Over the last 54 years, Earth Day has become the largest civic event on the planet. Sponsors say it engages more than 1 billion people every April 22 to raise environmental awareness and mobilize ecological action.
Earth Day is also an opportunity for introspection about how humans have aborted the nearly 12,000-year epoch in which the planet’s climate was ideal for our species to prosper.
Fifteen years ago, several leading geologists suggested that human civilization had become the principal cause of negative changes on Earth. They posited that a new epoch had begun and called it the Anthropocene. But last month, the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) rejected the proposal because the evidence of human-caused geologic change was not old enough for epochal status. Epochs are periods of thousands or millions of years.
However, the IUGS recognized that the Anthropocene has already entered the world’s lexicon. “The Anthropocene as a concept will continue to be widely used not only by Earth and environmental scientists but also by social scientists, politicians and economists, as well as by the public at large,” the IUGS decided. “As such, it will remain an invaluable descriptor in human-environment interactions.”
In truth, the Anthropocene idea is a downer. Its advocates list the many profound ways humanity has defaced and devalued the planet, but their evidence doesn’t address our potential and obligation to fix what we’ve broken.
Also, the idea that humanity is the dominant influence on Earth is typical of the anthropomorphic mindset that gets us into trouble. We are part of nature, not its masters. Mother Nature will have the final say. She will survive even if we do not. She demonstrates her dominance with harsh feedback, including unprecedented floods, fires, drought, storms, heat and rising seas.
The IUGS decision has shortcomings, too. Research shows civilization is rapidly approaching nine planetary thresholds we cannot cross without leaving the Earth’s “safe operating space.” We already have crossed six. Another study shows we will transgress most or all of the planetary boundaries much sooner if we try to achieve global economic and environmental equity.
In rejecting the Anthropocene, the IUGS might not have considered that an epoch today isn’t the same as an epoch was an epoch ago. Futurist Ray Kurzweil points out that change, primarily technological, is accelerating so rapidly that in two decades, it will be four times faster than it is now. He calculates we will experience 20,000 years of change this century.
If we want to get to the heart of our damages to the planet, we shouldn’t blame only fossil fuels or technologies. The problem is our attitude about the human-nature relationship. The history of the United States and our celebrated “frontier spirit” are examples.
It started as long ago as 1492, when Europeans began systematically colonizing North America. They found a continent inhabited by humans for at least 11,000 years. Natural resources seemed boundless and inexhaustible, partly because many of the hundreds of Native American tribes in North America considered themselves stewards of the natural world on which their lives depended.
Europeans had a different view. Although government incentives encouraged people to move westward, the late historian Frederick Jackson Turner wrote that rich natural resources and an ethic of dominating nature were bigger motivators. “After they depleted one area, they moved westward to new frontiers (assuming) that the earth has an unlimited supply of resources,” according to Prof. Kamala Dorsner at the University of the People. “This attitude sees humans as masters who manage the planet. The frontier ethic is completely anthropocentric, for only the needs of humans are considered.”
Forests were early victims as settlers moved west. One environmental writer notes, “the Midwest went bald in a human lifetime.” But one of the most destructive developments was how the invading white civilization used energy as it industrialized.
The sun is the best power plant we never built. It continuously delivers over 10,000 times the world’s total energy use in eight minutes from 93 million miles away. It will last another 5 billion years. Indigenous peoples harvested their energy from the solar resources around them — sunlight, plants, wind and “old solar,” the fossil fuels they found on the surface. But in the 18th and 19th centuries, we began drilling, blasting and digging to penetrate the Earth and extract energy-intensive oil, gas and coal.
Our challenge is to rapidly shift back to receiving the ample energy resources around us rather than damaging the environment to extract them, fouling the air we breathe, and suffering from escalating weather disasters.
The international community has responded to environmental problems with several of its 17 sustainable development goals and various treaties. However, because countries jealously guard their sovereignty, the goals are aspirational and voluntary rather than binding and enforceable. Nations’ failure to stand up to the entrenched fossil-fuel sector and live up to the Paris climate agreement is a prominent example of how tough love is necessary now.
We need a shared vision and concrete commitments to carry it out. The U.S. Congress articulated the vision in 1970: A world of “productive and enjoyable harmony between man and his environment” where we “fulfill the social, economic, and other requirements of present and future generations.”
Now, we must overcome fossil fuels’ powerful inertia, leave most of the world’s remaining reserves of oil, gas and coal in the ground, create a restoration economy and achieve a level of political will we have yet to see.
And while we continue avoiding another stone age by exploring space and creating new technologies, we should respect and learn from nature. We are newcomers, while the plant has gained its wisdom from nearly 4 billion years of trial and error.
William Becker is executive director of the Presidential Climate Action Project (PCAP), a nonpartisan initiative founded in 2007 that works with national thought leaders to develop recommendations on national climate and energy policies. He is a former senior official at the U.S. Department of Energy.