In 2024 I stopped fearing the Anthropocene.
24 years earlier, when the Y2K bug failed to end the world, maybe it was the coining of the term “the Anthropocene” at a little-known meeting of eco-scientists in Mexico that was the watershed moment in the first year of the new millennia. The chemist and botanist who invented the word knew full well that the current geological epoch was called the Holocene, but they felt they needed a term that expressed to those observing their presentation that humanity has even more influence on planetary systems than forces of nature, like the sun. The SUN!
Now, in the year 2050, we have accepted the transition of the 4,200 years of the Holocene to the Anthropocene – the Age of Humanity. But for many years the word was an attention-getting nickname, and indeed a derogatory self-accusation of our exploitative relationship with our Mother Earth. And if the Holocene was indeed over, when did it end? An Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) was formed to evaluate our ecological “Wall of Shame,” and in August of 2024 they determined that humanity took the wheel in 1952 when the first tests of the hydrogen bomb spread plutonium isotopes around the world.
“Hey, now,” said the climate scientists. “Surely the invention of the steam engine in 1784 steered us off the rails, billowing smoke, ash, and chemicals into the atmosphere in ever-increasing intensity, ushering in The Industrial Revolution. By 2024, climate scientists had well established that climate change was a real phenomenon, that it was exacerbated by humans, and was threatening life as we knew it. Decades earlier, the climate movement formed around a conviction that our “anthropogenic” impact was primarily our carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels, and the climate crisis could be overcome by vigorously phasing out that one harmful sector while maintaining all other industries.
Surely, the Agricultural Age that preceded it was 10,000 years of agrarian benevolence. How much damage could a mere million human beings do with axes and plows? Well, another one of their tools was fire…and it only takes one person to start one of those and burn many miles of forest.
At the same time as the AWG leveraged the Atomic Age anxiety of mutually-assured nuclear annihilation, a paleoclimatologist proposed an Early Anthropocene Hypothesis which recognized that ten centuries of neolithic agriculture was far from benign, having deforested and desertified and emitted more carbon into the atmosphere than three centuries of burning fossil fuels.
Sure, this discovery suggested that our bad land use practices meant that we emerged as nature’s enemy #1 a lot earlier than we thought (while still other anthropologists marveled how the mass extinction of megafauna coincided with the spread of hunter-gatherers over the past 50,000 years).
But was it all bad news? If that much carbon was historically taken out of forests and fertile land, how much carbon could be sequestered if they were rapidly restored? It took an unreasonably long time before we concluded that our deforestation started the Anthropocene and therefore reforestation activities could stabilize it.
Climate mitigation of carbon dioxide was not going well – not only were the fossil fuel cartels and corporations powerfully undermining the political will necessary for the phase out, construction of a global power infrastructure based on renewable energy would take decades. Even weak, insufficient carbon targets seemed doomed to fail.
Eco-anxiety was becoming unbearable, and the climate movement needed a win. Mitigation of other greenhouse gasses needed to be reprioritized, and more than one industry would have to be phased out.
Surely not agriculture. We gotta eat! Still, there were sectors within the food production industry whose impacts were known to be exponentially worse than the others.
The previous agricultural revolutions first domesticated bovines in particular for draft power, but with the event of gas powered tractors cattle became the product of a global flesh industry. Their political lobby was every bit as thuggish as those for oil, and while most people didn’t care what generated the electricity that powered their refrigerator, they cared deeply about what food they put inside it. Persistent myths had been devised to promote meat and dairy as not only desirable, but essential.
Among the interdependent “too big to fail” industries of banking, pharmaceutical, chemical, entertainment, tech, and military, animal agriculture had inefficiencies that made it the weakest link. Were our addictions to nonessential animal flesh and secretions sufficient to maintain the perverse subsidization of industries harmful to public health? The COVID-19 shutdown revealed the fragile supply lines of the slaughter industries, raising doubt about their resilience in an uncertain future.
By 2024, more than half of the world’s population lived in cities, and the livelihood of rural agricultural centers was in feeding their increasingly meaty appetites. As breeders of the animals grown for food, farmers were dismayed at emerging plant-based trends for heart and habitat. It took some time to realize that the liberation of “their” animals also unfettered their next generation of children from the ritual desensitization the slaughter industries required.
Farmers found themselves on the front lines of climate impacts as growing seasons became less and less predictable, and dry and wet seasons more extreme. Among their evidence-based decisions was rejecting the climate-denying narratives of farm bureaus and Heartland think tanks and embracing opportunities to transition to “future-proofed” growing of plant-based foods.
The mechanism to transform their industry was already in place – the supports for feed crops and the slaughter industries needed only to shift to “future-proofed,” plant-based food production for direct human consumption.
To accomplish that political shift the population would need a revolution in how they think about food – do we eat to live, or live to eat? Modern agricultural systems had eliminated food scarcity, but food governance failed to distribute to almost a billion people. In developed nations, the poor tended towards obesity more than the rich, and commercial culture set “pleasure traps” that prioritized indulgence and “foodtainment” over nutrition and public health.
Though in 2024 I was already vegan for almost a decade, I was dismayed to see that the “meatification” of Western society was being exported to the rest of the world. Would countries that wanted to expunge colonial influences from their borders continue to be tantalized by the cruel indulgences of industrialized meat, dairy, and eggs? Would cultures remain artifacts of inflexible ritual, or adapt to serve a joyfully thriving future? After all, culture should serve the best interests of its people, rather than the other way around.
It turned out that the antidote to the Anthropocene came in the form of another word. This one originated around 4000 years ago, in the Vedic era of ancient India. “Ahimsa” is a Sanskrit word that embodies the morality of nonviolence towards all living beings, and represents the core spirituality of Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, and Buddists.
When the vegan movement that arose in the most cosmopolitan cities was exposed to the power of this word they imagined the social evolution of homo sapiens, (“wise humans”) to homo ahimsa, (“peaceful humans”).
Still, coming to see ourselves with clarity can be a rude awakening. Every new activist in any justice movement may have moments of doubt that humanity is worth saving. We sometimes long for the days when we lived in blissful, willful ignorance of the selfishness, greed, and apathy demonstrated by our species. The cultural resistance to compassion, generosity, and equity is often overwhelming, and the seeming inability for humanity to make the necessary choices sends many to despair.
The Anthropocene: The Age Where Humanity Drove Off The Cliff.
To my surprise, those dark moments ended for me in 2024.
Part of what encouraged me was that we had put a name to both our affliction and its cure. The Anthropocene embodies all human addictions to power and flesh, yet acknowledges our inherent ability to choose our destiny, if we find the humility to fit ourselves into a “safe living space for humanity.”
An “early Anthropocene” began in an age before we could even write our history, eliminating an ice age with an ambitious project called agriculture, which sprang up rather simultaneously across continents. By the second millennium we could imagine what was possible when we stop using technology to thwart Mother Nature and instead become her Thermostat Species.
Ours was the character arc of the prodigal son. Our behavior was not wicked, but wayward, and in the process we learned our way back home. Our addiction to destructive behaviors were an adolescent phase, the immortal confidence of youth that eventually matured to modest responsibility.
In 2024, I looked at all of our systems of commerce, education, employment, agriculture, and governance, all relics that seemed sensible in the Industrial Age. Following the wisdom of changemakers of the past, I stopped fighting the old systems, and started building the new world that makes the old one obsolete.
In just a few years we curbed our appetite and the market for flesh dwindled; fewer people had to inseminate animals and the global herd diminished. Subsistence farmers flourished while the producers and workers of the slaughter industries adapted to the most sustainable, plant-based food systems. The dairy market collapsed first, and the remaining cows were retired to sanctuary grasslands. The egg industry followed, and the hens that weren’t accommodated by sanctuaries were kept on fallow lands, which they fertilized for future cultivation. Land trusts anticipated the death knell of ranching and the right-sized cattle herds joined the bison on natural grasslands. What was once forest became forests once again when land owners cash in on incentives to grow carbon sinks.
The urgent regrowth of the world’s forests becomes the dominant human effect on the biosphere.
The Anthropocene retained its status as the geological epoch where humanity exercised more power than forces of nature. However, moved by principles of ahimsa, we gravitated to a responsibility of healing rather than harming. Instead of dominating our ecosystems, homo ahimsa used technology to measure Mother Earth’s fever, and prescribe the regenerative healing of the planet. In the year 2050 we have fully become the thermostat species for all nine planetary boundaries of climate change, biodiversity, land and freshwater use, the ozone layer, acidity of the ocean, and fertilizer management, optimizing a safe living space for humanity and thriving habitats for the rest of the animal and plant kingdoms.
In retrospect, was it something we accomplished, or something we witnessed as a participant? We neither revoked the Scientific Revolution nor returned to a preindustrial society. We had no more choice than a caterpillar contemplating becoming a butterfly.