Great+Acceleration

Jordan Mundell February 12th, 2015 Annotation #1 //The trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration // Will Steffen, Wendy Broadgate, Lisa Deutsch, Owen Gaffney and Cornelia Ludwig

Around the turn of the century, a project was taken up by the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme to gather data and generate models for different aspects of the world around us, e.g. population, greenhouse gas concentration, surface temperatures, ocean acidification, from essentially the Industrial Revolution to present day. The data was modified to include the recent first decade of the 21st century. One of the main outcomes of the project was the dubbing of a time period known as the ‘Great Acceleration,’ whose beginning is marked as approximately 1950. While it has long been known that humans can have a significant impact on the environment around them, post-1950 marked unprecedented numbers; increases in population, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, GPD, etc. went from near linear to almost exponential growth. For example, climate change had been a heated debated for the last few decades, whether it was natural, or if it was being human influenced; the Great Acceleration has made it nearly a unanimous consensus (from scientists at least), that is the latter.

“Only beyond the mid-20th century is there clear evidence for fundamental shifts in the state and functioning of the Earth System that are beyond the range of variability of the Holocene and driven by human activities.”

What I found interesting was the breakdown of countries into three categories, and how each of their effects on the Great Acceleration, the OECD (essentially the ‘west’), the BRICS (economically growing countries), and then the rest. It’s interesting to see put into numbers the inequality between the countries of the world, we always try to take a holistic view, but sometimes that is hard when not everyone is not on equal terms, whether it be economically or socially.

“The most striking insight […] is that most of the population growth has been in the non-OECD world but the world’s economy (GDP) is still strongly dominated by the OECD world […] In 2010 the OECD countries accounted for 74% of global GDP but only 18% of the global population.”

The major problem with this situation is that the upper echelon is now trying to regulate the things that sent us into the Great Acceleration, but the developing countries like China and India will be critical of those ‘leaders.’ When they go through a developing period like the USA and Europe went through, they see it as hypocritical when regulations and restraints are thrown onto them. What I enjoyed about this piece was that it was a purely informative article, riddle with numbers, statistics, and figures. People may argue that sustainability studies may not be “real science,” but I think pieces like this prove otherwise. However, what I did not find compelling was that it didn’t expand upon itself, while I enjoyed the statistics, that’s all it was. There were no recommendations to combat what the Great Accelerating has caused, only that we will eventually find out the final consequences within this century:

“Will the next 50 years bring the Great Decoupling or the Great Collapse? […] But 100 years on from the advent of the Great Acceleration, in 2050, we’ll almost certainly know the answer.”

For me, this article teaches two major points. One, the world is one large, living, breathing network. The actions of a few may impact the whole, but in order to fix the chaos, we will need the cooperation of the whole. And two, if we don’t attempt to control the Great Acceleration, it is going to spiral out of control, as the above quote fears.