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By Root 791 0

are unsettling. We have transformed our environment within just a few centuries in ways that are wiping out other life-forms at a shocking speed—the changes so rapid that evolution has no time to adapt and thereby allow other organisms to survive. Like a rebel organism, our species discovered a colossal new source of energy, which had lain hidden and undisturbed for millions of years, and which no previous life-form had found a use for. It is the sheer rapidity in the rise of the waste from the exploited new energy source of buried carbon—largely in the form of gaseous carbon dioxide—plus the other combined wastes and environmentally transformative impacts that fossil fuels allowed humanity to achieve, that have now begun to overwhelm the self-regulatory capacity of the Earth system. This single element holds the key to a possible future mass extinction.

Flask world is now our world. Consider that our wastes are accumulating so fast in the oceans that no species can consume them; instead, massive dead zones are spreading around the world’s coasts, from China to the Gulf of Mexico, where the recent BP oil spill adds to the toll. We have produced novel organic chemicals and synthetic polymers that no microbes have yet learned to digest, and which are poisonous to most organisms—often including ourselves. And we are steadily eating our way through global biodiversity—from fish to frogs—consuming voraciously, and moving on to the next species when one is extinguished. Those species that are not edible we ignore and displace, while those that threaten or dare to compete with us we pursue mercilessly and annihilate. Thus is our rebel nature revealed.

There is a paradox however. Even as a putative rebel organism, humanity is a product of Darwinian evolution, like every other naturally generated life-form sharing our planet today. Moreover, we did not evolve the biological capacity to eat coal and drink oil—the energy from these abundant “nutrients” is combusted outside the body rather than metabolized within it. Why us, then? Our mastery of fire was a product of the adaptability and innovativeness with which evolution had already equipped us long before, and that no other species had heretofore possessed. Humanity’s Great Leap Forward was not about evolution, but adaptation—and could therefore move a thousand times faster.

I don’t want to oversimplify: The Stone Age did not end in 1764 with James Watt’s invention of the steam engine. Clearly great leaps in human behavior and organization took place over preceding millennia with the advent of language, trade, agriculture, cities, writing, and the myriad other innovations in production and communications that laid the foundations for humanity’s industrial emergence. But I would argue that the true Anthropocene probably did begin in the second half of the eighteenth century, for it was then that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels began their inexorable climb upward, a rise that continues in accelerated form today. This date also marks the beginning of the large-scale production of other atmospheric pollutants and the planetwide destabilization of nutrient cycles that also characterize this new anthropogenic geological era.

Take population. When humans invented agriculture, some 10,000 years ago, the global human population was somewhere between 2 and 20 million.3 There were still more baboons than people on the planet. By the time of the birth of Jesus, the globe supported perhaps 300 million of us. By 1500, that population had increased to about 500 million—still a relatively slow growth rate. A global total of 700 million was reached in 1730. Then the boom began. By 1820 we numbered a billion. That total rose to 1.6 billion by 1900, and the growth rate continued to accelerate. By 1950 we were 2.5 billion strong, and by 1990 had doubled again to more than 5 billion. In 2000 the 6 billion mark was passed. At the time of writing, in late March 2011, we number an astonishing 6.88 billion individuals.4 Through the process of writing this book, another 225 million people were added