“The Anthropocene: A Multidisciplinary Approach” By Julia Adeney Thomas / Mark Williams / Jan Zalasiewicz
Confronting the Reality of a Planet in Crisis
The age when we could take hope and pride in being members of the human species has passed. We are not an exceptional species standing at the center of the world, free to determine our own destiny. Instead, we have become like parasites, drawing excessive amounts of energy from the biosphere while destroying the very environment on which our survival depends.
This book confronts readers with the stark reality of the “Anthropocene,” drawing on an enormous body of academic evidence and a wide range of scholarly debates. Since the term was proposed by atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen in 2000, the Anthropocene has been extensively examined by geologists around the world. It describes an unprecedented condition in Earth’s 4.5-billion-year history: for the first time, a single species has come to exert a significant influence on the functioning of the Earth system. Sometimes described as human disturbance, this phenomenon is widely recognized within the scientific community. Since the mid-twentieth century, indicators of human activity—including urban population, energy use, the number of large dams, water use, fertilizer consumption, and transportation—have risen sharply alongside Earth-system indicators such as carbon dioxide and methane concentrations, ocean acidification, surface temperatures, fish catches, and the loss of tropical forests and the terrestrial biosphere.
Yet these changes, collectively known as the “Great Acceleration,” are difficult to perceive in our everyday lives. This book gives material form to the otherwise elusive reality of the Anthropocene. It begins with an overview of geological history, showing just how recent a phenomenon the Anthropocene is. The total mass of human-made objects, for example, is estimated to have reached 30 trillion tons—enough, if spread across the Earth’s surface, to cover every square meter with a layer of material several tens of centimeters thick and weighing 50 kilograms.
The changes the Anthropocene demands of humanity must also be understood through debates in the humanities and economics. The historian Dipesh Chakrabarty points to the difficulty of accepting that human beings are both actors within nature and beings who are themselves part of nature. Responding to this reality requires political systems capable of ensuring a fair distribution of resources, as well as individual efforts to reduce carbon emissions and support the health of ecosystems. Humanity is now living through a transition: from the human-centered timescales to which we are accustomed toward attunement with the “deep time” of the Earth system.Translated by Michinobu Ka. (¥3,850)
