The Shock of the Anthropocene

by Christophe Bonneuil

  The great temporal and ontological divide between nature and society

  Whereas the Biblical account, like many other non-Western origin myths, made it possible for a long time to view human history as closely linked to that of the Earth, and Buffon proposed in his Epochs of Nature a great fresco tracing the common destiny of Earth and mankind, these two domains became increasingly separated in the course of the nineteenth century, as the prehuman history of the Earth became longer. Two major texts from the early 1830s, by the geologist Charles Lyell and the historian Jules Michelet, attest to this great discordance. In Michelet’s universal history of humanity:

  Along with the world there began a war that will end together with the world and not before: that of man against nature, of spirit against matter, liberty against fatality. History is nothing else than the account of this interminable struggle … the gradual triumph of freedom … What is bound to encourage us in this endless struggle is that, by and large, the one side does not change, while the other changes and becomes stronger. Nature remains the same, whereas every day man gains some advantage over her. The Alps have not grown taller, while we have driven a road across the Simplon pass; the waves and winds are no less capricious, but the steamship breaks the waves heedless of the caprice of wind and sea. Follow the migrations of the human race from east to west, along the route of the sun and the magnetic currents of the globe: observe it on this long journey from Asia to Europe, from India to France, and you will see at each point the fatal power of nature diminish, and the influence of race and climate become less tyrannical.12

  Continuing Michelet’s vision, the great historian of the Renaissance, Burckhardt, depicted the modern conception of history as ‘the break with nature caused by the awakening of consciousness’.13

  In symmetry with this ‘history against nature’, nature dismissed to immobility, at least on the human timescale, Lyell inaugurated with his Principles of Geology a view of the Earth’s geological history as indifferent to human action. An intelligent observer arriving on our planet and assessing the role of human action, he explained:

  would soon perceive that no one of the fixed and constant laws of the animate or inanimate world was subverted by human agency, and that the modifications now introduced for the first time were the accompaniments of new and extraordinary circumstances, and those not of a physical but a moral nature … so that, whenever the power of the new agent was withheld, even for a brief period, a relapse would take place to the ancient state of things.14

  The great discrepancy between a long history of the Earth, impassive to human action, and a history of the emancipation of the latter from any natural determinism, was based on a separation of timescales allowed by the gradual extension in the estimated age of the Earth. Buffon proposed a preliminary estimate of 77,000 years, which already broke with the Biblical canon. This was based on the cooling time of an initially very hot planet, extrapolating to the planet the cooling times of metal spheres as measured in his forge. With Lyell, we advance to a timescale of tens of millions of years. The geologist’s uniformitarianism allowed very slow phenomena to have great effects. He accordingly opposed other theories, championed in particular by Georges Cuvier, known as ‘catastrophist’ because they minimized the Earth’s timescale and had to explain geological formations by the existence in the past of abrupt phenomena that had ceased to play a role since the appearance of man.15 The history of the Earth that Lyell proposed was one of slow and regular forces on which man had no hold, in relation to which ‘the modifications in the system of which man is the instrument, do not, perhaps, constitute so great a deviation from previous analogy as we usually imagine’.16 In 1862, the physicist William Thomson (the future Lord Kelvin) gave an age of 400 million years for the Earth (the present estimate is 4.5 billion).17

  The Lamarckian theory of evolution, for its part, and following it that of Darwin, extended the time frame of the history of life, with the appearance of man from a simian ancestor being only a belated episode in this.

  In the nineteenth century, the natural sciences also stripped away the telos from both life and the Earth, while the human and social sciences became teleologically progressive. The former removed from life and Earth their sensitivity to human action, while the latter declared their autonomy by assiduously detaching the explanation of human and social phenomena from natural causes. History applied to the study of ‘human affairs’ the methods of the natural sciences: the quest for archival traces as evidence, after the model of fossil traces; the accumulation and comparison of ‘series’; and, in the twentieth century, the ‘immobile history’, as Fernand Braudel put it, of structural, economic and social evolutions. But within this common paradigm of process and history, forming the cultural matrix of the industrial nineteenth century, a division of fields of authority occurred: the history of the Earth and life was the province of natural scientists, and the history of ‘progress in human affairs’18 that of historians and social sciences – a division that still casts a shadow today. As we shall see, this great temporal and ontological divide broke with the conception of connections between climate, environment and society that had prevailed in the late eighteenth century (Chapter 8) and formed a cultural precondition for the swing into the Anthropocene, by constructing a great external nature, slow, immense and undaunted, and thereby making invisible the limits of the planet (Chapter 9) and the unequal socioeconomic relations of nascent fossil capitalism (Chapter 10).

  Profiting from this open discordance between the time of nature and the time of man, liberal economists such as Jean-Baptiste Say, considering that the exhaustion of natural resources was a matter for a distant future beyond the grasp of economic rationality, broke with Malthus and proclaimed a nature placed outside of economic thought as a free gift: ‘We leave the study of natural wealth to the scholars who deal with natural things.’19 ‘Natural wealth is inexhaustible … Unable to be either multiplied or exhausted, it is not the object of economic science.’20

  This divide between the natural and the human sciences was further accentuated between 1850 and 1960. Climatology became the science of an external, global climate, conceived as an averaging out of thermometric data over a very large scale, and no longer as the science of places and topographies, the basis for reflection on the human making of climate and the climatic making of societies.21 In a related fashion, public health and its revolutionizing by Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch focused medical attention on microorganisms, thus marginalizing the earlier neo-Hippocratic medical paradigm which viewed the body as shaped by a far wider number of elements in the environment such as light, temperature, climate, wind, odour and ‘miasmas’.22 After 1900, the new science of genetics promoted a ‘modern conception of heredity’ centred on the isolated gene, which ruled out the idea (which only recently came back with epigenetics) of a heredity co-determined by the influence of the environment.23 With the exception of geography, almost all the social sciences defined their object in a way that assiduously removed it from nature: thus social and cultural anthropology separated off from physical anthropology, and Émile Durkheim excluded climatic parameters from the pertinent causes of suicide, the nascent sociology making a watertight division between society and the natural environment.24 In this respect, Durkheim followed Comte, who with his Course of Positive Philosophy had founded sociology as a ‘genuine science of social development’ that obeyed the specific laws of the ‘general progression of humanity’ rather than environmental influences.25 For Comte, in fact, Montesquieu in The Spirit of the Laws had exaggerated the influence of ‘local physical causes’ such as climate on the social and political organization:

  The true political influence of climate is misconceived, and usually much exaggerated, through the common error of analysing a mere modification before the main action is fully understood … This error was inevitable under Montesquieu’s necessary ignorance of the great social laws … Montesquieu did not even perceive … that local physical causes, ve
ry powerful in the early days of civilization, lose their force in proportion as human development admits of their being neutralized.26

  Likewise, in the age of empires, an ‘environmental orientalism’ reserved the ‘external’ influences of the environment on human history to discourses on ‘less advanced’ societies, as a counterpoise to an industrial society moved above all by an ‘internal’ logic of progress.27 Soon after, Freud separated the adult individual from the world, decreeing that the cosmic feeling of ‘being in correlation with the surrounding world’ – Romain Rolland’s ‘oceanic feeling’ – was no more than a childish illusion.28 He thus separated out a psychic interiority that the analyst could study in abstraction from its vast ecological context.29

  Beyond the great separation

  On one side, therefore, were the natural sciences with their non-human objects, their concept of objectivity and their modern certainties; on the other, humanities and social sciences became ‘a-natural’30 by conferring on ‘society’ a self-sufficient totality, free from natural determination (despite the observations of Marx, Sergei Podolinsky, Patrick Geddes and many others on socio-ecological metabolisms; see Chapter 8). The natural sciences postulated a physical continuity between humans and other entities that obscured the social production and social relations of nature, while the field of human sciences was defined by a metaphysical discontinuity postulated between humans and everything else, hence obscuring the natural production and relations of social order by what Peter Sloterdijk has called a ‘backstage ontology’.

  The Anthropocene, as the reunion of human (historical) time and Earth (geological) time, between human agency and non-human agency, gives the lie to this – temporal, ontological, epistemological and institutional – great divide between nature and society that widened in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The new geohistorical epoch signals the irruption of the Earth (its temporality, its limits, its systemic dynamics) into what sought to be a history, an economy and a society emancipating themselves from natural constraints. It signals the return of the Earth into a world that Western industrial modernity on the whole represented to itself as above the earthly foundation. If our future involves a geological swing of the Earth into a new state, we can no longer believe in a humanity making its own history by itself. This nature that Michelet saw as the static scene of our exploits has clearly entered the game in the most powerful and dynamic manner possible. The Anthropocene thus requires the substitution of the ‘ungrounded’ humanities of industrial modernity by new environmental humanities that adventure beyond the great separation between environment and society.31 Environmental history, natural anthropology, environmental law and ethics, human ecology, environmental sociology, political ecology, green political theory, ecological economics, etc., are among the new disciplines that have recently begun to renew the human and social sciences, in a dialogue with the sciences of nature. They sketch new environmental humanities that go beyond the two cultures’ fissure and put an end to the jealous division of territories. In the Anthropocene, it is impossible to hide the fact that ‘social’ relations are full of biophysical processes, and that the various flows of matter and energy that run through the Earth system at different levels are polarized by socially structured human activities.

  But how are we to conceive conjointly a society structured by nature and a nature structured by the social? In 1998, the ecologists Fikret Berkes and Carl Folke proposed the concept of ‘socioecological systems’.32 A whole field of research (continuing the work of Georgescu-Roegen and Howard T. Odum) has since established itself, to integrate the analysis of flows of matter and energy, and of ‘socioecological metabolisms’, into the social sciences.33 These approaches conceive society and the compartments of the Earth system as two structures connected by exchanges of matter and energy. The diagrams in Figure 3 illustrate the theoretical frameworks employed by the main interdisciplinary projects that study socioecological systems.

  3a

  3b

  3c

  Figure 3: Standard representations of human activities in relation to the Earth system.

  In the first diagram (Figure 3a), ‘human activities’ comprise a homogeneous black box, while attention is focused on the ‘natural compartment’ of the Earth system. In the second (Figure 3b), commonly adopted by the ‘socioecological systems’ approach, we have two compartments connected by two paths: the impacts of human management of ecosystems and feedback from the latter. The third diagram (Figure 3c) adds to these two paths an intersection between the two compartments, that of ecosystem services and their use.

  This type of representation errs by its excessive simplicity and the functionalism of its description of the social. First of all, the historical, material and cultural dynamics of human societies, their asymmetries and relations of domination, are obscured in a black box. Secondly, in all three diagrams, socio-natural metabolisms are reduced to a play of pressures and responses, whereas what is needed is an understanding of the energy and matter metabolisms operated in and by the social system that is as fine-grained as the analysis of biogeochemical flows in the Earth system. It is hard to grasp what is happening if the Anthropocene is represented by a box of ‘human activities’ that interacts with boxes for the atmosphere, biosphere, etc. We are rather dealing with an intricate network in which social and natural arrangements mutually reinforce each other: European consumer attitudes and the orangutans of Indonesia, markets and rainforests, social inequalities and endocrine disturbance, state powers and the chemical composition of the atmosphere, representations of the world and energy flows. And this ‘socio-bio-geosphere’ in its uncertain becoming can only be understood in a dialogue of disciplines with varying levels of analysis, from the molecular level of environmental effects on our heredity through to the global level of flows of matter and capital organized by the WTO, by way of local scenes at industrial sites or socio-environmental mobilizations.

  How then are we to overcome the dualism between nature and society that persists in the approaches supported by the three above diagrams, a relation that remains one of externality even if a connected one? First of all, as proposed by the interdisciplinary field of political ecology, we have to think of ecology and power relations together if we are to understand the formation of social and environmental inequalities.34 We then have to envisage a double relation of internality:35

  — Natures pervaded by the social, by the thousand and one sociotechnical interventions that are historically situated, and that are only dimly understood when placed in compartments connected by the ever-repeated ‘pressure-response’ pair. The nature of the Anthropocene is above all a ‘second nature’ fostered by powerful institutions (the great networks of capitalism, technological systems, military apparatuses, etc.), which does not rule out the alterity of nature nor the fact that the Earth is not just a social construct.

  — Societies pervaded by nature, in which social relations and cultural norms are structured and rigidified by mechanisms that organize metabolisms of matter and energy, and that govern the social uses of nature. Far from surrounding the social, the environment traverses it, and the history of societies, cultures and socio-political regimes cannot ignore the flows of matter, energy and information that frame them.

  In this perspective of a double-framing internality, each of the two former supposed ‘compartments’ must thus be studied by combining the approaches of the so-called social and so-called natural sciences, rather than by an interdisciplinarity of adjacency in which each would reign over its own compartment. The joint history of the Earth and of human societies then appears as the co-evolution of metabolic (material-energetic) regimes and social orders. In each period, a set of world-views and social relations supports sociotechnical arrangements that organize the metabolisms of a given society and world-system and alter the functioning of the Earth system. And reciprocally, the metabolisms thus constructed have also political agency; they make possible, robust and ‘natural’ a certa
in social order, a hierarchy between nations, a certain type of lifestyle and vision of the world.

  Reintegrating nature into history

  From the time of Michelet and Jacob Burckhardt, history has been above all the history of ‘human affairs’, those of men making history. It could scarcely interact with the history of nature, the timescales being quite different. After the Second World War, historians following Fernand Braudel36 distinguished three temporalities: that of nature and climate, almost immobile and not affected by human action; the slow temporality of economic and social facts; and finally, the rapid temporality of events, vibrating to the rhythm of battles, diplomacy and political life. This separation of domains and time frames between nature and society, the legacy of industrial modernity, has had profound consequences for the writing of history. Many historians have related the history of scientific and technological mastery of nature. But until the emergence of environmental history, particularly in the United States in the late 1960s, it was rare indeed for historians to ‘think like a mountain’, in the expression of Aldo Leopold, i.e., to narrate history from the point of view of animals, ecosystems and other non-human entities. And until the 1960s, few historians addressed the alterations of the environment caused by human action and the effects these in turn had on societies.

  Rather than an environmental history as had developed in the United States, what we had in France first of all was a ‘history of the environment’, a new object for history as defined by the Annales School. The quest for scientific authenticity, taken over from historical climatology, and the view of nature as an environment external to society, led Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie to concern himself with climatic history as a ‘history without men’. This was the basis out of which environmental history painfully emerged in France, its protagonists, unlike their American counterparts, maintaining a cordon sanitaire against the ecological mobilizations of the 1970s.37