The Economist -- The Anthropocene

A man-made world
Science is recognising humans as a geological force to be reckoned with
26 May 2011 from the print edition


THE here and now are defined by astronomy and geology. Astronomy takes care of the here: a planet orbiting a yellow star embedded in one of the spiral arms of the Milky Way, a galaxy that is itself part of the Virgo supercluster, one of millions of similarly vast entities dotted through the sky. Geology deals with the now: the 10,000-year-old Holocene epoch, a peculiarly stable and clement part of the Quaternary period, a time distinguished by regular shifts into and out of ice ages. The Quaternary forms part of the 65m-year Cenozoic era, distinguished by the opening of the North Atlantic, the rise of the Himalayas, and the widespread presence of mammals and flowering plants. This era in turn marks the most recent part of the Phanerozoic aeon, the 540m-year chunk of the Earth’s history wherein rocks with fossils of complex organisms can be found. The regularity of celestial clockwork and the solid probity of rock give these co-ordinates a reassuring constancy.

Now there is a movement afoot to change humanity’s co-ordinates. In 2000 Paul Crutzen, an eminent atmospheric chemist, realised he no longer believed he was living in the Holocene. He was living in some other age, one shaped primarily by people. From their trawlers scraping the floors of the seas to their dams impounding sediment by the gigatonne, from their stripping of forests to their irrigation of farms, from their mile-deep mines to their melting of glaciers, humans were bringing about an age of planetary change. With a colleague, Eugene Stoermer, Dr Crutzen suggested this age be called the Anthropocene—“the recent age of man”.

The term has slowly picked up steam, both within the sciences (the International Commission on Stratigraphy, ultimate adjudicator of the geological time scale, is taking a formal interest) and beyond. This May statements on the environment by concerned Nobel laureates and the Pontifical Academy of Sciences both made prominent use of the term, capitalising on the way in which it dramatises the sheer scale of human activity.
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The advent of the Anthropocene promises more, though, than a scientific nicety or a new way of grabbing the eco-jaded public’s attention. The term “paradigm shift” is bandied around with promiscuous ease. But for the natural sciences to make human activity central to its conception of the world, rather than a distraction, would mark such a shift for real. For centuries, science has progressed by making people peripheral. In the 16th century Nicolaus Copernicus moved the Earth from its privileged position at the centre of the universe. In the 18th James Hutton opened up depths of geological time that dwarf the narrow now. In the 19th Charles Darwin fitted humans onto a single twig of the evolving tree of life. As Simon Lewis, an ecologist at the University of Leeds, points out, embracing the Anthropocene as an idea means reversing this trend. It means treating humans not as insignificant observers of the natural world but as central to its workings, elemental in their force.

Sous la plage, les pavés

The most common way of distinguishing periods of geological time is by means of the fossils they contain. On this basis picking out the Anthropocene in the rocks of days to come will be pretty easy. Cities will make particularly distinctive fossils. A city on a fast-sinking river delta (and fast-sinking deltas, undermined by the pumping of groundwater and starved of sediment by dams upstream, are common Anthropocene environments) could spend millions of years buried and still, when eventually uncovered, reveal through its crushed structures and weird mixtures of materials that it is unlike anything else in the geological record.

The fossils of living creatures will be distinctive, too. Geologists define periods through assemblages of fossil life reliably found together. One of the characteristic markers of the Anthropocene will be the widespread remains of organisms that humans use, or that have adapted to life in a human-dominated world. According to studies by Erle Ellis, an ecologist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, the vast majority of ecosystems on the planet now reflect the presence of people. There are, for instance, more trees on farms than in wild forests. And these anthropogenic biomes are spread about the planet in a way that the ecological arrangements of the prehuman world were not. The fossil record of the Anthropocene will thus show a planetary ecosystem homogenised through domestication.

More sinisterly, there are the fossils that will not be found. Although it is not yet inevitable, scientists warn that if current trends of habitat loss continue, exacerbated by the effects of climate change, there could be an imminent and dramatic number of extinctions before long.

All these things would show future geologists that humans had been present. But though they might be diagnostic of the time in which humans lived, they would not necessarily show that those humans shaped their time in the way that people pushing the idea of the Anthropocene want to argue. The strong claim of those announcing the recent dawning of the age of man is that humans are not just spreading over the planet, but are changing the way it works.

Such workings are the province of Earth-system science, which sees the planet not just as a set of places, or as the subject of a history, but also as a system of forces, flows and feedbacks that act upon each other. This system can behave in distinctive and counterintuitive ways, including sometimes flipping suddenly from one state to another. To an Earth-system scientist the difference between the Quaternary period (which includes the Holocene) and the Neogene, which came before it, is not just what was living where, or what the sea level was; it is that in the Neogene the climate stayed stable whereas in the Quaternary it swung in and out of a series of ice ages. The Earth worked differently in the two periods.

The clearest evidence for the system working differently in the Anthropocene comes from the recycling systems on which life depends for various crucial elements. In the past couple of centuries people have released quantities of fossil carbon that the planet took hundreds of millions of years to store away. This has given them a commanding role in the planet’s carbon cycle.

Although the natural fluxes of carbon dioxide into and out of the atmosphere are still more than ten times larger than the amount that humans put in every year by burning fossil fuels, the human addition matters disproportionately because it unbalances those natural flows. As Mr Micawber wisely pointed out, a small change in income can, in the absence of a compensating change in outlays, have a disastrous effect. The result of putting more carbon into the atmosphere than can be taken out of it is a warmer climate, a melting Arctic, higher sea levels, improvements in the photosynthetic efficiency of many plants, an intensification of the hydrologic cycle of evaporation and precipitation, and new ocean chemistry.

All of these have knock-on effects both on people and on the processes of the planet. More rain means more weathering of mountains. More efficient photosynthesis means less evaporation from croplands. And the changes in ocean chemistry are the sort of thing that can be expected to have a direct effect on the geological record if carbon levels rise far enough.

At a recent meeting of the Geological Society of London that was devoted to thinking about the Anthropocene and its geological record, Toby Tyrrell of the University of Southampton pointed out that pale carbonate sediments—limestones, chalks and the like—cannot be laid down below what is called a “carbonate compensation depth”. And changes in chemistry brought about by the fossil-fuel carbon now accumulating in the ocean will raise the carbonate compensation depth, rather as a warmer atmosphere raises the snowline on mountains. Some ocean floors which are shallow enough for carbonates to precipitate out as sediment in current conditions will be out of the game when the compensation depth has risen, like ski resorts too low on a warming alp. New carbonates will no longer be laid down. Old ones will dissolve. This change in patterns of deep-ocean sedimentation will result in a curious, dark band of carbonate-free rock—rather like that which is seen in sediments from the Palaeocene-Eocene thermal maximum, an episode of severe greenhouse warming brought on by the release of pent-up carbon 56m years ago.

The fix is in

No Dickensian insights are necessary to appreciate the scale of human intervention in the nitrogen cycle. One crucial part of this cycle—the fixing of pure nitrogen from the atmosphere into useful nitrogen-containing chemicals—depends more or less entirely on living things (lightning helps a bit). And the living things doing most of that work are now people (see chart). By adding industrial clout to the efforts of the microbes that used to do the job single-handed, humans have increased the annual amount of nitrogen fixed on land by more than 150%. Some of this is accidental. Burning fossil fuels tends to oxidise nitrogen at the same time. The majority is done on purpose, mostly to make fertilisers. This has a variety of unwholesome consequences, most importantly the increasing number of coastal “dead zones” caused by algal blooms feeding on fertiliser-rich run-off waters.

Industrial nitrogen’s greatest environmental impact, though, is to increase the number of people. Although nitrogen fixation is not just a gift of life—it has been estimated that 100m people were killed by explosives made with industrially fixed nitrogen in the 20th century’s wars—its net effect has been to allow a huge growth in population. About 40% of the nitrogen in the protein that humans eat today got into that food by way of artificial fertiliser. There would be nowhere near as many people doing all sorts of other things to the planet if humans had not sped the nitrogen cycle up.

It is also worth noting that unlike many of humanity’s other effects on the planet, the remaking of the nitrogen cycle was deliberate. In the late 19th century scientists diagnosed a shortage of nitrogen as a planet-wide problem. Knowing that natural processes would not improve the supply, they invented an artificial one, the Haber process, that could make up the difference. It was, says Mark Sutton of the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Edinburgh, the first serious human attempt at geoengineering the planet to bring about a desired goal. The scale of its success outstripped the imaginings of its instigators. So did the scale of its unintended consequences.

For many of those promoting the idea of the Anthropocene, further geoengineering may now be in order, this time on the carbon front. Left to themselves, carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere are expected to remain high for 1,000 years—more, if emissions continue to go up through this century. It is increasingly common to hear climate scientists arguing that this means things should not be left to themselves—that the goal of the 21st century should be not just to stop the amount of carbon in the atmosphere increasing, but to start actively decreasing it. This might be done in part by growing forests (see article) and enriching soils, but it might also need more high-tech interventions, such as burning newly grown plant matter in power stations and pumping the resulting carbon dioxide into aquifers below the surface, or scrubbing the air with newly contrived chemical-engineering plants, or intervening in ocean chemistry in ways that would increase the sea’s appetite for the air’s carbon.

To think of deliberately interfering in the Earth system will undoubtedly be alarming to some. But so will an Anthropocene deprived of such deliberation. A way to try and split the difference has been propounded by a group of Earth-system scientists inspired by (and including) Dr Crutzen under the banner of “planetary boundaries”. The planetary-boundaries group, which published a sort of manifesto in 2009, argues for increased restraint and, where necessary, direct intervention aimed at bringing all sorts of things in the Earth system, from the alkalinity of the oceans to the rate of phosphate run-off from the land, close to the conditions pertaining in the Holocene. Carbon-dioxide levels, the researchers recommend, should be brought back from whatever they peak at to a level a little higher than the Holocene’s and a little lower than today’s.

The idea behind this precautionary approach is not simply that things were good the way they were. It is that the further the Earth system gets from the stable conditions of the Holocene, the more likely it is to slip into a whole new state and change itself yet further.
You maniacs! You blew it up!

The Earth’s history shows that the planet can indeed tip from one state to another, amplifying the sometimes modest changes which trigger the transition. The nightmare would be a flip to some permanently altered state much further from the Holocene than things are today: a hotter world with much less productive oceans, for example. Such things cannot be ruled out. On the other hand, the invocation of poorly defined tipping points is a well worn rhetorical trick for stirring the fears of people unperturbed by current, relatively modest, changes.

In general, the goal of staying at or returning close to Holocene conditions seems judicious. It remains to be seen if it is practical. The Holocene never supported a civilisation of 10 billion reasonably rich people, as the Anthropocene must seek to do, and there is no proof that such a population can fit into a planetary pot so circumscribed. So it may be that a “good Anthropocene”, stable and productive for humans and other species they rely on, is one in which some aspects of the Earth system’s behaviour are lastingly changed. For example, the Holocene would, without human intervention, have eventually come to an end in a new ice age. Keeping the Anthropocene free of ice ages will probably strike most people as a good idea.

Dreams of a smart planet

That is an extreme example, though. No new ice age is due for some millennia to come. Nevertheless, to see the Anthropocene as a blip that can be minimised, and from which the planet, and its people, can simply revert to the status quo, may be to underestimate the sheer scale of what is going on.

Take energy. At the moment the amount of energy people use is part of what makes the Anthropocene problematic, because of the carbon dioxide given off. That problem will not be solved soon enough to avert significant climate change unless the Earth system is a lot less prone to climate change than most scientists think. But that does not mean it will not be solved at all. And some of the zero-carbon energy systems that solve it—continent- scale electric grids distributing solar energy collected in deserts, perhaps, or advanced nuclear power of some sort—could, in time, be scaled up to provide much more energy than today’s power systems do. As much as 100 clean terawatts, compared to today’s dirty 15TW, is not inconceivable for the 22nd century. That would mean humanity was producing roughly as much useful energy as all the world’s photosynthesis combined.

In a fascinating recent book, “Revolutions that Made the Earth”, Timothy Lenton and Andrew Watson, Earth-system scientists at the universities of Exeter and East Anglia respectively, argue that large changes in the amount of energy available to the biosphere have, in the past, always marked large transitions in the way the world works. They have a particular interest in the jumps in the level of atmospheric oxygen seen about 2.4 billion years ago and 600m years ago. Because oxygen is a particularly good way of getting energy out of organic matter (if it weren’t, there would be no point in breathing) these shifts increased sharply the amount of energy available to the Earth’s living things. That may well be why both of those jumps seem to be associated with subsequent evolutionary leaps—the advent of complex cells, in the first place, and of large animals, in the second. Though the details of those links are hazy, there is no doubt that in their aftermath the rules by which the Earth system operated had changed.

The growing availability of solar or nuclear energy over the coming centuries could mark the greatest new energy resource since the second of those planetary oxidations, 600m years ago—a change in the same class as the greatest the Earth system has ever seen. Dr Lenton (who is also one of the creators of the planetary-boundaries concept) and Dr Watson suggest that energy might be used to change the hydrologic cycle with massive desalination equipment, or to speed up the carbon cycle by drawing down atmospheric carbon dioxide, or to drive new recycling systems devoted to tin and copper and the many other metals as vital to industrial life as carbon and nitrogen are to living tissue. Better to embrace the Anthropocene’s potential as a revolution in the way the Earth system works, they argue, than to try to retreat onto a low-impact path that runs the risk of global immiseration.

Such a choice is possible because of the most fundamental change in Earth history that the Anthropocene marks: the emergence of a form of intelligence that allows new ways of being to be imagined and, through co-operation and innovation, to be achieved. The lessons of science, from Copernicus to Darwin, encourage people to dismiss such special pleading. So do all manner of cultural warnings, from the hubris around which Greek tragedies are built to the lamentation of King David’s preacher: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity…the Earth abideth for ever…and there is no new thing under the sun.” But the lamentation of vanity can be false modesty. On a planetary scale, intelligence is something genuinely new and powerful. Through the domestication of plants and animals intelligence has remade the living environment. Through industry it has disrupted the key biogeochemical cycles. For good or ill, it will do yet more.

It may seem nonsense to think of the (probably sceptical) intelligence with which you interpret these words as something on a par with plate tectonics or photosynthesis. But dam by dam, mine by mine, farm by farm and city by city it is remaking the Earth before your eyes.

The New Era of Attraction

There will new a mew magazine called "Succeed" featuring Bob Procter. It looks like he will be coaching leaders of the environmental movement, just as I hoped!

The guru of The Law of Attraction, Bob Proctor, believes our leaders are missing the point when it comes to climate change and other problems facing the world's six billion-plus inhabitants.

"The current problems we have in the world are the results of ignorance; we need to elevate our awareness so that change comes for the better. Increase our awareness and things will change," says Proctor.

Proctor says the law of attraction is always working – always – so what mankind is experiencing is the result of what mankind attracts to it and at the moment it's ignorance. "Leaders are like most people – they may be brilliant in one area but ignorant in another. Just because they are a leader doesn't mean they know anything," says Proctor.

"Look at the history of global warming – global warming has been around for decades and some
people such as Al Gore (former US Presidential contender) were warning us about it 10 years ago
and only now are people starting to listen and
respect him.

Proctor says whenever someone or something new comes along it is standard human behaviour to mock – new technology, new music, new thinking are challenges to our accepted sense of how we are, so in many cases it's easier to be ignorant rather than embrace new thinking, or at least consider it. "If someone is enlightened in a certain area we tend to laugh at them because we don't understand them.
At the moment our awareness as a race of people is
in the wrong place," says Proctor.

Bob Proctor has been teaching these messages for more than 30 years. He has built a multi-million dollar business spanning the globe based around the principals of the psychology of wealth creation and happiness.

The Law of Attraction features strongly in his teachings because he believes that people attract to them the things and relationships they are most aware of. We don't need a great education or genetic makeup to succeed.

This Law works in strange ways, for example, if a person is worried about debt it is most likely that their awareness is constantly on debt and thereby creating negative emotions and propelling the person into more debt. What they are really saying is 'give me more debt'.

The solution here is for the person to change their awareness to wealth and abundance and not just be a little aware – they need to believe, ask and be prepared to receive. They also need to take action because "nature hates a vacuum."

Proctor believes in paradigms. We are all programmed or conditioned from a very early age to believe in and expect the things and outcomes that we do. This is a limiting set of beliefs that inhibits creativity and act as a self-imposed prison to a person's potential and capacity in all areas of life.

"Some people lack the awareness to create or be happy and are controlled by what is going on around them and this starts in school," says Proctor.

"The report card controls what we think – it tells us if we are a good or bad person but what it really tells us is what we were like for a brief period of time several weeks before.

"People are learning and a global shift is happening. The Secret is impacting upon the entire world and
the fact that is has such an impact is a symptom that the world was ready for this type of information,"
he concludes.

Bob Proctor's paradigm
No more effort or energy is required in order to aim high in life, to demand abundance and prosperity, than is required to accept misery and poverty. The difference between the two lies in your level of awareness.

The information I'm about to share with you is extremely powerful and, in many cases, could set you free from the constraints that keep you from realising your full potential, and freedom to all of the good you desire.

Yet you cannot be free until you know exactly what it is that governs, shapes, and directs your behaviour and ultimately, your results. If you're not careful, your thinking and results can be controlled by your paradigms.

Paradigms are your mindsets. They are your ideas; the little habits that your brain has developed over the years. The 'operating system' on which your mental processes run.

Your paradigms create the prism through which most people view and make sense of the world around them. Information is presented to your mind in one-way or another. Your mind runs through all of the things it already knows about that piece of information and figures out where it fits in with the bigger picture. Your mind then makes a determination whether the information is good or bad, desirable or undesirable, possible or not — all of which can be influenced by your existing paradigms.
Like most things, paradigms in and of themselves are neutral. If your paradigms are positive, you will have a happy, growth-oriented life, a healthy self-image, and the ability to adapt successfully to changes, upsets and unforeseen events.

Conversely, negative, limiting paradigms can keep you stuck in old ways of thinking that can be very limiting. Negative paradigms keep you as imprisoned as do a cell and a set of iron bars. Maybe even more so, since it imprisons you in the place where all true freedom resides: the mind. It follows, then, that if you want to create change in your life and start getting new and different results—you have to change your paradigms.

How do you go about that?
Step One: Write down one thing -- that goal, dream, challenge that you have not yet resolved in your life. The subconscious mind thrives on detail, so describe it to yourself as vividly as you can.

Step Two: Write down every association that you connect to this thing: everything you think about it, good and bad, everything that the thought of it brings to your mind. One approach I have found extremely effective is to 'map' it in much the same way writers come up with plot concepts.

Draw a circle around the words or sentence you came up with in Step One. Then, in the space around that circle, write down your associations as they come to you, encircling each one and connecting it with a line to the original encircled goal. When you feel like you've come up with a substantial number of associations, take a good look at what your mind has shown you.

Step Three: It's time to address your paradigms and ask 'why?' I suggest that you zero in on a few of the most powerful paradigms, the ones that have the biggest negative impact.

Ask yourself, "Why do I think this? Where does it come from? Where did I get such an idea?" Keep on digging until you've exhausted every possible scenario. And finally, now that you know what your paradigm is on any given topic, create an affirmation that will assist you in re-programming your mind, something that is the opposite of your paradigm.

For example, if your paradigm is you'll never earn a lot of money, your affirmation might be: I am so happy and grateful now that money comes to me on a continual basis through multiple sources of income. I am a magnet to money; I now have all that I want.

Write your affirmation on a 3x5 card and repeat it daily, as many times as possible. In time, you'll begin to notice yourself thinking and acting in a different way. And, just when you think you've got it, it will be time to work on another paradigm!

Timing is
Everything

When coaching teams and individuals I'm often asked 'Why do some people achieve so much while I struggle just to get by?' The latest psychological research into personal productivity and time management shows that the mindsets we apply can pay big dividends in how much we accomplish. In fact, they are far more important than the number of hours we invest in any given task.

Here are 7 Taylor-Made Champion Mindsets that will help you increase personal effectiveness in your personal and professional life. The more mindsets you adopt, the more automatic and effortless time management will become for you.

1. The 'GO FOR IT' MINDSET!
In your job, do you consciously seek ways to challenge yourself and stretch your skills? If you're a terrific time manager, you probably answered 'yes'. Working
at your 'cutting edge' and finding ways to extend yourself increases productivity and willingness to manage time effectively. (It increases your value in
the job market, too!)

2. The 'WANT TO' not 'HAVE TO' MINDSET!
Do you tackle tasks at work because you want to or because you have to? Most people agree that approaching something from a 'have to' point of view results in an unwilling attitude, lack of satisfaction and a mediocre outcome. It also leads to procrastination and poor time management.

3. The 'CAN DO' MINDSET!
Do you expect the best of yourself, for yourself, and from everyone around you? Unless you believe you have what it takes, you'll never improve time management or achieve the things you want to achieve. Set high standards; 'expect the best' is a good motto to adopt.
4. The 'PRESENT' MINDSET!
Do you ever feel in a rut with your job; that it's just the same old thing, day after day? 'We've always done it this way' thinking leads us to just go through the motions in a rigid and automatic way. And it's very easy to burn out when we face the same old problems without solutions.

Terrific time managers don't get into ruts. That's because they're mindful that there can be multiple solutions to almost anything. They keep thoughts, words, deeds and mental pictures sharply focused on what they intend to achieve. This prevents burnout and leads to better time management. Keep looking for better, easier, more efficient ways to achieve results. Ask yourself 'How can I streamline this? How can I add more value'?

5. The 'WELLNESS' MINDSET!
If we feel energetic, we're more likely to have a go at tasks that, if we're tired, might overwhelm us. This is important, because it's not the tasks we've completed that make us tired or wake us up at 2 am; it's worrying about the tasks we haven't done!
Exercise boosts stamina, strength and suppleness, and reduces stress. It also increases self-confidence and self-esteem, improves your mood and, as a result, you can achieve more. Experiment to find the level of exercise that makes you feel physically and psychologically 'raring to go'. This is the 'WELLNESS' mindset.

6. The 'GOAL GETTER' MINDSET!
Do you routinely establish both long- and short-term goals for your business? Do you have a business plan? Study after study has found that goal setting – more than any other technique (including pay rises!) – increases productivity in terms of both quality and quantity. Setting explicit, worthwhile goals can help you accomplish anything. Short-term goals make long-term goals seem more realistic and achievable. They're also easier to meet, so start by breaking your large, long-term goals into weekly and daily goals. Create daily or weekly 'To Do' lists and use them as a guide to manage your time.

7. The 'TAKE RESPONSIBILITY' MINDSET!
Who's driving your bus? Are you calling the shots? Poor time managers are often obsessed with being busy. But if this is unfocused it can lead to poor goal achievement and low productivity. Don't let your environment or other people dictate your activities.
It's a recipe for stress. Know your priorities – anything that moves you closer to your goals – and work to them. The more you control your environment, the more you'll achieve.

Blogger Direct-Action Day: The Environment and Sustainability

To celebrate blogger action day, here is a random clip about how the media mistreats Britney Spears:
All jokes aside, politicians and world leaders should embrace public policies which are environmentally sustainable. Public intellectual David Suzuki depicts a bleak picture for humanity's future if we don't adapt: