Elsevier

Anthropocene

Volume 4, December 2013, Pages 116-121
Anthropocene

Looking forward, looking back: Humans, anthropogenic change, and the Anthropocene

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ancene.2014.05.002Get rights and content

Abstract

As acceptance of the Anthropocene grows among scientists and the public, decisions must be made on whether and how to define this geologic epoch. Designating a starting point for the Anthropocene may be less important than understanding the cultural processes that contributed to human domination of Earth's natural systems. Just as climate changes and their consequences often occur over centuries, millennia, or more, archaeological records show that humans have been active agents of environmental change for thousands of years. Their effects, often dramatic and cumulative, have grown from local, to regional, and now global phenomena. We discuss five options for defining the Anthropocene, most of which recognize a deeper history of widespread and measurable effects of human activities on the Earth's surficial biological and physical systems. A primary goal of debating and defining the Anthropocene should be to educate the public about the effects humans have had on natural systems for millennia, the compounding nature of such impacts, and the pressing need to reverse current trends.

Introduction

The proposal to formally designate an Anthropocene Epoch has become a hot issue over the last several years, championed or contested by the public, media, and scientists. The response has been powerful enough to garner the cover story on the May 26, 2011, edition of The Economist, numerous articles in top-tier academic journals such as Science (e.g., Balter, 2013, Cooper et al., 2012), Nature (e.g., Crutzen, 2002, Crutzen, 2010, Jones, 2011), and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (e.g., Beerling et al., 2011, Smol et al., 2005), and the founding of this journal dedicated to the topic. The designation of an Anthropocene could be a milestone in the geological and social sciences, an idea that has been building for 140 years since Italian geologist Antonio Stoppani first proposed an “anthropozoic era” in AD 1873 (see Crutzen, 2002, Goudie, 2000: 4–5).

With a world population of more than 7.2 billion, it is difficult to argue that we are not currently living in an “age of humans.” The acceleration of CO2, CH4, and N2O in atmospheric records (Crutzen and Steffen, 2003), the explosion in global human populations (McNeill, 2000), anthropogenic land surface clearance (Ellis, 2011, Ellis et al., 2013, Vitousek et al., 1997), the crisis of our world's oceans from overfishing, ocean acidification, and pollution (Jackson et al., 2001, Pauly et al., 1998), the appearance of radio-nucleotides from atomic detonations (Crutzen and Steffen, 2003), and much more all provide ample evidence that human alterations of Earth's natural systems have become pervasive and ubiquitous.

The major point of contention, at least among the geoscientists, has been the starting date for the Anthropocene (for an alternate view see Crist, 2013). Most have proposed to either divide the Holocene – already the shortest geologic epoch beginning just 11,700 calendar years ago – into a smaller temporal unit or do away with it altogether (Doughtry et al., 2010; see Foley et al., 2014 for a brief summary). For some, the compression of the Holocene follows a sensible trend because more recent data on global climatic patterns and stratigraphic records are of higher resolution, but others consider such short geologic epochs to be out of synch with geological timelines (Jones, 2011). In our view, the Holocene has always been something of an anomaly, one of several interglacial cycles within the Pleistocene, none of the earlier examples of which warranted similar designations (Smith and Zeder, 2014), if not for the actions of humans (Erlandson, 2014).

After the submission of a proposal to formally designate the Anthropocene by the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London (Zalasiewicz et al., 2008), an Anthropocene Working Group was created to evaluate its merits. Posted on the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy's 2009 Working Group on the ‘Anthropocene’ webpage, the outline of activities detailed that the group was to be:

ideally…composed of Earth scientists with worldwide representation and familiar with deep time stratigraphy history (Cenozoic and older), with Quaternary (including Holocene) stratigraphy, and with relevant aspects of contemporary environmental change (including its projection by modeling into the future). It should critically compare the current degree and rate of environmental change, caused by anthropogenic processes, with the environmental perturbations of the geological past. Factors to be considered here include the suggested pre-industrial modification of climate by early human agrarian activity (Outline of Working Group Activities, 2009).

This 22-person working group is dominated by geoscientists and paleoclimatologists, but included an environmental historian and a journalist. Despite the specific call to deal with the environmental impacts of pre-industrial societies, archaeologists trained to investigate the complex dynamics of human–environmental interactions and evaluate when humans first significantly shaped local, regional, and global climatic regimes, were not included. As a result of our symposium at the April 2013 Society for American Archaeology annual meetings in Honolulu, however, archaeologist Bruce Smith was added to the working group. Since designations of geologic timescales and a potential Anthropocene boundary, determined by physical stratigraphic markers (Global Stratigraphic Section and Point, often called a “golden spike”) or a numerical age (Global Standard Stratigraphic Age), are the domain of geoscientists, perhaps this is not surprising. What makes this designation different from all previous geologic time markers is that it is directly tied to human influences. Logically, therefore, it should involve collaboration with archaeologists, anthropologists, and other social scientists.

Section snippets

Archaeological perspectives on the Anthropocene

The papers in this special issue are the result of discussions, debates, and dialogue from a 2013 Society for American Archaeology symposium centred around archaeological perspectives on the Anthropocene. We brought together a diverse group of archaeologists to explore how and when humans began to have significant and measurable impacts on Earth's ecosystems (Fig. 1). In this special issue, the symposium participants explored the processes that contributed to a human domination of the Earth

What is at stake?

One of the most compelling parts of the Anthropocene debate is the attention it has generated among the media and public. The International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) working group will evaluate the proposal to designate the Anthropocene in the same way used to define all preceding geological epochs from the Cambrian onwards – on the basis of “golden spikes” or a date of inception – then make a recommendation that will be ratified or rejected by the ICS (Gradstein et al., 2004). For most

Options for an Anthropocene

Ultimately, as the papers in this volume demonstrate, the definition of an Anthropocene epoch marked by the human domination of Earth's ecosystems should explicitly recognize the deep historical processes that contributed to such domination. There is little question that a variety of geological and archaeological evidence will clearly illustrate that domination to future scientists. If the value of historical records now seems obvious, defining a starting date for the Anthropocene is a trickier

Acknowledgements

We thank all the contributors to this volume, the many anonymous reviewers who helped strengthen the papers in it, and the editorial staff of Anthropocene – Rashika Venkataraman, Timothy Horscroft, and especially editor Anne Chin – for their help in shepherding the papers and volume through the submission, review, revision, and production process. We dedicate the volume to Paul Crutzen, who has done more than anyone to bring the Anthropocene and human domination of Earth's systems to the

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