Adventures in the Anthropocene summary

Humans have always been enthralled by the gleaming majesty of snow-capped mountain summits. But scale any mountain today, and you’re more likely to find a trail of litter than an untouched snowy wonderland.

And, tragically, the changes are more than just aesthetic.

Drinking, washing, fishing, sailing – from food to transport, we’ve been relying on rivers for our basic needs since the beginning of time. But in the last century we’ve also used them as a source of power. Today, two-thirds of the world’s rivers already have a dam somewhere along them – and ever more are planned.

The key message here is: Our rivers supply much-needed energy, but this comes at great human and environmental cost.

In this age of global warming, where water shortages are becoming the norm, land is becoming increasingly less hospitable for farming.

Africa is a prime example. Across the continent, there is already little irrigation and little rainfall. And with the climate changing, it’s getting ever harder for people to survive there.

The earth’s oceans are vast. We’ve explored only around 3 percent of the world beneath their surface. And yet we’ve already transformed them drastically.

We’ve built bridges over them and tunnels under them; we’ve even joined oceans with the canals in Panama and Suez. We throw our waste into them. We get food from their surface and gas and oil from their depths. And, most worrying of all, as the global temperature rises, the frozen waters of the Arctic are melting.

For centuries, nomadic desert tribes like the Turkana have been wandering the barren landscapes in the north of Kenya with their cattle, goats, and camels.

But their way of life is disappearing fast. In 2006, Christian Aid reported that one-third of northern Kenya’s nomadic peoples had been forced to leave their traditional way of life behind. Within two years, that number doubled.

Ever since we learned to walk upright among the lush green grasses of the savannah, we have been gradually altering our natural environment. Whether cutting down trees or introducing new plants, hunting wild animals or creating domesticated species, we’ve put our stamp on virtually every corner of the earth.

But it’s one thing to influence ecosystems. It’s quite another to fundamentally reshape them.

Roughly half of the forests that once covered the earth have already disappeared because of human activities. If we keep going at this rate, we’ll wipe out all of the world’s rainforests before the century is over.

But what, precisely, is driving all this destruction?

Humans now move more sediment and rocky materials around the planet than any natural cause – more than all the rivers, glaciers, wind, and rain of the world combined. Take coal alone; we mine around 8 billion metric tons of it each year. You could build 16 Great Walls of China with that amount of material.

But the earth’s supplies are finite.

Whether you’re listening to these blinks on your commute to work or reading at home, chances are you’re in an urban environment. In the not so distant past, as an urban dweller, you’d be part of a tiny minority. But these days more than half of all people on the planet live in cities – and the number is growing fast.

The key message here is: Our age is the urban age and cities are the future.