Introduction - Environmental Transformations - page 1

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CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

Geography in the Anthropocene

Welcome to the Anthropocene. It's a new
geological era, so take a look around. A
single species is in charge of the planet,
altering its features almost at will. And what
[is] more natural than to name this new era
after the top of the range anthropoid,
ourselves? (Pearce, 2007: 58).

environmental shift of geological proportions (see
Crutzen, 2002; see also Steffen et al, 2007) . 1 A t the
heart of Crutzen's argument was his belief that
humans had collectively become a force of nature.
For Crutzen, what marked humans out as a force,
at least, equivalent to nature were two key
processes: 1) the range of different ways in
which humans had transformed the environment;
and 2) the ways in which these transformations
were increasingly expressed at a planetary level.
The Anthropocene is thus marked, according to
Crutzen, by 'greenhouse gases' reaching their
highest levels for 400,000 years; the increasing
power of humans to regulate and control the
flow of water through dam-building and sluice
constructions; global industries releasing some
160 million tonnes of sulphur dioxide into the
atmosphere each year; increasing levels of oceanic
exploitation by the fisheries industry; rising rates
of artificial fertilizer application to soils; and the
increasingly high extraction of minerals and
aggregates from the Earth's crust through mining.
This topic is premised on the fact that the
Anthropocene appears to require a change in
the ways in which we study environmental
transformations. Studying the deep times of other
geological eras and epochs has required scientific
skills that can capture and interpret the hidden
records of environmental history (including fossils,
rock samples and sediment cores). Studying the
Anthropocene is, however, a real-time project

1.1 MEME OR GEOLOGICAL
EPOCH: INTRODUCING THE
ANTHROPOCENE
It is, I must admit, unusual for an academic
conference to produce a new geological epoch. But
this is, in a sense, precisely what happened when
the eminent Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric
chemist Paul Crutzen announced the arrival of
the Anthropocene. While attending a scientific
conference, Paul Crutzen described suddenly
feeling uneasy about a fellow delegate's use of the
term Holocene (Pearce, 2007: 58). The Holocene
is a geological term used by environmental
scientists to denote the warmer, inter-glacial
period in which we now live (the Holocene began
approximately 12,000 years ago, or around 10000
BCE ). For Crutzen, however, the rapid and
extensive nature of global environmental change
over more recent history made the Holocene seem
like an out-dated marker. In a short article he
would later write in the journal Nature , Crutzen
explained why he felt we had experienced an