Adventures in the Anthropocene. Gaia Vince
enormous impacts we’re having on our living planet in the Anthropocene are a direct consequence of the immense social changes we’re undergoing – changes to how we live as a species. We now support a massive global population, but we have not simply multiplied the number of small hunter-gatherer communities. More than half of the world’s people now live in cities – artificial constructs of densely packed, purpose-built living spaces, which act as giant factories consuming the planet’s plants, animals, water, rocks and mineral resources. Humanity operates on an industrial scale, and has needs – currently, eighteen terawatts of the energy at any time, 9 trillion cubic metres of fresh water per year and 40% of the global land area for food. It has become a super-organism, a creature of the Anthropocene, a product of industrialisation, population expansion, globalisation and the revolution in communications technology. The intelligence, creativity and sociability of this humanity super-organism is compiled from the linked-up accumulation of all the human brains, including those from the past who have left a cultural and intellectual legacy, and also the artificial minds of our technological inventions, such as computer programs and information libraries like Wikipedia. Humanity is a global network of civilisations with a stream of knowledge already being channelled for human protection. And, just as a cloud of starlings suddenly flips direction en masse, it is difficult to predict humanity’s behaviour. Although humanity is an enormous planetary force, our super-organism can be steered by individuals and its behaviour can be shaped by the societies within it – and the solutions are often to be found at the local level. We are essentially a conglomeration of chemicals that recycle other chemicals and the biosphere is capable of supporting 10 billion of us. The difficulty is doing so within social and environmental constraints.
The self-awareness that comes with recognising our power as a planetary force also demands we question our new role. Are we just another part of nature, doing what nature does: reproducing to the limits of environmental capacity, after which we will suffer a population crash? Or are we the first species capable of self-determination, able to modulate our natural urges, our impacts and our environment, such that we can maintain habitability on this planet into the future? And what of our relationship to the rest of the biosphere? Should we treat it – as every other species does – as an exploitable resource to be plundered mercilessly for our pleasures and needs, or does our new global power imbue us with a sense of responsibility over the rest of the natural world? Our future will be defined by how we reconcile these two opposing, interwoven forces.
There comes a time in a child’s life when they first realise that the food they enjoy – the meat they eat – comes from an animal. That the lovely fluffy mammal they pet is also food. Some children become vegetarian and refuse to eat meat again. Most do not. At this moment in our history, we are like children, realising that the things we enjoy in life, that we depend upon, from energy to water to consumables, all come with environmental and social consequences that affect us. How we struggle to resolve this issue will determine the trajectory of the Anthropocene for years to come.
We are pioneers in this era, but we have a superior understanding of science, excellent communication and connectivity that breeds collaborative thinking. In the post-natural era of the Anthropocene, we will have to either preserve nature or master its tricks artificially. I wanted to find out how, and that would mean leaving my desk in London.
Just as latitude and longitude tell you all and yet nothing about a place, so the abstract numbers and graphs produced by scientists seemed to be telling me nothing about the new world we are living in. What’s more, there is no other field of science in which the academic findings are so contested by society. People often hold extreme views on solutions to the problems of the Anthropocene – many even question established scientific fact. I was intrigued and I knew that I wanted to explore our planet at such a significant time in its history. It seemed to me that the most important people I hadn’t heard from were the human guinea pigs of this new epoch – those who are already experiencing this changed world – and I wanted to see how they were coping. I wanted to delve behind the headlines, the barrage of statistics, computer models, the tit-for-tat arguments between green campaigners and corporations, the shock-doctrines and tired slogans. I wanted to investigate the truth for myself by looking at the situation on the ground, talking in person to the human players of this epoch, seeing with my own eyes the reality of our Anthropocene.
I decided to leave my job in London and set off on a quest: to explore the globe at a crucial moment in its living history, at the beginning of this extraordinary new human age. I looked at how people are learning to undertake nature’s tasks. I found people creating artificial glaciers to irrigate their crops, building artificial coral reefs to shore up their islands, and artificial trees to clean the air. I met people who are trying to preserve important remnants of the natural world in the Anthropocene, and those trying to recreate the old world in new places. And I met people who are looking at ways to resolve the conundrum: to find a way for 10 billion people to live in greater comfort, with enough food, water and energy; and yet at the same time, reduce our impact on the natural world and its ability to carry out the processes we rely on.
As I travelled through our changing planet, I looked at the world we are creating and wondered what sort of Anthropocene we want. Will we learn to love the new nature we make, or mourn the old? Will we embrace living efficiently or will we spread out over newly ice-free lands? Will we eat new foods, plant new crops, raise new animals? Will we make space for wildlife in this human world? I experienced the Anthropocene from different perspectives and met the pioneers who are negotiating a development path through the complexity of our shared biosphere. This book is a journey around our new world, a series of stories about remarkable people living in extraordinary times. It’s the story of ingenious inventions, incredible landscapes and about how we have come to own Gaia for better or for worse.
As humanity faces its biggest challenge in 10,000 years, I set out to discover whether our species will survive, and how.
Earth’s Great Aerial Ocean, the churning sky of gases that gravity hugs to the planet, is the breath of life that ignites this unique speck of the universe. Breathe in, breathe out: the atmosphere is vital to life on Earth. It is an organ of the living biosphere – a great pulsating body that recycles the breathable air, regulates the temperature and climate, and protects us from the hazardous meteors and deadly cosmic and ultraviolet rays of space.
The atmosphere extends for an indivisible one hundred kilometres, and is invisible except through its meteorological moods that reveal clouds of water vapour or falling snow, electric flashes of lightning or the blush of a sunset.
The swirling currents of Earth’s aerial and terrestrial oceans interact to create our planet’s many weathers and different climates, and these dictate the conditions for life. Perhaps the most significant of these global weathers is the Hadley Cell, a pattern of hot moist air that dumps reliable rains on the lush equatorial belt, generating the planet’s highly biodiverse tropical rainforests and swamps, while leaving parched deserts to the immediate north and south. The impact of this system can be seen from space as a sharp delineation of green to brown.
But life on Earth also dictates the atmospheric condition and its weathers. The world’s first atmosphere was hydrogen and water vapour – it took around 2 billion years for the gas of life, oxygen, to pervade the air, courtesy of the early photosynthesisers. Those ancient blue-green algae, which survive today as unremarkable-looking stromatolites, used energy from the sun to make sugars from carbon dioxide, in the process releasing oxygen as a waste product.
The continual breathing of Earth’s living organisms, from tiny ants to massive trees, depletes the atmosphere’s oxygen and replaces it with carbon dioxide and water vapour. During daylight hours, especially in the summer, this respiratory exchange is offset by the photosynthesis of the world’s terrestrial and oceanic forests of trees and algae. The various feedbacks between biota and air have created an atmosphere of roughly 78% nitrogen and 21% oxygen with the remainder being