Christian Schwägerl

The Anthropocene


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and the diamonds in Russia were all found untouched, for the first time, by humans. Our civilization has been one big treasure hunt.

      All this came to a head in the eighteenth century, at another civilizational watershed, when people learned how to use the energy made available by earlier members of the Club of Revolutionaries: energy from the sun that led to the formation of coal and crude oil or natural gas. This is the moment Paul Crutzen suggests represents the transition from the Holocene to the Anthropocene—the emergence of humans as a veritable geological force.

      When our great-great-great-grandparents discovered how to use this energy to power machines, humanity’s potential increased, at a stroke. It was as if people had been given a collective potion that harnessed the strength of millions of horses and workers in the form of black chunks of coal and viscous oil. So much is taken for granted these days that we hardly notice. But if you’ve ever sweated to shovel a cubic meter of soil and then watched a backhoe do the same job, you too have experienced the Industrial Revolution, in one instant. Using fossil-based fuels and machines that could be powered by them, humanity really started to accelerate.

      THREE The End of the Holocene

      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).

      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.