Officially, for the last 11,700 years we have
been living in the Holocene epoch. From the Greek for “totally new,” the
Holocene is a blink in the eye of geological time. In its nearly 12,000 years,
plate tectonics has driven the continents a little more than half a mile: a
reasonably fit person could cover the scale of planetary change in a brisk
8-minute walk. It has been a warm time,
when temperature has mattered as much as tectonics: sea levels rose 115 feet
from ice melt, and northern landscapes rose almost 600 feet rebounding from the
weight of now-melted glaciers. But the
real news in the Holocene has been people.
Estimates put the global human population between one million and 10
million at the start of the Holocene and keep it in that range until after the
agricultural revolution, some 5,000 years ago.
Since then, we have made the world our anthill: the geological layers we
are now laying down on the earth’s surface are marked by our chemicals and
other industrial emissions, the pollens of our crops, and the absence of the
many species we have driven to extinction.
Rising sea levels rise are now our doing. As a driver of global change, humanity has
outstripped geology.
This is why more and more voices, from the
earth sciences to English departments, propose that we live in a new era, the Anthropocene – the age of humans. The term was coined by ecologist Eugene
Stoermer in the 1980s and has gained prominence since 2000, when Paul Crutzen,
a Nobel-winning atmospheric scientist, urged scientists to adopt it. In 2008,
the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London – the people
who set and enforce the boundaries of eras, the Pleistocene Police – took up a
proposal to add the Anthropocene to the official timeline of earth’s epochs. (It is still pending: straigraphers are well
acquainted with geological rates of motion.) The proposal suggests that we have
entered a new era of the earth’s history, when humans are a force, maybe the force, shaping the planet.
...
The revolution in ideas that the Anthropocene
represents – the end of the division between people and nature – is rooted in
hundreds of eminently practical problems. The conversation about climate change
has shifted from whether we can keep greenhouse-gas concentrations below key thresholds
to how we are going to adapt when they cross those thresholds – and change
everything. Geo-engineering,
deliberately intervening in planetary systems, used to be the unspeakable
proposal in climate policy. Now it is in
the mix and almost sure to grow more prominent. As climate change shifts
ecological boundaries, issues like habitat preservation come to resemble
landscape architecture. We can’t just pen in animals to save them; we need to
build corridors and help species migrate as their habitats move. There is open talk in law-and-policy circles
about triage in species preservation – asking what we can save, and what we
most want to save. We can call the sum
of these changes, the vast and irreversible human impact on the planet, the Anthropocene Condition.
The other side of the coin is something more
conceptual, which we can call the Anthropocene
Insight. Part of the meaning of the
Anthropocene is as a political and ethical idea. Calling this the age of
humanity is a way of owning up to responsibility for shaping the world.
...
In this way,
talking about the Anthropocene is involves two very different registers. On the one hand, it is predictive, like
speculating about next summer’s weather and how we will keep cool (if we even
can). On the other, people who use the
term are trying to get listeners to see themselves, their problems, and other
people’s problems as aspects of a single pattern, which “the Anthropocene” is
meant to name. In turn, this second,
persuasive aspect of the Anthropocene splits into two further faces. First, it simply offers to unify events that
might otherwise seem unrelated. In this
way, “the Anthropocene” is an attempt to do the same work that “the
environment” did in the 1960s and early 1970s: meld problems as disparate as
extinction, sprawl, litter, national parks policy, and the atom bomb into a
single phenomenon called “the ecological crisis.” Such a classification is always somewhat
arbitrary, though often only in the trivial sense that there are many ways to
carve up the world. However arbitrary,
it can become real because people treat it as real – for instance, by forming
movements, proposing changes, and passing laws aimed at “the environment.”
Here the Anthropocene’s persuasive
sense comes into its stranger version, at once the most charismatic and the
most dubious. Anthropocene talk is a
discourse of responsibility, to borrow a term from Mark Greif’s brilliant study
of mid- twentieth-century American thought and letters, The Age of the Crisis of Man.
Greif argues that a high-minded (but often middle-brow) strain of
rhetoric responded to the horrors of the world wars and global struggles
thereafter with a blend of urgent language and sweeping concepts (or
pseudo-concepts): responsibility, the fate of man, the urgency of now. Two example stand out particularly. Albert Camus told a rapt audience at Columbia
in 1946, “We must call things by their right names and realize that we kill
millions of men each time we permit ourselves to think certain thoughts…. One is a murderer if one reasons badly.” In 1950, William Faulkner, accepting the
Nobel Prize in Literature, told his audience (in a widely republished speech),
“I decline to accept the end of man…. I
believe that man will not merely endure; he will prevail.” Whether you find this admirable or ridiculous
(Greif leans toward ridiculous) it is an attempt to turn words and thoughts,
uttered in a certain attitude called “responsibility,” into an effective, even
imperative, way of engaging the world’s events.
It treats serious thinking, right naming, heroic intentions, as a high
form of action. In using the language of
responsibility, it purports to bring into being the agent of responsibility.
Well, you might think, the worst it
can achieve is nothing. Unfortunately,
that is overly optimistic. Discourses of
responsibility distract and confuse: they charge up the heart and blur the
mind; they invite bloody-minded shadow-boxing and a misplaced sense of having
done something by willing an argument over whether a thing is called by its
right name, and about the difference between enduring and prevailing. Indeed, the Anthropocene has inspired the New York Times to publish a piece of
high-seriousness worthy of 1950, an essay titled “Learning How to Die in the
Anthropocene,” which concludes, “this civilization is already dead” (emphasis original) and that the only way forward is
“to realize there’s nothing we can do to save ourselves” and therefore “get
down to the hard work … without attachment or fear.” It concludes, “If we want to learn to live in
the Anthropocene, we must first learn how to die.”
Frankly, I have no idea what this is
supposed to accomplish. It makes me feel
vaguely Stoic, which, in the twenty-first century, means vaguely American-Buddhist. It confirms my sense that halfway measures
won’t do much for climate change, and it also leaves me feeling that, if I
compose my feelings in the right way – with a little help from some sonorous
phrases – I will already be getting down to the hard work.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in the Times you can read the paper’s roving
environmental maven, Andrew Revkin, touting Peter Kareiva, the Nature
Conservancy’s lead scientist, who has drawn controversy by trashing
environmentalism as philosophically naïve and urging fellow conservationists to
give up on wilderness and embrace what the writer Emma Marris calls the
“rambunctious garden” of a world that is everywhere changed. In other words, the Anthropocene is both a
discourse of responsibility and a discourse of complacency. In some hands, it is the ultimate
catastrophe, the epochal disruption that will finally confront us with our real
situation in the world (as earlier generations thought the atom bomb, or World
War One, or the Holocaust might do). In
others, it is business as usual – and the business of business is business, as
the Nature Conservancy’s partnerships with Dow, Monsanto, Coca Cola, Pepsi, JP
Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and the mining giant Rio Tinto remind us.
This is the problem with a
charismatic, all-inclusive idea like the Anthropocene: it becomes, more or less
instantly and unavoidably, an all-purpose projection screen and amplifier for
whatever one happens to believe already.
Today, at least, it also becomes a branding strategy, a way to claim
newness and relevance, and an opportunity to slosh around your old plonk in an
ostentatiously factory-fresh and gleaming bottle.
More interestingly, if no less
frustratingly, Anthropocene talk also becomes an inadvertent meditation on the
devastating absence of any agent of responsibility – a state, or even a
movement – that could act on the scale of the problem. Indeed, it reveals that there is no agent that
could even define the problem; that
is, if the Anthropocene is about the relationship between humanity and the
planet, well, there is no “humanity” that agrees on any particular meaning and
imperative of climate change, extinction, toxification, etc., etc. The different negotiating positions of India,
China, Russia, Europe, and the United States over twenty-plus years to climate
talks are as much evidence of this as the chattering schisms of elite media and
even environmental movements. To think
about the Anthropocene is to think about being able to do nothing about
everything. No wonder the topic inspires
compensatory fantasies that the solution lies in refining the bottom line or
honing personal enlightenment – always, to be sure, in the name of some fictive
“we.”
The Anthropocene might be
particularly susceptible to this kind of confusion. Discourses of responsibility would make full
and complete sense only in certain elusive circumstances: a religious context
where words created an ontological community of meaning among speaker,
listeners, and a created world; or a political setting where a genuine unity of
attention made words in the public forum a fulcrum of joint action. The first of these is an object of nostalgia,
the second a project of utopia. It is
crushingly clear that neither of these conditions holds around here today. But “nature” has always stood for the mind of
God, and environmentalism has always traded in calls for “us,” the “community,”
and “humanity” to act on its supposedly self-evident truths. It has been a way of pretending to, or
seeking, more unity and clarity, and more integrity and force for words, than
there otherwise is.
Without that prop, talk of the
Anthropocene as a discourse of responsibility cannot make, to repeat, full and
complete sense. The question remains:
what kind(s) of sense can it help to make?
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