The Anthropocene is perceived as a new geological era, succeeding the Holocene, a discrete age in which human beings have affected the world. Some scientists suggest it dates from the beginning of agriculture and human management of the land; some from the inception of the Industrial Revolution, which began to pump exponentially greater quantities of carbon into the atmosphere. And some source it to the middle of the last century: the dawn of a new nuclear age and the start of the 'Great Acceleration', which has witnessed an exponential increase in the exploitation of resources and extinction of species. Indeed, in her recent book, The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert notes that the legacy of our own species's brief reign on the planet will be a stratum the thickness of a cigarette paper.
The Anthropocene has become a fashionable term. Earlier this year I spoke at a conference in Sydney, 'Encountering the Anthropocene', which drew together scientists, historians, writers, artists and filmmakers - a motley crew whose disparity underlined the all-encompassing appeal of the new term. Such studies of the Anthropocene offer a neat blurring of the distinctions that have grown up between the arts and sciences - a schism that is mirrored in our disastrous separation from the natural world.
Gaia Vince is not only well named but also well placed to write about this subject. As a former news editor at Nature, she has contributed to a prestigious magazine which, since its first publication in 1869, has documented the changing patterns of the natural world and, perhaps more importantly, the impact of humans on that world. Vince's ambitious and provocative book aims to take snapshots of hot spots of Anthropocene action: from Nepal to the Maldives, from Peru to Kenya. She arranges her chapters by geographical feature - 'Atmosphere', 'Mountains', 'Rivers', 'Oceans' - prefacing each with deft, if gloomy summaries of the ecological state-of-play in these areas, before launching into on-the-ground reports. Hers is a journalistic account, in magazine style, as she talks to geo-engineers, conservationists and activists: the people dealing with the direct effects of climate change and other global-scale depredations. Like other recent books in the field - George Monbiot's Feral and Callum Roberts's Ocean of Life - Adventures in the Anthropocene lays out the bad news baldly, in order to jerk us out of our complacency. Bare, brutal statistics show how we have turned the planet into a 'super organism', tailored to sustain our expanding, exploiting species.
Some 40 per cent of the earth's ice-free land mass is now intensively farmed to produce food. Only 12 per cent of its rivers run freely to the seas. Nearly one billion people go hungry every day; 1.5 billion are overweight or obese. Each year, more than 300,000 sea birds die on fishing lines and 100 million sharks are killed. Every square kilometre of sea contains 18,500 pieces of floating plastic. Only 1 per cent of the world's urban population are breathing air clean enough to meet EU standards according to a 2007 report by the World Bank (the Chinese government, fearing social unrest, redacted it on publication).
These are the facts we hear every day, yet we seem inured to their impact. In the wake of last February's storms, I took a train ride across Suffolk and into Essex. The land around the tracks was flooded, it was an almost apocalyptic scene, yet my fellow passengers barely gave the inundation - and the devastation that it represented to both the wildlife and the human managers of the land - a second glance. It felt like a glimpse of the future: a drastically changed world, greeted with a weary shrug of the shoulders.
by Philip Hoare, Literary Review | Read more:
Image: uncredited
The Anthropocene has become a fashionable term. Earlier this year I spoke at a conference in Sydney, 'Encountering the Anthropocene', which drew together scientists, historians, writers, artists and filmmakers - a motley crew whose disparity underlined the all-encompassing appeal of the new term. Such studies of the Anthropocene offer a neat blurring of the distinctions that have grown up between the arts and sciences - a schism that is mirrored in our disastrous separation from the natural world.Gaia Vince is not only well named but also well placed to write about this subject. As a former news editor at Nature, she has contributed to a prestigious magazine which, since its first publication in 1869, has documented the changing patterns of the natural world and, perhaps more importantly, the impact of humans on that world. Vince's ambitious and provocative book aims to take snapshots of hot spots of Anthropocene action: from Nepal to the Maldives, from Peru to Kenya. She arranges her chapters by geographical feature - 'Atmosphere', 'Mountains', 'Rivers', 'Oceans' - prefacing each with deft, if gloomy summaries of the ecological state-of-play in these areas, before launching into on-the-ground reports. Hers is a journalistic account, in magazine style, as she talks to geo-engineers, conservationists and activists: the people dealing with the direct effects of climate change and other global-scale depredations. Like other recent books in the field - George Monbiot's Feral and Callum Roberts's Ocean of Life - Adventures in the Anthropocene lays out the bad news baldly, in order to jerk us out of our complacency. Bare, brutal statistics show how we have turned the planet into a 'super organism', tailored to sustain our expanding, exploiting species.
Some 40 per cent of the earth's ice-free land mass is now intensively farmed to produce food. Only 12 per cent of its rivers run freely to the seas. Nearly one billion people go hungry every day; 1.5 billion are overweight or obese. Each year, more than 300,000 sea birds die on fishing lines and 100 million sharks are killed. Every square kilometre of sea contains 18,500 pieces of floating plastic. Only 1 per cent of the world's urban population are breathing air clean enough to meet EU standards according to a 2007 report by the World Bank (the Chinese government, fearing social unrest, redacted it on publication).
These are the facts we hear every day, yet we seem inured to their impact. In the wake of last February's storms, I took a train ride across Suffolk and into Essex. The land around the tracks was flooded, it was an almost apocalyptic scene, yet my fellow passengers barely gave the inundation - and the devastation that it represented to both the wildlife and the human managers of the land - a second glance. It felt like a glimpse of the future: a drastically changed world, greeted with a weary shrug of the shoulders.
by Philip Hoare, Literary Review | Read more:
Image: uncredited
