From Past to Present - Philosophy of the Anthropocene - Final Section

      In this final section, we will explore Anthropocene: A Very Short Introduction (Anthropocene) by Erle C. Ellis and discuss any final thoughts. In the beginning of Anthropocene, the author states that his goal is “to provide you with the background needed to understand the Anthropocene as a scientific proposal and to explain why it has become so broadly influential.” (preface) Of which, I believe he did an excellent job. Throughout the book, Ellis explains the Anthropocene as both a potential geological epoch and a poignant social, political, historical, and philosophical issue of our age. I will try here to highlight the most salient information from each chapter. 

     

     Chapter one, Origins, discusses both the origin of the idea of the Anthropocene as a new epoch and how this idea affects the various origin stories of different religions. He writes:

From prehistory to present, the human role in nature – as progeny, partner, steward, gardener, or destroyer – has been defined and redefined by narratives explaining human emergence on Earth. Origin stories gave humans a privileged place at the center of divine creation in the Abrahamic religions. Copernicus and Darwin built new narratives from scientific evidence and humans became just another animal on just another planet orbiting just another ordinary star.

The Anthropocene demands an even greater adjustment of our perspectives. As geologists and others struggle for and against various proposals to formalize the Anthropocene, it should come as no surprise that their efforts have become entangled with both age-old worldviews and contemporary debates on the role of humans in nature and even what it means to be human. (p.1-2)

     The author goes on to point out the importance of origin stories in the human experience. He states: “Through story lines connecting cosmos, Earth, and people with all the other actors and forces they must interact with, origin stories tell us who we are, where we came from, the role we play on earth, and our relationships to the rest of nature.” (p.5) However, as Ellis explains, many past origin stories are not rooted in facts and are, therefore, often harmful in the ways they define our relationships with nature. In Abrahamic faiths, humans are given ‘dominion’ over the earth and asked to be good stewards, yet God is seen as the only force capable of creating planetary change. On the opposite side, Darwin’s scientific theory, though based on factual ideas of evolution, relegated humans to nothing more than ‘naked apes’. In both scenarios, there is a refusal of man’s power to cause real, lasting, planetary changes. In this way, the idea of the Anthropocene – the realization of humans as the primary drivers of planetary environmental issues – is Earth-shaking. Ellis writes: 

By redefining the roles and relations of humans, earth, and cosmos, the origin story of contemporary science challenges some of the most deeply held traditional beliefs of societies around the world. There is no role for an all-powerful God or any other mystical force. Humans play no central role in the universe. [While also being based on scientific fact,] the Anthropocene goes even further, not only by confronting these traditional beliefs, but also by revising the classic origin story of contemporary science. In the Anthropocene, humans are put back into a central role on Earth, as planet shapers. (p.6)

     

     Chapter two, Earth System, is, as the name suggests, a discussion of the various “...processes underpinning Earth's functioning as a complex dynamic system” and how humans have begun changing this system. Ellis explains why Earth system science has played such a fundamental role in understanding how humans have brought on the Anthropocene. He writes: “Without a robust understanding of Earth as a system – its fundamental components, their interactions, and, most importantly, the processes that keep the Earth system stable or induce change – it is not possible to establish the causes of changes in the Earth system.” (p. 16) Earth system science recognizes four major spheres, or ‘subsystems,’ that are closely linked and work together to form Earth’s system – lithosphere (land, or earth’s crust), hydrosphere (water), atmosphere (gases in the air), biosphere (all living things). Each of these subsystems, and their interconnected cycles, plays a critical role in keeping the Earth regulated to support life. 

     The ‘Gaia hypothesis’, first introduced by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis in the 1970s, “...holds that the biosphere regulates Earth's climate by acting like a thermostat.” (p.18) Ellis explains:

When Earth heats up, the biosphere responds by producing cooling effects. For example, organisms increase their uptake of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and release fine particles – aerosols – into the air, helping to form clouds that reflect the sun's energy. In response to a cooling Earth, the biosphere produced opposite effects, counteracting cooling by producing warming effects – increasing greenhouse gases and reducing aerosols in the atmosphere. In this way, the biosphere could stabilize Earth's temperature through a ‘negative feedback’ system… (p.18-19)

This is just one of the ways that one of the subsystems, working in tandem with the others, keeps our planet in the ‘Goldilocks zone’ that supports life. 

     However, “[t]he Earth system is also full of positive feedback systems...” (p.19) Unlike the negative feedback loops, positive feedback loops continue to move in the same direction once something starts the process and can become self-reinforcing. The example Ellis provides is Arctic sea ice. Normally, the white ice reflects sunlight and, therefore, keeps temperatures cool enough for ice to persist. However, in a time of global warming, like we are in now, when the ice begins to melt, it exposes the dark ocean water beneath, which, in turn, absorbs more radiant heat and melts even more ice. Ellis warns that, like any positive feedback system, “[a]t some point, this positive feedback system may reach a point of no return – a ‘tipping point’ or ‘regime shift’ – after which the melting of Arctic ice will continue until all the ice has melted.” (p.19) 

     The author also discusses how humans have altered the Earth system through our actions. He writes:

By the mid-1990s, Earth system scientists coordinated by the IGBP [International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme] and other international scientific institutions had assembled a potent body of evidence demonstrating that humans were dramatically altering Earth's functioning as a system. Not only were human activities filling the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, CFCs, aerosols, and other trace gases, these were threatening Earth's protective ozone layer and driving global changes in climate. The global cycling of elements, Earth's biogeochemical cycles, were [also] being disrupted, and not only the carbon cycle, but also the cycles of nitrogen and other life-giving elements. Human use of land was [also] reshaping Earth's ecology, eroding productive soils, diverting water to farms and cities, eliminating natural habitats, and driving species extinct at alarming rates. (p.31)

    

     In chapter three, Geologic Time, Ellis discusses how geologists determine the various eons, eras, periods, and epochs. This is important to understand because it will be geologists who make the final decision whether or not to create a new epoch, the Anthropocene, based on these criteria. The first thing to understand is stratigraphy. Ellis writes:

Stratigraphy began with the late 17th-century work of Nicholas Steno and his interpretations of the layered structure of sedimentary rocks. His ‘Law of superposition’, in which newer layers of sedimentary rocks must form on top of older layers, remains the most fundamental concept in stratigraphy. To this he added two principles, holding that no matter what condition or orientation layers of sedimentary rock might now be in, they must originally have formed as horizontal and continuous layers. Steno’s principles made it possible for ancient sedimentary rocks to be interpreted as layers of time no matter how deformed, tilted, eroded, or otherwise jumbled up they had become through various geological processes. Steno and others also recognized that the physical characteristics (mineralogy, texture, colour, etc.) and fossil content within layers could be used to differentiate them from each other and enable correlation of layers across different rock formations even when these were exposed in different places. (p.36)

     Additionally, William Smith, in the late 1800s, recognized that stratigraphic layers could cover large continuous areas. 

[As]...an English surveyor of mines, canals, trenches, and coal pits…, [he]...became intimately familiar with the varied strata he observed across Great Britain. By correlating fossils and different types of rock…, he connected them together into stratigraphic layers covering the whole of England, Wales, and Scotland…[i]n a feat still known as ‘the map that changed the world’... Smith is now known as ‘the Father of English Geology’. His map still hangs in Burlington House, home of the Geological Society of London. (p.36) 

Later, Giovanni Arduino and others began to reconstruct a continuous geologic timeline “...encompassing all of Earth's history.” (p.37)

     Since the 1800s, science and technology have provided many other tools for determining various strata in ways other than their relative positions, beginning with identifying different types of rocks and examining the “...thickness and rates of formation…” of the strata for time frame information. (p.36) Next, “[r]adiometric dating, of which ‘carbon dating’ is a popular example, enabled absolute dates to be assigned to stratigraphic units for the first time, yielding ‘geochronologic units’ with known dates of formation.” (p.37) Adding to the toolbox, “[s]tratigraphy would also gain...chemostratigraphy, enabling stratigraphic units to be identified and correlated based on their detailed chemical and isotopic composition, and magnetostratigraphy in which the age of units could be determined relative to historical reconstructions of changes in the magnetic polarity of Earth.” (p.38)

     All of these advances led to the formation of “[t]he Geologic time scale (GTS) [which]  brings together the work of generations of stratigraphers within a single standardized geochronology of Earth history…The GTS divides 4.55 billion years of Earth history into chronostratigraphic units that capture many of the key events in Earth history…” (p.38) However, for our purposes, the most important aspect of the GTS is that not all the important events in Earth’s history are marked by a new epoch, period, era, or eon. For example, there is “...no geological boundary marking the origins of life (occurring sometime in the early Archean)...” (p.42) This is because geologists require there be “...clear and recognizable global stratigraphic signatures…,” or markers. (p.42) “These defined and dated markers, known informally as ‘golden spikes’, identify a ‘specific point in a specific sequence of rock strata’, and are known formally as Global Boundary Stratotype Sections and Points (GSSP).” (p.43) The stratigraphic marker that was chosen to potentially mark the start of the Anthropocene was “...the spread of radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons testing, beginning with the Trinity Test of 1945…,” and associated with the Great Acceleration. (p.51)

     

    Chapter four, The Great Acceleration, describes much of the same information as we have already explicated earlier this semester while reading The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945, therefore I will only focus on the information that is pertinent to this text. The Anthropocene Working Group (AWG), is a group that was created with the “...single task: to examine the case for recognizing a new interval of geologic time based on ‘the wide-ranging effects of anthropogenic influence on stratigraphically significant parameters’. In other words, the AWG would examine the case for subdividing the Quaternary Period of the GTS by identifying the lower boundary of a potential Anthropocene Epoch, ideally with a new GSSP.” (p.48) However, the group suffered from an abundance of information that needed to be narrowed down and analyzed. Ellis explains:

Inspired by Crutzen's vision of the Anthropocene, the team focused on human-driven changes to the Earth system brought on by the Industrial Revolution…Published in 2004 as the now classic IGBP report Global Change and the Earth System: A Planet Under Pressure, their work did not reveal a continuous rise in Earth transformation as the Industrial Revolution gathered steam and spread across the world. Rather the data showed a dramatic jump in the rate of human environmental changes starting in the middle of the 20th century…

The message from Earth system science was clear. Starting in the 1950s, humans began shifting Earth's functioning as a system into a new and unprecedented state. (p.52-53) 

This increase in momentum after World War II was termed ‘The Great Acceleration’, a period in time in which human fingerprints could be found on nearly every aspect of the Earth system. “In a 2016 paper in Science, the Anthropocene Working Group endorsed the Great Acceleration as the main scientific narrative explaining Earth's transition to the Anthropocene.” (p.73)

     

     Chapter five, Anthropos, asks the question: “When exactly did humans attain dominance of the Earth's environments?” (p.75) To answer this question, Ellis turns to the field of archeology. He states: 

Archaeologists are the stratigraphers of the human world, specializing in reading the material records left by human societies over the long term, often from their very first beginnings. And like the stratigraphers of geology, archaeologists serve as the timekeepers of humanity, dedicated to reconstructing the social and environmental history of human societies from the physical records left behind. Over decades, their research has amassed an impressive body of evidence demonstrating that humans have dramatically altered terrestrial environments around the world starting in the late Pleistocene…

From their perspective as archaeologists, the onset of the Anthropocene ought not to be defined solely by the environmental consequences of human activities, but rather by the emergence of unprecedented human capacities to alter Earth's environments. (p.75-76)

     Ellis points out that, by the late Pleistocene, “...behaviorally modern human societies… were established on every continent except Antarctica.” (p.79) Additionally, 

Hunter-gatherer societies learned to capture and consume an ever wider diversity of new species; broadening the human niche. These new species included many that had never evolved to live with a tool-wielding, fire-using, social-hunting, niche-constructing primate. Many of these species, especially the larger animals prized as human prey – the megafauna – would soon be extinct…

In the late Pleistocene and Early Holocene, hunter-gatherers probably caused the extinction of about half of Earth's large-bodied mammals and a number of large bird species in Australia. (p.79,81)

     On top of killing off the megafauna such as the woolly mammoth, which altered the vegetation of their grazing area by allowing brush and tree growth that they once inhibited, hunter-gatherers of the late Pleistocene also altered the land themselves by means such as strategic fires. Ellis explains: 

Once preferred megafauna and other species became rare or extinct, hunter-gatherers learned to harvest more species, broadening their diets and their niche. They burned vegetation to encourage new growth. They learned to increase the nutritional returns from hunting and foraging by cooking, grinding, and efficiently processing animal and plant foods, making small grains and tubers useful for the first time. They spread the seeds of the plants they liked and managed the populations of the animals they hunted – and would later domesticate. (p.84)

And, by 4,000 to 5,000 years ago, agricultural societies existed “...on every populated continent except Australia.” (p.85) 

     As one can see, human transformation of the Earth is nothing new. What is new is the speed, breadth, and enormity of the transformations, as well as the magnitude of the damage to the Earth system these transformations are causing. However, as Ellis points out: 

[F]or archaeologists, anthropologists, geographers, geologists, and others focused on the long-term causes, rather than the consequences, of anthropogenic global environmental change, the Anthropocene begins long before 1950.

An earlier Anthropocene might recognize the late Pleistocene megafauna extinctions, the emergence and spread of agriculture, rising atmospheric methane from rice production 5,000 years ago, widespread anthropogenic soils 2,000 years ago, the formation of a world system circa 500 years ago…, or the start of the industrial era circa 200 years ago…

From an archaeological point of view, there is nothing recent or unusual about human alteration of Earth's environments. The human world has always been anthropogenic. Nearly every human society in Earth history has lived in environments transformed by their ancestors. (p.101-102)

     

     Chapter six, Oikos, asks: “What does ‘natural habitat’ even mean on a planet transformed by humans?” This question has implications for conservationists, environmental ethicists, and others. For possible answers to this question, Ellis turns toward ecology: 

Ecology, from the Greek ‘oikos’ (‘house’),  is a relatively new and integrative scientific discipline focused on understanding interactions among organisms and their environments, including the ‘food chains’ that connect carnivores, herbivores, and plants; the spatial patterns of plant and animal populations; and the biogeochemical fluxes among organisms and their abiotic environments. Emerging at the end of the 19th century, ecology has deep roots in natural history dating back to Aristotle and before. Darwin was a naturalist…

Darwin and most other naturalists were comfortable with including humans in their work…But this had already begun to change in the late 18th century, when Comte de Buffon distinguished between ‘original nature’ and ‘nature civilized’ by humans. This division into human and non-human natures deepened with the rise of the natural sciences, ecology among them, which left the study of the human world to the social sciences and the humanities…

Dividing nature into two parts has always been problematic, especially given who is doing the dividing. Yet this unnatural act of division may have also heightened the sensitivity of the ecologists to the transformative capacities of human societies. (p.104-105)

     One of the most interesting outcomes of this division of nature, and of colonizer mentality, was ‘The Pristine Myth’. Ellis explains: “To study habitats and ecosystems uninfluenced by humans, many ecologists, especially in North America, have sought out places without clear evidence of human activity.” (p.105) However, as it turns out, there is little to no land that has not been transformed by humans at some time. Ellis points out:

Even in many regions where human influences appear to be absent, palaeoecological evidence regularly demonstrates that contemporary ecological patterns and processes were shaped by earlier human societies…

But the descendants of European settlers in the Americas and Australasia have regularly mistaken dense woodlands for untouched ‘pristine’ habitats when they are in fact still recovering from long-term management by earlier societies. Geographer William Denevan highlighted this error in his aptly titled 1992 article ‘The Pristine Myth: The Landscape of the Americas in 1492’…

The Pristine Myth – that places without humans today represent an ecology without prior human influence – is now recognized as a serious barrier to understanding contemporary ecological patterns and processes. (p.107-108)

     Acknowledging this barrier makes it easier to understand the interconnectedness of nature, which includes humans, and therefore begin to determine whether ecological change has occurred. Ellis states:

The complex dynamics of human-environment interactions make it a challenge to detect whether a significant ecological change has occurred. To make this possible, it is necessary to characterize the ‘historic range of variability’ of ecological parameters, including variations in the populations of different species, abiotic environmental conditions, and frequencies of fire and other disturbances over time. By establishing this historical range as a reference or ‘baseline’ state, changes outside the range provide evidence of ecologically significant change. (p.110-111)

     This is important when trying to prove that anthropogenic factors are the cause of some significant ecological change. One such example is species extinctions. Ellis writes:

Species extinctions are among the most significant ecological changes human societies have yet produced. Their causes are many. Overexploitation dates to the Pleistocene and remains important. Land use for agriculture and settlements has long been and continues to be the most potent and ongoing driver of terrestrial extinctions. By shrinking, fragmenting, and transforming habitats, land use reduces the resources available to vulnerable populations and divides them into smaller, less viable groups, increasing the probability of extinction. Introductions of non-native species have also played a major role in native extinctions, especially on islands, where endemic species – species that are restricted to local areas, sometimes just a single small island – have proved most vulnerable of all. (p.111)

By knowing the baseline, or background, extinction rate, scientists can more easily understand the impacts of human interaction with an environment. “[C]urrent Extinction rights for vertebrates, estimated in extinctions per million species per year, are now at least 10 and potentially up to 1,000 times higher than the historical baseline and have increased dramatically in recent centuries.” (p.112) 

     So, knowing how humans have altered their environments, all over the planet, for millennia and steering clear of ‘The Pristine Myth’, how do we answer the question of what a ‘natural habitat’ habitat should look like now? Ellis writes: 

Is it possible to sustain a historical reference state when both biotic communities and abiotic environments have shifted so far beyond their historic range of variability? Under such novel conditions, restoration ecologist Richard Hobbs and others have proposed that adhering to historical baselines may hinder conservation and restoration efforts more than it helps them. Hybrid ecosystems – part historical, part novel – might effectively be restored to their historical states. But traditional restoration is unlikely to succeed and too costly to consider in ‘novel ecosystems’ where biotic and abiotic conditions have shifted too far beyond historical levels. (p.117)

     

     Chapter seven, Politikos, explores the “implications of a new age of humans” for those outside of the scientific community. Ellis explains: “For some philosophers, conservationists, and even geologists, the act of designating a human epoch says more about human hubris and anthropocentrism than it does about science. Who are ‘we’ to name a new interval of geologic time after ourselves, and why are we doing it?” (p.128-129) This is only one of several valid complaints leveled at those who wish to designate an Anthropocene Epoch. Another is that some may see it as justifying human domination of the environment. Yet another is that it could lead some to advocate for further human interference to “save” the planet from our past actions – such as geoengineering to help solve the climate crisis; this issue could also spiral further into feeling as though we can continue business-as-usual and just fix it later. “Similarly, the prospect of a formal Anthropocene Epoch has troubled some conservationists, who interpret this as marking all of nature as ‘touched by humans’, seemingly leaving no nature left to conserve. Opposing the Anthropocene, they point out that declaring Earth's ecology entirely transformed by humans exaggerates the scope of human alterations while cultivating ‘hopelessness in those dedicated to conservation’.” (p.129)

     An even more concerning, issue is that “...the most popular interpretation of the Anthropocene…is a catastrophic, human-induced shift in Earth's functioning as a system.” (p.130) And, though this does promote a sense of urgency for some to try to change our most harmful behaviors, for others, this could make them lose all hope and give up. And, within the scientific community, there is the sense that focusing on the potential of the Anthropocene as a new epoch is the wrong place to place their energies. Ellis writes: “In the words of geologist James Scourse, ‘while the anthropocenists rearrange the deck chairs, other scientists are getting on with the business of trying to understand, and do something about, the crisis we face’.” (p.130)

      And, perhaps the most poignant complaint lodged at the anthropocenists, is that naming the epoch the Anthropocene seems to indict all humans equally. However, as Ellis points out:

It should be clear that there is no one ‘human’ way of transforming Earth…Your home, your consumption of resources, and your exposure to environmental hazards – all of these are a function of your society and your role in it. The human way of living on Earth, our ecological niche, is shaped far more by our societies than by our biology. And different societies use and transform environments very differently…

Is it correct to say that Homo sapiens as a whole is causing rapid global climate change? Clearly not. Wealthy nations and wealthy people use vastly more energy and emit far more carbon dioxide than the poor. (p.132-133)

     There are also issues that arise in the political and philosophical spheres around how to address the problems that the Anthropocene poses at the state level. Ellis paraphrases Jedediah Purdy as stating that the problems of the Anthropocene are “...overwhelmingly complex and wicked social-environmental challenges.” (p.137) Ellis further explains:

To call Anthropocene challenges ‘wicked’ is not to call them evil…but to highlight that they are perfect examples of what policymakers call ‘wicked problems’, characterized by the absence of agreed-upon solutions, the tendency of solutions to yield additional problems, for solutions to generate both winners and losers, and the difficulties of even defining what the problems are. (p.137)

Perhaps, the best way to solve complex problems is to realize they will require complex solutions. We can no longer think in either/or scenarios or fall into black-and-white decision-making. As Albert Einstein famously said: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”

Ellis concludes the chapter: “There appears to be a common thread across the Anthropocene’s more creative interpretations: the Anthropocene as crisis. A crisis of nature, a crisis of humanity, a crisis of meaning, a crisis of knowledge, and above all, a crisis of action. The Anthropocene demands action.” (p.143) 

     

     Chapter eight, Prometheus, discusses what actions can be taken? Ellis emphasizes: “What's at stake, outside the domains of geology and stratigraphy, is a new account of our place in nature, our relationship with the rest of the planet.” (p.144) Later he points out: “The less that is done now, the more societies will be willing to do for a cooler climate in the future;" illuding to potentially catastrophic effects of actions such as geoengineering. (p.151) He adds:

From a scientific point of view, the Anthropocene is neither good nor bad; it is just an observable reality. Yet it should also be clear that the Anthropocene is not yet over. Like other epochs of geologic time it might last for millions of years, with or without us. Better and worse Anthropocenes are real possibilities, depending on what human societies do now and in the future… 

The Anthropocene calls on us to think bigger than our individual lives, to imagine the operations of an entire planet and its changes over timescales longer than human societies, from start to finish…

Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot advised that ‘The visions we offer our children shape the future. It matters what those visions are. Often they become self-fulfilling prophecies. Dreams are maps.’ (p.156,158,159)

     In 2014, as Ellis states, “...The Anthropocene entered the Oxford English Dictionary, defined as:

Relating to or denoting the current geological age, viewed as the period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment. (p.158) 

And, though just this year, in March of 2024, a Washington Post article reported that geologists had decided, in a contested vote, not to delineate this period, starting in the mid-20th century, as the Anthropocene, I think the Anthropocene will continue to be used to describe this era when humans have become the primary force on the natural environment.