Learning Goals
After reading this chapter, you will be able to:
- Define fundamental geographic concepts like globalization, spatial scale, and environmental determinism.
- Illustrate how fundamental concepts in geography aid in evaluating contemporary human-environment issues.
- Explain how the organizational structure of this book can contribute to your learning of contemporary human-environment processes, patterns, issues, and potential solutions.
Has our drive to build an advanced global civilization exhausted our planet’s resources and polluted our planet to such a degree that we are in fact destroying the very civilization we are trying to build? Does our example explain why we have not located any evidence for life elsewhere? Are we an example of the Fermi paradox and the Great Filter where the Great Filter is an abiogenesis? In other words, is the rise of technological human-level intelligence ultimately self-destructive before we make contact with other alien civilizations? If so, then Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, would be very depressed!
We hope not, and tragic major global crises such as the global economic crisis of 2007/2008, SARS, and COVID-19 suggest that downturns in the global economy yield positive environmental impacts! For instance, as of March 2020, nitrate oxide levels in China and within the Po Valley of Italy are down as much as 10–30%. As of March 27, congestion in and around Los Angeles is down and the traffic is moving 53% faster. Indeed, according to the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) air quality index, by the end of March 2020, Los Angeles had recorded three straight weeks of “Good” air quality, which indicates little to no risks of air pollution. Contrast this with summer 2019, when EPA’s air quality index in LA was in the “Unhealthy” range or worse every day for two straight months. Similarly, in the San Francisco Bay Area, air quality has improved markedly, with the number of vehicles crossing the Bay Bridge having dropped 40%, as has the number of vehicles driving into Seattle, Chicago, and Atlanta have seen similar trends, with massive downturns in numbers of vehicles on the roads.
Please note we do not advocate for emergent diseases and are horrified by the death toll of COVID-19 .
Yet, this does illustrate that as people stay at home, consumption decreases, factory outputs decrease, transportation (including shipping, but also individual car drivers, trucks, etc.) decreases, and with this there is significant reduction in air pollution and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. We hope, from this evidence, that people (especially rich people) realize that reducing personal consumption (by a relatively small amount) can have an immediate impact on GHG emissions, and that we should, as a global society, explore zero-growth policies coupled with concerted efforts to reduce local, regional, national, and global socioeconomic inequalities.
As we noted in the last sentence, the onus is really on rich people to change their consumption patterns, particularly when it comes to flying. Oswald and coauthors (2020) found that the richest 10% of people consume 20 times more energy than the poorest tenth in each region and across the globe. In fact, the richest 10% consume 187 times more fuel when traveling than the poorest tenth, wherever they live, and as they become richer, they use more energy in heating/cooling their homes, traveling, shopping, and eating. According to Harrabin (2020), in the United Kingdom (UK), 15% of flyers fly 70% of all flights, yet 57% of UK citizens do not fly abroad! Oswald and coauthors found that 20% of the UK population, 40% of the German population, and all Luxembourg citizens are among the top 5% of global fuel users. But, contrary to popular expectations, only 2% of the Chinese population and only 0.02% of the Indian population are among the top 5% of global fuel users.
In this chapter, we have several challenges—identify the scope of this project, from there define nature, define what are human-environment issues, define the Anthropocene, and begin to illustrate the connections between globalization, the defining attribute of our global society, and global environmental change, the defining by-product of our global society.
1.1 Anthropocene and Omnicide
Today, we live in the Anthropocene, an era dominated by humans, but also by the positive yet destructive environmental feedbacks that are poised to completely reset the relationships between nature and society! But what is the Anthropocene?
With world population projected to reach at least 9 billion by 2050, human interactions with landscapes are increasing at unprecedented rates. Indeed, the environmental impacts of human population growth and accompanying resource consumption have intensified to the extent that the term ‘anthropocene’ has emerged to signify a new geologic era dominated by human activity.
The Future of Human-Landscape Interactions (AAG Newsletter, Dec 2010), Ann Chin and Carol Harden
Temporally constraining the Anthropocene has proved difficult. According to Waters et al. (2018), the Anthropocene Working Group representing the American Geosciences Institute and earth scientists worldwide is suggesting the “golden spike” in radioactive nuclear fallout and changes in carbon chemistry through fossil fuel burning between 1952 and 1955 should stratigraphically define the new Anthropocene epoch. Carrington (2016) suggests that other proposed Anthropocene stratigraphic signals might include the presence of plastic pollution, coal soot from power stations, concrete and concrete dust, and domestic chicken bones in rubbish dumps and kitchen hearths.
Chin and Harden continue by posing a series of questions related to the human and physical dimensions of landscape change, including:
What are the unintended and broader social and political consequences of landscape change, especially when a small change in landscape processes can produce large social change, and vice versa? What common currency can express the value of environmental goods and services, and relate environmental systems to economic and political systems?
While agreeing with their premise, we take issue with the authors’ privileging of population growth and their omission of the immense diversity of resource consumption and technological access across the globe. However, we would be derelict if we did not mention that between 1990 and 2010, globalization, capitalism, and market socialism (China’s model of growth) helped more than a billion people out of poverty. But these three systems might have reached their zenith. Increasing use of technology in the Global North in manufacturing, product delivery, and services will likely cause 47% job losses among the middle and working classes in the next 25 years according to Frey and Osborne (2017). This at a time when middle- and working-class wages have stagnated; for instance, 15% of the US population today exists below the poverty-line, while all productivity gains have accrued to the top 1% of earners.
However, the utilization of space by humans or the lack of space for other species is certainly an issue. Sir Richard Attenborough states, “space is not as sexy as plastic, it’s a harder thing to get your head around, it’s a much bigger issue.” For instance, blue whales are struggling to find partners because the noise of the oceans is drowning out their songs, so their ability to communicate and find each other over vast distances is diminishing. By 2050, 10% of all animal and plant species or a million species are expected to go extinct according to Chris Thomas and coauthors (2014). Among the first to go are those animals larger than 100 kg; these include elephants, rhinos, giraffes, lions, tigers, many whale species, blue-fin tuna, orangutans, and most shark species, among many others. All these species require significant landscape or space to survive. Today’s current extinction rate is at least 1000 times faster than the background extinction rate since the Chicxulub event 66.043 ± 0.011 million years ago.
Yet space is not the only pressing issue. Business-as-normal is consuming all earth’s natural resources (i.e., minerals, timber, soil, freshwater and groundwater, clean air) and generating enormous pollution, of which one form, GHGs, is conspiring to unnaturally warm our earth to levels not seen in millions of years. This at a time when urbanization is accelerating! And yet according to Felix Creutzig and coauthors (2015), urban areas consume more energy, spread more diseases, consume more water, and generate more trash and more GHGs than rural environments.
Both Frank Fenner and Jared Diamond liken our spiraling descent into chaos triggered by global warming, business-as-usual resource consumption, and loss of natural landscape space as reminiscent of Easter Island. Both are worried that humans “lost in space” will perish! Both are worried that competition for the last remaining natural resources, for example, water and soil, will trigger wars over food and water!
Furthermore, we would augment these passages by noting the severity of humans’ impact on the environment, where some instances of environmental degradation have reached their thresholds, such that the extent and severity of the impacts may prove to be irreversible. In addition, physical and human-driven processes work in tandem to produce the constantly changing landscapes that Chin and Harden identify, and the scope and extent of such drivers remain difficult to predict precisely because of such complex interactions. Moreover, those processes operating at a global scale result in geographically uneven consequences for both societies and physical environments, such that places and peoples neither contribute to nor are affected by environmental impacts equally.
Although the term Anthropocene captures the essence of our era, it tends to camouflage a sinister reality—we are all of us, at different scales and different rates but especially Global Northern citizens, culpable of “ecocide” or rather “omnicide”! We prefer the term omnicide to ecocide, the killing of ecosystems, as ecocide is spatially more restricted in interpretation.
Omnicide—the killing of everything is global in its reach. We have actively and passively conspired to create conditions in which our modern highly interconnected, highly wasteful, highly resource-exploitive global civilization is initiating the sixth mass die-off or sixth mass extinction. As Danielle Celermajer suggests, we are not just killing animals, trees, fungi, biomes, forests, and rivers, we are also killing humans through pollution and natural resource exhaustion.
According to Danielle Celermajer, and we concur, we need to identify the political representatives, the media representatives, the financial institutions, the businesses, the governments, and individuals who are, at whatever geographic scale, facilitating and are culpable for omnicide of the earth. We as citizens and as scientists must not hide or be quiet anymore; we must remember Elie Wiesel’s quote about the Holocaust and apply it to our modern context and change it subtly:
We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the polluter, the natural resource exploiter never the natural environment. Silence encourages the environmental abuser.
This is why environmental abusers, governments and businesses alike, target the likes of Sweden’s teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg and others.
Thus, a more explicit integration of human-driven and physical processes coupled with careful attention to issues of geographical scale, environmental thresholds, and geographical unevenness potentially provides a comprehensive and sophisticated depiction of human-environment interactions in the twenty-first century. Such an integrative approach that draws on fundamental geographic concepts to represent and analyze the complexities involved in the production and impacts of human-landscape processes that mosaic the earth’s surface provides a framework for this book.
1.2 Geographic and Environmental Concepts
At first glance, “nature” may seem a fairly obv...