The term "Anthropocene"
Continued from the Home page….
Stratigraphers coined the term “Anthropocene” to designate a new human-caused geological age, and they are working to date the beginning of it. Was it the onset of the Industrial Revolution? Was it the use of nuclear weapons? Or, was it even earlier with the invention of agriculture? Whether and or when the collective behavior of our species has ushered in a new geological age is somewhat in dispute. What is not in dispute is the staggering effect of the human footprint on systems that support life on earth as we have known it. My article on the Anthropocene attempted to understand the grip that the Anthropocene idea has come to have on so many people in so many disciplines.
The term has become entrenched in the humanities, the social sciences, popular culture, and the arts. It may refer to an all-encompassing dystopian metanarrative, a story calling for responsible stewardship, a Promethean planetary managerialism by experts in geoengineering, an ideology, or as Clive Hamilton’s book title reflects, a “requiem for the species.” Obviously, it is at the very least a marker for a growing awareness of our relative helplessness in relation to systems that reach far beyond us.
It is also about the effects of what social ecologist Murray Bookchin called “grow or die” capitalism. Indeed, some, such as Jason Moore, prefer the term Capitalocene. Our fossil fuel-based economy—and really, our fossil fuel-based form of life since the Industrial Revolution—now means that everything we consume in some way depends on fossil fuel use. We drink microplastics and sea life becomes sea-dead. We are caught in a system not of our making, but which we nonetheless continue to make. Even though capitaIism has accelerated the process, I opt for Anthropocene as the broader, more fitting term
The term Anthropocene is apt because humans are center stage in an epic drama about the aggregated effects of their own successes in relation to unpredictable processes indifferent to them. The world has become—literally—strange. Each of us, if we attend to the magnitude of the disruption for any length of time—and I recommend rationing that attention for the sake of one’s mental health—feels what it is like to be a member of an endangered species. We are probably the only creatures able to think about ourselves as such. It doesn’t take much effort to extrapolate from our own individual vulnerability to the vulnerability of others. And then to the vulnerability of ecosystems. However, it is precisely this awareness that may be our salvation—along with our astounding capacity for creativity.
What all Anthropocene narratives share, whether they stem from the sciences or the humanities is an anxious attempt to wrap our heads around our place in relation to increasingly erratic disruptions to many Earth systems. Some say we must adjust our thinking to embrace the “planetary.” Planetary boundaries of climate, biosphere integrity (biodiversity loss), land-system change (deforestation, desertification), and altered biogeochemical cycles that were relatively stable during the approximately 11,000-year Holocene age have been breached. In 2022, a new boundary called “novel entities” was identified, i.e., plastics and chemicals that have increased pollution, harmed biodiversity, and have long-lasting effects we cannot yet fathom.
The Anthropocene concept collects many scientific studies, as well as stories, fears, and hopes–all pointing to the fact that our species must learn to adapt to a world that will continue to change radically even if we stop using fossil fuels today. “Anthropocene” names what our species—Anthropos—has wrought, an awareness of planetary processes slipping out of our control, and the startling realization they were never under our control to begin with.
Narratives
The Anthropocene can be understood as a kind of narrative or story that includes many substories. Perhaps this means competing accounts of our place in the web of life and in planetary time and space, as well as our prospects. A word about narrative: humans orient themselves in stories, e.g., a story of who I am, moral stories about what’s right and what’s not, a story about my country and the countries of others, and so on. We are all involved in narratives: I am someone’s daughter, a part of someone’s family, reside in a location with customs and values. Humans cannot do without narratives because they cannot do without some way of trying to make sense of experience. Narratives that do not synch up with reality usually perish, often after leading to injustice and great damage. The Anthropocene has to potential to upend all of the narratives we have relied on for orientation.
Narrative also has a broader meaning. It can refer to the background story that holds things together behind our backs and shapes whole civilizations. For example, the progress narrative associated with modernity and modern science is one of those. It has brought our species scientific advances as well as conceptions of rights and justice. But it also brought us colonialism, runaway capitalism that penetrates every nook and cranny of our lives, and environmental catastrophes that the Anthropocene stories, debates, and scientific accounts chronicle. What does it mean that Holocene stability is giving way to conditions that challenge survival? The Anthropocene literature confronts this question on many fronts.
This is not an either/or proposition, i.e., that we can or should reject modern progress. There is no good reason to reject the good that the modern progress narrative brought us. However, when enough people suffer from the downside of of what used to be an unquestioned story about our prospects and related goals, counternarratives emerge. People caught in the maelstrom try to make sense of chaos and feel their way forward in a new compelling story. Competing accounts of the Anthropocene involve debates about possible directions we can or should take given an assessment of the environmental damage done. These are dangerous times, but they are also times when new directions can and are being taken. Will populism, sectarianism, distrust of science, distrust of people who look different–all fueled by conspiracy theories–morph into something akin to fascism? Will the narratives reminding us of our place in the web of life gather strength and prevail?
Anthropocene and the Progress Story
Paradoxically, the negative, “doomism” Anthropocene narrative is an outcome of the modernist progress narrative of ever-increasing growth, prosperity, and well-being. This mantra for growth has not factored in the externalities, or the delusion of total freedom to extract resources and pollute habitats cost free. The progress idea has been under attack for decades, even though some speak of a “good Anthropocene,” brought to us by the power of geoengineering (some of which may become necessary). Undergirding the progress story is the metaphor of a mechanistic metaphysics, which understands reality as quantifiable, measurable, controllable—and dead.
Metaphysics is simply the word philosophers have used since Aristotle for the segment of philosophy that tries to answer the question: “What is real?” However, how we conceptualize “reality” has consequences. Many environmental thinkers have written about the downside of understanding nature as a dead mechanism, for example Carolyn Merchant’s well-known book The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution and historian Lynn White’s seminal essay “The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis.” Since then, authors contesting this background metaphysics of dead nature are too numerous to mention here.
The oscillation between doomism and belief in a technological silver bullet is also an outcome of the Platonist and Christian metaphysics that define reality as a dualism between mind and matter or body and the soul. This metaphysics accords primacy of place to the immaterial and affirms our separation from and dominion over nature. As Merchant and White wrote, this understanding of reality melded seamlessly into the modern scientific and technological revolution. This doesn’t mean that science and technology haven’t helped us or won’t continue to help us produce astonishing inventions plus advances in medicine. But this progress won’t continue unalloyed unless it is subordinated to emergent narratives that foster subduing our excesses and recognizing our embeddedness in what we have historically called the “natural world.” It is unclear at this point what “natural” means given that there is no ecosystem our species has not affected. “Human-made materials now equal the weight of all life on Earth,” writes Maddie Stone for National Geographic. Human behavior has continually reduced the “carrying capacity,” or ability of regions and ecosystems to support life. We can choose to keep understanding reality mechanistically and ourselves as atomistic, competitive preference-satisfying individuals. It is also possible to join those engaging in regenerative practices or forming institutions that embody emerging biological metaphors of living systems as the underlying reality. In this latter narrative, humans are simply very clever social animals and part of an interconnected but threatened web of life.