The Shock of the Anthropocene

by Christophe Bonneuil

  We can understand why the socialists of the mid nineteenth century were so closely interested in the work of chemists and the question of metabolism. In 1843, Pierre Leroux, who coined the word ‘socialism’, founded in Boussac, in the department of Creuse, a colony by the name of ‘Circulus’ that put into practice the agricultural recycling of human excrement: ‘Nature has established a circulus between production and consumption. We do not create anything, we do not destroy anything: we effect changes … Consumption is the aim of production, but it is also the cause.’44

  This circular view of the material relationship between society and soil was also the basis for a radical critique of work that dissipated the material riches transiting around the circulus in useless movements and unproductive capital. Against the accumulation and plunder of the capitalists, a society in homeostasis should be established, engaged chiefly in maintaining the circulus and minimizing loss.45

  Leroux’s circulus was simply one example of countless technical, technocratic and public health projects that aimed to make proper use of excrement. To the degree that European countries urbanized, the question of human fertilizer became crucial for the fertility of the soil. The rising fees for leases on Paris refuse collection (conceded to private entrepreneurs who sold dried excrement to farmers) during the first part of the nineteenth century attest to the economic importance of ‘human fertilizer’. Chemical analysis of water from the sewers and comparison of this with the precious guano from Chile and Peru incited local authorities in the mid nineteenth century to see their waste water as a resource. Rather than emitters of waste, towns were thought of as fertilizer factories. Health officials who promoted the development of sewerage, such as Edwin Chadwick in Britain, also used this economic argument to convince municipalities that the sale of waste water to farmers would enable them to finance completely this major infrastructural work.46 Other solutions were also proposed, less grandiose but more practical, such as the dry toilets promoted in 1861 by Henry Moule, vicar of Fordington, which used a mixture of earth and ash to deodorize and produce fertilizer.47 In the late nineteenth century, a Michigan entrepreneur, William Heap, produced dry toilets on an industrial scale, with a certain success in Canada and the US Midwest.

  In the nineteenth century, therefore, there was a fundamental project to restore material cycles. The fate of excrement lay at the heart of some profound debates. It was bound up with the social question, inasmuch as the impoverished soil of the countryside provoked famines, pauperism and revolutions; with the fate of civilizations (Rome, according to Liebig, fell on account of its inability to manage its excrement properly); with geopolitics, e.g., the seizure of Peruvian guano by the British state; with public health and the degeneration of populations; and even with the divine order: in Victorian England, the metabolic rupture put in question the moral status of urbanization.48

  This metabolic view of agriculture persisted for a long time into the twentieth century. Inspired by the ideal of self-sufficiency developed by the anarchist Pyotr Kropotkin, the German architect Leberecht Migge integrated it into his project of self-sufficient co-operatives. In his pamphlet Jedermann Selbstversorger (Everyone Self-Sufficient, 1918) and his article ‘Das grüne Manifest’ (1919, the first occurrence of the term ‘green’ in a political sense), he developed a political and urbanistic theory based on garden cities that would be self-sufficient thanks to solar and wind power, horticulture and the strict recycling of organic waste. Recycling was the essential lever to escape from the great technological networks of capitalism and establish self-management, ‘the smallest form of government possible – according to the will of the people’.49

  From the 1900s to the 1920s, Albert Howard, working in the agricultural service of colonial India, studied Indian agricultural systems. This agronomist was particularly impressed by the efficiency of recycling practices that allowed the long-term preservation of soil quality. In Farming and Gardening for Health or Disease, a founding text of organic agriculture, he emphasized the ‘great law of return’ and criticized the replacement of organic fertilizers by mineral ones.50 Finally, it was with explicit reference to such metabolic theories that the Indian minister of agriculture, K. M. Munshi, rejected the logic of the ‘green revolution’ based on chemical fertilizer, proposing instead to ‘study the life’s cycle in the village under your charge in both its aspects – hydrological and nutritional. Find out where the cycle has been disturbed and estimate the steps necessary for restoring it.’51

  The analysis of flows of material was thus inspired by the desire to maintain closed cycles on both local and national scale. It was also applied on a world scale. For Lavoisier, Boussingault and Kliment Timiriazev, through to the biogeochemistry of Vladimir Vernadsky in the 1920s, study of the chemical relations connecting the vegetable, animal and mineral worlds with human societies aimed at understanding the functioning of the Earth as a whole. In 1845, for example, the French chemist Jacques-Joseph Ebelmen established the major principles of the global carbon cycle by identifying the processes that tended to increase or reduce the quantity of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. According to him, the atmosphere was co-produced by living beings:

  Variations in the nature of the air have most likely been always in relation with the organized beings who lived at each different epoch … has the composition of our atmosphere reached a permanent state of equilibrium? … We leave to future generations certain elements for this important question.52

  This global approach to cycles of matter would be taken up by Vernadsky in the 1920s, by Evelyn Hutchinson in the United States in the 1940s, then by systems ecology, and would form the framework of the Gaia hypothesis put forward by Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock.53

  From entropy to degrowth

  In the late nineteenth century, thermodynamics, the study of the properties of energy and its transformations, formed a new grammar for the general apprehension of relationships between nature and society. Historians of science have shown how the works of James Joule and William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) still fell largely into the English tradition of natural theology. The focus on loss, waste and dissipation was bound up with the project of continuing the work of God in the world below: a Christian society should organize itself so as to maximize use of a stock of energy that, despite being constant, was in constant dissipation (entropy).

  Thermodynamics was also anchored in the British political economy of the 1840s, which based itself on labour value. At the Glasgow Philosophical Society (whose members included William Thomson), the desire to optimize the profit derived from both men and machines led to comparing the efficiency of human and mechanical engines, and to proposing the equation: mechanical effect = labour value (in money) = bread,54 consequently conceiving an entity that was converted and conserved in the productive process. Energy, therefore, was from its origin a concept seeking to apprehend economic and social problems.

  In the 1860s, accordingly, it was possible to elaborate a quantitative view of energy flow, intercepted by plants or extracted from coal, and of its circulation in the economy. One of the first to conduct an analysis of this kind was the Ukrainian socialist Sergei Podolinsky. By comparing pasture to wheat, he showed that the agricultural yield in terms of energy grew with the proportion of animal or human input, and declined with the use of machines using coal.55

  Many writers at the turn of the century proposed a reform of economic analysis, and of the economy itself, based on the study of energy: Eduard Sacher, Foundations of a Mechanics of Society (1881); Patrick Geddes, John Ruskin, Economist (1884); Rudolf Clausius, On the Energy Stocks in Nature and their Valorization for the Benefit of Humankind (in German, 1885); and somewhat later Frederick Soddy, Cartesian Economics (1921). All of these shared a very critical view of a political economy that was content to study the monetary value of things. A mere ‘chresmatics’ of this kind obscured the real problem, which was the provisioning of human societies in terms of material and energy. These writers also emp
hasized the divergence between the appearance of growing financial wealth and the truth of energy dissipation. Geddes, for example, remarked that only the energy obtained from a steam engine was taken into account by economics, whereas the 90 per cent of energy dissipated and permanently lost remained invisible. In Cartesian Economics, Frederick Soddy, professor of chemistry at Oxford University and Nobel laureate for chemistry, explained that the rate of interest was a contingent human invention, which could never contradict for too long the principle of entropy to which capital remained subject. According to him, investment, far from increasing wealth, actually accelerated the exhaustion of fossil resources.56 Clausius, Thomson and Bernard Brunhes also drew the most general implications for the progress of the world from the second law of thermodynamics: though the quantity of energy is conserved, it degrades in form, inexorably increasing the entropy of any isolated system. Brunhes concluded from this in 1909 that ‘if the world progresses like a wound clock whose spring relaxes by the minute, what tells us that the spring, once unwound, would not be in a state of complete instability?’57

  Analysis and critique of economics in terms of thermodynamics thus follows a long heritage and could give rise to quite technocratic views in writers such as Eugene Odum, Kenneth Boulding or Vaclav Smil, for example, as well as more radical ones with Ivan Illich, Nicolas Georgescu-Roegen and the present-day theorists of degrowth.

  Resources and finitude

  The question of exhaustion of resources constitutes the sixth and last grammar of environmental reflexivity in modern societies. It emerged in the seventeenth century in the context of natural theology: What moral meaning to give to the ‘corruption of nature’ or the limits of natural wealth, to the growing scarcity of woodland around English towns, for example? Was it a defiance of providence to seek to preserve resources in order to delay the Last Judgement?58 The famous example of the silver mines of Potosí led to inferences on the exhaustion of the world in general. This theme was sufficiently well known for the satirist Edward Moore to depict in 1754 a young mathematician who had after long calculations discovered ‘that the profusion of man consumes faster than the Earth produces. Vast fleets, and enormous buildings have wasted almost all our oak … What shall we do when the coal, iron and lead mines are exhausted?’59

  The question of limits was fundamental in the political economy of the early nineteenth century, which should be understood in the context of an organic economy and the perception of an asymptotic limit to resources.60 If coal made it possible to envisage an economy in continuous growth, this did not prevent the problem of exhaustion of coal stocks being raised right from the beginnings of industrialization. In 1819, for example, on the subject of gas lighting, the renowned chemist and industrialist Jean-Antoine Chaptal estimated French coal resources as too low to be wasted in this way: better to reserve them for the production of iron, which was far more useful for national defence.61 In the same vein, at the start of the railway age in France, the engineer Pierre-Simon Girard argued against steam engines and for animal traction, estimating that the price of coal was bound to increase as mines were gradually exhausted.62 In England in the 1820s, the exhaustion of certain mines, combined with parliamentary debates on the export of coal, led to the first assessments of national reserves. The House of Lords set up commissions on this subject in 1822 and 1829.

  Jevons’s well-known treatise on The Coal Question (1865) can be placed in a particular English political context, that of debates on free trade (Should coal exports be encouraged?) and the reduction of the public debt (What burden should we leave to future generations deprived of cheap energy?). Three new aspects were emphasized by Jevons. First of all, that of a fundamental difference between the asymptotic development of organic economies (the stationary state) and the logic of collapse specific to mineral economies:

  A farm, however far pushed, will under proper cultivation continue to yield forever a constant crop. But in a mine there is no reproduction, and the produce once pushed to the utmost will soon begin to fail and sink to zero. So far, then, as our wealth and progress depend upon the superior command of coal, we must not only stop – we must go back.63

  In the organic energy system, marginal returns fall to zero and production stabilizes at the limit of sustainable exploitation. In a fossil fuel economic system, it is production itself that collapses towards zero.

  Secondly, the debate on exhaustion shifted from the geological question to the estimate of future consumption: should the hypothesis of geometrical growth be accepted (based on the fundamental notion of the rebound effect that Jevons proposed) or simply that of an arithmetical one?

  Thirdly, this period was marked by a general questioning on the subject of exhaustion of nature. We have seen the very marked concern raised by the metabolic rupture between town and country. In the same period, geologists worried about the scarcity of copper, zinc and tin, in the context of the development of the world telegraph network. In 1898, the president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, William Crookes, warned against the exhaustion of nitrate from guano, and the risk of a global crisis for an agriculture that had suddenly become dependent on non-renewable resources.64 The disturbing fact had to be acknowledged that the transition from an organic economy and the rupture of metabolic cycles had been undertaken despite a sharper attention to the future and despite a clear awareness of the unsustainable character of the new regime that was coming into being in the late nineteenth century. For Jevons, the coal question amounted to a ‘momentous choice between brief greatness and longer continued mediocrity’65 and, contrary to current interpretations that would see Jevons as a precursor of ‘sustainability’, he argued for this ‘brief greatness’!

  The historical choice of a ‘brief greatness’ that was made at the end of the nineteenth century is clearly reflected in the sudden contraction of the temporal horizon of contemporary political actors. In 1860, in the House of Commons, Disraeli, opposing the free-trade treaty with France (the Cobden-Chevalier Treaty), maintained that, since English reserves would cover no more than three or four centuries of national consumption, it was imperative for the long-term survival of the empire that exports should be taxed. Gladstone, on the other hand, a champion of free trade, mentioned other geological studies that estimated reserves at 2,000 years’ consumption. A scarcity foreseeable in three centuries seemed to justify a course of action that was economically damaging in the present. The long term of English politicians managing their empire, instilled with classical references and quoting Edward Gibbon, was in the order of millennia.

  Oil exploitation confirmed the historical choice of a ‘brief greatness’. The first debates about oil reserves were marked by a spectacular shortening of time frames in relation to the debate about coal. In the United States, the explosion of consumption linked to the automobile and the First World War took place despite warnings as to the coming exhaustion of national reserves. In 1918, a report by the Smithsonian Institution explained that it was unlikely that major new oilfields would be found in the United States. During the First World War, the director of the US Fuel Administration anticipated a decline in US military power arising from the increasing scarcity of oil. In 1921, the US Geological Survey estimated the economically exploitable oil reserves as twenty years at the most.66

  With the Second World War and then the Cold War, a new political attention focused on the sites of strategic materials and their limited stocks. With the universalization of oil, the question of exhaustion became structural. In December 1945, in a celebrated article titled ‘The War and Our Vanishing Resources’, Interior Secretary Harold Ickes warned his fellow-countrymen that

  the prodigal harvest of minerals that we have reaped to win this war has bankrupted some of our most vital mineral resources. We no longer deserve to be listed with Russia and the British Empire as one of the ‘Have’ nations of the world. We should be listed with the ‘Have-nots’ such as Germany and Japan.67

  Circumfu
sa, climate, metabolism, economy of nature, thermodynamics, exhaustion: these six grammars of environmental reflexivity of which we have sketched a typology need to be pursued in historical studies, particularly to show their articulation to concrete practices (maintenance of clean air, soil fertility, recycling, etc.), as well as the interaction between their theoretical formalization and political problems. From a preliminary analysis, however, it is clear that the moderns possessed their own forms of environmental reflexivity. The conclusion that forces itself on us, disturbing as it may be, is that our ancestors destroyed environments in full awareness of what they were doing. Industrialization and the radical transformation of environments that it caused by its string of pollutions went ahead despite environmental medicine; the ever more intensive use of natural resources continued despite the concept of economy of nature and the perception of limits. The historical problem, therefore, is not the emergence of an ‘environmental awareness’ but rather the reverse: to understand the schizophrenic nature of modernity, which continued to view humans as the products of their environment at the same time as it let them damage and destroy it.

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  1Jean-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 ‘Trente Glorieuses’. Modernisation, contestations et pollutions dans la France d’après-guerre, Paris: La Découverte, 2013, 61–79.

  2For example William Cronon’s great book, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, New York: Norton, 1991; also William McNeill, Plagues and Peoples, New York: Anchor Books, 1976, and John R. McNeill, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean, 1620–1914, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. This describes a general tendency, though there are of course many exceptions: Clarence Glacken, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought to the End of the Eighteenth Century, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967; Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement 1890–1920, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999; or in France, Raphaël Larrère, L’Utopie forestière de F.-A. Rauch, Paris: INRA, 1985.