The Anthropocene, Eurocentrism and Consensus

The Anthropocene is, as they say, a contested concept. This contestation has rumbled loudly along a number of fault-lines – none louder (or perhaps faultier) than the dispute between Clive Hamilton, on the one side, and the likes of Erle Ellis and Mark Maslin, on the other.

For Hamilton, the Anthropocene has to be defined principally in accordance with the principles of Earth System science; specifically, with regard to the shift of system state brought about by industrialised human activity. 'Industrialised' is the key term. The mere fact of human beings affecting their surroundings – something recognised for centuries – is beside the point.

For others, however, this is precisely the point (e.g.). Ellis and Maslin argue that an industrially-defined Anthropocene:

"[…] ignores thousands of years of human impact on Earth. To declare the start of human transformation of Earth in the 1950s fails to take into account the continuous nature of human-induced changes to our planet. Underlying such a claim is the view that only Earth’s most recent human populations possess the capacity to change Earth. Such thinking instils a Western, white-male, elite-technocratic narrative of human engagement with our environment that is counter to contemporary thinking in the social sciences."

While sharing many of these authors' convictions, I must confess that I find this claim to be rather misguided.

First of all, I agree with Hamilton that an 'early' Anthropocene defined in terms of human capacities for soil erosion, fire-based agriculture or continent-scale extinction is basically incoherent. It has to be defined explicitly in relation to a tipping point or shift of magnitude or the whole concept becomes basically arbitrary.

However, this is the least of the problems. The Anthropocene as a term has been widely criticised, not least by social scientists, for its construction on the Greek 'anthropos' – i.e. humanity. Since causality entails responsibility, a great many have pointed out that it is not humanity as such but, rather, that most industrialised, capitalised tranche of humanity that has brought about the new epoch.

Ellis and Maslin attempt to turn this critique on its head by suggesting that a denial of the 'early' Anthropocene entails a denial of the "capacity" of "all but Earth’s most recent human populations" (presumably they mean industrialised societies) "to change Earth" (note the capitalisation and absence of 'the,' conveniently blurring 'surroundings' and 'planet').

So, non-industrialised humans are left out of the Anthropocene club. Is this an exclusion or an exemption? Ellis and Maslin presume the former. It must be humanity as such that defines the Anthropocene – to say otherwise reinforces the narrative of "Western, white-male, elite-technocratic"…

While I would not presume to pronounce what the "contemporary thinking in the social sciences" is, I  suspect more than a few social scientists would take issue with this on any number of levels. It is like saying that nineteenth-century Indians, as human beings, had the capacity to colonise the British – undoubtedly true but also completely beside the point. There is a whole historiography on why the Industrial Revolution didn't happen in China before Britain. It could have done; it didn't.

This rather perverse universalist guilt-trip evaporates the moment one considers the question of magnitude.  Yes, humans have always "shaped the environment" – so have all mammals, animals, life. So what? Not every meteor strike is geologically significant, some are. Same principle.

It seems to me that the 'early' Anthropocene, if it is to make any sense whatsoever, must adhere to the following: The arrival of industrial humans was inevitable. Take pre-industrial humans and industrial humans follow as if it were a logical consequence. This is the only way all these myriad diversities can be lumped into the same boat.

And 'diversity' is the final point. Ellis and Maslin make a plea for the place of social scientists at the natural science table:

"It is time for the Anthropocene Working Group to move beyond its current status as a typical stratigraphic working group, formed of invited volunteers without a formal membership process or by-laws. 

We instead call for a dedicated scientific institution, perhaps called the International Anthropocene Commission, to coordinate this. It could be set up and funded by the International Union of Geological Sciences, Future Earth and the United Nations. Half its members should be drawn from anthropology, archaeology, history, sociology, geography, paleoecology, economics and philosophy."

In broad strokes, this is something that I would be sympathetic with. However, there is a crucial difference between geology in particular and the social sciences and humanities in general. A single community-approved timescale is the backbone of the former, it is more or less irrelevant to the latter. Non-geologists can do their work without this consensus – and they will do, whatever happens.

Ellis and Maslin are right to point out that the institutional inauguration of a "human epoch" is an event with much broader and more profound consequences than the parochially geological. However, their strategy of blurring boundaries helps no one. Geology is not landscape ecology and it is not at all clear why it should be.

Above all, defending a post-1750 or post-1950 Anthropocene in no way, shape or form entails the presumption that non-industrial peoples are somehow 'in harmony with nature' or any of that outdated claptrap.

The "Western, white-male, elite-technocratic" concern is an important one but, in this case, thoroughly misconceived. Certainly, this means that more dialogue is needed between natural, social, political and human sciences. However, this is already happening without the forms of consensus that are the peculiar prerequisite of geology.

Dialogue doesn't mean collapsing differences. On the contrary, it requires heightened sensitivity to them.

What is politics? Ecomodernist disagreements

A couple of months ago, I wrote a few review posts on The Breakthrough Institute's Ecomodernist Manifesto. This week, the Institute held an event that brought together the Manifesto's major proponents and critics, including (just to name those most familiar to me) Mark Lynas, Clive Hamilton, Bruno Latour and Steve Fuller.

Latour's contribution, titled 'Fifty Shades of Green,' expressed its sympathies for the Institute's aims but strongly criticised the Manifesto's politics – or, rather, its lack of politics.

Couched in (Carl) Schmittean terms of friend/enemy declarations, I don't think it went down well with its (I presume) broadly liberal (in the US sense) audience. I posted a few excerpts from Latour's piece on Twitter, including the following, which drew a response from Mike Shellenberger, one of the Institute's founders:

Not a trace of anger anywhere in the Manifesto, though lots of it in Bruno's talk. @Philip_R_Conway @AIMEproject

— Mike Shellenberger (@MichaelBTI) June 25, 2015

I suggested that perhaps this might be part of the problem – politics without anger is lacking its proper passion. Mike generously responded again. However, this exchange only really brought home to me how difficult it is to make anything approaching an intelligent point in less than 140 characters! I certainly failed to.

In any case, there is a basic disagreement here as to what constitutes politics. As I quoted in the final instalment of my aforementioned review posts, Matthew Nisbet, an Associate Professor of Communication Studies, writes:

"Politics, argue ecomodernists, is about getting a diversity of people to act on behalf of the same goal but for different reasons."

From the point of view of agonistic pluralism (terminology from political theory that is usually associated with Chantal Mouffe but I think is also fair to apply to Latour's political thought in a general sense), this is not in itself a problematic claim. Politics is certainly about building alliances, working together and living together without any unity, any common identity, any easy 'of course, we can all agree on...' to take as a starting point and serve as a steady, unquestionable foundation, a keystone. This political theory is, in short, pluralistic – no problem.

However, pluralism should not, I believe, be separated from agonism. Indeed, I would agree with Mouffe, Latour and others that politics only really comes into existence in its proper form when there is conflict, disagreement, dissensus – yes, even anger.

Insisting upon the friend/enemy distinction is not to say that we should march around with baseball bats looking to silence those we disagree with. As Tim Howles adds:

@MichaelBTI Remember the enemies he was calling to bring into view = ‘hostis’ not ‘inimicus’ (Schmitt). @Philip_R_Conway @AIMEproject

— Tim Howles (@AimeTim) June 26, 2015

It means, first of all, that we should recognise that we are unavoidably politically engaged with people who have no interest in 'debating' us.

There are those for whom politics is simply about winning. In one of the more chilling moments in the recent film The Look of Silence, a leader of the forces that conducted the Indonesian genocide, now a powerful politician, insists that the genocide was simply politics because (and I paraphrase from memory but this is more or less verbatim, at least to the translation) 'politics is about achieving your ideals' – and that is what they did, with machetes, wire, knives... (Lest we 'eco-modern' Euro-Americans feel smug and superior, let's not forget our flesh-smeared border fences and body-strewn beaches, for starters. Barbed wire fences are also Anthropocene technologies...)

One thing that this (quite brilliant) film brought home to me was how political struggle is often literally and immediately a matter of life and death. This genocide happened with the active support of the US government because it was exterminating 'communists' (which was, needless to say, a rather broadly applied category). The astonishingly brave protagonist of this film, whose older brother was killed in the genocide, is regularly threatened with a refrain: 'why do you want to re-open old wounds? you'll make it happen again.' The subtext being that he and his family could very well disappear if they insist on pursuing truth and justice.

That is a bit of a tangent but the point that I am making is that there are people out there who no amount of well-mannered argumentation will ever reach. To take another very important film that has just been released (or, depending on where you are, will be soon), the screen adaptation of Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway's well-known book Merchants of Doubt. The political and geopolitical actors in this real-life horror story were not out to 'negotiate' but to defeat, by any means necessary – death threats, misinformation, outright lies and worse.

Are these not our enemies (we are most certainly theirs)?...

This is the first importance of the recognition of the friend/enemy distinction, then: recognition that if politics is not war (if it is not simply the 'achievement of ideals by any means necessary') then neither, in many cases, can the two things be easily separated. It takes an extremely privileged, metropolitan and, frankly, cosseted perspective to ignore this fact. (A perspective that I myself am lucky enough to fall into on occasion, I will admit.)

However, the other crucial aspect of agonism is that politics must be distinguished from governance. For Latour, after John Dewey, Walter Lippmann and Noortje Marres, there is no politics of any note without a public and there is no public without people becoming passionately interested by issues that affect them. The problem of the 'post-political' (a term that I don't think Latour has used but, again, fits well with his thinking) is the problem of the radical disinterest in active, passionate, engaged political discourse that we find throughout Western societies in recent decades.

Throughout, the Manifesto speaks in the language not of politics but of governance. It proposes and debates technical fixes that could be employed precisely so that the masses needn't get worked up and worry themselves about it. It is not a matter, of course, of 'governance bad, politics good' but the difference must be understood. (I've written more on this aspect of Latour's work elsewhere.)

Why does a theory of politics have to rely exclusively on power, conflict, and lists of friends and enemies? #GoodAnthropocene (1/3)

— Matthew C. Nisbet (@MCNisbet) June 23, 2015

Insisting upon 'naming your enemies' doesn't mean that this is what politics is reducible to, that there is no more to it than that. It means that politics-proper cannot exist without agonism. It doesn't mean that we should simply set out to defeat our opponents 'by any means necessary' but it means that we recognise that there are people who behave like this and they (at the very least) are our enemies. Moreover, it compels us to recognise that we cannot count on consensual negotiation achieving sufficient momentum or enough of a critical mass (to mix my metaphors) to achieve meaningful political change (but that, I suspect, is precisely what the eco-modernists do not believe is necessary).

We have enemies and they must be defeated – not 'by any means necessary' but by means more forceful than earnest negotiation. We cannot assume that the existing parameters of negotiation and debate are sufficient. There is a political imperative to remake these parameters. This is, in my understanding, what Latour means when he insists that neither Nature nor Society nor anything else can remain as 'sovereign' – these parameters that used to organise our collective being simply no longer function. It is in this sense that the eco-modernists adopt some of Latour's slogans ('no more Nature!') but fail to grasp their meaning.

A fully realised pluralism has to know when to abandon discursive 'business as usual' – when to abandon ship and to learn how to swim again.

To refuse to engage with that dimension of the political demonstrates a totally underdeveloped sense of plurality (here the agonistic and the pluralistic are tied together fundamentally). Well-heeled and well-meaning, more or less metropolitan and by and large academic points of view are only a few of the political forces at play here. Supposing (as the Manifesto does) that liberal values (and US liberal values at that) are somehow universal (or can be expected to be universalised through techno-economic progress) is worse than naive. Remember Indonesia.

Modernity is built on bones as well as carbon.

I apologise that the above is a little verbose. As I believe Mark Twain put it, I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.

'An Ecomodernist Manifesto' reviewed—Conclusion

The fourth and final part (1, 2, 3) of a review of the Ecomodernist Manifesto.

When criticising something, I think it's important to make a distinction between what that text is attempting to do and how well it achieves what it sets out to do. In other words, one can criticise a text's objectives, or its realisation of those objectives, or both.

The Manifesto, I think, can be praised on this basis: it achieves what it sets out to do. In response to Clive Hamilton's rather scathing critique, Matthew Nisbet replies:

History suggests that policy makers and their publics are far more likely to spare nature if options are available that allow them to meet their social development goals, than for any sacred, moral, or ideological reasons. 

Politics, argue ecomodernists, is about getting a diversity of people to act on behalf of the same goal but for different reasons. Politics is not about getting everyone to share the same belief, or vanquishing from politics those who disagree.

If that is what this text is about—presenting ecological imperatives in terms that well-meaning and more or less liberal politicians and bureaucrats can understand and make use of—then that's great. However, this cannot disguise the Manifesto's flaws.

My main constructive suggestion would be that the authors need to broaden their cohort to include anthropologists and postcolonial political scientists. The way in which liberal values are presented as obvious, incontestable and universal is a mistake. Perhaps that is what policymakers and business leaders need to hear so as to get their attention (and not scare them off with the idea that they might be part of the problem) but I, for one (and I'm sure I'm not alone), will never be satisfied with the sub-Pinkeresque verbiage that passes for their geopolitical analyses.

There are others than the ecomodernists doing similar sorts of work and doing it, in my opinion, rather better in some respects. Johan Rockström, for instance, in a recent article titled "Bounding the Planetary Future: Why We Need a Great Transition" writes:

Economic growth in the Global South and global sustainability are compatible aims. A world paradigm of abundance within planetary boundaries can be made plausible— if we act with sufficient rapidity, scope, and coherence to avoid crossing thresholds of irreversible change. But robust world development within [Planetary Boundaries] will need to ensure a fair distribution of this finite space among all nations and people. 

[...] 

Sharing finite planetary budgets will require fundamental value changes. Planetary regulation needs to spur innovation and technological breakthroughs. Ethical norms need to evolve to embrace a universal belief that all citizens in the world have the right not only to an equitable share of the available environmental space, but also to a stable and healthy environment.

Rockström also utilises some of the tropes and traits that I've criticised; e.g.:

Our species [emphasis added] must thus give up the illusion that a heavy reliance on market-based policy measures—which can, at best, deliver relative, not absolute, improvements—can deliver a flourishing civilization in this century.

However, the emphasis on boundaries and limits moves away from any tendency towards excessively utopian optimism and his attention to non-Western peoples and the poor is far stronger.

I hope that others better informed that me (particularly in scientific and technical terms) will get their teeth into the ecomodernist claims as, for all their faults, I think that this is a movement worth engaging with.

'An Ecomodernist Manifesto' reviewed—part 2

In my first (very hastily written) part of this review, I commented that the Ecomodernist Manifesto gets off to a very bad start, reproducing, as it does, the simplistic interpretation of ‘Anthropocene’ as ‘The Age of Humans’ (at least they didn’t say ‘Man’).

This etymologically correct but politically misguided iteration has been criticised from many quarters. For example, Bruno Latour in his Gifford Lectures:

“Indian nations in the middle of the Amazonian forest have nothing to do with the ‘anthropic origin’ of climate change — at least so long as politicians have not been distributing chainsaws at election times. Nor do the poor blokes in the slums of Mumbai, who can only dream of having a bigger carbon footprint than the black soot belching out of their makeshift ovens.”

(Incidentally, Latour is a member of The Breakthrough Institute, an organisation closely affiliated with the ecomodernist initiative, and is participating in their event ‘Breakthrough Dialogue 2015: The Good Anthropocene’ in June.)

The notion of a ‘good’ (and, as we shall see, ‘early’) Anthropocene is foremost in their thoughts:

“[…] a good, or even great, Anthropocene. A good Anthropocene demands that humans use their growing social, economic, and technological powers to make life better for people, stabilize the climate, and protect the natural world.”

I, at this point, remain with the (objection-taking) opinion of Clive Hamilton. The Manifesto is not, however, uniformly disagreeable from any particular point of view:

“[…] we affirm one long-standing environmental ideal, that humanity must shrink its impacts on the environment to make more room for nature, while we reject another, that human societies must harmonize with nature to avoid economic and ecological collapse.”

‘Hear, hear,’ exclaim environmentalists everywhere.

It soon becomes very apparent that the solution to most ecomodernist problems is technological. We must, they argue, put “humankind’s extraordinary powers in the service of creating a good Anthropocene.” Their narrative is based upon optimism not only for the future but also for the past and present:

“Humanity has flourished over the past two centuries. Average life expectancy has increased from 30 to 70 years, resulting in a large and growing population able to live in many different environments.”

Accordingly, they seem to endorse (without citation) Steven Pinker’s arguments regarding violence:

“Violence in all forms has declined significantly and is probably at the lowest per capita level ever experienced by the human species, the horrors of the 20th century and present-day terrorism notwithstanding. Globally, human beings have moved from autocratic government toward liberal democracy characterized by the rule of law and increased freedom.”

At this point they get rather Whiggish:

“Personal, economic, and political liberties have spread worldwide and are today largely accepted as universal values.”

If you’ve never travelled outside the Euro-American metropoles, sure. There are entire academic disciplines devoted to demolishing this sort of naive, coyly imperialistic liberalism.

They have little truck with ‘pessimistic’ assessments of the Earth’s carrying potential, scorning the “limits to growth” thesis of the 1970s. Solar energy, for example, is effectively unlimited and energy from a “closed uranium or thorium fuel cycle” or “hydrogen-deuterium fusion” could see a technologically advanced civilisation in rude health for millennia, so they claim.

The answer to our problems, in a word: decoupling.

“Relative decoupling means that human environmental impacts rise at a slower rate than overall economic growth. […] Absolute decoupling occurs when total environmental impacts — impacts in the aggregate — peak and begin to decline, even as the economy continues to grow.”

Humans must close themselves off in a kind of eco-citadel, technically disembedding their modes of social reproduction from the wider Earth environment. (Logan’s Run flashes to mind.)

They are on stronger ground when they note, for example, the relative ecological per capita efficiency of cities compared to rural modes of living:

“Cities occupy just one to three percent of the Earth’s surface and yet are home to nearly four billion people . As such, cities both drive and symbolize the decoupling of humanity from nature, performing far better than rural economies in providing efficiently for material needs while reducing environmental impacts.”

Intensive, large-scale farming is, very unambiguously, the future: “modernization is not possible in a subsistence agrarian economy.” Intensification allows for progressive net reforestation as the square mileage of land required for every unit of food is reduced.

However, for every thought provoking point something ire-raising tends to follow:

“[…] in contradiction to the often-expressed fear of infinite growth colliding with a finite planet, demand for many material goods may be saturating as societies grow wealthier.”

While this is true, it is rather beside the point since the rise before the peak is so gargantuan. There’s no way that even a significant minority of the present-day poor could reach that peak without total ecological devastation – so does that help?

Not wanting to ramble on for too long (and being about halfway through the Manifesto), I’ll leave the rest for my next post.

Clive Hamilton and Jacques Grinevald: 'Was the Anthropocene anticipated?'—Explorations of historical geo-ontology

In what is, in my humble opinion, one of the most important contributions on the subject yet, Clive Hamilton and Jacques Grinevald ask: 'Was the Anthropocene anticipated?' [paywalled; if anyone wants a copy and doesn't have access, drop me an email]. That is, does the notion that human beings can and have had transformative, geology-scale effects on the Earth itself have precedents within the history of thought?

Various commentators have recently drawn links between thinkers as diverse in time and predilection as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Vladimir Vernadsky, George Perkins Marsh, and the Comte de Buffon (to name but a few), suggesting that these figures articulated arguments regarding the effects of human action on the Earth that are directly comparable to present concepts.

Hamilton and Grinevald argue in no uncertain terms that to equate any of these authors with the Anthropocene is deeply anachronistic. None of these authors had anything approaching the same conception of what the Earth is as we do today. They were operating, in other words, with completely different geo-ontologies. Their statements should, therefore, be read in their historical contexts.

"[S]ince the last decades of the 19th century natural science’s understanding of the global environment has undergone a profound transformation, a scientific revolution not yet fully recognized. Although human impact on Earth was a well-known theme within naturalistic and geological thinking from the time of the Western industrial revolution, there was no foreshadowing of the Anthropocene in its contemporary sense. Stoppani’s ‘anthropozoic era’ and a number of variations – Renevier’s ‘Période Anthropique’ (1873), Joseph LeConte’s (1877) and Charles Schuchert’s (1918) ‘psychozoic era’, James Dwight Dana’s ‘Era of Mind – Age of Man’, Teilhard’s noösphere – described the impact of human action on ‘the face of the Earth’ rather than on the planet Earth as an evolving complex system. The concept of the Earth system – including the anthropogenic alteration of the great biospheric or biogeochemical cycles – was another century in the making." (p.6)

For Hamilton and Grinevald, we must recognise the deep novelty of the Anthropocene and refuse any undue backdating of either its concept or its referent. The historiographical and geopolitical point of their argument is to unbendingly refute the 'early Anthropocene' thesis.

Alongside John Tresch's work, which I wrote about yesterday, this short but extremely informative essay has convinced me that the project of reconceiving geopolitics as a concept requires a far more historically informed and anachronism-sensitive approach than has prevailed so far. This kind of historical geo-ontology is something that I'm hoping to develop in the near future. 

Clive Hamilton and Toby Tyrell on Gaia

Clive Hamilton made two wonderful contributions to the final AIME colloquia/diplomatic summits held the week before last. Both have now been published on his website. First, Gaia Does Not Negotiate; second, When Earth Juts Through.

The latter begins:

With the arrival of the Anthropocene we must now be suspicious of all ideas developed in the last 10,000 years. That includes James Lovelock’s notion of Gaia which, it turns out, is a child of the Holocene. In his recent book, On Gaia, Toby Tyrell shows that since Lovelock put his idea into the world some 30 years ago our understanding of the Earth system has changed dramatically. 

As Earth scientists have found means of taking a more fine-grained view of Earth history, especially through the analysis of ice-cores, the trajectory of Earth appears much more wild and unpredictable. There is no built-in stabiliser; life does not bring the planet back into equilibrium. Gaia is based on old science.

(I love that first line!) Now, I haven't read Tyrell's book but I think one point needs to be made: while Earth system science has moved on in the past thirty years so has Lovelock's take on Gaia. It is true that the original hypothesis posited the Earth as a homeostatic system but that notion of homeostasis has long since been abandoned. 'Gaia' has evolved. Lovelock now well understands that there is no equilibrium as such, only an indefinitely large range of quasi-stable states within a complex system; strange attractors and so on. This is not the same thing as 'homeostasis.' The possibility of a sudden and massive system state shift in response to a relatively minor degree of perturbation is precisely the point of his more recent works. That is why Gaia is 'vengeful.'

Here is how Lovelock differentiates the hypothesis and the theory in the glossary to Revenge of Gaia (p.208):

Gaia Hypothesis
James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis postulated in the early 1970s that life on Earth actively keeps the surface conditions always favourable for whatever is the contemporary ensemble of organisms. When introduced it was contrary to the conventional wisdom that life adapted to planetary conditions as it and they evolved in their separate ways. We now know that both the hypothesis as originally stated and the conventional wisdom were wrong. The hypothesis evolved into what is now Gaia Theory and the conventional wisdom into Earth System Science.

Gaia Theory
A view of the Earth that sees it as a self-regulating system made up from the totality of organisms, the surface rocks, the ocean and the atmosphere tightly coupled as an evolving system. The theory sees this system as having a goal—the regulation of surface conditions so as always to be as favourable as possible for contemporary life. It is based on observations and theoretical models; it is fruitful and has made ten successful predictions.

The hypothesis is not the theory and while I am in no position to scientifically defend either this is worth noting.

While, as I say, I've not read Tyrell's book, this interview on his publisher's website makes for interesting reading. Tyrell makes the case, albeit briefly, that Gaia is simply anthropocentric wishful thinking and should be rejected as a scientific idea:

Q: If the Gaia hypothesis is not the reason, then why did the Earth remain habitable for such an enormously long interval of time? 

A: This may relate partly to the weak Anthropic Principle, whereby we logically cannot observe any facts that preclude our own existence. So however infrequent it may be in the universe for a planet to remain continuously habitable over billions of years, we happen to be on just such a planet. According to this way of thinking, Earth may just have been lucky, with no sentient observers having evolved on other planets which were not so lucky, i.e. where conditions became sterile at some point. Another possible explanation for extended habitability in the absence of Gaia is a predominantly inorganic thermostat, such as has been suggested for silicate weathering.

This is a provocative and contestable claim. However, his concluding remarks are if anything more revealing than his central thesis:

Q: Are there any implications for the current era of global change? 

A: Yes, it is suggested that belief in the Gaia hypothesis can lead to excessive complacency about the robustness and resilience of the natural system. Gaia emphasizes stabilising feedbacks and protective mechanisms that keep the environment in check. If Gaia is rejected, however, we are left with a less comforting view of the natural system. Without Gaia it is easier to appreciate that the natural system contains lines of weakness and other susceptibilities. One such line of weakness that has already been demonstrated is the ozone layer depletion by CFC’s. I have argued in the book that there is no over-riding Gaia to protect our planet’s life support system. Maintaining the Earth’s environment is up to us [emphasis added].

Who is the Modern here? I don't think that it's Lovelock... To suggest that Gaia is a 'comforting' theory is to be a few decades out of date. Yes, the original might have encouraged worshipful idleness and Nature-absorbed complacency but that is not at all the image of Gaia that is now presented to us. In Gaia Does Not Negotiate Hamilton quotes Latour who is in turn ventriloquising Gaia:

I am not your Mother, nor your protector. … So figure out the enigma of my presence.

The motherly vision of Gaia as homeostatic über-regulator is surely a holocenic fable that has long passed its sell-by-date. However, while, as I've mentioned recently, Lovelock is a tricky ally to enrol I'm not sure that Tyrell is a better option.

Without Gaia what planetary imagery are we left with? 'Spaceship Earth'? Again?...

More on Clive Hamilton on optimism

Reading the pieces mentioned in my last post reminded me that I've had Clive Hamilton's Earthmasters on my bookshelf for a few weeks now. Finally getting around to read it this weekend I've found it to be an outstanding introduction to the issue of geoengineering. I'm about half way through and just getting into the discussion of how these technologies intersect with geopolitics. Anyway, I particularly enjoyed this section on the follies of optimism as an end in itself:

Some people derive a peculiar sort of pleasure in describing themselves as an 'optimist.' It's a kind of one-upmanship used to shut down those arguing that the evidence shows the future is not rosy. 'Whatever you might say, I am an optimist,' they declare, implying that their interlocutor is somehow not bold enough to take on the challenge. It's not so much passive aggression as sunny aggression firmly rooted in the moral superiority of cheerfulness [...] (104-105)

Clive Hamilton on the 'new environmentalists' and the 'good Anthropocene'; the rough edges of political aesthetics

An important article by Clive Hamilton on the 'new environmentalists' and the so-called 'good Anthropocene':

[...] almost as soon as the idea of the Anthropocene took hold, people began revising its meaning and distorting its implications. A new breed of ecopragmatists welcomed the new epoch as an opportunity. They gathered around the Breakthrough Institute, a “neogreen” think tank founded by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, the authors of a controversial 2004 paper, “The Death of Environmentalism.” They do not deny global warming; instead they skate over the top of it, insisting that whatever limits and tipping points the Earth system might throw up, human technology and ingenuity will transcend them. 

As carbon dioxide concentrations pass 400 ppm for the first time in a million years, and scientists warn of a United States baking in furnace-like summers by the 2070s, Shellenberger and Nordhaus write that by the end of the century “nearly all of us will be prosperous enough to live healthy, free, and creative lives.” The answer, they say, is not to change course but to more tightly “embrace human power, technology, and the larger process of modernization.” 

The argument absolves us all of the need to change our ways, which is music to the ears of political conservatives. The Anthropocene is system-compatible.

[...] 

In the words of the most vocal eco-pragmatist, the environmental scientist Erle Ellis, “We will be proud of the planet we create.” Ellis speaks of “the good Anthropocene,” a golden era in which we relinquish nostalgic attachments to a nature untouched by humans and embrace the new epoch as “ripe with human-directed opportunity.”

By the final quoted paragraph in particular I am reminded of Nigel Clark's thesis in Inhuman Nature (and other writings) where he holds constructivism (particularly of the Latourian variety) as being effectively complicit with the over-statement of human agency in the face of overwhelmingly inhuman forces. I don't agree with parts of his analysis; however, the above clearly demonstrates his wider and more important point: that we must reckon with our finitude -- and fast.

In another article on the same themes posted only a few days ago Hamilton writes:

In the end, grasping at delusions like “the good Anthropocene” is a failure of courage, courage to face the facts. The power of positive thinking can’t turn malignant tumours into benign growths, and it can’t turn planetary overreach into endless lifestyle improvements. Declaring oneself to be an optimist is often used as a means of gaining the moral upper hand: “Things may look bad but, O ye of little faith, be bold and cheerful like me.”

There is a point at which optimism starts to become pathological; I think this the point where it is taken to be an end in itself. In a society with a fully-developed pathology one can win an argument simply by being optimistic; one can, with a snide chuckle, merely brush off inconvenient questions simply because they are uncomfortable. One's cognitive comfort (and that of the well-heeled choir to which one preaches) comes first and prevails over and above all dissuasive shrieks and cries. Those who suffer must not only suffer but also do so quietly.

I must say that excessive optimism is not a condition not something that we Brits are overburdened with in general.



However, that does not mean that we are not similarly insensitive. Most of us would sooner starve half the world than give up our cars or our South African asparagus (though we would never admit this, least of all to ourselves).

I don't suppose that any of the 'eco-pragmatists' would agree with a word of what I am polemically attributing to them; however, this really does seem to be the unavoidable conclusion of their line of thinking -- how else will they sustain their fantasy if not by exporting disconfirmatory externalities into the bodies and atmospheres of others?

The incapacity to cognise discomforting information as anything other than a falsehood (false because it is discomforting) leads inexorably to chronic insensitivity.

If we're not afraid then we really haven't been paying attention.

Political aesthetics must have rough edges.