The Shock of the Anthropocene

by Christophe Bonneuil

  3The expression is inspired by George Orwell’s ‘common decency’.

  4On the history of the notion of milieu, see Ferhat Taylan, La Rationalité mésologique. Connaissance et gouvernement des milieux de vie (1750–1900), PhD thesis, University of Bordeaux, 2014.

  5Jean-Baptiste Dubos, Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture (1714), vol. 2, Utrecht: Étienne Neaulme, 1732, 152–7.

  6Alain Corbin, Le Miasme et la jonquille. L’odorat et l’imaginaire social, XVIIIe–XIXe siècles, Paris: Aubier, 1982; Sabine Barles, La Ville délétère. Médecins et ingénieurs dans l’espace urbain, XVIIIe–XIXe siècles, Paris: Champ Vallon, 1999.

  7Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, L’Apocalypse joyeuse. Une histoire du risque technologique, Paris: Seuil, 2012, 111–14.

  8Thomas Le Roux, Le Laboratoire des pollutions industrielles, Paris: Albin Michel, 2011.

  9Louis Leclerc, Les Vignes malades. Rapport adressé à M. le comte de Persigny, minister de l’Intérieur, Paris: Hachette, 1853, 15.

  10Léon Peeters, Guérison radicale de la maladie des pommes de terre et d’autre végétaux ou moyen d’en faire dispaître la cause, Namur, 1855.

  11Corneille Jean Koene, Conférences publiques sur la création à partir de la formation de la terre jusqu’à l’extinction de l’espèce humaine ou aperçu de l’histoire naturelle de l’air et des miasmes à propos des Fabriques d’acide et des plaintes dont leurs travaux font l’objet, Brussels: Larcier, 1856.

  12Eugène Huzar, L’Arbre de la science, Paris: Dentu, 1857, 113.

  13Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and Fabien Locker, ‘L’agir humain sur le climat et la naissance de la climatologie historique’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, 62:1, 2015: 48–78.

  14Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, Histoire naturelle générale et particulière, vol. 5 (‘Des époques de la Nature’), Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1778, 237.

  15Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, Histoire naturelle générale et particulière, supplément, vol. 5 (‘Des époques de la Nature’), Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1778, 244. See Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, ‘Eugène Huzar et la genèse de la société du risque’, introduction to Eugène Huzar, La Fin du monde par la science, Alfortville: Ère, 2008, 24–6.

  16Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

  17Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and Fabien Locher, Le Climat fragile de la modernité, Paris: Seuil, 2016.

  18Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977; Jean-Paul Déléage, Histoire de l’écologie. Une science de l’homme et de la nature, Paris: La Découverte, 1991; Jean-Marc Drouin, L’Écologie et son histoire. Réinventer la nature, Paris: Flammarion, 1997.

  19Carl Linnaeus, 1760, quoted in Drouin, L’Écologie et son histoire, 40.

  20Quoted in Worster, Nature’s Economy, 7.

  21Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint Pierre, Voyage à l’île de France (1773), Paris: La Découverte, 193, 136.

  22Jean-Baptiste Robinet, De la nature, vol. 4, Amsterdam: Van Harrevelt, 1766, 25.

  23John Fleming, ‘Remarks Illustrative of the Influence of Society on the Distribution of British Animals’, Edinburgh Philosophical Journal, 11, 1824: 288; on the emergence of studies on the extinctions of species, see Mark V. Barrow Jr., Nature’s Ghosts: Confronting Extinction from the Age of Jefferson to the Age of Ecology, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009.

  24Antonio Stoppani, Corso di Geologia, vol. 2, Geologia stratigrafica, Milan: G. Bernardoni, 1873. (An extract from this on the ‘Anthropozoic era’ is translated in Valeria Federighi and Etienne Turpin (eds), ‘The Anthropozoic Era: Excerpts from Corso di Geologia’, trans. Valeria Federighi, Scapegoat, 5, 2013, scapegoatjournal.org.)

  25Fressoz, L’Apocalypse joyeuse, 132–40.

  26Alain Corbin, Le territoire du vide. L’Occident et le désir du rivage (1750–1840), Paris: Aubier, 1988, 226–9.

  27Charles-François Tiphaigne de la Roche, Essai sur l’histoire œconomique des mers occidentales de la France, Paris: Bauche, 1760, 117.

  28Ibid., 142.

  29Henri-Louis Duhamel du Monceau, Les trois premières sections du traité des pêches et l’histoire des poissons. Description des arts et métiers, 1763 and 1776, 683, note 169.

  30François-Antoine Rauch, Harmonie hydro-végétale et météorologique, Paris: Levrault, 1801, i.

  31François Quesnay, Physiocratie, ou constitution naturelle du gouvernement, Yverdon, vol. 2, 1768, 25.

  32Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution, New York: Harper and Row, 1983, 2–41.

  33Félix Nogaret, La Terre est un animal, ou conversation d’une courtisane philosophe, Versailles: Colson, 1795.

  34Eugène Patrin, ‘Remarques sur la diminution de la mer et sur les îles de la mer du sud’, Journal de physique, de chimie et d’histoire naturelle, 60, 1806: 316.

  35Charles Fourier, ‘Détérioration matérielle de la planète’, in René Schérer, L’Écosophie de Charles Fourier: Deux textes inédits, Paris: Anthropos, 2001, 31–125, quotes from 37–44; these were preparatory notes for Traité de l’association domestique-agricole, later titled Théorie de l’unité universelle, first published in La Phalange in 1847.

  36Huzar, L’Arbre de la science, 103.

  37Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (1859), London: Penguin, 1985, 119.

  38Quoted by Sharon E. Kingsland, Modeling Nature: Episodes in the History of Population Ecology, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985, 10.

  39Worster, Nature’s Economy, 191–5.

  40Antoine Lavoisier (1789), quoted in Jean-Paul Deléage, Histoire de l’écologie, Paris: La Découverte, 1991, 51.

  41John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000.

  42Arthur Young, Rural Economy (1770), quoted in Paul Warde, ‘The Invention of Sustainability’, Modern Intellectual History, 8:1, 2011: 166.

  43Justus von Liebig, Organic Chemistry in its Applications to Agriculture and Physiology, London: Taylor and Walton, 1840.

  44Quoted by Claude Harmel, ‘Pierre Leroux et le circulus. L’ engrais humain, solution de la question sociale’, Cahiers d’histoire sociale, 14, 2000: 117–28.

  45Dana Simmons, ‘Waste Not, Want Not: Excrement and Economy in Nineteenth-Century France’, Representations, 96:1, 2006: 73–98.

  46Nicholas Goddard, ‘A Mine of Wealth? The Victorians and the Agricultural Value of Sewage’, Journal of Historical Geography, 22:33, 1996: 274–90.

  47Henry Moule, National Health and Wealth Instead of the Disease, Nuisance, Expense, and Waste Caused by Cess-Pools and Water-Drainage, 1861.

  48Christopher Hamlin, ‘Providence and Putrefaction: Victorian Sanitarians and the Natural Theology of Health and Disease’, Victorian Studies, 28:3, 1985: 381–411.

  49Quoted by Fanny Lopez, Le rêve d’une déconnexion. De la maison autonome à la cité auto-énergétique, Paris: Éditions de la Villette, 2014, 94. On Migge, see David H. Haney, When Modern Was Green: Life and Work of Landscape Architect Leberecht Migge, New York: Routledge, 2010.

  50Albert Howard, Farming and Gardening for Health or Disease, London: Faber and Faber, 1945 (republished in 1947 as The Soil and Health: A Study of Organic Agriculture), Chapter 2.

  51Quoted in Vandana Shiva, The Violence of the Green Revolution: Third World Agriculture, Ecology and Politics, London: Zed Books, 1991, 25.

  52Jacques-Joseph Ebelmen, ‘Recherches sur les produits de la décomposition des espèces minérales de la famille des silicates’, Annales des mines, 7, 1845: 66.

  53Jean-Paul Deléage, Histoire de l’écologie, Paris: La Découverte, 1991, 202–44.

  54M. Norton Wise and Crosbie Smith, ‘Work and Waste: Political Economy and Natural Philosophy in Nineteenth Century Britain, III’, History of Science, 28:3, 1990: 221–60, and Crosbie Smith, The Science of Ene
rgy: A Cultural History of Energy Physics in Victorian Britain, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.

  55Joan Martínez Alier and Klaus Schlüpmann, Ecological Economics: Energy, Environment and Society, Oxford: Blackwell, 1987, 45–53.

  56Ibid., 127–44.

  57Bernard Brunhes, La dégradation de l’énergie (1909), Paris: Flammarion, 1991, 401.

  58Rolf Peter Sieferle, The Subterranean Forest: Energy Systems and the Industrial Revolution, Isle of Harris: White Horse Press, 2001, 181–200; Carolyn Merchant, Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture, London: Routledge, 2004, 71–7.

  59Edward Moore, The World, vol. 3, London: Dodsley, 1755, 262.

  60E. A. Wrigley, ‘Two Kinds of Capitalism, Two Kinds of Growth’, in Poverty, Progress and Population, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

  61Fressoz, L’Apocalypse joyeuse, 209.

  62Pierre-Simon Girard, Mémoire sur les grandes routes, les chemins de fer et les canaux de navigation, Paris: Bachelier, 1827, cxxv.

  63William Stanley Jevons, The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal-Mines, London: Macmillan, 1866, 155.

  64Vaclav Smil, Enriching the Earth, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001, 58.

  65Jevons, The Coal Question, 375.

  66Aaron Dennis, ‘Drilling for Dollars: The Making of US Petroleum Reserve Estimates, 1921–25’, Social Studies of Science, 15:2, 1985: 241–65; Jérôme Bourdieu, Anticipations et ressources finies. Le marché pétrolier americain dans l’entre-deuxguerres, Paris: EHESS, 1998, 170.

  67Quoted by Daniel A. Barber, ‘Tomorrow’s House: Solar Housing in 1940’s America’, Technology and Culture, 55:1, January 2014: 1–39, 15.

  CHAPTER 9

  Agnotocene: Externalizing

  Nature, Economizing the World

  The Anthropocene societies did not destroy their environments inadvertently, or without considering – sometimes in terror – the consequences of their actions. How did we enter the Anthropocene despite the environmental grammars studied above? In sociology and the history of science, a new field of research has recently developed, that of ‘agnotology’, which studies the production of zones of ignorance. How are the damages of ‘progress’ made invisible (think of the effects of asbestos, known since 1906 and ignored at the cost of hundreds of thousands of deaths)? How are opposition and criticisms against technoscientific projects managed?1 In this vein, the present chapter offers a history of some of the agnotological processes that accompanied the Anthropocene.

  It likewise analyses the great adjustments to the world picture that accompanied the commodification of man and nature, enabling environmentalist critique to be disqualified and the finitude of the Earth to be denied. It starts from the hypothesis that the cultural history of the Anthropocene cannot be that of some fundamental breaks that preexisted it (the destructive destiny of Homo sapiens, Christianity as domination of nature, the great division between nature and culture, the mechanistic world picture of the scientific revolution, etc.), but that it is borne by cultural and ideological devices that are contemporary with it and still active today. The history of the Anthropocene is not one of a frenetic modernism that transforms the world while ignorant of nature, but rather of the scientific and political production of a modernizing unconscious.

  The infinite world of fossil capitalism

  At the threshold of the Anthropocene, the Homo economicus of liberal political economy, moved by self-interest and material appetites, required in exchange a world made to his measure.2 Nature had to be profoundly redefined, as well as its influence on human societies, its capacity to reproduce itself and the wealth it offered to industry, in order to leave free rein to Homo economicus. The sciences accordingly composed a nature that liberalism and industry could mobilize, a mundus economicus to the measure of its industrious master.

  In the eighteenth century, Europe, like the rest of the world, lived in an organic economy in which the limits of agricultural land and forests formed a strong constraint on growth. Mechanical force derived from muscular energy (human and animal), from water and from wind, all drawing their source in the last instance from the energy of the sun. For the United Kingdom, the historian E. A. Wrigley has calculated that vegetation cover fixed a part of this solar energy in the production of biomass equivalent to between 20 and 40 million tonnes of coal.3 It was within this limit (extendable as a function of colonial territories) that human activities developed. The organic economy was thus embedded in a very constrained energy budget: four hectares of forest, for example, were needed to produce a tonne of iron, two hectares of pasture to feed a horse, etc. Every development of one kind of production had a negative effect on the growth capacity of others. The rise of forges and glass-works as new consumers of wood came into conflict with the needs of village and urban communities for fire-wood, threatening the quality and docility of the labour force. After more than two centuries of shrinking forests, Western Europe thus experienced a serious energy crisis at the turn of the nineteenth century, connected to social tensions and fears of global climatic disturbance. The price of wood doubled in France between 1770 and 1790.4 In 1788, the intendant of Brittany predicted that ‘within twenty years all the present manufactures will fail for want of wood to fuel them’.5 The growth of the population, the development of manufacturing and the rank of the nation all seemed to depend on the future of the forests.

  The initial response to this sense of permanent limitation was to foster ‘rational’ forestry. By organized annual cutting (with rotation of up to two centuries for the masts of warships), it was possible to guarantee the monarch and his army a stable and predictable supply of wood and at the same time an increased income for the forest proprietors. This mathematical forestry, the forerunner of the contemporary idea of sustainable development, was founded on an iterative conception of nature, which reproduced itself uniformly and whose future could be securely predicted. Developed under Louis XIV and in the German court science of the early eighteenth century, rational forestry conquered Europe at the start of the nineteenth, followed by the colonial territories in the second half of the century.6 In the 1850s, however, foresters noted the extreme fragility of the ecosystems they had created. Forests of uniform age and species were very vulnerable to parasites, storms and meteorological accidents. The introduction of the word ‘Waldsterben’ (forest death) in Germany in the late nineteenth century attests to the seriousness of foresters’ concerns.7 German foresters developed a new ‘forest hygiene’ that aimed to recreate the soil and the symbioses that existed before the introduction of forest monoculture. Despite its negative ecological effects and the social conflicts it aroused, the mathematical management of the forest was a promise, a scientific guarantee of the future, making it possible to circumvent the fears bound up with the scarcity of wood that were so forcibly expressed in the late eighteenth century.

  Naturally, the main factor that relieved the energy constraint and reversed the shrinkage of European forests was the exploitation of coal. Coal was even presented as a sort of ‘green energy’ by many foresters, such as François-Antoine Rauch in France, who called for a ‘generalized use of these fuels’ in order to spare ‘our depopulated forests’.8 Yet coal did arouse sharp disquiet. On the one hand, its toxicity was feared. Coal’s sickening fumes were shunned by bourgeois and aristocratic homes, and it was perceived as the fuel of the poor. On the other hand, there was concern for its rapid exhaustion. In 1792, a French deputy explained that the conservation of the forests was of utmost importance, since coal mines ‘are not as common as is thought. It is noticeable that those of the Auvergne are becoming exhausted, and the prospections that have multiplied around the capital have not been successful.’9 The Scottish geologist John Williams expressed similar fears at the same time.10 At its beginnings, coal seemed only a temporary solution.

  The rise of geology then played a major anxiolytic role. In the 1800s, William Smith, an
English geometer working in the construction of mines and canals, used fossils as markers of geological strata and showed that the study of their succession made it possible to predict the presence of coal in a given subsoil. By indicating probable deposits, guiding the digging of pits and avoiding useless work, geologists made investment in the mining sector less risky and more lucrative. Geological maps (of which Smith was the precursor) encouraged the owners of land situated in favourable zones to undertake probes, thereby increasing proven reserves.11 In a general sense, geology constructed the image of a subsoil organized according to vast mineral strata that were hidden but continuous.12 By moving from the sporadic view-point of the mine exploiters to a larger and continuous view of the subsoil, it founded reassuring concepts such as ‘potential discovery’ or ‘probable reserves’, which authorized far more optimistic estimates than those of the practitioners.

  In the second half of the nineteenth century, the globalization of geological prospecting further shored up the confidence of the imperial powers as to the material bases of their domination. One of the effects of Jevons’s The Coal Question (Chapter 8) was to intensify the activity of the British Geological Survey across the empire.13 In the same way, international geological conferences (starting in 1877) established a global inventory of energy and metal resources. That of Toronto in 1913, devoted to coal, led to the first quantification of global reserves. A certain vagueness in the definition of ‘likely reserves’ and the extension of the limit of economically exploitable coal to 4,000 feet (instead of the previous 2,200) allowed a massive overestimate – in any case a figure six times higher than contemporary estimates.14 By the late nineteenth century, worries about the exhaustion of the mineral world had been circumvented by this global construction of resources by the science of geology.