The Anthropocene: Environmental Challenges

Farming has been a source of work ever since man has been introduced to the earth, but the past 100 years have been promising in continuing to provide for the needs of the growing population. The people have become more educated, and technology has become much more advanced. The two have come together to boon the land and animals so that they produce to their fullest potential. The people of the world have been influenced to the extent that they work smarter not harder to provide for the growing population. Farming, a crucial necessity to the survival of mankind, has evolved in the area of education of the people which has assisted in the advances of technology, land, and animal production which will lead to the provision of food for the growing

Agriculture contributes to global greenhouse gas emissions. The “agriculture connection” is any direct impacts agriculture has on climatic change. “Carbon dioxide is the

After learning about the statistics of how much agriculture consumes our planet, I was appalled to see how destructive it is. Jonathan Foley put into perspective the increase and rapid demand for food. Agriculture alone consumes 40% of our land surface, 70% of our irrigation system, and

Humanity is confronted by multiple environmental challenges which threaten to undermine the advances in health achieved over recent decades. The Rockefeller Foundation/Lancet Commission on Planetary Health showed how climate change, loss of biodiversity, land use change, ocean acidification and overfishing, nitrogen and phosphorus loading and environmental pollution more generally all have the potential to adversely affect health through a range of pathways1. A recent joint publication by WHO and Convention on Biological Diversity articulated the myriad connections between biodiversity and health and the threats to both posed by environmental change2. The dramatic changes in the global environment have led many scientists to conclude that we are living in a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene – in which the activities of one species – homo sapiens -have become the dominant driving force transforming the Earth’s natural systems3. These natural systems provide food, clean water and air and modulate the global temperature within limits in which humanity has been able to flourish for around 11,500 years during the preceding Holocene epoch.

The excess of carbon in the atmosphere is the cause of global climate change. To reverse global warming we must balance the carbon cycle by removing carbon from the atmosphere and returning it to the plants and to the soil (4). Though in the end, carbon exists in everything and the carbon cycle is much more complex because it includes every plant, animal, microbe, fallen tree, body of water, bit of soil, breath of air, plume of smoke, combustion of fossil fuel, decaying particle, and bubble popping to the surface of a swamp (5). Industrial farming has disrupted this cycle. If we completely halted the burning of fossil fuels today, which we can not by any means, climate change would still continue through modern agriculture. The key to reversing global warming is not solely through solar panels and ethanol fuel, but in proper symbiotic farming

The Industrial Revolution was a period that changed the course of human history in many ways. People often think of the positive outcomes rather than the negative consequences, for example, the creation of a more efficient manufacturing process that resulted in more products and profits. However, the industrial revolution also paved ways for humans to increase the amount of pollution being put into the atmosphere immensely. Evidence of this is seen in various graphs of Carbon Dioxide, Methane, and Nitrous Oxide. In these graphs, there is a notable spike in these levels starting around the mid 1800s, which is also around the time the Industrial Revolution started to take off and spread around the world. In the data of CO2 emissions, Carbon Dioxide was about 280 ppm (parts per million) in the pre-industrial time period, since then CO2 levels have increased rapidly resulting in around 407 ppm, which is the highest level humans have ever experienced. This being said, the whole human race needs to be self-conscious of what get exposed to Earth’s atmosphere.

The “agricultural connection” is defined by direct effects agriculture has on climatic change. The article states that 13.5 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions are due to food production (particularly in the livestock industry), and approximately seventy percent of the world’s available freshwater is used for irrigation purposes in agriculture. The third “connection” between global warming and the food industry in the article deals with how food is distributed throughout the world and how the byproducts of agriculture are disposed of. The “waste and transportation connection” emerges from the idea of more conventional global warming thinking: the burning of fossil fuels as well as garbage disposal.

Some contend that the Anthropocene started with the appearance of agriculture, in light of the fact that specific horticulture related activities, for example, rice paddy water system and deforestation may have prompted sharp ascents in convergences of CO2 and methane as ahead of schedule as 8,000 years prior. Many trust that it was not until the Industrial Revolution that our abuse of fossil fuels and monumental increases of energy utilize and populace began to push us sufficiently far to demonstrate a recognizable human impact.

Our lives involve the emission of theses dangerous greenhouse gases (Bushnell 25). Carbon dioxide has increased to

In the scientific community, climate change is practically undeniable and its universal importance not trivial. However, in respects to a new concept called the Anthropocene, debate has waged over the struggle of its classification. In the article The “Anthropocene” epoch: Scientific decision or political statement?, California State University geological sciences professor Stanley Finney and U.S. Geological Survey geologist Lucy Edwards unmask the current representation of the Anthropocene and explain its implications of being recognized as a geological unit to the ICC. Finney and Edwards examine the basis of the Anthropocene’s validity and lead the reader towards potential political and social motives for proceeding in admitting the Anthropocene

Anthropocene is a time period where the “effects of the humans on the global environment have escalated” (Crutzen 23). The Earth is no longer in its natural state but is “moving into a less biologically diverse, less forested, much warmer, and probably wetter and stormier state” (Steffen 614).

Anthropocene refers to the start of a time where human influence on the earth’s ecological and geological state rapidly increased. This rapid increase is known as the “Great Acceleration” which takes place from the mid-20th century and continues on today. A push was made to distinguish this time from the previous epoch known as the Holocene period because of the dramatic impact that humanity is now having on the environment. The Anthropocene period is characteristically different because the changes in the ecological environment are being rapidly affected and changed due to human activity not purely natural means. While humans were active during the Holocene period they did not begin to affect their environment

According to the article “The Anthropocene: Can Humans Survive A Human Age?”, our society is now passing through a new geological age so called Anthropocene, characterized by a centralization of the human being in the society. However, looking at the humanity today, it does not seem to be so. I would rather say money is the center of the world nowadays; in fact, everything turns around it: it is a limitless loop that walks with us for our entire life. Because of the people’s careless toward the earth, our home, Anthropocene will be maybe remembered (if it will be even a way to be remembered) as the darkest era for the human species. In fact, the climate and the environment change take hold in this era and they are strictly linked to the bad

The fundamental principles, the concepts of spatiality, temporality, organizational structure, and health effects and outcomes of environmental toxicology are all correlated. From the way pollutants are transported from one environment to another to the ultimate impact the pollutant exposed to the system. I start off thinking of the overall idea environmental toxicology with a global picture and global environmental impacts and how it is correlated with everything. In the article “The Trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration”. This paper gave a very detailed explanation on a trend that they have confidence in is due to human influence on the Earth. This influence is shown in 24 graphs that depict an intense acceleration in human enterprise

As I will try to explore in the conclusion, the Anthropocene thesis (a new geological epoch characterised by the impact of human activity as visible in earth’s geological strata) anticipating human extinction might force educational-as-environmental theory to take seriously the fact that the question will no longer be of living on but of living otherwise. What might be needed in educational theory is not so much the contestation of human exceptionality and malevolence of cogito but the radicalisation of thought – of its potential to differentiate more – as opposed to (following Bergson) maintaining its proclivity to reduce the infinite variation of life to the manageable human input-output. For example, we can read printed texts for the meaning they communicate in order that the sense we make of them is brought back to and for the self. But we could also, following Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of ‘higher deterritorialization’, read the intensities of ink itself, the spatial relations of printed