 Up until now in the course we've been focusing on natural ecosystems, but in this coming section to the course we'll be looking at coupled socio-ecological systems. We want to start this discussion by looking at the general context within which the study of socio-ecological systems exists today. More specifically, we will do this by talking about what is called the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene has emerged as a popular term used by scientists, media, and general public to describe the period of Earth's history during which humans come to have a decisive influence on the state, dynamics, and future of Earth's systems, and it is widely agreed that the Earth is currently in this state. We can understand this idea of the Anthropocene as both a set of scientific facts about the geological time we live in, but also as a paradigm surrounding the relationship between human society and the natural environment. We'll talk about this geological interpretation first before going on to elaborate on this new paradigm. The name Anthropocene is a combination of the Greek root anthropo, meaning human, and seen, meaning new. As a scientific term, it is used to refer to the current geological epoch where human beings are identified as the primary factors of change within Earth's systems. Geological epochs are distinguished from one another based upon geological observations, such as the composition of sediment layers and other tools of paleoclimatology. To justify the identification of a new Anthropocene epoch, it must therefore be demonstrated that evidence of anthropogenic global change is present at such a level that it can be distinguished using geological indicators despite natural variations in these indicators across the Holocene. According to the International Union of Geological Scientists, the professional organization in charge of defining Earth's time scales. We are officially in the Holocene epoch, which began approximately 12,000 years ago after the last major ice age, and it is marked by an exceptionally stable climate and benign environment for the development of human civilization. But some experts say that this label is outdated, arguing for the term Anthropocene because of the scale of anthropogenic influence on the planet. Since the introduction of the term in the 1980s, it has been taken increasingly seriously, and today steps are currently being undertaken by independent working groups of scientists from various geological societies to determine whether the Anthropocene will be formally accepted into the geological time scale. Added to this contestation surrounding the formal acceptance of the term, the Anthropocene also has no agreed upon starting date. Instead, there are typically three different periods in human civilization that are cited as forming its origins, the Neolithic Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, or the more current transformation, sometimes called the Great Acceleration. William Ruderman, among others, has argued that the proposed Anthropocene began approximately 8,000 years ago with the development of farming and sedentary cultures. At this point humans were dispersed across the continents and the Neolithic Revolution was ongoing. The Neolithic Revolution was a fundamental change in the way people lived. The shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture led to permanent settlements, the establishment of social classes, the eventual rise of urban living and large civilizations. During this period, the critical change in technology and economic organization was the development of agriculture and animal husbandry to supplement or replace hunter-gatherer subsistence. Such innovations were followed by a wave of extinctions beginning with large mammals and land birds. This wave of extinction was driven by both the direct activity of humans through hunting and the indirect consequences of land usage change for agriculture. Some scientists propose that based upon atmospheric evidence, the beginning of the Anthropocene should be dated back to the start of the Industrial Revolution in the late 1700s. The large-scale combustion to the energy sources of coal, oil and gas enabled the transition to new manufacturing processes as they shifted from manual to mechanical. The ecologist James Lovelock proposed that the Anthropocene began with the first application of the Newcomen atmospheric engine in 1712. Until then, the highest level of energy available throughout human history had been limited to 1 kW per square meter from the sun. With the development of modern industrial technologies, historical feedback loops between economic and ecological systems that had co-evolved over thousands of years were rapidly dislocated. Before the Industrial Revolution, people were very much aware of their environmental limits. Their culture, values, knowledge, technology, social organization and other parts of their social system were by necessity closely adapted to their natural environment. Most people were small-scale subsistence farmers. Most of the agricultural production was for home consumption. Most families had a variety of farm animals and cultivated many different crops to meet the family's needs for food and clothing. Agricultural techniques were adapted to local environmental conditions. The amount of land that each family could cultivate was limited by the large amount of human or animal labor that was necessary for agriculture. Most farmers used polyculture, a mixture of several crops together in the same field. Agriculture changed in Europe when the Industrial Revolution made it possible to use machines instead of human and animal labor for work, such as plowing fields and harvesting crops. Starting with mechanization, the chain of effects can be traced through as machines gave families the ability to cultivate larger areas of land. Farm sizes increased dramatically as mechanized agriculture is more efficient on a larger scale. These initial changes in technology, economy, society and ecology set in motion a series of change, such as increasing economics of scale, commodification and urbanization that through interconnected feedback loops continue to this day in many countries around the world. Although it is apparent that the Industrial Revolution ushered in an unprecedented global human impact on the planet, it can be equally seen as yet another stepping stone to the extraordinary exponential growth of human activity that began in the mid 20th century. The second half of the 20th century is unique in the history of human existence. Many human activities reached a take-off point sometime in the 20th century and sharply accelerated towards the end of the century. This period is called the Great Acceleration or Global Change, referring to unprecedented human-induced planetary scale changes in Earth's systems. The last 60 years has without doubt seen the most profound transformation to the human relationship with the natural environment in the history of humankind. Human activity, predominantly in the form of the global economic system, is now the primary driver of change in Earth's systems. This is made most explicit with reference to the recent publication of a set of 24 global indicators, sometimes called the Planetary Dashboard, that was published in 2015. In this report, 12 indicators depict human activity, for example economic growth in GDP, population, foreign direct investment, energy consumption, water, etc. 12 indicators show changes in major environmental components to the Earth's system. For example, the carbon cycle, nitrogen cycle and biodiversity, with all graphs showing an exponential increase starting around the middle of the last century. Professor Will Steffens, the lead author on the project, had this to say about him. It is difficult to overestimate the scale and speed of change in a single lifetime humanity has become a planetary scale geological force. He added, After 1950, you can see that major Earth's systems changes become directly linked to changes largely related to the global economic system. This is a new phenomena and indicates that humanity has a new responsibility at a global level for the planet. The new paper argues that of all the candidates for the start date for the Anthropocene, the beginning of the Great Acceleration is by far the most convincing from an Earth's system science perspective. It is only beyond the mid 20th century that there is clear evidence for fundamental shifts in the state and functionality of the Earth's system that are beyond the range of variables of the Holocene and driven by human activity and not by natural variables. Although there's very little we can say about the future to the Anthropocene, we can say something about the current state using the language of nonlinear systems dynamics that we learned in previous modules. We could tentatively say that Earth's systems are going through a likely irreversible phase transition, broken negative feedback loops and increased positive feedback have taken it far from equilibrium in what appears to be some form of a critical bifurcation state, the outcome of which will be either some form of ecological collapse into a degraded equilibrium or self-organization to some other new higher equilibrium. We could also say that the outcome to the process will likely be determined within the coming decades and it will likely be a product of economic choices made. As we know in this period of transition close to a bifurcation the system can become very sensitive to small fluctuations. During this period both the global economy and global biosphere would appear highly vulnerable. Today many tipping points have been identified within Earth's systems such as Arctic summer ice where due to a positive feedback loop the transition to an ice-free Arctic summer could occur within a few decades and this has significant ecosystem and geological implications. Other examples include oscillations within El Niño weather system where climate change might cause El Niño to occur more often or more intensely. The Indian summer monsoon is again identified as another vulnerability where the Indian summer monsoon rainfall critically affects India's agriculture and economy. It is the primary delivery mechanism for freshwater into the Indian subcontinent upon which hundreds of millions of people depend. Global warming trends mean that this could become more and more unpredictable. Changes in temperature could also cause the collapse of the West African monsoons or cause changes within the North Atlantic thermohaline ocean belt. These are just some of the major potential tipping points within Earth's systems that both the global economy and biosphere are vulnerable to at this time. Added to this is the fact that any one of them could have a cascading effect on others and of course we shouldn't forget about the many interactions and complex interdependencies within Earth's systems that we do not know about or cannot measure. Dating the origins of the Anthropocene or trying to predict its future is probably not as important as obtaining a recognition to the overarching profound process of change that it has or is enabling. Through the development of our technology infrastructure and economic organization over thousands of years we've gone from a small world on a large planet to a large world on a small planet where humans are increasingly the primary regulators of Earth's core systems. This is essentially a completion version to this relationship and within such a context we can understand the need for a new paradigm and new models that define a new relationship between ecosystems and economies. A need for new models of socio-ecological systems that makes it possible for us to understand human activity within an ecological context. Not as two distinct systems where humanity is just thought of as an impact or disturbance that needs to be managed but instead as an integral part of ecosystem structure and function. An expanded conception of an ecology that is relevant to the era of the Anthropocene where we can no longer ignore human beings as exogenous factors. This new context of the Anthropocene represents a paradigm shift in the relationship between the social and ecological domains until recently it was a zero-sum game of man against nature where for all intensive purposes the natural environment was infinite. Moving natural capital from the ecosystem to the economy was a linear interaction. The Anthropocene though represents a state of interdependency. In such a dynamic both systems lose or win together and we get positive or negative sum games. The classical paradigm sees a strong dichotomy between the natural and engineered environments where the biosphere is shaped primarily by biophysical processes where economic industrial activity is seen as a disturbance where human influences are characterized along a single dimension of impact dominance footprint or appropriation where sustainable management of ecosystems is seen to be achieved by minimizing human influence and that if we can just minimize this impact on earth systems we will go back to what is seen as some natural equilibrium but much of the idea of the Anthropocene runs contrary to this paradigm. A more relevant paradigm given the Anthropocene is a recognition that most of the biosphere has been reshaved by industrial systems and given the extent that economic systems of organization influence the development of ecologies today it is unlikely that they will ever go back to the previously existing natural equilibrium. It is a recognition that everything changes including the state of earth systems and humans are in some way part of and possibly an integral part of a broader process of change within the biosphere. A recognition that humans are no longer one element within the ecosystem or in some ways separate from it but are now in fact planetary stewards of the biosphere based upon a recognition of humans as permanent managers of the biosphere that the internal workings of the global economy is now the primary regulatory system to the biosphere whether this is a desired state or not it would appear to be the practical reality going forward. This nature 2.0 paradigm then is ultimately a recognition of a paradise lost. Nature 2.0 is an acceptance to the idea that nature as a wild untouched phenomena does not exist anymore and is searching for a new understanding of it within this context that humans have permanently changed the biosphere and the question is now to try and understand what that process of change is and what is the most appropriate way to manage that process of change given both the biospheres and human society's needs. It is ultimately about turning what is seen as a zero sum game into a positive sum game as synergy between economic development and the development of the ecosphere. But this will of course require major transformations to the internal structure of the economic framework that runs our global economy. This recognition to the omnipresent coexistence of human nature upsets the traditional idea that conservation can win with walls and gardens. As the ecologist Timothy Seastead put it, the point is not to think outside the box but to recognize that the box itself has moved and in the 21st century it will continue to move increasingly rapidly. In this module we've been talking about the Anthropocene. We firstly gave an outline to the current definition as a geological park following the hollow scene and talked about its acceptance within the natural sciences and the debate surrounding its dating. We talked about a number of the key stages marking this major shift in the relationship between human civilization and the natural environment. Identifying the Neolithic Revolution as the origins of humans as major ecosystems engineers through the development of agriculture and urban living. We talked about the Industrial Revolution as the next major step in this process that created major socio-economic upheaval displacing traditional feedback loops. We then mentioned the great acceleration as a major shift as many socio-economic indicators began to rise at an unprecedented exponential rate that continues today. Finally we talked about the new paradigm associated with the Anthropocene, a recognition that our traditional conception of nature in an untouched wild state does not really exist anymore. That humans have permanently changed the biosphere and in so doing the global economy has become its primary regulatory system. With the remaining question being how can we change a contemporary zero-sum game into a positive sum synergistic interaction between economy and ecology.