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life were building up at an ever-increasing pace as the result of increases in world population, industrial activity, waste products, pollution, and resource exploitation, as well as because of long-term trends in regional climatic change. To preserve or expand the life-support systems during the 21st century, governments of all nations would have to design long-term plans that, while addressing their own specific national goals, would have to be based on basic scientific knowledge of the global terrestrial environment and on anticipated natural and anthropogenic change. The required detailed and quantitative scientific knowledge simply does not yet exist.⁸

      In 1986, the ICSU initiated the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program, “the largest, most complex, and most ambitious program of international scientific cooperation ever to be organized.”⁹ The IGBP’s objective was to “describe and understand the interactive physical, chemical, and biological processes that regulate the total Earth system, the unique environment it provides for life, the changes that are occurring in that system, and the manner in which these changes are influenced by human actions.”¹⁰

      A secretariat was established in Stockholm in 1988, and some 500 scientists worldwide began planning initial projects. By the early 1990s, the IGBP was coordinating the work of thousands of scientists studying the Earth System, a term that has been well defined by Frank Oldfield and Will Steffen:

      In the context of global change, the Earth System has come to mean the suite of interacting physical, chemical, and biological global-scale cycles (often called biogeochemical cycles) and energy fluxes which provide the conditions necessary for life on the planet. More specifically, this definition of the Earth System has the following features:

      • It deals with a materially closed system that has a primary external energy source, the sun.

      • The major dynamic components of the Earth System are a suite of interlinked physical, chemical, and biological processes that cycle (transport and transform) materials and energy in complex, dynamic ways within the System. The forcings and feedbacks within the System are at least as important to the functioning of the System as are the external drivers.

      • Biological/ecological processes are an integral part of the functioning of the Earth System, and not just the recipients of changes in the dynamics of a physico-chemical system. Living organisms are active participants, not simply passive respondents.

      • Human beings, their societies and their activities are an integral component of the Earth System, and are not an outside force perturbing an otherwise natural system. There are many modes of natural variability and instabilities within the System as well as anthropogenically driven changes. By definition, both types of variability are part of the dynamics of the Earth System. They are often impossible to separate completely and they interact in complex and sometimes mutually reinforcing ways.¹¹

      As Hans Schellnhuber of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research wrote, this was a revolutionary shift in the scientific view of Earth, comparable to the sixteenth-century discovery by Copernicus that Earth orbits the Sun.

      Optical magnification instruments once brought about the Copernican revolution that put the Earth in its correct astro-physical context. Sophisticated information-compression techniques including simulation modeling are now ushering in a second “Copernican” revolution….

      This new revolution will be in a way a reversal of the first: it will enable us to look back on our planet to perceive one single, complex, dissipative, dynamic entity, far from thermodynamic equilibrium—the “Earth system.”¹²

       Global Change and the Earth System

      An overarching goal of the IGBP’s work was to develop “a substantive science of integration, putting the pieces together in innovative and incisive ways toward the goal of understanding the dynamics of the planetary life support system as a whole.” By early in the twenty-first century, they were confident that “an integrative Earth System science is already beginning to unfold.”¹³

      In 2000, the IGBP was a decade old, and its various projects had begun preparing comprehensive reports on what had been learned in ten years of Earth System research. The extensive documents that resulted were subsequently published by the German publishing house Springer Verlag, as the IGBP Book Series.¹⁴

      The meeting in Mexico in February 2000 was part of the summing-up process. Paul Crutzen’s outburst—“We’re in the Anthropocene!”—led to intense unscheduled discussions. For ten years, the participants had been immersed in detailed investigation of aspects of the Earth System; now they saw a theme that unified their work: the Earth System as a whole was being qualitatively transformed by human action. That realization confirmed the need for an overall synthesis of scientific knowledge about the past, present, and probable future of the Earth System:

      The synthesis aimed to pull together a decade of research in IGBP’s core projects, and, importantly, generate a better understanding of the structure and functioning of the Earth System as a whole, more than just a description of the various parts of the Earth System around which IGBP’s core projects were structured. The increasing human pressure on the Earth System was a key component of the synthesis.¹⁵

      Crutzen’s proposal crystallized a new perspective on the impact of global change. According to Steffen, “The concept of the Anthropocene became rapidly and widely used throughout the IGBP as its projects pulled together their main findings. The Anthropocene thus became a powerful concept for framing the ultimate significance of global change.”¹⁶

      After the February 2000 IGBP meeting, a literature search found that Eugene Stoermer had previously used the word, so Crutzen invited him to co-sign a short article in the IGBP’s Global Change Newsletter:

      Considering these and many other major and still growing impacts of human activities on earth and atmosphere, and at all, including global, scales, it seems to us more than appropriate to emphasize the central role of mankind in geology and ecology by proposing to use the term “anthropocene” for the current geological epoch.¹⁷

      The article alerted scientists associated with the IGBP that a new synthesizing framework was emerging. A few months later, the message was reinforced by a peer-reviewed article in the prestigious journal Science, in which the members of the IGBP’s Carbon Cycle Working Group referred to humanity “rapidly enter[ing] a new Earth System domain, the ‘Anthropocene’ Era.”¹⁸

      But the Anthropocene’s real coming-out party was in Amsterdam, in July 2001. “Challenges of a Changing Earth,” a conference organized jointly by the IGBP, the International Human Dimensions Program, the World Climate Research Program, and the biodiversity program DIVERSITAS, was a critical turning point in the development of Earth System science. About 1,400 people, including researchers from 105 countries, took part in four days of lectures and discussions, many of them focused on the IGBP’s research.

      The materials that participants were given included a 32-page pamphlet, signed by all four sponsors but obviously prepared by the IGBP. Titled Global Change and the Earth System: A Planet Under Pressure, it would later be expanded, using the same title, into the IGBP’s 350-page synthesis report. The pamphlet, which is in effect a high-level outline of the later book, included a chapter, “The Anthropocene Era,” that expanded on the arguments presented in the Crutzen-Stoermer newsletter article:

      Until very recently in the history of Earth, humans and their activities have been an insignificant force in the dynamics of the Earth System. Today, humankind has begun to match and even exceed nature in terms of changing the biosphere and impacting other facets of Earth System functioning. The magnitude, spatial scale, and pace of human-induced change are unprecedented. Human activity now equals or surpasses nature in several biogeochemical cycles. The spatial reach of the impacts is global, either through the flows of the Earth’s cycles or the cumulative changes in its states. The speed of these changes is on the order of decades to centuries, not the centuries to millennia pace of comparable change in the natural dynamics of the Earth System.

      The extent to which human activities are influencing or even dominating many aspects

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