The Anthropocene – A Big Idea in the Making

The Anthropocene – A Big Idea in the Making

Recently, much of my research has focused on the Anthropocene. I'm wondering, and have been investigating, what people mean when they talk about the Anthropocene, and what they imagine when they think about it. Given the current excitement about this new and big idea, I want to track some of my observations concerning conceptual developments, diversifications of meaning, and struggles to determine what the Anthropocene is not.

1. (Re)Defining the Anthropocene

Paul Crutzen is often credited with coining the term Anthropocene in a famous short paper in the journal Nature in 2002. In another paper he made the argument that 

Human activities have grown to become significant geological forces, for instance  through the manufacturing of hazardous chemical compounds, land use changes, deforestation and fossil fuel burning. 

He seemed to suggest that the big A has to do with geology - the traceability of the collective human impact on the planet in its rock layers. Note that Crutzen used the word "significant" to describe the nature of the human impact on Earth. Soon, other scholars would use much stronger terminology, such as profound and dominant.

In a paper in 2010, one of the most eminent Anthropocene experts, Will Steffen, offered his definition: 

The behavior of the Earth System over the past two centuries has been dominated, by the rapid rise of human activities as a significant geophysical force at the global scale. 

Rather than focusing on geological traces of human activity only, he's worried about the planet's geophysical systems, for example the climate and atmosphere, hydrology and oceans. Neill Powell and others offer another angle in 2014, conceiving of the transition from the Holocene to the Anthropocene as a tipping point: 

The Anthropocene articulates a systemically compelling picture of an earth system that has flipped from a regime governed by natural drivers to one governed by human agency. 

The pieces of the definition that all of these scholars seem to agree on is the global scale of the human trace. It's not enough that an oil spill in the Arctic causes birds to die in Antarctica. The effect has to be a persistent change in some global system,  affecting the planet systemically, potentially reaching into the deep future. 

The human footprint at 3250m; Hintertux Glacier, Austrian Alps (photo credit: Manjana Milkoreit)

2. The Anthropocene Campus - Much More than Geology and Deep Time
 

In November 2014 I was part of a nine-day event called the Anthropocene Campus, organized by the House of World Cultures in Berlin. About 120 young scholars with diverse disciplinary backgrounds took part in a series of interdisciplinary seminars and cultural experiences to explore the meaning of the Anthropocene. The rich personal experiences of the Campus have been described elsewhere, but I was struck by the fact that the event seemed to knock Mr. Crutzen's definition of its pedestal without intending to do so or acknowledging that it did. But rather than replacing the geological definition of the big A, the group added a whole bunch of conceptual elements to it. Instead of a single, authoritative, scientific definition, suddenly the Anthropocene became a collection of ideas, proposals, possibilities, representations, challenges, and even emotions. 

I followed the Campus as a researcher, asking whether and how the event would affect the thoughts and future research plans of its participants. The key cognitive change I was able to observe through surveys and interviews was what I would call cognitive-emotional destabilization. While Mr. Crutzen's idea was still very much alive by the end of the Campus, participants left Berlin with a wealth of new ideas, images and questions that they struggled to integrate into their cognitive architecture. It would take a while – weeks, maybe months – to fit these new pieces together into a new, coherent system of meaning. 

The Campus had triggered what creativity experts call a process of divergent thinking: producing lots of different ideas and increasing the pool of definitional source material to chose from. What should follow at some point is a phase of convergent thinking – developing agreement about the best or most valuable ideas out of the pool. But I think we – the scholarly community – are far from done with divergence. The public hasn't even gotten started. 

3. The Good Anthropocene

 
In January 2015 I was invited to a workshop on "Bright Spots - Seeds of a Good Anthropocene" in Stockholm. (It seems that Europeans have a greater taste for funding events on the An thropocene than the rest of the world). The workshop was again interdisciplinary and international, but focused on particular types of ideas: those that could lead to a good Anthropocene. But what does that mean? Adding the word good – innocent and likable as it seems – opens a big can of worms. Suddenly we need to make value statements about the kind of future we want, the kinds of societies we want to live in, the pieces of nature we want to protect and those we are willing to sacrifice, and the pathways to get into from here to one of those good Anthropocenes. Who gets a say in what is good and bad? And what about conflicting or even mutually exclusive value sets? Does the Anthropocene mean that we all have to share at least a part of the future? Or do we all get to pick our own – individually, locally, nationally? Do plant and animal species get to vote? Mountains (those rocks we're layering with plastic and radioactive isotopes), forests, and oceans? What about the people or non-human beings who will live in the future? 

Of course the workshop couldn't answer these questions, but we started to think about the difference – if there is any – between a ‘good Anthropocene’ and sustainable development. Both concepts are concerned with the future of humanity and global environmental change. Both seek to understand and maybe redefine the relationship between humans and nature. So, what's the difference?

Returning to the definitions of the Anthropocene, we start with the ideas of global scale, human impacts on earth systems (rather than ecosystems at other scales), and a profound cognitive change – a new way of thinking – that builds on and requires a complex-systems view of the world. 

Are we on a good track?