When Did the Great Acceleration Really Start? Saskatchewan Wheat Farming and Early CO2 Emissions

A new article argues that the Great Acceleration, the sharp rise in human impact on Earth systems, may have started decades before the commonly cited 1950s. It points to Saskatchewan's agricultural boom between the 1890s and 1930s, when settlers broke 20 million acres of prairie grassland for wheat farming, releasing large amounts of soil carbon. The piece suggests that land-use change from global resource booms in places like the Great Plains, Argentina, and Ghana contributed significantly to early anthropogenic climate change. The author challenges the standard Great Acceleration timeline by showing that global population, CO2 emissions from land use, and agricultural area all inflected well before 1950. By 1900, land-use change supplied roughly two-thirds of all human CO2 emissions. The article uses historical data to argue that the real inflection point may be closer to 1850, not 1950, and that focusing only on post-WWII trends misses the earlier, large-scale ecological transformation driven by colonial expansion and industrial agriculture.