Adventures in the Anthropocene
by Gaia Vince
Summary
Vince begins with the scientific proposal that gives the book its title: that humanity has ended the Holocene and begun a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, the age in which one species is the dominant planetary force. Then she does what nobody else covering the debate had done: she resigned her desk, and spent two years travelling the new epoch to see it from the ground.
The structure is elemental, chapters on atmosphere, mountains, rivers, farmlands, oceans, deserts, savannahs, forests, rocks and cities, and each is built from the same double material: the planetary science of what is changing, and the people already improvising a life inside the change. The book's heroes are the adapters. The retired engineer in Ladakh building artificial glaciers, meltwater frozen in shaded catchments through winter to ration irrigation water into the growing season. The villagers wiring themselves to hydro power in Nepal's hills; the man painting mountainsides white in Peru to call back the cold; islanders raising their ground against the sea; slum dwellers in Nairobi and factory cities in China navigating the epoch's urban half. Vince neither romanticises the ingenuity nor lets it excuse the drivers: the adaptation is heroic and the need for it is an indictment, and the book holds both without letting either cancel the other.
Around four hundred and fifty pages, reported with a correspondent's eye and a science editor's discipline.
Best for readers who want the planetary crisis at human scale, told through the people already living in the future everyone else is debating.
Historical Context & Significance
Adventures in the Anthropocene won the Royal Society Winton prize in 2015, and the win made overdue history: Gaia Vince was the first woman to take the prize outright in its twenty eight year history, a fact the Royal Society highlighted in its announcements, and which drew a round of commentary about the prize's, and science writing's, gender record; the shortlists changed visibly afterwards.
Vince had left the news editorship of Nature to make the journey, a professional gamble the result vindicated, and the book helped move the Anthropocene from stratigraphy committee jargon into general vocabulary, artificial glaciers and all.
Her follow ups, Transcendence and the climate migration study Nomad Century, extended the method, big planetary argument grounded in reportage, and the first win's asterisk kept its point: the prize's winners since have looked more like its readers.