Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
and the oceans and by elevating continents (Condie 1997)—or that generate vol-
canic eruptions and earthquakes. Earthquakes are the worst natural catastrophes
in terms of casualties: between 1970 and 2005 they killed nearly 900,000 people
(Swiss Reinsurance Company 2006), and the actual total was almost certainly
over one million because the toll of China's Tangshan earthquake of July 28, 1976,
was put as high as 655,000 people rather than the ofi cial admission of 242,219
casualties (Huixian et al. 2002). On a time scale of millennia there are also the
nontrivial threats of collisions with large asteroids, events that surely (and cata-
strophically) do not i t the concept of nature embedded within human systems
(Smil 2008).
As far as the naming of geological epochs goes, I would argue for a more detached
appraisal. The average duration of the six elapsed epochs of the Cenozoic era (from
the Paleocene to the beginning of the Holocene) was more than 10 million years,
the last two, the Pliocene and Pleistocene, each lasted nearly three million years, and
we are now just over 10,000 years into the Holocene. Does it make sense, consider-
ing these time scales, to rush into singling out an epoch that has lasted, so far, at
best 8,000 but perhaps only 200 years? Would not it be prudent to wait at least
another 10,000 years before we make more solidly founded judgments about the
adaptability and hence longevity of human civilizations? Only an unreconstructed
fan of anything-goes science i ction could feel certain that modern civilization, with
its extraordinarily high energy and resource demands, will be around for 10,000
years. Or, to address both the anthrome and Anthropocene matters in a single simple
judgment: in order to acknowledge the obvious reality, namely, a high degree of
human interference in various biospheric processes, there is no need to make exces-
sive and highly arguable claims.
What Next?
Global population growth, a key driver of future demand for phytomass, reached
its relative peak (at just over 2%/year) during the 1960s, and the absolute annual
addition peaked at nearly 90 million people a year during the late 1980s (Smil 1998).
Most long-range forecasts have envisaged a comparatively modest increase before
an eventual stabilization, but the most recent UN projections changed their fertility
assumptions and assume continuous growth past the 10 billion mark during the
twenty-i rst century (UN 2011). In any case, there is an enormous potential for
increases in per capita consumption throughout the modernizing world, and that
growth may lead to very large gains (even to a doubling) of currently consumed
