On Monday the International Geological Congress was advised to declare the start of a new geological era, the Anthropocene, which means that our tribe of “bloody ignorant apes” – in Samuel Beckett’s pithy appellation – has officially taken control of the planet.
The very next day, the Guardian reported on the impending extinction of the Asiatic cheetah (farmers, cars and hunting are among the causes cited for their decline to just two females now known to be living in the wild). Time to despair? If you’re an Asiatic cheetah – or any number of other endangered species – it doesn’t look good. But can the humanity that drove, starved and hunted them to extinction also be their salvation?
This is one of the increasingly urgent questions that Gaia Vince addresses in her dazzling work of global reportage, which won the Royal Society Winton prize in 2015. “Will we learn to love the new nature we make, or mourn the old?” she asks in Adventures in the Anthropocene. “Will we embrace living efficiently or will we spread out over newly ice-free landscapes. Will we eat new foods, plant new crops, raise new animals? Will we make space for wildlife in this human world?”
Journalism might merely be the first draft of history, but since the Anthropocene is only estimated by the IGC to have begun in 1950 and is likely to go on for many thousands of years, that first draft is badly needed. Vince set out to supply it, leaving her job as news editor of Nature magazine to trudge around many of the world’s most embattled environments – from mountains to oceans, forests to deserts – finding out how people are surviving in them.
In Peru, she discovers two friends who are painting a mountain white in an attempt to bring back the glacier that made their valley habitable. In the Maldives, she encounters the young president of a sinking nation. “It is too late for us, but it’s not too late for everywhere,” he tells her, outlining a radical vision of artificial coastlines, floating islands and, if worst comes to worst as well it may, the relocation of the entire population to higher ground bought from another nation.
In rural India, she meets a village chief who used satellite imaging to identify defunct water courses in the rock that are now being replenished with carefully positioned monsoon dams and wells. The beauty of this idea made my eyes water. The Anthropocene’s usual encounters with previous geological eras involve drilling, quarrying and fracking, but these villagers have effectively put a pair of spark-plugs between them, creating a model for a future sustainably powered by the interaction of past and present, constancy and change, flood and drought.
I love this book for what it says about the resourcefulness of humanity, the capacity of ordinary people to make a difference, and for those small differences to add up to something that might even turn the planet away from its apparently unstoppable hurtle towards environmental destruction.
Vince doesn’t shirk the hard stuff – the whats, whys and whethers of conservation. She acknowledges that extinction is not unique to the Anthropocene, and she is clear that many of the schemes she witnesses will fail. But where they do, others will spring up. I keep returning to her book, because there is hope between these pages of colourful reportage: from the former fashion executive who is breeding Chinese tigers in South Africa to the Caribbean fisherman who has built a fruit garden on an island made of garbage. With such will and ingenuity, there may yet even be hope for the Asiatic cheetah.
