In 1962, President John F. Kennedy observed that “our progress in the use of science has been great but our progress in ordering our relations small.” His words remain pertinent, not least in the context of Anthropocene debates, where the dominant buzz is about technological innovation, climate engineering, and designing a sustainable future. Far less attention has been paid to the geopolitics of environmentalism’s geologic turn. Yes, mitigating the Anthropocene’s most destabilizing effects will require technological inventiveness, but the distribution of advances cannot be divorced from questions of political governance and equitable access. Which cabal of engineers gets to decide to reset the global thermostat? Will their experiments be backed by rogue billionaires unanswerable to humanity at large? Will climates be reengineered in the name of humans flourishing and then, in the resource wars to come, be wielded by the rich and for the rich as weapons of mass destruction?
High-consuming humans with energy-intensive lifestyles are leaving knee-deep Anthropocene footprints while billions of others leave so little impress on Earth’s life systems that they barely qualify as geomorphic actors. But such deep disparities among human impacts rarely feature in prognoses by Anthropocene techno-optimists, who prefer to operate in the high ether of species thinking. Thus, for the Nature Conservancy’s Peter Kareiva and his coauthors, what distinguishes humans from other life-forms is “our unlimited creativity and our sense of moral purpose. The Anthropocene is about designing the future….[It is] an extraordinary opportunity to be welcomed and not feared.” The ecologist Erle Ellis cheerily declares that far from being a crisis, the Anthropocene offers a new beginning “ripe with human-directed opportunity.” The science journalist Ronald Bailey is sanguine that “over time, we will only get better at being the guardian gods of the earth.” The writer Stewart Brand is likewise confident in Anthropocene humanity’s surrogate divinity: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.”
Is that splash the sound of Icarus falling into a rapidly warming sea?
Who exactly is the “we” that the Anthropocene’s bright-siders love to invoke? It’s we the species, big-H Humanity, collectively propelled by ethical purpose and technological drive, a superpower whose managerial might is now written in stone. But in a time of deepening divides between concentrated wealth and concentrated abandonment, who will be the unelected deciders, the planetary directors? Which humans will get to stand in for humanity at large? In plutocratic times, the politics of surrogacy can look positively chilling.
The rush toward species thinking that characterizes much Anthropocene thought calls to mind the dispute in the United States that arose around Black Lives Matter when some outside the movement started proclaiming, “All lives matter.” On the surface, this was a generous, inclusive move. But black activists bristled. For the easy universalism of “All lives matter” blurs the focus on systemic discrimination, on the disproportionate burdens of vulnerability borne by black and white Americans. Similarly, viewed through an environmental justice prism, universalizing Anthropocene colloquies about Homo sapiens as problem and solution are self-deluding if they fail to address unequal burdens of Anthropocene risk and unequal access to overstrained resources.
Moreover, by positioning humans as bosses of the biosphere, technophiles risk confusing power with control, impact with mastery. Human geomorphic reverberations across Earth’s life systems are not synonymous with human dominion over life, which would reduce the infinitely complex interplay among countless animate and inanimate forces to one supreme species’ decision making on planetary design. Too often, technophile enthusiasm for the Anthropocene sounds like a hybrid of manifest destiny and selective enlightenment.
To heed, in Pope Francis’s words, “the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor,” we need to advance alternatives to neoliberalism, which encourages profiteering in the present with little regard for future fallout or social equity. A viable planetary future can be achieved only by attending to the environmental struggles and values of ordinary people, only 16 percent of whom globally live above the U.S. poverty line. The new environmental justice movements, from sustainable cities initiatives to the indigenous Idle No More, are becoming ever more forceful and resourceful. They remain indispensable to any transformative vision of Anthropocene possibility, as they refuse the temporal parochialism, the hubris, and the plutocratic plunder that stand between us and an inclusive, enduring earthly life.
THE GLOBAL COMMONS
NAOKO ISHII
The organization I lead, the Global Environment Facility (GEF), is arguably the only institution of planetary reach that has embedded in its mission the long-term livability of humanity on a finite, crowded, and increasingly stressed planet. The GEF was created on the eve of the 1992 Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit—itself the cradle of three multilateral environmental agreements, covering climate change, biodiversity, and land degradation—to provide developing countries with the funding necessary to adopt greener development paths in their pursuit of economic growth and poverty eradication.
While some progress in greener development has been made, overall improvement has been woefully insufficient compared to the level of global environment degradation we have witnessed, particularly during the past quarter century. In too many instances, the goals these agreements set were not met or have fallen short of the ambition required to turn the tide in favor of the planet’s health. Human activities are rapidly driving the global environment out of the stable conditions humankind has enjoyed for the past ten thousand years.
Stressors that have been accumulating since the Industrial Revolution are now being further magnified by three global megatrends: rapid population growth, a sharp increase of the global middle class, and exploding urbanization. Fewer than four billion people inhabited the world back in 1970; we will number more than nine billion by 2050. By 2030, there will be five billion members of the global middle class. In 1970, about 1.3 billion people lived in urban areas; by 2050, seven billion will be living in cities.
The great majority of the world’s scientists have repeatedly warned us of the need for urgent action. In 2014, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change made it clear that the longer we delay tackling climate change, the higher the risks and the costs of dealing with it will be. Others have warned that the planetary system is losing the resilience that has served as a buffer to shocks and other environmental stressors. We may be entering uncharted territory, where abrupt changes—mostly harmful to human societies—cannot be ruled out.
However, there is hope and a way to deal with the unprecedented challenges before us. After a quarter century of feeble attempts, the global community appears to have finally awakened to the call for urgent action. The year 2015 witnessed two landmark accomplishments: the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals in New York and the climate change agreement at the Conference of the Parties (COP 21) in Paris. Those two historical agreements sent three central messages to the global community.
First, the global environmental commons—be they land, biodiversity, forests, oceans, or the climate system—are the ultimate foundation for sustainable development. Transgressing the planetary boundaries across these dimensions will impose huge costs on humanity.
Second, for humanity to stay within planetary boundaries and hence safeguard the global commons, economies must move to low-carbon development pathways, which will require major changes in our energy, urban, and land-use systems. Incremental progress alone will not suffice.
Third, the solutions needed are everybody’s business. It is futile to put all the blame on developed countries while others stay on the sidelines. At the same time, leaving the responsibility solely to governments will also not do the trick. To be crystal clear: without the private sector and the marketplace, transformation will not happen. Perhaps most important, change needs to happen through a global movement in which all citizens can contribute in their own way.
The GEF is ready to take on this challenge and solidi
fy its position as the champion of the global environmental commons. To do that, we have revitalized our strategies and are refocusing our priorities so as to seize the moment and the emerging opportunities before us.
GEF’s new strategy, GEF2020, focuses on three principles. The first is a drivers-focused approach. Because our goal is to help transform the systems rapidly being stressed by human activity, the key must be dealing with the root causes of environmental degradation rather than just the symptoms. This means, for example, tackling the drivers of tropical deforestation, which are overwhelmingly associated with agriculture development, in particular a few global commodities such as palm oil, soy, beef, and pulp and paper.
Second, we must adopt an integrated approach to the required interventions. Planetary boundaries do not exist in isolation but instead are highly interdependent. Solutions to the plight of the global commons call for integrated approaches that account for the needs of and interconnections among the many environmental dimensions at the local, regional, and global levels. The multidisciplinary nature of the threats to our climate and to the global environment—and of the solutions needed to counter these threats—is reflected in the mission and the very DNA of the GEF in support of a range of key multilateral environmental accords, including the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Convention on Biological Diversity, and the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification.
Third, we must foster multistakeholder approaches. The root causes of environmental degradation are complex; so are their solutions. Many issues can be effectively tackled only through platforms that can be used to galvanize multiple stakeholders and sectors. For instance, addressing palm-oil-driven deforestation in Indonesia or Malaysia calls for a coalition among all players along the supply chain, including producers large and small, processors, retailers, financial actors, governments, civil society, and consumers at large.
Cities represent another platform for integration. They produce 80 percent of the world’s gross domestic product, consume more than two-thirds of the global energy supply, and are responsible for 70 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. In many ways, how we manage our urban areas will largely answer the sustainability question in the Anthropocene world. If managed well, compact, resilient, and resource-efficient cities have the potential to drive the sustainability agenda, contributing to both local livability and global public goods. Interestingly, cities do not have a seat in climate conventions—putting them together is a job for specialized negotiators, representing nation-states. However, cities are where much of the real action on the ground has to happen, and the GEF must stand ready to support them through its engagement with country governments.
COP 21 in Paris captured, to a certain extent, the long-awaited political momentum for climate change. Now is the time to strengthen other political coalitions to address other facets of the global environmental commons, such as the economic value of our oceans and forests, the health of our land and our soils, and the integrity of biodiversity.
A necessary new vision is one that promotes sustainable development by ensuring that our societies thrive within safe planetary boundary limits, thereby avoiding disruptive changes to the climate and other key global systems. Reforms of our major economic systems—food production, energy, and urbanization—are needed that will reflect the reality of operating in the Anthropocene. The GEF, in its role as a financial mechanism for the Rio conventions and a growing number of multilateral environmental agreements spanning virtually all of the planetary boundary dimensions, is uniquely placed to help deal with the complex challenges before us and to buttress Earth’s life-support systems in the Age of Humans.
CAN WE REDEFINE THE ANTHROPOCENE?
THOMAS E. LOVEJOY
In 1949, Ruth Patrick, a young limnologist and specialist in the green algae called diatoms, studied the species diversity in the streams and rivers of the mid-Atlantic region of the United States. She concluded that the number and kinds of diatoms (which build beautiful, species-specific silica boxes) reflected not only the natural physics, chemistry, geology, and biology of the watercourses but also the stresses inflicted on their watersheds by human activity. In other words, the biodiversity of a watershed provides an accurate measure of human impact.
That fundamental relationship underpins the water quality programs of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to this day. The relationship works because nothing is considered an environmental problem unless it affects living systems, such that, in the end, biodiversity integrates all environmental problems. Sometimes called the Patrick Principle, it applies to terrestrial and marine ecosystems as well as to freshwater systems.
Accordingly, soaring rates of extinction and endangerment are probably the most precise way to measure the impact of humanity on the biosphere. But the Patrick Principle is not just a diagnostic tool; it is equally useful in thinking about how human activities should mesh with landscapes and waterscapes. How might we go from a world that is in trouble biologically, with great global cycles of carbon and nitrogen so distorted that they are impoverishing the diversity of life, to one in which humanity seeks and creates opportunity within the planet’s natural fabric?
The interaction between biodiversity and climate change has serious implications for the future of myriad species but, when flipped around, also has the potential to significantly reduce the amount of climate change that life on Earth (including humanity) would otherwise encounter. Often overshadowed by the challenge of fossil fuel emissions is the significant amount of carbon in the atmosphere from centuries of destruction and degradation of modern ecosystems. That carbon can be recaptured through ecosystem restoration. If done at scale, this might even prevent as much as half a degree Celsius of potential temperature increase because of the long lag time between reaching a concentration level of carbon dioxide (CO2) and the consequent trapping and accumulation of radiant heat.
Restoration in this context primarily means reforestation and restoring grasslands and grazing lands, agricultural ecosystems, and “blue carbon” (coastal wetlands). This will produce additional benefits beyond pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere: for instance, forests provide functioning watersheds, restored grasslands offer better grazing, agroecosystems that accumulate carbon become more fertile, and restored coastal wetlands enhance fisheries and furnish protection against storm surges.
Happily, recognition of the importance of ecosystem restoration is gaining traction. All three of the Rio conventions that sprang from the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (the Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Convention to Combat Desertification and Degradation, and the Convention on Biological Diversity) now include restoration as a priority, as does the globally ambitious Bonn Challenge, which emerged from the 2011 meeting of the International Union for Conservation of Nature. And there are multiple other restoration initiatives at various levels of government, civil society, and the private sector.
Implicit in the restoration agenda is the recognition that the planet works not as a physical system alone but as a joint biological and physical system—that it is in fact a living planet and that we need to “manage” it as such. This may sound quite arrogant, as if humans have become carried away with the notion of the Anthropocene, but it really means that we must manage ourselves. And it is a way to benefit biodiversity, which is important for myriad reasons. This agenda also represents a profound change in how this human primate could view its place in nature.
So what might restoration look like in a place such as the Amazon—a huge area equivalent to the continental United States, and one of the major repositories of terrestrial biodiversity on the planet? We now know that this vast, unexplored, and seemingly mostly untouched region makes half of its own rainfall. Air masses come off the tropical Atlantic and drop rain, which then evaporates off the complex surfaces of the forest and is transpired through the leaves, returning moisture to the westward-moving air mass, which again
falls as rain and repeats the cycle farther to the west.
Prior to this discovery, the prevailing dogma was that vegetation is a consequence of climate and has no influence on it. That belief is now shattered, and echoes of this kind of climate-vegetation interaction have been found in other areas. In the Amazon, it raised a question as soon as the hydrological cycle was recognized: how much deforestation would cause this cycle to degrade and simultaneously reduce the Amazon’s capacity to support tropical rain forests and all their amazing biodiversity?
This observation reinforces the idea that the Amazon has to be managed as the system that it is. The actual tipping point of Amazon dieback from failure of the hydrological cycle is not known but is probably in the vicinity of 20 percent deforestation (about the current level). There is no point in discovering the precise tipping point by tipping it, so the sensible approach would be to engage in some reforestation, which the Brazilian government is planning, to build back a margin of safety.
Managing the Amazon as a living system is a complex challenge. Even though more than 50 percent of the region is currently under some form of protection—a remarkable achievement—different sectors (e.g., transportation and energy) reach decisions largely without regard for or oblivious to the implications for further deforestation (through spontaneous colonization, pursuit of short-term economic interests, etc.). The fact that eight nations share the Amazon presents another challenge in itself: even though an Amazon Cooperation Treaty exists, it is largely quiescent and weak.
Although the details of managing the Amazon as a system are complex, they can help us think about managing large units of landscape in general. For that to be successful from a biodiversity perspective, there is a need for much more connection in the natural landscape. Even extensive protected areas, such as Yellowstone National Park in the western United States, need natural connections to the broader landscape. In a changing climate, these connections are even more important because individual plants and animals require relatively natural habitats to move through to track their required climatic conditions. Restoring riparian vegetation along watercourses, for example, goes a long way toward providing the necessary biological connections in the landscape. Protection without connection is insufficient.
Living in the Anthropocene Page 15
