The Shock of the Anthropocene

by Christophe Bonneuil

  The problem with all these grand narratives of awakening, revelation or arousal of consciousness is that they are historically wrong. The period between 1770 and 1830 was marked on the contrary by a very acute awareness of the interactions between nature and society (Chapter 8). Deforestation, for example, was conceived as the rupture of an organic link between woodland, human society and the global environment, and the use of coal was promoted as a way to restore forests. Neo-Hippocratic medicine explored interaction between the state of the organic body, that of the social body, and that of the environment. An organicist scientific thought conceived the Earth as a living being right to the mid nineteenth century. This attests to an intertwining of environments, bodies and societies. By proposing in 1821 that ‘it is therefore the planet as a whole that is compromised [by deforestation and other environmental damages], and not just certain regions’, Charles Fourier simply drew on a large number of scientific writings and warnings of his time.35

  Yet it was in this very period that Western Europe plunged the world into the Anthropocene! Far from a narrative of blindness followed by awakening, we thus have a history of the marginalization of knowledge and alerts, a story of ‘modern disinhibition’36 that should be heeded (chapters 9 and 11). Our planet’s entry into the Anthropocene did not follow a frenetic modernism ignorant of the environment but, on the contrary, decades of reflection and concern as to the human degradation of our Earth.

  Likewise, the Great Acceleration of the Anthropocene after 1945 in no way went unperceived by the scientists or thinkers of the time (chapters 8 and 11). Well before the images of the Earth seen from the Moon, the atom bomb stood out as the event that unified the human condition and the Earth. The books Road to Survival by William Vogt and Our Plundered Planet by Henry Fairfield Osborn,37 which together sold between 20 and 30 million copies, were organized respectively around the inclusive categories of ‘the planet’ and ‘the Earth’, and launched a warning about the future of the global environment and its profound human repercussions. These authors already saw humanity as ‘a geological force’.38 Human action and natural cycles mutually determined one another in a ‘total environment’ of systemic character.39 Following Svante Arrhenius, who explained the greenhouse effect in the late nineteenth century, the American scientists Roger Revelle and Hans Suess wrote in 1957:

  Human beings are now carrying out a large-scale geophysical experiment … Within a few centuries we are returning to the atmosphere and oceans the concentrated organic carbon stored in the sedimentary rocks over hundreds of millions of years. This experiment, if adequately documented, may yield a far-reaching insight into the processes determining weather and climate.40

  It is either historical error or culpable ignorance, therefore, to maintain that ‘we’ entered the Anthropocene in the early nineteenth century, or with the Great Acceleration of the mid twentieth century, without awareness or knowledge of global ecological disturbances.

  Why should we criticize the anthropocenologists, whether scientists or philosophers, for a grand narrative of this kind? After all, is this not needed to dismantle the opposing grand modernist narrative of progress? ‘We have … to counter a metaphysical machine with a bigger metaphysical machine!’41 Does not the end (making humanity aware of the scale of ecological disarray) justify the means? Not as we see it.

  First of all, because this fable, claiming to break with the world-view of the moderns that it incriminates, in the end actually reproduces it. It proceeds from the same regime of historicity that dominated the nineteenth century and a part of the twentieth, in which the past is assessed only as a backdrop, for the lessons it yields for the future, and in a representation of time as a one-directional acceleration.42 It presents a ‘modernization front’,43 leaving a blind past towards a future in which our knowledge will have become global and solid, eventually compelling us to take this into account in politics (but differently from before: with no ‘great division’, without an authoritarian Nature or blind certainties). The new teleology of ecological reflexivity and collective learning replaces the old teleology of progress. Such heralding of the end of modernization is in fact a new modernist fable.

  Secondly, this narrative, ‘forgetting’ the environmental reflexivity of modern societies, tends to depoliticize the ecological issues of the past and thus obstructs understanding of present issues. Taken seriously, the Anthropocene and its continuing acceleration buries the dream of a society that has at last become reflexive. Who can still believe that if individuals, societies, states and corporations do not behave in an ecologically sustainable way, it is because the scientific knowledge to convince them is still too recent or not yet complete? Scholarly work in the human and social sciences shows how certain socio-economic and cultural processes are far more determining than the quantity of scientific information: such phenomena as lobbying, story-telling, rebound effect, technological coup, green-washing, recuperation of criticism, complexification, banalization or a simulated taking into account.44 There is a whole arsenal that makes it possible to ignore warnings and protests; it is important to see this at work in the past and propose a dynamic reading of it, one politically less naive than the grand narrative of an awakening of awareness (Chapter 11).

  Rather than suppressing the environmental reflexivity of the past, we must understand how we entered the Anthropocene despite very consistent warnings, knowledge and opposition, and forge a new and more credible narrative of what has happened to us.

  A grand narrative with scientists as its heroes

  The assimilation of the environmental preoccupations and knowledge of the past to timid and incomplete ‘precursors’ leads to an exaggerated glorification of today’s scientific knowledge. The grand narrative of the Anthropocene places anthropos, humanity, into two categories: on the one hand, the uninformed mass of the world population, who have become a geological agent without realizing it, and on the other, a small elite of scientists who reveal the dramatic and uncertain future of the planet. In the former, we have a non-reflexive group objectified by demography, biology and economics; in the latter, an idealist history made up of intellectual filiations, precursors and stubborn resistances:

  In the sixteenth century America was discovered. In the twenty-first century, it is not in the sense of an extension of space that other lands that are discovered, but rather in the sense of an intensification of our relationship to this Earth … The Anthropocene and Gaia are two concepts developed by researchers in the exact sciences; extraordinarily more advanced for their time than the whole mass of intellectuals, politicians and artists interested only in the history of human beings.45

  In this type of prophecy, the modernist fable that places specialists in the Earth system in the glorious filiation of the explorers of the sixteenth century (as if America had not been ‘discovered’ by the humans who crossed the Bering Strait more than 25,000 years ago, by the Polynesians who brought back the sweet potato a thousand years before Christopher Columbus, and then by the Vikings around 1000 AD), scientists are represented as the ecological vanguard of the world. Not only do they appear as spokespeople for the Earth, but also as shepherds of a public opinion that is ignorant and helpless. In this dominant grand narrative of the Anthropocene, humans have been ‘wandering in the desert’, but can finally ‘reach not the Promised Land but Earth itself, quite simply … the aptly named Gaia’,46 or again experience a new Renaissance by ‘reconnecting with the biosphere’.47

  This then is a prophetic narrative that places the scientists of the Earth system, with their new supporters in the human sciences, at the command post of a dishevelled planet and its errant humanity. A geo-government of scientists! By throwing overboard the categories of the ‘old social sciences’, bearing on asymmetries between human groups, do democratic political ideals also have to be cast adrift? What is left for a politics on the geological scale to which the Anthropocene summons us? What can we still do on the individual and collective scale given the massive sc
ale of the Anthropocene? The risk is that the Anthropocene and its grandiose time frame anaesthetizes politics. Scientists would then hold a monopoly position both in defining what is happening to us and in prescribing what needs to be done.

  This is how experts in global environment, in keynote articles that introduced the concept of Anthropocene in 2000 and 2002, imagine the rescue of humanity by science and engineering:

  Mankind will remain a major geological force for many millennia, maybe millions of years, to come. To develop a world-wide accepted strategy leading to sustainability of ecosystems against human induced stresses will be one of the great future tasks of mankind, requiring intensive research efforts and wise application of the knowledge thus acquired … An exciting, but also difficult and daunting task lies ahead of the global research and engineering community to guide mankind towards global, sustainable, environmental management.48

  A daunting task lies ahead for scientists and engineers to guide society towards environmentally sustainable management during the era of the Anthropocene. This will require appropriate human behaviour at all scales, and may well involve internationally accepted large-scale geo-engineering projects, for instance to ‘optimize’ climate.49

  We see here how at the same time as the Anthropocene is announced, geoengineering (the set of technologies for manipulating climate on a global scale, by the emission of sulphurous aerosols into the atmosphere, iron into the oceans, reflective satellites around the Earth, etc.) is promoted, despite its uncertainties and dangers (hundreds of thousands of premature deaths to be imagined in the case of the ‘solution’ of sulphurous aerosols),50 and despite the existence of a UN moratorium on such interventions. In the journal of the British Royal Society, four anthropocenologists precisely list the ‘innovative approaches’ that scientific technology can contribute as responses to ecological disarray. Not only do these include large-scale technological systems to pursue the observation of the planet and set scientifically the limits that humanity must not exceed, but also synthetic biology to create new artificial forms of biodiversity, adaptive management applying the rules of ecology to public action, and geoengineering to remake the climate.51

  Does the irruption of nature into politics imply entrusting ourselves completely to scientists, or on the contrary a critique of technoscience and the abandonment of a posture of mastery of the Earth? The first option seems the only one possible in the Anthropocene’s dominant grand narrative. If past innovations upset the planet, let’s have the innovating approaches that contemporary technology presents. In the major scientific periodicals dealing with the Anthropocene, everything is presented as if the environmental knowledge and initiatives of civil society did not exist. Indigenous peoples struggling against the devastation of mining or oil exploitation on their lands, activists who build tree cabins in the path of bulldozers constructing pipelines and airports, antinuclear or neo-Luddite, anti-high-tech movements, collectives that experiment with less materialistic and ‘simpler’ ways of living, ‘degrowth’ practitioners or the ‘transition towns’ movement, all of these are absolutely invisible in the grand narrative. If we believe the anthropocenologist experts, serious solutions can only emerge from further technological innovation in the laboratory, rather than from alternative political experiment ‘from below’ in society as a whole! This is how Bruno Latour asks the sorcerer’s apprentices to return to their laboratories to save humanity:

  We remember perhaps how, in the novel by Mary Shelley, Dr Victor Frankenstein accused himself of one sin – that of having been a sorcerer’s apprentice – only to disguise another infinitely more serious, that of having been horrified by the sight of his creature, who had only become a monster because its author had abandoned it. Instead of crying: ‘Victor, stop innovating, believing, growing and creating’, it would seem more fruitful for him to have said, in the end: ‘Dr Frankenstein, return to your laboratory and finally give a face to your unsuccessful attempt.’ But how will we be able to return to our laboratories and revise every detail of our material existence?52

  While criticizing the modernization project and viewing the Anthropocene as a refutation of modernity, Bruno Latour, together with the Breakthrough Institute’s ‘ecomodernists’, urges us to ‘love our monsters’. He reads Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein not as a cautionary tale against technological hubris, but rather against irrational fears in the face of technology’s side-effects. Dr Frankenstein failed not because he created a monster but because he fled in horror instead of repairing and improving him. ‘The sin is not to wish to have dominion over nature’, goes the story, ‘but to believe that this dominion means emancipation and not attachment.’53

  ‘They still don’t know what to do’: the ‘public’ seen by the Anthropocene experts

  If humanity needs scientific shepherds and eco-Frankensteins, this is, according to the anthropocenologists, because traditional politicians have failed, while the public is insufficiently aware or trapped in a ‘cognitive dissonance’. The whole world needs to be educated, enlightened by the luminaries of science:

  Up to now the concept of Anthropocene has been confined almost entirely to the research community. How will it be perceived by the public at large and by political or private sector leaders? … The notion, subsequently strengthened by further scientific research, that we are ‘just’ another ape and not a special creation ‘above’ the rest of nature shook the society of Darwin’s time, and still causes tension and conflict in some parts of the world … The concept of Anthropocene, as it becomes more well known in the general public, could well drive a similar reaction to that which Darwin elicited … [T]he Anthropocene will be a very difficult concept for many people to accept.54

  While the Earth system scientists compare themselves to Darwin, Latour compares Lovelock to Galileo and Pasteur.55 Praise of this kind paints the picture of a science well above society, bringing revolutionary findings that shatter accepted beliefs. The anthropocenologists then turn to psychosociology to understand why the public resist the evidence of facts that show the gravity of global ecological unbalances. Diagnosis: the public suffer from cognitive dissonance, described half a century ago by psychology as a phenomenon of distancing between what one learns (in this case, for example, climate disturbance) and what one clings to (here, the continuance of a certain way of life): ‘When facts that challenge a deeply held belief are presented, the believer clings even more strongly to his or her beliefs and may begin to proselytize fervently to others despite the mounting evidence that contradicts the belief.’56

  After Galileo and Darwin, therefore, we are said to be in a new stage of history in which ‘science’ must turn upside down a ‘system of belief’ of society. Like the dogma of the virgin birth of Jesus, in which God saves the world without compromising himself with humans, it is from a distance, way above society, without a dialogue with socioecological movements or accepting its part and responsibility for the first two centuries of the Anthropocene, that science is presented as our saviour. In this logic, the right policy will be that which involves the ‘advised application’ of the neutral findings of science. Humanity will become ecologically sustainable when the scientific message has properly penetrated it and humanity has adopted its solutions.

  Age of man, death of nature?

  Announcing the advent of the Anthropocene makes it possible for certain anthropocenologists to proclaim the death of Nature with a capital ‘N’, nature seen as external to humans. We are said to be entering an anthropo-nature, a techno-nature, a post-nature (Latour) that is hybrid and dynamic, in which humans will at last recognize themselves as taking part: ‘There is no ecosystem without humans and no humans who do not depend on the functioning of ecosystems.’57

  The old nature no longer exists. The myth of the wilderness, external and virgin, is shattered. Natural parks and reserves are criticized on all sides for having excluded local populations: from now on nature has to be participative: ‘No need to be a postmodernist in order
to understand that the concept of Nature … has always been a human construction, forged for human purposes.’58

  In fact, cybernetics and the cyborg science of the post-war era did not wait for Latour, Donna Haraway or Philippe Descola to celebrate the dissolution of the nature/culture boundary, since they precisely sought to optimize systems that connected humans and non-humans. Thus, as Catherine and Raphaël Larrère have shown, ‘the thesis of the end of nature is that of its complete intelligibility … and of its complete mastery’.59 In the sciences of conservation, the notion of the Anthropocene is accompanied by the diffusion of a doctrine accepting the inevitable character of certain modes of artificialization of nature, proclaiming that what matters is to preserve biodiversity as a function of the services it provides for humans rather than as a value in itself, or again presenting urban nature as having as much value as so-called ‘wild’ nature.

  The dominant narrative of the anthropocenologists magnifies the irruption of human action as a telluric force. We have become ‘equipotent to the Earth’.60 The figure that is put forward is that of ‘Man, gardener of the planet’. This new model of the biosphere moves us away from an outdated view of the world as ‘natural ecosystems with humans disturbing them’ and towards a vision of ‘human systems with natural ecosystems embedded within them’.61

  Thus, the sublime of catastrophe is succeeded by the giddiness of omnipotence. For Mark Lynas, ‘Nature no longer runs the Earth. We do. It is our choice what happens here.’62 After having briefly raised fear by imagining a planet out of control, a number of scientists and journalists have adopted the almost glorious story of the advent of humanity as pilot and engineer of the planet.63