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3.3: How We Got to Where We Are Today

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    76112
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    Consider a very simple model of human development from the life of pre-humans, highly interactive with and dependent on the natural environment, to life today, in which people barely acknowledge the existence of the natural world, let alone consider it a requirement for their existence. It consists of six steps. The model presented here describes this shift. The steps are not discrete, they reflect stepping stones in human history, and may overlap or run in parallel.

    Step 1. Earth: ~ 4.5 Billion years ago: An environment was formed that was capable of supporting simple life and letting it evolve. This began about 0.5-1 billion years after the formation of the Earth and continues to the present (Betts et al., 2018). During this time biogeochemical cycles developed that are essential to all life. These cycles ensure that the necessary chemicals and elements are available at the right time and place and amount for lifeforms to use, and that when they are no longer needed they are recycled, stored temporarily, or safely sequestered somewhere on Earth. They evolved for virtually every element used in life.

    These cycles form part of what we call ecosystem services – the benefits people obtain from ecosystems. These include provisioning (food, water, timber), regulating (climate, floods, wastes, water quality), supporting (soil formation, photosynthesis, nutrient cycles) and cultural (recreation, spiritual, aesthetic) services (MEAB, 2005). This definition reflects an anthropocentric perspective, because the first three (regulating, supporting, and provisioning) services are required for all life, and, in a reciprocal manner, the rest of life also acts to maintain these services. On the other hand, cultural services relate only to humans.

    Summarized simply, ecosystem services give us a stable climate, food and shelter. It is difficult to overemphasize the complexity and interdependence of the ecosystem processes, but, simply put, they keep the air safe to breathe, the water safe to drink, the soil capable of growing nutritious crops and the climate conducive to organized society. They maintain the stable chemical and physical composition of Earth and provide us with the resources we use for every material thing we create; nothing is unnecessary and nothing is wasted. All of these services, processes, and cycles interact with each other and respond in an integrated manner to environmental demands. Through the actions of these ecosystem services, Earth’s environment evolved from a primitive and toxic (to most life) environment to one sustaining life today.

    Step 2. ~ 200,000 years ago: Pre-historic Homo sapiens emerges, living a life closely integrated with and generally subservient to the natural world.

    Step 3. ~11,000 years ago: Human society begins to use basic technology, especially weapons and agricultural technology, and lives within local cultures. It slowly develops a perception of being superior to nature (White, 1967). This step gradually transitioned to Step 4.

    Step 4. ~11,000 years ago to now. Earth’s climate stabilizes at a temperature enabling the development of agriculture and ultimately more advanced human societies. Civilizations are formed and humans live in increasingly complex cultures, with increasingly sophisticated philosophies, religious beliefs, political and economic systems, schools, sciences and technologies. Humans spread into all parts of the world, including under the oceans, to the poles and the mountaintops, and even into space and to the moon.

    Step 5. The last 100-200 years of Step 4, but with changes so radical as to constitute its own period. It is characterized by the globalized human living in an environment characterized by high technology, aggressive and unsustainable global exploitation of resources, unrestrained consumption combined with indifferent disposition of waste, rapid global transport, and virtually instantaneous global communication. The underlying philosophy is based on human superiority and on economic theory ground on the unrestrained use of natural resources to promote economic growth, human ‘progress’ and excessive material consumption.

    Step 6. Post-WW II to … ? This is a time of living with the consequences of . It is today and tomorrow and the foreseeable future. Life is happening in a rapidly changing, overpopulated, resource constrained, polluted, warming, and politically, economically, and environmentally unstable world. This time (from about the late 20th century on to today) is called the Anthropocene (Steffen et al., 2011), a geologic epoch characterized by the dominance of humankind as a global force in its own right. It is so named in recognition that human actions are affecting the fundamental life systems of the planet and a reflection of our awareness that humans can change and have changed the biological and physical properties of the Earth.

    A striking feature of these steps is that the rate of change accelerates as the steps increase in number. Thus, to get to Step 1 took about one billion years; from Step 1 to the evolution of Homo sapiens (Step 2), almost another 3.8 billion years. To get from Step 2 to Step 3 took maybe 200,000 years, and from Step 3 to Step 4 less than 10,000 years. The transition from Step 4 to Step 5 lasted perhaps 250 years, i.e. lightning fast in comparison. We do not know how long Step 6 will last, but the progression from Step 1 to Step 6 depended on a favourable environment, and today that environment is changing. The general environmental balance that humankind has depended on for over 11,000 years is becoming more and more unstable. How long Step 6 lasts, and what Step 7 will look like, depends on how rapidly and effectively humans can act to stabilize our environment to a state compatible with maintaining human society.

    In short, while humans evolved relatively late, they have rapidly progressed to become Earth’s most successful and perhaps most dangerous species.


    3.3: How We Got to Where We Are Today is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by LibreTexts.

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