{"id":7754,"date":"2014-08-18T07:10:15","date_gmt":"2014-08-18T12:10:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/?p=7754"},"modified":"2021-08-12T08:09:35","modified_gmt":"2021-08-12T13:09:35","slug":"anthropocene-too-serious-for-postmodern-games","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2014\/08\/18\/anthropocene-too-serious-for-postmodern-games\/","title":{"rendered":"Anthropocene: Too serious for postmodern games"},"content":{"rendered":"

The following is a guest post by Clive Hamilton<\/a>, professor of public ethics<\/a> at Charles Sturt University in Canberra, Australia. It continues the Immanence series “Debating the Anthropocene.” See here<\/a>,\u00a0here<\/a>, and here<\/a> for previous articles in the series. (And note that some lengthy comments have been added to the previous post by Jan Zalasiewicz, Kieran Suckling, and others.)<\/em><\/p>\n

\"040325_hmed_iceberg_1130a.grid-6x2\"<\/p>\n

The Anthropocene: Too Serious for Post-Modern Games<\/strong><\/p>\n

by Clive Hamilton<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

In his post<\/a> \u201cAgainst the Anthropocene\u201d, Kieran Suckling makes two main arguments. The first is that the choice of \u201cAnthropocene\u201d as the name for the new epoch breaks with stratigraphic tradition; he feels uncomfortable with a change in tradition, not least because he suspects the break reflects a hidden political objective. The second is that similar names have been invented for the era of industrialism in the past, names that have gone out of fashion, and the Anthropocene will go the same way.<\/p>\n

Many scientists and social scientists have entered the debate over the Anthropocene. Each of them seems to want to impose their own disciplinary framework on it. Thus one respondent to Kieran\u2019s post wrote that it is \u201cdifficult to get a handle on the term \u2018Anthropocene\u2019 because it means very different things to different people\u201d. This is true, but it is true because most people 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.<\/p>\n

The problem is that those who want to colonise and redefine the Anthropocene completely miss the central point being made by Earth system scientists like Paul Crutzen, Will Steffen and Jan Zalasiewicz. I have elsewhere<\/a> explained why those who have not made the gestalt<\/em> shift to Earth system thinking cannot help but get the Anthropocene wrong. The Earth system scientists are saying that something radically new has occurred on planet Earth, something that can be detected from the late 18th<\/sup>-century and which is due predominantly to a serious disruption to the global carbon cycle. This disruption has set the Earth system on a new, unpredictable and dangerous trajectory.<\/p>\n

Ecologists who have not made the leap to Earth system thinking have been the worst offenders<\/a>. But a few social scientists and humanities people have been joining the fray, bringing their constructivist baggage. Kieran, I fear, is one of them.<\/p>\n

In response to Jan Zalasiewicz\u2019s comment that Paul Crutzen came up with the term at the right time, Kieran misunderstands him, asking: \u201cWhy was the time right? Is there something about western psychology and history that made this time right?\u201d So he treats the development of a body of scientific evidence as if it were merely an emanation of social and psychological conditions. It\u2019s a reading that has all of the epistemological and political faults of the \u201csocial construction of science\u201d, an approach that today is deployed most effectively by climate science deniers.<\/p>\n

Kieran\u2019s disquisition on the historical use of terms like \u201cthe age of man\u201d compounds this mistake. It suggests that he has missed the fundamental point \u2013 the<\/em> fundamental point \u2013 about the new epoch: that the functioning of the Earth system<\/em> has changed, and that it changed at the end of the 18th<\/sup> century; or, if we want to be absolutely certain, in the decades after the Second World War. I sense that Jan Z\u2019s gentle reminder was lost, so let me stress it. He wrote: \u201cThe Anthropocene is not about being able to detect human influence in stratigraphy, but reflects a change in the Earth system<\/em>\u201d (my emphasis). The core of the problem, I think, is that most participants in the debate do not actually understand what is meant by \u201cthe Earth system\u201d.<\/p>\n

So whatever historical interest it may have (and personally I find it fascinating), the fact that Cuvier, Buffon, de Chardin and several others have deployed terms like \u201cthe age of man\u201d has no bearing whatsoever on the current debate, which is about a physical transformation, a rupture, that has actually occurred. Arguing that it\u2019s all been said before \u2013 \u201cI can show that your claim to have come up with something decisively new is historically inaccurate\u201d \u2013 is a standard rhetorical strategy known as deflation. But it carries the same danger we were warned of as children when our parents read us the story of the boy who cried wolf. Whatever historical precedent, and whatever environmental alarm bell may have been rung in the past, the wolf has arrived.<\/p>\n

Deflationary moves that characterise the Anthropocene as merely the latest attempt by anthropocentric westerners to impose an \u201cage of man\u201d frame on the world \u2013 that it is a fad that will wane as all the others have \u2013 betray an essential failure to grasp what the Earth scientists are telling us is now happening in the Earth system. When the IPCC tells us we are heading for a doubling or, more likely, a trebling of CO2<\/sub> concentrations it is not a fad. When the world\u2019s scientific academies warn we are heading into a world of 4\u00b0C warming, changing the conditions of life on the planet, they are not saying it because it\u2019s fashionable. And if the Anthropocene is another example of western linguistic imperialism, changing the name will not exempt the poor and vulnerable of the South from its devastating effects.<\/p>\n

No, I\u2019m sorry, this is serious now. After all the attacks on climate science and the well-funded, systematic campaign to discredit climate scientists, people of good will have an absolute obligation not to play around with the science. The constructivist games of the 80s and 90s are an intellectual luxury we can no longer afford.<\/p>\n

Let me now comment on Kieran\u2019s argument that the Anthropocene is wrongly named because it deviates from naming tradition. He writes that epochs are never named for the causes of change but for the changed composition of the species present in each epoch, era or period. When we examine the helpful lists he provides linking eras, periods and epochs to their characteristic biota, the word that appears uniformly is \u201cappear\u201d. Eukaryotes appear, reptiles appear, fish appear, mammals appear, and so on.<\/p>\n

When he calls for consistency in naming, then, we should name the Anthropocene not after the cause of the new epoch (techno-industrial anthropos<\/em>) but after the new forms of life that have appeared. The problem is that no new forms of life have yet appeared. It seems very likely they will, but it would be impractical to wait 100,000 years before we knew what to name the latest epoch. By then all of the members of the International Commission on Stratigraphy will be dead (they who already in my imagination are like the wizened judges of the Court of Chancery hearing Jarndyce v<\/em> Jarndyce in Bleak House<\/em>).<\/p>\n

So we are stuck with an anomaly; why this should cause anxiety, except to those wedded to tradition, I do not know. We are practical people; if we cannot apply the old principle to naming a manifestly new and important geological epoch then we must choose a new principle.<\/p>\n

Kieran\u2019s solution to the problem is to name the epoch after the radical homogenization of the planet\u2019s species (along with the extinction of many). He suggests the \u201cHomogenocene\u201d. But here he only smuggles in a new criterion, replacing the appearance<\/em> of new species with a change in the distribution of existing ones. If we were to accept Kieran\u2019s argument then, as Jan points out, why not name the epoch after the overwhelmingly dominant feature of homogenisation, the spread of humans across the globe. According to Vaclav Smil, humans and their domestic animals now account for a breath-taking 97 per cent of the biomass of all terrestrial vertebrates. On Kieran\u2019s own criterion, we would name the new epoch \u2026 the Anthropocene.<\/p>\n

Finally, it will help if I tell the story of the naming of the Anthropocene, for an innocent reader of Kieran\u2019s piece may draw the conclusion that there was some kind of secret meeting at which a group of western scientists committed to an anthropocentric worldview conspired to promote their ideology by choosing a name that embodies it. Kieran asks: \u201cWhat belief system(s) drive the shift \u2026 to a name based on the power of one species, a species that happens to be us?\u201d<\/p>\n

The answer is more prosaic and goes like this. In 2000 Paul Crutzen was at a scientific meeting in Mexico. As the discussion progressed he became increasingly frustrated at the use of the term \u201cHolocene\u201d which he felt no longer described the state of the Earth system, which he knew had been irreversibly disrupted and damaged by human activity. Unable to contain his irritation he intervened, declaring to the meeting: \u201cIt\u2019s not the Holocene, it\u2019s \u2026 it\u2019s \u2026 it\u2019s \u2026 the Anthropocene<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

That was it. He just blurted it out; and it stuck. Paul Crutzen is an atmospheric chemist. Given his training it is no surprise that as his brain struggled for the right word it would come with one that linked the state of the Earth to the activities of humans, anthropos<\/em>. If there had been a savvy sociologist sitting at the table, she might have said: \u201cWait a minute Paul. It\u2019s not humans in general who got us into this mess, but western industrial ones. So let\u2019s call it the Capitalocene or the Technocene.\u201d<\/p>\n

Who knows, perhaps that intervention would have changed the course of history right then. But it didn\u2019t happen, and we have the term we are now debating. Crutzen and his various co-authors would agree with the savvy sociologist that it has been techno-industrialism with its origins in Europe that brought on the new epoch. They have argued persistently that the Anthropocene began with the growth of industries powered by fossil energy towards the end of the 18th<\/sup>-century and accelerated with the hyper-consumerism of the post-war decades.<\/p>\n

The real adversaries here are not Crutzen et al. but those scientists, mostly ecologists who do not \u2018get\u2019 Earth system science, who are making all sorts<\/a> of erroneous and confusing claims about the Anthropocene\u2019s origins lying in the distant past, thousands of years before European industrialisation. If anyone is trying to displace responsibility for the mess we are in then they are the culprits. It is they who want to blend the Anthropocene into the Holocene and thereby make the anthropos<\/em> of the Anthropocene a neutral, blameless, meaningless cause, so that the radical transformation that we now see is the result merely of humans doing what humans do, which nothing can change. No wonder political conservatives are drawn to the early Anthropocene hypothesis.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The following is a guest post by Clive Hamilton, professor of public ethics at Charles Sturt University in Canberra, Australia. It continues the Immanence series “Debating the Anthropocene.” See here,\u00a0here, and here for previous articles in the series. (And note that some lengthy comments have been added to the previous post by Jan Zalasiewicz, Kieran […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[688615,520594,688977,4437],"tags":[123667,123517,25057,619],"class_list":["post-7754","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropo_scene","category-climate-politics","category-geo_philosophy","category-science","tag-anthropocene","tag-clive-hamilton","tag-environmental-humanities","tag-geology"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4IC4a-214","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":7993,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2015\/01\/17\/anthropocenic-reckoning\/","url_meta":{"origin":7754,"position":0},"title":"Anthropocenic reckoning","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"January 17, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"With environmental and eco-political news in the front pages daily, it's easy to get back into the swing of regular, even daily, posting after the winter holiday lull. Here's more on the \"dating the ecocrisis\" theme... Andy Revkin is reporting that the Anthropocene Working Group has concluded that the middle\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Anthropocene"","block_context":{"text":"Anthropocene","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/anthropo_scene\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7686,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2014\/07\/07\/against-the-anthropocene\/","url_meta":{"origin":7754,"position":1},"title":"Against the Anthropocene","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"July 7, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"The following is a guest post by Kieran Suckling, Executive Director of the nonprofit\u00a0Center for Biological Diversity. It follows the discussion begun\u00a0here\u00a0and in some\u00a0AESS conference sessions, including Andy Revkin's keynote talk\u00a0(viewable here)\u00a0and responses to it (such as\u00a0Clive Hamilton's).\u00a0 I In considering why the name \u201cAnthropocene\u201d has been proposed, why it\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Anthropocene"","block_context":{"text":"Anthropocene","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/anthropo_scene\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"setting-sun-smokestacks","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2014\/07\/setting-sun-smokestacks-275x179.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":8265,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2015\/07\/21\/bandwagocene\/","url_meta":{"origin":7754,"position":2},"title":"Bandwagocene","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"July 21, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"These days, it takes a course release for an academic to keep up with the avalanche of books\u00a0being published with titles that feature the word \"Anthropocene.\" To read them would take a sabbatical. Doing anything approximating a \"slow read\" would require, well, retirement. But that's no reason not to try.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Anthropocene"","block_context":{"text":"Anthropocene","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/anthropo_scene\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8908,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2016\/07\/30\/anthropocenic-sublime\/","url_meta":{"origin":7754,"position":3},"title":"Anthropocenic sublime","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"July 30, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"I'll be giving the following talk at the \"Popular Culture, Religion, and the Anthropocene\" workshop\u00a0at the National University of Singapore this coming week. Navigating the Zone of Alienation: Chernobyl and the Anthropocenic Sublime Abstract: This two-part talk will interpret the Chernobyl nuclear accident and its \u201cZone of Alienation\u201d (Zona vidchuzhennia)\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Anthropocene"","block_context":{"text":"Anthropocene","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/anthropo_scene\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":8271,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2015\/06\/01\/anthropocene-equity\/","url_meta":{"origin":7754,"position":4},"title":"Anthropocene & equity","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"June 1, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"I've reported previously\u00a0on how\u00a0critics see the \"Anthropocene\" concept as overgeneralizing from the causal nuances of actual\u00a0responsibility for climate (and global system) change. In an excellent summary of recent writing on the topic, ecosocialist climate observer\u00a0Ian Angus answers the question \"Does Anthropocene science blame all humanity?\" with a definitive \"no.\" That\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Anthropocene"","block_context":{"text":"Anthropocene","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/anthropo_scene\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11113,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2020\/09\/29\/dont-travel-the-anthropocene-without-this\/","url_meta":{"origin":7754,"position":5},"title":"Don’t travel the Anthropocene without this","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"September 29, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"I just found out that Punctum Books has created a Shadowing the Anthropocene travel mug based on Vincent van Gerven Oei's superb cover design of my book. Cool. Readers can spare yourself the money for the book (read the free PDF) and get the mug instead! 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