Anthropocene, as you likely know, is the term applied increasingly by a range of scientists and others to this period in Earth and human history in which our species is influencing a host of planetary systems in big ways with long-lasting consequences. In the strictest sense, it’s the name proposed for an emerging geological epoch measurably shaped by humans and putting an end to the Holocene, the epoch since the last ice age ended. In a looser sense, Anthropocene is an emerging name (for lack of a better one) for a time in which the global environment is increasingly what we choose to make it — for better or worse.
On that “better or worse” point, there’s a range of strongly held views. I’ve spoken repeatedly about the prospect, with sustained effort, of a good human age, and noted a positive outcome was possible in my 1992 global warming book. The writer Diane Ackerman has similar views. Many of the authors of the Ecomodernist Manifesto, together and as individuals, express optimism.
But other writers, campaigners and scholars, including Kieran Suckling of the Center for Biological Diversity and the Australian ethicist and author Clive Hamilton, flatly disagree. Hamilton has written that it is delusional to think there can be a “good” Anthropocene. ( See our discussion, with Grist’s Nathanael Johnson, for more depth.) Elizabeth Kolbert, the author and New Yorker writer focused on climate change and extinction, embraced Hamilton’s views, summarizing things this way on Twitter: “2 words that probably should not be used in sequence: ‘good’ & ‘anthropocene.’”
At this year’s Breakthrough Dialogue meeting [main panels are here], Hamilton presented a new lecture, with a rebuttal provided by Mark Lynas, an environmental writer best known for his recent shift to support of nuclear power and genetic engineering in agriculture. He is an author of the manifesto.
Below you can read excerpts from both talks and follow links to read them in full. But you can also read a third valuable view, articulated by Christian Schwägerl, a Berlin-based science journalist and author of “The Anthropocene: The Human Era and How It Shapes Our Planet,” which was published in a revised English edition last year. The book is valuable for its dispassionate, reportorial assessment of the science and history behind this concept.
Here’s a portion of Clive Hamilton’s lecture:
The Theodicy of the “Good Anthropocene”
To the dismay of those who first proposed it, the Anthropocene is being reframed as an event to be celebrated rather than lamented and feared. Instead of final proof of the damage done by techno-industrial hubris, the ‘ecomodernists’ welcome the new epoch as a sign of man’s ability to transform and control nature. They see it as evidence neither of global capitalism’s essential fault nor of humankind’s shortsightedness and rapacity; instead, it arrives as an opportunity for humans finally to come into their own.
A few years ago Erle Ellis began to speak of the ‘good Anthropocene,’ an unlikely juxtaposition now amplified into the idea of the ‘great Anthropocene’ and set out in An Ecomodernist Manifesto. There are no planetary boundaries that limit continued growth in human populations and economic advance, they argue. ‘Human systems’ can adapt and indeed prosper in a warmer world because history proves our flexibility.
In this view, as we enter the Anthropocene we should not fear transgressing natural limits; the only barrier to a grand new era for humanity is self-doubt. Ellis urges us to see the Anthropocene not as a crisis but as ‘the beginning of a new geological epoch ripe with human-directed opportunity.’ Romantic critics of technology (and the gloomy scientists they draw on) stand in the way of the vision’s realization. For Ellis and those of like mind, humanity’s transition to a higher level of planetary significance is ‘an amazing opportunity.’ Unashamed to place ‘good’ next to ‘Anthropocene’, they believe ‘we will be proud of the planet we create in the Anthropocene’ and are fond of quoting Stewart Brand: ‘We are as gods, so we may as well get good at it.’
Although the ecomoderns write as humanists, they construe the new epoch in a way that is structurally a theodicy, that is, a theological argument that aims to prove the ultimate benevolence of God….
Climate disruption is viewed as a treatable side effect of the modernization process – a growing pain that the growth process itself will resolve. Whereas in Leibniz’s theodicy God’s will ensures all is for the good, for the ecomoderns it is Progress driven by man’s creativity and urge to betterment that ensures good will prevail. So in place of a theodicy they instate an ‘anthropodicy’ in which human-directed Progress takes the place of God. The goodness that will prevail does not reside in the hearts of men and women but in the order of things, an order that mobilizes the creativity and resourcefulness of humans. In the end the ecomoderns’ commitment to the good Anthropocene is a secular manifestation of the religious idea of Providence, with Man rather than God guiding human destiny. We have seen the future, and it is good…. [Please read the rest in the pdf at this link.]
Here’s an excerpt from Mark Lynas’s defense of ecomodernism and a good human age (as with Hamilton’s, please click the link and read it in full):
It is hardly surprising that early environmentalists thought growth would be exponential and we would crash the planet – Limits to Growth was written at exactly the point in the 1970s when all the consumption trends were pointing steeply upwards. No one thought that a peak even existed, let alone that it was so close.
One should not blame the Club of Rome for incorrectly anticipating the future. But we can be critical of those whose mental frames are still stuck in the 1970s world that failed – literally – to materialize.
Moreover, it turns out that human technology, so long held as an object of suspicion by environmentalists, is nature’s greatest liberating force.
Take intensive agriculture. Since the 1960s we have doubled global food production while cultivating approximately the same area of cropland.
In land use terms, agriculture is now so efficient that we may be looking at a peak in the use of farmland in the forseeable future, despite the growing human population and the need to double food production by 2050.
Peak farmland would do more than perhaps any other transition to safeguard nature, and reverse the still very worrying trends in biodiversity loss and defaunation.
That’s why high-yield agriculture, despite its immediate impacts in terms of fertiliser, pesticides and other inputs, is on aggregate much better than the organic alternative.
If the entire world were to convert to low-input, low-yield farming, we would have to plough up an area twice the size of South America simply to keep us from mass starvation. Good luck protecting the rainforests in such a scenario.
Another example of an environmentally liberating technology is nuclear power, the most energy-dense, resource efficient and environmentally friendly power source humanity has yet discovered.
Billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide have been released into the atmosphere from coal-fired power stations that would never have been built if it weren’t for our fear of nuclear power.
If we are not to repeat the mistakes of the past, we must learn from them.
Eco-modernists love nature, but we don’t want to love it to death. We do not hold romantic illusions about lost rural idylls of the past. We don’t fool ourselves that there was ever a time when people really lived in harmony with nature.
Hunter-gatherer lifestyles could only support 1 human per 10 square kilometres of land. Today each square kilometre in England supports about 400 people, with a total population of over 50 million. So if each of these 400 tried to go back to hunter-gathering… you would need an area 20x North America just to absorb the population of England.
Thus it is hardly surprising that early humans, despite numbering barely one million worldwide, drove megafaunal mass extinctions in every continent they occupied.
In fact we urgently need to get out of the hunter gathering business where it still exists – in the oceans. The oceans face ecological calamity precisely because we still depend on wild fish stocks, though now harvested with industrial killing machines.
The solution is obvious – sustainable aquaculture, with fish fed from land-based feedstocks. The sooner we eat more farmed fish than wild, the sooner we can turn the majority of the oceans into marine protected areas so they can recover from the devastation of decades of overfishing.
Eco-modernists are not micro-managers. We are enthusiastic about leaving nature alone – about rewilding, in other words. I recently stood on a hilltop in the French Pyrenees mountains, surrounded by thick oak forests full of wild boar, patrolled by sea eagles and soon likely to be occupied by the expanding territories of nearby bear and wolves.
Hidden in the depths of these woodlands, even on the steepest slopes, I found the remains of agricultural terraces, built and used in earlier times of scarcity when this marginal land was needed for food production. It looked wild, but appearances deceive – this landscape was not wild but rewilded.
This struck me as a wonderful eco-modernist paradox – that higher technology and development allows us the thrill of experiencing wilderness close at hand once again. The less we are directly dependent on nature, the more we can enjoy and protect it as more than just a source of sustenance. [Please read the rest.]
Finally, here’s Christian Schwägerl’s look at both arguments:
Is a “good Anthropocene” possible? Having explored the Anthropocene idea over the past eight years in my book, the large cultural-scientific “Anthropocene Project” at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin and an ongoing special exhibition at the Deutsches Museum in Munich, I find it laudable that the recently published “ Ecomodernist Manifesto” of the Breakthrough Institute attempts to encourage a debate about this question.
Fostering a more positive, optimistic reading of Paul Crutzen’s and Eugene Stoermer’s idea of a geological epoch shaped by human actions is not against the spirit of the Anthropocene concept, despite claims of the Australian ethicist Clive Hamilton in his recent blistering critiques of the Manifesto, titled “The Technofix is in” and an even harsher attack called “’The Theodicy of the ‘Good Anthropocene’” presented to the Breakthrough Institute’s recent dialogue session in Sausalito.
Seeking a good path in a turbulent era, an endeavor also undertaken in different form by Andy Revkin, who runs this blog, is in my eyes a necessity.
Like hundreds of millions of people, I share the fear of runaway global warming and ocean acidification, of losing the richness of life forms we humans share the planet with, of plastic and other toxics substances contaminating the biosphere. Having witnessed a lot of these problems firsthand over the past 25 years as a science and political reporter, I know that Hamilton’s concerns are well founded.
But it is not true, as Hamilton writes, that Paul Crutzen was solely driven by “anxiety” and a negative outlook when he framed and developed the Anthropocene idea. It was not Erle Ellis or the Breakthrough Institute who first speculated about a “good Anthropocene,” but Crutzen himself.
Even in his seminal Nature article of 2002, “Geology of mankind,” Crutzen concluded a long list of environmental problems with a call for “scientists and engineers to guide society towards environmentally sustainable management during the era of the Anthropocene” – with that, Crutzen defined his own vision of a “good Anthropocene” as a goal.
In a 2007 article in Ambio journal, Crutzen, together with climate scientist Will Steffen and environmental historian John McNeill, described three “stages” of the Anthropocene: Stage 1 is the Industrial Era from 1800 to 1945; stage 2 is defined as the “Great Acceleration” from “1945 to ca. 2015″’ stage 3 is a hypothetical new era starting in 2015 in which humans act as “stewards of the Earth System.” In this part of the article, Crutzen, Steffen and McNeill describe a number of factors that could support a change for the better:
“The growing awareness of human influence on the Earth System has been aided by i) rapid advances in research and understanding, the most innovative of which is interdisciplinary work on human-environment systems; ii) the enormous power of the internet as a global, self-organizing information system; iii) the spread of more free and open societies, supporting independent media; and iv) the growth of democratic political systems, narrowing the scope for the exercise of arbitrary state power and strengthening the role of civil society. Humanity is, in one way or another, becoming a self-conscious, active agent in the operation of its own life support system.”
What follows in this paper are three scenarios for how the future might play out:
— a business-as-usual scenario with “collapse of modern, globalized society under uncontrollable environmental change” as one possible outcome;
— a “mitigation” scenario with improved technology and changes in societal values and individual behavior triggering a “transition of our globalizing society towards a much more sustainable one”;
— finally a “geo-engineering” scenario in which options are weighed, including the “possibility for unintended and unanticipated side effects that could have severe consequences.”
In this important paper, Crutzen, Steffen and McNeill describe the Anthropocene future as inherently open, with both negative and positive potentials. They warn that “the Great Acceleration is reaching criticality.” But at the same time, radically different pathways become possible through “innovative, knowledge-based solutions.”
The authors conclude: “Whatever unfolds, the next few decades will surely be a tipping point in the evolution of the Anthropocene.”
When I interviewed Crutzen for my book and the catalogue of the Anthropocene exhibition (on display until next year at the Deutsches Museum — the German Technology Museum), he pointed out that he doesn’t define himself as an “optimist.” Nevertheless, he saw reasons for hope. So Clive Hamilton and others should really be more careful when rejecting the notion of a “good Anthropocene” as against its originator. While I share many of his fears and can relate to a sense of despair in light of continued growth in CO2 emissions, habitat destruction and plastic pollution in the oceans, I see many reasons why it is absolutely necessary to explore and pursue the possibility of a “good Anthropocene.”
Apocalyptic and misanthropic environmental narratives, as Clive Hamilton represents them, have had an important role in stirring up the public. But they have also contributed to widespread resignation and cynicism. So far, they have fallen short of mobilizing enough people to bring about real political change. Constant warnings about an imminent ecological doomsday might turn out to be counterproductive as they encourage short-term thinking and an eleventh-hour panic. If I knew that the world would end tomorrow, would I really plant an apple tree? I, for one, would prefer to eat apple cake.
Defining the Anthropocene as “not good” discourages the development of concrete and attractive alternatives to the rampant destruction caused by the currently dominant economic ideology which is blind to the multi-dimensional values of nature. An Anthropocene defined as the mere sum of all environmental havoc would present humanity as stuck in this crisis for an entire geological epoch and could actually become misinterpreted as an entitlement by those who are driving forces of environmental destruction. Those critics who call the Anthropocene the “Capitalocene” to blame Western lifestyles for all ills don’t seem to understand that they are, in essence, ceding this epoch to the dominant economic model. Instead of literally carving today’s problems in stone, it would be better to strive toward an Anthropocene that gives all humans equal influence or even extends political representation beyond the human sphere.
Strangely, doomsday environmentalism and destructive capitalism have a couple of things in common: for one, a certain future-blindness. Capitalism devalues all future life with its emphasis on quarterly earnings. Likewise, certain environmentalists don’t think beyond a self-chosen threshold of predicted global self-destruction — be it a year, say, 2050 or a number like 2 (degrees Celsius of warming). Secondly, what current capitalism and doomsday environmentalists share is a tendency to frame nature and resources as scarce, when they aren’t. This raises prices for commodities and helps draw attention to scary eco-headlines, but it stops us from developing a really intimate relationship with the circular, networked and plentiful nature of living nature.
Framing nature as scarce and as doomed due to the existence of humans makes it hard for hundreds of millions of people in the younger generation to connect with the living world in a healthy and positive way and to experience its abundance and richness.
In any debate there are optimists and pessimists, pragmatics and utopians. With his approach, Clive Hamilton injects a darkness that hopefully helps others to think more positively. Ultimately what is needed are not more scenarios of Anthropocene Apocalypse but more ideas of how a “good Anthropocene” might emerge with the help of new societal values, new economic rules, landmark political decisions, individual behavior changes and, yes, new technologies.
But does this mean that the “Ecomodernist Manifesto” is a particularly convincing articulation of a good Anthropocene? Not at all. The Breakthrough Institute essay is full of outdated ideas that have actually contributed to the very problems we are faced with today. The manifesto’s central idea of “conscious decoupling” from nature by technological solutions independent from surrounding ecosystems is what has brought us over-industrialized agriculture with zero regard for the planet and the people around it. What is needed in the Anthropocene, in my view, is the opposite: “conscious coupling” – a re-integration of human civilization into the fabric of life.
True, the idea of “conscious decoupling” is deeply rooted in the environmental movement, as Michael Shellenberger from the Breakthrough Institute claims. As early as the 1970s, “deep ecologist” Paul Shephard, developed the misanthropic notion that the whole of humanity should be ghettoized in cities, giving the rest of the planet over to a nature devoid of humans. Shephard wanted to resettle the entire human race into coastal regions and change their eating habits to bacterial products and algae. The only permissible way for people to travel into the inner wilderness of the continents would be on foot; this space “could be freed for ecological and evolutionary systems on a scale essential to their own requirements and to human synergetic culture.” Is this the ultimate goal of the Ecomodernist manifesto? What Shepard described was a totalitarian program, killing off tens of thousands of regional cultures and the deep connections between people and land that have grown over 12,000 years of post-glacial civilization. In the New Yorker, Michelle Nijhuis poignantly described why the “Ecomodernist Manifesto” is an intellectual Cul-de-Sac.
Another flaw in the manifesto is the way it mischaracterizes renewable energies and presses for building new nuclear power plants. To write this at a time when wind energy has become the cheapest form of newly installed electricity production and when thousands of people still can’t return to their homes in the Fukushima disaster zone seems quite bizarre. Thirdly, beyond prescribing quick techno-fixes that haven’t worked in the past, the manifesto offers close to nothing aimed at moderating consumption, societal values, economic rules and inequitable influence. While disguising itself as ecological, the manifesto tries to hijack the Anthropocene idea for the benefit of very centralized power structures like big ag and the nuclear industry. Finally, ending the manifesto with the vision of a “great” Anthropocene really is making nonsense of this precious idea. What is needed is less, not more hubris and boastfulness in the face of daunting problems.*
Taken together, the manifesto is “modernist” only in the sense of a 20th century modernism that saw the American Way of Life as the ultimate solution to everything. This type of modernity died conceptually some time ago but keeps producing zombie landscapes and zombie economic practices around the planet.
There’s a desperate need for eco-postmodernist strategies that reconnect our ways of life with Earth and help to turn consumerist materialism into what political scientist Jane Bennett has called “vital materialism” or what Pope Francis has described as an intimate connection with all beings alive in his recent encyclical “Laudato Si”. Moving beyond anthropocentrism is a central challenge. An anthropocentric Anthropocene would be short, ugly and, in the words of E.O. Wilson, lonely.
In my book and in a talk I gave at the Royal Institution in London in March this year, I explore a “good Anthropocene” based on conscious coupling, a renewable economy, bioadaptive technologies, decentralized power systems and a biocultural transformation.
There shouldn’t be only one “good Anthropocene”, however. The idea of a world with a homogenous eco-friendly lifestyle, a green version of Silicon Valley’s totalitarian Singularity ideology, is also a bit scary. What we need are millions of diverse and competing attempts to work towards good Anthropocene practices – and constant reminders that, at the moment, what we are heading for – because of a lack of deep economic, political, societal and technological changes – indeed appears to be some form of “dark Anthropocene.”
If you have the appetite to dig deeper, please explore the current issue of Breakthrough Journal, with a set of relevant essays including “The Return of Nature: How Technology Liberates the Environment,” by Jesse Ausubel, an essential analyst of global environmental and human trends.
And to go dark, you might read a fresh and provocative lecture by Hamilton, split into two posts at The Conversation. Hamilton essentially says that climate change, guaranteeing thousands of years of disruption in Earth systems, is a crime on a scale with no possible remedy in existing judicial or penal institutions:
Penal codes proscribe offenses against property and the person. Some codify crimes against humanity. But where in a statute book would we look for the crime of subverting the laws of nature? What penalty would a court impose for killing off a geological epoch?
He doesn’t name names, but asserts:
Looking back on the last two decades of denial, delay and obstruction, there have been perhaps two hundred individuals who should be held most culpable, if not by the courts then by history, for failing to prevent harm or of obstructing others from taking measures to prevent harm.
As I wrote in the passage in that 1992 book that earned me a subsidiary paragraph in the Wikipedia entry on the Anthropocene, I could see things going well or poorly. But I see our halting, flawed journey so far as more akin to a person’s passage through puberty than Hamilton’s notion of a cosmic crime.
I’ve posted it before, but it’s worth posting the book passage again:
Perhaps earth scientists of the future will name this new post-Holocene era for its causative element — for us. We are entering an age that might someday be referred to as, say, the Anthrocene. After all, it is a geological age of our own making. The challenge now is to find a way to act that will make geologists of the future look upon this age as a remarkable time, a time in which a species began to take into account the long-term impact of its actions. The alternative will be to leave a legacy of irresponsibility and neglect that will manifest itself in the fossil record as just one more mass extinction — like the record of bones and empty footprints left behind by the dinosaurs.
Postscript, 12:30 p.m. | I also recommend reading David Ropeik’s recent piece at Big Think, which asks, “A Good, Even GREAT Anthropocene? Not If It Depends on Wisdom Overcoming Instinct.”
Clarification, 2:10 p.m. | * The language at the asterisk above has been adjusted for clarity.