Anthropocene

I have just been reading Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene by Clive Hamilton.

I find Anthropocene quite hard to say, and I feel chuffed when it comes out right. Paul Crutzen’s term meant, I thought, a description of humankind’s impact on the Earth. But Defiant Earth defines Anthropocene in an Earth Systems way. Anthropocene is the name of a geological epoch. It means the Holocene, the mild warm nurturing climate we have enjoyed since the last ice age 11,000 years ago, has come to an end. The exact timing of the start of the Anthropocene is still debated but the author thinks, as do many Earth Systems people, that the start is 1945.

The significance of this new geological epoch is that the activities of humans have caused a shift in the future of the Earth. Instead of being in an inter glacial period and heading gently back towards another ice age, we are going in the opposite direction. The greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, ozone, water vapour, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs)) we are adding to the Earth’s atmosphere are warming our planet and because of the half life of these gases, especially carbon dioxide, there is no going back (or not for thousands of years). We are committed, right now, today, to a warming and increasingly restless planet.

We did this. By digging up stored carbon, actually buried ancient forests and swamps, and burning it in our power stations, cars, planes, ships and homes. This makes us different from any other species that has ever lived on this planet in its 4.7 billion year life – except for Cyanobacteria which utterly transformed our planet billions of years ago by photosynthesizing and releasing oxygen. And we did most of it in the last 60 years. My generation, post WWII baby boomers, are responsible for this and also for not doing anything about it when we first knew in the 1970s and 1980s.

We humans are part of this planet, we share our DNA and biochemistry with all other living things. Our atoms came from star dust, just as did every atom on this planet. But  our activity and creativity mean we have caused this change. And because we did this, the responsibility to decide what comes next is ours and only ours. And because our development and technology have caused this change, we can decide to use our  development and technology to to slow down the release of greenhouse gases.

Or, we can, as many national governments seem to have decided, decide not to take responsibility. Instead we – actively – choose to bequeath our children (children already born now, not those to come in the future) a rapidly changing and more dangerous planet.