Welcome to the Anthropocene
Watch human and urban life evolve in this 3-minute journey through the last 250 years of our history, starting at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
What is Next Nature?
With our attempts to cultivate nature, humankind causes the rising of a next nature, which is wild and unpredictable as ever. Wild systems, genetic surprises, autonomous machinery and splendidly beautiful black flowers. Nature changes along with us.
Posts Tagged ‘Anthropocene’
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The Medea Hypothesis: Is Life on Earth Suicidal?
At Next Nature, we often argue that “our image of nature as static, balanced and harmonious is naive and up for reconsideration.” Paleontologist Peter J. Ward happens to agree. In a challenge to the Gaia hypothesis, which holds that all life functions as nurturing, super-organismal “mother”, Ward argues that life on earth has a death wish that would do Freud proud.
Ward claims that, contrary to popular images of cataclysmic asteroids and volcanoes, most mass extinctions on earth were set in motion by microbes. 2.4 billion years ago, microscopic cyanobacteria emerged newly equipped with photosynthesis and triggered the Great Oxygenation Event. While great for aerobic organisms, it was fatal news for anaerobic life, which had up until then had free reign over the planet. The sudden release of oxygen is also likely what set off the Huronian Glaciation, a deadly “snowball earth” that kept the planet locked in ice for 300 million years.
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Urban Heat Causes Trees to Grow Faster
The high temperatures of urban environments causes trees to grow faster in the city than in rural areas. Researchers at Columbia’s Earth Institute have discovered this by planting seedlings of the American red oak in four sites from Central Park to the foot of the Catskill Mountains.
Cities are hotter because buildings, streets and other urban structures absorb more solar energy during the day, and radiate that energy at night. This causes a difference in temperature between the city and rural areas in the New York area, with an average difference of 2.4 degrees during the day and an average minimum of 4.6 degrees at night. Cities also have greater atmospheric nitrogen and CO2 concentrations, which are vital for plant growth.
By August, the city seedlings had developed a biomass eight times that of the non-urban trees. Besides their fast growth, the city grown trees also developed bigger leaves, giving them a greater photosynthetic area. Urban trees allocated proportionately less mass to roots, an important carbon sink, than did rural trees.
Since urbanization is happening everywhere at a rapid pace, this adaption of our trees and plants to city life may have an impact on urban forest management and climate change discussions.
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Humans Caused Mass Extinctions Before There Were Even Humans
Humans and other hominids have a reputation for bringing about mass extinctions. Homo erectus has been blamed for the disappearance of many African carnivores, our ancestors likely caused the Pleistocene extinctions, and modern humans are currently embroiled in the midst of the sixth great extinction event.
New evidence indicates that hominids have been causing significant extinctions far earlier than ever thought. Australopithecus afarensis, of Lucy fame, has been implicated in the disappearance of 23 species of carnivores that prowled Africa around 2 million years ago. Omnivores and small to mid-sized carnivores all bowed out at the same time tool-using A. afarensis showed up, leaving only hyper-specialized carnivores such as lions and hyenas.
Lars Werdelin, of the Swedish Museum of Natural History, theorizes that Australopithecines were such efficient scavengers that they knocked out any species that relied on part-time carcass theft. Groups of A. afarensis with stone tools likely were enough to scare away civets or large, predatory otters that competed for meat. This finding is all the more the remarkable becuase Australopithecines’ brains and bodies were only slighter larger than those of modern chimpanzees. Human-style social living and tool use, it seems, have made us top competitors from the beginning.
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Man-Made Coral Reefs
Last week I had the pleasure of being the studio guest at the Earth Beat radio show. I was treated with examples of ‘artificial nature’ and asked to respond from a Next Nature perspective. Among them where these amazing underwater sculptures, created by Jason de Caires Taylor as a man-made coral reef to provide a habitat for sea-life and distract snorkelers from the vulnerable coral reefs elsewhere.
Listen to the entire Earth beat broadcast (mp3).
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Magnifiying the Universe
Warning: playing with the interactive infographic created by Number Sleuth may result in profound feelings of modesty and insignificance.
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Rotund Rats, Fat Cats and Chubby Chimps
It’s nothing new that humanity is getting chubbier by the day. What’s surprising is that we’re bringing our animals along for the ride. A meta-analysis of animal weight has revealed that, over the last several decades, creatures as diverse as feral rats and laboratory primates have been getting fatter.
For some of the species in the study, these trends have obvious causes. Dogs and cats are moving less and watching more tv, just like their owners. ‘Synanthropes’, animals like pigeons and rats that live in association with human communities, are thriving on dumpsters filled with our calorie-dense discards. Without natural predators keep them on their toes, it makes sense that city rats living on fatty, sugary foods will turn into the rodent equivalents of Howard Taft.
It’s harder to explain weight gain in lab animals. Creatures used in research settings like chimpanzees, macaques and vervets all live in controlled environments where they’re insulted from the charms of Krispy Kreme and HBO. These zaftig animals typify the complex state of obesity science. One day obesity is reducible to maxims – “eat less, exercise more” – while the next it balloons outwards to encompass hidden factors like viruses, thrifty genes, drifty genes, and chemical obesogens.
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Watch Out Whales, Humans Want Your Krill
Krill, those tiny members of the ocean’s planktonic community, have an importance disproportionate to their size. They are a vital food for whales, penguins and increasingly, humans. Demand for krill-based animal feed and 0mega-3 fatty acids is leading to a “gold rush” in the Southern Ocean off Antarctica.
Harvesting krill is the outcome of a decades-long trend of “fishing down the food web“. After humans decimated large oceanic organisms like tuna and swordfish, global fisheries have turned to smaller and less desirable species. Lobster, for instance, was once fed to prisoners, while cod was once so plentiful it was used as fertilizer. Now, fisheries are increasingly snapping up ‘bait fish’ like anchovies, mackerel and menhaden. The fact that commercial fishermen are now turning to krill, even jellyfish, indicates we may be scooping up the last and least tasty fish in the sea.
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The Sound of Silence? An Aircraft Engine.
Silence is a thing of the past. Just as no place has been left untouched by climate change, there is no place on earth that is not ‘polluted’ by the sounds of planes, ships, and cars. In Alaska’s Denali State Park, as true a ‘wilderness’ as any other, the sound of an airplane engine can be heard around 80 times each day. In the ocean, marine mammals fight to be heard above the sound of and military sonar and ships’ propellers. Whales and dolphins that live on shipping lanes exhibit elevated stress hormones. Songbirds, such as these robins, have adapted to sing louder to compete with traffic, or have switched to singing at night when the human population is asleep.
The last of the auditory wilderness disappeared in 1949. Scientists are now concerned that the sounds animals rely on for survival – the skitter of a prey species hidden in its burrow, the snaps and croaks of a coral reef – are being drowned out in the cacophony of the Anthropocene.
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“That Was Then. This is Now”
The wunderkammer – the traditional repository of natural history curiosities and cultural relics – has been updated by the Center for PostNatural History in Pittsburgh, which opened the doors of its new museum this month. A curated microcosm populated by plant and animal specimens modified by man, this is the first synthetic history museum dedicated to documenting our Age of Anthropocene.
The museum’s curator, artist Richard Pell, has been painstakingly collecting examples of the ‘PostNatural’: “living organisms that have been altered through processes such as selective breeding or genetic engineering”. These organisms are not archived (unless accidentally, as Rich discovered) in natural history collections. Are genetically engineered Glo-Fish, Roundup-Ready maize and ‘biosteel’ goats post-natural organisms from the branches of the Synthetic Kingdom, or does their ‘true’ nature remain preserved?
Pell’s research has taken him on quite a journey through the living (and taxidermied) kingdoms, from the archives of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History to dealings with Monsanto. Through the PostNatural taxonomy, the collection raises vital questions of intellectual property, genetic modification, scientific objectivity and as Pell describes in this interview, how we cannot forget that “the project of science is never divorced from the cultural context”.
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Will Eugenics Become an Acceptable Strategy to Avoid Climate Change?
Climate change is one of the biggest challenges of today and various scenarios, ranging from artificial trees, pollution trading, co2 capturing to geo-engineering, have been proposed to cope with planetary heating. Most of these existing strategies, however, focus on the altering our environment, but as global warming is inflicted by people, why not start at the root of the issue and change humanity itself to cope with climate change?
Recently New York University bioethics professor S Matthew Liao published a paper (PDF) in Ethics, Policy and the Environment arguing that one way to tackle the challenges of a rise in energy use is to modify humanity to simply use less energy.
The researchers argue biomedical modifications of humans so that they can reduce and/or adapt to climate change is potentially less risky than geo-engineering. They suggests a range of ways to achieve this, from creating an aversion to meat by giving diners a mild intolerance to it, to using gene therapy to create smaller children.
Although eugenics, the deliberate “improvement” of the genetic composition of people, has been in disfavor since its mid-20th century association with Nazi Germany, the researchers argue it “deserves further consideration in the debate about climate change”. Apparently radical problems require radical measures? Certainly next nature causes more next nature.
Via Wired. Download the entire paper (PDF)
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Christian Schwägerl – Riding the Anthropocene
Christian Schwägerl, biologist, correspondent for Der Spiegel and writer of the book Menschenzeit, introduces us into the Anthropocene, a geologic term that marks the significant global impact of human activities on the Earth’s ecosystems.
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Slavoj Žižek abandons Nature
The always excellent VPRO Tegenlight made an interview with Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek in which he talks about the ongoing ecological crisis and concludes that Nature doesn’t exist, at least not as the balanced and harmonic force we traditionally take it for.
Of course our faithful readers – yes thats you! – already long know that Nature is better understood as a dynamic force that changes along with us. Even so it is an illuminating joy to hear Žižek express it in his own eccentric words.
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Welcome to Earth, Number 7,000,000,000!
Today marks another milestone in the march of the Anthropocene. According to United Nations demographers, the seven billionth person on Earth arrived today, just in time to put on a tiny halloween costume (might we suggest an adorably endangered tuna?). It’s taken just 12 years to add the last billion people, and even with slowing birth rates, it will still take us only 14 years to add another billion more.
What does the burgeoning population of Homo sapiens mean for our overloaded planet? Learn more about the global effects of the Anthropocene here and here. If you’re in the Amsterdam area on November 5th, Christian Schwägerl will be giving a talk on the “Age of Man” at the Next Nature Power Show.
Image via Looking to Business.
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The Earth on Loan
Christian Schwägerl is a correspondent for Der Spiegel and the author of Menschenzeit (The Age of Man). He will be presenting his views on the Anthropocene at the Next Nature Power Show on November 5th. Learn more about the Anthropocene here.
We move mountains, make islands, create life, and call up lolcats at whim from the greatest storehouse of human knowledge ever compiled. Yet we can’t seem to control the economy.
In a recent opinion piece at Yale Environment 360, journalist and author Christian Schwägerl argues that the financial collapse and the environmental collapse stem from the same mistakes of human foresight. The financial crisis was triggered by a pass-the-buck thinking, with blindly optimistic (or darkly cynical) reliance on proliferating loans that no one ever expected to pay back. The problem only became apparent when there were no more suckers left to exploit. We ran the economy down to its lowest trophic level, and that’s exactly what we’re doing with the global ecology as well.
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Poaching from the New Savannah
The Ipswich Museum, the Tring Museum, and around 30 other European cultural institutions and antiques dealers have experienced a rash of theft over the last few months. What turns an everyday crime into next natural poaching is the strange selectivity of these thieves. Despite having a selection of priceless artifacts to choose from, the robbers have only targeted rhinoceros horn.
A coveted commodity in Chinese Traditional Medicine, powdered rhinoceros horn is worth around €68,000 a kilo: twice the value of gold. Rhino horns are made of the same material as hooves and fingernails, and have the same lack of actual medical effectiveness. Authorities are urging museums, auction houses, and taxidermists to lock away their horns, and replace any horns on display with fake ones. Naturalis Museum in Rotterdam recently moved all of their rhino collection to a secure, secret location.
Wild rhinos have become so scarce that poachers must turn to long-dead, taxidermied specimens for their crimes. In the case of the Ipswich Museum, Rosie the Rhino was last shuffling around India sometime in the late 1800s. We already know that the supermarket is the new savanna. Who would have guessed that the new savanna is also in museum storage?
Story via the New York Times. Image of the (fake) Naturalis rhinos via Ferdi’s World.
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Mapping the Utilisphere
Earth has had a geosphere, atmosphere and biosphere for a few billion years. Only within the last several thousand years has earth gained a global noosphere, the intangible ‘sphere’ of human thought and communication on earth. Now, anthropologist Félix Pharand has mapped an even newer addition to the Anthropocene’s profusion of next natural spheres.
The utilisphere consists of the planet’s utilities and transportation networks: highways, railroads, pipelines and fiber optic cables. By making his animation without labels or city names, Pharand invites us to view the spiderweb shape of the utilisphere as something more organic, approaching the freshwater hydrosphere in complexity.
Via Gizmodo
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Anthropocene for Dummies
The Anthropocene is the recently proposed epoch of Earth history that, proponents say, has begun with the rise of the human species as a globally potent biogeophysical force, capable of leaving a durable imprint in the geological record.
Will Steffen, executive director of the Australian National University’s Climate Change Institute, lays out the basic idea in the familiar TED-talk format.
