This week I have been reading
Adventures in the Anthropocene by Gaia Vince, I’m only a quarter of the way
in, but it has linked up some thoughts, memories and ideas for me.
Essentially, Gaia talks about the
effects that humans have had on the world, and how we are now shaping it to
such an extent that it is a new geological age, the Anthropocene. This is not
new to me. Neither are some of her stories I have read so far, which are fascinating and fill in a number of the knowledge gaps that I didn't get on my travels – in fact I think
this is why it is so compelling. It’s a year after I returned from working in Northern
India on climate change adaptation research, and kayaking down lakes in Laos
where the Chinese were busy dam building. Since then I’ve managed to hole
myself up in Berlin, one of the West’s greatest cities and live again in my
comfortable 21st century life.
But talking about this new age,
this new age we are going into, this new age we have made and must accept we
are in, brings on a unexpectedly different meaning to the climate change problem
for me. It has let me maybe move towards accepting things are as they are and
they aren’t necessarily going to change on the timescale I would like. With so
much human spirit dependent on the current system, indeed I’m not sure things
can change. But time is so deceptive. More than anything, reading this book
highlights the speed at which we are moving. All previous geological and
climatic periods have a time span of at least some 10,000 years or so. Our most
expansive terraforming has happened within the last 50 years, and yet the
amount of mining in the world is supposed to triple by 2050.
If we were to look at London just
50 years ago, would we recognise it now? How much land has it sprawled over
since then? The cities of today as we know them, as I and my generation knows
them, have always been there. So many people, cars, buildings and perfect functioning
infrastructure has always been there. This is not a new thing. Or is it?
In
1900, did we have anything like the scale of building, movement and number of
people we have in any city right now? Were the roads all lit up at night and
made of smooth tarmac? But 100 years is
a long time though right? To me, to all living beings, maybe. To a 4 million
year old Earth it is literally nothing. To the modern human species, it’s just 0.05%
of the 200,000 years that we have been around. Yet in just 100 years we have become
an explosive, all-conquering human force, which has taken over every corner of
the planet. We became exponential due to fossil fuels, medicine and nitrogen
fertiliser. We beat survival and nature, to become a formidably successful
species, so far.
Of course we will continue striving to overextend into the reaches of mother earth like never before. There are 7
billion people all trying to survive in whatever way possible driving this ‘economy’
forward. It’s instinct. Only time knows if there’s a way for us all to survive
in this new paradigm; though in our favour we do have ingenuity and engineering, coupled more and more with sustainable thinking and compassion. Not to mention the
extended brain power that the internet 2.0 provides, which is dramatically accelerating
communication and learning beyond what was previously possible – when we don’t
watch cat videos. Within this great mass of humanity, we have made some pretty
amazing things.
But what linked up in my mind is
a piece I read a few weeks ago, called This is Water by David Foster Wallace. It was an essay from a while back,
talking about consumerism and why you should consider other people’s
perspectives to reduce your own frustrations in the queue at Walmart (and much
deeper reflections). The realisation that came with it was a deep one: there is
only one person who really matters in my world, and that’s me. I’m the one who’s
going to take care of breathing, eating, thinking and doing. All decisions I
make are related to what I want to do right now or in the future, with varying outcomes
I want to reach in the actions and feelings of those around me. This is mostly based
upon me ensuring my future survival.
Everything I know about the world is based
on my experiences up to now. Each one of those experiences was from my
viewpoint only. What this means, is that to me, the 24 years I have lived on
this earth are everything. These
years contain all that I know, and as
such, these years are my only reliable reference for that thing we call time, or more appropriately:
years, decades, centuries. Though normally we don’t manage to look more than five
years ahead (at least not at 24), and unfortunately our memories are remarkably good at distorting the time we did experience. Furthermore, someone younger than me will see me as old: they
won’t be 24 for ages. Whereas someone older than me will see me as young: 24 was great,
but wow did those next 24 years go quickly.
So what am I getting at here?
Well, in my 24 years I have known
nothing more than the world in which we live now. As far as I can remember, or
let’s say, the last 15 years, computers have always been around me. Therefore as far as I'm concerned, they've always been there. But I don’t have to go far
back to find the time that they weren't. In my father’s 65 years, computers,
amongst a plethora of other new inventions, were not a part of daily life when
he was 24. He most certainly did not spend all day and all evening in front of
one. Maybe he might say that he had something else, that there were type writers or
filing cabinets or fax machines. But that’s irrelevant. Go back to when my
Grandad was 24, and you won’t find many cars in his town. There was no TV, and a sizeable family including my father would have lived in not much more
than a single room. In contrast, as far as my experience goes; cars have always been there, I’ve
always had my own room and these things will always be this way. The economy
and mass production have always been there. They are permanent fixtures because they exceed my own lifetime. Though in terms of the earth, what we
have today is remarkably new. In terms of just one generation, what we have is
entirely new. And there’s just so much of it.
Within my father’s lifetime, the
planet’s population has more than doubled. But this is old news, didn’t we get
used to this information so very quickly? We adapt. We adapt so
quickly to being conservative. The idea of not having a computer is something
my father also wouldn’t entertain. So long as things are apparently getting
better and they don’t affect us yet, it’s fine. Once we get used to something,
we don’t want to go back to what was there before. We adapt incredibly quickly
to what we consider the best, and then we aren’t prepared to give it up once we
get our hands on it. You can go somewhere incredibly breath-taking, but after a
few days, you’ll get used to it. My life now, completely dependent on phones
and computers: I got used to it pretty quickly. It’s hard to imagine them not
being there, but they’ve only been around for a good 10 years or so. That’s
such a miniscule blip in the grand scheme of things, and it necessarily remains
beyond our own comprehension.
This 7 billion people on earth is
really something that’s never been there before. It’s new. It’s changed Earth
and it’s here to stay as long as each one of us continues to want to survive.
Welcome to the Anthropocene. For the West it’s still a comfortable, interesting
and exciting time to be alive. Enjoy your part of this moment on planet earth,
your human instinct demands that you see everything as it affects you and your
survival only. Though we should try to remember that atmosphere, water, food
and the resources that go into our products are actually global commons. They
do belong to all of us. This much was given to us by our ancestors. Maybe we
should try to waste a little bit less of them.
Here's a great video which inspired the writing tonight:
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