Living in the Anthropocene

by W. John Kress

  In reality, we need both global and local approaches. Success on the local level can give hope, serve as an example of what to do elsewhere, and motivate others to positive future action. Local-level research, however, must be done in concert with global, policy-driven discussions such as those among nation-states working to combat climate change. Collectively, all these efforts indicate that we can transcend the challenges of the Anthropocene. Although archaeology shows our past pitfalls, it also gives us reasons to be optimistic by revealing how truly ingenious we humans can be. The key now is to make a global call to action that begins at the local level, is driven by interdisciplinary research, and uses our planet’s past to help guide its future.

  LIVING ON A CHANGING PLANET

  WHY INDIGENOUS VOICES MATTER

  IGOR KRUPNIK

  By the 1980s, mounting scientific evidence pointed to global climate change as one of humanity’s most daunting problems. The subsequent international debate often drew attention to particularly vulnerable areas of the planet—small islands, high mountains, tropical forests, lowlying coastal areas, and polar regions. Besides their heightened sensitivity to the early impacts of climate change, many of these areas have been homes to distinct groups of indigenous peoples.

  In spite of this disproportionate attention to their homelands—which were often undiplomatically called the canaries in the coal mine of global climate change—indigenous groups have had to fight hard to gain a place in the high-level international discussions of climate change. Yet their perspectives have proved more welcome in certain areas than in others. For example, because Earth’s northern polar region has experienced one of the globe’s most pronounced shifts in its climate regime over the past several decades, the voices of indigenous Arctic residents were heard loud and clear by 2000, with their observations and concerns about the changing climate and weather widely reported. As the case of the Arctic demonstrates, a strong consensus among indigenous peoples, scientists, politicians, and governments on the threats brought about by the changing environment and the need for collective action is possible.

  Similar, albeit slower moves to recognize the value of indigenous knowledge of climate change have taken place in small-island habitats, mountainous areas, tropical forests, arid lands, and other regions populated by indigenous peoples. In the past fifteen years, as the dams of political neglect and sidelining have been breached, scholarly papers, international conferences, research initiatives, special journal issues, and books on indigenous peoples and global change have proliferated.

  The lasting value of indigenous people’s voices in the climate change debate is based on four messages that come from their specific knowledge, observations, and practical solutions in the changing environment. These messages may be critical to strengthening the new intellectual framework that is emerging to address global change.

  THE MESSAGE OF LOCAL SCALE

  From a climate science perspective, present-day climate change is a global process. Yet people commonly experience its impacts in local contexts. The critical role of indigenous peoples in anchoring or scaling down global change scenarios is often overlooked. As a large portion of the world’s population celebrates the new global village, indigenous people continue to live locally—in the context of the habitat they have longed called home. It is the piece of the planet they know best and observe daily. They keep a record of its minute changes, which they pass from generation to generation. Every study on indigenous peoples and global climate change confirms the richness and the value of indigenous observations and interpretations, which international organizations and government agencies are increasingly willing to accept.

  By 2020, climate scientists and environmental agencies will be forced to translate their global and regional scenarios into high-confidence local models and plans. When this happens, the knowledge and high-resolution vision of indigenous peoples may offer an authoritative template. We may argue that scientists and policymakers will look to indigenous peoples not as much for new data as for a general philosophy to interpret the data they already possess. Such a philosophy will focus on intimate features of individual habitats, local adaptations, grassroots initiatives, attention to emotional and spiritual well-being, and growing self-reliance—all trademark features of indigenous peoples’ knowledge systems.

  THE MESSAGE OF SELF-RELIANCE

  Indigenous peoples historically viewed themselves as being responsible for the health of their habitats in a practical, social, or spiritual sense—usually all three—and, in most cases, they continue to do so. Environmental scientists increasingly call such an approach ecosystem stewardship, and many argue that it should be promoted to the level of planetary stewardship.

  Emerging from many recent studies of indigenous adaptations is a recognition that indigenous peoples are able to keep their “houses” (meaning their habitats) in order. They rightly claim that they possess a thorough knowledge of their environment and have maintained sustainable links with their habitats via technological and spiritual means over generations—rotating crops and plots, following nomadic routes, maintaining local networks of exchange, and even singing and drumming for the animals. Far from passive victims of change, they are actively observing, experimenting, and evaluating alternative livelihood strategies, just as they have always done.

  Their individual stories coalesce into a powerful message of self-reliance, contrary to the common assumption that indigenous peoples are mere casualties of global change because of their small numbers or simple technologies. This message promises to gain strength as the world’s attention shifts from planetary modeling toward addressing specific threats in specific locales through the development of local-scale initiatives and grassroots solutions.

  THE MESSAGE OF INDIGENOUS PEOPLES’ RIGHTS

  Indigenous peoples have been instrumental in adding a human rights agenda to the global climate change debate. Documents including those generated at the 1992 United Nations Earth Summit indirectly addressed this topic through discussions of economic inequality, colonialism, and conflicts between the world’s industrial and developing nations. However, the specific aspect of minority and human rights has been conspicuously absent from many high-level discussions of global change. There are reasons to look at climate change and indigenous peoples through the lens of social justice—or rather, injustice. The question is straightforward: how can we respond to climate change in ways that are just?

  Climate change has disproportionally affected many of the world’s indigenous groups, whose situation has been made worse by the historical legacy of unjust treatment within their nation-states. Their lands are now mere fractions of their former tribal habitats, as these groups were shunted to regions with extreme environments—areas with limited water resources or at high elevations or in remote locations that others found undesirable. Indigenous peoples commonly have lower income levels and fewer resources for adapting to change than their nonindigenous neighbors in the same society, while they are subjected to webs of regulations by the management agencies charged with administering their lands and affairs.

  Indigenous peoples’ demand for environmental justice also articulates the plights of other disadvantaged and marginalized groups, such as small sharecroppers and fishers, women and children, and urban and rural poor, who often have no representation in international bodies. As indigenous peoples argue for recognition of their traditional knowledge, respect for their use of land, and acceptance of their right to membership in climate change agreements, their voices at the table help to expand our common ethical and societal sensitivity. Their engagement also puts a human face on the international climate change negotiation process, which is often dominated by government-to-government politics and ideology and conflicting national claims.

  THE MESSAGE OF ACTION

  As the world’s representative bodies struggle to establish meaningful strategies to combat global climate change, indigenous peoples’ message of self-reliance increasingly stan
ds as a call for action. Almost every study of indigenous communities’ adaptations to environmental change underscores the proactive nature of their responses to the threats associated with a warming planet.

  Some of their actions are surprisingly akin to strategies being applied by other local players, such as small municipalities, town mayors, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and citizen groups, that are increasingly taking matters into their own hands by promoting alternative energy sources, reliance on green technologies, horizontal networking, resource sharing, and reduced pressure on vulnerable ecosystems. It is almost certain that the growing connections among indigenous peoples, scientists, NGOs, and other grassroots programs will provide a viable alternative to the top-down practices of national governments and international agencies. Architects of such alternative approaches may draw on many strengths inherent to indigenous people, such as intimate knowledge of local environments, cultural resilience, kinship and regional networking, flexible economies, and close bonding with nature.

  One way or another, the politics of global climate change will shift. A new era will begin that ushers in a growing role for local voices everywhere—in integrative assessments, grassroots self-reliance, recognition of human rights in climate change adaptations, and collective actions to combat environmental threats. This transition promises to frame the international climate change debate for years to come, and the growing role of indigenous people in this process is hard to overestimate.

  This essay draws on ideas first presented by the author at the United Nations University–United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization conference “Indigenous Peoples, Marginalized Populations and Climate Change,” held in Mexico City in July 2011.

  BLACK AND GREEN

  THE FORGOTTEN COMMITMENT TO SUSTAINABILITY

  LONNIE G. BUNCH III

  In the spring of 1971, four African American freshmen from Howard University decided to attend the second Earth Day celebration on the National Mall in Washington, DC. Walking south from the campus, they soon joined a small army of college kids from around the nation, all bent on reminding America that protecting the planet should matter to all who inhabit it. The day unfolded like so many other gatherings of the period, with speeches, chants directed at Richard Nixon, and music by groups such as the Beach Boys. The Howard students sat behind a group of other students from an array of colleges, who suddenly noticed their presence. One woman asked them, with a mixture of questioning and confrontation, “What are you black guys doing here? This isn’t a civil rights demonstration.”

  The notion that issues of environmentalism are outside the scope, interest, and historical concern of black America is both a misreading of American history and a failure to grasp how often lax laws and environmental change have shaped, damaged, and affected communities of color. The fallacy that grappling with the environment is solely a white concern has limited the development of alliances with African Americans, which would strengthen the coalitions needed to battle for the protection of the environment.

  African Americans, who have often borne the brunt of environmental injustice, have a long and complicated history of protecting their communities while combatting environmental pollution. In almost any American city, the most environmentally at-risk areas are frequently in neighborhoods of poor or working-class communities of color. Whether from mercury-soaked lots in South Central Los Angeles, tainted landfills near Newark, New Jersey, or the drinking water in Flint, Michigan, recently discovered to be unsafe, African Americans have felt the greatest impact of the United States’ willingness to compromise environmental protection. How many historically black communities, such as those in Saint Paul, Chicago, and Providence, Rhode Island, have been divided and negatively impacted by the construction of interstate highways, which have fractured communities and adversely affected air quality? These impacts are not accidents but part of considered decisions that sacrificed the health and cohesion of communities of color for the “greater good” of regional progress and economic growth. The disastrous 1927 flood in Mississippi and the devastating 2005 inundation of New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina demonstrated that black communities and black lives are not as valued or protected as those of white America when environmental calamities strike.

  Yet African Americans have not just been victims of environmental abuse and neglect. They also have a long history of involvement in sustainability movements. Until the 1920s, the majority of African Americans lived in the South and worked the land, some as owners of small farms, many as sharecroppers or tenant farmers. All were dependent upon the land for their survival. The novelist John Williams described this connection by simply stating, “Black people are land people.” Limited resources and reliance on agriculture for their survival conditioned many African Americans to find ways to protect the land and to develop lifestyles based on sustainability.

  These farm families were early advocates of recycling, the careful use of limited resources, taking a long-term view toward land use, and learning about, understanding, and adjusting to changing climate conditions—all of which were essential to the existence of the millions of African Americans who tilled the land. The work of historically black colleges often supported and developed these notions of sustainability. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, colleges such as the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama and the Hampton Institute in Virginia created rural cooperatives and agricultural extension services that brought the most recent agrarian knowledge and domestic efficiencies to black farm families. While these farmers could not define sustainability or environmentalism, their daily practices and values not only provided the means for survival but established traditions that benefited their land and the country.

  Recognizing and acknowledging how African Americans have made America better—whether through a forgotten commitment to environmentalism, the struggle to find racial justice, or contributions that shaped American culture—is one of the goals of the newest museum of the Smithsonian Institution, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, created by congressional legislation in 2003. Millions of people who visit this inclusive institution will remember or learn about the rich, complex, and often unknown history of black America. While the museum helps America confront its tortured racial past—visitors can ponder the pain of slavery and segregation—it is also a place to find the joy and the strength that are so much a part of the African American experience. But if a museum only helps people to remember, then it is fulfilling only part of its mandate. This museum uses African American history as a lens to better understand what it means to be an American. It does not create a historical narrative for black people alone. The museum suggests that the resiliency, optimism, and spirituality at the heart of the African American community have shaped much of America’s identity and that many of the moments when Americans embraced an expansion of liberty or a redefinition of citizenship were shaped by or emanated from within the African American experience. Ultimately, the vision for the museum is to provide a safe space where engaging exhibitions, scholarship, and educational and public programs enable Americans to grapple with the issue of race that has so divided us and with the goal of making America better.

  It is ironic that when the National Museum of African American History and Culture decided on the characteristics that would shape the architectural design of its new edifice, one particular aspect evoked great surprise. While the building had to speak of a permanent African American presence and reflect spirituality and uplift, it was also essential that it be sustainable and green and obtain the standard of Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design Gold. Some of the initial comments from the public and Smithsonian colleagues were reminiscent of the young woman who could not understand why African Americans cared about the environment. Why was sustainability so important? Would resources not be better spent on other aspects of the building’s development? Did the Smithsonian have the expertise to oversee such a design? Regardles
s of the challenges, it was crucial that the building remind us of what is often overlooked. So much of African American history is unacknowledged or hidden in plain sight, and, since the history of black America is also tied to notions of sustainability, it was essential that the building be green. This was a way to recognize that the struggle to protect the planet, to find fair and equitable environmental treatment, is a civil rights issue, an issue that has had a major impact on black lives both historically and contemporarily. One hopes that this new, sustainable museum will encourage and stimulate other museums to follow suit, and that it will remind all who visit that race matters when it comes to environmental issues.

  FOREST SUCCESSION AND HUMAN AGENCY IN AN UNCERTAIN FUTURE

  ROBIN L. CHAZDON

  Forests, like all ecosystems, are constantly changing. As naturalists, foresters, scientists, and users of forest products, we impose our human constructs on spatially and temporally dynamic tree-based systems that defy static definitions. The forces that shape the composition, structure, and ecosystem properties of forests—geologic history, climate, natural disturbances, harvesting, fires, fragmentation, and agricultural land uses—act synergistically to influence the past, present, and future of the socioecological systems we call forests.

  Uncertainty has been and always will be a major element in the regeneration of forests, and succession is nature’s way of responding to both uncertainty and opportunity. The first individuals and species that arrive in a newly opened habitat play a decisive role in the unscripted play of forest succession. These pioneers can accelerate or inhibit future species colonization, which is also strongly affected by local conditions, fauna, and features of the surrounding landscape. These interacting factors have always been a part of the assembly processes that characterize regenerating forests, often leading to highly variable successional trajectories even within the same region. We are just beginning to understand the complex interactions among landscapes, fauna, and forest regeneration, which will inform how these factors can be manipulated to restore forests and landscapes. Our nascent understanding will need to expand quickly to meet the certain demands of an increasingly uncertain future.