Anthropocene The Human Epoch Quotes

Our planet has entered the Anthropocene – a new geological epoch when humanity’s influence is causing global climate change, the loss of wild spaces, and a drastic decline in the richness of life. Microbes are not exempt. Whether on coral reefs or in human guts, we are disrupting the relationships between microbes and their hosts, often pulling apart species that have been together for millions of years.

Crutzen wrote up his idea in a short essay, “Geology of Mankind,” that ran in Nature. “It seems appropriate to assign the term ‘Anthropocene’ to the present, in many ways human-dominated, geological epoch,” he observed. Among the many geologic-scale changes people have effected, Crutzen cited the following: • Human activity has transformed between a third and a half of the land surface of the planet. • Most of the world’s major rivers have been dammed or diverted. • Fertilizer plants produce more nitrogen than is fixed naturally by all terrestrial ecosystems. • Fisheries remove more than a third of the primary production of the oceans’ coastal waters. • Humans use more than half of the world’s readily accessible fresh water runoff. Most significantly, Crutzen said, people have altered the composition of the atmosphere. Owing to a combination of fossil fuel combustion and deforestation, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air has risen by forty percent over the last two centuries, while the concentration of methane, an even more potent greenhouse gas, has more than doubled. “Because of these anthropogenic emissions,” Crutzen wrote, the global climate is likely to “depart significantly from natural behavior for many millennia to come.

The first thing to note here is how the rise of posthuman agents and the anthropocene epoch are two aspects of the same phenomenon: at exactly the time when humanity becomes the main geological factor threatening the entire balance of the life of Earth, it begins to lose its basic features and transforms itself into posthumanity.

This may be the era of the Anthropocene – the geological epoch in which human action is transforming the planet. But it is also one in which the human animal is less than ever in charge. Global warming seems to be in large part the result of the human impact on the planet, but this is not to say humans can stop the process. Whatever is done now, human expansion has triggered a shift that will persist for thousands of years.

It seems appropriate to assign the term ‘Anthropocene’ to the present, in many ways human-dominated, geological epoch,” he observed. Among the many geologic-scale changes people have effected, Crutzen cited the following: • Human activity has transformed between a third and a half of the land surface of the planet. • Most of the world’s major rivers have been dammed or diverted. • Fertilizer plants produce more nitrogen than is fixed naturally by all terrestrial ecosystems. • Fisheries remove more than a third of the primary production of the oceans’ coastal waters. • Humans use more than half of the world’s readily accessible fresh water runoff. Most significantly, Crutzen said, people have altered the composition of the atmosphere. Owing to a combination of fossil fuel combustion and deforestation, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air has risen by forty percent over the last two centuries, while the concentration of methane, an even more potent greenhouse gas, has more than doubled. “Because of these anthropogenic emissions,” Crutzen wrote, the global climate is likely to “depart significantly from natural behavior for many millennia to come.

we have entered the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch defined by humanity’s influence on the global environment.

From a narrative perspective, beginning the Anthropocene with the birth of the modern world tells a story of a new profit-driven mode of living. This new geological epoch is built from slavery and colonialism, enabled by a long-distance financial industry. The human epoch is a story of domination, and the resistance to that domination.

Many traditional conservationists are deeply suspicious of the idea of the Anthropocene. They see the word itself as an illegitimate claim on power. To them it is not just a neutral name for a geologic epoch, but code for a threatening and dangerous agenda. They describe their enemies in this war as the proponents of the “Anthropocene worldview.” Some writers have caricatured a belief in the Anthropocene as synonymous with cheerleading for development, celebrating human hegemony over Earth, and believing that human needs justify destroying other species and that technology and capitalism will just take care of everything, so there is nothing to worry about. Of course this is a straw man argument, a cartoon view of the Anthropocene and ecomodernism constructed for the purpose of knocking it down. At

What will be the significance of the Anthropocene rock layer and the ultimate legacy of the human race when, in another 225 million years, our star, having completed one more dance around the black hole at the center of our galaxy, returns to this quadrant? Will we simply leave a thin layer rich in refined metal and Twinkie wrappers, underlying a layer bereft of coral reefs? Or will we leave more lasting changes on this world, or even never leave it at all? In the scientific literature, you see the Anthropocene referred to sometimes as an “event” and sometimes as an “epoch.” “Event” implies it will all be over pretty quickly, whereas “epoch” implies some more prolonged phase of human influence. From the standpoint of Earth evolution, which will we be, a moment or a phase?

Welcome to the Sapiezoic Eon Some see the concept of an Anthropocene epoch as grandiose. They wonder if the coming of humanity is really so important, seen against the immense backdrop of Earth history. They worry that we are thinking too big. Yet I think the opposite is true. Maybe in thinking of it as only a new epoch we are thinking way too small. A shift to a new epoch is not that rare. An epoch typically lasts for a few million years, which, for Earth, means it’s no big deal. Yet this is not merely another geological shift among many in Earth’s long, ever-changing history.

We are coming to a fork in the road in human history, where the system of global capitalism is forcing an end to the Holocene Epoch of the last 12,000 years, the geological period within which human civilisation has developed, where we have to decide between ‘capitalism or the planet’. —DEL WESTON1

Paul Crutzen, the atmospheric chemist who won the Nobel Prize in 1995 for his work on ozone depletion, coined a word that has resonated. “It seems appropriate,” he wrote, “to assign the term Anthropocene to the present, in many ways human-dominated, geological epoch.

On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces, which no epoch of the former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman Empire…. This antagonism between modern industry and science on the one hand, modern misery and dissolution on the other hand; this antagonism between the productive powers and the social relations of our epoch is a fact, palpable, overwhelming, and not to be controverted.

The drifting of continents—now universally accepted as plate tectonics—is far too gradual for humans to perceive. The same is true for other highly significant phenomena. When Charles Darwin first proposed natural selection, he faced at least as much resistance as Wegener; although his theory explained myriad observations, nobody had actually seen finches evolving. Likewise, the effects of our own collective activity—such as climate change and loss of biodiversity—are almost invisible to us, because the impact spans the whole planet, growing over centuries. Like plate tectonics and evolution, the arrival of the Anthropocene epoch is not a human-scale phenomenon. Buckminster Fuller conceived the Geoscope as a tool to help humans attain a global perspective, to see worldwide events and to probe geological time. It was to be an instrument for scoping Earth’s patterns—an instrument of comprehensive anticipatory design science. And though it was never built adjacent to the United Nations, he always carried one in his head. In order to anticipate comprehensively, the present-day design scientist must do as he did. Design scientists must be sensitive to natural patterns of change and human patterns of activity, extrapolating from fragmentary evidence. In the Anthropocene, these patterns will be interrelated. And since human activity is the driving force, they not only can be observed but also can be impacted. However, patterns must be detected before they become settled, before the consequences are foregone conclusions. Unlike Wegener and Darwin, the design scientist cannot be passive. There