The Shock of the Anthropocene
Page 6
46Chakrabarty, ‘The Climate of History’, 208.
47We shall discuss the theses of Ulrich Beck, Bruno Latour and Anthony Giddens in Chapter 4.
48Latour, Politics of Nature, and An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.
49Andrew Dobson et al., ‘Andrew Dobson: Trajectories of Green Political Theory’, Natures Sciences Sociétés, 22:2, April–June 2014: 132–41; Andrew Dobson, Green Political Thought, London: Routledge, 2007; Andrew Dobson and Robyn Eckersley (eds), Political Theory and the Ecological Challenge, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
50Luc Semal, Politiques catastrophistes. Pour une théorie politique environnementale, Paris: PUF, 2015; also Agnès Sinaï (ed.), Penser la décroissance. Politiques de l’Anthropocène, Paris: Les Presses de Sciences Po, 2013.
51Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.
PART TWO: SPEAKING FOR THE
EARTH, GUIDING HUMANITY:
Deconstructing the Geocratic Grand
Narrative of the Anthropocene
CHAPTER 3
Clio, the Earth and the
Anthropocenologists
The scientists who invented the term ‘Anthropocene’ did not simply produce fundamental data on the state of our planet or advance a systemic and fruitful perspective on its uncertain future. They also proposed a history, a story seeking to respond to the question ‘How did we get here?’ In this way, they developed an authorized narrative of the Earth, its past and its future shared with the human species, a narrative that makes the management of the Earth system a new object of knowledge and government.
The concept of the Anthropocene continues a number of previous narratives, produced in the course of history, of the global environment, the Earth and its proper usage. The world’s centres of government have long been the places where what balances or unbalances the planet has been spoken and demonstrated. They construct spheres in which the proper ways of handling it, tempering it or acclimatizing it are presented: from the greenhouses of the Jardin du Roi where Buffon wrote his Epochs of Nature to the projects of geoengineering promoted by Paul Crutzen, by way of the Crystal Palace of London’s Great Exhibition of 1851, symbol of the commercial organization of the world,1 or again the geodesic dome conceived by Buckminster Fuller – of the ‘Spaceship Earth’ metaphor – for the United States pavilion at the Montreal Universal Exhibition of 1967, presenting the first image of an ‘Earthrise’ seen from the Moon.2
The elites of the French colonial empire in the eighteenth century, such as Pierre Poivre and Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, those of the British empire in the nineteenth century, such as the economist William Stanley Jevons and the forester Dietrich Brandis, those of the conquest of the American West, such as Gifford Pinchot, or of US hegemony in the 1950s, such as Henry Fairfield Osborn, all developed in their time knowledge and global environmental warnings that dovetailed into systems of world domination – while attempting to inflect these a little (see chapters 8 and 11). Far from being the hallmark of our present era, knowledge of the global environment has thus for a very long time been part of imperial cosmographies.
There is some reason to suspect, therefore, that the knowledge and discourse of the Anthropocene may itself form part, perhaps unknowingly, of a hegemonic system for representing the world as a totality to be governed. To analyse this new cosmography, we shall study those texts most often cited by the scientists, historians and philosophers who have introduced and discussed the notion of Anthropocene on the international stage.3 For simplicity’s sake, we shall refer to this phalanx of renowned scholars who made the bold gesture of naming our epoch as ‘anthropocenologists’.
Submitting these narratives to criticism does not mean denying the value of the investigations of these anthropocenologists. It is rather a matter of opening up the official narrative of the Anthropocene to discussion, so as to enable closer reflection on the particularities of our representations of the world. So that other voices from and for the Earth can be heard, coming from other cultures and other social groups; so that other explanations of ‘how we got to this point’ and other proposals for ‘what is to be done’ may also have their say. Otherwise the seductive Anthropocene concept may well become the official philosophy of a new technocratic and market-oriented geopower.
In order to make fruitful use of the advances in the Earth system sciences, we have to learn to distrust the grand narratives that come with the Anthropocene concept, to pass them through the sieve of criticism. This is the way in science, history and democracy.
A history of ‘stages’
Anthropocenologists seem attracted to historical narration. What is more natural than to explain the human dynamic that has tipped the Earth into a new state? Since the Anthropocene is a new epoch, the question of knowing how we arrived here arises quite immediately, and science presents an account of ‘the evolution of humans and our societies from hunter-gatherers to a global geophysical force’.4 To tell the Odyssey of humans, still in the nineteenth century ‘frail bent reeds … with their feet plunged unto death into the immemorial soil’,5 but who have today become beings ‘equipotent to the Earth’,6 as Michel Serres puts it, anthropocenologists have constructed a narrative, searched for founding events and causal chains, and marked out periods.
In 2000, Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer posited the invention of the steam engine in 1784 as the start of the Anthropocene.7 They also mentioned scientific precursors of the Anthropocene concept, from Antonio Stoppani and George Perkins March in the nineteenth century to Vladimir Vernadsky.8 Since then, articles proposing a historical narrative of the Anthropocene have proliferated, as well as interdisciplinary projects that bring together scientists and historians (such as the IHOPE project: Integrated History and Future of People on Earth).9 Specialists in environmental history such as John McNeill and Libby Robin have likewise joined with scientists in elaborating a historical account of the interactions between the human species and the Earth system since the end of the eighteenth century.10
The narratives of the anthropocenologists propose three ‘stages’. The first, from the beginnings of the industrial revolution to the Second World War, corresponds to the turn into the Anthropocene, with the thermo-industrial revolution raising the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide from 277 to 280 parts per million (ppm) in the eighteenth century to 311 by the mid twentieth century (as against between 260 and 285 ppm for the 11,500 years of the Holocene). The mobilization of coal formed hundreds of millions of years ago started in China and in Europe in the eleventh century but only acquired a massive scale from 1750 on, with the increase from some 500 steam engines in the whole world to hundreds of thousands by 1900. This fossil energy supplanted renewable energies, making possible the development of rail transport and global trade, facilitating access to water, and from the early twentieth century the chemical synthesis of nitrogen fertilizers that considerably increased agricultural yields. The availability of this ‘ready’ energy leads anthropocenologists to conclude that a rise in energy consumption by a factor of forty between 1800 and 2000 made possible economic growth by a factor of fifty, demographic growth by a factor of six, and an anthropic artificialization of land that increased by a factor of between 2.5 and 3 in this same period.11
A second stage in the Anthropocene opened after the Second World War. Anthropocenologists have called this the ‘Great Acceleration’,12 succinctly adducing a number of causal factors: the collapse of European pre-industrial institutions, a new international economic system of free trade, the technologies that were developed in the Second World War and now applied to civilian economic growth, and the establishment of markets and growth as ‘central societal values’.13 But the new historical stage is demonstrated above all by statistics. Figure 1 in Chapter 1 gives a dashboard display of twenty-four charts, measuring a spectrum of ‘human activity indicat
ors’ characteristic of the Great Acceleration, from the concentration of atmospheric carbon and methane through to the number of large dams, by way of nitrogen and phosphorous cycles and the measure of biodiversity. All these graphs attest to an exponential upsurge in human impacts since 1950.
The third stage in the Anthropocene is seen as beginning around the year 2000, marked by a number of turning-points. As with the beginnings of the first stage, it is again carbon that governs this periodization, since the anthropocenologists note that ‘environmental problems aroused little attention during the Great Acceleration … the major emerging environmental problems were largely ignored’,14 and it was not until 2001 that the international scientific community, in the third report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), asserted for the first time with certainty the chiefly human origin of the climate change under way. The third stage in the Anthropocene was thus that of a new ‘growing awareness of human impact on the global environment’, as expressed by the IPCC or the Earth Summit of 1992 in Rio de Janeiro, as well as the ‘first attempts to construct systems of global governance to manage the relations of humanity with the Earth system’.15
It was also the development of environmental accounting on a planetary scale that spurred these authors to discern a third phase: the perspective of the exhaustion of hydrocarbons (with a peak in conventional oil reached in 2006, according to the International Energy Agency), a phosphorous peak equally close and threatening agricultural production, and the accelerating reduction in biodiversity. As well as the volume of human impacts, it is also their distribution structure that is changing in this third stage. In the first decade of the new century, China overtook the United States as the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide, while India took third place from Russia, South Korea caught up with the United Kingdom, and both Indonesia and Brazil overtook Germany. The countries of the OECD, which in 1971 emitted 67 per cent of carbon dioxide, made up only 42 per cent of the total in 2009.16 The globalization of the development model born in the West is now making the upper social strata of the countries of the South into major contributors to human telluric action.
The story that anthropocenologists tell in these three phases presents a co-evolution of human species and the Earth system over the last centuries. Environmental history, which has long been mainly focused on particular territories or objects (fire, urban pollution, forests, pesticides),17 thus advances to a global outlook, at the crossroads of recent advances in world history and the sciences of the Earth system.
After acknowledging the merits of this global perspective of socio-ecological metabolisms in the last quarter of a millennium, we can now question the particular forms of historical explanation as a function of the numbers and curves that this mobilizes.
A history in curves
The anthropocenologists’ modalities of argument were imported into history from the environmental sciences, just as, in the mid twentieth century, history sought to become a science by way of quantitative series borrowed from the science of economics. Under the influence of economists such as Walt W. Rostow, whose classic The Stages of Economic Growth was published in 1960, the writing of history in terms of stages on a linear and universal path was standard practice: ‘the traditional society, [then] the preconditions for take-off, [then] take-off, [then] the drive to maturity and [finally] the age of high mass-consumption’.18 These stages were accessible to historical knowledge thanks to methods of the triumphant economic and social history that made quantity the key to historical narrative.
Let us look again at this second stage, the Great Acceleration. Some writers even propose having the Anthropocene start from this point in time, arguing from the vertiginous rise of the curves shown above. They point to a ‘post-1950 acceleration’ of different exponential curves with human impact on the planet.19 By definition, an exponential curve is characterized by an increasingly steep slope (velocity) but a constant growth rate: there is no sudden jump in the growth rate at the end of the curve. Let us take for example the (almost exponential) curve of CO2 emissions from fossil fuels – coal, gas and oil – as shown in Figure 4.
Figure 4: Global carbon emissions from fossil fuels since 1751 (in millions of tons)
On Figure 4a, which shows emissions from 1750 to 2006, we can see a vertical rise after 1950. But let us now look at Figure 4b. This shows the same data but stops at 1914 and presents a similar vertical rise – though this time after 1880. Should we conclude that a ‘great acceleration’ took place in the years 1870–1914, and seek its causes in the second industrial revolution, the expansion of European imperialism, and the remarkable commercial and financial globalization of this period (Chapter 10)? Conclusion: if the seriousness and change of scale of human impacts on the Earth system from 1945 is incontestable, the slope of a curve is not in itself sufficient to decide on the start of a historical or geological epoch and can certainly not take the place of causal historical explanation.
Today, the notion of ‘stages’ seems to many historians obsolete and excessively teleological. And yet it has returned with the anthropocenologists’ grand narrative, like an inverted replica of economic history à la Rostow. Just as the quantitative history of half a century ago, fascinated by the movement of technology and economics and challenging the primacy of politics, formed part of the productivist ideology of that time,20 so the official narrative of the Anthropocene could well be part of the contemporary ideology of an ecological modernization and a ‘green economy’ that internalizes in markets and policies the value of the ‘services’ supplied by nature.
Indeed, quantifying nature is today big business, just as quantifying the economy had been after the Second World War. We should not be surprised, therefore, that the grand narrative of the anthropocenolo-gists seeks truth by way of an accounting of the flows and stocks of nature. And it is no accident that one of their leading figures, the director of the IHOPE project, is Robert Costanza, a student of Howard T. Odum, the founder of the ecology of ecosystems. Costanza is a master in the accounting of nature. In 1997 he published a famous article in Nature that assessed the annual value of the services rendered by the biosphere at about $33 billion, or twice the world’s GDP.21 The notion of ‘ecosystemic services’ and the project of measuring their monetary value were inscribed in 2005 in the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment published by the UN. All values of nature, even those far upstream from production and including the most spiritual (renamed ‘cultural services’), thus enter into an accounting logic. And the International Union for Conservation of Nature now presents nature as ‘the largest company on Earth’.22
History as conceived by the anthropocenologists could thus be to contemporary green economics what economic and social history was to the Keynesian and productivist economics of the post-war period. Like the latter, it tells us a history governed by quantities, in this case biogeochemical and ecological ones. The principal marker that divides the Anthropocene into three stages is the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere, expressed in parts per million. This is followed in second place by other magnitudes such as global average temperature (an abstraction that does not correspond to any particular place), the percentages of the Earth’s surface that are anthropized and the millions of tonnes of nitrogen and potassium that are in circulation. In each case, these quantities are related to the pre-industrial values as evidence of a leap into the Anthropocene and of limits that are dangerous to exceed.
This dominant history of the Anthropocene is written in the great book of global environmental accounting, with stocks being ‘capital’ and flows the ‘impacts’ or ‘services’ to be measured. In Something New under the Sun, the magnum opus on twentieth-century environmental history by the American historian John McNeill, the chapters are organized according to the various compartments of the Earth system: atmosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere, lithosphere.23 This remarkable book of over 400 pages has only one page on the emergence of mass consumption and mass markets, five pag
es on international economic exchange and some twenty pages on political processes. The historical account of the environmental crisis that results from this is one of a more or less undifferentiated demographic, economic and technological growth, with no focus on the strategies of the actors involved, the choices that could have been made differently or the controversies and conflicts around these choices. We thus have a kind of global growth dynamic that serves as the motor of history and danger for the planet.
Systemization: the Earth as a great cybernetic machine?
Under such headings as ‘Assessing Human Impacts on the Earth System’ or ‘Human-Nature Interactions’, these historical narratives of a new type are full of concepts and methods that have been rather unfamiliar to historians until recently, such as ‘non-linear systems’, ‘multi-agent models’, ‘modelling’, ‘adaptive capacity’, ‘resilience’ and ‘socioecological systems’.24 Such a story of the Anthropocene fits into a series of operations of systemization, which lead to conceiving the Earth as a ‘complex system’, a great self-regulating cybernetic machine (but one that human excesses could cause suddenly to deviate from its trajectory). It is important therefore to understand the historical genesis of this view, its contributions and its limitations.
The view of the Earth as a system lies at the source of modern geology. The term was used both by Charles Lyell and by James Hutton, his predecessor in the formulation of the uniformitarian theory. In his Theory of the Earth of 1788, Hutton presents the terrestrial system as ‘a machine of a peculiar construction’, with its components, mechanical principles and functions. But he goes on to add right away that the Earth can ‘be also considered as an organized body’, with ‘a constitution in which the necessary decay of the machine is naturally repaired, in the exertion of those productive powers by which it had been formed’.25 This tension between machine and organisms not only pervades all biological thinking, but also all thinking about the Earth.