The Anthropocene: Geologists are Not Stupid People

How much pure carbon have you held in the palm of your hand during your lifetime?  My guess is not much that you can see with the naked eye.  The carbon that is mined from the earth is not pure, but it is highly concentrated.  Petroleum and coal are two concentrated forms that work well as fuels; however, when we burn them we release carbon from the lithosphere (geological deposits) into the atmosphere.  We began intensifying our ability and propensity to do just that, release geological sources of carbon into the atmosphere, about three hundred years ago.  We have done this so prolifically that geologists have pondered and are close to formally approving a new geological epoch, the age of humans, the Anthropocene, beginning (most argue) about 300 years ago.  This is a period in which people have dramatically altered the lithosphere and atmosphere on a geologically deep (incomprehensibly so) time scale.  The Anthropocene is a period in which we have overwhelmed the living world with carbon from the past.  To transcend our impacts we must sequester atmospheric carbon resulting from millions of years of geological processes; the rate of ongoing carbon sequestration in plants today via photosynthesis amounts to a drop-in-the-bucket compared to what we have released. 

What we are doing in terms of fossil fuel use cannot be sustainable for purely geological reasons.  Sustainability is defined as using resources at rates and in amounts that make it possible for future generations to have the same level of access to the same resources.  It is usually argued that fossil fuel use is unsustainable because geological deposits are finite, but this is beside the point.  Geological processes simply cannot replenish the fuels we use at the pace we use them.  And we are currently unable to sequester geological carbon that has been released into the atmosphere at the rate we burn fossil fuels (we should refer to ‘atmospheric carbon’ as ‘geological carbon’ because that is primarily what it is).  This relationship is not a mysterious, complicated one proffered down from a scientific ivory tower; anyone can understand it should he/she try to.  Most forms of fossil fuels result from deposition and transformation of organic carbon during vast periods in the past.  For example, the aptly named ‘Carboniferous’ period from 359 to 299 million years ago was a period of organic-carbon deposition—a period in which a lot of plant matter was buried and eventually fossilized into highly concentrated carbon, globally. 

People have a tough time comprehending the scale of 60 million years of global deposition, but most can conceive of the volume 42 gallons, which is the amount of oil in a single barrel, and most people are familiar with the idea of outer space.  A low estimate is that 35,000 barrels of oil are pouring in the gulf in a single day during the current BP disaster.  The massive oil stain on the Gulf of Mexico that can be observed from outer space is the product of just one oil well.  What this should make visible is the geological scale of our fossil fuel consumption.  The massive oil spill in the Gulf is but one small fraction of the fuel that we borrow from the Carboniferous, which took tens of millions of years to deposit and many tens of millions more to form into fossil fuels.  Imagine all of the oil wells in the world; imagine the scale of oil being sucked out of the lithosphere, imagine the economic demand that drives this lithospheric sucking!  Perhaps now that we can see it, we will pay attention to the geological scale of our consumption. 

Prior to the Anthropocene, human use of carbon was sustainable because, for the most part, we relied heavily on ecological forms of fuel, which can be defined as wood and other forms of plant debris not yet geologically deposited into the lithosphere.  And, we did so at low population densities.  Ecological processes can renew those forms of fuel, should products be harvested sustainably. Today, at the global scale, however, we are more than half pregnant.  We cannot shift to ecological forms of carbon fuels because our populations are too large.  How did this happen?  Through food production (mainly farming) for several thousands of years, humans manipulated a caloric surplus that kept fecundity and fertility high thus causing global population growth.  Non-farmers rarely had the luxury of such a surplus, thus their populations remained low, and their use of ecological forms of fuels (not to mention wild foods) was sustainable.  Some researchers call this seemingly innocuous effect of low populations in hunter-gatherers ‘epiphenomenal conservation,’ meaning that human impacts led to (unintended) conservation.  Other researchers show that some ‘traditional societies’ imbued cultural mechanisms to intentionally conserve resources.  It is the scale that matters, not the intent. 

Why is it that proponents of the green revolution are so keen on solar and wind resources?  Because these sources do not require us to borrow from the Carboniferous!  Must there be more debate?  The issue is one of scale; humans do not attend to the scale of things.  Even sustainability is defined in terms of ‘generations,’ which is hardly sufficient in terms of time scale to conceive of the size of our consumption.  If ‘seeing is believing,’ then let me ask: can we now see the geological scale of fossil fuel use?  Is it now believable?  The term ‘fossil’ should have clued us in decades ago. 

What can be done?  The United States of America is in a powerful position in the world.  If individuals in this society were to simply pay attention to the nature of consumption and work slowly toward meaningful alternative forms of fuel and more localized forms of food, a big difference would be made.  Drive a bit slower, drive a bit less, eat a bit less, walk a bit more, turn the AC down a fraction, keep the house a degree cooler in the winter, open the windows to cool the house, turn off the lights when you leave a room, rotate your tires so that you do not have to replace them and your mileage stays higher, plant some trees in your yard, pay attention to what you eat, cook at home instead of driving to get food—these are simply individual choices!  These things can all be done while voting for either a Democrat or a Republican.  Our impact might be profound globally in that people in many societies want to be like Americans.  Our biggest flaw is our lack of geological (and self) awareness.  The paragraph you are reading would undoubtedly be castigated as ‘liberal’ by some (when did this term become so derogatory, by the way?).  To those readers; the message here is conservative common sense in the most meaningful fashion, that of geological time scales you are simply not aware of it. 

Source literature

Anderson, E. N. 2010. The Pursuit of Ecotopia: Lessons from Indigenous and Traditional Societies for the Human Ecology of Our Modern World. Praeger Press.

Borgmann, A. 2000. The Transparency and Contingency of the Earth. In Earth Matters: The Earth Sciences, Philosophy, and the Claims of Community, edited by R. Frodeman, pp. 99-106. Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ.

Lepofsky, D. 2009. The Past, Present, and Future of Traditional Resource and Environmental Management.  Journal of Ethnobiology 29:161-166.

Miller, G. T. Jr. and S. Spoolman.  2008. Living in the Environment: Principles, Connections, and Solutions, 16th Edition.  Brooks Cole.

Steffen, W., P. J. Crutzen and J. R. McNeill. 2007. The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature? Ambio 36:614-621.