The Anthropocene Working Group, a scientific colloquium tasked with describing humanity’s effect on its surroundings, has chosen Crawford Lake, a sinkhole near Toronto, Canada, as the spot where the Holocene ended and the Anthropocene began. The date? 1950.
By itself, this isn’t news. The end of the Holocene—twelve thousand years of a stable worldwide climate—has been in the cards since the Industrial Revolution.
It’s likely that humans created both epochs. Slash-and-burn agriculture, the development of rice paddies and wheat fields, and the domestication of ruminants slowly put greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, counteracting a Milankovitch-cycle cooling that would have begun a new ice age. Over 120 centuries, humans created a weird interlude of benign, gently nurturing weather.
Crops could be planted in the expectation of rain. Irrigation systems could be designed in the expectation of annual wet seasons. Food could be stored over months and even years of cold and drought. Children could be conceived in the expectation that they would have enough to eat, or if not, that they could be sold as agricultural slaves so the rest of the family could have enough to eat.
But the success of agriculture (most notably in the 20th century’s Green Revolution, which took the constraint of famine off human population) ensured progress in technology. Technology ensured the end of the weather that made it possible. Eight billion humans have now produced enough CO2 to have raised the temperature of the planet by 1.5 degrees C. A rise of at least 3 degrees C is expected by the end of the century.
Multiple climate systems have reached tipping points. We now live on a planet where weather extremes are destroying economies and causing mass migrations, and where sooner rather than later, we’ll have a climate-caused sixth great extinction.
Any humans who survive this extinction won’t be recognizable as human, which will be all right with them.
Following the teachings of their AI religious leaders, they will deny that they descended from the species that knew it was wrecking the planet and went ahead and wrecked it anyway.
“We have nothing in common with those murderous plastic-loving greed monkeys,” they will say.
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Canada’s Crawford Lake is a good recorder of events. Its annually deposited sediments have faithfully archived coal and oil ash, hydrogen bomb tests, fertilizers, chemical industry fumes, microplastics, increases in atmospheric CO2, forest-fire particulates, and heavy metals from smelters. It was chosen as the place where the Anthropocene had the best chance of being preserved in geological strata, out of a dozen or so candidates worldwide.
It's going to be a very thin layer in the geological record. Geologists tend to think of epochs in terms of millions of years. By comparison, both the Anthropocene and the Holocene will be periods so short as to be temporally negligible.
Still, the exponential increase in energy and resource extraction since 1945, radionuclides from bomb tests and reactor accidents, a radical change in the insulative power of the atmosphere, and the probable emergence of new intelligence from an intelligence-created environment (I’m betting on either AI or the corvids rather than much-modified humans)—make it likely that our time will be given a non-epochal name, probably one like the K-T Boundary, which records the tiny layer of iridium spheres deposited worldwide by the asteroid that hit the Yucatan. From the perspective of a few million years, those brief bright lines of asteroid impact and human civilization will be equally small in size and equally large in impact.
If intelligence does emerge from our ruins, it will say things like, “if the humans hadn’t died out, we wouldn’t be here.” I’m betting it won’t last any longer than we did, simply because that sort of self-congratulatory intelligence seems to be a self-limiting phenomenon, at least once it invents extractive capitalism.
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Last week, The Guardian published an article about a recent report from the Stockholm Resilience Center, an environmental research organization run by gloomy Swedes. It was headlined, “Earth ‘well outside of safe operating space for humanity’.”
It was written by The Guardian’s environment editor, and it bears the marks of his climate and economic environment, namely post-Brexit Great Britain. Which is to say, it’s profoundly pessimistic when it isn’t despairing.
I know my readers suspect that I like that sort of thing, but I don’t.
I do my best to find out and face the truth of humanity’s situation, but I do like my life in the here and now. I’m therefore caught between living as a fully accredited member of an eat-drink-and-be-merry-for-tomorrow-we-die species, and being a grieving witness to that same species’ self-destruction.
Unfortunately for the planet, the human mind has room for both states of being.
Like a lot of comfortable people, I’m in the position of a citizen of Rome when Alaric and the Visigoths were outside the gates. Nobody was getting in or out. The emperor and senate were oblivious to any danger, and they insisted on arguing with an opponent who held all the power. It was only a matter of time before the city walls were breached, and the impossible—the fall of Rome, corpses on the street, the toppling of the emperor’s statues and the looting of luxurious homes by people who derive their moral authority from the weapon they carry—became the real.
The Guardian article names—as our environmental equivalent to the Visigoths—a bunch of human-caused disruptions that threaten the ability of the planet to support life.
A sampling: Humans started chopping up healthy ecosystems in the 19th century. Fresh water became a rarity in the early 20th. Destruction of the life-support functions of land (as in burning forests for pasture) reached a halfway point in the mid-20th. Synthetic pollution—pesticides, fertilizers, nuclear waste—became planet-threatening by the 21st. Ocean acidification has not yet reached Permian levels, but it’s getting closer.
The signs of these disruptions are already in the layered sediments of Crawford Lake, ready to be interpreted by whatever intelligence finds them, if an intelligence finds them, and if it’s susceptible to philosophical musings about the ashes of dead civilizations.
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Why has it been impossible for contemporary policy makers to figure out that civilization is a self-limiting phenomenon? It’s not like there weren’t people shouting it from the rooftops in 1950, when the atomic destruction of the world’s major cities looked inevitable. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Garret Hardin’s The Tragedy of the Commons, Paul Erhlich’s Population Bomb, and the Club of Rome’s The Limits to Growth were all published before I graduated from college, and they are only a tiny portion of the warnings published back when we might have had a chance of saving ourselves.
But these works were ignored, reviled, dismissed, buried under the distractions of war, finance, religious doctrine, political repression, and the inability of people to see how much of their world is a constructed environment.
Here’s a story you’re familiar with from my earlier posts, darkly repurposed:
At the College of Idaho, I asked my students to write about how much of their world was once blueprints. “Try to find something in your world that isn’t an idea made flesh,” I’d say.
The students usually defaulted to what they called Nature, but I would point out that “Nature” was an idea, too. A few exceptional students realized that their world was all simulacrum, that nothing was as it once had been, and that the fresh green breast of a new world, as F. Scott Fitzgerald put it on the last page of The Great Gatsby, had been conceptualized out of existence by the very language that they were learning to write.
I told my students that my time as a wilderness ranger put me in places where I didn’t use language for four and five days at a time, and after day 3, I sometimes found myself in an unfamiliar place, seeing it without naming it, and it changed what I thought was real.
Some of my students suggested that visiting wilderness was a way to touch the world, but I told them that wilderness is a concept that lives in the pages of law books, and it has resulted in some of the most highly regulated real estate on the planet.
“Besides,” I said, “Even in wilderness, the air you’re breathing is an artifact of civilization.”
Then I asked the obvious: “If everything is an idea, what if it’s a bad idea?”
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The much-maligned The Limits to Growth (1972) postulated the future tracks of resources, industrial output, pollution, and population. Those postulates have been uncannily accurate, and the Club’s resultant prediction of world civilizational collapse in the 2040s appears to be on track.
We are in for it, and whatever your definition of it is, it’s not something to look forward to.
The human mind is not good at grasping its own demise. As I write, 8 billion humans are studiously avoiding thinking about it, and the billionaires among them are doing everything they can to survive until technological progress makes immortality possible. The rest of us must be content with distractions like politics, war, famine, and plague, preferably when they happen to other people.
But why did it take 70+ years to declare that the Holocene is finished? What is hard to understand about exponential growth in a closed container? Why can’t we apply the concepts of The Tragedy of the Commons to a world of one billion humans, much less the projected 10 billion by 2050? Why do we ignore the fact that if growth were somehow to continue for 400 years, the waste heat of the human economy would boil the oceans? How is it that we can see the end of essential-to-civilization resources and not see the end of civilization?
These are the kind of questions I’d ask my students now, if I had students. It’s just as well I don’t, because interrogating them on these matters would just bring up an indelible grief for the dead Holocene, a grief they’ve encountered too early in their lives, and one they’ve already spent a lot of time and energy putting out of their minds.