The Shock of the Anthropocene

by Christophe Bonneuil

  In France, the radical critique of industrialism and ‘progress’ is to be found from the pens of a number of writers, as well as in the context of ‘individualist’ anarchism, whose social base was made up of artisans and occasional or migrant workers, resisting factory discipline.

  Within this fringe there developed vegetarian practices and a ‘naturien’ current around publications such as L’Humanité nouvelle, L’État naturel and La Vie naturelle, whose authors also wrote in more influential anarchist organs such as Le Libertaire.52 Here are two voices of its protagonists at the dawn of the twentieth century:

  We are deeply tired, disheartened, fed up with the Artificial Life … and we want a rapid return to a better regime, anti-civilization, to the natural state … We are, above all, revolutionaries … we have vowed hatred against everything that makes for human suffering, everything that takes from Man a fragment of his liberty: army, police, judiciary, clergy, family, country, government … and we add Science, Progress, the new religion.53

  The smoke from the factories, the gunshots fired at ceremonies and in war, the continuing deforestation and the poisoned air, abused by the sickly smells arising from the factories – these are the causes of atmospheric disturbance … What use are the telegraph, telephone, air travel and electricity? Just a life of hot air! The civilized are people in a great hurry, living always at a rush! … How our poor mother Earth has been damaged! … now the land largely only produces with the help of chemical fertilizers: … a moment will come when a person walking on foot will be regarded as a phenomenon … and we know that organs that get no exercise inevitably end up atrophying … Return to the natural state is not a turning back; it is no turning back to want to be happy with natural means alone.54

  Figure 16: Le Sauvage satirique, Journal de Gravelle, ‘naturien’ anarchist paper, 1898 The Cities – hells on earth and burning centres of Hatred – will be abandoned!

  A Humanity aware of the causes of Evil will tear down the Tree of supposed science! By the triumph of Nature over the Artificial, the Earth will regain its green adornment! And men will rediscover the Joy of living!

  Figure 17: L’En dehors (The outsider)

  Postcard from a woodcut by Louis Moreau, 1922

  These sandal-wearing, anti-industrial currents combined speech and action. Continuing the experiments of the Owenite, Fourierist and other utopian communities, the experiments of return to the land in egalitarian, socialist or anarchist communities proliferated in the United States (New Harmony, 1826; Fruitlands, 1843), Great Britain (Millthorpe, founded by Edward Carpenter in 1884), France (Vaux, Bascons, and some fifteen ‘free milieus’ before 1914), Brazil (La Cecilia) and Switzerland (Monte Verità, 1900–25, on the shores of Lago Maggiore, where both Herman Hesse and Isadora Duncan stayed).55

  The thought of the young Gandhi was formed under the influence of this radically anti-industrial socialism or anarchism. A reader of Carpenter, Ruskin, Tolstoy and Thoreau during his studies in London, Gandhi published his first articles in the Tolstoyan journal of the Vegetarian Society. His first book, Hind Swaraj (1909), rejected industrialization as a possible path for an independent India.

  Citing Edward Carpenter, Gandhi denounced a ‘civilization’ in which

  thousands of men for the sake of maintenance work in factories or mines. Their condition is worse than that of beasts. They are obliged to work, at the risk of their lives, at most dangerous occupations, for the sake of millionaires.56

  His thought proceeded from a critique of Western modernity in all its forms, but it distanced itself both from traditionalist currents that hymned the ancient Hindu civilization and from modernizing nationalists like Nehru who sought to catch up with the West. For Gandhi, environmental questioning was bound up with the future of the colonized countries once emancipated by non-violence. In an analysis that linked British industrialism, imperialism and the degradation of the planet, Gandhi maintained the fundamentally inegalitarian nature, not generalizable to the whole planet, of the British model of industrial development:

  The economic imperialism of a single tiny island kingdom (England) is today keeping the world in chains. If an entire nation of 300 millions took to similar economic exploitation, it would strip the world bare like locusts.57

  It is important to stress that resistance to industrialism was not the monopoly of a far-sighted elite or radical intellectuals. On the contrary, as a result of their impact on the environment, and because they deeply altered ways of living, the major technologies of the Anthropocene have aroused opposition both general and sporadic. Historians have begun to uncover from archives the hundreds of struggles that surrounded the various health and environmental problems of ‘progress’.

  For example, in England civil society mobilized strongly against urban industrial pollution, with the National Smoke Abatement Institution (1882), the Coal Smoke Abatement Society (1898) and the Smoke Abatement League of Great Britain (1909); legislation was obtained in 1866 and 1891, even if this did not actually reduce emissions. The pollution of rivers and dams mobilized fishermen across Europe.

  Struggles against industrial pollution, though often arbitrated by law, sometimes took a tragic turn. Thus in 1888, the Rio Tinto copper mine in Spain was the stage of a revolt in which workers, peasants and local dignitaries all took part. The British mining company that exploited it paid starvation wages and used a technology of open-air calcination of gigantic quantities of ore, 200-tonne teleras. On 4 February of that year, at the call of an anarchist trade-union leader and local leaders of the Anti-Smoke League, 1,500 persons demonstrated in the village to demand an end to the calcination of teleras and a reduction of the working day from twelve to nine hours. But soldiers dispersed the demonstration in blood, leaving several dozen dead.58 A few years later, a similar drama was played out in Japan, likewise against a copper mine. A Japanese-European consortium that exploited the Ashio mine north of Tokyo massively contaminated agricultural land downstream. In 1901, the local notable Tanaka Shôzô resigned his seat as deputy to protest against parliamentary indifference to this contamination. By direct action and at the risk of his life, he enjoined the emperor to ‘put an end to a poisonous mining industry’.59

  Far more than the train had done in a previous period, the motor car, in all probability the single technology with the greatest share of responsibility for the present climate crisis, was far from arousing unanimous approval. Switzerland gives a good sign of this, on account of its tradition of referendum by popular initiative. In the early 1900s, after a series of accidents, the communes of the canton of Graubünden passed decrees prohibiting automobile traffic. No less than ten referendums between 1900 and 1925 confirmed the ban on individual motorcars on cantonal roads (ambulances and fire engines remained authorized). The arguments against the individual car at the time were chiefly economic: cars increased considerably the cost of maintaining the roads, and above all came into competition with the public rail network, which would sooner or later have to be subsidized out of taxation.60

  Beyond Switzerland, the monopolization of the public space by motorists aroused very lively opposition everywhere. During its first decades, moreover, motoring only benefited a narrow fringe of bourgeois keen on strong sensations and meant an immense pollution for the majority of the population. The car imposed a new urban discipline and made many other uses of the street impossible, in particular children’s games. Children were perhaps the greatest losers from motorization: in 1910, in New York, they made up 195 out of 376 victims of fatal traffic accidents.61 Would the car have been accepted in a genuine democracy?

  Challenging the Great Acceleration

  The historical sequence that runs from the First World War to the atomic bomb, with its unprecedented unleashing of violence, opened a new phase of questioning of Western industrial modernity and its human, social, ecological and spiritual disasters. The Great Depression and the mass unemployment incriminated mechanical overproduction for the social disorders of th
e time. On the other hand, industrial wars and the patriotic dimension it granted to productivism, the rise of the consumer society and the establishment of the Fordist model, the confrontation between East and West, the developmentalist dream of a ‘catching up’ on the part of the countries of the South, the dismissal of dissidents of ‘progress’, or again the management of the ‘secondary’ effects of progress by expert authorities, operated as so many strategies of legitimization, marginalizing or ridiculing political critiques and scientific warnings that pointed out global ecological imbalances. As early as 1916, Léon Jouhaux, general secretary of the French Confédération Générale du Travail trade-union federation, rallied to productivism and the scientific organization of labour for a ‘maximum yield’,62 and after the Second World War, American trade unions likewise accepted the Cold War Keynesian compromise (see Chapter 7). Dissidents of progress were dismissed either as irrevocably superseded nostalgists or even as internal enemies linked to the opposing camp (capitalist, Communist or fascist). We shall trace here some elements of this dialectic of criticisms, challenges and their control.

  In the aftermath of the First World War, the writings of Oswald Spengler, Martin Heidegger, Georges Duhamel, Paul Valéry, the emerging personalist movement, or again the solid body of work of the American Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (1934), illustrate the rise of an ambivalence on the part of intellectual elites. Henri Bergson summed this up in a formula: ‘Mankind lies groaning, half crushed beneath the weight of its own progress.’63 An outdated historiography was able to see these critiques of the ravages of ‘progress’ as a temptation to ‘return to the soil’ that prepared the way culturally for fascism, Nazism and the ideology of the Vichy regime. In actual fact, if these regimes did sometimes appeal to the past and the ‘soil’, they were in no way traditionalist but rather ‘reactionary modernist’, profoundly technocratic and pervaded by a posture of domination of nature.64 In the inter-war period, in both Europe and the United States, the leading elites of the right rallied generally to technology (as against one Céline, how many Henry Fords, Ernst Jüngers, SS technocrats and fascist futurists?), whereas the critique of technology was more associated with an egalitarian and emancipatory thought (Mumford, the Surrealists, Orwell, Gandhi, etc.) or represented by a youth described as ‘nonconformist’ and with varied political trajectories.65

  In France, Jacques Ellul and Bernard Charbonneau illustrate the emergence within the personalist movement (around the journal Esprit) of a critique of industrial modernity that was at the same time social, environmental and moral. In their ‘project for a personalist manifesto’ of 1935, they rejected capitalism, fascism and Communism alike. All three regimes were deemed equally dangerous for the primacy that they gave to technology and for their proletarianization of man in all dimensions of life: economic, but also political and spiritual.66 They proposed to replace progress understood as power by progress understood as autonomy (reduction of working time, importance of art and culture, guaranteed minimum income) while accepting a certain simplicity in living standard. This idea of a technological totalitarianism, characteristic of Communist and fascist regimes and liberal democracies alike, is found in the works of such writers as George Orwell,67 Georges Bernanos and Aldous Huxley, as well as the former Trotskyists Cornelius Castoriadis and Claude Lefort. It was popularized by the success of Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (1964), followed by Ivan Illich’s Tools for Conviviality (1973).

  After 1945, Ellul and Charbonneau broke away from the dominant orientation of personalism represented by Emmanuel Mounier and Esprit, which embraced the modernization slogan along with the Christian-Democrat movement as a whole.68 In 1954, Ellul theorized the autonomy of technological systems in La Technique ou l’enjeu du siècle. This critique of the neutrality of technology found echoes in the philosophy and social theory of former students of Heidegger (Günther Anders, Hannah Arendt), as well as in representatives of the Frankfurt School (Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse). These German theorists, who had known Nazism and escaped to the United States, strongly resented the loss of a part of their identity in an American society that they considered technocratic, industrialist and consumerist. For them, Auschwitz, Hiroshima and the post-war consumerism all participated in the same supremacy of technology and instrumental reason over the natural, social and moral world.69 Hannah Arendt pursued this line of reflection in The Human Condition (1958), seeing the posture of domination of nature as ‘an instrumentalization of the world and the earth’ and a ‘limitless devaluation of everything given’: ‘Our whole economy has become a waste economy, in which things must be almost as quickly devoured and discarded as they have appeared in the world, if the process itself is not to come to a sudden catastrophic end.’70 What was threatened by this mobilization of nature was not simply the environment, but the very possibility of human freedom.

  In the time of the Great Acceleration of the Anthropocene, these philosophical and cultural critiques of a technological civilization echoed with the environmental warnings formulated by leading scientists. These already depicted man as a ‘geological force’ by virtue of his reproductive, technical and industrial activity.71 Henry Fairfield Osborn, in Our Plundered Planet, shared with Bernanos, Anders and Huxley the refusal to see the ideological confrontation between East and West as the most fundamental tension affecting humanity, and warned against

  the other war, the silent war, eventually the most deadly war, was one in which man has indulged for a long time, blindly and unknowingly. This other world-wide war, still continuing, is bringing more widespread distress to the human race than any that has resulted from armed conflict. It contains potentialities of ultimate disaster greater than would follow the misuse of atomic power. This other war is man’s conflict with nature.72

  ‘Man against Nature’ was also the title of an exhibition in 1955 at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris. Its director Roger Heim, one of the founders of the International Union for Protection (later changed to Conservation) of Nature along with Osborn, wrote a preface to the French translation of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), which denounced the effects on environment and health of the biocides used on a massive scale after the war. In this text, Heim presented a charge-sheet against ‘blind industrialization’ and the ‘pollution, chemical as well as radioactive, that darkens the atmosphere and acidifies the water’, as being ‘often conducted by strict financial concern and not by collective interest’.73

  Alongside these intellectual critiques, the inter-war period and the decades after 1945 saw frequent controversies and mobilizations against the various dangers and disturbances of the time. No more than the nuisances of industrialization in the early nineteenth century did the Great Acceleration of the Anthropocene pass without scientific warnings, popular resistance and challenge by the social groups affected. We can take the case of France in the years 1945–68, traditionally viewed as a period rich in ideological and social confrontations but consensual in terms of support for a ‘necessary modernization’. The history of the ecological movement is usually written as starting only after 1968. Were the French politically anaesthetized by the growth of the so-called ‘Trente Glorieuses’? In no way. Well before the images of Earth seen from the moon, the atom bomb appeared as the event that unified the human condition and the planet. As Bernard Charbonneau put it, ‘an event analogous to the discovery of America, the bomb closes the world’ instead of opening it, since ‘under the threat of the final explosion, the Earth forms a whole’;74 and Georges Bernanos wrote in 1945 that ‘the planet is being transformed into a gigantic laboratory’.75 In France as elsewhere, the environment was already discussed as a global problem in the years immediately after the war, with warnings from writers and such leading scientists as Roger Heim, Théodore Monod and Jean Rostand.

  On the ground, many opponents confronted the steam-roller of modernization: the construction of dams that condemned villages to disappear; the modernization of agricult
ure that counted on young ‘advanced’ farmers and dismissed elderly small peasants; the decline of handicrafts and small-scale trade in the face of industry and large-scale distribution; modern town planning. Each time, a genuine cultural war was waged between modernizers and populations perceived as backward – Jacques Tati’s film Mon Oncle (1958) is a comic illustration of this. In Tignes, in the early 1950s, as many riot police as villagers were needed to protect the construction site of a new dam from sabotage. The pollution of rivers mobilized thousands of fishermen and many associations were formed. Inhabitants of the towns organized campaigns against pollution. The writer René Barjavel, author of the anti-industrial novel Ravage, wrote in the press in the following vehement terms in 1962: