Infrastructure in the Anthropocene: Example of Information and Communication Technology

As a recent Nature ~2003! editorial put it, ‘‘Welcome to the Anthropocene,’’ the era of the anthropogenic Earth in which the dynamics of many major natural systems increasingly reflect the activities of a single species ~Allenby 2000/2001! ~B. R. Allenby, unpublished working paper, Batten Institute, Univ. of Virginia, 2002!. Indeed, it is increasingly apparent that a principle result of the Industrial Revolution and associated changes in human demographic patterns, technology and economic systems, and cultures, is a continuing, indeed accelerating, integration of many natural and human systems at all scales, including the global, with concomitant emergent behaviors and increasingly complex and coupled dynamics. Under these conditions, continued stability of both human and natural systems will require development of an earth systems engineering and management capability, which can be defined as the ability to rationally engineer and manage coupled human-natural systems in a highly integrated fashion. Thus framed, it is apparent that the need for earth systems engineering and management has not arisen from any particular project, issue, or perturbation but is rather a reflection of a new stage in the evolution of earth systems, including human systems such as economies, flows of energy and materials, institutional and cultural organization, and built infrastructures of many kinds. This perspective raises a challenging question for engineers: Under such circumstances, what is infrastructure? To begin with, it is apparent that the kinds of things we traditionally think about as infrastructure—transportation networks and water and sewage systems—clearly remain important, but emergent behavior, as these built systems integrate in ever more complex ways with the natural environment and other human systems at higher scales, becomes increasingly important and increasingly reflective of human activities. Systems that are considered ‘‘natural,’’ ranging from the elemental cycles of carbon and nitrogen to the hydrologic cycle, are increasingly integrated with infrastructure systems. For example, genetic engineering is integrating previously independent biological systems—in this case, biological structures at the genomic level—into food production and, through politics, food distribution systems. The global climate change negotiations are, in part, a mechanism by which portions of the carbon cycle are brought into the human economic system and made human, and the fossil fuel energy infrastructure and automotive infrastructure play important roles in this. The evolution of ‘‘intelligent infrastructure’’ creates new and complex patterns of interactions among previously disparate infrastructures, as well as between infrastructure and the natural systems they affect.