For millennia, many civilizations thought that earth, air, fire, and water were the primary forces—the elements—of nature. Now, through new knowledge of how the world works, science has led us to realize that humanity itself has its own elemental power.
Earth scientists speak of natural tectonics. These are the forces cracking the planet’s crust with earthquakes and volcanoes. But humanity is a tectonic force, too. The combined power of our population, our technology, our survival needs, and our desire for affluence has reshaped the Earth as we know it.
James Balog—photographer, scientist, and filmmaker—recently dubbed the mechanisms of our impact “Human Tectonics.” In recognition of the widespread and long-lasting impact of humanity, the epoch of geologic time in which these impacts are taking place is known to science as the Anthropocene (pronounced “an’-throw-poe-scene”).
When the Anthropocene began is a matter of debate. Some scientists put it at 10,000 years ago, when agriculture became more prevalent than hunting and gathering. Many others peg it at 200 years ago, when the Industrial Revolution started spewing so much carbon dioxide and other gases into our air that the composition of our atmosphere changed. Still other scientists favor dating it to the first atomic bomb test: starting in 1945, the fallout from nuclear blasts laid down a worldwide layer of long-lived radioactivity on land and sea.
Human Tectonics produced the Anthropocene—and nearly everyone on Earth has benefited from the processes of the epoch. Increased industrial and agricultural capacity, improvements in water quality and medical care: these are big benefits to human life as a consequence of the Anthropocene. A dramatic increase in the human population during the past three centuries has resulted. The 20th century alone saw a fourfold increase in global population; as of 2018, there are 7.6 billion people on Earth. By the end of our current century, global population will likely reach 11 billion.
Ironically, that is both good news and bad news. Good news because people live at a generally higher level of health and comfort than our ancestors did. But it can also bring bad news for humanity and the environment around us.
Thus far, people have transformed more than 50 percent of the world’s land surface. 37 percent of all land area is now cultivated. Forests, deserts, and grasslands have been turned into farms and plantations, cities and suburbia. Populations of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, and amphibians have plummeted 60 percent, on average, since 1970.
The Earth has warmed an average of 1.6 degrees F (1.0 degrees C) over the past 100 years. Some regions have seen two to three times that increase: the Arctic, for example, is warming four times as fast as the rest of the world. Storms, floods, and wildfires are more severe. Sea level is rising. Some of these impacts can be attributed to natural variation, but the science is crystal clear: most of these changes are a consequence of human impact.
The Anthropocene overturns centuries of Western philosophical tradition. It replaces the traditional idea that people are separate from nature with the realization that we are an integral part of it. As we reveal in our documentary film THE HUMAN ELEMENT, when people change the other elements, those elements in turn change us.
In THE HUMAN ELEMENT, Balog serves as our guide to the Anthropocene. The film takes us from Chesapeake Bay and the coal mines of Appalachia to the Rocky Mountains and the forests of California. We meet Americans on the front lines of climate change—and reveal what all this means for our children and our children’s children.
Vintondale, Pennsylvania is a community built on black rock. Located in the heart of Appalachia, this is coal country—a name that now evokes bittersweet nostalgia among the town’s older citizens. Because during its heyday from the late 19th century through World War II, coal mining was the foundation of the town’s economy.
In this segment of THE HUMAN ELEMENT, we see narrator James Balog’s roots running deep in coal country. “I don't think there is any question that my interest in Earth material and matter came out of this heritage,” he says.
His grandfather, Michael, worked as a cutter in Vintondale Mine Number 6. With an enormous chainsaw-like machine, he would slice a cut through the bottom of a coal seam. Then other members of his crew would drill holes, load them with dynamite, and blow out the rock face. One day, though, when Michael was working on the face of a coal seam, the roof of the tunnel collapsed and a rock hit him on the side of the head. The concussion killed him.
“The mine gave and it took away as well,” says James’ father, who was a freshman in college when his father died. “I knew those two things were related, and I knew that my father’s sacrifice was for me and for my siblings. We all drew strength and opportunity from that goddamn hole in the mountain.”
There’s no small irony in the fact that James Balog, one of America’s leading environmental photographers, concedes coal as the source that sustained his family and ultimately provided otherwise unreachable opportunities for him and his siblings. For all intents and purposes, our switch away from coal is a good thing. But coal’s absence is not without consequence for many people in coal mining country.
Coal, like floppy discs and fax machines, was once ubiquitous. As writer Barbara Freese points out in the film, “Coal gave us the steam engine, it gave us the railway, it gave us the iron to make those things, and then it gave us the energy to move them.” But today, technology and financial markets are moving on.
For hundreds of years, our quest for coal reshaped the natural landscape. To get it, miners removed the tops of mountains or tunneled into the Earth.
Unfortunately, coal is the dirtiest fuel source in the world. For every gram of carbon burnt, coal produces nearly four grams of CO2. Coal plants are responsible for 42 percent of U.S. mercury emissions and much of today’s atmospheric warming.
In the United States of the 21st century, burning coal satisfies roughly 30 percent of electricity demand (down from almost half the supply at its peak in the mid-20th century). Today, only 18 states generate the majority of their electricity from coal (down from 28 states in 2007). The decline in coal as a fuel has been offset by using more natural gas, wind, and solar energy sources. Buildings and machines have also become significantly more energy-efficient, helping reduce demand without any decline in economic growth or material comfort for people.
Though not as polluting as coal, oil and gas use also has had severe consequences for the global climate. Those two fuels are, like coal, the organic remains of ancient animals and plants rotting and decomposing deep inside the Earth. Burning natural gas emits about half the CO2 of coal, but drilling, fracking, and burning natural gas releases methane—a greenhouse gas about 34 times stronger than CO2 when it comes to trapping heat in our atmosphere.
Coal allowed us to build our nation through the sacrifices of the men who worked in the mines. It provided a stable income—enough to raise a family—for those who toiled long days in the black soot. But due to more efficient and automated machinery in the mines, the move of many electric power plants toward burning natural gas, and renewable energy like wind and solar becoming price competitive, coal jobs have been steadily disappearing.
“Coal will not carry the Appalachian economy for the next 100 years,” says Andrew Scott, mayor of Coal Run, Kentucky, deep in the heart of eastern Kentucky’s Appalachia.
This economically depressed region is now in dire need of an alternative.
In Pike County, in the far eastern part of the state where mines are closing down, Ryan Johns and Adam Edelen say the most promising way to economically revive the region is to invest in an unlikely ally—solar power.
“Growing up in the area, coal was part of every fabric of your life,” says Johns, Vice President at Berkeley Energy Group, a coal company. But he knows they can’t fix the future by looking to the past.
That’s why he and his friend Adam Edelen, founder of Edelen Ventures, are on a mission to convince Appalachia that renewables aren’t the enemy—they’re the opportunity.
Just under 374,000 people were employed in solar energy in 2016 in the United States—more than oil, coal, and gas combined. To Johns and Edelen, there’s no reason why some of those jobs shouldn’t come to Pike County. The innovative duo are working to transform a reclaimed mountaintop removal mine site into a 100-megawatt solar facility, enough energy to power 90,000 homes and the first large-scale solar array in Appalachia.
“Ryan and I joke that if we had proposed this a few years ago we would have been run out of town on a rail,” says Edelen. “But people know that the economy is changing, and they know that they have got to change with it in order to benefit from it.”
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When Yadira Sanchez’s three children leave for school, the worrying begins. Sanchez lives in Denver’s Elyria Swansea neighborhood. After she moved to this heavily industrialized part of town, her oldest son, Ruben, developed asthma. Her daughter, Olivia, began taking breathing medications a year after she was born. Her youngest, Leonardo, “was just kind of born into [asthma].”
“We have the refinery and all of the pollution from the semis that pass through,” she explains. “Asthma is a normal thing in this part of town. You’re most definitely afraid of the air you’re breathing in because although you need it to survive, that same air is also killing you and your family.”
Some children coping with severe asthma aren’t able to attend ordinary schools due to frequent absences and needing special attention just to stay alive. In Denver, the only school that provides extra medical care is Morgridge Academy. All three of Sanchez’s children go to the school.
“Our students have trouble in typical schools because they would often miss 40, 80 days of school each year just trying to get medical care,” says principal Jennifer McCullough. “We’re able to take care of them so they don’t have to go home and they can continue getting their education.”
One out of every 10 American schoolchildren has asthma—and those rates are increasing rapidly due to pollution.
“When I have an asthma attack, it feels like someone holding me underwater for a while,” says Marilyn Moore, a fifth-grader at Morgridge Academy. “You feel like you’re underwater and you can’t come up,” echoes seventh-grader Jahmir Young.
We are all citizens of the global air supply. Air is life. And when we change the air, we change ourselves.
Air pollution was significantly worse during the early stages of the Industrial Revolution. Coal, the dirtiest source of fossil fuel energy, was burned to heat homes, power factories, and produce electricity. Famously toxic blankets of “smog”—a mixture of smoke and fog—blanketed big cities like London. But new laws helped clean up the air. After amendments were made to the U.S. Clean Air Act of 1970, air quality markedly improved in cities like Denver and Los Angeles (the latter experienced unhealthy levels of air pollution on more than 200 days a year in the early ‘70s).
Now, new threats are popping up. The oil and gas industry is increasing operations in densely inhabited areas in their quest for new reserves. Pollutants leak during the process of drilling and equipping wells; as time goes on, pipes rust, holding tanks leak, and pollution increases. A study by Cornell University forecasted that four out of every ten wells in northeastern Pennsylvania will leak or fail.
Studies in Colorado, Pennsylvania, and Utah have documented elevated levels of harmful air pollutants in and around areas with oil and gas production activity; 12.6 million Americans live within a half-mile of active oil and gas wells, compressors and processors. Approximately 158 million Americans—nearly half of the country—live in counties where air pollution exceeds national health-based standards; each year, air pollution causes 200,000 premature deaths in the U.S.
Whether the pollutant is soot, sulfur dioxide, or climate-altering gases like carbon dioxide, methane, or nitrous oxide, much clean-up work still needs to be done—particularly in rapidly industrializing countries like China and India. The World Health Organization estimates that dirty air kills about 7 million people worldwide each year.
The majority of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide spewed into the atmosphere comes from burning coal, oil and natural gas in everything from cars and airplanes to power plants and home furnaces. The methane-rich burping and flatulence of livestock like cows adds still more.
These pollutants create warmer air. A vicious cycle ensues. Warmer, drier air feeds wildfire and wildfire alters air. Our forests and lungs burn. Our climate changes. The Anthropocene unfolds.
Since the mid-1800s, researchers have understood that changing the chemical characteristics of our air supply, by filling it with the waste products of combustion, can heat the atmosphere.
Earth’s atmosphere is 78 percent nitrogen, 21 percent oxygen, 0.93 percent argon, and the rest trace gases including 0.04 percent carbon dioxide (CO2). Even though CO2 is such a miniscule fraction of the air supply, it has an extraordinary ability to trap heat in the atmosphere.
Researcher Charles Keeling was the first person to consistently measure carbon dioxide concentrations in the air. He began his measurements in 1958 at Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. These measurements—later traced in a graph known as the Keeling Curve—would reveal a shocking rise in the concentrations of CO2. Measurements all around the world reveal a similar uptick.
When Keeling began his work, the air contained just 315 parts per million of CO2.
With an increase of more than 2 parts per million every year, the concentration is now, in 2018, approximately 411 parts per million. The concentration varies slightly throughout the year, but it is on a steady upward trend.
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On July 22, 2016, hikers in California’s Garrapata State Park reported a small wildfire burning in the forest— the result of an illegal campfire. By the next morning, the fire had grown to 2,000 acres, with officials issuing an evacuation advisory for the nearby community of Palo Colorado. The Soberanes Fire, as it would later be named, went on to burn more than 132,000 acres along the Big Sur coastline, with more than 5,000 personnel combatting the blaze at its peak. The fire was the most expensive firefighting operation in U.S. history to date, costing $260 million.
In 2017, California spent more than $700 million fighting fires, exceeding their budget by several hundred million and making 2017 the costliest year in California’s history. The Wine County Fires that burned through Napa Valley in the fall proved to be the most expensive in property damage, with nearly $12 billion in filed claims.
And, in August 2018, the Mendocino Complex Fire in northern California became the largest wildfire in the state’s history, burning more than 450,000 acres—300,000 of which were lost in the first two weeks. To cap the season off, the Camp Fire, a ferocious blaze that burned the equivalent of 10 Manhattan islands and destroyed 18,000 structures, claimed at least 88 lives in Butte County, just north of Sacremento.
The United States has a fire problem.
The American Northwest has witnessed a 1,000 percent increase in the frequency of large fires — 1,000 acres or larger — since the 1970s. In the western United States, the wildfire season has lengthened by 78 days, and the incidence of large wildfires in western forests is nearly four times what it was in the 1970s and early 1980s. The amount of land these fires burn is more than six times higher than it was four decades ago.
Climate change is the overarching condition transforming the landscapes of the American West. Scientists have found that 55 percent of increases in “fuel aridity” — the drier plants that feed fires — in western forests is due to climate change, contributing to an additional 10.4 million acres lost to forest fires between 1984 and 2015.
“We have changed our relationship to fire and that has rippled through everything: the atmosphere, the oceans, the biosphere,” says Arizona State University fire historian Dr. Stephen Pyne. “What we’re seeing now are the consequences.”
Perhaps nowhere is human-driven climate change more visually evident than in the fire cycle.
The original fire in our solar system is the burning star-ball of hydrogen and helium in the sky — the sun. On Earth, nature’s fires—nearly all of them caused by lightning bolts— have purified, transfigured, rejuvenated, recycled. The biological world thrives because of this natural fire.
But some three million years ago, hominids began learning how to handle natural fire. Fire was power. It radiated heat, light, and security. As our early ancestors progressed, so too did our relationship with fire.
In the 1800s, humans began to extract fossil fuels from our geologic past, breaking fire apart and putting it into machines, where we couldn’t see it. Contained in boxes, fire remained central to our lives, but it had been abstracted into what Dr. Pyne calls “industrial fire.”
We waged war against the natural fires, believing that they robbed us of timber, scenery, and living space. We suppressed them for decades. Then we moved into fire’s home: more than 44 million Americans now live in the wildland-urban interface—the area where homes and neighborhoods meet forests and dense expanses of shrubbery.
At the same time, hotter temperatures equal more fire. Human-caused climate change heats the air, then vegetation dries out, making it much more likely to burn. 2015, one of the three hottest years in the global record, was the worst year for U.S. wildfires on record. “We are organizing landscape in favor of big fires,” says Mark Finney, a physical scientist at the Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory.
Today’s wildfires are like nothing fire crews have ever seen before. The fires are bigger, hotter, more violent. The 2018 California wildfire season brought both the largest and deadliest fires in recorded history: the Mendocino Complex Fire and the Camp Fire, respectively.
“These big megafires have certainly changed the terms of engagement for the fire community,” says Stephen Pyne. “We’re beyond the age where can just throw firefighters into remote and hazardous settings under large fires and expect them to survive.”
The air is thick with smoke and ash billowing ceaselessly from the Soberanes Fire. Yet Tony Howard, chief of the Mendocino Unit for Cal Fire, the California state firefighting agency, calmly smokes his Meerschaum tobacco pipe.
Howard has spent 26 years on the fire line, watching forests burn. “A long time ago, fire would just sweep through areas and nobody really fought the fire,” he says. “People would just burn around their houses and let the fire pass through as a natural progression.”
But things have changed. The destructive Soberanes Fire is evidence of that.
“It’s fire season pretty much year-round,” says Carignane Ferreira, one of the unit’s firefighters. “We’re burning way earlier, fire seasons go way longer.”
Ironies abound in firefighting. Today we are forced to fight fires with airplanes, helicopters, bulldozers, tanks, engines—all of which burn the same fuels that are heating the climate, drying out the forests, and making the landscape more flammable.
Every year, tens of thousands of men and women work to fight fires. In California and other states, some firefighters come from state prisons. When manpower is particularly stretched, firefighters from Australia and Canada pitch in too.
“It’s harder and takes more manpower, more resources to suppress fire,” says Bruce Miller, division supervisor with Cal Fire. In many cases, suppression isn’t even possible. Finney adds, “We have megafires now, and we have no control over them.”
Fires don’t only affect those deployed to fight them. They affect those who live in their habitat. The wildland-urban interface, or WUI, pronounced “who-ee,” is rapidly expanding in the contiguous United States. From 1990 to 2010, the number of homes built in the WUI grew from 30.8 million to 43.4 million. As Ken Pimlott, director of Cal Fire, says, “People are part of the equation now.”
In California alone, a third of homes are located in areas prone to wildfires. In an evacuee camp, Kris McKegney recalls the Soberanes Fire burning towards her home. “We were just throwing things in our car … trying to figure out should you take the expensive stuff or should you take the stuff you’re gonna need right now, like camping gear and pillows. And you can see it, the fire coming right down the hill getting closer and closer.”
McKegney was one of the lucky ones. She didn’t lose her home—or her life. No civilians were killed in the Soberanes Fire, thanks to the round-the-clock effort, and sacrifices, by Cal Fire. Tragically, Robert Reagan, a bulldozer operator on the Soberanes, was killed when his bulldozer overturned while he was cutting a fire line.
In 2017, more than 71,000 wildfires across the country burned nearly 10 million acres and destroyed 12,000 structures. Increasingly, homeowners in the wildland-urban interface are unable to find companies willing to insure their homes at a tolerable price.
Wildfires affect those living far away from the flames, too: 15,000 people die in the U.S. every year due to the effects of inhaling wildfire smoke. Scientists predict that by 2100, that number will more than double.
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Sea level rise is not a far-off problem for future generations to worry about. It’s already happening. The boundary between land and water is changing, with serious consequences for people living on the coasts. During severe storms, rising seas provide more water to act as a battering ram when wind and tides drive waves toward land, a phenomenon known as “storm surge.”
Every story about sea level rise, or “SLR,” starts with ice. Freezing and melting are a natural part of the water cycle. But by heating the air, people have altered the cycle in two important ways:
1) At most of the world’s glaciers outside East Antarctica, more ice is melting than in previous centuries. That meltwater eventually finds its way to the ocean, raising global sea level.
2) When water heats up, it expands. Roughly half of global SLR is due to the thermal expansion of water—not just the runoff from melting ice on land.
Melting glaciers and the shrinking Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets are causing an average global SLR of one-eighth of an inch per year. By 2100, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change expects seas to rise between one and three feet if glaciers and ice sheets maintain their current rate of ice loss. That increase in water is more than enough to inundate parts of many towns and cities along the East Coast of the U.S.
Glaciologists also see acute signs of ice sheet instability in West Antarctica. As a consequence, some ice experts predict a very real possibility that SLR of much more than three feet could happen in decades to come.
Surges of seawater during big storms aren’t the only problem. A warmer climate causes more evaporation from land and oceans. That evaporated moisture ultimately condenses and falls back to Earth as rain. The consequences can be catastrophic. In some parts of the world, climate-enhanced downpours are already leading to unprecedented flooding. When combined with storm surges, many coastal communities from the Gulf Coast to New England face a very big problem.
Hurricane Harvey made landfall in Texas on August 26, 2017, dumping more than 60 inches of rain around Houston in eight days. It was the second costliest natural disaster in United States history at $125 billion. A month later, Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico nabbed third place. But neither of these hurricanes was entirely natural.
According to scientists, both hurricanes went through a “rapid intensification cycle,” meaning that the strongest winds within the storm sped up significantly just before making landfall. A 2018 study found that these intensification cycles increased between 1986 and 2015 as a consequence of warming sea surface temperatures. If greenhouse-gas emissions stay at their current level, super-intense hurricanes can be expected to occur every five to 10 years by 2100.
In recent years, scientists have documented a sharp increase in what’s known as “nuisance flooding.”
Even on calm, sunny days, communities around Chesapeake Bay can flood when the tide comes in. Norfolk and Virginia Beach, Virginia, which together have a combined population of 700,000, sit less than 15 feet above sea level. Local sea level has risen by a foot and a half in the past 100 years, and a storm surge during a relatively modest category-3 hurricane could flood the entire city.
The largest U.S. Navy base in the world is located in Norfolk. The multi-billion-dollar facility, which cannot be easily re-situated, is home port for nearly 70 ships. Captain Dean Vanderley, commanding officer of naval command engineering in Norfolk, explained in THE HUMAN ELEMENT, “If sea level were to rise as is projected, to the degree that we can no longer operate here, that would be a significant impact to national security.”
In Chesapeake Bay, 70 miles northeast of Norfolk, lies Tangier Island. The low-lying coastal island is comprised of sandy ridges, tidal streams, and marshes. It’s one of the communities in the United States most vulnerable to sea level rise.
Over the past 400 years, more than 500 islands have disappeared from Chesapeake Bay—40 of which were once inhabited. Tangier is in line to be next. Rising waters continuously erode the island’s sand, silt, and peat, tearing the island apart: every year, nine acres of Tangier erode into the bay. In a 2015 study, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers marine biologist David Schulte concluded the island has only 25 to 50 years left before the sea claims it. More recent studies have indicated that it might disappear twice that fast.
Will the federal government pay the $100 million-plus it will take to save the island and its 700 residents? Homeowners on Tangier may become some of the first climate change refugees in the U.S. As Carol Pruitt-Moore, part of a multi-generational Tangier clan, puts it, “We’re just one storm away from becoming part of history.”
Forty percent of Americans live in vulnerable coastal areas. Without rapid government intervention, severe storms may soon make some beachside communities uninhabitable—or wash them entirely away. But, in an aquatic version of the wildland-urban interface issue that affects fire-prone communities in the American West, people are still building their homes in locations terribly vulnerable to storms and floods.
Storm and flood damage along coastlines and stream drainages may seem a world away from many Americans. Yet these problems touch the pocketbooks of everyone who buys homeowners or renters insurance—not to mention everyone who pays federal taxes. Homeowners pay higher insurance premiums because insurance companies need to cover damages from flooding and storms. Federal taxes cover the Federal Emergency Management Agency budget, enabling it to provide billions in financial support in disaster-prone areas.
Of course, sea level rise isn’t just a problem in the waters surrounding the U.S. On planet Earth, we have a world ocean: the Atlantic, Pacific, Arctic, Indian, and Southern oceans are all connected.
Many low-lying island nations scattered throughout the South Pacific are particularly vulnerable to rising seas. The Marshall Islands, Kiribati, Tuvalu, Tonga, Micronesia, the Cook Islands, Antigua, Nevis and the Maldives will lose much or all of their dry land by the end of the century. When they do, a huge wave of climate refugees will be forced to migrate elsewhere.
Climate change is here, and the human element is both the problem and the solution. The glaciers are melting, the coasts are flooding. The forests are burning, the air is changing. So where do we go from here?
We are all part of the human element, and we have the ability and responsibility to be part of the climate protection movement.
Why?
Because we are concerned and aware. We understand that climate change is not a question of what we “believe,” but about what we know, based on scientific and visual evidence.
The foundation for change is the combined power of our dynamic, imaginative, and impassioned human minds. We can and must activate the hundreds of clever tools, tactics, and strategies already at our fingertips in the realms of daily behavior, technology, politics, and finance.
The mind activates another vitally important function—the heart. If art and science can reveal the issues, it will take heart to solve them.
We all have a basic, inalienable human right to clean air, clean water, and a stable climate. No society or institution should deny people that right. Humans are a tectonic force. As much as we’ve shaped the planet for the worse, we can also build a better future. We are not destined to be only victims and villains, but also problem-solvers and change-makers.
In more specific and pragmatic terms, here are a few ideas—out of the hundreds possible—on what you can do to take part in climate protection.
Our individual actions may seem small and insignificant alone, but when combined together, we become a force to be reckoned with. We all must resolve to do what we can, in our own ways.
Pick one action and do it. Then do another. One step at a time is the only way we can move forward, together.
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