Welcome to the Anthropocene: The Future of Environmental Law and Policy

• Author: Oliver Houck
• Pages: 174-177

174 Best of the Books: Ref‌lections on Recent Literature

Welcome to the Anthropocene:

The Future of

Environmental Law and Policy

By Oliver Houck

Conservation in the Anthropocene, by Peter K areiva, Michelle

Marvier, and Robert Lalasz, in the BREAKTHROUGH JOUR NAL (Fall 2011),

and Conservati on in the Real World, response by Kieran Suckling,

available at thebreakthroug h.org (The Breakthrough Insti tute).

From the July/ August 2012 issue of The Environm ental Forum.

Now we k now, the Earth is rea lly

about us after all. We dominate

every medium on the planet,

remove mountains, run rivers backwards,

alter the atmosphere, cover the oceans with

plastic, and spread ourselves so ubiquitously

that the number of locations in America

free from human noise (short of a waterfall)

is, at last report, zero. We have achieved the

Anthropocene. But what, then, about the

rest of nature?

Here, we have made another discovery

and it comes in handy. ere is no such

thing as natural. Humans have been modi-

fying nature for so long that it has become,

functionally, one big toy. e eorts of

environmentalists are therefore not only futile in the face of population

explosion, rising expectations, and the insatiable rush for energy, but also

because they deny t his second truth: nature is whatever we want it to be. In

fact, and rather mar velously, we are making new nature every day. It is time

to smell the roses.

Such is the thesis of Peter Kareiva and colleagues in the fall 2011 issue

of t he Breakthrough Journal entitled “Conservation in the A nthropocene.”