The Anthropocene and its Discontents
By Michael Coleman
Article originally published in Issue 5 of Rupture, Ireland’s eco-socialist quarterly, buy the print issue:
Upon the publication of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s recent report, the headline for the Guardian’s analysis read as follows: ‘IPCC report’s verdict on climate crimes of humanity: guilty as hell’ [1]. This kind of language reflects what has become a very common way of thinking about the environmental turmoil that has been unleashed in recent decades and appears to only be intensifying, that we live in the era of ‘humanity’ as a collective actor over nature whose imprint on the global environmental system rivals that of many of the ‘great forces of Nature’ [2]. Therefore, the logic goes, we must understand climate change through the lens of humanity’s collective impact on the natural world. Speaking in this register, the Guardian article goes on to state ‘The repeatedly ignored warnings of scientists over past decades have now become reality. Humanity, through its actions, or lack of action, has unequivocally overheated the planet’ [3]. This kind of understanding of the climate crisis, along with a constellation of related views and frameworks, comes under the rubric of a concept known as the Anthropocene.
At its most fundamental, the Anthropocene represents a claim that we are living through a new geological epoch characterised by the unique impact of humanity upon the natural world, a claim that in many ways appears empirically incontrovertible. But it is a way of thinking and talking about climate change and environmental destruction that has become "common sense" and has escaped the confines of dry academic debate and filtered through into the awareness of a much broader audience, capturing the imagination in a way that must have been beyond the wildest dreams of even the most ambitious scholars of geological timescale nomenclature. Some, however, have raised a number quite worrying concerns about this way of understanding climate change and environmental devastation more generally; could, for example, the idea that ‘humanity’ is guilty, rather than a specific fraction of humanity or a system we live under, lead us to pathologise the cause of climate change as an inherent part of human civilisation, a kind of original sin that lay latent within early humans from the moment we began to control and utilise fire?
“ “Could... the idea that ‘humanity’ is guilty, rather than a specific fraction of humanity or a system we live under, lead us to pathologise the cause of climate change as an inherent part of human civilisation?””
In response to concerns like this, many scholars and climate activists have proposed a different concept, ‘the Capitalocene’ which challenges the "common sense" of the Anthropocene and lays the guilt for environmental degradation firmly at the feet of capital; not just as an economic system but more fundamentally as a way of organising nature. The purpose of this article is not necessarily to dismiss wholesale the idea of the Anthropocene, it is rather to think it through and identify some of the lines of inquiry by which it may mystify more than reveal the problems we face and their root cause, leading the environmental movement astray in the process.
The Anthropocene Discourse
Before we can assess the Anthropocene as a framework, it is first necessary to understand more substantially what it is and how it draws various ideas and ways of thinking under its umbrella. To begin, we can be certain about its origins and initial meaning. In 2000, Paul Crutzen, a Nobel Prize winner for work on the Ozone Layer, declared at a conference that ‘We’re no longer in the Holocene but the Anthropocene’ [4]. In 2002, Crutzen laid out what he meant by this. Geologists typically speak of distinct geological epochs, visible in the fossil record, the transition between which represented fundamental changes in the conditions on the Earth. For example, the Pleistocene - characterized by repeated ice ages in the northern hemisphere - began 2.5 million years ago and the Holocene - the end of the last ice age - which had been considered the current epoch, began about 11,500 years ago. Crutzen felt that we had actually transitioned into another new epoch, arguing that ‘it seems appropriate to assign the term “Anthropocene” to the present, in many ways human-dominated, geological epoch.’He put the date of the beginning of this new human epoch as 1784, when James Watt discovered the steam engine, symbolising the start of the Industrial Revolution and the carbonification of the atmosphere [5]. The Anthropocene does not yet have official status as a geological epoch (a task force of stratigraphers has been established for this purpose [6]), but this hasn’t stopped an array of scientists, social scientists, philosophers and historians, as well as journalists, politicians and ordinary citizens, from rallying around its compelling and persuasive central kernel, the idea that humanity has become a geological force comparable to the onset or disappearances of the ice ages of the past.
Beyond, but still drawing from, its technical meaning as a geological epoch, the Anthropocene ultimately ends up implying different ideas and conclusions to different people. With such a diversity of disciplines drawing on it, it is natural that we would see a diverse set of understandings and emphases blossom, but through this it still acts as a kind of central web within which different competing ideas and perspectives can be held. In this way, it makes sense to think of the Anthropocene as a discourse rather than a more concrete concept with a definition everybody agrees on and clearly defined boundaries. The Anthropocene has essentially become an interweaving and recurring set of themes developed in a myriad of ways by various exponents. As the ecologist Eileen Crist puts it, the ‘Anthropocene themes braid, and the braided rope is its discourse’ [7]. Crucially, this discourse has by now moved well beyond the central and initial claim of Anthropocene thinking that humanity’s impact on the Earth will be visible to future geologists, even as it remains the putative starting point. Some of the key themes that tend to crop up as firm articles of faith under the rubric of the Anthropocene, then, include the idea that the Earth’s human population will continue to grow; economic growth and consumer culture will remain the leading social models; we now live on a domesticated planet, with wilderness gone for good; and technology, including risky, centralized, and industrial-scale systems, should be embraced as our destiny and even our salvation [8].
The problems with ‘humanity’ as the protagonist of reality
As we can see from the above, a central and growing thread on this rope is the idea that ‘humanity’ as collective has become the master of the Earth and environment, that it should embrace this role and that this has happened in a way that is irreversible, except perhaps through our own extinction as the more pessimistic advocates of Anthropocene thinking are all too keen to remind us. There is in this way a simultaneous naive techno-optimism and fatalism at the heart of Anthropocene discourse that is worth unpacking here. Key to either perspective is a sort of determinist logic that tries to explain the Industrial Revolution and the rise of steam power as ultimately inevitable occurrences. In this view, these were events decided long before the first steam powered mills opened, based on something inherent in human nature, as opposed to being the result of historically contingent social relations. Often this comes back to the discovery of fire. When in the ancient past our ancestors learned how to control fire, the ‘path to the fossil economy was set’ [9]. Some Anthropocene thinkers have described this event as the ‘evolutionary trigger’ for the Anthropocene, attributing industrial society to the fact that a specific ‘primate species learned how to tap the energy reserves stored in detrital carbon’, and have referred to humans as ‘the fire-ape, Homo pyrophilis’ [10][11][12].
We see in this, then, the potential tendency of Anthropocene thinking to cast humankind as the fated masters of planet Earth, the protagonists of existence. One might wonder what the harm in this actually is, aside from hubris. It is first worth noting here that the view is incorrect (more on that below), but even beyond that it can infect our thinking of the contemporary climate and biodiversity crises in some very dangerous ways. The implication here of some kind of trans-historical human nature that stands apart from material social relations should already be setting alarm bells ringing for Marxists, who will note that when something is described as human nature there is usually an ideological sleight of hand going on that obscures contingent material relations and the interests of the class that benefits from them. Of course the irony here is that the Anthropocene was initially meant to do the exact opposite; the idea was to denaturalise the causes of climate change by removing it from the sphere of natural causes and into the sphere of human activities. This was only for it to be renaturalised in the next instant by being attached to an inherent human trait. Nature merely reappears in the form of a confused conception of eternal, unchanging human nature.
““When something is described as human nature there is usually an ideological sleight of hand going on that obscures contingent material relations and the interests of the class that benefits from them””
The idea of a natural human trait fuelling climate change imbues humanity as a whole with a sense of what historians of science refer to as ‘geodestiny’, something that is apprehended with a simultaneous sense of elation and despondency [14]. The elation comes from the almost intoxicating sense of possibility that the image of humans being masters of the world invokes. This of course has its own problems, but of more concern here is despondency. This is a path that is easy to follow if one accepts the truth of humanity’s geodestiny. It is not difficult for fatalism to set in because if we accept the idea that humanity became a geological force capable of controlling nature, then it is all too simple to follow the logical thread and assume the way that control has been exercised is itself down to human nature in some sense. On this view any attempt to avert climate disaster appears pointless because there is a madness and destructiveness inherent to humans that can never be overcome. This is a line that some people have all-too-easily followed, Roy Scranton, for example, has argued in the cheerfully titled ‘Learning to Die in the Anthropocene’ that ‘The greatest challenge we face is a philosophical one: understanding that this civilisation is already dead’ [15], and the claim that the environmental movement should simply disband and admit defeat has become a troublingly common one in some quarters. [16] I am inclined to agree with Andreas Malm here, who has described climate fatalism as ‘this side of climate denial the most despicable of positions’, [17] but at the same time it is not difficult to see how smart people can fall into this quagmire having accepted the tenet that climate change has been caused by something inherent to human nature.
Ultimately if we are to find our way out of the climate crisis, we need to dismantle the claim that it is anything to do with inherent human nature. As Mark Fisher has so astutely put it, ‘emancipatory politics must always destroy the appearance of a ‘natural order’, must reveal what is presented as necessary and inevitable to be a mere contingency, just as it must make what was previously deemed to be impossible seem attainable.’ [18]. When we begin to do this, we start to see that the so-called natural and inevitable behaviour of humans in changing the climate is in fact something enmeshed with capitalist social relations.
Capitalocene
In many ways the development of Anthropocene thinking has been about the abandonment of particularity in favour of abstract generality. The formerly Marxist historian Dipesh Chakravorty, for example, has spoken of the insufficiency of critiquing capital in the age of the Anthropocene instead insisting that the critical lens be aimed at humanity as a whole, arguing that ‘humans – thanks to our numbers, the burning of fossil fuel, and other related activities – have become a geological agent on the planet’ [19]. There is much lost, however, when we lose sight of the particular components of humanity more responsible for climate change than others. This is because the choice to embrace fossil fuel and steam power in the late 18th and early 19th century was not one made by ‘humanity’, but rather by a small band of British capitalists who collectively made up the tiniest fraction of a percentage of the global population. One might respond quite reasonably to this observation by pointing out that this isn’t the time to be playing the blame game; regardless of who was the first mover, it is the responsibility of every human now. From an outside perspective, the cause for these environmental changes has come from within humanity, regardless of whether or not we should blame all of it, and as such a species based concept like Anthropocene is suitable. The idea that this specific change has come from within humanity in some sense is certainly true, and is perhaps the best reason not to jettison entirely the idea of the Anthropocene, but it also elides something of fundamental importance- climate change and environmental destruction is rooted in the social. That is to say, the social relations of a given system, whether that be under feudalism, capitalism or something else, manifest and materialise throughout the rest of nature. In doing so, they change nature but in distinct ways based on the form social relations take within that system [20]. The environmental footprint of feudalism, for example, took a very different form to that of capitalism. It was not biological destiny that brought about the Industrial Revolution nor is it this that maintains the burning of fossil fuels. Rather, it is a set of social divisions between human beings and a global structure that allowed and motivated those British capitalists to make the decisions they did and which continues to compel their successors to make similar decisions. As Jason W. Moore points out, the perspective of the Anthropocene is capable of telling us that humans have become a geological force, which is a useful observation, but it is entirely incapable of telling us how this happened [21]. Locating the main cause of our current crisis in the establishment and maintenance of capitalism and imperialism, the ‘Capitalocene’ is the best analytic tool we have for this task.
The explosion of steam power and the Industrial Revolution was not a completely random event in the history of climate change that came out of nowhere to change everything, but nor was it inevitable due to human nature. Instead, it was the direct consequence of a global system of capitalist imperialism at which Britain lay at the head. As Malm and Hornborg explain, the logic of investing in steam power was born out by ‘the opportunities provided by the constellation of a largely depopulated New World, Afro-American slavery, the exploitation of British labour in factories and mines, and the global demand for inexpensive cotton cloth.’ [22] Steam engines could only be installed by the owners of means of production, operating in this specific social and economic context. It is also important to stress the imperial nature of this system. Mass production through steam power required (and still requires) huge volumes of raw materials such as cotton. Britain on its own simply would never have had the physical space to produce such raw materials, but what it did have was an Empire. Thanks to its imperial power, and also due to the fact that genocide of indigenous peoples had left vast swathes of the Americas open to use as plantations, large parts of the world were put to work producing these raw materials to the exclusion of their own independent development. Put simply, the inequalities in the early capitalist global order were the very things that made human-induced climate change possible. The form of this kind of relationship has altered considerably since this time, but a lot of the fundamentals remain strikingly similar. [23] Whether it be in terms of using their physical space to produce raw materials, or in plundering their natural resources (human and non human), ‘developed’ capitalist countries are built off the appropriation of nature in the rest of the world. And this is what has enabled so much of the overproduction and growth that has characterised the last century or so. Indeed, economists have suggested that at least two-thirds of the growth seen in the Western world following World War 2, a time generally considered to be a golden age of capitalism, was driven purely by increased use of fossil fuels needed to process the volume of raw materials extracted from elsewhere in the world [24]. The Capitalocene is therefore a perspective that allows us to connect the dots between the problems our world faces- it is not just that the inequalities created by capitalism are unjust, it’s that their creation and perpetuation engender the very conditions that make the current warming of the planet possible.
“ “The social relations of a given system, whether that be under feudalism, capitalism or something else, manifest and materialise throughout the rest of nature””
Another way the Capitalocene allows us to join the dots, is that it enables us to see capitalism not just as a socio-economic system, but as a way of organising nature and a way of making the world. Capitalism is a particular form of environment-making which is distinct in the way it puts things and people to work. In maximising its return on investment, it seeks to extract as much value as possible from working people and the appropriation of what Jason W. Moore calls ‘cheap natures’ in order that they be used as inputs for commodity production. This is a category that includes labour-power, but also food, energy and raw materials. Moore argues that this points to one of capitalism’s dirty secrets; that it was built upon a tendency to cast large parts of humanity, such as indigenous people, enslaved Africans and most women as a part of nature separated from humanity-at-large (usually rich white men) so that they could be better exploited as cheap natures in this way. Once again, we see the roots of our climate crisis- a particular kind of logic, that of cheap nature, rationalised imperial plunder and through that plunder the global capitalist system was born and maintained, its inequities making the exploitation of fossil fuels possible.
Conclusion
Regardless of what I have said here, the Anthropocene has in many ways represented a serious advancement in our thinking of climate crisis. It recognises the undeniable fact that humans have played an instrumental role in the warming of the planet, and the invocation of humans as a geological force and the new era brought about by this points to the fact that we are at a tipping point of sorts and that tinkering at the margins is not sufficient. One could even see a certain emancipatory potential in the idea of choosing to inhabit the Anthropocene collectively and democratically as some authors have called for (25). However, there are certain dangerous pitfalls if we begin to fully follow the logic of Anthropocene thinking, and for this reason it is necessary to draw upon other concepts to inform our theorising of the climate crisis. The idea of the Capitalocene provides us with an array of vital tools for this task.
Notes
2. Will Steffen et al. ‘The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives’ Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society A. (2011), 369: p.842-867
4. Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene (Verso Books, London, 2017), p.3
5. Paul J. Crutzen. ‘Geology of Mankind ‘, Nature (2002), 414; p.23
6. Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene (Verso Books, London, 2017), p.5
7. Eileen Crist, ‘On the Poverty of Our Nomenclature’, in Jason W. Moore (ed.) Anthropocene or Capitalocene? (PM Press, Oakland, 2016)
8. Ibid
9. Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg, ‘The Geology of Mankind? A Critique of the Anthropocene Narrative’ The Anthropocene Review (2014), 1; p.63
10. Michael Raupach and Josep Canadell ‘Carbon and the Anthropocene’ Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability (2010) 2: p.210–218
11. Will Steffen et al. ‘The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives’ Philosophical Transactions of The Royal Society A. (2011), 369: p.842-867
12. Mark Lynas The God Species: How the Planet Can Survive the Age of Humans. (Fourth Estate, London, 2011)
13. Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg, ‘The Geology of Mankind? A Critique of the Anthropocene Narrative’ The Anthropocene Review (2014), 1; p.65
14. Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene (Verso Books, London, 2017), p.93
15. Roy Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene. (City Lights Publisher, San Francisco, 2015)
16. See, for example, https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v36/n20/paul-kingsnorth/the-four-degrees
17. Andreas Malm, How To Blow Up a Pipeline, (Verso Books, London, 2021)
18. Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism, (Zero Books, London, 2009), p.17
19. Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’, Critical Inquiry (2009) 35; p.212
20. Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg, ‘The Geology of Mankind? A Critique of the Anthropocene Narrative’ The Anthropocene Review (2014), 1; p.66
21. Jason W. Moore, ‘The Rise of Cheap Nature’ in Jason W. Moore (ed.) Anthropocene or Capitalocene? (PM Press, Oakland, 2016)
22. Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg, ‘The Geology of Mankind? A Critique of the Anthropocene Narrative’ The Anthropocene Review (2014), 1; p.63
23. Gael Giraud and Zeynep Kahraman, ‘How Dependent is Growth from Primary Energy? Output Energy Elasticity in 50 Countries (1970-2011), parischoolofeconomics.eu
24.Jason W. Moore, ‘The Rise of Cheap Nature’ in Jason W. Moore (ed.) Anthropocene or Capitalocene? (PM Press, Oakland, 2016)