When did the Anthropocene begin?
Tuesday race, January 14, 2025
I had to stop running for a week and a half, I got a horrible flu.
But now that I'm back on my runs, two things made me wonder. First, it is now official, the hottest year in history, since records have been kept, was 2024, for the first time above 1.5°C above the temperature before the Industrial Revolution. Second, next Monday a climate change denier takes office as President of the United States. For me, with everything we are currently experiencing, denying climate change is like denying that the earth is round. Climate change is the seal that shows the impact of man on Earth,
This brings me to the question, when did man's impact on Earth begin? When did the Anthropocene begin?
“Anthropocene” has gained considerable popularity in recent years. It is a new geological epoch characterized by humans' great effect on the Earth. However, geologists, who are responsible for naming eras and epochs, do not accept the term.
But those who defend this term have looked for ways to define its beginning. I think it is difficult. Man's impact has grown exponentially, so it is difficult to say our effect was great.
Some believe that the beginning could be considered after the Second World War when the use of plastics expanded. It's a good point, since these are not degraded by organisms, they remain. Yes, weathering is making them smaller and smaller, but they do not disappear. We now have microplastics in everyone, including inside us. We would be talking about about 80 years ago.
But I think we can go further back, we could say about 250 years ago, with the appearance of the steam engine, not with the Industrial Revolution. I believe that the Revolution came first, using wind and hydraulic energy, but the requirement for constant and on-demand energy caused the development of the steam engine, with this the exponential growth in carbon consumption and, with it, the dependence on fossil fuels. Currently, we measure climate change based on the gases produced by the combustion of these fuels. That must have been about 250 years ago.
I believe that we can go even further back, with the domestication of other organisms. Many talk about the domestication of vegetables, agriculture. I believe that the domestication of animals began at the same time and has the same implications. The destruction of natural ecosystems to transform them into land for agriculture and livestock, and here we are talking about about 10 thousand years.
But, my opinion is that we can go even further back, when modern human beings, Homo sapiens, left Africa. To begin with, in each new place we arrived the largest animals, the megafauna, quickly disappeared. Apparently, at that time we specialized in hunting large prey; In a single hunting event, we had food for a long time and many mouths. But large animals, basically mammals, have low reproduction rates, long gestation times, and take many years to reach sexual maturity, so by hunting few preys but continuously we put them in a very disadvantageous situation. So the first effect we had on the Earth begins with the extinction of these large animals. With this, the Anthropocene, in my opinion, began approximately 70 thousand years ago.
The truth is, we are a plague.
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