The Shock of the Anthropocene

by Christophe Bonneuil

  Finally, the Anthropocene body is shaped by the automobile and the suburb. American town-planners and doctors have recently shown the correlation between motorization, urban sprawl and the prevalence of diseases such as diabetes and obesity. Between 1963 and 2003 in the United States, distances travelled by motorcar doubled, while obesity now affects 65 per cent of adults, leading to a rise in cardiovascular diseases.53

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  1Daniel Horowitz, The Morality of Spending: Attitudes toward the Consumer Society in America, 1875–1940, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985, and The Anxieties of Affluence: Critiques of American Consumer Culture, 1939–1979, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004.

  2André Cicolella, Toxique planète. Le scandale invisible des maladies chroniques, Paris: Seuil, 2013.

  3Clive Hamilton, Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth about Climate Change, London: Routledge, 2010, 66–77.

  4Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and John Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England, London: Europa Publications, 1982.

  5Hoh-Cheung Mui and Lorna Holbrook Mui, Shops and Shopkeeping in Eighteenth-Century England, London: Routledge, 1989, 36–7.

  6Jan de Vries, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008, 3.

  7Edward P. Thompson, ‘Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism’, Past and Present, 38:1, 1967: 56–97.

  8Michael Sonenscher, Work and Wages: Natural Law, Politics and the Eighteenth-Century French Trades, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, 69–72.

  9Gary Cross, Time and Money: The Making of Consumer Culture, London: Routledge, 1993, 16–20.

  10Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness: Advertising and the Social Roots of the Consumer Culture, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976.

  11Jon Soluri, Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005, 219.

  12Richard Tucker, Insatiable Appetite: The United States and the Ecological Degradation of the Tropical World, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. On Guatemala, see Beatriz Manz, Paradise in Ashes, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.

  13William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, New York: Norton, 1991, 97–147.

  14Herbert Hoover in 1923, quoted by Ewen, Captains of Consciousness, 28.

  15Susan Strasser, Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989, 29–57.

  16Ibid., 58–88.

  17Ewen, Captains of Consciousness, 32.

  18Quoted ibid., 39.

  19Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America, New York: Basic Books, 1994, 196–233.

  20George Gunton, Principles of Social Economics (1893), quoted by Cross, Time and Money, 25.

  21Matthew B. Crawford, The Case for Working with Your Hands: Or Why Office Work Is Bad for Us and Fixing Things Feel Good, London: Viking, 2009, 41–2.

  22Lendol Calder, Financing the American Dream: A Cultural History of Consumer Credit, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999, 19.

  23Victoria De Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005, 90.

  24Sabine Barles, L’Invention des déchets urbains. France 1790–1970, Paris: Champ Vallon, 2007.

  25Susan Strasser, Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash, New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000, 70–80.

  26Ibid., 30.

  27Ibid., 181–7.

  28Sue Bowden and Avner Offer, ‘Household Appliances and the Use of Time: The United States and Britain since the 1920s’, Economic History Review, 47:4, 1994: 725–48.

  29Strasser, Waste and Want, 169–81; Giles Slade, Made to Break: Technology and Obsolescence in America, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006, 9–27.

  30Bernard London, Ending the Depression Through Planned Obsolescence, New York, 1932.

  31Slade, Made to Break, 29–55.

  32Cross, Time and Money, 22–4.

  33Ibid., 37.

  34Léo Lagrange (1900–40) was France’s first minister for sport and leisure, in the Popular Front government of 1936, and particularly associated with the introduction of paid holidays.

  35Ibid., 82–4.

  36Timothy Mitchell, ‘Fixing the Economy’, Cultural Studies, 12:1, 1998: 82–101.

  37Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America, London: Vintage, 2004, 63.

  38Donald Albrecht (ed.), World War II and the American Dream: How Wartime Building Changed a Nation, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995, 27.

  39Quoted by David Noble, Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation (1984), New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2011, 3.

  40Lynn Spiegel, ‘Installing the Television Set: Popular Discourses on Television and Domestic Space, 1948–1955’, Camera Obscura, 16:1, 1998.

  41S. Jonathan Wiesen, Creating the Nazi Marketplace: Commerce and Consumption in the Third Reich, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010; Victoria De Grazia, The Culture of Consent: Mass Organisation of Leisure in Fascist Italy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.

  42Götz Aly, Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State, New York: Henry Holt, 2005.

  43De Grazia, The Culture of Consent. On the Americanization of French society and the reactions it aroused, see Richard Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

  44Marc Lazar, ‘Damné de la terre et homme de marbre. L’ouvrier dans l’imaginaire du PCF du milieu des années trente à la fin des années cinquante’, Annales, 1990, 45:5, 1071–96.

  45Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996, 38.

  46Claire Leymonerie, ‘Le Salon des arts ménagers dans les années 1950. Théâtre d’une conversion à la consommation de masse’, Vingtième siècle. Revue d’histoire, 91, 2006: 43–56.

  47Paul Bairoch, Mythes et paradoxes de l’histoire économique, Paris: La Découverte, 1999, 161.

  48Martin Bruegel, ‘Alimentary Identities, Nutritional Advice, and the Uses of History’, Food and History, 2:2, 2004: 105–16.

  49Roger Horowitz, Putting Meat on the American Table: Taste, Technology, Transformation, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006; William Boyd, ‘Making Meat: Science, Technology, and American Poultry Production’, Technology and Culture, 42:4, 2001: 631–64.

  50Cicolella, Toxique planète. See also Julie Guthman, Weighing In: Obesity, Food Justice, and the Limits of Capitalism, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.

  51Marie Ng et al., ‘Global, Regional, and National Prevalence of Overweight and Obesity in Children and Adults During 1980–2013: A Systematic Analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2013’, The Lancet, 384:9945, 2014, 766–81.

  52Soraya Boudia and Nathalie Jas (eds), Toxicants, Health and Regulation since 1945, London: Pickering and Chatto, 2013.

  53Laura E. Jackson, ‘The Relationship of Urban Design to Human Health and Condition’, Landscape and Urban Planning, 64:4, 2003, 191–200; Wesley E. Marshall, Daniel P. Piatkowski and Norman W. Garrick, ‘Community Design, Street Networks, and Public Health’, Journal of Transport and Health, 1:4, 2014, 326–340.

  CHAPTER 8

  Phronocene: Grammars of

  Environmental Reflexivity

  The great advantage of the concept of Anthropocene is that it abolishes the futile distinction between modernity and reflexive modernity, forcing us to consider the contemporary situation from a historical standpoint, less as a threshold in the acquiring of environmental awareness than as the culminating point of a history of destructions.

  The problem
with the narrative of ecological awakening, according to which our generation is the first to recognize environmental disturbance and question industrial modernity, is that by obliterating the reflexivity of past societies it depoliticizes the long history of the Anthropocene.

  In their defence, the scientists, philosophers and sociologists who proclaim this narrative have hardly been helped by historians. If it is a cliché to say that history is written by the victors, then to say that economic or technological history is written from the standpoint of the modernizers is a euphemism. For a long time indeed, historians in general showed little interest at all in environmental controversies: concerns and alarms were viewed as romantic curiosities or simply ‘resistance to progress’.1

  As for environmental history, despite being very dynamic since the 1980s, it has still not had the refutation effect that it should have had on the grand narratives of postmodernism. While it describes very convincingly the radical transformation of environments (rivers, oceans, plains) by technology and the market,2 and shows the fundamental importance of non-humans (viruses in particular) in world history, it has also tended to deprive actors of the capacity that they had to understand and analyse the complexity of the new situation they were creating. Environmental historians have often offered bird’s-eye views, deliberately removed from political history, of societies caught in ecological traps or in technological and capitalist logics that have made (or unmade) their environments, without really seeming to account for this process, ending up with a view of the environmental crisis as an unexpected consequence of modernity.

  To start out on the right track, the history of the Anthropocene must base itself on the disturbing fact that the destruction of environments has not been carried out inadvertently, as if nature did not count, but despite the environmental prudence (phronesis in Greek) of the moderns. If it is anachronistic to view modern societies, or certain of their actors, as ‘ecological’, it is on the other hand impossible to understand their particular forms of reflexivity by envisaging them in terms of today’s categories (global environment, ecosystem, biogeochemical cycles, Anthropocene, etc.), as if this offered the only valid and useful way of being ‘environmentally aware’. History provides us with a space of intelligibility for grasping the localized, changing and disputed character of ways of being in the world and conceiving the place of humans within nature.

  The problem posed for history is thus to restore the conceptual grammars within which what we now call environmental reflexivity was conceived. The present chapter will analyse six of these: circumfusa and environment, climate, nature’s economy, society-nature metabolisms, thermodynamics and exhaustion.

  Three remarks first of all. Firstly, this list is not exhaustive, and the connections that exist among these different grammars make possible different arrangements. Secondly, if these environmental grammars are expressed in scientific theories, we should not underestimate the importance of ‘common environmental decency’,3 i.e., a moral economy of nature on the part of ordinary people. For fishermen managing their resources in common, the notion of nature’s economy was an everyday experience that circumscribed their action; for people close to chemical plants, their stench was an unambiguous danger signal. Thirdly, these grammars, rather than systems of propositions, constitute rules of conduct. They differentiate the healthy from the contaminated, the pure from the impure, and sustainable uses of nature from dangerous actions. In this way, they make it possible to give a wider sense to particular or local struggles by connecting them with a public good that combines social uses and natural creatures.

  From circumfusa to environment

  Let us begin quite simply with the word ‘environment’. Its recent history seems to confirm the thesis of a contemporary environmental awareness: it was only in the 1970s that the environment became institutionalized, with the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency in the United States, ministries of the environment in the countries of the OECD, and the UN Environment Programme (1972). It is necessary however to note two points: firstly, these new agencies and ministries were charged with applying laws and regulations (such as clean air acts, for example) that had a longer history, and secondly, the very history of the word shows that the form of reflexivity it denotes is in fact very long-standing, going back at least to the late eighteenth century.

  The present-day sense of ‘environment’ was popularized by Herbert Spencer in the mid nineteenth century, and subsequently adopted in French. George Perkins Marsh does not use it in Man and Nature, the great American environmentalist text of its decade, nor does Eugène Huzar in La Fin du monde par la science (1855), the first catastrophist philosophy of technology. Herbert Spencer, on the other hand, first in Principles of Psychology (1855) and then in Principles of Biology (1864), uses it dozens of times to describe the ‘circumstances of an organism’, in other words all the forces that affect and transform it, and he explores the reciprocal relationships between organism and environment.

  In the 1850s, in both French and English, ‘environment’ was commonly used to refer to such things as the immediate surroundings of a town. But Spencer used the term in a more specific sense, corresponding to a fundamental concept of French public health studies from the late eighteenth century, that of circumfusa or ‘surrounding things’. By this term, the medics included air, water and place, inspired by Hippocratic medicine and all the elements that held an influence over health. At the same time, materialist philosophers such as Buffon and Diderot were interested in environment and climate as a way of modifying or improving living creatures and, above all, man. The notion of circumfusa finally merges, in Lamarck’s theories, with the concept of the ‘surrounding circumstances’ that shape living creatures, in the ideas of Cabanis (‘surrounding objects’), then finally in the notion of ‘milieu’ that was central to Comtean sociology and drawn on by Herbert Spencer in the new sense he gave to the word ‘environment’.4

  The filiation of circumfusa and environment is important, as it refutes the common opposition made between the ‘old kind’ of environment, mere surroundings, an externality out of reach, and the ‘environment’ of the 1970s as a fragile object to protect, internal to the social and thus eminently political.

  In the eighteenth century, surroundings were already viewed as highly fragile. Transformations that were apparently benign could have dreadful consequences. The degeneration of the Romans after the classical period was explained by the destruction of the sewers (the cloaca maxima) by the barbarians, and the proliferation of alum mines that spoiled the city’s air.5 An epidemic in the Dutch Moluccas was attributed to the destruction of the clove trees, whose aromatic particles healed the air corrupted by the fumes of a volcano. Smoke from manufacturing aroused similar concerns among the urban bourgeoisie: in the eighteenth century, cities were seen as extremely unhealthy, on a par with swamps, prisons and ships.6

  According to the medical and philosophical thinking of this century, human societies evolved in relation with the atmospheric envelopes that they shaped. The circumfusa were the sum of all possible environmental transformations; human action reverberates in the things surrounding it, which in turn modifies human constitutions.

  From the eighteenth century into the early nineteenth, pollution was seen as extremely dangerous. Neighbours accused polluting factories of fomenting epidemics and leading to a degeneration of the population. The police paid scrupulous attention to air quality, since the health, number and even shape of the inhabitants seemed to depend on this.7 They kept a close eye on workshops, their smoke and discharge. Overly polluting trades, in particular those that involved work on organic materials (tanners, tripe butchers, candle-makers, etc.), were not allowed in built-up areas.8

  In the mid nineteenth century, it seemed that industrial pollution was even disturbing the large-scale equilibrium of the atmosphere. In 1845, when crops were attacked by cryptogamic diseases, farmers accused the big chemical works. According to one agronomist, ‘from
Genoa to Grenoble, from Lyon to Dijon and as far as Strasbourg and Metz … people ascribe the vine disease to gas lighting’.9 In 1852, when the potato harvest failed in the Charleroi region of Belgium, peasants demanded that the authorities suspend production in soda factories. At one demonstration, soldiers fired and two people were killed. Léon Peeters, a Charleroi pharmacist, was imprisoned for publishing a short book seeking to demonstrate that bad harvests were not caused by cryptogams but by the hydrochloric acid fumes that poured out from these plants. As the fumes paid no heed to national borders, ‘To obtain a radical cure of the plague that has been desolating Europe for ten years, it is necessary for all governments to come to agreement.’10 As a calming influence, Corneille Jean Koene, a chemistry professor at the University of Brussels, gave a series of popular science lectures on this subject. According to him, chemical plants helped to regulate the overall composition of the atmosphere. He argued that the increase in human population, and in the number of cattle and buildings, had fixed carbon and increased the proportion of oxygen in the atmosphere. Industry maintained a stable level of carbon in the atmosphere by burning coal; chemical plants, by emitting hydrochloric acid, destroyed alkaline miasmas and reduced the risk of epidemics.11 And so it was not only the detractors of industry but also its defenders who saw it as a major environmental factor.

  In the 1850s, human technology seemed to have reached a global scale. As Eugène Huzar wrote in 1857, the modern age was marked by a transformation of our responsibilities. Earth and science had followed opposing paths; the first had shrunk while the second was stretching:

  I would understand how a South American savage who had never left his forest could tell me that the earth was infinite, and that man therefore could not disturb it. Today, with science, the proposition is completely reversed; it is man who is infinite, thanks to science, and the planet that is finite.12