In its four-billion years, Earth has seen many conquerors. There were single-stranded ribonucleic acid (RNA) that multiplied and, in its wake, originated ‘life.’ Then there were the cyanobacteria — spread like sheets of neon lights — that belched oxygen and laid the foundation for future plants. These tiny ancient kings are still around unlike the great dinosaurs.
Man, at 200,000 years old, is not even close to the dinosaur’s longevity but has ambition that far exceeds all previous life put together. He believes that his influence on Earth has been so unique that future excavators — whatever species or chemistry they may be — will find unmistakable traces of his existence.
And therefore, man — in his infancy — must formally etch his name into Earth’s history book and conceive of a name of his time. The Anthropocene, or the Age of Man, is slowly gaining the kind of momentum that an idea requires before it becomes a reality. Other men, the geologists and the official name-givers to the Earth’s senescence, however, believe that we may be hasty.
Ian Angus, in this book called Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System, puts together a succinct summary of this continuing quest to name our present era and its relationship to the problem of climate change. A central character in the book is Paul Crutzen, the Nobel-prize-winning chemist, who pointed out the depredation of the ozone hole and has been a well-known advocate of the idea that the Anthropocene began in the mid-20th century.
Officially, as far as the geological record goes, we are still in the Holocene that began about 11,000 years ago when, after one of the ice ages, the Earth entered a long, warm period conducive to agricultural settlement and the flourishing of human civilisations. The bronze and copper and precious metals extracted are testimony to this, but some scientists argue there was a qualitative change after the industrial age and particularly since the rise of nuclear weapons.
Earth’s natural systems were for millennia governed by the balance between carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and now calculations show that the former two are at levels unprecedented in the last 10,000-odd years. Man’s activities are veering Earth into unchartered territory and the most compelling evidence is how chlorofluorocarbons — the byproduct of refrigerant gases — near-perilously ate into the ozone layer.
Angus then explains how the challenges that we face in the Anthropocene are a consequence of global capitalism. This is a short book, and while there’s an obligatory chapter on ‘solutions’ and how there needs to be a re-ordering of the way we consume and produce if we are to have any hope at preventing the build-up of atmospheric carbon dioxide, there’s no novel plan of action.
Given that the debate on the Anthropocene is yet to go mainstream, Angus’s primer is a valuable backgrounder.
Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System; Ian Angus, Aakar Books, ₹395.