Living in the Anthropocene

by W. John Kress

  The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) recognizes more than six hundred species extinctions on land in the past 515 years, but only fifteen in the oceans. While this pattern genuinely reflects the late start of the marine Anthropocene, measurements of ocean extinction must be viewed as minimum estimates. Just as it is harder to cause extinction in the oceans, it is also much harder to detect marine extinctions. It took us seventy-three years to find the Titanic after it sank—and she weighed fifty thousand tons and was perhaps the most famous ship in all of history. It is easy to imagine that a cryptic marine species, such as a flatfish or goby, could go extinct without notice.

  Measures of outright global extinction, by themselves, are insufficient barometers of anthropogenic change. Many extant marine species have been massively depleted in number both purposefully (e.g., highly priced and prized bluefin tuna) and accidentally (e.g., sea turtles as bycatch). Precipitous declines in the abundance of terrestrial species such as amphibians, bees, and bats are widely known, but drops of equal or greater intensity have recently been described for marine fauna: seabird species have declined by about 70 percent, numerous shark species by more than 90 percent, and certain great whale species by 80 to 90 percent.

  One proposed start date for the terrestrial Anthropocene is about eleven thousand years ago, when key human populations switched from hunting and gathering to farming. A similar game-changing transition occurred in the oceans in 2014, when it was estimated that, for the first time, humans consumed more fish that came from aquaculture than from the wild. Throughout history, the oceans have served as publicly accessible seafood sections full of free-range meat, but the potential for wild terrestrial ecosystems to regularly provision humanity in this fashion went extinct in most parts of the planet hundreds of years ago. A repetition of this history in marine ecosystems would represent a radical shift in our relationship with the oceans.

  Another transformative change in the Anthropocene oceans is the emergence of the Marine Industrial Revolution: a shift, now under way, from focusing on the capture of marine wildlife for consumption to using marine resources and marine real estate to foster new marine industries. The Marine Industrial Revolution is well exemplified by the explosive growth of marine mining, marine power generation, desalination projects, aquaculture, oil and gas extraction, and coastal construction. While much of this new ocean industry positively stimulates economic growth and helps meet food and energy shortfalls, it also ups the ante on how humans change the oceans. We have graduated from harvesting marine species to harvesting marine habitats.

  The Anthropocene palpably manifests itself as colorful flecks in the cod end of plankton nets and in grabs of deep-sea sediment. Plastic pollution has become a near ubiquitous constituent of our modern oceans. We take about five million tons of tuna from the global oceans annually—and put back two to three times that amount of plastic. This plastic is making its way into marine food webs (for instance, it is estimated that 99 percent of seabirds will be swallowing plastic by 2050) and even onto our own dinner plates (25 percent of fish in market surveys contained plastic or fiber debris).

  Like all parts of Earth, from rocks to human tendons, the tissues of animal life in the oceans (e.g., shark vertebrae, coral skeletons) were chemically marked by aboveground nuclear weapons testing during the 1950s. Bomb carbon, however, remains only one of a diverse array of indelible signatures of the Anthropocene left in our oceans. Increased industrial activity, for example, has fueled dramatic and potentially deleterious increases in the mercury levels of top marine predators, including albatross, whales, and seafood-eating humans. The 2011 Fukushima nuclear accident, too, marked a vast section of the Pacific with its eastward-dispersing chemical fingerprint. The raw power of humanity to write our history into the very bodies of marine life and the essence of the waves is impressive—and deeply disconcerting.

  Nothing happens fast in a 352-quintillion-gallon water bath—and still we have begun to alter basic physical elements of the global ocean. Human-caused climate change is having well-known effects on ocean temperature, acidity, and sea level state, but it is also predicted to exacerbate ocean deoxygenation, perturb coastal upwelling, and alter patterns of ocean circulation. A steadily rising Anthropocene ocean that is hotter, harder to breathe in, and more acidic presents obvious challenges to the future of marine life. The Anthropocene has definitively begun to wash from the land into the oceans, and although its arrival has been delayed and its effects are still less intense there, humanity has already fundamentally altered the ecology, chemistry, and physics of the oceans.

  As the first impacts of the marine Anthropocene come into view, so too do the first consequences of living with an altered ocean. Climate-induced shifts in oceanography and weak governance will disproportionately degrade fisheries in poor tropical regions where access to highly nutritious marine foods is just barely keeping myriad malnutrition diseases at bay. Loss of marine wildlife has been linked to increases in insidious social injustices, such as human trafficking and piracy. Degradation of ecosystems also imperils the sustained provisioning of the $2.5 trillion in goods and services that come to us yearly from the oceans.

  Is there reason to be optimistic about our potential to constructively engage the arrival of the Anthropocene in the oceans? Definitively yes. Emerging marine industry can be intelligently managed to provide clean energy and new resources without deleteriously usurping ocean ecosystems. Prudent management of wild fisheries can ensure that we can have our marine biodiversity and eat it, too. If we meaningfully follow through on recent groundbreaking global promises to slow climate change, we can buy ocean animals time to adapt to a changing ocean.

  It is precisely because the Anthropocene has only just begun in the oceans that we retain a hopeful, meaningful, and valuable opportunity to control how it evolves. The inextricable links between human health and ocean health dictate that much will be determined by how we decide the Anthropocene will unfold in the sea.

  WHAT WILL IT MEAN TO BE HUMAN?

  RICK POTTS

  The narrative of human origins is the heritage of all people alive today. It is a six-million-year journey of evolutionary forebears, all of whom walked upright and possessed significant composites of the features that define our version of humanity, Homo sapiens. Of some two dozen lineages of bipeds currently known to science, we are the last one standing. All the prior ways of being human have become extinct. Our species’ evolved capabilities set the foundation for how we have, somehow, survived and ultimately spawned a radically altered world. The question of our collective future is this: What will it mean to be human?

  For untold millennia, human survival has depended on altering things: making a tool, building a fire, constructing a shelter. More than 2.5 million years ago, our tool-bearing forebears carefully struck one stone on another and inaugurated a way of life dedicated to modifying the world within reach. Even such primeval manipulations required social responsibilities as these predecessors carried food to others, initiating that beautiful oddity of human anticipation called sharing. The discovery of a fossil skull of a decrepit human ancestor from 1.8 million years ago, who survived toothless for many years, has further shown that early toolmakers, at least on occasion, extended care to the incapacitated.

  For hundreds of thousands of years, the predecessors of Homo sapiens made hand axes and other reliable implements for simple purposes. By three hundred thousand years ago, matters had begun to change. From African excavations come the oldest hints of Stone Age innovation: smaller implements, a diverse tool kit, and a lethal invention—the first stone points that could be launched through the air to deeply penetrate their targets.

  The reshaping of humanity, however, extended beyond technological know-how, as a growing sentience of others also emerged at this time. Social networks and symbols began to knit together these new-styled toolmakers. Highly valued obsidian stone was shared over long distances among an ever-expanding web of neighbors. Th
ese ancestors also collected pieces of red hematite and black manganese. Red and black thus became significant colors, denoting symbolic motives and practices around which cultures began to diversify. The human venture as expressed by peoples around the globe today had its start in that early era.

  How did such fundamental transitions in the human way of life occur? Environmental dynamics seem to have played a role. The vital benchmarks in human evolution coincided with times of unstable climate and tectonic shifts of the landscape. The tales told by African fossil remains and prehistoric artifacts imply that the origins of technological innovation, symbolic thought, social networks, and our species all were impacted by the vicissitude and novelty of a restless environment.

  Development of the social and mental foundations of human culture sped up the adjustment to new conditions. The most exaggerated expressions of human sociality today—think of massive gatherings in rituals of celebration, competition, and mourning—are possible because such vast numbers of people can plan by imagining an imminent future they have not yet witnessed. We hold such abstractions in our collective brains and can act accordingly. Values, a sense of life’s purpose, combat, and moral acts are all conveyed within the symbolic universes we create and are made possible by an ability to conceptualize and produce codes about prospects neither visible nor immediately present. Perhaps nothing is more distinctive of our species than our recognition of forces beyond direct human senses—gleaned by curiosity and imagination—that are then made real and crucial motivators of life and meaning.

  These central aspects of human life reflect psychological and societal responses to uncertainty, attempts to make sense of a world prone to change. The ability to create meaning—whether religious, ethical, artistic, philosophical, or scientific—is part of the tool kit that enabled Homo sapiens to meet disruption in the external and social domains. The more we investigate the survival challenges of human origins, the more we see that the elaboration of human sociality, technology, and influence came about in an unnurturing world, inculcating in us the dual urges to explain and to secure gain.

  Now we have fashioned a new era of uncertainty by adding our bold signature to this dynamic Earth. Surely statistics and other numbers matter as measures of our intellectual grasp of the likelihoods ahead. Yet to understand humanity also requires our wisest comprehension of the mental and social proclivities of our species, a recognition of both our shared origin and our cultural differences, appreciating our capacity for problem solving and the range of emotions aroused by dearth and plenty.

  Dwindling reservoirs and waterways, rising seas that threaten homes, droughts that prompt hunger: such possibilities evoke lessons from the past about human well-being. When essential needs are unmet, nothing less than unrest, fear, and degradation of the better angels of our nature soon follow. We dream, as all predators do, and in those dreams lie utopias and nightmares. Particularly haunting is the loss of confidence in our neighbor, who is now everyone on Earth, since our social web has now become global. In times of change and uncertainty, the greatest potential casualty, therefore, is the attention paid by neighbors in times of need. A rising tide of mistrust would mean that the universal of self-interest has begun to defeat the universal of sharing and caring. Both are part of human nature, and while there is an intellectual tradition that associates human nature with raw biological instincts in battle with civilized humanity, our basest impulses are actually born of learning and culture that recruit reason and conscience to the cause of malice.

  So where is there hope? And what will it mean to be human? These two questions are deeply entwined.

  It has been said that civilization, especially the tendency to extend tolerance to larger numbers of individuals, is a compensatory consequence of the will to harm and kill one another. While such a casual hypothesis may do more to provoke than to enlighten, it suggests that reactions to an opposing impulse can arouse profound change within us: benevolence may arise from the dust of cruelty, knowledge as a reaction to ignorance, and perhaps even wisdom when confronted with lunacy.

  Altered climate, eroded landscape, misused water, and wasted food plainly will impact people unevenly. Injury will be unequal relative to wealth, crowding, security, and geography. A sense of injustice and resentment is inevitable, and even modest projections suggest that hundreds of millions of people will need to relocate and recast the status quo of their lives. In this new era, our reactions to strife and the values we adopt will define our humanity.

  The question of our future depends on whether cooperation and altruism will counter self-interest and apathy, and whether empathy and connection can overcome intolerance and xenophobia. Our shared evolutionary origin implies deep genetic affinity among all people, but can this kinship and the prospect of reciprocity defeat the urges that divide us and magnify hostility? This new era has incentives to pollute and destroy without awareness; habits that nurture the surroundings and care for other species are antidotes to such inclinations. Intensification of our moral principles and the activation of meaningful values will guide the future path of compensation against the biases that degrade our surroundings or drown us in a sorrow of loss.

  We now find repugnant that bigoted violence, slavery, and annihilation were ever deemed well-reasoned acts and expectations. Yet we must be repulsed, not because people are naturally disinclined to impose tragedy on others but rather because the meaning we discern in our fellow human beings, and in ourselves, has been transformed. What we come to value at the core of our lives is altered by reaction to the things that ultimately sicken us. In this experience lies hope.

  Societies are jerry-built on the unforeseen outcomes of history. Future societies incarnating the Age of Humans are only now beginning to germinate. Each decade will be different from the one before it, as the human instincts to alter and to preserve continue their strange dance. We possess passions inclined toward sustaining the world as we know it, yet we live in a world that ever stretches us into the unfamiliar. Sustainability without adaptability is tomorrow’s dead end.

  Thus we return to the core question of human origin, now for a species dependent upon meaningful experiences of the world. Is it possible to transform, with informed purpose and care, our ways of living on this human-altered planet? Our responses will reveal the ever-evolving nature of what it will mean to be human.

  RETHINKING ECONOMIC GROWTH

  PAULA CABALLERO AND CARTER J. BRANDON

  Humans have gradually but relentlessly altered planetary life-support systems. Over time, as human progress has been increasingly predicated on continued economic growth (which has been measured almost exclusively since the mid-twentieth century by gross domestic product, or GDP), such growth has become an end in itself. Economic growth has helped to reduce poverty: when analysts reported that the share of the world’s population living in extreme poverty had fallen from 37.1 percent in 1990 to a historic low of 9.6 percent in 2015, World Bank Group president Jim Yong Kim hailed the milestone as “the best news in the world today,” adding that it marked real progress on the road to ending extreme poverty by 2030.

  Yet economic growth and poverty reduction have come at the expense of the world’s natural capital and ecosystems, as well as human health. The past decades have witnessed notable acceleration in resource degradation, climate change, pollution, and extinction. In fact, in 75 percent of all countries, the negative costs of environmental degradation are increasing right along with—and often far more rapidly than—economic growth. One terrible impact of such degradation is that almost nine million people die every year because of complications from air, land, and water pollution, according to the World Health Organization. Economic growth also has accelerated losses in the planet’s biological diversity, with human activity contributing to both “the sixth extinction” of species and the third episode of global coral bleaching in the past 450 million years.

  The reality of the Anthropocene is that a small percentage of the world’s popul
ation has achieved a demonstrable and secure measure of prosperity and, in a very few cases, unfathomable wealth. However, the gains of the bottom 40 percent are insecure, and there will be challenges in meeting the expectations of the rising global middle class. In 2014, the World Economic Forum ranked widening income disparities as the second-greatest worldwide risk. The prevailing economic proposition has been that continued growth, through the steady distribution of benefits, would improve the lot of the poor and that concomitant environmental damages were an unfortunate, but not untenable, cost. Yet economists now recognize that the delivery of prosperity has been highly uneven. The relentless degradation of the world’s natural assets, combined with the rising temperatures brought about by climate change, means that maintaining growth is no longer viable with business-as-usual approaches. The propositions of environmental sustainability and social equity require a major reevaluation.

  The Anthropocene calls for radical changes in how we interact with nature, how we tackle poverty, and how we define prosperity. Given these challenges, the past few years have been momentous for the international development agenda. The definitions of new, universal frameworks that recognize the limits of planetary systems have been essential. Both the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, approved by the United Nations General Assembly in September 2015, and the Paris Climate Change Agreement, approved in December 2015, acknowledge that all countries have a role to play in changing the prevailing development paradigm. These international frameworks recognize that sustainable—and inclusive—development must be more robustly defined, implemented, and monitored. While there is no silver bullet, certain tools and approaches will be decisive.

  The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the United Nations General Assembly acknowledge the necessity of breaking down the sectors (e.g., industry, transport, housing) that define how our economies, governments, and societies operate. Traditional economic measures of income and growth do not adequately capture or quantify what governments must manage to achieve long-term sustainability: since they reflect only monetary values, they do not reflect the need for clean air, clean water, and healthy ecosystems, especially when these are all threatened. The Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) that 163 countries pledged at the Paris Climate Change negotiations represent the beginning of thinking about economic growth in new ways while achieving the environmental objectives of reducing carbon emissions and enhancing climate resilience.