9 minute read
Along Paths of the Anthropocene
Footprints
A Chapter from Author Bo Landin’s Book – Footprints
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My footprint is much too large. I’m not talking about the 280 mm of flesh and blood, which leave an imprint in the soft earth, the tracks of an individual often erased as soon as they are made. That footprint only reveals where I have been, not who I am.
My ecological footprint tells a different story. Regrettably, that footprint often remains for a long time. It is incorporated into the Earth’s history and becomes part of a collective effect on all living things: on mountains, soil, air, and water. Just like my human footprint differs from others – some larger, most smaller – my ecological footprint differs from that of other people. My ecological footprint informs on a history; it tells of oppression, of financial conditions and of power. It divulges something about knowledge and desire, of inability and insufficiency. My ecological footprint is as vulnerable as my very nature and still so powerful that it can step on humanity and on the rights of individual people – now and in the future.
Modern science breaks down all knowledge into tiny parts, so small that we sometimes forget to see the bigger picture. Today we are bombarded with statistics, diagrams, and power-point images. I learn that each of us walking the earth today is “entitled to” an ecological footprint of 1.8 hectares of Earth’s surface. That equals all the land we can divide between all of us living on Earth today. In the last 50 years, the ecological footprint – measured by use of natural resources – increased by 190 percent. Together we stomp around with footprints to the tune of 2.7 hectares per person, meaning we need one and a half planets to fulfil everyone’s needs – if we divide the use up evenly among all citizens of Earth. But this of course is not the reality. Those of us in the richer parts of the world have grabbed more of everything. Personally, I have fought for environmental issues my entire life. I try to live sustainably by principles, rules and guidelines of the last decades. I still fail monumentally. If everyone lived as I do, we would perhaps need four or five planets Earth. My ecological footprint has a history I cannot erase. I have deposited insurmountable amounts of carbon dioxide in the global climate bank. And I keep doing it. In this bank, physical and ecological feedback loops are the interest accumulation, which plays out as dividends that breaks down the climate – and ecosystems – exponentially.
The measures we take today as humans on a limited planet, will determine what lives and which world our descendants will experience. Or perhaps I should say, which world they will endure, because when I look to the future, it is not an all beautiful and harmonious one. The outcome is up to us. This is why our epoch is called the Anthropocene, a proposal among scientists to create a new geological time where humans decide how the world at large will look and perform. People are about to reshape this planet. At the same time, a lot of people also know and sense that this is wrong, and our direction is beyond reason, but are still not interested in breaking the pattern. In the human world, there are forces beyond those of nature. For all of humanity, people have tried to rein in the forces of nature – to control the forces that would otherwise control us. In this futile ambition, we have lost our foothold. Can we regain our firm footing on the path in our human history where we instead focus on controlling our own destructive forces, our inner demons, which threaten our world – and our mere existence?
It is undeniable that we live in a changing time, where one species – Homo sapiens – has the ability to change an entire world. Humans have the power to move mountains, melt polar ices, leave traces in all soils and waters and perhaps irreversibly change the conditions for their own lives as well as the lives of all living creatures on Earth.
This makes me think of the Greek expression ‘kairos’. The word belongs in classic rhetoric, meaning “the right moment”, the moment in a conversation or debate where a new fact, the right word at the right time, changes everything. Is that moment now? Is today the day when our arguments finally stick the landing and lead to decisions and change?
The baffling thing is that our present was my future. At the end of the 1960s, when I first got engaged in environmental issues, I was part of the ‘future generation’. We were rebels, demanding answers from our parents’ generation. As a field biologist, I saw impacts in nature which terrified me. As teenagers, we were able to see the world in a totally different light from our parents. But as our worldview expanded, this social activism soon got other overtones. In 1971, I was one of the Swedish representatives at the world’s first international youth conference on the human environment. The idea was that we would organize and prepare our input at the UN’s first environmental conference, scheduled for the following year in Stockholm, Sweden. I travelled to Canada with ideas of nature under threat, an awareness of toxic substances like DDT and a lot of information about polluted rivers. But in just a few days, my worldview was changed completely. Meeting young people from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, I realized that my limited knowledge and insight did not include their daily reality. Their environmental questions revolved around daily survival, food production, apartheid, control of natural resources, war, and international justice.
COLORS OF POISON #7 BY HANS STRAND. Colors of Poison #7 from the series ‘Manmade Land’, by nature and landscape photographer Hans Strand, shows the pollution of the Rio Tinto River in southwestern Spain. An incredibly beautiful picture with a dark truth. In this series, Strand let’s us witness landscapes where nature has completely given way to the influence of mankind. Places that are more ‘man-made’ than natural.
Today, reading the declaration we agreed on then, I realize it has taken 30-40-50 years for several of our stanzas to be included in international declarations and resolutions. Back then, we knew nothing of the “greenhouse effect” or climate change, but the result of our agreements was that a more just world, peace, and a more ecologically sound and democratic progress would, in fact, benefit all of humanity. As the threat of climate change grows, and ominous reports multiply, it is easy to become pessimistic. Some speak of ‘environmental angst’ when the future looks bleak. Perhaps we think that we won a few battles but are still losing the war.
But I admit that I’m not as easily optimistic as I used to be. It is no longer simply a matter of technological solutions and political breakthroughs. It is about our lifestyle, our cultures’ survival, and it demands large social adjustments – nothing less than a complete system re-set. Already now we are getting a glimpse of what the future will hold. Refugees today seek protection from offenses and war. But they are also fleeing the effects of climate change.
When the temperature rises a degree, maybe two or three, millions of people will begin a new era of migration. I can thumb through the pages of history and see how migration is part of the human soul’s constant striving toward new worlds, new opportunities while fleeing war, threats and hardships. This is often a search for arable land, water and a chance to survive.
The images I see in scientific reports are clear. Behind dry facts telling us that the northern Mediterranean regions will be subject to severe drought, lays the knowledge that the life lived there today is not sustainable; depleted water sources forces people on the move. Already now the yearly winter rains in southern Europe that have guaranteed life here are no longer falling as they used to do. Constant wildfires decimate what little vegetation remains. It is as though the Sahara Desert extends its desiccated and deadly hand over the Mediterranean and creates a stranglehold over the land. “Head north!” the calls will echo among people. “There is land there, there is water, there we can grow what we and our ancestors always grew around the Mediterranean!”
Seen from this angle, we must now ask the tough questions: can our democratic systems handle the immense changes we will face when climate change dictates the situation? Faced with serious enough threats, humans have shown they can make decisions, which change entire societies. Sometimes, these changes came about through war. During the Second World War, the entire industrial production was altered – particularly in the USA. Production means and goals were successfully altered without delay. Society got a boost. With the climate crisis, mankind faces an existential threat, and I must once again believe we can make wise decisions to benefit humanity at large. This crisis creates opportunity. Even in the United States, which is responsible for a disproportionate amount of the world carbon emissions, something is changing. Today, more people are employed in solar, wind and alternative energy projects than are employed in the oil, coal, and gas industries combined!
Sitting on the Arctic mountainside, the sun’s last rays setting the glacier’s edge aflame, my being moves into the perspective of eons, and I feel comforted by my own smallness and insignificance. That feeling creates respect for nature and reignites the forces of my youth, which made me fight for everything nature represents.
Just like the delegates at the youth conference in Canada in 1971 made me realize that the dream of a sustainable and fair society was a matter of power, I now realize it is no longer enough to believe in hope and imagine we will simply arrive in a utopia. To avoid an even worse dystopian reality than the one already staring us in the face, we must channel our constructive rage into a force which hopefully can take power from those who do not wish to give our grandchildren and descendants any alternatives past the Anthropocene. Nature sets our limits and shows us the possibilities.
As I hike in nature and dwell in my inner landscape, I let the elements of wood, air, water, fire, and earth flow through my senses and reveal the processes that ultimately rule the lives of you, me, and those who come after us. With great care, I leave my footprint.
ANTHROPOCENE – the human epoch – is a proposed geological period usually pertaining to the time period after the industrial revolution (around 1800) to the present day, a time during which human impact and activities have been a significant factor in changes in the Earth’s geology, climate and ecosystems.
