Transcriber: Amanda Zhu Reviewer: Rhonda Jacobs
On my way to work, I walk through a typical new England woodland
and see enormous trees -
pine, oak, beech, hickory, maple -
they all grew back like weeds on what had once been a farm,
a patchwork of grassy pastures and cultivated fields.
My footpath wends its way around a small pond
that once watered livestock,
past an old cellar hole,
and through old stone walls that crisscross beneath the forest canopy.
During each of my pedestrian commutes,
I’m witness to the ruins of an abandoned agricultural civilization
and the power of wild nature to reclaim the land.
I live in a distinctly younger epoch of modernity.
The word “modern” comes to us from the Latin “modo,”
meaning "just now" as opposed to some previous condition or mode.
To become modern is to cross a boundary in time.
In this place between an older culture of rural farmers
energized by manual labor, draft animals, and fuel wood
and a younger culture of urbanizing, industrial, more mobile people
energized mainly by fossil fuels.
When I get to my office at the university, however,
to teach Earth System Science,
the spatial scale shifts from that of New England farmsteads
to that of the entire globe.
And what does modernity look like at that scale to a geoscientist?
Well, it looks like a lot of familiar things to you:
rapid climate changes fueled by greenhouse gas transfers,
resulting in the melting of glaciers and permafrost,
the expansion of drylands,
and the intensification of storms.
It looks like ecosystem collapses, resulting in a sixth mass extinction
involving both terrestrial and marine settings.
And it looks like oceanic transformations,
resulting in sea level rise,
warming waters, diminished pack ice,
and a carbonized chemistry with more acid and less oxygen.
This geophysical and geochemical modernity
also includes a human component.
An overwhelmingly dominant species,
ours, Homo sapiens,
spread into every habitat
and being in direct or indirect control over nearly every other species.
It includes deliberate human makeovers of land and sea from top to bottom,
often called "land use,"
accompanied by inadvertent, often chaotic repercussions that we hadn't planned on.
It includes never-seen-before synthetic materials
like plastics,
novel chemicals
like the chlorofluorocarbons that nearly destroyed the ozone layer,
and radionuclides like plutonium-239,
which dusted the entire planet
during the atomic bomb testing I remember as a child.
The first of these three megatrends, these modern megatrends -
climate change, ecosystem collapse and oceanic changes -
are nothing new to planet Earth.
In fact, these are the criteria
that typically separate epochs on the geological calendar.
It's the last three of these modern megatrends,
the human dominance, the human makeovers, and the human inventions,
that are truly unique with respect to the long-haul of Earth history,
which began a long time ago,
4.6 billion years ago.
But is there a single global thing that holds these six megatrends together -
holistically and historically?
The answer is a clear “yes,” in both space and time.
In space, that thing is the entire planet.
The close examination inclusive modeling of which
leads to our understanding
of a spinning,
wobbling,
tilting,
orbiting,
sloshing,
living
spheroid
of gases liquids and solids.
So that's the part about space.
In time, that thing is the newest epoch of the geological time scale,
the almost-official Anthropocene epoch.
It's an idea evoked 20 years ago, in the year 2000,
by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Sturmer
to highlight the idea
that modern Earth is distinct from all previous states.
It's an epoch name for us human beings not out of vanity or hubris
but for the astonishing power we've used to literally change the face of the Earth.
It's a word that according to Google Analytics
has been accelerating in popularity,
even as the popularity of the word “environmentalism”
is diminishing a little bit.
It's a word that through categorical thinking
will help create a paradigm shift
in the way we think about nature, the wild, and the environment,
a word that I hope will help us return to an ethical and sustainable future.
Consider three examples of news stories from the modern United States
within the last few months:
raging forest fires in the American West, especially in California;
the return of great white sharks to New England,
especially Outer Cape Cod;
the drenching catastrophic floods along the US Gulf Coast,
especially in New Orleans.
Now, all three of these things are truly wild responses -
wildfires, wild carnivores, wild waters -
is something that we humans have done.
Ultimately, they can be traced back to human behavior,
natural human behavior.
The wildfires come from the baking droughts
we've intensified by global warming;
the wild shark populations
comes from the rising population of seals that we've protected;
the wild waters
are happening on a landscape that's sinking beneath the sea
because we've starved the land
of the sediment it needs to stay above sea level.
But what's the root cause of all this?
To get there,
we have to work our way backwards through a chain of causality,
and I'll use the case of wildfires as an example.
The fires are more intense
because the regional climate is drier in summer
because the prevailing hemispheric circulation has changed
because the average temperature of the troposphere
is almost two degrees warmer
because humans have transferred enormous amounts of carbon
from the terrestrial component of our system
to the atmospheric component
because we enjoy the advantages
of cheap energy provided by fossil fuels and of global deforestation
because our human psyches are governed by instinctual animal behaviors
that emerged during human evolution.
Two of our behaviors are particularly important.
The first is our natural drive to have families
and provide for them as much as we can.
The second is our natural cognitive intelligence,
which allows us to figure out how things work
and invent new and better things,
such as tools, crops, materials, medicines, homes, and sources of energy.
The motivation to improve our lives combined with our flexible intelligence
gave rise to science,
which gave rise to engineering,
which gave rise to the power to literally remake the planet.
The rest of this natural behavior
has been a human makeover of the Earth's surface,
part of which has been very deliberate,
like the building of cities, the taming of rivers,
and the killing of carnivores;
and part of which has been completely inadvertent,
like the fouling of our nests and the raising of Earth's temperature.
Regardless of intent,
human beings are now the dominant geologic agent operating on the planet.
That's a fact.
Moving mass at a greater rate than the glaciers of the last ice age
and the rivers of familiar geologic history,
global modernity looks strikingly different
from the regional human history of the previous Holocene epoch,
which began about 11,700 years ago.
Thus, we geoscientists have no choice but to create an official new epoch,
and we're nearly done with the process.
And the label “Anthropocene”
is simply the best one we've come up with so far.
Various dates for the beginning of this epoch of geologic modernity
have been suggested and hotly debated.
Some proponents favor the onset of agriculture and early civilizations
about 10,000 years ago,
some favor the onset of maritime colonialism
in the late 15th century,
some favor the rise of the industrial revolution
in the late 18th century,
and most favor the global explosion and great acceleration
of science, technology, human populations,
urbanization, energy use, and land conversions
in the mid-20th century.
This last candidate for the beginning of the Anthropocene epoch
is the best one
because it is ubiquitously and clearly marked
by the radioactive dust from atomic bombs,
major excursion in chemical cycles,
and the deposition of sediment with plastic trace fossils
the world over.
The Anthropocene finds its ancient counterpart
in the 66 million-year-old Paleocene epoch,
which was also strikingly different from its predecessor
ruled by the dinosaurs.
In this earlier case,
the change came not from human technology
but from an asteroid impact
combined with colossal volcanism about 67 million years ago
that initiated a cascade of global disruptions
that gave mammals a chance to start evolving into humans.
This earlier transition
is ubiquitously and clearly marked
by a concentration of cosmic dust,
geochemical excursions,
and the deposition of sediment with different trace fossils.
So why does naming a new epoch matter?
Because as Aldous Huxley once wrote,
“Words are the channels through which thought flows,”
some of our most influential words are categorical labels;
for example, good versus bad, old versus new, us versus them,
fruit versus vegetables, or Democrats versus Republicans.
Thinking in the box versus thinking out of the box
is also a categorical distinction -
though this practice can lead to dangerous false dichotomies
and implicit biases -
on the whole that it's an essential tool for science,
the basis of all classifications.
In 1963,
I watched one of my heroes, Rachel Carson, address the nation
on our family's small black-and-white TV.
She was featuring her book “Silent Spring.”
Seven years later, in 1970,
I participated in the first Earth Day celebration as a college student.
Between these dates,
I witnessed the rise
of a new categorical meme in popular culture:
environmentalism -
a new way of thinking about chemical pollution,
endangered species,
and wilderness conservation,
all wrapped up into one bigger thing.
The single word “environmentalism” channeled our thinking
to create a profound social change
in a world that had not yet begun to concern itself with climate change.
Well, clearly, today we need a new categorical meme
to channel our thinking
about an even larger and more profound global concern:
the recognition that the fate of the entire planetary surface
lies in human hands.
Is climate change that new meme?
It seems that way
given all the scientific, media, and political attention,
but for me, and despite its popularity,
climate change is too small a concept
because climates are by definition regional
and have always come from the geological underground
via the tectonic rearrangements of continental plates
and the chemical transfers
between Earth's solid, liquid, and gaseous reservoirs.
Climate change, ecosystem collapse, oceanic transformations,
these are merely the big pieces of a larger pie.
The holistic or mechanistic view of that global pie is what I teach,
Earth system science.
The historic or narrative view of that pie is Earth system history,
its latest chapter being the Anthropocene epoch.
For me, the new meme we need is the word "Anthropocene."
We must be brave enough to admit
that we live in a new world of our own making.
Only then can we stop blaming nature and stop blaming ourselves
and return to sustainable ways through human invention.
To help you understand this new world,
"the modern world,"
"modernity,"
"the Anthropocene,"
I ask you to imagine Earth's surface being a golf course of global proportions
with oceans being oversized water features.
I don't play golf, but the analogy works for me.
Everything everywhere is the result of human choices,
whether conversions of places to better suit our needs
or the set-asides of places for various reasons.
The intensity of transformation
falls on a continuum on local golf courses,
from the holes in the sod to the smooth greens
to the long fairways
to the uncut rough and the forested out-of-bounds,
and this entire patchwork of places lies below a human tweaked atmosphere.
On an actual rather than golf-course-imagined Anthropocene Earth,
the intensity of transformation on land
falls on a continuum from urban downtowns to suburbs
to ruburbia
to remote wildlands;
and on the sea, it falls from fortified beaches
to dredged channels
to anoxic dead zones.
Both patchworks of places also lie beneath a human-tweaked atmosphere.
Make no mistake -
geological modernity has arrived.
Its name is the Anthropocene.
After a day at work
spent thinking and teaching about the global Earth system
at the university,
I walk back home through the woods.
During my return trip,
I find it easier to see these abandoned pastures,
the livestock pond, the cellar hole, and the stone walls
for what they are -
fossil evidence of the epoch before modernity.
Perhaps in some distant future,
a post-human intelligence
will discover the ruins and residues of our Anthropocene epoch
embedded in yet unnamed strata.
If and when that happens,
modernity will need a new name.
Thank you.