Last year was drought and this Spring has been wet, overcast, and cool: for now the drought is a distant memory.
Anthropocene
I’ve been thinking about the new epoch we are living in, the Anthropocene. It is the first historical period in which man completely dominates the biosphere. Like most major shifts in geological history it didn’t happen overnight, unlike the die-offs caused by asteroids hitting the planet.
And like most things human there is disagreement.
Many geologists argue that we are in the Holocene, meaning “entirely recent” and have been for 11,700 years. (1) The reasoning being that each period has a clearly defined geological layer, the last of which was about 12,000 years ago with the ending of our most recent ice age.
Environmentalists and a growing number of scientists have begun to use the term Anthropocene, meaning “age of humans” because they believe that there are enough human caused changes in the biosphere to require a new and more accurate name for the time we live in. These folks point to the massive wave of extinctions that are occurring now, the melting of ice caps and glaciers all over the world, the accelerating rise in sea levels, and the changing of the composition of the atmosphere. Similar events occurred during earlier geological transitions. Instead of the geologists, it is the anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians that are providing the evidence.
The Anthropocene was a long time in coming and is the result of the accumulative actions of we humans. The tipping point was about 3,000 years ago (2) when human society began developing the institutions we are familiar with today, farming, domesticated animals, population centers like towns and cities, technologies like metallurgy and ceramics, and a rapidly expanding population. It is then that we begin to see our ancestors intentionally alerting the landscape to fit their needs. Even then they diverted rivers, clear cut forests, hunted animals to extinction, and genetically modified animals and plants through cross-breeding.
Proof that we live in the Anthropocene is elegantly simple. Compare the world of 12,000 years ago to now against the human population then and now. There are over 7.1 billion human beings on the planet now (3).
Orchid and Flame
Despite its fragile beauty, the orchid is a hardy plant. It has to be if it is to survive in my house. They are found around the world and have been admired and used since antiquity. An example is Tlilxochitl, a vine orchid, which was grown by Aztecs for its perfume and use in food. (4) Today we call it vanilla.
Orchid and Flame started as a straightforward portrait of an orchid growing in my kitchen window and then it wasn’t.
Make of it what you will.
(1) What is the Anthropocene and Are We in It? Joseph Stromberg, Smithsonian
Magazine, 01/2013.
(2) The Long Anthropocene: Three Millenia of Humans Shaping the Earth, The
Breakthrough Institute, Erle Ellis, 05/01/2013
(3) Current World Population, worldometers: Real Time World Statistics,
www.worldometers.info/world-population/
(4) Early History of Orchids, Orchid Run,
www.orchidrun.net/index.php?lay=show&ac=article&Id=538760802