Introduction
When I was younger, I used to love looking out of the window of planes as we took off or landed, watching the straight lines of city streets give way to the curving cul-de-sacs of suburban neighborhoods before eventually giving way once again to the long straight lines of country roads and farm fields. Now, however, that view from above only furthers my sense of despair over the growing ecological and social disasters that we have created on this only world of ours.
In recent years, many biologists, chemists, and scientists of all sorts have begun to refer to the current epoch we live in as the “Anthropocene”; a new geological era defined by the footprint of human civilization and our human capacity to fundamentally change the way the world works.
While we here all the time about the dangers of human caused climate change, the view from our airplane window should be just as worrying. When one flies into almost any major city in the developed world, there is nothing but human created habitat for as far as one can see. Nature doesn´t work in straight lines; nor does it grow huge areas of monoculture crops within well-defined squares and other geometric shapes. The fact that almost our entire landscape is “designed” for our own purposes should be more than enough evidence that the Anthropocene isn´t simply some neat word used by radical ecologists and tree-hugging hippies, but rather a tangible and palpable reality that we have created.
What are the Effects of the Anthropocene?
The fact that humans affect the world around them isn´t a cause for concern in and of itself. Every creature affects its surroundings in some way or another, and in healthy ecosystems, this generally leads to a sense of overarching equilibrium, resiliency, and ecological health. When one certain type of species begins to cause damaging effects to the system as a whole, the natural world responds by limiting the scope of the effects of the species until equilibrium and balance is once again achieved.
Because of our technological prowess, the human species has essentially become more powerful than Nature´s checks and balances. Industrialization and the globalization of our economy and way of life has essentially separated us from any bioregional reality. Many of us never see the effects of our consumer-defined lives, and we simply trust that the titans of science and industry will do all they can to ensure that we continue to have the means to live the life we have grown accustomed to. This, in effect, has led us into a new geological era where human beings have reshaped the way the world´s systems works.
In recent years the extent of our negative influence on the world has becoming all too clear. Global climate change is a reality that we must now live with, even if certain world leaders continue to claim it is a hoax. Other defining characteristics of this new geological epoch include massive extinctions of species of flora and fauna caused by the spread of human and industrial habitats around the world, a massive loss in biodiversity (nature´s key to resiliency), massive loss of topsoil (nature´s key to fertility), among others.
When did the Anthropocene begin? While some scientists mention an exact date (July 16th, 1945, the date the first atomic bomb was dropped), others mention the Great Acceleration, a time in the middle of the 20th century when human activities that affected the functioning of the natural world began to geometrically increase.
Whenever the Anthropocene actually began, the evidence is clear that the effects of human civilization on the healthy functioning of the wider world has not been positive.
Is there a Way out of the Anthropocene?
The thing about geological eras is that they tend to be pretty long; millions of years to be exact. Does that mean that there is simply no short term solution to the disasters we´re creating? Nature will eventually find its way back to equilibrium, but for our relatively recent human civilization, we probably don´t have a couple hundred thousand years to wait for that to happen.
The effects of the Industrial Revolution and our consumer-driven global economy aren´t simply going away. Species have been lost that will never come back. The amount of carbon dioxide we´ve put in the air will similarly be there for the long run. The Anthropocene, then, isn´t disappearing. Instead of wishing that we could regress into the more benign Holocene Era (when the conditions were ripe for life to flourish), we need to accept responsibility for what we´ve created and accept the challenge to find way for our human footprint to affect the world in a positive way.
A Few Pathways
Simple solutions are usually deceitful. We won´t stop climate change by changing a few light bulbs and I am similarly hesitant to offer any ideas that could be considered as a panacea for all our world´s problems. What is needed, more than any technical fix, is a change in culture, mindset, and worldview that allows to limit our lives and our desires to fit our places so that we can thus use our human power to effect positive changes that will lead us back towards the greater equilibrium.
First and foremost, we need to limit our dependence on raw materials from the natural world. We´ve manufactured enough concrete, to name just one example, to cover the entire surface of the world with a thin layer of concrete (which obviously isn´t great for growing things to eat). Instead of mining more cement, why not recycle cement and asphalt for our houses and roads. Governments could subsidize paving contractors that only used recycled concrete for roads. Besides the obvious ecological benefits, one paving company mentions that recycled asphalt paving also has economic benefits and could save taxpayers billions of dollars per year.
Secondly, those of us living in developed nations need to shift our understanding of what a healthy economy looks like. Instead of measuring our economic success in numbers of sustained (and unlimited) growth, we need to learn to find happiness in de-growth, living simpler lives that are more frugal, less mobile, but ultimately more fulfilling.
Lastly, we need to accept a certain level of wildness. When I fly into Guatemala City, I see plenty of straight lines in the city itself. Outside the city boundaries, however, the straight lines of farm fields are not visible. Rather, the forested, jagged hills, mountains and volcanoes offer a sense of wildness to the area around the city. While there are small cornfields interspersed with the wildness of the forest, the natural world obviously takes precedence. To limit the negative aspects of the Anthropocene, we need to allow the natural world to teach us the natural equilibrium and balance that is essential for all life (ours included) to thrive.