Week 3: Welcome to the Anthropocene - Post 1

Week 3: Welcome to the Anthropocene - Notes 

Lecture 1: Humanity’s Period of grace: the Holocene

What is the desired state of planet earth? 

 

On the Y axis you see that temperatures on average change with only +/-4 degrees Celsius, and that's the difference between having two kilometers of ice above our heads, and the warm, lush environmental conditions that we are so used to in the world of today. So this is one reminder of the extraordinarily important insight that the environmental conditions on Earth vary and that we have stable states.

The Holocene: is an extraordinarily stable phase for human development. In fact temperatures vary with only +/-1 degrees Celsius. And even though the genetic diversity has been around for millions, often hundreds of millions of years, it is now that everything we know in terms of ecosystems, nature, the biosphere, settles in. This is where the rainforest, the coral reef systems, the temperate forests, all the wetlands, settle in and establish themselves very permanently in the state that we know.

 

We invent agriculture. And the exciting thing is that we invent agriculture right at the start of the Holocene in at least four different places simultaneously on Earth. And because we didn't

have SMS or e-mail or chat rooms it's absolutely proven that this occurred entirely independent of each other, and because of the stable environmental conditions on Earth.

And the scientific conclusion of this single graph is as simple as it is dramatic, that the Holocene is the only stable state of the Earth that we know can support the modern world as we know it. We can live outside of the Holocene, the planet isn't bothered, but we would probably not have any chance to support the modern world as we know it, soon with nine billion co-citizens.

Overall: we need to recognize that the biomes and ecosystems in the world sustain and support the Holocene state of the world. That systems such as rainforests that regulate the carbon sinks in large parts of the rainforest systems, and the rainfall systems regionally; that we have coral reef systems that also regulate the resilience in the ocean, and the ability to circulate heat, and the ability to take up carbon dioxide; the large permafrost regions holding vast amounts of methane; the temperate forest regions that provide a canopy that reflects back heat back into space through its darker color, but also massive carbon sinks; the systems on the savannahs which in turn regulate large parts of heat fluxes, rainfall trajectories, and also carbon sinks; are all systems that together form part of regulating the stable state of the Holocene. And the conclusion is that we understand the Holocene, we need to preserve the Holocene, and the Holocene is the state that we know can support human development in the future.

Lecture 2: Entering the Anthropocene

Science increasingly shows that the Holocene is our desired state; the state that is stable and able to support human development in a world soon to become 9 billion people. Now the drama is that the evidence on the human pressures on the planet point at the risk of us moving out of the Holocene. And in fact it's gone so far that science today indicates that we are entering a whole new geological epoch, the Anthropocene.

Anthropocene: Relating to or denoting the current geological age, viewed as the period during which human activity has become the dominant influence on climate and the environment.

On average science points in the Anthropocene that we're moving towards a 3 degrees Celsius warming in this century. Again, this is a place we haven't been over the past 3 million years. We are in the sixth mass extinction of species, the first mass extinction to be caused by human beings, another species in the world. One of these six, by the way, is when we lost the great, large dinosaurs some 65 million years back.  And we are committed to 9 billion people. And that this 3-6-9 world is the world of Anthropocene, which we now need to navigate.

It's a reality where global changes in Anthropocene affect local conditions, and we can no longer eparate what happens locally from the global change. And therefore we need to interact across all levels in societies in order to be able to provide prosperity. It sounds challenging to think of economic development in a large urban area having today to relate to the complex changes in the Earth system, but that is the reality. We can not develop a city, a household, an agricultural system today, planning for fresh water, clean air, ecosystem support, without also understanding that we're changing the planetary system because it hits back on that local scale, across different scales in the world.

It links also to health. If we start moving along the worst scenario on climate change, which is the red curve shown here that takes us towards 4 degrees C, we must then also recognize that infectious diseases, crop pests and diseases, heat waves and droughts, food insecurity, will increase in the world as temperatures rise, and also reach completely new geographical regions which never had these kind of impacts previously.

Overall: This is a situation where we now must address how can we bend development back towards Holocene-like conditions, even though we are in the Anthropocene? And that we want to avoid a situation where we let unsustainable development go unbounded, which could take us to a transition into a completely new stable hot state of the planet which would not support the modern world as we know it. So to conclude, the challenge for humanity is to recognize that the Holocene is our desired state, we're moving into the Anthropocene, placing us in the driving seat, but we still have a choice. We can navigate ourselves away from the largest risks that the Anthropocene pose.

*And the last slide here shows examples of media outside of science welcoming humanity to the Anthropocene. And the Economist has this wonderful citation in its issue welcoming humanity to the Anthropocene, which I think is a good reflection of how science feels today in the face of these global risks. And it says exactly as follows,

"That when reality is changing faster than theory suggests it should, a certain degree of nervousness is a reasonable response."

And I think that is one of the guiding principles for sustainable development in the Anthropocene that precaution must be operationalized as a guiding principle for human development.

Lecture 3: Non-Linear thinking in the Anthropocene

Resilience -How to live in the Anthropocene- It has a dual nature of both thinking about sustaining what we want to sustain, to keeping what we want to keep, and building capacity to adapt or transform into something better.

 

Resilience thinking is useful for navigating situations that are difficult to control and are poorly understood. Rapid change and novel social-ecological interactions are likely to produce more situations that are difficult to understand or control, suggesting that resilience thinking is increasingly important in the Anthropocene.

Maximum Sustained Yield: it's one of the basic ideas in a lot of natural resource management, which is the idea we want to maximize what we can get out of something over a long period of time. And this is sort of embodies this kind of optimization type approach, and this really works well, when we know how the world works we can control things, and we can optimize it and do really well over time. However, this view of the world is really key. It depends upon that the world works in kind of a linear way, and I like this figure for thinking about it, meaning that if we hit the world, if the world is changed, that the consequences of that change diminish in time and space.

Linear: Ecological Complexity- In many cases the impact of some action is actually larger far away and over a longer period of time than immediately. And I'm sure everyone can think of cases of this. But one place where I work where we think is a really, excellent example of this, is the Arctic. As many people and animals in the Arctic have very high levels of persistent organic pollutants in their body fat. And that's because industrial pollution from industries in Europe, especially Asia and North America, are transported by processes to the Arctic and then are biomagnified by animals that live in the Arctic, and then eaten by people who live in the Arctic. And so people who live in what many people would consider almost a pristine environment have some of the highest levels of industrial pollutants in their bodies. These effects are distant in time and space from where they occurred. And this type of situation is very common, maybe not as common as simple cases but is common in many places where people have transformed the planet and made novel connections. And this is what we're having more and more in the Anthropocene.

 

Overall: So this kind of comes into sort of what in resilience thinking we would say is sort of three big kind of areas for action. One is trying to develop new understanding to cope with uncertainty, the unknown, and the evolution of new things. We need to think about social, technical, and institutional ways to enable learning. If we also have novelty though, we also need to build resilience to the unexpected, we need to be prepared for the unexpected, both to be able to cope with shocks, but also to take advantage of potentially positive surprises. And finally, I think and maybe most important of all, we need to develop capacity to navigate change. And this is basically so that the learning and change can be very traumatic and people - I mean everyone, myself, you want to keep doing things the way you want to do it, and the way you've been used to doing things. But in a changing and transforming world that's not necessarily an option for us, but we need to make sure there's some kind of broad social capacity to enhance the ability of people to navigate change, especially people who are maybe marginalized or having change imposed upon them. And what are fair, just and desirable ways to do this is a huge area of research I think resilience thinking is about trying to understand dynamic change, understanding all sort of different processes that interact at different levels that mean you can't ever sit still even if you want to.

*It's this kind of understanding what creates, destroys, trades-off resilience that really needs to be developed in as a resilience thinking for navigating the Anthropocene.

Lecture 4: Imagining the Anthropocene

Popular Views of the future- Dystopia VS Eutopia:

-we have to think about how we can make the Anthropocene, whoever "we" is and whatever "good" means, as good as it can be for us.

Popular representations of the future: at least in the English-speaking world, there's been a boom in dystopian literature in the last ten years. And it's interesting when you try to look through different visions of the future, of how rarely you see positive visions of the future. And these range from, things like, embodied in stuff like Cormac McCarthy's The Road, a novel and a movie, to "Mad Max," and all these other films about a collapsed world where the biosphere is severely degraded, and humanity in on the way out, and there people are just struggling to survive. In another sense you have this, with the widespread exception of the Anthropocene, there's been an idea we're living on engineered Earth, and these futures often downplay the fact of how much we have transformed the planet, but how much we rely upon the biosphere to keep our civilization functioning, which is absolutely essential.

And we need to, in this sense, have more futures that try and think about both how humanity can better fit with the biosphere, and what could it look like if the world didn't collapse? …I think as more sustainability scientists, and as people on the planet we need to think about what are ways that we can imagine desirable social-ecological futures?

One of them is that the Anthropocene challenges us to think about there needs to be new ways of thinking about global social integration, because if the world has become a social-ecological system, our webs of global trade, migration are radically changing the planet. And we need to think about the ways in which all the difference in the world can be done to support the biosphere that underpins all our wealth and well-being.

Solution Thinking: I think a good place to start, or my place to start, is to think about the basic definition of sustainable development, which is generally, something to do with that we need prosperity, there's an economy that exists within some kind of society, where we need to have fairness, and this is supported by the biosphere, which needs to be sustainable.

Prosperity: we're now richer as a planet than we've ever been before. People live longer, people are higher educated, and this development is broad-based around the world. However, we're also hugely unequal.

So there's a lot of latent capacity. I believe there's a lot of evidence for having a good Anthropocene, but the challenges, how do we reach this? And I think we need to have more integrated research that tries to better unite these three, sort of pillars of the Anthropocene, of trying to have more fair -- think about how fairness, prosperity, and sustainability can reinforce one another.

We need to think more about also resilience, that we have to be planning for surprise, maintaining diversity, and keeping our capacity to self-organize to enable us to experiment our ways towards a better Anthropocene because no one knows what that exactly will look like. And I think it's also very much we need to kind of keep thinking in these -- we need to have these visions of the world, and I think it's important to look to literature, film, and art to get inspiration to move towards a more beautiful and fun world, not just something that provides income and opportunity to people, but is really an inspiring place to move towards, to enable our transition towards a better Anthropocene.

Overall - Visions of a better Future:

Try and imagine in fiction, in film, in all sorts of visual representations: what would a world that's probably going to be warmer, has different animals in it, and has different amounts of nutrients flowing through it, what kind of world would, could that be? Not would it be, but could it be. And what kind of world would you like it to be that we think we can achieve? And what are kind of things that people can do to work towards this?

And I think there's no way we're going to get a blueprint, but by having a diversity of visions from different perspectives; from Asia, from indigenous perspectives, from urban perspectives, from rural perspectives; we can work towards a vision of a better future.

*In the Anthropocene, the world is shaped by human action, and because human action is based upon people's worldview it is important to articulate what future they expect.*

Lecture 5: Making the case for the Anthropocene

“Nature in the twenty-first century will be a nature that we make; the question is the degree to which this molding will be intentional or unintentional, desirable or undesirable”  -Daniel Botkin, Ecologist

The recognition that humanity is now a force of change at the planetary scale, the evidence that we're putting exponential and never seen before levels of pressure on the planet is probably the most important message from science to humanity.

if we recognize that we are in the driving seat of changing, and defining the conditions for world development, it also profoundly shifts our attention in terms of economic growth, in terms of social well-being, in terms of development.

So many scientists argue that the Anthropocene in fact starts, and as the onset, with the invention of agriculture eight thousand years back. But then we have the very important evidence that up until very recently all these changes that have occurred for thousands of years had very little impact on the Earth system as a whole. And this graph summarizes all those pressures and shows that it's not until we enter the last hundred years, from the 1900s onwards, fifty years into the larger, let's say going to scale with our Industrial Revolution, that we start seeing the curves bending upwards. This to me is an argument, which many scientists share, that the onset of Anthropocene in fact is more recent. From the Great Acceleration in the 1950s.

Overall: But the conclusion is actually not subject to very large uncertainty, I would argue. Whether it started eight thousand years back, or 16^th of July 1945, or in the mid-1950s, the evidence is overwhelmingly clear that we as humanity today constitute the overriding force of change on planet Earth superseding the pace and magnitude of the natural changes, which have occurred over the past millions and billions of years, but today the change is in pace and magnitude unprecedented. And this is the Anthropocene.

And whether we like it or not we now have the opportunity to take responsibility in Anthropocene, and attempt to navigate this into what we could call a good Anthropocene, allowing ourselves for sustainable development within a safe operating space.

-Example of use of the three pillars of the good Anthropocene- https://youtu.be/DX6Uidpg3VM