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).