Around Marseille in the 1820s, for example, opposition to the widespread damage caused by chemical factories united a large part of Provençal society: from rich landowners and peers of the realm, through mayors, doctors and judges, down to small farmers who saw their fields devastated. The judiciary, moreover, played a very prominent role in the struggle against factories: in the 1820s, nearly 10 per cent of legal cases in the rural districts around Marseille concerned pollution, and it was thanks to the damages awarded by the courts that industrialists were compelled to install condensers on their chimneys to limit the effects of pollution.26
Manchester, the home of the textile industry, a city of steam engines and laissez-faire economics, swallowed up the surrounding countryside and absorbed millions of tonnes of coal and American cotton to fuel its mechanical looms. Gigantic chimneys, 500 of them by 1843, belched out a dark and highly toxic smoke that blended with that from domestic emissions.27 This ‘Cottonopolis’, responsible for 40 per cent of British exports in the early part of the nineteenth century,28 was then one of the most polluted and wretched cities in the world, as Tocqueville observed:
A sort of black smoke covers the city. The sun seen through it is a disc without rays. Under this half daylight 300,000 human beings are ceaselessly at work … From this foul drain the greatest stream of human industry flows out to fertilize the whole world.29
Manchester had Britain’s highest rates of mortality from both respiratory diseases and rickets (for want of light and proper nourishment). In 1899, the majority of Mancunians who volunteered for the second Boer War were rejected on account of their defective constitution.30 The first public parks, established in 1846, soon saw their trees die from ‘acid rain’ (the term dates from 1872), which also transformed the region’s flora and acidified lakes. The denunciations and complaints of contemporaries multiplied, emphasizing a loss of sunlight in the city of close to 50 per cent, the deterioration of goods and buildings, the destruction of vegetation, the loss of birds and the epidemics of respiratory diseases. As far back as 1819, a committee of inquiry was disturbed by the scale of toxic waste from steam engines, and in 1842 the Association for the Prevention of Smoke was established, soon followed by other similar bodies. But industrial interests were too strong for this problem to be really tackled politically before the twentieth century.
Challenging the damages of progress in the age of empires and the second industrial revolution
In the mid nineteenth century, John Stuart Mill put forward a critique of economic growth that was very detailed and combined with a politically progressive and redistributive standpoint (as opposed to the conservatism of Malthus). In his Principles of Political Economy, in fact, Mill declared himself in favour of a halt to growth in the near future and ‘a stationary state of capital and wealth’, rather than the pursuit of a constant economic struggle. He argued for a better distribution of wealth by the combined effect of ‘prudence and frugality’:
If the earth must lose that great portion of its pleasantness which it owes to things that the unlimited increase of wealth and population would extirpate from it, for the mere purpose of enabling it to support a larger, but not a better or a happier population, I sincerely hope for the sake of posterity that they will be content to be stationary, long before necessity compels them to it.31
If this programme seems to anticipate that of the stationary state and degrowth economists of the late twentieth century, Mill was not so much a precursor as one of the last classical economists whose thought remained bound to the processes of life and their finite character.
In the second half of the century, however, the wind changed. Classical economists and the idea of a stationary state gave way to a largely dematerialized marginalist paradigm (see Chapter 9); environmental medicine was displaced by new public-health doctrines and eventually Pasteurism, which downplayed the health effects of pollution. The question of anthropogenic climate change also lost importance, with the emergence of the theory of glaciations that saw humanity caught up in great climatic cycles over which it had no control; and Luddism dwindled away.
After the revolutionary defeats of 1848, the majority of the workers’ movement rallied to the industrial world and machinery, both in the trade unions and among the socialists. The challenge to machinery was dismissed as archaic and doomed to defeat by Marx and his successors, opening the way to the socialist productivism that the USSR embodied in the twentieth century.
It was in the second half of the nineteenth century, in fact, that ‘progress’ imposed itself as the central ideology of the industrial West. This movement is indissociable from the rise of European nationalisms that saw science and industry as indispensable vectors of power. Progress, the veil of modesty clothing the damages of industrial capitalism, was originally an ideology of consolation and struggle. It magnified the grandeur of goals the better to exorcize disasters and combat opponents. The promises of progress justified the fate of its victims. The ideology of progress was also built upon a contrast between the technological West and the barbarous rest. As explored in Jules Verne’s novels such as Five Weeks in a Balloon or Around the World in Eighty Days, the great Western fantasy of the time was to penetrate into dangerous and barbarous extra-European places in a safe and technological European bubble: balloons flying over Africa or trains crossing India. The ideology of progress bore within it a devalorization of the rest of the world. Its triumph coincided with the second industrial revolution and economic globalization; it justified the growing gulf between rich and poor nations, and in return used this widening discrepancy in wealth and power to discredit opponents of industrialism in the West.
The shift of forest damage and conflict to the South
It was in this context of a stabilization of the industrial order in the North and the incorporation of the economies of the South into the world economy that criticism and opposition arose again in new forms.
If in Europe, for example, recourse to fossil fuel made it possible to attenuate both social tensions and ecological degradations around forestry, this was at the cost of an accelerated deforestation in the tropical zones after 1850, or else their transformation into monoculture plantations of eucalyptus (for paper), hevea (for rubber) or oil palm.32 In the second half of the twentieth century, the model of ‘regulated forestry’ (born in Germany, then spread by the École Forestière of Nancy) was universalized. The creation of the Indian Forest Service in 1860, then the establishment of similar administrations in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the colonial territories of Africa, meant that by the end of the nineteenth century British foresters managed an area some ten times that of Great Britain. Led in the early twentieth century by Gifford Pinchot, a former student of the École de Nancy and a leading figure of ‘conservationism’, the public forest domain in the United States was just as gigantic: together with that of Canada, it covered 15 per cent of the land surface of the North American continent. With the backing of nation-states and empires that gave a growing place to scientific expertise, the ‘sustainable’ management of forests made it possible to redefine these immense spaces as national or imperial property and to organize their ‘managed’ exploitation. It also facilitated control of local populations in their relationship with nature.33
In the Indian case, the forest administration came into conflict with almost every social group: communities of hunter-gatherers, those practising slash-and-burn agriculture or extensive stock-raising, village communities who found themselves deprived of usage rights, and traders who dealt in precious woods. From the 1870s on, serious disturbances over forest restrictions broke out across the country: the revolts of Gudem and Rampa in 1879 and Chotanagpur in 1893. The formation of forest reserves invariably led to the destruction of many villages and the eviction of their inhabitants. At the time of the Madhya Pradesh troubles of 1910, the Indian government had to send in the troops. Hunger strikes, telegraph wires cut, railways sabotaged, police stations burned: more than 900 rebels were cap
tured.34 In 1915, in the foothills of the Himalayas, immense pine forests designed for commercial use were burned down by the local people.35 These popular revolts were linked to the Indian national movement. In January 1930, after the Purna Swaraj (declaration of independence), the nationalist movement led by Gandhi argued for civil disobedience in regard to forest laws and for a democratic management of the forests that would involve local populations in a conservation policy.
As in Europe around 1800, forest conflict in India was a major social struggle between an ‘optimized’ nature connected to the market for the purpose of serving the needs of distant consumers and an ‘environmentalism of the poor’, of village communities deprived of usage rights and common management. The historian Ramachandra Guha draws an overall negative environmental balance-sheet for this technocratic forestry, emphasizing that the forests of India today are in a ‘far worse condition’ than in 1860. While the forest service still manages 22 per cent of India’s surface area, less than half of this amount is actually wooded.36
Questioning industrialism
Machine breaking began to decline in Western Europe after the 1830s. Across the whole continent, moreover, 1848 dealt a blow to revolutionary ardour, followed by 1871 in France. The Third Republic, from this point of view, not only ‘ended the revolution’, but also, thanks to the authority bestowed by science, stabilized the bourgeois and industrial social order – moderated by an agrarian protectionism that kept the peasants as a counterweight to industrial workers.37 The social reforms of the late nineteenth century supported the Marxist thesis that industrial capitalism was a necessary stage towards socialism. In the early twentieth century, a large part of the European socialist movement, and even of its anarchist counterpart, rallied to industrialism. The ideology of progress and the valorization of the future (François Hartog’s ‘futurist historicity’) even won over oppositional and anti-capitalist movements. A new ‘politics of the past’ weakened the rhetoric of loss which had been so present with the first socialists in their utopia of rebuilding a just and harmonious society on the basis of an ‘untamed’ or pre-industrial past.38
It would however be wrong to believe that the integration of the anti-industrial popular movement into the progressive, pedagogic and industrial vision of the world, that of the parliamentary, liberal and bourgeois left (of which socialism would not form part until the late nineteenth century), simply left the critique of anthropocenic activity to socially conservative voices. The late nineteenth and early twentieth century actually saw a renewal of the critique of anthropocenic activity structured around three distinct poles.
The first pole, that of ‘conservationism’, pertains to the ‘industrial polity’ analysed by Boltanski and Thévenot.39 It appealed to efficiency and science, and promised to improve industrial domination over nature by an increase of industrial logic itself: valorizing nature, optimizing flows, limiting losses, adjusting harvests, standardizing for a better long-term management, etc. We can include here ‘scientific forestry’, the movement for industrial recycling (promoted by Peter Lund Simmonds in Britain, for instance), the sanitarian movement or the policies of President Theodore Roosevelt.
Conservationists denounced the merely extractive logic as unsustainable. The question of the finitude of the planet was also clearly posed, in the context of the ‘end of the frontier’ decreed in the United States by Frederick Jackson Turner (1893) and the completion of a process of four centuries of European expansion. We have reached the ‘limits of our cage’, wrote the geographer Jean Brunhes in 1909, shortly after Roald Amundsen’s conquest of the South Pole. Around the same time, Max Weber introduced another ‘cage’ metaphor, noting that the growing concern for material goods was becoming an ‘iron cage’ that came into conflict with the exhaustion of resources:
The modern economic order … bound up with technological and economic conditions of mechanical and machine production determines with an irresistible force the style of life of all individuals. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt.40
In the columns of La Nature, the main periodical of scientific popularization in France, a mining engineer and member of the Académie des Sciences extended the calculations of Jevons and envisaged distant exhaustion of ‘the world’s combustible resources’. In particular, he concluded his essay by evoking another danger:
In order to produce some 8,000 million [tonnes] of mineral combustibles, how much has been needed in the way of vegetable matter accumulated and very accidentally preserved from combustion over a geological timescale? The day that this carbonic acid will have been restored to the lower layers of air by our factory chimneys, what changes (of which we already have the first signs in the large industrial cities) will not be realized bit by bit in our climates?41
At the same time in Germany, the notion of Raubwirtschaft (pillage economy), originally introduced by Liebig to describe the metabolic rift, made its way into geography. Friedrich Ratzel, one of the founders of geopolitics (and of the ill-fated concept of lebensraum) utilized it in a classic manner to refer to the practices of exploitation of nature of ‘primitive’ or ‘barbaric’ peoples. But his colleague Ernst Friedrich applied the notion of Raubwirtschaft to show the unsustainability of Western development by continuous territorial expansion, the extraction of non-renewable resources at the periphery, and the ejection of pollution and waste.42 However, Brunhes and Friedrich remained confident in the ability of the white man to improve his ‘cage’; enlightened by conservation-oriented science, he would necessarily become conscious of his mistakes and decide to organize a more rational and sustainable management of the globe.
A second pole, ‘preservationism’, defended nature on non-utilitarian grounds. Whether for aesthetic, scientific, recreational or spiritual reasons, they argued for protecting nature from any utilitarian interference. This current was represented by the Sierra Club in the United States, by various leagues for the protection of nature in Europe and by renowned naturalists (such as Edmond Perrier in France and Paul Sarasin in Switzerland). Preservationism was institutionalized in the establishment of national parks and gained international standing at the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1913 the first International Conference for the Protection of Nature was held in Bern, and in 1934 the notion of ‘integral natural reserve’ was adopted internationally.43 In 1913, Perrier, the director of the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris, delivered an address denouncing the destruction of biodiversity and natural milieus in the colonial peripheries of the European empires:
Do we have the right to monopolize the Earth for ourselves alone, and to destroy for our profit, and to the detriment of future generations, everything it has produced that is finest and most powerful in the course of more than 50 million years’ development?44
If this current represented a quite radical anti-utilitarian critique of the Western project of exploiting the globe economically, it also participated in the expulsion of indigenous populations from their territories, in the name of their protection and a touristic consumption of nature by world elites.45
A third pole, which some historians have called ‘back-to-nature socialism’, corresponded to a more global critique of industrial capitalism, mixing environmental and health observations, social demands and cultural criticism. We can include in this the English ‘sentimental’ socialists, the German Lebensreform movement and some French anarchist currents known as ‘naturiens’. While the new ‘politics of the past’ of the post-1945 modernist left (and most professional historians) had edged out these diverse forms of eco-socialisms, they are now the object of rediscovery.
In Great Britain, for example, in the second half of the nineteenth century, a utopian anti-industrial current known as ‘sentimental socialism’ developed around John Ruskin, William Morris, Robert Blatchford and Edward Carpenter. This inherited the Romanticism of Wordsworth and Carlyle: the desire to preserve communitarian social relations in the face of indiv
idualism, to protect the countryside against the aggression of the modern world, and to maintain artisan and artistic skills in the face of industrial standardization. To this conservative Romanticism it added a revolutionary aspect in the form of a rejection of capitalism and parliamentary reformism and commitment to socialism (Morris was one of the founders of the Socialist League in 1884, together with Engels).46 Its protagonists promoted socialism as a politics of beauty and conviviality in harmony with nature. A novel that expresses this current, Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872) depicts a civil war between the champions and opponents of mass industrialism. The victory of the latter opens the way to a new harmonious society, socially just and close to nature. In Merrie England, published in 1894, Robert Blatchford, publisher of the Clarion, the most widely read socialist newspaper of that decade, led a frontal attack on the ‘industrial system’, denounced in four points, the first two of which were ‘because it is ugly, unpleasant and mechanical’ and ‘because it is harmful to health’.47 To ensure a good life for all in the beauty of nature, Blatchford called for the nationalization of the means of production. Montagu Blatchford, his brother, likewise denounced a system that ‘dirties the sky, poisons rivers and poisons the atmosphere’.48 Walking and cycling clubs were established around the Clarion, a kind of socialist scout movement, with some 8,000 members in 1913.
A parallel current developed in Wilhelmine Germany, with the large-scale Lebensreform movement: the struggle against the corset and urban pollution, with pedagogic arguments, urban health and garden cities, protection of nature, naturopathy, sun-bathing and naturist culture, vegetarianism.49 The Wandervögel movement, launched in 1896, included both conservative and socialist youth groups seeking in nature emancipation from imperial, authoritarian and industrial society. Emancipation took the form of camping, hiking and living in the countryside. Close to these movements, the philosopher Ludwig Klages drew up a violent charge-sheet in 1914 against a ‘progress’ that destroyed animal and vegetable species, made the countryside ‘sinisterly silent’ and crammed ‘hordes’ of humans into cities with ‘chimneys vomiting soot’: ‘like a fire that devours everything on its passage, “progress” turns the whole Earth upside down’.50 He denounced the extermination of hundreds of millions of birds across the world for the demands of the fashion industry, as well as the elimination of non-Western cultures. The anti-industrialist critique included Marxism in its targets. For instance, the libertarian socialist Gustav Landauer rejected any progressive and mechanical view of history and saw Marxism as the ‘child of the steam engine’. Against the prediction of the automatic advent of socialism on the basis of a certain level of development of the productive forces, Landauer stood for a non-centralized socialism, to be brought about not by an evolutionist law of history but ‘when a sufficient number of men wish it’.51
The Shock of the Anthropocene Page 30