Anthropocene,’ Crutzen recalls blurting out. ‘Well, it was quiet in the room for a while.’ When the group took a coffee break, the Anthropocene was the main topic of conversation.11 No wonder. No other species has had the dubious distinction of defining a geological era by its activities. According to the Royal Society, the Anthropocene is a ‘vivid expression of the degree of environmental change on planet Earth’. We have laid down a trail, left our mark, indelibly, on ice cores in the Antarctic and in new layers of sedimentary rock being laid on the ocean floor.
Two recent events highlight the threat that economic growth poses to ‘ecosystem services’, the natural cycles and systems that make our planet green, clean and habitable. We mentioned Fritz Schumacher’s inclusion of these ‘services’ in the phrase ‘natural capital’. But let me say a little more about these gifts that nature bestows on us and which we mostly take for granted. They include those fundamental processes that lurk in the background of our daily lives – the water cycle, photosynthesis, pollination, flood control, the decomposition of wastes and, ultimately, the regulation of the global climate. Unfortunately, both the terms ‘natural capital’ and ‘ecosystem services’ adopt the dry language of economics to interpret the richness and mystery of nature. Nonetheless, they are useful, if mechanistic, shorthand to counter the prejudices of mainstream economics, in which the environment has never been treated as more than an ‘externality’. This of course is nonsense. Nature is not external; it is fundamental. The human economy is not a self-contained system. It is a product of human culture and human culture is uniquely, delicately, nested in the natural systems of the biosphere.
So let’s look now at those three examples of the erosion of ecosystem services by exponential growth.
When NASA released satellite photos of the Greenland ice sheet, taken four days apart, in July 2012, the contrast between the two images could not have been starker. An unusu al Arctic heat wave had melted a vast expanse of surface ice; approximately 97 per cent of it had thawed in less than a week. We’re talking about the surface here. The ice did not disappear. It’s almost two miles thick in places so it will take decades to melt to bare earth. But Greenland’s ice sheet is dwindling, undeniably, a little more with each passing year. About four times more ice melted in the summer of 2012 than in the 10 previous years. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a UN-mandated grouping of the world’s most eminent climate scientists, warns that if Greenland’s ice sheet were to melt completely it would raise sea levels by 7.5 meters.
Back in 2007 the IPCC said that we would not see ice-free summers in the Arctic for another century. That now looks wildly optimistic. Things are changing even more quickly than forecast. A month after the NASA Greenland photo, researchers using data from the European Space Agency’s satellite corroborated the NASA findings for the Arctic as a whole. The Polar ice cap, too, had melted at an unprecedented rate – in total more than 11.7 million square kilometers, 22 per cent more than average. Scientists now predict an ice-free Arctic summer within 20 years. ‘This is staggering,’ Cambridge University sea-ice researcher Nick Toberg told The Guardian. ‘It’s disturbing, scary that we have physically changed the face of the planet.’12 Studies show that 60-95 per cent of the melting of Arctic ice between 1953 and 2011 was due to human activity. There is little doubt that human-induced global warming has been more extreme in the far north. The area has been heating up about twice as fast as the rest of the world.
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