Reframing the Anthropocene Controversy
Deforestation
Over the last 10,000 years, human activities have fundamentally changed biological, atmospheric, and geological processes on earth. In recent decades, humans have produced nearly 9 billion tons of plastic, farmed almost half of the globe’s habitable land, and threatened almost a quarter of the world’s species with extinction. In only 100 years, industrialized nations have emitted enough CO2 to reach levels that haven't existed for 4 million years, during which global temperatures were 3 degrees Celsius warmer and seas were over 30 feet higher.
This rapid and ongoing period of global change has led scientists of various disciplines to coin a new geologic era: the “Anthropocene.” This geologic epoch marks a period of environmental change in which humans are the driving force—the impacts of which will likely be recorded in the earth's rock record for millions of years to come. While post-industrial era climate change confirms unprecedented human impacts on the environment, human societies have been altering the environment for thousands of years before this, leading to a scientific debate surrounding the exact start of the Anthropocene era.
In response to this Anthropocene start-date controversy, some scholars have questioned the efficacy of pinpointing a single geologic event to mark this new era. Erle Ellis in Involve Social Scientists in Defining the Anthropocene argues that understanding the Anthropocene requires the incorporation of knowledge outside of the natural sciences and describes how our changing global climate is also affected by culture, politics, and positionality. Defining a lower boundary for the Anthropocene is itself a political statement and will shape the way humans view the extent and role of our collective impact.
Many eurocentric conceptions of the Anthropocene fail to account for power imbalances contributing to the state of ecocide we find ourselves in today, particularly with regard to the role of Western industrialized nations. The invasion of the Americas by Europeans in the 15th and 16th centuries resulted in the largest human population decline in over 10,000 years. The population of indigenous peoples in the Americas is estimated to have dropped from 54 to 6 million people in under two centuries due to disease, war, land degradation, and enslavement. With a fraction of the population left to maintain the agricultural land they had for millennia, forests grew back and sequestered enough carbon to cause a global CO2 concentration decline. This global decline, recorded in Antarctic ice, represents our current ecological crisis as a manifestation of extractive relationships that began in the colonial era. By recognizing that the colonization of indigenous peoples and the reorganization of ecological systems led to fundamental shifts in many civilizations’ relationships with the earth, we may better understand how we arrived at this state and how our culture-environment narratives must change going forward.
Climate change and climate injustices are not new concepts to indigenous communities; rather, they are facets of an established structure of violence that has been tied to industrialism and environmental disaster over the last millennia. The repercussions of these colonial systems are finally catching up with the Euro-Western societies that introduced them. While this realization is not novel, the concept of decolonizing the Anthropocene remains relatively under-researched and unacknowledged, especially by natural science disciplines. By attempting to pinpoint an exact date for the onset of the Anthropocene, we may be missing out on using this moment of dialogue to raise awareness of the social-ecological crisis we face now and in the future. Instead, we should focus on examining the effect of the colonial era on this crisis, which may allow us to reframe the historical context of climate change, justice, and resilience.
