Our abilities and needs, our knowledge and emotions, are beginning to transform not only the surface of the earth but also the future course of evolution—this is the fourth dimension of the Anthropocene. We are running populations of many plant and animal species down to the point of extinction. Biologists talk about a sixth wave of extinction in the history of the earth that is now underway, due to cutting down tropical rainforests, overfishing, overhunting, and a general loss of habitats.76 Geologists will see a reflection of this in the fossils that will be left from our epoch.77
Further, humans are beginning to create new life forms through interbreeding, gene technology and more recently, biotechnical design. Life forms of the future might be products of the human imagination: a scientist’s bracing walk through the forest might spawn a new form of life some months later. Trading and transport routes are bringing about large-scale changes in the distribution of animals, plants and other organisms and may determine whether they continue to exist at all. The figure that probably best symbolizes the transition from the Holocene to the Anthropocene is how matter is distributed among life forms. According to an estimate by Vaclav Smil, 10,000 years ago, humans and their livestock were a mere 0.1 per cent of the entire live weight of mammals. The other 99.9 per cent was being used by elephants, deer, gorillas, and so on. According to Smil’s estimate, 90 per cent of today’s mammalian matter is part of the soon-to-be eight to ten billion people on the earth, along with their billions of cattle, pigs, dogs and other domesticated creatures.78 Human influence on the current and future course of evolution has become huge.
In the course of my work as an environmental and science journalist over the past few years, I have experienced at first hand many of the problematic phenomena that scientists believe imply the end of the Holocene. I have stood in Borneo and in Amazonia, in the middle of a blazing rainforest. I have been scuba diving off the coasts of Mexico and Indonesia, observing devastated coral reefs. I have witnessed the clearing of old-growth forests on Vancouver Island in British Columbia, Canada and in Finland. I have traveled miles below the earth’s surface to places where nuclear waste is supposed to be stored for millions of years. I have trekked across melting glaciers in the Alps and have directly experienced the fragility of ecosystems in the Himalayas. In New Zealand and Central Africa, I have observed some of the rarest animal species in the world. In laboratories in the US and Europe, I have explored how biotechnologists are starting to control the forces of life. Starting with the first-ever UN climate summit held in Berlin in 1995, I have reported from many global conferences on protection of the climate and biodiversity.
After all these experiences, it seems quite obvious to me that humans have become a geological factor during the Holocene. I saw many terrible things during the course of my investigations and met people whose livelihoods had been stolen by rainforest clearing. Some experiences made me wonder whether we are witnessing the collapse of our civilization, a global variation on what Jared Diamond so vividly described of past civilizations all over the earth.79 So much has been destroyed, so much is vanishing. But what does this really mean? The end of the Holocene is, at the same time, a beginning. What I felt was a fusion of nature, of people and technology into something new.
When I began to think about the Anthropocene idea, I realized that this fusion process touches our modern Western worldview to the core. Humans are accustomed to neatly categorizing “people” and “environments,” “nature” and “culture,” “economy” and “ecology,” “geology,” and “technology.” It is on such distinctions that Western society has been based. In the Holocene, there was always a “big world out there,” the “great outdoors,” an infinite natural world that seemed inexhaustible, at least as late as the 1950s, even to the environmental visionary Rachel Carson.80 But, in the Anthropocene there is only “the great inside.” jointly shaped by each one of us in everyday life, like global interior designers. We are not separate from our environment.
To understand the extent to which we human beings are changing the earth, you do not have to live in an urban region in China with a hundred million neighbors, or on the agricultural plains of the American Midwest that stretch to the horizon, nor on the edge of a burning rainforest. Today, it is enough to stop for a moment and realize that with every meal, we alter distant ecosystems as if by remote control because the ingredients come mostly from different continents or even ecological hotspots: palm oil grown in former rainforests or industrially produced pork. Just by getting into a car, turning on the heat or air conditioning, or going on vacation by plane, we impact the world’s climate. Each time we reach for our smartphones, we are holding to our ear an assortment of rare metals that have come from dozens of different mines around the world!
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,
