Anthropocene

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The Anthropocene is defined as "the period of time during which human activities have had an environmental impact on the Earth regarded as constituting a distinct geological age."[1] There is debate regarding the validity of such a designation, because not all humans are equally responsible for said changes. This is clear when looking at countries with the highest emission rates compared to low emitting developing countries and who is disproportionately affected by the changing of the Earth's atmosphere, land, oceans etc.:

The Anthropocene designation is far from settled fact, however, sparking intense debate within the social sciences, including human geography. Attributing global change to a universalized human “Anthropos,” many critical scholars argue, risks ignoring the fact that some human groups have contributed far more to globally problematic transformations than others. It also tends to elide the role of structural inequalities along the lines of race, gender, class, geography, and more in producing these changes, as well as the long-standing ecosocial crises experienced by indigenous communities. Indeed, the category of human itself has historically anchored social hierarchies and thus might be ill equipped to define a more desirable future. Singling out a species as irreversibly dominant might inhibit action by naturalizing and depoliticizing ecological crises, normalizing narratives of control as progress, institutionalizing human mastery, and reifying a false division between humans and the biophysical world of which we are a part. Social scientists, particularly those influenced by science and technology studies, also observe that writings on the Anthropocene tend to gloss over the diverse ways in which other organisms and objects shape and are coconstituted with human action. By now, these critiques should be impossible to ignore, yet existing scholarship on agrifood systems and the Anthropocene often misses the opportunity to address them.[2]


Critical Agriculture Analysis

We argue that critical agri-food scholarship provides a powerful vantage point from which to engage with the Anthropocene idea—one that precludes historical oversimplifications, enriches theoretical insights, and keeps alternative futures squarely in view. Rather than wholeheartedly accepting or rejecting the term Anthropocene, we embrace its controversial nature as a source of insight. The Anthropocene concept is contentious because it calls for a single, all-encompassing global story that risks erasure of alternatives. Focusing on agri-food systems as a central theme for understanding Anthropocene debates helps to hold several narratives simultaneously while keeping central concerns within the field of view. Examining the histories and theories of agrarian change alongside Anthropocene discourse, we argue, illustrates the limits, friction, and unevenness of human influence while underscoring the inseparability of people with their environments. Moreover, if the Anthropocene concept is to mobilize action for reversing problematic trends, it must address agriculture in a way that does not treat it only as a set of impacts to be avoided but rather as a site of political economic processes to be accounted for and reimagined. In this article we open up such possibilities by offering an integration of agri-food studies and critical Anthropocene scholarship, arguing that agri-food systems can serve as a critically engaged through line to competing Anthropocene origin stories, a source of theoretical insight for the complexity of human–environment relations, and a site of agency for forging alternative futures.[3]

Plants and Animals: Active Actors

Recent studies of agriculture incorporate insights from science and technology studies to detail how the material specificities of plant, animal, and fungal life on the farm actively shape economic activity. The genetic gymnastics of a soil fungus plaguing strawberry fields, for example, deepens growers’ dependence on toxic, ozone-depleting, soon-to-be-banned fumigants, rendering the industry’s future exceedingly fragile. Industrial hog producers rely on a precarious pool of migrant laborers to hand-feed piglets because reproductively optimized sows now birth more offspring than they have nipples. Biology, in these accounts, is a source not only of “obstacles” but also “opportunities and surprises”. The physical properties of the apple, for instance, place many idiosyncratic constraints on the apple industry but also produce spontaneous mutations that become a basis for novel varieties and profit streams (Legun 2015). These detailed explorations of how diverse life forms influence human activity counteract the tendency of Anthropocene scholarship to render the more-than-human world as a passive substrate for human intervention.[4]


Critical agrarian scholarship offers stories that counter the most concerning oversights of Anthropocene thinking. In place of totalizing narratives of human transformation of the Earth, these stories show industrializing ambitions thwarted, at times, by the Earth itself; in place of passive, dominated “nature,” they show crops whose diverse biological characteristics shape the possibilities of human action; in place of a homogeneously destructive humanity, they show the search for profit and geopolitical power by some people at the expense of others driving agro-environmental change. In agriculture, we see clearly that human transformations of the Earth are halting, piecemeal, and inextricable from inequality.[5]

Root Cause Analysis

Agriculture

See also: Industrial Agriculture

The rise of agriculture, or Neolithic Revolution, is one proposed marker for the onset of the Anthropocene that, upon closer inspection, reveals the oversights that come of treating history as linear and of treating humans as an undifferentiated group affecting the globe. As archaeologists have shown, the transition to farming has been far from complete or irreversible. There is no clear mark indicating “before” and “after” the transition to agriculture, as groups shifted food provisioning strategies based on their circumstances, often with agriculture as a last resort (Head 2014). Labeling societies as either foragers or agriculturalists, even for a single moment in time, is also falsely dualistic, because many groups have lived from both wild and cultivated foods for thousands of years (B. D. Smith 2001). Where agriculture did arise, it is often associated with forced labor and the use of violence by elites to retain populations attempting to flee the disease and periodic famine brought on by farming’s dense settlements and instability (Cohen 2009; Scott 2017), a clear indication that treating all humans as equally responsible for agriculture’s impacts neglects deep inequalities. Importantly, foraging continues today (Jordan 2014), and its association with lack of “civilization” has proven deeply damaging, showing how the idea of a linear and complete conversion to agriculture is not only inaccurate but ignores real harm caused by such assumptions. For example, Native Americans in what is now called California “tended the wild,” managing land for food production without plant or animal domestication, until forced to farm by settler colonists who deemed their nonagricultural lifeways inferior, expendable, and threatening (Anderson 2013). In considering the Anthropocene, a closer look at agriculture’s origins indicates that the transition to farming is not unidirectional, comprehensive, or universally attributable to human groups, and thus neither are its biogeochemical effects.[6]

Capitalism

See Also: Capitalism

Another suggested root cause of the Antropocene is Capitalism. Focusing on Capitalism demonstrates how not all humans are equally responsible (or hold no responsiblity at all,) and this can be seen when considering that at least 71% of all global emissions are from only 100 companies.[7] So while capitalism has had a massive effect on the Earth and is one of the main root causes of climate collapse the majority of the world has not had anywhere near as much of an impact to the collapsing climate. This reality is why Climate Reparations are so important to Climate Justice:

The origin of capitalism is marked by the late sixteenth-century English enclosures in which elites appropriated peasant land to graze sheep and engage in the highly profitable wool trade, while peasant farmers became landless and thus obliged to engage in wage labor. Surplus capital and social dislocations intensified European colonial expansion in pursuit of raw materials and new markets, widely disseminating a plantation model of agriculture premised on racialized enslaved labor while devastating indigenous food-ways. In short, this was not a shift in the relationship between all humans and all natural resources. Instead, the change was driven by relatively small groups of elites and it relied on social hierarchies that exploited some for the gain of others. Importantly, capitalism’s agrarian transformations were met with significant resistance, including within the plantation itself, and its dominance remains patchy to this day as nonmarket exchange and economic diversity persist. The role of the agri-food system in capitalism and colonial expansion is undoubtedly world-changing, yet it also underscores how capitalism’s effects on the Earth were rooted in social hierarchy and are neither uniformly distributed nor complete.[8]

Industrial Revolution

Another potential root cause is the Industrial revolution, which is closely linked to capitalism and, again, illustrates that not all individuals are equally (or at all) responsible for the devastating environmental impacts of the industrial revolution:

...Here again, agrarian dynamics highlight that not all humans participated equally and that social dislocations were necessary conditions for industrialization’s environmental changes. Although the Industrial Revolution is often considered an urban phenomenon, the proliferation of factories was, in fact, tightly linked with transformations in the countryside. Population migration into the cities created a “metabolic rift” whereby nutrients transported from the farm as produce no longer cycled back to replenish the soil’s fertility. The resulting soil exhaustion sparked a fertilizer industry that now impairs water quality around the world. The most iconic early industrial machine, the loom, rapidly transformed wool and cotton into global commodities, accelerating demand for raw materials, which in turn prompted expansion of colonial control in India and slavery in the U.S. South. Additionally, the Industrial Revolution’s legacy of pollution, atmospheric and otherwise, would not have been possible without cheap agricultural products from the colonies subsidizing factory workers’ low wages. Like both agriculture and capitalism, industrialization is a patchy transformation rife with resistance and not practiced by all peoples. Much as Luddites destroyed looms, farm laborers actively protested the rural poverty enabled by grain threshing machinery. The Industrial Revolution’s fossil fuel fingerprint is undoubtedly impactful on a global scale, but its entanglement with rural transformations in Europe and beyond underscores the friction and disparities inherent to its ecological transformations.[9]


Cartesian Dualism

... Green Arithmetic: the idea that our histories may be considered and narrated by adding up Humanity (or Society) and Nature, or even Capitalism plus Nature. For such dualisms are part of the problem—they are fundamental to the thinking that has brought the biosphere to its present transition toward a less habitable world. It is still only dimly realized that the categories of “Society” and “Nature”—Society without nature, Nature without humans—are part of the problem, intellectually and politically. No less than the binaries of Eurocentrism, racism, and sexism, Nature/Society is directly implicated in the modern world’s colossal violence, inequality, and oppression. This argument against dualism implicates something abstract—Nature/Society—but nevertheless quite material. For the abstraction Nature/Society historically conforms to a seemingly endless series of human exclusions—never mind the rationalizing disciplines and exterminist policies imposed upon extra-human natures. These exclusions correspond to a long history of subordinating women, colonial populations, and peoples of color—humans rarely accorded membership in Adam Smith’s “civilized society”.[10]

The Anthropocene argument shows Nature/Society dualism at its highest stage of development. And if the Anthropocene—as historical rather than geological argument—is inadequate, it is nevertheless an argument that merits our appreciation. New thinking emerges in many tentative steps. There are many conceptual halfway houses en route to a new synthesis. The Anthropocene concept is surely the most influential of these halfway houses. No concept grounded in historical change has been so influential across the spectrum of Green Thought; no other socioecological concept has so gripped popular attention.[11]


Discourse

The discourse of the Anthropocene is arguably an ideational preview of how this concept will materialize into planetary inhabitation by the collective. As a cohesive discourse, it blocks alternative forms of human life on Earth from vying for attention. By upholding history’s forward thrust, it also submits to its totalizing (and, in that sense, spurious) ideology of delivering “continuous improvement”. By affirming the centrality of man—as both causal force and subject of concern—the Anthropocene shrinks the discursive space for challenging the domination of the biosphere, offering instead a techno-scientific pitch for its rationalization and a pragmatic plea for resigning ourselves to its actuality. The very concept of the Anthropocene crystallizes human dominion, corralling the already-pliable-in that-direction human mind into viewing our master identity as manifestly destined, quasi-natural, and sort of awesome. The Anthropocene accepts the humanization of Earth as reality, even though this is still contestable, partially reversible, and worthy of resistance and of inspiring a different vision. Yet the Anthropocene discourse perpetuates the concealment that the human takeover is (by now) an unexamined choice, one which human beings have it within both our power and our nature to rescind if only we focused our creative, critical gaze upon it.[12]


The Anthropocene? Such is the poverty of our nomenclature to bow once more before the tedious showcasing of Man. To offer a name which has no added substantive content, no specific empirical or ethical overtones, no higher vision ensconced within it—beyond just Anthropos defining a geological epoch. If a new name were called for, then why not have a conversation or a debate about what it should be, instead of being foisted (for a very long time, I might add) with the Age of Man as the “obvious” choice?[13]


Alternative Discourse

Capitalocene/ Necrocene

Justin McBrien in his essay 'Accumulating Extinction: Planetary Catastrophism in the Necrocene' proposes a different way of framing the Anthropocene, centering Capitalism, coined the 'Capitalocene' or 'Necrocene':

Today’s debate about planetary crisis has yielded the concepts of the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene. Both recognize extinction but have yet to grasp its ontological significance—for humanity or for capitalism. What I wish to propose is that we recognize the Necrocene—or “New Death”—as a fundamental biogeological moment of our era: the Capitalocene. The Necrocene reframes the history of capitalism’s expansion through the process of becoming extinction.

The accumulation of capital is the accumulation potential extinction—a potential increasingly activated in recent decades. This becoming extinction is not simply the biological process of species extinction. It is also the extinguishing of cultures and languages, either through force or assimilation; it is the extermination of peoples, either through labor or deliberate murder; it is the extinction of the earth in the depletion fossil fuels, rare earth minerals, even the chemical element helium; it is ocean acidification and eutrophication, deforestation and desertification, melting ice sheets and rising sea levels; the great Pacific garbage patch and nuclear waste entombment; McDonalds and Monsanto.[14]

McBrien lays out four key stages of the Necrocene:

  • The first stage being the "Columbian exchange": "Pangea was restored through the intercontinental and transoceanic exchanges of crops, humans, animals— and commodities. The decimation of indigenous populations made for another “discovery”: the idea of extinction. Extinction became a problem of knowledge.[15]
  • The second stage is the "the reorganization of capital through scientific management and fossil fuel extraction made extinction an apparent problem: one that needed “stewardship.” Capitalism’s dialectic of accumulation and extinction coevolved with a conceptualization of knowledge of “risk” and “environment.” Capitalism did not ignore environmental risk; it made it the central problem of its survival."[16]
  • The third stage: "the post-World War II “Great Acceleration” witnessed the convergence of financial, actuarial, military strategic, and environmental risk around biosecurity. These emerged primarily from the problems of nuclear warfare and the environmental consequences of nuclear testing"[17]
  • The final stage: biosecurity disappeared into catastrophic nihilism and the embrace of necrosis; the “survival economy” of neoliberalism as the Donner Party. The belief in our alienation from nature became embodied in the perspective of the human being as the monstrous all-powerful offspring of nature. The problem of extinction was rendered intrinsic to human nature rather than to capital.[18]


Nuclear Testing

Atmospheric nuclear testing made the need for weather models practical—and urgent. When testing began in earnest in the 1950s, so too did the greatest experiment upon the earth: global radioactive fallout. Strontium-90 did not exist before a hot July day in 1945. As warlike Athena sprung from Zeus’s head, strontium-90 burst forth from “the gadget’s” plume, flying upward into the stratosphere. From there it dispersed and rained down upon the planet, a toxic blanket of human design and a moment of no return. The earth, capital, and body were now joined through the deep time of radioactive mutation. The notion of the atmosphere and the oceans as a bottomless sink was now put to the test.[19]

Biosphere Occupation

Geoengineering

....In the Anthropocene “the people” (humanity) are the dramatis personae who can make their social, economic, political and geological history. But they only can influence their geological history on an insignificant scale although it is growing in the course of economic and social development. In the Capitalocene, the major formative forces are the laws of motion of capital: of the capitalist social formation, of the financialized capitalism today. These also influence the geological history of the planet, the geological formation, as part of capital’s drive to extend and deepen its reach, to externalize social and environmental costs. From this follows a mighty effort to regulate, control, and neutralize these externalized costs—costs which now encroach upon capital’s costs of doing business.

Now the geoengineers enter the stage of capitalist modernity. Geoengineering faces a double task. On the one hand, they must create necessary resources on the input side of the planetary social and geological systems at a time when they can no longer be easily extracted from external nature. On the other hand, they must organize new methods of dumping all emissions into the earth’s systems. It is a seemingly impossible task. Their task is much greater than building a car or a dam or a hotel; the geoengineers are tasked with controlling whole earth systems in order to combat—or at least to reduce—the negative consequences of capitalist externalization. However, the required internalization of externalized emissions is the internalization of external effects into production costs at the level of the corporation. Then indeed—in principle—the prices could “tell the truth,” as in the neoclassical textbooks. But we would not be wiser still. Why? Because many interdependencies in society and nature cannot be expressed in terms of prices. Any effective rationalization would have to be holistic; it would have to be qualitative and consider much more than price alone. But that is impossible because it contradicts capitalist rationality, which is committed to fixing the parts and not the whole. In such a scenario, capitalist modernization through externalization would—inevitably—come to an end. The Four Cheaps would disap- pear behind the “event horizon.” Would it be possible for geoengineers to bring the necessary moderation of modernization and of capitalist dynamics in coincidence? They cannot, for the engineers are not qualified to work holistically. They fight the effects of externalization (e.g., green-house gas emissions) by externalizing the external effect once again (e.g., by obscuring the sun to reduce solar heat radiation). This would amount to an absurd secondary externalization of primary external effects.[20]

Catastrophism

Prometheanism, the view that humans could and indeed should control nature, went hand-in-hand with a new catastrophism. At its center of was a new cult of expertise. American world power justified expert political authority through the necessity of managing the hazards set in motion by its permanent war economy. But these experts’ authority derived from more than a promise to mitigate catastrophic risks; it also owed much to their proclamations that such risks were unavoidable—and outside of political deliberation.6 This was the birth of the biosecurity state. Vannevar Bush’s Science: The Endless Frontier (1945) justified this cult of the expert in his reappropriation of Turner’s frontier thesis (1898). Bush proposed a new, macho, techno-utopian ideology. The scientist was became a gunslinger in a sidereal wild west, an imperialist fantasy that would overcome the contradictions of capitalist surplus extraction. The Endless Frontier as scientific exploration was really the Endless Frontier as commodity expansion: apocalyptic fears of extinction would be vanquished by utopian fantasies of techno-omniscience. The scientized discourse of environmental risk obfuscated the close relationship between economic and environmental inequality. This excused the system of production that threatened environmental catastrophe by framing humanity as an undifferentiated mass that had become a “planetary agent.”[21]

Sources

  1. ↑ https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Anthropocene
  2. ↑ Reisman, E., & Fairbairn, M. (2020). Agri-Food Systems and the Anthropocene. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 1–11. doi:10.1080/24694452.2020.1828025
  3. ↑ Reisman, E., & Fairbairn, M. (2020). Agri-Food Systems and the Anthropocene. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 1–11. doi:10.1080/24694452.2020.1828025
  4. ↑ Emily Reisman & Madeleine Fairbairn (2020): Agri-Food Systems and the Anthropocene, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2020.1828025
  5. ↑ Emily Reisman & Madeleine Fairbairn (2020): Agri-Food Systems and the Anthropocene, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2020.1828025
  6. ↑ Emily Reisman & Madeleine Fairbairn (2020): Agri-Food Systems and the Anthropocene, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2020.1828025
  7. ↑ https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10/100-fossil-fuel-companies-investors-responsible-71-global-emissions-cdp-study-climate-change
  8. ↑ Emily Reisman & Madeleine Fairbairn (2020): Agri-Food Systems and the Anthropocene, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2020.1828025
  9. ↑ Emily Reisman & Madeleine Fairbairn (2020): Agri-Food Systems and the Anthropocene, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2020.1828025
  10. ↑ Moore, Jason W., "Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism" (2016).Sociology Faculty Scholarship; Page: 2
  11. ↑ Moore, Jason W., "Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism" (2016).Sociology Faculty Scholarship; Page: 3
  12. ↑ Moore, Jason W., "Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism" (2016).Sociology Faculty Scholarship; Page: 25
  13. ↑ Moore, Jason W., "Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism" (2016).Sociology Faculty Scholarship; Page: 27
  14. ↑ Moore, Jason W., "Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism" (2016).Sociology Faculty Scholarship; Page: 116-117
  15. ↑ Moore, Jason W., "Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism" (2016).Sociology Faculty Scholarship; Page: 119
  16. ↑ Moore, Jason W., "Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism" (2016).Sociology Faculty Scholarship; Page: 119
  17. ↑ Moore, Jason W., "Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism" (2016).Sociology Faculty Scholarship; Page: 119
  18. ↑ Moore, Jason W., "Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism" (2016).Sociology Faculty Scholarship; Page: 119
  19. ↑ Moore, Jason W., "Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism" (2016).Sociology Faculty Scholarship; Page: 126
  20. ↑ Moore, Jason W., "Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism" (2016).Sociology Faculty Scholarship; Page: 150-151
  21. ↑ Moore, Jason W., "Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism" (2016).Sociology Faculty Scholarship; Page: 125
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