THIS POST IS A CRITICAL REVIEW OF AN ARTICLE IN THE CONVERSATION WHERE MARK MASLIN PRESENTS A REVISED VERSION OF HIS ANTHROPOCENE THEORY WHERE THE BEGINNING OF THE ANTHROPOCENE IS MOVED FROM THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION BACK TO THE 15TH CENTURY HORSE AND BUGGY DAYS WHEN THE GLOBAL NORTH HAD STARTED THEIR COLONIZATION OF THE GLOBAL SOUTH. LINK: https://theconversation.com/why-the-anthropocene-began-with-european-colonisation-mass-slavery-and-the-great-dying-of-the-16th-century-140661 . THE RATIONALE FOR THIS CHANGE IS PROVIDED IN TERMS OF THE TOPPLING OF STATUES IN THE USA DURING THE BLACK LIVES MATTER RIOTS. QUOTE: “The toppling of statues at Black Lives Matter protests has powerfully articulated that the roots of modern racism lie in European colonization and slavery”. A further argument is offered as follows: “Racism will be more forcefully opposed once we acknowledge this history and learn from it“. This is how racism and the black lives matter movement have changed the theory of the Anthropocene.

Why the Anthropocene began with European colonisation, mass slavery and the ‘great dying’ of the 16th century. June 25, 2020 8.23pm AEST, Authors: Mark Maslin, Professor of Earth System Science, UCL & Simon Lewis, Professor of Global Change Science at University of Leeds and, UCL.

About the authors:

Mark Maslin is a Founding Director of Rezatec Ltd, Co-Director of The London NERC Doctoral Training Partnership and a member of Cheltenham Science Festival Advisory Committee. He is an unpaid member of the Sopra-Steria CSR Board. He has received grant funding in the past from the NERC, EPSRC, ESRC, Royal Society, DIFD, DECC, FCO, Innovate UK, Carbon Trust, UK Space Agency, European Space Agency, Resaerch England, Wellcome Trust, Leverhulme Trust and British Council. He has received research funding in the past from The Lancet, Laithwaites, Seventh Generation, Channel 4, JLT Re, WWF, Hermes, CAFOD and Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors.

Simon Lewis has received funding from Natural Environment Research Council, the Royal Society, the European Union, the Leverhulme Trust, the Centre for International Forestry, National Parks Agency of Gabon, Microsoft Research, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Greenpeace Fund, and the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.

PART-1: WHAT THE SOURCE PAPER SAYS

The toppling of statues at Black Lives Matter protests has powerfully articulated that the roots of modern racism lie in European colonisation and slavery. Racism will be more forcefully opposed once we acknowledge this history and learn from it. Geographers and geologists can help contribute to this new understanding of our past, by defining the new human-dominated period of Earth’s history as beginning with European colonialism.

Today our impacts on the environment are immense: humans move more soil, rock and sediment each year than is transported by all other natural processes combined. We may have kicked off the sixth “mass extinction” in Earth’s history, and the global climate is warming so fast we have delayed the next ice age. We’ve made enough concrete to cover the entire surface of the Earth in a layer two millimetres thick. Enough plastic has been manufactured to clingfilm it as well. We annually produce 4.8 billion tonnes of our top five crops and 4.8 billion livestock animals. There are 1.4 billion motor vehicles, 2 billion personal computers, and more mobile phones than the 7.8 billion people on Earth. All this suggests humans have become a geological superpower.

The evidence of our impact will be visible in rocks millions of years from now. This is a new geological epoch that scientists are calling the Anthropocene, combining the words for “human” and “recent-time”. But debate still continues as to when we should define the beginning of this period. When exactly did we leave behind the Holocene – the 10,000 years of stability that allowed farming and complex civilisations to develop – and move into the new epoch? Five years ago we published evidence that the start of capitalism and European colonisation meet the formal scientific criteria for the start of the Anthropocene.

Our planetary impacts have increased since our earliest ancestors stepped down from the trees, at first by hunting some animal species to extinction. Much later, following the development of farming and agricultural societies, we started to change the climate. Yet Earth only truly became a “human planet” with the emergence of capitalism, which itself grew out of European expansion in the 15th and 16th century and the era of colonisation and subjugation of indigenous peoples all around the world.

In central and south of the Americas, just 100 years after Christopher Columbus first set foot on the Bahamas in 1492, 56 million indigenous Americans were dead, mainly in South and Central America. This was 90% of the population. Most were killed by diseases brought across the Atlantic by Europeans, which had never been seen before in the Americas: measles, smallpox, influenza, the bubonic plague. War, slavery and wave after wave of disease combined to cause this “great dying”, something the world had never seen before, or since. In North America the population decline was slower but no less dramatic due to slower colonisation by Europeans. US census data suggest the Native American population may have been as low as 250,000 people by 1900 from a pre-Columbus level of 5 million, a 95% decline. This depopulation left the continents dominated by Europeans, who set up plantations and filled a labour shortage with enslaved workers. In total, more than 12 million people were forced to leave Africa and work for Europeans as slaves.

One further impact of the great dying was that there were at first very few farmers left to manage the fields and forests. Our image of the Native American hunting buffalo on horseback is false – those who adopted this new lifestyle only did so because they had been forced off their land by the European invaders, who also brought with them the horse. Most pre-Columbus indigenous Americans were farmers. In their absence, previously managed landscapes returned to their natural states, with new trees absorbing carbon from the atmosphere. So large was this carbon uptake that there is a drop in atmospheric carbon dioxide recorded in Antarctic ice cores, centred around the year 1610.

The deadly diseases hitched a ride on new shipping routes, as did many other plants and animals. This reconnecting of the continents and ocean basins for the first time in 200 million years has set Earth on a new developmental trajectory. The ongoing mixing and re-ordering of life on Earth will be seen in future rocks millions of years in the future. The drop in carbon dioxide at 1610 provides a first marker in a geological sediment associated with this new global, more homogeneous, ecology, and so provides a sensible start date for the new Anthropocene epoch.

In addition to the critical task of highlighting and tackling the racism within science, perhaps geologists and geographers can also make a small contribution to the Black Lives Matter movement by unflinchingly compiling the evidence showing that when humans started to exert a huge influence on the Earth’s environment was also the start of the brutal European colonisation of the world.

In her insightful book, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, the geography professor Kathryn Yusoff makes it very clear that predominantly white geologists and geographers need to acknowledge that Europeans decimated indigenous and minority populations whenever so-called progress occurred.

Defining the start of the human planet as the period of colonisation, the spread of deadly diseases and transatlantic slavery, means we can face the past and ensure we deal with its toxic legacy. If 1610 marks both a turning point in human relations with the Earth and our treatment of each other, then maybe, just maybe, 2020 could mark the start of a new chapter of equality, environmental justice and stewardship of the only planet in the universe known to harbour any life. It’s a struggle nobody can afford to lose.

PART-2: CRITICAL COMMENTARY

(1) THE DROP IN CARBON DIOXIDE IN 1610 IS ATTRIBUTED TO A DECLINE IN NATIVE FARMING AS A RESULT OF A RAPID DECLINE IN THE POPULATION OF NATIVE FARMERS BECAUSE OF A LARGE FATALITY RATE FROM DISEASES BROUGHT TO THE NEW WORLD BY THE EUROPEANS. THE LARGE AREAS OF LAND LEFT FALLOW TO RETURN TO FOREST IS SAID TO HAVE CAUSED A DROP IN ATMOSPHERIC CO2 BY WAY OF PHOTOSYNTHESIS. AN ANALYSIS OF THIS HYPOTHESIS IS PRESENTED IN A RELATED POST: LINK: https://tambonthongchai.com/2019/04/23/european-colonization-of-america-the-lia/ . THE AREA OF LAND INVOLVED IS 556,847 SQ KM. EQUAL TO ABOUT 0.374% OF THE WORLD’S LAND AREA. SINCE ABOUT 60% OF THE WORLD’S PHOTOSYNTHESIS IS IN THE OCEAN, 0.374% OF THE WORLD’S LAND COULD EXPLAIN A CHANGE OF NO MORE THAN 0.15%. IT IS NOT POSSIBLE FOR THAT PHOTOSYNTHESIS EFFECT TO EXPLAIN THE CHANGE SEEN IN THE LAWDOME CO2.

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

CONQUEST AND SLAVERY IS NOT AN INNOVATION OF LATE IRON AGE EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION AND THE MOVEMENT AGAINST ITS INHUMANE CRUELTY IS NOT AN INNOVATION OF THE BLACK LIVES MATTER MOVEMENT. IF THESE THINGS CREATE AN ANTHROPOCENE, THEN THE ANTHROPOCENE IS THOUSANDS OF YEARS OLD.

(3) IN EVALUATING THE CLAIM THAT HUMANS MOVE MORE EARTH THAN NATURE DOES WE FIND THAT HUMANS MOVE ABOUT 45 GIGATONS OF EARTH PER YEAR. A SINGLE VOLCANIC ERUPTION MOVES ABOUT 3 TO 4 GIGATONS OF TEPHRA OR SAY 3.5 GIGATONS ON AVERAGE. TYPICALLY WE WILL HAVE ABOUT 60 VOLCANIC ERUPTIONS PER YEAR FOR A TOTAL AMOUNT OF TEPHRA MOVED EQUAL TO 210 GIGATONS. CONCLUSION: HUMANS DO NOT MORE MORE DIRT THAN NATURE DOES. AND THAT’S ONLY LAND VOLCANOES. MORE THAN 80% OF THE WORLD’S VOLCANIC ACTIVITY IS SUBMARINE.

(4) AS FOR CONCRETE, HUMANS MAKE 10 GIGATONS OF CONCRETE A YEAR BUT NATURE MAKES 210 GIGATONS OF TEPHRA FROM VOLCANOES AND AN EVEN GREATER FLOW OF MATERIAL IS FOUND IN MUD VOLCANOES. GEOLOGY IS BIGGER THAN HUMANS BY MANY ORDER OF MAGNITUDES AND HAS BEEN AROUND A LOT LONGER BY MANY ORDERS OF MAGNITUDES. IT IS NOT POSSIBLE TO DESCRIBE HUMAN ACTIVITY IN THE CONTEXT OF THE GEOLOGICAL FORCES THAT HAVE CREATED THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT. WE JUST LIVE HERE. WE ARE NOT THE MASTERS AND CARETAKERS OF THE PLANET ALTHOUGH IT IS TRUE THAT THE BIBLE GIVES HUMANS DOMINION OVER NATURE.

CONCLUSIONS:

IF BLACK LIVES MATTER IT IS UP TO THE BLACKS TO MAKE BLACK LIVES MATTER. THE WHITE MAN’S IDEA EXPRESSED IN THIS PAPER BY TWO WHITE MEN THAT IT IS THE WHITE MAN’S JOB TO TAKE CARE OF THE BLACKS AND MAKE SURE THAT THEIR LIVES MATTER IS ITSELF RACIST. IT CONTAINS THE ASSUMPTION THAT BLACK LIVES DON’T MATTER BUT THAT’S OK BECAUSE THE WHITE MAN WILL TAKE CARE OF THEM AND CODDLE THEM WITH WEIRD WHITE MAN GRANDEUR LIKE THE ANTHROPOCENE WHERE THE WHITE MAN IMAGINES THAT HE IS BIGGER THAN GEOLOGY.

ALSO, COLONIZATION OF THE WORLD BY THE WHITES WAS NOT LIMITED TO BLACKS BUT INCLUDED BROWNS AND REDS AND YELLOWS. IF THE CRITERION OF WHETHER THE LIVES OF PEOPLE OF A CERTAIN SKIN COLOR MATTER IS DETERMINED BY EUROPEAN COLONIZATION, THEN WHY WERE THE OTHER SKIN COLORS LEFT OUT?

RACISM RUNS DEEP AND IT MAKES ITS CASE IN SUBTLE WAYS WHEREIN THE WHITE MAN CAN IMAGINE THAT HE CONTROLS THE CLIMATE AND EVEN THE GEOLOGICAL FORCES OF THE PLANET BUT SO DEEP IS HIS KINDNESS AND SO UNLIMITED IS HIS POWER AND LARGESSE THAT HE CAN CODDLE AND TAKE CARE OF THE LESSER RACES.

RELATED POSTS ON HOW THE THE WHITE MAN USES THE RACISM ISSUE TO PUSH THE CLIMATE CHANGE AGENDA

RELATED POSTS ON RACISM

#1: RACISM & CLIMATE CHANGE: https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/06/11/racism-and-climate-change/

#2: CLIMATE CHANGE RACISM: https://tambonthongchai.com/2021/03/19/climate-change-racism/

#3: CLIMATE MIGRATION RACISM: https://tambonthongchai.com/2021/04/03/divine-climate-activism/