Origin Story, page 27
In an increasingly interconnected world, governance also assumed more global forms. By the late twentieth century, there were many political structures—not yet governments—that managed, advised, and administered on a global scale. They included the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, and large numbers of corporations and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) such as the Red Cross, whose activities range across many different countries. These institutions represent, in embryonic form, a new, global level of governance that would have been unimaginable just a few centuries ago.
New Ways of Living and Being
Technological and political transformations have been accompanied by equally radical changes in human lifestyles—in the experience of life.
Modern humans live in ways that would have baffled, confused, and possibly terrified our ancestors. All the many different activities of a peasant household—plowing, sowing, harvesting, feeding livestock, milking cattle, cutting firewood, gathering mushrooms or herbs, bearing and rearing children, cooking the foods and weaving the fibers you have grown—dominated the lives of most people for thousands of years. Today, most farmers are entrepreneurs or wage earners. They work on huge industrial farms that specialize in just a few crops, some of them genetically engineered. They cultivate and transport their crops using lashings of fertilizers and pesticides and energy-hungry harvesters, tractors, and trucks. Modern farmers grow crops not to eat but to sell. They manage businesses. They borrow money from banks and buy their seeds, fertilizers, and tractors from large corporations.
Most people no longer live in villages but in towns and cities. Away from the fields, streams, and woods of the peasant village, they live in environments almost entirely shaped by human activity. As different jobs and skills and forms of expertise proliferate, people spend more and more time learning. Information—expert knowledge—is what counts, rather than the generalized skills of peasants. Increasing numbers of people enjoy levels of nutrition and health that were rare even a century ago, thanks to the productivity of modern agriculture and modern advances in medicine and health care. Modern anesthesia has ended the agony of most traditional medical interventions. (No longer is an amputation or tooth extraction made easier to bear by nothing but a shot of liquor.) Perhaps most remarkable of all, in just a century, these changes have more than doubled the average life expectancy of human beings.
Despite the wars of the twentieth century, interpersonal relations have also become, for the most part, less violent. There is a clear logic to this change, as coercion has become a less effective way of controlling behavior in the last century or two (when did you last see a public flogging?), and economic rewards and punishments have slowly taken their place (you probably have asked for a pay raise). Though today most people take for granted that slavery and domestic violence are wrong, it is important to remember that, as late as the eighteenth century, the slave trade remained quite respectable in most of the world; torture and execution were standard punishments even for petty crimes and widely regarded as a form of public entertainment; and beatings or corporal punishment were regarded as a normal and perfectly acceptable way of maintaining order within families and schools. Personal violence is still all too common, but, relative to the number of people in the world, it is much rarer than it used to be and no longer regarded in most of the world as an acceptable way of controlling behavior.
In the world of peasants, most lived close to subsistence, periods of shortage were familiar and common, and affluence meant, for most people, a solid home, freedom from debt, and enough money to pay taxes and feed and clothe a family. Today’s consumerist world is utterly different. It is fueled by economic systems that, in the more affluent parts of the world, produce so much material wealth that their very survival depends on massive, sustained consumption by a rapidly growing global middle class. The idea of progress, which most of us take for granted, is also new. For the majority of human history, people assumed that, barring catastrophes, children would live much as their parents had.
Attitudes toward families and children have changed profoundly. In recent centuries, improved nutrition and health care began to lower child mortality, so more children survived into adulthood. Yet traditional peasant attitudes ensured that families kept trying to produce as many children as possible. Such attitudes, along with increasing food production, high fertility, and declining mortality helped drive the extraordinarily rapid population growth of recent centuries. Eventually, though, traditional attitudes began to change as families moved into towns, as educating and rearing children became more expensive, and as more children survived to adulthood. Urban families began to have fewer children, and fertility rates began to fall. The fall in fertility rates after the earlier fall in mortality rates is what demographers call the demographic transition: the emergence of a new demographic regime of low fertility and low mortality. And that explains why, in the twentieth century, rates of population growth began to slow, first in more affluent countries, and then throughout the world. It also helps explain fundamental changes in gender roles. Reduced pressure on women to spend their entire adult lives bearing or rearing children blurred traditional divisions between male and female roles and allowed women to take up roles from which they had been excluded during most of the agrarian era.
For anyone alive today, these aspects of modern lifeways are familiar, though the contrast with the now-vanished world of the peasantry may be harder to appreciate. Even harder to grasp is the staggering increase in the complexity of modern societies, the way every detail of your life is enmeshed in networks involving millions of other people who supply food and employment, health care, education, electricity, the fuel for your car, the clothes you wear. Each of these chains of interconnection may include thousands or millions of other humans linked together in networks of fabulous complexity. In idle moments at airports, I like to try to calculate how many people are involved in the project of building and maintaining an Airbus 380 and getting it from Sydney to London. Weaken any of these links, and our worlds can break down terrifyingly fast, as is apparent today in those parts of the world where state structures have collapsed. Kautilya, the author of the Arthashastra, would have said that humans in these places live under “the law of the fish.”
Transforming the Biosphere
The fossil-fuels revolution and the Great Acceleration did not just transform human societies; they are also transforming the biosphere. The activities of humans are changing the distribution and number of living organisms, altering the chemistry of the oceans and the atmosphere, rearranging landscapes and rivers, and unbalancing the ancient chemical cycles that circulate nitrogen, carbon, oxygen, and phosphorus through the biosphere.
It has taken researchers a long time to realize that the impact of human activities is now as great as that of the major biogeochemical processes that maintain the stability of the biosphere. Without really understanding what we are doing, we are fiddling with the biospheric thermostats that have kept Earth’s surface within habitable temperatures for four billion years.
Carbon is central to the chemistry of life, and its distribution in the atmosphere, the sea, and the crust has helped determine temperatures at Earth’s surface throughout the planet’s history. Today, as we tap the energy in fossil fuels, we are pumping huge amounts of carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere. But not until the 1950s did scientists seriously consider the impact this might have on the carbon cycle. Charles Keeling began measuring levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide levels in Hawaii in 1958. Within a few years, he found that those levels were rising fast. Before the fossil-fuels revolution, human emissions of carbon dioxide were not large enough to affect the levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Today, though, human activities are releasing about ten thousand megatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year, and it is estimated that since the industrial revolution, the total emissions amount to about four hundred thousand megatons of carbon dioxide.5 How significant these changes are became apparent when researchers found ways of measuring carbon dioxide levels over hundreds of thousands of years. One method was to study ice cores, which contain tiny bubbles, trapped year by year, that can tell us the composition of the atmosphere on geological time scales. These showed that, in the two centuries since the industrial revolution, levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide had risen to levels higher than any seen for almost a million years.
The changes Keeling noted were real; they were striking; and they were transforming the carbon cycle. Rising carbon dioxide levels will mean warmer climates, and warmer climates will mean more energetic hurricanes, storms, and wind currents and rising ocean levels that will flood low-lying cities. The effects will persist for many generations because, once released into the atmosphere, carbon dioxide stays there for a long time. But carbon dioxide is not the only important greenhouse gas whose atmospheric levels have increased as a result of human activities. Levels of methane have risen even faster in the past two centuries, driven largely by the spread of rice-growing in flooded fields and the increasing number of domestic livestock. Methane is an even more powerful greenhouse gas, though it breaks down faster.
In the late twentieth century, computers allowed climate scientists to build increasingly sophisticated models of the likely impact of such changes on the atmosphere. Their models suggest that, within a few decades, as greenhouse-gas emissions create a warmer world, melting glaciers and ice caps will raise sea levels, drowning many coastal cities, and increased heat energy and evaporation will ensure more erratic, unpredictable, and extreme weather patterns and make agriculture more difficult. Within a few decades, global climates will look very different from the relatively stable patterns of the Holocene. As one US climate scientist puts it: “The climate is an angry beast, and we are poking it with a stick.”6
Nitrogen is as vital for life as carbon. In 1890, human impacts on the nitrogen cycle were insignificant. Each year, humans extracted about fifteen megatons of nitrogen from the atmosphere, mainly through farming, while wild plants extracted about one hundred megatons, or almost seven times as much. One hundred years later, humans and plants had swapped roles. By 1990, the area of farmed land had increased to such a degree that wild plants were extracting only about 89 megatons, while human extraction of nitrogen through farming and fertilizer production had risen to 118 megatons.
Our impact on other large mammals has also been profound. In 1900, wild land mammals accounted for the equivalent of about ten megatons of carbon biomass. Humans already accounted for about thirteen megatons, while domesticated mammals—our cows, horses, sheep, and goats—accounted for an astonishing thirty-five megatons. In the next century, these ratios would get even more warped. By 2000, the total biomass of wild land mammals had fallen to about 5 megatons, while that of humans had increased fast (not surprising, given what we know of population growth) to about 55 megatons and that of domesticated mammals to an astonishing 129 megatons. This is a powerful indicator of the extent to which expanding human activities have squeezed out other species of large animals by taking more and more of the biosphere’s resources.
The point is a general one. Most species of animals and plants that are not of immediate value to humans are declining in numbers. They are declining so fast that some speculate that we may be witnessing the early stages of another mass-extinction event. Rates of extinction are now hundreds of times faster than in the past few million years and approaching rates not seen since the last mass-extinction event, sixty-five million years ago. We humans have even managed to drive our closest relatives to extinction, including, probably, our hominin relatives, such as the Neanderthals. Our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans, are close to extinction in the wild.
The fossil-fuels revolution has magnified the scale of human impacts in many other areas. Mining, road building, and the spread of cities now move more earth than is moved by erosion and glaciation. Diesel pumps suck fresh water from aquifers ten times faster than natural flows can replenish them. We are producing minerals, rocks, and forms of matter that never existed before. They include plastics (made from oil, and now accumulating in landfills in cities and within the oceans), pure aluminum, stainless steel, and vast amounts of concrete, a human-made rock whose manufacture is now a major contributor to carbon emissions. Such a proliferation of new substances has not been seen on Earth since the appearance of an oxygen-dominated atmosphere, around 2.4 billion years ago.7
One of the most terrifying of these changes is the increasing productivity of human weaponry. Just a few centuries ago, our most lethal weapons were spears or, perhaps, rock-throwing catapults. From the late medieval age, the gunpowder revolution, pioneered in China, gave us muskets, rifles, cannons, and grenades. World War II spawned weapons that could degrade the entire biosphere in just a few hours, weapons with the destructive power of the asteroid that did in the dinosaurs.
Measuring Change in the Anthropocene
New flows of information and energy have woven humans, animals, and plants, as well as the chemicals of the earth, seas, and atmosphere, into a single system constructed primarily for the benefit of our own species. This system depends on huge flows of energy from fossil fuels. We can roughly measure the impact of these energy flows in the Anthropocene using figures in the statistical appendix.
The first thing that stands out is the sheer scale of change in recent centuries. In the past two hundred years, human populations (column B) rose from nine hundred million to more than six billion. That is the equivalent of adding twenty-six billion people in a thousand years, a rate of growth one thousand times faster than that of the agrarian era, in which, on average, about twenty-five million people were added each millennium. Such growth rates are unsustainable, and in recent decades, they have been slowing. Nevertheless, the figures illustrate the stunning impact on population growth of the fossil-fuels revolution.
Rapid population growth depended on huge increases in the energy available to our species (column C). In the eight thousand years between the end of the last ice age and two thousand years ago, human energy consumption increased by about seventy times. In just two hundred years, between 1800 and 2000, total energy consumption rose by about twenty-two times, from 20 million gigajoules (20 exajoules) to 52 million gigajoules (520 exajoules). That rise is the equivalent of an increase of 2,500 exajoules every thousand years, a rate of increase twenty thousand times as fast as in the agrarian era.
The energy bonanza from fossil fuels, like the energy bonanza from farming, paid for population growth, for the complexity taxes demanded by entropy, and, finally, for rising living standards, but on a much larger scale than in the agrarian era. And this time, the rise in living standards was not confined to a tenth of the human population but extended to a much larger emerging middle class.
Much of the energy bonanza from fossil fuels paid for increasing numbers of humans. It fed, clothed, and housed the five to six billion people added to the world’s population in the past two centuries. But the fossil-fuels bonanza was so much greater than that from farming that a lot more was left over for other uses. We know this because column D shows that the energy available per person increased by almost eight times in the past one thousand years, while in the whole eight thousand years between the end of the ice age and two thousand years ago, it had less than doubled. In the past two hundred years, populations have grown at lightning speed, but energy flows have grown even faster.
A lot of the extra energy must have paid for the taxes demanded by entropy from increasingly complex societies. Much of that energy did no productive work or was dissipated as heat or in pollution or waste or the destruction of war. It was doing entropy’s work of degrading complex structures. We have no good measures of the amounts involved, but they must be significant. Then there are the other complexity taxes, the energy and wealth that paid for the infrastructure of today’s global societies. In the past two hundred years, the size of the largest cities rose from about one million (a level that had barely changed in two thousand years) to more than twenty million (column F). Given the infrastructure of electricity, sewers, roads, and public transport needed for a modern city and the challenges of policing and regulating the activities of twenty million people crowded into a small area, it is apparent that this represents a quantum leap in social and technological complexity. Complexity taxes pay for the construction and upkeep of buildings, buses, trains and ferries, sewers and roads; they pay for garbage collection, the electricity grid, law codes, policing, prisons and courts, and the links by ship, plane, train, and the Internet that bind cities throughout the world into a single network. Without these different systems, all driven by huge flows of energy, the complex structures of a modern city would break down fast. And cities, in turn, are linked by a complex infrastructure of highways, laws, and electronic communications to hundreds of thousands of smaller towns, villages, and isolated settlements. Though we have no way of measuring it precisely, we can be sure that complexity taxes account for a large share of the energy from fossil fuels.
But the bonanza from fossil fuels was so massive that a lot of energy was left over for one more task: that of improving human welfare. As in the agrarian era, a disproportionate amount of wealth still supports a tiny elite, so, as in the past, we can allocate a significant share of the energy bonanza to elite consumption. But so huge was the increase in energy and wealth that, for the first time in human history, consumption levels began to rise for a growing global middle class of billions of people, far more people than the entire population of the world at the end of the agrarian era. Thomas Piketty estimates that in modern European countries, 40 percent of the population controls between 45 percent and 25 percent of national wealth. The appearance of this middle class was a new phenomenon in human history. And more and more people are joining the new middle class as the numbers living in extreme poverty fall.
