Seven Billion

There are seven billion people on this planet. Enough food must be grown to feed those seven billion. Enough energy must be generated for those seven billion. Enough forests must be cut down to make room for those seven billion. Imagine the impact seven billion people make on the environment. No wonder we’re entering into a new epoch: the Anthropocene.

Industrial Farming in Spain

Human beings alter the shape of the planet to such a degree that it is now reflected in geology. If a geologist millions of years from now examine the rock record of our time, he will see a change in pollen record which reflects corn, wheat, and other crop signature, a change in sedimentation patterns caused by dams and land denudation, and a change in the carbon signature of the oceans due to acidification, to name but a few.

Jan Zalasiewich, a British stratigrapher, compares what future geologists will see from the rock record of our period to the Ordovician extinction 445 million years ago: ‘a sharp band in which bad things happened’.  Or an asteroid impact: sudden and destructive.

This is why scientists believe we are entering a new epoch, which is defined by changes in sedimentary rock. Nobel Prize Dutch chemist Paul Crutzen popularized the term ‘Anthropocene’ – ‘anthropo’ = man and ‘cene’ = new. He believes the Holocene ended in the late 1700s when ice cores began to show increases in CO₂ levels.

Here’s an overview of what ‘Trees & Towers’ will be about:

• Human-induced environmental change, including ocean acidification, atmospheric pollution and land use, on recent timescales
• New technology and schemes to help alleviate human impact on the planet – namely what the governments/industries/private companies are up to
• Scientific and opinion papers on the future outlook of the Anthropocene

What we do today will decide whether millions of years from now, we’ll be known as another asteroid impact. Now that's bleak.

Here’s a really good article by NatGeo I used for this blog post.

Reference:

Kolbert, Elizabeth. "Enter the Anthropocene: Age of Man." National Geographic. Mar 2011 (http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2011/03/age-of-man/kolbert-text/1).