Redefining the Anthropocene
What can a place-based analysis of human ecology and development teach us about the nature of the Anthropocene?
“The Anthropocene is the time at which the human becomes truly thinkable in a non-teleological, non-metaphysical sense. The waste products in the Earth’s crust are also the human in this expanded spectral sense, as if what the human becomes is a flickering ghost surrounded by a penumbra of flickering shadows that seem to hover around it like a distorted halo.”
– Timothy Morton, in Humankind, 2017
The following essay was composed as part of a university course that centered the Amazon Rainforest — its history, ecology, and sociocultural diversity — in the Anthropocene. The key question we explored in this course was “How have people shaped the Amazon?” Although this essay does not address any specifically Jewish topics, through a local examination of human niche construction, it will help bring the Anthropocene into view. This is the first essay I have published that was not written explicitly for Jewish Ecology, however, I felt that sharing it would allow you, dear reader, to better appreciate the scientific context within which many of these ideas have developed. I hope you enjoy my attempt to Redefining the Anthropocene. With these words, I hope you can see some of the playful creativity that helped me move out of the rigid world of academia and into the creative niche explored here on Jewish Ecology.
Redefining the Anthropocene in the Amazon
The term “Anthropocene” was first coined in 2000 by two scientists who were looking to describe the massive changes occurring across the globe that had become increasingly apparent. In 2016, the Anthropocene Working Group of the International Union of Geological Sciences chose 1950, the beginning of the post-WWII “Great Acceleration,” as the global onset of a new epoch and the end of the Holocene. This has been a hotly debated topic, as processes which define the Anthropocene have occurred nonuniformly across the earth, as humans dispersed across different environments, and had begun long before 1950 (Knight and Harrison, 2014). Because these changes occur nonlinearly, and heterogeneously across space and time, I argue that only by examining anthropogenic processes at multiple scales across time can we better date the onset of the Anthropocene. In the Anthropocene, our biosphere is becoming increasingly fragmented by anthropogenic biomes (anthromes), which has reverberated across all the dynamic and fossil spheres of Earth, holistically forming the anthroposphere (Fuentes and Baynes-Rock, 2017).
In this essay, I will be using examples at multiple scales from the Amazon Basin to argue that the onset of the Anthropocene should be defined as the rise of the anthroposphere across the globe. The core ecological process of the Anthropocene is niche-construction, through which different facets of the Earth system are transformed by humans, to form the anthroposphere (Smith and Zeder, 2013). Through learning to recognize and utilize plants and technologies, humans have become the keystone species of a rich community of symbionts, which collectively co-create anthropogenic environments. Evidence for specific niche-constructing lifeways and technologies in the Amazon rainforest can help narrow in on a better definition for the Anthropocene (Roberts et al., 2021). This essay will look at the history of the Amazon biome through the last 11.7 thousand years (ky) and use cultural, paleobotanical and geological evidence to define and subdivide the Anthropocene.
Figure from Malhi et al.’s 2014 article, “Tropical Forests in the Anthropocene” showing the unfolding dynamics that are playing out across the Amazon throughout the Anthropocene.
The Holocene epoch was first defined as the most recent interglacial period, in which, as Charles Lyell put it, was the era that “the Earth has been tenanted by man.” In this definition, we see both natural and cultural cues being invoked to define the epoch - the natural changes that deglaciated the Earth, and permanent human habitation and the cultural transition towards (semi)permanent settlement, domestication and the creation of anthropogenic environments. At the beginning of the most recent interglacial, the early Holocene 11.7 thousand years ago (kya), natural and anthropic processes shaped local biogeography (Certini and Scalenghe, 2015). Human occupation in the Amazon started from the east, from the Orinoco Basin, and further south from the Andean highlands in the late Pleistocene(Morcote Ríos et al., 2021). The sudden end of the Younger Dryas, 11.7 kya, caused a rapid increase in average temperature and seasonal aridity. As humans spread across the Southern and Eastern forest-grassland Amazonian ecotones, megafauna populations collapsed by 12 kya (Doughty et al., 2016). This led to a diversification of subsistence strategies. In the Amazon, this varied by region and culture, but always included gathering plants. Following megafaunal extinctions, there were many opportunities for humans to shape the forest by becoming the principle symbiont with many fruit trees that once relied on megafaunal dispersal (Van Zonneveld et al., 2018). This available niche helped humans to begin ecosystem engineering on a larger scale, while knowledge of these peripheral forests helped move novel social ecological relationships deeper into the Amazon. From 10.8 to 10.3 kya, manioc and squash were domesticated and diffusing through the Basin, beginning in Llanos de Moxos, Bolivia (Lombardo et al., 2020). This rapid turnaround between megafauna extinction and crop domestication indicates that the Holocene should be the initial phase of the Anthropocene, as the combination of natural and anthropogenic factors each played a role in defining human ecology through this period, which had ramifications across the Biome (Doughty et al., 2013). In the Amazon from 11.7kya increased aridity arrived gradually until Holocene thermal maximum.
The continued loss of large game began an increasing tendency toward plant-food foraging and (at least) partial domestication of many species in many regions across Amazonia. Human communities at this time were already deeply entwined with their changing environment, and engaged in landscape scale niche construction projects. In the forest, humans took over the role of consumption and dispersal of Brazil nuts (Bertholletia excelsa) and other large-fruit species, while along the savanna, humans managed the ecotone using fire, shaping and maintaining community composition throughout the Amazon biome (Mayle and Power, 2008). The contemporary Holocene is best seen as the initial phases of the Anthropocene, as already in the first millennium of this “epoch”, humans facilitated the construction of novel agroecological landscapes.
There is clear evidence that by 8 kya, people had learned to use fire to manage landscapes and engaged in complex social ecologies which transformed both plant genetics and forest composition across the Amazon(Piperno, 2007). The increased aridity brought repeated prolonged drought throughout the Central Amazon, which prevented the potential productivity of horticulture from bringing consistent growth in regional populations, though did increase the flammability of the landscape (Meggers, 2007). Regional aridity in the Eastern Amazon maintained a broader savanna, which combined with poor soils maintained a wide but sparsely populated environment across the southern Amazonian cerrado (De Souza et al., 2018). Evidence for cultivation and consistent settlement remains limited during this period, though this can be in part attributed to the semi-nomadic “play farming” which was critical to Amazonian domestication and subsistence (Graeber and Wengrow, 2021). Amazonian horticulture began as a hybrid lifestyle in which indigenous groups engaged in swidden agriculture as one of many shifting subsistence strategies.
This protean relationship left minimal fossil evidence aside from spreading cultivars and filtering forest composition as burned sites rebounded. This lack of an early commitment to agriculture is mirrored in the slow adoption of sedentary lifestyles elsewhere in the Americas, but is unique in the Amazon as it remained dominant and has continued in places to the recent day (Piperno, 2011). The early Anthropocene represents a high point in human ingenuity and occurred relatively evenly across continents. Not including this period in the Anthropocene fails to acknowledge the vast debt we owe to past peoples who through living helped created the fruits, nuts and vegetables we eat today.
This cannot be used to geologically define the global onset of the Anthropocene, however, because we lack situated evidence of this process. Soils offers us the most reliable evidence for human niche construction (Certini and Scalenghe, 2011). By 6.5 kya, manioc, corn and many other staple crops were being cultivated alongside a suite of semi-domesticated tree crops (Clement et al., 2010). With this botanical tool kit, and an increasingly moist climate beginning 3 kya, human populations began to rapidly increase in density. During this period, archeological sites show the formation of anthrosols - soils shaped by human processes (Arroyo-Kalin, 2010). Across the Amazon biome, from the Madeira, Tapajós and Xingu, and from Marajo island toward the Amazonian headwaters, the controlled application of fire to recycle anthropogenic waste proliferated, forming terra preta soils. This process-- creating fossilized evidence of technological niche construction -- created a widespread intergenerational legacy that led to a positive feedback for both communities and their environment, resulting in the formation of a distinct anthropogenic soil horizon (Leguédois et al., 2017). Across the Amazon biome, this advanced form of niche construction heterogeneously between 3 and 0.2 kya. This complex of species and technologies diffused across the Amazon, leading to a slow but persistent rise in local populations. This period incidentally coincides with the beginning of a dramatic rise in global atmospheric methane, which resulted from similar landscape scale niche construction, only an ocean away using wet rice agriculture (Ruddiman et al., 2008). This provides strong evidence that a middle stage of the Anthropocene had begun by 2 kya, in which processes of both urbanization and agroecosystem engineering created hybrid landscapes that increasingly bore evidence of human occupation, altering multiple interacting attributes of the earth system.
Through this formative phase of the Anthropocene, human culture continued to diversify as human groups adopted new technologies and acclimated to new environments (Arroyo-Kalin and Riris, 2020). Along the Amazon river, trade and reciprocal sharing in neotropical plants, ceramics and other objects tied communities together but ultimately, unity was found in diversity. People continued to spread heterogeneously across the Basin, creating networks which spread knowledge and the useful plants from the Andes to both the Caribbean and the Atlantic (Graeber and Wengrow, 2021). Urbanization did occur during this period, but largely in dispersed smaller settlements linked by the rivers. By 1200 AD (.8kya) large villages and towns had been established across the banks of the Amazon, where densely populated cities were sitting when the first Europeans arrived down the river in the mid 1500s. Though a downturn in climate once again limited further growth, thriving cultures had turned the Amazon into a home (Azevedo et al., 2019).
This brings us to the Columbian exchange — the meeting and exchange of people, plants, pathogens and ideas, which one historian calls “The Dawn of the Homogenocene” (Mann, 2011). The Homogenocene is an apt name because it focuses on the anthropogenic reorganization of the biosphere following global integration. Following European voyages, several waves of epidemic outbreaks ensued which shattered social ecological systems and fragmenting cultural groups. This apocalyptic series of events opened up opportunities for niche construction strategies which mirrored old world agroecosystems and soon began reshaping ecosystems across the American continents.
Following in the wake of epidemics, colonizers sought novel ways to exploit the region. By 1610, a period I will call the “Late Anthropocene” had begun. The late Anthropocene began with the construction of a global economy which soon brought wealth to some and massive changes to all. In 1610 a global CO2 minimum was reached, likely resulting from secondary succession following social disintegration across the Americas (Lewis and Maslin, 2015). Three major processes define the late Anthropocene: 1) Biological and cultural diversity loss following the redistribution of organisms, 2) the expansion of linked urban and rural anthromes, and 3) the homogenization of culture through colonialism. Each of these processes continue today, and while they have changed in scale over the last 500 years, this period must be contextualized to show why we still live in the late Anthropocene, despite the increasingly rapid changes beginning in the last 200 years.
In an interfluve between the Rio Negro and the Amazon lies a vast area which people have inhabited for millenia. In 1669, the Portuguese constructed a fort at what is now Manaus. Though it was nearly another 200 years before it was declared a city, this settlement maintained and radiated colonial power, subduing indigenous culture through demonization and indoctrination. Through the mid 1800s, struggles for liberation led to conflict and increasing dispossession (Lewis, 2021). Increased global integration during the rubber boom, followed by totalizing commodification saw increases in diseases and land use change. This led to both biodiversity and cultural diversity loss, as well as the reformation of anthromes along extractive colonial lines. This period has been called the “Capitalocene”, and is defined by the shaping of social ecologies to optimize resource extraction and centralized capital gains (Wark et al., 2015).
An image showing the difference between nutritionally-rich terra preta (left) and ordinary low-nutrient tropical soil. It is widely accepted that terra preta was anthropogenically produce. Image from Glaser et al, 2001.
While a soil profile from a site near Manaus would still show evidence of past Terra preta formation, without maintenance, it was soon buried by recent erosion due to local deforestation. Another radical change could also be observed in this soil profile, associated with “The Great Acceleration”, which is the cornerstone of the currently accepted Anthropocene model. Urbanization and fossil fuel use are both observable in the fossil record through local deposits of microplastics in anthropogenic soils, which also depends on local population density, infrastructure and cultural practice. This will lead to the formation of discrete soil horizons rich in microplastics which can last eons. This will create a new soil horizon, though it does not erase the intensive use by past peoples. By using this horizon to highlight the high of the late Anthropocene, we can better define this epoch without erasing shattered indigenous communities.
The novel processes which define the late Anthropocene are a result of ideological constructions imposed by the hegemonic colonial culture. Exploitation of natural and human capital, combined with commodity production, and the imposition of a mass culture which sees itself as superior to Amazonian culture created feedback processes which over centuries reordered social relationships across Amazonia. The arrival of diseases and colonial ideologies made Europeans see conquest as morally and socially justified, first by God and then by progress throughout the last 400 years, and has consistently dispossessed people from their homelands, domineering social ecological systems. Throughout the late Anthropocene, cattle have played an important role as unintentional agents of imperialism and capitalism (Ficek, 2019). Through processes of deforestation, large-scale grazing and fossil fuel exploitation, the late Anthropocene is defined by increasing anthropogenic involvement with the global carbon cycle (Raupach and Canadell, 2010). While distinguishing between the local introduction of global commerce, and the regional proliferation of different types of pollution may provide some valuable insight, going to the root of late Anthropocene processes provides us better insight on how to move beyond the disconnect that has grown between ecology and the dominant culture, which has led to continuous diversity loss.
To formally define the Anthropocene, geologists have been hunting for fossil evidence of the impact of humanity across the Earth. So far, I have argued that local soi evidence of human occupation provides concrete fossil evidence, and that through this benchmark, we are also able to observe qualitative changes in human-nature interactions as they evolved through the last several millennia. We can already see the end of the Anthropocene today in the ongoing end-Anthropocene mass extinction (Kolbert, 2014). This implores us to examine the root causes of these changes. Throughout the late Anthropocene, a hegemonic culture has spread throughout Amazonia, through agents representing the “universal good” of God and multinational capital. The belief that humans are apart from nature has turned once mutualistic relationships into parasitic ones. While indigeneity has been under constant siege, indigenous worldviews which incorporate humans as members, rather than masters of the biosphere, are beginning to shift how scholars see our place in nature (Fletcher et al., 2021). The “Anthropocene ideology” which reduces science to dogma and people to capital is seemingly tied to the very processes which define the Anthropocene. Our economy is currently positioned against the biosphere, and unless we can reign in avarice and capital, our future is in peril.
Overview of Igarapé Educandos, a waterway in Southern Manaus. Image by César Nogueira.
There are two potential futures that an intergalactic geochronologist may uncover when they dig up our soil profile near Manaus. Above a horizon of clay, chemical pollution and microplastics will lie a more recent layer of soil. If it is clay and sand, and around lies an open savanna, humanity has made coexistence with the biosphere impossible; the exodus or extinction of humanity will have created opportunity for new adaptive radiations in an altered post-Anthropocene world. However, perhaps a new thick horizon of Amazonian Dark Earth has formed on top of a layer of microplastics. This would tell us that humanity learned to reharmonize our relationship with the natural world. By adopting new technologies in concert with old techniques, and even older domesticates and worldviews, humanity can once again become agents for positive change across the globe. While humans’ role as ecosystem engineers would not cease, we would need to stop considering constructed landscapes as truly anthropogenic, as the community which depends on it is mixed, containing not just humans, but species from all across the tree of life. To survive beyond the Anthropocene, humanity must learn to see landscapes not as anthropogenic, nor wilderness, but as a home for all members of the local living community.
Chronological Diagrams of the Anthropocene:
This diagram is not to suggest that these dates are fixed and apply globally. While divisions between the Early, Middle and Late Anthropocene are tied to both atmospheric and pedogenic evidence, Anthropocene processes occur heterogeneously across landscapes and continents and stages need to be defined independently at regional scales. These dates are based on evidence from the Amazon. Names are just for fun. Margin of errors are based on spatial variability and uncertainty. Style is based on graphics in Lewis and Maslin’s “Defining the Anthropocene” (see below).
After reading this essay, I hope you are clearly seeing the stakes and processes implicated in the debate over the Anthropocene. With this overarching framework, I hope you can appreciate the invaluable insights many researchers have gleaned by applying new lenses to human ecology. Through assessing human niche construction and “development” across our history, we can more effectively struggle to understand and resolve the global ecological crisis. I hope you continue this journey with me, as we continue to unravel the interwoven stories of human niche construction and the dawn of the Anthropocene.
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