Anthropocene

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Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made by Gaia Vince

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, bank run, biodiversity loss, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, citizen journalism, clean water, climate change refugee, congestion charging, crowdsourcing, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, driverless car, energy security, failed state, Google Earth, Haber-Bosch Process, hive mind, hobby farmer, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), ITER tokamak, Kickstarter, Late Heavy Bombardment, load shedding, M-Pesa, Mars Rover, Masdar, megacity, megaproject, microdosing, mobile money, Neil Armstrong, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Peter Thiel, phenotype, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, supervolcano, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology

This stability led to the development of culture and civilisations – our species became more populous and so successful we spread across six continents. The impacts of the Anthropocene will be just as profound. It was Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen who came up with the term Anthropocene. The Dutch chemist was sitting in a scientific conference, he told me, when it occurred to him that all the biophysical changes that researchers were discussing ‘meant we weren’t in the Holocene any more. The planet had changed too much from what would be considered normal for the Holocene.’ Crutzen made a case for the Anthropocene in an article in Nature in 2002, and over the past decade the term has gained use in the scientific community.7 Now, the British Geological Society is beginning the slow process of formally deciding and listing this new epoch, based on the changes humans are making to the biosphere that will be preserved in the geology, chemistry and biology of our planet for thousands or millions of years.8 These include land-use changes, such as the conversion of forest to farmland, and radioactive fallout particles.

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Marine ecologists are warning of worse to come: human changes to the marine environment may lead to a tipping point in which jellyfish rather than fish dominate the oceans of the Anthropocene, much as they did hundreds of millions of years ago in pre-Cambrian times.27 Jellyfish are simply better prepared than other marine life for Anthropocene conditions – warmer temperatures, salinity changes, ocean acidification and pollution work to their advantage. Jellyfish can cope far better with anoxia (low oxygen) than muscular fish. Even our infrastructure – pontoons, piers and drilling platforms – is a boon for jellyfish, providing an anchor for polyps. We need to decide what kind of ocean biodiversity we want for the Anthropocene – and then act fast if we are to save species.

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And it’s thought that thousands of years before that, hunter-gatherer communities burned large areas to encourage grazers and their predators to the area for easier hunting. But not until the Anthropocene has the far-reaching, global impact of humanity come into play. Now, the sheer number of people, their spread and incredible harvesting of natural resources, means that Holocene ecosystems throughout the world are tipping into new Anthropocene states that have never been seen before. The megafauna extinctions that occurred at the end of the Pleistocene were small, insignificant happenings compared to what is occurring in the Anthropocene – we’ve lost a third of wild vertebrates just since 1970. In around 300 years, 75% of all current mammal species on Earth will be extinct – that’s the startling calculation made by palaeobiologist Anthony Barnosky, at the University of California, Berkeley, based on the current rates of extinction, and assuming the animals already threatened or endangered are wiped out this century.3 Renowned biologist E.

There Is No Planet B: A Handbook for the Make or Break Years by Mike Berners-Lee

air freight, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, cloud computing, dematerialisation, disinformation, driverless car, Easter island, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, fake news, food miles, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, Hans Rosling, high-speed rail, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jevons paradox, land reform, microplastics / micro fibres, negative emissions, neoliberal agenda, off grid, performance metric, post-truth, profit motive, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Stephen Hawking, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, urban planning

ix 73 74 75 75 77 78 79 81 82 84 85 87 89 91 93 94 95 97 99 99 100 101 104 105 106 107 109 110 112 113 114 116 117 x CONTENTS 5 GROWTH, MONEY AND METRICS Which kinds of growth can be healthy in the Anthropocene? Why is GDP such an inadequate metric? How do our metrics need to change? What metrics do we need to take more note of? What metrics do we need to downgrade? Can the free market deal with Anthropocene challenges? Which is better, the market economy or the planned economy? What is trickledown and why is it dangerous? Why might wealth distribution matter more than ever? How is the world’s wealth distributed?

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The energy released in that wave was about equivalent to 24 hours’ worth of human global energy consumption at the time. 150 years ago, it would have taken humanity about a month to acquire and use the same amount of energy. Today it only takes us 18 hours1. The ‘big people, small planet’ syndrome has a name that is going to be useful to us; the Anthropocene. I use this simply to mean the era in which human influence is the dominant source of change to the ecosystem. Our arrival in this ‘Anthropocene’ has been like a pH titration experiment. In the lab, acid might be dripped into a flask of alkali solution. For ages there is no colour change at all because the alkali still dominates, then suddenly, one more drip and the balance shifts.

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Bear in mind before sharing this view that it is the scale of our energy supply that has taken us into the Anthropocene, and all the dangers that come with it. More energy to solve the problem is like ‘hair of the dog’ – a beer for breakfast to fend off a hangover. I tried that only once, a long time ago, and don’t recommend it. Luckily, perhaps, we are still a few breakthroughs away from getting fusion off the ground as an energy supply. We don’t know for sure how fast things might move forward but according to one group at MIT there could be fusion electricity feeding into the US grid by 203323. One way of looking at it is that we have until then to get to grips with the Anthropocene. 78 3 ENERGY Are biofuels bonkers?

Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-communist, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, demand response, Google Earth, Lewis Mumford, megacity, Minecraft, oil rush, out of africa, planetary scale, precariat, sovereign wealth fund, supervolcano, the built environment, The Spirit Level, uranium enrichment

When I consider our attempts to speak the Anthropocene, I think of that watchman with the ox on his tongue, unable to cry out his warning, so that the danger draws ever closer. The idea of the Anthropocene repeatedly strikes us dumb. In the complexity of its structures and the range of its scales within time and space – from nanometric to the planetary, from picoseconds to aeons – the Anthropocene confronts us with huge challenges. How to interpret, or even refer to it? Its energies are interactive, its properties emergent and its structures are withdrawn. We find speaking of the Anthropocene, even speaking in the Anthropocene, difficult.

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Chapter 3: Dark Matter Pages 55 shielded from the surface by 3,000 feet of halite, gypsum . . . clay and topsoil: on the strata sequence at Boulby, see ‘Lithological Log of Cleveland Potash Ltd’, Borehole Staithes No. 20, drilled September–December 1968 to a depth of c.3500 feet (BGS ID borehole 620319, BGS Reference NZ71NE14). 58 ‘the revelation of a new order . . . and darkness as well’: Kent Meyers, ‘Chasing Dark Matter in America’s Deepest Gold Mine’, Harper’s Magazine (May 2015), 27–37: 28. 58 ‘As if. . .you could infer the meadow ‘: Rebecca Elson, ‘Explaining Dark Matter’, in A Responsibility to Awe (Manchester: Carcanet, 2001), p. 71. 75 ‘I suddenly thought. . . it seems to have stuck’: Paul Crutzen, quoted in Howard Falcon-Lang, ‘Anthropocene: Have Humans Created a New Geological Age?’, BBC, 11 May 2011 <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/mobile/science-environ ment-13335683>. 75 ‘mankind [sic] . . . millions of years to come’: Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer, ‘The Anthropocene’, International Geosphere-Biosphere Newsletter 41 (May 2000) <https://www.mpic.de/mitarbeiter/auszeichnungen-crutzen/the-anthropocene.html>. 75 As the Pleistocene was defined by the action of ice . . . at a global scale: for several years now I have taught a graduate course at Cambridge called ‘Cultures of the Anthropocene’. The literature of and on the idea of the Anthropocene is vast, various, disputatious and growing.

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What will survive of us is plastic, swine bones and lead-207, the stable isotope at the end of the uranium-235 decay chain. There are many reasons to be suspicious of the idea of the Anthropocene. It generalizes the blame for what is a situation of vastly uneven making and suffering. The rhetorical ‘we’ of Anthropocene discourse smooths over severe inequalities, and universalizes the site-specific consequences of environmental damage. The designation of this epoch as the ‘age of man’ also seems like our crowning act of self-mythologization – and as such only to embed the technocratic narcissism that has produced the current crisis. But the Anthropocene, for all its faults, also issues a powerful shock and challenge to our self-perception as a species.

Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism by John Elkington

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, anti-fragile, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, deglobalization, degrowth, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Future Shock, Gail Bradbrook, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, green transition, Greta Thunberg, Hans Rosling, hype cycle, impact investing, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, John Elkington, Jony Ive, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, M-Pesa, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, microplastics / micro fibres, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, placebo effect, Planet Labs, planetary scale, plant based meat, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, systems thinking, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, Whole Earth Catalog

A key reason for that is that we are moving into an unprecedented, exponentially charged era in Earth’s evolution. WELCOME TO THE ANTHROPOCENE One thing to know about the Anthropocene epoch is that we are likely to be in it for as long as human numbers are measured in the billions. As our population numbers push up against the capacity of our planet to nurture us and absorb the damage we inflict upon it, the potential for wicked problems, for Gray and Black Swans, goes off the scale. Like many baby boomers, I was born (just) in the earlier Holocene geological epoch, at least as the boundaries are currently understood, with the Anthropocene considered to have started in 1950. By geological standards, the Holocene is—or as many scientists now argue was—remarkably young.

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On this basis picking out the Anthropocene in the rocks of days to come will be pretty easy. Cities will make particularly distinctive fossils. A city on a fast-sinking river delta (and fast-sinking deltas, undermined by the pumping of groundwater and starved of sediment by dams upstream, are common Anthropocene environments) could spend millions of years buried and still, when eventually uncovered, reveal through its crushed structures and weird mixtures of materials that it is unlike anything else in the geological record. Some scientists are still debating whether we should talk in terms of the Anthropocene, but the signs increasingly suggest that this is the term that future scientists will use.

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Finally, The Economist moved from a discussion of how the dawn of the Anthropocene could herald a fundamental rebooting of our entire climate system, in ways that would spell the end of civilization as we know it, to a rather more positive framing: Better to embrace the Anthropocene’s potential as a revolution in the way the Earth system works [. . .] than to try to retreat onto a low-impact path that runs the risk of global immiseration. Such a choice is possible because of the most fundamental change in Earth history that the Anthropocene marks: the emergence of a form of intelligence that allows new ways of being to be imagined and, through co-operation and innovation, to be achieved.

The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World by Oliver Morton

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Apollo 13, Asilomar, Boeing 747, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, Columbian Exchange, decarbonisation, demographic transition, Dr. Strangelove, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy transition, Ernest Rutherford, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Haber-Bosch Process, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kintsugi, late capitalism, Louis Pasteur, megaproject, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, plutocrats, public intellectual, renewable energy transition, rewilding, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, tech billionaire, Ted Nordhaus, Thomas Malthus, Virgin Galactic

I do know that imagining that humans could double carbon-dioxide levels in just half a millennium was a dramatic claim at that time, even if today it is an underestimate. It could be done in a century. The Anthropocene That humans can, in lifetimes, make changes over which the Earth unaided would labour for millions of years is at the heart of the idea of the Anthropocene. Since Paul Crutzen brought the idea to prominence in 2000, the Anthropocene has been taken up as a framing device by a wide range of people interested in global change. Some natural scientists see it as a way of stressing the depth of human involvement in the earthsystem.

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Some object to the idea as legitimizing the level of human interference in the earthsystem when the aim must be to reverse it. If talking about the Anthropocene shifts environmental debates towards the best strategies for managing human dominance over the earthsystem and away from a steadfast refusal to countenance such an idea, a fundamental back-to-nature strand in environmental thought would seem to be sundered. To the extent that there is any point in talking about the Anthropocene, in this analysis it is in the context of retreating from it and back into some more natural epoch as quickly as possible. And some see the Anthropocene as a category mistake; shoehorning the enormity of what humans are doing to the planet into the strict and objective confines imposed by the rules of geological nomenclature is, they say, a disservice both to the disciplinary niceties of geology and to the discourse surrounding human influences on nature.

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His ideas also have a political dimension; Ruddiman did not conceive them that way, but that’s the Anthropocene for you – it makes ideas about how the earthsystem changes political more or less from the get-go. If you accept the idea that climate change brought about by the spread of agriculture constitutes an early Anthropocene, you dilute the shock of what is happening to the earthsystem today; the industrial changes of the climate become an extension of what was done unwittingly by farmers just by farming. The Anthropocene becomes an unwitting and more or less unavoidable consequence of there being people on the planet, and thus a rather friendlier concept.

Origin Story: A Big History of Everything by David Christian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Arthur Eddington, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cepheid variable, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, Columbian Exchange, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, demographic transition, double helix, Easter island, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, Francisco Pizarro, Haber-Bosch Process, Harvard Computers: women astronomers, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Large Hadron Collider, Late Heavy Bombardment, Marshall McLuhan, microbiome, nuclear winter, Paris climate accords, planetary scale, rising living standards, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, trade route, Yogi Berra

It occurred mostly in just the past one hundred years and primarily during the Great Acceleration of the second half of the twentieth century. This is the face of the Good Anthropocene (good from a human perspective). The Good Anthropocene has generated better lives for billions of ordinary humans, for the first time in human history. (If you doubt the improvement, think again about having surgery without modern anesthesia.) But there is also a Bad Anthropocene. The Bad Anthropocene consists of the many changes that threaten the achievements of the Good Anthropocene. First, the Bad Anthropocene has generated huge inequalities. Despite colossal increases in wealth, millions continue to live in dire poverty.

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In the past, coal miners took canaries into mines to detect carbon monoxide. Today, rising carbon dioxide levels, declining biodiversity, and melting glaciers are telling us that something dangerous is happening, and we should take notice. The challenge we face as a species is pretty clear. Can we preserve the best of the Good Anthropocene and avoid the dangers of the Bad Anthropocene? Can we distribute the Anthropocene bonanza of energy and resources more equitably to avoid catastrophic conflicts? And can we, like the first living organisms, learn how to use gentler and smaller flows of resources to do so? Can we find global equivalents of the delicate proton pumps used to power all living cells today?

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We are beginning to see red warning lights on the control panels of the global machine we humans have built. If, despite all the challenges, we humans are successful in our quest, what will a “mature Anthropocene” look like?6 It will not be a perfect world, of course. But it is important that we try to imagine such a world as we try to build it. There are so many imponderables here that we cannot produce any sort of architect’s sketch. Nevertheless, we can describe some of the main features of a world that preserves the best of the Good Anthropocene while avoiding the dangers of the Bad Anthropocene. Population growth will slow, eventually, to zero, and perhaps start falling. Rates of population growth are already falling in most parts of the world, and in some regions, the absolute number of people is beginning to fall.

The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us by Diane Ackerman

23andMe, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, airport security, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, carbon footprint, clean water, climate change refugee, dark matter, dematerialisation, digital divide, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Google Earth, Google Glasses, haute cuisine, Higgs boson, hindcast, Internet of things, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, Masdar, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, microbiome, mirror neurons, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, personalized medicine, phenotype, Ray Kurzweil, refrigerator car, rewilding, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, skunkworks, Skype, space junk, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the High Line, theory of mind, urban planning, urban renewal, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

DIANE ACKERMAN THE HUMAN AGE THE WORLD SHAPED BY US W. W. NORTON & COMPANY NEW YORK LONDON CONTENTS I.WELCOME TO THE ANTHROPOCENE Apps for Apes Wild Heart, Anthropocene Mind Black Marble Handmade Landscapes A Dialect of Stone Monkeying with the Weather Gaia in a Temper Brainstorming from Equator to Ice Blue Revolution II.IN THE HOUSE OF STONE AND LIGHT Asphalt Jungles A Green Man in a Green Shade House Plants? How Passé Opportunity Warms III.IS NATURE “NATURAL” ANYMORE? Is Nature “Natural” Anymore? The Slow-Motion Invaders “They Had No Choice” Paddling in the Gene Pool For Love of a Snail IV.NATURE, PIXILATED An (Un)Natural Future of the Senses Weighing in the Nanoscale Nature, Pixilated The Interspecies Internet Your Passion Flower Is Sexting You When Robots Weep, Who Will Comfort Them?

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The Slow-Motion Invaders “They Had No Choice” Paddling in the Gene Pool For Love of a Snail IV.NATURE, PIXILATED An (Un)Natural Future of the Senses Weighing in the Nanoscale Nature, Pixilated The Interspecies Internet Your Passion Flower Is Sexting You When Robots Weep, Who Will Comfort Them? Robots on a Date Printing a Rocking Horse on Mars V.OUR BODIES, OUR NATURE The (3D-Printed) Ear He Lends Me Cyborgs and Chimeras DNA’S Secret Doormen Meet My Maker, the Mad Molecule Conclusion: Wild Heart, Anthropocene Mind (Revisited) Acknowledgments Notes Further Reading Index PART I WELCOME TO THE ANTHROPOCENE APPS FOR APES On a blue-sky day at the Toronto zoo, flocks of children squired by teachers and parents mingle excitedly between exhibits. Some kids pull out cell phones and send texts or snap pictures with the easy camaraderie of wired life.

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Once you start looking, it’s startling how many foods, shampoos, toothpaste, soaps, makeup, and other products use palm oil. Orangutan Outreach encourages people to boycott all palm oil–laced products, and dozens of multinational companies (McDonald’s, Pepsi, et al.) have agreed, for the sake of the rainforests. Wild Heart, Anthropocene Mind 11The term “Anthropocene” was coined by the aquatic ecologist Eugene Stoermer (Emeritus, University of Michigan), who used it at a conference, and Paul Crutzen, who currently works at the Department of Atmospheric Chemistry at the Max Planck Institute in Mainz, Germany; the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego; and Seoul National University in South Korea. 12According to the BBC News website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-15391515. 12“Nature,” as E.

The Moon: A History for the Future by Oliver Morton

Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, commoditize, Dava Sobel, Donald Trump, Easter island, Elon Musk, facts on the ground, gravity well, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, Late Heavy Bombardment, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, plutocrats, private spaceflight, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, space junk, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Nordhaus, UNCLOS, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize

When some 50m people in the Americas died, new forests took root in what were once their fields, trees broke through the fallen roofs of their homes. The biosphere withdrew billions of tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere, investing it in trunk, root and leaf. How do the versions of the Anthropocene defined by these dates differ in what they say about the relationship between the two histories that have become one? An Anthropocene which starts in the 1950s is a purportedly value-neutral just-the-facts-ma’am Anthropocene: its beginning marks the point at which, looking back, the strains on the Earth system first became apparent. It doesn’t worry about why humans are having their impact, just notes that this is the well-marked point at which the scale of that impact started to increase very rapidly.

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Shipping food to the Earth and getting nothing back—no replacement for the carbon, nitrogen, endless spacey cake and endless Earthly eating phosphorus and so on that the grain shipped down the gravity well contains—means that the Moon’s otherwise-closed ecology has a gaping hole in it, as frightening as an air-sucking meteorite puncture in a hab. The stuff of life is leaking away. “The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress” is thus an environmental novel. Indeed it is an Anthropocene one, as long as one remembers that the Moon’s branch of the Anthropocene is an inversion of the Earth’s, as well as an extension of it. The Earth’s Anthropocene is a breaking down of the environment’s prior encapsulation of the economy. On the Moon, it is the reverse. When a living environment arrived there, it did so in a curiously shaped aluminium box which marked the greatest single achievement of the Earth’s greatest economy—always already encapsulated.

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CHAPTER IV The political and social context of the Apollo and early-post-Apollo years is dealt with thoughtfully in Maher (2015). For an introduction to the Anthropocene and debates over its timing, see Lewis and Maslin (2018), and for a consideration of its impact on the humanities, see Chakrabarty (2009). David Grinspoon puts forth his ideas about the Anthropocene and Tranquility Base in Grinspoon (2016); a broader take on the need to consider the Anthropocene beyond the Earth can be found in Olson and Messeri (2015). For the Chaotian and Hadean periodization of the very early solar system, see Goldblatt et al (2010).

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert

Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, Columbian Exchange, correlation does not imply causation, double helix, Easter island, Honoré de Balzac, index card, Jacob Silverman, Maui Hawaii, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, out of africa, seminal paper, Skype, Steven Pinker, the long tail, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Yogi Berra

(One of Crutzen’s fellow Nobelists reportedly came home from his lab one night and told his wife, “The work is going well, but it looks like it might be the end of the world.”) Crutzen told me that the word “Anthropocene” came to him while he was sitting at a meeting. The meeting’s chairman kept referring to the Holocene, the “wholly recent” epoch, which began at the conclusion of the last ice age, 11,700 years ago, and which continues—at least officially—to this day. “’Let’s stop it,’” Crutzen recalled blurting out. “’We are no longer in the Holocene; we are in the Anthropocene.’ Well, it was quiet in the room for a while.” At the next coffee break, the Anthropocene was the main topic of conversation. Someone came up to Crutzen and suggested that he patent the term.

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“Because of these anthropogenic emissions,” Crutzen wrote, the global climate is likely to “depart significantly from natural behavior for many millennia to come.” Crutzen published “Geology of Mankind” in 2002. Soon, the “Anthropocene” began migrating out into other scientific journals. “Global Analysis of River Systems: From Earth System Controls to Anthropocene Syndromes” was the title of a 2003 article in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. “Soils and Sediments in the Anthropocene” ran the headline of a piece from 2004 in the Journal of Soils and Sediments. When Zalasiewicz came across the term, he was intrigued. He noticed that most of those using it were not trained stratigraphers, and he wondered how his colleagues felt about this.

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(After much heated debate, the commission recently moved that epoch’s start date back from 1.8 to 2.6 million years ago.) Zalasiewicz had convinced the ICS to look into formally recognizing the Anthropocene, an effort that, logically enough, he himself was put in charge of. As head of the Anthropocene Working Group, Zalasiewicz is hoping to bring a proposal to a vote by the full body in 2016. If he’s successful and the Anthropocene is adopted as a new epoch, every geology textbook in the world immediately will become obsolete. CHAPTER VI THE SEA AROUND US Patella caerulea Castello Aragonese is a tiny island that rises straight out of the Tyrrhenian Sea, like a turret.

The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty by Benjamin H. Bratton

1960s counterculture, 3D printing, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, additive manufacturing, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, Charles Babbage, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, company town, congestion pricing, connected car, Conway's law, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Graeber, deglobalization, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, distributed generation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, functional programming, future of work, Georg Cantor, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Guggenheim Bilbao, High speed trading, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, industrial robot, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Laura Poitras, liberal capitalism, lifelogging, linked data, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, McMansion, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, OSI model, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, peak oil, peer-to-peer, performance metric, personalized medicine, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, precautionary principle, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reserve currency, rewilding, RFID, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, skeuomorphism, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Startup school, statistical arbitrage, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, the long tail, the scientific method, Torches of Freedom, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Washington Consensus, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, working poor, Y Combinator, yottabyte

Manuel de la Pila housing block, Puerto Rico, 311–312 drones, hacking, 401n45 drowning nations, 100 Dürer, Albrecht, 53, 181 Durkheim, Emile, 266, 385n25 Dutch East India Company, 399n32 “Dymaxion File” (Fuller), 267 Dyson, Freeman, 106–107 Dyson sphere conjecture, 106–107 Eames, Charles and Ray, 52 Earth composability of, 84–86 in Earth layer, 76, 82–84 geoaesthetics, 83–87 geometrics, 90–91, 309 grids and networks, 37–38, 90–97, 149–153, 170, 180, 192, 229, 280, 294–296, 393n53 human transformation of, 354 loop topology of, 24 petawatts of radiant energy from sun, 106–107 planet-spanning architectural propositions, 178 remapping everything in, 191–192 second planetary computer overlaying, 300–301 as skin, 87–92 subdividing, 21–24, 193, 195, 309, 413n5 terraforming, 85–86, 181, 187, 404n11 two, parable of, 444n27 writing on (geo-graphy), 85–86, 149, 193, 249 Earth layer address geographies, 193–195 to come, 294–295, 300–307 computational transparency, 76–81, 101 defined, 370–371 design issues, 101–107 Earth in, 76, 82–84 emergencies, designing for/designing with, 101–104 energy monitored and provisioned, 87–92 function of, 107, 300 geodesign, 83–84, 288, 304 geopolitical architecture, 98, 300–302 governance, 98–104, 140 human-facing permeation, Apple's, 187–188 interfacial problematics of, 256 introduction, 69–70, 75–76 productive accidents of, 91, 93 sensing and sovereignty, 97–101 world-making/world-erasure projects, 91–92 Earth layer interactions Address layer, 211 City layer, 153 Cloud layer, 94, 110, 140–141 User layer, 154 Earth-order, 24 “Earthrise” photograph (Anders), 86, 150, 300, 442n11 Easterling, Keller, 182 e-citizenship, 446n42 Eco, Umberto, 125, 243 eco-computing, 258–263, 268, 354 ecoglobalism, 89, 259, 303 ecojurisdictions, 97–100 ecological crisis, contributors to Anthropocenic energy platforms, 106 anthropogenic climatic events, 102 electronics manufacturing, 82–83 planetary-scale computation, 82–83, 92–96, 106–107, 113, 140–141, 258–260, 303–304 ecological noise, 106 ecology Anthropocenic, 102, 106, 217, 458n15 of energy, 98–104 mobile, of interfaces, 237–238 popular ecology movement, 86 restoration of, 304–305, 442n14 ecology of the gut, 268 e-commerce, 131 economic inequity, 311–312, 439n66, 458n15 economic planning systems, cybernetic, 58–61, 328–329 economics. See also platform economics Anthropocenic, 58, 103 of borders, 173 capitalist, 56 City layer, 159–160 Cloud model, 137 electronics, mining and trading in, 82–83 zero-sum, 336 economy of additive manufacturing, 202 of cognitive capital, 110, 116 computational, 328 computer-controlled, 58–60 of contemporary warfare, 248 digital, 196 of energy, 92, 106–107 Facebook, 127 Google, 136–138, 159, 444n26 of identity, 270 of information, 199 of mobility, 280 of prostheticization, 273 of reversible partitions, 21 of scarcity, 208 and sovereignty and territory, 114, 316 ecopolitics, 100 ecosystems, 129, 178, 185, 336, 456n6 Ecumenopolis (Dioxiadis), 178 Eisenman, Peter, 410n50 Elden, Stewart, 335, 379n12 electricity, 93, 95, 141 electronics, mining and trading in, 82–83 electronic waste, 83 Elysium (Blomkamp), 311, 323, 444n27 emergency accommodating, 103–104 designing for/designing with, 101–104, 321, 325 ecojurisdictions in response to, 99–100 ecological, 105–106, 295, 305 ecopolitics emerging by, 100 exceptional, 103–104, 173, 321–322 permanent, 104 progress in response to, 321 sovereign decision and, 20, 32, 102–103 state of, 32–33, 99 emergent, the, 9 empty space, 30, 380n20 enclosure and escape, 22, 32–33, 149–150, 172–176, 303 “end of history,” 321 “End of Sykes-Picot, The” 430n65 energy alternative sources, 259 ecologies of, 98–104 economy, 92 efficiencies, 140–141 energy-information network, 93, 95 footprint, of planetary-scale computing, 82–83, 92–96, 106–107, 113, 140–141, 258–260, 303–304 grid, 92–96, 140, 152, 201, 294–295 needs, predicted, 113 political loyalty and availability, 141 polities, subdivided, 99–100 post-Anthropocene, 217 Eneropa, 99 Engelbart, Douglas, 343 Enlightenment, 251, 426n46 entertaining securitization, 156 entertainment identifier registry (EIDR), 207 entrance/exit, 149–150, 313, 315, 317, 371 envelope-interface borders, 172–173 envelopes airports, 156–157 architectural, 23, 165–167, 195, 303, 311–313, 323 cars as, 238 City layer, 12, 70, 148–149, 152, 154–155, 163–171, 173 as interface, 167 mixed, designing for, 168–172 paper, 46, 195 physical, 167 software, 167 urban, 168–172 urban platform, 180 User position in relation to, 252 environmental migrants/refugees, 100–101 Epicureanism, inverse, 358 equilibrium, cybernetic, 59, 158 error detection, 50 espionage, 398n21 Estates of The Oaks, 311 Estonia, 399n36, 446n42 Ethereum, 336 ethics, 258, 285, 362 European nomos of World Wars I and II, 25–26 European Space Agency, 181 European Union, 309 exception in Apple model, 130 automation of, 33 becomes the rule, 102–103, 111 emergency, 103–104, 173, 321–322 emergent order of, 110–111 inside and outside the law, 102 interface, 357 legitimate state of, 104 normalizing, 23, 32–33, 39, 103–104 reversibility of, 21, 32–33, 39, 145 sovereignty over, 20–21, 32, 105, 341 state of emergency as, 99, 105 territories of, 114 exclusion agency and, 173–175 augmented reality and, 236, 241–242 elective, 316–317 societal, 308–309, 311–312, 317 exclusive totalities, 245 exit.

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In the figure of The Stack, we see not one totality but the production of multiple and incongruous totalities, some of which are “interfacial regimes,” some are superimposed landscapes of Addresses, and others are interwoven Cloud and state geometries. These geometries both draw and draw on the vertical platform of The Stack, and in doing so may also displace existing geographies with several alternatives at once. Perhaps these culminate in the apotheosis of Anthropocenic industrialism and perhaps they provide larval scripts for a post-Anthropocenic alternative, or both, or perhaps something much less decisive and dramatic. Our sights are not trained on how The Stack might hasten the messianic arrival of some seamless full-spectrum computational end of history, but how its gnashing and grating juxtapositions generate peculiar new spaces, normal enclaves, and how those exceptions are instructive as ways of deliberately reorganizing the world.

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Is the reliance on the identification of ecological noise—a standing enemy of excess and waste to be disciplined and normalized—also to foreclose possibilities and to guarantee that Anthropocenic global society, as it exists now, can only be the antecedent enemy of another Stack-to-come? If we fashion the Earth layer of The Stack in these terms, we have set ourselves up as the enemy of the enemy of the enemy of the friend we hope to conjure up. The math is against us. Finally, as for the scale and program of the lines and frames we inscribe and the worlds we present by them, I would rather that design draw too big than draw too small. As we know, Anthropocenic energy platforms largely rely on sucking fossil fuels out of the ground and burning them in the sky, but planetary-scale computation cannot really grow if it powered by the oozy corpses of Mesozoic vegetation.

Nomad Century: How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World by Gaia Vince

3D printing, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, charter city, circular economy, clean water, colonial exploitation, coronavirus, COVID-19, decarbonisation, degrowth, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, European colonialism, failed state, gentrification, global pandemic, Global Witness, green new deal, Haber-Bosch Process, high-speed rail, housing crisis, ice-free Arctic, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, job automation, joint-stock company, Kim Stanley Robinson, labour mobility, load shedding, lockdown, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, mass incarceration, mega-rich, megacity, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, old age dependency ratio, open borders, Patri Friedman, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, place-making, planetary scale, plyscraper, polynesian navigation, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, rewilding, Rishi Sunak, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, undersea cable, urban planning, urban sprawl, white flight, women in the workforce, working-age population, zero-sum game, Zipcar

She is an honorary senior research fellow at the Anthropocene Institute at University College London and is the author of Transcendence and Adventures in the Anthropocene. You can sign up for email updates here. Thank you for buying this Flatiron ebook. To receive special offers, bonus content, and info on new releases and other great reads, sign up for our newsletters. Or visit us online at us.macmillan.com/newslettersignup For email updates on the author, click here. Contents Title Page Copyright Notice Dedication List of Figures Introduction 1. The Storm 2. The Four Horsemen of the Anthropocene 3. Leaving Home 4.

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Sea levels are already rising faster than even the most pessimistic predictions.15 Our future world is one depleted of the biodiversity we’re dependent on, and where we’re facing a cocktail of negative shocks all the time, from fires to droughts. Within decades, we risk a turbulent, conflict-ridden world with great loss of life and perhaps the end of our civilizations. 2 The Four Horsemen of the Anthropocene Climate change is a threat multiplier, which exacerbates the other social, environmental and economic problems that populations face. Fire, heat, drought and flood will transform our world this century. These four horsemen of the Anthropocene will make much of our world unliveable for people. Here’s how. FIRE The first dawn of 2020 never arrived for my Auntie Helen on the south coast of New South Wales, Australia.

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While the dramatic devastation of a hurricane erasing whole villages can make refugees of people overnight, the impacts of climate change on people’s lives are usually gradual – another poor harvest or another season of unbearable heat, which becomes the final straw that pushes people to seek better locations. Such people would be categorized as economic migrants, but they are also refugees from the Holocene world, the pre-Anthropocene landscapes that their ancestors’ cultures and societies learned how to make into a home. With those Holocene environments gone, we are all finding our feet in the Anthropocene, and no one has better claim than anyone else to the habitable twenty-first-century landscapes. 5 Wealth of Migrants Our recently invented national border controls, and our newly inherited attitudes towards national identity and migrants, are causing us all huge and unnecessary trouble.

Humankind: Solidarity With Nonhuman People by Timothy Morton

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Anthropocene, capitalist realism, David Brooks, Georg Cantor, gravity well, Ian Bogost, invisible hand, means of production, megacity, microbiome, mirror neurons, Oklahoma City bombing, phenotype, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Richard Feynman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, trolley problem, Turing test, wage slave, zero-sum game

Humankind is not a negation of a human being, but rather an implosive whole that is susceptible to all kinds of phenomena. The Anthropocene is one of the first truly anti-anthropocentric concepts because via thinking the Anthropocene, we get to see the concept of “species” as it really is—species as a subscendent hyperobject, brittle and inconsistent. The Anthropocene is the moment at which humans come to recognize humankind, insofar as it subscends its parts (such as plastics and concretes in Earth’s strata). The Anthropocene is the moment at which species as such becomes thinkable in a non-metaphysical way, such that humankind cannot rigidly exclude nonhumans.

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And solidarity is also used for the constitution of a group as such, the example given being the notorious notion of “the human race,” aka species, what is now called the “Anthropos” of the dreaded Anthropocene, a new geological era (officially dated to 1945) marked by human-made materials such as plastics, nucleotides and concretes in the upper layers of Earth’s crust.24 Existing thought protocols in the humanities make this geological era look like an embarrassing generalization, an Enlightenment horror that strips historical specificity, race, class and gender from the human. The concept of species as such, lurking behind the notion of the Anthropocene, seems violently antique, like a rusty portcullis. To add insult to injury, solidarity can mean “community,” and this term is also compromised by notions of full presence and volkisch sentiments.

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But they produce only their own immediate needs or those of their young; they produce one-sidedly, while man produces universally; they produce only when immediate physical need compels them to do so, while man produces even when he is free from physical need and truly produces only in freedom from such need … It is therefore in his fashioning of the objective that man really proves himself to be a species-being … estranged labour therefore tears away from him his species-life, his true species-objectivity, and transforms his advantage over animals into the disadvantage that his inorganic body, nature, is taken from him.48 In the second passage, not a page later, only humans get to universalize. We end up with the idea that only humans have species-being. Notice, then, that species-being is ambiguously anthropocentric. It has one foot in anthropocentrism, but one foot not. Humankind is arguing that we can lift out the foot standing in anthropocentrism. The Anthropocene is the time at which the human becomes truly thinkable in a non-teleological, non-metaphysical sense. The waste products in Earth’s crust are also the human in this expanded, spectral sense, as if what the human becomes is a flickering ghost surrounded by a penumbra of flickering shadows that seem to hover around it like a distorted halo.

The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming by David Wallace-Wells

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Blockadia, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Chekhov's gun, climate anxiety, cognitive bias, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, effective altruism, Elon Musk, endowment effect, energy transition, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, failed state, fiat currency, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, it's over 9,000, Joan Didion, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kevin Roose, Kim Stanley Robinson, labor-force participation, life extension, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, megastructure, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, microplastics / micro fibres, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Sam Altman, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, the built environment, The future is already here, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Whole Earth Catalog, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

* * * — When Bill McKibben declared “The End of Nature,” in 1989, he was posing a hyperbolic kind of epistemological riddle: What do you call it, whatever it is, when forces of wilderness and weather, of animal kingdoms and plant life, have been so transformed by human activity they are no longer truly “natural”? The answer came a few decades later with the term “the Anthropocene,” which was coined in the spirit of environmental alarm and suggested a much messier and more unstable state than “end.” Environmentalists, outdoorspeople, nature lovers, and romantics of various stripes—there are many who would mourn the end of nature. But there are literally billions who will shortly be terrified by the forces unleashed by the Anthropocene. In much of the world, they already are, in the form of lethal close-to-annual heat waves in the Middle East and South Asia, and in the ever-present threat of flood, like those that hit Kerala in 2018 and killed hundreds.

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around ten times faster: Sarah Griffiths, “Global Warming Is Happening ‘Ten Times Faster than at Any Time in the Earth’s History,’ Climate Experts Claim,” The Daily Mail, August 2, 2013. See also Melissa Davey, “Humans Causing Climate to Change 170 Times Faster than Natural Forces,” The Guardian, February 12, 2017; this estimate for a rate of warming 170 times faster came from Owen Gaffney and Will Steffen, “The Anthropocene Equation,” The Anthropocene Review, February 10, 2017, https://doi.org/10.1177/2053019616688022. the average American emits: Dirk Notz and Julienne Stroeve, “Observed Arctic Sea-Ice Loss Directly Follows Anthropogenic CO2 Emission,” Science, November 3, 2016. See also Robinson Meyer, “The Average American Melts 645 Square Feet of Arctic Ice Every Year,” The Atlantic, November 3, 2016.

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This is a note of contrarian optimism echoing Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, in their Break Through: Why We Can’t Leave Saving the Planet to Environmentalists and Love Your Monsters: Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene; and the Canadian, Swedish, and South African academics behind the research collaboration “Bright Spots,” who, despite considerably more concern about the effects of global warming, nevertheless keep a running list of positive environmental developments they believe makes the case for what they call a “good Anthropocene.” “The Second Coming”: Among other things, Yeats gave Joan Didion the lines she built into her essay “Slouching Towards Bethlehem”: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.”

The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable by Amitav Ghosh

Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, carbon footprint, climate fiction, Donald Trump, double helix, Fellow of the Royal Society, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeremy Corbyn, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, megacity, megaproject, Michael Shellenberger, Naomi Klein, non-fiction novel, Ronald Reagan, spinning jenny, Ted Nordhaus, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban planning

Richardson, ‘When the End of Human Civilization Is Your Day Job’, Esquire, 7 July 2015. 12 era of the Anthropocene: Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’, Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter 2009). 12 ‘processes of the earth’: The quote is from Naomi Oreskes, ‘The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change: How Do We Know We’re Not Wrong’, in Climate Change: What It Means for Us, Our Children and Our Grandchildren, ed. Joseph F.C. DiMento and Pamela Doughman (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007). For a discussion of the genealogy of the concept of the Anthropocene, see Paul J. Crutzen, ‘Geology of Mankind’, Nature 415 (January 2002): 23; and Will Steffen, Jacques Grinevald, Paul Crutzen and John McNeill, ‘The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 369 (2011): 842–67. 13 the wind in our hair: Stephanie LeMenager calls this ‘the road-pleasure complex’ in Living Oil: Petroleum Culture in the American Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 81. 14 Bangkok uninhabitable: Cf.

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In thinking about the mismatch between my personal concerns and the content of my published work, I have come to be convinced that the discrepancy is not the result of personal predilections: it arises out of the peculiar forms of resistance that climate change presents to what is now regarded as serious fiction. 4 In his seminal essay ‘The Climate of History’, Dipesh Chakrabarty observes that historians will have to revise many of their fundamental assumptions and procedures in this era of human-induced climate change, in which ‘humans have become geological agents, changing the most basic physical processes of the earth’. I would go further and add that the Anthropocene presents a challenge not only to the arts and humanities, but also to our common-sense understandings and beyond that to contemporary culture in general. There can be no doubt, of course, that this challenge arises in part from the complexities of the technical language that serves as our primary window on climate change.

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His review, when I read it, made a great impression on me: I found that in the process of writing about Munif’s book Updike had also articulated, elegantly and authoritatively, a conception of the novel that was indisputably an accurate summing-up of a great deal of contemporary fiction. Yet it was a conception with which I found myself completely at odds. The differences between Updike’s views and mine have an important bearing on some of the aspects of the Anthropocene that I have been addressing here, so it is best to let him speak for himself. Here is what he had to say about Cities of Salt: ‘It is unfortunate, given the epic potential of his topic, that Mr. Munif . . . appears to be . . . insufficiently Westernized to produce a narrative that feels much like what we call a novel.

A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet by Raj Patel, Jason W. Moore

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Bartolomé de las Casas, biodiversity loss, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, company town, complexity theory, creative destruction, credit crunch, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, energy transition, European colonialism, feminist movement, financial engineering, Food sovereignty, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Haber-Bosch Process, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, means of production, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, microcredit, Naomi Klein, Nixon shock, Occupy movement, peak oil, precariat, scientific management, Scientific racism, seminal paper, sexual politics, sharing economy, source of truth, South Sea Bubble, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, surplus humans, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, wages for housework, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War

These ideas, we suggest, offer a way to think beyond a world of cheap things to imagine how we might live without the real abstractions of Nature and Society and the strategies that capitalism’s ecology has spawned. If this sounds revolutionary, so much the better. Notes INTRODUCTION Epigraph. Nietzsche 2001, §125, 120. 1. Roberts 1989; Hansen and Sato 2012. 2. Carrington 2016; Working Group on the ‘Anthropocene’ 2016. Here we refer to the Anthropocene as a field of geological inquiry: the Geological Anthropocene. It is distinct from its widely circulated sibling, the Popular Anthropocene, which encompasses a broad discussion of the origins of ecological crisis. See Moore 2016, 2017a, 2017b. 3. Barnosky et al. 2012, 52. 4. See, e.g., the excellent N. Klein 2014. 5. Barnosky et al. 2004. 6.

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Woods, Jeremy, Adrian Williams, John K. Hughes, Mairi Black, and Richard Murphy. 2010. “Energy and the Food System.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 365, no. 1554: 2991–3006. Working Group on the “Anthropocene.” 2016. “What Is the ‘Anthropocene’?—Current Definition and Status.” Last modified January 4. http://quaternary.stratigraphy.org/workinggroups/anthropocene/. World Economic Forum. 2012. Energy for Economic Growth: Energy Vision Update 2012. Geneva: World Economic Forum. http://reports.weforum.org/energy-for-economic-growth-energy-vision-update-2012/. ———. 2016. The New Plastics Economy: Rethinking the Future of Plastics.

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Accounting, Business and Financial History 16, no. 2: 219–43. Carney, Judith Ann. 2001. Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Carrington, Damian. 2016. “The Anthropocene Epoch: Scientists Declare Dawn of Human-Influenced Age.” Guardian, August 29. www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/aug/29/declare-anthropocene-epoch-experts-urge-geological-congress-human-impact-earth. Catz, Rebecca. 1993. Christopher Columbus and the Portuguese, 1476–1498. Westport, CT: Greenwood. Cavanagh, Edward. 2013. “Kingdom or Colony? English or British? Early Modern Ireland and the Colonialism Question.”

Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future by Elizabeth Kolbert

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, big-box store, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, Donald Davies, double helix, Hernando de Soto, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jacob Silverman, James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, lockdown, Maui Hawaii, moral hazard, negative emissions, ocean acidification, Stewart Brand, The Chicago School, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

This system has allowed the Chinese to harvest immense quantities of carp—almost fifty billion pounds in 2015 alone. In the sort of irony the Anthropocene teems with, the number of free-swimming carp in China has crashed even as pond-raised populations have soared. Thanks to projects like the Three Gorges Dam, on the Yangtze, river fish are having trouble spawning. The carp are thus at once instruments of human control and victims of it. The four famous fish ended up in the Mississippi, at least in part, owing to Silent Spring—another Anthropocene irony. In the book, whose working title was The Control of Nature, Rachel Carson denounced the very idea.

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The quantities involved were comparatively small, but, according to advocates of this theory, known as the “early Anthropocene hypothesis,” the effect was fortuitous. Owing to natural cycles, CO2 levels should have been falling during this period. Human intervention kept them more or less constant. “The start of the switchover from control of climate by nature to control by humans occurred several thousand years ago,” William Ruddiman, a professor emeritus at the University of Virginia and the most prominent proponent of an “early Anthropocene,” has written. According to a second, more widely held view, the switchover only really started in the late-eighteenth century, after the Scottish engineer James Watt designed a new kind of steam engine.

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“In fact,” as a recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences observed, “humans and livestock outweigh all vertebrates combined, with the exception of fish.” We have become the major driver of extinction and also, probably, of speciation. So pervasive is man’s impact, it is said that we live in a new geological epoch—the Anthropocene. In the age of man, there is nowhere to go, and this includes the deepest trenches of the oceans and the middle of the Antarctic ice sheet, that does not already bear our Friday-like footprints. An obvious lesson to draw from this turn of events is: be careful what you wish for. Atmospheric warming, ocean warming, ocean acidification, sea-level rise, deglaciation, desertification, eutrophication—these are just some of the by-products of our species’s success.

The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis by Christiana Figueres, Tom Rivett-Carnac

3D printing, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Extinction Rebellion, F. W. de Klerk, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gail Bradbrook, General Motors Futurama, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mustafa Suleyman, Nelson Mandela, new economy, ocean acidification, plant based meat, post-truth, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, the scientific method, trade route, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, Yogi Berra

National Aeronautics and Space Administration, “As Seas Rise, NASA Zeros In: How Much? How Fast?” August 3, 2017, https://www.nasa.gov/​goddard/​risingseas. 13. Joseph Stromberg, “What Is the Anthropocene and Are We in It?” Smithsonian, January 2013, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/​science-nature/​what-is-the-anthropocene-and-are-we-in-it-164801414/. 14. An exploration can be found in Darrell Moellendorf, “Progress, Destruction, and the Anthropocene,” Social Philosophy and Policy 34, no. 2 (2017): 66–88. See also the documentary film Anthropocene: The Human Epoch, 2018, https://theanthropocene.org/​film/. 15. More than 3 degrees Celsius warmer than the preindustrial average global temperature. 16.

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Some suggest we are already living through the sixth mass extinction.7 According to the latest research, 12 percent of all surviving species are currently threatened, and climate breakdown will significantly amplify that threat.8 Oceans have absorbed more than 90 percent of the extra heat we have produced over the last fifty years.9 As a result, half the world’s coral reefs are already dead,10 and the Arctic summer sea ice, whose reflective capacity helps to regulate temperatures all over the world, is shrinking rapidly.11 The melt from land glaciers has already caused sea levels to rise more than twenty centimeters, leading to major salt intrusion in many aquifers, worsening storm surges and existential threats to low-lying islands.12 In short, in just the last fifty years we have catapulted humanity and the planet out of the previous benevolent Holocene epoch and into the Anthropocene, a new geological period where biogeochemical conditions are dominated not by natural processes but by the palpable impact of human activity. Humans are for the first time ever the prime driver of large-scale climate change on the planet.13 All studies you may read about the Anthropocene epoch point to the unprecedented levels of destruction that we have caused in just five decades.14 The underlying assumption in those analyses is that we have irretrievably cast our die and that increasing destruction will be the leitmotif of the entire geological era.

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Sir David Attenborough, one of the most renowned naturalists of our time, has warned us that “the Garden of Eden is no more.” We agree. That is why we now have to create a Garden of Intention—a deliberately regenerative Anthropocene. Instead of strip-mined mountains, destroyed forests, and depleted oceans, imagine millions of rewilding projects covering over a billion hectares of forests, regenerating wetlands and grasslands, and restoring coral farms in all tropical oceans. We will not have a regenerative Anthropocene by default, but we can create it by design. With directional intent, we can shift our aspirations from our current extractive growth to a life-sustaining society of regenerative values, principles, and practices.

Grand Transitions: How the Modern World Was Made by Vaclav Smil

8-hour work day, agricultural Revolution, AltaVista, Anthropocene, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, Boeing 747, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, energy transition, European colonialism, Extinction Rebellion, Ford Model T, garden city movement, general purpose technology, Gini coefficient, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, hydraulic fracturing, hydrogen economy, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microplastics / micro fibres, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, peak oil, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, power law, precision agriculture, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Republic of Letters, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Singularitarianism, Skype, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, working-age population

Jeanne Calment: The secret of longevity. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/329773795_Jeanne_Calment_the_secret_of_longevity Zalasiewicz, J. et al. 2016. The geological cycle of plastics as a stratigraphic indicator of the Anthropocene. Anthropocene 13:4–17. Zalasiewicz, J. et al. 2017. The Working Group on the Anthropocene: Summary of evidence and interim recommendations. Anthropocene 19:55–60. Zarfl, C. et al. 2011. Microplastics in oceans. Marine Pollution Bulletin 62(8):1589–1591. Zarfl, C. et al. 2014. A global boom in hydropower dam construction. Aquatic Sciences. doi 10.1007/s00027-014-0377- Zhang, B. 2015.

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This is an apposite place to note that some critics would dismiss these prefatory remarks concerning environmental changes as being fundamentally insufficient because we now live in the Anthropocene, a new geological era supposedly characterized by the dominant role of humans: The Anthropocene concerns human impacts on the Earth System, not on the environment, and one cannot understand the emergence of the concept of the Anthropocene without an understanding of the radically new conception of the Earth System that emerged with Earth System science in the 1980s and 1990s. . . . The Earth System is not “the landscape,” it is not “ecosystems,” and it is not “the environment” (Hamilton 2015, 103).

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The progressive increase of food waste in America and its environmental impact. http://www.plosone.org/article/metrics/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0007940 Hallmann, C.A. et al. 2017. More than 75 percent decline over 27 years in total flying insect biomass in protected areas. PLoSONE 12(10): e0185809. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0185809 Hamilton, C. 2015. Getting the Anthropocene so wrong. The Anthropocene Review 2:102–107. Hanemann, T. and M. Huotari. 2017. Record Flows and Growing Imbalances: Chinese Investment in Europe in 2016. Berlin: Mercator Institute of China Studies. Hanley, S.B. 1974. Fertility, mortality, and life expectancy in pre-modern Japan. Population Studies 28:127–142.

This Will Make You Smarter: 150 New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking by John Brockman

23andMe, adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, biofilm, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, butterfly effect, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, cognitive load, congestion charging, correlation does not imply causation, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data acquisition, David Brooks, delayed gratification, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, Garrett Hardin, Higgs boson, hive mind, impulse control, information retrieval, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, market design, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, microbiome, Murray Gell-Mann, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, open economy, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, placebo effect, power law, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, randomized controlled trial, rent control, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, Satyajit Das, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, security theater, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Stanford marshmallow experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, sugar pill, synthetic biology, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, Turing complete, Turing machine, twin studies, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

While such “inconvenient truths” about the carbon cycle have been the poster child for our species’ slow-motion suicide, that’s just part of a much larger picture, with all the eight global life-support systems under attack by our daily habits. Anthropocene thinking tells us the problem is not necessarily inherent in the systems like commerce and energy that degrade nature; one hopes that these can be modified to become self-sustaining, with innovative advances and entrepreneurial energy. The real root of the Anthropocene dilemma lies in our neural architecture. We approach the Anthropocene threat with brains shaped by evolution to survive the previous geological epoch, the Holocene, when dangers were signaled by growls and rustles in the bushes, and it served one well to reflexively abhor spiders and snakes.

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Could any of the computer, behavioral, or brain sciences come up with an information prosthetic that might reverse our course? Paul Crutzen, the Dutch atmospheric chemist who received a Nobel for his work on ozone depletion, coined the term “Anthropocene” ten years ago. As a meme, “Anthropocene” has as yet little traction in scientific circles beyond geology and environmental science, let alone the wider culture: A Google check on “anthropocene,” as of this writing, shows 78,700 references (mainly in geoscience), while, by contrast, “placebo,” a once esoteric medical term now well established as a meme, has more than 18 million (and even the freshly coined “vuvuzela” has 3,650,000).

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William Calvin Find That Frame What has been cropped out of the frame can lead the unwary to an incorrect inference. Jay Rosen Wicked Problems In the United States, rising health care costs are a classic case of a wicked problem. No “right” way to view it. Daniel Goleman Anthropocene Thinking Beginning with cultivation and accelerating with the Industrial Revolution, our planet left the Holocene epoch and entered . . . the Anthropocene, in which human systems erode the natural systems that support life. Alun Anderson Homo dilatus Cancun follows Copenhagen follows Kyoto, but the more we dither and no extraordinary disaster follows, the more dithering seems just fine.

Five Billion Years of Solitude: The Search for Life Among the Stars by Lee Billings

addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Arthur Eddington, California gold rush, Colonization of Mars, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dava Sobel, double helix, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Ford Model T, full employment, Hans Moravec, hydraulic fracturing, index card, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, Late Heavy Bombardment, low earth orbit, Magellanic Cloud, music of the spheres, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, planetary scale, private spaceflight, profit motive, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, selection bias, Silicon Valley, space junk, synthetic biology, technological singularity, the scientific method, transcontinental railway

We cannot say, however, whether whatever may later find the Anthropocene’s new shales will, as we did, extract and burn the accompanying deposits of oil and gas to build a global technological civilization. Fossils abutting the Holocene-Anthropocene transition will record a planetary mass extinction event, the sixth in Earth’s history, one in which species-rich ecosystems developed over tens of millions of years suddenly, irretrievably vanished and were replaced with agrarian homogeneity. Upper Holocene fossil beds will reward any future paleontologists with finds such as lithified coral reefs and carbonized amphibians; lower Anthropocene beds will more likely offer corn cobs, cow bones, petrified oil palms, and perhaps even some remains of their human masters, to whose needs they were bent and bred.

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Crutzen felt compelled to coauthor an influential paper with the aquatic ecologist Eugene Stoermer arguing that our newfound planetary powers placed us in an entirely new geological period. In this “recent age of man,” the “Anthropocene,” human dominance altered the skies and seas, and even changed the very rocks that through the eons would endure as mute testament to our era. For many millions of years to come, the Holocene-Anthropocene transition will be clearly visible to the naked eye wherever a proper rock face is exposed. In marine basins where white carbonate sediment once settled to form limestone and chalk, CO2-saturated ocean water will have become more acidic, depositing instead dark carbonate-depleted clays and muds.

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Gas shale seems, in fact, to be so abundant that it could almost unilaterally transform the fortunes of many developing countries, bringing economic prosperity and soaring levels of consumption and greenhouse emissions. In developed nations already hooked on ancient carbon, the shales could be a lifeline, found and seized just before the Anthropocene’s fossil-fuel boom would otherwise reach its end. Arthur looked down at his desk, strewn with unsteady piles of paper, charts of geologic sections and maps of stratigraphic thickness—the detritus of a scientist working to unwrap rockbound gifts from the Earth. He briefly closed his eyes and raised his fingers to rub his forehead, as if to stave off the full-steam arrival of a freight-train headache.

Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, clean water, David Graeber, demographic dividend, demographic transition, deskilling, domesticated silver fox, facts on the ground, founder crops, invention of writing, joint-stock company, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, means of production, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, zoonotic diseases

While the thick Anthropocene is judged by some to have begun with worldwide deposit of radioactivity following the dropping of the first atomic bomb, there is what I have termed a “thin” Anthropocene that dates from the use of fire by Homo erectus roughly half a million years ago and extends up through clearances for agriculture and grazing and the resulting deforestation, and siltation. The impact and tempo of this early Anthropocene grows as the world’s population swells to roughly twenty-five million in 2,000 BCE. There is no particular reason to insist on the label “Anthropocene”—a term both in vogue and in much dispute as I write—but there are many reasons to insist on the global environmental impact of the domestication of fire, plants, and grazing animals.

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Just how massive that impact has become is captured in the lively debate swirling around the term “Anthropocene,” coined to name a new geological epoch during which the activities of humans became decisive in affecting the world’s ecosystems and atmosphere.1 While there is no doubt about the decisive contemporary impact of human activity on the ecosphere, the question of when it became decisive is in dispute. Some propose dating it from the first nuclear tests, which deposited a permanent and detectable layer of radioactivity worldwide. Others propose starting the Anthropocene clock with the Industrial Revolution and the massive use of fossil fuels.

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A case could also be made for starting the clock when industrial society acquired the tools—for example, dynamite, bulldozers, reinforced concrete (especially for dams)—to radically alter the landscape. Of these three candidates, the Industrial Revolution is a mere two centuries old and the other two are still virtually within living memory. Measured by the roughly 200,000-year span of our species, then, the Anthropocene began only a few minutes ago. I propose an alternative point of departure that is far deeper historically. Accepting the premise of an Anthropocene as a qualitative and quantitative leap in our environmental impact, I suggest that we begin with the use of fire, the first great hominid tool for landscaping—or, rather, niche construction. Evidence for the use of fire is dated at least 400,000 years ago and perhaps much earlier still, long predating the appearance of Homo sapiens.2 Permanent settlement, agriculture, and pastoralism, appearing about 12,000 years ago, mark a further leap in our transformation of the landscape.

The God Species: Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans by Mark Lynas

Airbus A320, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, degrowth, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Easter island, Eyjafjallajökull, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, ice-free Arctic, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, megacity, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Negawatt, New Urbanism, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, peak oil, planetary scale, precautionary principle, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, special drawing rights, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, Tragedy of the Commons, two and twenty, undersea cable, University of East Anglia, We are as Gods

Wherever you look, this truth is there to behold: Pristine nature—Creation—has disappeared forever. There is a name for this new geological era. The Holocene—the 10,000-year, climatically equable post–ice age era during which human civilization evolved and flourished—has slipped into history, to make way for the Anthropocene. For the first time since life began, a single animal is utterly dominant: the ape species Homo sapiens. Evolution has equipped us with huge brains, stunning adaptability, and brilliantly successful technical prowess. In less than half a million years we have gone from prodding anthills with sticks to constructing a worldwide digital communications network.

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My thesis is the reverse: playing God (in the sense of being intelligent designers) at a planetary level is essential if creation is not to be irreparably damaged or even destroyed by humans unwittingly deploying our newfound powers in disastrous ways. At this late stage, false humility is a more urgent danger than hubris. The truth of the Anthropocene is that the Earth is far out of balance, and we must help it regain the stability it needs to function as a self-regulating, highly dynamic, and complex system. It cannot do so alone. This means jettisoning some fairly sacred cows. Nuclear power is, as many Greens are belatedly realizing, environmentally almost completely benign.

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Being against something can have just as big an opportunity cost as being for it. Certainly deciding on something as epochal as intentional climatic geoengineering would involve us in some truly awesome collective decisions, which we have only just begun to evolve the international governance structures to manage. But if we want the Anthropocene to resemble the Holocene rather than the Eocene (roughly 55–35 million years ago, which was several degrees hotter and had neither ice caps nor humans) we will need to act fast. On climate change, meeting the proposed planetary boundary means being carbon-neutral worldwide by mid-century, and carbon-negative thereafter.

Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World by Jason Hickel

air freight, Airbnb, Anthropocene, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, biodiversity loss, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate personhood, cotton gin, COVID-19, David Graeber, decarbonisation, declining real wages, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairphone, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gender pay gap, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, meta-analysis, microbiome, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, passive income, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Rupert Read, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, universal basic income

It was only with the rise of capitalism over the past few hundred years, and the breathtaking acceleration of industrialisation from the 1950s, that on a planetary scale things began to tip out of balance. Once we understand this, it changes how we think about the problem. We call this human epoch the Anthropocene, but in fact this crisis has nothing to do with humans as such. It has to do with the dominance of a particular economic system: one that is recent in origin, which developed in particular places at a particular time in history, and which has not been adopted to the same extent by all societies. As the sociologist Jason Moore has pointed out, this isn’t the Anthropocene – it’s the Capitalocene.1 This can be difficult to wrap our minds around at first. We tend to take capitalism so much for granted that we just assume it has more or less always been around, at least in nascent form.

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The language I’ve been using here – the language of ‘we’ – isn’t quite accurate. Even when we accept that capitalism is driving ecological breakdown, we have a tendency to describe it in collective terms, as if all humans are equally responsible. The ideology of the Anthropocene has a way of worming its way back into our discourse. But this assumption blinds us to what’s really going on. The word ‘Anthropocene’ is wrong not just because previous economic systems did not pose a threat to global ecology in the way that capitalism does today. It’s also that even today not all people are equally responsible. Once we grasp the relationship between GDP growth and ecological impact, it’s easy enough to guess that countries with higher GDP per capita will have higher ecological impact, and vice versa.

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Jason Hickel * * * LESS IS MORE How Degrowth Will Save the World Table of Contents PREFACEBy Kofi Mawuli Klu and Rupert Read of XR INTRODUCTIONWelcome to the Anthropocene Part OneMore is Less ONECapitalism – A Creation Story TWORise of the Juggernaut THREEWill Technology Save Us? Part TwoLess is More FOURSecrets of the Good Life FIVEPathways to a Post-Capitalist World SIXEverything is Connected Acknowledgements Endnotes About the Author Jason Hickel is an economic anthropologist, Fulbright Scholar and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He is originally from Eswatini (Swaziland) and spent a number of years with migrant workers in South Africa, writing about exploitation and political resistance in the wake of apartheid.

A Poison Like No Other: How Microplastics Corrupted Our Planet and Our Bodies by Matt Simon

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Anthropocene, biofilm, carbon footprint, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, decarbonisation, Easter island, epigenetics, food desert, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, microplastics / micro fibres, ocean acidification, precautionary principle, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, South China Sea, the built environment

., and Mark A. Maslin. 2018. The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Gowdy, John, and Lisi Krall. 2013. “The Ultrasocial Origin of the Anthropocene.” Ecological Economics 95:137–47. https://doi.org/10.1016 /j.ecolecon.2013.08.006. Zalasiewicz, Jan, Colin N. Waters, Juliana A. Ivar do Sul, Patricia L. Corcoran, Anthony D. Barnosky, Alejandro Cearreta, Matt Edgeworth, et al. 2016. “The Geological Cycle of Plastics and Their Use as a Stratigraphic Indicator of the Anthropocene.” Anthropocene 13:4–17. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ancene.2016.01.002. Wright, Ronald. 2004.

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Frontiers in Marine Science 7. https://doi .org/10.3389/fmars.2020.576170. Zalasiewicz, Jan, Colin N. Waters, Juliana A. Ivar do Sul, Patricia L. Corcoran, Anthony D. Barnosky, Alejandro Cearreta, Matt Edgeworth, et al. 2016. “The Geological Cycle of Plastics and Their Use as a Stratigraphic Indicator of the Anthropocene.” Anthropocene 13:4–17. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ancene.2016.01.002. Ross, Peter, Stephen Chastain, Ekaterina Vassilenko, Anahita Etemadifar, Sarah Zimmermann, Sarah-Ann Quesnel, Jane Eert, et al. 2021. “Pervasive Distribution of Polyester Fibres in the Arctic Ocean Is Driven by Atlantic Inputs.” Nature Communications 12:106. https://doi .org/10.1038/s41467-020-20347-1.

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Nowhere is untouched, and the crisis will only deepen as microplastics flow unabated into every corner of Earth and, by their very design, persist. “Are we going to go the way of climate change, and not listen to the scientists until it’s too late?” Enck asks. “On the plastic pollution issue, I think we still have time.” Geologists have been arguing about this notion of the Anthropocene, a new age in Earth history characterized by humanity’s transformation of the planet.25 The controversy isn’t about whether the age exists, but what signal in that geological record should mark its inception. You could make the case that it was the invention of agriculture, when we gave up the freedom of the hunter-gatherer lifestyle for the prison of the farm: body-breaking labor to produce grains that made us sicker yet created food surpluses that fed a booming population26—such a big population, in fact, that we had to invent plasticulture to sustain it.

The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism by Leigh Phillips, Michal Rozworski

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, Colonization of Mars, combinatorial explosion, company town, complexity theory, computer age, corporate raider, crewed spaceflight, data science, decarbonisation, digital rights, discovery of penicillin, Elon Musk, financial engineering, fulfillment center, G4S, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, germ theory of disease, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, hiring and firing, independent contractor, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kiva Systems, linear programming, liquidity trap, mass immigration, Mont Pelerin Society, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, post scarcity, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing machine, union organizing, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, We are all Keynesians now

One of capitalism’s great contradictions is that it increases the real connections between people at the same time as it encourages us to see each other as monadic individuals. All this demonstrates both the horror and marvel of the Anthropocene. Humanity so fully commands the resources that surround us that we have transformed the planet in mere decades, on a scale that leviathan biogeophysical processes took millions of years to accomplish. But such awesome capability is being wielded blindly, without intent, in the service of profit, rather than human need. The Socialist Anthropocene Climate researchers sometimes talk about a “good Anthropocene” and a “bad Anthropocene.” The latter describes the intensification, and perhaps acceleration, of humanity’s unintended disruption of the ecosystems on which we depend.

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Planning will have to account for the ecosystem services implicitly included in prices—as well as those that the market ignores. Therefore, any democratic planning of the human economy is at the same time a democratic planning of the earth system. Global democratic planning is not merely necessary for the good Anthropocene; it is the good Anthropocene. 11 CONCLUSION: PLANNING WORKS Planning exists all around us, and it clearly works; otherwise capitalists would not make such comprehensive use of it. That’s the simple message of this book and one that strikes at the heart of the dogma that “there is no alternative.” Today, this Thatcherite slogan is already wilting under the pressure of its own success.

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Other titles in this series available from Verso Books: Utopia or Bust by Benjamin Kunkel Playing the Whore by Melissa Gira Grant Strike for America by Micah Uetricht The New Prophets of Capital by Nicole Aschoff Four Futures by Peter Frase Class War by Megan Erickson Building the Commune by George Ciccariello-Maher Capital City by Samuel Stein The People’s Republic of Walmart How the World’s Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism LEIGH PHILLIPS AND MICHAL ROZWORSKI First published by Verso 2019 © Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski 2019 All rights reserved The moral rights of the authors have been asserted 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201 versobooks.com Verso is the imprint of New Left Books ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-516-7 ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-517-4 (UK EBK) ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-518-1 (US EBK) British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Typeset in Monotype Fournier Printed in the US by Maple Press CONTENTS Acknowledgements 1.Introduction 2.Could Walmart Be a Secret Socialist Plot? 3.Islands of Tyranny 4.Mapping the Amazon 5.Index Funds as Sleeper Agents of Planning 6.Nationalization Is Not Enough 7.Did They Even Plan the Soviet Union? 8.Hardly Automated Space Communism 9.Allende’s Socialist Internet 10.Planning the Good Anthropocene 11.Conclusion: Planning Works ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The idea for this book was born of a beer or three at a scruffy Gastown pub early on in our friendship. Sharing our frustrations about the absence of democratic planning from political debate, we quickly realized that we were both thinking of writing the very same book.

The Techno-Human Condition by Braden R. Allenby, Daniel R. Sarewitz

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, airport security, Anthropocene, augmented reality, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, coherent worldview, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, decarbonisation, different worldview, Edward Jenner, facts on the ground, friendly fire, Hans Moravec, industrial cluster, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, mutually assured destruction, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, Peter Singer: altruism, planetary scale, precautionary principle, prediction markets, radical life extension, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Silicon Valley, smart grid, source of truth, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

What it does mean is that human impact, intentional or not, is now affecting global systems, be they natural, built, social, or cultural, at all scales, and thus that the world as we must now live in it is increasingly affected by the choices, activities, and general milling around of a single species: ours. The term "Anthropocene" makes the same point. (See "Welcome to the Anthropocene," Nature 424 (2003): 709.) 12. Heidegger 1977, pp. 49 and 136. 13. As Karl Marx wrote in his 1852 article "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon," "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past."

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Even as technological, social, economic, organizational, and (yes) cognitive changes coevolve around us, we fall back into classic European Enlightenment terms: liberty, equality, progress, natural order, human "dignity," the Christian Great Chain of Being (and thus the blasphemy of engineering ourselves), and, perhaps above all, the individual as the meaningful unit of cognition, action, and meaning. 10 Transhumanism is at best a local phenomenon in a far more pervasive reality. All around us is the evidence of our first terraforming adventure-and it is not Mars, but Earth. Indeed, many scientists are beginning to call this era the Anthropocene (meaning, roughly, the Age of Humans). The background to much discussion of transhumanism is a world in which human activity increasingly affects global systems, including the climate and the hydrological, carbon, and nitrogen cycles of the anthropogenic Earth. l l And yet we know it not. We are strangers in our own strange land, homeless because we have been turfed out by our very successes.

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Earth's spectrum, however, is not just a matter of reflections from clouds, emitted infrared radiation, and the like. It also includes television and radio broadcasts and leakage from all sorts of technologies. Remember those pictures of Earth from space at night, and the electric lights spread over North America, Europe, and Asia. In the Anthropocene, perhaps the most fundamental physical manifestation of our planet in the universe, its , radiation spectrum, carries our signature. Or consider a more topical example. Virtually everyone is aware of global climate change, which vies with terrorism for billing as the top existential catastrophe.

Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist by Kate Raworth

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, bank run, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, circular economy, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, dematerialisation, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, Future Shock, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, global village, Henri Poincaré, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, land reform, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, loss aversion, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Minsky moment, mobile money, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, price mechanism, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, smart meter, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, systems thinking, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the map is not the territory, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, wikimedia commons

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stedman Jones, D. (2012) Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics. Oxford: Princeton University Press. Steffen, W. et al. (2011) ‘The Anthropocene: from global change to planetary stewardship’, AMBIO 40: 739–761. Steffen, W. et al. (2015) ‘The trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration’, Anthropocene Review 2: 1, pp. 81–98. Sterman, J. D. (2002) ‘All models are wrong: reflections on becoming a systems scientist’, System Dynamics Review 18: 4, pp. 501–531. Sterman, J. D. (2000) Business Dynamics: Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World.

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We would have to be crazy to kick ourselves out of the Holocene’s sweet spot, but that is, of course, exactly what we have been doing. Our growing pressure on the planet has turned us, humanity, into the single biggest driver of planetary change. Thanks to the scale of our impact, we have now left behind the Holocene and entered uncharted territory, known as the Anthropocene: the first geological epoch to have been shaped by human activity.29 What will it take, now that we are in the Anthropocene, to sustain the benevolent conditions that we knew in our Holocene home: its stable climate, ample fresh water, thriving biodiversity, and healthy oceans? In 2009 an international group of Earth-system scientists, led by Johan Rockström and Will Steffen, took on this question and identified nine critical processes – such as the climate system and the freshwater cycle – that, together, regulate Earth’s ability to maintain Holocene-like conditions (all nine are described more fully in the Appendix).

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J-P. (2009) Report by the Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Social Progress, Paris, p. 9. http://www.stiglitz-sen-fitoussi.fr/documents/rapport_anglais.pdf 23. United Nations (2015) Sustainable Development Goals, available at https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/?menu=1300 24. Steffen, W. et al. (2015) ‘The trajectory of the Anthropocene: the Great Acceleration’, Anthropocene Review 2: 1, pp. 81–98. 25. International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (2015) ‘Planetary dashboard shows “Great Acceleration” in human activity since 1950’, press release 15 January 2015, available at: http://www.igbp.net/news/pressreleases/pressreleases/planetarydashboardshowsgreataccelerationinhumanactivitysince1950.5.950c2fa1495db7081eb42.html 26.

Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy by Adam Tooze

2021 United States Capitol attack, air freight, algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blue-collar work, Bob Geldof, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, cognitive dissonance, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, floating exchange rates, friendly fire, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, junk bonds, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, oil shale / tar sands, Overton Window, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, Potemkin village, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, QR code, quantitative easing, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, social distancing, South China Sea, special drawing rights, stock buybacks, tail risk, TikTok, too big to fail, TSMC, universal basic income, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, yield curve

Ip, “Businesses Fret Over Potential Bernie Sanders Presidency,” Wall Street Journal, March 1, 2020. B. Schwartz, “Mike Bloomberg Prepares Media Onslaught Against Democratic Front-Runner Bernie Sanders,” CNBC, February 24, 2020. 78. A. Tooze, “ ‘We Are Living Through the First Economic Crisis of the Anthropocene,’ ” Guardian, May 7, 2020. 79. The best compact introduction is C. Bonneuil and J.-B. Fressoz, trans. D. Fernbach, The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us (Verso, 2016). 80. B. Croce, History: Its Theory and Practice (Russell & Russell, 1960). CHAPTER 1. ORGANIZED IRRESPONSIBILITY 1. Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, Financing Global Health 2019: Tracking Health Spending in a Time of Crisis (IHME, 2020); www.healthdata.org/sites/default/files/files/policy_report/FGH/2020/FGH_2019_Interior_Final_Online_2020.09.18.pdf. 2.

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* * * — Seeing 2020 as a comprehensive crisis of the neoliberal era—with regard to its environmental envelope, its domestic social, economic, and political underpinnings, and the international order—helps us find our historical bearings. Seen in those terms, the coronavirus crisis marks the end of an arc whose origin is to be found in the 1970s. It might also be seen as the first comprehensive crisis of the age of the Anthropocene to come—an era defined by the blowback from our unbalanced relationship to nature.78 But rather than trying prematurely to sketch the continuities of that half century of history, or attempting to project speculatively into the future, this book stays, as far as possible, in the moment itself.

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As it did to billions of other people around the world, the coronavirus forced me to change my plans. I began the year working on a book about the history of energy policy, tracing the political economy of carbon back to the era of the oil crises, mapping a prehistory of the Green New Deal. Like so many others, I had become preoccupied with the Anthropocene, a transformation driven by capitalist economic growth that puts in question the very separation between natural and human history.79 In February, as the virus was spreading silently around the world, I was traveling in East Africa, immersed for the first time in the history of the continent.

The Weather Makers: How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth by Tim Flannery

Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, biodiversity loss, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, climate change refugee, cross-subsidies, decarbonisation, Doomsday Clock, Ford Model T, Future Shock, Gregor Mendel, hydrogen economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Watt: steam engine, junk bonds, Medieval Warm Period, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, uranium enrichment, Y2K

Then the confluence of Milankovich’s cycles and levels of CO2 was similar to the present, and the warm spell was exceptionally long—26,000 years, as opposed to 12,000 for the others. Only time will tell whether Ruddiman is correct in placing the beginning of the Anthropocene at 8000 rather than 200 years ago. Nonetheless, his analysis is one of the most provocative and stimulating to be published in recent times. Regardless of its origin, today there are unmistakable signs that the Anthropocene is turning ugly. So great are the changes scientists are detecting in our atmosphere that time’s gates appear once again to be opening. Will the Anthropocene become the shortest geological Period on record? EIGHT DIGGING UP THE DEAD We walk on earth, we look after, like rainbow sitting on top.

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That unique factor, he decided, was ourselves, and in doing so he revolutionised another recent development—the endowing on our post-industrial times of its own geological period. It was Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen (awarded the prize for research into the ozone hole) and his colleagues who first recognised and named this momentous geological event. They called it the Anthropocene—meaning the age of humanity—and they marked its dawn at AD 1800 when methane and CO2 brewed up by the gargantuan machines of the Industrial Revolution first began to influence Earth’s climate.1 Ruddiman added an ingenious twist to this argument, for he detected what he believes to be human influences on Earth’s climate that occurred long before 1800.

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Had the insolation cycle controlled them, methane should have commenced declining around 8000 years ago, and gone into a rapid decline by 5000 years ago. Instead, after taking a shallow dip that bottomed out 5000 years ago, methane concentrations begin a slow but emphatic rise. This, Ruddiman argues, is evidence that humans had wrested control of methane emissions from nature, and so we should mark the Anthropocene’s dawn as occurring 8000 years ago rather than 200. It was the beginnings of agriculture—particularly wet agriculture such as that practised in flooded rice paddies in eastern Asia—that tipped the balance, for such agricultural systems can be prodigious producers of the gas. It’s fair to note too that farmers of other crops that require swampy conditions were making their own contributions at around this time.

On the Future: Prospects for Humanity by Martin J. Rees

23andMe, 3D printing, air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Benoit Mandelbrot, biodiversity loss, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, carbon tax, circular economy, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, decarbonisation, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, Dennis Tito, distributed ledger, double helix, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Great Leap Forward, Higgs boson, Hyperloop, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, quantitative hedge fund, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart grid, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, supervolcano, technological singularity, the scientific method, Tunguska event, uranium enrichment, Walter Mischel, William MacAskill, Yogi Berra

All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Control Number 2018935643 ISBN 978-0-691-18044-1 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Adobe Text Pro and Refrigerator Deluxe Printed on acid-free paper. ∞ Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 CONTENTS Preface vii INTRODUCTION 1 1  DEEP IN THE ANTHROPOCENE 11 1.1. Perils and Prospects 11 1.2. Nuclear Threats 17 1.3. Eco-Threats and Tipping Points 21 1.4. Staying within Planetary Boundaries 31 1.5. Climate Change 37 1.6. Clean Energy—and a ‘Plan B’? 44 2  HUMANITY’S FUTURE ON EARTH 61 2.1. Biotech 61 2.2. Cybertechnology, Robotics, and AI 83 2.3. 

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*   *   * For medieval Europeans, the entire cosmology—from creation to apocalypse—spanned only a few thousand years. We now envision time-spans a million times longer. But even in this vastly extended perspective, this century is special. It is the first when one species, ours, is so empowered and dominant that it has the planet’s future in its hands. We’ve entered an era that some geologists call the Anthropocene. The ancients were bewildered and helpless in the face of floods and pestilences—and prone to irrational dread. Large parts of the Earth were terra incognita. The ancients’ cosmos was just the Sun and planets surrounded by the fixed stars spread across the ‘vault of heaven’. Today, we know our Sun is one of one hundred billion stars in our galaxy, which is itself one of at least one hundred billion other galaxies.

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Finally, I address today’s global challenges—emphasising that these may require new international institutions, informed and enabled by well-directed science, but also responsive to public opinion on politics and ethics. Our planet, this ‘pale blue dot’ in the cosmos, is a special place. It may be a unique place. And we are its stewards in an especially crucial era. That is an important message for all of us—and the theme of this book. 1 DEEP IN THE ANTHROPOCENE 1.1. PERILS AND PROSPECTS A few years ago, I met a well-known tycoon from India. Knowing I had the English title of ‘Astronomer Royal’, he asked, ‘Do you do the Queen’s horoscopes’? I responded, with a straight face: ‘If she wanted one, I’m the person she’d ask’. He seemed eager to hear my predictions.

The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View From the Future by Naomi Oreskes, Erik M. Conway

Anthropocene, anti-communist, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Great Leap Forward, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Kim Stanley Robinson, laissez-faire capitalism, Lewis Mumford, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, military-industrial complex, oil shale / tar sands, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precautionary principle, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, stochastic process, the built environment, the market place

These materials included sulfates from coal combustion, as well as CO2 and methane (CH4) from a host of sources including fossil fuel combustion, concrete manufacture, deforestation, and then-prevalent agricultural techniques, such as growing rice in paddy fields and producing cattle as a primary protein source. In the 1970s, scientists began to recognize that human activities were changing the physical and biological functions of the planet in consequential ways—giving rise to the Anthropocene Period of geological history.1 None of the scientists who made these early discoveries was particularly visionary: many of the relevant studies were by-products of nuclear weapons testing and development.2 It was the rare man—in those days, sex discrimination was still widespread—who understood that he was in fact studying the limits of planetary sinks.

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By the late 1980s, scientists had recognized that concentrations of in the 1970s, scientists began to recognize that human activi- CO2 and other greenhouse ties were changing the physical gases were having discern- and biological functions of the ible effects on planetary cli- planet in consequential ways— mate, ocean chemistry, and giving rise to the Anthropocene biological systems, threat- Period of geological history. ening grave consequences if not rapidly controlled. Vari- ous groups and individuals began to argue for the need to limit greenhouse gas emissions and begin a transition to a non-carbon-based energy system. Historians view 1988 as the start of the Penumbral Period.

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Others consider that outcome wishful, in light of the dreadful events of the past, and reject the reappraisal that we wish to invite here. Evidently, the Penumbra falls even today—and likely will continue to fall for years, decades, and perhaps even centuries to come. Lexicon of Archaic Terms Anthropocene The geological period, beginning in approximately 1750 with the start of the Industrial Revolution, when humans have become geological agents whose activities effectively compete with, and begin to overwhelm, geophysical, geochemical, and biological processes. Baconianism A philosophy, generally attributed to the English jurist Sir Francis Bacon (1561–1626), that held that through experience, observation, and experiment, one could gather reliable knowledge about the natural world and this knowledge would empower its holder.

New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future by James Bridle

AI winter, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boeing 747, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, congestion charging, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Eyjafjallajökull, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fear of failure, Flash crash, fulfillment center, Google Earth, Greyball, Haber-Bosch Process, Higgs boson, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Bridle, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Large Hadron Collider, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, Leo Hollis, lone genius, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, Minecraft, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, oil shock, p-value, pattern recognition, peak oil, recommendation engine, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social graph, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stem cell, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, Uber for X, undersea cable, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks

It is perhaps this event that should be considered the beginning of the anthropocene, rather than some marvellous human invention belatedly recognised as suicidal. Not the invention of the coal-fired steam engine that kick-started the industrial age in the eighteenth century; not the fixation of nitrogen beginning with the invention of the Haber-Bosch process; not the release of billions of particles of radioactive contamination from the detonation of hundreds of nuclear bombs: the anthropocene starts with mass genocide, with planetary violence on such a scale that it registers in ice cores and the pollination of crops. It is the hallmark of the anthropocene that, unlike those epochs that started with a meteor strike or sustained volcanic eruptions, its origins are cloudy and uncertain.

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From Aldous Huxley, Island, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1962. 3.H. P. Lovecraft, ‘The Call of Cthulhu’, Weird Tales, February 1926. 4.Rebecca Solnit, ‘Woolf’s Darkness: Embracing the Inexplicable’, New Yorker, April 24, 2014, newyorker.com. 5.Donna Haraway, ‘Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene: Staying with the Trouble’ (lecture, ‘Anthropocene: Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet’ conference, UC Santa Cruz, May 9, 2014), opentranscripts.org. 6.Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas, New York: Harvest, 1966. 2Computation 1.John Ruskin, The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century: Two Lectures Delivered at the London Institution February 4th and 11th, 1884, London: George Allen, 1884. 2.Ibid. 3.Ibid. 4.Alexander Graham Bell, in a letter to his father Alexander Melville Bell, dated February 26, 1880, quoted in Robert V.

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In The Invisibles’ cosmology, this is one of the dramatic moments when the narrative collapses, and evidence of time travel and much else is revealed. For us, the strange, global entanglement of Cirrus homogenitus and its endless circulation and reproduction online through climate research and conspiracy theory is the moment when the weather becomes active data: a Storm-Cloud of the Anthropocene, unlimited in physical space and spreading through the network, and the paranoid imagination. Source: NASA. November 13, 2001, NOAA-15 AVHRR infrared over the southeastern United States, showing contrails of various ages. Scientists are at pains to disassociate ‘normal’ contrails from the conspiracists’ chemtrails, but they contain the seeds of the same crisis.

The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions by Greta Thunberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, basic income, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, BIPOC, bitcoin, British Empire, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, degrowth, disinformation, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Food sovereignty, global pandemic, global supply chain, Global Witness, green new deal, green transition, Greta Thunberg, housing crisis, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, land tenure, late capitalism, lockdown, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, phenotype, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, retail therapy, rewilding, social distancing, supervolcano, tech billionaire, the built environment, Thorstein Veblen, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban sprawl, zoonotic diseases

. / People in positions of power and privilege refused to acknowledge that climate change was a manifestation of a broken economic system. 1.8 Tipping Points and Feedback Loops Johan Rockström Scientifically, it is now well established that Earth has entered a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, where our globalized world constitutes the largest driver of change on Earth. The amount of CO2 emitted so far from our fossil fuel burning (some 500 billion tonnes of carbon) and the environmental destruction caused by us is sufficient to affect our planet’s future during the next half a million years. We are in the driver’s seat, determining the future state of our home, planet Earth. We triggered the Anthropocene some seventy years ago when our fossil-fuel-driven industrialized world economy went truly global, causing multiple ‘hockey sticks’ of rising human pressures; the ‘Great Acceleration’ is a fact, manifested in an accelerated rise in greenhouse gas emissions, fertilizer consumption, water use, marine fish catching and terrestrial biosphere degradation, to name just a few (Fig. 1).

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The scientific community now must explore whether we are at risk of destabilizing the entire Earth system, which means pushing biophysical systems and processes – like the ice sheets, forests and the ocean’s circulation of heat – past their tipping point, where feedbacks shift from cooling and dampening to warming and self-reinforcing, which could culminate in an irreversible drift of the entire planet away from the stable interglacial state of the planet, the Holocene, that we have benefitted from since the emergence of human civilizations some 10,000 years ago, and still completely depend on. This means that we have reached an existential fork in the road. We are in the Anthropocene and are seeing rising signs of the approach of irreversible tipping points. Still, the Earth system, while showing worrying signs of destabilization, remains in an interglacial Holocene-like state. This may seem odd, but it is the reason we can still talk of hope. While the Holocene is a state of the planet (an interglacial with two permanent ice caps in the Arctic and Antarctica), the Anthropocene, so far, is ‘only’ a trajectory – a movement away from a Holocene state and not, yet, a new state.

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Reproduced with permission of Oxfam 7: © Johnny Gaskell 8: Composite graph of ‘Atmospheric CO2 at Mauna Loa Observatory’, Dec 2021, Scripps Institution of Oceanography; NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory; #ShowYourStripes – Graphis & lead Scientist: Ed Hawkins, National Centre for Atmospheric Science, University of Reading; Data: UK Met Office. Design by sustention [PG]. Creative Commons License 9: Adapted from ‘Socio-economic trends’ and ‘Earth System Trends’ from ‘The trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration’ by Will Steffen, Wendy Broadgate, Lisa Deutsch, et al., The Anthropocene Review, 01/04/2015, Vol 2(1), 81–98, SAGE Publications, copyright © 2015, SAGE Publication. Reprinted with permission of SAGE Publications 10: © Johan Rockström. Reproduced with permission 11: Adapted from ‘Tipping elements in the Earth’s climate system’ by T.

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations by Thomas L. Friedman

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, centre right, Chris Wanstrath, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, demand response, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Flash crash, fulfillment center, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, inventory management, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, linear programming, Live Aid, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, ocean acidification, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, planetary scale, power law, pull request, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Solyndra, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Transnistria, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban decay, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

This is what the graphs look like: Source: Steffen, W., Broadgate, W., Deutsch, L., Gaffney, O., and Ludwig, C., “The Trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration.” Anthropocene Review (vol. 2, no. 1), pp. 81–98. Copyright © 2015 by the authors. Reprinted by permission of SAGE Publications, Ltd. Source: Steffen, W., Broadgate, W., Deutsch, L., Gaffney, O., and Ludwig, C., “The Trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration.” Anthropocene Review (vol. 2, no. 1), pp. 81–98. Copyright © 2015 by the authors. Reprinted by permission of SAGE Publications, Ltd. The Planetary Boundaries Once these accelerations were established, it became critical to try to quantify, as best one possibly could, the impacts they were having on Mother Nature’s most important systems, since she couldn’t tell us herself.

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They believe we’ve already left it behind and entered a new era that is being driven by … us. The name being given to this era is the “Anthropocene,” as in anthropo, for “man,” and cene, for “new.” It is a fancy scientific name for the power of many. “Human activity is leaving a pervasive and persistent signature on Earth,” said Colin Waters of the British Geological Survey, coauthor of an essay in the January 8, 2016, issue of Science making the case that the Anthropocene deserves to be defined as a distinct new epoch from the Holocene. The authors acknowledge that “any formal recognition of an Anthropocene epoch in the geological time scale hinges on whether humans have changed the Earth system sufficiently to produce a stratigraphic signature in sediments and ice that is distinct from that of the Holocene epoch,” and they go on to make the case that we have.

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Louis Park Agadez, Niger age of accelerations; dislocation and; education and; human adaptability as challenged by; as inflection point; innovation as response to; leadership and; the Machine and; Moore’s law and; social technologies and agriculture: in Africa and Middle East; climate change and; monocultures vs. polycultures in Airbnb; trust and air-conditioning Aita, Samir algorithms; human oversight and; self-improving Alivio Capital Allen, Paul Allisam, Graham Almaniq, Mati Al Qaeda Al-Shabab AltaVista Amazon (company) Amazon rain forest Amazon Web Services American Civil Liberties Union American Dream American Interest American University of Iraq “America’s New Immigrant Entrepreneurs: Then and Now” (Kauffman Foundation) Amman, Jordan amplifying, as geopolitical policy Andersen, Jeanne Anderson, Chris Anderson, Ross Anderson, Wendell Andreessen, Marc Andrews, Garrett Android AngularJS Annan, Kofi Anthropocene epoch Anthropocene Review anti-Semitism APIs (application programming interfaces) Apple; see also Jobs, Steve Applebaum, Anne Apple Newton Apple Pay apps revolution Arab Awakening Arabic, author’s study of Arab-Muslim world, golden age of Arafat, Yasser architects, software for Armstrong, Neil artificial intelligence (AI); intelligent algorithms and; intelligent assistance and Artnet.com Ashe, Neil Ashraf, Quamrul Assad, Bashar al- Associated Press Astren, Fred AT&T; intelligent assistance and; iPhone gamble of; lifelong learning and; as software company Atkinson, Karen atmosphere: aerosol loading in; CO2 in; ozone layer of ATMs Auguste, Byron Austria Austro-Hungarian Empire Autodesk automation, see computers, computing autonomous systems; see also cars, self-driving Autor, David Avaaz.org Azmar Mountain Bajpai, Aloke Baker, James A., III balance of power Bandar Mahshahr, Iran bandwidth Bangladesh bankruptcy laws bank tellers Barbut, Monique baseball, class-mixing and BASIC Bass, Carl Batman, Turkey BBCNews.com Bee, Samantha Beinhocker, Eric Beirut: civil war in; 1982 Israeli-Palestinian war in Bell, Alexander Graham Bell Labs Bennis, Warren Benyus, Janine Berenberg, Morrie Berenberg, Tess Berkus, Nate Berlin, Isaiah Berlin Wall, fall of Bessen, James Betsiboka River “Better Outcomes Through Radical Inclusion” (Wells) Between Debt and the Devil (Turner) Beykpour, Kayvon Bible Bigbelly garbage cans big data; consumers and; financial services and; software innovation and; supernova and Big Shift Big World, Small Planet (Rockström) “Big Yellow Taxi” (song) Bingham, Marjorie bin Laden, Osama bin Yehia, Abdullah biodiversity: environmental niches and; resilience and biodiversity loss; climate change and biofuels biogeochemical flows biomass fuels biotechnology bioweapons birth control, opposition to Bitcoin black elephants Blase, Bill blockchain technology Bloomberg.com Blumenfeld, Isadore “Kid Cann” Bobby Z (Bobby Rivkin) Bodin, Wes Bohr, Mark Bojia, Ayele Z.

Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet by Jeffrey Sachs

agricultural Revolution, air freight, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, biodiversity loss, British Empire, business process, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, digital divide, Edward Glaeser, energy security, failed state, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Global Witness, Haber-Bosch Process, impact investing, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, mass immigration, microcredit, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, peak oil, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, Skype, statistical model, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, unemployed young men, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, zoonotic diseases

JEFFREY D. SACHS Common Wealth Economics for a Crowded Planet PENGUIN BOOKS Contents Foreword by Edward O. Wilson PART ONE New Economics for the Twenty-first Century 1. Common Challenges, Common Wealth 2. Our Crowded Planet PART TWO Environmental Sustainability 3. The Anthropocene 4. Global Solutions to Climate Change 5. Securing Our Water Needs 6. A Home for All Species PART THREE The Demographic Challenge 7. Global Population Dynamics 8. Completing the Demographic Transition PART FOUR Prosperity for All 9. The Strategy of Economic Development 10.

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The major donors are on the record promising a doubling of aid to Africa (an extra $25 billion per year) by the year 2010, but as of 2007 have not delivered a sustained increase above the 2004 levels. There is still time to make good on the promises, but the clock is running and millions of lives are lost each year by this neglect. PART TWO Environmental Sustainability Chapter 3 The Anthropocene THE WORLD’S ABILITY TO COMBINE long-term economic growth with environmental health is heavily debated. Yet one thing is certain: the current trajectory of human activity is not sustainable. If we simply do what we are doing on the planet with unchanged technology—but on a much larger scale as China, India, and other large population centers experience rapid economic growth—the environmental underpinnings of global well-being will collapse.

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The gradual rise of the human population, from perhaps ten million in 8000 BC to five hundred million in AD 1800, was followed by an explosion of human population shown in Figure 3.1 that has changed everything about us and the natural environment. As of 1800, give or take a few decades, we entered the age of the Anthropocene, when human activity became the dominant driver of the natural environment. Starting around 1800 the traditional limits on the human population gave way to unprecedented new technologies. Before then, humanity had lived on the contemporaneous energy of the sun, mainly in the forms of food, fuel wood, fibers, and a modest capture of wind and water power.

Cities: The First 6,000 Years by Monica L. Smith

Anthropocene, bread and circuses, classic study, clean water, diversified portfolio, failed state, financial innovation, gentrification, hiring and firing, invention of writing, Jane Jacobs, New Urbanism, payday loans, place-making, Ponzi scheme, SimCity, South China Sea, telemarketer, the built environment, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, urban planning, urban renewal, wikimedia commons

Linkages Between a Gated Community and Its Poorer Neighbour in a Cape Town Master Plan Development,” Urban Studies 43, no. 2 (2006): 397–420. CHAPTER 10: A WORLD OF CITIES geologic era to be called the Anthropocene: For variable definitions of the Anthropocene, see P. J. Crutzen, “The ‘Anthropocene,’” in Early System Science in the Anthropocene, eds., Eckart Ehlers and Thomas Krafft (Berlin: Springer, 2006), 13; and Will Steffen, Paul J. Crutzen, and John R. McNeill, “The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?,” Ambio 36, no. 8 (2007): 614. Ecologists worry that the next generation: Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, rev. ed.

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With more than half of the world’s populations now living in cities, there’s an increased concentration not only of people but also of wealth, knowledge, and expertise in urban centers, too. It’s not surprising that scientists are increasingly calling for us to acknowledge the significant impact of humans through the development of a special geologic era to be called the Anthropocene: the time when humans’ impact has outweighed nature itself. An Unnatural World? One of the criticisms of urban life, particularly modern urban life with its plastics and internal-combustion engines and electric lines, is that we have become utterly removed from nature. Ecologists worry that the next generation of children will have no direct experience of an unpaved world and that the rest of us will become progressively disassociated from the realm of other living things.

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See also specific cities “first,” 75–87 maps, 28–33 street layouts, 36–38 urbanization, 1–9 working definition of, 9–12 ancient Egypt Amarna, 81, 238 education, 189–90 engineering, 209–11 obelisks, 238 portrait from, 184 ancient Egyptian obelisks, 238 ancient Greece coinage, 172, 174 middle-class life, 194–96 pottery, 46, 151, 152 Roman conquest of, 27, 163, 174 ancient Rome, 8, 227–28 baths, 132–33 coinage, 172, 174–75 concrete, 253 conquests and travels, 26–27, 163, 174 entertainment and tourism, 162–63 funerary practices, 218 hairstyles, 177 malaria, 90 maps, 28, 31–32, 51, 88 middle class, 212–13 middle managers of, 220 Monte Testaccio, 1–3, 159, 166 networks, 236, 238–39, 249 population, 243–44 roadways, 39, 144 slums, 113 souvenirs, 179 urban collapse, 254 walls, 124–25 waste infrastructure, 134–35 water infrastructure, 132–33, 223–24 water laws, 193–94 Angkor, 63–64, 268n collapse, 256, 258 eating and drinking, 168 animals extinctions, 9 life in modern cities, 230–32 science, 185-86 anonymity, 35–36, 78–79, 214 Anschuetz, Kurt, 149 Anthropocene, 229 Antony, Marc 174 anxiety, 215, 217–22 aqueducts, 132, 135, 208–9, 223–24 archaeology (archaeological research), 43–58 beginnings of site occupation, 54–58 challenges of deep digs, 53–57 crew members, 49–50 layers of ancient habitation, 44–46, 53 process of excavation, 48 rubric of approach, 46–47, 50–53 skill set required for, 43–44 tool kit for, 48–49 walls and, 125, 126–27 waste infrastructure and, 136 archaeological museums, 151–52 archaeological surveys, 59–65 “architectural dependence,” 38 “architectural restlessness,” 252 architecture, 12, 19, 25–26, 30, 47–48, 55, 105–9, 116–17, 126, 245, 249–53 Arthaśātra, 219 assimilation, 244–45 Assyrian Empire, 247–48 astronomy, 9, 11–12 Athenian Owl Coin, 174 Augustus, 124, 174–75, 238, 251 Aurelian, 125, 127 Australopithecus, 91 “auto malls,” 199 Aztec Empire, 20–23, 142–43, 167–68, 245, 254 Babylon, 57, 83, 128, 238 Babylonian law, 190–94, 217–18 ball courts, 25–26, 251 “bandwidth,” 102 Bangkok, 168, 227 banlieues, 109 Barbault, Jean, 42 barter systems, 153, 171–72 baths, 132–33 Bayon Temple (Angkor), 168 bazaar economies, 198–99 beads, 102–3, 155–56, 197–98 beggary, 173–74 beginnings of cities, 67–87 first cities, 75–87 ritual spaces, 68–75 Benin City, 125 Berlin Pergamon Museum, 128 Bermondsey, 109 bevel-rim bowls (BRBs), 152–53, 154, 156, 167 bike lanes, 141 biology, 9 bird life, 230–31 Bonampak, 219–20 breaking the glass, 158 Breasted, James Henry, 84 bridges, 26, 120, 140, 145 “bright lights, big city,” 7 British Museum, 81 Broman, Vivian, 154 Buffalo Bayou, 146 building construction, and engineering, 205–11 burial societies, 218 buskers, 214–15 Cairo, 27, 209 Campus Martius, 42 canals, 83, 120, 130–31, 145, 149, 208 Canterbury Tales, The (Chaucer), 247 Cape Town, South Africa, 224–25 Caracol, 166 carnivores, 230 Carter, Howard, 81 Carthage, 27, 254 cartography, 28–33 cash economies, 170–71, 172–76 catastrophic events, 90 Catholic Church, 238–39, 255 cave art, 105 Celts, 124, 125 ceremonial ship launching, 158 Chan Chan, 111–12 Chang’an, 39, 59 canals, 130–31 characteristics of cities, 12, 75–76 chemistry, 9 Chichén Itzá, 254 chicken wishbones, 158 Childe, V.

Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies by Geoffrey West

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, British Empire, butterfly effect, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean water, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, continuous integration, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, creative destruction, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, double helix, driverless car, Dunbar number, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, housing crisis, Index librorum prohibitorum, invention of agriculture, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, life extension, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Benioff, Marchetti’s constant, Masdar, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, Murray Gell-Mann, New Urbanism, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Thiel, power law, profit motive, publish or perish, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, Salesforce, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Suez canal 1869, systematic bias, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, time dilation, too big to fail, transaction costs, urban planning, urban renewal, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons, working poor

Consequently, some have proposed that we should date the beginnings of the Anthropocene from the Industrial Revolution, while others suggest it should be as recent as the middle of the twentieth century. Others have even suggested that it began more than ten thousand years ago coinciding with the beginning of the Holocene, the geological epoch that began when the Earth warmed up, leading to the development of agriculture and modern man. I am very enthusiastic about explicitly acknowledging our profound impact on the planet by naming a new epoch but would prefer that we reserve Anthropocene for the entire period going back several thousand years to when we first began to significantly diverge from being predominantly biological to becoming predominantly social by increasing our effective metabolic rate.

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THE FOURTH DIMENSION OF LIFE: Growth, Aging, and Death The Fourth Dimension of Life • Why Aren’t There Mammals the Size of Tiny Ants? • And Why Aren’t There Enormous Mammals the Size of Godzilla? • Growth • Global Warming, the Exponential Scaling of Temperature, and the Metabolic Theory of Ecology • Aging and Mortality 5. FROM THE ANTHROPOCENE TO THE URBANOCENE: A Planet Dominated by Cities Living in Exponentially Expanding Universes • Cities, Urbanization, and Global Sustainability • Digression: What Exactly Is an Exponential Anyway? Some Cautionary Fables • The Rise of the Industrial City and Its Discontents • Malthus, Neo-Malthusians, and the Great Innovation Optimists • It’s All Energy, Stupid 6.

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Among his many exploits, he gained a certain early notoriety when he and a fellow graduate student used statistical analysis to determine which roulette wheels at a casino in Reno, Nevada, were accidentally biased. By betting heavily on the ones that were most unbalanced, they cleaned up. The casinos eventually realized what was happening and banned them from betting. From his winnings Walford funded his medical school education as well as a year of sailing a yacht in the Caribbean. 5 FROM THE ANTHROPOCENE TO THE URBANOCENE A Planet Dominated by Cities 1. LIVING IN EXPONENTIALLY EXPANDING UNIVERSES One of the most startling and profound discoveries of the twentieth century was to learn that on the cosmic scale we are living in an exponentially expanding universe. An equally profound, but much less heralded, discovery was the realization that on the earthly scale we are also living in an exponentially expanding universe, this one socioeconomic.

Ecovillages: Lessons for Sustainable Community by Karen T. Litfin

active transport: walking or cycling, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, collaborative consumption, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, congestion pricing, corporate social responsibility, degrowth, glass ceiling, global village, hydraulic fracturing, intentional community, megacity, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planetary scale, publish or perish, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, the built environment, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, urban planning, Zipcar

Climate change and the mass extinction of species are the primary signs that we have entered a new geological age. Scientists call it the Anthropocene, the era dominated by the human presence. In other words, the upshot of the story of separation is that we are now the protagonists in the Great Unfoldment. This is our current evolutionary predicament. The question now is whether we can embrace a cosmology of wholeness and harmonize our lives with Earth’s community. With their lives, ecovillagers are voting on the side of “yes.” If they and other sustainability pioneers succeed, perhaps the Anthropocene will take a cue from Thomas Berry and bear a more humble name: the Ecozoic – the ecological era.

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The future depends upon how wide our circles of wisdom and compassion are today. If we want to live as a global species within the circle of life, then we need to scale up the lessons from ecovillages commensurately. Humanity is operating as a geophysical force, yet most of our members are utterly unaware of our perilous entry into the Anthropocene.15 At the same time, globalization has given us the material infrastructure for planetary connectivity. As we cross the threshold into this new era, the question is whether we can develop the technological, social, and spiritual connectivity to live as one species on our one Earth. To my mind, rising above endless consumption and aiming for connectivity is a worthy purpose.

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It is a purpose that supplants the old story of separation for it brings us home to ourselves as integral members of the Earth community. On a micro-scale, ecovillages are at the leading edge of this homecoming and can therefore help to illuminate the path. It is, however, a pathless path; we make it by walking forward together. The Anthropocene calls us to a larger sense of identity and responsibility. In this emergent identity, we can experience a global citizenship that simultaneously transcends and includes our bounded self and our existing social identities. In stretching our loyalties, we are each enlarged – particularly when we join with others who are embarking upon this pathless path.

The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity by Toby Ord

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, availability heuristic, biodiversity loss, Columbian Exchange, computer vision, cosmological constant, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, defense in depth, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, Doomsday Clock, Dr. Strangelove, Drosophila, effective altruism, Elon Musk, Ernest Rutherford, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Large Hadron Collider, launch on warning, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, OpenAI, p-value, Peter Singer: altruism, planetary scale, power law, public intellectual, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, seminal paper, social discount rate, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supervolcano, survivorship bias, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, uranium enrichment, William MacAskill

Proposed beginnings for this epoch include the megafauna extinctions, the Agricultural Revolution, the crossing of the Atlantic, the Industrial Revolution, or early nuclear weapons tests.66 Is this the same as the Precipice? How do they differ? • The Anthropocene is the time of profound human effects on the environment, while the Precipice is the time where humanity is at high risk of destroying itself. • The Anthropocene is a geological epoch, which typically last millions of years, while the Precipice is a time in human history (akin to the Enlightenment or the Industrial Revolution), which will likely end within a few centuries. • They might both officially start with the first atomic test, but this would be for very different reasons. For the Anthropocene, it would be mainly for convenient dating, while for the Precipice it is because of the risk nuclear weapons pose to our survival. 2 EXISTENTIAL RISK The crucial role we fill, as moral beings, is as members of a cross-generational community, a community of beings who look before and after, who interpret the past in light of the present, who see the future as growing out of the past, who see themselves as members of enduring families, nations, cultures, traditions.

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THE PRECIPICE & ANTHROPOCENE It has become increasingly clear that human activity is the dominant force shaping the environment. Scientists are concluding that humanity looms large not just in its own terms, but in the objective terms of biology, geology and climatology. If there are geologists in the distant future, they would identify the layer of rock corresponding to our time as a fundamental change from the layers before it. Our present-day geologists are thus considering making this official—changing their classification of geological time to introduce a new epoch called the Anthropocene. Proposed beginnings for this epoch include the megafauna extinctions, the Agricultural Revolution, the crossing of the Atlantic, the Industrial Revolution, or early nuclear weapons tests.66 Is this the same as the Precipice?

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., and Cohen, A. S. (2018). “Subdecadal Phytolith and Charcoal Records from Lake Malawi, East Africa, Imply Minimal Effects on Human Evolution from the ∼74 ka Toba Supereruption.” Journal of Human Evolution, 116, 75–94. Zalasiewicz, J., et al. (2017). “The Working Group on the Anthropocene: Summary of Evidence and Interim Recommendations.” Anthropocene, 19, 55–60. Zelicoff, A. P., and Bellomo, M. (2005). Microbe: Are We Ready for the Next Plague? AMACOM. Zhang, B., and Dafoe, A. (2019). Artificial Intelligence: American Attitudes and Trends. Center for the Governance of AI, Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford.

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari

23andMe, Aaron Swartz, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic trading, Anne Wojcicki, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, call centre, Chekhov's gun, Chris Urmson, cognitive dissonance, Columbian Exchange, computer age, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, don't be evil, driverless car, drone strike, European colonialism, experimental subject, falling living standards, Flash crash, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, glass ceiling, global village, Great Leap Forward, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, lifelogging, low interest rates, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Nick Bostrom, pattern recognition, peak-end rule, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, Ray Kurzweil, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, stem cell, Steven Pinker, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, too big to fail, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, ultimatum game, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero-sum game

Dedication To my teacher, S. N. Goenka (1924–2013), who lovingly taught me important things. Contents Dedication 1 The New Human Agenda PART I Homo Sapiens Conquers the World 2 The Anthropocene 3 The Human Spark PART II Homo Sapiens Gives Meaning to the World 4 The Storytellers 5 The Odd Couple 6 The Modern Covenant 7 The Humanist Revolution PART III Homo Sapiens Loses Control 8 The Time Bomb in the Laboratory 9 The Great Decoupling 10 The Ocean of Consciousness 11 The Data Religion Notes Acknowledgements Index About the Author Also by Yuval Noah Harari Credits Copyright About the Publisher In vitro fertilisation: mastering creation.

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King Ashurbanipal of Assyria slaying a lion: mastering the animal kingdom. © De Agostini Picture Library/G. Nimatallah/Bridgeman Images. PART I Homo sapiens Conquers the World What is the difference between humans and all other animals? How did our species conquer the world? Is Homo sapiens a superior life form, or just the local bully? 2 The Anthropocene With regard to other animals, humans have long since become gods. We don’t like to reflect on this too deeply, because we have not been particularly just or merciful gods. If you watch the National Geographic channel, go to a Disney film or read a book of fairy tales, you might easily get the impression that planet Earth is populated mainly by lions, wolves and tigers who are an equal match for us humans.

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In the same year, Europeans raised 1.9 billion chickens for meat and eggs.4 At present, more than 90 per cent of the large animals of the world (i.e. those weighing more than a few kilograms) are either humans or domesticated animals. Scientists divide the history of our planet into epochs such as the Pleistocene, the Pliocene and the Miocene. Officially, we live in the Holocene epoch. Yet it may be better to call the last 70,000 years the Anthropocene epoch: the epoch of humanity. For during these millennia Homo sapiens became the single most important agent of change in the global ecology.5 This is an unprecedented phenomenon. Since the appearance of life, about 4 billion years ago, never has a single species changed the global ecology all by itself.

Origins: How Earth's History Shaped Human History by Lewis Dartnell

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, bioinformatics, clean water, Columbian Exchange, decarbonisation, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, Eratosthenes, financial innovation, Google Earth, Khyber Pass, Malacca Straits, megacity, meta-analysis, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Pax Mongolica, peak oil, phenotype, rewilding, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, spice trade, Suez crisis 1956, supervolcano, trade route, transatlantic slave trade

The Planet in a Pebble: A Journey into Earth’s Deep History, Oxford University Press. Zalasiewicz, J., C. N. Waters and M. Williams (2014). ‘Human bioturbation, and the subterranean landscape of the Anthropocene’, Anthropocene 6: 3–9. Zalasiewicz, J., M. Williams, R. Fortey, A. Smith, T. L. Barry, A. L. Coe, P. R. Bown, P. F. Rawson, A. Gale, P. Gibbard, F. J. Gregory, M. W. Hounslow, A. C. Kerr, P. Pearson, R. Knox, J. Powell, C. Waters, J. Marshall, M. Oates and P. Stone (2011). ‘Stratigraphy of the Anthropocene’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A–Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 369(1938): 1036–55. Zeebe, R. E., A. Ridgwell and J.

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Our building of cities and roads, damming of rivers, and industrial and mining activity are having a profound and lasting effect, remoulding the landscape, changing the global climate and causing widespread extinctions. Scientists have proposed that a new geological epoch should be named to recognise this dominance of our influence over natural processes on the planet–the Anthropocene, the ‘recent age of humanity’.2 But as a species we are still inextricably linked to our planet, and the Earth’s history is imprinted in our make-up, just as much as our activities have left their distinct marks on the natural world. To truly understand our own story we must examine the biography of the Earth itself–its landscape features and underlying fabric, atmospheric circulation and climate regions, plate tectonics and ancient episodes of climate change.

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‘Mapping world oil transport’, http://blogs.reuters.com/data-dive/2015/03/27/mapping-world-oil-transport/. Cowie, J. (2012). Climate Change: Biological and Human Aspects, Cambridge University Press. Crowley, R. (2016). Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire, Faber & Faber. Crutzen, P. J. and E. F. Stoermer (2000). ‘The “Anthropocene”’, International Geosphere–Biosphere Programme (IGBP) Newsletter 41: 17–18. Cunningham, C. G., R. E. Zartman, E. H. McKee, R. O. Rye, C. W. Naeser, O. Sanjines, G. E. Ericksen and F. Tavera (1996). ‘The age and thermal history of Cerro Rico de Potosi, Bolivia’, Mineralium Deposita 31(5): 374–85.

Squid Empire: The Rise and Fall of the Cephalopods by Danna Staaf

3D printing, Anthropocene, colonial rule, Kickstarter, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, Skype, wikimedia commons

The total loss of the phragmocone in modern squid brings us to the development of ammonia for buoyancy, which had the curious side effect of erasing squid from the fossil record. Nautiluses, meanwhile, have somehow managed to retain their external shells: Are they doomed relics of the past or harbingers of evolution to come? Finally, we’ll bring ourselves up to date with the human-dominated Anthropocene, settling into the contemporary shape of the world as we look around us at the results of the past 500 million years. Return from the Deep After an initial warm spell following the end-Cretaceous extinction, continental drift and enthusiastic plant growth cooled the planet and kick-started a global ocean circulation pattern that would maintain itself up to the present day.

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Despite the popular use of “ice age” to refer to the time of woolly mammoths and migrating humans, when glaciers covered both New York and Old York, that time is more accurately known as the last “glacial period.” It ended about 15,000 years ago when permanent ice retreated to the poles and high places and the interglacial Holocene began. That’s our contemporary epoch, although scientists are considering that perhaps the Holocene ended and the Anthropocene began when humans became the most influential species on the planet. From our first appearance in Africa we moved around the world, often settling near the ocean, swimming and fishing and rowing and sailing. Just like the first animals in the Cambrian Explosion, we’re actively changing our environment, rendering many ecological niches inviable and opening a few new ones.

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But even the chemical and physical systems of the world are deeply entwined with each other, and with us living components. Changes wrought by humanity are now being felt on every level, from the deepest ocean trench to the most remote mountain glacier. After much informal bandying about of the word “Anthropocene,” a group of scientists in 2016 officially recommended using this name for a new geologic epoch. The International Commission on Stratigraphy is deliberating as I write. That’s how things stand now, 500 million years after the first fossil cephalopod and 200,000 years after the first fossil human.

Unsustainable Inequalities: Social Justice and the Environment by Lucas Chancel

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Anthropocene, behavioural economics, biodiversity loss, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, energy transition, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Gini coefficient, green new deal, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, job satisfaction, low skilled workers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, price stability, purchasing power parity, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, urban planning, very high income, Washington Consensus

The Problem of Environmental Responsibility The term Anthropocene was coined to describe the geological era we are living in today, one in which human activity modifies the geoclimatic system, by contrast with previous eras during which only geophysical forces were capable of altering the climate.1 While there is still some controversy among geophysicists regarding the term’s usefulness, it is undeniable that the climate system, under the influence of human action upon it, is being disrupted with stunning rapidity, the like of which was unknown until the present age. The notion of an Anthropocene era therefore has the virtue of directly confronting human beings with their responsibility for the derangement of planetary stability and for its long-term consequences.

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Gordon Walker and Kate Burningham, “Flood Risk, Vulnerability and Environmental Justice: Evidence and Evaluation of Inequality in a UK Context,” Critical Social Policy 31, no. 2 (2011): 216–240. 21. Hallegatte et al., Shock Waves. 5. Unequal Responsibility for Pollution 1. Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin, “Defining the Anthropocene,” Nature 519 (2015): 171–180. 2. Nicholas Stern, The Economics of Climate Change: The Stern Review (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 3. Lucas Chancel and Thomas Piketty, “Carbon and Inequality: From Kyoto to Paris; Trends in the Global Inequality of Carbon Emissions (1998–2013) and Prospects for an Equitable Adaptation Fund,” Paris School of Economics, November 3, 2015, http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/ChancelPiketty2015.pdf. 4.

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I am grateful to Marie-Edith Alouf, Dominique Chancel, and Aurore Lalucq for their careful proofreading. My thanks, finally, to my family and friends, to Alexandra for her endless patience, and to Kevin Jamey and Simon Ilse for their inexhaustible energy. INDEX agriculture, 75–77, 86–87 air pollution. See pollution air travel, 98, 136, 165n13 Anthropocene, 90–91 anxiety, 20–21 aquaculture, 76–77 baby boomers, 98–101 behavioral economics, 26–28 border carbon adjustment (BCA), 146 Brazil, 14, 43, 93, 97, 103, 117. See also Rio + 20 summit (2012) BRICS effect, 103 cancer, 78–79, 83 carbon tax, 3; debates on, 33–34, 126–127, 167n19; examples of, 6, 34, 113, 127–129; lack of support for, 146, 156n44, 169n14; progressive forms of, 134–136, 146–147.

How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell

Airbnb, Anthropocene, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Big Tech, Burning Man, collective bargaining, congestion pricing, context collapse, death from overwork, Donald Trump, Filter Bubble, full employment, gentrification, gig economy, Google Earth, Ian Bogost, Internet Archive, James Bridle, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, Minecraft, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Plato's cave, Port of Oakland, Results Only Work Environment, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Snapchat, source of truth, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, union organizing, white flight, Works Progress Administration

Solnit suggests that the real disaster is everyday life, which alienates us from each other and from the protective impulse that we harbor. And as my familiarity with and love for the crows grows over the years, I’m reminded that we don’t even need to limit this sense of kinship to the human realm. In her essay “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin,” Donna J. Haraway reminds us that relatives in British English meant “logical relations” until the seventeenth century, when they became “family members.” Haraway is less interested in individuals and genealogical families than in symbiotic configurations of different kinds of beings maintained through the practice of care—asking us to “make kin, not babies!”

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If, as I’ve argued, certain types of thought require certain types of spaces, then any attempt at “context collection” will have to deal not only with context collapse online, but with preserving public and open space, as well as the meeting places important to threatened cultures and communities. In a time increasingly referred to as the Anthropocene (a geologic era in which the environment is irreversibly shaped by human activity), I find Donna J. Haraway’s term for this era even more useful. She calls it the Chthulucene, in which “the earth is full of refugees, human and not, without refuge.” In Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Haraway writes, “One way to live and die well as mortal critters in the Chthulucene is to join forces to reconstitute refuges, to make possible partial and robust biological-cultural-political-technological recuperation and re-composition, which must include mourning irreversible losses.”23 With this in mind, when the logic of capitalist productivity threatens both endangered life and endangered ideas, I see little difference between habitat restoration in the traditional sense and restoring habitats for human thought

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Somewhere between over-engineering and abandonment, Fukuoka found the sweet spot by patiently listening and observing. His expertise lay in being a quiet and patient collaborator with the ecosystem he tended to. Fukuoka’s stance is an example of something that Jedediah Purdy suggests in his book After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene. In each subsequent chapter, Purdy shows how the different views of nature throughout history have each corresponded to a set of political beliefs about value and subjecthood, being used to justify everything from hierarchical social orders and racism (“everything in its place”) to an obsession with the productivity of industry.

Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason by William Davies

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, citizen journalism, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, Colonization of Mars, continuation of politics by other means, creative destruction, credit crunch, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, digital divide, discovery of penicillin, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, first-past-the-post, Frank Gehry, gig economy, government statistician, housing crisis, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, mutually assured destruction, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, post-industrial society, post-truth, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, Turing machine, Uber for X, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Valery Gerasimov, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

In 2000, the geologists Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer suggested that the earth had entered a new epoch which they christened the “Anthropocene,” as its climate appeared to have changed irreversibly as a result of human (anthropic) activities. The build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, plastics in the oceans, and production of new radioactive materials contributed to an epochal shift. Aside from the geological significance of such a break, this has deep philosophical and political importance: nature is not something pure and separate from culture, but already bears the stamp of human activity. Others have pointed to 1945 as the key year in the rise of the Anthropocene, as Hiroshima made manifest humanity’s capacity to rapidly destroy their own world.

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Public debate might descend into irresolvable conflicts, but the intelligence powers of business, computing, and the military expand all the time. The good news is that, at least in terms of technical equipment, we could scarcely be more capable of dealing with the uncertainties and dangers of the Anthropocene. Even if consensus on nature and society seems further off than ever, coordination of responses is still eminently possible. We are endowed with a global information nervous system, allowing us to detect change and react at great speed. An example of this is how financial markets are harnessed as environmental policy tools, with new markets and derivatives in carbon being constructed, in the hope that the sentiments and guessing games of the financial economy will spontaneously steer us toward a sustainable path.

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has collected written letters from climate scientists describing their feelings about their work. One writes that “It is probably the first time that I have been asked to describe what I feel, rather than what I think” about climate change. The letters frequently include words such as “overwhelmed,” “tired,” “fear,” but also several references to “hope” and “excitement.” The Anthropocene epoch offers a different political role for science, which could connect with the emotions that are otherwise channeled into more tribal forms of politics. Throughout its history, modern science has been vulnerable to the charge that it is aloof, amoral, and oblivious to ordinary people. Science, from this perspective, turns nature into something mechanical, abstract, and distant.

Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers by Stephen Graham

1960s counterculture, Anthropocene, Bandra-Worli Sea Link, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, Chelsea Manning, commodity super cycle, creative destruction, Crossrail, deindustrialization, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Elisha Otis, energy security, Frank Gehry, gentrification, ghettoisation, Google Earth, Gunnar Myrdal, high net worth, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, megaproject, megastructure, military-industrial complex, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, nuclear winter, oil shale / tar sands, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Project Plowshare, rent control, Richard Florida, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, security theater, Skype, South China Sea, space junk, Strategic Defense Initiative, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trickle-down economics, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, white flight, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche

Sebald’s Apocalyptic Vision: The World Will End in 2013’, New Statesman, 4 June 2013. 2Pascal Peduzzi, ‘Sand, Rarer Than One Thinks’, Environmental Development 11, 2014, p. 208. 3Simon Price, Jonathan Ford, Anthony Cooper and Catherine Neal, ‘Humans as Major Geological and Geomorphological Agents in the Anthropocene: The Significance of Artificial Ground in Great Britain’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 369:1938, 2011, pp. 1056–84. 4Roger Hooke, ‘On the History of Humans as Geomorphic Agents’, Geology 28:9, 2000, pp. 843–6. 5Gavin Bridge, ‘Material Worlds: Natural Resources, Resource Geography and the Material Economy’, Geography Compass, 3:3, 2009, pp. 1217–44. 6Seth Denizen, ‘Three Holes: In the Geological Present’, in Etienne Turpin, ed., Architecture in the Anthropocene: Encounters among Design, Deep Time, Science and Philosophy, New York: Anexact, 2013, p. 40. 7Price, ‘Humans as Geomorphic Agents’. 8Matt Edgeworth, ‘The Relationship between Archaeological Stratigraphy and Artificial Ground and Its Significance in the Anthropocene’, Geological Society, London, Special Publications 395:1, 2014, pp. 91–108. 9Eric Sanderson, Mannahatta: A Natural History of New York City, New York: Abrams, 2013. 10See Christian Neal MilNeil, ‘Inner-City Glaciers’, in Elizabeth Ellsworth, Jamie Kruse and Reg Beatty, eds, Making the Geologic Now: Responses to Material Conditions of Contemporary Life, New York: Punctum Books, 2013, pp. 79–81. 11Jamie Kruse and Elizabeth Ellsworth, Geologic City: A Field Guide to the Geoarchitecture of New York, New York: Smudge Studio, 2011. 12See Björn Wallsten, The Urk World: Hibernating Infrastructures and the Quest for Urban Mining, Linköping: Linköping University, 2015. 13Björn Wallsten, ‘Urks and the Urban Underworld as Geosocial Formation’, Science, Technology and Human Values, forthcoming. 14James McCarthy and Kate Driscoll Derickson, ‘Manufacturing Consent for Engineering Earth: Social Dynamics in Boston’s Big Dig’, in Stan Brunn, ed., Engineering Earth, Rotterdam: Springer, 2011, pp. 697–713. 15Cited in Pete Brook, ‘The Toxic Landscape of Johannesburg’s Gold Mines’, Wired, 18 June 2014. 16See Martin J.

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Geologists now estimate that the deliberate shift of material by humans through construction, mining, agriculture and the generation and the movement of materials deemed to be waste now amounts to around 59 billion tonnes a year.2 Startlingly, this total now exceeds the transport of material by the world’s rivers and oceans (22 billion tonnes) by almost 300 per cent.3 Rising levels of urbanisation, extraction, industrial agriculture and construction around the world mean that this figure is growing fast. Little wonder that geologists are on the verge of formally re-labelling our geological epoch – currently the post-glacial Holocene – as the Anthropocene: the age in which human agency shapes land, soil and the very geology of the earth – as well as air, atmosphere, biosphere and ocean – more powerfully than any other ‘natural’ force. Globally, it was estimated that by the year 2000 around 21 tonnes of rock and soil were moved for every one of the planet’s then 6.5 billion humans through agriculture and construction.

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Like everything else in this apogee of modernity, Manhattan’s flatness was manufactured through wild cycles of speculation and creative destruction.9 Like all major ‘world cities’, in fact, New York can be viewed as a ‘geological hot spot’ – a crucial node in the historic and contemporary human manufacture of local, regional, national and international geology. As an indicator of the ‘geologic turn’ under way in the arts, social sciences and humanities, New York’s Smudge Studio have published a guidebook illustrating how the city is a geologic force of truly global importance within the contemporary Anthropocene period. They trace the distant origins of the materials that make up the city’s pivotal supplies of concrete, steel, road salt, gold reserves, food, energy, water and fossil fuels. They also map the new geologies and landscapes created by the city’s construction industries, demolitions and waste outputs.

Life on the Rocks: Building a Future for Coral Reefs by Juli Berwald

23andMe, 3D printing, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, Charles Lindbergh, circular economy, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, en.wikipedia.org, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial innovation, Garrett Hardin, George Floyd, Google Earth, Gregor Mendel, Greta Thunberg, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), lateral thinking, Maui Hawaii, microbiome, mouse model, ocean acidification, Panamax, Paris climate accords, Skype, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, TED Talk, the scientific method, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons

., “Century-Scale Records of Coral Growth Rates Indicate That Local Stressors Reduce Coral Thermal Tolerance Threshold,” Global Change Biology 16, no. 4 (2010): 1247–57, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2486.2009.02043.x. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT encircled the globe yet again: Table S1, Hughes et al., Supplementary Materials for “Spatial and Temporal Patterns of Mass Bleaching of Corals in the Anthropocene.” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT even without El Niño: Terry Hughes et al., “Spatial and Temporal Patterns of Mass Bleaching of Corals in the Anthropocene,” Science 359, no. 6371 (2018): 80–83, https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/359/6371/80.full.pdf. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT In 2015, another blast: CBS News and Associated Press, “Coral Bleaching Crisis Spreads Worldwide—and It’s Getting Worse,” CBSNews.com, October 8, 2015, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/coral-bleaching-crisis-spreads-worldwide/.

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Discover, March 19, 2019, accessed March 4, 2021, https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/how-do-we-define-a-species. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT already risen by a degree: M. A. Alexander et al., “Projected Sea Surface Temperatures over the 21st Century: Changes in the Mean, Variability and Extremes for Large Marine Ecosystem Regions of Northern Oceans,” Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene 6 (2018): 9, https://www.elementascience.org/articles/10.1525/elementa.191/. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT rise by three feet: Rebecca Lindsey, “Climate Change: Global Sea Level,” NOAA Climate.gov, January 25, 2021, https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-change-global-sea-level.

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GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT In 1987 it was the Caribbean: William Steif, “Experts Are Puzzled by Widespread Coral ‘Bleaching’ in Caribbean,” The New York Times, December 15, 1987, https://www.nytimes.com/1987/12/15/science/experts-are-puzzled-by-widespread-coral-bleaching-in-caribbean.html. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Maldives and Costa Rica: Terry P. Hughes et al., Supplementary Materials for “Spatial and Temporal Patterns of Mass Bleaching of Corals in the Anthropocene,” Science 359, no. 6371 (2018), https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/suppl/2018/01/03/359.6371.80.DC1/aan8048_Hughes_SM.pdf. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT in 1991, Thailand and Tahiti: “Science: Is Coral Bleaching Caused by Global Warming?” New Scientist, August 16, 1991, https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg13117823-600-science-is-coral-bleaching-caused-by-global-warming/.

Everything Under the Sun: Toward a Brighter Future on a Small Blue Planet by Ian Hanington

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, Day of the Dead, disinformation, do what you love, energy security, Enrique Peñalosa, Exxon Valdez, Google Earth, happiness index / gross national happiness, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Medieval Warm Period, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, planned obsolescence, precautionary principle, stem cell, sustainable-tourism, the scientific method, University of East Anglia, urban planning, urban sprawl

We have become a new kind of biological force that is altering the physical, chemical, and biological properties of the planet on a geological scale. Indeed, Nobel Prize–winning chemist Paul Crutzen has suggested that the current geologic period should be called the Anthropocene epoch to reflect our new status as a global force—and a lot of scientists agree. As noted in an article in the Economist, “Welcome to the Anthropocene,” we are altering the earth’s carbon cycle, which leads to climate change, and we have sped up the nitrogen cycle by more than 150 per cent, which has led to acid rain, ozone depletion, and coastal dead zones, among other impacts.

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In the past, it took centuries or even millennia to fully exploit a technological breakthrough, but modern technology, fuelled by cheap energy, exploded in the twentieth century. Machinery, driven by fossil fuels, has amplified our muscle power to a point where we are altering the physical, chemical, and biological features of the planet on an unprecedented scale. Some scientists have even proposed calling this the Anthropocene epoch, a time when human beings have become a geological force. We’re starting to realize, however, that although our technologies are powerful, our sense of control is often illusory; the application of brute power to bludgeon nature into apparent submission often has unexpected costs. Examples of the negative consequences of our great innovations are numerous: the pesticide DDT, splitting the atom, chloro-fluorocarbons, phosphate fertilizers, and, of course, harnessing the energy of fossil fuels.

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—IH Index Numbers refer to pages in the print edition Aboriginal peoples, 23, 29, 183 Aesop’s fables, 256 Aflockalypse, 37–39 agribusiness, 178–79 agriculture, 179–82, 237–38, 255 Alberta, 23, 54, 67, 70, 74–77, 81–82, 83–86 alien species, 25–27 Amazon rainforest, 256 amphibians, 11–14 Anderson, Ray, 94–95 Antheil, George, 98 Anthropocene epoch, 93, 244 anthropocentrism, 103 anti-greenies, 239–41 aquaculture, 194–97 automobiles, 40–41, 44–45, 51–55, 219 bacteria, bedrock, 84, 146 bailouts, financial, 107–9 Baliunas, Sallie, 132 Banff Springs snail, 33 basking sharks, 173–75 Basking Sharks: The Slaughter of B.C.’s Gentle Giants (Wallace and Gisborne), 174 BBC, 166–67 bears, 7, 10, 28–29, 34 Beaufort Sea, 38, 165 bees, 17–19, 112 Benyus, Janine, 93–94 Bernal, Patricio, 160 berries, 112, 182–84 bicycling, 44, 46–48, 49–51 biocapacity, 89 biocentrism, 102 biodiversity, 9–11, 26, 139, 216 Biological Conservation, 14 biomimicry, 93–95 biophilia, 222 bitumen, 67–70 Blaser, Martin J., 204 blueberries, 112, 183–84 bluefin tuna, 199–201 boreal forest ecosystems, 22–24, 69, 183, 216 bovine growth hormone, 178 BPA (bisphenol A), 96 Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, 103–4 British Columbia. see also Vancouver, British Columbia: basking sharks, 174; bees, 112; caribou population, 15, 22–23; Hydro, 143; ocean management, 164; renewable energy moratorium, 142; salmon, 195–96; sardine fishing, 198; spotted owl habitat, 111; Transmission Corporation, 143; trophy hunt, 28–30 British Petroleum (BP), 70, 72, 76, 77 Budescu, David, 128–30 butterflies, 19–21 Canada: Atlantic, 10; bicycle use, 48; carbon capture and storage (CCS), 83–86; carbon dioxide, 44–45; caribou, 21–25; Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO), 164; Environment Canada, 26, 147; Fisheries and Oceans, 33; forest protection, 111, 216–17; genetically modified (GM) foods, 185; Health Canada, 96, 207; North Atlantic right whales, 32–34; nuclear power, 60; petro dollar, 73; science and politicians, 96–97; waste and recycling, 41–42 carbon: capture and storage (CCS), 83–86, 161; offsets and global warming, 117–19; sinks, 137–38; stewardship, 140–41; taxes, 119–21, 250 carbon dioxide, 44–45, 84, 137–38, 158, 159–60 car-centric urban areas, 40–41, 44–45 Carey, John, 147 caribou, 15, 21–25, 88 Carson, Rachel, 144, 223–24 CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons), 85, 127, 144, 149, 150, 235, 253 Chappell, Michael Jahi, 180 chemicals, 155–56 Chernobyl, 59–60 childhood lessons, 263–65 children, environment and, 228–30 children, outdoor activity, 221–23 children, schools, 223–25 children, teaching to be well, 225–28 China, 48, 54, 55 Christmas, 258–61 chytrid (fungus), 12–13 city dwelling, 43–46 climate change: carbon capture and storage (CCS), 83–86; caribou populations and, 23; city dwelling and greenhouse gases, 43–44; conspiracy to deny, 135–37; costs of, 108–9; economic madness, 122–24; human caused, 130–33, 152; mammal extinction and, 7; marine life, 155–57; oceans and, 160; science, 97–98; science and threat of, 128–30; species extinction, 38–39; technology fixes, 144–46; water and, 146–48 “Climategate,” 97, 132, 133 coal mining, 115 coffee, 189–92 Coleman, Eliot, 180–81 Collapse (Diamond), 245 Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC), 171, 175 Condon, Patrick, 44–45, 45 consumer culture, 41, 156, 250, 259 Conway, Erik, 150 coral reefs, 158 corporate change, 173 cosmetics industry, 208–9 Coulter, Lindsay, 260 cruise ship industry, 168–70 Crutzen, Paul, 244 Cuccinelli, Kenneth, 97 Cullis-Suzuki, Severn, 226, 229–30 cycling. see bicycling David Suzuki Foundation, 33, 110, 120, 167, 189, 193, 209 Davis, Wade, 247 DDT, 85, 144, 178, 253 Deacon, Gillian, 209 DeChristopher, Tim, 74–76 Deepwater Horizon, 57, 72, 76, 79 Dene Nation, 24 deniers, 133–35, 151–53, 240 Diamond, Jared, 245 diethyl phthalate (DEP), 206–7 dinosaurs, 254 Earle, Sylvia, 167 earthquake crisis, Japan, 57–58 Earth Summit, 226, 229, 246 ecological footprint, 89, 237 economic crisis, 81, 105, 113, 219 economic growth, 104–7, 236 economic paradigm, 102–4 economy, 114–17, 122–24 ecosystem, 16, 34, 110–13, 157–59, 161–66, 203–5. see also ocean ecosystem ecotourism industry, 29 Enbridge, 77 energy, 44, 61–64, 64–66, 141–44, 263 environment. see also ecosystem; wildlife: children and, 228–30; crisis, 122–23; economy and, 114–17; green, being, 248–51; learning, 225; perceptions of, 246–48; protection, 125, 192–94, 203–5 environmentalists, 231, 239–40, 241–43 Ethical Oil (Levant), 69 European bailouts, 107–8 European Commission, 60–61, 206 European Union, 48, 117, 207 evolutionary change and hunting, 31 exercise, 227 extinction, 7–9, 11–14, 36, 37–39, 139, 155–57 Exxon Mobil, 70, 78, 131, 132 fables, 256–58 farmed seafood, 194–97 farming, 179–82, 189, 237–38 Fellmann, Andy, 50 financial bailouts, 107–9 First Nations, 24, 28, 70, 81–82, 111, 165, 182, 217 fisheries management, 174–75 fishing, 10, 31, 155, 162, 255 Flannery, Tim, 245 food, vegetables, 177–79 food production, local, 187–89 “Food Security and Biodiversity: Can We Have Both?”

Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together by Ian Goldin, Tom Lee-Devlin

15-minute city, 1960s counterculture, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brixton riot, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, congestion charging, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, data science, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Enrique Peñalosa, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, race to the bottom, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Salesforce, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart meter, Snow Crash, social distancing, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

However, as automation undermines the economic advantage provided by cheap labour, it looks increasingly unlikely that economies that are still early along the development path will be able to follow past labour-intensive models of growth. We will explore what the future of economic development might look like for these countries, as well as the consequences if they fail to create a sufficient number of good jobs for their growing populations. The Perils of the Anthropocene Cities – by unleashing humankind’s potential for cooperation, specialization and invention – have made us masters of the earth. Yet our fate is still fundamentally tethered to the natural world, and our actions are putting that relationship in danger. The first cities did not emerge until a period of relative environmental stability for our planet known as the Holocene.

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A mild and stable environment created the necessary conditions for Homo sapiens to transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture. With time, we became more productive farmers, which eventually made it possible for the first urban dwellers to untether themselves from toiling the land and gather together in cities. Now, the Holocene is being replaced by the Anthropocene, as a growing population and rising living standards are together straining the limits of our planet and undermining the foundation upon which the success of our species has thus far depended. It is beyond dispute that human-induced climate change is accelerating. In the last 50 years alone the global average surface temperature has risen by about 1 °C,26 the Arctic sea ice minimum has shrunk by 35 to 40 per cent,27 and the frequency of natural disasters has increased five-fold.28 We are simply doing too little too late to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

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., 2022, ‘Child mortality rate (under five years old) in the United Kingdom from 1800 to 2020’, Statista (statista.com). 27 Kenny, The Plague Cycle. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid. 30 Jones, K., et al., 2008, ‘Global trends in emerging infectious diseases’, Nature, Vol. 451. 31 Morand, S. and Walther, B., 2020, ‘The accelerated infectious disease risk in the Anthropocene: more outbreaks and wider global spread’, Working paper. 32 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2021, ‘Zoonoses’ (cdc.gov). 33 Greger, ‘The human/animal interface’. 34 Ibid. 35 UNFAO, 2022, ‘State of the world’s forests’ (fao.org). 36 Young, R., 2014, ‘Take bushmeat off the menu before humans are served another Ebola’, The Conversation (theconversation.com). 37 Cawthorn, D-M. and Hoffman, L., 2015, The bushmeat and food security nexus: A global account of the contributions, conundrums and ethical collisions, Food Research International, Vol. 76. 38 Maxmen, A., 2022, ‘Wuhan market was epicentre of pandemic’s start, studies suggest’, Nature.com. 39 Kenny, The Plague Cycle. 40 Smitham, E. and Glassman, A., 2021, ‘The next pandemic could come sooner and be deadlier’, Center for Global Development (cgdev.org). 41 Barnes, O., 2022, ‘Just where and when will the next pandemic strike?’

The Toaster Project: Or a Heroic Attempt to Build a Simple Electric Appliance From Scratch by Thomas Thwaites

Anthropocene, carbon footprint, global supply chain, invisible hand, lateral thinking, supply-chain management, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

Over the next couple of days a strong vinegar smell percolates through the house, and I watch with mounting unease as my plastic cracks up as it dries. Another failure. London to Manchester, 173 miles This situation requires some lateral thinking. In the discipline of geology, a debate is currently raging over whether or not to declare the beginning of a new epoch—the Anthropocene—a geological age of humanity’s own making. This would be quite a big deal in geological circles, as epochs don’t begin every year—generally more like every few million. The reason a new one is being considered is that geologists in the far future, without any knowledge of our civilisation, would notice sharp changes in the strata of rock that are being laid down today.

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A sudden increase in radioactivity would be detected—left over from the two thousand or so nuclear weapons we’ve exploded since 1945, and “new” molecules would be found in ice cores and rocks, molecules from plastics. Just as rocks have been laid down during previous epochs, could it not be argued that equivalent rocks are being laid down in the Anthropocene, and that some of these rocks happen to be made of polypropylene, for instance? If I can mine iron ore, can I not “mine” some of this nascent plastic rock at a dump? I admit that it’s a stretch, but they’re my rules and I’ll break them if I want to. Axion Recycling is an SME (small-to-medium-sized enterprise) located in Manchester.

Wasteland: The Dirty Truth About What We Throw Away, Where It Goes, and Why It Matters by Oliver Franklin-Wallis

air freight, airport security, Anthropocene, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, barriers to entry, big-box store, bitcoin, British Empire, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, climate anxiety, coronavirus, COVID-19, Crossrail, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, global pandemic, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Kintsugi, lockdown, meta-analysis, microplastics / micro fibres, oil shale / tar sands, planned obsolescence, refrigerator car, sharing economy, social distancing, space junk, Suez canal 1869, Tim Cook: Apple

Spend enough time on a dump, I have found, and waste starts to blend together, the way clouds do, until it is not many things but one thing – a foul, abstract mass. Looking at it, I’m reminded of class geography trips as a child, visiting cliffs and marking off epochs in the geological strata. This one might be marked Anthropocene. We climb. The waste on the lower levels, compressed by weight and time, feels firm, but on the slopes it is loose and unpredictable, scree-like. Trash crunches loudly underfoot. ‘It takes time to fill in, so that it becomes solid,’ Anwar explains. During the wet season, rainwater trickles down between the waste, forming subterranean flows that can carve off larger sections, triggering landslides.

…

Looking at it, I’m reminded of the story of a group of oceanographers who, in 2006, discovered marine debris washed up on the beach of Hawaii, bound together by bright seams of molten plastic.61 To describe this new material, the scientists coined the term ‘plastiglomerate’. The plastic was likely trash that had been burned on camp fires, and coalesced around the matter on which it was dumped. The researchers speculated that plastiglomerate will likely one day enter into the geological record as a marker of the Anthropocene. Waste as time capsule. We were here. At the final step in the process, the newly recycled nurdles are cooked in two large silos for eight hours. ‘That bakes out any volatiles,’ Chris says. Underneath the silos, the nurdles are collected in sacks. Unlike the rainbow-like flake they’re flat and grey, the colour of concrete.

…

Should Onkalo in fact survive in 100,000 years, the risk to whoever might discover its remains will not be much greater than getting a CAT scan. After a few million, the risk will be indistinguishable from background radiation. Even so, traces of the nuclear waste left behind will still be evident in the geological record billions of years from now, as perhaps the most enduring marker of the Anthropocene. * * * My Sellafield tour is over, and so we drive back to the farmhouse, talking about Onkalo. Lately, there is renewed hope that the UK is getting close to securing its own geological disposal facility. In 2019, the government announced it was resuming plans to finally build one; at the time of writing, several sites are currently being considered, including two in Cumbria, not far from here.

Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet by Mark Lynas

accounting loophole / creative accounting, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, blood diamond, Climatic Research Unit, Deng Xiaoping, failed state, Garrett Hardin, hindcast, ice-free Arctic, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Live Aid, Medieval Warm Period, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, price stability, South China Sea, supervolcano, Tragedy of the Commons

Places which would normally experience a temperate climate became subtropical, and a fascinating array of species spread across the globe. But don't be deceived. The world in a natural state can never be a perfect analogue for the globe as it exists now. We are already well into a new geological era, the Anthropocene, where human interference is the dominant factor in nearly every planetary ecosystem, to the detriment of perhaps all of them. The rising heat of the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum took place over about 10,000 years, giving plants and animals time to migrate and adapt to the new circumstances.

…

Nor am I suggesting that the prospect of methane fireballs tearing across the sky is remotely likely in today's world-it is merely one of many theories that have been advanced to explain the end-Permian die-off, and as such may hint at the worst the greenhouse Earth can sometimes do to its inhabitants. On the other hand, there are some aspects of today's global warming crisis which are especially worrying, even when contrasted with the horrors that struck the world at the end-Permian. An extinction event-tentatively titled the Anthropocene Mass Extinction-is already under way, largely independently of global warming. With so many plants and animals drastically reduced and forced onto the margins of survival, the natural world is already less resilient to change than would have been the case in the late Permian. Consider our cousins the great apes, so small in number now that more human babies are born every day than the entire global population of gorillas, chimpanzees and orang-utans put together.

…

acid rain 171, 228, 230, 249 adaptation 94, 103, 196, 208-9, 220, 235 Afifi, Abdulkader 268 Africa 120 agriculture 89-90, 157-8, 173, 195 ancient 108, 220 disease 151-3 drought 22, 101-5, 173, 194 famine 112, 113 glacial retreat 13-18 monsoon 20-1, 52 rainfall 21-2 refugees 159 refuges 210 Agassiz, Lake 10 agriculture xv, 176, 261 abandonment 8, 174, 211 Africa xv, 89-90, 157-8, 173 Arctic 131 Australia 112, 124, 173 Central and South America 82, 85, 89, 134, 173 China 172-3 decline in 90-1, 157, 172-5, 196 drought-resistant crops 174 Europe 59-60, 62, 89 ‘firestick farming’ 122 growing season, extended 131, 158, 196 harvest failure 13, 113 India 78-9, 137, 173, 174 intensive 195 irrigation 8, 58, 82, 86, 140, 144, 159, 197 new areas 157, 186-7, 196, 197 North America 5-9, 88-9, 90, 143-4, 158-9, 173 Pakistan 139-41 refuges 210 slash-and-burn 120 UK 89, 210-11 worldwide agricultural drought 173-4 air-conditioning 59, 62, 178 Alaska 25, 221 meltdown 25-6, 75, 131, 187 North Slope fossils 219, 221 rainfall 129, 193 Alexandria, Egypt 163-5, 167 algae 34-5, 37, 58, 224 Algeria 19-20 Alley, Richard 68 Alps xv, 29-31, 58, 150, 177, 180-1, 246 Amazon River 119 Amazonia 32-3, 153, 175 death of 115-21, 190, 209, 252 deforestation 119-20 desertification 194, 209 drought 112, 115, 116, 173 American Association for the Advancement of Science 204 American Geophysical Union 69 Andes 80-5, 108, 115, 119, 238 Angola 104, 105 animals see wildlife Antarctic Ocean 199-200 Antarctica 67, 176 ancient 108-9, 220, 222, 228 coal 222 ice-free 211, 220 ice sheets 64, 71, 146, 167-70 Anthropocene 208, 235 aquifers 8, 53, 158, 166, 170, 194-5 Archer, David 205, 206 Arctic 10, 66, 128-31 agriculture 196 amplifier 24, 76, 189 ancient 109-10, 198-9, 203 ice-free 25-7, 109-10, 130, 170, 186, 203, 220 meltdown 23-8, 66-73, 186-90, 246 peoples 76-7 vegetation 76 wildlife 33, 72-7, 187 Arctic Climate Impact Assessment 75 Arctic Ocean ancient 199, 219, 249-50 freshwater run-off 188 methane hydrate melt 205-6 sea-ice xx, 72-7, 129, 186-7 Argentina 194 Asian Brown Cloud 136 Atacama Desert, Peru 113 Atlantic Ocean: ancient 201, 218, 219 circulation 9-13, 110, 176 freshwater run-off 10-11 hurricane formation 42-6 North 69 tropical 22 Atlas Mountains, Morocco 180, 181 atmosphere 128-9, 234-5, 236-7 ancient 202-5, 222, 225, 230-1, 249-50 atolls 16, 46-7 Australia 31-8, 95, 211 agriculture 112, 124, 173 bushfires 122-5 coal 221 desertification 194 drought 112, 113, 173, 194 Australian Conservation Foundation 123 avalanches 180 submarine 201, 206-8 Axel Heiberg Island, Canada 203 Baker, Andrew 37 Bakun, Andrew 238 Banda Aceh 207 Bangkok, Thailand 72 Bangladesh 79, 132, 135, 137, 165 Barbados 166 Barrow, Alaska 25 Beever, Dr Erik 40 Bennike, Ole 109 Benton, Michael 230-1 Bhopal, India 238 Bighorn Basin, Wyoming 199 biodiversity 33-4, 91-7, 154-6, 198, 213, 234, 240, 252 Amazon 119 China 171 marine 154 plants 39 under threat 18, 41 biofuels 274-6 Biosphere 2 97 birds 75, 77, 92, 94, 95, 120, 155 Black Sea 237 bogs, thawing 188-9 Bolivia 84, 121 Bombay see Mumbai Boston, USA 165 Botswana 90, 101-5, 151 Bowman, Malcolm 147 Brahmaputra River 138, 193 Brazil 42, 43, 44, 95, 120, 121, 194 desertification 194 hurricanes 42-4 rainforest 120 Brigham, Lawson 189 British Antarctic Survey 110, 167 British Council 14 British Virgin Islands 38 Broe, Pat 72 Bryden, Professor Harry 11, 12 Buffett, Bruce 205, 206 Bunyard, Peter 119 Burke, Eleanor 22 Burkina Faso 90 Bush, George W. 264 bushfires, Australia 122-5 butterflies 92, 93, 95 Cairo, Egypt 195 calcium carbonate 34, 53-6, 221 Caldeira, Professor Ken 54 California 3-5, 8-9, 85-8, 115, 142, 144-5, 195 California Coastal Range 87 Cameroon 232 Camill, Phil 188, 190 Canada xvii, 131, 188, 196 agriculture 90, 144, 158, 174, 196, 197 ancient 7 arctic 76, 131, 187 forest fires 197 fossil fuels 73, 221, 269 habitable areas 196, 197 rainfall 129 river flows 193, 196 Canberra, Australia 124-5 Cape Floristic Region, South Africa 39 carbon 96, 117, 205, 221-2, 267, capture and storage 271, 273, 276 carbon cycle 56, 116, 117-19, 190, 220-2, 225, 227, 250,254-5, 256 carbon trading 257 dissolved 188-9 release from seabed 202 release from soil 117-18, 188, 250-1 sequestering 175, 221-2, 223 carbon dioxide xix-xx, 89, 96-7, 252-3 ancient atmosphere 110-12, 203-4, 220, 225, 229, 230, 233, 249-50 and climate sensitivity 248-9 emissions 78, 131, 204, 234-6, 246-7 fertilising effect of 174 from fires 197, 203 ocean acidification 53-6 plant emissions 60 volcanic outgassing 232, 233, 235 Caribbean 38, 113 Carboniferous period 234 Carnegie Institution 54 cars 172, 271, 272, 276 Carson, Rachel 95-6 Cascades, USA 87 Caspian Sea 178 cattle ranching 8, 19, 102, 103, 119, 184 Cayman Islands 63 Central America 82, 83-4, 85, 89, 133-5, 173 Chaco Canyon, New Mexico 5-6 Chad, Lake 20 Chernobyl 176 Chile 89, 194, 211 Chilingarov, Artur 73-4 Chimu civilisation 82, 83 China xxii, 140, 197, 218 coal 221 conflict 197 desertification 197 droughts 51-3 early civilisation 172-3 emissions 257, 258, 264 floods 112 forests 155 hypercapitalism 170-5 monsoon 52-3, 193, 209 water supply 140, 194 civilisations, collapse of 82-3, 131-5, 174-5 climate change xix-xx, 6, 10-11 ancient 15-16, 23, 197-206 conferences on 14 denial 14, 16, 262-5 modelling xv, 105-7, 194-6, 217, 248-51 speed of xxi, 235-6 transient xxi-xxii climate sensitivity 248-50, 252-3 climate zones, shifting 27-8, 123, 129 climatic envelope 94 clouds 107, 114, 125, 175 coal 221, 222, 226, 234, 262, 269, 271 coasts 72, 76, 145-8, 183, 184-5, 193 coccolithophores 54-5, 56 Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive (Diamond) 134 Colorado River, USA 6, 86, 142-5, 167 Columbia 121 Columbia River, USA 87 Comiso, Josefino 75 computer modelling 12, 22 carbon-cycle feedback 116-18 climate xv, 105-7, 194-6, 217, 248-51 El Niño 113-14 global and regional models 106 Hadley Model 39, 59, 105-6, 134 hindcasting 104, 106 hurricane 128 hydrological 139 sea temperature 110 conflict 6, 212-14 over climate refugees 141, 159, 179 over habitable land xxii, 197 over oil 268-9 over water xxii, 85, 86, 141 conservation, site-based 94 continental climates 198 continental drift 218 continental shelf 237 collapse of 201, 206-7 contraction and convergence 257 Cooke, Jennifer 184, 185 cooling: aerosols 135 north-west Europe 9, 12, 211 nuclear winter xviii, 125, 233 Younger Dryas 10 coral: bleaching 34-9, 154-5 reefs 34-9, 42, 63, 91, 154-5, 209, 220, 246 Coral Coast, Fiji 38-9 Cordillera Blanca, Peru 81-2, 84 Cordillera Central, Peru 83-4 Cornwall 28 Costa Rican golden toad 40-1 Cox, Peter 117, 273-4 Cretaceous 56, 200, 217-23, 236, 250 Crump, Marty 40-1 CSIRO 33-4, 122-3 cyclones see hurricanes Cyprus 62 dams 86, 142-3, 167, 196 Dante xviii, 217, 245-6 Danube River 181 Dasuopu, Tibet 14 Dawson, Mary 197, 198 Democratic Republic of Congo 16 Day After Tomorrow, The 9 deforestation 14, 175-6, 247 Amazonia 119-20 Central America 134 deforestation diesel 276 deglaciation see glaciers denial 14, 16, 262-5 Denmark 73, 149 Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (UK) 78 Department for International Development (UK) 139 desalination plants 178 desert: Amazonia 115, 116 Europe 58, 60, 62, 150, 194 Kalahari Desert 102, 103-4, 105, 194 Marine 224 Mediterranean rim 150-1 North America 3-9 Polar 67 Sahara 21-2, 23, 61, 120, 151, 180, 186, 194, 195, 224 sandstorms 224 spreading 150-1, 186, 194-6, 209, 246 Diamond, Jared 133-4 Dickens, Gerald 200, 204 disease 123, 151-3, 158 drought 60, 193 Africa 101-5 and agriculture 157, 173-4 Amazonia 112, 115, 116, 173 ancient 16, 133-4 Australia 112, 113, 173, 194 Central America 83-4, 133-5 China 51-3 ENSO-related 113 Europe 58, 60, 62, 150, 194 extreme 4, 23 hotspots 173-4 Mediterranean 62-3 Palmer Drought Severity Index 22-3 perennial 194, 209 Sahel 18-19, 22-3 spread of 22-3 threat to woodland 94 UK 177-8, 182 US 3-9, 60, 86-8, 129, 143, 142-5 Doyle, Arthur Conan 153, 154 Dudh Koshi River 80 Dukes, Jeffrey 260, 265-6 dust storms 9, 51-2 Dust Bowl 7-8, 9, 88, 144, 194 Earth: thermal time lag 246, 251 thermoregulation systems 176 earthquakes 207 ecological overshoot 134 economics 170-2 ecosystems 91-7, 175-6, 222-3, 240, 261 Arctic 187 Wet Forest 31-4 Ecuador 84, 89 Eemian interglacial 52, 63, 64 Egypt 19, 195 El Niño 83, 112-15, 224 Ellesmere Island, Nunavut 25, 109, 197-8 Emanuel, Kerry 45, 46 emissions 113, 258, 259 contraction and convergence 257 cuts in 124, 246, 253-9, 276-7 future scenarios 247-8 India 77-8 permits 257 rate of 56, 246, 259 stabilising 276-7 targets 251-9 see also greenhouse gases energy: efficiency 271, 272-3, 275-6 renewable 258, 267-70, 271-7 ENSO 113, 114, 115 Environmental Research Letters 71 Eocene 198, 199, 203-4, 208, 209 see also Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum erosion: coastal 76, 145-8, 183, 184-5, 193 hillside 134 soil 170, 184-5, 202, 203, 214, 227-8 Estonia 59 ethanol 275 Ethiopia 18, 90, 108, 194, 210 Europe: agriculture 59-60, 62, 89 ancient 218, 220 cooling 9, 10, 11-12 desertification 150, 177-8, 186 drought 58, 60, 62, 150, 194 El Niño effect 113 extinctions 95, 156 floods 148-51, 182-4 heatwaves 57-61, 62, 177-9, 180-2 hurricanes 44-5 rainfall 62, 177 refuges 159 storms 148-51 temperature rise 175-9, 186 wildfires 62 European Union 256, 276 Everest, Mount 138, 139 extinctions 33, 39-41, 76, 77, 86, 91-7, 208 Anthropocene Mass 235 end-Permian 226-34 Paleocene-Eocene 208-10 human 240 living dead species 156 marine 208-10, 224, 225-6, 229, 233, 234 mass 56, 92, 157, 201, 224, 226-34, 235 plant 39, 76, 77, 91, 93-4, 155, 228 Fahnestock, Mark 69 famine 88, 89, 90-1, 103, 158-9, 213 Africa 112, 113 India 78-9 mass 174 Sahel 18 Faroe Islands 207 feedbacks 190, 252, 255 carbon-cycle 60-1, 116-19, 190, 245, 250, 255 desertification 194 ice-age 255 ice-albedo 28, 70-1 methane 188-90, 202, 204-6 Fiji 38-9, 166 Finland 177 flood barriers 147, 148, 165 flooding: Africa 151 atolls 46-7 coastal cities 145-8, 164-7, 193, 211-12 continental interiors 193, 218 Europe 148-51, 182-4 flash floods 5, 23, 146, 180, 203, 230 monsoon see monsoon post-ice age 66; storm surge see storm surge UK xiii-xiv, 148-51, 182-4, 193-4 USA xiv, 115, 145-7, 158, 165-6 food 88-91, 140-1, 166, 172, 213 aid 210 prices 8, 91, 158, 275 production 210, 261-3 shortages 134, 140-1, 158, 174, 186, 275 web, Arctic 75 see also agriculture Ford, Derek 63 forest 262 ancient 229 boreal 197 carbon emissions 60 deforestation 119-20, 175, 176, 247 die-back 60, 78 montane 17-18 polar 187, 208, 220 reforestation 272 US West 144 forest fires 17, 61-2, 122-5, 197, 203 Amazonia 120-1 Asian 276 Australia 122-5 Europe 58, 59, 61-2 Indonesia 118-19, 121, 136-7 North America 4, 87-8, 144-5 fossil fuels 73, 78, 171-2, 221, 222, 223-6, 261, 267-70 France 58, 62, 149, 177 Francis, Jane 108, 110 freshwater surges 10-11 Frey, Karen 188-9 Friends of the Earth 256 frogs 31-4, 40-1 frost 89, 219 fungi 228 Gabon 90 Gaia Theory 176, 221, 240 Ganges, River 138, 140, 141, 193, 211 gas, natural 7, 73, 222, 260, 261, 268, 269, 271, 272, 276 Gazprom 73 Geology 185 Geology Today 111 Geophysical Research Letters 43, 185 Germany 58, 59, 94, 149, 150, 181, 221 Ghana 18 Giant Sequoia National Park 4 glaciers 10, 80, 110 Alpine 30, 58, 177, 180-1, 187, 246 Andean 80-5 Antarctic 108-9, 167, 168, 169 Arctic 25-6 Greenland 66-9, 138 Himalayas 80 Iceland 130-1 Karakoram 137-42 Kilimanjaro 13-18 Scandinavian 131 Gladwell, Malcolm 23 Glen Canyon Dam 142-3 Global Carbon Project 246 Global Commons Institute 257 global dimming 107, 249 global warming xix accelerating xiv, 206 ancient xvii Arctic amplifier 24, 76 climate zone shifts 28 peaks 223-6 positive feedback 189, 252 runaway 204-5, 231, 246, 253, 256, 258 speed of xxi, 235-6 thermal inertia xxi-xxii, 111 Gobi Desert 51, 194, 195 GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) 70 Great Barrier Reef 34-6 Great Lakes 9 Great Plains 4, 5, 7, 155 Great Depression 210 Greece 177 greenhouse gases xix-xx, 110, 176, 178-9, 188, 236, 247 ocean acidification 53-4 see also carbon dioxide emissions methane Greenland 6, 10, 13, 67-70, 76, 129, 187, 252 ancient 24, 75, 109, 219, 233 ice sheet collapse 64-72, 129, 130, 131, 146, 170, 176, 252 Greenpeace 120 Grindelwald, Switzerland 30 Guadalupe River 184 Gulf of Mexico 224 Gulf Stream 9-10, 211, 237 Hadley Centre, UK 22-3, 39, 59, 105-6, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 134, 148,205 Haeberli, Wilfried 30 Hall, T.

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab, Peter Vanham

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

As industrialization took hold, however, we started to rapidly consume some of the world's most precious natural resources, the stored energy of oil and coal, and later also rare earth minerals and even gases such as helium. At the same time, the footprint of human activities became ever greater. It was this industrialization that led to the Anthropocene—a label indicating human responsibility for planetary changes in climate and biodiversity. The subsequent second and third waves of industrialization—which brought the world the internal combustion engine, cars, planes, and computers—made the human footprint on the environment only worse, even as it increased the quality of life for billions of people.

…

A Abortion law (Ireland), 194 Abu Dhabi, 159 Adenauer, Konrad, 8, 81 Adobe Systems, 69 Advocacy groups, 243–246 Afghanistan, 195 African countries average economic mobility improvement in northern, 44 capitalism vs. communism ideological battle in, 7 colonialization (19th century) of, 104 demographic changes in, 161 economic ties between China (2020s) and, 69–70 emerging markets in, 63 Locust–19 plague (2020) in, 176 sub-Saharan, 27, 40 See also specific country Age of Discovery (15th to 18th century), 100–102 Air pollution (WHO guidelines), 50 Air traffic controllers strike (US), 122 Alibaba (US), 128, 143 Alphabet, 127 Alstom, 141 Alstom–Siemens merger (proposed), 142 Alternative for Germany (AFD) [Germany], 79 Amazon Rainforest, 107 “Amazon's Antitrust Paradox” (Khan), 127 Amazon (US), 97, 127, 143, 209 Ambani, Mukesh, 68 American Dream, 119 American Economic Association, 35 Amoco, 134 Andersen, Hans Christian, 200 Angola Chinese investments in, 70 oil exports to China from, 64 Ansary, Tamim, 195–196 Anthropocene, 161 Antitrust legislation the EU Commission's pursuit of, 139–140 in the United States, 132–134, 135–136 A.P. Møller–Mærsk (Denmark), 167–168, 199–201, 202–207, 208, 213, 215 Appellate Judges (World Trade Organization), 197 Apple Computer, 126, 137 Apple (US), 59, 127, 128, 137, 209, 211 Arab Spring (2011), 40 Ardern, Jacinda, 219, 220–223, 236 Argentina “reefer ships” (1870s) bringing wealth to, 104, 110 “21st century socialism” of, 225 Artificial intelligence (AI), 143–144, 145, 161 ASEAN nations Chinese economy and emerging markets of, 63–66, 70–72 environmental degradation and economic growth of, 72 IMF forecast on 2020 economic growth of, 71 as an international community stakeholder, 178 national income inequality increasing in, 40 tech unicorns in the, 66, 67fig “The Asian Century,” 70–71fig Asian countries capitalism vs. communism ideological battle in, 7 post-war economy of, 6 severe financial crisis (1997) in, 16, 98, 109 WHO on unsafe air (2019) in, 72 Asian financial crisis (1997), 16, 98, 109 Asian Tigers GDP growth contributions (1980s) by, 13 globalization and economic growth of, 98 influence on China's economy by, 57 shift to producing goods for export, 58 See also Hong Kong; Singapore; South Korea; Taiwan AT&T monopoly, 127, 135 Audi (German manufacturer), 9 Aufstehen movement (Germany), 88 Australia efforts to reduce emissions in, 166–167 mining exports to China, 64 Austrian populist parties (2000, 2017–2019), 84fig Auto industry city of Detroit, 110–111 Ford Motor Company, 33 lack of regulatory scrutiny of the, 136 Mercedes, 9 Automation Dansk Metal's industrial robots, 115, 117 labor market and challenge of, 115–126 Axis nations (World War II), 5 B Baby boom (1950s and 1960s), 8, 9, 105, 135, 154, 160 Bah, Aziz, 238 Bai Chong-En, 225–226 Baidu (US), 143 Bain, 66 Baker, George Pierce, 11 Baldwin, Richard, 64, 113 Bandung entrepreneurs story (2012), 93–94 Bangladesh unsafe air (2019), 72 Bank of America, 214, 215, 249 Bank of England, 162 Bay of Pigs, 76 Belgium declining income inequality in, 41 digital economy embraced by, 113–114 economic loss due to closed car plants in, 111 First Industrial Revolution spreading to, 131 stakeholder approach solving disagreements in, 195 stakeholder concept adopted in, 174 Bell Company.

…

See AT&T Belt and Road Initiative (China), 100 Benioff, Marc, 164, 201, 207, 207–208, 210, 211, 212–213 Berkshire Hathaway Energy (US), 218 Berlin Wall (1961–1989), 75–77, 88, 89 Berlusconi, Silvio, 83 Better Life Index (OECD), 190 Bezos, Jeff, 132 Bhutto, Bhenazir, 245 Bhutto, Bilawal, 245 Big Four (Deloitte, EY, KPMG, and PwC), 215, 250 Big Tech Benioff's call for European regulators to break up, 211 lacking core values of the past, 208 monopolies of, 127–129, 140–142, 145, 211 shift toward stakeholder model approach by, 201–202 tech unicorns of ASEAN nations, 66, 67fig widening inequalities, 210 See also Silicon Valley; US economy The Billionaire Raj (Crabtree), 40 Biodiversity Amazon Rainforest, 107 Anthropocene label on human responsibility for, 161 fossil fuels accelerating loss of, 49 Global Risks Report (2020) on losses in, 52 looking for solutions to stop loss of, 165 Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystems Services (IPBES) report [2019], 51 Bismarck, Otto von, 133 Bivens, Josh, 122 Black Lives Matter, 186, 243, 246, 250 BlackRock (US), 164, 215, 216 Bloomberg, 163, 177 BMW (German manufacturer), 9 BNY–Mellon, 132 Bolivia, 225 Bolsonaro, Jair, 84, 85 Bombardier (Canada), 142 Booking (US), 97 Boston Consulting Group, 167 BP Statistical Review of World Energy (2019), 49 BP Statistical Review of World Energy (2020), 63 Brandenburg Gate (East Berlin), 76–77, 79, 89–90 Brazil dropping voter turnout for elections in, 188 erosion of political center in, 84, 85 income inequality in, 40 mining exports to China, 64 “21st century socialism” of, 225 Brexit vote (2016), 80 Brookings Institution, 70 Brooks, Robin, 27 Bruegel Institute, 36, 37, 112 Bryan, William Jennings, 133 Brynjolfsson, Eric, 143 B Team Responsible Tax Principles, 205 Buffet, Warren, 218 Bundesrepublik Deutschland (BRD).

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

As industrialization took hold, however, we started to rapidly consume some of the world's most precious natural resources, the stored energy of oil and coal, and later also rare earth minerals and even gases such as helium. At the same time, the footprint of human activities became ever greater. It was this industrialization that led to the Anthropocene—a label indicating human responsibility for planetary changes in climate and biodiversity. The subsequent second and third waves of industrialization—which brought the world the internal combustion engine, cars, planes, and computers—made the human footprint on the environment only worse, even as it increased the quality of life for billions of people.

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A Abortion law (Ireland), 194 Abu Dhabi, 159 Adenauer, Konrad, 8, 81 Adobe Systems, 69 Advocacy groups, 243–246 Afghanistan, 195 African countries average economic mobility improvement in northern, 44 capitalism vs. communism ideological battle in, 7 colonialization (19th century) of, 104 demographic changes in, 161 economic ties between China (2020s) and, 69–70 emerging markets in, 63 Locust–19 plague (2020) in, 176 sub-Saharan, 27, 40 See also specific country Age of Discovery (15th to 18th century), 100–102 Air pollution (WHO guidelines), 50 Air traffic controllers strike (US), 122 Alibaba (US), 128, 143 Alphabet, 127 Alstom, 141 Alstom–Siemens merger (proposed), 142 Alternative for Germany (AFD) [Germany], 79 Amazon Rainforest, 107 “Amazon's Antitrust Paradox” (Khan), 127 Amazon (US), 97, 127, 143, 209 Ambani, Mukesh, 68 American Dream, 119 American Economic Association, 35 Amoco, 134 Andersen, Hans Christian, 200 Angola Chinese investments in, 70 oil exports to China from, 64 Ansary, Tamim, 195–196 Anthropocene, 161 Antitrust legislation the EU Commission's pursuit of, 139–140 in the United States, 132–134, 135–136 A.P. Møller–Mærsk (Denmark), 167–168, 199–201, 202–207, 208, 213, 215 Appellate Judges (World Trade Organization), 197 Apple Computer, 126, 137 Apple (US), 59, 127, 128, 137, 209, 211 Arab Spring (2011), 40 Ardern, Jacinda, 219, 220–223, 236 Argentina “reefer ships” (1870s) bringing wealth to, 104, 110 “21st century socialism” of, 225 Artificial intelligence (AI), 143–144, 145, 161 ASEAN nations Chinese economy and emerging markets of, 63–66, 70–72 environmental degradation and economic growth of, 72 IMF forecast on 2020 economic growth of, 71 as an international community stakeholder, 178 national income inequality increasing in, 40 tech unicorns in the, 66, 67fig “The Asian Century,” 70–71fig Asian countries capitalism vs. communism ideological battle in, 7 post-war economy of, 6 severe financial crisis (1997) in, 16, 98, 109 WHO on unsafe air (2019) in, 72 Asian financial crisis (1997), 16, 98, 109 Asian Tigers GDP growth contributions (1980s) by, 13 globalization and economic growth of, 98 influence on China's economy by, 57 shift to producing goods for export, 58 See also Hong Kong; Singapore; South Korea; Taiwan AT&T monopoly, 127, 135 Audi (German manufacturer), 9 Aufstehen movement (Germany), 88 Australia efforts to reduce emissions in, 166–167 mining exports to China, 64 Austrian populist parties (2000, 2017–2019), 84fig Auto industry city of Detroit, 110–111 Ford Motor Company, 33 lack of regulatory scrutiny of the, 136 Mercedes, 9 Automation Dansk Metal's industrial robots, 115, 117 labor market and challenge of, 115–126 Axis nations (World War II), 5 B Baby boom (1950s and 1960s), 8, 9, 105, 135, 154, 160 Bah, Aziz, 238 Bai Chong-En, 225–226 Baidu (US), 143 Bain, 66 Baker, George Pierce, 11 Baldwin, Richard, 64, 113 Bandung entrepreneurs story (2012), 93–94 Bangladesh unsafe air (2019), 72 Bank of America, 214, 215, 249 Bank of England, 162 Bay of Pigs, 76 Belgium declining income inequality in, 41 digital economy embraced by, 113–114 economic loss due to closed car plants in, 111 First Industrial Revolution spreading to, 131 stakeholder approach solving disagreements in, 195 stakeholder concept adopted in, 174 Bell Company.

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See AT&T Belt and Road Initiative (China), 100 Benioff, Marc, 164, 201, 207, 207–208, 210, 211, 212–213 Berkshire Hathaway Energy (US), 218 Berlin Wall (1961–1989), 75–77, 88, 89 Berlusconi, Silvio, 83 Better Life Index (OECD), 190 Bezos, Jeff, 132 Bhutto, Bhenazir, 245 Bhutto, Bilawal, 245 Big Four (Deloitte, EY, KPMG, and PwC), 215, 250 Big Tech Benioff's call for European regulators to break up, 211 lacking core values of the past, 208 monopolies of, 127–129, 140–142, 145, 211 shift toward stakeholder model approach by, 201–202 tech unicorns of ASEAN nations, 66, 67fig widening inequalities, 210 See also Silicon Valley; US economy The Billionaire Raj (Crabtree), 40 Biodiversity Amazon Rainforest, 107 Anthropocene label on human responsibility for, 161 fossil fuels accelerating loss of, 49 Global Risks Report (2020) on losses in, 52 looking for solutions to stop loss of, 165 Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystems Services (IPBES) report [2019], 51 Bismarck, Otto von, 133 Bivens, Josh, 122 Black Lives Matter, 186, 243, 246, 250 BlackRock (US), 164, 215, 216 Bloomberg, 163, 177 BMW (German manufacturer), 9 BNY–Mellon, 132 Bolivia, 225 Bolsonaro, Jair, 84, 85 Bombardier (Canada), 142 Booking (US), 97 Boston Consulting Group, 167 BP Statistical Review of World Energy (2019), 49 BP Statistical Review of World Energy (2020), 63 Brandenburg Gate (East Berlin), 76–77, 79, 89–90 Brazil dropping voter turnout for elections in, 188 erosion of political center in, 84, 85 income inequality in, 40 mining exports to China, 64 “21st century socialism” of, 225 Brexit vote (2016), 80 Brookings Institution, 70 Brooks, Robin, 27 Bruegel Institute, 36, 37, 112 Bryan, William Jennings, 133 Brynjolfsson, Eric, 143 B Team Responsible Tax Principles, 205 Buffet, Warren, 218 Bundesrepublik Deutschland (BRD).

Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani

"Peter Beck" AND "Rocket Lab", Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, capital controls, capitalist realism, cashless society, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, computer vision, CRISPR, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, dematerialisation, DIY culture, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, G4S, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gregor Mendel, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, land reform, Leo Hollis, liberal capitalism, low earth orbit, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, market fundamentalism, means of production, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, off grid, pattern recognition, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, post scarcity, post-work, price mechanism, price stability, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, profit motive, race to the bottom, rewilding, RFID, rising living standards, Robert Solow, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sensor fusion, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, SoftBank, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transatlantic slave trade, Travis Kalanick, universal basic income, V2 rocket, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, working-age population

Industrial capitalism, whose immense powers were made possible by the extraction and burning of fossil fuels, would change the Earth’s ecosystems. For the first time in billions of years, the activity of a single species would become the leading factor in our planet’s ability to sustain life. Arrival of the Anthropocene While the precise environmental consequences of the Second Disruption are unclear, the scientific consensus indicates that higher concentrations of greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide, have caused global temperatures to rise. As a result the world is 0.8 degrees centigrade warmer today than it was in the 1880s.

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The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies. W.W. Norton, 2014. 5. Limitless Power: Post-Scarcity in Energy Energy and Disruption Malm, Andreas. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. Verso Books, 2016. Arrival of the Anthropocene Lynch, Patrick. ‘Secrets from the Past Point to Rapid Climate Change in the Future’. NASA, 14 December 2011. Can We Survive Climate Catastrophe? Klein, Naomi. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. Penguin Books, 2015. Lynas, Mark. Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet. Fourth Estate, 2007.

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Index ‘Abundance Index’, 235–6 Africa, 107–10, 162 ageing about, 138–41 in Britain, 141–4 Elysium, 154–8 gene therapies, 149–54 genetic information, 144–9 Green Revolution, 164–8 agriculture about, 31–2 cellular, 171, 174, 175, 177–81 end of mass, 79–80 agronomic research, 165 Alzheimer’s disease, 143 Amazon, 88–9 Amazon GO, 88–9 Antarctic Treaty System, 136, 136n anthropocene, 96–7 anti-austerity, politics of, 201 Apollo, 122, 128, 137 Apple, 84 Arkwright, Richard, 208 Arkyd, 132 Around the World in Eighty Days (Verne), 33 artificial intelligence (AI), 90 asteroid 16 Psyche, 134 asteroid belt, 131 asteroid mining, 119–20, 133–4 Atlas robot, 82–3, 132 automation actual, 88–92 growth of, 239 in medicine, 91 autonomy autonomous vehicles, 83–6 of publicly owned firms under market socialism, 231 Autumn Budget (2017), 58 Ava Winery, 180 Badiou, Alain, 18 Bank of England, 228, 229 Beck, Peter, 123 Bezos, Jeff, 121, 135 biology, as information, 39 birth rites, 146–7 Blue Origin, 124, 133–4, 135 Blumenthal, Chris, 2–4 Blur Origin, 121 BNP (British National Party), 27 Boeing, 121 Borlaug, Norman, 165–6, 171 Boston Consulting Group, 46–7 Boulton, Matthew, 34 BP (British Petroleum), 100 Brand, Stewart, 48–9, 64 Brexit, 21, 28–9, 30, 206–7 Brin, Sergey, 171 Britain ageing in, 141–4 transportation in, 215 unions in, 211–12 British National Party (BNP), 27 British Petroleum (BP), 100 British Rail Consortium, 89 Brus, Włodzimierz The General Problems of the Functioning of the Socialist Economy, 231 From Marx to the Market, 230–1 Brynjolfsson, Erik, 93 capital, when it becomes labour, 69–71 ‘capital stock’, 69 capitalism about, 22, 51–3 critics of, 34–6 features of, 137 market, 39–40, 197–8 Marx on, 35, 199 capitalist realism, 17–19, 186 capitalist state central banks as central planners, 226–9 end of GDP, 232–6 socialised capital market, 230–2 speculative economy, 229–30 Universal Basic Income (UBI), 224–6 carbon emissions, 197 Carillion, 201–3 Carney, Mark, 86–7 cellular agriculture, 171, 174, 175, 177–81 central banks, as central planners, 226–9 central planning, 226–9 Centre for Local Economic Strategies (CLES), 209 Ceres, 130, 131 Children of Men (film), 18 China National Space Administration, 131 Clancy, John, 212 Clara Foods, 178–9 clean energy, 190 CLES (Centre for Local Economic Strategies), 209 Cleveland Model, 209 climate change.

Four Futures: Life After Capitalism by Peter Frase

Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, Anthropocene, basic income, bitcoin, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, congestion pricing, cryptocurrency, deindustrialization, do what you love, Dogecoin, Donald Shoup, Edward Snowden, emotional labour, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ferguson, Missouri, fixed income, full employment, future of work, green new deal, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, high-speed rail, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), iterative process, Jevons paradox, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kim Stanley Robinson, litecoin, mass incarceration, means of production, military-industrial complex, Occupy movement, pattern recognition, peak oil, plutocrats, post-work, postindustrial economy, price mechanism, private military company, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Gordon, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart meter, TaskRabbit, technoutopianism, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck

Here the human task of shaping the natural world around our needs is separated from the impulse to preserve particular natural environments for their own sake. Back here on Earth, the ecologist Eugene Stoermer and others have proposed that we live in an era that should be called the “Anthropocene,” the period of geological time in which humans have had a major impact on the Earth’s ecosystems. Some leftist ecologists are suspicious of this term, viewing it as a way of blaming ecological damage on humans in general rather than on capitalists in particular.12 But it doesn’t have to be that; the Anthropocene can simply be a recognition that ecology must always revolve around human concerns. The question, in other words, is not how we reduce our impact on nature, but how we can better manage and care for nature.

The New Prophets of Capital by Nicole Aschoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, American Legislative Exchange Council, Anthropocene, antiwork, basic income, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, clean water, collective bargaining, commoditize, crony capitalism, do what you love, feminist movement, follow your passion, food desert, Food sovereignty, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global value chain, helicopter parent, hiring and firing, income inequality, Khan Academy, late capitalism, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, means of production, microapartment, performance metric, post-Fordism, post-work, profit motive, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school vouchers, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, structural adjustment programs, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, urban renewal, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

If society is to avoid the devastating environmental and social effects of the current trajectory it needs to take a different path. Mackey believes that this is starting to happen, and though this nascent philosophy of capitalism is in its early stages, the direction is clear: “If your company doesn’t care, it will not be in business for long.”5 The Anthropocene Era For the past thirty years companies have been told that their only social responsibility is to make a profit. In this ideological context, recent moves by mega-corporations like Kraft, Walmart, McDonalds, Hewlett-Packard, Nordstrom, Nestlé, IKEA, Southwest Airlines, Zappos, and many more to scrutinize their supply chains and speed their adoption of sustainable practices is surprising and indicates growing concerns about the current global model of extraction, production, distribution, and consumption.

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Examining growth trends in human population, industrialization, pollution, and resource depletion, the report’s authors suggested possible scenarios of “overshoot and collapse” in the global system by the middle of the twenty-first century. In the decades since, a shared global consciousness has emerged that humans are destroying the planet. Some scientists have even started referring to the time since the rise of industrial capitalism as the Anthropocene era, arguing that humans are altering the planet in ways similar to major geological events in the past. Apocalyptic predictions about the effects of global warming have become a news staple as groups like the Natural Resources Defense Council broadcast a steady stream of warnings about a future plagued by droughts, typhoons, fires, and floods.

The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning by Jeremy Lent

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Atahualpa, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, complexity theory, conceptual framework, dematerialisation, demographic transition, different worldview, Doomsday Book, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Firefox, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of gunpowder, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, language acquisition, Lao Tzu, Law of Accelerating Returns, mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Metcalfe's law, Mikhail Gorbachev, move 37, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, peak oil, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Solow, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, scientific management, Scientific racism, scientific worldview, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, South China Sea, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technological singularity, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, ultimatum game, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, wikimedia commons

To sustain our current rate of expansion, it's been estimated that human appropriation of net primary productivity would need to double or triple by mid-century. Scientists are understandably asking if this is in fact possible.44 Like the sorcerer's apprentice, we've discovered the magic spell to unleash formidable forces, only to find that they seem to be unstoppable once they've begun. The Arrival of the Anthropocene In every part of the earth, natural systems that have sustained themselves from time immemorial are groaning under the strain of this pressure. The basic elements of life on earth that we take for granted—forests, fish in the oceans, water to drink—are rapidly being consumed by humanity's voracious demands.

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Between 30 and 50 percent of all vertebrate species are threatened with extinction this century.50 Many prominent scientists have concluded that humanity has now emerged as its own force of nature. The scope of human impact is so enormous, and will affect the distant future of the earth to such a degree, that they are describing our modern period as a new geological epoch called the Anthropocene. “Human activities,” writes a leading scientist, “have become so pervasive and profound that they rival the great forces of Nature and are pushing the earth into planetary terra incognita…. The phenomenon of global change represents a profound shift in the relationship between humans and the rest of nature.”51 Heating the Planet Of all the impacts humanity is having on the planet, perhaps the most ominous is climate change, which threatens to disrupt the very foundation on which human society has been built since the rise of agriculture.

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., “Assessing ‘Dangerous Climate Change’: Required Reduction of Carbon Emissions to Protect Young People, Future Generations and Nature,” PLOS ONE 8, no. 12 (2013): e81648. 51. Jane Lubchenco, “Entering the Century of the Environment: A New Social Contract for Science,” Science 279 (1998): 491–97; Will Steffen, Paul J. Crutzen, and John R. McNeill, “The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?,” Ambio: A Journal of the Human Environment 36, no. 8 (2007): 614–21. See also Paul J. Crutzen, “Geology of Mankind,” Nature 415, no. 6867 (2002): 23; and Vitousek et al., “Human Domination.” 52. James Hansen, Storms of My Grandchildren: The Truth about the Coming Climate Catastrophe and Our Last Chance to Save Humanity (New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2009), Kindle edition, locations 2152–61; Climate Change: Evidence and Causes (Royal Society and National Academy of Sciences, 2014); Justin Gillis, “Heat-Trapping Gas Passes Milestone, Raising Fears,” New York Times, May 10, 2013; Noah Diffenbaugh and Christopher Field, “Changes in Ecologically Critical Terrestrial Climate Conditions,” Science 341, no. 6145 (2013): 486–92. 53.

The Ministry for the Future: A Novel by Kim Stanley Robinson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Anthropocene, availability heuristic, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, cakes and ale, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cryptocurrency, dark matter, decarbonisation, degrowth, distributed ledger, drone strike, European colonialism, failed state, fiat currency, Food sovereignty, full employment, Gini coefficient, global village, green new deal, happiness index / gross national happiness, High speed trading, high-speed rail, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, Jevons paradox, Kim Stanley Robinson, land reform, liberation theology, liquidity trap, Mahbub ul Haq, megacity, megastructure, Modern Monetary Theory, mutually assured destruction, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, place-making, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, quantitative easing, rewilding, RFID, Robert Solow, seigniorage, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special economic zone, structural adjustment programs, synthetic biology, time value of money, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, wage slave, Washington Consensus

But consider this aspect of it: Recent extinctions include the Saudi gazelle, the Japanese sea lion, the Caribbean monk seal, the Christmas Island pipstrelle, the Bramble Cay melomys, the vaquita porpoise, the Alagoas foliage-gleaner, the cryptic treehunter, Spix’s macaw, the po’ouli, the northern white rhino, the mountain tapir, the Haitian solenodon, the giant otter, Attwater’s prairie chicken, the Spanish lynx, the Persian fallow deer, the Japanese crested ibis, the Arabian oryx, the snub-nosed monkey, the Ceylon elephant, the indris, Zanzibar’s red colobus, the mountain gorilla, the white-throated wallaby, the walia ibex, the aye-aye, the vicuna, the giant panda, the monkey-eating eagle, and an estimated two hundred more species of mammals, seven hundred species of birds, four hundred species of reptiles, six hundred species of amphibians, and four thousand species of plants. The current rate of extinctions compared to the geological norm is now several thousandfold faster, making this the sixth great mass extinction event in Earth’s history, and thus the start of the Anthropocene in its clearest demarcation, which is to say, we are in a biosphere catastrophe that will be obvious in the fossil record for as long as the Earth lasts. Also the mass extinction is one of the most obvious examples of things done by humans that cannot be undone, despite all the experimental de-extinction efforts, and the general robustness of life on Earth.

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Madagascar celebrates its Great Forest Restoration by the example of Project Moringa, and Using Trees to Save Lives. Mexico presents Greening the Chihuahuan Desert, Intensive Silvopasture, Hidden Rivers, Reforestation and Water Protection Group, and Via Organica. Morocco brings you its organization Making the Desert Bloom. We come from Nepal to describe the Beyul Project and the Anthropocene Wilderness Group. New Zealand here: Hinewai Reserve, Mangarara Eco Farm, and The Regenerators. As with all the other countries gathered here, tip of the iceberg really. I come from Niger to tell you of Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration, and Re-greening in Niger. From Norway we speak of Polar Permaculture Solutions.

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Indeed it can never be emphasized enough how important the Paris Agreement had been; weak though it might have been at its start, it was perhaps like the moment the tide turns: first barely perceptible, then unstoppable. The greatest turning point in human history, what some called the first big spark of planetary mind. The birth of a good Anthropocene. So the last two days of this meeting consisted of one day of people summarizing, listing, and celebrating various aspects of the positive changes made since the Agreement was signed. The second day was devoted to listing and describing some of the outstanding problems they had yet to solve if they were to secure the progress inherent or promised by the things mentioned on the first day.

Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? by Bill McKibben

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, Anne Wojcicki, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, biodiversity loss, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, CRISPR, David Attenborough, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Flynn Effect, gigafactory, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Hyperloop, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Bridle, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kim Stanley Robinson, life extension, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, Menlo Park, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart meter, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, supervolcano, tech baron, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Y2K, yield curve

As the title indicates, The End of Nature was not a cheerful book, and sadly its gloom has been vindicated. My basic point was that humans had so altered the planet that not an inch was beyond our reach, an idea that scientists underlined a decade later when they began referring to our era as the Anthropocene. This volume is bleak as well—in some ways bleaker, because more time has passed and we are deeper in the hole. It offers an account of how the climate crisis has progressed and of the new technological developments in fields such as artificial intelligence that also seem to me to threaten a human future.

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“Scientists’ Warning to Humanity ‘Most Talked about Paper,’” March 7, 2018, sciencedaily.com. 7. Nafeez Ahmed, “NASA-Funded Study: Industrial Civilization Headed for ‘Irreversible Collapse’?” Guardian, March 14, 2014. 8. Baher Kamal, “Alert: Nature, on the Verge of Bankruptcy,” September 12, 2017, ispnews.net. 9. Clive Hamilton, Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2017), p. 42. 10. John Vidal, “From Africa’s Baobabs to America’s Pines: Our Ancient Trees Are Dying,” Huffington Post, June 19, 2018. 11. Anne Barnard, “Climate Change Is Killing the Cedars of Lebanon,” New York Times, July 18, 2018. 12. Damian Carrington, “Arctic Stronghold of World’s Seeds Flooded After Permafrost Melts,” Guardian, May 19, 2017. 13.

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Abou, Naore accelerating information returns Adirondacks Advanced Cell Technology Africa African Americans agriculture AIDS/HIV air-conditioning air pollution Alabama Alaska Alberta Alcor Algeria algorithms Allen, Paul alligators Allpress, Bob Alpha Centauri Altman, Sam altruism Amazon (company) Amazon Basin Ambrosia American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) American Petroleum Institute (API) American Revolution Americans for Prosperity American Society for Testing and Materials Amoco Andrea, Lembris Anoh, Jean Antarctica anthrax Anthropocene epoch Apollo missions aquifers Arab Spring archaeology Archer Daniels Midland Arctic aridification Aristotle Arizona Arizona Public Service (APS) Armstrong, Lance Armstrong, Neil artificial general intelligence (AGI) artificial intelligence (AI) Ashland, Kansas asphalt shingle Athens athletes Atlas Shrugged (Rand) Atlas Society atmospheric temperature, rise in.

Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World by Laura Spinney

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, autism spectrum disorder, British Empire, colonial rule, dark matter, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Jenner, experimental subject, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, global pandemic, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, invisible hand, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, nocebo, placebo effect, social distancing, trade route, urban renewal

If we understood the relationship between bird migration paths and flu, however, we might also be able to determine how our burning of fossil fuels will impact the timing, and geographical origin, of any future pandemic. We have, after all, now entered the Anthropocene epoch, which is defined by the impact of humanity on earth–the trace that our cars, nuclear weapons and discarded chicken bones have left on the planet. The previous epoch, the Holocene, spanned the 12,000 years since the last ice age and–coincidentally–the farming revolution that marked the beginning of the story of flu as a human disease. In the Anthropocene, we have moved into uncharted territory. As palaeoclimatologist William Ruddiman put it, ‘we humans have now ended the 2.75-million-year history of northern hemisphere ice-age cycles for a time into the future that is beyond imagining’.

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Aboriginals, Australian 21, 62, 100 acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) 19, 208 Adams, Harriet Chalmers 52–3 Addis Ababa, Ethiopia 41 AEF see American Expeditionary Forces AFIP see Armed Forces Institute of Pathology Afkhami, Amir 206 Africa 5, 38, 40, 41, 49, 64–5, 244 Christian missionaries 237 Ebola 17, 18, 61, 90, 231, 275, 292 flu mortality rates 201, 202 Pentecostal movement 236–7 see also South Africa; Tanzania African Americans 203–4 African National Congress (ANC) 225, 226 Afrikaners 225, 226 Ahmedabad, India 254, 255, 256, 257, 258 Ahwa, India: Church of the Brethren mission 215 AIDS/HIV 25, 61, 78, 198, 231, 283, 292 AIR Worldwide 278 Akhmatova, Anna 262 Alaska 140, 143, 144, 190, 207, 232–3 see also Brevig Mission; Bristol Bay; Dillingham; Yupik, the Alaska Natives Commission 232–3 Alaska Packers’ Association (APA) 142, 143, 144, 149 Albright, Frederick 208 alcohol: as protection against flu 123–4 Aldershot, England 162 Aleuts/Aleutian Islands 140, 142 see also Unalaska Island Alfonso XIII, of Spain 38, 235–6, 252 alternative medicine 8, 121, 125, 235, 236, 238 Álvaro y Ballano, Antonio, Bishop of Zamora 79–80, 82–3, 84, 85 Alzheimer’s disease 209 America see United States of America American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) 37, 40, 43 American Indian Wars 29–30 American Medical Association 98 Amerindians 20–21 amino acids 185 ammonia, manufacture of 247 Amritsar, India: massacre (1919) 259–60 anaemia 206, 207 ANC see African National Congress Andrade, Mário de: Macunaíma 268–9 Andrés, Sister Dositea 83 Andrews, Father Charles 258 Anglo American mining company, Zambia 230 Anglo-Boer Wars (1899–1902) 225, 245 Antarctica 7, 44 anthrax 62, 128 Anthropocene epoch 277 antibiotics 31, 121, 243 antibodies 181–2, 192, 195, 209 antigens 182, 184 see also haemagglutinin Antilles, the 21 anti-Semitism 128, 245 antiviral drugs 121 APA see Alaska Packers’ Association Apollinaire, Guillaume 3–4, 47 Apollinaire, Jacqueline 47 Archangel 43 architecture, post-flu 123–4, 261 ARDS see acute respiratory distress syndrome Argentina 100, 197 Arlen, Michael: The Green Hat 265 Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (AFIP), Washington DC 190, 191–3 arsenic preparations 123 art, post-flu 261 Ashkhabad, Turkmenistan 114 Asia 244 flu mortality rates 170–71, 201, 202 see also China; India; Japan ‘Asian’ flu (1957) 199 aspirin 76, 122 Asquith, Herbert Henry 247 astrologers, Persian 119 Atilano, Bishop of Zamora 85 Atlanta, Georgia see Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Auckland, New Zealand 205 Audubon Society of America 277 Australia/Australians 38, 44, 93, 293 Aboriginals 21, 62, 100 flu mortality rates 44, 201 Austria/Austrians 40, 44, 130, 133, 249 music 261 tuberculosis 250 see also Freud, Sigmund; Kafka, Franz; Vienna Austro-Hungarian Empire 42, 249, 250 Azevedo, Aluísio: O Cortiço (The Slum) 26, 27, 52 Aztec Empire 21 Babel, Isaac: Odessa Tales 127, 135 back-to-nature movements 236 bacteria 25, 26, 27, 176–7, 184 Mycobacterium tuberculosis 25, 209 Yersinia pestis 31, 73, 155–6 see also ‘Pfeiffer’s bacillus’ Baden, Germany 138, 240 Baden, Max von 267 badgers 89, 126 Baker, Josephine 104 Bal Gangadhar Tilak (independence movement) 257, 258 Ballets Russes: Cleopatra 41–2 Baltimore Afro-American (newspaper) 203–4 Bandeaux, Father 102 Bangkok, Thailand 75 Bangladesh 202 Bardakh, Henrietta 129 Bardakh, Yakov 128, 129, 130–31, 132, 133, 135, 168, 175 Barry, John M. 163–4 Bartók, Béla 218 bats 197 Bayer’s aspirin 76 Bazalgette, Joseph 28 Beckett, Samuel: Murphy 266 bees 89 Beethoven, Ludwig van 218 Beijing see Peking Belgium 158, 159, 160 Benedict XV, Pope 238 Benjamin, Walter 292 Bergen-Belsen concentration camp 67 Bergensfjord (ship) 103 Bergman, Ingmar 30 Berlin 31, 48 Bevan, Aneurin 243 biowarfare 76 bird flu 18, 188–9, 191, 193, 194, 197, 198–9, 276, 277 birth rates, post-flu 216–17, 231 Bismarck, Otto von 240 Black Death, the 4, 8, 31, 75, 139–40, 228, 290, 291 bloodletting 123 Boccaccio, Giovanni: The Decameron 139–40 Bohr, Niels 237 Bokhara, Uzbekistan 23 Bombay (Mumbai) 10–11, 38, 49, 107, 256, 258, 260 Boston, Massachusetts 40, 41 Psychopathic Hospital 220 Boxer Rebellion, China (1900) 71 Brainerd, Elizabeth and Siegler, Mark: ‘The Economic Effects of the 1918 Influenza Epidemic’ 231–2 Brandt, Johanna 225 Brazil 26, 41, 45, 64, 100, 268 writers 268–9 see also Rio de Janeiro Breslau, Germany (Wrocław, Poland) 38 Brest, France 40, 41, 47 Brest-Litovsk, Treaty of (1918) 38–9, 113, 127 Brevig Mission, Alaska: mass grave 190–91, 232 Bristol Bay, Alaska 140–42, 143–4, 148, 207 orphans 212–13 see also Dillingham; Yupik, the Britain/the British 20, 38, 63, 264 adoption 231 in China 157, 158, 159 flu mortality rates 169, 293–4 health insurance 240 National Health Service 242–3 and Palestine 267 and Persia 43, 113, 114–15, 116, 117 writers 263, 264, 265 see also British Army British Army 39, 160, 177 deaths 6, 248, 293 at Étaples 150–51, 160–63 Étaples mutiny 247 Persians in 206 Brittain, Vera 218, 293 ‘bronchitis, purulent’ 161–2, 221 Buber, Martin 267 bubonic plague 8, 21, 31, 73, 292, 293 Bulgaria 26 Bulhoek, South Africa 225–6 burials 54–5, 74, 109, 116, 117, 118, 156 see also coffins By the Fireside (film) 134 Calcutta, India 260 Caldwell, John Lawrence 114 Cambridge University 237 Camp Funston, Kansas 34–5, 37, 153, 163, 164 camphor oil 123 Canada/Canadians 159, 198, 202 cancers 242 Canetti, Elias: Party in the Blitz 289 Cape Town 41, 77, 204, 231 Spanish flu summit (1998) 6 Cardoso Sales Rodrigues, Nair 49, 55–6 Carella, Corporal Cesare 110 Careta (magazine) 53 Caribbean, the 21, 41 Caribbean spiny lobster 89 Caruso, Enrico 106 Casanova, Jean-Laurent 208–9 castor oil 123 Catherine II, of Russia (‘the Great’) 127 Catholic Church/Catholicism 79–80, 82–5, 102, 138, 238 Caulfield, Sueann: In Defense of Honor… 140 CDC see Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Ceau¸sescu, Nicolae 30 Céline, Louis-Ferdinand: Journey to the End of the Night 175 Cendrars, Blaise 3, 47 censorship 49, 63, 102, 282 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Atlanta, Georgia 187, 191–2, 279, 281–2 Chagas, Carlos 268 Chapekar brothers 100 Chaplin, Charlie 105 Charlemagne 20 Chen Tu-hsi (Chen Duxiu) 69 Cheyenne Bottoms, Kansas 189 Chiang Kai-shek 242 Chicago, Illinois 202 Chile 45, 67–8 chimpanzees 89 China 38, 43, 62, 153, 154, 164, 165 An Lushan Rebellion (8th century) 290 Boxer Rebellion (1900) 71 British in 157, 158, 159 carrier pigeons 30 Confucianism 70, 71 ducks 199 flu ‘cures’ 125 flu mortality rates 71, 73, 167, 169–70 foot-binding 70 literature 269–70 missionaries 7, 71, 72, 74, 156, 158, 169 National Medical Association 242 National Quarantine Service 242 New Culture movement 69, 269, 270 Qing dynasty 69, 73, 125, 154, 156, 157 revolution (1911) 69, 70 and World War I 157 see also Harbin; Peking; Shansi; Shantung; Wu Lien-teh Chinese Labour Corps (CLC) 157–9, 161, 164 chiropractic 235 cholera 27–8, 29, 62, 67, 70, 92, 107, 114, 115, 116, 117, 128, 130, 131, 132, 135, 168, 179, 256 Chopin, Frédéric 28, 209 Christakis, Nicholas and Fowler, James H.: ‘Social network sensors for early detection of contagious outbreaks’ 279–80 Christian Scientists 236 Christianity/Christians 115–16, 117, 134, 137, 205, 215, 224, 237, 258 see also Catholic Church; ‘Israelites, the’ chronic fatigue syndrome, post-flu 219 see also post-viral fatigue Churchill, Winston 243 cities: vulnerability to infection 202, 205 CLC see Chinese Labour Corps Clemenceau, Georges 250 Coffin, Eugene 144, 145, 147 coffins 47, 55–6, 73, 84, 110, 136, 227 ‘collective’ v. individual 98–9 ‘collective resilience’ 136, 137, 139 Collier, Richard 39, 77, 138, 230 The Plague of the Spanish Lady… 75 Columbus, Christopher 20–21 Commission on Creating a Global Health Risk Framework for the Future (GHRF) 275 Report (2016) 279 concentration camps 67, 245–6 Concepción, Chile 68 Connecticut, USA 202 Connelly, Mayme 146–7 conquistadors 21, 64 Constantinople: Hamidiye Children’s Hospital 67 Cook, Captain James 141 Cooper, John Milton, Jr 251 Copeland, Royal S. 86, 103–5, 108–9, 110, 111–12, 130, 235 Copeland, Royal S., Jr 87, 108–9 Corbusier, Le (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret) 123–4 Cordeiro, José Luís (Jamanta) 54 cordons sanitaires see ‘sanitary cordons’ Correio de Manh (newspaper) 54 Correo de Zamora, El (newspaper) 79, 81, 82, 83 Corriere della Sera (newspaper) 102 Cortés, Hernán 21, 22 cowpox vaccine 98 Crazy Horse, Chief 145 crime 100, 106, 127, 130, 136, 138, 139–40, 153, 155, 231, 233 Crosby, Alfred: America’s Forgotten Pandemic 43, 99, 262 ‘crowd diseases’ 16, 18–19, 23, 25 Cruz, Oswaldo 53, 268 Cuba 80 Cunard, Nancy 265 cytokines 192–3, 195, 217 Czechoslovakia 42, 267 Dakar, Senegal 49, 50 Dangs, the 203 Darwin, Charles: On the Origin of Species 28–9 De Beers Company 77 Defoe, Daniel: Journal of the Plague Year 136 dementia 220, 226, 242 Demerara, SS 41, 49–50 dengue fever 20, 67 Denmark 64, 201–2 depression 24, 264, 265 post-flu/post-viral 24, 218–20, 264, 265, 283 Desai, Dayalji 257, 259 De Simone, Raffaele 109–10 Diaghilev, Sergei 41 digitalis 123 Dillingham, Alaska 142, 143, 144, 146, 149, 190 disease surveillance systems 92–3, 96, 278, 279, 283 ‘disgust response’ 89–90 disinfectant, use of 97, 100 DNA 31, 184, 185, 201 Doane, Lt Philip S. 76 doctors 137–8, 240, 241, 243 Dodge, Captain Frederick 144, 145, 148 dogs 197 Don Juan 267–8 Don Juan Tenorio 267 Dos Passos, John 262 Downton Abbey (TV) 291 Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan 237 ‘drift’ 185, 196 ‘Dr Kilmer’s Swamp-Root’ 124 drugs 76, 121–3, 124 see also antibiotics Dublin 43 Duchamp, Marcel 3 ducks 18, 188–9, 199 Dujarric de la Rivière, René 172–3, 176, 177–9, 180, 181 Durban, South Africa 77, 204 Dyer, Brigadier General Reginald 259–60 dysentery 168, 169 Earhart, Amelia 218 Ebey, Adam 215 Ebey, Alice 215 Ebola 17, 18, 61, 90, 231, 275, 292 EC see European Commission Edel, Harold 105 Edgar, Robert 227 Egypt 19, 254 Einstein, Alfred 237 EL see encephalitis lethargica El Niño-Southern oscillation (ENSO) 276–7 electron microscopes 184, 190 micrograph of flu virus 272–3 electrons 184 elephants 89–90 Eliot, T.

Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension by Samuel Arbesman

algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Apple II, Benoit Mandelbrot, Boeing 747, Chekhov's gun, citation needed, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Danny Hillis, data science, David Brooks, digital map, discovery of the americas, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Flash crash, friendly AI, game design, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, Hans Moravec, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, Inbox Zero, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Kevin Kelly, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, mandelbrot fractal, Minecraft, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Parkinson's law, power law, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, SimCity, software studies, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, superintelligent machines, synthetic biology, systems thinking, the long tail, Therac-25, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K

As computing has become embedded in everything from our automobiles and our telephones to our financial markets, technological complexity has eclipsed our ability to comprehend it. In recent years, scientists have even begun to recognize the inextricable way that technology and nature have become intertwined. Geologists who study the Earth’s rock layers are asking whether there is enough evidence to formally name our current time period the Anthropocene, the Epoch of Humanity. Formal title or not, the relationship between our human-made systems and the natural world means that each of our actions has even more unexpected ramifications than ever before, rippling not just to every corner of our infrastructure but to every corner of the planet, and sometimes even beyond.

…

Dijkstra made a similar point in his Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Turing Lecture in 1972. E. W. Dijkstra, “The Humble Programmer,” Communications of the ACM 15, no. 10 (1972): 859–86. Not every technology is computational, but Dijkstra’s insight does impinge on much of our technological life. the Anthropocene, the Epoch of Humanity: For further reading, see Lee Billings, “Brave New Epoch,” Nautilus 009: January 30, 2014. a journal article in Scientific Reports: Neil Johnson et al., “Abrupt Rise of New Machine Ecology Beyond Human Response Time,” Scientific Reports 3:2627, September 11, 2013. with humans on the sidelines: “Back in 2008, when it first occurred to Brad Katsuyama that the stock market had become a black box whose inner workings eluded ordinary human understanding . . .”

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 9 dash line, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, capital controls, Carl Icahn, charter city, circular economy, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, disruptive innovation, diversification, Doha Development Round, driverless car, Easter island, edge city, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, Fairphone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, forward guidance, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, ice-free Arctic, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, industrial robot, informal economy, Infrastructure as a Service, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Khyber Pass, Kibera, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, low cost airline, low earth orbit, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass affluent, mass immigration, megacity, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, openstreetmap, out of africa, Panamax, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Planet Labs, plutocrats, post-oil, post-Panamax, precautionary principle, private military company, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Quicken Loans, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, the built environment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero day

SOURCEMAP http://www.​sourcemap.​com/ Sourcemap provides end-to-end visibility into supply chain data from raw materials to end consumers, allowing for visualization of risks, calculation of costs, and planning for resilience. VISUAL LITERACY http://www.​visual-literacy.​org/​periodic_table/​periodic_table.​html Visual Literacy’s Periodic Table of Visualization Methods provides instructive pop-up infographics summarizing dozens of key data and mapping techniques. WELCOME TO THE ANTHROPOCENE http://www.​anthropocene.​info Welcome to the Anthropocene is a collection of short video journeys covering the past 250 years since the Industrial Revolution that depicts humanity’s impact on the planet. WORLD BANK PUMA SPATIAL DATA SETS http://puma.​worldbank.​org/​downloads/ The World Bank’s PUMA, or Platform for Urban Management and Analysis, is the repository for urban spatial data and a geospatial tool that allows users to download data sets for direct visualization and analysis.

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Journal of Strategic Information Systems 13, no. 1 (2004): 5–28. Cunliffe, Barry. Europe Between the Oceans. Yale University Press, 2008. Curtis, Simon. “Global Cities and the Transformation of the International System.” Review of International Studies 37, no. 4 (2011): 1923–47. Dalby, Simon. “Rethinking Geopolitics: Climate Security in the Anthropocene.” Global Policy 5, no. 1 (Feb. 2014). Davies, James, Rodrigo Lluberas, and Anthony Shorrocks. Global Wealth Report 2012. Credit Suisse, 2012. Davies, Norman. Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations. Penguin Books, 2012. Deaton, Angus. The Great Escape: Health, Wealth, and the Origins of Inequality.

Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism by Stephen Graham

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", addicted to oil, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, anti-communist, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, congestion charging, creative destruction, credit crunch, DARPA: Urban Challenge, defense in depth, deindustrialization, digital map, disinformation, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, edge city, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, failed state, Food sovereignty, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Global Witness, Google Earth, illegal immigration, income inequality, knowledge economy, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, loose coupling, machine readable, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, McMansion, megacity, military-industrial complex, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, one-state solution, pattern recognition, peak oil, planetary scale, post-Fordism, private military company, Project for a New American Century, RAND corporation, RFID, Richard Florida, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, SimCity, smart transportation, surplus humans, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, white flight, white picket fence

Finally, the temporal horizons of politics must reach well beyond the speculative advantages, the sound-bite opportunities, of the ‘long now’. Consider, after all, that the human shaping of the earth has become so dominant that an entirely new geological era – the Anthropocene – has been introduced to address it.91 Surely, cultural, technological and environmental politics must be re-forged to match the force of the Anthropocene. With fossil-fuel extinction looming, and water and food security rapidly deteriorating, a radical new politics of security must be both local and transnational. A ‘low-energy cosmopolitanism’92 demands a revitalized, democratic public sphere at every level.

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Human Security for an Urban Century, Vancouver, 2004. 89 Boal, Clark, Matthews, and Watts, Afflicted Powers, 177. 90 Thanks to David Campbell for stressing this crucial point. See William Connolly, Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox, Minneapolis, MN; University of Minnesota Press, 2002. 91 See Simon Dalby, ‘Ecological Intervention and Anthropocene Ethics’, Ethics & International Affairs 21: 3, 2007. 92 Andrew Dobson and David Hayes, ‘A Politics of Crisis: Low-Energy Cosmopolitanism’, OpenDemocracy.net, 22 October 2008. 93 See Leonie Ansems de Vries, ‘(The war on) terrorism: Destruction, Collapse, Mixture, Re-enforcement, Construction’, Cultural Politics 4: 2, 183–98. 94 See Keith Krause and Michael Williams, eds, Critical Security Studies: Concepts and Cases, New York: Routledge, 1997. 95 See Willem de Lint and Sirpa Virta, ‘Security in Ambiguity: Towards a Radical Security Politics’, Theoretical Criminology 8: 4, 2004, 465–89. 96 See Stephen Graham, ‘“Homeland” Insecurities?

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., 303 n.11, 311, 335 n.142 Amman, 261 Amoore, Louise, 99,100, 125 n.128, 126, 138 n.180, 139, 142 n.190, 360 n.33 Anastassia, Tsoukala, 90 n.6, 91 n.10 Andrejevic, Marc, 93 Andreu, Paul, 89 n.2 Andrews, Andy, 190 Ansary, Tamim, 273 n.32, 300 Ansems de Vries, Leonie, 267 n.14, 383 n.93 Anthropocene, 382 anthropologists, 33 anti-globalization, 22–23, 59, 122, 353 anti-urbanism, xxi, 27, 32, 40–52 passim, 314, 317, 320 APEC, 122 Appadurai, Arjun, 145; Fear of Small Numbers, 16 n.66, 17 n.70, 28, 56 n.83; Modernity at Large,18 appropriation, 363–68 Arab cities, 38, 41 n.25, 53 n.74, 56–57, 71, 185, 188, 191, 194, 196, 199, 203, 205–6, 209, 211, 218–19, 225, 227, 237 Arabs, pathos of, 235 The Arab Mind (Patai), 53 n.71, 57, 235 Arafat, Yasser, 233 Arizona Republic,187 Arkin, Ronald, 180 Armitage, John, 181 ARMY, 243 Army News Service, 209 Arnold, Kathleen, 93 n.25 Arquilla, John, 22 n.89, 155 n.7 art, 351–80 passim Arziof, David, 255 Assa, Haim, 286 assassination raids, 248–50 Astore, William J., 292 n.112 asymmetric war, xiv, xx, 19, 27, 40, 71, 156, 162–63, 175, 230, 235, 238, 260, 265, 267, 292, 316 Atkinson, Rowland, 95 n.34, 107 Atta, Mohammed, 41 Aum Shinrikyo group, 268, 295 Australia, 98, 137, 340 Axe, David, 208 n.81 Axyell, Bryan, 202 Aziz, Tariq, 153 n.1 Aznar, 82 Azri, Ben, 284 Babero, Mike, 190 Backhaus, Gary, 110 n.78 Baeten, Guy, 43 n.36, 95 Baghdad, 112, 114, 121, 129, 130, 158, 170, 203, 224–25, 241, 242, 248, 261, 270, 280, 283–84, 324, 361–62; simulated, 201–2 Bajkowski, Julian, 378 n.71 Baker, Peter, 364, 364 n.39 Baladia.

The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality by Richard Heinberg

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, business cycle, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, green transition, happiness index / gross national happiness, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Kenneth Rogoff, late fees, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, naked short selling, Naomi Klein, Negawatt, new economy, Nixon shock, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, price stability, private military company, quantitative easing, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, short selling, special drawing rights, systems thinking, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade liberalization, tulip mania, WikiLeaks, working poor, world market for maybe five computers, zero-sum game

“Peak Everything,” Wired.com, wired.com/inspiredbyyou/2010/10/peak-everything/?ibypid=13. 92. Aeldric, “The Networking of Resource Production: Do the Networks Give Us Warnings When They Are About to Fail?,” The Oil Drum, posted September 22, 2010, anz.theoildrum.com/node/6974#more. 93. Paul Crutzen, “The ‘Anthropocene’,” in Earth System Science in the Anthropocene: Emerging Issues and Problems, Eckart Ehlers and Thomas Krafft, eds. (New York: Springer, 2006). 94. Joseph A. Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies, New Studies in Archaeology, (Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 95. Graeme Wearden, “BP oil spill costs to hit $40bn,” Guardian.co.uk, posted November 2, 2010. 96.

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The billions of tons of carbon dioxide that our species has released into the atmosphere through the combustion of fossil fuels are not only changing the global climate but also causing the oceans to acidify. Indeed, the scale of our collective impact on the planet has grown to such an extent that many scientists contend that Earth has entered a new geologic era — the Anthropocene.93 Humanly generated threats to the environment’s ability to support civilization are now capable of overwhelming civilization’s ability to adapt and regroup. Ironically, in many cases natural disasters have actually added to the GDP. This is because of the rebound effect, wherein money is spent on disaster recovery that wouldn’t otherwise have been spent.

The Frayed Atlantic Edge: A Historian’s Journey From Shetland to the Channel by David Gange

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, British Empire, garden city movement, global village, rewilding, Scientific racism, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, work culture

The largest such ‘kiln’ is thirty metres deep by fifteen wide: within it, swell churns until it bubbles as if boiling. This movement threatened to pull me in as I hung at its mouth to marvel at the fracturing, scarring and sagging that the sea inflicted. These geological creations felt like the imaginary future ruins of a civilisation lost to the rising seas of the Anthropocene. But the most remarkable features of this landscape belong to the shorter span of time between prehistory and the Victorians. I soon had vistas across the parish of Quandale, where old abandoned townships are sandwiched between the Atlantic and the hilly moorland called the Brae of Moan. It was only here that the true tragedy of the survival of Rousay’s archaeological heritage struck me.

…

Following the watery threads that lead back to the Mesolithic provokes the realisation that our species is not by nature settled and land-bound. It reveals the myths on which ‘we Mesopotamians’ have constructed the separation of people and nature from which our current eco-crises emanate: these Mesolithic seafarers have been argued to be the only humans in the whole of time and space who are not the ‘anthro’ in Anthropocene. And we would benefit from seeing through what we imagine to be their eyes more often. The long, dark night I spent between knuckles of knock and lochan on the edge of the Inner Sound was intensely atmospheric. I hunkered down against a thin smurr of rain, sometimes caught in moonlight, with the thick smell of sodden peat eclipsing the salt of sea just feet away.

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Ecologically, all owe a great deal to Aldo Leopold whose ‘land ethic’ insisted that, since all plants and animals (including humans) sink or swim together in our fragile ecosystem, all are entitled to citizenship as equal members of the biotic community. The radical work of Donna Haraway and Jason Moore, perhaps best approached through collected editions such as Jason W. Moore (ed.), Anthropocene or Capitalocene? (Oakland, CA, 2016) provides further evidence for the importance of these approaches. Historians have made some headway in adapting their ideas, but much less than literary scholars, geographers or social scientists; Timothy Mitchell’s ‘Can the Mosquito Speak?’ remains one of the few convincing historical experiments towards this goal; in relation to this book’s themes, the closest thing yet written is perhaps Marcus Rediker, ‘History from the Below the Water Line: Sharks and the Atlantic Slave Trade’, Atlantic History (2008). 6 There have been several calls to end this situation and rethink the skill sets involved in historical practice, such as Mark Levene, ‘Climate Blues: Or How Awareness of the Human End might Re-instil Ethical Purpose to the Writing of History’, Environmental Humanities (2013), and Daniel Smail, On Deep History and the Brain (2007). 7 For the beginning of a new, more concerted, attempt to write ocean histories, see the volume mentioned above, David Armitage, Alison Bashford and Sujit Sivasundaram, Oceanic Histories (Cambridge, 2018); the work of Sverker Sörlin, on the Arctic ocean, is a particularly insightful contribution combining multiple kinds of history into a genuine study of ocean, not just the maritime movement of people.

The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma by Mustafa Suleyman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, ASML, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, ChatGPT, choice architecture, circular economy, classic study, clean tech, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, drone strike, drop ship, dual-use technology, Easter island, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, energy transition, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Extinction Rebellion, facts on the ground, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global pandemic, GPT-3, GPT-4, hallucination problem, hive mind, hype cycle, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, lab leak, large language model, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, license plate recognition, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, microcredit, move 37, Mustafa Suleyman, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Nikolai Kondratiev, off grid, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, plutocrats, precautionary principle, profit motive, prompt engineering, QAnon, quantum entanglement, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, satellite internet, Silicon Valley, smart cities, South China Sea, space junk, SpaceX Starlink, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steven Levy, strong AI, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, tail risk, techlash, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, the long tail, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, TSMC, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, warehouse robotics, William MacAskill, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, zero day

Bachman, adapted for ebook Cover design: Christopher Brand and Oliver Munday ep_prh_6.1_144835715_c0_r0 Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Glossary of Key Terms Prologue Chapter 1: Containment Is Not Possible Part I: Homo Technologicus Chapter 2: Endless Proliferation Chapter 3: The Containment Problem Part II: The Next Wave Chapter 4: The Technology of Intelligence Chapter 5: The Technology of Life Chapter 6: The Wider Wave Chapter 7: Four Features of the Coming Wave Chapter 8: Unstoppable Incentives Part III: States of Failure Chapter 9: The Grand Bargain Chapter 10: Fragility Amplifiers Chapter 11: The Future of Nations Chapter 12: The Dilemma Part IV: Through the Wave Chapter 13: Containment Must Be Possible Chapter 14: Ten Steps Toward Containment Life After the Anthropocene Acknowledgments Notes Index About the Authors _144835715_ GLOSSARY OF KEY TERMS AI, AGI, AND ACI: Artificial intelligence (AI) is the science of teaching machines to learn humanlike capabilities. Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is the point at which an AI can perform all human cognitive skills better than the smartest humans.

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We should all get comfortable with living with contradictions in this era of exponential change and unfurling powers. Assume the worst, plan for it, give it everything. Stick doggedly to the narrow path. Get a world beyond the elites engaged and pushing. If enough people start building that elusive “we,” those glimmers of hope will become raging fires of change. LIFE AFTER THE ANTHROPOCENE It was quiet. Windows and shutters were closed, fires and candles put out, meals eaten. The bustle and hum of the busy day receded, and only the occasional bark of a dog, or scratching in the undergrowth, or soft rustle of the wind in the trees broke the hush. The world exhaled and slumbered.

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For another example of a holistic approach to containment strategy, see Allison Duettmann, “Defend Against Physical Threats: Multipolar Active Shields,” Foresight Institute, Feb. 14, 2022, foresightinstitute.substack.com/​p/defend-physical. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT The economist Daron Acemoglu Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, The Narrow Corridor: How Nations Struggle for Liberty (London: Viking, 2019). GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Life After the Anthropocene Technology should amplify See, for example, arguments like that of Divya Siddarth et al., “How AI Fails Us,” Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Ethics, Dec. 1, 2021, ethics.harvard.edu/​how-ai-fails-us. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT INDEX The page numbers in this index refer to the printed version of the book.

Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm by Isabella Tree

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, British Empire, carbon footprint, clean water, dark matter, illegal immigration, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, mass immigration, meta-analysis, oil shale / tar sands, phenotype, rewilding

Many argue that the stubborn little prefix ‘re-’ reveals a naive ambition to recover the past. ‘Rewilders’, they claim, are idealists calling for the impossible – a return to a state of nature that, because of species and habitat losses down the centuries, irreversible changes to soil and climate, and the incalculable impositions of ‘The Anthropocene’, can no longer exist. We knew we were not guilty of that. Our landscape in Sussex is so heavily influenced by human beings, so altered by its history and the prevailing conditions of the present, we could only ever hope to create something for the future out of the ingredients remaining to us.

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All except one – a dark grey cow with sweeping, upright horns, who warily rises to her feet as we approach. The Black Bitch is notoriously shirty and prone to charging anyone who comes near her calf. We have tolerated her because she is such a good mother. There’s a spirit about her we can’t help but admire. But this is rewilding in the Anthropocene with footpaths and dog-walkers to consider. The lofty whorl, like an Indian bindi in the middle of her forehead above her eyes, confirms what we already instinctively know. We have to cull her, Temple suggests, and, to ensure her over-protective genes are not passed on, all her progeny must go, too.

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Index Aberdeen Angus cattle see under cattle, breeds of Aberfoyle, Scotland ref1 adder’s tongue fern (Ophioglossum vulgatum ) ref1 ADHD ref1 , ref2 Adur, river/valley canalization of ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 , ref5 , ref6 flooding ref1 , ref2 as HLS target area ref1 Operation Turtle Dove ref1 origin of name ref1 potential for beavers ref1 re-naturalization of ref1 , ref2 , ref3 aesthetics, as ecosystem service ref1 Africa ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 , ref5 , ref6 agricultural fertilizers see chemical fertilizers Agricultural Property Relief ref1 Agriculture Act, 1947 ref1 air quality ref1 , ref2 , ref3 alder (Alnus glutinosa ) ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 Alexander, Dr Keith ref1 algae ref1 Alice Holt, Hampshire/Surrey border ref1 alien species ref1 , ref2 Allen, Dr Mike ref1 Alps ref1 Alzheimer’s disease ref1 , ref2 , ref3 American mink (Neovison vison ) ref1 amphibians ref1 see also common lizard , common newt , common toad , great crested newt , natterjack toad ancient woodland ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 , ref5 , ref6 , ref7 anecic earthworms ref1 , ref2 anemone see wood anemone angelica see wild angelica Anthropocene era ref1 , ref2 antibiotics, new ref1 effects on the soil ref1 use in intensive livestock farming ref1 ants ref1 , ref2 , ref3 apex predator trophic cascades ref1 , ref2 apple see crab apple Appleby, Cumbria ref1 aquatic invertebrates ref1 fairy shrimp (Chirocephalus diaphanus ) ref1 krill ref1 aquatic plants ref1 arable farming see also food production and chemical fertilizers cereal production ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 , ref5 crop yields and earthworms ref1 , ref2 decrease in land usage ref1 and flooding ref1 grain consumption ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 at Knepp ref1 , ref2 , ref3 policies/subsidies ref1 , ref2 Second World War ref1 , ref2 Arctic alpine plants ref1 Arctic char (Salvelinus alpinus ) ref1 ARK Foundation ref1 artificial fertilizers see chemical fertilizers Arun, river ref1 , ref2 ash (Fraxinus excelsior ) ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 , ref5 , ref6 , ref7 , ref8 , ref9 , ref10 ash die-back (Chalara ) ref1 , ref2 Asia ref1 , ref2 aspen (Populus tremula ) ref1 , ref2 Atlas Mountains, Morocco ref1 Atlas of European Breeding Birds ref1 attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) ref1 , ref2 aurochs (Bos primigenius ) ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 , ref5 , ref6 , ref7 , ref8 , ref9 avermectins ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 , ref5 bacteria and carcass decomposition ref1 , ref2 decline in populations of ref1 and soil ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 badger (Meles meles ) ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 , ref5 Baerselman, Fred ref1 Balharry, Dick ref1 Balkans ref1 Baltic States ref1 bank vole (Myodes glareolus ) ref1 Bannerman, David Armitage ref1 barbastelle bat (Barbastella barbastellus ) ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 Barkham, Patrick ref1 barn owl (Tyto alba ) ref1 Barnes, Simon ref1 basil thyme (Clinopodium acinos ) ref1 Bateman, Mark (stable manager) ref1 bats ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 , ref5 , ref6 see also barbastelle , Bechstein’s , common pipistrelle , Daubenten’s , greater horseshoe , whiskered bat Bavaria, Germany ref1 ‘BB’ see Watkins-Pitchford, Denys bearded tit (Panurus biarmicus ) ref1 bears ref1 , ref2 , ref3 see also brown bear , grizzly bear beautiful china mark moth see under moths, species of Beaver Advisory Committee for England (BACE) ref1 , ref2 , ref3 beavers see also individual species attitudes towards ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 , ref5 , ref6 , ref7 , ref8 BBC Springwatch ref1 Devon Wildlife Trust ref1 , ref2 earliest presence of ref1 , ref2 future plans ref1 Knapdale trial ref1 , ref2 population increases ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 , ref5 Rewilding Britain ref1 role of ref1 , ref2 , ref3 and tourism ref1 Bechstein’s bat (Myotis bechsteinii ) ref1 , ref2 Bee Quest (Goulson) ref1 beech (Fagus sylvatica ) ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 , ref5 , ref6 , ref7 beefsteak fungus (Fistulina hepatica ) ref1 bees ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 bees, species of Melitta europaea ref1 red bartsia bee (Melitta tricincta ) ref1 ridge-cheeked furrow bee (Lasioglossum puncticolle ) ref1 rough-backed blood bee (Sphecodes scabricollis ) ref1 see also bumblebees , mining bees , solitary bees beetles and deadwood ref1 , ref2 , ref3 earliest presence of ref1 population increases ref1 , ref2 , ref3 in soil ref1 see also carrion beetles , click beetles , clown beetles , dung beetles , ground beetles , saproxylic beetles , soldier beetles , steely blue beetle , tiger beetles , violet click beetle , water beetles Bernwood Forest, Oxfordshire ref1 biodiversity benefits to economy ref1 , ref2 biodiversity intactness index ref1 fossil pollen evidence ref1 grazing animals as drivers of ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 , ref5 , ref6 , ref7 , ref8 , ref9 and nature management ref1 , ref2 offsetting ref1 , ref2 role of ref1 , ref2 UK Biodiversity Action Plan species ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 biofuels ref1 biomass plantation trials, Knepp ref1 Biophilia Hypothesis (Wilson) ref1 , ref1 Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council ref1 birch ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 , ref5 , ref6 , ref7 , ref8 Bird Life & Bird Law (BosworthSmith) ref1 Birdlife International ref1 birds impact of habitat on UK populations ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 , ref5 at Knepp ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 , ref5 and oak trees ref1 Oostvaardersplassen ref1 species isolation ref1 see also individual species bird’s-foot trefoil (Lotus corniculatus ) ref1 , ref2 bird’s nest orchid (Neottia nidus-avis ) ref1 Birds of Great Britain, The (Gould) ref1 , ref2 birds of prey see raptors Birds of Sussex (Walpole-Bond) ref1 Birds of the British Isles (Bannerman) ref1 Bisham Woods, Berkshire ref1 bison (Bison bonasus ) ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 , ref5 , ref6 bison wallows ref1 bittern (Botaurus stellaris ) ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 black bryony (Tamus communis ) ref1 black redstart (Phoenicurus ochruros ) ref1 black stork (Ciconia nigra ) ref1 black tern (Chlidonias niger ) ref1 blackthorn (Prunus spinosa ) ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 , ref5 , ref6 , ref7 , ref8 , ref9 , ref10 blowflies ref1 , ref2 blue tit (Cyanistes caeruleus ) ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 bluebell (Hyacinthoides non-scripta ) ref1 , ref2 boar see wild boar bog myrtle (Myrica gale ) ref1 bog pimpernel (Anagallis tenella ) ref1 bog trees ref1 boletes ref1 Boletus mendax ref1 Bookham Common, Leatherhead, Surrey ref1 Borders Forest Trust ref1 Borkener Paradies, Germany ref1 Bosworth-Smith, R. ref1 Bournemouth University ref1 , ref2 bovine grazing relationship with equines ref1 see also cattle box, common (Buxus sempervirens ) ref1 bracken (Pteridium aquilinum ) ref1 , ref2 , ref3 bracket fungi ref1 Buglossoporus quercinus ref1 Ganoderma resinaceum ref1 Phellinus robustus ref1 Bramber, Sussex ref1 bramble ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 , ref5 , ref6 , ref7 , ref8 , ref9 , ref10 , ref11 , ref12 , ref13 , ref14 , ref15 , ref16 brambling (Fringilla montifringilla ) ref1 Bredon Hill, Worcestershire ref1 Breite Nature Reserve, Romania ref1 Brexit, potential effects/options ref1 , ref2 British Equine Veterinary Association (BEVA) ref1 British Horse Society ref1 British Islands and Their Vegetation (Tansley) ref1 British Trust for Ornithology ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 brittlegills ref1 broad-leaved dock (Rumex obtusifolius ) ref1 broadleaved woodland ref1 , ref2 , ref3 see also individual tree species Brookhouse Scrapes ref1 broom (Cytisus scoparius ) ref1 brown bear (Ursus arctos ) ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 , ref5 brown hairstreak butterfly (Thecla betulae ) ref1 , ref2 brown hare (Lepus europaeus ) ref1 brownfield sites, value of ref1 browsing animals ref2 , ref3 , ref4 , ref5 , ref6 , ref7 , ref8 , ref9 , ref10 , ref11 , ref12 , ref13 , ref14 , ref15 , ref16 , ref17 , ref18 , ref19 , ref20 , ref21 see also grazing animals bryophytes ref1 BSE crisis ref1 Buckland, Professor Paul ref1 , ref2 Buckley, Tom ref1 bugle (Ajuga reptans ) ref1 Buglife, The Invertebrate Conservation Trust ref1 Buglossoporus quercinus (bracket fungus) ref1 bullfinch (Pyrrhula pyrrhula ) ref1 , ref2 bumblebees ref1 , ref2 see also short-haired bumblebee burbot (Lota lota ) ref1 , ref2 Burrell, Anthony ref1 Burrell, Sir Charles Merrik ref1 Burrell, Charlie ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 , ref5 , ref6 , ref7 , ref8 , ref9 , ref10 , ref11 , ref12 , ref13 , ref14 , ref15 , ref16 , ref17 , ref18 , ref19 , ref20 , ref21 , ref22 , ref23 , ref24 , ref25 , ref26 , ref27 , ref28 , ref29 , ref30 , ref31 , ref32 , ref33 , ref34 , ref35 , ref36 , ref37 , ref38 , ref39 , ref40 , ref41 , ref42 , ref43 , ref44 , ref45 , ref46 , ref47 , ref48 , ref49 , ref50 , ref51 , ref52 Burrell, Mark ref1 Burrell, Sir Merrik ref1 , ref2 , ref3 Burrell, Nancy ref1 , ref2 Burrell, Ned ref1 Burrell, Sir Percy ref1 Burrell, Sir Raymond ref1 Burrell, Sir Walter ref1 , ref2 , ref3 Burrell, Sir William ref1 Burton, Dr John ref1 bush crickets ref1 bushgrass (Calamagrostris epigejos ) ref1 Butler, Jill ref1 , ref2 butterflies breeding patterns ref1 , ref2 impact of habitat on UK populations ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 at Knepp ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 , ref5 migration and travel ref1 , ref2 , ref3 Oostvaardersplassen ref1 butterflies, species of Camberwell beauty (Nymphalis antiopa ) ref1 common blue (Polyommatus icarus ) ref1 , ref2 dark green fritillary (Argynnis aglaja ) ref1 , ref2 Duke of Burgundy (Hamearis lucina ) ref1 Essex skipper (Thymelicus lineola ) ref1 , ref2 , ref3 green-veined white (Pieris napi ) ref1 high brown fritillary (Fabriciana adippe ) ref1 large blue (Maculinea arion ) ref1 marbled white (Melanargia galathea ) ref1 , ref2 , ref3 marsh fritillary butterfly (Euphydryas aurinia ) ref1 , ref2 meadow brown (Maniola jurtina ) ref1 , ref2 painted lady (Vanessa cardui ) ref1 pearl-bordered fritillary (Boloria euphrosyne ) ref1 , ref2 , ref3 purple emperor (Apatura iris ) ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 , ref5 , ref6 purple hairstreak (Neozephyrus quercus ) ref1 Queen of Spain fritillary (Issoria lathonia ) ref1 ringlet (Aphantopus hyperantus ) ref1 , ref2 scarce tortoiseshell (Nymphalis xanthomelas ) ref1 small copper (Lycaena phlaeas ) ref1 small heath (Coenonympha pamphilus ) ref1 small skipper (Thymelicus sylvestris ) ref1 , ref2 , ref3 small tortoiseshell (Aglais urticae ) ref1 wall brown (Lasiommata megera ) ref1 white admiral (Limenitis camilla ) ref1 , ref2 white-letter hairstreak (Satyrium w-album ) ref1 wood white (Leptidea sinapis ) ref1 Butterfly Conservation ref1 , ref2 buzzard (Buteo buteo ) ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 , ref5 , ref6 calcium ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 , ref5 , ref6 California, University of ref1 Camargue horses see under horses/ponies, breeds of Camberwell beauty see under butterflies, species of Campbell-Palmer, Roisin ref1 , ref2 Canada ref1 , ref2 , ref3 canals ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 , ref5 , ref6 canary-shouldered thorn moth see under moths, species of capercaillie (Tetrao urogallus ) ref1 Capps Bridge, Shipley ref1 Car Dykes, Fens ref1 Carbon Farmers of America ref1 Carbon Fields (Harvey) ref1 carbon sequestration and beaver ponds ref1 and biodiversity ref1 as ecosystem service ref1 , ref2 , ref3 at Knepp ref1 Making Space for Nature report ref1 and mycorrhizae ref1 planting woodlands ref1 carline thistle (Carlina vulgaris ) ref1 Carlisle, Cumbria ref1 carp-farming at Knepp ref1 , ref2 Carpathian Mountains ref1 , ref2 , ref3 carrion beetles ref1 , ref2 carrion crow (Corvus corone ) ref1 , ref2 Caryll family ref1 , ref2 , ref3 Castle Dairy ice-cream ref1 castoreum ref1 castration, of ponies ref1 catastrophic shift ref1 cats, domestic ref1 cattle see also pasture-fed meat annual die-offs ref1 , ref2 beef industry ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 carcasses, disposal of ref1 , ref2 , ref3 cattle-grids ref1 Chillingham herd ref1 commons grazing ref1 creators of biodiversity ref1 dairy, at Knepp ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 dairy industry ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 , ref5 diet/eating behaviour ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 , ref5 disturbance ref1 ear-tagging ref1 free-roaming at Knepp ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 , ref5 neighbours’ attitudes to ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 grain-fed ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 grazing relationship with equines ref1 , ref2 handling systems ref1 , ref2 meat sales, Knepp Wild Range ref1 , ref2 , ref3 natural behaviour ref1 , ref2 , ref3 Oostvaardersplassen ref1 , ref2 , ref3 regulations ref1 , ref2 slaughter of ref1 temperament and whorl placement ref1 cattle, breeds of Aberdeen Angus ref1 , ref2 Charolais ref1 Friesian ref1 , ref2 , ref3 Galloway ref1 Heck (Bos taurus ) ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 , ref5 , ref6 Hereford ref1 Highland ref1 , ref2 Holstein ref1 , ref2 , ref3 old English longhorn ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 , ref5 , ref6 , ref7 , ref8 , ref9 , ref10 , ref11 , ref12 Red Poll ref1 , ref2 , ref3 Spanish fighting bull ref1 , ref2 White Belgian ref1 White Park (Bos taurus ) ref1 cedar of Lebanon (Cedrus libani ) ref1 , ref1 centipedes see under soil biota Centre for Ecology and Hydrology ref1 cereal production ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 , ref5 , ref6 , ref7 , ref8 ref9 , ref10 , ref11 , ref12 chaffinch (Fringilla coelebs ) ref1 Chalara /ash dieback ref1 , ref2 chalk grassland ref1 , ref2 charities, funding of tree plantations ref1 Charles, Prince of Wales ref1 Charles II ref1 Charlie Burrell’s Castle Dairy ice-cream ref1 Charlwood ref1 Charolais cattle see under cattle, breeds of chemical build-up in soil dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) ref1 organochlorides – dieldrin ref1 polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) ref1 chemical fertilizers see also individual types dependency on ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 effect on biodiversity ref1 , ref2 , ref3 and human health ref1 , ref2 inefficiency of ref1 invention of ref1 at Knepp ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 , ref5 , ref6 and mycorrhizae ref1 pasture-fed meat ref1 pollution caused by ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 , ref5 chemicals, synthetic/dangerous – build-up in soil ref1 cherry see wild cherry chicken-of-the-woods (Laetiporus sulphureus ) ref1 chiffchaff (Phylloscopus collybita ) ref1 children, access to nature ref1 , ref2 , ref3 China ref1 , ref2 , ref3 Chinese water deer (Hydropotes inermis ) ref1 , ref2 Churchill, Winston ref1 cinnabar moth see under moths, species of cirl bunting (Emberiza cirlus ) ref1 CLA see Country Landowners Association CLA (conjugated linoleic acid) ref1 , ref2 Clare, John ref1 , ref2 , ref3 clay soil and grazing animals ref1 as habitat ref1 impact of ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 land drainage ref1 , ref2 Sussex Weald ref1 Clements, Frederic ref1 click beetles (Calambus bipustulatus ) ref1 climate change and biodiversity ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 and carbon sequestration see carbon sequestration and flooding risk ref1 , ref2 and nightingales ref1 UK legislation ref1 climax vegetation theory ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 Clinton Devon Estates ref1 closed-canopy theory ref1 , ref2 closed-canopy woodland ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 clover ref1 , ref2 , ref3 clown beetles ref1 club-rush see common club-rush Cnappe/Cnapp see old Knepp Castle Cockermouth, Cumbria ref1 cod ref1 collared dove (Streptopelia decaocto ) ref1 , ref2 , ref3 Colorado State University ref4 Common Agricultural Policy (EU) ref1 , ref2 , ref3 decoupling farm subsidies ref1 Environmental Stewardship Schemes ref1 farming subsidies ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 , ref5 , ref6 Higher Level Stewardship ref1 , ref2 common blue see under butterflies, species of common club-rush (Schoenoplectus lacustris ) ref1 common cow-wheat (Melampyrum pratense ) ref1 common dog-violet (Viola riviniana ) ref1 , ref2 common field grasshopper (Chorthippus brunneus ) ref1 , ref2 , ref3 common fleabane (Pulicaria dysenterica ) ref1 , ref2 common fumitory (Fumaria officinalis ) ref1 , ref2 , ref3 common frog (Rana temporaria ) ref1 , ref2 common gorse (Ulex europaeus ) ref1 , ref2 , ref3 common lizard (Zootoca vivipara ) ref1 , ref2 , ref3 common magpie (Pica pica ) ref1 , ref2 , ref3 Common Market see European Union (EU) common milkwort (Polygala vulgaris ) ref1 common newt (Lissotriton vulgaris ) ref1 , ref2 common ragwort (Senecio jacobaea ) ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 , ref5 , ref6 common shrew (Sorex araneus ) ref1 , ref2 common snipe (Gallinago gallinago ) ref1 common spotted orchid (Dactylorhiza fuchsii ) ref1 common toad (Bufo bufo ) ref1 , ref2 Composition of Foods, The ref1 coniferous woodland ref1 , ref2 , ref3 conjugated linoleic acid (CLA) ref1 , ref2 connectivity see landscape connectivity and Living Landscapes conservation interventions, potential negative effects ref1 coppice, woodland ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 , ref5 , ref6 , ref7 coppicing ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 , ref5 corn bunting (Emberiza calandra ) ref1 corn marigold (Glebionis segetum ) ref1 corncockle (Agrostemma githago ) ref1 corncrake (Crex crex ) ref1 cornflower (Centaurea cyanus ) ref1 , ref2 corridors for wildlife ref1 , ref2 Corsican pine (Pinus nigra ) ref1 Cotta, Heinrich von ref1 Country Landowners Association ref1 , ref2 , ref3 Countryside Rights of Way Act 2000 ref1 Countryside Stewardship Scheme ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 , ref5 , ref6 cow-wheat see common cow-wheat cows see cattle crab apple (Malus sylvestris ) ref1 , ref2 , ref3 crab spiders ref1 Crabro scutellatus (wasp) ref1 Craft Fairs ref1 , ref2 Crawley, Professor Mick ref1 crayfish ref1 creeping thistle (Cirsium arvense ) ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 , ref5 , ref6 crested dog’s tail (Cynosurus cristatus ) ref1 crop pollination ref1 , ref2 , ref3 Crow map of Knepp Estate ref1 , ref2 crows ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 see also individual species crucian carp (Carassius carassius ) ref1 , ref2 Cuckmere, river ref1 cuckoo (Cuculus canorus ) ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 , ref5 cuckoo pint (Arum maculatum ) ref1 culling, livestock ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 culm grasslands ref1 , ref2 Cumbria ref1 curled dock (Rumex crispus ) ref1 daffodils ref1 , ref2 dairy farming effects of milk quotas ref1 , ref2 , ref3 foot and mouth disease ref1 grain-based diet ref1 , ref2 at Knepp ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 , ref5 , ref6 , ref7 mastitis ref1 separation of mothers/calves ref1 Dalmatian pelican (Pelecanus crispus ) ref1 dams ref1 damselflies ref1 , ref2 Dangerous Wild Animals Act ref1 Danube, river ref1 dark green fritillary see under butterflies, species of Dartford warbler (Sylvia undata ) ref1 Dartmoor ref1 Dartmoor Hill Pony Association ref1 Dartmoor pony see under horses/ponies, breeds of Darwin, Charles ref1 , ref2 Daubenton’s bat (Myotis daubentonii ) ref1 DDT ref1 dead donkey fly ref1 dead wood/trees ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 , ref5 , ref6 , ref7 decoupling subsidies, impact of ref1 Dee, river ref1 deer see also Chinese water deer , fallow , muntjac , Père David , red deer , roe , sambar , sika annual die-offs ref1 areas for ref1 , ref2 , ref3 at Knepp ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 , ref5 , ref6 , ref7 , ref8 , ref9 , ref10 , ref11 , ref12 , ref13 , ref14 , ref15 , ref16 , ref17 , ref18 , ref19 , ref20 , ref21 debarking of trees ref1 creators of biodiversity ref1 , ref2 , ref3 diet/eating behaviour ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 , ref5 , ref6 , ref7 , ref8 disturbance ref1 , ref2 disease ref1 hunting and population management ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 , ref5 , ref6 , ref7 , ref8 , ref9 , ref10 lekking ref1 neighbours’ attitudes to ref1 , ref2 Norway ref1 , ref2 Scotland ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 supplementary feeding ref1 deer fences ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 , ref5 , ref6 , ref7 , ref8 deer parks ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 , ref5 , ref6 , ref7 , ref8 , ref9 , ref10 DEFRA and beavers ref1 , ref2 , ref3 Countryside Stewardship Scheme see Countryside Stewardship Scheme ecosystem services ref1 , ref2 Environmental Stewardship Scheme see Environmental Stewardship Scheme Higher Level Stewardship Scheme ref1 ‘grass-fed’ livestock ref1 and Knepp rewilding ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 , ref5 , ref6 , ref7 , ref8 Making Space for Nature ref1 naturalistic flood management ref1 , ref2 Nature Improvement Areas ref1 , ref2 Pickering, Yorkshire Dales ref1 and ragwort ref1 , ref2 , ref3 Denman, Lady ref1 Denmark ref1 Derek Gow Consultancy ref1 Devensian era ref1 , ref2 devil’s bit scabious (Succisa pratensis ) ref1 Devon ref1 , ref2 Devon Wildlife Trust ref1 , ref2 , ref3 Dial Post ref1 die-offs, animals ref1 , ref2 , ref3 Dig for Victory ref1 , ref2 diversification, at Knepp ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 , ref5 , ref6 Dixton Wood, Gloucestershire ref1 Dog-barking Wood ref1 dog rose (Rosa canina ) ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 , ref5 , ref6 , ref7 , ref8 dog violet (Viola odorata ) ref1 , ref2 Doggerland ref1 dogs/dog walkers ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 , ref5 dogwood (Cornus sanguinea ) ref1 , ref2 dolphins ref1 , ref2 domestic cat (Felis catus ) ref1 , ref2 domestic goat (Capra aegagrus hircus ) ref1 , ref2 , ref3 Donovan, Isobel ref1 dormouse (Muscardinus avellanarius ) ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 dragonflies ref1 emperor dragonfly (Anax imperator ) ref1 scarce chaser dragonfly (Libellula fulva ) ref1 drainage see land drainage drainage ploughs ref1 , ref2 drought, effects of ref1 , ref2 , ref3 land resistance to ref1 ducks ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 see also mandarin duck , scaup duck Duke of Burgundy see under butterflies, species of Duncan (Exmoor stallion) ref1 dune landscapes ref1 dung beetles ref1 , ref2 , ref3 Geotrupes mutator ref1 dunnock (Prunella modularis ) ref1 dusky thorn moth see under moths, species of E . coli ref1 eagle owl (Bubo bubo ) ref1 early purple orchid (Orchis mascula ) ref1 earthworms ref1 , ref2 , ref3 anecic ref1 , ref2 coelomic fluid ref1 crop yields ref1 detoxification of soil ref1 endogeic ref1 epigeic ref1 see also individual species East Germany ref1 ecoducts see land bridges ecological corridors ref1 , ref2 Economic and Social Research Council ref1 Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity initiative ref1 Economics of Land Degradation Initiative ref1 economics of rewilding ref1 ecosystem services ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 , ref5 eco-tourism ref1 , ref2 edge effect, and isolated habitats ref1 edible dormouse (Glis glis ) ref1 Edinburgh Zoo ref1 , ref2 , ref3 Edlin, Herbert ref1 education, and nature ref1 Edward II ref1 Egypt ref1 Egyptian goose (Alopochen aegyptiaca ) ref1 elder (Sambucus nigra ) ref1 , ref2 , ref3 , ref4 Elizabeth I ref1 elk see Eurasian elk (Alces alces ; known as ‘moose’ in N.

The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber, David Wengrow

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Atahualpa, British Empire, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, degrowth, European colonialism, founder crops, Gini coefficient, global village, Hernando de Soto, Hobbesian trap, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, Isaac Newton, labour mobility, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, means of production, Murray Bookchin, new economy, New Urbanism, out of africa, public intellectual, Scientific racism, spice trade, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl

Geologists call this period the Holocene, from Greek holos (entire), kainos (new). Many earth scientists now consider the Holocene over and done. For at least the last two centuries we have been entering a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, in which for the first time in history human activities are the main drivers of global climate change. Where exactly the Anthropocene begins is a scientific bone of contention. Most experts point to the Industrial Revolution, but some put its origins earlier, in the late 1500s and early 1600s. At that time, a global drop in surface air temperatures occurred – part of the ‘Little Ice Age’ – which natural forces can’t explain.

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Hunters of the Golden Age: The Mid-Upper Palaeolithic of Eurasia 30,000–20,00 BP. Leiden: University of Leiden Press. Rollings, Willard H. 1992. The Osage: An Ethnohistorical Study of Hegemony on the Prairie-Plains. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Roosevelt, Anna. 2013. ‘The Amazon and the Anthropocene: 13,000 years of human influence in a tropical rainforest.’ Anthropocene 4: 69–87. Rosenwig, Robert M. 2010. The Beginnings of Mesoamerican Civilization: Inter-Regional Interaction and the Olmec. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. —. 2017. ‘Olmec globalization: a Mesoamerican archipelago of complexity.’ In Tamar Hodos (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Archaeology and Globalization.

…

In Mesoamerica, Amazonia and the Andes, some 50 million hectares of cultivated land may have reverted to wilderness. Carbon uptake from vegetation increased on a scale sufficient to change the Earth System and bring about a human-driven phase of global cooling.12 Wherever one starts it, the Anthropocene is what we have done with the legacy of a Holocene Age, which in some ways had been a ‘clean sheet’ for humanity. At its onset, many things really were new. As the ice receded, flora and fauna – once confined to small refuge zones – spread out to new vistas. People followed, helping favoured species on their way by setting fires and clearing land.

The End of Growth by Jeff Rubin

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bakken shale, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deal flow, decarbonisation, deglobalization, Easter island, energy security, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, Eyjafjallajökull, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, flex fuel, Ford Model T, full employment, ghettoisation, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Hans Island, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, illegal immigration, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, Kickstarter, low interest rates, McMansion, megaproject, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, new economy, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

The resulting algal blooms choke off other marine life and create coastal dead zones, which are now common around the world. Our impact on the physical environment is leading some geologists to refer to the modern era as a new geological epoch. The preceding eleven thousand years are known as the Holocene, which roughly translates into “most recent era.” Now they say we have entered the Anthropocene, or “age of man.” Geological nomenclature is of little concern to most economists, who don’t pay attention to how we change the landscape or whether the human population increases at the same pace as bacterial reproduction. What matters is what markets tell economists through price signals. And for a long time, falling resource prices—from oil to food to the items in Simon’s commodities basket—signaled that population growth wasn’t hindering resource consumption.

…

I’d like to thank Peter Victor of York University for the information he sent me on Germany’s Kurzarbeit program, as well as David Foot of the University of Toronto for data on international birthrates. Also I would like to thank two of my former colleagues at CIBC World Markets: Benjamin Tal, Deputy Chief Economist, for information on potential growth rates in North America, and Karl Kainz, my old broker, for drawing my attention to the Anthropocene. Lastly, I would like to thank my agent, Rick Broadhead, and once again my lawyer and friend Aaron Milrad, for his wise counsel and guidance. © Greg Tjepkema JEFF RUBIN was the chief economist at CIBC World Markets for almost twenty years. During that period, he placed first ten times in Brendan Wood’s institutional investor ranking of top Bay Street economists.

Affluence Without Abundance: The Disappearing World of the Bushmen by James Suzman

access to a mobile phone, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, clean water, discovery of the americas, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, full employment, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, means of production, Occupy movement, open borders, out of africa, post-work, quantitative easing, rewilding, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, trickle-down economics, unemployed young men, We are the 99%

And, as subsistence farmers, both communities were far more vulnerable to famine, chronic nutritional privation, and environmental shocks than hunter-gatherers.1 Both communities also believed humans to have been created by God in His image and to have been granted a divine mandate to tame and shackle an otherwise hostile wilderness. This was because both communities were the progeny of the Neolithic Revolution—the extended moment in time during which groups of people in different parts of the globe adopted farming and in doing so reconfigured their relationships with the natural world and ushered in the Anthropocene. For if our physiology is a legacy of our hunting and gathering past, much of what we do and how we think about our place in the world stems from our relatively short history as farmers. No one can be certain quite what persuaded the first groups of hunter-gatherers to abandon hunting and gathering and commit themselves to a life of toil in the fields.

…

If evolutionary success is judged on the basis of a species’ ability to reproduce, then aiding the expansion of Homo sapiens over the past ten millennia was a golden ticket. The plants and animals that became staples for farmers are now among those that future archaeologists will conclude dominated the earth along with humans during the Anthropocene. Cattle, goats, sheep, dogs, cats, poultry, rice, wheat, and maize are now ubiquitous even in habitats where they could never have survived without the assistance of humans. Today’s intensive farming techniques are extraordinarily productive.3 Now fewer than 2 percent of Americans employed in agriculture are able to feed everyone else in the United States—and have plenty left over for export.

The Corona Crash: How the Pandemic Will Change Capitalism by Grace Blakeley

Anthropocene, asset-backed security, basic income, Big Tech, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, debt deflation, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, don't be evil, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gig economy, global pandemic, global value chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, income inequality, informal economy, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, pensions crisis, Philip Mirowski, post-war consensus, price mechanism, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, reshoring, Rishi Sunak, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, social distancing, structural adjustment programs, too big to fail, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, yield curve

But it was not long before these debts began to accrue once again. 37 See, for example, ‘Coronavirus: Cancel the Debts of Countries in the Global South’, Jubilee Debt Campaign, 18 March 2020, jubileedebt.org.uk. 38 Sarah-Jayne Clifton, ‘Coronavirus Could Collapse the World’s Poorest Economies’, Tribune, 11 April 2020, tribunemag.co.uk. 4 Reconstruction 1 ‘Republicans Suddenly Find a Bailout They Can Back’, Politico, 18 March 2020; ‘Trump Pivots to “Phase Two”, Risking More Death to Save Economy’, Bloomberg, 6 May 2020. 2 Irving Fisher, The Debt-Deflation Theory of Great Depressions, Cleveland: Econometric Society, 1933. 3 CEIC Data, ‘Private Consumption: % of GDP by Country Comparison’, 2020, ceicdata.com. 4 Gary Stevenson, ‘Following the Coronavirus Money Trail’, Open Democracy, 27 March 2020. 5 Luke Savage, ‘One Cheque Isn’t Enough’, Jacobin, 26 May 2020. 6 Richard Partington, ‘Living Costs Rising Faster for UK’s Poorest Families Than Richest’, Guardian, 25 April 2019. 7 Claer Barrett, ‘Inside the UK’s Debt Crisis’, Financial Times, 26 April 2019. 8 Richard Partington, ‘UK Households Spend above Their Income for Longest Period Since 1980s’, Guardian, 29 March 2019. 9 Ann Pettifor, The Case for the Green New Deal, London and New York: Verso, 2019. 10 David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming, New York: Tim Duggan/Random House, 2020. 11 Alejandra Borunda, ‘The Last Five Years Were the Hottest Ever, NASA and NOAA Declare’, National Geographic, 9 April 2019, nationalgeographic.co.uk. 12 Laurie Laybourn-Langton, Lesley Rankin and Darren Baxter, This Is a Crisis: Facing up to the Age of Environmental Breakdown, London: Institute for Public Policy Research, 2019. 13 Will Steffen et al., ‘Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene’, PNAS August 2018, 115, no. 33: 8252–59, pnas.org. 14 Fiona Harvey, ‘What Is the Carbon Bubble and What Will Happen if It Bursts?’, Guardian, 4 June 2018. 15 Oxfam, ‘World’s Richest 10% Produce Half of Carbon Emissions While Poorest 3.5 Billion Account for Just a Tenth’, Oxfam International press release, 2 December 2015, oxfam.org. 16 Shannon Hall, ‘Exxon Knew about Climate Change Almost 40 Years Ago’, Scientific American, 26 October 2015. 17 Colin Leys, ‘The British Ruling Class’, in Socialist Register 2014: Registering Class, eds, Leo Panitch, Greg Albo and Vivek Chibber, London: Merlin Press, 2014, 108. 18 Andrew Gamble, The Free Economy and the Strong State: The Politics of Thatcherism, Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 1988. 19 Andrew Atkinson, ‘George Osborne, Architect of UK Austerity, Says New Cuts Needed Post-Crisis’, Bloomberg, 20 April 2020; ‘Treasury Blueprint to Raise Taxes and Freeze Wages to Pay for £300bn Coronavirus Bill’, Telegraph, 12 May 2020. 20 Jonathan Ostry, Prakash Loungani and Davide Furceri, ‘Neoliberalism: Oversold?’

SUPERHUBS: How the Financial Elite and Their Networks Rule Our World by Sandra Navidi

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, assortative mating, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, digital divide, diversification, Dunbar number, East Village, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, fake it until you make it, family office, financial engineering, financial repression, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google bus, Gordon Gekko, haute cuisine, high net worth, hindsight bias, income inequality, index fund, intangible asset, Jaron Lanier, Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, McMansion, mittelstand, Money creation, money market fund, Myron Scholes, NetJets, Network effects, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Parag Khanna, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, performance metric, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Renaissance Technologies, rent-seeking, reserve currency, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Satyajit Das, search costs, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Predators' Ball, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, women in the workforce, young professional

Interconnectedness is an indispensable component of our financial system, because the exchange of goods and services for money by its very nature presupposes connections. In fact, our ability to cooperate within networks distinguishes us from other primates and has made us the most successful species on the planet—so much so that scientists have proposed calling our current time period the “Anthropocene,” the epoch of the human. However, over time certain network dynamics—such as the “rich-get-richer phenomenon” and self-perpetuating feedback loops—will cause any system automatically to become more interconnected, homogeneous, and complex. Most systems are adaptive and self-correcting, so when they become too lopsided, circuit-breaking feedback loops kick in, restabilizing the system.

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See also Deutsche Bank at EQT Partners, 144 family of, 136 general references to, 101, 118, 120 International Institute of Finance and, 131 legal charges against, 142–143 Mannesmann AG and, 142–143 Pierre Wauthier suicide and, 138, 144 public relations mistakes by, 143 at Zürich Insurance, 144 “Age of irresponsibility,” 222 Ahamed, Liaquat, 160 AIG, 31, 48, 183–184, 217 Air France, 193 “Airport test,” 80 Albania, 27 Alibada Group, 103 Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference, 112 Alpha personality, 55–58 Alps, 38, 93, 122 Altman, Roger, 121 Alumni networks, 81 Al-Waleed, Prince of Saudi Arabia, 205 Amazon, 199 Amygdala, 98 “Analysis paralysis,” 51 Analytical thinking, 218 Anarchy, 213 Andreessen Horowitz, 189 Anger, 57 Annan, Kofi, 27 Ant colonies, 6 “Anthropocene,” xxvii Apollo Global Management, 88 Appaloosa Management, 88 Arab Spring, 226 Arabella Sheraton Hotel Seehof, 115 Arbitrage traders, 166, 208 Arcadia Conference, 34 Archbishop of Westminster, 226 Aristotle, 79 Arrow, Kenneth, 185 “Ask gap,” 153 Aspen Institute, 112, 200 Assess the Value of Your Networks, 41 Assessment gap, 152–153 “Assortative mating,” 80 Athleticism, 126 Atlantic Council, 158 Avenue Capital Group, 90 AXA, 179 Axel Springer, 136 Azerbaijan, 171 B Babacan, Ali, 120 Bacall, Lauren, 199 Bacon, Louis, 109 Bailouts, 10–11, 216 Bair, Sheila, 56, 150, 168, 172–173, 176, 214 Baker & McKenzie, 154, 159 Banamex Bank, 167 Banco Santander, 121, 148 Bank(s) bailouts of, 10–11, 216 central, xxv, 6, 10, 32–33, 37 CEOs of, 38, 87–88, 174 commercial, 37 description of, xxv investment, 38 postcrisis regulation of, 218 private, 37 private equity firms and, 61 regular, 37 savings, 37 shadow, 38 “too big to fail,” 216 Bank Credit-Dnepr, 195 Bank for International Settlements, 37, 78, 214 Bank of America, 115, 151, 183 Bank of Cyprus, 144–145 Bank of England, xxv, 32, 43, 57, 84, 106, 165, 214–215, 222 Bank of Israel, 36, 84 Bank of New York, 196 Bank One, 65 Banking Conduct and Culture, 223 Banque de France, 39 Barabasi, Albert-László, 19 Barak, Ehud, 9 Barclays, 43, 137, 179, 183, 205 Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, 37 BASF, 115 Bass, Kyle, 154 Baur au Lac Hotel, 38 Bear Stearns, 41, 56–57, 198 Beaux-Arts style, 34 Behavior of networks, 20 Beijing, 103, 194 “Believability index,” 72 “Believability matrices,” 71 Belvédère Hotel, 3, 9, 29 Berkeley Hotel, 43 Berkshire Hathaway, 60 Berlusconi, Silvio, 177–178 Bernanke, Ben annual salary of, 165 as Federal Reserve chairman, 34–37, 188 background on, 36 at Bilderberg conference, 121 in Euro crisis, 177–178 in financial crisis of 2007–2008 management, 11, 36–37, 84, 172 Medley Global Advisors leak and, 43 power of, 35 Princeton University graduation speech by, 50, 80 successor to, 188 Bernstein, Leonard, 199 Beverly Hills Hotel, 192 Bieber, Justin, 67 “Big data analysis” programs, 72 Bild, 136 Bilderberg conference, 120–122 Bilderberg Group, 96, 112 Bilderberg Steering Committee, 142 Billionaires, 123 BIS.

Green and Prosperous Land: A Blueprint for Rescuing the British Countryside by Dieter Helm

3D printing, Airbnb, Anthropocene, barriers to entry, biodiversity loss, British Empire, carbon tax, clean water, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, Crossrail, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, digital map, facts on the ground, food miles, Haber-Bosch Process, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Internet of things, Kickstarter, land reform, mass immigration, microplastics / micro fibres, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, quantitative easing, rewilding, smart meter, sovereign wealth fund, the built environment, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, urban sprawl

A bad farming year no longer induces hardship and famine. In economic terms it just does not register. Fishing is now an even less consequential part of the economy, employing only a few thousand people. Nature may not be man-made, but we as the ultimate eco-engineers increasingly shape it. Britain is a leading exemplar of the Anthropocene, a new geological age defined by human impact. There is nothing truly wild left. Much of the fauna has ingested plastic of one form or another, and the fashion for rewilding is best seen as just another form of eco-engineering, a switch from one man-made landscape to another. Wild, as a concept, has lost its practical meaning, even if its cultural power remains.

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Abbots Hall Farm, Essex 143 Africa 1, 48, 55 agriculture: ammonia emissions from 88, 102, 153, 179, 223, 224 antibiotic use in 197, 216 average age of British farmer 89, 214, 217 carbon emissions from 82, 102, 104, 183, 197, 199, 200, 201, 214, 216, 223 cattle farming 62, 87, 99, 106, 107, 108, 119, 179, 264, 267 crops/arable farming see individual crop name cross-compliance and 97, 98, 251 digitalisation and 81, 96, 100 disaster of modern British, recognising the scale of 80 economics of British, 88–90 ‘enemies of’, elimination of 4–5 fertiliser use 22, 39, 43, 65, 80, 82, 86, 87, 94, 96, 100, 102, 119, 124, 163, 196–7, 200, 201, 216, 223, 243, 244, 253, 254 field margins 96–7, 251 food security/self-sufficiency as priority in 32, 99–102, 106, 182–4, 210 genetics and 4, 81, 95–6 green 79–104 herbicide use 4, 21, 22, 43, 44–5, 65, 83, 84, 85, 95, 96, 97, 100, 102, 124, 197, 199, 200, 201, 216, 223, 243 history of British intensification of 80 impact on farmers of a better agricultural sector and countryside 102–4 intensification of xii, 44, 58, 80–8, 93, 152, 211 land ownership and prices 8, 9, 11, 75, 89, 92–3, 102–3, 168, 190, 193, 198, 211–13, 214, 217–18 live export of animals 23, 101 Nature Fund and 219, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225, 232–3, 239, 240 new sustainable and prosperous 93–7 organic 96–7, 119, 197, 223 pesticide use xii, 21, 22, 43, 45, 65, 82, 83, 84, 95, 96, 100, 102, 124, 197, 199, 200, 201, 216, 223, 243, 244 polluter-pays principle and 88, 95, 99–100, 101, 103, 104, 195, 196–8, 199, 201, 203–4, 205, 207, 210–14, 216, 217–18 pollution from xii, xiv, 4, 5–6, 8, 11, 19–21, 22, 23–4, 32, 39, 43–5, 56, 61, 62, 64–6, 74–8, 80, 81–2, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89–90, 94, 95, 96, 97, 99–100, 101, 102–4, 119, 123, 124, 128, 136, 163, 179, 180, 195–218, 223, 224, 242, 243, 244, 248, 251, 253, 254, 255 see also fertilisers, herbicides and pesticides public goods concept and 92–7, 98, 99, 102–4, 179, 181–4, 188, 189, 190–1, 192, 193, 194 run-off from 4, 5, 19–21, 22, 43–4, 61, 62, 64–6, 74, 76, 81, 85, 96, 123, 179, 180, 180, 196–8, 203–4, 205, 207, 216–17, 224, 242, 248, 251 slurry and 21, 22, 64–5, 74, 179, 180, 190, 203, 204, 205, 224 soils and see soils subsidies and xii, 2, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 21, 22, 23, 34, 45, 62–3, 75, 76, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 87, 88–90, 95, 97, 100, 101, 102–4, 110–11, 118, 119–20, 122, 124, 126, 139, 183, 184, 188, 191, 195, 204, 205, 210–15, 217, 218, 219, 220–1, 226–7, 232, 234, 239, 241, 243, 244, 247, 253 see also subsidies tariffs and 87–8, 89, 102, 104 technology, future of and 5–7, 9, 80–1, 96, 100, 120, 223, 251, 263 25 Year Environment Plan and 241, 242, 243, 244, 245, 246–7, 248, 250, 251, 253, 255, 258 upland sheep farming 11, 21–2, 23, 33, 62–3, 64, 74, 87, 101, 106–7, 108, 110–11, 113, 119, 122, 124, 125, 183, 190, 210, 211, 217, 218, 264, 267 value of countryside for other uses and 90–3 wildlife corridors and 97–9 Agriculture Act (1947) 80 Agriculture Bill (2018) 103, 122, 232 agri-environment schemes 75, 111, 212, 220, 251, 257 AI (artificial intelligence) 230, 252–4, 255, 258 air pollution 18, 184, 264, 266 costs of 171 deaths linked to xiv, 154 evidence of improvements in air quality 39 farming and 44, 81, 88, 93, 96, 179, 255 future of 28, 219, 221, 246, 247, 249, 254, 255, 261, 262 green spaces and 24, 155, 156–8, 162, 167 green walls and 162 measuring 5, 28, 246, 254 Nature Fund and 219, 221 polluter-pays principle and 196, 199, 203, 215 technology and 154, 169, 254, 255 towns/cities and 152, 153–4, 155, 156, 157, 158, 162, 167, 169, 171 25 Year Environment Plan and 246, 247, 249, 254, 255, 261, 262 algae 32, 34, 68, 136, 156, 196, 216, 251 Alladale Wilderness Reserve, Scotland 108 Anthropocene 2 antibiotics 38, 68, 197, 216 aphids 84 arable weeds 44, 80, 85, 97 Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) 63, 105, 117, 257 Asian hornet 147 avocet 133, 161 Bank of England 232, 240 barbed wire 124–5 barley 86 Barle, River 63 barn owl xi, 31, 85, 195 Batters, Minette 99 BBC xiv, 128, 176–7, 178, 224–5 beaches 4, 7, 17, 34, 127, 128, 129, 131–2, 136, 149, 184, 246 beaver 4, 8, 31, 108, 250 Beckton Sewage Treatment Works 20 bees 35, 83, 84, 85, 94, 170 Betjeman, John 166 Big Data 81, 251, 252, 254, 255 biofuels 101, 183 biophilia xiv, 160, 261 birds xv, 5, 8, 17, 20, 37, 42, 43, 61, 72, 80, 83, 84, 86, 87, 91, 97, 124, 129, 130, 132, 133, 134, 140, 158, 189, 204, 207, 217, 222, 243, 245, 252, 264 eggs, stealing 203, 205 farmland xi, 21, 32, 33, 44, 58, 85, 94, 107, 246, 250, 263 game 4, 34, 113–14, 115, 116 seabirds 34, 129, 137, 138–9, 142, 143, 144, 146–7, 149, 150, 156, 263 songbirds 39 upland 40, 119–20 urban 159–62, 164, 170, 185 wading 123 woodland 45 bittern 19, 161 Blackwater, River 134, 253 blanket bog 63 Bleaklow, Peak District 67 Blue Belt 145, 151 blue-fin tuna 137 Blue Flag system 131 Blue Planet II (TV series) xiv, 176–7 bracken 109, 123, 145 Brecklands 8, 183 brent geese xi, 253 Brexit 49, 92, 118, 220, 232, 243, 260 brownfield sites 46, 130, 159, 167, 170, 206 business rates 88, 89, 102, 213, 214 butterflies 17, 18, 91, 195, 207 buzzard 4, 40, 113, 115 Camel, River 134 Canvey Island 130, 159 Canvey Wick 159 carbon: budgets 13, 233, 249 emissions 28, 33, 41, 43, 51, 53, 58, 82, 83, 88, 89, 101, 102, 104, 154, 175, 183, 196, 197, 199, 200, 201, 202, 214, 216, 223, 224, 233 fuel taxes and 214 price 10, 89, 104, 175, 201, 202, 214, 216, 223 as private good 175 in soils 7, 184, 216, 246 stores 124, 133 tax 223, 224 Carboniferous age 1 Carbon Price Floor 89, 223 Carson, Rachel: Silent Spring 5 cattle farming 62, 87, 99, 106, 107, 108, 119, 179, 264, 267 cereal crops 5, 21, 39, 64, 85–6, 97, 101 Channel Islands 139 China 25, 55–6, 155 cirl bunting 40 Cley Marshes 133 climate change xiii–xiv, 6, 13, 33, 40, 44, 46, 56, 63, 74, 79, 82, 92, 133, 135, 158, 188–9, 219, 229, 230, 233, 234, 243, 249, 256, 258, 264 Climate Change Act (2008) 13, 233, 249, 258 Climate Change Committee 82, 234 coal 1, 42, 201 mining 42, 67, 68, 103, 111 power 153, 159, 201 Coal Authority 67 Coast (TV programme) 128 coasts 9, 19, 22, 29, 30, 32, 34, 43, 45–6, 127–51, 159, 185, 188, 206, 221, 241, 243, 245, 266 access to 128, 129, 130, 145–6, 149, 150 beaches and 4, 7, 17, 34, 127, 128, 129, 131–2, 136, 149, 184, 246 climate and 127–8, 136 coastal fringe 128–31 Coastal Green Belt 247 coastal paths 7, 128, 129–30, 145, 186, 189 coastal prize in 2050 150–1 coastal waters 135–9 eradication of alien species from islands 146–8 estuaries and 134–5 fishing and 24, 128, 133, 136–9, 141–5 habitat restoration 145–6 islands and 139–40, 146–8 marshes at the sea edges 132–3, 250, 253 Nature Fund and 221 pollution/waste and 32, 45–6, 67, 128, 131, 134–5, 136, 137, 138, 144, 148, 158, 204 ports and 130 public love of 127–8 returning to good health (and increasing prosperity) 140–50 tourism and 24, 91, 127, 128, 131, 139, 140, 148–50 wildlife corridors and 17, 129–32, 150, 186 cod 137, 142 colour, landscape and 17, 31, 32, 39, 87, 124, 163 Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) xii, 80 basic farm payment/land ownership and 89–90, 97, 103, 193, 212 cross-compliance and 97, 98, 251 economics of British farming and 88, 89, 90 food prices and 80, 97 Nature Fund and 220–1, 226, 232, 234–5, 239 NFU defence of 211 Pillar 1 payments 212 Pillar 2 payments 212–13, 232 pollution and 89, 204, 210–13 redirecting to provision of public goods 102–4, 191, 193, 212–13, 220–1, 226, 232, 234–5, 239, 241, 243, 244, 247 reforms, 2000 211–12 25 Year Environment Plan and 241, 243, 244, 247 upland farming economics and 45, 110–11, 126, 220–1 welfare state, as branch of 218 withdrawal from 217 Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) 142 commuting 54, 71, 169 compensation payments 10, 11, 42–3, 52, 88, 144–5, 166, 179, 185–6, 194, 195, 206–9, 213, 219, 225–6, 235 see also polluter-pays principle Conservative Party 50 consumption, rising xii, 47, 49, 55–6, 57, 199 corncrake 140 Cornwall 68, 12, 134 corvids 115 Cost of Energy Review (2017) 201 Country Land and Business Association (CLA) 166 Countryside Stewardship Facilitation Fund 98 crime, wildlife 33, 34, 113–14, 203, 204–5 see also individual area of crime crofting 139–40 cross-compliance 97, 98, 251 Crossrail 2 26, 27, 28, 53, 133, 208 Crown Estate 238, 250 cuckoo 3, 18, 37, 84 Cumbria river catchment 30–1, 257–8 curlew 17, 31, 36, 37, 185 Dartmoor 35, 105, 119 Dart, River 134 DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) 5, 40, 84, 96 declines 3, 8, 18–25, 27, 32, 39, 40, 42–6, 47, 74, 82, 83, 140, 156, 184, 185, 208, 264, 268 deer 33–4, 36, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 112, 115, 116, 119, 147, 190 DEFRA (Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) 3, 76, 188, 219, 221, 232, 236, 266 ‘Heath and Harmony: The Future for Food, Farming and the Environment in a Green Brexit’ 232 Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) 219 Department for Education (DfE) 219 Department of Health & Social Care (DHSC) 219 Devon 4, 145 diesel 88, 89, 102, 136, 153, 154, 179, 214, 223, 264 Dig for Victory 80, 183 digitalisation 26, 37, 41, 42, 54, 64, 81, 96, 100, 230 Dovey Estuary 134 economics: agriculture and see agriculture British farming’s 52, 62–3, 65–6, 67, 79–80, 87–90, 99–104 building a greener economy 59–171 see also agriculture; coasts; rivers; towns/cities and uplands consumption rates, rising 55–6 cost–benefit analysis xvi, 29, 31, 184, 186–9, 194 destruction of nature, economic progress and xiii–xiv, 5, 6–7, 8–9, 24–5, 38 see also agriculture; coasts; rivers; towns/cities and uplands externalities 179, 180, 182, 183, 194, 210 fossil fuel xii, 42–3, 154, 264 see also coal and oil investing in nature to increase prosperity xiii, xv, 7–9, 17, 21, 24–5, 26–7 see also agriculture; coasts; rivers; towns/cities and uplands measuring cost of lost environment 208–9 measuring economic output of natural world xvi, 2, 3, 9, 27–30, 34, 51, 55, 56, 88, 141, 148, 175–262, 264 see also agriculture; coasts; rivers; towns/cities and uplands natural capital loss as a price worth paying 38 Nature Fund and see Nature Fund option value 188 polluter-pays principle and see polluter-pays principle population growth and xii, 11, 44, 47–50, 52, 55, 58, 166, 183 public goods and see public goods short-term, inefficient 40, 77, 112, 157, 231, 234, 238, 256, 261 25 Year Environment Plan and see 25 Year Environment Plan electricity 26, 28, 53, 54, 71, 75, 76, 100, 101, 135, 153, 201, 215, 223, 245, 262, 268 endangered species 18, 185, 205, 243 Ennerdale 121 EnTrade 78 Environment Agency 63, 65, 73, 75, 76, 77, 78, 88, 133, 141, 190–1, 192, 220, 221, 232, 257, 258, 260 Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Select Committee 182 Environment Protection Agency, proposed 205, 260 Essex coast xi, 129, 132, 133, 143, 145 European Economic Community (EEC) 95 European Union (EU) 48, 87, 89, 92, 139, 141, 211, 243, 268 air quality and 153 Bathing Water Directives 131–2 Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) xii, 45, 75, 80, 88, 89, 90, 97, 102–3, 110–11, 126, 141, 191, 193, 204, 210–13, 217, 218, 220–1, 226, 232, 234, 239, 241, 243, 244, 247 Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) 142 Water Framework Directive 77, 242, 243 eutrophication 19, 196 Exmoor 87, 89, 105, 114, 119, 120, 123, 125–6, 129, 267 Exmoor Mires Project 63, 78, 125–6 Exe, River 63 extinctions xiv, 40, 123, 250 Farmers Weekly 95, 96, 199, 204 Farne Islands 139 Fens 25, 32, 33, 82, 90, 132 fertiliser 22, 39, 43, 65, 80, 82, 86, 87, 94, 96, 100, 102, 119, 124, 163, 196–7, 200, 201, 216, 223, 243, 244, 253, 254 field margins 96–7, 251 financial crisis (2007–8) xii, 56 fish: farms 22, 34, 37, 45, 46, 57, 138, 139, 140, 144–5, 151 pollution and 34, 64, 68 rivers and 61, 64, 68, 97 fishing: coastal waters and 128, 129, 133, 134, 135, 136–9, 140 destructive practices 9–10, 17, 22, 24, 34, 128, 135, 136–9, 140, 141–5, 151, 175, 264 long-term management of 34, 141–5 Marine Protected Areas and 7, 268 policy fit for purpose 141–5 regulatory body 248 role in British economy 2, 148 subsidies 142, 221 flea beetles 84 flooding: climate change and 44 coasts and 127, 133 farming practices and 63, 65, 66, 81 flood meadows and 30, 66 floodplains and 61, 73–4, 77 Green Belt and 167 housing, urban centres, roads and 73–4, 75, 153, 158 industrial legacy and 67 natural management of 8, 18, 30, 31, 35, 124, 220, 248, 260, 268 Nature Fund and 219, 220, 221 paying for pollution and 213 peat bogs and 62, 119, 124 public goods and 181, 184, 189, 191, 192 sewage systems and 71–2 system operator and 76, 77, 258 25 Year Environment Plan and 248, 257, 258, 260 upper rivers and 62 flowers 7, 33, 35, 83, 94, 97, 124, 140, 157, 162, 163, 164, 168, 169, 170, 217, 246–7, 263 flycatcher 3, 13, 35, 36, 37, 84, 185, 261 fly-tipping 205 food 2, 3, 22, 33, 258 cost of 56, 88, 90 intensification of production 80–1, 87 link between production and consumption 168 polluter-pays principle and 198, 199 public goods and 92, 93–4, 182–4, 193 security/self-sufficiency 32, 99–102, 106, 182–4, 210 soils and 33, 81–3 subsidies and 100–4, 210–13 see also subsidies uplands and 122 waste 160 ‘Food from Our Own Resources’ (White Paper, 1975) 80 footpaths 7, 92, 98, 99, 123, 130, 145, 149, 169, 170, 191 Forest of Bowland 63 Forest of Dean 160 forests 4, 33, 39, 63, 107, 108, 109, 110, 112, 117, 160, 175, 178, 179, 180, 196, 230, 238, 247, 250 Fowey, River 134 fox 108, 113, 115, 159, 253 Friends of the Seals 150 frog 35, 81, 85, 164 fuel xii, 101, 102, 154, 183, 213, 214, 217, 223, 264 fungicides 95 gamekeeper 113–14, 115, 203, 204 game shooting 4, 34, 101, 113–14, 115, 116, 183, 203, 204, 258 Garden Bridge, London 221 garden centres 170–1 gardens xi, xiv, 7, 23, 35, 43, 46, 71, 85, 139, 147, 155, 162–4, 165, 167, 170–1, 207 genetically modified (GM) crops 4, 95–6 genetics 4, 5, 81, 95–6, 230, 252 genomics 38, 252, 254 GlaxoSmithKline 69 globalisation, species 41 glyphosate 4–5, 44–5, 80, 84, 85, 86, 95, 217 golden eagle 4, 113, 123, 203 golden plover 17, 36, 123 goshawk 160 GPS 6, 96, 223 Grand Banks cod fishery 137, 142 grasses/grassland 5, 31, 39, 64, 65, 87, 119, 124, 152, 155–6, 163, 164, 253 Great Stink of London (1858) 19–20, 158 Green Belt 7, 10, 17, 37, 46, 47, 50, 51–2, 57, 117, 145, 150, 151, 165–70, 185, 207, 208, 209, 247, 263 Green Belt National Parks 169, 170 green bonds 235–6 green corridors 7, 31, 164–5, 186, 191, 234, 247, 250 see also wildlife corridors green prize 8, 9, 17–36 enhancements and 25–36 no more declines and 18–25 securing 263–8 green spaces 7, 8, 22, 23, 24, 35, 46, 153, 155–6, 161–5, 167, 169, 170, 178, 189, 206, 221, 230, 262, 268 grey wagtail 61 grey water storage 71, 74 Gross Domestic Product (GDP) xvi, 2, 3, 9, 34, 51, 55, 56, 88, 141, 148, 264 groundwater 19, 41, 67, 69, 70 grouse shooting 4, 33, 106, 113–14, 115, 116, 183, 190, 203, 204, 258 Gulf Stream 2, 127–8, 136 Gwent Levels 57 Haber-Bosch process 82 hay meadows 17, 109, 124, 125 heather 33, 113, 123–4 Hebrides 1, 139 hedgehog 35, 85, 139, 162, 163, 164, 170 hedgerows xii, 21, 31–2, 36, 79, 85, 90, 97, 98, 103, 109, 123, 124–5, 167, 169, 180, 191, 207, 210, 211 hen harrier 33, 36, 113–14, 120, 123, 185, 203, 205, 250 herbicides 4, 21, 22, 43, 44–5, 65, 83, 84, 85, 95, 96, 97, 100, 102, 124, 197, 199, 200, 201, 216, 223, 243 Heritage Lottery Fund 247 Highland Clearances 106, 139–40 hill farming 24, 80, 89, 101, 103, 217–18 Hill Farming Act (1946) 80 Hobhouse Report 116 housing xii, 3, 7, 9, 11, 35, 37, 46, 49, 50–2, 53–4, 55, 57, 58, 72–3, 75, 77, 117, 128, 155, 165, 166, 170, 185, 205–6, 207, 209, 225–6 house sparrow xi, 21, 160–1, 185, 252 HS2 3, 26, 27, 28, 29, 47, 57, 185, 186, 226 Humber, River 134 Hyde Park 155, 156–7, 160 hypothecation 202–3, 224, 225, 236, 239 immigration 48–50, 183 India 48, 55, 155 industrial policy xii, 67–9, 128, 203, 215 industrial pollution 19–21, 61, 67–9, 77, 138, 203, 215 Industrial Revolution 3, 19, 41, 136, 155, 160 infrastructure xii, 18–19, 24, 26, 28, 29, 35, 44, 47, 49, 50, 52–4, 55, 56, 57, 58, 72, 74, 75, 120, 125, 134, 152, 157, 165, 168–9, 170, 176, 185, 207, 215, 226, 245, 267 inheritance tax 88, 89, 213–14, 217 insects xv, 4–5, 18, 20, 21, 31, 32, 33, 36, 37, 42, 45, 58, 72, 83, 84–5, 86, 87, 94, 97, 112, 115, 119, 124, 129, 147, 160, 162, 168, 170, 189, 217, 222, 243, 245, 252 internet 28, 54, 177, 205 Isle of Arran 141–2 Isle of Man 139, 141 Isle of Skye 140 Isles of Scilly 139, 145, 147, 149 Japanese knotweed 148 kingfisher 61, 164 Kingsbrook 165 Knepp Castle 108, 197 Labour Party 50 Lake District 1, 35, 105, 111, 121, 122–3, 158 lakes 19, 30, 61, 70, 122–3, 216, 225 land development xii, 3, 6, 7, 9, 11, 20, 35, 37, 46, 47, 49, 50–5, 57, 58, 72–3, 75, 77, 78, 89, 117, 118, 121, 128, 155, 156, 157–8, 165–70, 185–6, 189, 205–9, 215, 216, 218, 225–6, 241, 245, 268 landfill 136, 159, 200 land ownership/prices 8, 9, 11, 89, 92–3, 100, 102–3, 106, 156, 165–70, 189–90, 193, 198, 212, 213, 214, 217, 268 Land Trust 236 lapwing xi, xii, 31, 185 Larkin, Philip: ‘Going, Going’ vii lemmings 253 live export of animals 23, 101 lobbyists 4–5, 13, 52, 54, 57, 84, 87, 101–4, 116, 143, 166, 221, 239, 258–9, 261 London 19–20, 29, 43, 47, 49, 73, 74, 142, 153, 155–6, 158, 159, 160, 161, 209, 221 see also individual place name London Wetland Centre 74, 159 Lundy 146 lynx 4, 108, 250 MacFarlane, Robert 98 Macron, Emmanuel 96 maize 5, 21, 62, 63, 65, 86, 250 Malta 84, 243 Manx shearwater 146, 150 marginal land 87, 103, 183, 210, 211, 214, 217–18, 250 marginal losses 57–8 Marine and Coastal Access Act (2009) 130 Marine Conservation Zones 145 Marine Protected Areas 7, 10, 143, 145, 151, 247, 268 Marlborough Downs 98 Marsh harrier 133 marshes xi, 17, 128, 129, 130, 132–3, 145, 149, 151, 181, 208, 215, 250, 253 mayflies 41 meadows 17, 30, 31, 45, 66, 79, 87, 103, 109, 124, 125, 167, 168, 169, 209, 246–7, 263, 264 mental health, nature and xiv, 5–6, 24, 25, 28, 34, 73, 162, 169, 171, 189, 254, 264 Mersey, River 20, 40, 158, 209 metaldehyde 85, 190 mining 20, 67, 68, 73, 111, 235 Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) 80 Ministry of Defence (MOD) 130 Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) 219 Minsmere RSPB reserve 133 Mitchell, Joni: ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ vii, 57 molinia grass (Molinia caerulea) 124 Monsanto 95 moorland 33, 62, 67, 87, 103, 118, 119, 123–4, 180, 183, 190, 204, 210, 251, 258 M3 208 Muir, John 116 National Audit Office (NAO) 234 National Farmers’ Union (NFU) 80, 90, 99, 166, 182, 183, 211, 239, 258, 260 National Infrastructure Commission (NIC) 26, 44 National Parks xiv, 52, 105, 116–18, 121, 124, 125–6, 143, 169, 170, 178, 185, 220, 221, 234, 240, 241, 248, 257, 266, 267 National Parks Act (1949) 116–17 National Trust 117, 125, 130, 146, 177, 185, 192, 220, 221, 236, 237, 239 natural assets see individual asset name natural capital: acknowledgement of concept, lack of 265 aggregate measure of overall state of 41 categories/fundamental building blocks of 30, 41 see also individual category name definition of xiv, 2 enhancing/natural capital approach to management of environment 25–32 holding the line against further deterioration of 17, 18–25 maintenance 19, 24–32, 29, 119, 125, 156, 178, 184–5, 186, 187, 226, 234, 237–8, 246, 248, 259, 268 monitoring state of 250–5 Nature Fund and see Nature Fund NCC and xiv–xv see also Natural Capital Committee (NCC) as neo-liberal conspiracy 266–7 non-renewable 12, 42–3, 137, 205, 219, 228, 231, 235, 250 paying for pollution and 195, 198, 205, 206, 215 piecing together evidence for main categories of 41–2 public goods and 175, 176, 177, 178, 179–80, 181, 184, 185–6, 187, 188–9, 193, 194 renewable 12, 18, 28, 43, 69, 82–3, 123, 137, 140, 141, 142, 185, 195, 205, 206, 219, 228, 231, 235, 237, 245, 246, 250, 257 solutions see agriculture; coasts; rivers; towns/cities and uplands state of assets 245–8 25 Year Environment Plan and see 25 Year Environment Plan Natural Capital Committee (NCC) xi, xii, xiii, xiv–xv, 257 Natural Capital: Valuing the Planet (Helm) xv Natural England 75, 78, 185, 191, 221, 232, 248, 257, 258, 260 Natural Resources Wales 65 Nature Act 13, 258, 259 Nature Fund 12, 202–3, 209, 219–40, 241, 249, 254, 258 adding in the avoided subsidies beyond the CAP 226–7 adding in the net environmental gain compensation payments 225–6 adding in the value of pollution taxes 222–5 budget 234–6 deciding how to spend money 239–40 designing 231–4 green bonds and 235–6 looking after future generations and 228–31 owning assets 236–8 redirecting current spending 220–2 separating spending from revenues 227 nature, love of xiv, 160, 261 neonicotinoids 4–5, 82, 83, 84, 96, 217 net environmental gain principle 7, 11, 12, 46, 54, 149, 168–9, 186, 194, 202, 206, 208, 216, 218, 219, 225–6, 235, 244, 245, 258, 265 New Forest 117 New Naturalist 42 nitrates 123, 136, 152, 216 non-governmental organisations (NGOs) 42, 130, 239 non-renewable natural capital 12, 42–3, 137, 205, 219, 228, 231, 235, 250 North Sea 1, 12, 34, 133, 135, 137, 228, 235, 251 Norway 228–9, 231, 235 obesity xiv, 24, 28, 171, 264 Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) 240 Office for National Statistics (ONS) 236, 240, 249, 257 OFWAT 75, 78 oil 3, 12, 42, 45, 136, 159, 219, 228, 231, 235 oilseed rape 5, 37, 83, 85, 86, 95, 101, 183, 198, 207 organic farming 96–7, 119, 197, 223 organochlorines 96 organophosphates 96 osprey 161 Otmoor 8 otter 40, 61 Ouse, River 31 owl xi, 85, 115, 195, 253 oxbow lakes 30, 61 Oxford–Cambridge Corridor 46 Oxford concrete canal 30–1, 220 Parish, Neil 182 parks, urban xiv, 7, 23, 25, 34, 46, 155–6, 160, 170, 185, 221, 250 Parrot, River 63 Peak District 67, 105, 123, 158 peat 22, 61, 62, 63, 67, 82, 118, 119, 124, 163, 164, 170, 189, 201, 235 Pennines 1, 47, 90, 105, 120 peregrine falcon 40, 84, 160, 161–2 pesticides xii, 21, 22, 43, 45, 65, 82, 83, 84, 95, 96, 100, 102, 124, 197, 199, 200, 201, 216, 223, 243, 244 pharmaceutical industry 43, 61, 68 pheasant 33, 101, 114–16, 119, 190 phosphates 4–5, 20, 22, 77, 96, 136, 198 Pickering, River 31 pigeon 159–60, 161 pine marten 40 Planet Earth (TV series) 3 planning 52, 54, 56, 73, 74, 75, 76, 86, 89, 117, 118, 144, 146, 157, 166, 168, 169, 207, 208, 209, 213, 245, 248 Planning Act (1947) 52, 208 plastics xii, xiv, 2, 4, 5, 17, 34, 43, 45, 56, 128, 131, 136, 150, 188, 196, 201, 244 taxing 200–1, 223, 244 pollinators 5, 6, 7, 18, 25. 84 polluter-pays principle 9, 10–11, 12, 22, 34, 56, 66, 67, 68–9, 74, 87–8, 99–100, 102, 103, 104, 114, 137, 170, 179, 195–218, 219, 220, 225, 241, 244, 245, 249, 258, 265, 266 developers, net environmental gain and 205–9 fines for pollution and 203–5 hypothecation or earmarking of revenues to specific green expenditure 202–3, 224–5 improvements that come from economics of 216–18 money raised from 202–3 Nature Fund and 202–3, 209 net gain environmental gain principle and 195, 205–9 precautionary principle and 83–4, 195 pricing 198–201 principle of 195–8 subsidies and 210–15 Poole Harbour 78, 191 population growth xii, 11, 44, 47–50, 52, 55, 58, 166, 183 Porlock Marshes, Somerset 133 potholes 24 power stations 53, 83, 109, 130, 135, 159, 186, 203 precautionary principle 11, 83–4, 142, 194, 195, 218 public goods 10, 12, 23–4, 58, 75, 92, 93, 95, 98, 99, 102, 103, 104, 112, 118, 119, 122–3, 124, 125, 126, 149, 167–8, 175–94, 195, 208, 210, 212, 217, 218, 232, 237, 241, 244, 247, 249, 258, 265, 266, 268 definition of 176–9 ecosystems and coordination 179–81 importance of, relative 181–4 Nature Fund and 232, 237 polluter-pays principle and 195, 208, 210, 212, 217–18 private interests and 189–93 public money for public goods principle 9, 103, 181–2, 189, 191, 193, 210, 217, 218, 232, 244, 247, 249, 258, 265, 266 richer and greener public spaces 193–4 spending, allocating 184–9 25 Year Environment Plan and 241, 244, 247, 249, 258 railway 3, 7, 8, 11, 17, 25, 29, 35, 37, 54, 80, 170, 206, 234 rats 146, 147, 150 Ray, River 8 Rebanks, James: The Shepherd’s Life 111 red deer 110, 112, 116 red kite 4, 21, 40, 161 red lists 18, 185 redshank 31 redstart 185 reed beds 19, 20, 72 re-introduction programs 4, 31, 108, 161, 250, 267 renewable energy 28, 37, 57, 89, 124, 135 renewable natural capital 12, 18, 28, 43, 69, 82–3, 123, 137, 140, 141, 142, 185, 195, 205, 206, 219, 228, 231, 235, 237, 245, 246, 250, 257 rewilding 2, 36, 45, 91, 106–10, 111, 119, 124, 140, 240, 267 Rhine, River 34, 136 rivers 9, 17, 264 access to 61, 169, 180, 181, 189, 191, 248 algae blooms and 196–7, 216–17, 251 biologically dead 40, 158 catchment system plan and operator 9, 74–8, 118, 190, 193, 240, 248, 259, 260, 266 climate change and 44 current spending on 220 estuaries 17, 20, 30, 74, 128, 134–5, 136, 138, 181, 186, 196, 208, 209, 215, 251, 253 eutrophication of 19, 196–7 farm pollution and 4, 5, 19–21, 22, 43–4, 61, 62, 64–6, 74, 76, 81, 85, 96, 123, 196–8, 203–4, 205, 207, 216–17, 224, 242, 248, 251 fish stocks and 138 flooding and 8, 30–1, 44, 61, 62–3, 65–6, 72–4, 75, 76, 77, 81, 181, 189, 190, 191, 192, 219, 220, 248, 253, 257, 260, 268 floodplains 61, 73–4, 77 fly life and 19, 41 housing/urban centres/roads and 72–4 industrial pollution and 19–21, 61, 67–9, 77 integrated management 7, 9, 19, 74–8, 118, 190, 193, 240, 248, 259, 260, 266 meanders 30, 61 National Parks and 118 natural capital approach to 30–2, 36, 61, 63, 76, 260, 268 Nature Fund and 220, 224–5, 240 oxbow lakes and 30, 61 polluter-pays principle and 9, 196–8, 203–4, 205, 207, 216–17 pollution of 4, 5, 19–21, 22, 43–4, 61, 62–9, 74, 76, 81, 85, 88, 96, 123, 132, 158, 181, 190, 191, 192, 196–8, 203–4, 205, 207, 216–17, 219, 220, 224, 225, 242, 244, 248, 251 public good concept and 180, 181, 185, 186, 188, 189, 190–1 recreation on 61, 73 restoring 61–78 sewage and 19–20, 23, 42, 61, 69, 76 soil erosion and 19, 191, 248 State of Nature Review and 248 upper rivers, protecting 62–3, 254–5 water abstractions from 43, 53, 61, 66, 70–1, 72, 73, 74, 75, 103, 220 water companies and see water companies water quality and 23, 28, 29, 43, 61, 63, 69–72, 158, 180, 190, 197–8, 220, 242, 253, 260 wildlife/biodiversity along 61, 97, 98, 165, 180, 189, 190, 191, 198 road verges 7, 8, 35 roads xii, xiv, 7, 8, 29, 35, 54, 215, 226 romantic art/literature 39, 91, 92 Roundup 44, 95 rowan 123 RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds) 42, 133, 165, 177, 185, 220, 221, 225, 236, 239 rubbish disposal 43, 69, 128, 131, 136, 150, 204 run-off 4, 5, 22, 62, 61, 65–6, 67, 72, 73, 74, 88, 123, 132, 158, 196, 207, 216, 224, 242, 251 St Agnes 139, 146 Salisbury Plain 238 salmon 222, 37, 40, 45, 46, 61, 135, 138, 139, 144, 252 sand eels 45, 46, 138, 139 schools 34, 99, 169–70, 171, 207, 247 Scotland 22, 105, 106, 108, 114, 131, 139–40, 203 Scots pine Caledonian forests 107 Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) 65 seabirds 34, 129, 130, 137, 138–9, 140, 142, 143, 144, 146, 147, 150, 263 sea eagle 4, 161 sea walls xi, 128, 132, 134, 143, 145, 151, 186 seas 1, 2, 4, 5, 128, 250 climate and 127–8 fishing and 17, 22, 135, 136–9, 141–5, 160 pollution of 4, 6, 34, 40, 45, 56, 68, 71, 128–9, 132, 136, 158, 205 returning to good health 140–50 rising levels 63, 74, 133, 134, 253 State of Nature Review and 248 Severn: Estuary 134, 135, 209 River 31 sewage 19–20, 23, 25, 34, 40, 43, 53, 61, 68, 69, 70, 71–2, 74, 75, 76, 128, 131, 132, 136, 155, 158, 180, 196, 197, 204, 264 sheep farming 11, 21–2, 23, 33, 62–3, 64, 74, 87, 101, 106–7, 108, 110–11, 113, 119, 122, 124, 125, 183, 190, 210, 211, 217, 218, 264, 267 Sheffield City Council 8, 23, 157 shellfish 24, 128, 135, 141–2, 143, 151 Shetland 139 Shiants 139, 146 shipping 45, 46, 127, 129, 136, 147, 148, 204, 205 shooting, game 4, 33, 34, 45, 101, 106, 112–16, 119, 183, 190, 203, 204, 205, 222, 258 silage 109, 124 silt 19, 21, 32, 43, 44, 63, 65, 66, 67, 74, 81, 88, 207 Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSIs) 75, 119, 130, 181, 185, 257 skylark xi, xii slug pellets 85, 163, 170 slurry 21, 22, 64–5, 74, 179, 180, 190, 203, 204, 205, 224 snake’s head fritillaries 31 snowy owl 253 soils 133, 217, 224, 242, 245, 247, 250 carbon in 7, 184, 216, 246 erosion/degradation and restoration of xiv, 4, 6, 18, 19, 21, 25, 32–3, 39, 41, 44, 61, 62, 63, 65, 81–3, 94, 96, 103, 123, 157, 163, 184, 189, 190, 191, 198, 207, 211, 216, 248, 250, 251, 264 Solway Firth 134, 253 Somerset Levels 63, 65 South Downs 1, 105, 117 South West Coast Path 128 South West Water 63, 78, 125–6 sovereign wealth funds 12, 228–9, 231, 233, 235 species protection 18–19 State of Nature Review 248 Steart Marshes 133 Stern, Nicholas: ‘Economics of Climate Change’ 229 Stour, River 134 subsidies: bidding for 191, 192 business rates and 88, 89, 102, 213, 214 Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) xii, 45, 75, 80, 88, 89, 90, 97, 102–3, 110–11, 126, 141, 191, 193, 204, 210–13, 217, 218, 220–1, 226, 232, 234, 239, 241, 243, 244, 247 Common Fisheries Policy (CFP) 142 cross-compliance and 97, 98, 251 farming xii, 2, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 21, 22, 23, 34, 45, 62–3, 75, 76, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 87, 88–90, 95, 97, 100, 101, 102–4, 110–11, 118, 119–20, 122, 124, 126, 139, 183, 184, 188, 191, 192, 195, 204, 205, 210–18, 219, 220–1, 226–7, 232, 234, 239, 241, 243, 244, 247, 253 fishing 22, 142, 221 flood risk insurance and 73 focusing on public rather than private goods 7, 12, 23 102, 104, 118, 167, 168, 182, 184, 188, 191, 212–13, 216–18, 232 food and 100–4, 210–13 fuel duty and 214 improvements from removing 216–18 industrial policy and infrastructure and 215 inheritance tax and 88, 89, 213–14, 217 islands and 139 land ownership and 89–90, 97, 103, 193, 212 landowner subsidies and bird killing in the uplands 119–20 National Parks and 118, 221 Nature Fund and 220–2, 226–7, 232, 239 NFU defence of 182, 183, 211 pollution and 23, 77, 195, 204, 205, 210–18 rivers and 62–3, 73, 75, 76, 78 tourism and 34 25 Year Environment Plan and 241, 243, 247, 248, 253, 258 upland sheep farming and 11, 22, 23–4, 62–3, 106, 110–11, 118, 122, 124, 126, 211, 220–1, 267 zero subsidies concept 45 Surfers Against Sewage 34, 131 Sustainable Soils Alliance 81–2 swallow xi, 3, 13, 18, 35, 37, 47, 84, 185, 187, 195, 261 sweet vernal grass 31 swift 37, 47, 161, 182, 185 Taff, River 20 tariffs 87, 88, 89, 102, 104 Tarr Steps, Exmoor 125 Taw, River 134 taxes: farming and 23, 79, 80, 88, 89, 90, 95, 100, 102, 106 housing and 52 Nature Fund and 227, 234 pollution 12, 23, 199, 200, 202, 203, 210, 213–14, 215, 217, 222–5 public goods and 178, 179 selling land for development and 168 25 Year Environment Plan and 244, 253 technology: AI (artificial intelligence) 230, 252–4, 255, 258 aides destruction of nature 5–7, 80–1 air quality and 154, 169, 254, 255 farming and 5–7, 80–1, 96, 120, 223, 253 fishing and 136, 143, 144 pollution detection and 65, 251, 253, 254, 255 renewable energy 28, 37–8, 57, 89, 124, 135 routes to a greener world through 6–7, 9, 28, 65, 230–1, 251–5 25 Year Environment Plan and 251–5, 256 waste crime detection and 205 wastewater and sewage detection 69 Thames: Estuary 134, 186, 208 Gateway 20, 134–5, 208, 226 River 8, 20, 34, 40, 74, 98, 134–5, 136, 158, 186, 192, 203–4, 220 Tideway 20, 53, 74 Thames Water 159, 203–4 Thelwall Viaduct 158 ‘The Natural Choice’ (White Paper, 2011) xii–xiii, 13, 265–6 thrush 85, 163, 164, 170 tidal lagoons 128, 135, 209 toad 35, 164 Tone, River 63 Torridge, River 134 tourism 7, 24, 34, 55 agriculture and 90–3 coasts and 127, 128, 131, 133, 139, 140, 148–50 growth of countryside/nature 90–3 Nature Fund and 232 pollution and 222 public goods and 181, 190 rivers and 73 uplands and 111, 119, 120–1, 125 towns/cities 9, 10, 20, 22–3, 24, 29, 30, 31, 34–5, 46, 50, 51, 53, 58, 85, 98, 108, 129, 152–71 air pollution and 153–4, 155, 157, 167, 254 a biodiverse and green urban environment 170–1 coastal 129 green corridors in 164–5 greener streets and roofs 157–8, 170 green spaces in, new 161–5, 170 housing and see housing link with nature 152 natural capital solutions for 154–7 Nature Fund and 221 nature/wildlife in the 158–61 outer rings/Green Belt 165–70 parks, urban xiv, 7, 23, 25, 34, 46, 155–7, 160, 170, 185, 221, 250 rivers and 20, 30, 31, 72–4 State of Nature Review and 248 water quality in 153, 155, 158 tragedy of the commons 24, 137, 175 Treasury 10, 29, 77, 188, 218, 219, 220, 223–4, 226, 227, 229, 232, 247, 267 trees 33, 156, 190, 207, 212 cutting down 8, 23, 157 flood management and 30 planting 7, 10, 35, 157, 221 towns/cities and 7, 10, 160, 162, 170 uplands and 106, 107, 110 Tresco 147 turtle dove 18, 84, 243, 250 25 Year Environment Plan xv, 12–13, 28, 94, 118, 181, 184, 188, 222, 232, 233, 240, 241–62, 265, 266, 267–8 accounting basis and metrics 245–7 Big Data, GPS, genomics and 250–5, 258 embedding/delivery body 255–61 European and global dimensions 242–3 how the bits fit together 244–5 making governments stick to 261–2 prioritising within 247–8 revising 248–50 top-down plan, why we need a 242 Two Moors Way 98 Twyford Down 208 Tyne, River 138 Tyneside 74 United Utilities 63, 78 uplands 9, 17, 19, 21–2, 29, 30, 33–4, 39, 40, 43, 45, 62, 72, 98, 104, 105–26, 185, 188, 189, 191, 214, 240, 248, 264, 266, 267, 268 access to 105–6 birds in 4, 33, 36, 40, 45, 84, 106, 113–14, 115, 116, 119–20, 123, 160, 161–2, 183, 185, 190, 203, 204, 205, 250, 258 see also individual bird type deer and 33–4, 36, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 112, 115, 116, 119, 147, 190 game shooting and 4, 33, 34, 45, 101, 106, 112–16, 119, 183, 190, 203, 204, 205, 222, 258 managing for people and wildlife 123–6 National Parks and 116–18, 121 Nature Fund and 220–1 population 120–3 public benefits in 118–20 rewilding and 106–10 rivers and 62–3, 71–2 second home owners and 121 sheep farming and 11, 21–2, 23–4, 33, 62, 106–7, 110–11, 113, 119, 122, 182, 211, 212, 217, 218, 264, 267 State of Nature Review and 248 tourism and 120–1 trees and 106, 107, 110 25 Year Environment Plan and 241, 245, 248, 257 as wildlife refuge 21–2, 118–20, 123–6 visitor charge 125 volunteers 125, 147, 149, 150 wading birds 123 Wallasea Island 133, 143 walls: green 35, 162, 165, 170, 221 maintenance of 119, 123, 124–5, 167–8 sea xi, 128, 132, 133, 134, 135, 143, 145, 151, 186 stone 31, 103, 120, 123, 124–5, 167–8, 180 water quality/cleanliness xvi, 8, 264, 268 Blue Flag system/EU Bathing Water Directive and 131–2 farm pollution and xiv, 19, 23, 43–4, 63, 65–6, 72, 78, 81, 85, 88, 190, 191 future of 28, 220, 221, 222, 225, 242, 243, 244, 246, 247, 249, 253, 258, 260, 262 improvements in 39, 41, 43–4 industrial pollution and 19–20, 68–9 Nature Fund and 219, 220, 221, 222, 225 peat bogs and 63, 78, 119, 124, 125–6 polluter-pays principle and 196, 197–8, 199, 203–4, 207, 215 public goods concept and 181, 189, 190, 191 rivers and 23, 28, 29, 43, 61, 63, 69–72, 158, 180, 190, 197–8, 220, 242, 253, 260 towns/cities and 153, 155, 158 25 Year Environment Plan and 242, 243, 244, 246, 247, 249, 253, 258, 260, 262 wastewater and 69 water companies and see water companies water companies 181 cleanliness of water and xiv, 23, 63, 68, 69–72, 78, 81, 85, 88, 125–6, 190, 191, 197–8, 203–4, 215, 219, 220, 221, 222, 225, 242, 244, 253, 258, 260 Exmoor Mires Project and 63, 78, 125–6 farm pollution and xiv, 23, 63, 78, 81, 85, 88, 125–6, 190, 191 flood defences and 192 Forest of Bowland project 63 grey water system and 71 natural capital approach to river catchment system as a whole and 75–8 Nature Fund and 219, 220, 221, 222, 225 pharmaceuticals in water and 68 polluter-pays principle and 197–8, 203–4, 215 regulation of 75, 78 sewage and 71–2 25 Year Environment Plan and 242, 244, 253, 258, 260 water abstractions and 43, 53, 61, 66, 70–1, 72, 73, 74, 75, 103, 220 water bills and 20, 23, 75, 77, 78, 88, 131–2, 191 water leakage and 25, 61, 70–1, 74 water meadows 31, 66, 79, 103 weedkillers 163, 170 Wessex Water 78, 191 West Canvey Marsh 130 West Thurrock Lagoons 130, 159 wetlands 8, 74, 133, 159, 186, 234, 236, 237 wheat 86, 101 Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust 133 wildlife corridors 4, 7, 17, 31, 97–9, 118, 129, 150, 164–5, 167, 169–70, 180, 186, 191, 234, 247, 250 Wildlife Trusts 8, 75, 76, 125, 146, 177, 185, 192, 220, 221, 225, 236, 237 Wilson, E.

A New History of the Future in 100 Objects: A Fiction by Adrian Hon

Adrian Hon, air gap, Anthropocene, augmented reality, blockchain, bounce rate, call centre, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cepheid variable, charter city, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deepfake, defense in depth, discrete time, disinformation, disintermediation, driverless car, drone strike, food desert, game design, gamification, gravity well, hive mind, hydroponic farming, impulse control, income inequality, job automation, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, life extension, lifelogging, low earth orbit, machine translation, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral panic, Neal Stephenson, no-fly zone, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, peak oil, peer-to-peer, phenotype, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, precariat, precautionary principle, prediction markets, rewilding, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, smart contracts, social graph, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, telepresence, transfer pricing, tulip mania, Turing test, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, VTOL, working-age population

I’ll let Alice explain what it means: Before these translation systems came along, there were an awful lot of people worried that the world would settle on just one or two or three universal languages, like Mandarin and English. It wouldn’t have been the first time that languages had become extinct, like many Indonesian ones such as Bonerif or Usku have in recent centuries, but it looked like the rate of extinction might begin to drastically accelerate. A very ‘Anthropocene’ trend. When Babylon came along, it was the best thing that ever happened to the smaller, regional languages. It meant people could continue using them and teaching them to their children without being excluded from the world’s culture. Automatic translation helped them to communicate with the rest of the world in their own voices.

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Wilderness is relative, and after hundreds of thousands of years of human existence, practically nothing on Earth could be truly emptied of our presence. The half-empty world still had human caretakers and gamekeepers to restore species and environments, not into a “natural” state—an increasingly irrelevant concept practically vaporized by the escalation of the anthropocene—but to a state that was not continually interfered with by humans. The half-empty world was cross-hatched with corridors for transportation, for resources, for animals, and yes, for tourists. Humans had scorched the planet, but it was still our planet, and once emptied, it was there to be savored, not worshipped from afar.

The COVID-19 Catastrophe: What's Gone Wrong and How to Stop It Happening Again by Richard Horton

Anthropocene, biodiversity loss, Boris Johnson, cognitive bias, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, fake news, Future Shock, global pandemic, global village, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, lockdown, nowcasting, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peace of Westphalia, Slavoj Žižek, social distancing, South China Sea, zoonotic diseases

It is highly probable that the pandemic of SARS-CoV-2 will be neither the last nor the worst global health crisis of the present century. But, second, and more importantly, this global calamity is not a crisis concerning health. It is a crisis about life itself. We have been tempted in recent years to assume the omnipotence of our species. The idea of the Anthropocene places human activity as the dominant influence on the future for life on our planet. Although this newest of geological eras is supposed to underline the harm our species is doing to fragile planetary systems, paradoxically it also asserts our supremacy. SARS-CoV-2 has revealed the hubris of this view.

How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (Information Policy) by Benjamin Peters

Albert Einstein, American ideology, Andrei Shleifer, Anthropocene, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commons-based peer production, computer age, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Davies, double helix, Drosophila, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Gabriella Coleman, hive mind, index card, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, linear programming, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, power law, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, scientific mainstream, scientific management, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, transaction costs, Turing machine, work culture , Yochai Benkler

See also Nikolai Krementsov, A Martian Stranded on Earth: Alexander Bogdanov, Blood Transfusions, and Proletarian Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), and J. Biggart, P. Dudley, and F. King, eds., Alexander Bogdanov and the Origins of Systems Thinking in Russia (Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1998), and McKenzie Wark, Molecular Red: A Theory for the Anthropocene (New York: Verso, 2015). 40. On Stefan Odobleja, see Mihai Draganescu, Odobleja: Between Ampère and Wiener (Bucharest: Academia Republicii Socialiste Romania, 1981); Nicolae Jurcau, “Two Specialists in Cybernetics: Stefan Odobleja and Norbert Wiener, Common and Different Features,” Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy (1998), accessed October 11, 2011, http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Comp/CompJurc.htm. 41.

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Vucinich, Alexander. Empire of Knowledge: The Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1917–1970). Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Wädekin, Karl Eugen. The Private Sector in Soviet Agriculture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973. Wark, McKenzie. Molecular Red: A Theory for the Anthropocene. New York: Verso, 2015. Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Translated by Talcott Parsons and Anthony Giddens. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1930 [originally published in 1905]. Weintraub, Jeff. “The Theory and Politics of the Public/Private Distinction.” Public and Private in Thought and Practice: Perspectives on a Grand Dichotomy.

The Smart Wife: Why Siri, Alexa, and Other Smart Home Devices Need a Feminist Reboot by Yolande Strengers, Jenny Kennedy

active measures, Amazon Robotics, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, Boston Dynamics, cloud computing, cognitive load, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, cyber-physical system, data science, deepfake, Donald Trump, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, game design, gender pay gap, Grace Hopper, hive mind, Ian Bogost, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, Masayoshi Son, Milgram experiment, Minecraft, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, pattern recognition, planned obsolescence, precautionary principle, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, social intelligence, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Turing test, Wall-E, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce

We are inspired here by Haraway and her book Staying with the Trouble. Haraway calls on her readers to “make trouble, to stir up potent response [sic] to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places” in the “troubling and turbid” times that we live in. In the context of the Anthropocene—the epoch in which humans are completely transforming and remaking the planet—Haraway’s work argues for a “multispecies flourishing on earth, including human and other-than-human beings in kinship.”1 So too we propose a flourishing that accommodates the many species of smart wives and humans involved in realizing the smart wife.

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See also Alexa (Amazon) Dot Kids, 168 Glow, 197 Look, 186–189, 192, 194–195, 203 Anatomy of an AI System (Crawford and Joler), 97–98, 99, 103, 107, 189, 220 Angle, Colin, 27 Anheuser-Busch, 35–36 Animal-inspired robots. See Pet-inspired robots; Zoomorphic forms of smart wives Anime (animation), 65, 66, 68, 126–127 AnitaB.org, 212 Anthropocene, 208 Anthropomorphic forms of smart wives, 2, 19, 49, 56, 62, 165 Apple. See also Siri (Apple) as Big Five member, 85 employment at, and gender, 9 Home system, 46 renewable energy commitment, 101 users’ loss of control over devices, 193–194 working conditions, 99 Apple Watch, 30 Applin, Sally, 187 Aristotle (Mattel), 196–197 Artificial intelligence (AI) biases in, 219 as component of smart wife, 2 diversity imbalance in industry, 9, 10–11, 62 ethics, 224–226 marriage between Alexa and Siri, 127, 210 need for transdisciplinary approach to, 213 Artificial life made in creator’s image, 70 Ashley Too bot (Black Mirror), 218–219 Asian internet companies, 101 Asian smart wife markets, 4 ASIMO (Honda), 49, 56–57, 58, 67 Asimov, Isaac, 172–173 Assistive robots.

Reset by Ronald J. Deibert

23andMe, active measures, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Cal Newport, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, cashless society, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, confounding variable, contact tracing, contact tracing app, content marketing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, information retrieval, information security, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, license plate recognition, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megastructure, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, New Journalism, NSO Group, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-truth, proprietary trading, QAnon, ransomware, Robert Mercer, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, sorting algorithm, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, techlash, technological solutionism, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, TSMC, undersea cable, unit 8200, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game

-based non-profit TechSoup Global, says adding extra life to computers saves between five and twenty times more energy than recycling them outright.385 To be sure, the philosophy of “not a screw going wasted” is one that could be helpfully duplicated the world over, and used as a way to claw back some control over the platforms and companies that actively lobby against the right to repair, reuse, and remanufacture. But that’s still just treating one symptom of a much bigger underlying disease. * * * The COVID-19 pandemic reminded us in a brutal way that we are intimately and inescapably tied to nature. Most of us are now familiar with the term “Anthropocene,” which refers to the human impacts on the natural environment — now reaching the point of existential risk because of the climate crisis. Some scientists have studied how climate change may impact the internet and social media. One study warns that rising sea levels risk flooding critical infrastructure located in coastal areas.386 Says the author of the study, Alejandra Borunda, “We find that 4,067 miles of fiber conduit will be under water and 1,101 nodes (e.g., points of presence and colocation centers) will be surrounded by water in the next 15 years.”

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The development of “civic media” as a “social” or “public” (instead of commercial) “good”: Owen. The case for platform governance. Everyone’s efforts are weaving something larger than their own separate struggles: Deudney, D., & Mendenhall, E. (2016). Green Earth: The emergence of planetary civilization. In S. Nicholson & S. Jinnah (Eds.), New Earth politics: Essays from the Anthropocene (43–72). MIT Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1b349c4.8 The social media equivalent of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Barry Commoner’s The Closing Circle, and Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb: Carson, R. (1962). Silent spring. Houghton Mifflin; Commoner, B. (1971). The closing circle: Nature, man, and technology.

Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking by Michael Bhaskar

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, call centre, carbon tax, charter city, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cognitive load, Columbian Exchange, coronavirus, cosmic microwave background, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cyber-physical system, dark matter, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Eroom's law, fail fast, false flag, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, Haber-Bosch Process, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, hive mind, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Watt: steam engine, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, lockdown, lone genius, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megacity, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Gell-Mann, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, nudge unit, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-truth, precautionary principle, public intellectual, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, skunkworks, Slavoj Žižek, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, techlash, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, total factor productivity, transcontinental railway, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, When a measure becomes a target, X Prize, Y Combinator

How is the frontier stickier, slower, further away, more dispersed, and what does that mean? Why is it, when we have more people, with access to more knowledge and tools than ever, notionally spending their time on thinking, researching and creating, that there are signs of a slowdown in big ideas? Above those, however, is perhaps the ultimate question of the Anthropocene: whether this trend of relative slowdown, of big ideas stumbling rather than soaring, will continue and intensify over the next century, or whether a series of efforts and initiatives can reverse it. I will look to the most likely scenarios here, exploring everything from the structure of knowledge to the regulation of innovations, the growth of education in China to the boom in AI research.

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., and Uzzi, Brian (2007), ‘The Increasing Dominance of Teams in Production of Knowledge’, Science, Vol. 316 No. 5827, pp. 1036–9 Xinhua (2019), ‘China to build scientific research station on Moon's south pole’, Xinhua, accessed 18 January 2021, available at http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2019-04/24/c_138004666.htm Yueh, Linda (2018), The Great Economists: How Their Ideas Can Help Us Today, London: Penguin Viking Index ‘0,10’ exhibition 103 ‘0-I’ ideas 31 Aadhaar 265 abstraction 103 AC motor 287, 288 academia 209 Académie des sciences 47 Adam (robot) 235–6 Adams, John 211 Adler, Alfred 188 Adobe 265 Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) 180, 247, 253, 296, 317 AEG 34 aeroplanes 62–6, 68–70, 71, 219 Aeschylus 3 Africa 267, 279–80, 295 age/ageing 122, 158–60, 193 AGI see artificial general intelligence Agrarian Revolution 252 agricultural production 92–3 AI see artificial intelligence Akcigit, Ufuk 193 Alexander the Great 159 Alexander, Albert 52 Alexandrian Library 4, 295, 304 algorithms 175, 185, 196, 224, 235, 245 aliens 240–1, 306, 308–9, 337 Allison, Jim 58 Alphabet 193, 225, 265, 294, 295 AlphaFold software 225–6, 227, 228–9, 233 AlphaGo software 226–7, 228, 233 AlQuraishi, Mohammed 225, 226, 229 Amazon 84–5, 214, 272 Amazon Prime Air 71 American Revolution 139 amino acids 223, 226 Ampère, André-Marie 74–5 Anaximander 35 ancestors 10–12 ancient Greeks 1–6, 7–8, 291, 303–4 Anderson, Kurt 106 Angkor Wat 43 anthrax 47–8, 51 Anthropocene 14–15 anti-reason 211–12 anti-science 211–12 antibacterials 234 antibiotics 38, 52–3, 124, 125, 217, 315 resistance to 235 Apollo missions 70, 315, 316, 317, 318 Apple 33, 85, 159, 185, 186, 193, 272, 296, 312 Aquinas, Thomas 36 AR see augmented reality archaeology 153–4 Archimedes 1–6, 7–8, 19, 27, 32, 37, 39, 291, 304 architecture 103, 115, 188 ARIA 297 Aristarchus 5 Aristotle 24, 108, 282, 304 Arkwright, Richard 25, 26, 34, 253 Armstrong, Louis 103 ARPA see Advanced Research Projects Agency art 99–104, 107–8, 176–7, 236, 321, 339 Artemis (Moon mission) 71, 218 artificial general intelligence (AGI) 226, 237–8, 249, 250, 310, 313, 330, 341 artificial intelligence (AI) 225–9, 233–41, 246–7, 248, 249–52, 262, 266, 300, 310, 312–13, 323, 329, 330, 331, 338 arts 152, 293 see also specific arts Artsimovich, Lev 147 arXiv 116 Asia 264, 267–8, 273, 275 Asimov, Isaac, Foundation 45 Astor, John Jacob 288 astronomy 30, 231, 232 AT&T 85, 181, 183, 185, 197 Ates, Sina T. 193 Athens 24, 295 Atlantis 154 augmented reality (AR) 241–2, 338 authoritarianism 112–13, 284 autonomous vehicles 71, 72, 219 ‘Axial Age’ 108 Azoulay, Pierre 317–18 Bach, J.S. 236 bacillus 46 Bacon, Francis 25, 259 bacteria 38, 46, 53 Bahcall, Safi 31 Ballets Russes 99–100 Baltimore and Ohio railway 67 Banks, Iain M. 310 Bardeen, John 182 BASF 289 Batchelor, Charles 286 Bates, Paul 226 Bayes, Thomas 289 Beagle (ship) 36 Beethoven, Ludwig van 26 Beijing Genomics Institute 257, 294–5 Bell Labs 180–4, 186–8, 190, 206, 214, 217, 289, 296, 322 Benz, Karl 68, 219, 330 Bergson, Henri 109 Bessemer process 80 Bezos, Jeff 71, 326 Bhattacharya, Jay 201, 202, 321 Biden, Joe 59 Big Bang 117, 174, 181 Big Big Ideas 79–80 big ideas 5, 8, 11, 13–19 adoption 28 and an uncertain future 302–36 and art 99–103 artificial 223–38 and the Big Ideas Famine 13 and bisociation 36 blockers to 17–18 and breakthrough problems 46–73, 77, 86, 98, 222, 250, 301 and the ‘burden of knowledge’ effect 154–65, 175, 178, 235, 338 and business formation 95 ceiling 18 conception 37 definition 27–8, 40–1 Enlightenment 132–40, 136–40 era of 109–10 erroneous 176 evidence for 222, 223–54 execution 37 ‘fishing out’ mechanism 152 future of 45, 98, 302–36, 337–43 harmful nature 41–2 how they work 23–45 and the Idea Paradox 178–9, 187, 191, 217, 226, 250, 254, 283–4, 301, 312, 342 and the Kardashev Scale 337–43 long and winding course of 4, 5, 35–8, 136 and the low-hanging fruit paradox 149–54, 167, 178 and luck 38–9 moral 136, 138 nature of 169–72 necessity of 41–3 need for 42–3 normalisation of 171–5, 178 originality of 28 paradox of 143–79 and patents 97 process of 37–8 purchase 37–8 and resources 128 and rights 132–40 and ‘ripeness’ 39 and short-termism 192 slow death of 106–7 slowdown of 98 society's reaction to 216 and specialisation 156, 157–8 today 21–140 tomorrow 141–343 big pharma 31, 60, 185, 217–18, 226 Big Science 118–19 Bill of Rights 137 Bingham, Hiram 153 biology 243–8, 300 synthetic 245–6, 251, 310, 329 BioNTech 218, 298 biotech 195–6, 240, 246, 255–8, 262, 266, 307 bisociation 36 Björk 104 Black, Joseph 26 ‘black swan’ events 307, 310 Bletchley Park 180, 296 Bloom, Nick 91, 92, 93 Boeing 69, 72, 162, 165, 192, 238 Bohr, Niels 104, 118, 159 Boltsmann, Ludwig 188 Boston Consulting Group 204 Botha, P.W. 114 Bowie, David 107 Boyer, Herbert 243 Boyle, Robert 232 Brahe, Tycho 36, 229, 292 brain 166, 246–8, 299–300 collective 299, 300–1 whole brain emulations (‘ems’) 248–9, 341 brain drains 197 brain-to-machine interfaces 247–8 Branson, Richard 71 Brattain, Walter 182 Brazil 266–7, 268, 279 breakthrough organisations 294–9 breakthrough problems 46–73, 77, 86, 98, 222, 234, 250, 301 breakthroughs 2–5, 27–8, 32–7, 41, 129, 152, 156 and expedition novelty 333 hostility to 187 medical 58–60 missing 175 near-misses 160 nuclear power 145 price of 87–98 and short-termism 192 slowdown of 87, 94 society's reaction to 216 and universities 204 see also ‘Eureka’ moments breast cancer 94 Brexit referendum 2016: 208 Brin, Sergey 319, 326 Britain 24, 146, 259, 283, 297 see also United Kingdom British Telecom 196 Brunel, Isambard Kingdom 67 Brunelleschi 232 Bruno, Giordano 216 Buddhism 108, 175, 264–5, 340 Buhler, Charlotte 188–9 Buhler, Karl 188–9 ‘burden of knowledge’ effect 154–65, 175, 178, 235, 338 bureaucracy 198–87, 280–1 Bush, George W. 211 Bush, Vannevar 168, 314–15, 317 business start-ups 95–6 Cage, John 104 Callard, Agnes 111 Caltech 184 Cambridge University 75, 76, 124, 235–6, 257, 294–6 canals 67 cancer 57–61, 76, 93–4, 131, 234, 245, 318 research 59–61 capital and economic growth 88 gray 192, 196 human 275, 277 capitalism 36, 111–13, 186, 189, 191–8 CAR-Ts see chimeric antigen receptor T-cells carbon dioxide emissions 220–1 Cardwell's Law 283 Carey, Nessa 244 Carnap, Rudolf 189 Carnarvon, Lord 153 cars 289 electric 71 flying 71 Carter, Howard 153 Carter, Jimmy 58 Carthage 3, 43 Cartright, Mary 163 CASP see Critical Assessment of Protein Structure Prediction Cassin, René 135 Catholic Church 206, 230 Cavendish Laboratory 76, 294 Cell (journal) 234 censorship 210–11 Census Bureau (US) 78 Centers for Disease Control 212 Cerf, Vint 253 CERN 118, 233, 239, 252, 296 Chain, Ernst 52, 60, 124 Champollion, Jean-François 155 Chang, Peng Chun 135 change 10–13, 18–19, 24 rapid 30, 32 resistance to 222 slowdown 85 chaos theory 163 Chaplin, Charlie 104 Chardin, Pierre Teilhard de 300 Charpentier, Emmanuelle 244, 256 chemistry 49, 56, 104, 117, 118, 124, 149–50, 159, 241, 244 chemotherapy 57 Chicago 10 chicken cholera 46 chimeric antigen receptor T-cells (CAR-Ts) 58, 61 China 15, 25, 71–2, 111, 112, 138, 208, 213, 216, 255–64, 265, 266, 267, 268, 275, 277, 279, 280, 283, 284–5, 312, 313, 314, 319, 328 Han 259, 260 Ming 284, 308, 309 Qing 260 Song 24, 259–60, 306 Tang 259–60 Zhou 259 Christianity 108, 303–4, 340 Church, George 245 cities 270–2, 308–9, 340 civilisation collapse 42–4 decay 187 cleantech 195 climate change 219–21, 284, 313–14, 338 clinical trials 218 cliodynamics 339 coal 23, 24, 26, 80, 220 Cocteau, Jean 101 cognitive complexity, high 332–3 cognitive diversity 281–3 Cognitive Revolution 252 Cohen, Stanley N. 243, 244 collective intelligence 339 collectivism 282 Collison, Patrick 117, 272 colour 75 Coltrane, John 104 Columbian Exchange 177 Columbus 38 comfort zones, stepping outside of 334 communism 111, 133, 134, 173, 217, 284 companies creation 95–6 numbers 96–7 competition 87, 283 complacency 221–2 complexity 161–7, 178, 204, 208, 298, 302, 329 high cognitive 332–3 compliance 205–6 computational power 128–9, 168, 234, 250 computer games 107 computers 166–7, 240, 253 computing 254 see also quantum computing Confucianism 133, 259 Confucius 24, 108, 109, 282 Congressional Budget Office 82 connectivity 272 Conon of Samos 4 consciousness 248, 340 consequences 328–9 consolidation, age of 86 Constantine 303 convergence 174, 311–12 Copernicus 29, 30, 41, 152, 171, 229, 232, 292 copyright 195 corporations 204–5 cosmic background microwave radiation 117, 181 cotton weaving, flying shuttle 24–5 Coulomb, Charles-Augustin de 74–5 counterculture 106 Covid-19 (coronavirus) pandemic 13, 14, 15, 55, 86, 113–14, 193, 202, 208, 212, 218, 251–2, 263, 283–4, 297–8, 309, 318, 327 vaccine 125, 245 Cowen, Tyler 13, 82, 94–5, 221 cowpox 47 creativity 188, 283 and artificial intelligence 236 crisis in 108 decrease 106–8 and universities 203 Crete 43 Crick, Francis 119, 296 CRISPR 243, 244, 251, 255–8, 299 Critical Assessment of Protein Structure Prediction (CASP) 224–6, 228 Cronin, Lee 242 crop yields 92–3 cultural diversity 281–3 cultural homogenisation 177 cultural rebellion 106–7 Cultural Revolution 114, 305 culture, stuck 106 Cunard 67 Curie, Marie 104, 144, 203, 289–90, 332 Daniels, John T. 62–3 Daoism 259 dark matter/energy/force 338 DARPA see Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Darwin, Charles 34, 35–6, 37–8, 41, 77, 109, 118, 171, 289 Darwin, Erasmus 35 data 233 datasets, large 28 Davy, Sir Humphrey 149, 150 Debussy, Claude 100–1 decision-making, bad 43–4 Declaration of Independence 1776: 137 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen 1789: 137 DeepMind 225–9, 296 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) 315 democracy 111–12 Deng Xiaoping 261 deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) 119, 223–4, 243, 251, 255, 339 DNA sequencing 56 Derrida, Jacques 109 Deutsch, David 126, 203 Diaghilev, Sergei 99–101 Diamond, Jared 42 Digital Age 180 digital technology 241–2, 243 diminishing returns 87, 91, 94, 97, 118, 123, 126, 130–1, 150, 161, 169, 173, 222, 250, 276, 285, 301 Dirac, Paul 159–60 disruption 34, 96, 109, 119, 157 diversity, cultural 281–3 DNA see deoxyribonucleic acid Dorling, Danny 171 Doudna, Jennifer 244, 251, 256 Douglas, Mary 290 Douthat, Ross 14, 106 drag 65 Drake equation 306 Drezner, Daniel 214 drones, delivery 71, 72 Drucker, Peter 189 drugs 55–7, 124, 235 Eroom's Law 55, 57, 61, 92–3, 119, 161, 234, 245, 338 and machine learning 234 research and development 55–7, 61, 92–4, 119, 161, 172–3, 217–18, 234, 245, 315, 338 see also pharmaceutical industry Duchamp, Marcel 103, 171 DuPont 184 Dutch East India Company 34 Dyson, Freeman 120 dystopias 305–8 East India Company 34 Easter Island 42–3 Eastern Europe 138 ecocides 42–3 economic growth 240, 272, 273, 316 endogenous 94 and ideas 88, 89–92, 95 process of 87–8 slowdown 82, 83, 84, 85, 178 economics 87–9, 98, 339, 340 contradictions of 87 Economist, The (magazine) 188 Edelman annual trust barometer 209 Edison, Thomas 183–4, 286–9, 290, 293 education 127, 277, 324–8 Einstein, Albert 11, 29, 74, 77, 104, 109, 117, 119, 124, 159–60, 203, 332 Eisenstein, Elizabeth 231 Eldredge, Niles 30 electric cars 71 electricity 11, 74–7, 81, 286–7, 289 electromagnetic fields 76 electromagnetic waves 75, 76 elements (chemical) 149–50 Elizabeth II 144–5 employment 204–5 Encyclopædia Britannica 97, 128, 155 ‘End of History’ 112 energy 337–8, 341–2 availability 85 use per capita 85 see also nuclear power engineering 243 England 25, 144–5, 309 Englert, François 118 Enlightenment 130, 136–40, 252 see also Industrial Enlightenment; neo-Enlightenment Eno, Brian 295 entrepreneurship, decline 96 epigenetics 164 epigraphy 236–7 epistemic polarisation 210 Epstein, David 334 Eratosthenes 5 Eroom's Law 55, 57, 61, 92–3, 119, 161, 234, 245, 338 ethical issues 256–7 Euclid 3, 304 ‘Eureka’ moments 2–5, 35, 36–7, 129, 163 Europe 95, 247, 258–60, 268, 268, 271, 283, 304, 308 European Space Agency 71 European Union (EU) 206, 216, 262, 266 Evans, Arthur 153 evolutionary theory 30, 35–6 expedition novelty 333 experimental spaces 296–8 Expressionism 104 Facebook 34, 159, 170, 197 Fahrenheit 232 failure, fear of 335 Faraday, Michael 75 FCC see Future Circular Collider FDA see Food and Drug Administration Federal Reserve (US) 82 Feigenbaum, Mitchell 163 fermentation 49 Fermi, Enrico 143, 159, 306 Fermi Paradox 306 Fernández-Armesto, Felipe 109 fertility rates 269 Feynman, Richard 77, 166, 332 film 104, 106–7, 108, 115 financialism 191–8, 206–7, 214, 217, 219 Firebird, The (ballet) 99–100 ‘first knowledge economy’ 25–6 First World War 54, 99, 104, 187, 188–9 Fisk, James 182 Fleming, Alexander 38, 52, 60, 332 flight 36, 62–6, 68–70, 71, 335 Flint & Company 64 flooding 220, 284 Florey, Howard 52, 60, 124, 332 Flyer, the 62–4, 66, 72 Foldit software 225 Food and Drug Administration (FDA) 55, 60, 93, 212 food supply 81 Ford 34, 253 Ford, Henry 68, 104, 219 Fordism 81 Foucault, Michel 110 Fraenkel, Eduard 124 France 49–51, 54, 64, 67, 95, 279, 309, 332 franchises 31 Franklin, Benjamin 119, 211 Frederick the Great 292 French Revolution 137, 275 Freud, Sigmund 34, 36, 77, 104, 171, 188, 190, 216 frontier 278–9, 283–4, 302, 310–11 Fukuyama, Francis 111–12 fundamentalism 213 Future Circular Collider (FCC) 239 futurology 44 Gagarin, Yuri 70 Galen 303 Galileo 206, 231, 232, 291, 322 Galois, Évariste 159 GDPR see General Data Protection Regulation Gell-Mann, Murray 77 gene editing 243–4, 251, 255–8 General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) 206 General Electric (GE) 33, 184, 265, 288, 333 General Motors 289 Generation Z 86 genes 223–4 genetic engineering 243–4, 251, 253, 255–8 genetic science 163–4, 202 genius 26 genome, human 119, 202, 244, 255–7, 296, 313 genome sequencing 243–4 germ theory of disease 50–1, 53 Germany 54, 95, 96, 279, 283, 292, 332 Gesamtkunstwerk 99 Gibson, William 241 Glendon, Mary Ann 135 global warming 147 globalisation 177 Go 226–7 Gödel, Kurt 41, 168 Goldman Sachs 197 Goodhart's Law 199 Google 34, 85, 185, 197, 240, 272, 318 20 per cent time 319–20 Google Glass 241 Google Maps 86 Google Scholar 116 Google X 294 Gordon, Robert 13, 83, 94–5 Gouges, Olympe de 137 Gould, Stephen Jay 30 Gove, Michael 208 government 205, 207, 214, 216, 252, 267–8, 297 funding 185–6, 249, 252, 314–19, 321 GPT language prediction 234, 236 Graeber, David 13–14, 111 grants 120, 185–6, 195, 202, 316, 317, 319, 321–3 gravitational waves 117–18, 119 Great Acceleration 309–10 Great Convergence 255–301, 339 Great Disruption 96 Great Enrichment (Great Divergence) 23, 26, 258 Great Exhibition 1851: 293, 309 Great Stagnation Debate 13–14, 16, 17, 45, 72, 82–3, 87, 94–6, 129, 150, 240, 279, 338 Greenland 42 Gropius, Walter 103 Gross Domestic Product (GDP) 82, 90, 128, 278, 318 GDP per capita 23, 78, 82 growth cultures 25 growth theory, endogenous 88–9, 94 Gutenberg, Johannes 36 Guzey, Alexey 200, 322 Haber, Fritz 332 Haber-Bosch process 289 Hadid, Zaha 152 Hahn, Otto 144 Hamilton, Margaret 316 Harari, Yuval Noah 114–15, 236 Harris, Robert 307 Harvard Fellows 200 Harvard, John 156 Harvey, William 34, 291–2 Hassabis, Demis 229, 233 Hayek, Friedrich 189 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 36 Heisenberg, Werner 41, 159, 168, 332 heliocentric theory 5, 29, 118, 232, 304 helium 145 Hendrix, Jimi 105 Henry Adams curve 85 Hero of Alexandria 39 Herper, Matthew 55 Hertz, Heinrich 76 Herzl, Theodor 188 Hesse, Herman 307 Hieron II, king of Syracuse 1–2 Higgs, Peter 118 Higgs boson 117–18, 119, 239 Hinduism 133 Hiroshima 144 Hitler, Adolf 138, 188 Hodgkin, Dorothy 124, 332 Hollingsworth, J.

New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson

Anthropocene, availability heuristic, back-to-the-land, Black-Scholes formula, Burning Man, central bank independence, creative destruction, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, decarbonisation, East Village, full employment, gentrification, happiness index / gross national happiness, hive mind, income inequality, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Ken Thompson, Kim Stanley Robinson, liquidity trap, Mason jar, mass immigration, megastructure, microbiome, music of the spheres, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, Planet Labs, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, quantitative easing, Reflections on Trusting Trust, rent-seeking, Social Justice Warrior, the built environment, too big to fail

People sometimes say no one saw it coming, but no, wrong: they did. Paleoclimatologists looked at the modern situation and saw CO2 levels screaming up from 280 to 450 parts per million in less than three hundred years, faster than had ever happened in the Earth’s entire previous five billion years (can we say “Anthropocene,” class?), and they searched the geological record for the best analogs to this unprecedented event, and they said, Whoa. They said, Holy shit. People! they said. Sea level rise! During the Eemian period, they said, which we’ve been looking at, the world saw a temperature rise only half as big as the one we’ve just created, and rapid dramatic sea level rise followed immediately.

…

The important part is that those warmer ocean currents circulate all over, including around Antarctica, which sits down at the bottom of the world like a big cake of ice. A really big cake of ice. Melt all that ice and pour it in the ocean (though it pours itself) and sea level would go 270 feet higher than the old Holocene level. Melting all the ice on Antarctica is a big job, however, and will not happen fast, even in the Anthropocene. But any Antarctic ice that slides into the ocean floats away, leaving room for more to slide. And in the twenty-first century, as during the three million years before that, a lot of Antarctic ice was piled up on basin slopes, meaning giant valleys, which angled down into the ocean. Ice slides downhill just like water, only slower; although if sliding (skimboarding?)

…

The march of progress! Sustainable development! Always there is an encouraging motto to mark the remorseless migration of capital from an ex–highest rate of return to the next primed site. And indeed, development of capital gets sustained. So in that process—call it globalization, neoliberal capitalism, the Anthropocene, the water boarding, what have you—the Second Pulse became just an unusually clear signal that it was time for capital to move on. Rate of return on all coastlines having been definitively hosed, capital, having considerably more liquidity than water, slid down the path of least resistance, or up it, or sideways—it doesn’t matter, money being so slippery and antigravitational, with no restraints on capital flight or any other such impediment that the feeble remnant nation-state system might have thought to apply, if it had not already been bought and now owned by that very same capital saying bye-bye to the new backwater.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution by Klaus Schwab

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, circular economy, clean water, collaborative consumption, commoditize, conceptual framework, continuous integration, CRISPR, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, digital divide, digital twin, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, future of work, global value chain, Google Glasses, hype cycle, income inequality, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, life extension, Lyft, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, more computing power than Apollo, mutually assured destruction, Narrative Science, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, nuclear taboo, OpenAI, personalized medicine, precariat, precision agriculture, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, reshoring, RFID, rising living standards, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social contagion, software as a service, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Future of Employment, The Spirit Level, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y Combinator, Zipcar

This will be increasingly critical in order to navigate and harness the opportunities of the fourth industrial revolution. Towards a new cultural renaissance As the poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, “the future enters into us...in order to transform itself in us long before it happens.”73 We must not forget that the era we currently live in, the Anthropocene or Human Age, marks the first time in the history of the world that human activities are the primary force in shaping all life-sustaining systems on earth. It is up to us. Today we find ourselves at the beginning of the fourth industrial revolution, looking forward and, more importantly, possessing the ability to influence its path.

Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake

Anthropocene, Apollo 11, biofilm, buy low sell high, carbon footprint, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, deep learning, discovery of penicillin, Easter island, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, late capitalism, low earth orbit, Mason jar, meta-analysis, microbiome, moral panic, NP-complete, phenotype, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, TED Talk, the built environment, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, traveling salesman, two and twenty

As has long been the case, the influences of these trading decisions scale up and spill out over whole ecosystems and landmasses. A large study published in 2018 suggested that the “alarming deterioration” of the health of trees across Europe was caused by a disruption of their mycorrhizal relationships, brought about by nitrogen pollution. Mycorrhizal associations born of the Anthropocene will determine much of humans’ ability to adapt to the worsening climate emergency. Nowhere are the possibilities—and pitfalls—more apparent than in agriculture. * * * — “ON THE EFFICIENCY of this mycorrhizal association the health and well-being of mankind must depend.” So wrote Albert Howard, a founding figure in the modern organic farming movement and a passionate spokesman for mycorrhizal fungi.

…

Has the microbiota played a critical role in the evolution of the adaptive immune system? Science 330: 1768–773. Legras J, Merdinoglu D, Couet J, Karst F. 2007. Bread, beer and wine: Saccharomyces cerevisiae diversity reflects human history. Molecular Ecology 16: 2091–102. Le Guin U. 2017. “Deep in Admiration.” In Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts of the Anthropocene. Tsing A, Swanson H, Gan E, Bubandt N, eds. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, pp. M15–M21. Lehmann A, Leifheit EF, Rillig MC. 2017. “Mycorrhizas and Soil Aggregation.” In Mycorrhizal Mediation of Soil: Fertility, Structure, and Carbon Storage. Johnson N, Gehring C, Jansa J, eds.

Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City by Richard Sennett

Anthropocene, Big Tech, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, company town, complexity theory, creative destruction, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Frank Gehry, gentrification, ghettoisation, housing crisis, illegal immigration, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, megaproject, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, open borders, place-making, plutocrats, post-truth, Richard Florida, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, urban planning, urban renewal, Victor Gruen, Yochai Benkler

Pei Li, Jinyuan Xin, Yuesi Wang, Guoxing Li, Xiaochuan Pan, Shigong Wang, Mengtian Cheng, Tianxue Wen, Guangcheng Wang and Zirui Liu, ‘Association between Particulate Matter and Its Chemical Constituents of Urban Air Pollution and Daily Mortality or Morbidity in Beijing City’, Environmental Science and Pollution Research 22, no. 1 (2015): 358–68. 6. A good general overview of this complex subject is François Gemenne, ‘The Anthropocene and Its Victims’, in Clive Hamilton, Christophe Bonneuil and François Gemenne (eds), The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis: Rethinking Modernity in a New Epoch (New York: Routledge 2015). 7. Philipp Rode and Ricky Burdett, ‘Cities: Investing in Energy and Resource Efficiency’, in Towards a Green Economy: Pathways to Sustainable Development and Poverty Eradication (United Nations Environment Programme, 2011), pp. 331–73. 8.

Utopia or Bust: A Guide to the Present Crisis by Benjamin Kunkel

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, creative destruction, David Graeber, declining real wages, full employment, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, means of production, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, Occupy movement, peak oil, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, savings glut, Slavoj Žižek, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transatlantic slave trade, vertical integration, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

And yet the best of Jameson’s work has felt mind-blowing in the way of LSD or mushrooms: here before you is the world you’d always known you were living in, but apprehended as if for the first time in the freshness of its beauty and horror. One of the trippier as well as more affecting passages in Valences of the Dialectic is a sort of aria on the condition of living, through global capitalism, in a totally man-made world, one in which even the weather patterns and the geological age (the Anthropocene, it was recently declared) are human productions: We have indeed secreted a human age out of ourselves as spiders secrete their webs: an immense, all-encompassing ceiling … which shuts down visibility on all sides even as it absorbs all the formerly natural elements in its habitat, transmuting them into its own man-made substance.

Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming by Anthony Dunne, Fiona Raby

3D printing, Adam Curtis, Anthropocene, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, capitalist realism, Cass Sunstein, computer age, corporate governance, David Attenborough, en.wikipedia.org, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, General Motors Futurama, global village, Google X / Alphabet X, haute couture, Herman Kahn, intentional community, life extension, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, mouse model, New Urbanism, Peter Eisenman, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social software, synthetic biology, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Wall-E

At times it is a hedonistic playground, a very loud, vast mobile pleasure paradise announced in advance by a slow thumping sound, like a party cruise boat on the Thames. But mostly, like the 1930s Californian homesteaders it is a community seeking isolation on the edges of civilization, away from the detrimental effects of the Anthropocene. An ecological wilderness similar to demilitarized zones has emerged along its route where an absence of humans means an abundance of wildlife, and rare species can thrive. Anyone who gets too close is zapped with a noise cannon. Their survival requires extraordinary discipline, but to maintain mental well-being in such a confined environment, diversity is accommodated as much as is possible.

Because We Say So by Noam Chomsky

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Anthropocene, Chelsea Manning, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, high-speed rail, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Julian Assange, Malacca Straits, Martin Wolf, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, Powell Memorandum, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Slavoj Žižek, Stanislav Petrov, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

Along with melting Antarctic ice, that could raise sea levels to inundate major cities as well as coastal plains. The era of civilization coincides closely with the geological epoch of the Holocene, beginning over 11,000 years ago. The previous Pleistocene epoch lasted 2.5 million years. Scientists now suggest that a new epoch began about 250 years ago, the Anthropocene, the period when human activity has had a dramatic impact on the physical world. The rate of change of geological epochs is hard to ignore. One index of human impact is the extinction of species, now estimated to be at about the same rate as it was 65 million years ago when an asteroid hit the Earth.

Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All by Michael Shellenberger

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, Asperger Syndrome, Bernie Sanders, Bob Geldof, Boeing 747, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean tech, clean water, climate anxiety, Corn Laws, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, failed state, Garrett Hardin, Gary Taubes, gentleman farmer, global value chain, Google Earth, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hydraulic fracturing, index fund, Indoor air pollution, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, land tenure, Live Aid, LNG terminal, long peace, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Michael Shellenberger, microplastics / micro fibres, Murray Bookchin, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, renewable energy transition, Rupert Read, School Strike for Climate, Solyndra, Stephen Fry, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, WikiLeaks, Y2K

Sax, Steven D. Gaines, and James Brown, “Species Invasions Exceed Extinctions on Islands Worldwide: A Comparative Study of Plants and Birds,” The American Naturalist 160, no. 6 (2002): 766–783, https://doi.org/10.1086/343877. 9. Chris D. Thomas, “Rapid Acceleration of Plant Speciation During the Anthropocene,” Trends in Ecology & Evolution 30, no. 8 (2015): 448–455, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2015.05.009. 10. Kolbert, The Sixth Extinction, 186. 11. Ibid., 186–187. 12. Mark Sagoff, “Welcome to the Narcisscene,” Breakthrough Journal no. 9 (Summer 2018), https://thebreakthrough.org/journal/no-9-summer-2018/welcome-to-the-narcisscene. 13.

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AquaBounty, “Ask your supermarket to stock GMO salmon,” AquaBounty, March 20, 2019, accessed October 8, 2019, https://aquabounty.com/ask-your-supermarket-to-stock-gmo-salmon. 95. Jesse Ausubel (environmental scientist) in conversation with the author, November 6, 2019. 96. Richard Rhodes, “Yale Environment 360: Why nuclear power must be a part of the energy solution,” Anthropocene Institute, July 19, 2018, https://www.anthropoceneinstitute.com/2018/07/yale-environment-360-why-nuclear-power-must-be-part-of-the-energy-solution. 97. R.B. Allen, “Backward into the future: The shift to coal and implications for the next energy transition,” Energy Policy 50 (2012): 17–23, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2012.03.020. 98.

Work: A History of How We Spend Our Time by James Suzman

agricultural Revolution, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, basic income, biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, clean water, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, cyber-physical system, David Graeber, death from overwork, deepfake, do-ocracy, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, fake news, financial deregulation, Ford Model T, founder crops, Frederick Winslow Taylor, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kibera, Kickstarter, late capitalism, lateral thinking, market bubble, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, Parkinson's law, Peter Singer: altruism, post-industrial society, post-work, public intellectual, Rubik’s Cube, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, sharing economy, social intelligence, spinning jenny, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, urban planning, work culture , zoonotic diseases

There is now far more evidence than there was in 1972 or even 2002, and computers are capable of spitting out simulations many orders of magnitude larger and more complex. The evidence is now so overwhelming that debate within the scientific community on the scale of human impact on our planet has shifted to asking whether the current geological era merits being redubbed the Anthropocene – the human era. In John Maynard Keynes’s economic utopia, there was no anthropogenic climate change. Nor was there ocean acidification or large-scale biodiversity loss. But if there were, it would almost certainly be under better control than it is now. His utopia was, after all, a place where the scientific method was respected, scientists were admired, and laypeople paid serious heed to their warnings.

…

Index aardvarks here, here abiogenesis here Abrahamic religions here, here Académie des Sciences here acetogens here Acheulean hand-axes here, here, here Adam and Eve here, here adenosine triphosphate (ATP) here advertising here Africa, human expansion out of here agriculture and the calendar here, here catastrophes here and climate change here, here human transition to here inequality as consequence of here and investment here Natufians and here, here, here, here productivity gains here, here, here, here, here proportion employed in here spread of here and urbanisation here Akkadian Empire here Alexander the Great here American Federation of Labor here American Society of Mechanical Engineers here animal domestication here, here, here, here, here animal tracks here animal welfare here animals’ souls here anomie here anthrax here Anthropocene era here anti-trust laws here ants here, here, here Aquinas, Thomas here, here, here archery here Archimedes here, here, here Aristotle here, here, here, here Arkwright, Richard here armies, standing here Aronson, Ben here artificial intelligence here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here ass’s jawbone here asset ownership here AT&T here Athens, ancient here, here aurochs here Australian Aboriginals here, here, here, here, here Australopithecus here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here automation here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Aztecs here baboons here Baka here BaMbuti here, here, here, here, here bank holidays here, here Bantu civilisations here barter here, here, here, here, here Batek here Bates, Dorothea here beer here, here, here, here, here bees here, here, here, here Belgian Congo here, here Bergen Work Addiction Scale here Biaka here billiards here biodiversity loss here, here, here birds of paradise here bison, European here Black-Connery 30-Hours Bill here Blombos Cave here, here Blurton-Jones, Nicholas here boa constrictors here boats, burning of here Bolling Allerød Interstadial here, here, here Boltzmann, Ludwig here boredom here, here Boucher de Crèvecœur de Perthes, Jacques here, here bovine pleuropneumonia here bowerbirds here, here brains here, here, here increase in size here and social networks here Breuil, Abbé here Broca’s area here Bryant and May matchgirls’ strike here bubonic plague here ‘bullshit jobs’ here butchery, ancient here Byron, Lord here Calico Acts here Cambrian explosion here cannibalism here caps, flat here carbon dioxide, atmospheric here, here cartels here Çatalhöyük here, here Cato institute here cattle domestication of here as investment here cave paintings, see rock and cave paintings census data here CEOs here, here, here, here, here, here cephalopods here cereals, high-yielding here Chauvet Cave painting here cheetahs here, here, here child labour here childbirth, deaths in here Childe, Vere Gordon here, here, here, here chimpanzees here, here, here, here, here, here, here China here, here, here, here, here, here Han dynasty here medical licensing examination here Qin dynasty here services sector here, here Shang dynasty here, here Song dynasty here value of public wealth here Chomsky, Noam here circumcision, universal here Ciudad Neza here clam shells here Clark, Colin here, here climate change here, here, here see also greenhouse gas emissions Clinton, Bill here clothing, and status here Club of Rome here, here coal here Coast Salish here, here cognitive threshold, humans cross here, here ‘collective consciousness’ here ‘collective unconscious’ here colonialism here commensalism here Communism, collapse of here Conrad, Joseph here consultancy firms here Cook, Captain James here cooking here, here, here coral reefs here Coriolis, Gaspard-Gustave here coronaviruses here corporate social responsibility here Cotrugli, Benedetto here cotton here, here, here credit and debt arrangements here Crick, Francis here crop rotation here cyanobacteria here, here Cyrus the Great here Darius the Great here Darwin, Charles here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here debt, personal and household here deer here, here demand-sharing here Denisovans here Descartes, René here, here, here, here DeVore, Irven here Dharavi here diamonds here, here diamphidia larvae here Dinka here division of labour here, here, here DNA here, here, here mitochondrial here dogs here, here, here, here, here, here domestication of here Lubbock’s pet poodle here Pavlov’s here wild here, here double-entry bookkeeping here dreaming here Dunbar, Robin here, here Durkheim, Emile here, here, here, here Dutch plough here dwellings drystone-walled here mammoth-bone here earth’s atmosphere, composition of here earth’s axis, shifts in alignment of here East India Company here, here ‘economic problem’ here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here economics ‘boom and bust’ here definitions of here, here formalists v. substantivists here fundamental conflict within here ‘trickle-down’ here ecosystem services here Edward III, King here efficiency movement here egalitarianism here, here, here, here, here, here egrets here Egypt, Roman here, here Egyptian Empire here einkorn here Einstein, Albert here elands here, here elderly, care of here, here, here, here elephants here, here, here, here, here, here energy-capture here, here, here Enlightenment here, here, here, here Enron here Enterprise Hydraulic Works here, here entropy here, here, here, here, here, here EU Working Time Directive here Euclid here eukaryotes here eusociality here, here evolution here, here and selfish traits here see also natural selection Facebook here, here Factory Acts here, here factory system here, here famines and food shortages here, here fertilisers here, here fighting, and social hierarchies here financial crisis (2007–8) here, here financial deregulation here fire, human mastery of here, here, here, here, here see also cooking fisheries here flightless birds here foot-and-mouth disease here Ford, Henry here, here, here, here, here fossil fuels here, here, here, here, here, here, here Fox, William here foxes here, here bat-eared here Franklin, Benjamin here, here, here, here, here, here, here free markets here, here, here free time (leisure time) here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here freeloaders here, here, here Freud, Sigmund here Frey, Carl, and Michael Osborne here funerary inscriptions here Galbraith, John Kenneth here, here Galileo here Gallup State of the Global Workplace report here Garrod, Dorothy here, here gazelle bones here, here genomic studies here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and domesticated dogs here geometry here gift giving here Gilgamesh here glacial periods here, here gladiators here Gladwell, Malcolm here globalisation here Göbekli Tepe here, here Gompers, Samuel here Google here Google AlphaGO here Gordon, Wendy here Gorilla Sign Language here gorillas here, here, here, here see also Koko Govett’s Leap here Graeber, David here, here granaries here graves here graveyards, Natufian here Great Decoupling here, here Great Depression here, here, here ‘great oxidation event’ here, here Great Zimbabwe here greenhouse gas emissions here, here see also climate change Greenlandic ice cores here grewia here Grimes, William here Gurirab, Thadeus here, here gut bacteria here Hadzabe here, here, here, here, here, here, here Harlan, Jack here harpoon-heads here Hasegawa, Toshikazu here Health and Safety Executive here health insurance here Heidegger, Martin here Hephaistos here Hero of Alexandria here Hesiod here hippopotamuses here Hitler, Adolf here hominins, evidence for use of fire here Homo antecessor here Homo erectus here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Homo habilis here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Homo heidelbergensis here, here, here, here, here Homo naledi here horses here, here wild here household wealth, median US here housing, improved here human resources here, here, here Humphrey, Caroline here Hunduism here hunter-gatherers, ‘complex’ here hyenas here, here, here, here, here immigration here Industrial Revolution here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here inequality here, here, here, here, here in ancient Rome here influenza here ‘informavores’ here injuries, work-related here Institute of Bankers here, here Institute of Management here intelligence here, here evolution of here interest here internal combustion engine here, here Inuit here, here, here, here Iroquois Confederacy here Ituri Forest here jackals here Japan here, here, here jealousy, see self-interest jewellery here, here, here, here, here Ju/’hoansi here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and animals’ souls here contrasted with ‘complex hunter-gatherers’ here contrasted with farming communities here, here, here creation mythologies here and ‘creatures of the city’ here and demand-sharing here, here egalitarianism here, here, here, here, here, here energy-capture rates here life expectancy here and mockery here village sizes here Jung, Carl Gustav here kacho-byo (‘manager’s disease’) here kangaroos here Karacadag here karo jisatsu here, here karoshi here, here Kathu Pan hand-axes here, here, here Kavango here Kellogg, John Harvey here Kellogg, Will here Kennedy, John F. here Keynes, John Maynard here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Khoisan here, here, here Kibera here Kish here Koko here, here, here Kubaba, Queen here Kwakwaka’wakw here, here labour/debt relationships here labour theory of value here Lake Eyasi here Lake Hula here Lake Turkana here, here language arbitrary nature of here evolution of here Gossip and Grooming hypothesis here, here Grammaticalisation theory here processing here Single Step theory here langues de chat (cat’s tongues) here latifundia here le Blanc, Abbé Jean here leatherwork here Lee, Richard Borshay here, here, here, here, here leisure activities here leisure time, see free time Leopold II, King of the Belgians here, here Lévi-Strauss, Claude here, here, here, here Liebenberg, Louis here life expectancy here, here life on earth, evolution of here lignin here Limits to Growth, The here lions here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here literacy, see writing living standards, rising here Loki here, here London neighbourhoods here longhouses here Louis XIV, King of France here Louis XVI, King of France here Löwenmensch (Lion Man) sculpture here Lubbock, Sir John here, here Luddites here, here, here Luoyang (Chengzhou) here, here luxury goods here McKinsey and Co. here, here, here ‘malady of infinite aspirations’ here Malthus, Rev.

Water: A Biography by Giulio Boccaletti

active transport: walking or cycling, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, energy transition, financial engineering, Great Leap Forward, invisible hand, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, land reform, land tenure, linear programming, loose coupling, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, Medieval Warm Period, megaproject, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peace of Westphalia, phenotype, scientific management, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956, text mining, the long tail, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, Washington Consensus, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Boccaletti has pinned down our complex relationship with our most vital resource. We live, like the ancients, in a hydraulic civilization—one determined to a remarkable degree by where and when we can find water. As he reveals with startling clarity, we face a water crisis as profound as our climate crisis. The fate of the Anthropocene hangs on the fate of water.” —Fred Pearce, author of When the Rivers Run Dry “Excellent. Boccaletti takes the reader on a polyglot tour de force that shows how the flow of human history, economics, and geopolitics is utterly connected to the constant blue thread of our need for water.

…

Its engineering had become an instrument of the state in creating an illusion of final emancipation from nature in service of a commonwealth. The question is what happens when—not if—the illusion of emancipation is shattered. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, humanity has become a force on the planet so powerful that some have renamed this era “the Anthropocene.” But that has not heralded the conquest of nature. Far from it. The profound modifications inflicted on the planet have tightened, not severed people’s relationship with water. The increase in greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere is having a measurable impact on the energy balance of the planet, modifying Earth’s water cycle.

Player One by Douglas Coupland

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, call centre, double helix, Marshall McLuhan, neurotypical, oil shock, peak oil, post-oil, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), uranium enrichment, Y2K

That was just the most recent of numerous meteor strikes that caused mass extinctions and drastically altered life on earth over hundreds of millions of years. Androsolophilia The state of affairs in which a lonely man is romantic-ally desirable while a lonely woman is not. Anorthodoxical Isms The isms that pose the greatest threat to inflexible religious orthodoxies: Humanism Cultural Relativism Moral Relativism Secularism The Anthropocene A term recognizing that human intrusion on the planet’s surface and into the atmosphere has been so extreme as to qualify our time on earth as a specific geological epoch. Along with vast increases in anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases, which have drastically raised the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, our human footprint now covers more than 83 percent of the earth’s surface, according to the Wildlife Conservation Society.

Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth? by Alan Weisman

air freight, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, David Attenborough, degrowth, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Jenner, El Camino Real, epigenetics, Filipino sailors, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute couture, housing crisis, ice-free Arctic, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), land reform, liberation theology, load shedding, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahbub ul Haq, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, Money creation, new economy, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

“What the Money Spent in Iraq and Afghanistan Could Have Bought at Home in America.” Business Insider, August 16, 2011. http://articles.businessinsider.com/2011-08-16/news. Kareiva, Peter, and Michelle Marvier. “Conservation for the People.” Scientific American, October 2007: 2–9. _______, Robert Lalasz, and Michelle Marvier. “Conservation in the Anthropocene.” Breakthrough Journal, no. 2 (Fall 2011). Kennedy, Kelly. “Drugmakers Have Paid $8 Billion in Fraud Fines.” USA Today, March 6, 2012. Kiel, Katherine A., Victor A. Matheson, and Kevin Golembiewski. “Luck or Skill? An Examination of the Ehrlich-Simon Bet.” Research Series, Paper no. 09-08. College of the Holy Cross, Department of Economics Faculty, July 2009.

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Khabar South Asia, June 22, 2012. http://khabarsouthasia.com/en_GB/articles/apwi/articles/features/2012/06/22/feature-02. Singh, S., and J. E. Darroch. Adding It Up: Costs and Benefits of Contraceptive Services—Estimates for 2012. New York: Guttmacher Institute and United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), 2012. Steffen, Will, Paul J. Crutzen, and John R. McNeill. “The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?” Ambio, vol. 36, no. 8 (December 2007): 614–21. Suckling, Kieran. “Conservation for the Real World.” Breakthrough Journal, April 2012. Sulat, Nate. “Feasibility Study: Reintroduction of the Bay Checkerspot Butterfly to Stanford University Lands.” http://woods.stanford.edu/environmental-venture-projects/feasibility-study-reintroduction-bay-checkerspot-butterfly-stanford.

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom

agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, anthropic principle, Anthropocene, anti-communist, artificial general intelligence, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, bioinformatics, brain emulation, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cosmological constant, dark matter, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, different worldview, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Drosophila, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, epigenetics, fear of failure, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, friendly AI, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hallucination problem, Hans Moravec, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, iterative process, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, longitudinal study, machine translation, megaproject, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, nuclear winter, operational security, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, phenotype, prediction markets, price stability, principal–agent problem, race to the bottom, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, reversible computing, search costs, social graph, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, time dilation, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trolley problem, Turing machine, Vernor Vinge, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, World Values Survey, zero-sum game