The Shock of the Anthropocene

by Christophe Bonneuil

  3Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, Histoire naturelle générale et particulière, Supplement 5: Des époques de la nature, Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1778, 237.

  4Steffen et al., ‘The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives’.

  5Claude Lorius and Laurent Carpentier, Voyage dans l’Anthropocène. Cette nouvelle ère dont nous sommes les héros, Arles: Actes Sud, 2010, 11.

  6Anthony D. Barnosky et al., ‘Approaching a State Shift in Earth’s Biosphere’, Nature, 485, 7 June 2012: 52–8.

  7For a recent study of this, see World Meteorological Organization, ‘Record Greenhouse Gas Levels Impact Atmosphere and Oceans’, Press Release No. 1002, 9 September 2014, wmo.int.

  8Stuart L. Pimm et al., ‘The Biodiversity of Species and Their Rates of Extinction, Distribution, and Protection’, Science, 344:6187, 30 May 2014, sciencemag.org.

  9Vaclav Smil, The Earth’s Biosphere: Evolution, Dynamics, and Change, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002, 284.

  10Edward O. Wilson, The Future of Life, London: Vintage, 2003, 102.

  11Christer Nilsson et al., ‘Fragmentation and Flow Regulation of the World’s Large River Systems’, Science, 308, 15 April 2005: 405–6.

  12Johan Rockström et al., ‘A Safe Operating Space for Humanity’, Nature, 461, 24 September 2009: 472–5; James N. Galloway et al., ‘Transformation of the Nitrogen Cycle: Recent Trends, Questions, and Potential Solutions’, Science, 320:5878, 2008: 889–92.

  13Ibid.

  14Helmut Haberl et al., ‘Quantifying and Mapping the Human Appropriation of Net Primary Production in Earth’s Terrestrial Ecosystems’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, USA, 104, 2007: 12,942–7; Rockström et al., ‘A Safe Operating Space for Humanity’.

  15Global Footprint Network, footprintnetwork.org.

  16Steffen et al., ‘The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives’.

  17Erle C. Ellis, ‘Anthropogenic Transformation of the Terrestrial Biosphere’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, 369:1938, 2011: 1,010–35.

  18Erle Ellis and Navin Ramankutty, ‘Anthropogenic Biomes’, in The Encyclopedia of Earth, eoearth.org.

  19Details on the source data for all figures are to be found as part of the Illustration Credits.

  20Anthony D. Barnosky, ‘Approaching a State Shift in Earth’s Biosphere’; Will Steffen et al., ‘Planetary Boundaries: Guiding Human Development on a Changing Planet’, Science, 347:6223, 13 February 2015.

  21Smil, The Earth’s Biosphere, 186, 283–4.

  22Ibid., 269.

  23Bill McGuire, Waking the Giant: How a Changing Climate Triggers Earthquakes, Tsunamis, and Volcanoes, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

  24Patricia L. Korkoran, ‘An Anthropogenic Marker Horizon in the Future Rock Record’, GSA Today, 24:6, June 2014: 4–8.

  25Jan Zalasiewicz, response to Adrian J. Ivakhiv’s ‘Against the Anthropocene’ blog post, Immanence, 7 July 2014, blog.uvm.edu.

  26Ellis, Anthropogenic Transformation of the Terrestrial Biosphere’.

  27Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin, ‘Defining the Anthropocene’, Nature, 519, 12 March 2015: 171–80, nature.com.

  28Jan Zalasiewicz et al., ‘When Did the Anthropocene Begin? A Mid-Twentieth Century Boundary Level Is Stratigraphically Optimal’, Quaternary International, 2015 (early online edition available at ib.berkeley.edu/labs/barnosky).

  29Paul Crutzen and Will Steffen, ‘How Long Have We Been in the Anthropocene Era?’ Climatic Change, 61, 2003: 251–7, 253.

  CHAPTER 2

  Thinking with Gaia: Towards

  Environmental Humanities

  The Anthropocene is an event, a point of bifurcation in the history of the Earth, life and humans. It overturns our representations of the world. According to the philosopher Bruno Latour, it is ‘the most decisive philosophical, religious, anthropological and, as we shall see, political concept yet produced as an alternative to the very notions of “Modern” and “modernity”’.1 Continuing the systemic ecology which forty years ago framed human activities in an analysis of the functioning of ecosystems and the biosphere, the Anthropocene idea abolishes the break between nature and culture, between human history and the history of life and Earth.

  From Buffon to Lyell and Darwin, biology and geology extended terrestrial time to hundreds of millions of years, creating a context that was seemingly external, almost immobile and indifferent to human tribulations. In parallel with this, the bourgeois and industrial Enlightenment emphasized the value of man, the modern subject, as autonomous agent acting consciously on his history and settling social conflicts by dominating nature. We shall see how this break between nature and society was constructed in the nineteenth century, and the part played in it by the emerging human and social sciences. We shall go on to see how this forceful, even violent, return of the history of the Earth into world history creates a new human condition and requires us to reintegrate nature and the Earth system at the heart of our understanding of history, our conception of freedom and our practice of democracy.

  Rethinking the environmental crisis: an end to ‘sustainable development’

  By offering a reading of the ecological impacts of our model of development over two and a half centuries and on a planetary scale, the concept of the Anthropocene profoundly shifts our understanding of the contemporary ‘ecological crisis’.

  A few decades ago, the ‘environment’ was still understood as that which surrounds us, the place where humans went to extract resources, deposit waste, or even that in certain places was to be left virgin. Economists spoke of environmental degradations as ‘externalities’. In the forms of natural parks, ecosystems and environment, subsequently that of ‘sustainable development’, nature was recognized until relatively recently as essential but separate from us. It hardly seemed to present a serious limit to growth, a watchword intoned in chorus by business leaders, orthodox economists and policy-makers.

  The concept of Anthropocene challenges this separation and the promise to perpetuate our economic system by modifying it at the margin. In place of ‘environment’, there is now the Earth system. While triumphant industrial modernity had promised to prise us away from nature, its cycles and its limits, placing us in a world of boundless progress, the Earth and its limits are today making a comeback. We are facing ‘the intrusion of Gaia’, in the words of Isabelle Stengers – Gaia being the Greek goddess of the Earth.2 The global and profound biogeochemical processes that we have disturbed are forcing their way into the centre of the political stage and of our everyday lives. Instead of ‘masters and possessors of nature’, we find ourselves each day a bit more entangled in the immense feedback loops of the Earth system. There can be no more talk of a linear and inexorable progress that used to silence those who challenge the market-based, industrial and consumerist order by accusing them of seeking to return us to a bygone age; from now on, the future of the Earth and all its creatures is at stake. And this uncertain becoming, strewn with tipping points, scarcely resembles the radiant future promised by the ideologists’ progress of the last two centuries, whether liberal, social democratic or Marxist.

  As for the word ‘crisis’, does it not maintain a deceptive optimism? It leads us to believe, in fact, that we are simply faced with a perilous turning-point of modernity, a brief trial with an imminent outcome, or even an opportunity. The term ‘crisis’ denotes a transitory state, while the Anthropocene is a point of no return. It indicates a geological bifurcation with no foreseeable return to the normality of the Holocene.

  The warning given by the Anthropocene concept, and the recent advances in the sciences of the Earth system, thus go much further than an anthropocentric view of the ‘environmental crisis’, no matter how alarming. The problem is not only that our environment is being degraded, nor that ‘resources’ (another category that postulates an external and static character to the Earth and its beings and processes) are being exhausted, increasing social inequalities and thus threate
ning the planet with major geopolitical disturbances. The double reality that the Anthropocene presents is that, on the one hand, the Earth has seen other epochs in the last 4.5 billion years, and life will continue in one form or another with or without humans. But the new states that we are launching the Earth into will bring with them a disorder, penury and violence that will render it less readily habitable by humans. Even if the human species manages to reduce its ecological footprint drastically and invent a more sober civilization, we will not have settled accounts with Gaia. The Earth would take at least centuries if not hundreds of thousands of years to get back to the climatic and geobiological regime of the Holocene. The traces of our urban, industrial, consumerist, chemical and nuclear age will remain for thousands or even millions of years in the geological archives of the planet.

  The new sciences of the Earth system also give us a non-linear view of the past and future of our planet. We are no longer in a reassuring model in which x hectares of forests converted into fields leads to the disappearance of n per cent of species, causes y per cent extra greenhouse gas and generates z°C increase in global temperature. In both geological history and their own modelling of the future, scientists have detected climatic tipping points and sudden-collapse thresholds of ecosystems. Thus, noting that for the last 400,000 years the Earth has swung between a cold glacial state and a warm interglacial state, they suspect the existence of a tipping point (around +2°C or +3°C?) beyond which the Earth system will undergo a change of attractor and tend towards a new stable state that is decidedly warmer (some +5°C or even +10°C or more – no climatologist can predict), such as existed some tens of millions of years ago, long before the appearance of the human species, and lasted for millions of years. Well beyond the linear predictions of the International Panel on Climate Change’s first reports, this would be a real leap into the unknown. Living in the Anthropocene, therefore, means inhabiting the non-linear and highly unpredictable world of the Earth system’s (or Earth history’s) responses to our disturbances. For the Earth is ‘perhaps a mother, but an irritable and touchy one’, as Isabelle Stengers reminds us in tracing a mythological portrait of Gaia.3

  The Anthropocene thus cancels the peaceful and reassuring project of sustainable development. This concept derived from the notion of ‘maximal sustainable yield’ conceived by (ecological) fishery science in the 1950s, which itself came from the notion of ‘sustainable (nachhaltig) management’ developed by German forestry science in the eighteenth century (see Chapter 9). Today it fosters illusions that are belied by the advent of the Anthropocene.

  First of all, it supports belief in the possibility of perpetuating economic growth by means of a bit more ‘conservation’ of the environment. Publications from the early 1970s on the impossibility of indefinite growth on a finite planet (the Limits to Growth report of the Club of Rome in 1972, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen’s thesis on entropy and degrowth, etc.) were carefully swept under the carpet by the new watchword of ‘sustainable development’. While these writings proposed an economy in the service of society and within the biophysical limits of the planet, the discourse of sustainable development that arose in the 1980s claimed that three well-identified poles could be mutually negotiated: the economic, the social and the environmental. Instead of a concentric view in which the economy is within the social, itself framed by a thousand feedback loops within the biosphere and the Earth system, the environment became a new column in the bookkeeping of big corporations, which gave themselves new sustainable development divisions. The project of the ‘green economy’, born within international institutions in recent years, accentuates this development, with the celebrated ‘ecosystem services’ now being the object of markets: the biosphere, the hydrosphere and the atmosphere appear as mere subsystems of the financial and commodity sphere (see Chapter 9).

  The mechanical theory of maximum sustainable yield was refuted in 1973 by the ecologist Crawford S. Holling, who saw it as a reductionist and linear view that was responsible for the sudden collapse of certain ecosystems such as fishery resources. For him, ‘The well-being of the world is not adequately described by concentrating on equilibria and conditions near them … [The] effort to provide a maximum sustained yield from a fish population … may paradoxically increase the chances of extinctions.’4 Accordingly, before cofounding the Resilience Alliance in 1999, Holling had proposed already in 1973 the concept of ‘ecological resilience’ as the capacity of an ecosystem to maintain certain of its features despite and through sudden changes of state.

  This systemic and complex view of our planet breaks with the posture of control by scientists and engineers imbued with certainty and able to standardize environmental conditions. We enter a world of limits, which is also marked by a greater visibility of the limits of scientific knowledge. Faced with the highly unpredictable character of ecosystems and the Earth, the uncertainties are structural, and it is no longer a matter of believing that a simple compromise can be found between exploitation and conservation. What can help us to inhabit the Anthropocene collectively, therefore, is not, as Holling already said, ‘the presumption of a sufficient knowledge, but the recognition of our ignorance’.5 Far from the glorious advent of an ‘age of man’, the Anthropocene thus rather attests to our striking impotence.6

  A geopolitical event

  Besides being a geological event, the Anthropocene is at the same time a political event. In the IPCC’s hypothesis (by no means the most pessimistic) of an increase in average temperature of 3.7°C by 2100, the Earth will be warmer than it has ever been for 15 million years. As for the extinction of biodiversity, this is already proceeding at a speed unmatched for 65 million years. This means that human societies will have to face up in the coming decades to changes of state in the Earth system to which the genus Homo, which appeared only two and a half million years ago, has never experienced, and to which therefore it is neither biologically adapted nor culturally prepared. The Anthropocene thus opens a new situation for humanity, a new human condition.

  If the climatic stability of the last 10,000 years of the Holocene made possible the rise of cultures and civilizations on five continents, the end of this epoch and the entry into a new one will not be a smooth and steady process for human societies. Global warming means that people will die and countries disappear. The food situation already faces an uncertain future: the climate change of the last few decades has caused a shortfall of 4 to 5 per cent in world wheat and maize production in relation to 1980.7

  At the present time, 20 to 30 million people each year migrate in the wake of natural disaster, and the UN envisages 50 million environmental migrants a year by 2030, due in particular to changes linked to climate disturbance. Already today, therefore, there are ‘victims of the Anthropocene’,8 and there will be more in the future. As Harald Welzer suggests, with constraints on both resources and climate, the Anthropocene promises to be violent. The geopolitics of the present century may prove more full of conflict, more barbaric, than the twentieth century. The question in the twenty-first century will be how to inhabit the Earth less frightfully.9

  What levels of climate change and sea-level rise are acceptable? Which Pacific islands are condemned to disappear? How many other species besides our own will we allow to survive? At what point will the acidification of the oceans and the spilling of toxic substances be declared intolerable? If scientists can cast light on these questions, the answers are political decisions. In the time of the Anthropocene, the entire functioning of the Earth becomes a matter of human political choices. For example, knowing that the warming of recent decades has been limited by urban and industrial emissions of sulphur dioxide (an aerosol reflecting solar radiation), particularly in Asia,10 the international community finds itself facing the dilemma of reducing SO2 emissions by anti-pollution measures, at the risk of increasing global warming, or instead limiting these measures or even conducting projects of geoengineering that consist in massively spraying SO2 into the atmosphere so as t
o limit this warming, at the cost of millions of premature deaths from respiratory diseases caused by this gas.

  The slogan of the Rio+20 conference was ‘The future we want’. It thus expresses, not without an ambivalence that concedes to Promethean optimism, the fact that the planet will become what humans make of it, more or less voluntarily and more or less democratically. The Anthropocene is thus a political issue as well as a category in Earth sciences. We cannot be content with invoking demographic growth (the population increase of 2.4 times between 1950 and 2000) or world GDP (which multiplied by seven in the same half century) as explanations of the increasing human sway over the Earth (Chapter 4). In the same way, the emission of one kilogram of carbon dioxide or methane does not fulfil the same function for all human beings. For some people it is a question of survival, in the form of the available ration of rice, while for others it is simply increasing a consumption of meat (cattle, like rice fields, are great emitters of methane) that is already excessive from a medical point of view, monopolizing half of the planet’s cereal crop-land for cattle feed and generating 18 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions, or more than the entire transport sector.11

  We are therefore not in the peaceful and infra-political problematic of a reconciliation of humans with nature: the Anthropocene is political inasmuch as it requires arbitrating between various conflicting human forcings on the planet, between the footprints of different human groups (classes, nations), between different technological and industrial options, or between different ways of life and consumption. The Anthropocene has therefore to be given a political charge in order to overcome the contradictions and limits of a model of modernity that has spread globally over the last two centuries, and to explore the paths of a rapid and equitably divided reduction of the ecological footprint.