The book:
When Gaia Vince won the Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books at the end of September, much of the coverage led with the fact that she was the first woman to receive the award. But of course it was not her gender that makes her such a worthy winner, but the fact that she has created a science book without equal this year.
The idea of the anthropocene has been subject to much recent discussion. Are we in a new planetary epoch defined by the activities of humankind? In her prize-winning book, Gaia Vince delivers a brilliantly researched and engaging exploration of this tricky, contemporary and fascinating subject.
The changes we humans have made in recent decades have altered our world beyond anything it has experienced in its 4.5 billion-year history - we have become a force on a par with earth-shattering asteroids and planet-cloaking volcanoes. As a result, our planet is said to be crossing a geological boundary – from the Holocene into the Anthropocene, or Age of Man.
What the Guardian thought:
UN scholars have calculated that within the next 10 years the degradation of farm and grazing land could turn 50 million people into migrants: put them together and they would add up to the planet’s 28th largest nation. Almost simultaneously, another UN agency calculated that in the last 25 years, another 3% of the planet’s forests had been burned or felled: 129 million hectares of root, branch and canopy. Assemble all those charred stumps in one place and you have an area the size of South Africa.
Once you have read Gaia Vince’s book, you start to register the scale of change in a fast-changing world. The Anthropocene – the Age of Man – is a proposed new name for the present Holocene epoch of what geologists call the quaternary period that we now live in, and it encompasses what has come to be called the Great Acceleration, in which during the last 65 years, whatever humans did, they did it faster and more effectively, and on a greater scale, while at the same time reproducing more and dying much less.
Did it take 50,000 years for one megafaunal species, Homo sapiens, to reach a population of one billion? Just in the last 10 years, another billion people appeared on the planet, and by the end of this century, it could be home to 9, or 10, or 11 billion souls, each of which will hope for the minimum to sustain health and contentment. Many of them will demand a lot more – a car, a little place in France, a trip to Disneyland, a new smartphone – which is where the problems begin. To build cities, pave highways and establish factories, humans decades ago became the greatest earth-moving force on the planet: they each year shift more rock, soil and gravel than the wind and the rain, the rivers and the glaciers combined.
Cities now cover 2% of the planet’s land: by 2030, this will be 10%. Over the next 80 years, the species will build a city for one million people every 10 days. To keep these cities functioning, humans will at any time consume 18 terawatts of energy and even though most people in this teeming world have to scrape by on less that $2 a day, by 2020, around 5 billion of them will have smartphones, and internet access, and already people who are miserably poor can see, at a finger’s touch, what they are missing, and want it for themselves, and in the course of trying to get it, consume more resources and precipitate even faster climate change and ecological destruction.
Meanwhile, the other 10m species that share the same evolutionary nursery, the same living space and the same ultimate energy resource – and which in ways we don’t appreciate have so far tapped into, shaped, delivered and recycled the wealth that humans regard as theirs – will survive or dwindle to extinction largely because humans can choose whether they flourish or perish. Humans are melting the Arctic, turning forests into grasslands and savannahs into deserts, and choking the seas with plastic waste, and doing all this on a prodigal scale, mostly without thinking about it.
Anyone who reads this book will have no excuse for not thinking about it.
Tim Radford - Read the full review
If you liked this, then try:
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The Water Book by Alok Jha
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The Making of the British Landscape by Francis Pryor
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The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert
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