By George Smith
The Anthropocene denotes a fundamental repositioning of humans, the “anthropos”, in the context of geological history. In a nutshell, it says that humans have become a force of nature. From deforestation, to exponentially increasing use of fossil fuels and the sharp increase in the use of materials like plastic and concrete, the ways human societies are living is leaving an indelible mark on the planet. In short, our impact on the Earth’s system, scientists and geologists say, will be evident in sedimentary rocks, ice cores, and growth rings in trees for millions of years into the future.
This radical proposal, which originated in the natural sciences, has significant implications for the ways in which we tell our human story, and how we think about living in the “age of the human”. Whilst it’s true that the Anthropocene narrative shines a light on our terrifying ecological predicament – climate change, deforestation, mass extinction, soil erosion etc. – it’s also a term filled with contradictions and assumptions that make it difficult to understand why we are facing this crisis, and how we are to think about taking action. In this short essay I’ll outline some of these contradictions and assumptions and conclude by offering one possible way of re-thinking the Anthropocene narrative.
Problem 1: the "anthropos" of the Anthropocene
Is it fair to lay the blame of our current environmental crisis at the feet of some undifferentiated, homogenous version of humanity? In other words, banished from the garden of Eden, corrupted in our fallen “anthropos”, are we all really equally complicit in the making of this crisis? The simple answer is no. According to The Ecological Footprint Network, the U.K. would require the ecological capacity of 2.7 Earths (as of 2016) to achieve sustainable levels of consumption. That figure rises to nearly 5 Earths for the U.S.A. Compare these figures with “developing” countries, like Senegal for example (0.7 Earths), and it becomes unequivocally clear that blame for this environmental crisis can’t be (mustn’t be) attributed equally amongst all “anthropos”.
In short, what the Anthropocene narrative does, by implicating all humanity in this epochal shift, is to depoliticise an inherently political issue: resource use and ecological destruction. Oil extraction, deforestation, industrial agricultural and fishing practices – in one seamless move, all these practices are cast into the bracket of “human nature”, an inalienable part of part DNA. As Jason Moore surmised,
the Anthropocene is fundamentally a “bourgeois concept”: “the rich and powerful create problems for us all, then tell us we’re all to blame” (2017: 599).
Problem 2: depicting our place in the natural world
Praise for the Anthropocene narrative says that it challenges us to think beyond “Euro-Modern” assumptions that nature is separate from humanity, that nature is just some objective background for our human lives. Now we are “geological agents” (Chakrabarty, 2009) our societal actions have geological impacts. And in this way, we can no longer assume our separation from the natural world – thus “a fundamental assumption of Western (and now universal) political thought has come undone in this crisis” argues Chakraborty (2009: 207).
Whilst this narrative isn’t entirely false, it nonetheless fudges and distorts the conception of our place within the natural world, reducing our complex entanglements with the natural world into over-simplistic binaries. The Anthropocene implies that humans, while once just “part of” the natural world, playing no ultimate role in its “natural” workings, have now replaced those powerful forces of nature (Bauer & Bhan, 2018). As the old Anthropocene adage goes: “we have become a force of nature”. This assumption, however, is a problematic for two reasons.
Firstly, it implies that pre-Anthropocene humans were somehow less capable of affecting the natural world than we “moderns” are today. Indeed, our modern city skylines, our complex transport networks, and our rapidly advancing technologies etc. all go on to remind us just how “different” we are. Yet anthropological and archaeological research would quickly tell us otherwise; for millennia ancient human societies have had profound impacts upon their environments. In the Amazon, for example, anthropologists and archaeologists have been studying anthropogenic soils called terra preta – dark, fertile soils that exist in an otherwise nutrient-deficient Amazon. These terra preta soils have been made fertile over as the organic waste from ancient communities has slowly accumulated over hundreds if not thousands of years. They are, moreover, indicative of how humans manipulate and affect their environments – even in pre-Anthropocene (“pre-modern”) societies.
Secondly, to assume humans have now become this “force of nature” is, again, to misunderstand how we are intrinsically bound-up in the natural world – how we always have been and always will be, even now amidst our most destructive societal behaviours. Take the Earth’s atmospheric conditions, for example. Humans alone do not create global-greenhouse emissions; they're instead the culmination of certain human-environment relations that allow such gasses to increase in mass Bauer & Bhan, 2018). If there were fewer trees on Earth, for instance, human fossil fuel use would have a greater climatic influence. These complex human-environment entanglements are not seemingly accounted for in the Anthropocene narrative, however. Instead it’s us humans who are now the force of nature on the "human planet”. In this sense,
the Anthropocene surely continues to “hold humans apart from nature” (Bauer & Bhan, 2018: 44).
Problem 3: the binary division of time
When did the Anthropocene, this human epoch, begin? This is a central question within Anthropocene debates. Arguments range from the beginning of humans using fire (Ruddiman 2003); to the first arrival of Europeans in the Americas (Lewis & Maslin 2017); to more recent historical events such as the great acceleration or the use first use of nuclear weapons.
However, these arbitrary breaks in time are problematic for several reasons. They imply a binary conception of time – a before and after. On one level, this profoundly mischaracterises the ways in which humans interact with the natural world, which is ultimately a continuous process involving a variety of different actors in divergent historical, cultural, political, and ecological contexts (Bauer & Ellis, 2018). On another level, this binary conception of time, which pervades Anthropocene thinking, also fundamentally shapes modern attempts to adapt in the Anthropocene.
Of course, it’s essential that we react to the environmental catastrophe that’s currently unfolding. However, whist doing so, holding on to these reductive binaries of pre/post Anthropocene is problematic. Beth Conklin and Laura Graham have pointed out the dangers of this kind of thinking in a seminal paper (1995) on Amazonian Indigenous identity in the context of the global environmental movement.
Indigenous Amazonians, they point out, can (and have) gained immense media coverage concerning their fight to conserve their environment. Whilst this has undoubtedly aided their efforts and given them a powerful global voice for the conservation of nature, it’s predicated on them fulfilling Western projections of what Native Amazonians must be – from their appearance, to the ways they live and behave. In other words, Indigenous Peoples are cast as “ecologically noble savages” – innocent and free from the corruption of the West’s destructive materialism, a people “dwelling in nature according to nature” (Conklin & Graham, 1995: 696). When such Peoples fail to fulfil this romanticised ideal, however, they are chastised as inauthentic, their voices pushed even further to the margins. When, for example, whole Indigenous communities are represented by just a few individual leaders who act out of self-interest or greed, the entire community is smeared as depraved and backward.
Constructing binaries between pre/post Anthropocene worlds encourages precisely this kind of reification of Indigenous Peoples, which in turn leads to their inevitable marginalisation and vilification. Of course, Indigenous voices are indispensable given the environmental crisis we find ourselves in. However, these voices must be listened to as intrinsically valuable, not as Western projections of Peoples living in some pre-Anthropocene Eden.
Conclusion
The contradictions and pitfalls of the Anthropocene narrative, which I have briefly sketched out in this short essay, ultimately derive from its “modern” assumptions about the world and our place in it. These modern assumptions are two-fold: 1) that nature is ontologically distinct from culture, and 2) that time is something linear through with we are continually “progressing”.
The aim of this essay, however, is not to reject outright the introduction of the Anthropocene narrative; it has undoubtedly enlivened environmental discourses immeasurably. Instead, my aim here has been to demonstrate that as long as the Anthropocene clings to its modern assumptions of the natural world, the driving forces of the environmental crisis will go unchecked, and potential “non-modern” solutions ignored. The challenge for the Anthropocene narrative, then, is to recast the environmental crisis precisely as a “modern” problem. In this sense, as a concluding thought, we might turn to one of the many “anthropo-scenes” (Lorimer, 2017) that have arisen in response to the Anthropocene project: the “anthropo-not-seen” (De la Cadena, 2015).
The anthropo-not-seen reconceptualises the environmental crisis not as an epochal shift in which (all) humans have become a force of nature, but as a war against the non-modern, invariably indigenous, “world-making practices” that ignore the sharp separation of entities into nature and culture (De la Cadena, 2015). In other words, the anthropo-not-seen recognises how the root of the unfolding environmental catastrophe we are facing lies in the modern ontological assumption that nature is something objective, a “resource” to be exploited, and that the solution to our predicament is therefore to be found amongst those human groups (the unseen anthropos) who have radically different, non-modern, conceptions of the natural world. As Arturo Escobar has neatly put it:
“we are facing modern problems for which there are no longer modern solutions” (2015: 15).
References
Bauer, A. M., & Bhan, M. (2018). Climate Without Nature: A Critical Anthropology of the Anthropocene, Cambridge University Press
Bauer, A. M., & Ellis, E. C. (2018). The Anthropocene Divide: Obscuring Understanding of Social-Environmental Change. Current Anthropology, 59(2), pp. 209-227
Chakrabarty, D. (2009). The Climate of History: Four Theses. Critical Inquiry, 35(2), pp. 197–222
Conklin, B. A., Graham, L. R., & Graham, L. R. (2016). The Shifting Midlle Ground: AmazoInian Inians and Eco-Politics,97(4), pp. 695–710.
De La Cadena, M. (2015). Uncommoning Nature,E-Flux Journal #65 Supercommunity,May - August 2015, [online] available at: http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/authors/marisol-de-la-cadena/
Escobar, A. (2016). Thinking-feeling with the earth: Territorial struggles and the ontological dimension of the epistemologies of the south.AIBR Revista de Antropologia Iberoamericana, 11(1), pp. 11–32
Lewis, S., Maslin, M. (2018), The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene, Penguin Random House, UK
Lorimer, J. (2017), 'The Anthropocene-scene: a guide for the perplexed', Social Studies of Science, 47(1), pp. 117 - 142
Moore, J. (2017), ‘The Capitalocene Part I: on the nature and origins of our ecological crisis’, The Journal of Peasant Studies, 43 (3), pp. 494 – 630
Ruddiman, WF. (2003). The anthropogenic greenhouse era began thousands of years ago, Climatic Change61: 261–293.
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