Читать книгу The Anthropocene - Christian Schwägerl - Страница 9

AT THE BEGINNING OF THE INDUSTRIAL AGE, the side of the earth not facing the sun would have appeared completely dark when seen from space. Light from campfires, candles and oil lamps did not penetrate beyond earth’s atmosphere. But then, people began to systematically draw upon the stored energy of the sun found in underground deposits to light their lamps and to power machines. From that time forward, fossil fuels have enabled the fascinating acquisition of material wealth. Since industrialization, one dot of light after another has shone from earth’s dark side, like a long Promethean chain of lights, gas flames and burning forests: “It is like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker—may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling!” says the protagonist in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, referring to the lights along London’s river Thames. (Significantly, Conrad locates the “heart of darkness” in London, not in the forests of Central Africa’s Congo).

Over decades, these individual lights from houses, streets, offices, factories and burning forests have combined to form broad areas of illumination in intricate patterns that stretch along coastlines. We are sending a collective, moving sequence of lights into space, images of which get beamed back down to earth by satellites or by astronauts on the International Space Station. These images, some of which have been overlaid with cool musical tracks and posted on websites, inspire filmmakers like Alfonso Cuarón, the director of the movie Gravity.³⁷ In China, an urban mega-region over a thousand miles long is taking shape, while in West Africa, a coastal conglomeration nearly 600 kilometers (400 miles) in length is growing.³⁸

A succession of technical, social and economic innovations has enabled people to completely change the face of the earth in a mere two hundred years, spreading themselves and their accomplishments across almost the entire planet.

Tapping into fossil fuels has had positive effects on the lives of billions of people today, in the form of hospitals and schools, global mobility and a mind-blowing array of consumer goods. The proportion of people living in abject poverty nowadays has also sharply declined. Educational opportunities, particularly for women, have greatly increased. Since 1990, life expectancy at birth has increased globally by six years, to an average of 70 years of age.³⁹

The benefits of modern life are myriad: the use of a simple plastic cannula can save the lives of both mother and child at birth; driverless cars can take us, as if by magic, anywhere we want to go; research laboratories make it possible for billions of people to give free rein to curiosity. The late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries represent a time of incredible expansion of the human comfort zone, certainly for those who have the means and have never suffered the acute violence of war or the slow violence of poverty.

Without this new economy, without industrial-based agriculture or pharmaceuticals or fossil fuels, most of us would not be alive. Some people sound as if they would welcome a scenario of fewer people. The “population bomb” has been widely used as a metaphor. But in my opinion, the mere number of people is not the problem in the dawning Anthropocene. Being German, with the backdrop of my country’s National Socialist past, I wouldn’t want to imagine how a certain population number is considered “too many.” Who is the perpetrator and who the victim in such a scenario? I think that every new person enriches earth with his or her potential for consciousness, creativity and community. I am not someone who would prefer only one billion people (instead of seven or eight) to be living on earth, nor am I like Stephen Emmott, who finds a world population of ten billion to be a terrifying vision.⁴⁰

I believe that the Anthropocene idea can help people see themselves as active, integrated participants in an emerging new nature that will make earth more humanist rather than just humanized. It would be absurd if an idea named the “Anthropocene” were characterized by a negative view of humans!

But even the most positive attitude toward humanity cannot save us from having to face up to the enormous—literally earth-shattering—developments at the end of the Holocene. Our population numbers signal ever growing consumer demand, ever more areas of land claimed by people, ever increasing energy consumption with its consequences for the climate, and new influences on evolution. Attentive readers will already be familiar with some of these factors. But only when looked at as a whole, do they create the broad overview necessary to see how the Holocene is coming to an end and something new, the Anthropocene, is beginning. Our individual actions, multiplied by the number of people who are alive and make decisions, is a new reality that is hurtling towards us with such velocity that its consequences, both positive and negative, surprise us.

If your head starts spinning at the huge numbers being mentioned here, just remember that these figures derive from the totality of many small actions. Millions of tons of eroded soil start with the food harvested from one industrially farmed field. Billions of tons of carbon dioxide emissions start with the flick of a switch, whether to turn on a light or a car engine. All the phenomena of the Anthropocene—whether positive or insane, surprising, funny or creative—start with small actions. When you buy a ballpoint pen that has a tiny, man-made crystal on the tip, you are thereby increasing the variety of Earth’s minerals, something future geologists may wish to investigate. When you add another ton of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere, your descendants might swear at you long after you are gone.

There are four major factors determining the end of the Holocene. The first is population growth. If the number of people living today was the same now as at the time of Jesus Christ—a few hundred million—their collective impact would not be sufficient to initiate a new geological epoch.

In the year 1800, there were one billion people; in 1930, two billion and in 1960, three billion. In October 2011, the seventh billionth person was born: Danica May Camacho of the Philippines was chosen by the United Nations to have this starring role.⁴¹ If the world population was evenly distributed across the Earth, there would be fifty-three people per square kilometer of land (excluding the Antarctic).

By the middle of this century, according to United Nations forecasts, another two billion people will be added to the world population, which is equivalent to the number of people who were living on earth between World Wars I and II. This also means that by 2050, there will be about 140,000 more births than deaths, per day. By these calculations, a city with the population size of Los Angeles will be added to the world every month.

By the middle of this century, fifty-three people per square kilometer jumps to sixty-six people per square kilometer. All this growth is taking place mainly in developing countries. In other words, humanity is increasing every day by one Indian slum, one high-rise community in Beijing, one outlying district of Jakarta or one medium-sized town in the Congo.⁴² Just the number of people on earth does not signify much: The greater impact comes from our way of life by which this number must be multiplied. Our consumption habits determine how much land, how many industrial and mining areas and how much urban space is necessary to sustain this number of people, not only their survival but also their happiness.

The second factor that marks the end of the Holocene is the enormous increase in human living space requirements. Only a quarter of the Earth (about 7,000 square kilometers or 12 million square miles) is arable land that is suitable for growing food for human consumption. By 2007, cities and communities had already extended over an area half the size of the Australian continent, and this area is expected to grow considerably in the next decades.⁴³ Cities are really efficient at housing people, but nevertheless need a lot of energy and resources to be built and maintained. Gigantic quantities of concrete and other building materials are being produced, transported and deposited in order to create new settlements. Jan Zalasiewicz, a geologist at the University of Leicester, describes urbanization as “an alteration in sedimentation processes via the construction of man-made rock strata.” Concrete is a key material in this process: “The global annual production is now approaching five billion cubic meters, that is something over two-thirds of a cubic meter for every man, woman and child on Earth, in total enough to cover all of Germany, Austria and parts of neighboring countries under a centimeter-thick layer of this stuff—each year. It is part of the urban stratum, rising above the ground surface as our homes and factories, and extending below it as foundations, metro systems, sewers, electrical cables, and yet deeper as mines and boreholes.”⁴⁴

Dams, mines and human-induced erosion also comprehensively alter the geological state of the earth. Tens of thousands of hydroelectric dams stop enormous quantities of sediment from reaching estuaries.⁴⁵, ⁴⁶ Erosion caused by industrial agriculture moves ten times the volume of sediment than was the average 500 million years ago.⁴⁷ Material flows of such essential elements as phosphorous and nitrogen, both of which are used in artificial fertilizers, are caused by human activity. With the production of artificial fertilizers by means of the Haber-Bosch process, humans have already extracted more nitrogen out of the atmosphere than has ever circulated through the land ecosystems.⁴⁸

But our space requirements extend well beyond the land surface. The Holocene oceans seemed inexhaustible, a boundless global ecosystem, 1.3 billion cubic kilometers in size, many times larger than all land habitats put together.⁴⁹ In a very short time, humanity’s impact on the oceans has also become far-reaching, stretching thousands of feet down where atomic waste was dumped, new mining projects (such as the one off the coast of Papua, New Guinea) are pursued and new oil wells are drilled. Above all, our fishing fleets are transforming the oceans. There are one million large fishing ships worldwide and three million smaller boats.⁵⁰ These vessels track down schools of fish with the same sonar technology that American and Soviet nuclear submarines used during the Cold War. The hauling capacity of these ships has increased sixfold since 1970. Many of them use rollers that flatten the ocean floor, crushing every structure in which sea life can hide. Corals are the victim of trawlers with heavy harnesses. Deep-sea fishing damages the unique natural wonder of underwater mountains. This behavior is equivalent to hunters clearing entire forests just to catch a few deer. Yet, since 1970, yield per ship has fallen by two thirds. More and more ships compete for fewer and fewer fish. In the words of one ocean expert: “It’s a race to our own destruction.”⁵¹

When the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) began to register catch quantities in the 1950s, they recorded 20 million tons. This was followed by a rapid increase to over 90 million tons of wild seafood caught. Since then, haul sizes have reached a plateau and have even contracted. This is not due to political restrictions but to the depletion of many stocks. In spite of larger, more powerful trawlers, there is nothing left to fish. The FAO classifies eighty per cent of fish stocks as being fully or excessively depleted.⁵²

Even a natural disaster like a tsunami has a human dimension. The monster wave that hit Japan in 2011 was the manifestation of a powerful undersea earthquake. It devastated parts of the east coast of Japan and created a massive wave of man-made debris—houses, garbage, ships and containers—to be swept first inland, then out into the Pacific Ocean. The debris was tracked by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which regarded it as the largest occurrence to date demonstrating how debris disperses away from a single point.⁵³ The resultant islands of debris were not the only anthropogenic phenomenon. The tsunami wave triggered a disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant, widely dispersing radioactive materials, including isotopes that will continue to emit radiation of various types for thousands of years to come.

Wild nature no longer exists on land or out at sea. According to analyses by US researchers, in cooperation with Google, during the period between 2000 and 2012, 2.3 million square kilometers (about 880,000 square miles) of “natural” forest, disappeared. Only around 800 thousand square kilometers (about 308 thousand square miles) have been replanted while the remaining areas have been turned into agricultural areas, residential areas or into wasteland.⁵⁴ The FAO alerts us to an alarming development in which cleared woodlands and even replanted forests are often monotonous, with no biological diversity. These monocultures cannot sustain indigenous peoples and render few ecological services.⁵⁵

What remains of the wild is the result of human decision-making, such as when an area is perceived as being of lasting value and is then protected by the local population or by environmental organizations, or by a corporation that concludes that exploitation would not be profitable. Even in places where people think they are in the wild, they often come across traces of civilization when they take a closer look. This frequently happens in Amazonia where, during the clearing of allegedly pristine rainforest, traces of earlier settlements are found.⁵⁶

The Anthropocene marks the end of the illusion that “somewhere out there,” there are gigantic, unexplored, untapped, unused regions, areas of untouched nature surrounding what is man-made. Geographers Erle Ellis and Navin Ramankutty from the University of Maryland have got to the heart of this. Using data from satellite photographs, they have determined that only 22 per cent of the earth’s surface is still wilderness and only 11 per cent of photosynthesis activity takes place in these wild areas. The remaining area consists of agricultural, residential and industrial zones and other “anthromes,” that is, areas marked by humans. These have replaced former biomes. “This new model of the biosphere moves us away from an outdated view of the world as ‘natural ecosystems with humans disturbing them’ and towards a vision of ‘human systems with natural ecosystems embedded within them,’” states Ellis.⁵⁷

Let yourself drift across the digital globe offered by Google Earth and similar services. Don’t zoom in on your own apartment but go instead to areas in the world you do not know. Enjoy the unusual colors, shapes and mysterious structures. This used to be a perspective reserved only for gods. Then, such sights began appearing in expensively produced James Bond movies! Now, you only have to whip a small personal device out of your pocket to zoom down and see for yourself what it means to live on a planet shaped by humans. That green, dense forest—can you see the paths?

That wide, deserted plateau—can you see the open cast mine?

That sparkling blue coral reef—can you see the American military base?

That gray-brown gravel plain … Oops, it’s a city!

Those white dots in the sea off the coast—are they fishing boats?

From high above, these landscapes can look like complicated scriptures, cancerous tumors, works of art, geometric patterns, military parades, bacterial cultures, or even large gardens. It is a sensational sight in which millions of human decisions have been put together and displayed. Irish artist David Thomas Smith has created highly symmetrical photomontages of landscapes touched by humans. The title of his body of work is “Anthropocene.”⁵⁸

In addition to our increase in numbers and our growing imprint on the surface of the earth, the third characteristic that marks the end of the Holocene is our enormous energy consumption and its consequences for the global climate. World population has increased by a factor of 5.4 since 1860 but energy consumption has increased by a factor of 41, in the same period. On average, each individual now consumes the equivalent of half a gallon of petroleum—per day.⁵⁹

The signature of humans is becoming visible on land in the form of shale fracking, in the oceans in the number of deep-sea drilling rigs and in the sky with a wide range of new chemicals in the atmosphere. From regional phenomena, like the huge Asian “Brown Cloud” that hangs over megacities in China to the carbon dioxide emissions accumulating in the atmosphere from millions of individual sources, humans are creating a new physical reality.

Since the beginning of industrialization humanity has been running a gigantic geophysical experiment. People have been mining coal and petroleum from earth’s crust, burning them and dispersing the resultant carbon dioxide into the atmosphere for some time. Carbon is also released into the atmosphere when forests burn down or wetlands dry out. According to estimates by the Potsdam Institute, Oxford University and the World Resources Institute, an additional 2,110 billion tons of carbon dioxide went into circulation between 1800 and 2014 as a result of human activities.⁶⁰ This already represents a significant disturbance of the earth’s carbon cycle.⁶¹, ⁶² Despite global efforts, carbon dioxide emissions are still increasing; for energy consumption alone, emissions stood at 34.5 billion tons in 2012 and 36 billion tons in 2013.⁶³, ⁶⁴

If current trends continue, then from the beginning of industrialization to approximately 2025, the same quantity of additional carbon, in the form of carbon dioxide, will have been introduced into the atmosphere and oceans by humans, as is contained in all living organisms today.⁶⁵

Around sixty per cent of this colossal quantity of material is absorbed by the oceans and vegetation for now; because carbon dioxide dissolves in water and plants can absorb it and convert it into biomass. But that does not mean that the element has disappeared. In the sea, acidification has already started to take place because carbon and water combine to form carbonic acid, as everyone familiar with chemistry or fizzy drinks well knows.⁶⁶

If you’ve ever downed a soft drink with too much carbonic acid, you get an idea of how countless sea organisms must feel as they are disturbed by carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide has a slightly corrosive effect; organisms partly composed of calcite—like plankton or coral reefs—are extremely vulnerable to this. Coral reefs and the shells of organisms like diatoms, which are at the beginning of the food chain, are therefore endangered by acidification, which leads to the coral bleaching. While there are methods by which coral reefs buffer acidity, this is only possible to a certain extent.⁶⁷ The negative consequences of acidification are considerable because of how they affect the marine food chain.⁶⁸

This development worries me much more than higher temperatures on land. The oceans cannot absorb unlimited quantities of carbon dioxide and, if a tipping point is ever reached, warmed seas could change from being repositories of greenhouse gases into becoming sources of greenhouse gas emissions. If the seas become warmed to their depths, and there are already indications that this is happening, frozen methane gas could thaw and be released into the atmosphere. Methane is a much more potent heat-trapping gas than carbon dioxide.⁶⁹, ⁷⁰

At the beginning of industrialization, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was around 280 parts per million molecules of air (ppm). At the time of the UN Climate Summit in Rio de Janiero, Brazil, in 1992, it had reached 356 ppm. In May 2013, at the monitoring station on the summit of the Mauna Loa volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii, the value exceeded 400 ppm, and according to current trends it will reach 440 ppm by 2040—a threshold that climate researchers regard as critical.⁷¹

Scientists from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) continue to agree that emission of greenhouse gases caused by humans will increase the earth’s average temperature by at least two degrees Celsius by the end of this century. Apparent breaks in global warming trends appear to have more to do with complicated feedback mechanisms between the atmosphere and the oceans and a lack of measuring stations in the Arctic, rather than with incorrect scientific assumptions about climate change.⁷², ⁷³

Two degrees Celsius does not sound like much, which is true when it refers to normal daytime temperatures. However, when applied to the global average temperature of the earth, it is comparable to human body temperature, where an increase of two degrees can make the difference between normal well-being and life-threatening illness. In extreme scenarios, average temperature could rise six degrees by the end of the century, and even higher in some regions. At the moment, the global average temperature is about five degrees warmer than at the peak of the last Ice Age, when glaciers in the Northern hemisphere soared hundreds of feet high. An increase in the average global temperature of five or six degrees would portend the beginning of a “Heat Age.”

There is no certainty about what all this additional carbon dioxide will do to the earth. Scientific models are imprecise and not all future changes can be predicted. But, does that give us the liberty to play down the impact that people have on the climate the way that interest groups do, especially in the United States? Believing the climate change skeptics is taking an enormous risk for, if they are wrong, we will face a dangerous, perhaps irreversible situation. If the critics are proven right, little change will occur, except perhaps reasonable investments in environmental protection and renewable energy sources.

Underpinning the arguments of climate change skeptics is an assumption that humans are only a small factor in world events, so negligible that they cannot possibly trigger serious consequences. We shall simply carry on, they say. Advocates of this attitude think little of the Anthropocene idea. However, many scientific findings undermine the argument that human actions are only a trivial factor in earth events. The magnitude of the human factor is shown by one US Geological Survey study, according to which humans emit 135 times more carbon dioxide than all volcanoes combined.⁷⁴ Axel Kleidon from the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry, in Jena, Germany, states that annual human consumption of free energy stands at approximately 50 terawatts, mainly due to burning fossil fuels and cultivating crops. This is equivalent to between five and ten per cent of free energy available. According to Kleidon, this is significantly more free energy than is produced by all the volcanoes, earthquakes and other tectonic events, combined.⁷⁵

Population growth, and space and energy requirements are the powerful forces propelling us out of the Holocene into the Anthropocene. 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, but the Anthropocene is not destined to be a scary thing.

^37. The short film of a circumnavigation of Earth by the International Space Station astronauts is a must-see: http://vimeo.com/32001208.

^38. Karen C. Seto et al., “Global forecasts of urban expansion to 2030 and direct impacts on biodiversity and carbon pools”, PNAS, August 16, 2012 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3479537/.

^39. http://www.who.int/gho/mortality_burden_disease/life_tables/situation_trends_text/en/index.html.

^40. Stephen Emmott, Ten Billion, London: Vintage, 2013.

^41. See http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/oct/31/seven-billionth-baby-born-phi-lippines.

^42. Population Reference Bureau, 2009 World Population Sheet, Washington, DC, 2009.

^43. UNFPA, “State of World Population 2007: Unleashing the Potential of Urban Growth,” 2007: 45, https://www.unfpa.org/webdav/site/global/shared/documents/publi-cations/2007/695_filename_sowp2007_eng.pdf.

^44. Jan Zalasiewicz, in Nina Möllers and Christian Schwägerl, “Anthropozän Natur und Technik im Menschenzeitalter,” catalog for the eponymous exhibition at the Deutsches Museum, Munich, 2014.

^45. James Syvitski and A. Kettner, “Sediment flux and the Anthropocene”, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, vol. 369, no. 1938 (2011): 957–975, and James Syvitski et al. “Sinking deltas due to human activities,” Nature Geoscience, vol. 2, no. 10 (2009): 681–686.

^46. As a visual aid, see also James Syvitski, “Humanity’s Planet: Dams in the US 1800–2003,” on YouTube.com.

^47. Bruce H. Wilkinson, “Humans as geologic agents: A deep-time perspective,” Geology, vol. 33, no. 3 (November 2004): 161–164 http://geology.geoscienceworld.org/con-tent/33/3/161.abstract.

^48. P.M. Vitousek, “Beyond global warming: ecology and global change,” Ecology, vol. 75: 1861–1876.

^49. James Syvitski and A. Kettner, “Sediment flux and the Anthropocene,” op. cit.

^50. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), “The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture,” Rome, 2012, http://www.fao.org/docrep/016/i2727e/i2727e00.htm.

^51. FAO and World Bank, The Sunken Billions. The Economic Justification for Fisheries Reform, Rome/Washington DC, 2008.

^52. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), “The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture,” Rome, 2012, http://www.fao.org/docrep/016/i2727e/i2727e00.htm.

^53. Tony Barboza, “No ‘island’ of tsunami debris floating toward US, NOAA says,” Los Angeles Times, November 6, 2013, http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-tsunami-debris-noaa-20131106,0,3159522.story.

^54. Matthew Hansen et al., “High-Resolution Global Maps of 21st Century Forest Cover Change,” Science, 15 November 2013, vol. 342, no. 6160: 850–853 and Betsy Mason, “Incredible High-Resolution Interactive Map of the World’s Shrinking Forests,” Wired Online, November 14, 2013, http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/11/google-earth-deforestation/.

^55. Jianchu Xu, “China‘s new forests aren’t as green as they seem,” Nature, vol. 477, 371, (September 21, 2011).

^56. Michael Heckenberger et al., “Amazonia 1492: Pristine Forest or Cultural Parkland?” Science, vol. 301, no. 5640 (September 19 2003):1710–1714, DOI: 10.1126/science.1086112.

^57. Erle Ellis and Navin Ramankutty, “Putting people in the map: anthropogenic biomes of the world,” Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, vol. 6, no. 8, (2008): 439-447 and Erle Ellis and Navin Ramankutty, “Anthropogenic biomes,” Encyclopedia of Earth, Cutler J. Cleveland (ed.), Washington, DC, 2009.

^58. See personal website of the artist www.david-thomas-smith.com.

^59. International Energy Agency, World Energy Outlook 2012, Paris: IEA, 2012.

^60. op.cit

^61. For a graphic representation of CO₂ emissions, see the Oxford University project at http://trillionthtonne.org.

^62. UNESCO and UNEP, The Global Carbon Cycle, Paris: UNESCO, November 2009.

^63. PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, Trends in global CO2 emissions: 2013 Report, Den Haag, 2013.

^64. Global Carbon Project, International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, November 19, 2013, http://www.igbp.net/news/news/news/annualglobalcarbonemissionssettoreach-record36billiontonnesin2013.5.30566fc6142425d6c91195a.html.

^65. Dr. Thomas Dittmar, Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology, personal communication, August 2011.

^66. Jeremy Jackson, “Ecological extinction and evolution in the brave new ocean,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 105, suppl. 1, August 12 2008: 11458–465.

^67. Andreas J. Andersson et al., “Partial offsets in ocean acidification from changing coral reef biogeochemistry,” Nature Climate Change, published online, November 17, 2013, http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate2050.html.

^68. The Seattle Times together with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting published an excellent yet alarming report on ocean acidification entitled “Sea Change”, September 12, 2013, http://apps.seattletimes.com/reports/sea-change/2013/sep/11/pacific-ocean-peri-lous-turn-overview/.

^69. Timothy Lenton, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber et al., “Tipping elements in the Earth’s climate system,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 105, no. 6, (February 12, 2008): 1786–1793.

^70. For an overview of the ocean in the Anthropocene see Davor Vidas, “The Anthropocene and the International Law of the Sea,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society –A, vol. 369 (2011): 909–925.

^71. For continual measured data, see http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/.

^72. IPCC, Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis, Geneva, Switzerland, 2013.

^73. Kevon Cowtan and Robert G. Way, “Coverage bias in the HadCRUT4 temperature series and its impact on recent temperature trends,” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society, October, 2013, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/qj.2297/abstract.

^74. Terry Gerlach, “Volcanic versus anthropogenic carbon dioxide,” EOS, Transactions of the American Geophysical Union, vol. 92, no. 24, (14 June 2011): 201–208.

^75. A. Kleidon, “How does the earth system generate and maintain thermodynamic disequilibrium and what does it imply for the future of the planet?,” contribution to Theme Issue “Influence of Nonlinearity and Randomness in Climate Prediction,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, http://arxiv.org/pdf/1103.2014v2.pdf.

^76. Anthony D. Barnosky et al., “Has the Earth’s sixth mass extinction already arrived?” Nature, (March 3, 2011) vol. 471, no. 51–57.

^77. See also the outstanding books by Edward O. Wilson and Jean-Christophe Vié et al., Wildlife in a Changing World—An Analysis of the 2008 IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, Gland: IUCN 2009 and Arthur D. Chapman, Numbers of living species in Australia and the world, Canberra: Australian Biodiversity Information Service, 2009.

^78. Vaclav Smil, The Earth‘s Biosphere: Evolution, Dynamics, and Change, Cam-bridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002, quoted in Gaia Vince, “A Global Perspective on the Anthropocene,” Science, (7 October 2011) 32-37.

^79. Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, New York: Penguin, 2011.

^80. Callum Roberts, The Unnatural History of the Sea, Washington DC: Shearwater, 2009.

^81. See www.climatenamechange.org.

^82. Charles H. Langmuir and Wally Broecker, How to Build a Habitable Planet: The Story of Earth from the Big Bang to Humankind, Princeton University Press, 2012.

^83. Andrew Revkin has compared the developmental stage of our species with puberty: http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/20/maturing-teens-maturing-species/.

^84. See “NASA’s Hubble Shows Milky Way is Destined for Head-On Collision,” May 31, 2012, http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/milky-way-collide.html.