Facing the Anthropocene

Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System

Ian Angus

• Publisher: Monthly Review Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781583676110
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Environment & Energy Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Science tells us that a new and dangerous stage in planetary evolution has begun—the Anthropocene, a time of rising temperatures, extreme weather, rising oceans, and mass species extinctions. Humanity faces not just more pollution or warmer weather, but a crisis of the Earth System. If business as usual continues, this century will be marked by rapid deterioration of our physical, social, and economic environment. Large parts of Earth will become uninhabitable, and civilization itself will be threatened. Facing the Anthropocene shows what has caused this planetary emergency, and what we must do to meet the challenge. Bridging the gap between Earth System science and ecological Marxism, Ian Angus examines not only the latest scientific findings about the physical causes and consequences of the Anthropocene transition, but also the social and economic trends that underlie the crisis. Cogent and compellingly written, Facing the Anthropocene offers a unique synthesis of natural and social science that illustrates how capitalism's inexorable drive for growth, powered by the rapid burning of fossil fuels that took millions of years to form, has driven our world to the brink of disaster. Survival in the Anthropocene, Angus argues, requires radical social change, replacing fossil capitalism with a new, ecosocialist civilization.

PART ONE

A NO-ANALOG STATE

For nearly a decade after it first appeared in scientific literature in 2000, the word Anthropocene remained the exclusive property of specialists in Earth sciences. It was seldom heard, and even less often discussed, outside scientific circles.

But in 2011, a web search for Anthropocene produced over 450,000 hits, “Welcome to the Anthropocene” was a cover headline on The Economist, the Royal Society devoted an entire issue of its journal to it, the Dalai Lama held a seminar, and the Vatican commissioned and published a report.

There are now three academic journals devoted to the Anthropocene. It has been the subject of dozens of books, hundreds of academic papers, and innumerable articles in newspapers, magazines, websites, and blogs. There have been exhibitions about art in the Anthropocene, conferences about the humanities in the Anthropocene, novels about love in the Anthropocene, and there’s even a heavy metal album called The Anthropocene Extinction.

In the comic strip Dilbert, when Bob the dinosaur asked his smart watch for the time, the watch replied, “This is the Anthropocene epoch.”¹

Rarely has a scientific term moved so quickly into wide acceptance and general use. Even more rarely has a scientific term been the subject of so much misinformation and confusion. As Australian environmentalist Clive Hamilton has justly complained, much of what is written about the subject appears to have come from “people who have not bothered to read the half-dozen basic papers on the Anthropocene by those who have defined it, and therefore do not know what they are talking about.”²

This book does not attempt to address all the political and philosophical debates the Anthropocene has generated, nor does it discuss specialized technical questions. It aims, rather, to provide essential background and context for activists who need to understand what the Anthropocene is and why it is important. Such an understanding is essential to the development of an effective ecosocialist movement today, and will be even more critical for building a post-capitalist society tomorrow.

Part One discusses how scientists came to identify a qualitative change in Earth’s most critical physical characteristics, and what the implications are for all living things, including humans.

1

A Second Copernican Revolution

In terms of some key environmental parameters, the Earth System has moved well outside the range of the natural variability exhibited over the last half million years at least. The nature of changes now occurring simultaneously in the Earth System, their magnitudes and rates of change, are unprecedented. The Earth is currently operating in a no-analog state.

—AMSTERDAM DECLARATION ON GLOBAL CHANGE¹

The word Anthropocene has been coined three times.

In 1922, the Soviet geologist Aleksei Petrovich Pavlov proposed Anthropocene or Anthropogene as a name for the time since the first humans evolved about 160,000 years ago. Both words were used by Soviet geologists for some time, but they were never accepted in the rest of the world.

In the 1980s, marine biologist Eugene Stoermer used the word in some published articles, but no one seems to have followed his lead.

The third time’s the charm. Atmospheric chemist Paul J. Crutzen reinvented the word in February 2000, at a meeting of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Will Steffen, then executive director of the IGBP, was a witness:

Scientists from IGBP’s paleoenvironment project were reporting on their latest research, often referring to the Holocene, the most recent geological epoch of earth history, to set the context for their work. Paul, a vice-chair of IGBP, was becoming visibly agitated at this usage, and after the term Holocene was mentioned yet again, he interrupted them: “Stop using the word Holocene. We’re not in the Holocene any more. We’re in the . . . the . . . the . . . (searching for the right word) . . . the Anthropocene!”²

Five years earlier, Crutzen had won a Nobel Prize for work that helped prove that widely used chemicals were destroying the ozone layer in Earth’s upper atmosphere, with potentially catastrophic effects for all life on Earth. In his acceptance speech, he said that his research on ozone had convinced him that the balance of forces on Earth had changed dramatically. It was now “utterly clear,” he said, “that human activities had grown so much that they could compete and interfere with natural processes.”³ His interjection at the IGBP meeting in 2000 crystallized that insight in a single word, Anthropocene. “I just made up the word on the spur of the moment,” he says. “Everyone was shocked. But it seems to have stuck.”⁴

Crutzen was something of a scientific superstar: according to the Institute for Scientific Information, between 1991 and 2001 he was the world’s most-cited author in the geosciences.⁵ There is no question that his high profile drew attention to his articles on the Anthropocene, and eventually helped win broad acceptance for the idea.

Steffen, Crutzen, and environmental historian John McNeill subsequently explained the need for a new word this way:

The term Anthropocene . . . suggests that the Earth has now left its natural geological epoch, the present interglacial state called the Holocene. Human activities have become so pervasive and profound that they rival the great forces of Nature and are pushing the Earth into planetary terra incognita. The Earth is rapidly moving into a less biologically diverse, less forested, much warmer, and probably wetter and stormier state.⁶

“A no-analog state,” “planetary terra incognita”—these phrases are not used lightly. Earth has entered a new epoch, one that is likely to continue changing in unpredictable and dangerous ways. That’s not an exaggeration or a guess: it’s the central conclusion of one of the largest scientific projects ever undertaken, one that requires us to think about our planet in an entirely new way.

Earth as an Integrated System

Though it has gone unnoticed by most people and unmentioned in mainstream media, scientific understanding of our planet has radically changed in the past three decades. Scientists have long studied various aspects of Earth, using the methods of geology, biology, ecology, physics, and other disciplines. Now many are studying Earth as an integrated planetary system—and discovering that human activity is rapidly changing that system in fundamental ways:

Crucial to the emergence of this perspective has been the dawning awareness of two fundamental aspects of the nature of the planet. The first is that the Earth itself is a single system, within which the biosphere is an active, essential component. In terms of a sporting analogy, life is a player, not a spectator. Second, human activities are now so pervasive and profound in their consequences that they affect the Earth at a global scale in complex, interactive, and accelerating ways; humans now have the capacity to alter the Earth System in ways that threaten the very processes and components, both biotic and abiotic, upon which humans depend.⁷

Studying Earth as a system became possible and necessary in the 1980s. It became possible when new scientific instruments became available—in particular, satellites designed to gather data about the state of the entire Earth and computer systems capable of collecting, transmitting, and analyzing vast quantities of scientific data. It became necessary when scientists and others realized that nuclear weapons, ozone-destroying chemicals, and greenhouse gases could radically remake the world: human activity was causing not just change but global change, with potentially disastrous consequences.

Following discussion of global change at meetings of the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU) in Warsaw in 1983 and Ottawa in 1985, a series of international symposia and reports recommended creation of a coordinated international research program on global change. As a member of the American Geographical Union wrote, the need went beyond scientific curiosity:

It was noted that stresses on the support systems that sustain life were building up at an ever-increasing pace as the result of increases in world population, industrial activity, waste products, pollution, and resource exploitation, as well as because of long-term trends in regional climatic change. To preserve or expand the life-support systems during the 21st century, governments of all nations would have to design long-term plans that, while addressing their own specific national goals, would have to be based on basic scientific knowledge of the global terrestrial environment and on anticipated natural and anthropogenic change. The required detailed and quantitative scientific knowledge simply does not yet exist.⁸

In 1986, the ICSU initiated the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program, “the largest, most complex, and most ambitious program of international scientific cooperation ever to be organized.”⁹ The IGBP’s objective was to “describe and understand the interactive physical, chemical, and biological processes that regulate the total Earth system, the unique environment it provides for life, the changes that are occurring in that system, and the manner in which these changes are influenced by human actions.”¹⁰

A secretariat was established in Stockholm in 1988, and some 500 scientists worldwide began planning initial projects. By the early 1990s, the IGBP was coordinating the work of thousands of scientists studying the Earth System, a term that has been well defined by Frank Oldfield and Will Steffen:

In the context of global change, the Earth System has come to mean the suite of interacting physical, chemical, and biological global-scale cycles (often called biogeochemical cycles) and energy fluxes which provide the conditions necessary for life on the planet. More specifically, this definition of the Earth System has the following features:

•It deals with a materially closed system that has a primary external energy source, the sun.

•The major dynamic components of the Earth System are a suite of interlinked physical, chemical, and biological processes that cycle (transport and transform) materials and energy in complex, dynamic ways within the System. The forcings and feedbacks within the System are at least as important to the functioning of the System as are the external drivers.

•Biological/ecological processes are an integral part of the functioning of the Earth System, and not just the recipients of changes in the dynamics of a physico-chemical system. Living organisms are active participants, not simply passive respondents.

•Human beings, their societies and their activities are an integral component of the Earth System, and are not an outside force perturbing an otherwise natural system. There are many modes of natural variability and instabilities within the System as well as anthropogenically driven changes. By definition, both types of variability are part of the dynamics of the Earth System. They are often impossible to separate completely and they interact in complex and sometimes mutually reinforcing ways.¹¹

As Hans Schellnhuber of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research wrote, this was a revolutionary shift in the scientific view of Earth, comparable to the sixteenth-century discovery by Copernicus that Earth orbits the Sun.

Optical magnification instruments once brought about the Copernican revolution that put the Earth in its correct astrophysical context. Sophisticated information-compression techniques including simulation modeling are now ushering in a second “Copernican” revolution. . . .

This new revolution will be in a way a reversal of the first: it will enable us to look back on our planet to perceive one single, complex, dissipative, dynamic entity, far from thermodynamic equilibrium—the “Earth system.”¹²

Global Change and the Earth System

An overarching goal of the IGBP’s work was to develop “a s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• Part One: A No-Analog State
• Part Two: Fossil Capitalism
• Part Three: The Alternative
• Appendix: Confusions and Misconceptions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index