[A section of a Big History book I have been working on for three years. Perhaps some theoretical background to the global climate strike scheduled for September 20, and what’s ultimately at stake.]
Humanity’s Three Great Waves, Eight Great Leaps, and its Anthropocene Choice
We have arrived, dear readers, at our present critical moment, of human, even planetary, evolution. It’s now known as the Anthropocene, the Human Age. Let us first briefly survey some of the empirical evidence for this new notion of the Anthropocene.
First, population. The global human population has expanded from perhaps a few tens and then hundreds of thousands in the old stone ages to perhaps around 1 million at the cusp of the long Neolithic revolution in 10,000 BCE, 5 million around 8,000 BCE, 10 million at the time of the first Sumerian civilization in 3,500 BCE, 100 million in 500 BCE, 200 million around the time of Christ’s birth, 300 million in 1000 CE, 500 million in 1500, around 1 billion c. 1804, 2 billion in 1927, 3 billion in 1960, 4 billion in 1974/5, 5 billion in 1987, 6 billion in 1999 and seven billion in 2011.
The acceleration we have noticed throughout planetary evolution is again evident: it took a few million years for the world population to reach about one million in 10,000 BCE, then about 6,500 years to reach ten million, then 3,000 thousand years to reach a hundred million in 500 BCE, then 1,803 years for the world population to expand from two hundred million to one billion between the birth of Christ and beginnings of the Industrial Revolution in 1804. However, from then it took only just over 200 years to explode exponentially from one billion to seven billion. Correspondingly, humans now have the highest biomass of any animal species, and whereas in the year 1000 CE humans and their domesticated animals still made up only about 2 percent of the Earth’s mammal biomass, we now make up around 90 percent.
Our human population explosion is directly linked to our explosion in energy consumption. Some estimates see an at least 30-fold per capita increase in energy use in human history from 80 watt in pre-fire use homo species to c. 2,400 watt per capita for global society as a whole and c. 10,000 watt per capita in overdeveloped countries like the US; when total energy consumption is multiplied by the increase of the human population from a few thousand to over seven billion, the increase in the total amount of energy harvested during human history may be by an overwhelming factor of c. 30 million.
Our collective footprint as a species is now so high that we can literally move and unbalance the planet and radically transform its natural cycles. The massive burning of fossil fuels by our populous species since the Industrial Revolution and resulting ice melting and huge water shifting across the planet, also as droughts and ground water depletions, have since 2005 even changed the earth’s balance and shifted its tilt and spin axis from its previous path by centimetres. If CO2 emissions are not reduced (they are now over 400 ppm), they will reach 600 ppm by 2050, the highest level for fifty million years, creating climate chaos and reversing the long-term decline in CO2 levels over the past 500 million years that has balanced out a gradual rise in the sun’s warmth over that period and helped keep planetary temperatures in the habitable zone.
While for the past two million years the earth’s climate system has oscillated between natural cycles of 400 billion tonnes (cold) and 600 billion (warm) tonnes of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, in the past century or so human fossil fuel releases and activities have added another 200 billion tonnes to the 600 billion of the warm Holocene interglacial, which 800 billion tonne total is twice as much as was present during the last ice age and a third more than in recent interglacial eras; we continue to add several billion tonnes more each year, and are thus in completely unchartered territory.
Humanity’s gaseous waste emissions have also heavily impacted the global atmosphere by creating a dangerous ozone hole and regionally serious toxic air pollution. In 2009 humanity’s ecological footprint had significantly altered at least 86% of the world’s ice-free land area (a 9% increase in just sixteen years since 1993) : from human culture being embedded in the wild we have evolved to the wild being embedded within human culture. (At the same time, we have romantically redefined ‘wilderness’ according to our own modern preferences to mean ‘free of humans’). Today, for the first time in human evolution, more than half of humanity’s seven billion people lives in cities, increasingly in mega-cities of over 10 million people.
Fossil-fuel driven mining and industrial emissions have also radically altered the Earth’s biogeochemical cycles (carbon, nitrogen, sulphur, phosphorous) and chemically toxified the biosphere. One estimate is that there are over one hundred thousand synthetic chemicals on the market and thus in the environment. At best only a few hundred of these have been studied in any depth or detail for their possible toxic effects on lab animals, and none at all for real-world cumulative, synergistic or transgenerational effects. Nevertheless, at least one thousand new ones are added each year, most of them without adequate testing or regulation. These chemicals are having severe impacts on the health and well-being of wildlife and humans. The average toxic body burden of people in industrialised countries may now include at least 250 chemicals and heavy metals, many of them hormone-disrupting and/or cancerogenic. Eating fish we now ingest not only mercury but micro-plastics. So many plastics find their way to the oceans that by 2050 there will be more plastics than fish, i.e. plastics will outweigh total fish biomass. The overwhelming majority of drinking water in all countries is now contaminated with micro-plastic particles.
Humanity is even literally altering the earth’s geology: around 208 completely new minerals or mineral-like compounds are now the product of human activity and will ‘form a marker layer for all geological time’. Nanotechnology is creating machines of atomic size and new materials never seen on the planet before.
The core fact of the Anthropocene is that humanity is creating a second, totally artificial, nature that is gradually replacing the one we co-evolved with in the Holocene.
This human earth-changing and re-engineering is a process which one could say began very gradually either three million years ago with the first stone tools of Kenyanthropus or Australopithecus or else about 100-200 thousand years ago in the full emergence of homo sapiens and human culture in east Africa during the Eemian interglacial period (a 15,000 year long temperate phase) when the total human population was probably only somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000. The beginning of the Anthropocene could also theoretically be placed in the ‘great cultural leap forward’ of homo sapiens around 50,000 BCE or in the beginnings of the Agricultural Revolution c. 10,000 BCE. It could also be legitimately placed around 1750 or 1800 at the start of the Industrial Revolution/Capitalism.
In my view most convincingly, however, the beginning of the true Anthropocene could be placed around the time of the birth of my own generation, at the end of the last total war and the beginning of the postmodern nuclear age in July 1945 with the dropping of ‘Little Boy’ on Hiroshima, and thus with the first possibility of human self-annihilation and the global spread of radio-nuclides (and subsequently of many other chemo-industrial metals, plastics, toxics and waste products of hyper-industrialism). This period is also the start of the postmodern ‘Great Acceleration’, when all demographic, economic and ecological indices accelerated exponentially, when ‘massive increases occurred in population, carbon emissions, species invasions and extinctions, and when the production and discard of metals, concrete and plastics boomed.’
Thus a recent research paper published in the academic The Anthropocene Review, pointing out that ‘about one half of the global population now lives in urban areas and about third of the global population has completed the transition from agrarian to industrial societies’, also suggests that
Of all the candidates for a start date for the Anthropocene, the beginning of the Great Acceleration is by far the most convincing from an Earth System science perspective. It is only beyond the mid-20th century that there is clear evidence for fundamental shifts in the state and functioning of the Earth System that are beyond the range of variability of the Holocene, and driven by human activities and not by natural variability.
The paper also notes, despite recent strong economic development in the non-OECD or BRICS world, the stark and ongoing global inequality associated with this Great Acceleration and Anthropocene, concluding that:
the bulk of economic activity, and so too, for now, the lion’s share of consumption, remain largely within the OECD countries, which in 2010 accounted for about 74% of global GDP but only 18% of the global population. This points to the profound scale of global inequality, which distorts the distribution of the benefits of the Great Acceleration and confounds international efforts, for example climate agreements, to deal with its impacts on the Earth System.
According to the prior rate of acceleration and momentum of the evolutionary trajectory postulated in this Big History (I am writing), this and one more fluctuation of relatively short duration (perhaps no more than about 13-20 years in all, taking us to around 2030-40) may be all that separates us from the end or rather self-transformation of the Ninth Great Wave of cosmic evolution, the Postmodern Wave of Mind and humanity, which we suggest began with the explosion of the first nuclear weapon of mass destruction in July 1945.
If we should parse the nine waves of human evolution outlined above slightly differently, namely in terms of accelerating evolutionary ‘leaps’ within the three great premodern, modern and postmodern waves, then we would now be approaching the ninth leap to a new (higher, deeper) level of human evolution, into what I would like to call the ‘Conscious Anthropocene’.
For when looked at in this way, within the three Great Waves of human evolution we can also distinguish eight Great Leaps of creativity and innovation between hominization and a conjectural, perhaps emerging but yet to be accomplished ninth Great Leap, the ‘Conscious Anthropocene’. Further, like the material universe we incorporate, human evolution itself has been exponentially accelerating, these successive cultural leaps initially lasting millions of years and now only decades, possibly only years.
As one can see from the overview below (Figure 9), the accelerating leap durations are roughly as follows. Premodern Leap One to Leap Five: 3.5 million years, 2.4 million years, 68,000 years, 7,000 years, 4,300 years; Modern Leap Six and Leap Seven: 450 years, 200 years; Postmodern Leap Eight: 70 years. On this self-accelerating trajectory, the conjectural, possible (but not necessarily probable), next Leap Nine into the ‘Conscious Anthropocene’, already latent as a seed of potential within our previous eighth leap of Postmodern Mind, may thus be already emerging. Given the trajectory of exponential acceleration this Leap Nine may be just a matter of a very few years, perhaps less than two decades, before it becomes clearly visible, an emergence which like all the previous ones, however, will only be clearly seen in retrospect. In contrast to all previous leaps, and in contrast to the present trajectory of business-as-usual, however, this possible one would have to be, at least for a significant minority, a conscious one. There lies the rub.
Figure 9: The Nine Great Leaps of human evolution within the Three Great Waves of Mind (all dates very approximate).
I Premodern Great Wave
LEAP ONE: Hominid Emergence from Apes (Hominization), c. 6 ‒ 2.6 million years ago
LEAP TWO: Palaeolithic Social Learning and Rise of Homo species, c. 2.6 mya – 300,000 years ago
LEAP THREE: Palaeolithic ‘Great Leap Forward’/global Homo sapiens, c. 80,000 ‒ 12,000 years ago
LEAP FOUR: Neolithic Agricultural Revolution, c. 10,000 – 3,000 BCE
LEAP FIVE: Agrarian Civilizations and Commercial Globalization, c. 3000 BCE – 1300 CE
II Modern Great Wave
LEAP SIX: Modern-Scientific Age and Mercantilist Globalization, c. 1300 – 1750s CE
LEAP SEVEN: Industrial-Capitalist Revolution and Imperialist Globalization, c. 1750s – 1945 CE
III Postmodern Great Wave
LEAP EIGHT: Postmodern Atomic Age, Globalization, Unconscious Anthropocene (1945 – present)
LEAP NINE: Global Transformation into the participatory ‘Conscious Anthropocene’?
The Great Acceleration of cosmic, planetary and human evolution is also that of my own little life, both autobiographically and historically as a member of the so-called ‘baby boomer’ generation of the accelerating post-war Anthropocene. Like everyone else’s, my own life has been subjectively speeding up ever more as I get older: while childhood seemed to stretch on for ever, now every week speeds by ever faster towards the ultimate ‘gravitational singularity’ or ‘big crunch’ of my personal death or transformation as a transient, apparently individual organism-mind, a tiny fluctuation within the Great Waves, yet one that includes all other previous waves in body and mind.
Collectively, during my lifespan, that of the so-called ‘baby boomer’ generation in the west, the world has experienced unprecedented, exponential and accelerating growth rates on almost every level: of technological innovation and socio-cultural change, of global population and of ecologically unsustainable levels of extraction, production, consumption and waste production too long to list. As a species, humanity has, within the Anthropocene, long overshot the Earth’s ecological carrying capacity. Some estimates put the threshold of this overshoot in the 1970s-80s. Earth’s evolved life support systems or Ecosphere, the sixth Great Wave incorporating the fourth and fifth Great Waves of Cell and Organism, are thus being increasingly undermined and destroyed by the eighth and ninth Great Waves of modern and postmodern humanity, a process that – barring human transformation into a both grand and humble, ‘conscious Anthropocene’ or ‘symbiocene’‒ will destroy all the human Great Waves of Mind.
These trends seem now to be culminating in ‘peak everything’, in climate chaos and a generalised ecocide or ‘sixth great extinction event’ on planet earth, i.e. the radical transformation and regression of the evolved Ecosphere and its organisms into something much less complex and diversified, less beautiful and conducive to human dignity and well-being , or at least to human dignity and well-being as they have evolved in the Holocene and as we have so far defined them. In a further ecological great simplification and impoverishment, tough ecological generalists (like ourselves) will mostly replace vulnerable ecological specialists: weeds, rodents, insect plagues, acidified jellyfish oceans will replace an exquisitely diverse world of hummingbirds, tigers, gorillas, coral reefs.
Increasing climate disruption and chaos is perhaps the ultimate expression of all these trends, one that, unchecked, is likely to cause immense suffering, displacement and billions of deaths over time and the probable breakdown of urban civilisation itself. Massive wars and nuclear self-annihilation are, as always since 1945, also a continuing possibility. As humanity moves to increasingly design evolution, humanity may be moving, unconsciously, into some self-engineered, cyborg, ‘augmented’ or AI form of post-humanity and a concomitant post-biospherical geo-engineering of the planet. We would then be post-humans living in post-nature.
Many welcome this prospect: creator of the Gaia hypothesis James Lovelock calls it the ‘age of hyperintelligence’ or ‘Novacene’ and opines that ‘the chemical-physical type of humanity has had its time’. Our lives are already in many ways only partly biological, watching screens for ten or more hours while exercising only seventeen minutes a day, cars our feet, Google our memory, many regularly taking all kinds of drugs, many with implanted devices, and increasingly with no clear split between organic and technological, ‘we may not know yet where we’re going, but we’ve already left where we’ve been.’ The Pentagon (DARPA) is working on various ways of ‘augmenting’ soldiers and directly connecting the human brain to a machine, and prominent capitalists like Elon Musk are already working on cyborgs such as mind-controlled gadgets for the masses using electrodes surgically implanted by a robot to read people’s brainwaves.
This is the dark face of the uncontrolled, undemocratic, unconscious Anthropocene: the very real and increasingly likely possibility of global collapse, suffering and brutal societal regression and/or a technocratic, cyber-totalitarian dystopia of post-humans. Making this probable trajectory conscious is the first step to avoiding it.
The logic of all this is that as a species we now seem to be confronted with a unique moment in human history. For the first time we face an existential choice, a choice between a continuing business-as-usual, unconscious Anthropocene which is taking the Earth and humanity towards the abyss, or a movement towards a conscious, liberated and participatory Anthropocene. The key general feature of the latter would be the globally democratic debate about and control of our own co-evolution within a regenerated planet. This would necessarily include democratic debate and control of economic production, distribution and technological innovation.
If the probability of such a widespread consciousness-raising or -widening seems quite small at this point, the alternative question would then seem to simply be: will humanity somehow ‘muddle its way through’ all this with some sort of technological fixes and minor reforms, with totalitarian states of cyborgs and ‘posthumans’, or simply muddle its way to collapse, regression, chaos?
Posted in climate change, critical theory, eco-social theory, ecology, essays, social change, social ecology
Tags: anthropocene, anthropocene choice, Big History, conscious Anthropocene, cyber-totalitarian dystopia, global climate strike, global democratic dialogue, human evolution, nine great leaps of human evolution, participatory anthropocene, post-humans, post-nature, unconscious anthropocene
