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The Anthropocene. Christian Schwägerl
Читать онлайн.Название The Anthropocene
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780907791560
Автор произведения Christian Schwägerl
Жанр Зарубежная деловая литература
Издательство Ingram
All this came to a head in the eighteenth century, at another civilizational watershed, when people learned how to use the energy made available by earlier members of the Club of Revolutionaries: energy from the sun that led to the formation of coal and crude oil or natural gas. This is the moment Paul Crutzen suggests represents the transition from the Holocene to the Anthropocene—the emergence of humans as a veritable geological force.
When our great-great-great-grandparents discovered how to use this energy to power machines, humanity’s potential increased, at a stroke. It was as if people had been given a collective potion that harnessed the strength of millions of horses and workers in the form of black chunks of coal and viscous oil. So much is taken for granted these days that we hardly notice. But if you’ve ever sweated to shovel a cubic meter of soil and then watched a backhoe do the same job, you too have experienced the Industrial Revolution, in one instant. Using fossil-based fuels and machines that could be powered by them, humanity really started to accelerate.
And this is why Paul Salopek’s “Out of Eden Walk” confronted him with an entirely new reality just a few days after leaving the origins of humanity behind him: “Moving north and then east, we abandon the desert and stub our toes on the Anthropocene—the age of modern humans. Asphalt appears: the Djibouti-Ethiopia road, throbbing with trucks. We drift through a series of gritty towns. Dust and diesel. Bars. Shops with raw plank counters. Garlands of tin cups clink in the wind outside their doors. Then, near Dubti: a sea (no, a wall) of sugarcane. Miles of industrial irrigation. Canals. Diversion dams. Bulldozed fields. Levees crawling with dump trucks.”36
24. Recommended literature on the evolutionary history of consciousness: Giulio Tononi, Phi: A Voyage from the Brain to the Soul, New York: Pantheon, 2012.
25. Eva Bianconi et al., “An estimation of the number of cells in the human body,” Annals of Human Biology, 5 July 2013.
26. Excellent further reading on this subject in: Jan Zalasiewicz, The Planet in a Pebble: A Journey into Earth‘s Deep History, Oxford University Press, 2010.
27. See also Erle Ellis’ article “Conserving a Used Planet: Embracing Our History as Transformers of Earth,” Snap Magazine, http://www.snap.is/magazine/embracing-our-history-as-transformers-of-earth/.
28. For a general depiction of the history of the climate, see Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams, The Goldilocks Planet: The Four Billion Year Story of the Earth’s Climate, Oxford University Press, 2012.
29. For a comprehensible description of human evolution, see Alice Roberts, Evolution —The Human Story, Dorling Kindersley, 2011.
30. On the first modern humans in Europe, see Stefano Benazzi et al., “Early dispersal of modern humans in Europe and implications for Neanderthal behaviour,” Nature, vol. 479, no. 7374, November 2 (2011): 525–528. On the first modern humans in Australia, see Morten Rasmussen et al., “An Aboriginal Australian Genome Reveals Separate Human Dispersals into Asia,” Science, vol. 334, no. 6052, October 7 (2011): 94–98.
31. Dálen, Love, “Partial genetic turnoverbin neandertals,” Molecular Biology and Evolution, February 23, 2012.
32. David R. Montgomery, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.
33. Andrew Moore et al., Village on the Euphrates: From Foraging to Farming at Abu Hureya, Oxford University Press, 2000.
34. See Gowri Koneswaran and Danielle Nierenberg, “Global Farm Animal Production and Global Warming: Impacting and Mitigating Climate Change,” Environmental Health Perspectives, vol. 116, no. 5 (January 2008):578–582 and Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), “World agriculture–towards 2015/2030,” Rome, 2002 and FAO and OECD, “Agricultural Outlook 2009–2018”, Rome, 2009.
35. A very good overview of the ascent of human civilization in Asia and Europe can be found in Ian Morris’s book with the slightly misleading title, Why the West Rules for now: The Patterns of History and What They Reveal About the Future, Profile Books, 2011.
36. Paul Salopek keeps a fascinating online journal about his project, see www.outofedenwalk.com.
THREE The End of the Holocene
AT THE BEGINNING OF THE INDUSTRIAL AGE, the side of the earth not facing the sun would have appeared completely dark when seen from space. Light from campfires, candles and oil lamps did not penetrate beyond earth’s atmosphere. But then, people began to systematically draw upon the stored energy of the sun found in underground deposits to light their lamps and to power machines. From that time forward, fossil fuels have enabled the fascinating acquisition of material wealth. Since industrialization, one dot of light after another has shone from earth’s dark side, like a long Promethean chain of lights, gas flames and burning forests: “It is like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker—may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling!” says the protagonist in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, referring to the lights along London’s river Thames. (Significantly, Conrad locates the “heart of darkness” in London, not in the forests of Central Africa’s Congo).
Over decades, these individual lights from houses, streets, offices, factories and burning forests have combined to form broad areas of illumination in intricate patterns that stretch along coastlines. We are sending a collective, moving sequence of lights into space, images of which get beamed back down to earth by satellites or by astronauts on the International Space Station. These images, some of which have been overlaid with cool musical tracks and posted on websites, inspire filmmakers like Alfonso Cuarón, the director of the movie Gravity.37 In China, an urban mega-region over a thousand miles long is taking shape, while in West Africa, a coastal conglomeration nearly 600 kilometers (400 miles) in length is growing.38
A succession of technical, social and economic innovations has enabled people to completely change the face of the earth in a mere two hundred years, spreading themselves and their accomplishments across almost the entire planet.
Tapping into fossil fuels has had positive effects on the lives of billions of people today, in the form of hospitals and schools, global mobility and