RESILIENCE IN THE ANTHROPOCENE - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 45

RESILIENCE IN THE ANTHROPOCENE
A biography
Libby Robin
Anthropocene anxiety in the new millennium
As we entered the present millennium, there was a new anxiety, something much
bigger than a mere calendar moment, something more than the growing concern
about global warming which had been gathering pace since the greenhouse summer
of 1988 (Hulme, 2013). Paul Crutzen, a Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric
chemist, felt it keenly. He wanted to capture the collective insights of the physical
and biological Earth sciences that indicated that the planet was changing fast in all
sorts of ways. All of the changes were being induced or 'forced' by human activities.
Crutzen proposed that the Earth had entered a new geological epoch, the
Anthropocene, where humanity is now a global force changing biological and
physical Earth systems (Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000).
Since his initial proposal, Crutzen's Anthropocene has figured prominently in
discussions of environmental change. There are three broad areas of debate: the
first is in the geological and stratigraphic science community about whether the
changes justify the end of the Holocene epoch, the last of the current series, and
the beginning of a new one. Geological epochs are usually indicated by stratigraphic
layers in rocks, but the Anthropocene is as much about the acidity of oceans, the
presence of greenhouse gases in the air and changing ecologies, so it requires
technical ways to establish equivalence with earlier epochs (Zalasiewicz et al ., 2011).
The second area of Anthropocene debate is around the crucial historical question:
when did it begin? (Robin, 2013). The third area is raised by the adoption of the
Anthropocene as an heuristic device. Scholars of many persuasions well beyond
geology are considering anew the place of humanity on earth. From the notion
that humans are themselves invasive species, to the question of how humans might
adapt to planetary responses to historical changes, the Anthropocene gathers
together a range of new experts and new planetary discourses.