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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
Humans have become so powerful that we have disrupted the functioning of the Earth System as a whole, bringing on a new geological epoch - the Anthropocene - one in which the serene and clement conditions that allowed civilisation to flourish are disappearing and we quail before 'the wakened giant'. The emergence of a conscious creature capable of using technology to bring about a rupture in the Earth's geochronology is an event of monumental significance, on a par with the arrival of civilisation itself. What does it mean to have arrived at this point, where human history and Earth history collide? Some interpret the Anthropocene as no more than a development of what they already know, obscuring and deflating its profound significance. But the Anthropocene demands that we rethink everything. The modern belief in the free, reflexive being making its own future by taking control of its environment - even to the point of geoengineering - is now impossible because we have rendered the Earth more unpredictable and less controllable, a disobedient planet. At the same time, all attempts by progressives to cut humans down to size by attacking anthropocentrism come up against the insurmountable fact that human beings now possess enough power to change the Earth's course. It's too late to turn back the geological clock, and there is no going back to premodern ways of thinking. We must face the fact that humans are at the centre of the world, even if we must give the idea that we can control the planet. These truths call for a new kind of anthropocentrism, a philosophy by which we might use our power responsibly and find a way to live on a Defiant Earth.
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Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Preface: On Waking Up
Notes
Acknowledgments
1 The Anthropocene Rupture
A rupture in Earth history
Volition in nature
Earth System science
Scientific misinterpretations
The ecomodernist gloss
An epoch by any other name
Notes
2 A New Anthropocentrism
To doubt everything
Anthropocentrism redux
The antinomy of the Anthropocene
The new anthropocentrism
The world-making creature
The new anthropocentrism versus ecomodernism
In praise of technology
Notes
3 Friends and Adversaries
Grand narratives are dead, until now
After post-humanism
The freak of nature
The ontological wrong turn
Recovering the cosmological sense?
Notes
4 A Planetary History
The significance of humans
Does history have a meaning?
An Enlightenment fable
“Politics is fate”
Notes
5 The Rise and Fall of the Super-agent
Freedom is woven into nature
Responsibility is not enough
Living without Utopia
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Defiant Earth
The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene
Clive Hamilton
polity
Copyright © Clive Hamilton 2017
The right of Clive Hamilton to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2017 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1978-1
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Preface: On Waking Up
This is not a book of warning; it is a book groping toward an understanding of what it means after 200,000 years of modern humans on a 4.5 billion-year-old Earth to have arrived at this point in history, the Anthropocene. I say “groping toward” because the change has come upon us with disorienting speed. It is the kind of shift that typically takes two or three or four generations to sink in. Our best scientists tell us insistently that a calamity is unfolding, that the life-support systems of the Earth are being damaged in ways that threaten our survival. Yet in the face of these facts we carry on as usual. Most citizens ignore or downplay the warnings; many of our intellectuals indulge in wishful thinking; and some influential voices declare that nothing at all is happening, that the scientists are deceiving us. Yet the evidence tells us that so powerful have humans become that we have entered a new and dangerous geological epoch, defined by the fact that the “human imprint on the global environment has now become so large and active that it rivals some of the great forces of Nature in its impact on the functioning of the Earth system.”1
This bizarre situation, in which we have become potent enough to change the course of the Earth yet seem unable to regulate ourselves, contradicts every modern belief about the kind of creature the human being is. So for some it is absurd to suggest that humankind could break out of the boundaries of history and inscribe itself as a geological force in deep time. Humans are too puny to change the climate, they insist, so it is outlandish to suggest we could change the Geological Time Scale. Others assign the Earth and its evolution to the divine realm so that it is not merely impertinence to suggest that humans can overrule the Almighty but blasphemy. Many intellectuals in the social sciences and humanities do not concede that Earth scientists have anything to say that could impinge on their understanding of the world, because the “world” consists only of humans engaging with humans, with nature no more than a passive backdrop to draw on as we please. The “humans-only” orientation of the social sciences and humanities is reinforced in “mediatized” societies where total absorption in representations of reality derived from various forms of media encourages us to view the ecological crisis as a spectacle that takes place outside the bubble of our existence.
It is true that grasping the scale of what is happening requires not only breaking the bubble but also making the cognitive leap to Earth System thinking. It is one thing to accept that human influence has spread across the landscape, the oceans, and the atmosphere, but quite another to make the jump to understanding that human activities are disrupting the functioning of the Earth as a complex, dynamic, ever-evolving totality comprised of myriad interlocking processes. But consider this astounding fact.
With knowledge of the cycles that govern Earth’s rotation, including its tilt and wobble, paleo-climatologists are able to predict with reasonable certainty that the next ice age is due in 50,000 years’ time.2 Yet because carbon dioxide persists in the atmosphere for millennia, global warming from human activity in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is expected to suppress that ice age and quite possibly the following one, expected (other things being equal) in 130,000 years. If human activity occurring over a century or two can irreversibly transform the global climate for tens of thousands of years, we are prompted to rethink history and social analysis as a purely intra-human affair.
How should we understand the disquieting fact that a mass of scientific evidence about the Anthropocene, an unfolding event of colossal proportions, has been insufficient to induce a reasoned and fitting response? For many, the accumulation of facts about ecological disruption seems to have a narcotizing effect, all too apparent in popular attitudes to the crisis of the Earth System, and especially among opinion-makers and political leaders. A few have opened themselves to the full meaning of the Anthropocene, crossing a threshold by way of a gradual but ever-more disturbing process of evidence-assimilation or, in some cases, after a realization that breaks over them suddenly and with great force in response to an event or piece of information in itself quite small.
In German, Erlebnis can simply mean an event or occurrence in the course of life, the type of personal experience that was the hallmark of nineteenth-century Romanticism’s appeal to feeling. But it can also refer to an intense disruptive episode, one that makes an indelible impression, changing a life course, the kind of experience not so much integrated into a life but which relegates the old life to the past and inaugurates a new sensibility, “something unforgettable and irreplaceable, something whose meaning cannot be exhausted by conceptual determination.”3 Such a realization is not only a powerful emotional event but also one saturated with meaning. The subject often has the inexplicable feeling that the event has some purpose that asks to be understood. It is as if some force has intervened, creating a rupture that has meaning beyond the personal, a universal truth. And so beyond the science as such, the few alert to the plight of the Earth sense that something unfathomably great is taking place, “suffused with what is coming,”4 conscious that we face a struggle between ruin and the possibility of some kind of salvation.
So today the greatest tragedy is the absence of a sense of the tragedy. The indifference of most to the Earth System’s disturbance may be attributed to a failure of reason or psychological weaknesses; but these seem inadequate to explain why we find ourselves on the edge of the abyss. How can we understand the miserable failure of contemporary thinking to come to grips with what now confronts us? A few years after the second atomic bomb was dropped, Kazuo Ishiguro wrote a novel about the people of Nagasaki, a novel in which the bomb is never mentioned yet whose shadow falls over everyone. The Anthropocene’s shadow too falls over all of us. Yet the bookshops are regularly replenished with tomes about world futures from our leading intellectuals of left and right in which the ecological crisis is barely mentioned. They write about the rise of China, clashing civilizations, and machines that take over the world, composed and put forward as if climate scientists do not exist. They prognosticate about a future from which the dominant facts have been expunged, futurologists trapped in an obsolete past. It is the great silence. At a dinner party one of Europe’s most eminent psychoanalysts held forth ardently on every topic but fell mute when climate change was raised. He had nothing to say. For most of the intelligentsia, it is as if the projections of Earth scientists are so preposterous they can safely be ignored. Perhaps the intellectual surrender is so complete because the forces we hoped would make the world a more civilized place – personal freedoms, democracy, material advance, technological power – are in truth paving the way to its destruction. The powers we most trusted have betrayed us; that which we believed would save us now threatens to devour us. For some, the tension is resolved by rejecting the evidence, which is to say, by discarding the Enlightenment. For others, the response is to denigrate calls to heed the danger as a loss of faith in humanity, as if anguish for the Earth were a romantic illusion or superstitious regression. Yet the Earth scientists continue to haunt us, following us around like wailing apparitions while we hurry on with our lives, turning round occasionally with irritation to hold up the crucifix of Progress.
Notes
1
. Will Steffen, Jacques Grinevald, Paul Crutzen, and John McNeil, The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives,
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
A 369 (2011): 842–67, 843.
2
. David Archer,
The Long Thaw
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 149–57; Curt Stager,
Deep Future: The Next 10,000 Years of Life on Earth
(New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2011), 34–42.
3
. Hans-Georg Gadamer,
Truth and Method
(London: Bloomsbury, 1975), 61.
4
. Martin Heidegger,
Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event)
(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2012), 279.
Acknowledgments
Over three or four years this short book has been through several drafts, some radically different from their predecessors. I keep shifting my views, partly because when pushing at the boundaries of one’s understanding breakthroughs periodically occur, but more so because colleagues have pointed out contradictions, mistakes, and foolish detours. I feel privileged to be the beneficiary of many of my colleagues’ willingness to share their extraordinary knowledge, but if my intellectual debts are mountainous, then, unlike monetary ones, they are not onerous because they have been accumulated through so much generosity.
Many of the ideas in this book have emerged in the course of an engagement over the last few years with Bruno Latour, who did me the honour of reading two entire drafts. They were bruising encounters, but deeply provoking and sympathetic to the project and a quite different book emerged as a result.
Bron Szerszynski read an early draft and was kind enough to point me in some fruitful directions. Lisa Sideris provided a truly thought-provoking commentary that helped me resolve some weaknesses and contradictions in the argument. Adrian Wilding read certain key sections and was especially helpful with the philosophical references in the text. My friend Kjell Anderson read an early draft and provided a boost. Stephen Muecke posed some awkward questions to which I have tried to respond. Two anonymous readers provided both encouragement and challenges.
Conversations and email exchanges with an ever-generous Will Steffen have greatly extended and deepened my grasp of Earth System science. Jan Zalasiewicz has set me straight on various aspects of the science. My understanding of the development of this new science has been heavily influenced by my association with Jacques Grinevald, a wise collaborator who helped me see many things more clearly.
Dipesh Chakrabarty generously took time out from his pressured academic life to read a draft and pose challenging questions that forced me to make some big changes. His intellectual influence can readily be seen in the text. Thought-provoking exchanges with Alf Hornborg, Christophe Bonneuil, and Ingolfur Blühdorn helped shape my ideas, strengthen the arguments, and provide impetus to develop the ideas further.
My colleagues Stephen Pickard, Scott Cowdell, and Wayne Hudson very kindly gave their time and wisdom when they read a draft and told me of its weaknesses and strengths. My daily association with them at George Browning House is a blessing, for they create a rich and open-minded intellectual environment. Finally, I must thank Charles Sturt University for providing me with the freedom and support to pursue a speculative project like this one.
While the published text has been improved beyond measure as a result of the commentaries and advice from those I have mentioned, none is responsible for any of the remaining views.
1The Anthropocene Rupture
A rupture in Earth history
First, the science. The Geological Time Scale divides the Earth’s history into ages, epochs, periods, eras, and eons in ascending order of significance. The International Commission on Stratigraphy is considering officially adding a new epoch, the Anthropocene, to the scale. Stratigraphers – geologists who specialize in the study of rock layering – are perhaps the most tradition-bound members of a somewhat conservative profession; yet their decision has the most radical implications.
The principal reason for Earth scientists’ belief that the planet has shifted out of the previous epoch, the Holocene, lies in the rapid increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and its cascading effects throughout the Earth System. The system-changing forces of ocean acidification, species loss, and disruption of the nitrogen cycle add to the case. Human disturbance of the climate system is now detectable from the beginning of large-scale coal burning at the onset of the Industrial Revolution. The rise in atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide was gradual for the next 150 years, but became steep after World War II. Now a range of indicators shows sharp and unambiguous human disturbance to the Earth System from the end of World War II.1 The post-war period stands out, writes Earth scientist Will Steffen, “as one of the most remarkable in all of human history for its rapidity and pervasiveness of change.”2 Other Earth System scientists express it a little differently: “The last 60 years have without doubt seen the most profound transformation of the human relationship with the natural world in the history of humankind.”3
Long-term trends in global economic growth, resource use, and waste volumes show a sharp upturn after World War II, a period dubbed the “Great Acceleration” and that continues today. For this reason, expert opinion now dates the beginning of the new epoch from around 1945 rather than the end of the eighteenth century as first proposed.4 From a strictly stratigraphic point of view (the one most germane to the official decision on the new epoch), a million years hence the sharpest marker in the rock record will be the sudden deposition of radionuclides across the Earth’s surface as a result of nuclear explosions in 1945, known as the “bomb spike.” Although the nuclear age has not itself changed the functioning of the Earth System, the layer of radionuclides laid down in 1945 does mark the dawn of the era of US global hegemony and the astounding period of material expansion of the post-war decades, that is, of capitalism’s sublime success. We now understand what that success meant for the Earth System. It is measured most simply and strikingly by the Keeling Curve, showing the secular increase in carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere. Earth scientist James Syvitski puts it succinctly: “By any unbiased and quantitative measure humans have affected the surface of the Earth at a magnitude that ice ages have had on our planet, but over a much shorter period of time.”5 The course of the Earth System has been changed irrevocably.
To understand why these changes are effectively permanent consider global warming alone. Humans have redistributed the Earth System’s stock of carbon, a vital element that profoundly affects the climate. Large reserves of carbon that had over millions of years been immobilized as fossils deep beneath the Earth’s surface have been dug up, burned, and released in the system, where they will remain mobile in the atmosphere, oceans, and biosphere. It will probably be hundreds of thousands of years before most of this carbon can be rendered immobile again. In the meantime, the pulse of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere over a century or two is bringing changes that have everlasting consequences. Because they naturally draw carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, the oceans are already a third more acidic than they were before humans began burning fossil fuels on a large scale. Over a time-scale of many thousands of years, rising acidity disturbs the natural process of deposition of calcium carbonate on the deep seafloor.6 The destabilization of ice masses, such as glaciers and the Greenland ice-sheet, is not something that can be reversed except over tens of thousands of years. The possibility of an ice-free Earth over the next few centuries, bringing much higher sea levels, cannot be ruled out. Such a reconfiguration of the Earth System can be undone only over many millennia, if at all. In the words of 22 earth scientists writing in Nature, “the next few decades offer a brief window of opportunity to minimize [but not prevent] large-scale and potentially catastrophic climate change that will extend longer than the entire history of human civilization thus far.”7
A long time after humans disappear, or shrink to a position where we are no longer interfering in the Earth System, the great processes that drive planetary change – orbital forcing, plate tectonics, volcanism, natural evolution, and so on – will overwhelm human influences. But the planet will not settle into a state that looks anything like the Holocene – the 10,000-year epoch of mild and constant climate that permitted civilization to flourish. It has been diverted onto a different trajectory. Experts are already suggesting that the changes caused by humans in recent decades are so profound and long-lasting that we have entered not a new epoch but a new era – the Anthropozoic era – on a par with the break in Earth history brought by the arrival of multicellular life.8
So 1945 marks the turning point in the sweep of Earth’s history at which the geological evolution of the planet diverged from one driven by blind forces of nature to one influenced by a conscious, willing being, a new human-geological power. We are accustomed to the idea of humans as the agents that make history, and use the term “pre-history” for the period from the emergence of early humans to the invention of writing. Now we must concede what seemed impossible to contemplate – humans as agents changing the course of the deep history of the Earth, or rather of the Earth’s deep future, an event giving rise to what might be called “post-history.”
Although we are preoccupied with what the Anthropocene may mean for the future of humans, the present decades mark a transition in which Earth’s biogeological history itself enters a new phase, because the Earth’s history has become entangled with human history so that “the fate of one determines the fate of the other.”9 In a few short decades we have seen the entire history of the Earth – from its formation through to its eventual vaporization when the Sun finally explodes – split irrevocably into two halves – the first 4.5 billion years in which Earth history was determined by blind natural forces alone, and the remaining 5 billion years in which it will be influenced by a conscious power long after that power is spent. If humans disappear, then the great forces that drive the Earth System will continue and eventually erase the more obvious impacts of humans on the landscape. Even so, signs of the influence of humankind – its rise, fall, and enduring legacy – will be evident, not least in a disturbance in the rock record, a freakish band of a few hundred thousand years somewhere in the middle of the 10 billion-year record of the Earth.
Volition in nature
In all previous instances, transitions from one division to the next in the Geological Time Scale came about because of the gradual evolution of natural forces or, at times, a single massive event. These forces are unconscious and unintentional so that the feedback effects from one element to another are not filtered but exert their influence directly (albeit in complex ways). However, if the human imprint on the Earth System is so far-reaching that Homo sapiens now competes with the forces of nature in its impact on the way the planet as a whole functions, the human imprint is the effect of a force fundamentally unlike physical ones such as weathering, volcanism, asteroid strike, subduction, and solar fluxes. This new “force of nature” contains something radically different – the element of volition.
Global anthropogenic impacts, such as increases in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and disturbance to the nitrogen cycle, do not just happen but are the consequences, intended or otherwise, of decisions taken by human minds. In nature, as we have always understood it, the forces of nature are unconscious and involuntary; no decisions are made, so to comprehend humanity as a geological force we need to consider its distinctive quality, its volitional element. Humankind is perhaps better described not as a geological force but as a geological power, because we have to consider its ability to make decisions as well as its ability to transform matter. Unlike forces of nature, it is a power that can be withheld as well as exercised.
So for the first time in the Earth’s 4.5 billion-year history we have a non-physical force (which brings about physical effects) mixed in with physical forces, although it is not so much added to the pre-existing natural forces but in some sense infuses them and modifies their operation. And this new force can be integrated only imperfectly into the system of geodynamics used to explain the geological evolution of the planet. The uncertainty about how this new force will behave is the primary reason for the wide variation in projections of global warming over the twenty-first century. And it now seems certain that as long as humans are on the planet all future epochs, eras, periods, and so on will be hybrids of physical forces and this new power. No wonder there has been deep uneasiness in some sections of the geology profession about adding this weird division to official geochronology.
The inference that the Anthropocene is a profoundly new kind of division in the Geological Time Scale, and that 1945 marks an ontological shift in the deep history of the planet, can be reached another way. In deciding to add the Anthropocene to its geochronology the International Commission on Stratigraphy needs to agree, on the basis of stratigraphic indicators, that it is best classified as a geological epoch, as proposed. Some leading scientists are suggesting that deeming it an epoch – longer than an age but shorter than a period – is a conservative but appropriate decision. But they note that if society does not respond soon to the signs of climate disruption, then it may be necessary to upgrade the Anthropocene from an epoch to a period, or even to a new era, the Anthropozoic era, to succeed the current era, the Cenozoic, which began 66 million years ago.10
In other words, we are entering a geological episode whose designation depends not only on gathering and evaluating the available data, but also on human impacts on the Earth System that have not yet occurred. The verdict on the Anthropocene reached by the International Commission on Stratigraphy could be invalidated not by the discovery of new evidence that already exists, but by the generation of new evidence that may appear in the next few decades. That is impossible for every previous decision concerning the Geological Time Scale. The new geological epoch is radically distinct from all previous ones, so that 1945 may be thought of as the boundary that marks a break in Earth history of the greatest profundity; it divides the life span of Earth into two halves ontologically. In other words, the being-nature of the object itself has changed.
The historian Dipesh Chakrabarty has made the striking observation, pregnant with implications, that the arrival of the Anthropocene means that human history and geological history have converged, calling into question the modern conception of history as, in Jacob Burckhardt’s words, “the break with nature caused by the awakening of consciousness.”11 The initial divergence of the two histories can be traced to the emergence of the science of geology in the eighteenth century. Acceptance of its implications was slow. In the 1854 edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica we find “A Chronological Table from the Creation of the World to the Year 1854.” It begins: “B.C. 4004 Creation of the World, according to the Hebrew text of the Scriptures.” After centuries in which the European story of humans was part of the story of the Earth in the cosmology of Genesis, or similar myths of cosmogenesis in other cultures, it was geology’s discovery that the Earth is much older than humans, indeed much older than life, that gave the Earth its own history. It was only after nature acquired its own history that humans could acquire a history in the modern sense. An understanding of an independent human history became the foundation of all modern social sciences, so the convergence – or better, the collision – of human and Earth histories in the Anthropocene kindles the suspicion that all social sciences and their philosophical foundations have been built on an understanding of the historical process that is no longer defensible.
The convergence means that, contrary to our attempts to make ourselves free of the natural world, our future is tied to the fate of the Earth. Our disturbance of the Earth System has rendered it more unstable and unpredictable. Whereas industrialism’s essential aim has been to bring the natural world under human supervision, in practice the effect has been to leave it less controllable. If, as climatologist Kevin Trenberth has written, “all weather events are affected by [human-induced] climate change because the environment in which they occur is warmer and moister than it used to be,”12 every extreme event now has a human fingerprint. Flood, famine, fire, and pestilence can no longer be purely natural, so the theological distinction (also commonplace among the secular) between moral evil and natural evil collapses. What, we might now ask, does it mean to write insurance policies exempting the insurer from liability for “acts of God”? Humankind is now confronted with a momentous decision: to attempt to exert more control so as to subdue the Earth with greater technological power – the express purpose of some forms of geoengineering – or to draw back and practice meekness, with all of the social consequences that would follow.
Earth System science
The idea of the Anthropocene was conceived by Earth System scientists to capture the very recent rupture in Earth history arising from the impact of human activity on the Earth System as a whole.
I ask the reader to stop and read the above sentence again, taking special note of the phrases “very recent rupture” and “the Earth System as a whole.” Understanding the Anthropocene, and what humanity now confronts, is entirely dependent on a firm grasp of these concepts. As we will see, “the Anthropocene” has quickly become so encrusted with misreadings, misconceptions, and ideological co-optations that most who come to it for the first time are liable to be seriously misled. It is of the utmost importance to understand that the “Anthropocene” is not a term coined to describe the continued spread of human impacts on the landscape or further modification to ecosystems; it is instead a term describing a rupture in the functioning of the Earth System as a whole, so much so that the Earth has now entered a new geological epoch.
Whatever conclusions one might draw as to the ultimate causes and the solutions to the Anthropocene, an understanding of the basic science of it must come first. Such an understanding requires not much more than a careful reading of the half-dozen seminal papers in scientific journals, and yet most who lurch into print on the subject have not taken the time. (Ian Angus has now provided a superb overview of the science in the first part of his book Facing the Anthropocene.13)
First named by atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen in the year 2000, the Anthropocene is the name for a proposed new epoch to be added to the official Geological Time Scale that segments the entire history of the Earth.14
