We need to talk about scale.
In an article in Nature Reviews earlier this year, a group of geologists and environmental scientists summarizes the state of knowledge in a field of research that until recently seemed abstract and peripheral but which today should be read as a front-line report on the management of our companies.
It concerns the influence of human activities on the sediment cycles of the Earth. Sedimentation is the process by which sand, gravel and other materials travel with waterways and winds to eventually be stored in the seabed or captured by other reefs in the landscape. The amount of sediment and its cycles are controlled by factors such as melting, erosion and natural disasters, which affect the ongoing landscape formation and natural protection against landslides, floods and droughts.
Already at the beginning of In the 21st century, geological calculations showed that man had become the dominant force in the earth system. In a shorter time perspective, this means that human activities move more soil, sand and rock each year than all other natural processes combined. On a geological time scale, nature’s one-million-year cycles can lower global soil levels by a few tens of meters. Human intervention exceeds it by several hundred meters.
The researchers ‘overview shows that this shift mainly took place after 1950. Through countless activities such as road construction, mining, trawling, dams and logging, our societies’ footprint on the streams of terrestrial sediment has taken on a previously completely unknown scale. Around 1950, after the first two centuries of industrialization, the influence of human activities was double that of the natural transport of sediments from the earth. Half a century later, it had increased by about 500 percent.
The lasting traces are many
In the mid-20th century, damage caused by erosion from agriculture and logging was the dominant factor. Subsequently, it was overshadowed by the aftermath of mining. Mining, the researchers note, has changed the global landscape. The lasting traces are many: millions of abandoned mines, peaks removed, landfills, colossal accumulations of residual products. Today, coal mining alone in the world contributes more than three times as many sediments as all natural processes combined.
He created a greater unpredictability in the earth system. Our ability as geological actors freezes and releases mass in ways that drive sea level rise and increase the occurrence of landslides and floods, especially in the world’s delta landscapes. Of all the dams and river corrections in the world, more than 90 percent were added after 1950. The production of concrete, the most characteristic stone of the Anthropocene that binds huge volumes of sediments, increased 30 times over the same period. .
In addition to the increase in production, the same activities contribute to climate change, which in turn interrupts the sediment cycle, including through melting, ever stronger storms, greater wave formation resulting in coastal erosion, ever more extensive forest fires and greater amounts of precipitation. The climate systems that govern the world’s rivers have already changed. If we compare the values of climatic normality for the periods 1981-2010 and 1991-2020, the wetlands have become more humid, the dry areas drier.
None of these are models of an expected future. They are traces of our own history. And the change happened in less time than our life expectancy.
The synthesis of geologists and environmental scientists coincides with historical analyzes that describe the period after 1950 as “the great acceleration”. The term refers to the synchronized and extremely rapid increase in consumption, resource consumption and emission levels in the developed world since the mid-20th century. It is often illustrated by sharply increasing exponential curves that show how volumes shine. It is the sooty back of the era of well-being, but also an effective historical picture of how man’s geological capacity breaks into the earth system.
It’s amazing how scientific perspectives converge and reinforce each other. To more fully describe the anthropogenic design of the sediment cycle, the Nature Reviews researchers stress the need to combine studies of geophysical systems with historical, economic and social science research. It is a request for integrative approaches that is being heard by many parties today. The background is as simple as it is shocking: it is no longer possible to study fundamental processes on Earth such as the formation of mountains, waterways and sea levels without having information on the historical processes that have shaped landscapes over the past 70 years.
We are in the middle of an intertwining of the history of society and nature. It bridges deep-rooted barriers between different competing sciences and thinking styles. Throughout the modern period, historians and geologists worked essentially on different time scales. While geologists have counted the past in millions of years, historians have studied decades and centuries. Today they analyze overlapping processes and temporal perspectives. The human scale coincides with the geological one.
But how does it actually happen when a society changes scale?
This was, in a sense, the question Rachel Carson had already asked in her famous 1962 book “Silent Spring.” Carson drew attention to one of the fastest-rising curves of initial acceleration: the uncontrolled spread of chemical pesticides. You have described how modern farming techniques have gone hand in hand with the systematic extinction of species. Before long, the use of insecticides increased in huge volumes. The agents have upset the equilibrium of ancient ecosystems, wiped out bird species and fish stocks, poisoned human habitats, propagated in soil and water, spread with the terrestrial sedimentary system. Despite little knowledge of the effects of diffusion, resistance to regulations has been massive.
Carson often has described as one of the first environmentalists driven by a love for the local rhythms of nature, the song of birds and the flowers of the ditches. That picture is not wrong. He knew that there are landscapes that we cannot lose without something in ourselves breaking. Understanding the complexity of the earth system starts from the perspective of the soil, from the interaction with the environment in which we grew up. I want to describe it as an affective understanding of systems, a form of knowledge that has become more difficult to acquire at the same rate that natural environments have been sidelined and disappeared.
Despite little knowledge of the effects of diffusion, resistance to regulations has been massive
But Carson’s most important contribution to knowledge was something else. He pointed to the problem of accumulation itself, which means that modern society has acted on scales it did not understand. The worst thing about the chemical industry, as with atomic radiation, was its “poorly understood interactions, changes and increased harmful effects in sum”. It was impossible, he wrote, to predict the “cumulative effect” of substances sprinkled on landscapes. Neither the authorities nor the researchers had any idea of how and with what consequences they had been absorbed by the natural system and over time. The chemical industry has been allowed to operate in total darkness. How could this happen?
Carson distinguished three factors. The first was what she called the “age of specialists,” which meant that no one had knowledge of the contexts and systems of which the individual problem was a part. The second has been the studied ability of the industry to formulate promises and half-truths about measures and adjustments without ever compromising the “sacred right to make money”. The third was the absence of general regulations and precautionary principles. Overall, this made it possible to accelerate emissions.
The precautionary principle, which Carson invoked in his book in 1962, he laid the foundation for the United Nations Convention on Biological Diversity, which was adopted at the Rio Conference in 1992. The principle is simple: if we do not know what effects our actions may have on the nature, should assume that they are harmful. But the ability of nations to make blank promises was not as good as that of corporations. Today, species mortality and biodiversity loss continue to accelerate towards a bottom of straightened rivers, deforestation and vast tracts of land.
What will the future say of a company that places the responsibility for thinking longer on those who are younger?
The understanding and knowledge of abstract volumes and complex connections is usually sought on a human scale, at the meeting points between individual experiences and dark structures. But the great acceleration is the human scale. It is ourselves that we do not see. Shell blindness has created a gap between the world’s desire and the way of life.
This gap appears most clearly in the temporal dimension, the main source of conflict in the climate crisis. As scientists record the system-changing effects of accumulated assets over a few decades, society continues to mortgage habitats that span many thousands of years into the future. What will the future say of a company that places the responsibility for thinking longer on those who are younger?
It is as if we fallen into a historic fault fracture, unable to climb to the edge to see the new horizon. The blockade of late modernity with dysfunctional economic and political deadlines results in visions like “I love mine!” and “Five diesel crowns less!” It is not a lack of courage, knowledge or will that ultimately shapes these rumors, but a shell blindness that we all share.
Now a new historical narrative on the human scale is needed, about how in less than a century it has taken on planetary dimensions and how it needs to be moved again.
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