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oceans. There are one million large fishing ships worldwide and three million smaller boats.⁵⁰ These vessels track down schools of fish with the same sonar technology that American and Soviet nuclear submarines used during the Cold War. The hauling capacity of these ships has increased sixfold since 1970. Many of them use rollers that flatten the ocean floor, crushing every structure in which sea life can hide. Corals are the victim of trawlers with heavy harnesses. Deep-sea fishing damages the unique natural wonder of underwater mountains. This behavior is equivalent to hunters clearing entire forests just to catch a few deer. Yet, since 1970, yield per ship has fallen by two thirds. More and more ships compete for fewer and fewer fish. In the words of one ocean expert: “It’s a race to our own destruction.”⁵¹

When the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) began to register catch quantities in the 1950s, they recorded 20 million tons. This was followed by a rapid increase to over 90 million tons of wild seafood caught. Since then, haul sizes have reached a plateau and have even contracted. This is not due to political restrictions but to the depletion of many stocks. In spite of larger, more powerful trawlers, there is nothing left to fish. The FAO classifies eighty per cent of fish stocks as being fully or excessively depleted.⁵²

Even a natural disaster like a tsunami has a human dimension. The monster wave that hit Japan in 2011 was the manifestation of a powerful undersea earthquake. It devastated parts of the east coast of Japan and created a massive wave of man-made debris—houses, garbage, ships and containers—to be swept first inland, then out into the Pacific Ocean. The debris was tracked by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which regarded it as the largest occurrence to date demonstrating how debris disperses away from a single point.⁵³ The resultant islands of debris were not the only anthropogenic phenomenon. The tsunami wave triggered a disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant, widely dispersing radioactive materials, including isotopes that will continue to emit radiation of various types for thousands of years to come.

Wild nature no longer exists on land or out at sea. According to analyses by US researchers, in cooperation with Google, during the period between 2000 and 2012, 2.3 million square kilometers (about 880,000 square miles) of “natural” forest, disappeared. Only around 800 thousand square kilometers (about 308 thousand square miles) have been replanted while the remaining areas have been turned into agricultural areas, residential areas or into wasteland.⁵⁴ The FAO alerts us to an alarming development in which cleared woodlands and even replanted forests are often monotonous, with no biological diversity. These monocultures cannot sustain indigenous peoples and render few ecological services.⁵⁵

What remains of the wild is the result of human decision-making, such as when an area is perceived as being of lasting value and is then protected by the local population or by environmental organizations, or by a corporation that concludes that exploitation would not be profitable. Even in places where people think they are in the wild, they often come across traces of civilization when they take a closer look. This frequently happens in Amazonia where, during the clearing of allegedly pristine rainforest, traces of earlier settlements are found.⁵⁶

The Anthropocene marks the end of the illusion that “somewhere out there,” there are gigantic, unexplored, untapped, unused regions, areas of untouched nature surrounding what is man-made. Geographers Erle Ellis and Navin Ramankutty from the University of Maryland have got to the heart of this. Using data from satellite photographs, they have determined that only 22 per cent of the earth’s surface is still wilderness and only 11 per cent of photosynthesis activity takes place in these wild areas. The remaining area consists of agricultural, residential and industrial zones and other “anthromes,” that is, areas marked by humans. These have replaced former biomes. “This new model of the biosphere moves us away from an outdated view of the world as ‘natural ecosystems with humans disturbing them’ and towards a vision of ‘human systems with natural ecosystems embedded within them,’” states Ellis.⁵⁷

      Let yourself drift across the digital globe offered by Google Earth and similar services. Don’t zoom in on your own apartment but go instead to areas in the world you do not know. Enjoy the unusual colors, shapes and mysterious structures. This used to be a perspective reserved only for gods. Then, such sights began appearing in expensively produced James Bond movies! Now, you only have to whip a small personal device out of your pocket to zoom down and see for yourself what it means to live on a planet shaped by humans. That green, dense forest—can you see the paths?

      That wide, deserted plateau—can you see the open cast mine?

      That sparkling blue coral reef—can you see the American military base?

      That gray-brown gravel plain … Oops, it’s a city!

      Those white dots in the sea off the coast—are they fishing boats?

From high above, these landscapes can look like complicated scriptures, cancerous tumors, works of art, geometric patterns, military parades, bacterial cultures, or even large gardens. It is a sensational sight in which millions of human decisions have been put together and displayed. Irish artist David Thomas Smith has created highly symmetrical photomontages of landscapes touched by humans. The title of his body of work is “Anthropocene.”⁵⁸

In addition to our increase in numbers and our growing imprint on the surface of the earth, the third characteristic that marks the end of the Holocene is our enormous energy consumption and its consequences for the global climate. World population has increased by a factor of 5.4 since 1860 but energy consumption has increased by a factor of 41, in the same period. On average, each individual now consumes the equivalent of half a gallon of petroleum—per day.⁵⁹

      The signature of humans is becoming visible on land in the form of shale fracking, in the oceans in the number of deep-sea drilling rigs and in the sky with a wide range of new chemicals in the atmosphere. From regional phenomena, like the huge Asian “Brown Cloud” that hangs over megacities in China to the carbon dioxide emissions accumulating in the atmosphere from millions of individual sources, humans are creating a new physical reality.

Since the beginning of industrialization humanity has been running a gigantic geophysical experiment. People have been mining coal and petroleum from earth’s crust, burning them and dispersing the resultant carbon dioxide into the atmosphere for some time. Carbon is also released into the atmosphere when forests burn down or wetlands dry out. According to estimates by the Potsdam Institute, Oxford University and the World Resources Institute, an additional 2,110 billion tons of carbon dioxide went into circulation between 1800 and 2014 as a result of human activities.⁶⁰ This already represents a significant disturbance of the earth’s carbon cycle.⁶¹, ⁶² Despite global efforts, carbon dioxide emissions are still increasing; for energy consumption alone, emissions stood at 34.5 billion tons in 2012 and 36 billion tons in 2013.⁶³, ⁶⁴

If current trends continue, then from the beginning of industrialization to approximately 2025, the same quantity of additional carbon, in the form of carbon dioxide, will

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