The Anthropocene: Where on Earth are we Going? (Full)

my name is will steffen i'm an earth system scientist and i'm here to talk about my favorite topic the anthropocene the anthropocene is a new concept in the history of our planet it was first coined by the atmospheric chemist paul critzen 21 years ago and he was reacting to presentations given by a wide variety of scientists who were studying the ocean the land the atmosphere and so on and they were referencing all they were talking about to the holocene which of course is the geological epoch and the stable state of the earth system that humans have thrived in for nearly 12 000 years but all of the evidence that was being given was counter to their use of the word holocene and paul was getting very frustrated at this meeting and he finally had enough and he interjected he just burst out and he interrupted the speaker and he said stop saying that we're in the holocene we're not in the holocene anymore we're in the and then he was struggling a bit for a word and he stammered around a bit finally said we're in the anthropocene and that's where the word came from so the anthropos of course refers to us humans and the c e n e ending refers to a geological time period so that created an enormous amount of interest right away in the earth system science community to say well is there really any substance to this idea that in fact we have left the holocene and got into the anthropocene so here's our reference period the holocene this is now a hundred thousand years record of earth's temperature so you can see the last ice age the ups and downs but the general decrease in temperature going down to the depth of the last ice age about 20 000 years ago but this last nearly 12 000 years of relatively stable conditions compared to an ice age that's referred to as the holocene by the geologist this is when humans first developed agriculture villages cities and we've thrived during this period of the holocene so the question is can we actually gather evidence to say whether or not we are still in the holocene so that was part of the task that the research program i was involved in back in the years after 2000. that was our major task was to say is there anything to this so first of all we looked at the anthropos side and we looked at what we called the human enterprise so what we wanted to do was to go back to 1750 it's a bit hard to see on all of these little graphs but we wanted to pick up before the industrial revolution because paul critzen when he coined the term anthropocene he thought that the anthropocene started at the beginning of the industrial revolution so what would you measure if you wanted to quantify us who we are and what we do so we looked at population economic activity resource use urbanization globalization transport and so on and what we saw when we plotted the data from 1750 or as early as we could get them were was remarkable we thought we would see a nice even curve from 1750 beginning of the industrial revolution but we didn't in virtually all of these we see a little bit of an increase not a whole lot happening until this year 1950. mid 20th century and then we see all of these parameters taking off and some of the more contemporary ones like globalization here we use international tourism actually don't start before 1950 but in each one of these we see a remarkable increase in the magnitude of these parameters whether it's economy whether it's resource use and so on so that was the anthropos and we said indeed there is something really unusual going on here in the human enterprise starting in the mid-20th century but then we said we have to look at the other part of the word the c-e-n-e which refers to the earth system can we see any impact of these rapid increases in human pressures on the earth's system and we did the same thing we started from 1750 and we went to 2000 and now 2015. so what we did here was to look at six parameters which characterize the geosphere the non-living part of earth the climate ozone ocean acidity and so on and the bottom six of the biosphere the coastal zone the land the ocean so what you can see here when we look at the famous greenhouse gases loss of ozone atmospheric temperature ocean acidity we start to see that these are moving too not always precisely at 1950 but it's remarkable how many of them actually show changes in their rate around the mid 20th century so we amassed an enormous amount of evidence from the scientific literature from the observation agencies and so on and we can say two things about these graphs one is they are outside of holocene norms we can go back to the paleo record the geological record and look at what these look like for the past 12 000 years these are all outside of holocene norms and the second thing we can say for sure is the major driver are human pressures not natural variability in the earth's system so these two sets of graphs unequivocally showed that paul cruzen had it right we are in the anthropocene it is driven by humans it's a rapidly changing trajectory of the earth system away from the holocene what he didn't quite get right was that it really didn't begin in 1750 there were some small changes it really began in the mid 20th century what stratospheric goes on is one of the good news stories because we worked out very quickly the atmospheric chemist did what the problem was and we very quickly developed substitutes for the ozone depleting substances that we could use as refrigerants and so on domesticated land we're actually running out of it we've domesticated much of the earth's land anyway so you're making a very good point there because when you look at the so-called great acceleration curves they can't keep going on forever it's finite planet and so on so basically the form they'll take or what mathematicians call logistic curves they'll go up they'll hit a maximum rate of increase and then they'll start to level off or in some cases like wild fish capture it's actually going down because we've overfished things so what we're finding is that the the point at which they're changing most rapidly for many of them is around 1950 or the decade or two thereafter so it's that period second half of the 20th century where things really took off now they're starting to change in different ways because of the running out of resources etc so now we can look at what's on everyone's mind these days which is climate change which of course is one uh very important characteristic of the anthropocene so if we look at the global temperature record from 1850 to the present again we don't see much change in the first part of this record but again from about 1950 or actually from the 1970s there's a bit of a lag there we see an exceptionally strong increase in global atmospheric temperature and we know for certain that the dominant driver of this is human emission of greenhouse gases so there's no doubt about that but what we want to do is put this again in a holocene framework we want to go back all the time to our holocene point of reference so here is the last 2 000 years of the holocene for those of us of european background this is the time of the roman empire here's the medieval warm period and so on european invasion of australia occurred right around here european invasion of north america occurred right around there but the thing is the temperature the global average temperature was extremely steady and it only varied by one tenth of a degree either side of the norm but this is that instrumental record of the last hundred years or so on the same time scale so we can see how enormous the human influence is on our climate and we can also say for sure that this is way outside of holocene norms this indeed is what an anthropocene climate looks like there are multiple pro so-called proxies that paleo scientists use to tease out what climate was doing what the biosphere looked like in the past one of the common ones are ice cores which have isotopes of oxygen carbon hydrogen in them and the concentration of those can vary depending on the temperature so you can back out uh what the temperature was doing back then a lot of other indicators too speleothems stalactites like mites in caves can can give you information pollen records can give you very good information on what the biosphere was doing of course that's related to temperature and the rainfall and of course we also have some historical records too at least for several hundred years we have historical records from some of the europeans the chinese have some very long records which actually are interesting when you compare them to the paleo records you see that people back then had a pretty good fix on on monitoring what their climate was doing we can look at the rates of change too that that last line there just go back there you can see how sharp that is that's a spike in the temperature record we can actually measure this the rate of atmospheric co2 increase which is the major driver of that curve over the past two decades is about 100 times the maximum rate during the last deglaciation when co2 went up from about 180 to 260 to 280 parts per million for the last half century the global average temperature is risen at a rate about 170 times faster than that background rate over the last seven thousand years at the hall of c and in the opposite direction so again these are unprecedented rates of change and just a couple months ago the geological society of london put out a report saying that this current rate of carbon dioxide and temperature change is almost unprecedented in the entire history of earth that's 4.5 billion years they can find only one time when climate change faster and that was when the asteroid struck her 66 million years ago the one that wiped out the dinosaurs and that was instantaneously instantaneous but all other records of changes in climate in earth's 4.5 billion year history none of them are as fast as the human driven change of today but we also need to look at the biosphere because the other big part of the earth system is the living part the biosphere so if we look at how humans are transforming the biosphere we can look at a big synthesis report done just two years ago in 2019 that looked at all the evidence we have of how the biosphere is changing and how humans are changing a number of important conclusions were drawn in this i'll only put three of them up here one is nature is declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history so just as in climate we are driving extinctions changing land polluting the ocean faster and faster about one million animal and plant species are now threatened with extinction many within decades and that would amount to the sixth grade extinction event in the entire history of earth the web of life on earth is getting smaller and increasingly frayed and you can see that here in australia with the land use change with the bleaching of the great barrier reef with the massive fires it's hammering our biosphere on this continent but the earth has had five mass extinction events in the past usually associated with changes in glaciers or the meteorite strikes 66 million years ago which was actually sorry which is actually the most recent one which was here that's the one that knocked out the dinosaurs but the one we're entering into now will be the sixth grade extinction event in the history of the planet this is an amazing statistic that really hammers home how much we dominate the biosphere if you could weigh everything every living animal on land that has a backbone vertebrate so that's mammals reptiles birds amphibians everything on land you would find that our domesticated animals are pigs cattle chooks account for two-thirds sixty-seven percent of all that mass we humans just our own bodies we account for thirty of the mass and all wild creatures whether they're kangaroos elephants zebras what have you account for three percent so you add up all the wildlife on earth all the kangaroos that are living all the african wildlife all the bison in north america etc we humans weigh 10 times more than that i can't think of a better indicator for the anthropocene in the in that enormous domination of the terrestrial biosphere in fact we dominate the biosphere so much that a paleobotanist mark williams and his team have said we are now in the anthropocene biosphere and this is what he's saying global homogenization of flora and fauna we're mixing everything everything's becoming more monotonic humans we're commandeering 25 to 40 percent of the net primary productivity that's what the whole biosphere produces every year we're commandeering up to 40 of that and we're mining fossil net primary productivity coal oil and gas and burning that at enormous rate we're now directing the evolution of other species through genetic engineering and we're increasingly interacting the biosphere with the technosphere think of pollutants plastics radioactive materials and so on and mark and his colleagues conclude that this is signs of a new third stage of biosphere evolution the first stage being the evolution of life the origin of life itself on the planet the second big stage was going from single-celled organisms to complex organisms like ourselves but what we're doing now is so dramatic this could be the third stage of biosphere evolution in the planetary history this is a good way of looking at the holocene anthropocene boundary a colleague of mine gia savitsky from the united states put this together so here we're going back 12 000 years up to the present so the holocene began about there so here we're looking at things like human population because humans were around in pleistocene cumulative global energy use and gdp economy look at how flatlining that is until right at the end of the holocene when population goes up this little shaded area here is 1950 onwards have a look at what happened after 1950. that's that's just phenomenal how much the human enterprise exploded so if we just look at this area out a little bit more there's the 1950 there and if we look at here's the beginning of the industrial revolution we see that things started creeping up but it was really from 1950 that population energy use and gdp really exploded and this has been given the nickname now the great acceleration in human activity the geologist got into the act too we earth system scientists were really pushing the anthropocene concept really really hard and in 2009 the geologist in fact the geological society of london led this formed what they called the anthropocene working group and they were sort of putting us on the spot they said hey you were a system scientist you're making all these wild claims about the anthropocene and you're using a geological term does this stand up uh in geological terms stratigraphic terms so they formed a working group to look at that yanzala savage was the convener and colin waters was the secretary and this group's been working now for 12 years it still exists and it has to answer to bodies above it the subcommission on quaternary stratigraphy the international commission on stratigraphy and then the international union of geological scientists this is a pretty complex way that you have to go through if you're going to change the geological time scale go from the pleistocene the myosin pliocene all those earlier epochs through the holocene and if we want to call this anthropocene a geological epoch we have to go through a formal procedure and that's what's happening so a mass of data has been been brought together on how the earth system is changing but increasingly can we see it in the strata and the answer is yes there are enormous number of indicators be there radio nuclides phosphates and nitrogen chicken bones changing form because of the new forms of chickens because of genetic engineering and so on there's a massive mass of these so we finally a year or two ago put forward a formal question should the anthropocene be formalized in the geological time scale and should the base of the anthropocene the start date be placed around the mid-20th century the formal vote was 29-4 the most massive majority you're probably going to get in a very contentious community so the evidence is overwhelming so now this is a formal recommendation it has to go up that chain and that's going to take probably three or four years and in the meantime the stratigrapher is going to put forward what they call the golden spike this is the core that will mark the anthropocene but there'll be a whole host of ancillary cores that support it from all around the world and that's being put together as we speak but i want to jump back now to an earth system perspective and talk about where we might be going now that i hope i've convinced you that we are in the anthropocene and i should add that the anthropocene is not a stable geological epoch or stable state of the earth system it's a trajectory a fast trajectory away from the holocene probably away from the pleistocene as well so we can look at the temperature record and i've showed you this before this is the the influence up until now about a 1.1 degree temperature rise by the way the difference between the last ice age and the holocene was about 4 degrees in global average temperature so we're now a quarter of the way in terms of changing the temperature but in the opposite direction making it hotter these are the climate model projections going out to 2100. this was actually published in the fifth report of the ipcc so these start at 2005. this is the low emission scenario that's the high some in between so anywhere from another one degree up to four degrees but the point is this is only one century and it's spread out like this so the curves don't look too ominous but let's put it on this long time scale so here's the time scale there's nineteen hundred there's two thousand twenty one hundreds here on this temperature scale what does that look like well it looks like this this is why the geologist is saying that never before in 4.5 billion years of earth history apart from the asteroid strike 66 million years ago have we seen temperatures rise like this this is again a remarkable trajectory in the future so here's who we are now you can see the 1.1 here these are the paris targets 1.5 to 2 degrees so we're trying to keep temperatures somewhere within that range but this is where we're going now if we just keep emitting like where we are today australia other countries keep pretty much doing what we're doing we're going to hit at least three and a worst-case scenario of course if we use all the fossil fuels we can get our hands on is four and a half or five degrees and most people think that we will not be able to survive that much change in climate that fast that will be an existential threat to contemporary civilization so that's what we face and when you look at it in the proper time scale you can see what an emergency this actually is but what i want to talk about now is to go back to the earth's system and how it behaves and talk about this concept of tipping points i'll go into what they are in a little bit but the issue i want to point up here is that we think that many of these tipping points are vulnerable to temperature rises in the span of 1.5 to 3 degrees and we're approaching 1.5 we'll probably pass 1.5 in a bit over a decade so we need to take this seriously and the problem is once we start tipping them they will push their system on their own up to the higher temperatures we won't be able to stop it so there is uh sort of a point of no return in this trajectory that you really don't want to push the system past or we'll be in real trouble so that's something we need to know much more about what do these tipping points look like well we can actually map them so here are a number of them they come basically in three types big ice sheets here the antarctic ice sheets there's greenland and summer and winter sea ice they also come in the form of circulation like the jet stream and just now in north america when the american state of texas is getting hammered by snow and freezing temperatures this is a destabilization of the jet stream that's a tipping point so that's already showing we're approaching that one and then there are the big biomes the boreal forest the amazon forest coral reefs and so on you can see that we think there are a number of them in that one to three degree range these light colored ones that are vulnerable but the problem is they are connected and once we knock over the vulnerable ones like a row of dominoes we could get the whole thing going so the ipcc has looked at this too and in the special report on the 1.5 temperature target they said already there is a moderate risk of large scale singular events i.e tipping points at one degree c which is what we're just transgressing now and a moderate to high risk of 2.5 so the ipcc confirms what those of us working on thought that somewhere between one and a half or even one and two and a half and three were entering dangerous territory we're entering high risk territory so a group of us published a paper about a year and a half ago in december 2019 saying what do we know now because we can actually look at a lot of observations about these tipping points where we are today how are they changing and here's what we see greenland ice sheet it's losing ice and the rate is accelerating west antarctic ice sheet ice loss again accelerating arctic sea ice in the northern hemisphere summer that's shrinking more and more every year permafrost is starting to thaw and ominously the atlantic circulation is slowing down and has been for half a century but here's how they are connected as the arctic sea ice reduces an area to the during the northern hemisphere summer when it's in sunlight 24 hours a day that is increasing the heating of this region because it's absorbing more sunlight that is accelerating the loss of ice from greenland which sits in the far north that is pouring more fresh water onto the north atlantic ocean as it melts that is slowing the atlantic circulation that is reducing rainfall over the amazon causing more droughts more fires more carbon goes back up into the atmosphere and it accelerates the whole process that's what a so-called tipping cascade looks like and we can actually see it start to unfold now all the way from the arctic sea ice to the amazon rainforest so we made a very important point in this paper if damaging tipping cascades can occur and we think there's enough evidence that we have to take this seriously and a global tipping point cannot be ruled out then this is indeed an existential threat to civilization no amount of economic cost benefit analysis is going to help us so that's what we stand i think pretty much today in 2021 we can see a lot of instabilities beginning to grow in these tipping elements we can see some connections between them we haven't yet hit the global tipping cascade yet but we're concerned that somewhere between a degree and a half and three we could tip the whole planet we published an earlier paper which tried to put this into this little cartoon it's a stability landscape which these are stable states of the earth system this is an ice age and this little valley here is the holocene and so over the last 1.2 million years or so on the earth is just oscillated rolling up and down between the ice ages and the warm periods and that's been triggered by changes in earth's orbit fairly regular changes so about every hundred thousand years the earth gets bumped up into a nice warm period which is good for us humans and a lot of our colleagues uh the mammals and so on that's the whole thing but already today we're pushing the earth away from the next ice age in fact we think we already missed the next ice age that may be a good thing by the way but now we're moving over into this very shallow area that's ill-defined which means there's a lot more variability in the climate it's not in a stable system the earth is actually moving but we think we're very soon going to pass this fork where once we get these tipping elements going and degrade the biosphere even more so it's absorbing less carbon we could hit this planetary tipping point and this would take us into what we call hot house earth that's the four or five degree hotter world that the ipcc has as its highest emission scenario the difference we make is that you may not need human emissions to get you to hot house earth you may get human emissions to trigger tipping points and they will take you to hot house earth the other option is to meet the paris accord start regenerating the biosphere living in different ways that we look after the planet as our indigenous colleagues have done for thousands of years called earth system stewardship and park the earth in what we call stabilized earth i think there's a very big difference between those two fundamentally different approaches one of them is trying to influence this complex system we call your system and try to manage it or manipulate it or something i think that's exceptionally dangerous because this is the most complex system we've ever confronted we've ever tried to learn earth system science is incredibly difficult and challenging and we're only scratching the surface i don't think anyone any er system science scientist can say with any reasonable confidence what will happen if we try geoengineering it's and most of the geo engineering are designed around simple cause effect logic and in fact you are intervening in an incredibly complex system that we don't understand on the other hand going back to indigenous values looking after country is actually understanding that we live in a very complex system that has its own dynamics and its own inbuilt stability uh in in these geological epochs like the holocene so our job is to look after that look after country to make sure we don't disturb it and we benefit from it so uh in climate change the opposite of geoengineering would be drawdown which would be use biological means or others to draw co2 back out of the atmosphere and put it back down to where it came from underground implants and so on and that would be reducing the pressure on the system and allowing the system then to re-equilibrate so that's very different than from the geo-engineering approach you can use an engineering approach to look at this too in terms of intervention times and reaction times so what do we mean by that what's our reaction time you hear more and more countries saying we will commit to net zero emissions by 2050. it's becoming a common mantra so here's 2050 and they want to get net zero emissions so what emissions are left by 2050 are balanced by negative emissions uptake drawdown so that's what a lot of countries are aiming for but what about these tipping points i've just been talking about at what time intervals may we start to tip them we can start looking at them those are called the intervention times how much time do we have left to stop the tipping point arctic sea ice my guess is zero we're probably at the tipping point now and by 2025 it'll be clear that through its own momentum it will become ice-free during summer in a few decades and that's because the more it shrinks the more it opens up dark ocean water which means the more sunlight it absorbs and that accelerates the rate of melting which opens up even more darker ocean water and you see the feedback loop if we look at some of the other ones west antarctic ice sheet perhaps ten years before we will be committed to tipping that about three meters worth of sea level rise is bound up in that ice the amazon forest maybe 15 years left but if the brazilian president bolsonaro continues deforesting at this rate he could move that up to 10 years because that'll interact with the climatic impacts greenland ice sheet that's a pretty big one and it's pretty stable so we would say maybe 25 years from now we might be hitting a point of no return but the point is all of these are shorter than the net zero by 2050 which means that we are at great risk if this is what we think all we need to do is net zero by 2050 of initiating this tipping cascade in fact we could say are we already losing control of the system because we already see many of these tipping points moving there is no clear answer to that and there never will be a colleague of mine carlos nobre who works in the amazon when asked about when are we going to see the amazon tipping point he says the only way i can tell you for sure where that tipping point lies is by tipping it and he said that's not a very intelligent thing to do so you need to use a risk analysis when you address these sort of questions so where are we today this is a pretty shocking image in my view these are what's actually occurred in terms of human emissions in billions of tons of carbon dioxide which should be carbon dioxide equivalent but what i want to point out here is that except for a few bumps like the global financial crisis and kobe 19 this has been an increase at an increasing rate so we can look at what science has done in terms of ipcc reports what policy has done in terms of kyoto and paris there has been no demonstrable impact of any scientific research or any policy interventions yet this curve simply keeps going up our challenge of course is we have to get it down exceptionally fast now i want to conclude though by coming back to the anthropos in anthropocene i've talked a lot about the climate system i've talked about the biosphere and of course they are intertwined but i want to talk now about humans in our systems because the anthropocene has forced us to reconfigure our view of what the earth system actually is so this is a update that we published last year of the famous brethren diagram named after francis brotherton a nasa scientist who in 1986 published a diagram like this connecting the atmosphere the geosphere and the biosphere but he only had humans as a tiny little box with an arrow going into this now in 2020 we have the anthroposphere in its own right a big sphere in the earth's system with many connections in both directions with the geosphere and the biosphere so this is an engineering wiring diagram but it glosses over enormously complex and important aspects on the human side our cultures our values our beliefs our institutions our knowledge like the science that i'm involved in and a lot of my colleagues and our technology and our view it this way is all of these things are forming a loop that drives production and consumption and it's the big arrows coming out of this that are changing the earth system one of the big criticisms we had when we published these graphs that i showed right at the beginning of my talk of the human enterprise from 1750 onwards was we lumped all of humanity together and a very valid criticism of that was that humans are not equal we have enormous inequities throughout our global societies we have the small in population size very wealthy countries that are consuming and producing an enormous amount of material then we have very large in population developing countries who consume far far less and are far less responsible for the degradation of the earth system so he said all right let's put this to the test let's look at the data so what we did on all of these graphs here was to look at the wealthy countries the oecd countries and the darker shading the intermediate ones are the rapidly developing countries brazil russia india china south africa and then all the poorer countries are the light shaded wedges just look at two just look at two population and gdp because gdp is a good indicator of all the resources you use and all the other pollutants you shove into the earth system so from 1950 from great acceleration we see there has been some increase in oecd countries but it's very little almost all the additional human population is in the so-called brics countries and the developing countries but look at gdp look at this wedge the dark one this small population absolutely dominates human economic activity human consumption human production so all the massive people who have been added to the global population have actually contributed very little to the anthropocene this is stark evidence in my view and in many other people's views that equity issues cannot be swept under the carpet we cannot say well china and india are much bigger than australia they should do the heavy lifting on emission reductions that's absolutely unfair per capita we're one of the biggest emitters so are the other oecd countries and this carries through all the other uh indicators here and we look at the evolution of income inequality within the wealthy countries this is a very interesting one in my view so we can go back from 1900 we can see that this is now looking at equality with fairly high levels of inequality so we're looking at the top one percent of the population what percentage of the wealth income do they co-op they coughed about 20 back during the roaring 20s same in english-speaking countries same in europe same in japan the two world wars and a great depression evened this out so everything evened out by 1950s and so on but look what's happened since then japan and europe have kept far more equal societies whereas the english-speaking world has become far less equal we're concentrating wealth in the hands of a very few the us is by far the worst and i think if we can be proud of anything here it's australia is actually the best so far although you can see that our trajectory is creeping up towards more inequality now this is important because we can look at health and social problems this is some excellent work by kate pickett and richard wilkinson so things that are not related to poverty infant mortality homicides imprisonment teenage births obesity that's actually more in the wealthy countries mental illnesses and so on so what we can do is look at the oecd countries and look just plot the index of these health problems worse at the top better at the bottom this is low inequality so these are more equal countries like japan high the usa look at how tight that correlation is the more unequal your society is in terms of income the more social and health problems you have a very very tight correlation except for the u s which is anomalously bad unfortunately but here's australia and new zealand and the uk but the usual suspects are the best japan sweden norway the nordics and japan these two gentlemen have done an excellent job of putting all this together in what they call a systems view of life so they look at the earth system all the way down to our biological systems all the way to genetic systems life itself a unifying vision and they have made a profound statement that our world today is dominated by an economic system with disastrous social and environmental impacts they call it predatory capitalism because it's predatory on the physical climate system by dumping all our pollutants in the atmosphere and it's certainly predatory on the biosphere and they note that we are the only species on earth who destroys its own habitat threatening countless other species with extinction in the process no other species actually does that and they really say why are we doing this but there are some really interesting innovative people out there thinking of how do we deal with this this is kate rayworth from oxford university an economist who works with earth system scientists quite closely and she's developed what she calls donut economics and she says what we need is a social foundation everyone agrees whether you're a free-market capitalist or a socialist that you want to have healthy food clean water good health you want to have education resilience energy and so on so this defines a well-functioning human society but notice that she puts in things like social and gender equity voice resilience and so on so these social issues are just as important as the economic ones but here's the key she says there is an environmental ceiling on planet earth it's not infinite we must stay within a stable climate we must allow fresh water to flow around the planet and so on these nine indicators for the ceiling are the so-called planetary boundaries so this is her idea of a safe and just operating space for humanity this is the way we should organize ourselves i'll just put three of the main points what does this economy look like first of all it's systems thinking it's not this very simplistic gdp logics that we use today produce more consume more that's really kindergarten type thinking she says we need dynamic complexity in our economy in our societies they need to build and develop and maintain equity by their design right now equity is achieved even in the scandinavian countries by taxing people and redistributing so what she's saying is we actually need to design an economy where you don't need to do that it actually generates equity by the way it's designed and it regenerates the biosphere by the way it's designed absolutely the opposite of what we do today so they're all good thinkers but they're saying we really have to change directions philosophers have gotten into the act this is dipash chakrabati a colleague of mine from the university of chicago and he says our society is based on a human-centric approach it's all about us it's all about getting wealthy it's all about consuming more it's all about traveling around the world and so on but the anthropocene demands a zo centric or life-centric approach he's got this beautiful turn of phrase saying what we need is an epochal consciousness because we are changing the epoch of planet earth and he says we're stuck even in academia in departmental thinking that's a big problem i'm going to close by the longest continuous civilization on planet earth indigenous australians as far as we know they've been here at least 65 000 years and perhaps more they're the only society that i know of that's gone through the ice age holocene transition intact on probably the toughest continent on the world to do that there's a lot of wisdom embodied in indigenous australians and i think they have some very good pointers for how we need to go forward in the 21st century this is a quote from an elder from the noongar people and a very good book called elders wisdom from australia's indigenous leaders nungar people are from wa down i think just south of the perth ridge but here's what she said we're only here for a short amount of time to do what we've been put here to do which is to look after country we're only a tool in the cycle of things notice that they already knew about cycles not linear cause effects stuff cycles we go out into the world and help keep the balance of nature there's balance all right we don't exploit it just to keep increasing our gdp our our goal is to keep the balance it's a big cycle of living with the land and then eventually going back to it when we talk about indigenous culture values and so on they don't stand still either uh and and they're keen on learning from each other going forward but they have this deep-rooted feeling for the country and that's what we blow ins from from originally from europe are missing and that's hugely important so i think we have a interesting opportunity in australia because we have a lot of people from overseas i think over half of us weren't born in australia like myself although i've lived here for 44 years now and we have the longest continuous culture on the planet surely we can get together and do some really innovative things here and make australia showcase for how you back off from the anthropocene and make it a very different trajectory that we that we want to go on so i'm going to close there i hope i've convinced you that the anthropocene is real it certainly is real in terms of the earth's system we have left the stability of the holocene we know that for certain the stratigraphers are telling us that there is a massive evidence that this is a new epoch in earth history but the point is we're in the midst of it it's evolving it's changing it's accelerating it's a trajectory to a point that we can't yet know so the question we need to ask ourselves before we hit that fork in the road in the earth system we must ask ourselves this question where on earth are we going thank you very much the one thing i would want people to understand is that your life on on earth you're 70 80 odd years if you have a good life what what really do you want to make out of that is it only about getting wealthy and consuming more and going faster maybe covert showing us that there are some benefits of slowing down a little bit but when you get out at least in this wonderful land and i've tried to spend as much of my free time as i can going around the continent and you wonder what you just have to wonder at what a fantastic place this actually is and if i could go back i don't know whether i'd go into science as deeply as i have or do what one of my colleagues did and he called just at csiro i'll leave you on this note when he retired when he hit 65 he did what most of a scientist never do which is just to stop he said i want to get a combi i'm going to go around i'm going to learn more and more about this country and spend my last years just living in this place so that's that's something to think about and something i'm trying to do more and more of but i still i think i'm a little bit too much fascinated by the science still you

Channel: The Royal Society of Victoria

Views: 66,541

Keywords: climate change, earth system, earth sciences, atmospheric science, climate science, oceanography, culture change, social change

Id: HvD0TgE34HA

Length: 42min 37sec (2557 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 15 2021