History After Us

We’re about to enter a new era of geological time. Or rather, we’re already in it, but it’s about to become official. Maybe you’ve heard of it. It’s called the Anthropocene: the Age of Man.

The idea of the Anthropocene has been floating around for a while. But until recently, that’s all it’s been — an idea. Now a group of experts belonging to the International Geologic Congress, the body that decides how the history of the earth — all 4.54 billion years of it — should be divided up, has formally endorsed the Anthropocene.

All that’s left now is to decide on a starting date, and to agree on a golden spike that would mark it — something in today’s geologic record permanent and widespread enough to act as a durable sign for some far-future geologists to find when they try to plumb the depths of our present folly. A couple of proposals have been floated: a carbon-dioxide spike in the air trapped inside glacial ice. Radioactive isotopes scattered around the world by nuclear testing in the 1950s and ’60s. Spherules of ash from coal-burning electrical plants.

Whatever they choose, the message will be clear. Past geological eras have mostly ended in catastrophe: an asteroid impact, a mass extinction, a sudden onset of glaciation. This time the catastrophe is us. For historians, the opening of an era like this should be a cause for reflection. It’s a moment to think about the speed at which human beings are capable of change, and the scale of time we use when thinking about the future.

The historians Jo Guldi and David Armitage have published a book called The History Manifesto (Cambridge University Press, 2014), in which they argue that historians should expand the frame of their studies by embracing the long view, or longue durée. They envision a future in which historians surf vast temporal sequences of data and act as enlightened referees among disciplines’ competing claims. As someone who has spent years training to be a historian, I love this idea. But, like many of the things I love, it is both vauntingly ambitious and unlikely to come true.

While I doubt this will be the future of the profession — historians aren’t about to be embraced as enlightened referees when even basic scientific claims are increasingly being held in doubt — I agree with Guldi and Armitage about the importance of the longue durée. It’s a concept that was popularized by the great French historian Fernand Braudel. When I entered grad school for history (in what feels like another geological era), one of the first books that made a big impression on me was his The Mediterranean and Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (originally published in French, in 1949; since republished in English by the University of California Press).

Not much read or cited anymore, it remains a masterpiece. Braudel belonged to a group of French historians called the Annales School. They pioneered a way of studying history that looked past immediate events and toward the underlying structures — geographical, economic, demographic, even meteorological — that shaped most of human existence. Think of history as a glass of beer. The way the Annales School looks at it, geography and social structure are the beer and the glass. All that other stuff we think of as history — kings, queens, battles, wars — that’s just the foam.

Braudel taught historians to pay attention to landscape. He showed that it was one thing to toil as a peasant in the fields, and quite another to enjoy the freedom of the mountains. He taught us to think about stasis as much as we do change. Thinking in terms of the longue durée means adjusting one’s imagination to a different pace of history, at which changes unfold incrementally over hundreds, even thousands of years.

Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, the great historian of the French countryside, called this “l’histoire immobile” — history without a motor. This, he wrote, was what history was to most people, most of the time: an endless slow seesaw of demographic boom and bust — a famine here, a boon harvest there, and the slow, grinding hunger for land. This was the world where the introduction of the potato had a greater impact on everyday life than the French Revolution.

What can thinking in terms of the longue durée tell us about the future? For one thing, we should pay closer attention to slowness. The speed of technological change in the present blinds us to the degree to which our 200,000 years or so on the planet has been dominated by stasis.

Take religion. Religions change, but only slowly. Religious conflicts are long-lasting. Anti-Semitism has a history going back 2,400 years. Divisions between Sunnis and Shiites go back all the way to the first decades of Islam, in the seventh century AD. The European wars of religion after the Reformation lasted for more than a century. After hundreds of years, religious conflict in Ireland has settled down, mostly. Will the continuing strife in the Middle East be resolved in our lifetime? Perhaps. But it might well continue for hundreds more years.

Inequalities of race, region, class, or caste are deeply embedded in many societies. Even in countries oriented to their eradication, these inequalities prove remarkably persistent. Forms of government are likewise long-lasting. Monarchy and empire had their long reigns. Now the nation-state reigns supreme, while intergovernmental organizations like the European Union and the United Nations struggle to maintain their footing.

Social systems likewise last a long time. Feudalism had its five or six hundred years in the sun and lingered on for a few hundred more. In some places it lingers still. Capitalism has been around for close to 700 years, since the foundation of the great merchant banks, in Florence, in the 14th century. It’s been doing pretty well, at least by its own terms. One lesson from the 2008 financial disaster is that every-short term shock only seems to add to capitalism’s underlying stability: Crisis, as the economic history of the 19th century teaches us, is baked into the system.

Will capitalism last another 700 years? The possibility is one to be reckoned with.

Even technological change isn’t as fast as we think it is. Moore’s Law says that every 18 months or so, the density of transistors on a microchip will double. This has held roughly true for about 50 years. But in most areas of technology, change isn’t nearly as rapid. Vaclav Smil, an environmental scientist and policy analyst, calls this Moore’s Curse. Increases in energy generation and efficiency, for example, do not double — they inch along, improving by 1 or 2 percent a year.

Changing energy regimes is like turning an ocean tanker around, writes Smil. There’s a lot of infrastructure to replace, and that takes time. There are also serious technical challenges to making green energy genuinely widespread — challenges that we haven’t come close to acknowledging fully.

Recently the environmental activist Bill McKibben wrote an article in The New Republic in which he proposed declaring war on global warming. He suggests tackling the problem the way America fought World War II, through extensive mobilization and government investment. It’s a bold proposal. But not once in his account does McKibben mention another crucial part of that war mobilization on the home front: rationing. Where is the political will for that?

So here’s a prediction — or, because I’m not sure historians should make predictions — a worry. We’ll burn every available thing there is to burn. It’ll take 200 years, or 400, or 600, but eventually all easily available sources of fossil fuels will be used up. The earth will get very hot, and there will be little we can do about it.

Historians can weigh data from the past or make predictions about the future, but there is not much they can do in the face of entrenched systems of consumption. Our extinction will have its chroniclers, but no one will be left to read them.

But even in a worst-case scenario, the longue durée can offer a reason for optimism. After all, the atmosphere has a history of its own, and over the scale of hundreds of millions of years, it’s been quite a turbulent one. Fifty-six million years ago, during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, global temperatures rose 5 degrees Celsius Roughly six hundred million years ago, the whole earth — or at least most of it — froze. Then, at the end of the Permian period, volcanic eruptions heated coal beds, releasing enormous amounts of methane and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and causing temperatures to soar upwards of 10 degrees Celsius. That led to the most severe mass extinction in history. But even so, life survived.

We’re in the process of causing something similar, in a more compressed time frame. Maybe we’ll go extinct. Maybe all the mammals will go extinct. Maybe we’ll screw up so much that even our phylum, the Chordates, will go extinct. But no matter how much we screw up the earth, life will very likely endure. In the longue durée, that is a good thing.

Consider the priapulids, diminutive, carnivorous worms that live buried in the sea floor. They have two sexes, short rectums, and muscular pharynges. Their name, Latin for “little penis,” comes from their supposed resemblance to the male member. Nearly 30 years ago, Stephen Jay Gould speculated in his book Wonderful Life that if things had gone just a little differently 600 million years ago, when the first multicellular organisms were emerging, it might have been the priapulids, and not humans, that eventually inherited the earth.

Priapulids are still around. Why not give them a shot at the evolutionary rodeo? And if not them, maybe another animal phylum, like the indestructible Tardigrades or the wheel-mouthed Rotifers. Would that be so bad?

I’d like to imagine that in 600 million years, some magnificent, sentient representative Rotifer will emerge from the sea with loupe and hammer to examine the strata of some long-eroded cliff. At some point, she’ll come to the golden spike of the Anthropocene. By then the sediment from our era, so rich in ash and carbon spherules, will be compressed to the width of a fingernail. And our civilization, all our striving and fighting and innovating, will be revealed for what it was all along: a gasp, a sigh, a long wet fart vanishing in a cosmic ocean of time.

Jacob Mikanowski is a freelance writer in Berkeley, Calif. For many years he pursued a graduate degree in Eastern European history.