The Anthropocene - Christian Schwägerl

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between subjects and objects minimized, but the status of the shared materiality of all things is elevated.” After so many decades of a consumerist materialism that “treats the planet like a zombie” (Giulio Tononi), we now have a chance to develop a “vital materialism” that honors life in all its forms, including those made of stone. Thus, the Anthropocene idea becomes the opposite of anthropocentrism. You will find far more references to this impression of the Anthropocene in the current edition than there were in the original German language one.

      I also once thought that a flaw in the Anthropocene idea was that it did not immediately state what was good or what was bad. Stripped bare, it’s a scientific hypothesis about the geophysical state of the planet and does not take into account ethical or moral or spiritual values nor discuss the suffering of humans or other species. Since then, I have experienced personally how contemplation of the Anthropocene idea triggers strong, ethics-driven reactions and a strong impulse of caring. Sustainability ideas come prepackaged with a set of imperatives. The Anthropocene idea works differently, but in a complementary way. It exposes us all and asks for responsibility. It invites commitment and responsible behavior instead of demanding it. There is a possibility that this idea might be abused in order to advocate human entitlement and insist upon simple techno-fixes. However, I’m confident that this line of thinking will not prevail.

      Now I am speaking, even more directly, against misanthropy and “doomsday-ism.” I disagree with those who say the words “good” and “Anthropocene” should probably not be used in the same sentence. Why not? Are our children and their descendants already doomed to live through millennia of ecological hardship? Even worse, are humans the problem and should they therefore vanish from the planet? No! I am the last person to downplay the severe problems created by our civilization, many of which you will read about in this book. But despising the human species and waiting for the end of the world, as we know it, is not the answer.

      The Anthropocene is more than the sum of the parts of environmental havoc. It can be the arena in which humanity decides to wisely integrate into the planet’s workings, enriching itself by its actions as a result. Smart cities, cultivated life-forms and landscapes with a human-induced biodiversity, are examples of how we can create a positive geological record. Human creativity, community spirit and conscious thought can lead to changes that might make our species look back at current behavior as sheer ecological barbarism. This is the journey I invite you to take with me in this book: going from today’s crises to an enlightened planet with beautiful human imprints.

      Christian Schwägerl, Berlin, 2014

      PROLOGUE Writing in the Sky

      ON DECEMBER 3, 1933, in Amsterdam, Anna Crutzen, a woman in her early twenties, gave birth to a son. She had moved from the Ruhr region in Germany to the capital of the Netherlands, five years earlier, to earn her living as a housekeeper. She had met Josef Crutzen, a young man from Vaals, a small Dutch town on the German border, who was working as a waiter. They fell in love, married in 1932 and soon started a family.

      They named their first child Paul Jozef. Nothing at that time indicated that this young boy would literally be responsible for saving the planet from an existential threat and would introduce a groundbreaking idea that would redefine humanity’s place on Earth. Paul did not enjoy a private education like Alexander von Humboldt, nor did he have a botanically minded uncle, as did Charles Darwin.

      He grew up in harsh conditions. His mother, who made many sacrifices to care for the family, worked as a steward in a hospital kitchen. His father was regularly unemployed and the family was very poor. In addition, the darkest period of the twentieth century had just begun. Only months before Paul’s birth, Adolf Hitler, the new German Chancellor, had seized power in neighboring Germany. In 1939, just before Paul’s sixth birthday, the German dictator ordered his army to invade Poland, starting World War II. Crutzen’s childhood took place in the midst of war. The boy saw German troops march into Amsterdam and commandeer his school. He lived through the Hongerwinter (the famine of 1944–45) in which thousands of Dutch citizens died, including some of his friends. The sight of the Allied bombers that flew from England, across the Netherlands to bomb German cities caused him much distress. His mother’s family lived across the border in the Ruhr, the industrial heartland of Germany, an area laid waste by daily and nightly Allied bombing.

      In spite of the wartime conditions, his parents noticed that their son had a special talent for observation and a keen thirst for knowledge. He quickly learned German, French and Flemish, and even memorized dictionaries, just for fun. One bitterly cold winter night, his parents found him sitting, shivering in his pajamas by an open window, gazing up at the sky. Upon seeing snow for the first time, he didn’t feel the cold. Paul often came up with unusual observations. When he first glimpsed a half-moon, he said it was “broken,” and when he saw a man swimming in an Amsterdam canal he insisted for a long time that it was a head without a body. As a teenager, he not only played football but also began reading everything he could find concerning natural science.

      After the war, Paul did not want to be a burden to his parents and realized that further education in natural science was beyond his means. There was just enough money for him to attend engineering school. He learned how to build bridges across the many canals in the Netherlands. Then, at the beginning of the 1950s, a life-changing incident occurred. As a child, Paul had always longed to see mountains. Holland is not exactly famous for its high peaks so he often fantasized that the cumulus clouds at which he liked to gaze were mountains.

      Now that the war was over, it was possible once again to travel. Using his modest savings, Crutzen managed to get to Switzerland. Had he reached the summit of Mount Pilatus—a well-known mountain near the city of Lucerne—either ten minutes earlier or ten minutes later, he might have continued life as a bridge-builder but, just as he reached the summit, a young woman from Finland was starting her descent. She was working as an au pair and was spending her day off learning about her host country. Terttu Soininen walked past the young Dutchman just as he was about to take a photograph of the view and the two of them started talking.

      They married a few years later and moved to Sweden, to the small town of Gävle, to be nearer Terttu’s family. Paul found a job as a construction engineer and began building houses instead of bridges. But his taste for knowledge, exploration and understanding had not diminished. The construction job only partly satisfied him. Thus, one day he glanced at a job ad in the newspaper: The Meteorological Institute at the University of Stockholm had an opening for a computer specialist. Admittedly, he hadn’t the slightest experience in either meteorology or computer science, but something told him that he should apply.

      Rare individuals sometimes change the course of human history on a large scale, in both positive and negative ways. We can think of examples as diverse as Alexander the Great, Jesus Christ, Julius Caesar, Christopher Columbus, and, more recently, Mikhail Gorbachev. But can ordinary human beings also alter the course of Earth’s history?

      Yes, they can! A few years before Paul Crutzen was born, an American mechanical engineer and chemist named Thomas Midgley had unknowingly done just that. Midgley worked for the General Motors Chemical Company and had the task of developing new coolants for use in refrigerators and recently-invented air conditioners. Refrigerators had already been through their first design cycle. For all their benefits in helping to preserve food, refrigerator coolants were also volatile, poisonous and combustible. Midgley went in search of alternatives. He and his team produced synthetic compounds that didn’t occur naturally. The substances mixed together in Midgley’s laboratory included carbon, hydrogen, chlorine and fluorine, which, in turn, produced new compounds. One of these substances—chlorofluorocarbon, or

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