Mankind finds itself in the Anthropocene, the current geological epoch generally accepted by scholars and denoted by one species, our own, ascending to the role of major driver on Earth. The term Anthropocene was first-coined in the eponymous article by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer in the IGBP Global Newsletter [1]. Later, Crutzen argues in "Geology of Mankind" [2] that human effects on the global ecosystem have accelerated and are now the primary influence on the global ecosystem. This human-domination over nature necessitates a new epochal designation; in contrast to the previous epoch, the Holocene, that designated the post-glacial geological period proposed by Sir Charles Lyell in Principles of Geology [3] in 1833 and adopted in 1885 by the International Geological Congress (IGC).
Our very own Deryc Painter has been studying the development of the Anthropocene discussion using various computational tools. All of the records for the Anthropocene corpus came from the Web of Science [4], a highly curated database. The Web of Science (WoS) offers extensive metadata including the citations, author and WoS identified keywords (which were used to reference our keywords, but ultimately not used in the final analysis), and research area categories. The WoS platform covers 34,200 journals, books, proceedings, patents, and data sets with 151 million individual publication records, 37.2 million patents, and 7.3 million data sets. There are over 2,000 publications in the WoS database under the topic Anthropocene with more being published every day.
Figure 1:Publications about the Anthropocene divided up by year. After identifying all the WoS records under the topic “Anthropocene” the PDFs of the individual documents were manually acquired and converted into plain text files through embedded text extraction. A curated stoplist removed irrelevant words whose frequencies offered nothing to the keyword analysis and would otherwise obfuscate useful information. Keywords were then identified using the Baker-Brown Corpus for General American English as a reference corpus. No identifiable keywords exist when the few (17) documents from 2001 through 2006 are compared to each other.
The Anthropocene begins as a primarily geo-engineering topic. Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer assert that the Holocene, as proposed by Sir Charles Lyell, no longer accurately described the world in which we currently find ourselves. The two scientists argue that human influence has reached a global scale and is unlike anything our planet has experienced previously. Crutzen and Stoermer conclude their introduction of the Anthropocene with, save for major catastrophes, the idea that mankind will continue to dominantly drive the ecosystem and resource pools for the foreseeable future and call upon global engineering and research communities to lead mankind into a sustainable future.
Figure 2:The top x-axis represents the reference corpus and the y-axis is the test corpus. In the primary keyword analysis, the Baker Brown corpus for General American English is used as the reference corpus. A negative keyword is a word that occurs less often than would be expected by chance in comparison with the reference corpus, whereas a positive keyword would appear more than expected based on the reference corpus. No keywords between a test and reference corpus indicates a level on homogeneity between the two corpora.
As time goes by, the general public becomes incorporated into the once purely scientific discussion. In 2011, The Economist puts a picture of the world on their cover with the title “Welcome to the Anthropocene” [5]. By 2015, the Anthropocene discussion has grown quite large and closely linked to ideas about climate, politics, and environmental change, but also keywords like poetry, mitochondrial DNA, and economy show up as well. The Anthropocene is no longer a discussion for geo-engineers. Be on the lookout for an upcoming publication detailing the history and changes in the Anthropocene discussion.
Figure 3:Co-occurrence network of keywords and collocates from 2001-2006. Co-occurrence networks are created with the structure G = (V, E), where V is a node represented by a keyword and E is an edge represented by a shared publication containing the two connected keywords. The size of the labels and nodes are relative to the number of individual occurrences. Nodes are selectively labeled for clarity.
Figure 4:Co-occurrence network of keywords and collocates from 2015. Note how closely Anthropocene, science, world, politics, and economy are linked. Poetry is also linked closely to ethics and consumer near the bottom of the network. The size of the labels and nodes are relative to the number of individual occurrences. Nodes are selectively labeled for clarity.
References
[1] Crutzen, P. J. (2006). The “anthropocene”. In Earth system science in the anthropocene (pp. 13-18). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.
[2] Crutzen, P. J. (2002). Geology of mankind. Nature, 415(6867), 23-23.
[3] Lyell, C. (1833). Principles of geology: being an attempt to explain the former changes of the earth's surface, by reference to causes now in operation (Vol. 1). J. Murray. Chicago
[4] Reuters, T. (2012). Web of Science.
[5] Economist. (2011). Welcome to the Anthropocene. The Economist, 399, 13.