The Shock of the Anthropocene

by Christophe Bonneuil

  CHAPTER 4

  Who Is the Anthropos?

  The official grand narrative of the Anthropocene presents not only a unique view of Earth, of which we should all have the same representation, ‘from nowhere’, but also a humanity seen as biological entity and geological agent. The grand narrative of the Anthropocene becomes that of ‘the evolution of humans … from hunter-gatherers to a global geophysical force’.1 The anthropocenologists then present themselves as guides for a ‘humanity’ deficient in knowledge, recommending it to ‘reconnect with the biosphere’.2 Let us decipher this view of anthropos and the implications it holds.

  The odyssey of the species

  ‘Humankind, our own species, has become so large and active that it now rivals some of the great forces of Nature in its impact on the functioning of the Earth system.’3 This is the unchallengeable heart of the Anthropocene thesis. But it supports the idea of a totalization of the entirety of human actions into a single ‘human activity’ generating a single ‘human footprint’ on the Earth, an idea that deserves discussion. The key article on the Anthropocene and its history in Philosophical Transactions counts no less than ninety-nine occurrences of the adjective ‘human’ or the noun ‘humanity’.4 The anthropocenologists’ dominant narrative of the Anthropocene presents an abstract humanity uniformly involved – and, it implies, uniformly to blame.

  But viewing an undifferentiated anthropos as the cause of the Earth’s new geological regime is scarcely sufficient. This explanation might be sufficient for polar bears or orangutans seeking to understand what species was disturbing their habitat.5 And again, this would be orangutans and polar bears without much competence in ‘humanology’, unable to discern the ‘dominant males’ and asymmetries of power in the complex causal chain connecting the retreat of their habitat to human action. The human species’ geological action is the product of cultural, social and historical processes.

  The findings and approaches of decades of social sciences and humanities should not be overlooked in the name of ecological emergency and the interweaving of ‘socio-ecosystems’. From the Marxist concept of class to the anthropology of Claude Lévi-Strauss, feminist and post-colonial studies, these works have attacked the old universalism of ‘Man’ and emphasized the equal dignity but also diversity of cultures, societies, social classes and sexual identities. And they have worked to make visible the mechanisms of domination by which certain of these collectives are destroyed, exploited or subjugated by others in asymmetrical social relations.

  The advent of the Anthropocene concept turns the human and social sciences upside down, shaking their paradigms and categories.6 Now it is the sciences of the Earth system, and no longer historians, who name the epoch in which we are living. And, as dizzying as it may seem, scholars in the humanities need to rethink human action also on a geological scale of tens of thousands of years.

  This dizziness has disarmed major thinkers in the human and social sciences, who, in their desire to contribute to the official narrative of the Anthropocene, have endorsed an all-inclusive view of humanity in which great socially indifferent causal factors such as demography, economic growth and the mobilization of fossil fuels are put forward as responsible for the unprecedented increase in the human footprint on the planet. In the end, however, these yield a rather poor explanatory grid. Thus, in an article of 2009 that drew great attention, Dipesh Chakrabarty, formerly a Marxist historian and a leading figure in subaltern studies, explained that the main critical categories he had previously applied to understand history had become obsolete in the time of the Anthropocene. He justified this great theoretical reversal as follows: ‘A critique of capital is not sufficient for addressing questions relating to human history once the crisis of climate change has been acknowledged and the Anthropocene has begun to loom on the horizon of our present.’7 In short, since capitalism has triggered a geological phenomenon far greater than itself, and one which will survive it, the critique of capitalism is no longer sufficient. Chakrabarty then gives the category of ‘species’ a major role in the historical narrative (fifty-one occurrences) and adopts the dominant phraseology of the anthropocenologists: ‘Humans – thanks to our numbers, the burning of fossil fuel, and other related activities – have become a geological agent on the planet.’8 This manner of envisaging causalities by placing humanity in the narrative as a universal agent, indifferently responsible, illustrates the abandoning of the grid of Marxist and postcolonial reading in favour of an undifferentiated humanity.

  The dizziness of the human sciences in the face of the Anthropocene, the difficulty that they have in connecting socially differentiated historical phenomena with the evolution of the planet (with consequences for humans that are common yet differentiated), similarly emerges in the grandiose narratives of the environmental crisis. For major authors, either explicitly or implicitly, our ecological troubles are rooted in modernity itself. We find from their pens all the usual suspects in the great fresco of Western intellectual history: Greek science first of all, which conceived nature as an externality subject to laws independent of human intentions; then Christianity, which invented the singularity of man within a creation that was his to dominate; and finally the scientific revolution, which substituted for an organicist view of nature that of an inert mechanics which could be rationally modified.9 The eschatological issue in the environmental crisis thus presses them to propose immense and majestic narratives, emphasizing a hypothetical ‘great divide’, a great separation between man and other beings.

  Caught in the storm of Gaia, major sociologists and philosophers have decided to jettison from ‘Spaceship Earth’ the whole analytic, explanatory and critical arsenal of the human and social sciences. In a very influential essay, for example, Michel Serres deploys the geological metaphor of ‘tectonic plates’ visible ‘from satellite’: ‘On Planet Earth, henceforth, action comes not so much … from the groups analysed by the old social sciences … no, the decisive actions are now, massively, those of enormous and dense tectonic plates of humanity’.10 Whole books can now be written on the ecological crisis, on the politics of nature, on the Anthropocene and the situation of Gaia without so much as mentioning capitalism, war or the United States, even the name of one big corporation (one figure here, however: ninety corporations are responsible for 63 per cent of the cumulative emissions of carbon dioxide and methane between 1850 and today).11

  A fruitful encounter between the Earth system sciences and the humanities would have to take into account social asymmetries and inequalities, exploring how these are mutually constructed – on different scales, including the global – with the distribution of flows of matter and energy through economic, political and technological mechanisms. This encounter has already taken place, for instance in dialogue between global history of the ‘world-system’ (in the wake of Immanuel Wallerstein’s work) and the associated global ecological changes,12 or again in the research field of political ecology.13

  As a concept arising from Earth system sciences, it is natural that the Anthropocene should direct historical questioning according to their particular interests. For our anthropocenologists, the role of history consists in measuring the effect of human activities on the Earth system with a view to including them in the modelling, and, in return, testing the models in relation to past events. That is the specific perspective of the IHOPE project: Integrated History and Future of People on Earth.14 The key terms here are biogeochemical cycles, integration (of data, systems, disciplines), complexity and non-linear systems. History might introduce a degree of unpredictability (how to model Hernán Cortés?), but in the end its results are fairly predictable: the Anthropocene is the product of a generalized increase in population, agriculture, industry, deforestation, mineral extraction and GDP.

  Exaggerating a little, we could say that history for the anthropocenologists comes down in the end to a set of exponential graphs. The specificity of historical reasoning, the effort to construct an explanatory account
, is eclipsed in favour of a descriptive and quantitative view. But if the concordant upward curves are indeed chronological indexes, they are only explanatory at a secondary level. Environmental statistics simply measure the results of the historical phenomena that are the prime movers of the crisis. The less undifferentiated and more explanatory history of the Anthropocene that we propose in this book seeks to shift the focus of the study from the environments affected and the biogeochemical cycles disturbed onto the actors, institutions and decisions that have produced these effects.

  The anthropocenologists’ official narrative heralds the return of the human species into history. But what is this anthropos, the generic human being of the Anthropocene? Is it not eminently diverse, with extremely different responsibilities in the global ecological disturbance? An average American, for example, consumes thirty-two times more resources and energy than an average Kenyan. A new human being born on Earth will have a carbon footprint a thousand times greater if she is born into a rich family in a rich country, than into a poor family in a poor country.15 Should the Yanomami Indians, who hunt, fish and garden in the Amazonian forest, working three hours a day with no fossil fuel (and whose gardens have a yield in energy terms nine times higher than the French farmers of the highly fertile Beauce),16 feel responsible for the climate change of the Anthropocene? A recent report shows that the 1 per cent richest individuals on the planet monopolize 48 per cent of the world’s wealth, while the poorer half of humanity have to make do with 1 per cent.17 The eighty richest individuals in the world have a combined income higher than that of the 416 million poorest – each one earning more than a million times that of their fellow humans!18 This widening of inequalities is a major source of global ecological disarray, since the richest individuals set a standard of consumption that those below them seek to equal, and so on, as Thorstein Veblen already showed in 1899.19 It follows from this, as has been recently demonstrated by economists, that policies of taxing the richest are beneficial to the environment.20

  It would be better, indeed, to use Erik Swyngedouw’s term ‘Oliganthropocene’, a geological epoch caused by a small fraction of humanity, rather than Anthropocene. The choice of this latter term, and the grand narrative that comes with it, actually uses the abstract category of ‘human species’ to mask the great differentiation of responsibilities and incidences between the classes, sexes and peoples of Gaia. This choice has its effects on the type of ‘solutions’ that are proposed for ecological problems, whether they are legitimated or not in the narrative of the anthropocenologists. The keynote article in Philosophical Transactions attests to this obscuring of asymmetries, which are mentioned only in passing in a delicate newspeak: ‘Equity issues are often magnified in the Anthropocene’.21

  We should be suspicious, therefore, of a grand narrative of the Anthropocene that presents interactions between the human species and the Earth system. This leads to historical explanations that are impoverished or erroneous, comforting the interests of a minority of the planet’s population. On the contrary, the challenges of the Anthropocene demand a differentiated view of humanity, not just for the sake of historical truth, or to assess the responsibilities of the past, but also to pursue future policies that are more effective and more just; to construct a common world in which ordinary people will not be blamed for everything while the ecological crimes of the big corporations are left unpunished; in which the inhabitants of islands threatened by climate change will see their right to live on their territories recognized, without their weak numbers condemning them to statistical and political non-existence; a world in which the 30,000 people who still live as hunter-gatherers and are threatened with extinction by the year 2030 will continue to exist. The wealth of humanity and its capacity for future adaptation come from the diversity of its cultures, which are so many experiments in ways of worthily inhabiting the Earth.

  ‘They knew not what they did’: an account of the awakening of environmental consciousness

  ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do’ are the words of Jesus on the cross as reported in the gospel of St Luke. Humans allowed the execution of the Saviour, but humanity is not irredeemably condemned as it could be in the Old Testament, once expelled from the Garden of Eden. Salvation is possible by conversion and faith.

  Two centuries ago already, Charles Fourier used the rhetoric of revelation and pardon to foretell the ‘material deterioration of the planet’:

  This truth is more palpable for the moderns than for the ancients; the latter, still novices in the progress of society, may be pardoned for their illusions … but after the pictures that history has provided us with over 3,000 years … we have a superfluity of experience on the misdeeds of Civilization, and it is no longer permissible for upright men to deny that Civilization is the plague of humanity, that the present order of the globe is simply a material and social hell, and that reason should cease all other business to concern itself with seeking an escape from it.22

  Two centuries after Fourier, the Anthropocene narrative works in a similar way: if the ‘moderns’ were at fault in disturbing the planet, they must be excused as they did not know what they were doing. They had neither science nor awareness of the global and geological character of their actions. The moderns only have to embrace the anthropocenic gospel to obtain remission of their sins and perhaps even salvation.

  The grand narrative of the Anthropocene is thus the story of an awakening. There was a long moment of unawareness, from 1750 to the late twentieth century, followed by a sudden arousal. ‘We are the first generation with the knowledge of how our activities influence the Earth system, and thus the first generation with the power and the responsibility to change our relationship with the planet’,23 the anthropocenologists maintain. ‘Environmental problems received little attention during much of the Great Acceleration [after 1945]’, and ‘the emerging global environmental problems were largely ignored’.24 In the same vein, James Lovelock asserted that ‘by changing the environment we have unknowingly declared war on Gaia’.25

  The media echo this cliché of an inadvertent environmental destruction and a quite recent awakening, the better to heroize those scientists who opened humanity’s eyes. The newspaper Libération portrayed the glaciologist Claude Lorius in the following terms:

  Now in the evening of his life, Claude Lorius knows that he was one of the scientists whose work enabled man to know what he is doing. And the question is not to pardon humanity for acting in the past without knowledge, but to act with this new knowledge that is inscribed in a new word … Anthropocene.26

  The Economist likewise evokes the coining of the new term in the first decade of the new century as ‘one of those moments when a scientific discovery, as with Copernicus’s understanding that the Earth moved around the Sun, could radically change our vision of things’.27

  Major philosophers participate in this sublime concordance of contrition: in the past, we failed to recognize the global dimension of nature, we separated it from society, we reduced it to an external backdrop of human action. According to Michel Serres, it was only with the beginning of climate change in the late twentieth century that nature ‘burst in on our culture, which had never formed anything but a local, vague, and cosmetic idea of them … What was once local – this river, that swamp – is now global: Planet Earth.’28 In his commentary on an 1820 painting by Goya, with which Serres opens The Natural Contract, he maintains that at that time ‘the world wasn’t considered fragile’,29 while for Bruno Latour it is ‘unwillingly’ that humans have become geological agents.30

  Whether scientists or philosophers, the anthropocenologists thus present subjects from the past who did not act deliberately, who were unaware – who once were blind but now can know. This accent on a radical break is a rhetorical feature of any prophetic discourse that seeks to win people to the idea of an advent. The narrative of the Anthropocene does not escape this.

  But this binary narrative schema also derives from
major social theories that oppose a non-reflexive moment of modernity (from the eighteenth to the twentieth century) to the emergence in the late twentieth century of a reflexivity on the side-effects of modernization such as health risks, major accidents and environmental crisis. This is the case with Anthony Giddens’s thesis on ‘reflexive modernity’, Ulrich Beck’s thesis on the ‘risk society’ heralding the end of a supposed innocence on the secondary effects of progress, or that of Michael Gibbons and his colleagues on a new ‘mode 2’ of production of knowledge, more open and reflexive.31 It is also the perspective of the ecological modernization theory.32

  We can include in this binary narrative the overly simple thesis according to which modernity has established a great separation between nature and society, a separation that allegedly prevented us from becoming aware of ecological issues, and that was only challenged quite recently. As if the thinkers of antiquity had not already established this division between nature and culture, whether to promote it or to question its value and limitations;33 as if modernity, ever since the Renaissance, was not also constructed around knowledge that emphasized the belonging of human beings to the enveloping order of Nature.

  Even from the subtle Bruno Latour, we find this ‘great divide’ narrative, only slightly modified. According to him, modernity lied to itself in believing it had cut itself off from nature, whereas in laboratories, the crucibles of this modernity, scientists enrolled non-human beings in combinations with humans, thus surreptitiously weaving new hybrid collectives despite claiming to separate nature and society, science and politics. Thus, for Latour, though ‘we have never been modern’ from the point of view of this break between nature and society, we can take account of this only now and thanks to his sociology of scientific practice, which makes it possible to solemnly close a falsely modern parenthesis of 300 years … once again the alleged novelty of reflexivity!34