Dark Nature: Rapid Environmental Change and Human Response

What is Dark Nature? This slightly provocative title refers to a series of conferences concerning the influence of the environment on humans during the Holocene. There is no doubt that human actions are forcing major changes to climate, landscapes and the environment. Contemporary discourse holds that environmental havoc is chiefly caused by humans and that, only if we could manage our impacts on water, air, climate, the oceans and biodiversity, nature would be in fine balance, providing a benevolent ecosphere. However, despite the widespread influence of human actions, nature is also capable of rapid and dramatic change (Leroy, 2006). Throughout our planet’s geological history, its capacity for abrupt environmental change has provided the background and, commonly, the drivers for evolution. Such natural (i.e. non-human) activities shaped the physical (abiotic) environment through its interference with lake and sea levels, river channels and sediment load, slope stability, ground subsidence, frozen ground activity and desertification. Sudden sweeping change may be beneficial to life, with many environments requiring regular disturbance by hurricanes, wildfires or floods to maintain their ecological biodiversity. But occasionally natural disturbances affect too large an expanse, act with too excessive an intensity, or simply occur too fast or too frequently to be transient catalysts for environmental opportunism (Berger, 2006). Such changes, extreme examples of which are giant volcanic eruptions, earthquakes and floods, can inflict long-lasting harm on both the people and the environment. Between these opposing conditions of non-equilibrium sustainability and environmental destruction (collapse) is a continuum of natural disturbance with which communities and ecosystems have to cope (e.g. migration, adaptation, mitigation). Here, we refer to the potential for the natural environment to inflict harmful damage as ‘dark nature’ and highlight that these actions can occur on timescales of concern to society—that is, over a period of 100 years or less. Such ‘rapid’ environmental disturbances to ecosystems and communities include not only instantaneous catastrophes but also slow-onset, more pervasive changes to the environment, such as climate change. The aim of the Dark Nature programme is to refine the record of rapid (<100 years) environmental changes affecting physical environments and ecosystems during the last 11,500 years (the Holocene).