The Shock of the Anthropocene

by Christophe Bonneuil

  If your generation does not immediately become aware of the dangers, everything is lost … The air will rot. Green spaces will rapidly dwindle. Oxygen will be less and less renewed, while combustion of every kind, doubled or tripled in twenty years, will tend to replace it increasingly quickly by carbon dioxide and all kinds of aggressive waste products. If you are content to tell yourself ‘it’ll sort itself out, nature will see to it’, you will bleed for a long time in the flesh of your children. ‘Nature’ will not see to it, and ‘it’ won’t sort itself out.76

  Nuclear energy and atom bomb tests were widely opposed in France in the 1950s, not only by the French Communist Party but also by such ‘non-aligned’ forces as the Gandhian Catholic community of l’Arche founded in 1948 by Lanza del Vasto, who also sided with anti-colonial struggles in Algeria. L’Arche went on to play a central role in the Larzac resistance starting in 1972 against the establishment of a large military camp. And many French contemporary ecologists (such as the non-violent alter-globalist leader José Bové) began their activist careers in this struggle. Bee-keepers mobilized (in vain) against the chemicals that threatened bees right from the appearance of the first synthetic pesticides in the late 1940s.77

  In ‘developing countries’, the post-war decades similarly saw major socioecological movements: the Sarawak communities’ struggle in Malaysia against the deforestation of their territory; the Chipko movement in defence of forests and collective rights in India, in the wake of colonial struggles; the AGAPAN movement and the opposition of Amazonian gatherers in Brazil, led by Chico Mendes, to the advance of the tree-fellers and latifundist rancheros; civil disobedience against the eucalyptus plantations in Thailand; the Narmada movement in central India against a gigantic dam project, etc. On every occasion, this ‘environmentalism of the poor’ was faced with developmentalist governments and the associated economic interests.

  Nor did the ecological disturbances heralded by the Great Acceleration pass unperceived in the world of science. Books such as Road to Survival by William Vogt and Our Plundered Planet by Osborn, both published in 1948, sold millions of copies across the world, and there was a proliferation of international conferences on various environmental questions under the aegis of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization and UNESCO. The post-war years saw an assertion of the claims of the environment in multilateral international arenas. In part the scientific discourse warning about the degradation of the planet already under way or impending went together with a preservationist project that aimed to establish parks in the colonial territories, then on the path of emancipation. It also supported a new conservationist project of scientifically organizing the exploitation of the whole planet under United States leadership, with a view to securing and sustaining the Fordist model of the ‘free world’ (Western Europe, North America and Japan), as well as promoting ‘development’ in the non-Communist South (the ‘green revolutions’ in Latin America, India, the Philippines, etc.; see Chapter 10).

  Other scientific warnings, however, represented in particular by Rachel Carson and Barry Commoner in the United States, René Dumont in France, contributed to the building of the ecological movement, linked in the United States to the struggle for civil rights and the opposition to the Vietnam War. This current, and its counterparts in other industrialized countries, helped to put the environment on the world agenda with the UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972, soon followed by dozens of international environmental conventions and stricter controls on pollution in the North. The high point of this ecological movement was between 1968 and 1978. It was however gradually institutionalized (particularly with the expansion and professionalization of NGOs in the conservation sector),78 and a part of its strongest critiques (against capitalism and imperialism, against unequal exchange and ecology, against the ideology of growth) was stifled. In the context of neo-liberal globalization promoted by the WTO agreements and the financializing of the economy, the environmental norms of the rich countries led rather to a delocalizing of polluting activities to the poor countries than to a global improvement.79

  In the face of the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth and the works of the first degrowth economists, a section of the planet’s economic and political leaders in the 1970s dismissed any idea of a limit to growth, arguing that technological innovation would readily find solutions to these problems (see Chapter 9).

  The last fifteen years have witnessed a return of the radicalization of ecological warnings and mobilizations. On the one hand, the data coming from the life and Earth sciences tend to confirm the unprecedented character of planetary ecological disturbance, whether in the 2007 and 2013 reports of the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) or with the broad adoption of the notion of the Anthropocene. On the other hand, criticizing the modest achievements of pragmatic ‘green’ politicians in national governments and international arenas (the failure of the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference in 2009, then that of Rio+20 in 2012), this decade saw a proliferation of new forms of mobilization and commitment: anti-extractivist struggles in Latin America (around the concept of ‘buen vivir’), the international movement of ‘transition towns’ initiated in England, and the movement of objectors to growth (a concrete echo of economists’ reflections on prosperity without growth) as well as ‘Blockadia’ movements, as Naomi Klein call them, reclaiming a place for nature and for alternative ways of living and fighting against ‘large dangerous and useless projects’ such as pipelines, tar sands exploitations, airports and highways.

  As we see, the environmental warnings, socioecological challenges and critique of the ‘damages of progress’ did not await the scientific thesis of the Anthropocene and its embodiment in scientific literature after 2002. When we consider the multifarious and general character of these oppositions and the intensity of environmental reflexivity through time, the major historical problem seems to be not that of explaining the emergence of a new ‘environmental awareness’, but rather to understand how these struggles and warnings could have been kept to the margins by industrialist and ‘progressive’ elites, before being largely forgotten (a second death in which the human and social sciences participated), so that it can be claimed that the discovery that we are living in the Anthropocene is only very recent. These two centuries of scientific warnings and continuous challenges likewise suggest that the attribution of a name to a new geological era is not sufficient to inflect a trajectory of two centuries of assaults to planet Earth. We need to guard against the scientistic illusion that ecological awareness and ‘salvation’ can only come from scientists and not also from the struggles and initiatives of other Earthlings and citizens of the planet.

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  1E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963), London: Penguin, 1980, 12; François Jarrige, Face au monstre mécanique. Une histoire des résistances à la technique, Paris: IMMHO, 2009, and Technocritiques. Du refus des machines à la contestation des technosciences, Paris: La Découverte, 2014.

  2Ramachandra Guha, Environmentalism: A Global History, New York: Longman, 2000; Joachim Radkau, The Age of Ecology, Cambridge: Polity, 2014; Joan Martínez Alier, The Environmentalism of the Poor: A Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuation, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2002.

  3Martine Chalvet, Une histoire de la forêt, Paris: Seuil, 2011.

  4François Vion-Delphin, ‘La révolte des demoiselles en forêt de Chaux – 1765’, in Andrée Corvol (ed.), Violences et environnement. XVIe–XXe siècles, Cahier d’études, CNRS, 1991, 44–8.

  5Arlette Brosselin, Andrée Corvol and François Vion-Delphin, ‘Les doléances contre l’industrie’, in Denis Woronoff (ed.), Forges et forêts. Recherches sur la consommation proto-industrielle de bois, Paris: EHESS, 1990, 11–28.

  6Chalvet, Une histoire de la forêt, 167.

  7Peter Sahlins, Forest Rites: The War of the Demoiselles in Nineteenth-Century France, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994, 11.

  8Richard Höl
zl, ‘Historicizing Sustainability: German Scientific Forestry in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, Science as Culture, 19:4, 2010: 431–60.

  9John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature, New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000, 67.

  10Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and Fabien Locher, Le climat fragile de la modernité, Paris: Seuil, 2016.

  11Charles Fourier, ‘Détérioration matérielle de la planète’, in René Schérer, L’Écosophie de Charles Fourier. Deux textes inédits, Paris: Economica, 2001, 31–125, 79. These were preparatory notes from 1820–21 for Fourier’s Traité de l’association domestique agricole, later titled Théorie de l’unité universelle (1822), finally published in La Phalange in 1847.

  12Charles Fourier, Pièges et charlatanisme des deux sectes. Saint-Simon et Owen, Paris: Bossange, 1831, 10.

  13Fourier, ‘Détérioration matérielle de la planète’, 67.

  14Ibid., 117.

  15Radkau, The Age of Ecology, 17.

  16Jarrige, Face au monstre mécanique.

  17François Jarrige, Au temps des ‘tueuses de bras’. Les bris de machines à l’aube de l’ère industrielle, 1780–1860, Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2009, 23–51.

  18Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class; Adrian Randall, Before the Luddites: Custom, Community and Machinery in the English Woollen Industry, 1776–1809, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, Chapter 7.

  19Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre, Esprits de feu. Figures du romantisme anti-capitaliste, Paris: Éditions du Sandre, 1999, 60–102. On the other hand, John Tresh shows the fascination that the machine exerted on certain of the Romantics: John Tresch, The Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology after Napoleon, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.

  20Quoted by Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class, 518.

  21Jarrige, Technocritiques.

  22Ernest Jones, ‘The Better Hope’, Northern Star, 5 September 1846.

  23Charles Sabel and Jonathan Zetlin, ‘Historical Alternatives to Mass Production: Politics, Markets and Technology in Nineteenth-Century Industrialization’, Past and Present, 108, 1985: 133–76.

  24Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, ‘The Gas Lighting Controversy: Technological Risk, Expertise, and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London’, Journal of Urban History, 33:5, 2007, 729–55.

  25A summary of this is given in Jarrige, Technocritiques.

  26Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, L’Apocalypse joyeuse. Une histoire du risque technologique, Paris: Seuil, 2012, 149–94.

  27Stephen Mosley, The Chimney of the World: A History of Smoke Pollution in Victorian and Edwardian Manchester, Isle of Harris: White Horse Press, 2001.

  28Stephen Mosley, The Environment in World History, New York: Routledge, 2010, 104.

  29Alexis de Tocqueville, Journeys to England and Ireland, Rutgers, NJ: Transaction, 1987, 105.

  30Mosley, The Environment in World History, 106–7.

  31John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, 128 and 129.

  32John R. McNeill and Erin Stewart Mauldin (eds), A Companion to Global Environmental History, London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, 274.

  33Gregory A. Barton, Empire Forestry and the Origin of Environmentalism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

  34Madhav Gadgil and Ramachandra Guha, This Fissured Land: An Ecological History of India, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993, 156.

  35Ramachandra Guha, The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

  36Ramachandra Guha, Environmentalism: A Global History, New York: Longman, 2000, 41.

  37Guillaume Carnino, L’Invention de la science. La nouvelle religion de l’âge industrielle, Paris: Seuil, 2015.

  38Alastair Bonnett, Left in the Past: Radicalism and the Politics of Nostalgia, New York and London: Continuum, 2010.

  39Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot, On Justification: The Economies of Worth, trans. Catherine Porter, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006, 118ff.

  40Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–05), London: Routledge, 2001, 123.

  41Louis de Launay, ‘Les ressources en combustibles du monde’, La Nature, 1914, 238, cited by Jarrige, Technocritiques, 175.

  42Ernst Friedrich, ‘Wesen und Geographische Verbreitung der “Raubwirtschaft’”, Petermanns Geographische Mitteilungen, 50, 1904: 68–79 and 92–5.

  43Yannick Mahrane, Frédéric Thomas and Christophe Bonneuil, ‘Mettre en valeur, préserver ou conserver? Genèse et déclin du préservationnisme dans l’empire colonial français (1870–1960)’, in Charles-François Mathis and Jean-François Mouhout (eds), Une protection de la nature et de l’environnement à la française? (XIXe–XXe siècles), Paris: Champ Vallon, 2013, 62–80.

  44Edmond Perrier, ‘Discours du président de la Société nationale d’acclimatation de France’, Bulletin de la Société nationale d’acclimatation, 60, 1913: 210.

  45John MacKenzie, The Empire of Nature: Hunting, Conservation and British Imperialism, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997; Mahrane and Bonneuil, ‘Mettre en valeur, préserver ou conserver?’

  46Peter C. Gould, Early Green Politics: Back to Nature, Back to the Land, and Socialism in Britain, 1880–1900, Brighton: Harvester Press, 1988.

  47Quoted by Charles-François Mathis, ‘In Nature We Trust’: Les paysages anglais à l’ère industrielle, Paris: Presses de l’université Paris-Sorbonne, 2010, 484.

  48Montagu Blatchford, 1896, quoted in ibid., 488.

  49Ulrich Linse, Ökopax und Anarchie: Eine Geschichte der ökologischen Bewegungen in Deutschland, Munich: Deutsche Taschenbuch Verlag, 1986; Frank Uekötter, The Greenest Nation? A New History of German Environmentalism, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014.

  50Ludwig Klages, Mensch und Erde (1913), Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2013.

  51Gustav Landauer, Aufruf zum Sozialismus, Frankfurt: EVA, 1967, 97–8 and 108.

  52Jean Maitron, Le Mouvement anarchiste en France, vol. 1, Paris: Gallimard, 1992, 379–408. On naturism, see Arnaud Baubérot, Histoire du naturisme. Le mythe du retour à la nature, Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2004.

  53Henri Beylie, La Conception libertaire naturienne, 1901 pamphlet, reproduced in Invariance, supplement to 4:9, 1993: 75–83, 76.

  54Henri Zisly, ‘Réflexions sur le naturel et l’artificiel’, August 1901, reproduced in ibid., 91–2.

  55Kaj Noschis, Monte Verità. Ascona et le génie du lieu, Geneva: PPUR, 2011.

  56M. K. Gandhi, ‘Civilization’ (Chapter 6), in Hind Swaraj or Indian Home Rule, 1909.

  57The Oxford India Gandhi: Essential Writings, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008, 276.

  58Martínez Alier, The Environmentalism of the Poor, 155–7.

  59Dominique Bourg and Augustin Fragnière, La pensée écologique. Une Anthologie, Paris: PUF, 2014, 111.

  60Wolfgang Sachs, For Love of the Automobile: Looking Back into the History of Our Desires, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992, 18–27.

  61Clay McShane, Down the Asphalt Path: The Automobile and the American City, New York: Columbia University Press, 176.

  62Jarrige, Technocritiques.

  63Henri Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, University of Notre Dame Press, 1991, 317.

  64Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture and Politics in Weimar and the Third Reich, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984; Johann Chapoutot, ‘Les Nazis et la “nature”: protection ou prédation’, Vingtième siècle, 113, 2012: 29–39; Eric Dorn Brose, ‘Generic Fascism Revisited: Attitudes toward Technology in Germany and Italy, 1919–1945’, German Studies Review, 10, 1987: 273–97; Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World 1914–1991, New York: Vintage, 1996, 262; Robert Kuisel, Capitalism and the State in Modern France: Renovation and Economic Management in the Twentieth Century, New York: Cambridge U
niversity Press, 1981; Chris Pearson, ‘La politique environnemental de Vichy’, Vingtième siècle, 113, 2012: 41–50.

  65Jean-Louis Loubet del Bayle, Les Non-conformistes de années 30. Une tentative de renouvellement de la pensée politique française, Paris: Seuil, 2001.

  66Jacques Ellul and Bernard Charbonneau, ‘Directives pour un manifeste personnaliste’ (1935), in B. Charbonneau and J. Ellul, Nous sommes des révolutionnaires malgré nous. Textes pionniers de l’écologie politique, Paris: Seuil, 2014, 47–62.

  67George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), London: Penguin, 2001, Chapter 12.

  68Christian Roy, ‘Charbonneau et Ellul, dissidents du “progrès”. Critiquer la technique face à un milieu chrétien gagné à la modernité’, in Céline Pessis, Sezin Topçu and Christophe Bonneuil (eds), Une autre histoire des ‘Trente Glorieuses’. Modernisation, contestations et pollutions dans la France d’après-guerre, Paris: La Découverte, 2013, 283–301.

  69Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), Stanford: Stanford Unversity Press, 2007; Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958), Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998; Günther Anders, Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen. Über die Seele im Zeitalter der zweiten industriellen Revolution, München: C.H. Beck, 196; Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (1964), Boston: Beacon Press, 1991.

  70Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 185.

  71Henry Fairfield Osborn Jr., Our Plundered Planet, London: Faber and Faber, 1948, 38.

  72Ibid., 9.

  73Roger Heim, preface to Rachel Carson, Printemps silencieux, Paris: Plon, 1963, 12.

  74Bernard Charbonneau, ‘An deux mille’ (1945), in Bernard Charbonneau and Jacques Ellul, Nous sommes des révolutionnaires malgré nous. Textes pionniers de l’écologie politique, Paris: Seuil, 2014, 193–215, 198.

  75Georges Bernanos, ‘L’homme menacé de faillite’ (15 November 1945), in Michel Estève (ed.), Essais et écrits de combat II, Paris: Gallimard, 1995, 1103–10, 1104.