The Stockholm Memorandum and the strain of the Anthropocene

The Feb. 27th entry on PaleoTerran presented the debate on whether we have entered a new epoch, the Anthropocene. This week, The Stockholm Memorandum, produced by the 3rd Nobel Laureate Symposium on Global Sustainability held Stockholm, Sweden appears to make it official: 

Humans are now the most significant driver of global change, propelling the planet into a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. 

Whether this group, or the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), has the authority to name a new epoch is unclear. (The ICS site has not been updated for sometime.)  Nevertheless, the name of the epoch is not the issue; the subject of Memorandum is the strain humankind is placing on the planet. 

Unsustainable patterns of production, consumption, and population growth are challenging the resilience of the planet to support human activity. ...Evidence is growing that human pressures are starting to overwhelm the Earth’s buffering capacity.

In a series of pregnant statements, eight priorities are outlined:

1. Reaching a more equitable world

2. Managing the climate - energy challenge

3. Creating an efficiency revolution

4. Ensuring affordable food for all

5. Moving beyond green growth

6. Reducing human pressures

7. Strengthening Earth System Governance

8. Enacting a new contract between science and society 

While the challenge is clear and daunting, the document also serves as a roadmap for future entrepreneurs.

To learn more, download The Stockholm Memorandum.  

Related Post:

Welcome to the Anthropocene: Humankind's layer on Earth

Lecture: “Diet & Human Population Density in Paleolithic Mediterranean”

Anthropologist Mary Stiner lectures at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas on Mar. 7, 2011:

What is the legacy of the human ecological footprint in deep time? Our speaker explores the question by sorting out some features of Paleolithic meat diets in Mediterranean Eurasia. These involve predator-prey dynamics, transitions in energy acquisition, and the allocation of labor. By the Late Pleistocene, foragers were restructuring the living communities around them, with consequences for both diet and demographic robustness. These changes in turn altered social relations within early forager societies and also affected the development of cooperative networks across human society.

Learn more here.

Rare look at Paleoindian burial, housing, and nutrition

White-tailed Ptarmigan. Image: Footwarrior11,500 years agoin the Tanana lowlands of central Alaska, a three-year-old child died. The cause of death is not known. According to Natasha Pinol, writing for EurekaAlert, “the remains showed no signs of injury or illness, though that isn't surprising, since most health problems don't leave traces in bones.” The child, a member of a Paleoindian family or clan that was “among the first to colonize the Americas”, lived in a house.

Colored stains in the sediment suggest that poles may have been used to support the walls or roof, though it's not clear what the latter would have been made of. The entire house has not yet been fully excavated, so its total size is still unknown.(Pinol)

After cremation, the child was buried “in a large pit in the center of the home.” Archeologist Ben Potter of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, one of the discoverers, notes:

All the evidence indicates that they went through some effort. The burial was within the house. If you think of the house as the center of many residential activities: cooking, eating, sleeping, and the fact that they abandoned the house soon afterward the cremation, this is pretty compelling evidence of the careful treatment of the child.

Pinol writes:

In contrast to the temporary hunting camps and other specialized work sites that have produced much of the evidence of North America's early habitation, the newly discovered house appears to have been a seasonal home, used during the summer. Its inhabitants, who included women and children, foraged for fish, birds and small mammals nearby, according to Potter's team.

Evidence of a Paleolithic diet was discovered in sediment at the bottom of the 18-inch deep pit, specifically bone of “salmon, ground squirrels, ptarmigan and other small animals.”

The discovery provides a rare look at domestic life of the Paleoindians that crossed, or, more likely, descended from those that crossed the Beringian Land Bridge to Alaska. The report of the find will be published 25 February issue of Science, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. 

Source: Child's cremation site reveals domestic life in Paleoindian Alaska at EurekaAlert