Holocene utopias and dystopias: Views of the Holocene in the Anthropocene and their impact on defining the Anthropocene

Abstract

In delineating the Anthropocene, the Holocene is being redefined as the formative epoch of human development leading to the Anthropocene. This has led to a diversity of views of the Holocene and Holocene humanity in the Anthropocene, the extremes of which may be described as “Holocene utopianism” and “Holocene dystopianism.” The former views the Holocene as a solution to the predicament of the Anthropocene, as an idealized past of human activities and stable climate that must be aspired to. The latter perceives the Holocene and Holocene humanity as the root cause of the ills of the Anthropocene that must be avoided in the future. These views reflect a gross simplification of human activities and the environment of the Holocene. Human activity in the Holocene is characterized by diverse human behaviors that can be perceived as both destructive and sustaining to the earth’s ecological systems, and in many cases, emerged as a response to fluctuations in the Holocene climate. The Holocene does not provide an escape from the Anthropocene, as a solution or as a cautionary tale. Nonetheless, future human endeavors must necessarily draw from the diversity of human activities and systems of organization observed in the Holocene, but do so carefully.

Keywords

Anthropocene archaeology climate change dystopia Holocene utopia

Introduction

The Anthropocene has become a global term synonymous with the climatic and ecological repercussions of our actions. Although the concept of human induced change on a geological scale has been around for centuries, following discussions at the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme conference in which Paul Crutzen proposed that researchers stop using the term “Holocene” to refer to the present day and instead adopt the term, “Anthropocene” to reflect how this epoch is now more of a “human-dominated, geological epoch” that had come to supplant the Holocene (Crutzen, 2002: 23). This follows on from works between (Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000), and in formally proposing the concept, (Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000) and (Crutzen, 2002) emphasized the distinctiveness of the last few centuries, particularly following the Industrial Era, as a period in which the global human population rocketed exponentially, and with it, quantities of energy and water use and greenhouse gas concentrations.

The Anthropocene as the “human epoch” has now become a firmly implanted construct across many fields of research, and within a decade of this dramatic conference announcement, several journals and magazines have become dedicated to publishing articles and letters related to the Anthropocene. Although Anthropocene literature spans a wide array of topics and approaches, much of the work has focused on when and how to delineate the Anthropocene in time. Crutzen’s original proposal was for a post-Industrial onset of the Anthropocene (Crutzen, 2002; Waters et al., 2016; Zalasiewicz et al., 2008, 2017). Cross-disciplinarily many of the human activities that began in the Industrial Era have been noted as leaving a clear “marker” of humanity’s outsized impact on environmental systems on a global scale, including increased fossil fuel emissions due to energy use and farming, modification to sedimentary processes due to land modification, deforestation, and declining diversity of terrestrial and marine species (e.g.: Steffen et al., 2015; Waters et al., 2016; Zalasiewicz et al., 2015). However, there has been dissent around exactly when the Anthropocene began ranging from “recent” Anthropocene starts (Steffen et al., 2007, 2015; Waters et al., 2023; Zalasiewicz et al., 2015), Industrialization and/or colonialization start points (e.g.: Crutzen, 2002; Gill, 2021; Lewis and Maslin, 2015; Zalasiewicz et al., 2008), through to deeper time processes with early Anthropocene proponents pushing it back potentially to the Early Holocene or even beyond (Ruddiman, 2003; Ruddiman and Thompson, 2001; Smith and Zeder, 2013).

The task of delineating the Anthropocene starting boundary has been self-taken up (rather than given to by scholarly consensus) by the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG), an international group of researchers formally studying the Anthropocene (Waters et al., 2023; Zalasiewicz et al., 2017). Rather than conceptually debating the implications of defining the Anthropocene, the AWG is explicitly concerned with its delineation as a geological time unit, and though interdisciplinary in make, geology does define much of their work. As such, much of the research published by the AWG has focused on the global stratigraphic evidence for the Anthropocene epoch (see recent papers by Rosol et al., 2023; Waters et al., 2023). In particular, members of the AWG have argued that a Great Acceleration in the mid-20th century most clearly delineates the Anthropocene from the preceding Holocene. The AWG cites the release of radionuclide from the explosion of atomic bombs, and in addition the global spread of new manmade materials such as plastic and aluminum products, the rapid expansion of artificial human deposits as a result of construction and urbanization, and significant markers in polar ice from the release of fuels as the proposed markers of the shift (Waters et al., 2023; Zalasiewicz et al., 2015, 2017). Most notably they have argued for a Golden Spike to be defined, placing this in the latest round of announcements in Canada’s Lake Crawford at 1952 CE (McCarthy et al., 2023; Waters et al., 2023).

However, as noted above, a mid-20th century AD start is not universally accepted, and several scholars, most of which are notably not formally associated with the AWG, have pushed for an “early Anthropocene” or at least an earlier Anthropocene, with variable dates and prime movers within this. Proponents of an early or earlier Anthropocene note that regional and global markers of anthropogenic activities predate the Industrial Era and some stretch as far back as the early Holocene. Smith and Zeder (2013), for instance, propose the domestication of multiple species of plants and animals as it occurred in multiple parts of the world as a strong candidate for an early Anthropocene start date. These processes, they argue, both clearly reflect human tendencies for modification of ecosystems and also provide the “lever” that supported the growth of human populations through the early Holocene up to the present day (Smith and Zeder, 2013: 12). We see also arguments around the impact of colonialism and the role of European expansionism on global ecological niches as well as disparities in resource use driving planet-wide changes (see arguments for the Capitolocene and Plantacinocene in (Chao, 2022; Gill, 2021; Haraway, 2015; Moore, 2016). Others still have been more preoccupied with delineating a clearer boundary for an early Anthropocene, proposing signals such as increasing atmospheric concentrations of methane resulting from rice farming and cattle husbandry as a potential marker for a mid-Holocene start date for the Anthropocene (e.g.: Ruddiman, 2007).

This debate over the start date of the Anthropocene is ongoing in broader circles, and has become an aspect of almost every paper on the Anthropocene, either taking up the entire discussion throughout (e.g.: Bensaude-Vincent, 2022; Gale and Hoare, 2012; Gibbard et al., 2022) or explicitly discussed in the introduction and conclusion to papers (e.g.: Beach et al., 2015; Chen et al., 2022; Power et al., 2018), an entrenched part of the debate. However, underlying these chronological wranglings and far less discussed within the debate around the start of the Anthropocene are the implications that arise for bounding the Anthropocene to a specific date, and in turn, what is implied in delineating this epoch—the delineation of another epoch, namely, the Holocene. In demarcating the Anthropocene the Holocene must also be defined as a contrasting era. We see two contrasting views arising. On the one hand, the Holocene is defined as an epoch that provided the natural environmental baseline for a stable earth with minimal human impact (e.g., Lidskog and Waterton, 2016). On the other hand, many see the Holocene as the staging ground for the Anthropocene (e.g.: Smith and Zeder, 2013), and thus, perhaps a past that must be avoided (Dryzek and Pickering, 2019). Given these starkly different views, it becomes worth asking, what is the Holocene in light of the Anthropocene?

The use of the Holocene within the Anthropocene links through the construct of metaphor. Metaphors give “new meaning to an ordinary word by equating it to an unexpected one” (Rickards, 2015: 281). Within Anthropocene studies metaphor is a powerful tool—humans are frequently envisioned as a geological force for example (see Steffen et al., 2007), or may be metaphorically seen as stewards of earth, or described as a plague upon it (Rickards, 2015). Hamilton (2017) notes that the Anthropocene itself is turned into a metaphor within some ends of the community—as utopia, a new epoch in which humans finally reconcile the natural world with humans. This metaphor holds currency particularly with techno-utopianists who see the Anthropocene as an “amazing opportunity” for humans to recreate the planet in ways that both serves humans and the environment (Hamilton, 2017: 26). With the construct of metaphor in mind it is worth revisiting the Holocene and how it has been utilized—co-opted even—within Anthropocene literature to construct the Anthropocene as a “good” or “bad” era for humanity and our role within this new “human epoch.” Just like the Anthropocene, the Holocene is a culturally negotiated idea. Although the Holocene is ostensibly a geological epoch that simply serves to demarcate major changes in the earth’s climate, delineating the Anthropocene opens the way for new metaphors of the Holocene and the past humanity’s place within it. These vary from the Holocene as a utopia that provided the stable environmental backdrop for cultural developments with minimal environmental impact to the Holocene as a dystopia in which humans led themselves down a path of destruction.

In this paper we explore the notion of the Holocene as used on various Anthropocene conceptualisations. We consider how the idea of the Holocene as a utopia or dystopia—variably defined as explored below—underpin different conceptualisations of the Anthropocene. We then turn to how these different views have co-opted the complexity of the Holocene, and argue that a more explicit acknowledgement of human diversity not only within the Anthropocene but also within the Holocene is needed in order to prevent this utopic/dystopic dualism driving the definitions further apart.

The Holocene metaphors in the Anthropocene: Utopias and dystopias

Holocene utopias

For some, the conceptualization of the Anthropocene itself signals a departure from the “natural behaviours” of the planet (Crutzen, 2002: 23), implying a Holocene in which human activities were minimized or negligible enough that “natural” geological forces were left little affected on a global scale. This can be extended to argue that underlying this is the very 19th century notion that human activities were somehow “natural,” biologically or instinctually driven in the Holocene rather than “unnatural,” away from the norms of our innate human urges or biology, in a sense “cultural” as in the Anthropocene. The Holocene, thus, becomes the natural baseline from which changes that occur in the cultural Anthropocene are to be measured, and furthermore, framed as a goal, or a proposed solution, to the detrimental effects of the Anthropocene (Lidskog and Waterton, 2016). The broad implication is that the wide array of human activities observed in the Holocene allowed the planet to remain in a state of stability, which in turn, allowed humans to flourish (Steffen et al., 2011).

We argue that such views of the Holocene, as an epoch that is characterized by minimal human impact and environmental stability, may be loosely categorized as a form of “Holocene utopianism,” and that they can sometimes have dangerous undertones of the “noble savage” (González-Ruibal, 2018; Luke, 2017; Rudiak-Gould, 2015). Although there are a diversity of perspectives, one common thread is the notion that human activities throughout the Holocene were sustainable, or, at the least, minimally destructive within the bounds of ecological stability and feedback loops to an acceptable degree to maintain the planet’s natural systems and human societies with it (Steffen et al., 2011). The argument explicitly or implicitly is that despite the Holocene playing host to many of the major developments in human societies, including agriculture, metallurgy, and urbanization, humans managed to restrict land use and acquisition activities to a degree that the availability of fresh water, global temperatures, and biogeochemical processes remained in a relatively narrow and stable state (Rockström et al., 2009). Human population, while steadily growing throughout the Holocene, remained at levels that did not accumulate into exponential growth (Waters et al., 2016). Even the role of human activities in well-documented shifts in the global Holocene biosphere, such as the fifth mass extinction of megafauna at the turn of the Pleistocene, tends to be deemphasized in favor of descriptions of regional climate shifts and vegetation change that fail to accumulate into global-scale effects (Steffen et al., 2011; Wyner and DeSalle, 2020).

In short, from a Holocene utopianism perspective, the Holocene is regarded as a goldilocks state of optimal human resource use, population sizes, technologies, and per capita impact. Anything less places us back into a Pleistocene state of human existence among humans that lacked agriculture, written language, and cities, living at the whim of the natural behaviors of the planet. Anything more takes humanity beyond the tipping point of the Anthropocene. The Holocene, thus, becomes a new aspiration in the Anthropocene. In these constructions the Anthropocene becomes the geological era in which the carefully maintained equilibrium of the Holocene has been irreversibly breached, and humans and human culture have taken full control over nature. The exponential growth of the human population coupled with technological innovations and ever-increasing consumption ensures that even small-scale human activities carried out at the local level become globally impactful (Flaherty and Karnjanakesorn, 1995; Kalamandeen et al., 2018; Shester and Micheli, 2011).

How, precisely, to return the idealized Holocene-like state of humanity, however, is less clear in utopianist writing. Instead, the Holocene-as-utopia metaphor provides some targets on which to place the blame of the Anthropocene shift. Proponents of a post-Industrial or Great Acceleration Anthropocene, implicitly and/or explicitly identify the fatal flaw in the techno-social shift toward industrialization and mechanization and the consequential rise of fossil fuel use and the growth of human populations (Crutzen, 2002; Rudiak-Gould, 2015; Steffen et al., 2015; Waters et al., 2023; Zalasiewicz et al., 2008). Other culprits are the exponential acceleration of population, food and waste production, transportation, and technological change associated with the spread of global capitalism (Moore, 2016; Zalasiewicz et al., 2015). In either case, the notion is that the widespread techno-social shifts, which occurred on a global scale as a result of colonialism and capitalist-led globalization, somehow resulted in a qualitative departure from Holocene lifeways, which carefully sustained both earth’s biogeological systems, and in turn, human societies.

Although the originators of the current Anthropocene concept (Crutzen, 2002; Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000), and their successors in the Anthropocene Working Group (i.e., Zalasiewicz et al., 2017) have been notably silent on the implications of blame-shifting that emerge from a post-Industrial and Great Acceleration Anthropocene, other authors have been far more explicit. Originally proposed as a critique of the 19th and/or 20th-century Anthropocenes, the “Capitalocene” concept makes use of Marxist perspectives on the transition from feudalism to capitalism. This view traces the origins of the Anthropocene to the rise of mercantile capitalism in Europe (Moore, 2016). The Capitalocene concept distinguishes itself from the Anthropocene in that it seeks to explicitly identify a cause for the onset of the Anthropocene (or Capitalocene) in the activities of the capitalist class that emerged along with European colonialism in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. From this perspective, the Anthropocene/Capitalocene is not merely the result of accumulated consequential changes in human social, economic, and technological organization that led up to the Industrial Revolution or the Great Acceleration. It is an active project on the part of colonial capitalists originating in Europe to extract labor and resources from former feudal peasants and colonial subjects (Hornborg, 2017; Moore, 2016). Others, such as Chao (2022) and Haraway (2015) have argued that Anthropocene does not adequately define the disproportionate damage wrought by climate change and resource inequality as a result of colonialist and capitalist aggression. The Anthropocene/Capitalocene, thus, becomes not merely a departure from the Holocene, but a process that was put into motion by a relatively small group of humans—capitalist Europeans—at the expense of Holocene humans throughout the world (Malm and Hornborg, 2014). Here, Holocene humanity is no longer culpable in the human actions that brought about the Anthropocene, but rather coerced by a small number of bad actors to abandon the utopian Holocene ways of life.

The catastrophic and global changes wrought by colonial destruction of much of the world beginning in the 15th century and continuing to this day should and must be emphasized in understanding the development of the Anthropocene (see McEwan, 2021; Simpson, 2020). Equally important to critiques of the Anthropocene debates are identifying and highlighting the clear differences in the ways that climate change and other ecological changes continue to differentially impact descendants of colonial subjects throughout the world and how these are linked to the legacies of colonialism.

However, while there is great work ongoing to challenge the assumptions made surrounding how the Anthropocene is studied, where studies should be focused and even who should be leading the study as dominating voices in it, within much work there can be noted undercurrents of similarly utopian metaphors of the Holocene that can be challenged for an essentialist approach to indigenous Holocene lives. Gill (2021: 914), for example, proposes that Eurocentric worldviews must be supplanted by Indigenous and Black “earth-worldings” in order to free non-European humans and non-human worlds from “European capitalist mastery.” This is an important challenge to the idea that western science is the only way to understand the world, but it contains with an essentialized view of indigenous knowledge systems as “other,” “more natural,” “closer to the planet,” always sustainable, “purer” and characterized by a lack of change across the Holocene and into the Anthropocene.. Often implicit in such arguments is the idea that non-European Indigenous peoples live within radical alterities that ontologically do not distinguish between humans and an external environment or conceptions of nature (e.g.: Blaser, 2019), but without refining or defining the varieties of lifeways within this and the changing nature of these over the vastness (10,000 years) that make up the Holocene.

Such portrayals contain hints of a noble savage framework, even if implicit or unintended, as a Holocene utopia is placed in contrast against the Anthropocene dystopia. An imagined, primitive human state was conceptualized through a racist pseudo-anthropological framework and took root in much of colonialist works to justify imperialist aggression. The “noble savage” refers to a caricature of a primitive, uncivilized human that lives in relative peace and concert with nature that was often utilized by European colonialists to justify the subjugation, enslavement, and genocide of indigenous peoples throughout the world as a project of civilizing. And despite being roundly critiqued throughout 20th century, it has been pointed out that many activists and researchers in anthropology, archaeology, and culture studies have become unwitting custodians of the noble savage stereotype (see discussions in Ellingson, 2001; Raymond, 2007). Indeed, both popular and scholarly descriptions of non-European humans living outside of industrialized societies often expound the view of an “ecological noble savage,” one which characterizes indigenous peoples almost universally as conscientious protectors of the environment that live in “balance” with nature (Redford, 1991: 1). While much of this work aims to counter potentially harmful assertions that many non-European, pre-industrial societies were inescapably destruct to their environments and societies (c.f. Diamond, 2006), putting forward the ecologically noble savage stereotype as a counterbalance poses many of the same conceptual problems as the original noble savage myth: highly diverse groups and individuals tend to be painted as a broadly homogeneous group that has maintained a more pristine and balanced connection with nature, either as an essential, innate trait or as a result of lacking social complexity.

The “noble savage” is in essence essentialist, containing a simple cartesian dualism of nature versus culture, with culture seen as more “advanced” and linked to European white man, and nature an earlier and simpler way of being inherent to non-white non-European peoples. Within the Holocene utopia literature, it could be argued that this essentializing dichotomy is brought back, with Indigenous views argued as being more sustainable and thus reduced to “being in concert with nature,” and European science linked to colonialist imposition and thus to “culture” within the cartesian dualism. While not exactly the same as the noble savage trope, as rather than nature=simple and culture=advanced we see nature=sustainable and culture=destructive, such implicit essentializing of all indigenous and black cultures and lifeways as “in concert with nature” and sustainable and indeed unchanging return us to a problematic Cartesian dualism. Moreover, it is also likely the vast majority of humans living throughout the Holocene, and many that live now, did not/do not adhere to a Cartesian dualism of nature and society.

The Anthropocene human stands in stark contrast, as representing the ills of society and civilization. Whether one is a major contributor of environmental destruction, or a victim of its destruction, all are now actively or passively deployed toward the destruction of the earth and its human and non-human inhabitants. Not only does this perspective rely on the very same dualism that is purported to be a major cause of the Anthropocene conundrum, it follows down the path of drawing dangerous distinctions of past humans as well as humans of the present as possessing innate differences that determine their behaviors and actions. It is important to point out that the danger of this perspective goes beyond a mere conceptual othering of some groups of humans; the ecologically noble savage concept—a caricature borne from Holocene utopianism—also has the potential to dispossess certain groups of humans of real-world political and economic agency by casting them aside as benign remnants of a Holocene past.

Holocene dystopias

On the other end of the spectrum, some Anthropocene metaphors of the Holocene are characterized by greater pessimism for the epoch that allowed humanity to flourish for several millennia. For instance, proponents of an “early Anthropocene” often under the banner of historical-ecological approaches, tend to emphasize the long durée of human impacts on the environment that stretch back into the Holocene (Ruddiman, 2003; Smith and Zeder, 2013). Although there are differences in the scale and degree of human impacts described by such scholars, they are bound by a common understanding that humanity as a species, and human societies, have always had significant impacts on local, regional, and even the global environment. This is nuanced however by a recognition that the scale and character of these impacts varies widely.

Within archaeology, humans and their hominid predecessors are frequently explored across time and space as highly successful niche constructors, capable of modifying “species and ecosystems to their liking” (Smith and Zeder, 2013: 8). Humans of the Holocene (and even within the Pleistocene to a degree), are viewed as being inherently impactful toward their surrounding environments. This niche-constructing however is recognized to be taken to new global extremes in the Anthropocene. It is thus an issue not of impact or no-impact but of scale of impact in these models. As Bauer and Ellis (2018) note, human activities likely led to wide-ranging extinctions of land animals in areas such as Australia long before the Holocene. This however takes on a new scale of biodiversity (de)construction in the Holocene with the advent of agriculture and global wayfaring and then colonization, and in the Anthropocene we could argue we see new waves of extinction and eco-system engineering beginning (though the boundaries of this are highly disputed). Smith and Zeder (2013) for example propose that the transition to agriculture, which occurred independently in different parts of the world in the Early Holocene, signals a major shift in human lifeways that eventually led to increasing sedentism, urbanization, technological development, and population growth. However, they argue that these behaviors and their resultant impacts provide an ideal marker for an early Holocene, maybe even Holocene/Pleistocene boundary, start for the Anthropocene. Others have suggested that the Anthropocene simply be combined with the Holocene in recognition of the outsized human impacts on the earth’s systems beginning in the Holocene (Certini and Scalenghe, 2015). Ruddiman (2013) has gone as far as to identify global Anthropocene markers, such as rising levels of methane emissions as a result of rice farming and cattle husbandry, to provide a “golden spike” for a Holocene Anthropocene.

These early Anthropocene or even Holocene-as-Anthropocene views may be seen as providing a more nuanced and deep-time perspective balance of human impact and activity to counter what some may see as a preoccupation with Industrial Era or Great Acceleration Impacts. In these perspectives, it is argued that is important to take into account human impacts and environmental conditions that paved the way for the exponential changes that were to come later in the 19th and 20th centuries. However, some writers including some of these cited have gone further to propose a more dystopian view of the Holocene, as an epoch of human behavior that must not be repeated in order to avoid the past missteps of humanity. Dryzek and Pickering’s (2019: 20) account of “Holocene institutions” provides a particularly unsettling view of humanity in the Holocene in this regard. Dryzek and Pickering (2019) argue that the Holocene is described as an epoch in which large-scale civilizations and their pathological institutions were allowed to develop. In this view the Holocene is characterized by path-dependency institutions that only existed to sustain and grow themselves at the expense of the earth’s ecological systems resulting in the state of the Anthropocene, an inevitability. Contrary to the view of a Holocene utopia, the liberal democracies of today are modeled as far more prepared to recognize and manage ecological impacts of humans than early states (Dryzek and Pickering, 2019). The Anthropocene, therefore, provides an opportunity for humans to escape the problems of the Holocene

The Holocene dystopia metaphor, thus defines an epoch that allowed for the formation of human tendencies that give way to or foreshadows the destruction of the Earth. Far from the view of a Holocene characterized by minimal or negligible human impact, the Holocene dystopia vision sees the Anthropocene as a means for humans to escape the bounds of a Holocene past riddled with human hubris and destruction. In this light, the Anthropocene becomes an opportunity for humanity to remove pathologically damaging institutions (Dryzek and Pickering, 2019) or to take up new forms of technology that will allow humans to modify the planet in ways that make the earth more livable for humans.

Although this line of reasoning can lead down many different pathways, metaphors of Holocene dystopia tend to look toward technological advancements and major organizational shifts to distance humans from our Holocene past and usher in a utopian Anthropocene future. One example of this is the characterization of humans as a “god species” that possesses the intellectual and technological potential to engineer and reshape the world’s ecology to our liking (e.g.: Brand, 2009; Lynas, 2011). Examples of proposed solutions range from support for a shift toward more reliance on nuclear energy (Petrescu et al., 2016) to full-on ecological engineering and the cordoning off of the majority of the human population into urban districts and cities (Brand, 2009). Regardless of the radicality of the measures proposed, most of these techno-utopianist (Dalby, 2016) perspectives share in common strong confidence in novel and wide-ranging techno-social solutions. And although techno-utopianist positions often reveal an idealism for the future that is often lacking in the general discourse around the Anthropocene, proposals for novel solutions often fail to grapple with the more complex discussions of who will carry out the proposed changes, who might benefit from them, and who may suffer potential consequences. One such example is stratospheric aerosol injection, a proposed geoengineering method that aims to introduce aerosols into the atmosphere to reduce global warming (Richter et al., 2022). While aerosol geoengineering has been met with enthusiasm in some circles (Pasztor, 2017; Rahman et al., 2018), some researchers have pointed out that many ethical issues are often overlooked by proponents, including the possibility of unilateral deployment by a state or organization (Halstead, 2018; Smith and Henly, 2021) and potential detrimental effects, such as markedly increased or decreased precipitation in vulnerable regions (McLaren, 2018). In this way, many techno-utopianist solutions, which seek to correct the wrongs of the Holocene dystopia, run the risk of uneven geo-climatic and socio-economic effects that would almost certainly disadvantage those who already lack political and economic clout.

Social and environmental realities of the Holocene

The extreme utopian and dystopian metaphors discussed above present highly abstracted visions of the Holocene seen from an Anthropocene perspective. One, the utopian metaphor, sees the Holocene as an idealized state of existence in which humans were allowed to flourish within a stable and secure earth system. The dystopian metaphor, on the other hand, recalls the Holocene environment as providing the backdrop within which humans modified the landscape according to their needs and eventually developed ecologically and socially destructive institutions.

Both perspectives present a view of human impact that differs starkly in the Holocene. Often the same data is presented in different ways in order to present a different metaphor of the Holocene. On the one hand the Holocene is presented as a time of human and climate stability where humans simply did not have the technology and numbers to make a noteworthy impact on the planetary system (Figure 1a). On the other the Holocene is still seen as a stable backdrop, but this backdrop is the facilitator to the beginnings of destructive human tendencies (Figure 1b). Depending on one’s perspective then the Holocene may be marked by a quantitative shift in human-induced climate-change markers, such as methane output as a result of rice farming and livestock rearing thousands of years ago (Figure 1b), or as simply a period of no change in which these markers were simply a small blip and part of the natural actions of humans as biological elements in the stable Holocene. In this alternative view, the real quantitative and qualitative shift toward the role humans play in overwhelming other factors influencing climate change may only be detected after the Industrial Revolution or Great Acceleration, when levels of CO2 skyrocket beyond levels observed in millions of years as a result of fossil fuel use (Figure 1a).

A more nuanced view of the Holocene, which is neither utopic nor dystopic, requires both a consideration of past human behavior and also the Holocene environment. Did humans strive for minimal-impact lifeways in the Holocene? Did they singularly attempt to maximize their destruction in their need to modify landscapes to their benefit? And finally, did the climate of the Holocene provide a secure, unchanging environment within which humans could carry out activities according to their whims?

Destructive behaviors

Even the most strident Holocene utopianists and late Anthropocene boundists would not deny that humans have, for the hundreds of millennia of their existence, significantly altered their environments to varying degrees and scales. The migration of humans to and their habitation of every continent besides Antarctica before the end of the Pleistocene is a testament to the ability of humans to adapt to new environments, and in many cases, alter their surrounding ecologies to make them more habitable. However, it is the tendency to alter surroundings that often resulted in devastation to local and regional ecological systems.

Given its relatively short prehistory of occupation preceding the arrival of European colonists, the prehistoric deforestation of New Zealand is often cited as a case that demonstrates the potentially large scale and speed of human impacts on newly inhabited environments (McGlone, 1983; McWethy et al., 2014; Tepley et al., 2016). An already large and continuously growing body of literature has examined large-scale deforestation following the initial occupation of New Zealand (e.g.: McWethy et al., 2010; Newnham et al., 2018; Perry et al., 2012). Although regional variation in trends have been identified, researchers suggest that large swathes of forest were cleared through burning within several decades of the initial occupation of both northern (McWethy et al., 2010) and southern (Newnham et al., 2018) New Zealand. Although the overall scale of deforestation is difficult to estimate, researchers have suggested up to 50% of forests were cleared in burning events associated with the earliest occupation of the island (Perry et al., 2012). While much of the remainder of New Zealand’s forests were later cleared by European colonists in subsequent years (McWethy et al., 2010), the first Holocene inhabitants of New Zealand and many other forest biomes were not actively conserving forest ecosystems but instead altering them to better suit human lifeways. Rapid deforestation appears to have been a repeated trend in the initial colonization of many eastern Polynesian islands, and indeed, continues today in many tropical and temperate forest regions throughout the world (Perry et al., 2012), though today often with new goals in mind, related to what Moore (2016) might term the Capitolocene or Chao (2022) the legacy/continuation of the Plantacinocene.

Another oft-cited example of relatively fast, large-scale environmental impacts is the rapid erosion of China’s Loess Plateau in the mid-Holocene (He et al., 2006). China’s Loess Plateau is one of the largest in the world and is also closely related to the development of China’s first large-scale polities. Although early human settlement of the area (ca. 8000–7000cal. BP) undoubtedly affected the hydrogeological regime of the plateau (Rosen et al., 2017), the spread of rice farming into the area associated with the Neolithic Yangshao Culture (ca. 7000–5000 cal. BP) appears to have rapidly contributed to erosion, greatly altering the local landscape and alluvial systems (Rosen, 2008; Rosen et al., 2017). In particular, following the arrival of Yangshao farming settlements, vegetation change associated with clearance of land on hillslopes and ridges led to increasing erosion (Zhang et al., 2022). Erosion of loess platforms and ridges resulted in increasing valley alluviation, the effects of which have been clearly detected in sediment yields of the Yellow River of the time (Shi et al., 2002). As alluviation increased in valleys, large-scale settlements formed in the valleys and large-scale paddy cultivation developed, which coincidentally, likely led to deepening alluvial systems that eventually made the area less amenable to paddy farming (Rosen, 2008). The rapid erosion of the Loess Plateau may have had major impacts on the sediment yield, and thus, the flow, rates of sedimentation, and flooding across the Yellow River. This in turn affected the location and development of farming communities in Neolithic and Bronze Age China (Shi et al., 2002). Furthermore, the process of erosion kicked off by Neolithic farming communities in the Mid-Holocene continues to this day still presenting challenges to inhabitants of the region.

Setting aside examples of relatively rapid human-induced impacts on local or regional ecosystems, the Holocene is characterized by growing populations, deforestation for land use and decline of terrestrial and marine animal diversity as well as changes to plant and animal genetics, morphologies and behaviors in the form of domestication and their locations through the mass translocations of Neolithic expansion. Some estimates have suggested that per capita land use was greater in the earlier stages of the Holocene, which may suggest deforestation of large swathes of major regions for the purposes of the farming and settlement (Ruddiman and Ellis, 2009). Regardless of the precise timing, scale, and degree of impact, it is clear the human activities in the Holocene were largely destructive in different times and places.

Constructive/sustainable behaviors

Of course, not all Holocene human activities were highly destructive. On the contrary, there are also many examples of long-term continuity in human activities that are characterized by minimal or negligible environmental change. In some cases, active strategies have been employed with the aim of sustaining the surrounding ecosystem, and in turn, particular lifeways that benefitted both humans and their environments.

Moving back the Loess Plateau, the rice-farming settlements of the Yangshao Culture (7000–5000 cal BP) were not the first inhabitants in the region (Liu and Chen, 2012). Preceding the arrival of the Yangshao Culture, much of the region was inhabited by peoples associated with the archaeological Late Peiligang Culture (ca. 8000–7000 cal. BP), characterized by a mixed agricultural economy that included foraging, hunting, and fishing in addition to millet farming (Liu and Chen, 2012). Despite evidence for Peiligang settlement of the parts of the Loess Plateau, hillside dry farming of millets and hunting and foraging appear to have had little noticeable impact on vegetation and erosion in the region, despite occupation in the region lasting for up to one millennium (Rosen, 2008; Rosen et al., 2017).

There is evidence from other regions as well of agricultural systems that were developed to sustain local and regional biodiversity over the long term. New understandings of the beginning of agriculture in Amazonia, for example, are shedding light on practices of agriculture that appear to have been developed to maintain local biodiversity while also sustaining growing human populations (Iriarte et al., 2020; Junqueira et al., 2010). Recent studies of agricultural land and settlements, described by some researchers as ‘forest islands’ in Amazonia, suggest that early Holocene inhabitants of the forest intentionally settled and farmed anthropogenic savannahs from as early as 10,000 cal. BP that were sustained as patches in the forest biome (Lombardo et al., 2020). It is estimated that the landscape in the region comprised as many as 4700 such artificial savannahs that may have sustained human populations for over four millennia, likely increased species richness and continues to provide important habitats for many species (Lombardo et al., 2020).

Human-environment interactions

As noted above, aside from its supposed stability, the role of environmental change is often left largely ignored in discussions of the Holocene in the Anthropocene. Although the Holocene may be described as a time of relative stability on a geological time scale to build Anthropocene models of the coming/current catastrophe (Waters et al., 2016), it is important to recognize that local and regional scale climate change and resultant ecological changes within the Holocene may have had significant impacts on human populations and in turn may have affected human activities in diverse and complex feedback loops.

In all of the examples of both human destruction and sustaining mentioned above, ecological change often linked to larger trends of Holocene climate change, are thought to have played a major role in impacting human activities. The deforestation of New Zealand quickly followed its initial inhabitation by Maori settlers, but researchers have linked the initial colonization of New Zealand, as well as many of the other islands of eastern Polynesia with episodic changes in climate that shifted trade winds, opening the window for colonization of new islands (Goodwin et al., 2014). As for the rapid deforestation of northern New Zealand, Newnham et al. (2018) have identified a period of cooling that may have triggered the need for clearance of more arable land under circumstances of growing populations. A not entirely dissimilar role for climate change may have also played a role in the erosion of the Loess Plateau in China, where increasingly arid conditions in the region following the 4.2k event may have contributed to more rapid erosion of loess hillslopes and ridges as Yangshao rice farmers became established in the region (Zhang et al., 2022).

Meanwhile, in South America, long-term fluctuations in the Early Holocene resulting in unpredictable patterns of precipitation have been strongly correlated with a multi-millennia trend in population decline between 8.6kya and 6kya (Riris and Arroyo-Kalin, 2019). Authors note that cultivation of plants on the continent appears to have put a stop to the declining trend, possibly suggesting that the plant cultivation systems widely deployed by peoples throughout the Neotropics from 10kya to 8kya may have been developed as a response to fluctuating risks associated with hunting and foraging (Riris and Arroyo-Kalin, 2019).

The main point that can be gathered from this discussion is that Holocene activities—whether perceived as destructive or sustaining, utopic or dystopic—did not occur under unchanging, stable climate and environmental conditions. Human activities were often carried out in response to, in concert with, or perhaps causing, localized or regionalized climate or ecological changes, the consequences of which may have been difficult to foretell (a lesson for the variable impacts that may come in our Anthropocene futures). These human activities, from deforestation to rapid erosion of loess deposits to long-term resilient farming practices, may be perceived as destructive or sustaining in Anthropocene hindsight. However, they also likely reflect Holocene human attempts to support populations and sustain livelihoods in the context of everchanging social-natural environments.

Toward terra incognita?

Graeber and Wengrow (2021) note the tendency toward highly abstracted notions of humans in a past “natural state” to divine fundamental understandings of “human nature.” Humans from this view have often been abstracted as “noble savages” on the one hand, or solitary brutes only seeking personal gain at the expense of others on the other hand. The implicit or explicit metaphors of Holocene utopias versus Holocene dystopias attempts a similar abstraction of humanity, only in this case, in attempting to divine a way forward in the Anthropocene. Both are essentialist views of the Holocene that are designed to be comforting in that both views provide a simple way out of the Anthropocene predicament: one looks back with an aim of re-discovering idealized human behaviors, while the other looks forward, aiming to discard the mistakes of the past.

Facing the realities of the Holocene however requires us to abandon simplified, singular notions of the Holocene as a potential “solution” to the Anthropocene. The Holocene cannot be characterized as singularly utopian or dystopian, because the range and diversity of human activities show us that some humans of the Holocene may have been destructive, but in many cases others were also intentionally or unintentionally adapted toward long-term sustainability and continuity with the complexity of the earth’s ecosystems. At the same time, the natural environment of the Holocene was not static or stable at local, regional, or even global scales, and human adaptions to climate and ecological changes often required drastic changes to human behaviors.

Metaphors of the Holocene as utopian or dystopian betray a tendency to build grand narratives that largely arise from an adherence to Eurocentric ideologies (Hamilton, 2017). The binaries of human destruction versus sustainability and climate stability versus instability rely heavily on Cartesian dualisms (Gill, 2021) that attempt to epistemologically separate humans from nature. Humans of the Holocene engaged in diverse behaviors that impacted their surroundings in diverse ways. Only in hindsight are archaeologists and paleoclimate specialists able to deem these activities destructive and/or sustainable and even then we must do so cautiously and resist the desire to reduce them to simple comforting narratives of good or evil. Similarly, fluctuations in the Holocene climate are not inherently stable or unstable but may have allowed humans to maintain particular activities and lifeways, while leading to the discontinuance of others. Human behaviors in the Holocene are/were in this sense not very different from those of people in the Pleistocene or the Anthropocene (regardless where we chose to bound this, early or late). Humans have always been an ecological force and at the whim of ecological force, like all other organisms, and the perceived stability and/or instability of the climate is only measured against continuity or discontinuity in human actions.

What is also clear, however, is that the Anthropocene will not simply nor closely resemble the Holocene in any meaningful way. Exponential human population growth, the colonization of and expansion of people across all known land masses, including Antarctica and into new ecosystems, the development of new technologies, and increases in production, consumption, and waste in the Anthropocene on an entirely new scale—regardless of whether these activities have their origins in the Holocene—ensures that that the near-future Anthropocene cannot resemble any stage of the Holocene either climatically or socially. As (Crutzen, 2002) noted in proposing the Anthropocene concept, barring a meteorite impact, a major pandemic, or a devastating nuclear war, the Anthropocene is terra incognita, a social and natural existence on a heretofore unseen scale that is absolutely unknown to humans up to this point. Humans, no matter how favorably they view the Holocene, will not revert to a Holocene-like existence and given predictions of future human-induced climate change, will not return to the safety and stability of the “natural” Holocene environment, at least not in the near-future Anthropocene.

While this reality may soothe the Holocene dystopianists who wish to discard human history and prehistory wholesale, this does not imply that the Holocene is now devoid of value and will only exist as cautionary tales in the Anthropocene. On the contrary, all future human endeavors, whether the development of new resource-acquisition technologies, energy use, social and political organization and institutions will necessarily draw from the pool of the human past for inspiration. Holocene humanity likely provides the greatest diversity and array of options to draw from given it forms a vast part if our global past in which human social life and environmental impact/interaction developed to the stage it is now. Much work has already been invested in distinguishing and identifying practices and lifeways that are more sustainable given various social and environmental circumstances, and these will undoubtedly play an important role in the Anthropocene. Going beyond specific land use activities and practices, more attention is being given to the vast array of social and political systems of organization spawned by humans of the Holocene and how these attest to the highly flexible social adaptability of humans and possibilities for entirely novel systems of organization and governance (Aiuvalasit, 2019; Carballo and Feinman, 2016; Green et al., 2020; Wengrow and Graeber, 2015). For instance, socio-economic strategies aimed at promoting environmental and social sustainability, such as “planned degrowth” (Alexander, 2012; Kallis et al., 2018) may draw from a wide array of archaeological studies that have explored the causes and effects of population decline. In this sense, creating new and diverse metaphors of the Holocene may be one of the most important endeavors of humans of the Anthropocene.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful for the support of the Department of Archaeology and Art History, Seoul National University. They are also grateful for the thoughts and advice of people in the Anthropocene graduate seminar, from which this paper developed. The paper was written up and funded by Prof. Bates’s project at SNU, “Big data analysis on historical climate and land coverage changes for their prediction during next generation semiconductor manufacturing and the 4th industrial revolution era” grant number A0342-20220007, funded by Research Support Fund Industry-University Agreement Samsung Electronics DS. The project is informally called the Korean Working Group (KWG), and is part of the wider LandCover6k a working group of the Past Global Changes (PAGES) project, which in turn received support from the Swiss Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

CRediT statement

This paper was conceptualized by MC during JB’s class on the Anthropocene. The original draft writing was done by MC, with review and editing writing done by both MC and JB. Supervision and funding acquisition was carried out by JB.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The paper was written up and funded by Prof. Bates’s project at SNU, “Big data analysis on historical climate and land coverage changes for their prediction during next generation semiconductor manufacturing and the 4th industrial revolution era” grant number A0342-20220007, funded by Research Support Fund Industry-University Agreement Samsung Electronics DS. The project is informally called the Korean Working Group (KWG), and is part of the wider LandCover6k a working group of the Past Global Changes (PAGES) project, which in turn received support from the Swiss Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

ORCID iD

Jennifer Bates

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