The Holocene or The Anthropocene?

11 min readOct 9, 2022

10000 years of climate stability and its end.

Our ancestors

Somewhere around 300–200 thousand years ago, a new human species began to populate the African savannas. Known for their ability to express abstract thought and accumulate culture, in the biological literature of the 18th century, they began to be referred to as the wise people. These “wise people” are no one else but our distant, yet anatomically identical ancestors — the homo sapiens.

For most of history, people lived in unimaginably harsh conditions. Some of these conditions were characterized by long periods of extreme cold, known as ice ages or glacial periods These periods of extreme cold lasted anywhere between 70,000 to 90,000 years, whereas the warmer interglacial periods spanned for approximately 10,000 years each.

Our ancestors were extremely tough. By applying some calculations, we can see that they survived at least 2 ice ages. That is somewhere between 140,000 and 180,000 thousand years of frost! Taking into account our current level of comfort it is hard to even imagine the life of the hunter-gatherers of that time, roaming about from place to place, following other animals, while withdrawing from the spreading glaciers. Nonetheless, through the span of ~200,000 years they have managed not just to inhabit almost every known place on Earth, but also to multiply from ~1 million when leaving Africa, to 7,96 billion today. More than that, through the span of time they have managed to overcome most of their immediate threats, harnessing Earth’s recourses and even changing the planet’s climate to serve their needs. How did they do that?

The beginnings of the Anthropocene

In the 4.54 billion years of existence, our planet has experienced many changes. Meteorite hits, movement of tectonic plates, volcanic eruptions, and wavering planetary temperatures were the norm. But ~10000 years something began to appear different. The Earth’s climate stabilized. Why? In the book “The Human Planet. How We Created The Anthropocene” its authors Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin argue that there is a very strong likelihood of a causative relationship between the advent of agriculture, and the later ensuing period of worldwide climate stability. Building on the works of palaeoclimatologist B. Ruddiman, they argue:

At each interglacial, greenhouse gases begin at very high levels and then slowly decline. Studying them, palaeoclimatologist Bill Ruddiman realized that the current interglacial, the Holocene, was different: this time, after several thousand years of decline, carbon dioxide levels started to rise again from about 7,000 years ago and methane from about 5,000 years ago. He suggested that early farmers caused a reversal in the usual decline of atmospheric carbon dioxide by deforesting land for agriculture, and a reversal in the decline of atmospheric methane due to wet rice farming. This idea has caused a huge amount of controversy, but it has been tested again and again, as all promising theories should be, and has emerged even stronger.

As we currently know from the studies conducted by B. Ruddiman and M. Milankovitch, two of the main causes of both the warming and cooling of our planet are the angle of Earth while it receives solar radiation, and the amount of greenhouse gases, which are stuck between the Earth’s surface and its atmosphere at any given time. While both of these processes are natural, the invention of agriculture began to influence the second one more and more dramatically. Its reach was so drastic, that it even delayed the onset of the next ice age! The dawn of farming was the first time in Earth’s history that a single species started to influence and change the planet’s climate as a whole. Back in the early 2000s, scientists began to call this stage of planetary development “the Anthropocene.”

Officially, the current epoch is called the Holocene, which began 11,700 years ago after the last major ice age. However, the Anthropocene Epoch is an unofficial unit of geologic time, used to describe the most recent period in Earth’s history when human activity started to have a significant impact on the planet’s climate and ecosystems.

From one point of view, human activity has accidentally stabilized the environment and produced an amazing possibility for us to grow food, expand culture, and thrive. But after the Columbian expeditions and the advent of mercantile capitalism, the shift from environmentally friendly quickly started to turn toward environmentally ignorant. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature records 280 animal species that have been lost forever between 1500 and 1900, not to mention the death of well over 60 million native Americans, transatlantic slavery and an over-explosion of greenhouse gas emissions that have brought back our planet to a phase of instability as it had experienced recurrently before the advent of farming.

How should the problem be framed.

How we frame our narrative matters. Nowadays the common narrative is that we stumbled into the Anthropocene “accidentally”, which is hard to believe as truth because starting from the 17th century there were numerous scientists, scholars, conservations and just regular people who warned their local authorities about the threats that their over-reaching actions over the environment might have on people, and the planetary homeostasis. As quoted in a passage of the previously mentioned Simon L. Lewis’ and Mark A. Maslin’s book:

Back in 1661, polymath John Evelyn wrote of London air as:
“a cloud of sea-coal, as if there is a resemblance of hell upon Earth … This pestilent smoak, which corrodes the very iron and spoils all the movables, leaving a soot upon all things that it lights: & so fatally seizing on the lungs of the inhabitants, that the cough and the consumption spare no man.”
His book was directly addressed to King Charles II, recommending tree planting to reduce air pollution.

Seen from countless examples of conscious sightings such as the one presented to King Charles II, the debilitating effects of our activity have been well known and recorded even prior to the Industrial Revolution. We knew that is not good to drive various species to extinction. We knew that it is not good to burn fossil fuels as though there is no tomorrow. We knew it is not good to pollute the air, the soil and the oceans, yet the drive for profit was (and still is) too great. Shortsightedness is the gravest disease of humanity, which instead of curing we deny to exist.

The last time that our planet experienced a significant dip in its global temperatures was back in the early 1500s. Interestingly, the authors of the book “The Human Planet. How We Created The Anthropocene” mention, that after the horrors of the conquistadorian exploits in the Americas, the planet experienced (or at least strengthened) a global anomaly of a dip in temperature, formally known as “The Little Ice Age.” The authors explain, that this anomaly was caused (or at least strengthened) by the millions of deaths of the local people of the Americas’.

Native Americans, although still partly in touch with their hunter-gatherer roots, were widely practicing agriculture just like most other peoples of the world. Much of the land in the rainforest was cut down and prepared for crops such as maize to grow, but after the conquests by the Europeans, in a few decades, much of the land was again overgrown by forests. This caused a significant dip in the global CO2 levels, which in turn cooled the planet by at least 0.5°C over a period of several centuries.

Scientists theorize that the drop in global temperatures had had some unintended consequences. Farming needs stability, and both an increase and decrease in temperature might spell havoc on farmers’ crop yields. As the historian Geoffrey Parker had pointed out:

The seventeenth century was a time of revolts and revolutions, including central Europe’s devastating Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), the largest rural rebellion in modern Japanese history (1637), the English Civil War (1642–51), the end of the Ming dynasty (1644), and the overthrow of the Kongo kingdom in central Africa (1665), to list a few. Hunger was probably one of the contributing factors to the increase in the number of conflicts worldwide from 732 in the sixteenth century to 5,193 in the seventeenth century. Conflicts certainly have many causes, including the arrival of European colonialists, but climatic shifts that disrupted food production may have been an important contributor.

Unfortunately, now we are facing another problem. As many of us are aware, since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the global temperature has been rising. To be precise, since 1800, global temperatures have risen 1°C. Scientists have been predicting that by the year 2050 the global temperature might rise up to 3°C, or even more. That would be devastating to most marine life, vegetation, and other species, not to mention discomforting for most human beings. Many of the low coastal lands will go back underwater, while food production will most probably slow down. Heatwaves will be much more common, similar to droughts and other extreme weather conditions.

Knowing the consequent and highly likely problems that will befall us in the upcoming few decades, a question arises. What should we do? First, we should change our narrative. Why is narrative important? According to Lewis and Maslin:

The geological arguments and narratives articulated at any one point in time are often tilted towards positions that more easily fit with the dominant concerns of the day, be they religious, political or philosophical. (…) The idea that the Anthropocene is an ‘accidental’ occurrence — people just did not know what they were doing — is, again, the least discomforting to the status quo, allowing those in positions of power to avoid responsibility for today’s environmental problems.

Thus, if we want to actually change something for the better, first we have to claim responsibility for that which has befallen us and act according to our understanding. The shared responsibility should fall firmly on the shoulders of the former colonial powers of Europe and the US. As concluded in the aforementioned book:

The West, as we have seen in earlier chapters, got rich by plundering the rest of the world, and used up most of the world’s global carbon budget. A third of the extra carbon dioxide currently in the atmosphere came from the USA, a third from Europe and a third from the rest of the world. African emissions are only 3 per cent of all carbon dioxide pollution currently in the atmosphere. So not only are income-poor countries less able to adapt to the resulting climate change, they did not cause much of the problem. The West, therefore, owes the rest for its historical debt and has a clear obligation to pay for the future damage that its emissions will cause.

What can and should be done?

If since the advent of farming human activity has had an influence on the warming and cooling of our environment, maybe our activity (or the lack thereof) could also be the solution. A few things are certain:

a) the burn of fossil fuels is undeniably the main factor for the overabundance of trapped greenhouse gases, therefore, a move towards renewable energy sources (solar, wind, hydro) and work towards a ban on the global use of fossil fuels must be enforced on a governmental level worldwide.

b) less known, differently than CO2, most of our planetary methane (which traps 20x more heat than carbon dioxide) comes not from the burning of fossil fuels, but from raising farm animals, such as chickens, pigs, cows, and turkeys. Therefore, a cultural reorientation toward a more plant-based nutrition system could help societies to reduce their methane emissions.

c) countries that have pushed the world into a carbon debt should not just focus on their personal reorientation towards renewable energy systems, but help developing countries to do the same.

d) because trees capture most of the planet’s carbon dioxide, forest clearing for wood or farmlands remains a major issue. Therefore a ban on the cutting of tropical forests should be implemented immediately. According to the historian Yuval Noah Harari, it would take less than 1% of global GDP (~800 billion dollars) to save the South American rainforests from destructive business interests that cause deforestation. Are our societies and their politicians willing to make changes in the distribution of budgets to put an end to this issue?

Unfortunately, even if we are, still more has to be done both on the individual and the global levels still. Summing up, according to the authors of the book “The Human Planet. How We Created The Anthropocene (2019)”

To meet the 2°C limit of the Paris Agreement even in the ‘likely’ (66%) probability range requires rapid cuts in greenhouse gas emissions to near zero by just after 2050. This means halving global greenhouse gas emissions in every decade going forward, doubling the share of renewables in the energy system every five years, ending deforestation, and reconfiguring agriculture and our diets (so we eat less beef and more plants). While technologically feasible and economically possible, it is beyond highly ambitious. To achieve it, society would need to place the eradication of greenhouse gas emissions at the same level of importance as the pursuit of economic growth.

Are we willing to make such a reorientation? Not just in terms of policy, but also in terms of our attitude — mentally? Unfortunately, in many people’s minds, immediate returns are more important than long-term goals. Even though some countries and their policymakers are already moving towards a reorientation to carbon-free energy systems and lifestyles, it can’t be said about all communities globally. Disrespecting the 2015 Paris Agreement, some countries are not taking the measures required to lower their emissions, which can spell catastrophic not only for them but also for many other areas worldwide in the long run. For now, the leading producer of CO2 is China, while India’s emissions are rising steadily as well.

Even though most of us might feel powerless, as if we have no agency over what has been happening globally, that is not true. Communities are the sum total of their individuals, and if individuals demand a stable future for themselves and their families, over time policies begin to be enacted toward achieving that. As clearly shown by the women’s liberation movements of the 1970s — change is possible. What is required is to work towards it, relentlessly, without backing down or breaking.

For that reason, the next post is going to be dedicated to some personal changes that we can make right now individually to reduce our carbon footprints and push back the Earth’s Overshoot Day at least a couple days further. As for 2022, it is going to land on the 28th of July. That will be the day when humanity has used all the biological resources that Earth regenerates during the entire year. Can we stop it from coming closer to January 1st? It depends, on what actions we are willing to take.