A sociometabolic reading of the Anthropocene: Modes of subsistence, population size and human impact on Earth (original) (raw)
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The Anthropocene by the Numbers: A Quantitative Snapshot of Humanity's Influence on the Planet
2021
The presence and action of humans on Earth has exerted a strong influence on the evolution of the planet over the past ≈ 10,000 years, the consequences of which are now becoming broadly evident. Despite a deluge of tightly-focused and necessarily technical studies exploring each facet of “human impacts” on the planet, their integration into a complete picture of the human-Earth system lags far behind. Here, we quantify twelve dimensionless ratios which put the magnitude of human impacts in context, comparing the magnitude of anthropogenic processes to their natural analogues. These ratios capture the extent to which humans alter the terrestrial surface, hydrosphere, biosphere, atmosphere, and biogeochemistry of Earth. In almost all twelve cases, the impact of human processes rivals or exceeds their natural counterparts. The values and corresponding uncertainties for these impacts at global and regional resolution are drawn from the primary scientific literature, governmental and int...
Nature Communications Earth & Environment, 2020
Growth in fundamental drivers—energy use, economic productivity and population—can provide quantitative indications of the proposed boundary between the Holocene Epoch and the Anthropocene. Human energy expenditure in the Anthropocene, ~22 zetajoules (ZJ), exceeds that across the prior 11,700 years of the Holocene (~14.6 ZJ), largely through combustion of fossil fuels. The global warming effect during the Anthropocene is more than an order of magnitude greater still. Global human population, their productivity and energy consumption, and most changes impacting the global environment, are highly correlated. This extraordinary outburst of consumption and productivity demonstrates how the Earth System has departed from its Holocene state since ~1950 CE, forcing abrupt physical, chemical and biological changes to the Earth’s stratigraphic record that can be used to justify the proposal for naming a new epoch—the Anthropocene.
Revolutions in energy input and material cycling in Earth history and human history
Earth System Dynamics, 2016
Major revolutions in energy capture have occurred in both Earth and human history, with each transition resulting in higher energy input, altered material cycles and major consequences for the internal organization of the respective systems. In Earth history, we identify the origin of anoxygenic photosynthesis, the origin of oxygenic photosynthesis, and land colonization by eukaryotic photosynthesizers as step changes in free energy input to the biosphere. In human history we focus on the Palaeolithic use of fire, the Neolithic revolution to farming, and the Industrial revolution as step changes in free energy input to human societies. In each case we try to quantify the resulting increase in energy input, and discuss the consequences for material cycling and for biological and social organization. For most of human history, energy use by humans was but a tiny fraction of the overall energy input to the biosphere, as would be expected for any heterotrophic species. However, the industrial revolution gave humans the capacity to push energy inputs towards planetary scales and by the end of the 20th century human energy use had reached a magnitude comparable to the biosphere. By distinguishing world regions and income brackets we show the unequal distribution in energy and material use among contemporary humans. Looking ahead, a prospective sustainability revolution will require scaling up new renewable and decarbonized energy technologies and the development of much more efficient material recycling systems-thus creating a more autotrophic social metabolism. Such a transition must also anticipate a level of social organization that can implement the changes in energy input and material cycling without losing the large achievements in standard of living and individual liberation associated with industrial societies.
'Anthropocene' a new Tool for Understanding of human generate backlash of Nature.
The most recent epoch, the Holocene, has been a period of relative environmental stability, allowing humans to develop agriculture and establish settlements, culminating in modern civilization. Human activities have now reached such a scale that we are having significant impacts on planetary systems, and these effects are of sufficient magnitude to Within a human lifetime, the face of Earth has been transformed. Cities now dominate the landscape, and even if people disappeared tomorrow, cities would remain one of the Anthropocene’s most visible and enduring legacies.In 1950, only 29% of people lived in cities. Today more than half do, and that proportion is expected to reach 70% by 2050. Recently, urban growth has shifted from Europe and South America to Asia and Africa. Asia’s urban population is growing faster than that anywhere else. It passed the billion mark in 1990, and is expected to reach 3.4 billion by 2025. In the next couple of decades, more than 275 million people are projected to move into India’s enormous city centres. In Africa, meanwhile, only 40% live in cities, but this is changing fast.This frenetic urban growth is a big cause of environmental change. It drives loss of agricultural land, changes in temperature and the loss of biodiversity. Cities consume two-thirds of the world’s total energy and account for more than 70% of all energy-related carbon dioxide emissions. But people living in cities often have low carbon emissions because of efficient public transport systems and the fact that people often live closer to their work. Neither climatic nor biogeochemical stability is likely to continue in the Anthropocene, and the Earth systems we rely on to provide a liveable environment for human society are likely to become much less predictable. The stability of our infrastructure, the reliability of our production systems and the liveability of our cities will all be much less certain in the future. More research on the diverse aspects of global change will certainly help to improve predictions on the timing and extent of changes, but will not alter the basic conclusion that global change is upon us.
AnthropoceneAr.pdf Towards a better understanding of the Anthropocene
(1) Results of analysis of new sets of anthropogenic data are presented. They confirm earlier results of similar analyses. The expected and inevitable massive deceleration of human-induced global change process is demonstrated as an ongoing phenomenon. Human activities and impacts on the Earth System, while in general remaining strong, are now systematically slowing down. (2) It is now clearly stated, by supporters of the concept of the Great Acceleration, that the so-called Great Acceleration is not acceleration and that this term is open to misinterpretation. (3) There was no systematic sharp increase in anthropogenic growth trajectories around 1950 CE (Common Era) or around any other recent time. (4) Close inspection of data suggests that the Anthropocene is not a geological epoch, but a historical event, also reflected as a geological event. (5) The Anthropocene has no convincingly determinable beginning. What is described as the Anthropocene appears to be an integral part of a long process transcending the Pleistocene and Holocene epochs, a natural continuation of the past developments of human interaction with nature. (6) Using the concept of the Jinji unconformity, the embryonic beginning of human (hominid) interaction with the environment could be placed at the time of the first use of stone tools millions of years ago. Gradually the intensity of this interaction was increasing and culminated monotonically in an event described as the Anthropocene.
From nature-dominated to human-dominated environmental changes
Quaternary Science Reviews, 2000
To what extent is it realistic and useful to view human history as a sequence of changes from highly vulnerable societies of hunters and gatherers through periods with less vulnerable, well bu!ered and highly productive agrarian-urban societies to a world with regions of extreme overpopulation and overuse of life support systems, so that vulnerability to climatic-environmental changes and extreme events is again increasing? This question cannot be fully answered in our present state of knowledge, but at least we can try to illustrate, with three case studies from di!erent continents, time periods and ecosystems, some fundamental changes in the relationship between natural processes and human activities that occur, as we pass from a nature-dominated to a human dominated environment. 1. Early-mid Holocene: Nature dominated environment * human adaptation, mitigation, and migration. In the central Andes, the Holocene climate changed from humid (10,800}8000 BP) to extreme arid (8000}3600 BP) conditions. Over the same period, prehistoric hunting communities adopted a more sedentary pattern of resource use by settling close to the few perennial water bodies, where they began the process of domesticating camelids around 5000 BP and irrigation from about 3100 BP. 2. Historical period: An agrarian society in transition from an **enduring++ to an innovative human response. Detailed documentary evidence from Western Europe may be used to reconstruct quite precisely the impacts of climatic variations on agrarian societies. The period considered spans a major transition from an apparently passive response to the vagaries of the environment during the 16th century to an active and innovative attitude from the onset of the agrarian revolution in the late 18th century through to the present day. The associated changes in technology and in agricultural practices helped to create a society better able to survive the impact of climatic extremes. 3. The present day: A human dominated environment with increasing vulnerability of societies and economies to extreme events and natural variability. The third example, dealing with the history and impact of #oods in Bangladesh, shows the increasing vulnerability of an over-exploited and human-dominated ecosystem. Measurements exist for a short time only (decades), historical data allow a prolongation of the record into the last century, and paleo-research provides the long-term record of processes operating over millennia. The long-term paleo-perspective is essential for a better understanding of future potential impacts on an increasingly human-dominated environment. Understanding today's global change processes calls for several new perspectives and synergisms: E the integration of biophysically oriented climate change research with research about the increasingly dominant processes of human forcing, E a focus on overexploited or limited natural resources and on vulnerable and critical regions, E fuller use of our understanding of variability on a range of di!erent timescales:`The present without a past has no futurea. 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.
Tracking the anthropogenic drivers of ecological impacts
Ambio, 2004
Despite the pivotal role human factors (anthropogenic drivers) are presumed to play in global environmental change, substantial uncertainties and contradictory conclusions about them continue. We attempt to further discipline the human factors issue by estimating the effects of two anthropogenic drivers, population and affluence, on a wide variety of global environmental impacts, including greenhouse gas emissions, emissions of ozone depleting substances, and the ecological footprint. Population proportionately increases all types of impacts examined. Affluence typically increases impacts, but the specific effect depends on the type of impact. These findings refocus attention on population and material affluence as principal threats to sustainability and challenge predictions of an ameliorating effect of rising affluence on impacts.