Adventures in the Anthropocene: Journeys to the Heart of the Planet we Made

"Gaia is a good science journalist who worked for Nature and various other journals before moving into writing her own books. I like Adventures in the Anthropocene because it is just that. She has a series of chapters on grasslands, mountains, oceans, coastlines, climate—the standard repertoire of environmental issues on a global scale—but she sums up, in a couple o fpages, the issues from a scientific point of view and then she goes out and talks to people. I think she spent two years in the field researching this book, going into deserts, for example, talking to people about how they live in these ecosystems, where they get their water from, and so on. It’s kind of a political book, about how people use resources, and how their resources have been taken from them, how some people manage their environments while some people have lost them. In the rainforest, she finds indigenous communities are highly sophisticated managers of their forests. Similar things in the tundra, almost any ecosystem you care to name. She wasn’t just talking about indigenous people, she was talking to regular people trying to make their way in mostly rural environments, and discussing sustainable living and how some people do it and how some people can’t, and what drives that. As well as it being very good journalism—because she was out there in the field, getting quotes from real people—there are analyses of how they were living and descriptions of the geography of their environment. I’m a geographer, if you go a long way back, so I enjoyed all that. She did it in a really sophisticated way. She had the science right. She had a good go at the complexity of the politics and the social world, and the economics of how real people live their real lives. For most people, the environment is an abstraction. What they care about is how they live their lives, how they plough their fields, where they can get water from. I try to link scientific abstraction to real stories about real people in my own journalism, and I wish I’d written this book in many ways. So it’s a book I’m very happy to recommend to anyone. Yes. There is no certainty. We could be overwhelmed by really nasty tipping points in climate change, which mean there is no way back. Then we’d have to recognise that we were inhabiting a very different world, that we couldn’t go back to where we were even in the late 20th century. As a science journalist, I recognise that as a real prospect. But it does seem to me that we can reduce the risk of doing that quite a lot. We have to lose our addiction to carbon fuels, is what it comes down to. Almost everything that has happened since the Industrial Revolution up to the last 20 years has been founded on burning fossil fuels, and we are now living with the consequences of that. Carbon stays in the atmosphere for centuries. Every ton more we put up is adding to global temperatures. The faster we deal with it, the better, and the lower the change of going over dangerous tipping points. So: there are no certainties. But my hope lies in humanity’s ability to get its head around these issues and begin to address them. You know, thirty or forty years ago, people were beginning to think about how we might develop renewable fuels, and now they are coming to the fore at a huge scale. We also have to think ahead about other crises—the nitrogen crisis is one that people talk about a fair bit, caused in part by the green revolution we were talking about earlier. Every solution creates another new problem. There’s a kind of ratchet effect, so we have to keep alert the whole time. But my hope is that we can stay ahead of the game, to some extent, keep coming up with solutions. That also goes for how we manage the planet: we’re now talking about the ‘global commons’—the oceans and the atmosphere, which are commonly owned. The bad guys, if you like, have made money while releasing their pollution into the air. To hell what happens down the line! Similarly, we boil the oceans and over-fish. We have to find ways of collectively managing these resources before it is too late. It’s a difficult question which is unresolved. But we have to find ways of managing the critical resources on this planet—the ones on which we all depend—in a way that doesn’t destroy them. It’s a work in progress, but I think we can do it. Another reason for my optimism is that nature is very adaptable, very resilient. Give it the slightest chance and nature will come back. Across Europe and parts of North America we are abandoning more fields than we are creating. We are still destroying rainforests to grow crops in tropical areas. But, outside the tropics, we are abandoning more than we are taking. And nature is coming back. Look at any city: nature finds a way, comes up through the paving stones. It turns out most of the bee species in the UK are living in urban environments. Toxic industrial sites can be amazing places for certain species. Every species has its own little niche that it likes. In a lot of these places, nature does do very well. So we need to create room for nature to come back. And as we change our ways of growing food crops, we probably will need less land, and that again creates room for nature. This is about relearning a level of harmony between us and nature. I do believe we can do that. We’ll have to forget some of the things we’ve learned over the last two centuries, which have been really quite destructive. But I do believe we can right some of the mistakes we have made in the past. And, finally, we are kind of solving the population issue now as well. Populations are gradually stabilising. The average woman fifty years ago was having five children, which is now about 2.2 and it’s going down. We are going to reach a population plateau. It’ll be about ten billion, probably, a couple more billion than we have now, but we can see the end of what used to be called the ‘population bomb.’ Again, that comes back to where I started with Paul Ehrlich. At the time of that book, nobody could see an end to population growth. For the first half of the twentieth century, population had doubled every thirty years. And we didn’t realise that without draconian policies on reproduction that it might happen naturally. But now, because of medical advances, most children survive to adulthood, so we don’t need so many children, and lo and behold couples are making sensible choices by having one or two. The added by product has been the liberation of women from the tyranny of child-rearing and keeping a home. One of my first international conferences was the World Population Conference in 1984 , where all the talk was bout how to control population, what laws needed to be put in place. The UN Population Award went to the guy who ran China’s one-child policy, which was all about forced abortions and sterilisations. It was seen that everywhere in the world should be doing that. And, I might say, it was a conference run almost entirely by men. We’ve subsequently have female-dominated population conferences that discussed reproductive rights and access to contraception. So it’s a whole different world to where we were forty years ago. All these things together give me optimism. Sometimes good things happen without you having to dictate it. I feel rather privilege to have seen those changes. We haven’t solved all the problems, by any means. We’ve made some worse. But I can see the beginning of the solutions. I wouldn’t put it stronger than that, but—despite it all—I’m optimistic."