The Anthropocene. Christian Schwägerl

of Devonshire (the Devonian), names being determined by where researchers found rocks pertaining to a certain period.

      The time dimensions with which stratigraphers deal are formidable, especially compared to a non-geologist like me, who works on the nanoscale of daily life’s rounds of meetings, deadlines, invitations, children’s birthdays, and is delighted to have a handle on next week. Presumably, stratigraphers also have to deal with such mundane things but somehow they manage to live in two temporal zones at the same time. And so, over the past decades, they have created an impressive color-coded chart to show the geological eras, the names of which are stacked on top of each other much like the layers of rock.⁸⁷

      This chart depicts great eons like the Archean, the phase 1.5 billion years ago marked by the advent of bacteria, immediately after the creation of life; it depicts the Cenozoic or “new animal” Era, which encompasses the entire 66-million-year rise of mammals from the dinosaurs’ extinction to the present day. It shows periods such as the Jurassic (that has become better known since the film Jurassic Park), and vast epochs covering many millions of years like the Pleistocene or the current Holocene, a smaller unit on the geological timescale. Even this smallest scale is beyond normal human imagination.

      So, this is another reason why Paul Crutzen’s declaration of the Anthropocene, at that conference in Mexico back in February 2000, was such a huge statement. What he did was tantamount to driving humanity out of its ancestral geological home in the Holocene, and resettling it in new chronological territory, the Anthropocene. He effectively remapped the various timescales in which our existence is recorded—from the nanoseconds of stock exchanges to the four-year rhythm of politics—to much longer geological timescales. In doing so, he enabled human history to become the subject of geological examination. Human history became a part of deep earth history, an area that had previously been almost exclusively the realm of biologists and geologists.

      After the conference in Mexico, it quickly became apparent that there were hundreds and thousands of extant observations, studies and analyses showing that modern humans were indeed changing the Earth in a radical, long-term manner within a very short space of time, so much so, that future geologists will notice these changes. Scientists had been gathering evidence of the traces left behind by humanity for quite a while. Examples of these include artificially created elements, radioactive fallout from atom bomb tests, an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide, plastic waste, and the colorful assortment of archaeological substrata beneath cities.

      What had been missing up until then was a term to summarize these changes and someone sufficiently prominent to make such a term popular. To his surprise, after the conference, Paul Crutzen found out that another scientist, Eugene F. Stoermer, a limnologist at the University of Michigan, had already used the term Anthropocene back in the 1980s. In a book written in 1992, journalist Andrew Revkin of the New York Times claimed: “We are entering an age that might someday be referred to as, say, the Anthrocene.”⁸⁸ Andrew certainly earns a warm round of applause for almost nailing the magical new word.

      In 2000, Crutzen contacted Stoermer, as is proper when two scientists have arrived at the same conclusions independently of one another. He suggested that they publish the Anthropocene idea together. Stoermer agreed, later saying: “I began using the word ’Anthropocene’ in the 1980s, but I never formalized it until Paul contacted me.”⁸⁹

      Starting with a short article in the newsletter of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP), the Anthropocene idea was born.⁹⁰ Two years later Crutzen called for the renaming of the Holocene to Anthropocene, in an article entitled “Geology of Mankind” published in the influential scientific journal, Nature. “Unless there is a global catastrophe—a meteorite impact, a world war or a pandemic—mankind will remain a major environmental force for many millennia.”⁹¹

      Together with the renowned environmental researcher Will Steffen and historian John R. McNeill, Crutzen clarified his idea in 2007, and made a suggestion as to when the start of the Anthropocene might have been.⁹² According to them, the “pre-phase” of the Anthropocene ran from the time of the first human-made fire to the first fire inside a steam engine. The Anthropocene really began in 1800 because that is when scientific enlightenment and technology-driven industrialization produced measurable geological, chemical, and biological changes on earth.

      This pioneering article by Steffens, McNeill, and Crutzen contained an illustration that attracted a lot of attention: it showed various developments since 1945, from world population and energy consumption, to international tourism and the number of McDonald’s restaurants. All parameters showed a steep increase. The illustration captured in a nutshell what Crutzen and his colleagues call the “Great Acceleration.” This process, they wrote, “took place in an intellectual, cultural, political and legal context in which the growing impacts upon the Earth System counted for very little in the calculations and decisions made in the world’s ministries, boardrooms, laboratories, farmhouses, village huts, and for that matter, bedrooms.”

      Since the first papers describing it, the Anthropocene idea itself has undergone a “Great Acceleration,” as shown by the increases below on one search engine:

      In 2003, there were 413 Google hits for the term Anthropocene;

      In 2011, there were 450,000;

      In 2013, there were 1,070,000.⁹³

      Obviously, Google hits do not say anything about how correct or profound an idea is. This can be illustrated perfectly by the number of hits returned by a search for “Glenn Beck.” For a term as esoteric as “Anthropocene,” this increase is considerable.

      The Anthropocene idea touches a nerve with roots deep in the history of our civilization. Critical debates on humankind’s role on earth were taking place as long ago as the sixteenth century. Christian Europe, after China, the second center of science and technology, had begun to conquer the known world. During this period, a French artist named Jean de Gourmont created a symbol that characterizes this process. De Gourmont drew the most up-to-date world map of his time in the form of a human face. Rather than give this face the appearance of a king, he depicted it as a fool with a double-peaked, bell-tipped cap and jester’s staff.⁹⁴

      Known as “The Fool’s Cap,” the drawing was produced circa 1575, in the heyday of early explorers and European colonizers. It was the time of a worldwide race for raw materials and land estates, finding silver mines in Peru and spice plants on the Maluku Islands (Moluccas). Meanwhile, British miners were already excavating two hundred thousand tons of coal a year. Emperor Charles V had broken the Christian Church’s prohibition on limiting interest, thus enabling Dutch merchants to lend him money, and unleashing a wave of speculative investment that has lasted to the present day.

      De Gourmont’s fool’s head was regarded as a warning against earthly fantasies of power, pride and folly. Tattooed on the fool’s forehead is a proclamation of how absurd it is for men to fight over the earth with sword and flame. De Gourmont calls the earth the “world point.” This was a revolutionary term at a time when there was no telephone, no Internet, when no one spoke of a “global village” and when it was risky to question the biblical creation story. The Frenchman was thus one of the first to realize that the world is truly small, rather than the infinite space it seemed to conquerors at the time.

      On the jester’s scepter is written the “infinite vanity of human beings.” Above the fool’s head hangs the command: “Know Thyself.” For a long time, the map was filed in the humor section of map collections. But it is one of the most sharp-witted, serious reflections on the relationship of humanity with the Earth.

      Many others shared this critical line of thinking, including Hans Carl von Carlowitz, an early eighteenth century tax accountant and mining administrator at the royal court of Freiberg in Saxony. He determined how mining had led to a decline in forests across the whole of Europe. He lambasted the wastage of wood by the rich and in 1713 introduced the concept of sustainability.⁹⁵