Human societies didn’t just adapt to the planet—they learned to reshape it. From early fire use to today’s global supply chains, our cultural and social innovations have unlocked extraordinary power to transform Earth and improve human life. But that progress has come with serious costs, including climate change, pollution, and mass extinction. Instead of framing this era—the Anthropocene—as pure crisis, Erle Ellis argues it’s also proof of something hopeful: when people work together, they can drive massive positive change.

link to open access article…

https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rstb/article/379/1893/20220255/109324/The-Anthropocene-condition-evolving-through-social

The first principle for understanding the Anthropocene entanglement of social and planetary change is that this disruptive condition did not result from a lack of human capabilities to adapt to, shape or sustain the novel social–ecological systems (SES) that sustain human societies. Rather, it is only because human societies evolved unprecedented sociocultural capabilities and agency in shaping their social and ecological environments over thousands of years that human populations are now thriving at levels beyond those of any other species in Earth’s history [7,26,28–33]. For better and for worse, the Anthropocene condition of disruptive planetary change is coupled with unprecedented sociocultural capabilities to shape the SES that have always sustained human societies [7].

…

Anthroecology theory offers a different approach. While SES theory is based on understanding systems feedbacks and capacities relating to pathways of development, adaptation and transformation, anthroecology theory aims at understanding long-term evolutionary changes in human capabilities to shape societies and ecosystems and their consequences. In other words, anthroecology theory focuses on explaining the ongoing evolution of transformational possibilities. Evolutionary changes in human cultural traits and their transmission and inheritance are central to anthroecology theory because these are the main determinants of human societal capabilities and because cultural traits, including norms, institutions and technologies, can evolve, reproduce and spread much faster than genetic and other traits [7,60]. Cultural traits are, therefore, increasingly favoured by selection processes under increasingly dynamic environmental conditions, including those produced by many human societies [7,60].

Human sociocultural capabilities to engineer ecosystems, from using fire to clear land, to propagating favoured species, to agriculture, to industrial food systems, have evolved and accumulated over millennia, producing both beneficial and harmful ecological inheritances, from increased ecosystem productivity to soil erosion and pollution [7,11,61,62]. Over the same interval, these increasingly complex and intensive niche construction capabilities have tended to appear in parallel with the increasingly rich diversity and complexity of human cultural practices, technologies, institutions, norms, identities and values that structure human social relations, social groups and societies, including increasing dependence on non-kin exchange and other forms of cooperation that together define humans as Earth’s first ultrasocial species [7,30,34,49,50].

Like all evolutionary processes, sociocultural evolution is open-ended, diversifying, nondeterministic and generally unpredictable. Most changes in sociocultural niche construction are incremental and gradual, resulting from innovation, selection, accumulation, drift and diversification of sociocultural capabilities within and across societies. Nevertheless, across the tangled web of sociocultural history, some convergent general patterns are observable. With notable exceptions in highly productive and stable coastal and wetland environments, increasingly complex, specialized and larger-scale societies tend to be associated with increasingly intensive, complex and socially coordinated forms of sociocultural niche construction (figure 1; [7,34]). Anthroecology theory explains this long-term trend towards larger-scale societies sustained by increasingly transformative ecosystem engineering as the product of a runaway evolutionary process of sociocultural niche construction [7,34].

  • haverholm@kbin.earth
    6·
    4 days ago

    Editorialising headline:

    A new force of nature is reshaping the planet, study finds

    From the RSP opinion piece (not a study,) emphasis mine:

    However, this coupling of socially produced environmental challenges with disruptive social changes—the Anthropocene condition—is not new.

    Yes, we live in the Anthropocene. Yes, in geological terms human effects on the environment are new. But as the source also says, “new” in that context is still thousands of years old:

    Global climate change, biodiversity losses and other anthropogenic planetary changes all began long before the industrial age

    Plus, as is quoted in the OP:

    Human sociocultural capabilities to engineer ecosystems, from using fire to clear land, to propagating favoured species, to agriculture, to industrial food systems, have evolved and accumulated over millennia

    Anthroecology is the more novel concept here, and an interesting approach, too. But that is all it is — there is no “new force of nature” at play, only a recent framework to better understand and (hopefully) manage our detrimental effects on the world around us.