The most important thing to know about the anthropocene is that it puts people in a
new position in relation to the rest of nature. Basically, humans have emerged as
a force of nature on this planet. We are changing Earth's climate faster than at
any time in the last hundred thousand years, as a result of increasing carbon
dioxide in the atmosphere at rates faster than any time since the dinosaurs.
So the Anthropocene first got its name at a conference in 2001 when a Nobel
prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen
was frustrated at his colleagues who were calling our time period the Holocene. The
period of geologic time since the last ice age. From his point of view
everything had changed since the Industrial Revolution. The atmosphere had
changed, so many things had changed that we should recognize a new time period
changed by humans, the Anthropocene. We're changing the Earth in so many ways.
What's controversial though, is when did this begin? That's one of the
controversies. When did humans really become a global shaper of the Earth? So
the group that is responsible for recognising the Anthropocene within the
geologic timescale, the official geologic history of the Earth, of geologic
timescale, they are proposing to recognise the beginning of the
Anthropocene around 1950, in recognition of a time period of very rapid
accelerations in human induced changes in the environment that has been known
as the Great Acceleration. The middle of the 20th century is not the only
proposed beginning for the Anthropocene. Two other major proposals are that the
Anthropocene began very early with farmers first clearing the forests
across the Earth for agriculture, which happened at least 5,000 to 8,000 years
ago. That release carbon dioxide and potentially changed climate. We also have
the production of rice, which in those wet paddies produces lots of methane.
That methane release also changed Earth's climate 5,000 years ago. And you even
have the proposal for beginning the anthropocene in the year, about 500
years ago with the old world new world collision. Where you have the old world
meeting the new world, bringing it's diseases and other types of devastating
effects on the populations of the Americas, which caused a huge regrowth of
forests and brought down carbon dioxide. One of the biggest questions about the
Anthropocene is whether it should be considered to be a bad thing and the
reason that it's a big question is because so many of the definitions of
what humans are doing to this planet are negative things, like changing the
climate and causing mass extinction. Yet on the other hand the Anthropocene is
not over and it really remains to be seen what we're going to make of this
human time period. The Anthropocene is really a new story about what humans are
doing to the environment. What it even means to be human. And as a result you
see every kind of idea from humans being the destroyers of this planet to humans
being the salvation of this planet. Right now about 90% of the Earth's mammal
biomass is humans and livestock, so we have become the most dominant mammal on
Earth. We've also been putting so much plastic into the environment that if you
take all the plastic that we've produced so far on Earth, we could wrap the entire
planet in a thin layer of plastic film. We humans are going to shape the future
of this planet. So what kind of planet are we going to shape? Are we going
to shape it for the better or are we going to continue to do what we've been
doing so far and unintentionally creating a worse future for this planet,
both for humans and for the rest of life on Earth?