As an exact opposite of this objectivist history of an environment ‘without men’, other French historians developed a cultural history concerned with environmental representations and sensibilities. Alongside a host of scholarly works on the feeling for nature or the representations of landscapes, Alain Corbin’s Le Miasme et la jonquille, published in 1982, is a magisterial text emblematic of this cultural history. But by reading nature in terms of sensibilities and their historical situatedness, Corbin tended to relegate to the back burner the question of the very material effects of industrial activities on the bodies of workers, local residents and ecosystems.
Basically, the polarity between the objectivist perspectives of an environmental history impassive to human action and the constructivist ones of a cultural history of representations of the environment still reproduced the dividing lines between Lyell and Michelet. Taking the Anthropocene seriously as a historian means rejecting a duality that is unsatisfactory and departing from a Braudelian discordance of time frames that is no longer valid.38 Thus it is well established today that the little ice age, the cooling of the climate between 1450 and 1800 with a minimum in the period 1640–1730, was not simply a natural development experienced by human societies, but the product of a reciprocal interaction. If a cyclical reduction in solar activity was one factor involved, human action itself was another: the demographic collapse of the Amerindian population by some 50 million after 1492 led to an extension of forests and a fall in atmospheric CO2, hence a reduction in the greenhouse effect.39 The work of Earth system scientists on the Anthropocene question has thus challenged the externality of the climate in relation to human action even in the pre-industrial age. After the epoch of separate histories of nature and of human societies, only a shared history can do justice to the reality of the Anthropocene.
Several works of environmental history have sought to combine material readings framed by the ‘hard’ sciences (Alfred Crosby, John McNeill) with political and cultural readings, to integrate socio-natural metabolisms and environmental mutations into a historical account. The notion of a ‘second nature’ shaped by capitalist dynamics, used by William Cronon in his key work Nature’s Metropolis, Edmund Russell’s ‘evolutionary history’ perspective of the interactions between human technology and the responses of living organisms, and the history of Western democracies revisited through the energy prism by Timothy Mitchell, are three stimulating examples taken from the field of environmental history that we shall draw on in the third part of this book.40
Rediscovering freedom in the age of attachments
The Anthropocene challenges certain distinctions that were formerly deemed fundamental to the modern West: human exceptionalism41 and the ontological break between the human being as subject of entitlement and the object of nature. Environmental ethics therefore undertakes a basic rethinking of the foundations of the different moral rules that organize relations between humans and non-humans. A distinction is generally made between three major ethical proposals: anthropocentric (sustainably managing the Earth for man), biocentric (respecting the intrinsic right to existence of every being on Earth) and ecocentric (‘thinking like Gaia’, in the words of J. Baird Callicott, following on from Aldo Leopold). An entire field of philosophy (as well as law and political science) now explores the question of environmental law, or even the rights of nature (already sketched out in the constitution of Ecuador) and the Earth, and relations between nature and sovereignty.42
In the same way, the Anthropocene challenges the modern definition of freedom, long conceived in opposition to nature. John Stuart Mill related the freedom and autonomy of individuals to the achievement of ‘a high degree of success in their struggle with Nature’.43 A freedom understood in this way sets human emancipation against nature, against the Earth as a whole. This modern conception of freedom clearly comes up against global limits in a disturbing way. Benjamin Constant, in ‘The Liberty of Ancients Compared with That of the Moderns’, argued in 1819 that the situation of the citizens of his time, gathered in great national political spaces, could not underpin the same conception of liberty and sovereignty as that of the citizens of the civic democracies of antiquity.
Dominique Bourg and Kerry Whiteside have taken up this argument to maintain that today, in a time of global ecological disruptions of human origin, we need to invent a new ideal of emancipation different from that of the ‘moderns’.44 For Constant, liberty was synonymous with ‘security in private enjoyments’, those permitted by a government that limited itself to guaranteeing property and free exchange. For this liberal there was no question of limiting the propensity of individuals to produce, exchange, consume and even waste. If the early socialists opposed to this a different ideal of emancipation, one egalitarian and co-operative, so as to limit the struggle of all against all and the ‘material degradation of the planet’ as Charles Fourier expressed it (see Chapter 11), we have to acknowledge that the actual socialism of the twentieth century was not ecological, and that it is Constant’s market-based, individualist and consumerist view of liberty that is culturally dominant on the planet as a whole.
As the Anthropocene pursues its course, we find ourselves facing these limits, along with a host of non-human beings and caught in the feedback loops and boomerang effects of Earth history striking back. What use is it then to conceive liberty, as did Bacon, Descartes, Michelet or Sartre, in terms of a tearing away from nature? What use is it to believe, with Luc Ferry, that man is a ‘being of anti-nature’, and profess this view of liberty as a ‘glorification of uprootedness, or innovation’?45 As soon as it is no longer possible to abstract from nature, we have to think with Gaia. One of the major tasks of contemporary philosophy is undoubtedly to rethink freedom in a different way than this wrenching away from natural determinations, to explore what may be infinitely enriching and emancipatory in those attachments that link us with other beings on a finite Earth. What infinity remains in a finite world?
Rethinking democracy in a finite world
Freedom can only be conceived in the context of social arrangements and institutional constructions. But, as the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty observes, these political constructions are themselves put in question by the disturbances of the Anthropocene: ‘the mansion of modern freedoms stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil-fuel use’,46 which today are either growing scarce or disturbing the climate. How can the ideal of democracy be founded anew when the dream of material abundance is evaporating? How should politics be conceived in the age of the Anthropocene?
Faced with the rise of ecological movements, the first approach of political science was to take these as objects and investigate the relative novelty of their ‘offer’ in relation to other political paradigms. Other authors have used this situation to proclaim the ‘end of modernity’, or at least of the ‘simple’, non-reflexive modernity that environmental and health risks are putting in crisis.47 Bruno Latour, for example, uses the pertinence of ecology today to argue against those modernizers who sharpen the arrow of time and who manufactured a ‘before’, when nature was supposed to have been less separated from society and society less detached from beliefs and ideologies. He proposes to ‘ecologize’ instead of modernize, and, in the wake of Michel Serres’s The Natural Contract, bring nature into politics by a set of institutions (a ‘parliament of things’) so as to assess the place – irremediably uncertain and controversial – in our common world of a multitude of beings, none of which can any longer serve simply as ‘means’ for others.48
After this ‘postmodern’ phase, the aggravation of ecological disturbances indicated by scientists and the rise of the concept of Anthropocene have favoured a third wave of more materialist work on the foundations of democracy. Philosophers, political scientists and historians are shedding light on how deeply the political theories of the past were conditioned by particular eco-biogeochemical metabolisms – either explicitly (with Hobbes or Grotius, the state was justified by the scarcity of resources)
or implicitly (in the Fordist compromise based on an unequal exchange with the Third World). Effective democracy is as dependent on material foundations as is liberty, foundations that were unequally assured in the past and seem unsustainable in the future, hence the importance of new political theories that integrate the material and energy metabolisms that are the basis for political representation, the state, security, citizenship, sovereignty, justice, etc. This new field of green political theory (Andrew Dobson, Robyn Eckersley, Luc Semal, etc.) is thus questioning the standard political theory – contractualist, anthropocentric and blind to the limits of the planet.49 In this way it will be possible to discern the conditions in which the necessary de-carbonification of our societies, or even an overall energy reduction, could change our democracies. Recent texts have thus explored the rise of a post-growth activism and of territorial policy initiatives of energy sobriety. They show that, far from prefiguring a totalitarian regression, these ‘catastrophist’ initiatives (plans for local energy reduction, transition towns, etc.) can open new spaces for strong democracy, new participatory forecasting and policy-making, and new social inclusiveness.50
Questions of environmental justice also open up new and challenging fields for the social sciences. Can we speak of an ecological debt owed by the rich countries? How do environmental regulations in these countries, along with globalization, relocate polluting activities to poor regions? How does this affect social groups in these regions differently? Can exposing another party to environmental nuisance and catastrophe be analysed as a form of violence?51
To understand what is happening to us with the Anthropocene requires the mobilization of all forms of knowledge. If the natural sciences are essential to understanding the intrinsic dynamics of the Earth and its inhabitants, conceiving the Anthropocene also requires new environmental humanities. For this strange species, the ‘naked ape’ that has plunged the Earth into the uncertain future of the Anthropocene is not simply a biological entity. It is also made up of social and ideological systems, institutions and imaginations, pervaded by power relations that govern an unequal distribution of the benefits and ravages of Gaia, of legitimacy in speaking of and for the planet, and of the possibilities of influencing technological and economic choices – starting with the ability to tell the Anthropocene and its history.
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1Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Six Lectures on the Political Theology of Nature, Gifford Lectures, 2013, 77, bruno-latour.fr (accessed 22 June 2013, link since suppressed).
2Isabelle Stengers, Au Temps des catastrophes, Paris: Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond/La Découverte, 2009.
3Ibid., 53.
4Crawford S. Holling, ‘Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems’, Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 4, 1973: 2.
5Ibid., 21.
6We owe the idea of ‘powerful impotence’ to Michel Lepesant.
7David B. Lobell et al., ‘Climate Trends and Global Crop Production since 1980’, Science, 333, 2011: 616–20.
8François Gemenne, ‘The Anthropocene and Its Victims’, in Clive Hamilton, François Gemenne and Christophe Bonneuil (eds), The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis: Rethinking Modernity in a New Epoch, London: Routledge, 2015.
9Harald Welzer, Les Guerres du climat. Pourquoi on tue au XXIe siècle, Paris: Gallimard, 2009.
10Robert K. Kaufmann et al., ‘Reconciling Anthropogenic Climate Change with Observed Temperature, 1998–2008’, PNAS 108:29, 19 July 2011: 11,790–3; see also ‘Anthropogenic Global Cooling’, blog post, Open Mind, 23 August 2010, tamino.wordpress.com.
11UN Food and Agriculture Organization, Livestock’s Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options, Rome: 2006, fao.org.
12Jules Michelet, Introduction à l’histoire universelle, Paris: Hachette, 1831, 5–7; our emphasis.
13Cited by Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’, Critical Inquiry, 35:2, 2009: 197–222. We take up in this section Chakrabarty’s key thesis, according to which the Anthropocene shatters the temporal disjunction between human history and natural history.
14Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology, vol. 1, London: John Murray, 1830, 164.
15On Lyell and uniformitarianism, see Martin Rudwick, Worlds before Adam: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Reform, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008, 297–315.
16Lyell, Principles of Geology, 161.
17Martin Rudwick, Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.
18John Dalberg-Acton (Lord Acton) (1896), quoted by E. H. Carr, What Is History?, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965, 111.
19Jean-Baptiste Say, Cours d’économie politique, Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1996, 98.
20Jean-Baptiste Say, Cours complet d’économie politique pratique, vol. 1, Brussels: Meline, 1832, 83.
21Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and Fabien Locher, ‘Modernity’s Frail Climate: A Climate History of Environmental Reflexivity’, Critical Inquiry, 38, Spring 2012: 579–98.
22Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, ‘Circonvenir les circumfusa. La chimie, l’hygiénisme et la libéralisation des choses environnantes (1750–1850)’, Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine, 56:4, 2009: 39–76.
23Christophe Bonneuil, ‘Pure Lines as Industrial Simulacra: A Cultural History of Genetics from Darwin to Johannsen’, in Christina Brandt, Staffan Müller-Wille and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (eds), Exploring Heredity, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015.
24Émile Durkheim, Suicide (1897). See also Chapter 3, ‘Suicide and Cosmic Factors’. One of the first analysts of this ‘social only’ paradigm was Serge Moscovici, Essai sur l’histoire humaine de la nature, Paris: Flammarion, 1968.
25The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, New York: Calvin Blanchard, 1858, 440ff.
26Ibid., 443.
27Fressoz and Locher, ‘Modernity’s Frail Climate’.
28Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, Standard Edition, vol. 21, London: Hogarth Press, 1961, 64–5.
29Restoration of this connection is the task of today’s ‘ecopsychology’. See Andy Fisher, Radical Ecopsychology, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2013.
30We gratefully borrow this critique of ‘anaturalism’ from a book in preparation by Frédéric Neyrat, Enquête sur la part inconstructible de la Terre.
31For the critique of this great separation, see Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
32Fikret Berkes and Carl Folke (eds), Linking Social and Ecological Systems: Management Practices and Social Mechanisms for Building Resilience, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.
33Not without a totalizing and demiurgic perspective of optimal planetary management. See Chapter 4 below, and Peter Baccini and Paul H. Brunner, Metabolism of the Anthroposphere: Analysis, Evaluation, Design, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012.
34Richard Peet, Paul Robbins and Michael Watts (eds), Global Political Ecology, London: Routledge, 2010.
35This perspective is located at the junction of Earth system sciences, the philosophies of Whitehead and Deleuze, Bruno Latour and the ‘co-productionist’ studies of the sciences, and the ecologized Marxism of Jason Moore, who talks about ‘society-in-nature’ and ‘nature-in-society’. See Jason Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life, London: Verso, 2015.
36Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (2 vols), London: Fontana, 1966.
37See the very significant issue of Annales on the environment, 29:3, May– June 1974. On the ‘delay’ and specific characteristics of French environmental history, see Geneviève Massard-Guilbaud, ‘De la “part du milieu” à l’histoire de l’environnement’, Le Mouvement social, 200, July–September 2002, 64–72.
38Chakrabarty, ‘The Climate of History’.
39William F. Ruddiman, Plows, Plague and Petroleum, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005; Richard J
. Nevle et al., ‘Neotropical Human-Landscape Interactions, Fire, and Atmospheric CO2 during European Conquest’, Holocene, 21, 2011: 853–64; Robert A. Dull et al., ‘The Columbian Encounter and the Little Ice Age: Abrupt Land Use Change, Fire, and Greenhouse Forcing’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 100:4, 2010: 755–71; Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin, ‘Defining the Anthropocene’, Nature, 519, 12 March 2015: 171–80, nature.com.
40William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, New York: Norton, 1991; Edmund Russell, Evolutionary History: Uniting History and Biology to Understand Life on Earth, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011; Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil, London: Verso, 2013.
41Riley E. Dunlap and William R. Catton, ‘Struggling with Human Exemptionalism: The Rise, Decline and Revitalization of Environmental Sociology’, American Sociologist, 25, 1994: 5–30.
42Michel Serres, The Natural Contract, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995; Gérard Mairet, Nature et souveraineté, Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2013.
43John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government (1861), Rockville, MD: Serenity Publishers, 2008, 40.
44Dominique Bourg and Kerry Whiteside, Pour une démocratie écologique, Paris: Seuil, 2010, 21–5.
45Luc Ferry, The New Ecological Order, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995, 92. Jean-Claude Michéa responds that this uprootedness is ‘simply the other name for liberal anthropology’ and shows how the early socialists of the first half of the nineteenth century opposed this. See Jean-Claude Michéa, Les Mystères de la gauche, Paris: Climats, 2013.
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