The human planet

When I was little, my mother became religious. She taught me that God created the earth, the animals and the plants, and that God created Adam and Eve. But since they ate of the apple in the Garden of Eden, even though they had been told not to, they were cast out. From then on they had to live a human life, with everything the implies. Births and upbringing of the boys, which cannot have been so easy for them, since it ended with jealousy, envy and fratricide at the hands of Cain, I can also remember her telling about.

Men big bangor the big bang, I didn't hear anything about until I started school. Until I was six, seven, I was therefore sure that God created the earth. It did not occur to me that it could be any other way, until I was introduced to the scientific theory of creation in a science class. I was amazed that there were several explanatory models. At least that's how I remember it. Astonished that the genesis was not a given, that different theories exist side by side in different research fields and subject areas, within both the religious subject field and the secular one.

I confronted my mother and asked why she had only taught me that God created the earth, and not told me about the big bang. She said that she had wanted to give me a clear point of view from which to see the world. She had read that it was good for children. It was a conscious choice. And maybe it was just right the which was good for kids in the 1970s and 80s.

In a cubist way

As an adult, I have become almost obsessed with seeing things from different angles. I like Picasso's cubist paintings, and I remind myself that there are ways of seeing things that I have yet to discover, that my blind spot is probably huge. Perhaps you could say that my religious upbringing made me an agnostic. God's existence cannot be proven, so I am open. Because what do I know? But if there were to be a God, I think Tom Waits is right when he sings: "maybe God himself is lost and needs help / maybe God himself he needs all of our help."

There are so many underlines and notes in the margin that reading them is like reading two books at once.

After my mother died, I inherited her Bible, and in it and her other books there are so many underlines and notes in the margins that reading them is like reading two books at once, the book and her notebook that has written into it second book. In an attempt not to resemble my mother, I tried for a long time not to write and make notes in my books, so that others besides me could read them without being disturbed by my presence in the form of donkey ears and sloppy letters. But when I have to rewrite a book or use it for my work, I play havoc with it and make big and small donkey ears according to the meaning of the pages.

Also the book The Anthropocene. The Age of Man after finishing reading is similar to my mother's Bible, because I have constantly found things I want to emphasize, and quotes I want to read again. Despite its deeply serious content, the book has something of an excess about it. A clear and strong will to investigate his subject and lift it up and present it in a cubist way, from several angles.

anthropocene

Thus Plato, i The drinking fest in Athens, examines love through the party participants' various speeches about Eros, the concept is illuminated here anthropocene with interdisciplinary breadth.

The book's contributors have backgrounds in everything from social anthropology, cultural and social psychology, social economy and religion to philosophy, philosophy of religion, meteorology, oceanography and biology.

The backgrounds of the book's contributors range from social anthropology, cultural and social psychology, social economy and religion to philosophy, philosophy of religion, meteorology, oceanography and biology. Because what really lies in this term, which in recent years has become more and more used and recognized as the term for the era we now find ourselves in?

As the three editors write in the foreword: "The term is not yet official, but in recent years we have come closer to a clearer definition of something as rare as a new geological epoch." The first time the term was launched was in Mexico in the year 2000, when Nobel Prize winner Paul Cross, meteorologist and atmospheric chemist, at a conference exclaimed: "We are no longer in the Holocene, we are in the ... in the ... Anthropocene!" The statement led to debate, and since then there has been a discussion between biologists, anthropologists, geologists and representatives of other fields about what the term encompasses and implies. In Norway, perhaps especially at the Center for Biogeochemistry in the Anthropocene at the University of Oslo, led by Dag O. Hessen, questions from the book's preface have been discussed: "How should we think about the role of man, society and technology in the new ageone? Does it exist hope, or are we facing a bleak future?”

The consequence of humanity's presence

"The Anthropocene refers to the many ways in which we humans have transformed the world and recreated it in our image. The result is that we are now increasingly living on a human planet," writes Thomas Hylland Eriksen in his chapter "The straightening of food: What we eat in the Anthropocene".

If one day my children pick up this book, they will feel my presence in the same way that I feel my mother's presence in her books – as the planet also feels the presence of humanity: not in the form of excited and eager ink letters and lines, but as measurable changes in soil layers and rocks, in seas and lakes, in the atmosphere and biosphere. Each one of us, according to the editors, walks around with what scientists call a golden nail (golden spike) in our own body. "Like Cain got a mark on his forehead after killing his brother, we all walk around with a small mark in our cells, showing that we belong to the new age," write the three editors. The marks originate from the nuclear test explosions around 1950 to 1989, and earlier from the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, and can be measured from the number of isotopes in the cells. Because even if some of the traces that we humans have left may originate from the same excited motivation as the underlines in the books – desire for knowledge, thirst for discovery, hope for better times, desire for economic growth, lower mortality, increased prosperity and better future prospects – there is also arrogance or hubris, destructive power struggle and lack of humility as the basis for choices we have made. The consequences are felt in forms that currently affect us to a greater or lesser extent, depending on where on the globe we live.

The branch we are sitting on

But who are we? During the reading, it becomes obvious that when it comes to the Anthropocene, the words are menneskeheten og vi both a crucial and a problematic union of the global and the local. We are the cause of the problem. And we are sitting on the solution. But we are not in the same boat.

Placing large mirrors in space to reflect sunlight away from Earth.

In her chapter "Educating for sustainable change in the age of capitalism" Laura Hultbergs writes about how the social ecologist Andreas Malm in the book Fossil Capital (2016) deal with the narrative of humanity as a guilty and responsible actor, "for humanity has never operated as a single actor with common interests". She also refers to Oxfam's report Confronting Carbon Inequality (2020), which "shows that the richest ten percent of the world's population were responsible for 52 percent of all "carbon emissions in the atmosphere between 1990 and 2015". In the light of hindsight, one can ask oneself: What happened and is still happening on and with this globe that God in the Bible admonished us not to steal or kill? Or to put it with a natural metaphor used in the book: What now about the branch we are sitting on?

The book does not call for panic, but does not hide the fact that there is cause for concern. And several of the contributors encourage us to thoroughly investigate the reasons for the underlying structures that have led us here, in order to find better and more long-term solutions. The elephant in the room is, of course, capitalism. But there is no apportionment of blame. Nor exhortations. Rather factual, relevant and urgently needed information work. Dag O. Hessen in his chapter "Watch out, the Anthropocene" dispels, among other things, the myth about our so-called green oil and points out that Norwegians have "the supremely highest

Other possible solutions are modification of clouds over subtropical sea areas and carbon capture. But like Paul Crutzen – said namesake of the term 'anthropocene', discoverer of the hole in the ozone layer and the mastermind behind the volcano solution – already wrote in 2006, here quoted by Storelvmo: "The strongly preferred solution... is to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases."

The book's afterword has been written by three fellows at the Center for biogeochemical in the Anthropocene at the University of Oslo and gives an insight into the lectures and conversations that the interdisciplinary center opens up for, and from which the book springs.

But what can I do?

I open a door and go out, on an early spring morning, listening to scattered birdsong. A dove cooing, two black birds plunging into the air, a wasp queen finding her way in through a window, looking for a place to build a nest. I look around and think of the children in the Brazilian Amazon, as a philosophy professor Arne Johan Vetlesen writes that can distinguish between the river's 67 fish species. I myself do not know the names of either birds or insects beyond the species I am used to seeing: seagulls, crows, pigeons, ducks, flies, mosquitoes, moths, bees and wasps. But what about the other species, the ones I don't know the name of, how can I care that they become extinct if I don't know they exist and have a name?

I google "bird species in central Oslo".» and get a list of pictures so I can teach myself and my kids the specific name of some of the birds we share the city with. Perhaps we recognize them with the help of the descriptive names: Grågåsa. White-cheeked goose. The bud habit. Stokanda. Top duck. The eagle. Kvinanda. The top diver. Great Cormorant. Gray heron. Sparrowhawk. And afterwards we will learn the names of more of the trees in the park than birch and pine, and learn the names of the insects buzzing in the hedge outside our block, and in the tree I don't know the name of, and learn the names of the fish that are still left in the fjord. In a certain form. For the one you know, you care.

Democracy's Achilles heel

One of the few positive results of the Anthropocene that is highlighted in the book via the thinking of the American biologist Donna Haraway, is that we are forced to cooperate.

We are also encouraged to think in a seven-generation perspective with inspiration from Roman's book Krznaric, How to think long-term – in a short-term world (2021), which Dag O. Hessen visits in the chapter on tipping points and the link between climate and nature. Because "short-termism is democracy's Achilles heel", writes Hessen. And I think again of Tom Waits' song, of my mother, of God who I can see as clearly as I can see my children, my friends, my lover, my sister's canary, the activists on Sjursøya, the wasp queen on her way in through the window, just because God was brought to life for me as a part of reality when I was little, with a name of his own. But it is not only God who is 'lost' and needs us now. Be God in heaven or in the calculator. We also need each other, with knowledge from several angles. The book clearly shows us this through an important Cubist broad-based deep dive into the Anthropocene.

Ramsdal is an author and regular essayist in MODERN TIMES: See also Center for Biogeochemistry in the Anthropocene: https://www.mn.uio.no/cba/om/ See also lecture here: https://respublica.no/antropocen-foredrag-hele-varen/