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