“Our world, our old world that we have inhabited for the last 12,000 years, has ended, even if no newspaper in North America or Europe has yet printed its scientific obituary.”
- Professor Mike Davis
University of California at Irvine
Although science is at the heart of this blog, I am neither a scientist nor a science writer. I am an environmental journalist. However, science is at the heart of everything I write and advocate because without scientific laws, there is no existence.
Science has told us that we have poisoned our atmosphere and oceans but also that human landscape transformation now exceeds natural sediment production by an order of magnitude. In other words, the Earth really isn’t the Earth which humanity inherited.
In fact, geologically speaking, we have taken a natural progression from how things were eleven or twelve thousand years ago (and likely would have remained for hundreds of thousands more), and accelerated the evolutionary process to such an extent that the Holocene Epoch, the moderate climatological age in which we currently live, is coming to a very premature end. Even though humanity continues to thrive on this planet, we have committed climaticide.
As a general rule, I try to avoid technical jargon, only throwing in big words and lofty concepts when their more vernacular cousins fail to express the true flavor of my intent. Well, the month of June 2008 saw some remarkable statements about climaticide from the scientific community and it’s time for my prose to match their laudable work.
Stratigraphy is a specialty within geology. It studies the epochs (or ages) of the Earth, as in ice age. Because of our actions, the Holocene Epoch is ending and the Anthropocene, the next age with a climate generally inhospitable to wildlife and run by urban-industrial society, is beginning. Here’s an excerpt from what the oldest and most respected academic body on stratigraphy recently had to say on the question of moving from the Holocene to the Anthropocene.
“The combination of extinctions, global species migrations and the widespread replacement of natural vegetation with agricultural monocultures is producing a distinctive contemporary biostratigraphic signal. These effects are permanent, as future evolution will take place from surviving (and frequently anthropogenically relocated) stocks.”
- Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London
In broad terms, the food riots, relentless cycles of floods and tornados and frighteningly fast melting of our polar ice caps are a portent of an environmental apocalypse. I don’t wish to sound maudlin about the matter but within the last month several of the top minds and academic bodies on the subject, with centuries of experience, empirical data and wisdom on their side, have told us that the end is nigh.
So, here’s your wake-up call. Wake up, humanity!
How bad could it be? Well, the food riots I mentioned are a perfect example. They occurred in some places which ordinarily are peaceful and enjoy domestic harmony. We could lose that, the sense of universal brotherhood which today spans many borders and continents.
“The real danger is that human solidarity itself, like a West Antarctic ice shelf, will suddenly fracture and shatter into a thousand shards.”
- Professor Mike Davis
Back in October, I told you that the fuel consumed in an average transatlantic commercial air flight equals roughly one million years of planetary evolution. The climaticide we have committed in evoking the Anthropocene Epoch ahead of schedule may well take just as many years for the Earth to correct.
Fomenting the Triple Bottom Line
Corbett Kroehler
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