Opinion: Why the Anthropocene began with European colonisation and mass slavery

Professor Mark Maslin and Professor Simon Lewis (both UCL Geography) write about how colonisation marks the beginning of the Anthropocene, and how the origins of racism and climate emergency share common causes. The toppling of statues at Black Lives Matter protests has powerfully articulated that the roots of modern racism lie in European colonisation and slavery. Racism will be more forcefully opposed once we acknowledge this history and learn from it. Geographers and geologists can help contribute to this new understanding of our past, by defining the new human-dominated period of Earth's history as beginning with European colonialism. Today our impacts on the environment are immense: humans move more soil, rock and sediment each year than is transported by all other natural processes combined. We may have kicked off the sixth "mass extinction" in Earth's history, and the global climate is warming so fast we have delayed the next ice age. We've made enough concrete to cover the entire surface of the Earth in a layer two millimetres thick.