Humans and Fire
- Fire is one of our fundamental tools
- Fire is a unique product (or possibility) of the Cambrian
explosion of life.
o Fire = fuel + oxygen + spark = sustained chemical
reaction
o Fuel (organic chemical energy) only became possible after
land plant evolution
o Fire is thus about 500 million years old on Earth
o Humans may have begun to control it 1 to 2 million years
ago
- Natural fires occur frequently where humans likely evolved
(African savanna)
- Controlling fire has 3 rough stages: opportunistic (using it while
it still burns from a natural process), conserving it (maintaining
natural fires for longer periods), and acquiring the technology of
kindling (the real revolution). The transition of these occurred
over a million or more years.
- Fire, tools, and presumed language all are suspected of
appearing at about the same time in human history (tools likely
the earliest)
- The Quest for Fire puts you in the place and time of people who
see kindling for the first time.
- Fire has helped transform the Biosphere and us
- Many plant species are adopted to, or need fire, for their
ecology
- Grasslands are sometimes favored over forests due to fire
frequency
- Humans have likely used fire management of landscapes for a
long time
o Clear habitat
o Create more defensable space
o Ease of travel
o Get rid of competitors
o Hunting
o Favor certain plants
- North America heavily impacted by fire before the European
contact.
- How fire benefits us and early humans
o Cooking (less chewing, better nutrition, more foods,
development of social stratification)
o Protection
o Light
o Warmth (we do not have much hair anymore)
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o Weapons
o Land management
- Feedback on our evolution (fire)
o More varied diet
o More calories for bigger brains
o Big brains allows us to get more food and have bigger
brains
o May have made us more social (nighttime conversation,
myths, story telling, sharing of history)
- fire is consistent with our acquiring more energy and becoming
the most complex thing (energy wise) in the universe
- we use (industrial humans) twice the energy of a whale, and
have correspondingly low birth rates and long lives – energy
use corresponds to reduction in population growth
- We continue to acquire energy, now through the burning of
other fuels
- “Our pact with fire made us what we are”
- We can be born “prematurely” due to our ability to care for
infants (and allow their brains to grow) due to our ability to
harness energy
Note also: fire helped early South American inhabitants shape the
Amazon forests, and create soils (called Terra Preta) that improved
farming productivity. Just one of many things that make the “pre
Columbian” New World an already “used” and human shaped
biosphere.
Humans and Agriculture
- tools (~ 2.5 My), fire (~1 My), agriculture (~10,000 y)
- relative human cultural time scale: paleolithic, mesolithic,
neolithis, bronze age, iron age, today….
- what caused it remains uncertain: a mix of population increases,
environment changes, extinction of large wild animals,
competition, luck
- We are still genetically dominated by our hunter-gatherer
background
o Both dietary and psychologically (sometimes to our
disadvantage in a modern world)
o We HAVE also adapted genetically to agriculture
- The key steps or innovations to agriculture:
o Developing food storage
o Domesticating plants
o Domesticating animals
- Some lessons from Guns, Germs, and Steel
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o Very few animals and plants are capable of being
successfully domesticated (at least without modern
genetics)
o These species are restricted to certain geographic
locations
-
o The luck of geography helped certain peoples develop
agriculture while others still followed (and still follow)
hunting and gathering
o There is likely an effect of geography on the transfer and
expansion of agriculture: due to similar day length and
climate, it is usually easier to transfer agriculture E to W
rather than N to S. Thus, we in North American subsist on
largely a diet from the ancient fertile crescent.
o Our agriculture changed us genetically:
We developed abilities to digest new foods (milk into
adulthood, carbohydrates, alcohol, fats, sugars,
more salt)
We developed immunity to diseases that spread
from our livestock to us
Our germs helped Europeans conquer the New
World (more than guns and steel)
- The ancient sites of ag development do not always correspond
to our present world due to both climate change and land
degradation by early farmers.
- Be able to explain to someone how we domesticated a plant like
oats, and how we may have domesticated wolves into dogs.
- Know the seven characteristics which (any one of them) prevent
a species from being successfully domesticated
- How has domestication changed the animals we domesticated?
(5 ways)
- Agriculture developed independently in at least 9 (or more)
areas at different times (not just in fertile crescent)
- The difference between origin of “temperate” vs. “tropical”
diseases
- What are a list of negative impacts on the early farming
societies (or even up until the 20th century?)
Domestication
- Conscious and unconscious
- Wolves to dogs (unconscious), early plant varieties
(unconscious), plant breeding etc (conscious and fast).
- One plant (mustard) is artificially selected to produce cabbage,
kael, cauliflower, broccoli.
- How have we “genetically domesticated” ourselves?
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Our height over time
- We are now back at our pre-ag heights!
- Post industrial revolution increase in height
- Long agricultural decline in human height
-
The Hunter-Gatherer/Ag Transition
- Not always inevitable or desireable
- The tension is part of our collective myths and stories (even if
we fail to recognize it today)
- Not always a positive impact on people
- Led to a prolonged period in human history where a vast
population of farmers provided the energy for a
ruling/intellectual/military elite
- For a ruler to acquire more energy (the underpinnings of power)
required either more farmers or else the conquering of another
society (and the acquisition of their energy)
The Anthropocene Concept
- We use 16/60th of worlds NPP
- the last threshold in the Big History concept
- corresponds with the Modern or Industrial revolution
- a number of factors (energy, innovations in technology such as
steam engines) created an increase in societal complexity
- As with the other thresholds, the increase in complexity is
accompanied by a greater flow of energy through the system of
interest (in this case, human society)
- The term “Anthropocene” was coined independently by two
people, but was largely introduced to society by the Nobel prize
winning chemist Paul Crutzen.
- The idea of the Anthropocene is a new geological epoch. This
would, if it is formally adopted (a likely possibility) , replace the
present Holocene as our present epoch.
- The rationale for an epoch change are earth changes that rival
past geological catastrophes: climate, land change, marine
change, mass extinction
- Recent geological research suggests we began changing the
global CO2 and methane concentrations almost 5000 years ago,
staving off what likely would have been a slow transition into
the next glacial cycle
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Wildfire and Humans
- UCB has much expertise in this area
- Fire is the intersection of 3 requirements: fuel, oxygen, and a
spark (heat)
- Global fire only started after land plants (the Cambrian
explosion)
- Once humans got bigger brains some ~ 1 million years ago (and
grasslands increased) evidence of fire increases
- The Columbian exchange temporarily reduced global fire (due to
extermination of Native Populations)
- Much of our “natural” landscape has frequently burned before
the 19th and 20th centuries.
- Pre-Columbus, it is likely that 1.8 million acres of California
burned naturally or by human activity each year (about the
same as this year)
- Smoke was common each year (like this year)
- California suffers from years (and policies) of fire suppression
coupled with the additional stress of longer, hotter, and
sometimes drier fire seasons
- Managing for wild fire: better ecologically based forest
management and fuel reduction, better zoning and zoning
requirements to prevent houses in fire prone areas (or with fire
protection strategies), use of modern warning systems
Anthropocene and Climate Change
- why is a stable climate so important to human society?
- How long have we been accustomed to a stable climate?
- Are we immune as a society or civilization to changes in
climate ?
- What role did/is climate change believed to be playing in the
recent and on-going Syrian political crisis?
- What fundamental belief must we relinquish if we are to survive
and thrive in a world of change (according to your NYTimes
articles)
- Science has more than a 150 year history of understanding or
recognizing past climate changes and understanding how
chemistry impact the atmosphere and climate
- Climate history recognition:
o glacial deposits and feature on landscape (moraines, large
boulders) in 19th and earth 20th centuries
- James Hutton recognized evidence of glaciers, but Louis Agassiz
at Harvard was one of first to fully study and outline the history
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- Do we have glacial features in California? – and what are they?
- Tyndall, Foote, Henry, and Fourier all contributed to our
understanding that gases can retain heat. Arrhenius made
calculations of the effect of doubling atmospheric CO2 (which
we are on pace to achieve within a century)
- What are the 3 types of “wobbles” in the Earth’s orbital
configuration tha contribute to the amount of sun energy we
receive?
- Who was Milankovitch?
- How does polar ice form?
- What chemical information about climate is contained in an ice
core?
- Read Greenland is Melting
- Ice contains: (1) O isotope record in its molecules of the
temperature that the snow formed and (2) bubbles of air that
contain samples of the earth’s atmosphere at the time the ice
formed.
- What key feature do we see when we compare today’s CO2
(what is the concentration today?), CH4 and N2O with that of
the past 800,000 years?
- What can you say about the ways we know about this record,
and what it means for today’s (and this century’s) society?
- Be able to list or identify one or two ways that the global Co2,
CH4, and N20 cycles are out of balance due to human activities.
- What is a GCM? How long have they been around?
- GCM’s are made by many teams, and are now well established
in science
- what do GCM’s predict for earth surface temperature in your
life time?
- What is the “global temperature hockey stick”?
- What does the recent and continuous change in earth surface
temperature have to do with what some people call
“Environmental Amnesia”?
- Why does Environmental Amnesia make it harder for society to
address environmental change?
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- How can such a seemingly large and intractable problem such
as global climate change be solved? It is caused by many
groups, many countries, millions of individual sources?????
- The concept of “silver buckshot” vs. the “silver bullet”. Complex
problems require complex solutions. No one solution will solve
big issues.
- The “wedge” concept of solving the large global C problem: a
combination of 15 possible solutions together can create
meaningful and measureable differences. Be able to list at least
7 possilbe wedges and how they might work.
- For example, what is California doing with its electrical energy
sector?
Humans and Biodiversity
- We have a long history of removing the larger animals from our
environments
- Whenever we enter a region, extinction rates have usually
greatly increased
-
Cities: A Giant Threshold of Increasing Complexity
- Built on the backs of a peasant farmer society
- Cities are engines of innovation: cultural stratification, sharing
of collective knowledge, assemblage and transformation of
materials, ideas!
- Cities: led to writing, economic systems, government, military
- 6000 years ago, Uruk was 5000 people
- By a few hundred BC, Rome (and maybe others) were 1 million
people
- In 1930’s, New York City reached 10 million
- Society and cities require ~ 3X more energy flow per unit mass
than our brains
- Cities and society seem to have inherent rules of metabolism:
they run faster the bigger they get
- In order to prevent collapse and resource shortages, cities seem
to respond through innovations that help set new boundary
conditions.
- Cities tend to become more efficient the bigger they get – but
also are more productive
- “Economies of Scale”
- New Emergence
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Columbian Exchange
- For better and worse, Columbus’s contact with the Western
Hemisphere opened vast portals of energy and information
flows
- Transformed the power structure of the Old World, and even
more profoundly changed the New
- Food, land and slaves = “energy”
- The sharing (and inadvertent “discovery” of new ideas and
landscapes) helped launch the idea of Universities and science
- Our cuisine also changed
- The geographical history of the sweet potato shows that
Polynesians also contacted the western Hemisphere at some
point (and exchanged human genes)
The Great Acceleration
- The Columbian contact set into motion flows of energy, ideas,
change, innovations that have now inter-woven to create an on-
going period (your lifetime) of non-linear rates of change and
human activities (The Great Acceleration): science, capitalism,
government, steam, coal
- This concept did not even exist (or was recognized) 20 years
ago.
- Paul Crutzen: populized “the Anthropocene”
- Will Seffen: populized “Great Acceleration”
- Still not certain whether some observed changes are in reality
beginning to level off (specifically, human population)
- From I=PAT, we know that population is not directly related or
drives all negative environmental change - AFFLUENCE
- I=PAT, John Holdren and Paul Ehrlich
- Environmental pessimists (Prophets) tend to view humans and
population negatively
- Environmental Wizards tend to value human knowledge,
learning, and innovation to change our impacts
- Johan Rockstrom: Global Planetary Boundaries
- Global Boundaries: largely agreed are good for thinking about
our role on the planet, but also many argue we do not know
quantitatively what they are (or even when we have exceeded
them)
- We are proposed (by Rockstrom and others) to be presently
exceeding climate, biodiversity and nutrient planetary
boundaries
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- For example, they set 350 ppm as planetary CO2 boundary, yet
many climate scientists feel that is rather arbitrary
Climate: a planetary boundary
- A threat multiplier to our socio-cultural systems
- Syrian unrest impacted by drought and food shortages
- Migration to USA from Central America impacted by drought,
and uncertain weather
We know about climate due to:
- Carbon cycle: the abiotic loop cycles about 0.2 Gt C per year,
and the terrestrial biological loop cycles 60 Gt C per year. We
know we have put this out of balance by about 10 Gt C per year.
- 10 Gt C come from: power generation, industry, agriculture,
landuse, and domestic uses
- The 3 greenhouse gases humans increase are: (1) CO2 (fossil
fuels), (2) methane CH4 (agriculture and leakage from oil
wells/petroleum), and (3) nitrous oxide (N2O) from fertilizers
- We know much about the earth’s climate past from geological
deposits (glaciers) and from ice cores and from physics
(Milankovitch cycles)tilt, eccentricity, precession
Climate Tipping Points we are reaching:
1. Amazon forest
2. Artic sea ice: albedo
3. Atlantic circulation slow down: heat and salt, weather in Europe
and Africa
4. Boreal forests
5. Coral reefs: symbiotic relation with alage
6. North and South ice sheets: 7m sea level rise
7. Permafrost: methane craters, methane clathrate
GCM: Our way to probe our climatic future. What does GCM
mean, and how do they work?
Anthropocene and Land Use Changes
- Our general activity to acquire energy from Earth’s land surface
- Sustainable = steady state, unchanging, homeostasis
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- Farming: Replace natural flora/fauna with what we desire. Puts
existing land out of steady state (increase erosion, unbalanced C
cycle, unbalanced nutrient cycles)
- What is the largest human reason for changing the Earth’s
surface?
- What are 2 key changes that agriculture causes on land surface?
- What are 4 major results of land use change?
- Environmental researchers now recognize that even large areas
that seem pristine have in the past experienced large human
influences: the earth is both somewhat resilient over long time
spans, and also reflects our long activities. – However, the
changes increased after the Industrial Revolution in ~ 1750
- What are the 4 ways (buckshot) of putting controls on further
human modification of the earth’s surface?
Land use underlies biodiversity loss
- Natural extinction rates = <1 per million years, and we have
increased this by an order of magnitude or more
- Most of the biomass on Earth is livestock (60%) and Us
(36%)!!!!
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ARE THERE BIOPSHERES BESIDES OUR OWN?
- This lecture looks at the conditions of Mars, and its likelihood
of past or present life. However, it also asks the very
important question of whether these are even viable
alternatives to the complexity and durability of the world we
already have – and even if the other worlds are “habitable”,
can we even get there?
- Our solar system (like Earth) is about 4.5 billion years old.
Mars had an early aqueous history. So, on the Big History
timelime, we consider what might have happened on Mars at
that time
- What are 3 to 4 conditions for a habitable planet as we know
it?
- Origin of Life is by all accounts a major increase in the
complexity of the Universe, yet the “Ingredients” and
“Goldilocks conditions” that caused it are at best poorly
constrained
- The 3 key ways we know about Mars:
o Direct observation from Earth
o Mars meteorites on Earth
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o Space missions to Mars
- Like Earth, Mars has a relative geological time scale.
However, it is based on observable changes in the surface
chemical composition, rather than changes in the Biosphere
(as on Earth)
- Habatability of Mars
o Mars has (and has had) lots of water
In past, rivers, lakes, (possibly oceans), lots of
minerals formed in water
Today: lots of frozen water, lots of water
embedded in minerals
o Mars still has temperatures that can allow liquid water
to form
Surface temperatures can reach 70 to 80 F in
some place, but these plummet to well below 0 at
night
- Did/does Mars have life?
o Presence of methane (CH4) is suggestive, but not
definitive, of microbial anaerobic metabolism, possible
below the land surface
o Mars rover Curiosity has found that methane
“wisps”come and go over the course of a Mars year
o Methane has a very short (hundreds of years) lifetime
in atm, so it has to have an active source
o The use of CO2 as an electron acceptor to produce
methane (the redox reaction, or the exchange of
electrons that creates energy flow) is at the bottom of
an array of reactions of decreasing oxidant sources
- Should we even try to get to other planets?
- Human adaptability to space travel:
o We evolved on a planet with a stable and rich
Biosphere, we are genetically adapted to these
conditions
o List 5 negative things that happen to humans under
prolonged weightless conditions
- Where is everybody?
o Fermi’s paradox: despite the apparent likelihood of
many habitable planets and solar systems, why haven’t
we heard from or seen any evidence?
o Raises the profound idea that maybe we are alone, or
essentially alone in terms of intelligent life
- An explanation for Fermi’s paradox :
o (Elizabeth Kolbert) The truly successful intelligent life
forms in the Universe are successful because they
spend their time and energy sustaining their own
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planet, rather than looking for backup planets and
resources
The FUTURE OF OUR BIOSPHERE
- will the future hold new thresholds, new complexity? These
are the short term questions. The longer term future of our
own Biosphere is loaded with potential and uncertainty, but
we will ultimately return to star dust in a few billion years.
- Whatever our short term (near future) trajectory will be, it
will rely on our ingenuity (collective learning)
- To ponder our place in the Cosmos, we must grasp the
magnitude of time, a daunting and humbling exercise
o We may be genetically hardwired to consider the few
generations on either side of our own, this has both
negative (in terms of grasping environmental change)
and positive (keeps us sane) aspects for us as humans
- The Biosphere we now have is complex and resilient.
However, there are limits to this condition, and from our
understanding of stars, we know it will all come to an end
eventually.
- The challenges our Biosphere will face in the Future:
o 1. Ourselves
o 2. Random events from space and earth
o 3. Changes in the Earth’s physical systems (like plate
tectonics and orientation of continents)
o 4. The Sun
Our sun (go back to beginning of class) is a
normal sequence star, a small one, that will go
through a highly predictable old age and death
As it becomes a red giant, it will consume or bake
the inner planets – and the process will be
incremental, leading to a series of changes that
will likely sterilize the Earth
Rock weathering lowers CO2
Photosynthesis becomes impossible
Oceans boil off
Plate tectonics stops or slows down
Finally, Earth is either consumed by sun or
baked into a remaining small metal-rich
planet around a dead star
- The Universe is still young
- We live in a great time in the history of our own Sun
- The amounts of time involved in all this challenge our
abilities to comprehend it.
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- As the Little Prince observed, we can appear to be irrational
and act stupidly with our planet
- Yet, our brains, and collective knowledge, with a narrative of
innovation and some optimism, can help us continue to
evolve.
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