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A Currency for the Anthropocene: Part 2
The 3 A’s: Acceleration — Armageddon — Anthropocene
We live in the age of the great Acceleration, ecological Armageddon and the Anthropocene.
The Great Acceleration, the time period from 1950 onwards (by WIlliam Steffen) illustrates a number of socio economic trends — population, growth, urbanization, energy use, water consumption, fertilizer consumption, transport. All have been and are still accelerating upwards. The same applies to the indicators from “earth system trends”: carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides, methane emissions, marine acidifcation, loss of tropical forests and terrestrial biosphere degradation. All of these trends are accelerating in a negative direction (the only exception is stratospheric ozone).
This acceleration is causing the “ecological Armageddon”. Based on data collected by dozens of amateur entomologists in 63 nature reserves across Germany, a team of scientists concluded that the flying insect population had dropped by a staggering 76% over a 27-year period. At the same time, other studies began to highlight dramatic plunges across Europe in the populations of individual species of bugs, bees, and moths. The term “biological annihilation” was introduced in 2017 in a seminal paperby scientists Geraldo Ceballos, Paul Ehrlich, and Rodolpho Dirzo, whose research focused on the population declines, as well as extinctions, of vertebrate species. “Our data,” they wrote then, “indicate that beyond global species extinctions Earth is experiencing a huge episode of population declines and extirpations.”
If anything, the 148-page Living Planet Report published this October by the World Wildlife Fund International and the Zoological Society of London only intensified the sense of urgency in their paper. As a comprehensive survey of the health of our planet and the impact of human activity on other species, its key message was grim indeed: between 1970 and 2014, it found, monitored populations of vertebrates had declined in abundance by an average of 60% globally, with particularly pronounced losses in the tropics and in freshwater systems. South and Central America…
