Howard Burton - Embracing the Anthropocene: Managing Human Impact: A Conversation with Mark Maslin

Contemporary physicists like to invoke something called the Copernican principle, named after the 16th-century Polish astronomer who famously upended our self-important and largely unquestioned assumption that everything revolved around us. The modern version goes considerably further than anything Copernicus had in mind: rather than replacing the Earth with the sun at the privileged position in the centre of things, todays cosmologists believe that there is, in fact, no centre at allif things appear uniformly spread out from our vantage point then its safe to conclude that it looks that way from every vantage point because theres nothing particularly special about ours. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, this general outlook is also sometimes called the mediocrity principle, which urges people to assume that, unless we have some clear reason to suspect otherwise, any given scenario is as likely as another; and so there is nothing terribly unique about our own situation.

As a way of deliberately ridding ourselves of the many human-centred biases that distort our perceptions there is much to recommend this approach, and its generally regarded that this steady determination to take humans out of the picture is directly responsible for the remarkable scientific and technological progress weve enjoyed over the past few hundred years.

But now might well be the right time to consider putting humans back in again, with many opting to describe our current geological epoch as the Anthropocene given the highly significant impact of humans on the planet.

As Mark Maslin puts it:

For the last 500 years, the fairly constant scientific message has been that individual humans are tiny and insignificant: its a big, dangerous, nasty universe out there, and were just one small part of nature that has evolved.

However, the Anthropocene says, Well, hang on; were actually the most important thing on this planet, which is the only planet where we know life exists in the whole universe; and we control its destiny.

Mark, a geographer at University College London whose research spans climate change, human evolution, and global development, is clearly not saying this merely to improve our collective self-esteem, but rather to impress upon us the frightening power that we, as a species, now possess.

This prompts us to ask, OK, then: what sort of future do we want for this planet?

People are now starting to talk about bad Anthropocene and good Anthropocenecontemplating different possible futures that we collectively can imagine for the future: whether as custodians of the planet we make sure that we keep everything as nice as possible for all of uswhich means that we actually look after all of us and the planetor do we just have business as usual and keep going as we are because, well, thats just what we do. For me, then, the big thing is that weve now hit that choice of which direction to go.

But in order to move forward to do that, its worth recognizing that many need to be convinced that the concept of the Anthropocene makes sense at all.

As it happens, Mark is a specialist on the Anthropocene, not only through his professional ability to fully appreciate the detailed scientific evidence for how the Earths climate has changed over decades, centuries and millennia, but also because, as weve seen above, he recognizes the potential impact of that term: if the Anthropocene is going to really grab our attention, in other words, it should mean more than just humans are currently influencing things.

Which is why he has spent considerable time and effort in putting forward a clear position of when we should say that such an epoch actually began.

There are a number of ages that have been suggested, and theres even a discussion whether you need an actual proper geological marker in time, or whether you can just make up an age.

Simon Lewis and I wrote this big review paper in Nature about it. We argue that you have to stick to the geology, because if you dont stick to the geological definitions then youre basically just playing politics. So you have to go back to the fundamental science.

We found in reviewing everything, all the different possible dates, that there were three.

Those three are:

1. About 5,000 years ago when the cumulative impact of agriculture began to be noted in the CO and methane geological record.
2. Around 1610.
3. In the 1950s, during the so-called Great Acceleration when significantly increased levels of CO began being injected into the atmosphere.

Mark and his colleagues opt for 1610. Why 1610?

What you find is that there is a dip in the CO record about 1610. And the reason for that is due to the European colonization of the Americas. By doing that, what they did was start to exchange organisms from the new world and the old world.

So you have this huge swapping of organisms, which is irreversible. Unfortunately, we also bought over smallpox, measles and typhus to the Americas. And present estimates suggest that 50 million people died in the Americas.

And the result of that human catastrophe was that the rainforest and the savanna grew back. And as it grew back, it took CO out of the atmosphere, so much so that you can see in the ice core record that CO globally dropped.

That is why we argue that this was the start because if we all disappear now, that exchange of creatures is permanent in the record.

And now Marks point becomes clear: the Anthropocene should properly begin not only when we can clearly establish human impacts on the planet, but when such impacts have irrevocably changed the course of Earths biological and geographical trajectory. That is what it means to be, as he urges us to recognize, a geological superpower.

The impacts of being a geological superpower certain include climate change (and how to address it), but also many other extremely important issues that a single-minded focus on climate change might have missed.

For me, this is why even the discussion of the Anthropocene is really important.

Climate scientists have become louder and much more insistent over the last 25 years about climate change because they felt that nobodys listening. So they keep pushing and pushing and pushing.