The pollution of Earth’s atmosphere by fossil fuel burning is just one of the insults our planet faces in this human-engineered age of ours – the Anthropocene.

In their relentless hunger for food, fiber and fuel, humans have transformed an estimated three quarters of the planet’s vegetated land surface, and a quarter of its natural productivity.

Human Appropriation of Net Primary Production, or HANPP, this is called. Fridolin Krausmann is an authority on this phenomenon and metric. Krausmann is professor of sustainable resource use at the Institute of Social Ecology, at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, in Vienna.

Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.

Credit: Andrew S. Wright

It’s something human beings take for granted. The World is a very human place.

Covered by concrete and tall buildings; cars racing this way and that; food from all corners of the planet.

Some green space — for us humans.

Earth’s human age has a name – the Anthropocene. Dutch chemist Paul Crützen coined the term, twenty years ago. The Anthropocene, Crützen said, should be declared a new ‘Epoch’ in Earth history, terminating the one we’ve been in for the past 12,000 years, the Holocene.

Last year, a panel of scientists recommended that Crützen’s idea be moved up a notch, formally designating the Anthropocene in the geological community’s official time scale.

That idea got deep-sixed earlier this year by higher geological authorities. The Anthropocene idea is too political, they argue.

John McNeill was an advisory member of the Anthropocene Working Group, and a colleague of Paul Crützen’s. McNeill is associated with the idea that the Anthropocene began in the mid-20th century, at the start of something called the Great Acceleration, when the scale, scope and pace of humanity’s impact on Planet Earth started to skyrocket.

John McNeill is a professor of environmental history at Georgetown University, in the US. Listen to our conversation in today’s podcast. Click on the play button above, or go here.