The Shock of the Anthropocene

by Christophe Bonneuil

  At the same period, the idea of national income acquired a whole new importance. If this had long been estimated by economists and journalists concerned to study the distribution of wealth between wages and profits, it was now calculated by official bureaux. In the United States, the economist Simon Kuznets, a Harvard academic appointed to the National Bureau of Economic Research, established in 1936 rules for calculating GDP that would be taken up across the world. First envisioned as a tool for monitoring the economy during recession, the calculation of GDP would serve above all during the Second World War to prime the American military effort, without compromising economic growth. In 1900, only eight countries had published their national income, a figure that grew to thirty-nine in 1946 and eighty some ten years later.41 The change was also qualitative: the new mode of calculation, inherited from the realm of business accounting, was based on an equation between expenditure and income. This had two major consequences: first of all, the calculation of GDP naturalized the idea of the economy as a closed circuit, a circular flow of value between production and consumption cut off from its natural moorings; and secondly, by measuring it with just one figure, national accounting reified the economy and made it possible to erect it into an entity separate from society, politics and nature.

  National accounting rested, finally, on the hypothesis of a completely commodified economy. Housework and ‘free’ services (including those rendered by nature) were absent from the calculation. In 1949, a fascinating debate took place among the inventors of GDP: Kuznets, Milton Gilbert, Colin Clark, François Perroux, George Findlay Shirras and D. H. MacGregor among others.42 We find here the earliest and most radical critique of national accounting. According to its own progenitors, as GDP was narrowly correlated with military expenditure, it could not simply be used during peacetime conditions. Nor could it be used for less developed countries, as the non-market sphere played too important a role here, falsifying international comparison. Secondly, GDP had to be reduced by the ‘costs of civilization’, which included among other things pollution, traffic jams, police, judges, freeways, advertising ‘that stimulated artificial needs’, not to mention ‘the work of insurers, trade associations, lawyers, bankers and … statisticians’. Thirdly and above all, mining activity had to be counted negatively, since the exhaustion of resources impoverished the nation. In the end, none of these proposals were taken on board, opening an endless discussion on the ‘new indicators’ of wealth and well-being. But it was a close call: GDP, which actually is corrected for the amortization of capital, could well have been adjusted for the wear and tear of natural capital. If in the end this proposal was not accepted, it was on the pretext that GDP also did not include the discovery of new mines or oil fields replacing the depleted ones.43 Had this debate been decided otherwise, this adjusted GDP would have given a completely different view of Western economic development: for instance, the value of oil burned would have led to a steep decline of US GDP from the 1970s on.44

  The economization of the world

  By unburdening itself of nature, economics naturalized the idea of indefinite growth. Its role could have stopped there and been only ideological, if the tools and ontologies it had forged had not been projected back onto a nature that it had so potently externalized. In the course of the twentieth century, the mode of reasoning of marginalist economics, based on the ideas of optimality and equilibrium as well as on market instruments, became central in the definition of the proper uses of the world.

  The case of the management of fish stocks is quite exemplary here. After the Second World War, the countries of South America, Peru in particular, sought to forbid the activity of United States trawlers in their territorial waters. In a similar way, South Korea complained of the incursions of Japanese and Russian vessels. In order to preserve the principle of freedom of the seas, essential for its commercial and military power, the United States imposed on international fishery law a new principle, that of ‘maximum sustainable yield’, according to which fishing had to be authorized as long as the ratio of catch to effort had not yet reached a maximum. In order to apply the optimization principle, the model neglected both relationships between species and marine environments. It conceived fishery resources after the model of a field which would be stimulated by increased catches (since young fish grow quicker). Natural processes were conceived as linear and reversible. If the fishing effort was reduced, the resource would automatically increase. Under this regime of supposedly sustainable fishing, catches rose dramatically from 20 million tonnes in 1950 to 80 million tonnes in 1970, leading to a generalized decline in reserves.45

  From the 1970s onwards, the notions of sustainability and durability became central in the fundamental ideological battle to circumvent mounting criticisms of the Western growth model. The publication in 1972 of the famous Club of Rome report The Limits to Growth,46 which followed in the wake of major work by Kenneth Boulding, Herman Daly and Nicolas Georgescu-Roegen, should have forced economics to come down to Earth, but it led on the contrary to new constructions of the world that aimed to discredit any idea of a limit to growth.47

  First of all, orthodox economists accused the report of neglecting technological innovations that enabled the replacement of ‘natural’ capital by economic capital, or even the invention of new resources (synthetic rubber replacing natural rubber, for example). In economic theory this idea was embodied in the famous Kuznets environmental curve, according to which growth is increasingly less harmful to the environment. The environment is degraded in order to escape from poverty, but the rise in GDP then permits a better conservation. The future studies movement that developed in the 1970s strengthened the hope of a growth that was dematerialized thanks to innovation. The physicist Herman Kahn (who inspired the character of Dr Strangelove in Kubrick’s film) explained that within a few decades innovations would make it possible to feed billions of human beings (transgenic cereals capable of fixing atmospheric nitrogen), propelling them into space, etc. Another futurologist, Alvin Toffler, author of the bestseller The Third Wave, likewise depicted a dematerialized hightech future, realising the ‘post-industrial society’ dreamed of by Daniel Bell. In France, the Groupe des Dix, Joël de Rosnay’s book Le Macroscope (1975) that glorified ‘green biotechnologies’, or again the Nora-Minc report on L’informatisation de la société (1978), developed similar perspectives: the next industrial revolution, we were told, would introduce a bio-optimized and dematerialized service economy, enabling the fearless pursuit of economic growth while resolving environmental problems.48 It was in this vein that biotechnologies were promoted in the 1970s as alternatives to chemical fertilisers and pesticides (whereas 98 per cent of current GMO crops are designed either to produce a biocide or to be used in association with biocides), and new digital technologies as the vector of dematerialization of the economy (whereas the consumption of rare earths and the energy used by the global digital infrastructure have become colossal). At the present time, it is geoengineering and synthetic biology that are promoted as new technological solutions to deal with global warming and the erosion of biodiversity.

  Secondly, a new intellectual construction of nature is asserting itself, aligned to the frameworks of neoclassical economics. In this perspective, environmental problems are in fact ‘market failures’ that can be corrected by setting a price on nature. In the social democratic version of economization, this price should be paid to the state through a tax that enables environment and growth to be reconciled.

  From the 1970s, however, a ‘free-market environmentalism’ came to prevail, based on the theory of Ronald Coase that it is economically optimal to attribute marketable rights to pollute and leave actors to negotiate among themselves. In various guises, the ‘law and economics school’, the ‘new resource economics’ or ‘green economics’, ‘solutions’ were promoted that depended on market instruments: markets in emissions rights for sulphur dioxide and CO2, markets in fishing quotas or the extraction of ground water, even
markets in ‘ecosystemic services’ for biodiversity.49 These markets stimulated a global movement of land appropriation for the purpose of activities rewarded by the sale of ‘carbon credits’, ‘biodiversity credits’, etc., dispossessing rural and indigenous populations from their commons, in the same way that at the dawn of the Anthropocene the pursuit of charcoal and ‘rational forestry’ had dispossessed rural societies of their common forests.

  With instruments such as these, the whole Earth was subjected to an economic calculation of optimization. Economists thus reconsidered the atmosphere and its ecosystems after the model of an economic resource whose present net value could be maximized, for example by defining optimal paths for CO2 emission. Global climate change was translated into a problem of maximizing economic growth under climate constraint. In the first decade of the new century, negotiations under the aegis of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change became bogged down in what Stefan Aykut and Amy Dahan call a ‘reality schism’, with a façade of global governance quite removed from a ‘world reality, that of the globalization of markets and the frenetic exploitation of resources’.50 Carbon credits, for their part, collapsed then revived, and will most likely continue to fluctuate wildly without sufficient examination of their material references, among other factors because the audit companies that assess the CO2 emissions reductions of ‘clean development projects’ have no interest in appearing too strict. At all events, their very existence and exchange are enough to create the perspective of an economy at last ecologized.51

  What view of nature underlies these new mechanisms for governing the biosphere and atmosphere? First, that the best way of conserving the planetary environment is to set a price on it, to serve as a signal and enable the market, deemed cognitively superior to public action, to internalize the value of nature. Second and particularly, since Garrett Hardin’s famous article ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, some believe that only private property makes possible the proper management of nature, and that the ideal for certain economists is thus to ‘securitize the biosphere’,52 i.e., attribute property rights to all the different elements and ecological functions of the Earth system. With nature assimilated to a ‘natural capital’, it becomes fungible with finance capital. All the ‘services’ rendered by the Earth system (carbon capture, pollination, water purification, aesthetic or religious services, etc.) can be valued in dollars and made the object of environmental service markets, rewarding the proprietors of the corresponding spaces who would then maintain them as good managers. The old distinction between (natural) wealth and (social) value gives way to a fetishism of nature as ‘the biggest business in the world’ (in the expression popularized by the International Union for Conservation of Nature in 2009), as itself the producer of an economic value, already existing independent of any human labour or relation of production.53

  In this perspective, there is no longer a limit to growth: the preservation of the environment, the environmental crisis and the scarcity of resources are actually presented as economic opportunities. As the firm Advanced Conservation Strategies prophesies, ‘We enter a new era of scarcity, environmental markets are exploding. This includes not only carbon, but emerging water and biodiversity markets.’54 In 1997, the scientific journal Nature published a preliminary calculation of the monetary value of services rendered annually by nature on the planetary level, estimated at between $16 trillion and $54 trillion dollars, or the same order of magnitude as global GDP. The annual loss of biodiversity was estimated at $4,400 billion, and the same Advanced Conservation Strategies has no hesitation in promising that ‘by 2030, carbon will be the most important commodity exchanged in the world, with a market value of $1,600 to $2,400 billion, or the equivalent of the present value of the oil market’.

  At the start of the nineteenth century, industrial modernity constructed the idea of nature as stock, external to the economy and constituting an inexhaustible storehouse. By the late twentieth century, a new phase of capitalism – financial, postmodern, flexible and network-based – came and challenged this industrial-modern ontology of nature. In the new spirit of late capitalism, the issue of valuing diversity replaces the older issue of reducing diversity to standardize production; flows now matter as much as stocks, services as much as material production, relationships as much as entities. The film Avatar, counterpoising the extractivist view of nature as resources (in the shape of a capitalist firm hunting for mineral ore) to the ‘connected’ nature of the Navi, is emblematic of this ‘network’ turn of Western representations of nature. In our late modernity, the ‘invisibilizing’ of the limits of Earth is no longer just a result of an externalization (as a great outside that humans can draw from and jettison into without problem), but on the contrary of a radical internalization. This internalization is expressed in the efforts to measure ecosystemic functions in terms of financial flows, making a nature that is liquid and capitalizable even in its most intimate processes. Internalization into the market is backed by the ontological dissolution of nature by constructivist philosophies that deny its alterity in relation to humans, and from the geo-constructivist engineering project of all aspects of the Earth system, from the genome to the biosphere.55

  We could also remark that the break from the early nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century is not total. The mode of regulating environments by compensation (the ‘polluter pays’ principle) was in fact born in the nineteenth century, and experience shows that it did not prevent pollution but, on the contrary, historically accompanied and legitimized the degradation of environments. Such regulation possesses an intrinsic logic whose consequences were visible already in the 1820s. The principle of compensation for damage, combined with the imperative of economic profitability, produces three results: the employment for the most dangerous tasks of the weakest sections of the population, whose illnesses can remain socially invisible; the concentration of production and pollution in a few localities; and the choice, for these localities, of poor territories lacking in social and political resources, thus minimizing the value of environmental compensation.56 We cannot fail to note the contemporary persistence of this logic, and even its most likely accentuation made possible by economic globalization. We can also observe that these new markets for nature encourage the illusion that the human presence in the world has been brought under control.

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  1Robert N. Proctor and Londa Schiebinger, Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008; Robert N. Proctor, Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012.

  2Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, L’Apocalypse joyeuse, Paris: Seuil, 2012, 285–302, and ‘Mundus oeconomicus. Révolutionner l’industrie et refaire le monde vers 1800’, in Kapil Raj and Otto Sibum (eds), Histoire des sciences et des savoirs, vol. 2, Paris: Seuil, 2015, 369–89.

  3E. A. Wrigley, ‘Two Kinds of Growth, Two Kinds of Capitalism’, in Poverty, Progress and Population, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, 68–86.

  4Ernest Labrousse, Esquisse du mouvement des prix et des revenus en France au XVIIIe siècle, vol. 2, Paris: Dalloz, 1933, 343; Jérôme Buridant, Le premier choc énergétique. La crise forestière dans le nord bassin parisien, début XVIIIe–début XIXe siècles, thesis HDR Paris 4, 2008.

  5Quoted by Henri Sée, ‘Les forêts et la question du déboisement en Bretagne à la fin de l’Ancien Régime’, Annales de Bretagne, 36:2, 1924: 355–79.

  6Henry E. Lowood, ‘The Calculating Forester: Quantification, Cameral Science, and the Emergence of Scientific Forestry Management in Germany’, The Quantifying Spirit in the Eighteenth Century, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990, 315–43; Gregory Barton, Empire Forestry and the Origins of Environmentalism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

  7James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, New Haven: Yale University Press, 19
98, 11–22.

  8François-Antoine Rauch, Harmonie hydro-végétale et météorologique, ou recherches sur les moyens de recréer avec nos forêts la force de températures et la régularité des saisons, par des plantations raisonnées, Paris: Frères Levrault, 1802, 51–2.

  9Archives parlementaires de 1787 à 1860, vol. 39, Paris: Paul Dupont, 1892, 292.

  10Robert Peter Sieferle, The Subterranean Forest: Energy Systems and the Industrial Revolution, Isle of Harris: White Horse Press, 2001, 187.

  11Hugh Torrens, The Practice of British Geology, 1750–1850, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002.

  12Martin Rudwick, Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005, 431–45.

  13Robert A. Stafford, Scientist of Empire: Sir Roderick Murchison, Scientific Exploration, and Victorian Imperialism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

  14Nuno Luis Madureira, ‘The Anxiety of Abundance: William Stanley Jevons and Coal Scarcity in the Nineteenth Century’, Environment and History, 18:3, 2002: 395–421.

  15Sadi Carnot, Réflexions sur la puissance motrice du feu et sur les machines propres à développer cette puissance, Paris: Bachelier, 1824, 2.