Why does the Anthropocene matter?

Hello and welcome to my blog: "What started the Anthropocene, Farming or Factories?"

I am writing this blog as part of my Masters in Environmental Archaeology at University College London. Environmental Archaeology studies past human behaviours and societies through analysis of prehistoric plant and animal artefacts and analysis of pre-historic soils and landscapes. Analysis of these things allows us to describe models of past climates; why would we want to do this?

We live in an age where the impact of human behaviours on the planet has become a matter of global political and fiscal concern. It is no longer the domain of scientists or environmentalists who, in the past, have been sidelined as eccentric or misguided. Fundamental decisions about how we feed and power all our societies are now being taken with consideration about sustainability and environmental impact. These decisions must be informed by well-grounded and robust evidence for the likely consequences.

We need to look to the past to understand the history of environmental change and to determine how and why those environmental changes happened; we need to understand what we can control, what we cannot control and what we should control. Analysing past climatic and environmental change in the context of the emergence of modern civilisation informs us about the positive and negative impacts, and the risks and rewards of our behaviours. Environmental Archaeology is one tool we can deploy to achieve that understanding.

It is recognised that the development of industrialisation powered by fossil fuels has had a measurable impact on our environment. In the last thirty years some scientists have started to link those impacts with climate change. This has led to the development of the concept of the "Anthropocene" which is a 200-year geological period during which human behaviours have had a greater long-term impact on the environment than the natural forces acting on our planet.

The recent and short-term nature of contribution of humans to climate change is now being challenged by archaeologists, climatologists and geographers, amongst other disciplines, who have posited the theory that our pre-historic behaviours such as the adoption of sedentism, the development of agriculture, the clearance of great forests, the enrichment of soils, etc. is when the human impact started to outweigh the effects of natural forces and that the Anthropocene may have started as long as 8000 years ago. William Ruddiman's 2003 paper "The Anthropogenic Greenhouse Era Began Thousands of Years Ago" lays out the arguments for this hypothesis.

This blog will explore critically the evidence for that earlier emergence of the Anthropocene and consider the question: What started the Anthropocene, Farming or Factories?

I look forward to your comments, criticisms and contributions to this debate over the next few months.