Barrier Reef, Gatsby, Wall of China, Depression, Fire of London, Dying, Outdoors, Alexander, British Bakeoff, Escape, Plague and Plains.
What do all these things have in common?
They all sound much more epic with “The Great” alongside them.
Humans have always had a tendency to give monikers to historical moments, figures, events, or areas deemed of extreme significance. Sometimes we have done so in real-time. The Great War was a term coined in 1914, both as a nod towards the enormous geographic scale of what would later come to be referred to as the First World War, and to instill a sense of moral righteousness among ally forces.
Sometimes, the whole “Great” thing has been an exercise in self-congratulation. When Kim-Il Sung established a personality cult in North Korea, he self-appointed himself as Suryong — The Great Leader. And of course today, many of the leaders known to history as So-and-So the Great would be prosecuted as war criminals.
Other times, “The Great” has been used to signify a particularly tumultuous period in Earth’s history. About 250 million years after global warming wiped out the vast majority of marine and terrestrial life, scientists started referring colloquially to the end-Permian mass extinction as “The Great Dying”.
A couple of billion years before that was what’s now known as The Great Oxidation Event (also sometimes referred to as The Great Oxygenation Event) where cyanobacteria caused an oxygen spike in Earth’s atmosphere and shallow oceans, purging many oxygen-hating species and paving the way for multicellular life as we know it.
In fact, one interesting way of looking at the entirety of multicellular life and human history is through the lens of “The Greats”, all the way from this Great Oxidation event through to Mary Berry judging a slightly dry Victoria sponge on the Great British Bake off, to an audience of millions of Homo sapiens.
The lesson from history is clear. When “the” and “great” get capitalised and put in front of something, it’s A Big Deal.
And now we have supposedly entered the Anthropocene, a period where the very same Homo sapiens who used to ward off sabre-toothed tigers, but who now prefer to lie back on a settee to watch amateur bakers build gingerbread houses, have become the driving force behind changes in the Earth system.
It’s such a radical concept that one species can change a planet’s major processes that we tend not to really think about it much. It’s like a micro-version of our complete inability to grasp the concept of infinity, the universe, or space.
As Douglas Adams once put it:
Space is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space.
Our global planetary impact is also mind-bogglingly big and difficult for a single person to envision. This is because many of our impacts are hidden to most of us, have been multi-generational, and are spread (though not evenly) all across the globe. It might also be because it’s rare to hear about cumulative impacts of humanity–we tend to focus on a single problem or change, whether that’s looking at the climate, or species extinctions.
Some have captured our cumulative influence using the “Planetary Dashboard” of the Anthropocene. These hockey-stick charts show how certain socio-economic and Earth system trends have skyrocketed since some time around the 1950s, in a period earmarked as, you guessed it, “The Great Acceleration.”
There is in fact a fair amount of controversy around when the Anthropocene started, whether it’s just a fad word that’s having a zeitgeist moment, and what it might mean to have a good versus a bad Anthropocene.
Some date the start of Anthropocene back to human migration out of Africa, to the advent of farming, to the time of the extinctions of Pleistocene megafauna, the colonisation of the Americas, or the explosion of the first Atomic bomb.
I’m not qualified to wade into the debate around potential starting dates. For that, I would recommend checking out the book Human Planet by Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin.
But seeing how “The Great” seems to crop up over and over throughout human history got me thinking: if we’re still around in a few million years, what will we call this period of Earth history? By then we might well be a multi-planet species , communicating in wholly new ways totally unfamiliar to us today. But there’s one thing I think we can still be sure of. We’ll still be naming things.
So what might the Anthropocene come to be known as, colloquially?
The Great…what?
The Great Dying, as I mentioned, has already been taken by the death of up to 96% of marine species, and 70% of terrestrial vertebrates during the end-Permian mass extinction. And in any case, it does not capture the essence of what makes this current extinction event so different from any other: how it is being driven by just one of the millions of species inhabiting our planet.
Orangutans aren’t hunting elephants for their tusks, iguanas aren’t razing forests to make way for farmland, and barracudas can’t be blamed for literally changing the composition of the atmosphere and melting icecaps.
I remember once learning about the Pareto Principle. Pareto was an Italian economist who loved to comment about how 80% of outcomes can be driven by 20% of causes. Well, whatever nickname the Anthropocene is given, it will have to capture the Anthropocene Principle. That 0.00000001% of species (or whatever we humans make up) can come to dominate so much of Earth’s surface and processes.
So how about The Great Domination?
That gets a little closer perhaps, but I still don’t think it quite works. Domination suggests some kind of mastery, or iron-fisted control, like a puppet master pulling the strings.
For sure, over the millennia, we have moulded the Earth to be a safer, more comfortable, and less disease-ridden place for humans to live. We’ve extirpated populations of dangerous carnivores, developed vaccines to help fight off smallpox and measles, and created farming and technological systems that mean many of us have much less of a direct connection to wildernesses, and a much more pleasant lifestyle than in the past. (Though this has also come with its own costs, too).
There’s even evidence that through the onset of farming, we have inadvertently delayed the reoccurrence of an Ice Age and thus helped keep the Earth’s climate in a state in which humans can thrive.
But while I think it’s obvious the we have become a dominant component of the planet, I don’t think we have come to dominate the planet’s processes. That might seem like a distinction without a difference, but for me, The Great Domination would indicate some kind of fine-tuned control that we have not yet achieved.
We haven’t yet figured out how to stop killer storms, we still can’t get our act together in the face of a global pandemic, and many of our actions appear to be undermining the well-being and potential of future generations. At best, what we have at the moment is a short-sighted sort of dominance.
My two pennies, for what they’re worth, go towards something like “The Great Appropriation”.
I think this does a fairly good job of describing the monopolisation of impacts by a single ape. And if you look at many of the large impacts humans are having, they really could be considered a kind of planetary appropriation.
We’ve appropriated some two thirds of Earth’s ice free land surface for agricultural lands and human sprawl. We’ve appropriated much of the thin crust of topsoil that supports humanity and an enormous portion of the world’s freshwater. We’ve appropriated untold amounts of biomass from marine and forest environments, from tropical forest trees to ocean whales, and fish.
We’ve appropriated two billions years of accumulated energy reserves and used this to build civilizations as we know them today, and then appropriated the atmosphere as a dumping ground for the pollution and greenhouse gases that have unfortunately come with burning these fossil fuels.
Human appropriation of net primary production (HANPP) provides one useful measure of human intervention into the biosphere. It tells us how much of the productive capacity of land we have appropriated by harvesting or burning biomass, and by converting natural ecosystems to managed croplands and ranches. According to one estimate, between 1910-2005, one quarter of global net primary production was redirected toward fueling human societies (1).
That’s why I think a good contender for what future generations might call the Anthropocene is The Great Appropriation.
What do you think?
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