The Anthropocene hypothesis—that humans have impacted “the environment” but also changed the Earth’s geology—has spread widely through the sciences and humanities. This hypothesis is being currently tested to see whether the Anthropocene may become part of the Geological Time Scale. An Anthropocene Working Group has been established to assemble the evidence. The decision regarding formalization is likely to be taken in the next few years, by the International Commission on Stratigraphy, the body that oversees the Geological Time Scale. Whichever way the decision goes, there will remain the reality of the phenomenon and the utility of the concept.
The evidence, as outlined here, rests upon a broad range of signatures reflecting humanity’s significant and increasing modification of Earth systems. These may be visible as markers in physical deposits in the form of the greatest expansion of novel minerals in the last 2.4 billion years of Earth history and development of ubiquitous materials, such as plastics, unique to the Anthropocene. The artefacts we produce to live as modern humans will form the technofossils of the future. Human-generated deposits now extend from our natural habitat on land into our oceans, transported at rates exceeding the sediment carried by rivers by an order of magnitude. That influence now extends increasingly underground in our quest for minerals, fuel, living space, and to develop transport and communication networks. These human trace fossils may be preserved over geological durations and the evolution of technology has created a new technosphere, yet to evolve into balance with other Earth systems.
The expression of the Anthropocene can be seen in sediments and glaciers in chemical markers. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen by ~45 percent above pre–Industrial Revolution levels, mainly through combustion, over a few decades, of a geological carbon-store that took many millions of years to accumulate. Although this may ultimately drive climate change, average global temperature increases and resultant sea-level rises remain comparatively small, as yet. But the shift to isotopically lighter carbon locked into limestones and calcareous fossils will form a permanent record. Nitrogen and phosphorus contents in surface soils have approximately doubled through increased use of fertilizers to increase agricultural yields as the human population has also doubled in the last 50 years. Industrial metals, radioactive fallout from atomic weapons testing, and complex organic compounds have been widely dispersed through the environment and become preserved in sediment and ice layers.
Despite radical changes to flora and fauna across the planet, the Earth still has most of its complement of biological species. However, current trends of habitat loss and predation may push the Earth into the sixth mass extinction event in the next few centuries. At present the dramatic changes relate to trans-global species invasions and population modification through agricultural development on land and contamination of coastal zones.
Considering the entire range of environmental signatures, it is clear that the global, large and rapid scale of change related to the mid-20th century is the most obvious level to consider as the start of the Anthropocene Epoch.
Article
V. Kerry Smith
Geologists’ reframing of the global changes arising from human impacts can be used to consider how the insights from environmental economics inform policy under this new perspective. They ask a rhetorical question. How would a future generation looking back at the records in the sediments and ice cores from today’s activities judge mankind’s impact? They conclude that the globe has entered a new epoch, the Anthropocene. Now mankind is the driving force altering the Earth’s natural systems. This conclusion, linking a physical record to a temporal one, represents an assessment of the extent of current human impact on global systems in a way that provides a warning that all policy design and evaluation must acknowledge that the impacts of human activity are taking place on a planetary scale. As a result, it is argued that national and international environmental policies need to be reconsidered. Environmental economics considers the interaction between people and natural systems. So it comes squarely into conflict with conventional practices in both economics and ecology. Each discipline marginalizes the role of the other in the outcomes it describes. Market and natural systems are not separate. This conclusion is important to the evaluation of how (a) economic analysis avoided recognition of natural systems, (b) the separation of these systems affects past assessments of natural resource adequacy, and (c) policy needs to be redesigned in ways that help direct technological innovation that is responsive to the importance of nonmarket environmental services to the global economy and to sustaining the Earth’s living systems.
Article
Colin R. Robins
Soils are the complex, dynamic, spatially diverse, living, and environmentally sensitive foundations of terrestrial ecosystems as well as human civilizations. The modern, environmental study of soil is a truly young scientific discipline that emerged only in the late 19th century from foundations in agricultural chemistry, land resource mapping, and geology. Today, little more than a century later, soil science is a rigorously interdisciplinary field with a wide range of exciting applications in agronomy, ecology, environmental policy, geology, public health, and many other environmentally relevant disciplines. Soils form slowly, in response to five inter-related factors: climate, organisms, topography, parent material, and time. Consequently, many soils are chemically, biologically, and/or geologically unique. The profound importance of soil, combined with the threats of erosion, urban development, pollution, climate change, and other factors, are now prompting soil scientists to consider the application of endangered species concepts to rare or threatened soil around the world.
Article
Hubert Zapf and Timo Müller
The ecological dimension of literature has found proper attention only in the late 20th century, with the rise of ecocriticism as a new direction of literary studies. Ecocriticism emerged from a revalorization of nature writing in the United States and initially understood itself as a countermovement to the linguistic turn in literary and cultural studies. Since the early 21st century, the scope of ecocritical studies has widened to include literary texts and genres across different periods and cultures. Against the background of the global environmental crisis, it has made a strong case for the contribution of literature, art, and the aesthetic to the critique of anthropocentric master narratives as well as to the imaginative exploration of sustainable alternatives to the historically deranged human–nature relationship. Ecocritical scholars have examined the ecological potential of texts in various periods and literary cultures that make up American literature. They have given particular attention to the Indigenous poetic and storytelling modes of Native Americans, the Romantic and transcendentalist movements of the mid-19th century, the aesthetic practices of modernism and postmodernism, the ethnic diversification of American literature since the late 20th century, and, most obviously, contemporary writing that explicitly defines itself as a critical and creative response to the Anthropocene.
Thus, an ecological awareness in American literature emerged in different forms and stages that correspond to major periods, styles, and cultures of literary writing. While it is impossible to do justice to all relevant developments, the rich archive of ecological thought and perception in American literature can be productively brought into the transdisciplinary dialogue of the environmental sciences and humanities. The value of literary texts in relation to other forms of environmental knowledge lies not just in the topics they address but in distinctive aesthetic features, such as embodied multiperspectivity, empathetic imagination, reconnection of cultural to natural ecosystems, polysemic openness, and participatory inclusion of the reader in the transformative experience offered by the texts.
Article
Jozef Keulartz
The animal world is under increasing pressure, given the magnitude of anthropogenic environmental stress, especially from human-caused rapid climate change together with habitat conversion, fragmentation, and destruction. There is a global wave of species extinctions and decline in local species abundance. To stop or even reverse this so-called defaunation process, in situ conservation (in the wild) is no longer effective without ex situ conservation (in captivity). Consequently, zoos could play an ever-greater role in the conservation of endangered species and wildlife—hence the slogan Captivity for Conservation.
However, the integration of zoo-based tools and techniques in species conservation has led to many conflicts between wildlife conservationists and animal protectionists. Many wildlife conservationists agree with Michael Soulé, the widely acclaimed doyen of the relatively new discipline of conservation biology, that conservation and animal welfare are conceptually distinct, and that they should remain politically separate. Animal protectionists, on the other hand, draw support from existing leading accounts of animal ethics that oppose the idea of captivity for conservation, either because infringing an individual’s right to freedom for the preservation of the species is considered as morally wrong, or because the benefits of species conservation are not seen as significant enough to overcome the presumption against depriving an animal of its liberty.
Both sides view animals through different lenses and address different concerns. Whereas animal ethicists focus on individual organisms, and are concerned about the welfare and liberty of animals, wildlife conservationists perceive animals as parts of greater wholes such as species or ecosystems, and consider biodiversity and ecological integrity as key topics. This seemingly intractable controversy can be overcome by transcending both perspectives, and developing a bifocal view in which zoo animals are perceived as individuals in need of specific care and, at the same time, as members of a species in need of protection.
Based on such a bifocal approach that has lately been adopted by a growing international movement of “Compassionate Conservation,” the modern zoo can only achieve its conservation mission if it finds a morally acceptable balance between animal welfare concerns and species conservation commitments. The prospects for the zoo to achieve such a balance are promising. Over the past decade or so, zoos have made serious and sustained efforts to ensure and enhance animal welfare. At the same time, the zoo’s contribution to species conservation has also improved considerably.
Article
Sébastien Dutreuil and Pierre Charbonnier
The Anthropocene was proposed in 2000 as the name of a new geological epoch, succeeding to the Holocene, and marked by the influence of humanity as a biological species on its geological environment. It has resonated differently in three major epistemological domains, where the configurations of the debate has varied. For Earth system science, within which the term emerged, the Anthropocene was a keyword encompassing and stimulating large research programs which stimulated original and new scientific investigations and synthesis. The term had a more specific and evidential meaning for the geological community, which seized it after 2008. Documenting empirically the Anthropocene meant different things for these two scientific communities: tracking down every single impact humanity has on the environment on which humanity depends upon to survive for the former; analyzing how this influence can be documented in Earth’s strata for the latter. These two different epistemological regimes are intertwined with two different normative registers. Earth system science assumed from the very start a normative position: international experts elaborate normative concepts and produce scientific synthesis meant to define the conceptual space, quantitatively delimited, within which political decisions related to global environmental issues ought to be taken. By contrast, geologists were more cautious, and for some, reluctant, to engage in normative issues; but political issues unavoidably emerged when the starting date was discussed. This politicization of the debate was accompanied by human and social sciences, seizing up the debate at the same time as geologists and lay public did, toward the end of the 2000s.
