Our post-nature world

July 2023 will be the hottest month ever recorded on Earth, manifest in the heatwaves searing Europe and the surreal temperatures — 48ºC in Arizona, USA, 52.2ºC in Xinjiang, China, 66ºC in Bushehr, Iran — experienced elsewhere.
Setting islands ablaze and baking entire rivers, this heat has an insidious new quality — scientists find these heatwaves have been made hotter by over 2ºC not by forces of nature but humanity. This is the result of human-caused changes to the planet, summarised by researchers as ‘The Anthropocene’ and pithily described by Antonio Guterres, the UN Secretary General, as ‘the era of global boiling’.

We are here now because of humanity’s twin obsessions — combustion and consumption. The first rocketed as humans discovered the power of fossil fuels to transform industry. The second grew as billions discovered material culture, a smorgasbord of items, some necessities, some vanities, most ending as rubbish in soil and seas, circulated via the global scaffolding of fossil fuel-powered industry. These enchantments beguiled humans to think of Earth only as an ATM — and a trash can. Human activities have thus suffused nature’s balanced atmosphere with greenhouse gases, heating the planet’s air and water — July has seen the warmest ever oceans on Earth too. Human impacts even reflect in Earth’s geology now, scientists dating the Anthropocene to 1950, its traces captured in Canada’s Lake Crawford. This dating also raises questions over accounting for colonial history, which actually powered the Anthropocene.

This epoch thus brings us face to face with truth and reality. Earth is neither inanimate, nor passive — the more CO2 we emit, the more heat it will return. Wrecking elements, ecosystems and other species has brought us to the brink of what William McKibben called ‘a post-nature world’, a place of no stability with climates twisted out of recognition by human beings. This explains why strawberry studded summers now cause heatstroke while once-gentle monsoons destroy hills.


However, as Times Evoke’s global experts emphasise, we can step back. An awareness of our impacts can help muster the nerve needed for alternatives. We require renewable energy, material and imaginative, to see how extraction, consumption and wastage don’t make the world go round — they’ll make it stop. Join Times Evoke in exploring the Anthropocene — and help prevent a ‘post-nature world’.