After the Second World War, scientists sought to overcome this tension, to go beyond Cartesian analytic reductionism while preserving the ambition of control and engineering. This gave birth to the concepts of ecosystem and cybernetic machine, games theory and complex systems theory (or ‘general system theory’, in the title of the major book by the biologist and mathematician Ludwig von Bertalanffy, published in 1968).
James Lovelock, for his part, drew on this ambivalence between machine and organism in his famous ‘Gaia hypothesis’ of 1974. Having participated during the 1960s in a NASA project that aimed to identify criteria by which the possible presence of life on other planets could be detected, he asked what could explain such a long habitability of a planet by living beings as is found on Earth. Lovelock formulated the hypothesis that this habitability was also the product of the action of living beings themselves, acting to maintain conditions favourable to life.26 The blue algae or ‘cyanobacteria’ that appeared more than 3 billion years ago actually changed the course of the Earth. As the first living creatures to practise photosynthesis, they fixed carbon from the atmosphere into sediment in the ocean depths and released oxygen into the air, making it possible for the animals that appeared later to breathe, and forming the ozone layer that protects the planet from highly mutagenic ultraviolet radiation. Without the action of algae and plants, the biogeochemical cycles that make it possible for various life forms to maintain themselves would not be the same. Hence the idea of Lovelock and Lynn Margulis that life, by acting on the various biogeochemical cycles, stabilizes the state of the Earth system, ensuring the continuous habitability of the planet. The Earth system sciences have in recent years confirmed the existence of feedback loops between the living world and the basic physico-chemical parameters of the Earth system, and recognized their intellectual debt to Lovelock.
If what is often associated with Lovelock is his image of a New Age sage, and the teleological tone of his theory, he was in reality a pure product of the scientific-military-industrial complex of the Cold War. After collaborating with NASA, he worked for the CIA during the Vietnam War on detecting human presence under forest cover. His post-democratic conception of planetary government, his apology for nuclear power and his systemic view of the planet as a self-regulated system are the legacy of a world-view born from the Second World War and the Cold War.
These global wars, in fact, promoted the emergence of new knowledge and world-views such as cybernetics, followed by general systems theory, which claims to be applicable to all domains: every object of study from organisms to machines, cities to ecosystems, is broken down into discrete elements whose interactions and overall behaviour can then be analysed. Cybernetics, game theory and operational research became the privileged means for analysing situations, managing complex systems and rationalizing action, whether it was the Korean War, city planning, the management of health care or the whole Earth.27 Simulations (computer models, war games or strategy games around the control of resources) thus played a determining role in the emergence of a new relationship to the Earth seen as a ‘system’. The elites of the two post-war blocs conceived the planet as a ‘closed world’,28 a unified theatre where the battle between the two superpowers was played out; a vast reserve of supplies of strategic resources to make possible a faster growth than the other bloc and ensure social peace; a ‘gigantic laboratory’29 with its thousands of nuclear explosions,30 whose ecological and health effects were studied. Deriving from these ‘closed world’ views came the metaphor of ‘Spaceship Earth’31 that seen from the Moon suggests its finite and fragile character … not without giving a new sense of geo-technocratic power, the pleasure of imagining oneself piloting the whole system.
The Earth viewed from nowhere
The Anthropocene inherits a second element from the Cold War: a view of the Earth – and of our earthly issues – from above.32 The V-2 missiles developed by Nazi technology were already used by the US Army in 1946 to measure solar radiation above the ozone layer and show the protective role this played.33 Since the Cold War was global, the whole Earth became a strategic terrain to study. To guide ballistic missiles, a better knowledge of the atmosphere and geomagnetism was necessary. To cross and control the oceans, the oceanography of great depths had to be developed. To survey the movement of hostile submarines, it was necessary to know when and where they surfaced, and so to observe by satellite the polar ice caps and their seasonal changes.34 According to the US Army in 1961, the ‘environment in which the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps will operate covers the entire globe and extends from the depths of the ocean up to the far reaches of interplanetary space’.35
The scientific imaginary of the Anthropocene inherited ideologies, knowledge and technologies from the Cold War. Marshall McLuhan already proclaimed the end of Earth-nature and the emergence of a man-made Earth in a celebrated article of 1974:
Sputnik created a new environment for the planet. For the first time the natural world was completely enclosed in a man-made container. At the moment that the Earth went inside this new artefact, Nature ended and Ecology was born. ‘Ecological’ thinking became inevitable as soon as the planet moved up into the status of a work of art.36
Hannah Arendt warned against this interpretation in 1958, opening her book The Human Condition with a reflection on the philosophical significance of Sputnik: man’s alienation from ‘an Earth who was the Mother of all living creatures under the sky’,37 from his original earthly cradle, detaching himself from it in order to look on it from above. She saw Sputnik as representing a modernist denial of the human condition, ‘a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange, as it were, for something he has made himself’.38
These remarks of Arendt’s could also apply to the Anthropocene: a humanity abolishing the Earth as natural alterity in order to occupy it entirely and transform it into a techno-nature, an Earth entirely permeated by human activity, as if only what Homo faber makes has any genuine value. Arendt denounced this ‘instrumentalization of the whole world and the Earth, this limitless devaluation of everything given’.39
Since Sputnik, thousands of satellites have circled the Earth in ninety-minute orbits. Their electromagnetic waves now envelop the globe in a second atmosphere, a technosphere. The dense network of data gleaned from satellite observations, and the heavy computer infrastructure enabling this to be processed, are both part of the solution, by enabling us to know better the human impacts on the Earth, and part of the problem, the project of absolute domination of the planet that is one of the causes of our further swing into the Anthropocene after 1945. This ambivalence was illustrated by the Apollo programme. On the one hand, it offered us the picture of the ‘Blue Marble’ (Figure 5), an iconic image for the Western environmental movement. On the other hand is the hubris of control: just after the ‘conquest of the Moon’ in July 1969, Werner von Braun – the Nazi inventor of the V-2 rocket, and subsequently father of the US space programme – announced to the press that ‘from this marvellous observation platform we will be able to examine all the riches of the Earth: unknown oil wells, mines of copper and zinc’.40 The Apollo missions also polluted the Moon by leaving behind plutonium-238 and caused the extinction of at least one species, the dusky seaside sparrow (Ammodramus maritimus nigrescens), killed by massive DDT spraying around NASA’s space facility.41
Figure 5: The Earth seen from midway to the Moon, Apollo 17, 7 December 1972
Above all, the image of the Earth seen from space conveys a radically simplistic interpretation of the world.42 It gives an intoxicating sense of total overview, global and dominating, rather than a sense of humble belonging. It crowns what Philippe Descola has called the ‘naturalism’ born in the West, by which we conceive other earthly creatures as sharing the same ‘physicality’ as we humans while having an interiority that is radically different from our own,43 thus placing us at a vantage-point in relation to n
ature, a strategic external position from which the Earth system may be managed and piloted. This interpretation of our place on Earth from a spatial perspective thus extends a view of objectivity as the ‘view from nowhere’ born in the mid nineteenth century,44 according to which true knowledge is that produced by abstraction from the system observed, so as to let nature speak for itself. In this view, it is only possible to understand and manage the planet’s problems properly by looking at it from space, in a kind of ‘de-Earthed’ vision. This superior standpoint not only postulates that we have ‘only one Earth’ (the famous slogan of the Stockholm conference of 1972), but also that there is a superior knowledge of the planet’s problems. It perpetuates a naturalist imaginary (which the anthropology of Philippe Descola has shown is only one of four main models for the relationship of humans to the world) and, still more, a ‘de-Earthed’ imaginary, the product of a techno-scientific culture that developed in parallel with the dynamics that have led us into the Anthropocene.
The dominant view of the Anthropocene hence encapsulates a long process of Weberian ‘disenchantment’, pre-eminence of ‘instrumental rationality’ (Adorno and Horkheimer) and negation of the world as given otherness (Arendt), a process that has made the moderns ‘men without a world’ (Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro).45 This imaginary is not neutral and dominates other imaginaries (such as those of indigenous communities and of other grassroots socio-environmental movements), which may themselves be the bearers of relevant perspectives and solutions in the face of our present ecological disarray.
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1Peter Sloterdijk, In the World Interior of Capital: Towards a Philosophical Theory of Globalization, Cambridge: Polity, 2013, pp. 169–76.
2Sebastian Grevsmühl, La Terre vue d’en haut. L’Invention de l’environnement global, Paris: Seuil, 2014.
3In particular, Paul Crutzen’s article ‘Geology of Mankind’, Nature, 415, 3 January 2002: 23; that by the climatologist Will Steffen, together with Paul Crutzen and the historians Jacques Grinevald and John McNeill, ‘The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 369:1938, 2011: 842–67; a programmatic article on the piloting of the planet, by Will Steffen and Paul Crutzen along with the geologist Jan Zalasiewicz, ‘The Anthropocene: From Global Change to Planetary Stewardship’, Ambio, 40, 2011: 739–71; and that of Johan Rockström, specialist in ‘systems approaches’ and director of the celebrated Resilience Centre in Stockholm. This body of work is enriched by some other articles, including those on ‘planetary limits’, published also by Rockström together with some thirty colleagues (including Steffen and Crutzen, but also the American climatologist James Hansen as well as Robert Costanza, the ecologist who calculated in 1997 the monetary value of the services rendered by the biosphere), ‘A Safe Operating Space for Humanity’, Nature, 24, September 2009: 472–5; or ‘Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity’, Ecology and Society, 14:2, 2009: 1–33.
4Will Steffen, Paul J. Crutzen and John R. McNeill, ‘The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?’, Ambio 36:8, 2007: 614–21, 614.
5Michel Serres, The Natural Contract, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995, 17.
6Ibid., 110.
7Paul Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer, ‘The “Anthropocene”’, Global Change Newsletter, 41, 2000: 17–18. The steam engine, however, did exist before James Watt’s patent of 1784, being basically used to pump water in mines.
8We know from Georges Canguilhem the aporiai of the quest for precursors, and will not deal with this question in the present book.
9Robert Costanza, Lisa J. Graumlich and Will Steffen (eds), Sustainability or Collapse? An Integrated History and Future of People on Earth, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007. See also aimes.ucar.edu/ihope.
10Steffen, Crutzen and McNeill, ‘The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?’; Libby Robin and Will Steffen, ‘History for the Anthropocene?’, History Compass, 5:5, 2007: 1,694–719; John R. McNeill, Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World, New York: Norton, 2001; Steffen et al., ‘The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives’.
11Steffen et al., ‘The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives’, 848.
12Ibid., 849.
13Ibid., 850.
14Ibid., 850 and 853.
15Ibid., 856.
16OECD, ‘Emissions of Carbon Dioxide’, in OECD Factbook 2011–2012: Economic, Environmental and Social Statistics, oecd-ilibrary.org.
17With few exceptions, such as the works of Alfred Crosby and John McNeill.
18Walt W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960, 4.
19Will Steffen et al., ‘The Trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration’, Anthropocene Review 2:1, April 2015 (first published online 16 January 2015): 81–98.
20Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and François Jarrige, ‘L’histoire et l’idéologie productiviste. Les récits de la révolution industrielle après 1945’, in Céline Pessis, Sezin Topçu and Christophe Bonneuil (eds), Une autre histoire des ‘Trentes Glorieuses’. Modernisation, contestations et pollutions dans la France d’après-guerre, Paris: La Découverte, 2013, 61–79.
21Robert Costanza et al., ‘The Value of the World’s Ecosystem Services and Natural Capital’, Nature, 387, 1997: 253–60, especially 254.
22IUCN, ‘Wildlife Crisis Worse than Economic Crisis – IUCN’, news release, 2 July 2009, iucn.org.
23McNeill, Something New under the Sun.
24See for example Marian Glaser et al. (eds), Human-Nature Interactions in the Anthropocene, London: Routledge, 2012.
25James Hutton, Theory of the Earth (1788), 11 and 15. We are grateful to Pierre de Jouvancourt for drawing our attention to this author. See Pierre de Jouvancourt, ‘Tenir à Gaïa. Une anthropologie politique de l’Anthropocène’, master’s thesis in philosophy, June 2013, University of Paris I; Christophe Bonneuil et Pierre de Jouvancourt, ‘En finir avec l’épopée. Récit, géopouvoir et sujets de l’Anthropocène’, in Émilie Hache (ed.), De l’univers clos au monde infini, Paris: Éditions Dehors, 2014, 57–105.
26James Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
27Amy Dahan and Dominique Pestre (eds), Les Sciences pour la guerre, 1940–1960, Paris: Éditions de l’EHESS, 2004; Peter Galison, ‘The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision’, Critical Inquiry, 21:1, 1994: 228–66; Robert Leonard, Von Neumann, Morgenstern and the Creation of Game Theory: From Chess to Social Science 1900–1960, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010; Geof Bowker, ‘How to be Universal: Some Cybernetic Strategies, 1943–70’, Social Studies of Science, 23:1, 1993: 117–27; Agatha C. Hughes and Thomas P. Hughes (eds), Systems, Experts, and Computers: The Systems Approach in Management and Engineering, World War II and After, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000.
28The ‘closed world’ is the focus of the historian Paul N. Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997.
29Georges Bernanos, 15 November 1945, quoted in Christophe Bonneuil, Céline Pessis and Sezin Topçu, ‘Pour en finir avec les “Trentes Glorieuses”. Vers une nouvelle histoire de la France des décennies d’après-guerre’, in Pessis, Topçu and Bonneuil, Une autre histoire des ‘Trente Glorieuses’, 19.
30See the striking cartography of the 2,053 nuclear explosions between 1945 and 1998: ‘A Time-Lapse Map of Every Nuclear Explosion Since 1945 – by Isao Hashimoto’, YouTube video of Isao Hashimoto’s 2003 multimedia artwork 1945–1998, posted by ‘aConcernedHuman’, 24 October 2010, youtu.be/LLCF7vPanrY.
31The expression was coined by Kenneth Boulding in 1966.
32The French term vision déterrestrée gets well to the point. It comes from Geneviève Azam, Le Temps du monde f
ini. Vers l’après-capitalisme, Paris: Les Liens qui libèrent, 2010. Heidegger already spoke in 1966 of an ‘uprooting of man’ by visualizations of Earth seen from space; see Benjamin Lazier, ‘The Globalization of the World Picture’, American Historical Review, 116:3, June 2011: 609.
33Grevsmühl, La Terre vue d’en haut.
34Ronald Doel, ‘Quelle place pour les sciences de l’environnement physique dans l’histoire environnementale?’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, 56:4, 2009: 137–63.
35Quoted in ibid., 158.
36Marshall McLuhan, ‘At the Moment of Sputnik the Planet Became a Global Theater in Which There Are No Spectators but Only Actors’, Journal of Communication, 24:1, 1974: 49.
37Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013, 2.
38Ibid., 2–3.
39Ibid., 157.
40See Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America, London: Serpent’s Tail, 2009, 134.
41Fernando Elichirigoity, Planet Management, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999, 8. This bird species was endemic to the region of Florida that was set aside for space launches and sprayed with DDT.
42Grevsmühl, La Terre vue d’en haut.
43Philippe Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2013.
44The notion of a ‘view from nowhere’ proposed by Thomas Nagel, and its history as a norm of scientificity in the nineteenth century, are analysed in Lorraine Daston, ‘Objectivity and the Escape from Perspective’, Social Studies of Science, 22:4, 1992: 597–618.
45Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, ‘L’arrêt de monde’, in Hache, De l’univers clos au monde infini, 221–339.
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