Yet, the population problem is not behind us: According to the latest data revision by the UN Population Division, the global population is still expected to grow substantially: from 7.5 billion in 2017 (6.25 in the developing world and 1.25 in the developed world) to 8.1 billion in 2030 (6.9 in the developing world, 1.2 in the developed world) and then 9.5 billion in 2050 (8.25 in the developing world, 1.25 in the developed world). Hence, the absolute increase of human population in the next decades, and the related pressure on the biosphere, is an inescapable reality driven by the increase of about two billion people in the developing world, especially the fifty countries where demography remains extremely dynamic.
Human evolution toward planetary dominance: The small household and the bigger one
In his Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, French historian Fernand Braudel makes the hypothesis that the long geographical duration, which captures an almost immobile history (that of humans in their relations with the environment which surrounds them), can be set apart from the social time (economic and social cycles) and individual time (personal history). Because human development has accelerated so much during the twentieth century, we distinguish less and less clearly these three time horizons (geographical, social, and individual). We must now understand their contiguity, their correspondences, their interweaving. The story of humanity’s relationship with its environment has turned from a quiet lake into a tumultuous waterfall.
John Muir, who was instrumental in the creation of the first national parks in the United States in the 1870s and 1880s, said that when he wanted to know the news, he would go to the mountains. He meant to signify to his contemporaries that nothing was really new in their modernity and that only the contemplation of Nature brought to his soul a real regeneration. Today, our news is actually in the mountains: It is on the skin of sorrows of glaciers that we can read our future (in the Alps, the glacier surfaces have shrunk by half between 1900 and 2012).
Let us take stock of this acceleration of ecological time and the confusion of human and natural history. Earth was created 4.5 billion years ago. Life on Earth appeared 3.5 billion years ago. Manlike creatures first walked the face of the Earth seven million years ago. Homo sapiens sapiens emerged in 200,000 BCE. Already, we can see how late humans arrive in the biosphere picture. But then things start to really accelerate: Agriculture is developed around 10,000 BCE, industrial revolution is, so to speak, in full steam around 1850 CE, industrial growth kicks in 1950 CE and becomes global in 1990 (with the development of China and India). To put things in perspective, in a mere one hundred years, humans have become completely dominant on a planet that started its own evolution several billions of years before them.
Hence we get the idea of the Anthropocene, combining humanity and geology, a time when “the global effects of human activities have become clearly noticeable” (Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000).3 In the social-ecological approach of this book, we can more precisely define the Anthropocene as an age where social systems rule natural systems and are affected back by the dynamics they set in motion. To put it differently, the domination of human societies of the biosphere has not ended their dependence on the biosphere. This is what Vitousek and his colleagues meant when they wrote more than twenty years ago with profound wisdom supported by groundbreaking data: “It is clear that we control much of Earth, and that our activities affect the rest. In a very real sense, the world is in our hands – and how we handle it will determine its composition and dynamics, and our fate.”4
The biosphere: Interdependence and collaboration
The general mistake so often made in studying human environment is to set apart humans and the natural world. Humankind depends on the natural world (climate, biodiversity, ecosystems) and the natural world now depends on humankind because of human domination (“wild” species for instance must be preserved by human ingenuity in order for them to survive human expansion). Strictly defined, humans are organisms within ecosystems (an ecosystem5 is a community of animals and plants interacting with one another and with their physical environment, echoing the definition of ecology coined by E. Haeckel in 1866 as the “relation of the animal both to its organic as well as its inorganic environment”).
The biosphere is the ecosystem of ecosystems: It is composed of biomes (different types of ecosystems with certain climate, fauna and flora such as tropical rainforests or deserts), which themselves contain smaller ecosystems (like rivers, lakes) in which live natural creatures, among them human beings (who are ecosystems themselves, home to thousands of bacteria). Because humans have literally colonized the biosphere (see Chapter 6), they have formed “Anthromes” (or Anthropogenic Biomes)6 on the surface of the planet such as cities, villages, croplands, and pastures. But because humans remain part of Nature, they can learn a great deal from other natural beings in order to improve their own well-being.7 Natural beings are connected to their environment by energy and nutrient flow. Among them, humans interact with their physical environment, for example by extracting oxygen from the atmosphere and returning carbon dioxide (in too large amounts, as Chapter 8 will make clear), and have collaborated with other organisms in many ways for a very long time (the companionship between humans and dogs is at least 30,000 years old).
The idea of laws of evolution reduced to mechanisms of fierce competition between individuals for transmission of the best gene is indeed much too reductive. It has already been discredited a long time ago. The division of work exists in many species: Just observe the inside of an anthill or a hive, to be convinced. The British evolutionary biologist William Donald Hamilton even showed, fifty years ago, that individuals of certain species help members of their first circle to reproduce, which ensures an indirect form of gene transmission to the next generation. Research recently highlighted the ability of some insects not only to sacrifice themselves but to sacrifice their reproductive capacity, so that other individuals can perpetuate themselves. This is the case of “workers” among bees, ants, or termites.8 Collaboration among individuals of the same species is in fact a necessity for survival and reproduction: Some dolphins who know how to hunt alone decide nevertheless to associate with congeners to implement a sophisticated technique aimed at locking their prey in concentric circles in order to maximize the volume of the catch.
Where humans and other animals part ways is in the unique ability of humans not only to collaborate (for survival and reproduction) but also to cooperate in building, sharing, and passing on to future generations common knowledge.9 Yet this unique cooperation occurs in social systems embedded in and dependent on the biosphere.
Thermodynamics and material flow analysis: A wider economics
In the Court devoted to his work in the Detroit Institute of Arts lies a magnificent fresco by Mexican painter Diego Rivera. Commissioned by Henry Ford to glorify entrepreneurs and painted between 1932 and 1933, it exalts instead, in its lower panel, workers. But its upper panel reveals a striking truth: Labor and capital are only possible because of a third and sustaining production factor: The extraction of natural resources (represented in the fresco by mountain gods who allow a flow of energy to descend toward the car assembly line pictured in the lower panel). Human production depends on the biosphere, which provides energy and materials without which all economic models would remain purely theoretical.
The
