WELCOME TO THE AGE OF ANTHROPOCENE
Because of humanity, Earth has entered a new era, scientists say
The planet is becoming overpopulated — with humans, that is, not Javan rhinos or Sumatran tigers. And as never before, people are becoming urban dwellers.
By mid-century, two-thirds of the human race (by then almost 10 billion people) will live in cities and mega-cities.
John Kress, a veteran Smithsonian Institution scientist and curator of botany at the National Museum of Natural History, recalls that when he encountered the southeast Chinese community of Shenzhen decades ago, “it was a coastal village of 30,000 people and today has 15 million inhabitants. Fortunately, the Chinese are trying to make that a very green city.”
Kress is the co-editor of Living in the Anthropocene, a new book by the Smithsonian that puts our current dynamic age in context through more than 30 essays by experts in disparate fields all affected by our changing planet.
The reader learns that the Earth is about 4.5 billion years old and that humans as we know them have been around for about 200,000 years.
For the past 12,000 years, since the last great ice age, we have lived in the relatively calm climate of the geologic period we call the Holocene. But things started to change after the Industrial Revolution. We developed systems in which progress was wrapped up with burning fossil fuels.
The book stems from Smithsonian symposiums on the age of humans and adheres to the theory that the Holocene Age came to a wistful end around 1950, when a phenomenon known as the Great Acceleration began. Graphs show over the ensuing 60 years exponential increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, fertilizer and water consumption, energy use and more. The number of people living in cities climbed from less than one billion to approximately 3.5 billion.
Although some peg the Anthropocene to the Industrial Revolution, circa 1780 to 1850, or earlier, the book’s authors think the mid20th century is a better date.
The book was at least 18 months in the works, but it has been published at an ominous moment, as three back-to-back extreme hurricanes — Harvey, Irma and Maria — swept across the Caribbean and the southern United States.
But the Anthropocene goes beyond just climate and weather and marks a period when we have altered the landscape for our needs, from building highways, expanding cities, converting forest and savannah to agricultural use, constructing dams and flooding river valleys, and all the rest.
There is an environmental price for all this progress, in the loss of habitats, species and biodiversity, the scientists say.
But the last essays in the book see opportunities to move forward in the Anthropocene by conservation and habitat restoration, all predicated on a co-operative spirit between “citizens, governments, social and religious institutions, the marketplace, and the private sector.”