The Shock of the Anthropocene

by Christophe Bonneuil

  96U. T. Srinivasan et al., ‘The Debt of Nations and the Distribution of Ecological Impacts from Human Activities’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, 105:5, 5 February 2008: 1,768–73.

  97‘Visualizing Global Material Flows’, materialflows.net.

  98McNeill, Something New under the Sun, 213; Michael Williams, ‘A New Look at Global Forest Histories of Land Clearing’, Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 33, 2008: 345–67, 354.

  99Tucker, Insatiable Appetite; Michael Williams, Deforesting the Earth: From Prehistory to Global Crisis, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002; Williams, ‘A New Look at Global Forest Histories of Land Clearing’.

  100A history of this kind should go on to analyse the transformations of the world-system since the 1970s, after the oil shocks and the age of cheap petrol, in the age of the financialization of capitalism, the neoliberal and neoconservative revolution as an attempt to maintain US hegemony, the problematic ‘uncoupling’ of the Western industrial economies, the rise of China as potential centre of a new world-system in still embryonic competition with the United States, the enormous flows of toxic and electronic waste to the poor countries, and the increased geopolitical tensions over resources and atmosphere. Some elements of this can be found in Harvey, The New Imperialism; Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life; Andrew K. Jorgenson and Brett Clark, ‘Are the Economy and the Environment Decoupling? A Comparative International Study, 1960–2005’, American Journal of Sociology, 118:1, 2012: 1–44; Andrew K. Jorgenson, ‘The Sociology of Ecologically Unequal Exchange and Carbon Dioxide Emissions, 1960–2005’, Social Science Research, 41:2, 2012: 242–52.

  CHAPTER 11

  Polemocene: Resisting

  the Deterioration of the

  Earth since 1750

  Once the long history of environmental reflexivity and environmental inequalities resurfaces in our understanding of the last two hundred years, the centrality of conflict in the history of the Anthropocene becomes self-evident. It would be clearly anachronistic to speak of an ‘ecological movement’, when the very word did not exist until 1866, but a patronizing history that failed to rescue the socio-environmental resistances to industrialism from what E. P. Thompson called ‘the enormous condescension of posterity’, a history that would neglect to give voice to the defeated or to marginalized alternatives (technical, social, environmental), would be no less anachronistic.1 This chapter explores the existence, since the eighteenth century, of an ‘environmentalism of the poor’ fighting for social justice and environmental decency, active both in core countries and in the periphery.2

  Challenging the ‘material deterioration of the planet’ at the dawn of industrialization

  Anthropocenic undertakings that massively disturbed moral and natural economies did not proceed without criticism, challenge and struggle. Colonial expansion and monoculture; liberal laissez-faire; the reinforcement of property rights and private initiative to the detriment of customary or collective rights; the runaway growth of wood and coal burning for forges, heating and machinery; pollution from the nascent large-scale chemical industry; the transformation of rural landscapes by urbanization, agricultural specialization, railways – all these great changes that expanded the ecological footprint of Western Europe provoked innumerable conflicts right across the planet. All kinds of social and ethnic groups, communities and professions found their values, resources and ways of life affected or overturned by the process of industrial ‘modernization’: uprooted and over-exploited slaves in the Americas, colonized peoples whose use of nature was radically redefined by the colonists, villagers deprived of commons by enclosures, then of access to woodland by the new forest codes, urban and rural workers in trades threatened by machinery, owners of land adjacent to polluting industries, common people losing a precious source of subsistence with the pollution of rivers or the destruction of forests, the landed nobility losing its social ascendancy over the industrial bourgeoisie, as well as a fringe of artists and scientists hostile to the rise of utilitarian and mercantile logic, etc.

  If these groups were not aligned, either in their battles over the political regime or in the class struggle, they nevertheless sketched out an arc of resistance, and we shall establish some connections between them around three major questions of that time: forests and climate, machinery, and pollution.

  Defending the forest, its rights of usage and the planet

  In an organic economy marked by energy scarcity, the needs of the navy, the proliferation of forges, glass-works, lime-kilns, brickyards and tile-works increased the pressure on forest resources in Western Europe from the late seventeenth century on.3 Private landowners and royal foresters sought to ‘rationalize’ the management of forests so as to make them profitable in both the long and short term. What was already called ‘regulated’ or ‘sustainable’ management of forests (this term is found in a German forestry treatise of 1713, and even in medieval texts) functioned according to the principle of rotation (clear-cutting followed by homogeneous plantation). This management implied in practice that the usage rights of villagers were reduced or abolished altogether, such as the right to pasture animals and collect dead wood, which created very intense social conflicts from the mid eighteenth to the mid nineteenth century.

  In the French royal forest of Chaux in the Jura Mountains, a ‘War of the Demoiselles’ flared up in 1765. Where the royal forest managers congratulated themselves on a rational and sustainable production along German lines, the villagers and small artisans saw an appropriation that deprived them of cheap wood. They harassed the guards and helped themselves to wood, leading the authorities to send cavalry and grenadiers.4 Everywhere in France, the books of grievances of 1789 attest to countless complaints against industrial activities, forges and salt-works in particular, which were accused of causing deforestation and increasing the price of wood.5

  The French Revolution and the Empire, however, saw a great expansion of forest exploitation, made possible by the sale of national property and the law of 29 September 1791, of liberal inspiration, which strengthened the rights of landowners and abolished the control of royal forestry agents over the management of private lands.6 The forest code of 1827 abolished certain customary rights of village collection in the forests. In the sub-prefecture of Saint-Girons the number of hearings for forest crimes rose from 192 in 1825 to 2,300 in 1840. In Tarbes, an old man was condemned to a heavy fine of 11.60 francs for having ‘stolen’ a quarter of a litre of acorns in the forest! This assault on collective usage rights opened a half century of violent or latent conflicts in the French forests. In July 1830, while the people of Paris were overthrowing Charles X, the Pyrenean peasants were fighting another ‘War of the Demoiselles’ in the Pyrenees, against the forge-masters and charcoal burners. The newly established Louis-Philippe had to send thirteen infantry companies in an effort to regain control of this territory.7

  In the German states, the ‘sustainable’ management of forests, which transformed the woodland areas into timber factories, aroused similar tensions. In Bavaria in the 1840s, forest infractions, punished by fines or even prison terms, counted in the hundred thousands.8 In Prussia in the 1840s, five-sixths of legal prosecutions were bound up with thefts of wood. The young Karl Marx discovered the class struggle not in the English industrial cities but by way of this great question of political ecology, the privatization of forests and the exclusion of communal uses.9

  These popular mobilizations were combined, between 1780 and 1830, with a denunciation of the retreat of European forests and their recent excessive felling for industrial uses. The forest question was at the same time an environmental alert and a critique of liberal capitalism. The climatic and hydrological effects of deforestation, in fact, showed the lack of fit between the individual interests of the forest proprietors, the interest of the nation and even – already – that of the ‘planet’. In France, in the first half of the nineteenth century, this was a central political and scie
ntific debate that resurged with every climate aberration and major flood.10

  It was in this context that Charles Fourier wrote an extraordinary text with the title De la déterioration matérielle de la planète (1821).11 This early socialist thinker opposed Saint-Simon’s industrialism, accusing him of spreading a false religion, a ‘false progress’, and not placing the ‘association of workers before that of the masters’.12 Fourier gave his critique of ‘civilized industry’ (i.e., industrial capitalism) an ecological dimension. Starting from the observation of a disturbance in the climate, he diagnosed a ‘decline in the health of the globe’. The underlying source of the evil was social: it was individualism that led to deforestation and the exhaustion of natural resources: ‘These climatic disorders are a vice inherent to civilized culture; it overturns everything … by the struggle of individual interest against collective interest.’13

  Any attempt to manage the planet without an exit from the ‘civilization’ of the mercantile and individualist stage and an advance to the higher stage of ‘association’ was condemned to failure:

  It is thus completely ridiculous to stop at making decrees [on the forests] that enjoin civilization to be no longer itself, to change its devastating nature, to stifle its rapacious spirit … One might as well decree that tigers should become docile and turn away from blood.14

  For many thinkers of that time, testimonies of climate disturbances and social conflicts over wood, the restoration of forests and climate necessarily involved a reform that would deeply challenge the dominant industrialism and laissez-faire. The German historian Joachim Radkau imagined the possibility of a different outcome to the forest and climate question at the turn of the nineteenth century. Why should a ‘broad Green alliance’,15 bringing together anti–laissez-faire foresters, scientists fearful of climate change, romantic or revolutionary utopian intellectuals and the people of the villages defending the commons, not prevail over mercantile and industrialist doctrine?

  The question may seem an idle one, inasmuch as this ‘alliance’ appeared heterogeneous and unlikely. But it offers the advantage of forcing us to a more open and political reading of environmental history. What if the entry into the Anthropocene, rather than an unconscious slippage or even the simple result of technical innovation (the steam engine), was the result of a political defeat in the face of the forces of free-market economics? The socio-environmental tension around the forests was only settled in Western Europe at the cost of many illusions and pseudo-solutions typical of the Anthropocene: first, a massive use of coal, explicitly promoted as a solution to preserve European forests (see Chapter 9); second, an increased import of wood from the Baltic and the colonial periphery; and finally the normalization of the foresters’ environmental critique by placing them at the head of large forest administrations disciplining the relations between the poor and nature, and promising a sustainable management of the globe by science, a model that would soon be called ‘conservationism’.

  Questioning machines and mass production

  A conflict just as central for European societies at the dawn of the Anthropocene concerned the mechanization of production. A wide movement of challenging and breaking machines swept the whole of Western Europe from the late eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth. In the 1780s, machine breaking represented a tenth of all labour conflicts in Great Britain,16 coming to a head in the English textile triangle in 1811–12. In Normandy, where large-scale textile industry developed very early, more than half of Cahiers de doléances (list of grievances) demanded the suppression of mechanical looms.17 In the town of Falaise, in November 1788, two thousand workers armed with sticks destroyed a spinning machine, and in Rouen on 14 July 1789 hundreds of workers invaded a cotton mill and broke thirty mechanical looms. At the time of the revolution of July 1830, seven hundred Paris typographers destroyed the mechanical presses of the Imprimerie Royale. There were hundreds of such actions in Europe between 1780 and 1830.

  The machine-breaking movement was made up of urban artisans (typographers, textile workers) and rural labourers (peasants who spun, wove and knitted by hand, seasonal cereal threshers, etc.). They expressed their refusal to see themselves dispossessed of their skills, their livelihood and a way of life that combined agriculture with manufacture. They rejected poor-quality industrial products and championed the idea of a fair price for their labour against the machines that were the cause of imbalance and inequality.18 This ‘moral economy’ opposed to the increasingly triumphant laissez-faire political economy was shared by many small masters and local elites (French mayors often defended machine breakers).

  A challenge to machines also came from elements of the Romantic movement. In France, in the wake of the July 1830 revolution, there was a noticeable circulation between artisan and worker milieus and the young students and clerks marked by Romantic literature, such as the movement of the ‘boussingots’ in the wake of Hugo’s Hernani.19 In England, Byron famously spoke out against capital punishment for Luddites in 1812. The Luddites were supported by the English middle classes worried by a deterioration in the quality of products and the misery caused by the machines. In 1811, for example, the Nottingham Review wrote:

  The machines … are not being broken for being upon any new construction … but in consequence of goods being wrought upon them which are of little worth, are deceptive to the eye, are disreputable to the trade, and therefore pregnant with the seeds of its destruction.20

  The Luddite critique thus targeted a fundamental bifurcation that set in with the entry into the Anthropocene: the profitability of costly machines led capitalists to prioritize the quantity of products over their quality or durability. In the phalansteries imagined by Fourier (the harmonious societies designed in response to embryonic industrial capitalism), however, there are only a limited number of machines, as the objects produced are of such quality that they do not need frequent replacement.21 The denunciation of machinery also lay at the heart of the British Chartist movement, whose press in the 1840s was full of workers’ poems denouncing the loss of the countryside of their childhood, the ‘old woods’ and clear streams, for the profit of the morbid world of manufacture where ‘the noonday was darker than night’.22

  Opposition to innovations

  In fact, machine breaking constituted only the historically visible part of a quite general opposition to mechanization. Historians have shown that what was formerly classified as ‘resistance to technology’ or ‘inertia’ represented rather an alternative mode of production, no less innovative but turned more towards flexible and specialized production, allowing a better adaptation to the market and towards quality products.23 Different technical and social pathways were conceivable within an industrial context, as well as different ways of organizing labour. The historiography of the ‘industrial revolution’ that dominated the decades after 1945 and depicted mechanization and mass production as inexorable – and thus the struggles of Luddites and artisans as retrograde – deprived us of the possibility of conceiving the technological and industrial bifurcations of the Anthropocene in a more open manner. This resistance was never against technology as such, but against a particular technology and its ability to crush others, and we need to unfold the spectrum of alternatives that existed at each moment: canals instead of railways; improved oil lamps instead of gas lighting; flexible and quality production instead of mass production; and an artisanal chemistry with expertise in qualities and sources rather than industrial chemistry, etc.

  In the case of gas lighting, for example, the problems raised by its opponents in the 1820s and ’30s emphasized not only the danger of explosions at gasworks located in built-up areas, but also the unhealthy nature of the process of gas manufacture from coal and its poor yield in a context of finite coal resources. We should note in passing that history generally confirmed the fears of these opponents: gasometers frequently exploded, and the by-products of coal distillation proved to be highly carcinogenic, polluting the soil for a l
ong time ahead.24

  In the same way, the standard reading of resistance to the steam train highlights the cultural rejection of the Romantics (though in reality, against a few verses by Alfred de Musset, far more Romantic authors hymned praise to steam and rail) and medical fears that were subsequently judged irrational. But an analysis of studies of public utility conducted prior to railway construction constitutes a source of prime importance for a more realistic history of opposition to the railway. The arguments mobilized reveal a great variety of good reasons for opposing the new means of transport: unprofitable lines, competition with canals, which if slower were far less costly, the disappearance of horses for transport and thus a shortfall of fertilizer for agriculture, and in general, the concentration of wealth in large transport companies to the detriment of small ones.25

  Opposition to pollution and nuisance

  Your world is proud, your man is perfect!

  The hills are levelled, the plain lit up;

  You have cleverly trimmed the tree of life;

  All is swept clean on your iron rails;

  All is great, all is fine, but we die in your air.

  —Alfred de Musset, ‘Rolla’, 1833

  This well-known verse of Alfred de Musset not only expresses the strength of Romantic critique but also echoes the many warnings there already were about the dangers of industrial pollution. In the context of the environmental aetiologies of the neo-Hippocratic medicine of the early nineteenth century, industrialization and its unprecedented train of diverse pollutions appeared extraordinarily threatening. Historians have discovered thousands of petitions from the first half of the nineteenth century in which local residents refer to current medical doctrines to accuse industrialists of increasing mortality or causing epidemics.