Anthropocene: Difference between revisions

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== Plants and Animals: Active Actors ==
== Plants and Animals: Active Actors ==
<Blockquote>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.<Ref>Emily Reisman & Madeleine Fairbairn (2020): Agri-Food Systems and the Anthropocene, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2020.1828025</Ref></Blockquote>
<Blockquote>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.<Ref>Emily Reisman & Madeleine Fairbairn (2020): Agri-Food Systems and the Anthropocene, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2020.1828025</Ref></Blockquote>
<Blockquote>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.<Ref>Emily Reisman & Madeleine Fairbairn (2020): Agri-Food Systems and the Anthropocene, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2020.1828025</Ref></Blockquote>


= Root Cause Analysis =
= Root Cause Analysis =

Revision as of 23:05, 1 July 2023

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

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

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]

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
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