76René Barjavel, ‘Vénus et les enfants des hommes’, Les Nouvelles littéraires, 13 December 1962.
77All these and other oppositions are tackled by the various authors of the recent collective work: Pessis, Topçu and Bonneuil, Une autre histoire des ‘Trente Glorieuses’.
78Kenneth I. MacDonald, ‘The Devil Is in the (Bio)diversity: Private Sector “Engagement” and the Restructuring of Biodiversity Conservation’, Antipode, 42, 2010: 513–50.
79Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.
CONCLUSION
Surviving and Living
the Anthropocene
Thinking the Anthropocene means taking on board the data and models of the Earth system sciences that tell us in increasingly certain terms of a disturbance on the geological timescale that will radically overturn the conditions of human existence (Chapter 1). It means taking the measure of the telluric force of industrialization and commodification, which has derailed the Earth beyond the stable parameters of the Holocene, and of the need to give our freedom different material foundations; it means mobilizing new environmental humanities and new political radicalisms (movements of buen vivir, common goods, transition, degrowth, eco-socialism and many more) in order to escape the blind alleys of industrial modernity (chapters 2 and 11).
Thinking the Anthropocene also means challenging its unifying grand narrative of the errant human species and its redemption by science alone (chapters 3 and 4). It means meticulously listening to scientists and putting their results and conclusions into public and democratic discussions, rather than sinking into a geocracy of technological and market-based ‘solutions’ to ‘manage’ the entire Earth. The less that the science of the Anthropocene pretends to stand above the world, the more solid and fruitful it will be, and the less the seductive concept of the Anthropocene will risk serving as a legitimizing philosophy for an oligarchic geopower.
Thinking the Anthropocene, finally, means abandoning the hope of emerging from a temporary ‘environmental crisis’. The irreversible break is behind us, in that brief and exceptional moment of two centuries of industrial growth. The Anthropocene is here. It is our new condition. We have therefore to learn to survive, that is, to leave the Earth habitable and resilient, limiting the frequency of catastrophes and sources of human misery. But surviving is not enough. To continue to thrive as communities, individuals and citizens, we all must strive for change. We have to strive for a decent life for everyone, in a diversity of cultures and an equality of rights and conditions, in relations that liberate human and non-human alterities, in an infinity of aspirations, a sobriety of consumption and a humility of interventions.
‘What words must we sow, for the gardens of the world to be fertile again?’ asked the poet Jeanine Salesse. What histories must we write to learn to inhabit the Anthropocene?
First of all, we must make sense of what has happened to us, producing multiple, debatable and polemical narratives rather than a single hegemonic narrative that is supposedly apolitical. Rather than a universal history of the ‘human species’ distorting the ‘Earth system’, we have proposed seven historical workshops, seven possible narratives.1 First of all, we have shown the technological contingencies (other choices would have been possible) and political dimensions of our new geological epoch. The entry into the Anthropocene was intrinsically bound up with capitalism, with the commercial nation-state and the genesis of the British Empire, which dominated the world in the nineteenth century and forced other societies to serve its model or seek to follow it. Similarly, the Great Acceleration cannot be understood without the Second World War, the Cold War in which two blocs rivalled one another in the mobilization of the globe, and – since it emerged victorious – without American imperialism (Chapter 5). The history of capitalist world-economies lies at the heart of the change in the Earth’s geological regime (Chapter 10), with their Soviet and Chinese avatars being simply a part of this. Secondly, military apparatuses, war and the logic of power, with the unsustainable technological choices subsequently imposed on the civilian world, bear a heavy responsibility in the disturbance of local environments and the whole Earth system (Chapter 6). Thirdly, the history of the Anthropocene is also one of the unfurling of a capitalist world-economy, a world of increasing commodification; a history of the genesis of a new system of material needs and consumerist subjectivities that today are globalized (Chapter 7). Finally, it is impossible without fundamental self-deception to represent the last 250 years as the progressive emergence from an initial unawareness of environmental damage, from a model of industrial development at the end of which we are supposedly now better equipped with the skills for inflecting our trajectory (Chapter 8), nor as the gradual rise of an environmental movement that was initially embryonic and gradually matured (Chapter 9).
The contemporary moment is not one of a new awareness, nor one of a moral leap leading us towards a better humanity and a nice planet governed by sustainable geo-management, nor one of a reconciliation with Gaia. We have not suddenly passed from unawareness to awareness, we have not recently emerged from a modernist frenzy to enter an age of precaution. One of the determining aspects in the history of the Anthropocene is that of disinhibitions that normalize the intolerable: public-health policies that rejected the environmental medicine of the eighteenth century; the technological norm that undermined challenges and formed the ontology of dealing with environmental nuisances; the proliferation of objects that constructed the free-floating anthropological subject; GDP and the notion of an ‘economy’, which naturalized the absurd idea of limitless growth; technoscientific ‘solutions’ that claimed at every point to manage nature for a maximal sustainable yield; and many others more.
By envisaging the Anthropocene as a geohistorical event, we have avoided the gesture of the clean slate, of grandiose and impotent narratives about modernity. The multiplicity and variety of the processes of disinhibition reminds us that modernity is not this majestic, inexorable and spiritual movement that philosophers speak of. On the contrary, it can be conceived as a series of successive small coups, of imposed situations, of normalized exceptions. Rather than incriminating certain familiar monstres sacrés that are too enormous to be inflected (the biological gift of intelligence made to Homo sapiens but poorly used; demographic fate; the Judeo-Christian stance of domination of nature; blind ‘modernity’, separating and dominating), we should rather learn much from the various tactics and mechanisms of disinhibition that have made it possible for two and a half centuries to ignore successive environmental knowledges and warnings, and defeat those challenges and alternatives that opposed themselves to industrial and consumerist action.
The history we have proposed may seem depressing, i.e., that our ancestors destabilized the Earth and its ecosystems despite knowing what they were doing. Since there was not a transition from unawareness to awareness, since the present financialized capitalism has its own new forms of disinhibition, everything leads us to fear that things will continue as they have up till now.
But to abandon the official narrative of an awakening permits a more lucid and fruitful dialogue with the warnings of the Earth system scientists. We also have in hand several histories of the Anthropocene that invite us to conceive in political terms the metabolisms of energy and matter commanded by those mechanisms – of production, exchange and consumption – that were invented and imposed by quite particular groups, imaginaries and institutions, and in specific circumstances. These histories invite us to take a political grip on the institutions and oligarchies, the powerful symbolic and material systems, that led us into the Anthropocene: military apparatuses, the system of consumerist desire and its infrastructure, the gaps of income and wealth, the energy majors and the financial interests of globalization, the technoscientific apparatuses when these work in commodity logics or silence criticisms and alternatives.
To strive for decent lives in the Anthropocene therefo
re means freeing ourselves from repressive institutions, from alienating dominations and imaginaries. It can be an extraordinary emancipatory experience.
______________
1Many other historical narratives remain to be written, in particular a global and non-teleological history of technology, which the Anthropocene calls on us to rethink (see: David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology in Global History since 1900, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), or again accounts of the Anthropocene starting from the experience of its subalterns and victims.
Illustration Credits
Figure 1: Trends from 1750 to 2010 in (a) globally aggregated indicators for socio-economic development; (b) indicators for the structure and functioning of the Earth System
1a. Data from igbp.net; Will Steffen, ed., Global Change and the Earth System: A Planet Under Pressure, New York: Springer, 2005, 132–3.
1b. From Will Steffen, Wendy Broadgate, Lisa Deutsch, Owen. Gaffney and Cornelia Ludwig, ‘The Trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration’, The Anthropocene Review, January 2015: 1–18.
Figure 2: Temperature and human history over 100,000 years
Climate data from GRIP Ice Core Data, Greenland; archaeological data from Tim Appenzeller, ‘Human Migrations: Eastern Odyssey’, Nature, 485:3, May 2012: 24–6.
Figure 3: Standard representations of human activities in relation to the Earth system
3a. The famous ‘Bretherton Diagram’ (1986). From Earth System Science Overview: A Program for Global Change (NASA science advisory committee, 1986, 19).
3b. After Berkes, Folke and Colding (2003).
3c. After Benett, Peterson and Gordon (2009).
Figure 4: CO2 emissions, 1750–2009 and 1750–1913
Data from Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, cdiac.ornl.gov.
Figure 5: The Earth seen from midway to the Moon, Apollo 17, 7 December 1972
NASA/Apollo 17 crew
Figure 6: Annual energy consumption per capita in England and Italy (in megajoules)
Graph from Tony Wrigley, Energy in the Industrial Revolution, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, 95; on the basis of data from Paul Warde, Energy Consumption in England and Wales, Naples: CNR-ISS, 2007, 115–36.
Figure 7: Annual emissions in thousand tonnes of carbon
Data from Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC), cdiac.ornl.gov.
Figure 8: UK and USA’s share in global cumulative CO2 emissions
Data from Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC), cdiac.ornl.gov.
Figure 9: Defoliant spraying in South Vietnam, 1961–1971
Figure 10: The Japanese seen as lice in a wartime US magazine
From Leatherneck, 28 March 1945.
Figure 11: German motorways in 1936
Figure 12: The post-war world as technological consumerist paradise, General Electric advertisement, 1943
Figure 13: Thomas Burnet, ‘Ideas of Different Stages in the Formation of the Earth’
Engraving from Sacred Theory of the Earth, vol. 1 (1690), London: John Hooke, 1726, 312. (© BNF: French National Library)
Figure 14: Material balance of six major groups of countries since 1950
Graph formed from data presented in Anke Schaffartzik, A. Mayer, S. Gingrich, N. Eisenmenger, C. Loy, F. Krausmann, ‘The Global Metabolic Transition: Regional Patterns and Trends of Global Material Flows, 1950–2010’, Global Environmental Change 26, 2014: 87–97. We thank the authors for offering their raw data.
Figure 15: Creditor and debtor countries in terms of ecological footprint in 1973
From Global Footprint Network, storymaps.esri.com/global footprint.
Figure 16: Le Sauvage satirique
Journal of Gravelle, ‘naturien’ anarchist paper, 1898
Figure 17: L’En dehors (The outsider)
Postcard from a woodcut by Louis Moreau, 1922
Index
Page numbers in bold refer to figures.
Advanced Conservation Strategies 219–20
advertising 149, 155–6, 163
Afghanistan 129
African World Reparations and Repatriation Truth Commission 235
Agamben, Giorgio 90
Agent Orange 127
agnotology 198
aircraft industry 146, 147
air quality 205–6
aluminium production 145–6
Aly, Götz 166
American continent, conquest of 16
Amerindian population, demographic collapse 16, 39, 234
Ammonia, synthesis 136–7
Anders, Günther 280
Annales School 38
Anthropocene shock 17–18
Anthropocene xi–xii, 3–5, 12–13, 19, 47–9, 73–4
adapting to 288–91
causes 69
cultural precondition 29–30
narratives xiii–xiii, 70, 72–9, 87, 94
onset 14–17, 15, 50
quantifying 53–6, 54
stages 49–53, 54–6
violence of 25
anthropocenologists 48–9, 66, 67, 69, 83–4, 84–6, 93
anthropocentrism 4, 20, 40
anthropology 31
Apollo programme 62, 63
Arendt, Hannah 61, 63, 280
Arrhenius, Svante 77
artificial soda 135–6
Association for the Prevention of Smoke 263–4
atmosphere 3, 12–13, 218
atom bomb 76–7
Atomic Energy Commission 131–2
Australia 266
awakening narrative 72–9
Aykut, Stefan 218
Babbage, Charles 205
back-to-nature socialism 271–6, 274, 275
Bairoch, Paul 237, 248–9
banks and banking 156–7, 231
Banks, Joseph 179
Barjavel, René 284
Barthes, Roland 166
Baudrillard, Jean 148
Beck, Ulrich 74–5
Bell, Daniel 148–9, 216
Bergerie, Jean-Baptiste Rougier de la 179
Berkes, Fikret 33, 35
Bernanos, Georges 283
Bertalanffy, Ludwig von 57
Bertrand, Philippe 183
biocentrism 40
biodiversity, collapse of 6–7, 12, 24, 52
biological globalization 15–16
biological productivity 89
biomass 7, 12–13, 242–3
biopower 88
bioproductive capacity 245–6
biosphere 89
biotechnology 217
Blatchford, Robert 271–2
Boltanski, Luc 268
Borgström, Georg 225n
Boulding, Kenneth 216
Bourg, Dominique 41
Boussingault, Jean-Baptiste 205–6
Brandis, Dietrich 48
Braudel, Fernand 29, 37, 223–4
Braun, Werner von 62
Bretton Woods Agreements 244
Brundtland Report 90
Brunhes, Bernard 192
Buckland, William 204
Budyko, Mikhail 91–2
Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc de 4, 27, 28, 47, 48, 173, 177–8
Burckhardt, Jacob 37
Burnet, Thomas 177
Callicott, J. Baird 40
Canada 266
cancer 168
capitalism and capital flows 36, 67, 86, 222–52, 280, 290, 291
British world system 229–42
and climate change 227–8
ecological footprint 225–6
finance 237–8
fossil 199–206, 238
and the Great Acceleration 242–52
industrial 228–35
late 220
unequal exchange 225–6, 233–4
world-systems 223–7
carbon credits 218
carbon cycle 190
carbon dioxide 26, 68, 99–121
concentration rise 5–6, 12, 14–15, 16, 50, 51–2, 56, 99
/> emissions 52, 53–4, 54, 103, 104, 116–21, 117, 118, 205–6, 218, 238
energy history 100–12
political history 112–16
cardiovascular illness 168, 169
Carnot, Sadi 203, 204
car ownership 157, 162, 164
Carson, Rachel 285
Silent Spring 134, 281
Carter, Jimmy 148
Castro, Eduardo Viveiros de 63–4
Chadwick, Edwin 188, 208
Chakrabarty, Dipesh 42, 67, 227–8
Chalmers, Thomas 207
Chaptal, Jean-Antoine 135, 142, 193
Charbonneau, Bernard 280–1, 283
Char, René 94–5
Chase, Stuart 149
chemistry, of nature–society relations 185–90
Chile 119
China 52, 102, 103, 136–7, 232–3, 233–4, 240, 249
Christianity 68
Churchill, Winston 130, 143
circumfusa and environment 172–6, 209
Clausius, Rudolf 191–2
climate, and environmental reflexivity 176–9
climate change 14, 15, 24, 52, 56, 107–8, 176, 227–8, 257–8
acceptable levels 25
and biodiversity loss 6–7
and deforestation 178–9
economization 218
and history 39
responsibility 117–21
threat of 92–3
tipping points 22
climate engineering 91–2
climatology 30
closed world views 59–60
Club of Rome, Limits to Growth 22–3, 149, 216, 286
coal 50–1, 201–6, 229
CO2 emissions 53–4, 54, 205–6
consumption 102, 108, 112–13, 117–20, 141–3, 232–3
exhaustion 193–4, 195, 201–2
prices 102, 103
Coase, Ronald 217
Cobb, Charles 212
Cold War Keynesianism 163–5
Cold War 58, 60, 87, 89, 91–2, 123, 243–4, 248, 250, 289
Cologne 125
commodification 198
commodity fetishism 148
Commoner, Barry 285
Comte, Auguste 31
Conference for the Protection of Nature 270
conservation 22–3
The Shock of the Anthropocene Page 33
