up to the changes we have wrought and the havoc we continue to wreak. I don’t expect the Anthropocene to become a household word, much less a rallying cry, but if it isn’t motivational we’re in trouble.

So yes, we’re in trouble.

5. The Anthropocene might not even be the Anthropocene. It may well deserve, geologically speaking, a much more radical name. We might call it the “Anthropogene” or the “Anthropozoic”. Why? Because tucked into the information provided here is an anachronism of sorts. If, as feared, the changes we’re making to the Earth grow far worse, or eventually lead to the planet’s sixth mass extinction, then the geological time scale would have to signify this with a higher ranking. On the scale, an epoch (which can measure thousands to millions of years) is a subset of a period (millions to tens of millions of years) which is a subset of an era (tens to hundreds of millions of years). The higher rankings are marked by more severe events in Earth history. The “Anthropocene” name is formulated for a new epoch, but the abrupt catastrophic change we’re causing may signify a new period (recent ones have ended with “-gene”) or even a new era (“-zoic”), as when a large asteroid crashed into Earth and rebooted the planet. That planet-modifying, dinosaur-killing event sixty six million years ago initiated the Cenozoic Era, which we are still in today.

These names are only really meaningful to the scientific community, but the difference in measurement is extraordinarily important to understanding the worlds we’re making and unmaking. In gauging our impact, the shift in scale here is truly shocking. A diminishment of Earth’s biodiversity worthy of a new epoch may well last longer than modern humans have been around so far, but beginning a new era? It’s the difference between finding out your child started a forest fire while playing with matches and finding out your child initiated a global nuclear war. And then remembering that you carelessly gave them the launch codes.

Of course, once a mass extinction event is underway, an edit of the geological time scale is the least of our worries. As Peter Brannen explained in an excellent Atlantic article back in 2017, we are not yet suffering a mass extinction event. If we were, we wouldn’t be chitchatting about the details. We’d be struggling to survive, and failing, as convulsive planetary-scale ecosystem collapses came one after another, taking down not just the fragile places like coral reefs and cloud forests, but whole swathes of much hardier life: clams, grasses, beetles. The path to those collapses is paved with gradual, then sudden, increases in heat and CO2. We’re heading in that direction, but it’s a long way off. Until it isn’t.

6. Really, there are two Anthropocenes, the scientific and the popular. The scientific term is at the center of a debate over our future signature in the geologic record. The popular term recognizes and names the obvious: The planet has been changed in a million crazy ways.

Interestingly, the popular version of the term has made adoption of the scientific designation a bit more difficult. There are folks in the scientific community who feel that, as the bible of Earth history (awkward metaphor, I know), the geological time scale is no place for editorializing or political strategizing. The chart is a purely scientific instrument for mapping Earth history and, like any scientific standard, should be free of subjective input.

But clearly there’s sufficient objective input to merit the name change. And it’s worth noting that the entire concept of the chart, like much of science, is a function of the Anthropocene. It is neither an accident nor an irony that the same species which measures geologic time by periodic catastrophe has now created its own catastrophe to mark geologic time. These are two functions of a single skill set unique to humans: the willingness and capacity to reimagine nature.

The capacity to map is inseparable from the desire to reimagine the planet for our purposes. There is no rewriting genetic code without first mapping that code. There is no drilling for oil without first mapping the geology to be drilled. There is no emptying the oceans of fish without first designing scanners to see every fish. And, as history would suggest, there is no human signature in the geological record without first developing the capacity to map that record.

Vladimir Vernadsky, a Russian/Ukrainian scientist working in the first half of the 20th century, was the first to propose that science, as an expression of our rational thought (what he called the “noosphere”), would be as much an influence on Earth’s lifeforms (the biosphere) as life has been on the planet’s geological processes (the geosphere). In 1938, anticipating what we’re now calling the Anthropocene, he wrote of “scientific thought as a geological force.”

To be continued …

In the meantime, I have a housekeeping question I’d like readers to chime in on: Do you prefer links in the text or at the end of the article? I find links scattered through an article to be distracting, but understand that others like to have them at their fingertips while reading. Let me know.

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A Good Idea: Outfox your Lawn

Not long ago, I watched a fox – gorgeous, with black socks and a white-tipped tail – hunting for half an evening hour in the small field on the south side of my mother’s house. It spent most of its time rooted to a snow-free patch of ground near the compost pile. Clearly there was a mole or vole just under the surface, and it was determined to taste it. Its head turned left and right in the quick motions of canine intelligence-gathering, and its front feet were rooted together and poised for the attempt. It waited, cocked its head again, and waited some more. Finally, the pounce: Not the winter leap-and-pounce to break through crusty snow to subnivean tunnels, but a simultaneous scrabbling with the front feet as its muzzle went in for the bite.

To no avail. The rodent lived to tell the tale, and the fox shook the dirt off its nose before cruising the field’s edge and disappearing into the brush.

And therein lies my real interest here: my mother’s field. It’s an acre or two of restored ground that not long ago was unused lawn. The field isn’t a complex reestablishment of native species, though my mother has planted some of those, and not a thorough elimination of non-natives, but rather an acknowledgement that a tall meadow or pasture or field full of grasses and flowers is a balm to the eyes, a benefit for an older woman tired of mowing, and a blessing to the ecological neighborhood.

Allowing your lawn to become what it dearly wants to be is both an act of restoration ecology and a simple declaration that we can stop doing foolish, harmful things. Maintaining a lawn is a recent human practice, and a surprisingly destructive one. Not only is it little better than a parking lot as far as habitat goes, but it wastes water and invites us to practice our worst chemical obsessions: spreading herbicides, pesticides, and artificial fertilizers at the feet of our children and pets, and sending this hostile chemistry into the nearest stream or drainage system. Multiply those bad practices by the 31 million acres of lawn in the U.S., and you’ll see the scale of the problem.

The DIY solution is to maintain whatever lawn (or other barren surface – wood chips, patio) necessary to keep ticks away (if, like us, you live amid them) and have space for some recreation, then turn the rest into lush habitat by… doing very little. Simply let it grow. If time and finances allow, you can do a better job by researching which invasives to remove and which flowering plants to introduce for native pollinators. And if you have a few acres (or more) to restore, you can learn how to provide habitat for grassland birds (whose numbers are plummeting), for tree swallows and bluebirds, and for the ancient life-or-death dance between foxes and rodents.

The only real reason to mow, assuming you’re not harvesting hay, is to keep forest from taking over. Here in New England, a field wants to become forest, and so it makes sense to mow the perimeter to limit encroachment, and to keep an eye out for young trees sprouting mid-field. Mowing isn’t necessary for this as long as the woody growth isn’t too much to handle with a pair of loppers on an autumn stroll or two. Rarely does a tree sneak up on us. If you need to mow the woody growth, do it as late as possible in the fall or winter to avoid killing autumn’s pollinators and seed-gatherers.

A big-picture view of all this can be found in reading Douglas Tallamy, entomologist and activist for backyard rewilding. If enough of us transform our yards and fields into rich native habitat, he says, we can create a patchwork reserve he calls Homegrown National Park. It’s not enough to protect large tracts here and there. Huge national parks in Alaska and Wyoming don’t help pollinators or songbirds in New Jersey. Life needs diverse and, ideally, continuous habitat. Smithsonian has a good article on Tallamy from 2020, in which he “estimates that the worldwide population of arthropods, chiefly insects, has declined by 45 percent from preindustrial times. Without insects, it would be the case that lizards, frogs and toads, birds and mammals, from rodents up through bears, would lose all or a large part of their diets. ‘The little things that run the world are disappearing,’ he says. ‘This is an ecological crisis that we’re just starting to talk about.’”

That phrase about insects – “the little things that run the world” – is borrowed from the brilliant entomologist and natural philosopher E.O. Wilson, one of the world’s finest, most rational environmentalist voices asking us to fix our relationship with life on Earth before it’s too late. His Half-Earth Project takes habitat protection to the grandest level, advocating for keeping half of the planet for ourselves and protecting the rest for the remainder of Earth’s species. (More on that another day.)

So why not fly your lawn’s freak flag? It simplifies your life, connects you more deeply to the species that surround you, and puts a little local dent into the Anthropocene. More specifically, a happy field provides habitat for insects and birds, feeds pollinators (and really the entire food chain), maintains and enriches the soil, captures more CO2, puts out more oxygen, connects your kids to the real world, and enriches the sights and sounds of your life.

Or you might even discover new insect species and have one named after you. Naturalist Charley Eiseman in western MA let his suburban backyard grow wild and, with close observation, pretty quickly saw and recorded species and ecological relationships no one else ever had. He has a particular interest in leafminers, insects which live and eat inside the thin world of a leaf, and has contributed substantially to the scientific literature on them.

When merely paying attention to the outer reaches of our yard, after we stop mutilating it weekly with a blade, teaches 21st century science something about basic biology, it also tells us how little we know about the world around us, and how much we’re losing every day we don’t change our behavior.

My mother, meanwhile, is content to watch the fox hunt through her yard every evening. She turned the back yard into a field as well, mowing the perimeter and a path out to her (well-fenced) chicken house. When the monarch butterfly finds its milkweed and the fox gets its mouse, it’s almost enough to make you forget about the Anthropocene.

Thanks for reading. Please feel free to comment. See you next week.

Jason

Field Guide to the Anthropocene

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