This is a companion piece to my recent post Trivializing The Anthropocene.
I would claim that very few humans properly understand the Anthropocene. For example, geologists have their own view of it, to wit—
To define a new geological epoch, a signal must be found that occurs globally and will be incorporated into deposits in the future geological record. For example, the extinction of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous epoch is defined by a “golden spike” in sediments around the world of the metal iridium, which was dispersed from the meteorite that collided with Earth to end the dinosaur age.
For the Anthropocene, the best candidate for such a golden spike are radioactive elements from nuclear bomb tests, which were blown into the stratosphere before settling down to Earth. “The radionuclides are probably the sharpest – they really come on with a bang,” said Zalasiewicz. “But we are spoiled for choice. There are so many signals.”
Other spikes being considered as evidence of the onset of the Anthropocene include the tough, unburned carbon spheres emitted by power stations. “The Earth has been smoked, with signals very clearly around the world in the mid-20th century,” said Zalasiewicz.
Other candidates include plastic pollution, aluminium and concrete particles, and high levels of nitrogen and phosphate in soils, derived from artificial fertilizers.
Keep this next sentence in mind.
Although the world is currently seeing only the sixth mass extinction of species in the 700 million-year history of complex life on Earth, this is unlikely to provide a useful golden spike as the animals are by definition very rare and rarely dispersed worldwide.
In contrast, some species have with human help spread rapidly across the world. The domestic chicken is a serious contender to be a fossil that defines the Anthropocene for future geologists. “Since the mid-20th century, it has become the world’s most common bird. It has been fossilised in thousands of landfill sites and on street corners around the world,” said Zalasiewicz. “It is is also a much bigger bird with a different skeleton than its prewar ancestor.”
Future geologists?
Current geologists should bear in mind that there will no future geologists on the time scale they are using. Nature's failed human experiment is only going to happen once. In order to define the Anthropocene epoch, current geologists must pretend there will be future geologists.
But that's just another game people play, isn't it?
A proper understanding of the Anthropocene entails that we also understand that once humans achieved a certain degree of "success", for lack of a better word, the current human-dominated world was inevitable. This follows from the human instinctual drive to exploit the natural world for human purposes. That's what humans do and have always done. So, there's nothing new going on now. How much exploitation is happening is merely a matter of degree which is wholly dependent on the power and efficacy of human methods to carry out that exploitation.
Homo heidelbergensis could only do so much damage to the natural world some 500,000 years ago. Homo sapiens, at its current level of cultural achievement, can do far more damage.
It follows that dating the beginning of the Anthropocene in 1950, as geologists just proposed, is just plain silly. For humans, big events in the natural world (like the Anthropocene) have a "meaning" only because humans assign a meaning to them. In Flatland, where human instinctual drives do not exist, the Anthropocene epoch must be defined (assigned a meaning) by contingent human-created artifacts (e.g., lots and lots of domesticated chicken bones which will show up in the future geological record).
But contingent human traces like "radioactive elements from nuclear bomb tests" do not tell us anything important about the Anthropocene. Biological necessity—instinctual behaviors run amok—created the human-dominated epoch, regardless of how humans define it. Human definitions of their own dominance is uninformed by any kind of useful self-knowledge. In these big important matters, humans don't know what they're actually doing, or why. Human self-appraisals are not trustworthy, as I shall demonstrate here.
I'll repeat this next quote for your convenience.
Although the world is currently seeing only the sixth mass extinction of species in the 700 million-year history of complex life on Earth, this is unlikely to provide a useful golden spike as the animals are by definition very rare and rarely dispersed worldwide.
Within the human-assigned definition of the Anthropocene, this failed criterion seems to make sense, at least to geologists. But if the human-dominated world was born of biological necessity, the decimation of other species can not be ignored just because they are "very rare and rarely dispersed worldwide," and therefore do not provide a geological Golden Spike. Continued and intensive human exploitation of other animals is what matters, regardless of their frequency and dispersal on the ground. Thus is necessity revealed.
If we want to carry out a much deeper search for "meaning of the Anthropocene, it behooves us to look at Wildlife Farming: Does It Help Or Hurt Threatened Species? (Yale's Environment 360, August 30, 2016.)
And now, even before I quote from the article, we immediately notice two things: 1) these other species are threatened by human exploitation; and 2) humans are engaged in or want to engage in wildlife farming. Anyway—
More than a decade ago, looking to slow the decimation of wildlife populations for the bushmeat trade, researchers in West Africa sought to establish an alternative protein supply. Brush-tailed porcupine was one of the most popular and high-priced meats, in rural and urban areas alike. Why not farm it? It turned out that the porcupines are generally solitary, and when put together, they tended to fight and didn't have sex. In any case, moms produce only one offspring per birth, hardly a recipe for commercial success.
Wildlife farming is like that — a tantalizing idea that is always fraught with challenges and often seriously flawed. And yet it is also growing both as a marketplace reality and in its appeal to a broad array of legitimate stakeholders as...
Remember this next bit.
...a potentially sustainable alternative to the helter-skelter exploitation of wild resources everywhere.
Food security consultants are promoting wildlife farming as a way to boost rural incomes and supply protein to a hungry world. So are public health experts who view properly managed captive breeding as a way to prevent emerging diseases in wildlife from spilling over into the human population. Even Sea World has gotten into the act, promoting captive breeding through its Rising Tide nonprofit as a way to reduce the devastating harvest of fish from coral reefs for the aquarium hobbyist trade.
Conservationists have increasingly joined the debate over wildlife farming, with a view to keeping the trade in bushmeat and exotic pets from emptying forests and other habitats. Writing in the journal Conservation Letters, wildlife trade researchers Dan Challender and Douglas C. MacMillan argue that regulations and enforcement alone cannot end the current poaching crisis.
“In the medium term, we should drive prices down,” they write, with “sustainable off-take mechanisms” such as regulated trade, ranching, and wildlife farming. They say it has worked before. Successful introduction of carefully regulated crocodile ranching during a mid-twentieth century poaching crisis across Africa “led to reduced poaching pressure on wild populations, even in countries with weak governance,” they note.
But another article, published in April in the journal Global Ecology and Conservation asks the question, “Under what circumstances can wildlife farming benefit species conservation?” Author Laura Tensen, a conservation geneticist at the University of Johannesburg, provides a broad review of wildlife farming projects worldwide and answers, in effect, “not often.” And one of the few success stories she cites might not appeal to some conservationists: The shift in the 1930s from wild-caught to farmed animals was a key to the recovery of many North American mammal species in the luxury fur trade.
Straightforwardly, there is a Flatland argument between food security consultants and other "legitimate stakeholders" on the one hand, and wildlife conservationists on the other about the best way to preserve species humans have likely exploited to the point of no return.
Here we discover the true significance of the Anthropocene, regardless of what geologists believe.
You've got those on the one side (food security consultants, public health experts) who want to save over-exploited species by exploiting them some more. This is the characteristic (instinctual) Flatland response. On the other hand, you've got a relative few conservationists who think further exploitation more will not be effective, or will only be effective in specific circumstances (see the article).
And yet, despite the efforts of conservationists resisting further human exploitation of other species, those efforts have failed to halt the the helter-skelter exploitation of wild resources everywhere. Note the use of the word "wild resources" here as a euphemism for "other species".
Really, that phrasing tells you everything you need to know about the Anthropocene.
In fact, wildlife farming, however it is rationalized, is already going on at large scales.
What’s different now is the urgency of the commercial push for wildlife farming everywhere, and the extraordinary range of species being farmed.
[For example], a pilot study in Vietnam last year identified 185 farmed species in that country alone, including porcupines, flying foxes, crab-eating macaque monkeys, Asian palm civets, wildcats, and multiple rodents and reptiles. The survey, organized by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Agency (FAO), urged the creation of a national wildlife farm registry, training of Vietnamese farmers in food safety and disease prevention, and development of a system of regular veterinary care...
And further on, we get this. All human rationalizations justifying wildlife farming break down here.
... Because wild species can be so difficult to breed in captivity, farmers of terrestrial species also routinely re-stock from the wild.
There you go. Humans are not conserving wild animals with wildlife farms if they are re-stocking those farms with wild animals.
Studies have shown that 90 percent of cane rat farms in Ghana, half of porcupine farms in Vietnam, and up to three-quarters of green python farms in Indonesia still take animals from the wild.
At one point, even the FAO appeared to be arguing that farming of musk deer in Asia could be good for conservation – while it simultaneously provided instructions for capturing musk deer from the wild. Instead of preventing poaching, this continued reliance on wild stock serves, according to Tensen, simply to launder illegal bushmeat.
As human appropriation of natural "resources" grows, wildlife farming will continue unabated in the future, regardless of this utterly futile debate about it. Further exploitation of other species will continue because instinctual human drives dictate that such behaviors must continue.
That is the true significance of the Anthropocene, regardless of how geologists define it.
http://www.e-flux.com/journal/tentacular-thinking-anthropocene-capitalocene-chthulucene/
Posted by: dmf | 09/08/2016 at 11:20 AM