“Man has too long forgotten that the Earth was given to him for usufruct alone, not for consumption, still less for profligate waste”. –
Man and Nature, G.P. Marsh, 1864
By the end of the 19th century, there was already growing awareness that mankind’s interaction with the environment was changing the substance of the planet itself. The accusations and blame cast by the American politician and ecology pioneer George Perkins Marsh in his famous 1864 book
Man and Nature reveals the author’s strong preoccupation with the large-scale changes effected by mankind on the physical world. For example, he denounced the re-routing of rivers due to the consequences of erosion and sedimentation and sharply criticized deforestation of broad areas only to make room for agriculture and farming.
These changes were so deep that they were even changing the local climate.
Marsh underscores just how dangerous mankind’s recklessness is, to want to manipulate and control everything around them, and highlights that any great operation aimed at changing the surrounding environment (and thereby destroying the natural equilibrium that characterizes it) should always be evaluated with extreme caution – especially if dictated by pure economic interest.
At the time, Marsh’s accusations contributed to making American citizens realize the sheer magnitude of the environmental damage that human activities were causing, and
awakened the need for a more respectful and conscious behavior towards Nature. The strength of these feelings led to the creation of many protected areas and Natural Parks as well as the first political movements for the protection of environmental resources.
Not a long time has gone by since then. On a geological scale, 150 years are a blink of an eye, if not less. Nevertheless, the natural world became more and more unfamiliar to us, until it has turned, in some cases, into a complete stranger.
The unfamiliarity that nowadays we feel towards Nature, its equilibriums and its dynamics, goes hand in hand with the great, fast and uncontrolled use we make of its same resources. Mankind is no longer interconnected with the natural world, he actually takes it for
granted, sees it as superfluous, as something that has always been there and always will, so there’s no need to care for it.
For 2.0 humans, Nature is “that green thing” that today we experience only in a few occasions, such as weekend excursions to Natural Parks and Reserves, or through TV documentaries. That’s because that same nature, that once used to surround us, has been transformed by humans themselves into kilometers of treeless lands devoid of animals, dedicated instead to intensive agriculture and farming, housing and factories. Unfortunately,
the man of today considers the environment not so much as their home, a place to discover real experiences and where to get back in contact with their true self, but as an exploitable resource. Yet if on one side he admires Nature, seeking it, perhaps inspired by famous excursions and documentaries, on the other side he doesn’t seem to realize that it’s exactly the same Nature he destroys everyday.
In 2002, the Nobel Prize winning chemist Paul Crutzen reintroduced to the world the concept of “Anthropocene,” a term first used in the 1800s to define a new age of the Earth’s history: a period of time during which the planet’s processes were being deeply modified by mankind.
Indeed, now the human influence can be readily seen in the climate, on lands, oceans and the biosphere. According to Crutzen, mankind has caused changes to the Earth so deep that the Anthropocene can be identified as a
new geological era.
To better understand this, according to the Geological Time Scale, Earth’s history can be divided into eons, eras, periods and ages, a bit like human time can be divided into years, centuries and millenniums. Each of these terrestrial phases is characterized by clear events, such as extinctions visible in layers of rock that geologists can read like a book. This is called the
geological record.
Fortunately, the Anthropocene era is not yet clearly visible in the layers of rock that we just mentioned. For the time being, the effects can be perceived especially on the political, economic and social spheres. However, given the deep changes that mankind is causing to the biosphere, they will surely be seen on a geological level too in the near future.
Should mankind stop building and altering the environment, Nature would take back ownership in a few decades. However, even if traces of human mega-constructions (such as a metropolis) wouldn’t be preserved in the geological record, geologist J. Zalasiewicz states that
our chemical traces would surely remain: the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere started a chain of events that has modified the very substance of some environments themselves. For example, oceans have become more acidic and face an increase in temperature, which is the reason why some organisms that inhabit them, like corals and plankton, are decreasing if not dying, further impoverishing the base of the food chain. This phenomenon of acidification, already by itself, may be causing such devastating changes in the marine ecosystem (with such a remarkable decline of its biodiversity), that it may be evident in the geological record in the future.
It’s a complex topic, difficult to understand, starting from the concept of the Anthropocene itself. Indeed,
when we talk about the Anthropocene, we don’t refer to the environment, landscapes, ecosystems, pollution, or waste only. Rather,
we refer to human activity as a whole, which has consequences on the Earth System that are tangible and distinguishable from its natural cycles. The key to understanding this concept is that human activity doesn’t limit itself to have an impact on the environment or the landscape, but it makes mankind a “force of Nature” capable of altering natural cycles themselves, meaning the basic functioning of the Planet.
This is where Earth System Science comes into action. This field aims at tracing and defining these changes that involve all of the Planet’s components (C. Hamilton, 2015). In this case, the Planet is finally seen as a
system whose parts are deeply interconnected, and not just as a combination of many separate independent elements. Because of this complexity and this deep interconnection, but also, at times, because of the slowness of these changes, or of the manifestation of their consequences, often the topic of the Anthropocene seems distant, unclear and complicated. It’s hard but necessary to accept this new reality: that the world is literally changing before our eyes.
To put it simply, leaving the scientific aspect aside and considering our daily lives, it would be enough to think that
everything that surrounds us is part of a great circle, in which each alteration manifests changes in the short and long term and where each action has a consequence, however slowly it may show.
In this case, as geology and the Anthropocene theory demonstrate, the lifestyle that we acquire with this completely
unsustainable economic system is already having
extremely negative and alarming repercussions on the Planet and, consequently, on us: repercussions that were hypothesized at the beginning of the twentieth century but that are now tangible. So it becomes clear that
the velocity and scale of our exploitation of Earth’s (finite) resources is having such a huge and negative impact that the time has come to stop and ask what life, health and perspective we have, or better, we want, for our incredibly near future. By Angela Castagna
Bibliography
- G.P. Marsh, 1864. Man and Nature
- J. Zalasiewicz, 2011. The Anthropocene: a new epoch of geological time?
- C. Hamilton, 2015. Getting the Anthropocene so wrong
