Welcome to the Anthropocene. The era when our influence on the earth is comparable to a geological force such as volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. Where we once started as hunters and gatherers around a campfire, we are now heating the planet a degree warmer. The stories we tell about our relationship with nature also determine how we interact with it. How did those stories change from prehistoric times to now? How did our house get bigger and bigger?
The story of man begins around a crackling fire. The fire created a safe place to sleep, kept predators away, and you could cook on it. It was our first home and the cradle of the first stories. “As humans, we were confronted with all kinds of phenomena that we could not explain," says Matthijs Schouten. "Take the sun:you didn't know why the sun rose, but you did know that you would die if it didn't. Those forces were greater. than we, and they gave a supernatural charge.” Schouten is an emeritus environmental philosopher at Wageningen University and has researched the human and world views of various cultures and religions.
You can see the world views as a triangle between people, nature and 'supernatural', according to Schouten. “Ancient cultures do not have a sharp division between the three. They see similarities between humans and non-human beings, and see around them a nature that is animated:mountains, animals, trees and rivers.” There is also no distinction between the secular and the supra-worldly:the divine is present in this world.
The image of people around a fire in an animated nature contrasts sharply with our current world of smartphones, gravel gardens and houses like concrete boxes. NEMO Kennislink therefore speaks to several experts about the question of how humanity viewed itself and the environment. We step through our history in seven-mile boots to see how our place in the world changed. We do this by looking specifically at the most important transitions and how this affected our most important asset:the house.
Godless
Did we used to live more in harmony with nature? A fire takes firewood, and on the fire lay the spoils of the hunt. There is also evidence that humans played a role – through hunting or competition for food – in the extinction of prehistoric megafauna in Eurasia, America and Australia. Around the arrival of the first humans, large land mammals such as the mastodon, saber-toothed tiger and wild horse in North America and the kangaroo in Australia became extinct. Schouten:“People have always had an impact, there is no other way to survive. But that impact has grown. It started with hunter-gatherers, which were small communities. Their relationship with nature was reciprocal:give and take. For example, they made sacrifices for hunting to appease the gods.” At that time, people lived a nomadic existence with temporary shelter:a cave nearby, a simple hut, or a tent that you could take with you in the wake of the herd.
That changed when we started taming animals and growing plants as crops. Through agriculture and animal husbandry we produced more food and the population increased. “This is how history as we know it now begins, with tamed nature,” says Schouten. People no longer followed herds, but kept their own animals and crops. The house became a permanent structure surrounded by fields and meadows. The first villages and towns arose.
“With the advent of monotheism, nature becomes de-divinized and soulless. Religions such as Judaism and Christianity placed one God above the world. God was not in this world and henceforth sat in heaven, and only man had an eternal soul. It became heresy to worship nature.” The world was indeed created by God, and according to Christian theologians thus intended to serve man.
Machines
The sciences of the fifteenth to the nineteenth century brought about a change in the Western view of the world. Emphasis is placed on understanding the world. Not as God intended, but how it works and is put together. "God as the clockmaker of the world disappears from the scene," says Schouten. "We are moving towards an image of the 'big bang' and evolution, physics and biology. Everything is an expression of laws from science." Rural dwellers are moving to cities, cities are expanding and the distance between people and nature is increasing.
The French mathematician and philosopher René Descartes subsequently also banishes the spirit from nature. Schouten:“In no other being than man has he established that spirit and matter are united. His followers conclude from this that everything that is not human is mindless:animals are machines that respond to the laws of mechanics.”
Prosperity
The idea that animals are mindless machines is not surprising given the zeitgeist of the time. The first steam engines appeared in the eighteenth century, followed by the first factories in the following century. Harry Lintsen, emeritus professor of technology history at Eindhoven University of Technology, researched technology from 1850 to the present. He argues that industrialization – together with the socialist movement – abolished extreme poverty in the Netherlands between 1850 and 1960, while the pressure on nature remained limited. “Until then, life was hard. Man was a working animal at the mercy of the forces of nature. One fifth of the Dutch population (about 650,000 inhabitants in 1850 – ed.) lived around the absolute minimum subsistence level. That extreme poverty was solved in our country more than a century later, thanks to the fossil energy sources.”
Coal powered the steam engines that mechanized labor in the nineteenth century. In that century, energy consumption increased five times, Lintsen explains in his book The vulnerable prosperity of the Netherlands, 1850-2050 . Coal supplanted the other sources of energy, mainly muscle power of man and horse, wind and water mills and peat. “It led to increased productivity and products becoming cheaper,” explains Lintsen. “People had more money left over for food, clothing and a house.” Petroleum and natural gas later made their way into more and more appliances and machines:"Thanks to the combustion and electric motors in the twentieth century, people could work shorter hours and have more time for education and relaxation. At the same time, living conditions improved through social legislation, emancipation movements and hygienic measures. facilities such as sewage.”
The advances brought by fossil energy also had a downside:large-scale air pollution and environmental problems, ultimately leading to climate change. The majority of CO2 emissions did not come until after 1960. Lintsen:“We made great progress in mass production, mass consumption and extreme prosperity.” According to him, this was partly because people had more to spend. “On the other hand, the question arose as to what a person wants when his basic needs are met. The emerging middle class gave substance to this in the 1920s and 1930s:a washing machine, radio, car. In the 1960s, wages in the Netherlands increased and the ideals of the middle class came within reach of the working class. The welfare and consumer society was born. After a washing machine, radio and car, new needs followed, such as television, central heating, computer and internet.”
Uninhibited
Philosopher Matthijs Schouten explains the extreme consumption on the basis of the change in the western worldview. “If you see forces in nature greater than you, you are reluctant to intervene.” That reluctance disappeared when we took the divine from nature. “In addition, we have come to see soul, spirit and mind as exclusively human. The result:unlimited and increasingly intensive use of nature as our storehouse.” We only see nature as a collection of useful goods and colonizable space, as Schouten quotes the French philosopher Bruno Latour. It is the time of skyscrapers and metropolises, unlimited calls and internet from everywhere, of air travel at rock bottom prices, and flip-flops on offer. Be quick because:it's gone!
Until we get the sky on our roof. Climate change makes it clear that we don't have everything under control after all, says Schouten. “Over the past half century, an awareness of the fragility of nature and the environment has arisen, which forces us to ask ourselves what we are actually doing. Think of books like Silent Spring by Rachel Carson in 1962 and Limits to Growth of the Club of Rome in 1972, the hole in the ozone layer, species extinction, and finally global warming and the pandemic.”
Housemates
The Anthropocene, age of human influence, evokes different reactions. Schouten explains the classification of the Australian philosopher Clive Hamilton:“You have the deniers. Then there are the ecomodernists who have an unfailing faith in science and technology and want to solve climate change with technology. If it doesn't work out, we'll move to another planet if necessary." Schouten also mentions the anthropocentrists, who argue that man, from his special position, has the task of managing the planet sustainably. “Finally, there are the posthumanists, who believe that we need to rethink the place of humans in the world:we need to become partners or participants in the ecosystem. Those last two groups are growing.”
From prehistoric times to now we still stare into the campfire and drift our thoughts away in stories. But the stories we tell have changed a lot over the centuries. More and more people are now dreaming of a world in which people and nature are equal roommates in the same house of mother earth.
Slide1/9
Era of manSince prehistoric times, our influence on our environment has increased. According to some scientists, we have now arrived in the Anthropocene:the age of man. What inventions have brought us here? NEMO Kennislink lists the most important ones.Slide1/9
Campfire Controlling fire allowed humans to create a safe place that kept predators away, as well as a place to prepare food that was safer and more digestible. In addition, the campfire was a stage for stories and culture. The fire can still be found everywhere:in power plants, stoves, barbecues, engines, and ovens. But fire requires fuel, such as wood, gas, coal or oil. This combustion releases CO2, the most important greenhouse gas that warms the earth.Slide1/9
Agriculture Arable farming and animal husbandry started more than ten thousand years ago, in different places in the world – each with its own animal and plant species. With the rise of agriculture, man changed from a nomad to a farmer with a permanent house and fields and meadows around it. Since then, agriculture has become increasingly intensive. We can feed more and more mouths, but at the same time put pressure on global nature. Intensive livestock farming and the production of fertilizers also emit a lot of greenhouse gases.Slide1/9
Steam engineThe industrialization of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a combination of an energy revolution and associated machines. The first steam engines appeared in the eighteenth century, and the first factories in the following century. James Watt improved the existing steam engine with a big jump in efficiency. As a result of the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century, energy consumption in the Netherlands increased five times. Coal supplanted the other energy sources, mainly muscle power of humans and horses, wind and water mills and peat.Slide1/9
Incandescent lamp“The major energy supplies of today – gas, oil and electricity – all have their origin in the lighting systems at the end of the 19th century,” says Harry Lintsen, emeritus professor of technology history. The invention of the incandescent lamp and matching lighting system by Thomas Edison made the electric lamp a formidable competitor to gaslight in street lamps and mansions. Gas companies then came up with the incandescent mantle, which made gaslight more efficient. With the coin gas meter, gaslight made its appearance in middle- and working-class homes. “A coin gas meter gave you gaslight for a quarter of an hour. Not long after, gas heating and gas engines followed. A fully-fledged energy system developed from gas lighting.”Slide1/9
Gasoline enginePetroleum gets the Netherlands from Indonesia from 1890, initially only for lamp oil (kerosene). “It will only be with the breakthrough of the car at the beginning of the twentieth century that petrol and diesel will be added,” says Lintsen. “The petrochemical industry is built from there:the refineries will make plastics, dyes, solvents, and so on.”Slide1/9
AirplaneThe world becomes a lot smaller to travel by plane. At the same time, it is indicative of the prosperity and consumption that, according to Lintsen, has been taking off since 1960 at the expense of the climate. Between 1960 and 2018, the number of passenger kilometers flown increased from around 100 billion to more than 8,000 billion kilometers per year. The sector's carbon dioxide emissions increased almost seven times during that time. Aircraft also emit other greenhouse gases. Together they are responsible for 3.5% of global warming.Slide1/9
InternetThe computer and the Internet accelerated information and communication technology. Endless amounts of data travel the world between users. To store all that data, large data centers are needed that consume power. According to a 2018 study, the ICT sector will account for about 14 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in 20 years' time. Nevertheless, the energy consumption of data centers worldwide is increasing less rapidly, because they are becoming more efficient.Slide1/9
Solar cellThe transition to sustainable energy is now in full swing. We build wind and solar parks. Technology historian Harry Lintsen nevertheless has a warning:“Every transition is an exchange process, it has advantages and disadvantages. The production of solar cells costs raw materials. In addition, the transition can widen the energy gap:not everyone can buy solar cells or insulate the house, and then pay a higher price for energy while they have less to spend.”