Welcome to the Anthropocene, fellow human.

[seemslikeadream]

All of the Reasons Scientists Are Certain We Are Now Living in the Anthropocene
WRITTEN BY JASON KOEBLER
January 7, 2016 // 02:01 PM EST

“Human activity is leaving a pervasive and persistent signature on Earth.” So begins one of the more depressing scientific papers I’ve ever read.

What follows in “The Anthropocene is functionally and stratigraphically distinct from the Holocene,” a new study published in Science, is a laundry list of human sins that, in total, add up to what its authors say is irrefutable evidence that Earth has entered a human-driven geological epoch that began midway through the 20th century and continues today.

Whether we’re actually living in the Anthropocene (the era of humans, basically) rather than a subdivision of the Holocene, an era that started roughly 11,700 years ago, has been a subject of great debate in scientific circles for the last two decades. Some argue that the Anthropocene started when humans first began making fires and polluting; others have traced it back to around 1610, when European settlers began earnestly making their mark on the Earth as a whole. Still others suggest that humans aren’t capable of making a geologically significant impact on Earth. Or at least they’re not yet.

The paper, published Thursday by 24 well-respected scientists from the Anthropocene Working Group (whose members include scientists from the British Geological Survey, Cambridge University, Berkeley, the University of Nairobi, Harvard, Georgetown, Duke, the Australian National University, etc. etc. etc. and so on) argues that the Anthropocene started in the mid 20th century.

If the study is officially recognized by the International Commission on Stratigraphy, the authors say that “not only would this represent the first instance of a new epoch having been witnessed firsthand by advanced societies, it would be one stemming from the consequences of their own doing.”

As you might suspect, the driving force behind these changes are “accelerated technological development, rapid growth of the human population, and increased consumption of resources.”

Let’s take a look at the evidence.

Influence on rock layers (strata)





Image: Science
The authors note that “recent anthropogenic deposits, which are the products of mining, waste disposal (landfill), construction, and urbanization contain the greatest expansion of new minerals since the Great Oxygenation Event [2 billion years ago].”

The findings are “entirely novel with respect to those found in the Holocene and pre-existing epochs"

More than 98 percent of all elemental aluminum (the metal is not naturally occurring) has been produced since 1950, and the past 20 years account for more than 50 percent of all concrete ever created. The biomass of plastics we’ve manufactured now weighs at least as much as the combined weight of all the human beings on Earth, and “the decay resistance and chemistry of most plastics suggest that they will leave identifiable fossil and geochemical records.”

Modification of land surfaces



The remnants of Mir Mine in Russia. Image: Wikimedia
Dams, mining activities, and landfills have “modified sedimentary processes sufficiently to leave clear expressions in river, lake, windblown, and glacial deposits that are often far removed from direct point sources.” Meanwhile, agriculture and livestock farming has transformed countless biomes around the world and deforestation in the tropics has necessarily influenced the construction of mountain roads that “is resulting in substantial surface erosion and landslides.”

New geochemical signatures

Pollution, farming, and energy use (coal, gasoline, etc) have resulted in nitrogen and phosphorus levels doubling in soils over the last 100 years. “Human processes are argued to have had the largest impact on the nitrogen cycle for some 2.5 billion years.” Use of rare earth elements since World War II has resulted in “a global pattern of dispersion in the environment and novel stoichiometric ratios,” while “industrial metals such as cadmium, chromium, copper, mercury, nickel, lead, and zinc have been widely and rapidly dispersed since the mid-20th century.”

Radiological signatures



Image: Science
We of course haven’t even gotten into the fallout from nuclear bomb testing, which, according to the authors, is “potentially the most widespread and globally synchronous anthropogenic signal.” The scientists note that the fallout “will be identifiable in sediments and ice for the next 100,000 years.”

Carbon cycle and sea level rise

The researchers write that atmospheric carbon, which is now over 400 parts per million, “was emitted into the atmosphere from 1999 to 2010 ~100 times as fast as the most rapid emission during the last glacial termination.”

Most frightening, perhaps, is that Earth should be cooling due to its current orbit cycle around the sun, however, “increased anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases have instead caused the planet to warm abnormally fast, overriding the orbitally induced climate cycle.”

Species-level change



Image: Science
The scientists note that we are likely in the beginning stages of a sixth mass-extinction event, but that “evolution and extinction rates are mostly too slow and diachronous to provide an obvious biological marker for the start of the Anthropocene.” The planet does, indeed, still host most of the species that we began the Holocene with. However, we can still use species distribution to mark human impact on the Earth: “Species assemblages and relative abundance have been altered worldwide,” they wrote. “This is especially true in recent decades because of geologically unprecedented transglobal species invasions and biological assemblage changes associated with agriculture on land and fishing in the sea.”

Taken together, the findings noted above are “either entirely novel with respect to those found in the Holocene and pre-existing epochs or quantitatively outside the range of variation of the proposed Holocene subdivisions.”

In other words, welcome to the Anthropocene, fellow human.

[stillrobertpaulsen]

The researchers write that atmospheric carbon, which is now over 400 parts per million, “was emitted into the atmosphere from 1999 to 2010 ~100 times as fast as the most rapid emission during the last glacial termination.”

Most frightening, perhaps, is that Earth should be cooling due to its current orbit cycle around the sun, however, “increased anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases have instead caused the planet to warm abnormally fast, overriding the orbitally induced climate cycle.”

Oh yeah, us humans are leaving a yuuuge mark. Doubt we'll be around to see exactly how yuuuge.

Climate Denialism, Climate Fatalism and Porter Ranch: Confronting the Inevitability of the Carbon Crisis

snip

This really hit home for me on a personal level living in southern California this winter. There was a methane leak in Porter Ranch first reported October 23, 2015 that at this date still has not been plugged. This one failed well at Southern California Gas Co.'s Aliso Canyon storage field has put out, according to the Los Angeles Times, "the equivalent of 2.1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide - more greenhouse gas than 440,000 cars emit in a year." The methane emissions have surpassed what is released by all industrial activity in the state. While Governor Jerry Brown is currently working on a plan for So Cal Gas to "offset" the emissions, (click here to read how I really feel about what a bullshit concept offsets are) I find it astounding that they ordinarily wouldn't be required to pay for this leak "because California's climate change regulations exempt methane leaks — even enormous ones — as "fugitive emissions" that are not subject to the state's cap-and-trade program." As reprehensible as that is, it's pretty much par for the course for authorities upholding the consensus view on global warming. Guy McPherson has pointed out that most major climatological assessments "fail to account for significant self-reinforcing feedback loops" and the IPCC's praised Fifth Assessment "ignores important feedbacks." The melting of permafrost and Arctic methane clathrates are two of the biggest feedback loops that could make global warming spiral out of control.

There's one more elephant in the Carbon Crisis living room that McPherson frequently brings up that most others fail to address. That is the time lag between the release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and its corresponding affect on average global temperature. This time lag is approximately forty years. In other words, even if we stopped all fossil fuel emissions today, the carbon dioxide emitted in 2015, which amounted to approximately 9.734 gigatons, (1 gigaton = 1 billion tons) won't have an affect on global temperature until 2055. The global warming we're experiencing right now is from roughly 1975. With so much future warming already baked into the system, drastic action must take place. Yet reducing emissions alone won't stop climate change. McPherson explains that carbon emissions contain reflective particles. Dramatic emissions reduction of 35-80% would create an absence of solar dimming that would result in 1 °C of additional warming. That would put the planet at 2 °C. For those hoping for a techno-fix, the most recent conclusion of scientists is that we cannot geoengineer our way out of climate change.

[PufPuf93]

The industrial age of humanity caused an "extinction event" and the loss in biodiversity, especially complex biodiversity, cannot be walked back the timeframe of humanity as a species.

Yes welcome Anthropocene.

[Iamwhomiam]

Well, I'm glad they finally decided. I was worried we'd all become extinct before knowing this useful information.

[stillrobertpaulsen]

The Anthropocene Is Here: Humanity Has Pushed Earth Into a New Epoch

The epoch is thought to have begun in the 1950s, when human activity set global systems on a different trajectory
by
Deirdre Fulton, staff writer

The Anthropocene Epoch has begun, according to a group of experts assembled at the International Geological Congress in Cape Town, South Africa this week.

After seven years of deliberation, members of an international working group voted unanimously on Monday to acknowledge that the Anthropocene—a geologic time interval so-dubbed by chemists Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer in 2000—is real.

The epoch is thought to have begun in the 1950s, when human activity, namely rapid industrialization and nuclear activity, set global systems on a different trajectory. And there's evidence in the geographic record. Indeed, scientists say that nuclear bomb testing, industrial agriculture, human-caused global warming, and the proliferation of plastic across the globe have so profoundly altered the planet that it is time to declare the 11,700-year Holocene over.

As the working group articulated in a media note on Monday:

Changes to the Earth system that characterize the potential Anthropocene Epoch include marked acceleration to rates of erosion and sedimentation; large-scale chemical perturbations to the cycles of carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and other elements; the inception of significant change to global climate and sea level; and biotic changes such as unprecedented levels of species invasions across the Earth. Many of these changes are geologically long-lasting, and some are effectively irreversible.

These and related processes have left an array of signals in recent strata, including plastic, aluminium and concrete particles, artificial radionuclides, changes to carbon and nitrogen isotope patterns, fly ash particles, and a variety of fossilizable biological remains. Many of these signals will leave a permanent record in the Earth's strata.

"Being able to pinpoint an interval of time is saying something about how we have had an incredible impact on the environment of our planet," said Colin Waters, principal geologist at the British Geological Survey and secretary for the working group. "The concept of the Anthropocene manages to pull all these ideas of environmental change together."

Indeed, the Guardian compiled more "evidence of the Anthropocene," saying humanity has:

Pushed extinction rates of animals and plants far above the long-term average. The Earth is now on course to see 75 percent of species become extinct in the next few centuries if current trends continue.
Increased levels of climate-warming CO2 in the atmosphere at the fastest rate for 66m years, with fossil-fuel burning pushing levels from 280 parts per million before the industrial revolution to 400ppm and rising today.
Put so much plastic in our waterways and oceans that microplastic particles are now virtually ubiquitous, and plastics will likely leave identifiable fossil records for future generations to discover.
Doubled the nitrogen and phosphorous in our soils in the past century with our fertilizer use. This is likely to be the largest impact on the nitrogen cycle in 2.5bn years.
Left a permanent layer of airborne particulates in sediment and glacial ice such as black carbon from fossil fuel burning.

Now, scientists must commence their search for the "golden spike"—explained in the Telegraph as "a physical reference point that can be dated and taken as a representative starting point for the Anthropocene epoch." This could be found in anything from layers of sediment in a peat bog to a coral reef to tree rings.

"A river bed in Scotland, for example, is taken to be the representative starting point for the Holocene epoch," the Telegraph reports.

The Guardian points out: "For the Anthropocene, the best candidate for such a golden spike are radioactive elements from nuclear bomb tests, which were blown into the stratosphere before settling down to Earth."

However, Jan Zalasiewicz, a geologist at the University of Leicester and chair of the working group, told the paper that while "the radionuclides are probably the sharpest—they really come on with a bang," humanity has left no shortage of signatures.

"We are spoiled for choice," he said. "There are so many signals."

According to the Telegraph, once one or more golden spike sites have been selected, a proposal for the formal recognition of an Anthropocene epoch will be made to a series of commissions, culminating at the International Union of Geological Sciences. The process is likely to take at least three years.

[stickdog99]

LOL at our infinite hubris.

As far as the immortal microbial Gaia is concerned, humans are nothing but a bad case of dandruff.

[seemslikeadream]

SEPTEMBER 13, 2016
Anthropocene Boosters and the Attack on Wilderness Conservation
by GEORGE WUERTHNER


A growing debate has serious consequences for our collective relationship to Nature. Beginning perhaps twenty years ago, a number of academics in disciplines such as history, anthropology, and geography, began to question whether there was any tangible wilderness or wild lands left on Earth. These academics, and others, have argued that humans have so completely modified the Earth, we should give up on the notion that there is anyplace wild and instead recognize that we have already domesticated, in one fashion or another, the entire planet for human benefit.

These individuals and groups are identified under an umbrella of different labels, including “Neo Greens”, “Pragmatic Environmentalists” “New Conservationists” “Green Postmodernism” and “Neo-environmentalists” but the most inclusive label to date is “Anthropocene Boosters” so that is the term I will use in this essay.

The basic premise of their argument is that humans have lived everywhere except Antarctica and that it is absurd to suggest that Nature exists independent of human influences. Wilderness was, just like everything else on Earth, a human cultural construct—that does not exist outside of the human mind (1). With typical human hubris, Anthropocene Boosters suggest we need a new name for our geological age that recognizes the human achievement instead of the outmoded Holocene.

Not only do these critics argue that humans now influence Nature to the point there is no such things as an independent “Nature”, but we have a right and obligation to manage the Earth as if it were a giant garden waiting for human exploitation (2). Of course, there are many others, from politicians to religious leaders to industry leaders, who hold the same perspective, but what is different about most Anthropocene Boosters is that they suggest they are promoting ideas that ultimately will serve humans and nature better.

From this beginning, numerous other critiques of wilderness and wildness have added to the chorus. Eventually these ideas found a responsive home in some of the largest corporate conservation organizations like The Nature Conservancy as well as some think tanks like the Breakthrough Institute (3), Long Now Foundation (4), The Reason Foundation (5), and others.

The Anthropocene Boosters make a number of assertions:

1/ Pristine Wilderness never existed, or if it did, is now gone. Making wilderness protection the primary goal of conservation is a failed strategy.

2/ The idea that Nature is fragile an exaggeration. Nature is resilient.

3/ Conservation must serve human needs and aspirations, and do so by promoting growth and development.

4/ Managing for “ecosystem services”, not biodiversity protection, should be the primary goal of conservation.

5/ Conservation efforts should be focused on human modified or “working landscapes” not creating new strictly protected areas like national parks, wilderness reserves and the like. Wildlands protection is passé.

6/ Corporations are key to conservation efforts, so conservationists should partner with corporate interests rather than criticize capitalism or industry.

7/ In order to garner support for these positions, conservation strategies like creation of national parks and other reserves are attacked as “elitism” or “cultural imperialism” or “colonialism.” (6)

Many holding these viewpoints seem to relish the idea that humans are finally “masters of the Earth”. They celebrate technology and the “path of progress” and believe it will lead to a new promised land where Nature is increasingly bent to human desires, while human poverty is alleviated. For instance, Stewart Brand, of Whole Earth Catalog fame, embraces the idea of altering evolution with genetic modifications of species by “tweaking” gene pools. (7)

These trends and philosophical ideas are alarming to some of us who work in conservation. The implications of these goals and observations imply no limits keepingwildupon consumption that is destroying the planet’s ecosystems and contributing to a massive Sixth Extinction of species. Whether intentional or not, these ideas justify our current rapacious approach that celebrates economic and development growth.

These ideas represent the techno-optimism of a glorious future, where biotech, geoengineering, nuclear power, among other “solutions” to current environmental problems save us from ourselves.

Many Anthropocene Boosters believe expansion of economic opportunities is the only way to bring much of the world’s population out of poverty. This is a happy coincidence for global industry and developers because they now have otherwise liberal progressive voices leading the charge for greater domestication of the Earth. But whether the ultimate goals are humane or not, these proposals appear to dismiss any need for limits on human population growth, consumption, and manipulation of the planet.

Many of those advocating the Anthropocene Booster world view either implicitly or explicitly see the Earth as a giant garden that we must “steward” (original root from “keeper of the sty” or caretaker of domestic livestock) the land. In other words, we must domesticate the planet to serve human ends.

But the idea of commodifying Nature for economic and population growth is morally bankrupt. It seeks only to legitimize human manipulations and exploitation and ultimately is a threat to even human survival.

Our book, Keeping the Wild: Against the Domestication of the Earth, explains why this is so. It advocates a smaller human footprint where wild Nature thrives and humans manage ourselves rather than attempt to manage the planet.

However let us take these assertions one by one.

Pristine wilderness

First is the Anthropocene Booster’s assertion that “pristine” wilderness never existed, and even if it did, wilderness is now gone. Boosters never define what exactly they mean by wilderness, but their use of “pristine” suggests that they define a wilderness as a place that no human has ever touched or trod (8).

That sense of total human absence is not how wilderness advocates define a wild place. Rather, the concept of a wilderness has much more to do with the degree of human influence. Because humans have lived in all landscapes except Antarctica does not mean the human influence is uniformly distributed. Wilderness is viewed as places largely influenced by natural forces, rather than dominated by human manipulation and presence. Downtown Los Angeles is without a doubt a human-influenced landscape, but a place like Alaska’s Arctic Wildlife Refuge is certainly not significantly manipulated or controlled by humans. Though certainly low numbers of humans have hunted, camped, and otherwise occupied small portions of the refuge for centuries, the degree of human presence and modification is small. The Alaska Refuge lands are, most wilderness advocates would argue, self-willed. By such a definition, there are many parts of the world that are to one degree or another largely “self-willed”.

Nature is resilient

Peter Kareiva, The Nature Conservancy’s former Chief Scientist, is one of the more outspoken proponents of the idea that Nature is not fragile, but resilient. Kareiva says “In many circumstances, the demise of formerly abundant species can be inconsequential to ecosystem function.” He cites as an example the loss of the passenger pigeon, once so abundant that its flocks darkened the sky, whose demise, according to Kareiva, had “no catastrophic or even measurable effects.”

Stewart Brand also sees no problem with extinction. Brand recently wrote “The frightening extinction statistics that we hear are largely an island story, and largely a story of the past, because most island species that were especially vulnerable to extinction are already gone.” (10)

Indeed Brand almost celebrates the threats to global species because he suggests that it will increase evolution, including biodiversity in the long run.

Such a cavalier attitude towards the demise of species, and the normalizing of species declines, undermines the efforts of many conservation organizations to preclude these human-caused extinctions.

Many biologists disagree with Brand and the authors he references. They believe we are on the verge of a Sixth Mass Extinction. There have been other extinctions, but this is a preventable mass extinction. We know it is occurring and the cause of this extinction spiral is human-domination of the Earth and its resources (11).

There is something callous and morally bankrupt in asserting that it is OK for humans to knowingly drive species to extinction. There seems to be no expression of loss or grief that we are now pushing many species towards extinction. Humans have survived the Black Plague, the Holocaust, and many other losses over the centuries, but one doesn’t celebrate these losses.

Conservation must serve human needs

Another pillar of the Anthropocene Boosters platform is that conservation’s main purpose must be to enhance and provide for human needs and desires. Of course, one consequence of conservation is that protected landscapes nearly always provide for human needs—contributing clean water, biodiversity conservation (if you think that is important), moderation of climate change, to name a few.

However, the main rationale for conservation should surely be much broader and inclusive. Despite the fact that most conservation efforts do have human utilitarian value, the ultimate measurement of value ought to be how well conservation serves the needs of the other species we share the planet with.

The problem with Anthropocene Boosters promotion of growth and development is that most species losses are due to habitat losses. Without reigning in population and development, plants and animals face a grim future with less and less habitat, not to mention changes in their habitat that makes survival difficult if not impossible.

Even when species do not go extinct, the diminishment of their ecological effects can also lead to biological impoverishment, for instance, when top predators are eliminated from ecosystems.

Conservation should focus on “working landscapes” not creation of more parks and wilderness

The term “working landscapes” was invented by the timber industry to put a positive spin on their rapacious operations. Americans, in particular, look favorably upon the “work ethic” and industry coined the phrase to capitalize on that affirmative cultural perspective. Working landscapes are typically lands exploited for economic development including logging, livestock grazing, and farming.

While almost no conservationists would deny that there is vast room for improvement in these exploited landscapes, the general scientific consensus is that parks, wilderness reserves and other lands where human exploitation is restricted provide greater protection of ecosystems and biodiversity.

For this reason, many scientists, including such eminent biologists as Harvard biologist, E.O. Wilson, are calling for protecting half of the Earth’s terrestrial landscapes as parks and other reserves.

Conservationists should stop criticising corporations

Some Anthropocene Boosters believe conservationists should stop criticizing corporations and work with them to implement more environmentally friendly programs and operations.

Almost no conservationist would argue that corporate entities should not adopt less destructive practices. However, it is overdevelopment that is the ultimate threat to all life, including our own. Implementing so called “sustainable” practices may slow the degradation of the Earth’s ecosystems and species decline, but most such proposals only create “lesser unsustainable” operations.

At a fundamental level, the promise of endless growth on a finite planet is a dead end street, and it is important for conservationists to continuously harp upon that message. To halt criticisms of corporations invites greenwashing, and precludes any effective analysis of the ultimate problems of development and growth.

National parks and reserves are a form of cultural imperialism

Many Anthropocene Boosters, in order to validate their particular view of the world, go beyond merely criticizing environmental and conservation strategies. They seek to delegitimize parks and other wild lands protection efforts by branding them with pejorative terms like “cultural imperialisms”, “colonialism” and other words that vilify protected lands.

The creation of parks and protected areas began with Yellowstone National Park in 1872 (or arguably Yosemite, which was a state park earlier). The general Anthropocene Boosters theme is that this model has been “exported” and emulated around the world and that Western nations are forcing parks upon the poor at the expense of their economic future.

Notwithstanding that nearly all cultures have some concept of sacred lands or places that are off limits to normal exploitation, to denigrate the idea of parks and wildlands reserves as “Imperialism” because it originated in the United States is crass. It is no different than trying to scorn democracy as Greek imperialism because many countries now aspire to adopt democratic institutions. Western countries also “export” other ideas, like human rights, racial equality and other values, and few question whether these ideas represent “imperialism.”

Of course, one of the reasons protected areas are so widely adopted is because they ultimately are better at protecting ecosystems and wildlife than other less protective methods.

But it is also true that strictly protected areas have not stemmed the loss of species and habitat, though in many cases, they have slowed these losses. When parks and other reserves fail to safeguard the lands they are set aside to protect, it is typically due to a host of recognized issues that conservation biologists frequently cite, including small size, lack of connecting corridors, lack of enforcement, and underfunding.

To criticize parks for this is analogous to arguing we should eliminate public schools because underfunding, lack of adequate staffing, and other well publicized problems often result in less than desirable educational outcomes. Just as the problem is not with the basic premise of public education, nor are the well-publicized difficulties for parks a reason to jettison them as a foundation for conservation strategies.

Another criticism is that strictly-protected parks and other reserves harm local economic and sometimes subsistence activities. In reality that is what parks and other reserves are designed to do. The reason we create strictly protected areas is that on-going resource exploitation does harm wildlife and ecosystems or we would not need parks or other reserves in the first place.

While park creation may occasionally disrupt local use of resources, we regularly condone or at least accept the disruption and losses associated with much more damaging developments. The Three Gorges Dam in China displaced millions of people. Similar development around the world has displaced and impinged upon indigenous peoples everywhere. Indeed, in the absence of protected areas, many landscapes are ravaged by logging, ranching, oil and gas, mining and other resource developers, often to the ultimate detriment of local peoples and of course the ecosystems they depend upon. In the interest of fairness, however, people severely impacted should be compensated in some way.

Nevertheless it should also be recognized that the benefits of parks and other wildlands reserves are nearly always perpetual, while logging the forest, killing off wildlife, and other alternatives are usually less permanent sources of economic viability.

Summary

The Wild does have economic and other benefits for human well-being. However, the ultimate rationale for “Keeping the Wild” is the realization there are intangible and intrinsic value to protecting Nature. Keeping the Wild is about self-restraint and self-discipline. By setting aside parks and other reserves, we, as a society and a species, are making a statement that we recognize that we have a moral obligation to protect other lifeforms. And while we may have the capability to influence the planet and its biosphere, we lack the wisdom to do so in a manner that does not harm.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/09/13/ ... servation/

[seemslikeadream]

Minerals found in shipwreck and museum drawer 'show we are living in new epoch'

Researchers say 208 of more than 5,200 officially recognised minerals are exclusively, or largely, linked to human activity merely in last 200 years to indicate Anthropocene age


The blue fine-grained copper crust of chalconatronite, here from Mont Saint-Hilaire in Quebec, Canada, in a sample donated by Michael Scott. rruff.info/chalconatronite
The blue fine-grained crust of chalconatronite sometimes found on ancient Egyptian bronze artefacts. This sample is form Mont Saint-Hilaire in Quebec, Canada, donated by Michael Scott. rruff.info/chalconatronite Photograph: Courtesy of

Nicola Davis

Wednesday 1 March 2017 14.00 EST Last modified on Thursday 2 March 2017 04.16 EST
Humans are leaving an indelible mark on the planet in a vast array of manmade crystals, researchers have revealed, adding weight to idea that we are living in a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene.

Researchers say that 208 of more than 5,200 officially recognised minerals are exclusively, or largely, linked to human activity, with crystals forming in locations as diverse as shipwrecks, mines and even museum drawers.

“This is a spike of mineral novelty that is so rapid – most of it in the last 200 years, compared to the 4.5bn year history of Earth. There is nothing like it in Earth’s history,” said Robert Hazen, co-author of the research from the Carnegie Institution for Science. “This is a blink of an eye, it is just a surge and of course we are only seeing the tip of the iceberg.”

In addition, the study points out that many more “mineral-like” substances, from laser crystals to components of concrete, have been devised and produced by human hands. “Human ingenuity has led to a host of crystalline compounds that never before existed in the solar system, and perhaps in the universe,” the authors write.

Together with the building of large-scale infrastructure and even human-related changes in the global distribution of minerals, including gemstones, the researchers argue that humankind is creating a defined layer in the geological record.

That, they add, backs up the burgeoning concept of the Anthropocene epoch – a new geological age that, while not yet confirmed by the International Union of Geological Sciences, is defined by the boom in human activity that has left a profound impact on the planet.

Andersonite from Hillside Mine, Bozarth Mesa, Baghdad, Eureka District, Yavapai Co., Arizona, USA
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Andersonite from Hillside Mine, Bozarth Mesa, Baghdad. Photograph: Courtesy of Trevor Boyd/Causeway Minerals
“That’s really I think the most important factor in deciding whether or not the Anthropocene is a new geological time period – the fact that we have created these materials, these crystals, that are incredibly diverse and beautiful and they persist through billions of years,” said Hazen. “They are going to be for ever on Earth, a distinctive marker layer that makes our time different from any other time in the preceding four and a half billion years.”

Published in the journal American Mineralogist by a team of researchers in the US, the new study reveals that 208 of the 5,208 minerals officially recognised by the International Mineralogical Association can be traced to human activity, although some, they note, can also form naturally. Among them is chalconatronite, a copper mineral that forms bright blue crystals and has been found on ancient Egyptian bronze artefacts.

Mining, and processes associated with it – such as mine fires, ore dumps and even mine timbers – have also been associated with the formation of unexpected substances. Among those found on mine tunnel walls are andersonite – a uranium-containing mineral that can emit a green fluorescent glow – and the copper-containing kornelite. “In many cases, mine tunnels have a very distinctive temperature and humidity that wouldn’t normally occur,” said Hazen. “A sharp-eyed collector will go into the mine and look at the walls with a magnifying glass and they’ll see these little crystals,” he added. “They never would have occurred if it hadn’t been for the fact that humans dug the tunnel.”

Abhurite, meanwhile, was found on the wreck of the unfortunately named SS Cheerful – a steamship that sank off the coast of Cornwall in 1885 – with the mineral, not known to occur naturally, formed from a reaction between seawater and the ship’s cargo of tin ingots.

Abhurite, an aggregate of tan-coloured platy crystals from the wreck of the SS Cheerful, 14 miles NNW of St. Ives, Cornwall, UK. Michael Scott donated the sample. rruff.info/abhurite
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Abhurite, an aggregate of tan-coloured platy crystals from the wreck of the SS Cheerful, 14 miles NNW of St. Ives, Cornwall, UK. Michael Scott donated the sample. rruff.info/abhurite. Photograph: Courtesy of RRUFF
But perhaps most serendipitous of all in its formation is calclacite. “[It] occurs in oak museum drawers because the minerals that are placed in the drawers react with the chemicals in the wood and you form a new mineral,” said Hazen. “That is just a crazy thing, you never would have expected it, and it would never occur if it hadn’t been for that kind of human activity.”

While all of the 208 crystalline substances in the new catalogue are officially recognised as minerals, since the mid-1990s the official definition has ruled out substances made by humans, meaning that many of those already in the record – and even more yet to be found – would no longer be classified as minerals. It’s a notion Hazen takes issue with, suggesting a new category is needed since many modern mineral-like materials, from laser crystals to components of cement, will also be adding to the complex array of novel minerals that archaeologists of the future might unearth.


The Anthropocene epoch: scientists declare dawn of human-influenced age
Read more
“Imagine finding a solid waste dump where people throw away lots of computers and other electronic devices – you’ll have semiconductor chips and magnets and motors and all the metallic pieces and even speciality glasses with phosphors and so forth,” he said.

“In 100bn years, if someone comes back to Earth and looks at that land, they are really not going to be thinking ‘oh, this one is not a mineral or this one is a mineral’, they are just basically going to find these unusual crystalline compounds that form a distinctive marker layer,” Hazen added.


Human impact has pushed Earth into the Anthropocene, scientists say

Jan Zalasiewicz, professor of palaeobiology at the University of Leicester and chair of the Working Group on the Anthropocene (WGA), said the new catalogue was an excellent study. “It does add significantly to the characterisation of the Anthropocene – not least because there is little that is more fundamental to rock strata than the minerals they are composed of,” he said.

While the exact onset of the Anthropocene is a moot point, with the dawn of thermonuclear weapons tests currently the favourite marker, Zalasiewicz says the new catalogue could also prove valuable in distinguishing the epoch.

“The WGA is now putting together a wide range of physical, chemical and biological data on the Anthropocene in preparation for a formal proposal to include it into the Geological Time Scale,” he said. “The features selected to define it will ultimately be those that provide the sharpest and clearest boundary for practical recognition by geologists. The mineral evidence will certainly be borne in mind as we’re considering this.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/201 ... poch-study

[seemslikeadream]

Introducing the terrifying mathematics of the Anthropocene
February 10, 2017 4.48am EST
Authors

Owen Gaffney
Anthropocene analyst and communicator. Co-founder Future Earth Media Lab, Director of media (Stockholm Resilience Centre), Stockholm University

Will Steffen
Adjunct Professor, Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University

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Here are some surprising facts about humans’ effect on planet Earth. We have made enough concrete to create an exact replica of Earth 2mm thick. We have produced enough plastic to wrap Earth in clingfilm. We are creating “technofossils”, a new term for congealed human-made materials – plastics and concretes – that will be around for tens of millions of years.

But it is the scale that humans have altered Earth’s life support system that is the most concerning.

In 2000, Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer proposed that human impact on the atmosphere, the oceans, the land and ice sheets had reached such a scale that it had pushed Earth into a new epoch. They called it the Anthropocene and argued the current Holocene epoch was over.

The Holocene began 11,700 years ago as we emerged from a deep ice age. Over the past 10,000 years, the defining feature of the Holocene has been a remarkably stable Earth system. This stability has allowed us to develop agriculture and hence villages, towns and eventually cities – human civilisation.

We use pretty powerful rhetoric to describe the Anthropocene and current human impact. As The Economist stated in 2011, humanity has “become a force of nature reshaping the planet on a geological scale”. We are like an asteroid strike. We have the impact of an ice age.

But what does this really mean? Does it mean, for example, that we are having as big an impact as these natural forces are having right now, or is it, somehow, more profound?


Humans: the new asteroids. Steve Jurvetson, CC BY
The maths of the Anthropocene

In our recent study, we wanted to find the simplest way to mathematically describe the Anthropocene and articulate the difference between how the planet once functioned and how it now functions.

Life on Earth, the chemical and physical composition of the atmosphere and oceans, and the size of the ice sheets have changed over time because of slight alterations to Earth’s orbit around the sun, changes to the sun’s energy output or major asteroid impacts like the one that killed the dinosaurs.


Cyanobacteria changed the world; now it’s our turn. Matthew J Parker, CC BY-SA
They can also change due to geophysical forces: continents collide, cutting off ocean currents so heat is distributed in a new way, upsetting climate and biodiversity.

They also shift due to sheer internal dynamics of the system – new life evolves to drive great planetary shifts, such as the Great Oxidation Event around 2.5 billion years ago when newly evolved cyanobacteria began emitting the deadly poison oxygen that killed all simple life forms it came in touch with. Life had to evolve to tolerate oxygen.

Taking as our starting point a 1999 article by Earth system scientist Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, we can say the rate of change of the Earth system (E) has been driven by three things: astronomical forcings such as those from the sun or asteroids; geophysical forcing, for example changing currents; and internal dynamics, such as the evolution of cyanobacteria. Let’s call them A, G and I.

Mathematically, we can put it like this:


It reads: the rate of change of the Earth system (dE/dt) is a function of astronomical and geophysical forcings and internal dynamics. It is a very simple statement about the main drivers of the system.

This equation has been true for four billion years, since the first life evolved. In his article, Schellnhuber argued that people must be added into this mix, but his theory came before the full impact of humanity had been assessed. In the past few decades, this equation has been radically altered.

We are losing biodiversity at rates tens to hundreds of times faster than natural rates. Indeed, we are approaching mass extinction rates. There have been five mass extinctions in the history of life on Earth. The last killed the non-avian dinosaurs 66 million years ago, now humans are causing the sixth.

The rate we are emitting carbon dioxide might be at an all time high since that time too. Global temperatures are rising at a rate 170 times faster than the Holocene baseline. The global nitrogen cycle is undergoing its largest and most rapid change in possibly 2.5 billion years.

In fact, the rate of change of the Earth system under human influence in the past four decades is so significant we can now show that the equation has become:


H stands for humanity. In the Anthropocene Equation, the rate of change of the Earth system is a function of humanity.

A, G and I are now approaching zero relative to the other big force – us – they have become essentially negligible. We are now the dominant influence on the stability and resilience of the planet we call home.

This is worth a little reflection. For four billion years, the Earth system changed under the influence of tremendous solar-system wide forces of nature. Now this no longer holds.


IPCC, 2014: Climate Change 2014: Synthesis Report. Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. IPCC, Geneva, Switzerland
A new reality

Heavenly bodies of course still exert some force; so does the ground beneath our feet. But the rates at which these forces operate are now negligible compared with the rate at which we are changing the Earth system. In the 1950s or 1960s, our own impact rivalled the great forces of nature. Now it usurps them entirely.

This should come as a shock not only to environmentalists but to everyone on Earth. But our conclusion is arguably a modest addition to the canon of academic literature. The scale and rate of change has already been well established by Earth system scientists over the past two decades.

Recently, Mark Williams and colleagues argued that the Anthropocene represents the third new era in Earth’s biosphere, and astrobiologist David Grinspoon argued that the Anthropocene marks one of the major events in a planet’s “life”, when self-aware cognitive processes become a key part of the way the planet functions.

Still, formalising the Anthropocene mathematically brings home an entirely new reality.


The equations that shape our planet. Owen Gaffney, Will Steffen, Author provided
The drama is heightened when we consider that for much of Earth’s history the planet has been either very hot – a greenhouse world – or very cold – an icehouse world. These appear to be the deeply stable states lasting millions of years and resistant to even quite major shoves from astronomical or geophysical forces.

But the past 2.5 million years have been uncharacteristically unstable, periodically flickering from cold to a gentle warmth.

The consumption vortex

So, who do we mean when we talk of H? Some will argue that we cannot treat humanity as one homogenous whole. We agree.

While all of humanity is now in the Anthropocene, we are not all in it in the same way. Industrialised societies are the reason we have arrived at this place, not Inuits in northern Canada or smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa.


Fossil fuels have turned us into a force of nature. Reuters
Scientific and technological innovations and economic policies promoting growth at all costs have created a consumption and production vortex on a collision course with the Earth system.

Others may say that natural forces are too important to ignore; for example, the El Niño weather system periodically changes patterns globally and causes Earth to warm for a year or so, and the tides generate more energy than all of humanity. But a warm El Niño is balanced by a cool La Niña. The tides and other great forces of nature are powerful but stable. Overall, they do not affect the rate of change of the Earth system.

Now, only a truly catastrophic volcanic eruption or direct asteroid hit could match us for impact.

So, can the Anthropocene equation be solved? The current rate of change must return to around zero as soon as possible. It cannot continue indefinitely. Either humanity puts on the brakes or it would seem unlikely a global civilisation will continue to function on a destabilised planet. The choice is ours.
https://theconversation.com/introducing ... cene-70749

[seemslikeadream]

there is life after trump

This shift will be celebrating the cultivation of life and not the accumulation of possessions. It will be a shift of focusing on how hard you live and who you share your life with. This is what it will mean to live in the age of the Anthropocene.

btw I already live that way

What Does It Mean to Live in the Age of the Anthropocene?

Rob Seimetz

Photo by possan | CC BY 2.0

It’s another day in the age of the Anthropocene where a global game of musical chairs continues to play out.

As humans continue to plunder and pillage the earth in a global economy that thrives on converting the living to the dead, more chairs get removed from the game.

The game doesn’t care about your race, gender, or class it just needs your chair so those that think they are watching the game from afar can enrich themselves at the expense of the living. What these game managers do not know is they are part of the game as well.

The only living organism that gets to see the end of the game is Mother Earth, and it will squeeze humans and most other living beings on this planet out of existence. These psychopathic oligarchs are nothing more than a pimple on Mother Earth’s ass.

Many experts believe the age of the Anthropocene began in 1950 shortly after the United States dropped nuclear bombs on Japan. The Anthropocene is the age in which humans are causing massive changes to the planet which can include mass extinctions of plant and animal species, polluted the oceans and altering the atmosphere.

The Anthropocene epoch will also be known as the time of the decline and fall of the United States as the world’s global superpower. It will be a time where the global superpower torch will be passed to China. Some critics of U.S. Imperialism will gush at this passing of this torch, and continue to compliment China’s “New Silk Road” ambitions and their investment over intervention strategy.

While I long and fight for an end to U.S. Imperialism, as well as, the U.S. ceasing to be the planet’s superpower, I will not celebrate the successes of China.

China’s global model still includes converting the living planet to the dead that contributes to global consumption using global markets.

China’s New Silk Road is going to cost roughly 900 billion dollars. This New Silk Road includes a “One Belt and One Road” mantra which will include land and maritime trading routes to connect Asia, Africa, and Europe.

China calls this a new era of globalization where it will lend 8 trillion dollars in infrastructure to 68 countries. They believe this will add a third to global GDP. Basically, they are looking to find ways for more people to consume more products to speed up the destruction of the living planet which will accelerate ecological collapse.

This investment versus intervention strategy by China includes investing in a South American railway that would cut into the middle of the Amazon rainforest that houses the lungs of our planet.

Indeed, many geopolitical analysts are taking note of China’s investments in Africa, Latin America, Asia, and Europe. But are they taking note these investments are in natural gas pipelines, mining, roads, rails, infrastructure, and ports are an investment in accelerated human consumption, which has already led to 52% of the world’s wildlife vanishing from 1970 to 2010?

Are these analysts noting China can’t even clean up their own backyard? This past October, data showed only four of 28 northern Chinese cities met their air quality targets in October and air quality in 338 Chinese cities worsened.

While investors may be very “bullish” about a 460 billion dollar investment into Artificial Intelligence, are they “bullish” about China using minerals from the earth that destroys the habitat of actual intelligent beings to create this artificial intelligence?

More people are voicing their concerns at the income inequality exhibited throughout the world. It’s great people are voicing their displeasure that the planet’s richest 1% owning half of the world’s wealth.

It’s also great that it’s being pointed out 1,542 billionaires have accumulated 6 trillion dollars of combined wealth which is up 17% from last year. But as many people rail against billionaire oligarchs do they realize out of the 195 new billionaires in 2017, 76 came from China? How many political pundits tell us this 76 were the most new billionaires from any other country this year?

The Age of Anthropocene will be synonymous with words like “unprecedented”, “extinction”, “migration”, “collapse”, “ignorance”, and “greed” to name a few. It’s an age where global systems implemented by humans will have global impacts on all life on Earth.

One has to wonder will this be the age that humans will finally shift their focus from global to local? Is this the age humans stare down the harsh reality of their future?

The answers to these questions are yes, but it’s a matter of doing this by force or by choice.

In this age, humans we will have to confront the sickness of our species. The vast majority of humans have been inflicted with a disease of subduing the environment they live in instead of harmonizing with it. This is a disease our species has carried with us for thousands of years.

Thousands of years ago Earth was inhabited by giant species such as saber-tooth tigers, 4,500-pound bears, woolly mammoths, and wombats. This is a class of species known as the megafauna. A club in which you must weight at least 97 pounds to be able to join. So where did these giant beasts go?

A majority of scientists believe that as humans left Africa, and first entered Europe, Asia, Australia, North America, and South America they took these beasts down to subdue their newfound land. As humans moved around the planet, this coincided with a wave of extinctions as these giant beasts encountered humans for the first time.

This is a symptom of the human disease to subdue rather than harmonize.

We also must look to the Middle East. When one thinks of the Middle East do they think of wide sections of pine and cedar forestswhere hippos and lions once thrived? What happened to this region, and why does it consist of mainly desert? A symptom of our subduing disease includes urban sprawl, which is what has subdued wildlife in the Middle East.

In the Anthropocene humans will have to deal with the consequences of their history of violence. And while we have a history of violence toward one another and the environment, we will have to rely on communities for survival and guidance in this age.

I hope we will have the ability to befriend various surrounding communities we live near. I hope that as we shift toward local communities we will not lose our sense of self. I hope that we can have relationships with several communities and it doesn’t mean our worldview has to subscribe to x, y, and z mantras to join these communities.

But with all this “hope” what I really hope for is that in the Anthropocene we redefine what “hope” means.

The definition of “hope” is to desire with expectation of obtainment or fulfillment. Hope and fulfillment have been linked together for too long. Fulfillment means there are solutions to our problems and it’s our desire for fulfillment that drives our consumption of the planet.

Instead of wanting something to happen, we must shift our focus to understanding what is happening.

When we redefine “hope” in the Anthropocene it must not include having solutions to our problems. It must include being able to live with problems we are facing that have no solutions. And that despite the problems our species is up against we must find a better way to live so we can have brighter days in thought and action. In this redefined “hope” we will know that everything isn’t going to be alright, and that we are a flawed species. Despite knowing these things there will be a shift in thought and consciousness.

This shift will be celebrating the cultivation of life and not the accumulation of possessions. It will be a shift of focusing on how hard you live and who you share your life with. This is what it will mean to live in the age of the Anthropocene.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/11/30 ... hropocene/

[seemslikeadream]

'Loneliest tree' records human epoch
Jonathan Amos
Science correspondent
@BBCAmos on Twitter
19 February 2018

The tree was planted around 1905 and puts on growth of about 1cm per year
It’s been dubbed "the loneliest tree on the planet" because of its remote location, but the Sitka spruce might represent something quite profound about the age in which we live.
The tree, sited on Campbell Island in the Southern Ocean, records in its wood a clear radioactive trace from the A-bomb tests of the 1950s and 60s.
As such, it could be the "golden spike" scientists are seeking to define the start of the Anthropocene Epoch - a new time segment in our geological history of Earth.
The suggestion is that whatever is taken as the golden spike, it should reflect the so-called "Great Acceleration" when human impacts on the planet suddenly intensified and became global in extent.
This occurs after WWII and is seen for example in the explosion in plastics production.
Chris Turney, from the University of New South Wales, Australia, and colleagues, say the Sitka spruce captures this change exquisitely in the chemistry of its growth rings.
"We're putting this forward as a serious contender to mark the start of the Anthropocene. It's got to be something that reflects a global signal," Prof Turney told BBC News.
"The problem with any Northern Hemisphere records is that they largely reflect where most major human activity has happened. But this Christmas tree records the far-reaching nature of that activity and we can't think of anywhere more remote than the Southern Ocean."
BBC
Search for Anthropocene 'golden spike'
'Case is made' for Anthropocene Epoch
Humans help cook up mineral bounty

Media captionWhen exactly did the "age of humans" really start to shape our planet?
The spruce shouldn't really be on Campbell Island, which is some 600km from the southern tip of New Zealand. Its natural habitat is found at northern Pacific latitudes, but a single tree was placed on the subantarctic island around 1905, possibly as the start of an intended plantation.
The next nearest tree is on the Auckland Islands about 200km to the northwest.
Prof Turney and colleagues drilled a fine core into the spruce, which has wide, sharply delineated growth rings, and examined the wood's chemistry.
They found a big leap in the amount of carbon-14 in a part of a ring representing the latter half of 1965.
This peak in the radioactive form of the element is an unambiguous signature of the atmospheric nuclear tests that occurred post-war.
The radioisotope would have been incorporated into the tree as carbon dioxide through photosynthesis.

Media captionProf Chris Turney: "The nuclear tests doubled the amount of radiocarbon in the atmosphere"
Co-author Mark Maslin, from University College London, UK, says the date comes just after the ban on atmospheric nuclear testing (1963), but describes that moment when the fallout from previous detonations had truly gone worldwide and even inveigled itself into the biosphere of the planet.
"If you want to represent the Anthropocene with the start of The Great Acceleration then this is the perfect record to define it. And what's really nice is that we planted a tree where it shouldn't be which has then given us this beautiful record of what we've done to the planet."

The Anthropocene would be added to the chart, above the Holocene
The international geological community is currently assessing how to update the "official" timeline of Earth history - the famous Chronostratigraphic Chart featured in all science textbooks.
The working group charged with leading the discussion recently concluded that the current epoch - the so-called Holocene, which has pertained for the last 11,700 years - could no longer constrain the immense changes taking place on Earth as a result of human activity.
The panel said the search should now be stepped up to find a suitable marker to define the onset of the proposed Anthropocene Epoch. Technically referred to as a Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP), the marker is more commonly called a golden spike.
For the start of the Holocene, the GSSP is a section ice drilled from the Greenland Ice Sheet. Its hydrogen chemistry records an uptick in warming as we emerged from the last ice age.
For the famous Cretaceous–Palaeogene (K–Pg) boundary 66 million years ago when the asteroid struck, wiping out the dinosaurs - the spike is an outcrop of rock in Tunisia that contains a strong trace of the element iridium that was delivered by the impacting space object.

Media captionCo-author Dr Jonathan Palmer removes a sample from the Sitka spruce
What will be key for any golden spike chosen to represent the Holocene-Anthropocene boundary is that it is long-lasting; that geologists a million years from now will be able to point at something and say, "There! That's the start of the Anthropocene Epoch."
"Radiocarbon persists in measurable amounts on the order of 50,000 to 60,000 years. After that, other radioisotopes associated with the bomb tests such as plutonium would still be there in the natural environment, preserving the signal," explained Prof Turney.
"We have archives of the spruce wood collected at the University of New South Wales in Sydney and at Invercargill in New Zealand at the museum and art gallery, so people can go and visit and put their finger on the actual moment we're suggesting the Anthropocene began."
Prof Turney and colleagues have published their study of the Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis) in the journal Scientific Reports.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-43113900

[seemslikeadream]

Insects are dying off at record rates — an ominous sign we're in the middle of a 6th mass extinction

8h
Insects
Forty-one percent of global insect species are at risk, a new study finds.
Hillary Kladke/Getty

Roughly 40% of the world's insect species are in decline, a new study said.
The die-offs are happening primarily because insects are losing their habitats to farming and urbanization. The use of pesticides and fertilizers is also to blame, as is climate change.
The study's authors said the repercussions of this loss of Earth's insects could be catastrophic.
The rapid shrinking of insect populations is also a sign that the planet is in the midst of a sixth mass extinction.
Somehow, it's easier to be concerned about wolves, sea turtles, and white rhinos dying off than it is to feel remorse over vanishing bugs.

But the loss of insects is a dire threat — one that could trigger a "catastrophic collapse of Earth's ecosystems," a new study said.

The research, the first global review of its kind, looked at 73 historical reports on insect declines around the world and found the total mass of all insects on the planets is decreasing by 2.5% per year.

If this trend continues unabated, the Earth may not have any insects at all by 2119.

"In 10 years you will have a quarter less, in 50 years only half left and in 100 years you will have none," Francisco Sanchez-Bayo, a study coauthor and researcher at the University of Sydney, told The Guardian.

That's a big problem because insects are food sources for countless bird, fish, and mammal species. Pollinators such as bees and butterflies also perform a crucial role in fruit, vegetable, and nut production.

Insects are going extinct 8 times faster than mammals, birds, and reptiles

Sanchez-Bayo and his coauthors focused their analysis on insects in European and North American countries. They estimated that 41% of insect species are in decline, 31% are threatened (according to criteria set by the International Union for Conservation of Nature), and 10% are going locally extinct.

That extinction rate is eight times faster than the observed pace of extinction for mammals, birds, and reptiles.

The study suggested that bee species in the UK, Denmark, and North America have taken major hits — bumblebees, honey bees, and wild bee species are all declining. In the US, the number of honey-bee colonies dropped from 6 million in 1947 to 2.5 million just six decades later.

A California beekeeper inspects his honey beehive.
AP
Moths and butterflies are also disappearing across Europe and the US. Between 2000 and 2009 alone, the UK lost 58% of butterfly species on farmed land.

Dragonflies, mayflies, and beetles appear to be dying off as well.

When looking at all animal populations planetwide (not just insects), according to a 2017 study, the Earth appears to be undergoing a process of "biological annihilation." That analysis estimated that "as much as 50% of the number of animal individuals that once shared Earth with us are already gone."

This rapid decline in global biodiversity is sometimes called the "sixth extinction," since it's the sixth time in the history of life on Earth that the planet's fauna has experienced a major collapse in numbers.

In the past, mass extinctions have been caused by the emergence of ice ages or asteroid collisions. This mass extinction, however, is driven by human activities — namely deforestation, mining, and carbon-dioxide emissions that contribute to global warming.

"As insects comprise about two thirds of all terrestrial species on Earth, the above trends confirm that the sixth major extinction event is profoundly impacting life forms on our planet," the authors wrote.

Read more: Scientists say we're witnessing the planet's sixth mass extinction — and 'biological annihilation' is the latest sign

'Catastrophic consequences for ... the survival of mankind'

By 2119, all the world's insects could be gone.
Joe Klementovich/Aurora Photos/Getty
The study emphasized that insects are "essential for the proper functioning of all ecosystems" as food sources, crop pollinators, pest controllers, and nutrient recyclers in soil.

"If insect species losses cannot be halted, this will have catastrophic consequences for both the planet's ecosystems and for the survival of mankind," Sanchez-Bayo told The Guardian.

Substantial declines in insect populations therefore threaten the food, timber, and fiber production that humanity's survival depends on, according to Timothy Schowalter, a professor of entomology at Louisiana State University.

"The pollinator declines jeopardize 35% of our global food supply, which is why European countries are mandating protection and restoration of pollinator habitats," he told Business Insider.

Schowalter added that insects also are critical food resources for many birds, fish, and other vertebrates, which would disappear if their food sources do.

"Insects are often maligned, or at least their significant contributions to ecosystem productivity and delivery of ecosystem services are underappreciated," Schowalter said. "In short, if insects and other arthropods do decline, our survival would be threatened."

Farming practices are behind the insect die-off

This isn't the first time scientists have called attention to plummeting insect populations.

In 2017, a study indicated that 75% of Germany's flying insects had disappeared since the 1990s. Another recent study showed that the total biomass of arthropods — creatures such as insects, spiders, and lobsters that have jointed legs but no backbone — in Puerto Rico has taken a nose dive since the 1970s.

Pesticides, fertilizers, and heavy land use for farming are primary drivers of this decline.

"Overall, the systematic, widespread and often superfluous use of pesticides in agricultural and pasture land over the past 60 years has negatively impacted most organisms, from insects to birds and bats," the authors of the new study wrote.

They added: "The conclusion is clear: unless we change our ways of producing food, insects as a whole will go down the path of extinction in a few decades."

Sanchez-Bayo told The Guardian he thinks insecticides such as neonicotinoids and fipronil are especially damaging.

"They sterilize the soil, killing all the grubs," he said.

A farmer sprays a pesticide.
REUTERS/Jayanta Dey
Climate-change-driven temperature shifts are playing a role in insect deaths, too, though it's not the main factor.

"So far, declines have been related more to land-use changes, especially agricultural intensification, forest fragmentation and urban development, than to temperature change," Schowalter said.

To address the steep decline in insect populations, Sanchez-Bayo and his coauthors are pushing for initiatives to restore insect habitats and cut down the amount of chemicals used in agricultural practices.

"It is imperative that current pesticide usage patterns, mainly insecticides and fungicides, are reduced to a minimum," they wrote.

Popular

Scientists say these 10 major cities could become unlivable within 80 years
https://www.businessinsider.com/insects ... ion-2019-2

[seemslikeadream]

The #Anthropocene is about more than #climatechange. It is about an entire system of life, designed to maximise resource extraction at the expense of expendable ‘Others’; a global system of racism emerging from the legacy of centuries of colonialism.

War, empire and racism in the Anthropocene

The biophysical-economics and military-logics of industrial hyperreality

Nafeez Ahmed


Image from the first Gulf War (Source: Wikimedia)
This article was originally commissioned by the Spanish magazine Papeles, where a slightly abridged Spanish-language edition is due to be published.
The Anthropocene. A proposed new geological epoch which designates a shift to a planetary age dominated by human impacts across the geological processes of the Earth. Geologists dispute the duration, precision, relevance and even accuracy of the concept. But the term has increasingly entered the scientific lexicon as increasing numbers of experts across myriad disciplines recognise that for the first time in history, the future of the entire planet — for generations if not millennia to come — is now being fundamentally determined by the activities of the human species. But the Anthropocene is about far more than just climate change. It is about an entire system of life, whose design is to maximise resource extraction at the expense of expendable ‘Others’. It is bound up, intimately, with a global system of racism emerging from the legacy of centuries of colonialism. And it is inseparable from the ceaseless sequence of industrial wars, culminating in today’s permanent state of the endless ‘war on terror’.

Human-induced global heating — terraforming the Earth beyond recognition

It is the unprecedented impact of anthropogenic climate change that has, perhaps, played the biggest role in efforts to define the Anthropocene as a distinctive new era in Earth’s history. Multiple warnings backed by a global consensus of climate scientists have warned over the last few decades that human activities, through the escalating consumption of fossil fuel resources — the burning of oil, gas and coal — is destabilising the Earth’s natural carbon cycle.

For hundreds of thousands of years, the planet has sustained an equilibrium, a ‘safe operating’ space offering an optimum environment for human and other habitation — in which the quantity of carbon emitted and absorbed by planetary ecosystems remains stable.

But since the Industrial Revolution, as human civilisation has inexorably expanded, consuming greater quantities of fossil fuel energy along the way, associated carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions have exponentially increased — overwhelming the planet’s capacity for absorption. The result has been a steady increase in global average temperatures.

Scientists warn that the extra addition of CO2 into the atmosphere, capturing greater heat, is in turn playing escalating havoc with the Earth’s climate, weather and ecological systems. As human civilisation continues its expansion, as it continues to burn up escalating quantities of fossil fuels, the climate science community warns that above a certain level of CO2 and global heating, planetary ecosystems will shift passed a key tipping point into a new, dangerous era — one that is outside the boundaries of the preceding hundreds of thousands of years, outside anything human beings have ever experienced.

If we continue on this pathway of business-as-usual, conservative projections suggest we are heading toward anywhere between a 3 to 6 degrees Celsius global average temperature rise.

Others, such as Schroders, the global investment firm, have suggested we could be heading toward an 8C planet due to the current rate of fossil fuel consumption — the 8C temperature projection was also suggested by a study funded by US Department of Energy’s Climate Change Research Division, which highlighted the potential impact of ‘amplifying feedback loops’ triggered by altering earth system processes that might trigger further greenhouse gas loading.

Between 4–6C, most climate scientists agree that there would be such a degree of chaos that the planet would become largely uninhabitable. The variation is complicated, and depends on a concept called ‘Earth System Sensitivity’ — how sensitive the planet’s ecosystems are to the CO2 change. But even at a conservative estimate of sensitivity, a 3C planet, to which at minimum we are likely heading, should be considered “extremely dangerous”; and a global average temperature rise within the 3–4C threshold would probably create conditions that make the core infrastructures of human civilisation increasingly unviable.

To the extent that governments are taking seriously this threat, they are doing so largely with a view to assess the implications for their own functioning — and with a view to consider how to sustain business-as-usual amidst rising instability. This is the context in which many studies have concluded that our current climate change trajectory will increase the chance of conflict. For the most part, Western national security agencies that have examined the issue agree that while climate change does not automatically produce war, it acts as an ‘amplifier’ which increases the prospect of war, due to its impacts in terms of water scarcity, the degeneration of critical food systems, the failure of conventional energy supplies, and the unpredictable impact of extreme weather events. Such impacts can sometimes devastate infrastructures and lead to the collapse of public services. In those contexts, the proliferating outbreak of wars and conflicts is widely recognised to be a likely symptom of climate change on a business-as-usual pathway.

The problem is that this usually leads to little reflection on the need to change the human system that is producing this trajectory — instead, we are largely told of the need for a greater expansion of security powers to respond to the chaos of a climate-impacted world: the intensification of the same system that produced the problem.

On the polar opposite of the spectrum, we have outright state denialism rooted in the goal of protecting the system of endless fossil fuel exploitation at any conceivable cost. It is telling that the Trump administration, as of March 2019, was considering the creation of a White House panel to dispute the findings of dozens of US military and intelligence assessments on the grave security risks posed by climate change. Which is interesting, given that the Pentagon emits more fossil fuel emissions than as many as 140 different countries.



And yet, the preoccupation with war that emerges from the narrow lens of ‘national security’ through which the human gaze is obsessed primarily with physical threats to the interests of nation-states, is ultimately counterproductive, symptomatic of the fragmentary cognitive framing in which human institutions are currently capable of thinking and acting — it focuses myopically on how to uphold the survival of the business-as-usual operations of the state and the interests lobbying through it, overlooking the global existential character of the crisis as a threat to the whole species.

At the worst end of the scale, war would be the least of our problems: we have the risk of a ‘hothouse’ Earth. A study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that the risk of an uninhabitable planet is not simply a far off possibility that might be triggered at several degrees of temperature rise in a more distant future — it could be triggered imminently; and it is possible that it may already have been triggered at the current level of an approximate 1C temperature rise above the pre-industrial average, which NASA’s former chief climate scientist James Hansen had argued is the safe upper limit, beyond which we move into a dangerous and more unpredictable climate with some consequences that may be irreversible.

But climate change is only one facet of the crisis. Our civilisational model, which has exponentially increasing energy and resource consumption as its driving motor, has seen human activities, exploitation and waste-generation accelerate across the planet. This has driven an escalating biodiversity crisis leading to potentially irreversible changes to soils and oceans, underpinning mass species extinctions.

Human civilisation and the war on life

About 15 years ago, the UN’s Millennium Ecosystem Assessment provided one of the first and most damning insights into the destruction wrought by humans that defines the Anthropocene. The report pinpointed the mid-twentieth century as a marked tipping point into a new era, where rapidly intensifying industrial agriculture accompanied an escalating collapse of biodiversity.

Consumption of food, water and fuel has not only exponentially increased, it has exponentially encroached on habitats — more in the preceding 50 years alone than throughout all of human history. The extinction rate of species was “up to one thou­sand times higher than the fossil record”, when “every thousand mammal species, less than one went extinct every millen­nium”. The UN assessment projected that the rate is still going up, and will be “ten times higher” in the near future.



The situation is now far worse than expected. This year, the UN’s Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services concluded that one million of the planet’s 8 million animal and plant species are at risk of going extinct in the near future, due to the expansion of human societies that has driven climate change, the loss of habitat, overfishing, pollution and invasive species.

Numerous studies have warned that our present trajectory is heading toward the collapse of our current form of civilisation. One model developed with NASA funding indicated that the current endless growth model of human civilisation was likely to lead to diminishing returns and deepening economic stratification, eventually culminating in collapse. All civilisations, the model seemed to show, tend to follow a growth trajectory consisting of an increasing intensification in complexity, whereby greater layers of complexity are continuously innovated to solve problems.

With each new layer, more complex problems are generated, requiring a further even more complex layer of problem-solving to address them, which in turn generates further problems. The cycle, drawing on the work of archaeologist Joseph Tainter who studied dozens of past civilisations, suggests that any civilisation will eventually collapse under the unsustainable weight of its own complexity due to excessive resource consumption and internal maldistribution of wealth — unless consumption and distribution begin to be rectified in time.

This particular model was fairly simple, focusing on a smaller number of variables to explore the general plausibility of the core hypothesis. A few years later, a far more complex scientific model with thousands of data inputs was developed by Anglia Ruskin University’s Global Sustainability Institute. with funding from the British Foreign Office. When run forward on a business-as-usual trajectory, the model suggested that human civilisation would probably collapse around 2040 amidst an eruption of converging climate, energy, food and water crises that would devastate major economies amidst an epidemic of food riots. Conventional war might happen — but either way, the planet would likely experience a proliferation of civil unrest within, between and across borders.

This year, a scenario analysis backed by the former head of Australia’s military drew on the peer-reviewed scientific literature to outline a plausible business-as-usual trajectory, based on what we know about how planetary ecosystems can respond to human-induced CO2 emissions. The scenario took seriously the scientific evidence of a potential ‘hothouse’ Earth scenario. It suggested that by 2050, human societies would face “outright chaos” due to escalating climate-impacts on key ecosystems, with two billion people suffering from water scarcity and another billion requiring relocation just to survive. The prospects would severely strain the capacity of human civilisation to function, and increase the chances of its collapse. The authors of this analysis called on the national security sector, the agencies of war, to respond more appropriately to these risks by supporting a comprehensive World War 2 style mobilisation to transition to a post-carbon civilisation.



While perhaps well-intentioned, the report did not recognise that war agencies might be structurally incapable of undertaking such a response precisely due to their embeddedness in the institutions captured by the very same fossil fuel system — and that such a transformation would conceivably imperil their very reason for being.

Another assessment in the form of a scientific briefing commissioned to feed into the UN’s Sustainable Development report found that one of the key drivers behind the growing risk of collapse is the very nature of the endless growth model of capitalism, as currently structured. The more we escalate our consumption of resources, raw materials, minerals and energy, the more we are using up the cheapest and most plentiful resources, and therefore the greater the costs of continued production. Drawing on the pioneering work of environmentalist Professor Charles Hall, the study advocated a focus on the ‘energy return on investment’ (EROI) of national and global energy systems to measure how efficient they really are (EROI measures the quantity of energy used to extract energy). The answer? Efficiency is declining for largely geological reasons. As the costs increase due to the need for greater quantities of energy and more complicated mechanisms of exploitation; the returns to society diminish. As we are using ever increasing quantities of energy and resources just to extract more energy and resources, the surplus we have left to sustain the financing of the public goods and services necessary to maintain a functioning civilisation is declining. This doesn’t mean we are running out of energy — but it means that as the energetic and environmental costs of energy extraction increase, we effectively have less and less spare to invest back into key social goods.

French economists Victor Court and Florian Fizaine showed in a recent global EROI study that we are well passed the maximum levels of efficiency. The amount of energy we can extract from fossil fuels compared to the energy used to extract it was once lucratively high — around 44:1 in the 1960s. Since then it has inexorably declined to just over 30 overall, accompanied by a long-term slow-down in the growth rate of the global economy, a decline in productivity, and an expansion of debt. At this rate of decline, by 2100 we are projected to extract the same value of EROI from fossil fuels as we were in the 1800s. While there might be more actual total energy being produced by end of century, the surplus energy available could be at nineteenth century levels if we continue on a business-as-usual path of fossil fuel-dependence.

This predicament is already driving social unrest, communal polarisation and the resurgence of populism in a situation where neither governments nor wider publics really understand why economies continue to experience chronic dysfunction, instability and tepid growth.

The report to the UN forecasted that this trajectory means that the current economic system, which depends on endless growth to survive, simply cannot be sustained. It therefore portends a future of increasing unrest without a change of course. We will inevitably shift toward a new, different type of economy — if we don’t, then we face a heightened risk of social tensions that could cascade into conflict; and at worse we may well face the danger of collapse.



War in the mirror of civilisation

The risk of collapse is inherently entwined with war — industrial civilisation’s growth trajectory has not only enabled the technologies of war, but is in turn enabled by them.

Earlier this year, the main scientific committee established to determine the accuracy and nature of the definition of the Anthropocene signed off on its initial proposal positing 1950 as the starting date for the new geological era.

The sign off is the first stage of a longer scientific process to properly investigate and test what is still, in raw scientific terms, a mere hypothesis. The scientists based their preliminary evaluations on the mid-twentieth century as a major tipping point into a new era of human interference with the Earth’s geology, characterised by industrial expansion, the proliferation of agricultural chemicals, and most significant of all, the invention and deployment of the atomic bomb. The latter’s radioactive debris became embedded in sediments and glacial ice, becoming part of the geologic record. All this demonstrates an unprecedented and unmistakeable human footprint across the planet whose impacts will be seen for decades, centuries and millennia to come.

War, then, is carved into the sinews of the Anthropocene. While the twentieth and twenty-first centuries can be seen as exemplifying the inherently ecocidal dynamic of the exponential growth of human civilisation, they have also exhibited another parallel feature: the systematic proliferation of war, mass violence, and multiple forms of genocide.

These parallel features — ecocide and genocide; the destruction of our environmental life-support systems, and our direct destruction of the lives of members of our own species — do not coincide haphazardly, but are symptoms of the system of human life itself, in its current form.

From 1945 onwards, human civilisation was caught between the clash of two pseudo-scientific industrial ideologies of endless growth: capitalism and communism — the former premised on extreme privatisation and individuation, the latter premised on extreme nationalisation and collectivisation.

Both paradigms saw the Earth as little more than an external repository of resources to be exploited ad infinitum for the endless consumption of a human species, now self-defined by its capacity for technologically-driven industry.

Both promised that their paradigms would herald utopian oases of industrial prosperity for their respective societies.



In reality, both not only ‘Otherised’ the Earth itself as merely a resource to be consumed by human beings as a predator species, they simultaneously ‘Otherised’ large sections of working populations in and beyond their own demarcated territories, as little more than instruments by which to endlessly accelerate industrial productivity; and they both went on to mindlessly ‘Otherise’ each other whenever they clashed with each other (and even when they did not).

The result was that in their very different efforts to expand, both systems resulted in the mass deaths of millions of people on a colossal scale.

The Soviet Union and Maoist China deployed brutal collectivisation methods on their path toward accelerating productivity, which produced foreseeable mass deaths. This included the generation of devastating artificial famines. Stalin’s policies eliminated between 20 and 60 million people; Mao’s ‘Great Leap Forward’ caused 27 million people to starve to death.

But liberal Western governments also left a trail of blood of a quite distinct kind, in the first major spate of violence since the dawn of the Anthropocene as so far tentatively defined.

From 1945 onwards, Western governments under the leadership of the United States — bearing the mantle of leader of the ‘Capitalist Free World’ — pursued a continuous sequence of direct and covert military interventions across the world. Western military interventions generated a continuum of violence in over 70 developing nations across Asia, Africa, South America and the Middle East from mid-century until today.

British historian Mark Curtis calculates that the total number of direct and indirect deaths from these interventions is approximately 8.6–13.5 million — a conservative underestimate, he qualifies. The interventions were often aimed at quelling nationalist movements for self-determination. Although publicly justified as defensive actions to repel communist subversion, Curtis’ evaluation of historical archives from the US and British governments revealed that policy planners had deliberately inflated the communist threat to justify a militarism aimed at defending Western business interests and acquiring control of critical resources and raw materials. In the Middle East, the biggest prize was control of strategic fossil fuel reserves, the very lifeblood of economic growth.



Development economist J. W. Smith has offered a higher estimate of the death toll, which he puts somewhere between 12–15 million deaths directly due to Western military interventions, with further “hundreds of millions” dying as an indirect consequence of the destruction and reconfiguration of their economies. Smith traced how Western interventions paved the way for the imposition of new capitalist social relations designed to extinguish domestic resistance and forcibly integrate developing countries into the global capitalist economy.

In the twenty-first century, this war trajectory has escalated, not waned. The driving motor remains the use of force to expand access to resources and labour, in order to lubricate the ever-expanding networks of global capital. It is a process sanitised, though, by various ideologies of humanitarianism, benign developmentalism, and ‘national security’.

The principal interventions of the ‘war on terror’ in Iraq and Afghanistan, for instance, are resource wars in core ways.

British Foreign Office documents prove clearly that American and British policy-planners saw the invasion and occupation of Iraq as a way to consolidate access to one of the world’s largest oil reserves, while ensuring the continued flow of to global markets with a view to help stabilise the global economy. In Afghanistan, Congressional records have revealed longstanding US-Western efforts to establish a trans-Afghan pipeline route for the transport of oil and gas from Central Asia to Western markets, bypassing US rivals Iran and Russia. In the 1990s, the US and British even funnelled support to the Taliban in a failed bid to establish the ‘security’ needed to pursue the plan.

Consecutively, the Obama and Trump administrations both continued to back the pipeline project which remains under construction.

In the Anthropocene, resource wars are bipartisan.
Both conflicts wrought colossal violence. Although the more widely accepted estimates of deaths in the hundreds of thousands are terrible enough, higher scale estimates could be more accurate, ranging up to a total of around 4 million people killed directly and indirectly across both conflicts since 1990.

Since then, war in the Anthropocene has intensified and proliferated in new and surprising ways as the more vulnerable nodes of human civilisation have begun to experience overlapping levels of failure and collapse due to the slow acceleration of converging climate, energy, food and water crises. The 2011 Arab Spring uprisings spiralled into a protracted, coalescing amalgamation of riots, civil wars and armed conflicts encompassing multiple theatres, Syria, Yemen, Libya and beyond.

The Arab Spring had been triggered by food price shocks which were, in turn, driven by a confluence of economic-energy shocks interacting with a series of climate shocks which had led to droughts and extreme weather crises across the world’s major food basket regions. Many Arab Spring countries from Syria to Egypt to Yemen had slashed subsidies for food and fuel in preceding years, largely due to the collapse of state revenues — many of them had been former major oil exporters, but in the mid-1990s had experienced peaks of their domestic conventional oil resources. As production thus declined, so did export revenues. With subsidies in the years before 2011 disappearing, coupled with global price spikes due to rampant market speculation on commodity prices coupled with global food shortages, prices of staple foods in these largely import-dependent countries rocketed. As the price of bread became unaffordable, people across the region hit the streets.



The Earth system crisis of the Anthropocene played a critical role in prolonging and amplifying this Middle East crisis, which in turn drove migration and asylum seeking from 2011 to 2015 to an unprecedented degree. Some 11.5 percent of the population of Syria alone has been killed in the ensuing conflict. The West, Russia, Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE have vied for control of Syria for a range of geopolitical reasons, not least of which was its centrality to potential transhipment routes for oil and gas to global markets. Partisans of these different forces tend to absolve their favoured side(s) of complicity, but it is worth noting that prior to the 2011 uprising the State Department was actively negotiating with Syria and EU officials to push forward a pipeline route through the country to transport Iraqi oil to Europe; Russia simultaneously saw Assad’s efforts to capitalise on Syria’s strategic position vis-a-vis the region’s energy corridors as a fundamental threat to Putin’s own gas export plans — the war provided the ideal spoiler, with each side using it to try to further their own interests, the Syrian people be damned.

In the Anthropocene, so-called anti-imperialists have few qualms about fighting resource wars in their own self-interest.
The million plus migrants that turned up on the shores of Europe did so as a direct result of these wars. They were escaping devastating geopolitical conflicts amplified by vested interests, but which had also been created or exacerbated by severe droughts amplified by climate change.

According to the co-author of a key study of the climate-migration connection, Dr Raya Muttarak — a senior lecturer in geography and international development at the University of East Anglia: “The effect of climate on conflict occurrence is particularly relevant for countries in Western Asia in the period 2010–2012, when many were undergoing political transformation during the so-called Arab Spring uprisings.” Muttarak and his team showed that climate change laid the groundwork for the simmering tensions which led to the outbreak of war in Syria and across parts of the region, by generating droughts that led to mass migration.

The mass migration triggered by these processes, in turn, have transformed and radicalised politics across the Western hemisphere. They provided the fodder for extreme nationalist narratives funded by colossal quantities of ‘dark money’ from a cross-section of trans-Atlantic right-wing elites, many of whom hold vested interests in perpetuating deregulation for fossil fuel giants and other giant corporations.



The mass migration thus stoked nativist fears that helped fuel the rise of extreme nationalist movements, which suddenly found renewed constituencies for their views and policies with increasing numbers of ordinary citizens who felt disillusioned with the prevailing order, but had no way of making sense of it. They knew, can feel, that something is deeply wrong, that the old order is collapsing, but their diagnosis is incomplete, narcissistic, fragmented and symptom-oriented. As such, it has led to incomplete, narcissistic, fragmented and symptom-oriented political reactionism.

The series of victories for the far-right that followed the eruption of Earth system crisis in the Middle East between 2011 and 2015 can thus be seen as a direct consequence of an incoherent cognitive response to the crisis, which reacted purely to its chief symptom: the desperate mass movement of vulnerable peoples.

We thus witnessed a series of seismic shifts in the reconfiguration of Western political systems, a hardening and centralising of power, a self-centring of values, a defensive rejectionism of science, and a polarising of identities, manifesting in a string of extreme nationalist wins. In 2014, far-right parties won just under a quarter of all seats in the European Parliament. In 2015, David Cameron was re-elected as Prime Minister with a parliamentary majority, a victory attributed in part to his promise to hold a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union. Unbeknownst to many, the Tories had quietly established wide-ranging links with many of the same far-right parties that were now capturing seats in the EU. The following year in June, the ‘Brexit’ referendum shocked the world with its result: a majority vote to leave the EU. Six months later, billionaire real estate guru Donald Trump became president of the world’s most powerful country. Like the Conservatives in the UK, the Republicans too had forged trans-Atlantic connections with European parties and movements of the extreme-right. Since then, far-right parties have made continued electoral gains across Europe in Italy, Sweden, Germany, France, Poland and Hungary; they are now just short of a third of seats in the European Parliament — and they are rapidly consolidating elsewhere, in the Philippines, Brazil, India, Myanmar and beyond.

The troubles and tribulations of contemporary politics, the increasing polarisation between left and right, the chronic incapacity to engage constructively across ideological divides, have become a pantomime hyperreality obsessing our consciousness through our television screens, desk computers, laptops, smartphones and wearable devices. The missing link is the planetary context — the crises of contemporary politics are, indeed, tidal waves, but they are occurring on the surface of an ocean in turmoil, of which, for all intents and purposes, we remain oblivious.

Political crisis is a symptom of the accelerating Earth system crisis. And as Clausewitz famously said, war is a continuation of politics by other means.
Colonisation and globalisation in the Anthropocene

Not everyone agrees, though, that the Anthropocene began in the mid-twentieth century. Some argue that there is a strong geological case for the Anthropocene commencing with the dawn of modern global empire.

British geographers Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin have put forward a much earlier date for this unprecedented era, one that “adheres to the geological criteria for defining an epoch: 1610. This date marks the irreversible exchange of species following the collision of the Old and New worlds”, which coincided with “an associated unusual drop in atmospheric CO2 captured in Antarctic ice cores.”

This alternative dating for the Anthropocene derives from the measurable impact of farming in relation to the colonisation of America by the Spanish, a pivotal event which many historians see as marking the inception of a new, distinctive age of empire that facilitated the birth of global capitalism. The drop in CO2 at the time, visible today in the ice cores, resulted from “vegetation regrowth on abandoned farmlands following the deaths of 50 million indigenous Americans (mostly from smallpox brought by Europeans). The annexing of the Americas by Europe was also an essential precursor to the Industrial Revolution and therefore captures associated later waves of environmental change.”


This alternative dating offers a compelling re-envisioning of the Anthropocene that associates it directly with the violence of empire, with the 1610 date providing the bridge connecting the historical violence of colonial discovery with its ensuing expansionism through biological conquest.

This encompassed the mass ‘free market’ famines in Ireland and India, which saw the deaths of one million and up to 12 million respectively; as well as the trans-Atlantic slave-trade which saw the deaths of as many as 65 million Africans over five centuries — a blood-drenched international regime that was inextricably linked to the formation of a capitalist world system that helped facilitate Britain’s industrial revolution.

By this standard, the Anthropocene — encompassing the period in which the human species most profoundly and near-permanently began transforming the very geology of the Earth — simultaneously represents the rapid expansion of empire, and with it, the systematic construction of new racial categories to legitimise the emerging system of global apartheid that came with it.

In this very period, we saw the dawn of scientific racism, the formal and scientifically-justified concept of multiple races, the grotesque legacy of which we continue to struggle with today. The idea that there are different ‘races’ can be traced back to the political appropriation and distortion of neo-Darwinian theories of evolution to underpin racial hierarchies which positioned white Europeans at the pinnacle of civilised human advancement in this juggernaut of global industrial expansion.

Racism, then, is not discrimination against other ‘races’. It is the very act of creating the notion of a distinctive ‘race’ of people — that is, of possessing common generalised characteristics, an act inseparable from the very dawn of the Anthropocene, which witnessed the emergence of a civilisation defined by its insatiable hunger for resources and labour.

Polarised constructions of the ‘Other’ have played a crucial ideological function throughout the Anthropocene, cleaving human beings from the environments in which they find themselves, and cleaving them apart from each other into exploitative factions of power. And so it is no surprise that the formalisation of racism as a global system appeared to solidify during the industrial revolution, as the human species’ domination of the Earth began to reach exponential acceleration.

In the early nineteenth century, racism manifested largely as a religious ideology linked to interpretations of the Bible, viewing non-European groups as inherently inferior due to their heathen beliefs and ancestry, and frequently targeted Jews. From the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, racism evolved on the basis of scientifically-justified biological theories which attributed fixed traits, behaviours, characteristics, abilities and disabilities to constructed groups of people based on their supposedly distinctive biological characteristics. Since then, racism has continued to evolve and is largely underpinned by a cultural theory which still projects homogenised constructions of different social groups with common traits and characteristics, but derived instead from their affiliation to a culture, ethnicity, nation, language or faith. Often, racism today borrows from across these subliminal theories — its proponents frequently not even recognising what they are doing.

The late sociologist Stuart Hall famously described “race” as a “floating signifier”. Rather than being a fixed concept, he explained, race has always been a deeply and inherently political construct, projected by powerful dominant groups, justifying unequal power relations with other groups. As such, it is a construct that changes and adapts to historical circumstance. Far from being exclusively biologically determined, Hall showed that the new type of cultural racism moves beyond discrimination related to skin colour. Instead, it focuses on the imagined cultures of people, generalised abstractions about their beliefs and practices, projecting a hierarchy of cultures. Racialised stereotypes can thus cut across colour divides, and ‘non-racial’ categories like faith, culture and civilisation can become racist code for similar discriminatory practices. One result is the projection of an unsurpassable divide between the “West” and “the Rest”, in which “Westerners” are seen as “civilised”, “safe”, “known”, while “migrants”, “Muslims”, “asylum seekers”, “foreigners” and so on are viewed as “uncivilised”, “dangerous”, and “different”.

The deepening and acceleration of identity-politics is a defining feature of the tail-end of the Anthropocene, as the endless growth project of maximum extraction, exploitation and centralisation of resources invents and entrenches multiple divides between human beings on its path of self-legitimisation. And so, too, the devastating impacts of the Earth system crisis remain racialised, with the worst consequences disproportionately affecting the poorer, darker nations around the world.

War is, perhaps, the most visible surface-symptom of the Anthropocene’s defining feature.

In the Anthropocene, we all become Others.
It is not yet too late to begin to actively redefine the meaning of the Anthropocene.

For ultimately, the character of the Anthropocene so far is a reflection of the system of human civilisation within the prevailing paradigm. This is a life-destroying paradigm, a death-machine whose internal logic culminates in its own termination. It is a matrix of interlocking beliefs, values, behaviours and organisational forms which functions as a barrier, not an entry-point, to life, nature and reality.

And in that sense, the end of this paradigm is utterly inevitable. But this does not erase the choice before us — which is to decide whether humanity will perish in the ashes of this paradigm, or plant seeds of a new life-affirming paradigm by building out an emerging system for the flourishing of a new ecological civilisation.

If human civilisation is to survive, it will not be what we see before us — erected on the blood of millions; premised on the exhaustion of planetary resources; crushing the bones of the poor, vulnerable and weak; hell-bent on self-annihilation — that does so. This is a paradigm beguiled by a techno-hyperreality of its own projection; a utopian simulacrum of endless growth, desperately attempting to conceal its own dystopic core from self-awareness.

And so our task is to reflect on what we have truly done to each other, and to the planet; and to recognise that these two phenomena are part of the same self-defeating paradigm: one which perpetually constructs a hyperreality of divisions, borders, and boundaries around projected externalisations of the ‘Other’, seemingly necessitating exploitative, parasitical behaviours. What emerges from this recognition is the relinquishing of the binary delusions that have riven the path of civilisation for hundreds of years, and thereby an embracing of a new vision of what it means to be human — retrieving the essence of our existence as beings who, together, have come from, and will inevitably return to, the Earth itself.

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Dr. Nafeez Ahmed is the founding editor of the 100% reader-funded investigative journalism project INSURGE intelligence. His latest book is Failing States, Collapsing Systems: BioPhysical Triggers of Political Violence (Springer, 2017). He is an 18-year investigative journalist, formerly of The Guardian where he reported on the geopolitics of social, economic and environmental crises. He now reports on ‘global system change’ for VICE’s Motherboard. He has bylines in The Times, Sunday Times, The Independent on Sunday, The Independent, The Scotsman, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, Quartz, New York Observer, The New Statesman, Prospect, Le Monde diplomatique, among other places. He has twice won the Project Censored Award for his investigative reporting; twice been featured in the Evening Standard’s top 1,000 list of most influential Londoners; and won the Naples Prize, Italy’s most prestigious literary award created by the President of the Republic. Nafeez is also a widely-published and cited interdisciplinary academic applying complex systems analysis to ecological and political violence. He is a Research Fellow at the Schumacher Institute.
https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence ... 33f13c3fb1

The global pandemic of anti-Muslim genocidal violence
Post-9/11 wars may have killed up to 6 million people in a global system that could be on the verge of a tipping point

Published by Insurge Intelligence, a crowdfunded investigative journalism project for people and planet. Support us to report where others fear to tread.

Nafeez Ahmed
This special report was commissioned by the Hub Foundation, courtesy of Dr Zachary Markwith.

The last two decades have seen an astonishing escalation in mass violence against Muslims across vastly separated geographies. While its true impact remains officially unknown, collating data across multiple studies suggests that at least 1 million and as many as 6 million Muslims may have been directly and indirectly killed since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, through a sequence of inter-state wars, civil conflicts, and military interventions involving major powers, as well as Muslim and non-Muslim regimes.

Although death toll figures are often hotly contested due to their moral and political implications, even the most conservative figures demonstrate a colossal scale of deaths, raising urgent questions about the legitimacy of Western and non-Western militarism.

The escalation suggests that this uptick in mass violence in different parts of the world, many instances of which are genocidal in character, is not an unhappy coincidence but rather a product of a wider pattern of relationships integral to the way the modern world system has developed.

War in Yemen: a genocidal campaign

One new study published earlier this year pinpoints the genocidal nature of the US-UK backed Saudi war on Yemen. Authored by genocide scholar Professor Jeffrey Bachman of the School of International Service at the American University in Washington DC, the paper examines the scale, pattern and intentionality of the coalition bombing campaign across Yemen.

“Coalition aerial attacks have intentionally targeted Yemen’s civilian infrastructure, economic infrastructure, medical facilities and cultural heritage,” Bachman observes. “Combined with the ongoing air and naval blockade, which has impeded the ability of Yemenis to access clean water, food, fuel and health services, the violence visited upon Yemen has created near-famine conditions.”

Meanwhile UNICEF has predicted an imminent cholera outbreak which could infect more than one million children. Drawing on the work of the conceptual founder of genocide, Raphael Lemkin, Bachman develops a holistic conception recognising that the existence of a group can be attacked through multiple, overlapping techniques across political, social, cultural, economic, biological, physical, religious and moral domains.

Applying this approach to the war on Yemen, Bachman argues that the coalition is “conducting an ongoing campaign of genocide by a ‘synchronised attack’ on all aspects of life in Yemen, one that is only possible with the complicity of the United States and United Kingdom.”

Anglo-American complicity in this “campaign of genocide” boils down to the fact that the US and UK governments “have provided the Coalition with aid and assistance that is essential to its ability to commit its attacks and maintain the blockade, the results of which, together, constitute genocide.”

Bachman is a professorial lecturer in human rights and the director of ethics, peace and global affairs at American University’s School of International Service. He is the author of Cultural Genocide: Law, Politics and Global Manifestations, just published last June as part of the Routledge Studies in Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity series.

In his Yemen paper, Bachman argues that it is immaterial whether the US and UK themselves intend for this support to go towards committing genocide by destroying a group in whole or in part. Complicity exists as long as their support is intended to facilitate the coalition’s military campaign, especially given that both governments are fully aware of the foreseeable genocidal consequences in terms of the mass destruction of all aspects of life in Yemen.

The key to Bachman’s argument is in how he situates the role of intentionality in relation to the actual consequences of the war, which has systematically targeted all critical infrastructure underpinning the existence of Yemen as a functioning society. The mass deaths of Yemenis and the collapse of Yemen society and life is an inevitable result of this.

Whether or not the US and Britain explicitly intended this outcome, by supporting the coalition despite the clear evidence that this is the foreseeable outcome, they are complicit through their implicit intent in the partial destruction of Yemenis as a group.

Deaths in Yemen

Like most modern wars, the death toll in Yemen is as yet not fully known, and potentially unknowable. As has become the norm, no government wants to keep track of the body count.

But according to a UN-commissioned report by the University of Denver, the total number of people killed in the war on Yemen by the end of 2019 is about 102,000 people.

This does not account for the number of ‘indirect deaths’ occurring as a result of the consequences of the war. The report further estimates that some 131,000 Yemenis by this date will die from hunger, disease and lack of health clinics and other infrastructure caused by the conflict. Between 2015 and 2019, then, some 233,000 Yemenis will have died due to the war.

That study was recently corroborated by data from the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data project, which similarly estimated that the direct death toll is already approaching the 100,000 mark.

But this could still severely underestimate the extent of the deaths.

According to the Secretariat of the Geneva Declaration on Armed Violence, an authoritative diplomatic initiative endorsed by over 90 states, indirect deaths usually vastly outnumber direct deaths. The patterns in which this take place suggest an average ratio of indirect to direct deaths in modern wars which we can use to infer some likely estimates of probable indirect deaths, acknowledging of course that these estimates will be subject to a large margin of error.

“In the majority of conflicts since the early 1990s for which good data is available, the burden of indirect deaths was between three and 15 times the number of direct deaths,” the initiative found.

The variation in the ratio of direct to indirect deaths, the initiative explains, depends on several factors including the pre-conflict level of development of the country, the duration of the fighting, the intensity of combat, access to basic care and services, and humanitarian relief efforts. Data on conflicts preceding the publication of the initiative’s report, however, suggested a narrower – but conservative — average range:

“A reasonable average estimate would be a ratio of four indirect deaths to one direct death in contemporary conflicts.”
The initiative thus uses this baseline calculus from the ratio of direct to indirect deaths in past conflict data to provide a conservative ratio by which to reasonably estimate the likely burden of indirect deaths from armed conflict, in new cases where we can discern similar levels of comprehensive destruction of the critical infrastructure necessary to sustain normal civilian life.

Source: Geneva Declaration Secretariat, ‘Global Burden of Armed Violence’ (2008)
This ratio is, of course, not a fool-proof approach to calculating indirect death tolls, but does provide an evidence-based method to generate plausible estimates.

In the Geneva Declaration Secretariat’s own words, this method can be used to generate an “order of magnitude” for indirect deaths from armed conflict which is likely to be conservative. We apply the same methodology below.

Applying it in the case of Yemen, where critical public health infrastructure has collapsed due to the bombing campaign, would suggest it is reasonable to suspect that the scale of indirect deaths in Yemen is much higher than the 233,000 estimate — and could be as high as around 400,000 (and probably much higher).

This would put the probable total death toll in Yemen including direct and indirect deaths at around half a million people.

Genocidal violence in Syria

Bachman is also the author of an earlier major genocide study focusing on reconceptualising the nature and impact of the US government’s relationships with genocidal regimes — The United States and Genocide: (Re)Defining the Relationship, published by Routledge.

His book makes clear that the sociological conception of genocide applied to the Yemen case points to the tendentially genocidal dynamics of numerous other conflicts in which Western governments have been complicit.

In this respect, Yemen is only among the latest in a long sequence of regional conflicts that have erupted in recent years, following on from what was arguably the first major disruptive regional event, the 2003 Iraq War. This triggered a domino effect culminating in the outbreak of a series of interconnected wars across the Middle East and North Africa.

The parallel conflict that erupted in 2011 and which continues to this day is in Syria. It is widely recognized that the Syria death toll is extremely difficult to pin down due to the complexity of tallying numbers with reports of deaths, coming in from areas where incidents of violence cannot be independently verified by foreign observers.

However, one of the most authoritative estimates of the war — which cannot be dismissed on grounds of partisanship — came from the Damascus-based Syrian Centre for Policy Research (SCPR), a nonpartisan think-tank which held good relations with Assad’s government.

In 2016, the SCPR estimated that 11.5 percent of the Syrian population had been either killed or injured, with nearly half a million people — some 470,000 — having been killed directly or indirectly as a consequence of the war. This total is nearly double the UN figures of 250,000 deaths, which the UN stopped collecting 18 months earlier.

The SCPR’s estimate seems to be broadly corroborated by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), which puts the direct death toll at 511,000 as of March 2019. SOHR’s data on fatalities comes largely from volunteers based in opposition-held territories. While SOHR’s data has been questioned on partisan grounds, the convergence between the SCPR and SOHR estimates indicates that the half million figure is very likely to be an accurate baseline estimate, with the actual death toll probably higher. Independent statisticians have also cross-referenced SOHR with other databases of casualty figures.

If the direct death toll figure of around 500,000 is accurate, then applying the Geneva Declaration ratio would suggest a total of 2 million indirect deaths in Syria from the war, providing a total death toll of around 2.5 million.

Lines of complicity in the Syria conflict can be seen encompassing both Western and non-Western powers. In my own major investigations into conflict narratives in Syria, while the complicity of Assad, backed by Russia and Iran, in carpet bombing civilians indiscriminately is absolutely unmistakeable, so too is the role of Western powers in intervening in the conflict in ways which have entrenched and exacerbated the violence — including the US military’s own indiscriminate aerial bombing of civilian areas.

There are two lines of critique in this respect which are worth noting, and they are not necessarily contradictory.

One is that the West’s approach to the conflict fanned the flames in such a way that it emboldened Assad in his efforts to crackdown on opposition forces and civilians. Another is that through the Gulf states and Turkey, the West armed and financed largely extremist groups among the opposition forces which tended to weaken the most democratic and secular centres of these movements, while empowering hardline jihadist groups, many with connections to al-Qaeda and ISIS.

It could be argued that these two dynamics foreseeably reinforced each other in unleashing outbursts of violence and counter violence from different sides which, by deliberately targeting critical civilian infrastructure, were genocidal in their implicit intent to destroy at least in part target groups.

In fact, two US military documents — one an internal planning assessment and another a public analytical report — suggest that some US policy-planners were neither truly committed to toppling Assad, nor wanted to guarantee a rebel victory for fear of lack of control of the final outcome. The documents indicate that US strategy instead was to continually hedge its bets during the conflict with a view to fracture Syria’s territorial integrity and weaken its existence as a cohesive state.

Those documents should not be generalized to assume that this was always a fixed policy of Western governments wholesale, but they are certainly indicative of the type of covert counter-democratic strategic intentionality active at certain times, and underscore how the West — alongside other powers — contributed to the genocidal destruction of Syrian society in different ways.

NATO’s genocidal military intervention in Libya

Just as unrest was breaking out in Syria, conflict was also breaking out in Libya, eventually prompting NATO intervention to topple Colonel Qaddafi.

A study in the Journal of African Medicine concluded that a total of 21,490 people had been killed in the armed conflict between 2011 and 2012.

Other agencies have documented war deaths from later episodes of violence. Libya Body Count, which tallies deaths described in media reports, counted a total of 5,871 deaths from 2014 to 2016 due to the outbreak of another civil war.

Conservatively, then, we are looking at a death toll of around 27,361 up to 2016, which by now has probably neared 30,000. But keeping with the figures which we can consider to be reasonably confirmed, applying the Geneva Declaration ratio would suggest that indirect deaths from the war in Libya likely amount to about 109,468 people. Total direct and indirect deaths from the war in Libya, then, are likely to approximate 140,000 people.

Like the US-UK backed Saudi air campaign in Yemen, NATO’s bombardment of Libya also exhibited genocidal characteristics when we apply the holistic conception developed by Professor Bachman.

In a report for The Ecologist, I documented evidence that NATO had deliberately targeted Libya’s critical water infrastructure with the foreseeable consequence of sparking a massive humanitarian emergency that could turn into an unprecedented public health epidemic. In particular, NATO’s destruction of water installations had made it impossible to sustain the functioning of the state-owned Great Manmade River (GMR) project, which supplied water to some 70 percent of the population. At the time, the GMR’s disruption left 4 million people without potable water. Libya’s national water crisis continues to this day.

This devastating outcome was anticipated. Private intelligence firm Stratfor even predicted that the disruption would lead Libya’s population, which had doubled since 1991 thanks to the GMR, to collapse “back to normal carrying capacities” — a clear indication of the foreseeable nature of this genocidal outcome vis-à-vis population collapse, and the tendentially genocidal intent implicitin the conduct of NATO’s war.

Post-9/11 genocidal wars

The eruption of this sequence of regional conflicts from Libya, to Yemen, to Syria followed directly from the destabilization of the region that had begun with the 2003 Iraq War.

We now know that the West’s intervention fueled the sectarian conflict in Iraq, emboldening Iran’s encroachment into the country and pitting many Shi‘ah against an increasingly radicalized Sunni insurgency, parts of which drew in and joined forces with al-Qaeda. This, in turn, provided the cauldron of violent radicalization from which emerged the so-called ‘Islamic State’ (ISIS), and a legion of other Islamist militant factions which began to accelerate their operations across Libya, Yemen and Syria.

The 2003 Iraq War had, of course, proceeded in parallel with the invasion of Afghanistan, both of which were justified as the pivotal mechanisms of military response to the 9/11 attacks.

In November 2018, Professor Neta C. Crawford, Co-Director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University, published a paper tallying the total direct death toll from post-9/11 wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The paper found that 147,000 people were directly killed in Afghanistan, 64,942 in Pakistan and between 267,792 and 295,170 in Iraq.

The total amounts to between 479,743 and 507,000 people directly killed in the main post-9/11 Western military interventions — a monumental scale of death which massively outweighs the violence of the terrorist attacks which served to justify these wars in the first place.

As these were only fatalities occurring as a direct result of the war, indirect deaths due to the consequences from degradation of civilian infrastructure will have been far higher. Using the Geneva Declaration standard to estimate concomitant indirect deaths from these conflicts suggests a total of between 1.9 and 2.1 million people dying from the consequences of these wars since 9/11. When added to the direct death total, this suggests an overall total of around 2.4 to 2.6 million total deaths.

At first glance these colossal figures might seem extraordinarily high, but this scale has been corroborated by other studies. In 2015, I reported on the findings of a landmark study by the Washington DC-based Physicians for Social Responsibility (PRS), concluding that the death toll from 10 years of the ‘war on terror’ since the 9/11 attacks is at least 1.3 million, and could be as high as 2 million.

The 97-page report by the Nobel Peace Prize-winning doctors’ group was authored by an interdisciplinary team of leading public health experts, including Dr. Robert Gould, director of health professional outreach and education at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center, and Professor Tim Takaro of the Faculty of Health Sciences at Simon Fraser University.

The PSR study found serious methodological flaws and omissions in a number of previous estimates of ‘war on terror’ casualties. It dismissed the figure produced by the NGO Iraq Body Count (IBC) of 110,000 dead, derived from collating media reports of civilian killings, as necessarily too low due to its dependence on media reporting which would tend to undercount incidents.

The problem with this approach, the PSR study noted, is that such ‘passive’ reporting methods invariably and inevitably undercount the total number of actual deaths, simply because media reporting tends to miss large volumes of deaths especially due to limitations on reporting in fraught conflict zones. Such methods also inherently ignore indirect deaths produced as a consequence of war.

Apart from identifying various gaps in the IBC’s database, the study also critically examined other studies on the Iraq War death toll. The review found that a much-disputed Lancet study which estimated 655,000 Iraqi excess deaths up to 2006 (and over a million until today by extrapolation) was likely to be the most accurate. That study applied the statistical methodology that is the universally recognised standard to determine both direct and indirect deaths from conflict zones, used by international agencies and governments.

When factoring in the death tolls in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the PSR’s total estimate of deaths was between 1.3 and over 2 million, which coheres with the probable estimates suggested above.

Politicization of the body count

At the time of publication, the PSR study was attacked by a number of researchers associated with the IBC project. The debate that ensued prompted me to conduct a series of further investigations into IBC’s methodologies, including the work of one of the most prominent IBC associates, Professor Michael Spagat — who had published a widely-cited and highly influential series of academic papers critiquing excess mortality estimates of the Iraq War death toll, especially the Lancet study. Spagat’s thesis was that the Lancet authors had produced a fraudulent study that breached basic scientific standards.

My investigation, to which Spagat offered no response, found that Spagat himself had committed a range of serious methodological errors of his own in his critique of the Lancet study. His errors were so egregious and so systematic, that they revealed to the contrary that it was Spagat, not the Lancet authors, who had put forward a number of fraudulent arguments which breached scientific standards.

Despite some legitimate reservations, my critique was taken seriously by a number of statistical authorities including the Human Rights Data Analysis Group (HRDAG), who had previously assumed that Spagat’s arguments on Iraq were correct. My investigation also confirmed that both Spagat and IBC more broadly suffered from deep conflicts of interests due to working with and directly accepting funding from Western governments and agencies who had been supportive of the Iraq War, and which had a vested interest in minimizing the scale of death in that war, and Western wars generally.

Spagat for instance has consulted for NATO in the creation of the so-called Dirty War Index, a ‘passive surveillance’ death toll counting methodology which systematically undercounts civilian deaths, overcounts other kinds of deaths, and generates serious inaccuracies; similarly, his work undercounting the Iraq War death toll has been cited with open arms by senior Pentagon officials attempting to sanitize US military responsibility for violence, despite his methods being critiqued by HRDAG.

The extent of complicity

It is not entirely surprising that some social scientists are actively being coopted by Western government agencies to promote models which underplay the violent impact of Western wars.

In all these conflicts, Western states have been directly complicit through various mechanisms of geopolitical interference, proxy warfare, aerial bombardment, and sponsorship of parties engaged in violence.

But it is important to note that complicity does not solely belong to Western states. Complicity also involves, often principally, multiple non-Western states engaged in exacerbating mass violence, including major rival powers like Russia, as well as Muslim regimes such as the Gulf states, Iran and Turkey.

Equally, this often does not obviate Western complicity in genocidal violence against Muslim groups. Complicity frequently extends to cases where Western powers may not be directly involved, but are nevertheless engaged in other mechanisms of indirect support. In these cases, the prime perpetrators are non-Western states, but a combination of Western silence and behind-the-scenes support illustrates varying degrees of complicity.

Large swathes of Asia, for instance, have become subject to pandemics of anti-Muslim violence and ethnic cleansing campaigns, bearing alarming genocidal features, and where Western governments have operated close alliances with the perpetrator regimes.

In India, incidents of communal violence targeted against Muslims have risen 28 percent between 2014 and 2017. The escalation of violence has occurred with the complicity of Indian law enforcement, egged on by political leaders affiliated with the ruling BJP party, which has openly castigated Muslim identity. According to news data portal India Spend, 97 percent of reported hate attacks in the name of the cow since 2010 occurred after President Modi was elected in 2014. About half the attacks were on Muslims, while 86 percentof the people killed were Muslims.

Despite this violence, India has strong relations with major powers, including the West which is keen to capitalizeon what is presently the world’s fastest growing economy.

In Myanmar, armed forces, police and paramilitary forces have since 2017 forcibly expelled over 730,000 Rohingya Muslims who are now residing as refugees in countries like Bangladesh, India and elsewhere. A total of nearly one million reside in refugee camps from previous episodes of violence. Some 5–600,000 Rohingya in Rakhine state, the locus of the violence, face dire conditions and live under constant threat. UN investigators have concluded that the violence amounts to ethnic cleansing and genocide, and leaked Myanmar government documents reveal official plans for the “mass annihilation” of the Rohingya.

But Western governments, despite prolific condemnations, have been complicit in the genocidal violence by maintaining strong trade, business and in some cases military relations with the Myanmar regime.

It is not just Western governments that have turned a blind eye to the destruction of the Rohingya people, but also Gulf states like Saudi Arabia and Qatar. All of them want to benefit from Myanmar’s ethnic cleansing of the Rakhine state for a major pipeline route. US, British, Australian and European oil majors, for instance, have been awarded contracts by the Myanmar government, including BG Group and Ophir (UK); Shell (UK-Netherlands); Statoil (Norway); Chevron and Conoco Phillips (US); Woodside (Australia); Eni (Italy) and Total (France).

Many of these contracts — particularly those involving Chevron, Ophir, Woodside, and Eni — are production-sharing initiatives in the Rakhine basin, just off the coast from where the genocidal violence is accelerating.

Meanwhile in China, an estimated over one million Uighur Muslims are being forcibly detained in ‘re-education’ camps in the Xinjiang region, without due process, on the basis of countering extremism.

Credible reports have emerged based on firsthand eyewitness accounts of torture, ill-treatment, and forced political indoctrination at these facilities, where children are often routinely separated from their parents. Peter Apps, director of the Project for the Study of the 21st Century, describes the incarceration as “almost certainly the largest mass incarceration of a racial or religious group since the Holocaust” which, however, is “neither front-page news nor a major part of diplomatic or political dialogue”.

In fact, both Western governments and major companies, including Silicon Valley giants like IBM, have played a direct role in helping to build China’s giant surveillance regime in Xinjiang currently being deployed largely against Uighur Muslims. Western complicity also extends to the eagerness of governments and businesses to invest in China despite its responsibility for this genocidal campaign.

Rushan Abbas, founder and director of the Campaign for Uighurs, whose own family has been abducted by Chinese authorities as retaliation for speaking out, calls the anti-Uighur policy a case of “slow motion genocide”.

The genocidal character of the policy is evident in its attempt to extinguish the Uighur’s existence as a distinctive social, cultural and religious group through systematic targeting, forcible incarceration and mass indoctrination designed to eliminate their cultural and religious identity.

Between Myanmar and China, a total of at least 2.5 million Muslims have been ethnically cleansed and imprisoned in detention camps.

The coming tipping point

The total number of Muslims who have died since 9/11 in wars for which Western states bear significant culpability is truly staggering. Unfortunately, while we can be reasonably certain of the direct death toll, the scale of indirect deaths remains unknown and we are forced to rely on probable estimates. These estimates are not suggested here as final, but rather as tentative, yet still plausible (and very likely highly conservative), figures which further urgent excess mortality research might be able to firm up.

At a minimum, focusing purely on the minimum conservative figures based on direct deaths, around which there can be little room for doubt, we have an alarming direct death toll of around 1.2 million Muslims from post-9/11 conflicts in which Western powers along with Muslim regimes, terrorist groups and rival non-Western powers are complicit.

However, these figures are not only likely to be a severe undercount on their own terms of the actual direct death toll; due to reliance on methods which tend to produce more conservative estimates, they do not account for the volume of deaths that will have been produced as an indirect consequence of wars due to the destruction of health, water and other critical infrastructure, and the impact of direct war casualties on societal functions; they also exclude certain conflicts, focusing on some more well-known conflicts (I acknowledge that to some extent the reasons for this focus may be arbitrary). When factoring in likely indirect deaths and applying the Geneva Declaration’s baseline ratio, probable total indirect deaths due to post-9/11 wars can be estimated at between 4.2 and 4.6 million deaths.



This implies that total direct and indirect deaths of Muslims across these six theatres of war amounts to between 5.3 and 5.7 million people. The full statistical range suggests that at least 1.2 million and more likely just under 6 million Muslims have died in the sequence of regional conflicts since 9/11. Once again, this analysis cannot provide precision, but gives a conservative sense of the likely order of magnitude.

Beyond that, a further 2.5 million Muslims face genocidal ethnic cleansing campaigns in Myanmar, from which they have been forcibly expelled, and in China, where they are being imprisoned in brutal detention camps the likes of which have not been seen since the Second World War.

Simultaneously, across the heartlands of the Western world, Islamophobic sentiment is at record levels, with Muslim communities facing epidemics of hate crimes, institutional racism, and legislative discrimination. As far-right populist parties have grown exponentially in popularity across the US, UK and Europe, as well as parts of Latin America and South Asia, they have increasingly normalized and mainstreamed hostility toward minorities along ethnic, religious and sexual lines, and to perceived ‘foreigners’, particularly migrants and asylum seekers.

The global convergence and acceleration of these trends in violence indicates that while they are being whipped up in the context of local and national factors, they are nevertheless intensifying as part of wider world system dynamics which are little understood. This is a global system that is increasingly tending to produce episodes of escalating genocidal violence in more and more regions of the world. While Muslims are currently a chief target, other minorities including Jews, black people, and LGBTQ+ people are also increasingly at risk, and being targeted in different ways.

These trends represent a continuation in new forms of the kinds of discriminatory political violence that prevailed during the colonial era. Perhaps the most worrying issue is that despite their gravity, this scale of violence is largely unknown and features little in public consciousness or policy debate.

This analysis also illustrates that the dynamics of genocidal violence have transformed after the Second World War.

Rather than being necessarily concentrated in the bureaucratic forces of a single centralized state, they are dispersed among multiple states and across multiple regions; yet despite unfolding over vastly different geographical territories, they carry common genocidal characteristics which have resulted in similar consequences: the death, persecution and incarceration of millions of people, and the increasing political tendency resulting in the social construction of those people as members of a homogenous group whose existence is seen as obstructive to various geopolitical goals, and therefore morally and functionally expendable.

As the forms and dynamics of genocide have transformed, then, arguably so too has the nature of fascism, which though believed to have been defeated over 70 years ago, in reality has quietly metamorphosed, subsisting implicitly and manifesting through outbursts of state repression via the postwar structures of Western liberal democracies, while resurfacing overtly in authoritarian societies like China, Myanmar, Russia and the Gulf states.

In itself, the relative blindness to the systematic escalation of these trends of political violence in particular, as far-right ideology and politics is resurgent, suggests we could be approaching a dangerous tipping point in mass violence of which minorities, and particularly Muslims, are at grave risk.

A new analysis of one of the largest databases of world conflicts lead authored by Dr Gianluca Martelloni of the University of Florence, covering the last 600 years, identifies patterns in the outbreak of major episodes of mass violence. The data examined in this working paper shows that wars have become less frequent but more destructive over time, with far greater fatalities in modern times. Although large wars are less probable than small ones, they tend to be triggered in the context of smaller conflicts through a process of escalation. The data also indicates that we could be statistically overdue for a particularly large episode of global mass violence.

Co-author of the paper, Professor Ugo Bardi, a systems theorist and earth scientist also at the University of Florence, argues that “statistically, a new pulse of exterminations could start at any moment and, the more time passes, the more likely it is that it will start. Indeed, if we study even just a little the events that led to the 20th century democide that we call the Second World War, you can see that we are moving exactly along the same lines.”

The rising trends of racism, fascism, sectarianism, ethnic cleansing and inequalities, he argues, “can be seen as the precursor for a new, large war engagement to come.” In particular, he points to the arc of mass violence that “starts in North Africa and continues along the Middle East, all the way to Afghanistan and which may soon extend to Korea. We can’t say if these relatively limited democides will coalesce into a much larger one, but they may become the trigger that generates a new gigantic pulse of mass exterminations.”

Action

Given that those “relatively limited democides” comprise a continuum of escalating genocidal mass violence — having already killed at least a million people and potentially as many as nearly 6 million (based on a conservative methodology) — there are strong grounds for concern over how these trends might escalate in coming years.

The remaining question is how to forestall or prevent such an escalation.

For Muslims, my recommendation is to undertake and act on spiritual reflection from within the Islamic tradition. One particular prediction of the Prophet Muhammad is worth noting. He reportedly said, according to an authenticated narration (Imam Dani, Al-Sunan al-Waridah fi’l-Fitan, Hadith №3260):

“When people will break their promises, God will place over them their enemy (as a ruler); when they will fail to enjoin good and forbid evil (amr bi’l-ma’ruf wa nahy an al-munkar) then God will place over them the worst of people; then the best amongst you will pray but their prayers will not be answered.”
The key to understanding this tradition is in the meaning of the concepts of enjoining ‘good’ and forbidding ‘evil’.

The Qur’an’s use of the terms ma‘ruf (good) and munkar (evil) implies a far broader meaning than is often assumed. Ma‘ruf and munkar convey a sense of ethical values which are universally recognized and understood. Ma‘ruf means literally ‘that which is commonly known or accepted to be right’, while munkar means ‘that which is universally rejected as wrong.’

In more contemporary but still accurate terms, ma’ruf signifies “the public good.” According to Muhammad Khalid Masud, Director General of the Islamic Research Institute at the International Islamic University in Islamabad, the term ma‘ruf signifies “right” or “rights” that are “well known and familiar… in the sense that it is through social discourse that it becomes well known. People agree to its being right on the basis of a consensus that develops by a process of mass communication, debate and social understanding.”

The powerful insight from this, then, is that according to the Prophet’s warning, a core driver of the extraordinary repression of Muslims across the world today is a fundamental spiritual malfunction — a failure to fulfil the core goal of upholding shared ethical values of love, compassion, generosity, justice and beyond (which are co-extensive with the Divine Names) universally recognized by humankind. This obligation is bound up with the Qur’anic stipulation that the very origination of human existence is by way of ‘trusteeship’ over the Earth on behalf of the Divine, with each human being playing the role of planetary caretaker for God.

This core insight suggests further that the pathway of action — to both challenge this genocidal system and transform it — requires Muslims and non-Muslims to work together to forge bonds of solidarity, which revolve around manifesting these core ethical values in efforts to transform repressive political and cultural structures as well as socio-economic systems.
That requires working to build new paradigms of nonviolent co-existence and cooperation which, instead of pitting human beings against each other and the planet, establish new bases to cultivate and recognize their inherent interconnections.

“God does not change the state of a people until they bring about change themselves.” (Quran 13:11)
Dr Nafeez Ahmed is an award-winning investigative journalist, change strategist and systems theorist. He is editor of the crowdfunded investigative journalism platform, INSURGE intelligence, and ‘system shift’ columnist at VICE where he reports on ‘global system transformation’. A former Guardian environment blogger where he covered the geopolitics of interconnected environment, energy and economic crises, he is a former Visiting Research Fellow at Anglia Ruskin University’s Faculty of Science & Technology, which supported his research to produce his latest book, Failing States, Collapsing Systems: BioPhysical Triggers of Political Violence (Springer, 2017). He is currently a Research Fellow at the Schumacher Institute. He is the winner of the 2010 Routledge-GCPS Essay Prize and 2015 Project Censored Award for Outstanding Investigative Journalism, and has been twice listed among the Evening Standard’s top 1,000 most influential Londoners. He has advised the US State Department, the UK Ministry of Defence, the UK Defence Academy, the UK Foreign Office, the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, and the Metropolitan Police, among other agencies, on global strategic trends.
https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence ... e735d4575e

[seemslikeadream]

War, empire and racism in the Anthropocene
The biophysical-economics and military-logics of industrial hyperreality

Nafeez Ahmed

This article was originally commissioned by the Spanish magazine Papeles, where a slightly abridged Spanish-language edition is due to be published.

The Anthropocene. A proposed new geological epoch which designates a shift to a planetary age dominated by human impacts across the geological processes of the Earth. Geologists dispute the duration, precision, relevance and even accuracy of the concept. But the term has increasingly entered the scientific lexicon as increasing numbers of experts across myriad disciplines recognise that for the first time in history, the future of the entire planet — for generations if not millennia to come — is now being fundamentally determined by the activities of the human species. But the Anthropocene is about far more than just climate change. It is about an entire system of life, whose design is to maximise resource extraction at the expense of expendable ‘Others’. It is bound up, intimately, with a global system of racism emerging from the legacy of centuries of colonialism. And it is inseparable from the ceaseless sequence of industrial wars, culminating in today’s permanent state of the endless ‘war on terror’.

Human-induced global heating — terraforming the Earth beyond recognition

It is the unprecedented impact of anthropogenic climate change that has, perhaps, played the biggest role in efforts to define the Anthropocene as a distinctive new era in Earth’s history. Multiple warnings backed by a global consensus of climate scientists have warned over the last few decades that human activities, through the escalating consumption of fossil fuel resources — the burning of oil, gas and coal — is destabilising the Earth’s natural carbon cycle.

For hundreds of thousands of years, the planet has sustained an equilibrium, a ‘safe operating’ space offering an optimum environment for human and other habitation — in which the quantity of carbon emitted and absorbed by planetary ecosystems remains stable.

But since the Industrial Revolution, as human civilisation has inexorably expanded, consuming greater quantities of fossil fuel energy along the way, associated carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions have exponentially increased — overwhelming the planet’s capacity for absorption. The result has been a steady increase in global average temperatures.

Scientists warn that the extra addition of CO2 into the atmosphere, capturing greater heat, is in turn playing escalating havoc with the Earth’s climate, weather and ecological systems. As human civilisation continues its expansion, as it continues to burn up escalating quantities of fossil fuels, the climate science community warns that above a certain level of CO2 and global heating, planetary ecosystems will shift passed a key tipping point into a new, dangerous era — one that is outside the boundaries of the preceding hundreds of thousands of years, outside anything human beings have ever experienced.

If we continue on this pathway of business-as-usual, conservative projections suggest we are heading toward anywhere between a 3 to 6 degrees Celsius global average temperature rise.

Others, such as Schroders, the global investment firm, have suggested we could be heading toward an 8C planet due to the current rate of fossil fuel consumption — the 8C temperature projection was also suggested by a study funded by US Department of Energy’s Climate Change Research Division, which highlighted the potential impact of ‘amplifying feedback loops’ triggered by altering earth system processes that might trigger further greenhouse gas loading.

Between 4–6C, most climate scientists agree that there would be such a degree of chaos that the planet would become largely uninhabitable. The variation is complicated, and depends on a concept called ‘Earth System Sensitivity’ — how sensitive the planet’s ecosystems are to the CO2 change. But even at a conservative estimate of sensitivity, a 3C planet, to which at minimum we are likely heading, should be considered “extremely dangerous”; and a global average temperature rise within the 3–4C threshold would probably create conditions that make the core infrastructures of human civilisation increasingly unviable.

To the extent that governments are taking seriously this threat, they are doing so largely with a view to assess the implications for their own functioning — and with a view to consider how to sustain business-as-usual amidst rising instability. This is the context in which many studies have concluded that our current climate change trajectory will increase the chance of conflict. For the most part, Western national security agencies that have examined the issue agree that while climate change does not automatically produce war, it acts as an ‘amplifier’ which increases the prospect of war, due to its impacts in terms of water scarcity, the degeneration of critical food systems, the failure of conventional energy supplies, and the unpredictable impact of extreme weather events. Such impacts can sometimes devastate infrastructures and lead to the collapse of public services. In those contexts, the proliferating outbreak of wars and conflicts is widely recognised to be a likely symptom of climate change on a business-as-usual pathway.

The problem is that this usually leads to little reflection on the need to change the human system that is producing this trajectory — instead, we are largely told of the need for a greater expansion of security powers to respond to the chaos of a climate-impacted world: the intensification of the same system that produced the problem.

On the polar opposite of the spectrum, we have outright state denialism rooted in the goal of protecting the system of endless fossil fuel exploitation at any conceivable cost. It is telling that the Trump administration, as of March 2019, was considering the creation of a White House panel to dispute the findings of dozens of US military and intelligence assessments on the grave security risks posed by climate change. Which is interesting, given that the Pentagon emits more fossil fuel emissions than as many as 140 different countries.



And yet, the preoccupation with war that emerges from the narrow lens of ‘national security’ through which the human gaze is obsessed primarily with physical threats to the interests of nation-states, is ultimately counterproductive, symptomatic of the fragmentary cognitive framing in which human institutions are currently capable of thinking and acting — it focuses myopically on how to uphold the survival of the business-as-usual operations of the state and the interests lobbying through it, overlooking the global existential character of the crisis as a threat to the whole species.

At the worst end of the scale, war would be the least of our problems: we have the risk of a ‘hothouse’ Earth. A study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that the risk of an uninhabitable planet is not simply a far off possibility that might be triggered at several degrees of temperature rise in a more distant future — it could be triggered imminently; and it is possible that it may already have been triggered at the current level of an approximate 1C temperature rise above the pre-industrial average, which NASA’s former chief climate scientist James Hansen had argued is the safe upper limit, beyond which we move into a dangerous and more unpredictable climate with some consequences that may be irreversible.

But climate change is only one facet of the crisis. Our civilisational model, which has exponentially increasing energy and resource consumption as its driving motor, has seen human activities, exploitation and waste-generation accelerate across the planet. This has driven an escalating biodiversity crisis leading to potentially irreversible changes to soils and oceans, underpinning mass species extinctions.

Human civilisation and the war on life

About 15 years ago, the UN’s Millennium Ecosystem Assessment provided one of the first and most damning insights into the destruction wrought by humans that defines the Anthropocene. The report pinpointed the mid-twentieth century as a marked tipping point into a new era, where rapidly intensifying industrial agriculture accompanied an escalating collapse of biodiversity.

Consumption of food, water and fuel has not only exponentially increased, it has exponentially encroached on habitats — more in the preceding 50 years alone than throughout all of human history. The extinction rate of species was “up to one thou­sand times higher than the fossil record”, when “every thousand mammal species, less than one went extinct every millen­nium”. The UN assessment projected that the rate is still going up, and will be “ten times higher” in the near future.



The situation is now far worse than expected. This year, the UN’s Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services concluded that one million of the planet’s 8 million animal and plant species are at risk of going extinct in the near future, due to the expansion of human societies that has driven climate change, the loss of habitat, overfishing, pollution and invasive species.

Numerous studies have warned that our present trajectory is heading toward the collapse of our current form of civilisation. One model developed with NASA funding indicated that the current endless growth model of human civilisation was likely to lead to diminishing returns and deepening economic stratification, eventually culminating in collapse. All civilisations, the model seemed to show, tend to follow a growth trajectory consisting of an increasing intensification in complexity, whereby greater layers of complexity are continuously innovated to solve problems.

With each new layer, more complex problems are generated, requiring a further even more complex layer of problem-solving to address them, which in turn generates further problems. The cycle, drawing on the work of archaeologist Joseph Tainter who studied dozens of past civilisations, suggests that any civilisation will eventually collapse under the unsustainable weight of its own complexity due to excessive resource consumption and internal maldistribution of wealth — unless consumption and distribution begin to be rectified in time.

This particular model was fairly simple, focusing on a smaller number of variables to explore the general plausibility of the core hypothesis. A few years later, a far more complex scientific model with thousands of data inputs was developed by Anglia Ruskin University’s Global Sustainability Institute. with funding from the British Foreign Office. When run forward on a business-as-usual trajectory, the model suggested that human civilisation would probably collapse around 2040 amidst an eruption of converging climate, energy, food and water crises that would devastate major economies amidst an epidemic of food riots. Conventional war might happen — but either way, the planet would likely experience a proliferation of civil unrest within, between and across borders.

This year, a scenario analysis backed by the former head of Australia’s military drew on the peer-reviewed scientific literature to outline a plausible business-as-usual trajectory, based on what we know about how planetary ecosystems can respond to human-induced CO2 emissions. The scenario took seriously the scientific evidence of a potential ‘hothouse’ Earth scenario. It suggested that by 2050, human societies would face “outright chaos” due to escalating climate-impacts on key ecosystems, with two billion people suffering from water scarcity and another billion requiring relocation just to survive. The prospects would severely strain the capacity of human civilisation to function, and increase the chances of its collapse. The authors of this analysis called on the national security sector, the agencies of war, to respond more appropriately to these risks by supporting a comprehensive World War 2 style mobilisation to transition to a post-carbon civilisation.



While perhaps well-intentioned, the report did not recognise that war agencies might be structurally incapable of undertaking such a response precisely due to their embeddedness in the institutions captured by the very same fossil fuel system — and that such a transformation would conceivably imperil their very reason for being.

Another assessment in the form of a scientific briefing commissioned to feed into the UN’s Sustainable Development report found that one of the key drivers behind the growing risk of collapse is the very nature of the endless growth model of capitalism, as currently structured. The more we escalate our consumption of resources, raw materials, minerals and energy, the more we are using up the cheapest and most plentiful resources, and therefore the greater the costs of continued production. Drawing on the pioneering work of environmentalist Professor Charles Hall, the study advocated a focus on the ‘energy return on investment’ (EROI) of national and global energy systems to measure how efficient they really are (EROI measures the quantity of energy used to extract energy). The answer? Efficiency is declining for largely geological reasons. As the costs increase due to the need for greater quantities of energy and more complicated mechanisms of exploitation; the returns to society diminish. As we are using ever increasing quantities of energy and resources just to extract more energy and resources, the surplus we have left to sustain the financing of the public goods and services necessary to maintain a functioning civilisation is declining. This doesn’t mean we are running out of energy — but it means that as the energetic and environmental costs of energy extraction increase, we effectively have less and less spare to invest back into key social goods.

French economists Victor Court and Florian Fizaine showed in a recent global EROI study that we are well passed the maximum levels of efficiency. The amount of energy we can extract from fossil fuels compared to the energy used to extract it was once lucratively high — around 44:1 in the 1960s. Since then it has inexorably declined to just over 30 overall, accompanied by a long-term slow-down in the growth rate of the global economy, a decline in productivity, and an expansion of debt. At this rate of decline, by 2100 we are projected to extract the same value of EROI from fossil fuels as we were in the 1800s. While there might be more actual total energy being produced by end of century, the surplus energy available could be at nineteenth century levels if we continue on a business-as-usual path of fossil fuel-dependence.

This predicament is already driving social unrest, communal polarisation and the resurgence of populism in a situation where neither governments nor wider publics really understand why economies continue to experience chronic dysfunction, instability and tepid growth.

The report to the UN forecasted that this trajectory means that the current economic system, which depends on endless growth to survive, simply cannot be sustained. It therefore portends a future of increasing unrest without a change of course. We will inevitably shift toward a new, different type of economy — if we don’t, then we face a heightened risk of social tensions that could cascade into conflict; and at worse we may well face the danger of collapse.



War in the mirror of civilisation

The risk of collapse is inherently entwined with war — industrial civilisation’s growth trajectory has not only enabled the technologies of war, but is in turn enabled by them.

Earlier this year, the main scientific committee established to determine the accuracy and nature of the definition of the Anthropocene signed off on its initial proposal positing 1950 as the starting date for the new geological era.

The sign off is the first stage of a longer scientific process to properly investigate and test what is still, in raw scientific terms, a mere hypothesis. The scientists based their preliminary evaluations on the mid-twentieth century as a major tipping point into a new era of human interference with the Earth’s geology, characterised by industrial expansion, the proliferation of agricultural chemicals, and most significant of all, the invention and deployment of the atomic bomb. The latter’s radioactive debris became embedded in sediments and glacial ice, becoming part of the geologic record. All this demonstrates an unprecedented and unmistakeable human footprint across the planet whose impacts will be seen for decades, centuries and millennia to come.

War, then, is carved into the sinews of the Anthropocene. While the twentieth and twenty-first centuries can be seen as exemplifying the inherently ecocidal dynamic of the exponential growth of human civilisation, they have also exhibited another parallel feature: the systematic proliferation of war, mass violence, and multiple forms of genocide.

These parallel features — ecocide and genocide; the destruction of our environmental life-support systems, and our direct destruction of the lives of members of our own species — do not coincide haphazardly, but are symptoms of the system of human life itself, in its current form.

From 1945 onwards, human civilisation was caught between the clash of two pseudo-scientific industrial ideologies of endless growth: capitalism and communism — the former premised on extreme privatisation and individuation, the latter premised on extreme nationalisation and collectivisation.

Both paradigms saw the Earth as little more than an external repository of resources to be exploited ad infinitum for the endless consumption of a human species, now self-defined by its capacity for technologically-driven industry.

Both promised that their paradigms would herald utopian oases of industrial prosperity for their respective societies.



In reality, both not only ‘Otherised’ the Earth itself as merely a resource to be consumed by human beings as a predator species, they simultaneously ‘Otherised’ large sections of working populations in and beyond their own demarcated territories, as little more than instruments by which to endlessly accelerate industrial productivity; and they both went on to mindlessly ‘Otherise’ each other whenever they clashed with each other (and even when they did not).

The result was that in their very different efforts to expand, both systems resulted in the mass deaths of millions of people on a colossal scale.

The Soviet Union and Maoist China deployed brutal collectivisation methods on their path toward accelerating productivity, which produced foreseeable mass deaths. This included the generation of devastating artificial famines. Stalin’s policies eliminated between 20 and 60 million people; Mao’s ‘Great Leap Forward’ caused 27 million people to starve to death.

But liberal Western governments also left a trail of blood of a quite distinct kind, in the first major spate of violence since the dawn of the Anthropocene as so far tentatively defined.

From 1945 onwards, Western governments under the leadership of the United States — bearing the mantle of leader of the ‘Capitalist Free World’ — pursued a continuous sequence of direct and covert military interventions across the world. Western military interventions generated a continuum of violence in over 70 developing nations across Asia, Africa, South America and the Middle East from mid-century until today.

British historian Mark Curtis calculates that the total number of direct and indirect deaths from these interventions is approximately 8.6–13.5 million — a conservative underestimate, he qualifies. The interventions were often aimed at quelling nationalist movements for self-determination. Although publicly justified as defensive actions to repel communist subversion, Curtis’ evaluation of historical archives from the US and British governments revealed that policy planners had deliberately inflated the communist threat to justify a militarism aimed at defending Western business interests and acquiring control of critical resources and raw materials. In the Middle East, the biggest prize was control of strategic fossil fuel reserves, the very lifeblood of economic growth.



Development economist J. W. Smith has offered a higher estimate of the death toll, which he puts somewhere between 12–15 million deaths directly due to Western military interventions, with further “hundreds of millions” dying as an indirect consequence of the destruction and reconfiguration of their economies. Smith traced how Western interventions paved the way for the imposition of new capitalist social relations designed to extinguish domestic resistance and forcibly integrate developing countries into the global capitalist economy.

In the twenty-first century, this war trajectory has escalated, not waned. The driving motor remains the use of force to expand access to resources and labour, in order to lubricate the ever-expanding networks of global capital. It is a process sanitised, though, by various ideologies of humanitarianism, benign developmentalism, and ‘national security’.

The principal interventions of the ‘war on terror’ in Iraq and Afghanistan, for instance, are resource wars in core ways.

British Foreign Office documents prove clearly that American and British policy-planners saw the invasion and occupation of Iraq as a way to consolidate access to one of the world’s largest oil reserves, while ensuring the continued flow of to global markets with a view to help stabilise the global economy. In Afghanistan, Congressional records have revealed longstanding US-Western efforts to establish a trans-Afghan pipeline route for the transport of oil and gas from Central Asia to Western markets, bypassing US rivals Iran and Russia. In the 1990s, the US and British even funnelled support to the Taliban in a failed bid to establish the ‘security’ needed to pursue the plan.

Consecutively, the Obama and Trump administrations both continued to back the pipeline project which remains under construction.

In the Anthropocene, resource wars are bipartisan.
Both conflicts wrought colossal violence. Although the more widely accepted estimates of deaths in the hundreds of thousands are terrible enough, higher scale estimates could be more accurate, ranging up to a total of around 4 million people killed directly and indirectly across both conflicts since 1990.

Since then, war in the Anthropocene has intensified and proliferated in new and surprising ways as the more vulnerable nodes of human civilisation have begun to experience overlapping levels of failure and collapse due to the slow acceleration of converging climate, energy, food and water crises. The 2011 Arab Spring uprisings spiralled into a protracted, coalescing amalgamation of riots, civil wars and armed conflicts encompassing multiple theatres, Syria, Yemen, Libya and beyond.

The Arab Spring had been triggered by food price shocks which were, in turn, driven by a confluence of economic-energy shocks interacting with a series of climate shocks which had led to droughts and extreme weather crises across the world’s major food basket regions. Many Arab Spring countries from Syria to Egypt to Yemen had slashed subsidies for food and fuel in preceding years, largely due to the collapse of state revenues — many of them had been former major oil exporters, but in the mid-1990s had experienced peaks of their domestic conventional oil resources. As production thus declined, so did export revenues. With subsidies in the years before 2011 disappearing, coupled with global price spikes due to rampant market speculation on commodity prices coupled with global food shortages, prices of staple foods in these largely import-dependent countries rocketed. As the price of bread became unaffordable, people across the region hit the streets.



The Earth system crisis of the Anthropocene played a critical role in prolonging and amplifying this Middle East crisis, which in turn drove migration and asylum seeking from 2011 to 2015 to an unprecedented degree. Some 11.5 percent of the population of Syria alone has been killed in the ensuing conflict. The West, Russia, Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the UAE have vied for control of Syria for a range of geopolitical reasons, not least of which was its centrality to potential transhipment routes for oil and gas to global markets. Partisans of these different forces tend to absolve their favoured side(s) of complicity, but it is worth noting that prior to the 2011 uprising the State Department was actively negotiating with Syria and EU officials to push forward a pipeline route through the country to transport Iraqi oil to Europe; Russia simultaneously saw Assad’s efforts to capitalise on Syria’s strategic position vis-a-vis the region’s energy corridors as a fundamental threat to Putin’s own gas export plans — the war provided the ideal spoiler, with each side using it to try to further their own interests, the Syrian people be damned.

In the Anthropocene, so-called anti-imperialists have few qualms about fighting resource wars in their own self-interest.
The million plus migrants that turned up on the shores of Europe did so as a direct result of these wars. They were escaping devastating geopolitical conflicts amplified by vested interests, but which had also been created or exacerbated by severe droughts amplified by climate change.

According to the co-author of a key study of the climate-migration connection, Dr Raya Muttarak — a senior lecturer in geography and international development at the University of East Anglia: “The effect of climate on conflict occurrence is particularly relevant for countries in Western Asia in the period 2010–2012, when many were undergoing political transformation during the so-called Arab Spring uprisings.” Muttarak and his team showed that climate change laid the groundwork for the simmering tensions which led to the outbreak of war in Syria and across parts of the region, by generating droughts that led to mass migration.

The mass migration triggered by these processes, in turn, have transformed and radicalised politics across the Western hemisphere. They provided the fodder for extreme nationalist narratives funded by colossal quantities of ‘dark money’ from a cross-section of trans-Atlantic right-wing elites, many of whom hold vested interests in perpetuating deregulation for fossil fuel giants and other giant corporations.



The mass migration thus stoked nativist fears that helped fuel the rise of extreme nationalist movements, which suddenly found renewed constituencies for their views and policies with increasing numbers of ordinary citizens who felt disillusioned with the prevailing order, but had no way of making sense of it. They knew, can feel, that something is deeply wrong, that the old order is collapsing, but their diagnosis is incomplete, narcissistic, fragmented and symptom-oriented. As such, it has led to incomplete, narcissistic, fragmented and symptom-oriented political reactionism.

The series of victories for the far-right that followed the eruption of Earth system crisis in the Middle East between 2011 and 2015 can thus be seen as a direct consequence of an incoherent cognitive response to the crisis, which reacted purely to its chief symptom: the desperate mass movement of vulnerable peoples.

We thus witnessed a series of seismic shifts in the reconfiguration of Western political systems, a hardening and centralising of power, a self-centring of values, a defensive rejectionism of science, and a polarising of identities, manifesting in a string of extreme nationalist wins. In 2014, far-right parties won just under a quarter of all seats in the European Parliament. In 2015, David Cameron was re-elected as Prime Minister with a parliamentary majority, a victory attributed in part to his promise to hold a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union. Unbeknownst to many, the Tories had quietly established wide-ranging links with many of the same far-right parties that were now capturing seats in the EU. The following year in June, the ‘Brexit’ referendum shocked the world with its result: a majority vote to leave the EU. Six months later, billionaire real estate guru Donald Trump became president of the world’s most powerful country. Like the Conservatives in the UK, the Republicans too had forged trans-Atlantic connections with European parties and movements of the extreme-right. Since then, far-right parties have made continued electoral gains across Europe in Italy, Sweden, Germany, France, Poland and Hungary; they are now just short of a third of seats in the European Parliament — and they are rapidly consolidating elsewhere, in the Philippines, Brazil, India, Myanmar and beyond.

The troubles and tribulations of contemporary politics, the increasing polarisation between left and right, the chronic incapacity to engage constructively across ideological divides, have become a pantomime hyperreality obsessing our consciousness through our television screens, desk computers, laptops, smartphones and wearable devices. The missing link is the planetary context — the crises of contemporary politics are, indeed, tidal waves, but they are occurring on the surface of an ocean in turmoil, of which, for all intents and purposes, we remain oblivious.

Political crisis is a symptom of the accelerating Earth system crisis. And as Clausewitz famously said, war is a continuation of politics by other means.
Colonisation and globalisation in the Anthropocene

Not everyone agrees, though, that the Anthropocene began in the mid-twentieth century. Some argue that there is a strong geological case for the Anthropocene commencing with the dawn of modern global empire.

British geographers Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin have put forward a much earlier date for this unprecedented era, one that “adheres to the geological criteria for defining an epoch: 1610. This date marks the irreversible exchange of species following the collision of the Old and New worlds”, which coincided with “an associated unusual drop in atmospheric CO2 captured in Antarctic ice cores.”

This alternative dating for the Anthropocene derives from the measurable impact of farming in relation to the colonisation of America by the Spanish, a pivotal event which many historians see as marking the inception of a new, distinctive age of empire that facilitated the birth of global capitalism. The drop in CO2 at the time, visible today in the ice cores, resulted from “vegetation regrowth on abandoned farmlands following the deaths of 50 million indigenous Americans (mostly from smallpox brought by Europeans). The annexing of the Americas by Europe was also an essential precursor to the Industrial Revolution and therefore captures associated later waves of environmental change.”


This alternative dating offers a compelling re-envisioning of the Anthropocene that associates it directly with the violence of empire, with the 1610 date providing the bridge connecting the historical violence of colonial discovery with its ensuing expansionism through biological conquest.

This encompassed the mass ‘free market’ famines in Ireland and India, which saw the deaths of one million and up to 12 million respectively; as well as the trans-Atlantic slave-trade which saw the deaths of as many as 65 million Africans over five centuries — a blood-drenched international regime that was inextricably linked to the formation of a capitalist world system that helped facilitate Britain’s industrial revolution.

By this standard, the Anthropocene — encompassing the period in which the human species most profoundly and near-permanently began transforming the very geology of the Earth — simultaneously represents the rapid expansion of empire, and with it, the systematic construction of new racial categories to legitimise the emerging system of global apartheid that came with it.

In this very period, we saw the dawn of scientific racism, the formal and scientifically-justified concept of multiple races, the grotesque legacy of which we continue to struggle with today. The idea that there are different ‘races’ can be traced back to the political appropriation and distortion of neo-Darwinian theories of evolution to underpin racial hierarchies which positioned white Europeans at the pinnacle of civilised human advancement in this juggernaut of global industrial expansion.

Racism, then, is not discrimination against other ‘races’. It is the very act of creating the notion of a distinctive ‘race’ of people — that is, of possessing common generalised characteristics, an act inseparable from the very dawn of the Anthropocene, which witnessed the emergence of a civilisation defined by its insatiable hunger for resources and labour.

Polarised constructions of the ‘Other’ have played a crucial ideological function throughout the Anthropocene, cleaving human beings from the environments in which they find themselves, and cleaving them apart from each other into exploitative factions of power. And so it is no surprise that the formalisation of racism as a global system appeared to solidify during the industrial revolution, as the human species’ domination of the Earth began to reach exponential acceleration.

In the early nineteenth century, racism manifested largely as a religious ideology linked to interpretations of the Bible, viewing non-European groups as inherently inferior due to their heathen beliefs and ancestry, and frequently targeted Jews. From the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries, racism evolved on the basis of scientifically-justified biological theories which attributed fixed traits, behaviours, characteristics, abilities and disabilities to constructed groups of people based on their supposedly distinctive biological characteristics. Since then, racism has continued to evolve and is largely underpinned by a cultural theory which still projects homogenised constructions of different social groups with common traits and characteristics, but derived instead from their affiliation to a culture, ethnicity, nation, language or faith. Often, racism today borrows from across these subliminal theories — its proponents frequently not even recognising what they are doing.

The late sociologist Stuart Hall famously described “race” as a “floating signifier”. Rather than being a fixed concept, he explained, race has always been a deeply and inherently political construct, projected by powerful dominant groups, justifying unequal power relations with other groups. As such, it is a construct that changes and adapts to historical circumstance. Far from being exclusively biologically determined, Hall showed that the new type of cultural racism moves beyond discrimination related to skin colour. Instead, it focuses on the imagined cultures of people, generalised abstractions about their beliefs and practices, projecting a hierarchy of cultures. Racialised stereotypes can thus cut across colour divides, and ‘non-racial’ categories like faith, culture and civilisation can become racist code for similar discriminatory practices. One result is the projection of an unsurpassable divide between the “West” and “the Rest”, in which “Westerners” are seen as “civilised”, “safe”, “known”, while “migrants”, “Muslims”, “asylum seekers”, “foreigners” and so on are viewed as “uncivilised”, “dangerous”, and “different”.

The deepening and acceleration of identity-politics is a defining feature of the tail-end of the Anthropocene, as the endless growth project of maximum extraction, exploitation and centralisation of resources invents and entrenches multiple divides between human beings on its path of self-legitimisation. And so, too, the devastating impacts of the Earth system crisis remain racialised, with the worst consequences disproportionately affecting the poorer, darker nations around the world.

War is, perhaps, the most visible surface-symptom of the Anthropocene’s defining feature.

In the Anthropocene, we all become Others.
It is not yet too late to begin to actively redefine the meaning of the Anthropocene.

For ultimately, the character of the Anthropocene so far is a reflection of the system of human civilisation within the prevailing paradigm. This is a life-destroying paradigm, a death-machine whose internal logic culminates in its own termination. It is a matrix of interlocking beliefs, values, behaviours and organisational forms which functions as a barrier, not an entry-point, to life, nature and reality.

And in that sense, the end of this paradigm is utterly inevitable. But this does not erase the choice before us — which is to decide whether humanity will perish in the ashes of this paradigm, or plant seeds of a new life-affirming paradigm by building out an emerging system for the flourishing of a new ecological civilisation.

If human civilisation is to survive, it will not be what we see before us — erected on the blood of millions; premised on the exhaustion of planetary resources; crushing the bones of the poor, vulnerable and weak; hell-bent on self-annihilation — that does so. This is a paradigm beguiled by a techno-hyperreality of its own projection; a utopian simulacrum of endless growth, desperately attempting to conceal its own dystopic core from self-awareness.

And so our task is to reflect on what we have truly done to each other, and to the planet; and to recognise that these two phenomena are part of the same self-defeating paradigm: one which perpetually constructs a hyperreality of divisions, borders, and boundaries around projected externalisations of the ‘Other’, seemingly necessitating exploitative, parasitical behaviours. What emerges from this recognition is the relinquishing of the binary delusions that have riven the path of civilisation for hundreds of years, and thereby an embracing of a new vision of what it means to be human — retrieving the essence of our existence as beings who, together, have come from, and will inevitably return to, the Earth itself.

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Dr. Nafeez Ahmed is the founding editor of the 100% reader-funded investigative journalism project INSURGE intelligence. His latest book is Failing States, Collapsing Systems: BioPhysical Triggers of Political Violence (Springer, 2017). He is an 18-year investigative journalist, formerly of The Guardian where he reported on the geopolitics of social, economic and environmental crises. He now reports on ‘global system change’ for VICE’s Motherboard. He has bylines in The Times, Sunday Times, The Independent on Sunday, The Independent, The Scotsman, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, Quartz, New York Observer, The New Statesman, Prospect, Le Monde diplomatique, among other places. He has twice won the Project Censored Award for his investigative reporting; twice been featured in the Evening Standard’s top 1,000 list of most influential Londoners; and won the Naples Prize, Italy’s most prestigious literary award created by the President of the Republic. Nafeez is also a widely-published and cited interdisciplinary academic applying complex systems analysis to ecological and political violence. He is a Research Fellow at the Schumacher Institute.

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