Fueling Culture

101 Words for Energy and Environment

Jennifer Wenzel, Patricia Yaeger, Imre Szeman, Imre Szeman

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780823273928
• Topic: Ciencias biológicas
• Subtopic: Ecología

How has our relation to energy changed over time? What differences do particular energy sources make to human values, politics, and imagination? How have transitions from one energy source to another—from wood to coal, or from oil to solar to whatever comes next—transformed culture and society? What are the implications of uneven access to energy in the past, present, and future? Which concepts and theories clarify our relation to energy, and which just get in the way? Fueling Culture offers a compendium of keywords written by scholars and practitioners from around the world and across the humanities and social sciences. These keywords offer new ways of thinking about energy as both the source and the limit of how we inhabit culture, with the aim of opening up new ways of understanding the seemingly irresolvable contradictions of dependence upon unsustainable energy forms.Fueling Culture brings together writing that is risk-taking and interdisciplinary, drawing on insights from literary and cultural studies, environmental history and ecocriticism, political economy and political ecology, postcolonial and globalization studies, and materialisms old and new.Keywords in this volume include: Aboriginal, Accumulation, Addiction, Affect, America, Animal, Anthropocene, Architecture, Arctic, Automobile, Boom, Canada, Catastrophe, Change, Charcoal, China, Coal, Community, Corporation, Crisis, Dams, Demand, Detritus, Disaster, Ecology, Electricity, Embodiment, Ethics, Evolution, Exhaust, Fallout, Fiction, Fracking, Future, Gender, Green, Grids, Guilt, Identity, Image, Infrastructure, Innervation, Kerosene, Lebenskraft, Limits, Media, Metabolism, Middle East, Nature, Necessity, Networks, Nigeria, Nuclear, Petroviolence, Photography, Pipelines, Plastics, Renewable, Resilience, Risk, Roads, Rubber, Rural, Russia, Servers, Shame, Solar, Spill, Spiritual, Statistics, Surveillance, Sustainability, Tallow, Texas, Textiles, Utopia, Venezuela, Whaling, Wood, Work For a full list of keywords in and contributors to this volume, please go to: http://ow.ly/4mZZxV

Anthropocene 1

Dipesh Chakrabarty

The International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) names the current epoch the Holocene (“entirely recent”), which began about 11,700 years ago, after the last major ice age (Stromberg 2013). Many students of the Earth’s climate argue that, in view of human effects on the biosphere, this name is no longer adequate. They suggest that we may have entered a new geological epoch when humanity acts on the planet as a geophysical force: the Anthropocene. The first statement in this regard was made jointly by Paul J. Crutzen, a Nobel Prize–winning chemist from the Max Planck Institute, and Eugene F. Stoermer, a former biologist. In a note published by the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) in 2000, they argued that the “impact of human activities on earth and atmosphere . . . at all, including global, scales” made it “more than appropriate to emphasize the central role of mankind in geology and ecology” (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000, 17). In an essay in Nature, Crutzen restated the argument that “anthropogenic emission of carbon dioxide” could make the global climate “depart significantly from natural behaviour for many millennia to come” and proposed Anthropocene to name “the present, in many ways human-dominated, geological epoch” (2002, 23).

However, Crutzen and Stoermer were not the first to make this kind of argument; the “idea of an epoch of the natural history of the Earth, driven by humankind” has a longer history (Steffen et al. 2011, 843–45). The Italian Catholic priest and geologist Antonio Stoppani (1824–1891) wrote of the anthropozoic era, a term the American environmentalist George Perkins Marsh borrowed in Earth as Modified by Human Action (1874). The term noosphere (world of thought) became popular in Paris after the Great War, when the Russian geologist Vladimir I. Vernadsky, the French Jesuit and geologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and the mathematician and philosopher Édouard Le Roy jointly coined it in 1924 to mark “the growing role played by mankind’s brainpower and technological talents in shaping its own future and environment” (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000, 17; Steffen et al. 2011, 843–46). In Global Warming (1992), the journalist Andrew C. Revkin coined Anthrocene to describe a “geological age of our own making” (55).

Crutzen and his colleagues date the beginning of the Anthropocene to the “latter part of the eighteenth century,” the period to which recent analyses of air trapped in polar ice date the increase in global concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000, 17; Zalasiewicz, Crutzen, and Steffen 2012, 1036). They further identify a “Great Acceleration” after the Second World War, when human population, consumption, and greenhouse gas emissions all exploded (Steffen, Crutzen, and McNeill 2007). Other scholars date the onset of the Anthropocene far earlier, linking it to the invention of agriculture (Ruddiman 2003, 2005, 2013; Ellis 2011).

In 2008, the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London created an Anthropocene Working Group, charged with submitting a report to the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (a division of the International Commission on Stratigraphy answerable to the International Union of Geological Sciences). A decision is expected in 2016. The geological judgment regarding the Anthropocene will depend on the available stratal data and other kinds of evidence by which geologists read the past (Zalasiewicz et al. 2008; Zalasiewicz et al. 2011). Bryan Lovell, then President of the Geological Society of London, acknowledged that “if, by our own hand, we create our own extreme warming event,” then “the time in which we now live would . . . sadly and justly, surely become known as the ‘Anthropocene’” (2010, 196).

Although the Anthropocene has yet to attain the official status of a geological epoch, an increasing scientific recognition that anthropogenic emission of greenhouse gases causes planetary climate change has popularized the term among concerned scientists and large sections of the general readership. The notion that humans have become geological agents with the capacity to determine the future of the planet has inspired among scholars in the humanities and the interpretive social sciences numerous vibrant discussions regarding climate injustice, human agency, the (collapsing) distinction between natural and human histories, interspecies and intergenerational ethics, consumerist cultures, Anthropocene affects, the (post)human condition, and the difficulties of representing the Anthropocene in film, art, and performance (see Chakrabarty 2009, 2012; House of World Cultures 2013; T. Morton 2013; Braidotti 2013; Di Leo 2013). These debates will only become more vigorous as the climate crisis unfolds.

As a historian of recorded human history, I am interested in the Anthropocene’s implications for how we tell the human story. We do not yet know whether the term will be formalized by geologists. Giving an official name to something that has implications for policy is always a political process, and I imagine that the deliberation will be subject to various pressures, formal and informal, scientific and nonscientific. But the anthropogenic nature of the climate crisis poses interesting challenges to several metanarratives of human history.

First, take the ideas of freedom and justice that saturate most humanist narratives of history. It is deeply ironic that what enabled humans to curtail the use of massive slave or bonded labor in the construction of massive structures such as the pyramids or the Taj Mahal was the discovery of cheap energy in the form of fossil fuels, since profligate use of those fuels is now understood to threaten human futures. Even if we assume that all will be well in the end and that humans will make a smooth transition to renewables, energy is likely to be dearer than at present. So if there is a close connection between consumption-expenditure of energy and the exercise of “freedoms,” then our freedoms are going to be more expensive and therefore relatively more scarce. A just distribution of freedom as a scarce resource will demand significant reordering of social hierarchies: society and freedom will need to be reimagined.

Second, consider the arguments that blame the climate crisis on the capitalist mode of production and the unstoppable tendency of capitalism (loosely speaking, for “capitalism” is not the same as “the capitalist mode of production”) to accumulate wealth. But if we accept this popular position, we stretch the analytics of “capital” to include information foreign to all received procedures of political-economic analysis. That the logic of capitalist production leads to further accumulation of capital—and thus to the pursuit of never-ending growth—is not in doubt. But climate change is not a problem that could have been recognized or named within the traditional procedures of political economy. To know what climate change is and to be able to measure it, you need—much more than the theories of the left—geological and paleoclimatological knowledge of this and other planets (for geophysicists study global warming on Earth as a subset of the more general phenomenon of planetary warming seen on other planets as well), the knowledge of climate modelers, instruments to measure trace gases and temperature, including those needed for the extraction of ice core samples, and so on. In other words, while some may see in the dynamics of capitalist production the causes of human-induced climate change, it still remains a problem that—unlike many other crises of capitalist accumulation, including some environmental issues—could not have been predicted from within the frameworks of political-economic analyses alone.

What does that mean? It means that political-economic knowledge about capital alone does not equip one to understand the relationship between the capitalist mode of production and global warming. One has to get beyond the historical life of capital—both backward and forward—to understand that the Earth has seen planetary warming long before there were human beings and that the logic of capitalist accumulation may have interfered with longer-term processes in the history of the earth system and the role of life in that history. In other words, the present crisis reveals the available analytics of capital to be necessary but insufficient. We have to think the history of capital (spanning a few hundred years) and much longer histories (of the earth system and life on it) at the same time.

And, finally, take the question of climate justice. There is surely a case for justice among nations and classes, as only some ten or twelve nations (India and China included) and about one-fifth of humanity account for most greenhouse gas emissions to date. One could legitimately argue that the crisis must be met in a way that addresses this uneven responsibility. Yet consider the problem we face. The calendar of justice among nations, groups, and individuals is an open one. One does not know when the world will be just. But the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) calendar for global action is short and finite. According to the fifth report of the IPCC, our budgeted emission of greenhouse gases should come to an end around 2040 in order to avoid “dangerous” warming beyond a 2°C increase. Now suppose that for an indefinite period into the future, nations do not find a way to come together and some parties hold out—with good reasons—on issues of justice. What would be the result? Given that climate change, while affecting all, will affect the poor of the world more than the rich, those feeling unjustly treated now will most likely find themselves in a world that is even less just, for climate change will have made their situation worse. This is not an argument for not fighting for justice but instead a suggestion that global unity on fighting climate change actually contributes to justice. Here the expression “the Anthropocene”—in its general sense of “the age of humans”—reflects an interesting problem of nomenclature.

Many are suspicious of the category “humanity” and resist notions of “human-induced” or “anthropogenic” climate change. The term human, they argue, hides the different responsibilities the rich and the poor bear for the current crisis. Yet climate change, whoever bears responsibility for it, is everybody’s problem, for we all share the planet’s climate. “Common but differentiated responsibility” is how the Kyoto Protocol puts it. The word differentiated acknowledges that we are not all equally responsible for climate change. The developed countries bear greater historical responsibility. But why is the responsibility also described as “common”? In what way could we all be responsible? Is there any name for this horizon of commonality? Is it humanity, that much-despised term, at some other level? Climate change thus raises the issue of a shared or common history, but we do not yet have a name for the subject of that history, a name that would not be mired in the ideological trappings of the term humanity.

See also: accumulation, guilt, limits, statistics.

Anthropocene 2

Rob Nixon

For a growing chorus of scientists, the Holocene is history. Through our collective actions we have jolted the planet into a new, unprecedented epoch, the Anthropocene, which, according to one influential view, dates back to the late-eighteenth-century beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. The ecologist Eugene Stoermer coined the term Anthropocene (age of humans) in 2000, and the Nobel Prize–winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen quickly popularized its core assertion that for the first time in Earth’s history, a sentient species, Homo sapiens, has become not just a biomorphic but a geomorphic force. The grand species narrative that drives the Anthropocene hypothesis is, in both senses of the phrase, epochal: it moves the geological boundary markers while also disturbing conventional assumptions about human agency, identity, and temporal power. The Anthropocene is a story of massive, lasting anthropogenic changes—to the lithosphere, the atmosphere, the hydrosphere, and the biosphere—that will be legible, in many cases, tens of millennia from now. In other words, over the past two and a half centuries we have been inadvertently laying down in stone a geological archive of human impacts.

This ascendant twenty-first-century grand narrative is unsettling some of our most profound assumptions about what it means to be human—imaginatively, biologically, existentially, ethically, and politically. Since George Perkins Marsh in the 1860s, many thinkers have recognized humanity’s capacity to transform the planet, among them Rachel Carson who observed that “only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species—man—acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world” (1962, 23). But between Carson’s mid-twentieth-century perspective and that of twenty-first-century Anthropocene mandarins, we have witnessed a marked technological and narrative shift. For Anthropocene scientists, the new metrics of accelerating human impacts indicate that we have not only been changing the world environmentally but changing the planet’s deep chemistry in ways that demand radically new modes of storytelling.

New metrics demand new metaphors. Taking her cue from paleobiologist Anthony Barnosky, Elizabeth Kolbert argues that “we are the asteroid” (2015). We may be meteoric in our capacity to catalyze mass extinctions and other long-lasting planetary effects, but we are not insensate: the humanity at the center of the Anthropocene is a hurtling hunk of rock that feels. Much Anthropocene theory addresses the complex implications of translating the feeling human species into a species of unfeeling geological agency. But less attention has been paid to the other assumption in this metaphoric equation: if “we are the asteroid,” who exactly is this high-impact “we”? What is gained and what sacrificed through this geologic-biologic turn that places, at its center, “we the species”?

Arguably, the central challenge posed by this new version of planetary history is this: How do we tell the story of Homo sapiens as an Anthropocene actor in the aggregate, while also insisting that the grand species narrative be disaggregated to reflect the radically divergent impacts that different communities have had on planetary chemistry? To approach the matter in this way is to ask searching questions about the geopolitics of Anthropocene geology’s layered assumptions. Historically and in the present century, how have social institutions, cultural practices, and forms of governance affected the way diverse communities have exercised radically different levels of geomorphic and biomorphic power? Homo sapiens may constitute a singular actor, but it is not a unitary one. Oxfam reports that in 2013 the combined wealth of the world’s richest 85 individuals equaled that of the 3.5 billion people who constitute the poorest half of the planet (Wearden 2014). In 2009, the 1.2 billion inhabitants of low-income countries were responsible for 3 percent of CO₂ emissions, while the 1 billion inhabitants of high-income countries were responsible for 47 percent, an immense difference per capita (World Bank 2009). Moreover, a 2013 study concluded that since 1751—a period that encompasses the entire Anthropocene to date—a mere ninety corporations have been responsible for two-thirds of humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions (Goldenberg 2014). That is an extraordinary concentration of earth-altering power.

The advent of the Anthropocene story has profound consequences for how we conceptualize the environmental crisis and the inequality crisis, two of the greatest crises of our time, which are joined at the hip, although the join is often invisible. The implications of Anthropocene perspectives for environmentalism have been extensively examined, but there has been little attention to the Anthropocene’s implications for how we address—and redress—inequality. In terms of the history of ideas, what does it mean that the Anthropocene has gained credence during the twenty-first century, during a time when, in society after society, we are seeing a widening chasm between the ultrarich and the uberpoor, between resource capture at the top and resource depletion at the bottom (Nixon 2011)? What does it mean that the Anthropocene as a grand explanatory species story has taken hold during a plutocratic age? For “we the species” is being positioned as a planetary actor when, planet-wide, in most societies, what it means to be human is breaking apart economically, exacerbating the distance between extremes of affluence and abandonment. Those extremes are profoundly consequential for the way human impacts are distributed, recorded, and deciphered in earth’s geophysical archive.

The story of the Anthropocene links “earthly volatility to bodily vulnerability,” as geographer Nigel Clark has noted (2011, xx). Yet the most influential Anthropocene mandarins have marginalized questions of unequal human agency, unequal human impacts, and unequal human vulnerabilities. If, by contrast, we take an environmental justice approach to Anthropocene storytelling, we can better acknowledge the way human actors’ geo- and biomorphic powers have involved vast disparities in exposure to risk and access to resources. In conceptualizing the Anthropocene, then, a critical challenge is how to think simultaneously about geological and social strata. The stratigraphers who are central proponents of the Anthropocene are specialists at reading layers of rock. But in studying the human contribution to those sedimentary layers, we also need to conduct another ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• How to Use This Book
• “Infinite”
• Introduction
• Aboriginal
• Accumulation
• Addiction
• Affect
• America
• Animal
• Anthropocene 1
• Anthropocene 2
• Architecture
• Arctic
• Automobile
• Automobility
• Boom
• Canada
• Catastrophe
• Change
• Charcoal
• China 1
• China 2
• Coal
• Coal Ash
• Community
• Corporation
• Crisis
• Dams
• Demand
• Detritus
• Disaster
• Ecology
• Electricity
• Embodiment
• Energopolitics
• Energy
• Energy Regimes
• Energy Systems
• Ethics
• Evolution
• Exhaust
• Exhaustion
• Fallout
• Fiction
• Fracking
• Future
• Gender
• Green
• Grids
• Guilt
• Identity
• Image
• Infrastructure
• Innervation
• Kerosene
• Lebenskraft
• Limits
• Media
• Mediashock
• Metabolism
• Middle East
• Nature
• Necessity
• Networks
• Nigeria
• Nuclear 1
• Nuclear 2
• Off-grid
• Offshore Rig
• Petro-violence
• Petrorealism
• Photography
• Pipelines
• Plastics
• Plastiglomerate
• Renewable
• Resilience
• Resource Curse
• Risk
• Roads
• Rubber
• Rural
• Russia
• Servers
• Shame
• Solar
• Spill
• Spills
• Spiritual
• Statistics
• Superhero Comics
• Surveillance
• Sustainability
• Tallow
• Texas
• Textiles
• Unobtainium
• Urban Ecology
• Utopia
• Venezuela
• Whaling
• Wood
• Work 1
• Work 2
• “Oil/Lie”
• Afterword
• Acknowledgments
• Works Cited
• List of Contributors