1The Anthropocene in Environmental History, East and West:
Human Efforts versus Nature’s PowerJ. Donald Hughes
Distinguished University Professor Emeritus, University of Denver
EAEH October 2017, Nankai University, Tianjin, China

The Anthropocene
A prominent buzzword these days in environmental history, geology, andanthropology is the term “Anthropocene,” the idea that human actions havebecome such a powerful force in the transformation and control of the rest ofnature as to leave traces in the natural environment that will persist into future ages.
The term, proposed by Paul J. Crutzen and E. F. Stoermer,1 has received
recognition from official committees that have examined evidence for it. It is a
useful concept, but there is different emphasis concerning its definition between
historians and scientists. Geologists look for durable evidence in detectable strata,
while historians are interested in the degree to which humans are responsible for
lasting changes in the landscape. There is also disagreement about when theAnthropocene began. Humans have had effects on the environment at least since
the invention of agriculture, and probably earlier. But in the context of world
history, human numbers, the extent of modification of the environment, and thespeed with which nature became subject to human domination all took anastounding upturn after the end of the Second World War. J. R. McNeill and PeterEngelke named this the “Great Acceleration.”2 I treat this as the onset of the2

Anthropocene. Interestingly, the recommendation of the Working Group on theAnthropocene (WGA) to the International Geological Congress (August 2016)chose near 1950 as the epoch’s onset.3
Many trends have risen into public consciousness since 1950 that hadreceived little or no notice previously. Global climate change, depletion of theozone layer, accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, oceanic pollution
by floating debris, a sharp increase in the number of invasive species and otherspecies made extinct, and rapid deforestation in the tropics are a few examples,
unfortunately among many others.

The Role of Capitalism
Several scholars, notably Andreas Malm, Donna Haraway, and Jason W.
Moore, have made the contention that capitalism is a driving force behind theAnthropocene, an idea that has led them to propose that the new age be designatedthe “Capitalocene.”4 As Colin Powell observed in 2003,

Money is a coward. It flees from corruption and bad policies, conflict andunpredictability. It shuns ignorance, disease and illiteracy. Money goes
where it is welcomed and where investors can be confident of a return on theresources they have put at risk.5

3

A better method to attract banks and capital can hardly be imagined. “Capitalocene”
may be a clumsy term, and will not replace “Anthropocene,” but it does represent
an important aspect of environmental history.6 Capital provides an engine of
growth giving energy to urban expansion, tourism, and the use of resources.
The results of capital development include urbanization and many effects ofinfrastructure and transportation that transform the habitats of animals and plants,
causing deforestation and loss of wetlands. It introduces disruptive species such as
rapidly reproducing animals including predators, and invasive plants, withunfortunate effects on biodiversity and ecosystems. Funds became available forconstruction of offices and business establishments, hotels, restaurants, homes andinfrastructure such as roads, water supply and sewage systems, petrol stations, andall the other intrusive necessities of urban life.

Nature’s PowerThe model of the Anthropocene as a progressive establishment of humancontrol over nature, however, is misleading in an important way. Humans imagine
that they are in control of the environment, even in suggesting that the present age
be denoted the “Anthropocene.” But nature is not just the stage setting of thehuman drama: she is an ever-present actor, and many of her actions are beyond
human control. There are volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, hurricanes, floods,earthquakes, and engulfing wildfires. Among these disasters are plagues that slay

4thousands or millions, and their danger has not abated in the present time. They
occur in both West and East, and often represent a connection between the two.
One of the best-documented of early epidemics is the Plague of Athens
during the Peloponnesian War of the 5th Century BCE, which contributed, to thedefeat of Athens by Sparta.7 We have considerable evidence about the pestilence
that killed a large fraction of the Athenian population, including their leader
Pericles. There is, for example, the account of the great historian Thucydides, whosuffered from the disease himself and survived, and provides a Hippocratean8
account of the symptoms and course of the effects felt by the victims. Our detailed
information on the Plague of Athens provides a description of the reaction ofindividuals and societies that is useful in understanding social responses toepidemic disasters Even so, there are problems in identifying the particular diseaseagent. Thucydides says that the plague entered Athens through the port of Piraeus
from Egypt, and speculates that it must have come down the Nile to Egypt fromEthiopia. But it is more probable that the source in fact was further east. Traderoutes led to Egypt from Central Asia. The course of the medieval Black Death of
the 14th century came along the Silk Road to the Mediterranean, and scholars havelocated its original appearance in Yunnan. A similar origin for the Plague ofAthens seems likely.

5Climate Change
A huge body of evidence is available for studies of climate change. When I
entered the storage facility of the US National Ice Core Laboratory (NICL),9 at thefoot of the Rocky Mountains west of Denver, I experienced the coldest temperature
I had ever felt: -36°C. The book of Job, in the Bible, asks the question, "Have youentered the storehouses of the snow?"10 I felt that I was doing so. There, on shelves
filling a large but inadequate space of 1,540 cubic meters, lay thousands of silvered
cylindrical sleeves containing sections of cores of ice pulled from the ice sheets ofAntarctica and Greenland, and from mountain glaciers: an archive of the history of
the Earth's climate and atmosphere. Many cores were drilled from ice surface tobedrock, some approaching 4 km in length, so that one core is represented bythousands of ice segments on the shelves. Looking at one of them removed from its
sleeve, I could see layers one above the other, each representing the annual
snowfall of a year many centuries in the past. These layers can be dated exactly,
using electrical conductivity, visual counting, and stable isotope analysis—more
accurately than a method such as radiocarbon allows, and they represent unbroken
records stretching back as far as 800,000 years in Antarctica. 11 Glaciers are fast
melting all over the Earth. There is a pattern of loss of volume almost everywherethat measurements are taken, and photographs taken over decades show
spectacular losses. So an archive like this one and similar facilities in other6countries is precious. 12 In the future, it may become impossible to collect such alibrary of ice.
Archival records of the history of climate change extend back through time
for hundreds of thousands of years, representing long-term natural cycles, rapid
climate variations, and the possible importance of human-induced change, but theknowledge of these archives and the ability to interpret them is a relatively recent
development. Through experimentation, study of proxy records, historical
documents, and computer models that simulate the past, and potentially the future,with increasing accuracy, climatic scientists have achieved a general consensus on
the process of climate change that is useful to historians as they developinterpretations of the changing relationships of human societies to the environment.
The overwhelming majority of climate scientists have reached a consensus
that the great acceleration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and resultant
heating of the climate in recent decades is the result of human activity. But even in
earlier times when non-anthropogenic processes dominated, mankind had to deal
with climatic phenomena such as ice ages, the medieval optimum, and the Little
Ice Age, which were widespread in the Northern Hemisphere, both West and East.

Land Against the Sea

7

Nature’s rebellion against the Anthropocene may be seen clearly in effects
coming from the interaction of sea and land: tsunamis, storm surges, rising sea
level, and flooding, all difficult to defend against.
The Netherlands has a constant need to control water to defend the country,
much of which was and is below sea level. Dikes and the hydraulic windmills
protect the lowlands against drowning. The long historical experience of the Dutch
in their struggle against rising sea levels and storm surges has attracted newinterest in the twenty-first century, in view of concerns about global warming andevents such as the flooding of New Orleans by hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Indeed,
communities facing possible inundation in places like the Gulf Coast andBangladesh now seek the advice of Dutch water management experts.
Virtually every square kilometer of the Netherlands landscape bears
evidence of human effort. Without constant exertion, most of it would be coveredby the North Sea. Historically landowners began to surround units of land withdikes, creating enclosures called polders.13. Emptying water from a polder,especially one below sea level, could only be accomplished by pumping, and thewindmill was adapted to lift water. Careful watching of the rivers and constantlabor on dikes and dams were forced on the inhabitants by a continually shiftingenvironment.
Constantly threatening were storm surges sweeping in from the North Sea,
impelled by gale winds and intensified by high tides. They could swallow polders

8and villages, drowning crops, animals, and people in salt water. Surges in thetwelfth and thirteenth centuries broke through between North Holland andFriesland, forming and enlarging a brackish arm of the sea in the heart of thelowlands called the Zuider Zee, a mixed blessing that offered access to the world
for the merchant fleet but provided a dangerous portal for the North Sea with its
gnawing tides and waves.14 As Petra van Dam noted, "The innovations in hydraulictechnology of the period 1300-1600 must be understood as response to the rapidlychanging conditions in Holland's wetland environment."15
The accomplishments of the Dutch in the "Golden Age" of trade, prosperity,
empire, and intellectual and artistic flowering included the reclamation of large
areas of land and installation of hydraulic infrastructure.16 Windmills were set upon the dike to pump the water from lakes into canals.17 The search for more
efficient pumps led to technological improvements. One of these was theArchimedes screw pump.18
One of the centralizing reforms was the Rijkswaterstaat, a nationaladministration that undertook water management projects and founded aprofessional school for hydraulic engineers.19 It exists today because historicexperience has shown that environmental survival makes a national policy
necessary for water management.
As the Industrial Revolution got under way, Dutch engineers used steam
engines for pumping. In the twentieth century, the source of energy that became9dominant was electricity. The twentieth century brought construction of works ofunprecedented size in attempts to control the sea and rivers. The first of these was
the separation of the Zuider Zee from the North Sea by a dam. At one end of theOosterschelde barrier, an inscription announces, "Here the tide is ruled by the wind,the moon, and us." The project has been declared one of the world's sevenengineering wonders. The Netherlands is greatly concerned about global warming
and rising sea level. Steps have begun to fortify coastal defenses.
Nevertheless, the devastating storm surge of February 1953 made breaches
in the dikes, inundated 200,000 hectares, and drowned 1,835 people, forcing
evacuation of 72,000.20
One proposal for the future includes a higher dike along the entire North Sea
coast from border to border, storage basins, and new "super pumping stations" toempty river water into the sea. Such a plan would continue the historical trajectoryof water control works, and would represent an escalation of human attempts tocontrol nature. The success of Dutch efforts to sustain the land was and is possible
only because the environmental facts led to the ascent of the public realm overlocalism and the privatistic aspects of the market economy. Civic freedom in theNetherlands allows environmental concerns to weigh in the social choices thatmust continue to be made for the survival of land and community.

10

Earthquakes and Tsunami
As a demonstration of nature’s unruly power in spite of the Anthropocene, it
is difficult to find a more striking example than the tsunami. The danger is wellknown, and defenses have been erected along threatened coasts, but they have inmany cases proved inadequate. Three examples that caused serious losses oftechnological structures and human lives can be noted here.
The 1960 Chilean earthquake with magnitude 9.5, certainly one of the top
megathrusts ever recorded, generated a tsunami that affected coastlands throughout
the Pacific and parts of the Southern Ocean. Twenty-five meters high, it destroyedcountless buildings, killed about 1,600 people in Chile, and upset many of thestatues on Easter Island. When the waves reached Hawai’i, they were 11 meters
high and caused millions of dollars damage and 61 deaths. At the island of Honshu
in Japan, they maintained a height of 5.5 meters, made 1,600 homes unlivable, andtook nearly 200 lives.
A much more deadly natural disaster was the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake
and tsunami, which began with a shock of magnitude 9.2 off the west coast ofSumatra lasting almost ten minutes. The resulting tsunami, with waves up to 30
meters high, affected 14 countries around the Indian Ocean as far as East andSouth Africa, killing about 280,000 people.21 The west coasts of India and SriLanka were affected. Some of the tsunami escaped into the Pacific Ocean andaffected Mexico, California and British Columbia. It also reached Antarctica. Huge

11

impacts were inflicted on the environment by the invasion of salt water, including
almost every ecosystem.
This audience need not be reminded of the Tohuku earthquake and tsunamiof 2011, which illustrate the power of nature to counter highly developed humantechnology. Located 70 km off the east coast at magnitude 9.1, it was the mostpowerful earthquake recorded in or near Japan.22 The tsunami waves reached 40.5
meters in height, poured over the seawalls, and penetrated up to 6 km inland.
Nuclear power plants including three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi complex
suffered loss of electricity and resultant explosions. Other nuclear plants weredamaged, and most were decommissioned. There was heavy damage toinfrastructure throughout northeastern Japan; 1,150,000 buildings collapsed tovarious extents. 18,000 people were reported dead or missing, and 340,000 weredisplaced. Coastlands around the Pacific felt the tsunami, and later detectedradioactivity and debris of every kind.

Conclusion
In conclusion, the idea of the Anthropocene as an epoch when humanactivities, began to act as a major force in environmental change that has left
geologically detectable evidence can well be maintained. A motive power in thisdevelopment is capitalism. But the idea that humans are now in total control ofnature, or are even the most important force in environmental change, must give12

way to recognition of the power of environmental forces and natural disasters thatcan negate many achievements of human technology. 23 It must not only be askedwhen the Anthropocene began, but also when it will end, as it surely will.

1Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer, “The ‘Anthropocene,’” IGBP (InternationalGeosphere-Biosphere Programme) Newsletter 41 (2000): 16-18.
2J. R. McNeill and Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of theAnthropocene since 1945. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
2014.
3
Damian Carrington, “The Anthropocene Epoch: Scientists Declare Dawn of Human-Influenced
Age,” The Guardian, 29 August 2016.
4
Andreas Malm, “The Origins of Fossil Capital,” Historical Materialism 21.1 (2013): 15-68;
Donna Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene. Chthulucene,” Environmental
Humanities 6.1 (2015): 159-165; Jason W. Moore, ed., Anthropocene or Capitalocene?: Nature,History, and the Crisis of Capitalism. Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016.
5
Quoted in J.A. Roy Bodden, The Cayman Islands in Transition: The Politics, History, andSociology of a Changing Society. Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers, 2007, p. 146.
6
Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth,History and Us, London: Verso, 2016. The authors criticize both “Anthropocene” and“Capitalocene,” offering a total of eight arguable designations of the latest period, adding
Thermocene (warming), Thanatocene (ecocide), Phagocene (consumption), Phronocene(language), Agnotocene (externalizing nature), and Polemocene (resisting deterioration).
7
J. Donald Hughes, “Responses to Natural Disaster in the Greek and Roman World,” in Forcesof Nature and Cultural Responses, edited by Katrin Pfeifer and Niki Pfeifer. Dordrecht: Springer,
2013, pp. 111-138.
8
That is, Thucydides applied the principle that in studying a disease, one must carefully observe
the symptoms and their changes over time: a principle attributed to Hippocrates (5th centuryBCE), often called “the father of medicine.”
9NICL is a joint program funded by the US Geological Survey and the National Science
Foundation. It is located in the Denver Federal Center, west of Denver, Colorado. Scientificaspects of NICL'S work are coordinated by a Science Management Office in the Climate Change
Research Center at the University of New Hampshire.
10Job 38:22.
11Richard B. Alley, The Two-Mile Time Machine: Ice Cores, Abrupt Climate Change, and Our
Future, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2000.
12Ben Orlove, Ellen Wiegandt, and Brian H. Luckman, eds, Darkening Peaks: Glacier Retreat,Science, and Society, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 2008.
13Charles Singer, E.J. Holmyard, A.R. Hall, and Trevor I Williams, eds., A History ofTechnology, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1956, Vol. 2, 682-683.
14TeBrake, "Taming the Waterwolf," 497.

1315Petra J. E. M. Van Dam, "Ecological Challenges, Technological Innovations: The
Modernization of Sluice Building in Holland, 1300-1600," Technology and Culture 43.3, July
2002, 500-520, 50616Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in theGolden Age, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1987
17Jan de Vries and Ad van der Woude, The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure, andPerseverance of the Dutch Economy, 1500-1815, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997,31.
18Hills, Power from Wind, 120; Van de Ven, Man-made Lowlands, 148-149.
19
Harry Lintsen, "Two Centuries of Central Water Management in the Netherlands," Technologyand Culture 43, No. 3, July 2002, 549-568.
20
Lintsen, "Two Centuries of Central Water Management," 567.
21Y. A. Kontar, V. Santiago-Fandino, and T. Takahashi, editors, Tsunami Events and Lessons
Learned: Environmental and Societal Significance, New York: Springer, 2016.
22Pradyumna P. Karan and Unryu Suganuma, editors, Japan after 3/11: Global Perspectives on
the Earthquake, Tsunami, and Fukushima Meltdown, Lexington, University Press of Kentucky,
2016.
23
Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, San Francisco: HarperOne, 1990.