•[three]* Into the Anthropocene: People and Their Planet J. R. McNeill and Peter Engelke Introduction S" MCE the nineteenth century, geologists, earth scientists, evolutionary biologists, and their colleagues have divided the history of the Earth into a series of .i.'j, periods, and epochs. These are based, in a loose sense, on the environmental history of our planet, especially on the twists and turns in the evolution of life on J.ai'th. We are (and have been for a long time) in the Cenozoic era and within that the Quaternary period. And within the Quaternary period, we are in the Holo-a ne epoch, meaning the last twelve thousand years or so. It is defined above all by its (.Innate, an interglacial moment that so far has been agreeably stable compared to what came before. All of what is conventionally understood as human history, including the entire history of agriculture and of civilization, has taken place in the Holocene. Or perhaps one should say it all took place in the Holocene, This chapter takes the view that a new era in the history of the Earth has begun, that the Holocene is over and something new has begun: the Anthropo-cene. The idea of the Anthropocene was popularized by the Dutch atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen, who won a Nobel Prize in 1995 for his work on depletion of the ozone layer in the stratosphere. The changing composition of the atmosphere, especially the well-documented increase in carbon dioxide, seemed to Crutzen so dramatic and so potentially consequential for life on Earth that he concluded that a new stage had begun in Earth history, one in which humankind had emerged as the most powerful influence upon global ecology. The crux of the concept is just that: a new era in which human actions overshadow the quiet persistence of microbes and the endless wobbles and eccentricities in the Earth's orbit and therefore define the age.1 Crutzen and colleagues argued that the Anthropocene began in the eighteenth century, with the onset of both the fossil fuel energy regime and the modern rise of global population.2 The use of coal was becoming integral to economic life in Brit-•T"i by the 1780s, and it would thereafter play a larger and larger role in the world ^■norny. New technologies and new energy demand led to the exploitation of J. R. MCNEILL AND PETER ENGELKE INTO THE ANTHROPOCENE other fossil fuels, namely oil and natural gas. By the 1890s, half of global cnc use came in the form of fossil fuels, and by 2010 that share had climbed to ncarlv •■ 80 percent. Modern history has unfurled in the context of a fossil fuel ene:^,-regime, and of exponential growth in energy use. Modern history also played out amid runaway population growth. In ir-about 800 to 900 million humans walked the Earth. By 1930 there were souk two billion, and by 2.011 just short of seven billion. No primate, perhaps ik.i mammal, has ever enjoyed such a frenzy of reproduction and survival in the !ii tory of life on Earth. There is nothing in the demographic history of our specif anything like the modern rise of population, nor will there be again. How these surges of energy use and population growth will evolve in the f ture is anyone's guess. In any case, since the eighteenth century the human sj cies has embarked on a bold new venture with no analogues anywhere in hisu ■■ ■. Within that span, the last two or three human generations have seen a screeching acceleration of most of the trends that define the Anthropocene. For exam] three-quarters of the human-caused loading of the atmosphere with carbon dio-ide took place between 1945 and 2.011. The number of motor vehicles on Earth creased from 40 million to Soo million. The number of people nearly tripled, am the number of city-dwellers rose from about 700 million to 3.5 billion. This period since 1945 corresponds roughly to the average life expectancy oi ■ human being. Only one in ten persons now alive can remember anythingbefoi 1945. The entire life experience of almost everyone now living has taken phi* e within what appears to be the climactic moment of the Anthropocene and is c. tainly the most anomalous and unrepresentative period in the quarter-millii . year history of relations between our species and the biosphere. That shoi make us all skeptical of expectations that any particular current trends will I.isl i. for long.5 Nonetheless, the Anthropocene, barring catastrophe, is set to continue. Human beings will go on exercising influence over their environments and over global ecology far out of proportion to their numbers and far overshadowing j^,.. that of other species. But just how, and for how long, humans will do so is unc< tain. In the fullness of time the Anthropocene may prove too brief to seem win-thy as a geological epoch. The International Union of Geological Sciences i1-wrestling with whether or not to recognize the Anthropocene formally in irs •[ 366 ]■ scientific scheme. Time will tell. With luck and restraint on our part, the Anthropocene might last as long as some earlier geologic epochs. The Shift to Fossil Fuels -\ll historical developments have tangled roots. Those of the Anthropocene extend deep into the past, although just how deep is open to question. People in Ch ina and England used fossil fuels in medieval times. But as late as 1750 there was no sign that fossil fuels would become, within 150 years, the centerpiece of the world's energy system. According to one controversial hypothesis, human action— land clearing for agriculture—has affected climate for eight thousand years, preventing a return to Ice Age conditions. If true, this is a deep taproot of the Anthropocene.'' We will skip over the deepest (and most tenuous) roots of the Anthropocene, such as the harnessing of fire and domestication of plants, to focus on the transitional stage from 1700 to 1950, during which time humankind shifted from an organic economy to one driven by fossil fuels, from slow and spotty demographic and economic growth to rapid and persistent growth, from mainly modest and localized impacts on the environment to deep and pervasive ones. In 1700 the Earth was home to perhaps 600 or 700 million people, roughly half the population of China today, or twice the population of the United States. Nearly 80 percent of them lived in Eurasia. Almost all were by today's standards desperately poor, more at the mercy of the environment than masters of it. They lived in fear of bad harvests and brutal epidemics, over which they had scant control and which they typically understood as divine retribution. They did their best to shape the world to suit their preferences. The only efficient means they had for this task was fire. They routinely ignited forests or bush to prepare the way for fields or pasture, as their ancestors had long done before them. Beyond fire, they had the muscle power of domesticated animals and their own limbs with which to sculpt the earth, drain marshes, build cities, and do all ■the things people then could do that changed the environment. Their direct impacts were for the most part slow and small, mostly amounting to further extensions of agriculture into lands formerly left uncultivated: newly terraced mountainsides in Morocco, drained fenlands in England, crops in place of jungle in ■[ 367 ]■ J. R. MCNEILL AND PETER ENGELKE Bengal, rice paddies carved out of South China hillsides, new clearings for. ,n sava in Angola, and sugarcane fields installed in Jamaica.5 These changes cojU seem dramatic on the local scale. Globally they were tiny and were sometimes I offset by land abandonment resulting from war or epidemics. In the Ame. t for example, the demographic catastrophe that followed the arrival of Europeans! in 1492.—a population decline of 50 to 90 percent within a century—mcam :n.u many formerly agricultural landscapes were turning to wilderness in 1700 Ui ; put more precisely, they were supporting new patterns of spontaneous veger.i: ion : and wildlife in accord with the processes of ecological succession. Similar tluv--, happened more locally wherever protracted wats drove farming folk away, ,r, in many patches of Central Europe during the Thirty Years' Wat (1618-164$), Despite their limited technologies, these 600 million earthlings had ',ciik powerful, if indirect, environmental effects. The main reason for that was modern globalization, the knitting together of the world's coasts through oceanic navigation. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, maritime voyaging— especially in the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, but to some extent in the Pacific j too—linked societies and ecosystems formerly kept separate by the broai 1 c\-!" panses of blue water. The most dramatic consequence of early modern globalization was the sp.ca J of infectious diseases to new lands and populations. In the Americas, South Africa, i Australia, and New Zealand this led to horrific epidemics and radical depopulation. Gradually, however, diseases spread so widely that more and more infections became endemic—or childhood diseases—and epidemics grew rarer. Tins "microbial unification of the world" often brought higher infant and child mortality, but because many diseases are more dangerous to adults than to children, over time it lowered overall disease mortality. In addition, it may have led tn :j proved generic resistance to infections, as survivors reproduced more often thin those most susceptible to disease. The rate of global population growth began a long upswing in the eighteenth century, partly as a result.6 No one understood the process at the time, no one intended it, and no one could predict that miuo-bial unification would help pave the way for the Anthropocene. The upturn in population growth also owed something to the early modern globalization of food crops. The peoples of the Americas suffered heavily troiu the globalization of infection, but they benefited from the arrival of wheat, bar- •[ 368 1- 0 INTO THE ANTHROPOCENE lev. bananas, oranges, apples, and dozens of other foodstuffs. Some of these could mow where no native American species would, and others yielded far better than did indigenous crops. So the food supply of the hemisphere improved, and conditions wcre set f°r rapid population growth—much of it in the form of immigrants, voluntary and involuntary, from Western Europe, West Africa, and Angola. At the same time, newly introduced American crops improved the food supply in Europe, Asia, and Africa. Potatoes, maize, and cassava (also known as manioc) did well in environments that were unsuitable for native crops in Eurasia and Africa. Potatoes sustained population growth in northern Europe, and maize had similar effects in hilly parts of China. Maize and manioc became important crops in Africa, although what the possible effects may have been upon population remain uncertain due to lack of data. In the nineteenth century, medicine and science too came to have a strong impact on population growth. The earlier improvements in food supply and the reduction in the roll of epidemics had owed very little to science. Now improved knowledge of disease transmission, and of the chemistry of soils and plants, led to a train of developments that relaxed constraints on population growth. Probably the most important was sanitation and the control of waterborne diseases such as ityphoid, cholera, and dysentery. Improved transport played a role too, as railroads and steamships made it practical to ship grain from distant frontiers in America or Australia to lands where population threatened to outstrip local food production. Population crept ever upward in the nineteenth century and the early twentieth. Even the death tolls of the world wars could scarcely slow this trend. Economic growth as well as the modern rise of population helped push us into the Anthropocene. The world economy grew timidly before 1700, at which point it was only about half the size of Mexico's today.7 It thrived in the following centuries, due partly to population growth, partly to technological advances, and partly to the efficiencies arising from specialization and exchange on an increasingly global scale—what economists often call Smithian growth. By 1950, despite the setbacks of the world wars and the Great Depression of the 1930s, the world economy was about fourteen times bigger than it had been in 1700. Economic growth on this scale required considerable environmental change. Lumberjacks felled forests to provide timber for construction of all sorts. Peasants and slaves toiled to convert land into cotton plantations to feed textile industries. •f 369 1- } J, An Indian coal miner carrying a basket-load of coal, ca. 1950. Coal and other fossil fuels, such as oil and natural gas, powered the world's economy after 1945 but entailed major public health and environmental costs associated with extraction and use. (Getty Images) Miners scraped the bowels of the earth to provide tin, copper, iron, and other ; | ores for metallurgy. Engineers straightened rivers for navigation and diverted ; \ their waters for agriculture as never before. And of course, farmers plowed mou' ! and more land around the world to feed themselves and their ever more numer- «|§| | ous neighbors. By dine of our economic activity, humankind had inadvertent h ;~* " become a geological force, shaping the face of the Earth. INTO THE ANTHROPOCENE ■V Much of that economic activity resulted from the adoption of fossil fuels. In 1700 people used almost no fossil fuels. But that soon changed. Although used only in parts of the world, coal gradually became the most important energy source, in the aggregate, over the century between 1790 and 1890. By 1910, oil had also entered the energy picture. Together, coal and oil soon amounted to three-fourths of human energy use. They allowed far more economic activity, wealth, consumption, and ease than people had ever known—and far more disruption to the biosphere. By 1945, although most people had still never seen a lump of coal or a drop of oil, die world was firmly in the age of fossil fuels. The adoption of fossil fuels, iuore than any other single shift, inaugurated the Anthropocene. •f 370 1- INTO THE ANTHROPOCENE i. Energy and Population ENERGY is a vexingly abstract concept. The word is derived from a term apparently invented by Aristotle to signify movement or work. Modern physicists have gotten only a bit further than the venerable Greek. They believe that energy exists in finite quantity in the Universe but in several different forms. Enerey can be neither created nor destroyed, but it can be converted from one form .o another. For instance, when you eat an apple, you convert chemical energy (the apple) into bodily heat, into muscular motion, and into other forms of chemical energy (your bones and tissues).8 The Earth is awash in energy. Almost all comes from the Sun. For human pui-poses, the main forms of energy are heat, light, motion, and chemical energy. The Sun's payload comes chiefly in the form of heat and light. A third of this is instantly reflected back into space, but most lingers for a while, warming land, »c. J: and air. A little of the light is absorbed by plants and converted into chemical energy through photosynthesis. Every energy conversion results in some loss of useful energy. Plants on aver-;; age manage to capture less than i percent of the energy delivered by the Sun. TV rest is dissipated, mainly as heat. But what plants absorb is enough to grow, each year, about no billion tons of biomass in the sea and another izo billion tons f u land. Animals eat a small proportion of that, converting it into body heat, motion, and new tissues. And a small share of those new animal tissues is eaten r\, carnivores. At each of these trophic levels, well under to percent of available ~n-l ergy is successfully harvested. So the great majority of incoming energy is lost to: no earthly purpose. But the Sun is so generous, there is still plenty to go arou nd.v Until the harnessing of fire, our ancestors took part in this web of energy and life without being able to change it. The only energy available to them was w hat; they could find to eat. Once armed with fire, perhaps half a million years v; our hominin ancestors could harvest more energy, both in the form of otherwise;, indigestible foods that cooking now rendered edible, and in the form of heat. Fire also helped them scavenge and hunt more efficiently, enhancing their access to chemical energy in the form of meat. This low-energy economy remained in place, with some modest changes, until agriculture began about ten thousand years ago. Growing crops and raising animals allowed ancient farmers to harvest considerably more energy than their forebears could. Grain crops are the seeds of grasses such as rice, wheat, or maize, and are packed with energy (and protein). So, with farming, a given patch of land provided far more usable energy for human bodies than it could without farming, perhaps ten to one hundred times more. Big domesticated animals, although they needed huge quantities of feed, could convert the otherwise nearly useless vegetation of steppe, savanna, or swampland into usable energy, helpful for pulling plows (oxen, water buffalo) or for transport (horses, camels). Farming slowly became widespread, although never universal. Eventually, watermills and windmills added a little more to the sum of energy available for human purposes. Watermills might be two thousand years old and windmills one thousand. In suitable locations, where water flowed reliably or reasonably steady winds blew, these devices could do the work of several men. But in most places, wind and flowing water were either too rare or too erratic. So the energy regime remained organic, based on human and animal muscle for mechanical power, and on wood and other biomass for heat. Tire organic energy regime lasted until the eighteenth century. Then in late eighteenth-century England the harnessing of coal exploded the constraints of the organic energy regime. With fossil fuels, humankind gained access to eons of frozen sunshine—maybe 500 million years' worth of prior photosynthesis. Early efforts to exploit this subsidy from the deep past were inefficient. Early steam engines, in converting chemical energy into heat and then into motion, wasted 99 percent of the energy fed into them. But incremental improvements led to machines that by the 1950s wasted far less energy than did photosynthesis or carnivory. In this sense, culture had improved upon nature. The enormous expansion of energy use in recent decades beggars the imagination. By about 1S70 we used more fossil fuel energy each year than the annual global production from all photosynthesis. Our species has probably used more energy since 1910 than in all of prior human history. In the half century before *95o, global energy use slightly more than doubled. Then in the next half century, •[ 373 ]■ J. R. MCNEILL AND PETER ENGELKE i . \ \ TABLE 3.1 j \ Global commercial energy mix, 2010 Type of energy % Oil 34% Coal 30% Natural gas 14% Hydroelectric 694 Nuclear 5% Data source: BP StatisticalReview of WorldEnergy>}\inc zon. it quintupled from the 1950s level. The energy crisis of the 1970s—two sharp oil '■ price hikes in 1973 and 1979—slowed but did not stop this dizzying climb in rln. : use of fossil sunshine. Since 1950 we have burned around 50 million to 150 mil : lion years'worth of fossil sunshine. The fossil fuel energy regime contained several phases. Coal outstripped bi< mass to become the world s primary fuel by about 1890. King coal reigned . about seventy-five years, before ceding the throne to oil in about 1965. Lat natural gas has grown in importance, so that in 2010 the world's energy■■■.■mi looked as shown in Table 3.1. ; These data do not include biomass, for which figures are sketchy. But the Ixsr guess is that it accounts for perhaps 15 percent of the grand total, fossil fueis fc about 75 percent, and hydroelectricity and nuclear power together for about 1 percent. King oils reign, now forty-five years in duration, will likely prove a brief as coal's, but that remains to be seen. We have used about one trillion bai- : rels of oil since commercial production began around i860, and now use ;.bour ' 32 billion barrels yearly.' The global totals belie tremendous variation in energy use around the work In the early twenty-first century, the average North American used about s enty times as much energy as the average Mozambican. The figures since 1965, 1 Table 3.2, speak volumes about the rise of China and India, and about the discn bution of wealth within the world. INTO THE ANTHROPOCENE TABLE 3.1 Annual energy consumption, 1965-2011 (in millions of tons of oil equivalent) Year World China India USA Japan Egypt 1965 3.813 181 53 1,184 149 8 1975 5,761 337 Si 1,698 319 10 1985 7.150 533 133 1,763 368 18 1995 8,545 S»7 2.36 1,117 489 38 3.005 10,565 1,42.9 361 1,341 510 61 1009 11,164 1,177 469 1,181 464 76 1010 11,978 1,403 521 1,278 503 81 101 I 12,175 1,613 559 2,169 477 83 Data source: BP Statistical Review of World Energy, June toio and June ion. Nttte: Amounts arc for commercial energy only, not biomass, which might add 10 to i$ percent. In 1960, most of the world outside of Europe and North America still used little energy. The energy-intensive way of life extended to perhaps one-fifth of the world's population. But late in the twentieth century that pattern, in place since 1880 or so, changed quickly. In the forty-five years after 1965, China increased its energy use by 12 times, India by 9, Egypt by 9 or 10. Meanwhile US energy use rose by about 40 percent. The United States accounted for a third of the world's energy consumption in 1965, but only a fifth in 2009; China accounted for only . 5 percent in 1965, but a fifth in 2009, and in 2010 surpassed the United States to become the world's largest energy user. In sum, the burgeoning rate of energy use in modern history makes our time wildly different from anything in the human past. The fact that for about a century after 1850 high energy use was confined to Europe and North America, and to a lesser extent to Japan, is the single most important reason behind the political and economic dominance these regions enjoyed in the international system. Since 1965 the total use of energy has continued to climb at only slightly diminished rates, but the great majority of the expansion has taken place outside of 1.1 rope and America, mainly in East Asia. •[ 374 J- •[ 375 ]" J. R. MCNEILL AND PETER ENGELKE Fossil Fuel Energy and the Environment The creation and spread of fossil fuel society was the most environmentally const quential development of modern times. Part of the reason for that lies in the ditee t effects of the extraction, transport, and combustion of coal, oil, and (to a much lesser extent) natural gas. These were (and are) mainly a matter of air, wccc.-, .im| soil pollution. The other part resides in the indirect effects of cheap and abundant energy: it enabled many activities that otherwise would have been uneconomic and would not have happened, or perhaps would have happened but only .midi more slowly. Extracting fossil energy from the crust of the Earth has always been a messv business. Coal, mined commercially in over seventy countries since 1945, had dx most widespread impacts. Deep mining brought changes to land, air, and w.uci. Carving galleries out from beneath the surface honeycombed the Earth in coal districts such as South Wales, the Ruhr, eastern Kentucky, the Donetsk 13a sin, and Shaanxi Province. Occasionally underground mines collapsed, as in the Saarland (Germany) in 1008, producing a small earthquake. In China, as nf 2005, subsidence due to coal mines affected an area the size of Switzerland. Mint-tailings and slag heaps disfigured the landscape around coal mines. In China (b-2,005) coal mine slag covered an area the size of New Jersey or Israel. Every ivh.-i tailings and slag leached sulfuric acid into local waters. In some Pennsylvanl and Ohio waterways, acidic liquids from mine drainage had killed off acuati life by the 1960s, although in some spots life has since returned. Deep mir.ir. also often put extra methane in the atmosphere, adding perhaps 5 to 6 percent 01 top of the natural releases of this potent greenhouse gas. Deep mining has always put people in dangerous environments. In Chin: for example, where roughly one hundred thousand small mines opened up dm ing the Great Leap Forward (1958-1961), mining accidents killed about six thou sand men annually at that time, and at least that many yearly in the 1990s. In ch United Kingdom in 1961, about forty-two hundred men died in mine accident* In the United States, the most dangerous year for coal miners was 1907 >■ h 1 more than three thousand died; since 1990, annual deaths have ranged from 1! to 66. Today about two thousand coal miners die from accidents each year it China, several times the figure for Russia or India. Black lung disease, a ccnsi' •[ 376 ]• INTO THE ANTHROPOCENE quence of years spent underground inhaling coal dust, killed far more wherever coal was mined.10 Surface mining, often called strip mining in the United States, was far safer for miners. It began with simple tools centuries ago, but steam technology made it more practical in the early twentieth century. After 1945, new excavation equipment and cheap oil ushered in a golden age of strip mining. Today it accounts for about 40 percent of coal mining worldwide, and outside of China is usually much more common than deep mining. In surface mining, which is practical to depths of nearly 50 meters, big machines claw away earth and rock above coal seams, destroying vegetation and soils. In the United States it aroused fervent opposition in many communities, which provoked federal regulation after 1977. Since that time, mining companies have been legally obliged to fund landscape restoration. One particularly unpopular variant of strip mining was "mountaintop removal," practiced especially in those parts of Kentucky and West Virginia that had low-sulfur coal. High energy prices in the 1970s made these procedures lucrative as never before. Tighter air pollution laws in the 1990s, which made using high-sulfur coal more difficult, added to the economic logic of mountaintop removal. Blasting the tops off the Appalachians had many environmental consequences, none so important as the filling in of streams and valleys with waste rock ("overburden"), which buried forests and streams and led to accelerated erosion and occasional landslides. Mountaintop removal, and surface mining generally, aroused spirited opposition from the 1930s onward and made environmentalists out of ordinary rural people Throughout Appalachia. Their farms, fishing streams, and hunting grounds were sacrificed for coal production. In the 1960s and 1970s, opposition to strip mining reached its height in Appalachia, proving divisive in communities where mining companies offered most of the few jobs around. But the practice of mountaintop removal remained economic, and lasted into the twenty-first century.11 Drilling for oil brought different environmental issues but no less discord. In the early twentieth century, oil drilling occurred in many heavily populated places, including East Texas, southern California, central Romania, the city of Baku, and die then-Austrian province of Galicia. Gushers, spills, and fires menaced hearth and -lome. But by midcentury the technologies of drilling and storage had improved, •[ 377 ]■ J. R. MCNEILL AND PETER ENGELKE INTO THE ANTHROPOCENE so that oil fields were no longer necessarily the oleaginous equivalent of the Augean stables. And production increasingly shifted to places where people wen few, such as Saudi Arabia and Siberia, so the consequences of oil pollution be^ came less costly—at least in economic and political terms. But the hike in energy prices of the 1970s inspired oil drilling in new and often challenging environments, including the seafloor, tropical forests, and the Arctic. Leaks, accidents, and blowouts became more common, thanks to Arctic cold and deep-sea pressures. Crude oil except in small concentrations is toxic tc most forms of life and is extremely hard to clean up. By 1005 the world had some forty thousand oil fields, none of them free from pollution. Routine drilling involved building new infrastructure, moving heavy equipment sometimes weighing thousands of tons, and splashing vast quantities of oil and contaminated water into the surrounding environment. In the decades after 1980, about 3c million tons (or 2.40 million barrels) of oil dripped and squirted into the environment every year, about two-fifths of it in Russia.12 Offshore drilling, pioneered in California waters in the 1890s, remained cc 11 fined to shallow waters for many decades. In the 1910s the practice spread to Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela, and to the Caspian Sea—both enduringly polluted a, & result—and in the 1930s to the Gulf of Mexico. Technological advances, and the huge pools of investment capital available to oil companies from the 1940s on, opened new offshore frontiers in deeper waters. By the 1990s deepwater platforms dotted the North Sea, the Gulf of Mexico, and the coasts of Brazil, Nigeria, Angola, Indonesia, and Russia, among others. Big platforms stood over 600 meta-. above water, rivaling the tallest skyscrapers. Offshore drilling operations were inherently risky. When hit by tropic.il storms or errant tankers, rigs splashed oil into the surrounding seas. The woisr accidents occurred in the Gulf of Mexico. In 1979 a rig operated by the Motion state oil company suffered a blowout and spewed oil for more than nine month* before it was successfully capped. Some 3.3 million barrels escaped (equivalent ui about six hours' worth of US oil use in 1979). It resulted in a surface oil sliclx roughly the size of Lebanon or Connecticut that ruined some Mexican fishwic-and damaged Texan ones.13 In April 2.010 the Deepwater Horizon, an oil platform leased by BP, exploded and sank, killing eleven workers and springing a leak some 1,500 meters below ■[ 378 ]■ the waves on the seafloor off the Louisiana coast. It defied all containment efforts for more than three months. Some five million barrels in all spewed into clie Gulf, the largest accidental oil spill in world history. The coastal wetlands ecosystems and what in previous years had been tourist-filled beaches of the Gulf Coast sopped up some of the wandering oil. Tar balls and oil washed up on the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida. Fisheries ceased operations, and dead and damaged birds began to pile up. One of the victims was the Louisiana brown pelican, once brought to the edge of extinction by DDT in the 1950s and 1960s. Conservation work had given the brown pelican second life to the point where in Z009 it migrated off the federal endangered species list. In the first two months of the BP spill, 40 percent of the known population of brown pelicans died oily deaths. Some forty-eight thousand temporary workers and an armada of vessels not seen since D-Day tried to limit the ecological damage, Oceanographers and marine biologists will be assessing the spill's impacts for years, and lawyers will be kept busy for decades ascertaining who will be held responsible and just how tens of billions of dollars will change hands.14 In the Gulf of Mexico, small spills occurred daily, huge ones every few years, but nothing yet matches the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Drilling for oil in the forests of Ecuador presented different challenges from offshore environments. In the remote upper reaches of the Amazon watershed, in northeastern Ecuador, a Texaco-Gulf consortium struck oil in 1967. Over the next half century, the region yielded over two billion barrels of crude oil, most of it sent by pipeline over the Andes, making Ecuador the second largest oil exporter of South America and keeping its government solvent. To operate in the rainforest, the consortium, and Ecuador's national oil company, which took over all operations by 1991, had to build new infrastructure of roads, pipelines, pumping stations, and so forth. Almost unencumbered by regulation, drilling in Ecuador took an especially casual course. Vast quantities of toxic liquids were dumped (or leaked) into the streams and rivers, creating the unhappy irony that in one of the most water-rich provinces on Earth, many people have no potable water. Inevitably, accidents happened. In 1989 enough oil spilled into the Rio Napo, which is about 1 kilometer wide, to turn it black for a week.15 Part of the local indigenous population, mobile forager-hunters called Hua-orani, tried to fight off the oil invasion. Armed only with spears, the Huaorani •[ 379 ]■ r INTO THE ANTHROPOCENE An exploratory oil-drilling sice in the Ecuadorian rainforest. Pollution from oil extraction inEcs dor and other oil-producing regions led to fierce environmental struggles between foreign coinp'ah and local populations. (© G. Bowater/Corbis) failed and were relocated by the government. Other indigenous groups in Ecuador have struggled, usually unsuccessfully, to keep oil production at bay. A«.con ing to some epidemiologists, the populations living near the oil fields have thuv. elevated rates of diseases, notably cancer. Oil revenues proved so tempting to the Ecuadorian state that it schcnV.Ii two-thirds of its Amazonian territory for oil and gas exploration. By 2.00s it h: leased most of that, including blocks within the Yasuni National Park. In con- H ventional calculations, it made sense for Ecuador (and for oil companies) to make money from oil drilling in Oriente (as Ecuadorians call it), because the indigen0US peoples whose lives it disrupted contributed next to nothing to the state. Likewise the ecosystems of western Amazonia, among the worlds most biologically rich and diverse, produced little that the state valued. Identical logic prevailed in Peru, although its government did not permit drilling in national parks. In 2.010, Ecuador and the UN Development Program (UNDP) cut a deal whereby a trust fund would pay Ecuador $3.6 billion not to produce oil in one of the Yasuni National Park blocks, where nearly a billion barrels of oil lay, preserving (for the time being) broad swaths of rainforest. Nigerian authorities showed instant interest in this novel arrangement, and with good reason.16 The Niger Delta region of southeast Nigeria, a patchy rainforest area, and one of the world's biggest wetlands, is a maze of creeks, marshes, and lagoons with once-rich fisheries. As in Oriente, the population of the Niger Delta is divided among several ethnic groups, notably the Ijaw, Igbo, and Ogoni. Unlike Oriente, it is densely populated, home to several million people. Shell and BP began oil operations here in the 1950s, happy to find a low-sulfur crude that is easy to refine into gasoline. Other companies followed, creating some 160 oil fields and 7,000 kilometers of pipelines. For decades, tankers filled up on crude where centuries before wooden ships had loaded slaves. The Nigerian government, in what could well be an understatement, recorded about seven thousand oil spills between 1976 and 2005 in the Delta, involving some three million barrels of crude.17 Some of the spills resulted from routine accidents, normal in the industry but especially frequent in the Delta cine to poor maintenance and challenging conditions, both geographic and political. Others were acts of sabotage undertaken by locals, some of whom were seeking revenge for something, others of whom sought extortion or compensation payments from oil companies. The Niger Delta was, and remains, one of the poorest parts of Nigeria despite the several billions of dollars' worth of oil pumped out. For most residents, oil production made life harder. Dredging canals tor oil exploration eliminated much of the mangrove swamp in which fish spawned, which together with oil pollution undercut a long-standing source of sustenance in the Delta. Air pollution and acid rain, largely from gas flares at oil wells, damaged crops. In the early 1990s the United Nations declared the Niger •[ 38o ]• J. R. MCNEILL AND PETER ENGELKE INTO THE ANTHROPOCENE Delta the world's most ecologically endangered delta. Locals felt (and feel) thji their natural wealth has been either destroyed or stolen by foreign company and the Nigerian state, whose leadership has shown remarkable persistence in skimming off oil wealth. Resulting frustrations fed both liberation movement-, of local minorities and criminal syndicates. Lately Nigeria and its multinational partners have emphasized drilling offshore, where there is no local populmion :