Living in the Anthropocene

by W. John Kress

  Today we can define sustainable development better than ever before, and new tools and methodologies are increasingly being applied to detect trends and calculate the economic and ecological losses that growth is inflicting on the planet. For example, we are learning to complement traditional national economic accounts with measures of produced, social, human, and, most important, natural capital. Integrating natural capital into national accounts helps countries measure the true value of that natural capital. It also helps them figure out the distributional impacts of ecosystem changes, such as who might enjoy the gains from investing in a healthier environment and who would ultimately bear the costs of ecosystem loss.

  Investments in natural capital can generate high rates of return, whether measured by economic growth, total welfare, or targeted poverty reduction. In China, for example, environmentally targeted investments in the degraded Loess Plateau, a region the size of Belgium, have generated decisive benefits in land and ecosystem restoration, improved waterways, heightened food security, and increased employment. These investments also have doubled local incomes and lifted 2.5 million people out of poverty. In the United States, the benefit-to-cost ratio of investments to reduce air pollution under the Clean Air Act, estimated to be 25:1 in 2015, is predicted to be 31:1 by 2020. Other examples abound, from Brazil to Ethiopia to India.

  Indeed, improved sustainability can be a forceful source of economic growth and poverty reduction, and not an impediment to either. A key challenge and opportunity of the Anthropocene will be advancing the SDGs on sustainable consumption and production. Promoting energy and other resource efficiency has been repeatedly shown to save production costs and improve long-term profits. Innovation in environmental technologies creates new markets, generates new jobs, and increases the productivity of labor and assets. Investments that reduce risk from climate-related extreme events also reduce costs by removing uncertainty from the marketplace. Finally, investments that reduce the impact of pollution improve the health of populations at large, enhance educational performance, and increase productivity.

  Halting or reversing the negative trends of the Anthropocene will require us to change development trajectories, not just deliver immediate development outcomes. Low-carbon, resource-efficient, resilient, and inclusive growth demands continuing engagement in implementation and monitoring. We urgently need to take short-term actions to protect our long-term welfare, some of which involve investment (e.g., restoring degraded lands), while others require reforming policies (e.g., carbon pricing), improving governance (e.g., combatting illegal logging), or strengthening regulation (e.g., to reduce industrial pollution and overfishing). But we must also acknowledge within decision-making and monitoring processes that many investments in natural capital do not generate immediate returns, just as the benefits of education are not immediate but rather accrue to society over the following ten to fifty years. The short-term perspective that contributed to the creation of this new epoch needs to be overcome in favor of a long-term, holistic viewpoint.

  Developing countries are growing faster than developed ones. In 2000, the developed countries constituted 60 percent of the world’s economy (valued in terms of purchasing power parity), yet by 2030, that ratio will be reversed in favor of the developing countries. It is our fundamental responsibility to help ensure that this growth is not temporary but rather sustainable in economic and environmental terms.

  At this point in the Anthropocene, hope can be found in the emerging transformation of the awareness, mind-sets, and behaviors that have defined the age’s genesis. The SDGs and NDCs signal global agreement on the need to work together to reverse untenable trends. In many key areas, the private sector is leading the way, such as by ramping up renewable energy and reversing deforestation. Technology is revolutionizing human endeavors, including opportunities to support poverty-eradication efforts. Social media are redefining the contours of effective and informed participation, helping many advocate for greater accountability and transparency. The open question is whether our species can bring about the needed transformations at the scale and speed required to keep the planet within manageable parameters habitable to life as we know it.

  The cumulative impacts of human activities—from agriculture, urbanization, and industrialization to the insatiable consumption of potable water, fossil fuels, forests, and other resources—have conjoined during the past ten thousand years to become drivers of planetary change, affecting the physical and biological state of Earth’s terrestrial and marine environments as well as the chemical composition and physical dynamics of the atmosphere. These impacts are expected to intensify as the rate of change increases. The mere trickle of carbon dioxide that returned to the atmosphere when humans built their first wood fires has morphed into a rampaging flood of pollutants released through the massive combustion of the fossil fuels that power our everyday lives. Of course, fossil fuel use varies widely among the world’s peoples, meaning that not everyone is equally culpable for this environmental scourge. The psychological dimension of this behavior adds another complication, as humans can embrace either their interdependence with the natural world or the illusion that they are not reliant upon Earth’s finite resources. Increased atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, sulfur and nitrogen oxides, and aerosols have accelerated the greenhouse warming of the planet, which threatens to drastically alter the climate in the immediate and long-term future. Habitat degradation, also associated with global warming, is dramatically expressed in the world’s forests, which have long been prized for conversion into croplands and pasture. Human migrations have produced more subtle—if no less profound—ecological impacts: people have been moving across oceanic and terrestrial environments for centuries, bringing along their favorite (and in some cases not so favorite) plants, animals, and microbes. Many of these transplanted organisms have thrived in their new, far-away habitats, becoming what some call invasive. This is especially true in urban settings, where native vegetation can be largely replaced by exotics. Yet while humanity’s footprint is unmistakable in the world’s burgeoning cities, it now extends to even the most remote, empty, and alien location imaginable—today hundreds of thousands of human-made objects circle Earth in near outer space. Expended rockets, dead satellites, and a multiplicity of other “space junk” litter the region enveloping our living planet. Human impact on every corner of Earth, and even beyond, is staggering. How we adapt and modify our behavior and activities will go a long way toward determining our destiny in the Anthropocene.

  THE FIRE THAT MADE THE FUTURE

  STEPHEN J. PYNE

  I sell here, Sir, what all the world desires to have—Power.

  —MATTHEW BOULTON (1776)

  In ancient times, fire was everywhere in daily life and, so it seemed, in nature as well. Heracleitus grandly asserted that all things were an exchange for fire, and fire for all things. Pliny the Elder, in tracing the means by which human artifice had transmuted raw nature into second nature, identified the critical catalyst as fire. Concluding his survey of the ways in which human intelligence could call upon art to help counterfeit nature, he marveled at the fact that fire was necessary for almost every operation. Fire was the keystone process for much of nature, and humanity the keystone species for how fire appeared in built and natural landscapes. Humanity’s environmental power was a firepower.

  So it made sense that creation stories for fire should serve double duty as creation stories for humanity. But fire did not come easily. It had to be taken through guile, force, or theft from ruling powers. It came with constraints: not every spark would kindle a flame, and not every flame could spread, unless its setting permitted. When Aeschylus wrote Prometheus Bound, about the Titan who brought fire to humanity, he had the hero boast that he had created all the arts of men, along with giving them hope. Fire made possible humanity’s future. But Prometheus was chained to a rock in the Caucasus Mountains and punished for his deed. So too the fire he carried was restrained
by the texture of the larger world.

  • • •

  That Promethean fire, encoded into cooking, crafts, hunting, foraging, farming, and herding, prevailed for millennia. Then fire on Earth underwent the greatest phase change since control over ignition was mastered by early hominins. It moved into machines, and the machines proved so ravenous that fire’s tenders had to find additional fuels. They began to burn lithic landscapes rather than living ones. The more fuel that was burned, the more they found. Revealingly, Thomas Newcomen’s first steam engines were invented to drain coal mines. The emerging power began to feed on itself in the kind of autocatalytic process that fire had long epitomized.

  The technological deconstruction of flame was under way. Gradually, working fires receded from human awareness as new technology found surrogates less prone to smoke and escape. Conceptually, too, fire ebbed from natural science as fire’s core reaction became a subset of oxygen chemistry, fire’s heat and light became derived phenomena of thermodynamics and electromagnetism, and animal heat yielded to the soft technology of metabolic physiology.

  The architects of what they freely described as “fire engines” were celebrated as New Prometheans. In 1820, nearly twenty years after the invention of the first practical steamship and locomotive, Percy Bysshe Shelley published Prometheus Unbound, a celebration of the Titan as romantic, an unrepentant and defiant breaker of chains. The new fire too was no longer shackled by the ancient ecological fetters that had governed what burned, when it burned, and how it spread. The new fires could burn day and night, winter and summer, through drought and deluge, through ice age and interglacial. They were limited only by human ingenuity in finding new combustibles, and people directed much of their new firepower to just this quest.

  A new fire was making a new future, as people took materials out of the deep past and projected them into what promised to be a very deep future. Until recent centuries, fire history could be broadly understood as a subset of natural history, particularly climate history. Increasingly, however, natural history, including climate history, must be understood as a subset of fire history.

  • • •

  Fire is a reaction, not a substance. It synthesizes its surroundings. So while scientists are fond of discussing processes in terms of drivers, fire more resembles a driverless car, no single set of hands on the wheel, barreling down the road and integrating everything around it. The same might hold for considerations of fire as a driver itself, but it’s hard not to identify the new combustion as the power behind the Anthropocene. Humanity might be twisting the dials and pulling the levers of global change, but industrial combustion is turning the gears.

  It is not just greenhouse gases that are the primary outcome, though their production promises to become another autocatalytic process of its own. It’s the total effluent being dumped into ocean and biosphere. It’s the fires that no longer burn living landscapes and are unhinging many biotas. And it’s how people live on and organize the land. We move ourselves and parts of the landscape that we value by internal combustion: we use our unbounded firepower to reorganize whole continents. Indigenous species lost, invasive species gained, surviving biotas reassembled—all follow the lines of fire laid down by the new order of combustion.

  This transformation in earthly combustion—what has been termed the “pyric transition,” by analogy to the better-known “demographic transition”—typically begins with a population explosion of burning that ends with fire numbers below replacement value, unable to do the ecological work required. Historically, the fire problem humans faced was finding enough stuff to burn in the right way. Now the issue is coping with all the effluent released. Probably sometime in the 1970s, Earth began experiencing more emissions from the burning of fossil fuels than from burning landscapes. In a way familiar to fire history, that transition in burning has begun to multiply itself such that climate change is prompting greater landscape fires.

  Cause, consequence, catalyst—fire can force change, fire can result from change, fire can assist change in ways seemingly removed from its immediate effects, and these changes can then propagate. In reshaping the order of fire, we have gone from remaking landscapes to remaking the planet. The fires of hearth and forge have both miniaturized into pistons and grown monstrous into dynamos. Previously tame landscape fires have gone feral. Once self-regulated wildland fires have gone rabid. In trying to confine fire too closely within our built world, we have let it run amok in the natural one, and now that unshackled combustion threatens to bind us with climatic and biotic fetters that could last for centuries.

  • • •

  Hesiod, Plato, Aeschylus—each told his own version of the Prometheus myth, adapted to his place and purpose. The moment has come to tell another version, better suited to our times and needs. To the good, the inherited story tells of our bond with burning, but it speaks to technological power abstracted, typically by violence, from its native setting and held in defiance of an existing order. Neither the unbound burning nor the defiant hubris can be tolerated much longer.

  We need a new myth—a creation story for the Anthropocene. The fire of the future will not be a source of raw power but a companion on our journey, part of our stewardship of the planet, a power we bind and bend to a greater biotic good. We need a Prometheus who is not a fire thief but a fire tender, a Prometheus who is not a disruptor but a guardian, a Prometheus willing to subject himself to shackles because unchained he is a danger to all, not least himself. We need fires not just to make a future but to sustain one.

  A NEW DREAM OF THE EARTH

  WADE DAVIS

  The term Anthropocene suggests that we have entered an era in which human beings, empowered with a transformative authority equal to the evolutionary and geologic forces of nature, will determine the destiny of the planet. As an organizing principle, the concept sends a powerful message to a species fully capable of adapting to any degree of ecological degradation. But as a metaphor, the notion is flawed, implying as it does that the environmental crisis is a consequence of the actions of humanity as a whole. Nothing could be further from the truth.

  To be sure, our species has never had a purely benign presence on the planet. Our Paleolithic ancestors hunted wildlife to extinction. Plant and animal domestication during the Neolithic only accelerated the erosion of the wild as the agricultural frontier spread. But the truly devastating human impact on the environment, the sequence of events that led to this moment, occurred in but fifteen human generations reaching back to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The entire history of the European colonial encounter reminds us that most human cultures played little, if any, role in the development and implementation of the ideas and technologies that ultimately resulted in an all-out assault on the natural world.

  The crisis of the Anthropocene was in fact provoked by a relatively small subset of humanity, a specific and unique cultural tradition that ultimately reduced the world to a mechanism, the planet to a commodity, with nature seen as but an obstacle to overcome. It is not humanity that has brought on the crisis, but rather a set of beliefs and attitudes that are most assuredly not held by the vast majority of people with whom we of the mechanized realm share the planet.

  All cultures are ethnocentric, fiercely loyal to their own interpretations of reality. The names of many indigenous societies translate as “the people,” the implication being that every other human is a nonperson, a savage from beyond the realm of the civilized. We too are culturally myopic and often forget that we represent not the absolute wave of history but merely a worldview, and that modernity is but an expression of our cultural values. It is not some objective force removed from the constraints of culture. And it is certainly not the true and only pulse of history. It is merely a constellation of beliefs and economic paradigms that represent one way of doing things, of going about the complex process of organizing human activities.

  It’s useful to recall where these ideas originated. During the Renaissance a
nd well into the Enlightenment, in our quest for personal freedom, we in the European tradition liberated the human mind from the tyranny of absolute faith, even as we freed the individual from the collective, which was the sociological equivalent of splitting the atom. In doing so, we also abandoned many of our intuitions around myth, magic, mysticism, and, perhaps most important, metaphor. The universe, René Descartes declared in the seventeenth century, is composed of only mind and mechanism. With a single phrase, all sentient creatures aside from human beings were devitalized, as was Earth itself. Science, as Saul Bellow suggested, made a housecleaning of belief. Phenomena that could not be positively observed and measured could not exist. The triumph of secular materialism became the conceit of modernity. The notions that land could have anima, that the flight of a hawk might have meaning, that beliefs of the spirit could have true resonance were dismissed as ridiculous.

  For several centuries the rational mind has been ascendant, even though science, its finest expression, can still in all its brilliance answer only the question “How?” but never come close to addressing the ultimate question: “Why?” The inherent limitations of the scientific model have long provoked a certain existential dilemma, familiar to many of us taught since childhood that the universe can be understood only as the random action of minute atomic particles spinning and interacting in space. But more significant, the reduction of the world to a mechanism, with nature but an obstacle to overcome, a resource to be exploited, has in good measure determined the manner in which our cultural tradition has blindly interacted with the living planet.