LITMIR.BIZ

In the Holocene, the world seemed boundless. Now everything we do rebounds on us. In the future it will be difficult, if not impossible, to cling to traditional demarcations and make distinctions between “natural” events and man-made phenomena. Has the beautiful plant growing at the side of the road been cultivated in a bio-lab or is it wild? Are cranes, now rare, still wild or already domesticated because they feed on genetically modified corn? Is that an ancient coral reef or a new one that’s grown up around a shipwreck? Do the clouds in the summer sky come from Mother Nature or are they jet plane vapor trails? Is that an old-fashioned thunderstorm brewing overhead or one that wouldn’t be there if not for climate change? Our descendants may not even ask themselves these kinds of questions. Storms and floods in the future cannot be called natural disasters; they will be “cultural calamities.” An initiative by US environmental conservationists to name future hurricanes after politicians who have not acted to prevent climate change seems logical.⁸¹

      Conversely, “natural wonders” in the future are more likely to be “wonders of civilization”—biologically rich landscapes or blossoms of anthropogenic evolution.

Even the most ardent advocates of the Anthropocene idea would never claim that human activity is completely replacing nature. Essentially, what is happening is that humans are becoming the dominant force of change on earth. Two prominent geologists, Charles H. Langmuir from Harvard University and Wally Broecker from Columbia University express what is taking place, in the following way: “The rise of human civilization is a transformative event in planetary history. For the first time a single species dominates the entire surface, sits at the top of all terrestrial and oceanic food chains, and has taken over much of the biosphere for its own purposes.”⁸²

We humans have grown up as children of the Holocene but a new phase is clearly arising, within the lifetime of our species.⁸³ This phase is characterized not only by measurable environmental changes but also by transitions in consciousness, learning, connectedness, cooperation and other capabilities with positive potential.

As our actions become more global, so does our environmental awareness. The more materials and living things we set in motion, bringing them to new places in new combinations, the more we expand our repertoire to track and influence these changes. And the more our actions reach toward the future, the greater our capacity grows to develop scientific models of change: from making projections about the world climate in fifty years’ time to events like the intergalactic merger of the Milky Way with the Andromeda Nebula due 3.7 billion years from now.⁸⁴ The very fact that we can classify our collective actions on the scale of Earth’s history is in itself a positive sign. Departure from the Holocene may be happening under some very frightening circumstances, but the Anthropocene is not destined to be a scary thing.