Book review: - The Anthropocene Truism
After
Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene
By Jedediah Purdy
Reviewed by Katrina Forrester
The idea of the “Anthropocene” was first
proposed in the 1970s, and came into widespread use in the early 2000s.
Scientists began to argue that there had been a seismic temporal shift, from
the geological epoch inhabited by humans, known as the Holocene, to one in
which humankind had itself become an agent of geological change. Initially, the
term was adopted by the “global change” research community: natural and social
scientists studying global warming, climate change, and other planetary
“symptoms” of the Anthropocene era. By the late 2000s, the idea had been taken
up by geologists, who look to stratigraphic evidence—rocks, glacier ice, marine
sediment—to measure the chemical composition of the global atmosphere and chart
the impact of human activity on it. Later this year, the Anthropocene Working
Group of the International Commission on Stratigraphy will meet to decide
whether enough evidence exists (and, if so, whether it would be scientifically
useful) to designate the Anthropocene as an official geological epoch.
Among scientists, and
for those across the humanities—particularly environmental historians, who have
taken up the idea over the last decade—the question of exactly when the
Anthropocene began is still up for grabs. Some date it to the introduction of
fire, many others to the development of agriculture or the Industrial
Revolution; still others, for reasons less immediately obvious, insist on the
start of the Cold War. The chemist who introduced the idea tied its origins to
the geological changes (such as increased atmospheric CO2, methane,
nitrate, and lead concentrations) that occurred following the surge in coal and
other fossil-fuel use by the 1780s, but since then other, even more specific
dates have been fielded as geological markers—“golden spikes,” in stratigraphic
terms—denoting when atmospheric changes significant enough to warrant a break
in geological time took place.
One of these is 1610,
when atmospheric CO2 decreased abruptly as a result—scientists
claim—of the meeting of the Old World with the New, which caused the
cross-continental movement of plant and animal species and a massive decline in
population as the inhabitants of the Americas were decimated by war,
enslavement, famine, and exposure to unfamiliar diseases, leading to a
reforesting of much of the two continents. Another is July 16, 1945, when a
nuclear weapon was first detonated. There is also a broad consensus that the
combination of the nuclear age and the three decades of economic growth after
1950—dubbed the “Great Acceleration” for their increase in human activity, and
evidenced by a golden spike in stratigraphic deposits in 1964—at least mark the
second stage of the Anthropocene, if not its beginning. Which of these dates,
if any, is officially recognized, will bring with it considerable implications.
If the Anthropocene era is said to have begun with the Industrial Revolution,
it will be tied to climate change. If its origins are in 1610 (or the end of
the last ice age), the political ramifications are less clear.
Even if the debate
about the Anthropocene’s geological origins is set aside, the politics of the
idea looks increasingly controversial. Because the term assigns responsibility
for the transformation of nature to the human race, it has become as much a
call to collective responsibility as the name of a geological period. Some
environmentalists see the label as repeating the Enlightenment mistake of
anthropocentrism: To speak of the Anthropocene is to assume, wrongly, that
human beings, with their mastery of nature, are exceptional. For those who care
more about ecological and planetary life in general than the impact of climate
change on humans in particular, the very idea of the Anthropocene puts us on
the wrong footing (whether or not human beings are in fact most responsible for
environmental degradation). Others worry that although the idea of a
collectively responsible humanity could, in theory, prompt an earnest call to arms
against global warming, in practice it invites political fatalism. We might all
be collectively responsible for the mess we’re in, but politics isn’t exactly
stopping climate change, and the lesson of the Anthropocene seems to be one of
resignation to an impending apocalypse: We can do little more than wait, learn
to care for one another, and put our faith somewhere other than politics—most
likely in technology.
Another problem with
invoking the Anthropocene to argue that we’re all responsible for climate
change is the reverse implication that none of us are—that no one in particular
can be held to account. So as a call to politics, the Anthropocene looks a
little flimsy, even to its champions… read more:
http://www.thenation.com/article/the-anthropocene-truism/