OMNI
ANTHROPOCENE NEWS
READINGS COMPILED BY DICK BENNETT FOR
A CULTURE OF PEACE, JUSTICE, AND ECOLOGY
January 23, 2016
[Apology: I prepared
this in January and forgot to send. A
note from Lolly today about Ian Angus sent me stumbling into it again. I hope everything is still relevant, but so
fast are climate developments, probably not.
Dick]
What’s at
stake: Shall we follow the path of
“adaptive optimism” that misled people during the early decades of warming, or
the path recommended by Thomas Hardy, 19th Century poet and
novelist? “… if way to the Better there be, it exacts a
full look at the Worst.” [Or look at the
worst in order to adapt accurately and adequately? Actually isn’t that what OMNI350 Book Forum
has done?]]
Climate
ANTHROPOCENE, the Great Acceleration
ANTHROPOCENE
is gaining favor as the word for the new epoch succeeding the Holocene. The central issue in the following writings
is: Why are scientists discussing
changing the name of the present epoch? What changes have occurred in the atmosphere
that might make a new epoch name needed? Shall OMNI350 begin using the term to help the
public become familiar with the idea? --Dick [And shall we henceforth write and say for
CC: Climate Catastrophe?]
Contents
The first
six items are introductory and easily read.
Miesler,
Thumbnail History
Dick, AD-G and Another Tiny History, The Collapse of Western Civilization by
Oreskes and Conway, a “Science Fiction Novel”
Oreskes and Conway, a “Science Fiction Novel”
Robinson, Forty Signs of Rain Novel
Oreskes and
Conway, Merchants of Doubt
Ian Angus, “Anthropocene,” Notes by Dick
International
Commission on Stratigraphy
The next two
for further research.
John Bellamy
Foster, The Great Capitalist Climacteric
Ian Angus, “Anthropocene,”
Google Search
Anthropocene,
Google Search
INTRODUCTION
FOR THE GENERAL READER: WHAT WE KNEW IN 1995.
THUMBNAIL
SKETCH OF DISCOVERY THAT OUR OWN BURNING OF FOSSIL FUELS WAS CHANGING THE
CLIMATE AND THEREFORE THE WEATHER. Why
did humans not respond effectively to CO2/Warming increases more quickly?
TheHumanist.com
TheHumanist.com
NOVEMBER 
Concerning Our Failure
to Appreciate the Weather
© Stocktrek Images
Twenty years ago I
came across a cartoon by Mike Keefe that captured an attitude I had found all
too pervasive among my fellow Americans: the attitude of entitlement and
detached disregard for understanding how our global climate system operates.
It inspired me to write an essay describing my understanding of
our planet’s climate system, and it was published in the November/December 1995 issue of the Humanist. Rereading it, I notice some minor errors but
the basic story remains as accurate today as it was back then. Since
anniversaries are a good time to reflect on history and how far we’ve come (or
not), I think it’s worth recalling where
our understanding of climate change was twenty years ago.
Though there were
fewer media outlets back then, they were more objective and for the most part
offered straightforward climate science information. After all, it’s not that
tough a story to summarize, even if the details get devilishly difficult.
By ’95 we had learned that weather is the product of climate
conditions and that Earth’s climate conditions fluctuated. We knew that CO2 and other greenhouse gases were a major
regulator of those fluctuations.
At the same time we
were also being forced to confront the reality that it was our own burning of
fossil fuels and the machines behind our modern marvels and lavish lifestyles
that were increasingly belching “gaseous insulation” into our atmosphere.
Back then we were thinking about the Keeling Curve, the mother
of all CO2concentration graphs. Consider for a moment that
before the industrial revolution our global climate system had its CO2 regulator slowly fluctuating between about 180
ppm (parts per million) to 280 ppm. And I mean slowly, taking tens of thousands
of years to go from peak to trough (±100 ppm), with profound changes from ice
ages to temperate periods.
Around 1850 this gaseous
regulator was set at the prehistoric peak of ±280 ppm, but by 1995 this
greenhouse gas regulator increased 80 clicks, up to 360 ppm. It has taken only
twenty years to ratchet up another forty clicks and bust through 400 ppm, which
is setting up the earth for a hothouse future.
This added
atmospheric insulation warms our climate system. Simple undeniable physics!
This warming then forces the troposphere to hold more moisture.
I believe
cartoonist Keefe’s storm clouds were a reminder of the increasing tempo of
“rogue” weather events we had been witnessing. For instance, in the United
States we had the great 1980 drought and heat wave that killed thousands; the
wild 1982-83 season, with its El Niño-driven storms and floods; an ugly drought
in Australia; and some crazy cyclone behavior in the Pacific. 1988 brought
another massive and costly drought and heat wave, 1991 saw the Oakland Hills
firestorm, and in 1992 category-five Hurricane Andrew hit the Atlantic,
category four Iniki struck Hawaii, and the Pacific Ocean had its most powerful
cyclone season in recorded history. The year ended with the colossal Nor’easter
of ’92. Since dubbed “The Perfect Storm,” it was a reminder for all who were
paying attention that global weather systems interact with each other and their
cumulative energy is capable of extraordinary outbursts. For the next three
years an amazing four extreme weather calamities hit the United States
annually.
I like to think
Keefe was mocking the studied avoidance found in growing numbers of citizens.
The science was becoming clearer as to our impact on climate, with headlines of
these events including phrases such as “wake up call.” Indeed, we were waking
up to the fact that it was our own collective behavior and expectations driving
this global problem; the escalating consumption we’d fallen in love with was
the cancer that would continue raising our planet’s temperature. However, this
dawning realization created a profound cognitive dissonance.
Mike Keefe’s cartoon
reprinted with permission of the cartoonist.
The stark historic
reality was this: power down or radically alter our planet’s global climate
system and the biosphere upon which we all depend. Yes, that meant consuming
less and in smarter ways. It also meant burning less fossil fuels and making
fewer babies.
Republican and
libertarian players took advantage of the power of cognitive dissonance and
created a network of right-wing think tanks and PR fronts. With hindsight it’s
easy to see their long-term, two-pronged approach. First, there was the
enlisting and cultivating of certain profit-focused evangelical interests to
foster faith-based communities that were emotionally hostile towards
evidence-based learning and rational constructive discourse. The other depended
on orchestrating dirty tricks, creating scandals, and lying about the
scientific evidence, along with misrepresentation of and personal attacks
against scientists themselves.
Instead of
promoting curiosity or interest in learning about what was happening to our
planet, they created an alternate universe of faux science that conformed to
their ideology and to their political and business objectives. To hell with
understanding observations and facts regarding Earth. The “merchants of doubt,”
to borrow a phrase from Naomi Oreskes, became masters of deception and spin.
For instance, after a record-smashing hot 1998, global surface temperatures
plateaued and didn’t rise as fast as some expected.
By 2006 the spin
masters started crying “no global warming!” with such insistence and wily
finesse that they even got the scientific community all atwitter about an
imaginary “global warming hiatus.”
It seemed like
everyone forgot the unavoidable basics: It’s our planet’s atmospheric
insulation doing the heavy lifting on this global warming thing.
The troposphere
(Earth’s lowest layer of atmosphere) is huge and complex; heat is absorbed and
moved around in myriad ways so it’s no surprise that scientists don’t have a
perfect inventory of where every joule of heat is going. What matters is how
atmospheric greenhouse gases are retaining heat, and that process scientists do
understand—thoroughly. It doesn’t turn on and off; the “global warming hiatus”
was an illusion from day one.
The question
everyone should have been asking was: “Where did the surface heat go?” The
answer turns out to be a combination of oceans and difficulties in deducing the
“average” global surface temperature in the first place.
Another PR ringer
is the soothing mantra that held some rational justification in the 1960s and
’70s, perhaps even in the ’80s, but has become increasingly disconnected from
reality: “No single storm is proof of global warming.” The success of this bit
of tactical misdirection has been astonishing and far-reaching. Even serious
scientists glommed onto it. But it ignores the basic physical reality that
weather is the tool of our climate and climate is dependent on the composition
of the atmosphere.
Climate is a heat
and moisture distribution engine. Weather is the physical tool that does the
work of distributing the sun’s heat and hot moisture-laden air masses that our
equatorial belt is constantly churning out. It follows that no weather event is
independent of the overarching warming of our weather-making engine. So, what’s
up with the wishful avoidance?
Flash forward to
2015 and the earth is experiencing its warmest year in recorded history.
Extreme weather events continue breaking records, yet business leaders, their
politicians, and their faithful continue to ignore everything climate
scientists and observations have to teach them about our one and only planet.
We face a
make-or-break challenge: Will we grow up and get serious about our impacts upon
this one and only, finite home of ours? Will our politicians and business
leaders muster the courage to take the threats to civilization seriously?
There are many who
see this as the people’s project. Citizens’ Climate Lobby (CCL), for example,
is a nonprofit, nonpartisan advocacy group that trains and supports volunteers
to engage elected officials, the media, and the public on the need to act to
mitigate climate change. They are gearing up for the upcoming UN Climate Change
Conference in Paris and need more support. If you care about the health of our
planet, here’s your chance to step up and be a global citizen; check out CCL’s
“Pathway to Paris” website and lend your support.
Peter Miesler writes from near Durango, Colorado, and maintains
the blog Whatsupwiththatwatts.blogspot.com, challenging
climate science contrarians to debate.
ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE JAN. 21,
2016, and The Collapse of Western
Civilization by Dick Bennett [Oh oh, Art has discussed this book
with us. –D]
The state’s largest circulation newspaper
now recognizes, at least in a news report, and only four decades late, that not
only is temperature rising, but has
risen dangerously, and is breaking the annual mark for high temperature. (Seth Borenstein (AP), “2015 Earth’s Hottest
in 136 Years, Experts Say.”) Well, the headline “experts say” dilutes the truth a little, and the
report is published on p. 6A below the fold.
One could think it would be page one news in large headline as a major
public service. Still, the truth inside
the report is imperative. (Placement of news
articles can make a big difference. You
recall in the film Spotlight, The Boston
Globe knew a decade earlier about priests’ pederasty but reported it in an
inner section, the public remained acquiescent, and nothing was done until an
investigative team worked relentlessly for the whole truth and reached page one.)
The little book The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future by
Oreskes and Conway summarizes contexts
for appraising the AD-G report. The book is written as science fiction for
the tercentenary of the end of Western culture (1540-2093) to explain why “the
children of the Enlightenment failed to act on robust information about climate
change and knowledge of the damaging events that were about to unfold.” The imagined historian “concludes that a
second Dark Age had fallen on Western civilization, in which denial and
self-deception, rooted in an ideological fixation on ‘free’ markets, disabled
the world’s powerful nations in the face of tragedy,” and the scientists
themselves “were hamstrung by their own cultural [specializations]
practices.” (Introduction).
Chapter I, “The Coming of the Penumbral
Age” (anti-intellectualism of the last quarter of the 20th c. and
first decades of the 21st), reminds us how very much scientists and
the people knew regarding the increasing C02 and warming, and how very little
they did to mitigate it, “giving rise to the Anthropocene Period of geological history” (3). As early as 1968, John Mercer warned the world in an article (p. 89) and Paul
Ehrlich in his book The Population Bomb,
but they were generally dismissed. 1988
is considered the beginning of the Penumbral Period, for in that year the
United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In 1991, the Montreal Protocol to Control
Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer became a model for international
governance. And in 1992, world nations
signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) “to
prevent ‘dangerous anthropogenic interference’ in the climate system” (5). But then, beginning with the USA, a backlash
occurred and “climate change denial… spread rapidly.” Corporations, government officials, and even
some scientists focused on “uncertainties.”
A massive disinformation campaign preceding the 2009 conference in
Copenhagen and funded mainly by fossil fuel companies undermined key
evidence. In all, fifteen post-UNFCC
conference attempts to agree on binding, international law to prevent
disruptive climate change” failed.
Chapter
II (pp. 11-33), “The Frenzy of Fossil Fuels” surveys some dozen reasons why the
opponents of truth about CO2, warming, and climate change were able to succeed
in blocking effective action. (It’s a
sickening history of major miscreancy and malfeasance but in which just about
everybody is complicit by doing nothing or too little. –Dick].
Chapter III, “Market Failure” examines two
ideologies that trapped Western civilization—positivism and market
fundamentalism--, and the “carbon combustion system” that together controlled
US climate decision-making.
An Epilogue anticipates China’s adaption
to climate change catastrophes.
Then a “Lexicon of Archaic Terms” (my italics, remember the book is written by an
author in 2093; I enjoyed this double-perspective).
Finally, an “Interview with the Authors.”
Oreskes and
Conway identify their books as at least half a novel. Here’s another about the shift from Holocene
epoch to the proposed Anthropocene:
FORTY SIGNS OF RAIN by Kim Stanley Robinson
Review in Publisher’s Weekly, 2004.
In this cerebral
near-future novel, the first in a trilogy, Robinson (The Years of Rice and
Salt ) explores the events leading up to a worldwide catastrophe
brought on by global warming. Each of his various viewpoint characters holds a
small piece of the puzzle and can see calamity coming, but is helpless before
the indifference of the politicians and capitalists who run America. Anna
Quibler, a National Science Foundation official in Washington, D.C., sifts
through dozens of funding proposals each day, while her husband, Charlie,
handles life as a stay-at-home dad and telecommutes to his job as an
environmental adviser to a liberal senator. Another scientist, Frank Vanderwal,
finds his sterile worldview turned upside down after attending a lecture on
Buddhist attitudes toward science given by the ambassador from Khembalung, a
nation virtually inundated by the rising Indian Ocean. Robinson's tale lacks
the drama and excitement of such other novels dealing with global climate
change as Bruce Sterling's Heavy Weather and John Barnes's Mother
of Storms, but his portrayal of how actual scientists would deal with this
disaster-in-the-making is utterly convincing. Robinson clearly cares deeply
about our planet's future, and he makes the reader care as well. Agent,
Ralph Vicinanza.
See Naomi
Oreskes, Erik
M. M. Conway. Merchants of Doubt:
How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to
Global Warming. 2011.
Film based
on book 2015.
Merchants of Doubt was one of the most talked-about climate change books of recent years, for reasons easy to understand: It tells the controversial story of how a loose-knit group of high-level scientists and scientific advisers, with deep connections in politics and industry, ran effective campaigns to mislead the public and deny well-established scientific knowledge over four decades.
Merchants of Doubt was one of the most talked-about climate change books of recent years, for reasons easy to understand: It tells the controversial story of how a loose-knit group of high-level scientists and scientific advisers, with deep connections in politics and industry, ran effective campaigns to mislead the public and deny well-established scientific knowledge over four decades.
The Great Capitalist
Climacteric
Marxism and "System
Change Not Climate Change"
http://monthlyreview.org/2015/11/01/the-great-capitalist-climacteric/
This article is from a
keynote address presented at Manifesta in Ostend, Belgium on September 19,
2015. This year’s Manifesta was
organized around the theme of climate change in preparation for the COP21
climate negotiations (and protests) in Paris in December 2015.
Humanity
today is confronted with what might be called the Great Capitalist Climacteric.
In the standard definition, a climacteric (from the Greekklimaktēr or rung on the ladder) is a period of critical transition or a
turning point in the life of an individual or a whole society. From a social
standpoint, it raises issues of historical transformation in the face of
changing conditions.1 In the 1980s environmental geographers Ian Burton and Robert
Kates referred to “the Great Climacteric” to address what they saw as the
developing global ecological problem of the limits to growth, stretching from
1798 (the year of publication of Thomas Malthus’s Essay on the Principle of Population) to 2048, 250 years later.
“Applied to population, resources, and environment throughout the world,” the
notion of a Great Climacteric, they wrote, “captures the idea of a period that
is critical and where serious change for the worse may occur. It is a time of
unusual danger.”2
I will use
the term the Great Capitalist Climacteric here to refer to the necessary
epochal social transition associated with the current planetary emergency. It
refers both to the objective necessity of a shift to a sustainable society and
to the threat to the existence of Homo sapiens (as well as numerous other species) if the logic of capital
accumulation is allowed to continue dictating to society as a whole. The
current world of business as usual is marked by rapid climate change, but also
by the crossing or impending crossing of numerous other planetary boundaries
that define “a safe operating space for humanity.”3 It was the recognition of this and of the unprecedented speed of
Earth system change due to social-historical factors that led scientists in
recent years to introduce the notion of the Anthropocene epoch, marking the
emergence of humanity as a geological force on a planetary scale.4 As leading U.S. climatologist James Hansen explains, “The
rapidity with which the human-caused positive [climate] forcing is being
introduced has no known analog in Earth’s history. It is thus exceedingly
difficult to foresee the consequences if the human-made climate forcing
continues to accelerate.”5
With the
present rate of carbon emission, the world will break the global carbon
budget—reaching the trillionth metric ton of combusted carbon and generating a
2°C increase in global average temperature—within a generation or so.6 Once we reach a 2°C increase, it is feared, we will be entering
a world of climate feedbacks and irreversibility where humanity may no longer
be able to return to the conditions that defined the Holocene epoch in which
civilization developed. The 2°C “guardrail” officially adopted by world
governments in Copenhagen in 2009 is meant to safeguard humanity from plunging
into what prominent UK climatologist Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Center for
Climate Change has called “extremely dangerous” climate change. Yet, stopping
carbon emissions prior to the 2°C boundary, Anderson tells us, will at this
point require “revolutionary change to the political economic hegemony,” going
against the accumulation of capital or economic growth characteristics that
define the capitalist system. More concretely, staying within the carbon budget
means that global carbon emissions must at present be cut by around 3 percent a
year, and in the rich countries by approximately 10 percent per annum—moving
quickly to zero net emissions (or carbon neutrality). For an “outside chance”
of staying below 2°C, Anderson declared in 2012, the rich (OECD, Annex I)
countries would need to cut their emissions by 70 percent by 2020 and 90
percent by 2030.7
Yet,
despite the widespread awareness of the planetary emergency represented by
global warming, carbon emissions have continued to rise throughout the world.
The failure of capitalism to implement the necessary cuts in carbon dioxide can
be explained by the threat that this poses to its very existence as a system of capital accumulation. As a result civilization is faced by a
threat of self-extermination that over the long run is as great as that posed
by a full nuclear exchange—and in a process that is more inexorable. The
present reality of global capitalism makes it appear utopian to call for a
revolutionary strategy of “System Change Not Climate Change.” But the objective
of stopping climate change leaves the world with no other option, since
avoiding climate-change disaster will be even more difficult—and may prove
impossible—if the global population does not act quickly and decisively.
Some
observers have been quick to conclude that 2°C will inevitably be crossed given
prevailing social reality and the failure of current climate negotiations, and
that we should therefore simply accept this and shift the target, choosing to
stop climate change before it reaches a 3°C or a 4°C
increase. This is a view that the World Bank has subtly encouraged.8 It is necessary, however, to take into account the likely non-linear effects of such global warming on the entire Earth system. Beyond 2°C, the level of uncertainty, and the threat of uncontrollable Earth warming due to “slow feedbacks” and the crossing of successive thresholds (tipping points), are magnified enormously.9 Human actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions might then come too late, not simply in the sense of an increase in catastrophic events such as extreme weather or the effects of sea level rise, but also in the even more ominous sense of humanity’s loss of the power to stabilize the climate (and civilization). We do not know when and where such a global tipping point will be reached, but today’s climate science tells us that it is much closer to a 2°C increase than was thought when that boundary was originally proposed. What was once believed to be “dangerous climate” change arising at 2°C is now considered to be “highly dangerous.”10 If uncontrollable global warming—driven by the reduction in the albedo effect (the reflectivity of the earth), the release of methane from the permafrost, and other slow feedbacks—were to take over, human beings would have little choice but simply to try to adapt in whatever ways they could, watching while their own future, and even more that of future generations, evaporated before their eyes.11
increase. This is a view that the World Bank has subtly encouraged.8 It is necessary, however, to take into account the likely non-linear effects of such global warming on the entire Earth system. Beyond 2°C, the level of uncertainty, and the threat of uncontrollable Earth warming due to “slow feedbacks” and the crossing of successive thresholds (tipping points), are magnified enormously.9 Human actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions might then come too late, not simply in the sense of an increase in catastrophic events such as extreme weather or the effects of sea level rise, but also in the even more ominous sense of humanity’s loss of the power to stabilize the climate (and civilization). We do not know when and where such a global tipping point will be reached, but today’s climate science tells us that it is much closer to a 2°C increase than was thought when that boundary was originally proposed. What was once believed to be “dangerous climate” change arising at 2°C is now considered to be “highly dangerous.”10 If uncontrollable global warming—driven by the reduction in the albedo effect (the reflectivity of the earth), the release of methane from the permafrost, and other slow feedbacks—were to take over, human beings would have little choice but simply to try to adapt in whatever ways they could, watching while their own future, and even more that of future generations, evaporated before their eyes.11
Indeed,
even the 2°C guardrail approach, Hansen argues, is too conservative. If major
sea level rise engulfing islands and threatening coastal cities throughout the
world and displacing hundreds millions of people is to be avoided, society
needs to aim at reaching 350 parts per million (ppm) of atmospheric carbon
(down from the present 400 ppm) by 2100, which would require cutting net carbon
emissions by about 6 percent per annum globally.12
As bad as
all of this is, it is essential to keep in mind that climate change is only one
part of the Great Capitalist Climacteric confronting the world in the
twenty-first century—although related to all the others. The world economy has
already crossed or is on the brink of crossing a whole set of planetary
boundaries, each one of which represents a planetary emergency in its own right,
including ocean acidification, loss of biological diversity, the disruption of
the nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, disappearance of fresh water, land cover
change (particularly deforestation), and growing pollution from synthetic
chemicals (leading to biomagnification and bioaccumulation of toxins in living
organisms).13 The common denominator behind all of these rifts in the
biogeochemical cycles of the planet is the system of capital accumulation on a
global scale. This points to the need for truly massive, accelerated social
change exceeding in scale not only the great social revolutions of the past,
but also the great transformations of production marked by the original
Agricultural Revolution and the Industrial Revolution: namely, a twenty-first
century Ecological Revolution.
Natural
science can take us only so far on these issues. Since the source of the Great
Capitalist Climacteric lies in the historical constitution of human society,
necessitating a social revolution, we must turn to social science as a guide.
Yet, the dominant social science has as its underlying premise—structuring its
entire frame of analysis—the notion that the critique of capitalism is off
limits. This is so much the case that even the name “capitalism,” as John
Kenneth Galbraith pointed out in The Economics of Innocent Fraud, was increasingly replaced
in the 1980s by the “meaningless designation” of “the market system.”14 When capitalism is referred to at all today in the mainstream it
is as a mere synonym for the watered down notion of a competitive market
society, viewed as the end (telos) of human history—both in the sense that all
of history is seen as the unfolding of a natural tendency toward market
capitalism, and that capitalism itself is “the end of history.”15
The result
of such ahistorical thinking is that conventional thought, with only minor
exceptions, has virtually no serious social scientific analysis on which to
rely in confronting today’s Great Capitalist Climacteric. Those who swallow
whole the notion that there is no future beyond capitalism are prone to
conclude—in defiance of the facts—that the climate crisis can be mitigated
within the present system. It is this social denialism of liberal-left approaches to the climate crisis, and of the
dominant social science, that led Naomi Klein to declare in This Changes Everything that “the right is right” in viewing climate change as a threat
to capitalism. The greatest obstacle before us, she insists, is not the outright denialism of the science by the far
right, but rather the social denialism of the dominant liberal discourse, which, while giving lip
service to the science, refuses to face reality and recognize that capitalism
must go.16
If
conventional social science is crippled at every point by corrupt adherence to
a prevailing class reality, the postmodern turn over the last few decades has
generated a left discourse that is just as ill-equipped to address the Great
Capitalist Climacteric. Largely abandoning historical analysis (grand
narratives) and the negation of the negation—that is, the idea of a
revolutionary forward movement—the left has given way to extreme skepticism and
the deconstruction of everything in existence, constituting a profound
“dialectic of defeat.”17
Although
some hope is to be found in the Green theory or “ecologism” that has emerged in
the context of the environmental movement, such views are typically devoid of
any secure moorings within social (or natural) science, relying on
neo-Malthusian assumptions coupled with an abstract ethical orientation that
focuses on the need for a new, ecocentric world-view aimed at protecting the
earth and other species.18 The main weakness of this new ecological conscience is the
absence of anything remotely resembling “the confrontation of reason with
reality,” in the form of a serious ecological and social critique of capitalism
as a system.19 Abstract notions like growth, industrialism, or consumption take
the place of investigations into the laws of motion of capitalism as an
economic and social order, and how these laws of motion have led to a collision
course with the Earth system.
It is therefore the socialist tradition, building on the
powerful foundations of historical materialism—and returning once more to its
radical foundations to reinvent and re-revolutionize itself—to which we must
necessarily turn in order to find the main critical tools with which to address
the Great Capitalist Climacteric and the problem of the transition to a just
and sustainable society. A period of self-criticism within Marxian theory,
commencing in the 1960s and developing over decades, eventually gave rise to a
revolution in its understanding of social-ecological conditions. Yet, like most
intellectual revolutions the new insights arose only by standing “on the
shoulders of giants”—that is, based on the rediscovery and reconstruction of
prior understandings, in the face of changing conditions.
The advance
of Marxian ecology was the product of a massive archaeological dig in the
scientific foundations of Marx’s thought, allowing for the development of a
much richer understanding of the relation of the materialist conception of history to the materialist conception of
nature—and
generating a deeper, wider social-ecological critique of capitalist society.
By the end of the last century this return to Marx’s ecology had
resulted in three crucial scientific breakthroughs: (1) the rediscovery of what
could be called Marx’s “ecological value-form analysis”; (2) the recovery and
reconstruction of his theory of metabolic rift; and (3) the retrieval of the
two types of ecological crisis theory embedded in his analysis. These critical
breakthroughs were to generate new strategic insights into revolutionary praxis
in the Anthropocene.
The Three Critical Breakthroughs of
Ecological Marxism
What has
often been called the Western Marxist tradition that arose in the 1920s and
’30s, was distinguished primarily by its rejection of the dialectics of nature
and Soviet-style dialectical materialism.20 The interpretation of Marx’s approach to the relation of nature
and society in the Western Marxist tradition found its most systematic early
expression in Alfred Schmidt’s 1962 The Concept of Nature in Marx, originally written as a
doctoral thesis under the supervision of Frankfurt School philosophers Max
Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. Schmidt recognized the central importance of
Marx’s notion of social metabolism in the development of a revolutionary, new
conception of nature. Yet, this was to be set aside in Schmidt’s wider
criticism, which attributed to Marx the same narrow
instrumentalist-productivist vision purportedly characteristic of the
“dialectic of Enlightenment” as a whole.21
In the
1970s and ’80s Schmidt’s overall negative assessment of Marx on nature was
adopted by what has now come to be known as “first-stage ecosocialism,”
associated with figures such as Ted Benton and Andre Gorz.22 Benton argued that Marx had gone overboard in his criticism of
Malthus’s population theory to the point of denying natural limits altogether.23 The mature Marx (as distinguished from the Marx of the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts) was thus seen as devoid
of positive ecological values and as promoting a crude “Promethean”
productivism. A common practice of first-stage ecoscialism was to graft both
neo-Malthusian concepts and the primarily ethical standpoint of Green theory
onto more traditional Marxian theory, creating a hybrid ecosocialism or what
was referred to as “the greening of Marxism.”24 As Raymond Williams critically observed, the result was a
tendency to “run together two kinds of thinking” associated with Green theory
and Marxism, rather than going back to the roots of historical materialism to
uncover its own ecological premises.25
It was in
this context that a “second-stage ecosocialism,” challenging the first, arose
in the 1990s in the work of various Marxian political economists. Socialist
theorists proceeded to dig into the very foundations of classical historical
materialism and its value-theoretical framework. The first critical
breakthrough, dramatically altering our understanding of Marx on ecology, was
provided by Marxian economist Paul Burkett, who in his 1999 Marx and Nature recovered the ecological
value-form analysis underpinning Marx’s entire critique of political economy.26 It was the early Soviet economist, I.I. Rubin, who had first
emphasized the double nature of Marx’s value theory as consisting of: (1) a
theory of the value-form, or what Marxian economist Paul Sweezy in the United
States was to call “the qualitative value problem,” and (2) a theory of the
quantitative determination of value and price. It was the value-form analysis,
focusing on the social form that value assumes and the larger qualitative
aspects of capitalist valorization connecting it to class and production, which
was to be Marx’s singular achievement—altering as well the understanding of the
quantitative aspects of value.27 In Burkett’s work, Marx’s value-form theory was elaborated to
explain systematically for the first time the ecological value-form analysis
embedded in classical historical materialism.28
From this
standpoint, Marx’s entire critique was seen as rooted in the contradictory
relations between what he called “production in general,” characterizing human
production in all of its forms, and the historically specific capitalist labor
and production process.29 In production in general the human labor process transforms the
products of nature, or natural-material use values, which constitute real
material wealth. However, in capitalism, conceived as a specific mode of
production, this characteristic of production in general takes a more alienated
form, as the majority of workers are estranged from the means of production,
and particularly the land, and are thus proletarianized—able to survive only by
selling their labor power.
All value,
the classical political economists argued, came from labor. But classical-liberal political economists saw
this as a universal, trans-
historical reality, while Marx, in sharp contrast, conceived it as a historically specific one, confined to capitalism. Nature was excluded, as Marx stressed, from the direct creation of value/exchange value under capitalism.30 This is still reflected in our national income or GDP statistics, which account for economic growth entirely in terms of thevalue added of human services, measured in the form of wages or property income.31 The capitalist calculation of value or economic growth thus has as one of its underlying premises, to quote Marx, the notion of the “free gift of Nature to capital.”32 Nature’s powers are presumed by the system to be a direct gift to capital itself, for which no exchange must be made.33 This means, in truth, that nature, or real wealth, is robbed. As the socialist ecological economist, K. William Kapp, wrote in the 1960s, “capitalism must be regarded as an economy of unpaid costs.”34 (It should be noted here that the existence of rents for land and resources does not alter the essential fact that nature is excluded from the value calculation. Instead, rents ensure that part of the surplus produced by society is redistributed to those who are able to monopolize the “rights” to natural resources.)
historical reality, while Marx, in sharp contrast, conceived it as a historically specific one, confined to capitalism. Nature was excluded, as Marx stressed, from the direct creation of value/exchange value under capitalism.30 This is still reflected in our national income or GDP statistics, which account for economic growth entirely in terms of thevalue added of human services, measured in the form of wages or property income.31 The capitalist calculation of value or economic growth thus has as one of its underlying premises, to quote Marx, the notion of the “free gift of Nature to capital.”32 Nature’s powers are presumed by the system to be a direct gift to capital itself, for which no exchange must be made.33 This means, in truth, that nature, or real wealth, is robbed. As the socialist ecological economist, K. William Kapp, wrote in the 1960s, “capitalism must be regarded as an economy of unpaid costs.”34 (It should be noted here that the existence of rents for land and resources does not alter the essential fact that nature is excluded from the value calculation. Instead, rents ensure that part of the surplus produced by society is redistributed to those who are able to monopolize the “rights” to natural resources.)
The second
critical breakthrough in Marxian ecology was the recovery of what has come to
be known as Marx’s theory of metabolic rift. Marx’s adoption of the concept of
metabolism to address the systemic relations of nature and society was evident
beginning with his writings in the Grundrisse in the late 1850s and in all of his major political-economic
writings thereafter—up through his 1879–1880 Notes on Adolph Wagner. In 1850 Marx encountered
what amounted to an early ecological system perspective, in the extension of
the concept of metabolism (Stoffwechsel) to the interconnected relations of plants and animals, through Mikrokosmos, written by his close friend and political associate, the
socialist physician-scientist Roland Daniels.35
Marx was
later to be influenced by the German chemist Justus von Liebig’s critique of
British industrial agriculture, particularly the introduction to the 1862
edition of Liebig’s great work on agricultural chemistry. Liebig’s virulent
critique of capitalist agriculture was concerned with the nineteenth-century
soil crisis. He noted that the essential soil nutrients, such as nitrogen,
potassium, and phosphorus, were shipped in the form of food and fiber to the
new densely populated urban-industrial centers, where they contributed to the
pollution of the cities, and were lost to the soil. Hence, Liebig and Marx both
referred to industrial capitalist agriculture as a robbery system, leaching the
soil of its nutrients. Britain in this period was forced to make up for its
robbing the soil of its nutrients by imperialistically importing bones from the
Napoleonic battlefields and the catacombs of Europe, and guano from Peru, in
order to obtain the natural fertilizer to replenish English fields. The global
metabolic rift, according to Marx, meant that capitalism disrupted “the eternal
natural condition” of life itself. It therefore produced “an irreparable rift
in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by
the natural laws of life itself.”36This rift could also be
seen in the unequal ecological exchange between countries, whereby capital in
the center systematically robbed the periphery of its soil and resources.37
Marx’s
overall analysis in this respect is best understood in terms of a triad of
concepts discussed in his Economic Manuscripts of
1861–1862 and Capital: “the universal metabolism of nature,” the “social metabolism,”
and the metabolic rift.38 Human beings, he argued, exist within the “universal metabolism
of nature,” from which they extract nature’s use values, and transform these in
production, i.e., the “social metabolism,” in order to meet their needs for
subsistence and development. Yet, capitalism, as a historically specific form
of production, systematically alienates workers from the means of production
(the land, nature, tools) thereby proletarianizing labor, and making possible
capitalist exploitation and accumulation. In the process, both the soil and the
worker, the “original sources of all wealth,” were undermined, generating a
metabolic rift. The result, Marx argued, was the necessity of the “restoration”
of this metabolism, which however, could only take place in a higher society,
i.e. socialism.39
It was with
such considerations in mind that Marx introduced the most radical conception of
ecological sustainability ever developed. As he wrote in Capital:
From the standpoint of a higher socio-economic formation, the private
property of particular individuals in the earth will appear just as absurd as
the private property of one man in other men. Even an entire society, a nation,
or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of
the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to
bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations, as boni patres familias [good
heads of the household].40
In Marx,
ecological sustainability together with substantive equality defined the entire
basis of socialism/communism. “Freedom, in this sphere,” he wrote, “can consist
only in this, that socialized man, the associated producers, govern the human
metabolism with nature in a rational way…accomplishing it with the least
expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their
human nature.”41
The third
critical breakthrough of second-stage ecosocialism was the retrieval of Marx’s
dual conception of ecological crisis in capitalist society. In the first form
of ecological crisis, depicted in Capital, the focus was on natural
resource scarcity. Here the problem is how increasing scarcities of resources
and environmental amenities in general lead to enhanced ecological costs,
thereby squeezing profit margins. This can be seen in Marx’s treatment of the
British cotton crisis during the U.S. Civil War, the role of resources in
elevating the cost of constant capital in his theory of the tendency of the
rate of profit to fall, and in his discussions of the need of capital to
conserve constant capital. Increasing resource costs with the degradation of
the environment can create huge problems for capitalist accumulation. Here it
is evident how imperialism, in keeping the price of internationally sourced raw
material prices low, helps promote capital accumulation in the center of the
system.
Yet, there is also to be found in Marx a theory of ecological
crisis proper, or a crisis of sustainable human development, going beyond the
value calculus of the system itself—as exemplified by the theory of metabolic
rift. Simply because capitalism is a robbery system, in Liebig and Marx’s
sense, it externalizes most of the costs of environmental (and social)
degradation on nature and society without this directly affecting its bottom
line. Thus such phenomena as desertification and deforestation—both of which
were discussed by Marx—have implications for sustainable human development but
do not enter directly into the value calculation of the commodity system. A
metabolic rift that disrupts biogeochemical cycles may be fully compatible with
continued accumulation. In its relative insulation from the environmental
degradation that it systematically creates everywhere around it, capitalism is
unique among modes of production.
As Burkett
writes, “For Marx…capital accumulation can maintain itself through
environmental crises. In fact, this is one thing that makes capitalism
different from previous societies. It has the ability to continue with its
competitive, profit-driven pattern of accumulation despite the damage this does
to natural conditions.”42 Today we see economic growth continue while the disruptions of
the biogeochemical cycles of the entire planet upon which all living beings
depend for their existence do not enter into the accounting. In fact, these
disruptions and rifts open new profit-making opportunities for capital such as
the agrichemical (fertilizers and pesticides) industry or today’s carbon
markets.
Most of the
concrete research inspired by Marxian theories of ecological crisis in recent
years has focused on the theory of metabolic rift, since it is the crisis of sustainable human development that defines the current planetary emergency. Moreover, the
metabolic rift perspective has provided an understanding of systemic
environmental changes not reducible simply to issues of scale and carrying
capacity or to the economics of the system—thereby probing new dimensions of
the problem. Marx’s metabolic rift analysis intersects with the treadmill of
production analysis (which grew out of his theory of accumulation), and at the
same time relates to developments in natural science, thus tying into the most
developed ecological perspectives.43 It points to the deep contradictions associated with capital’s
division of nature (alongside the division of labor).
For
example, the metabolic rift allows us to understand more fully the
implications—of which Marx was already critical in the nineteenth century—of
the attempts of the system to accelerate the growth rates of animals in
factory-style production, by removing them from their ecosystems, changing
their food intake, breeding, and so on. Animals are decomposed, their various
body parts manipulated, converted into mere processes of production to be
commodified to the nth degree.44
The metabolic
rift analysis was also seen by Marx and Engels in terms of open-system
thermodynamics, in the context of which, as Engels observed in 1882, humanity
was “squandering” the fossil fuels associated with “past solar energy” while
failing to make good use of present solar energy.45
Marxism and the Great Capitalist
Climacteric
It is on the basis of this set of critical theoretical
breakthroughs—constituting a scientific revolution in Marxian theory reaching
back into the very foundations of historical materialism—that it is possible to
draw five broad conclusions about the ecological and social revolution
that is now necessary in the face of today’s Great Capitalist Climacteric.
First, the
problem threatening the global environment is the accumulation of capital under the present phase of
monopoly-finance capital, and not just economic growth in the abstract. That is, issues
of the qualitative nature of development as well as quantitative development
are involved. This raises the question of the ecological value form associated
with capitalism in its monopoly-finance phase, geared to the promotion of
economic and ecological waste as a stimulus to accumulation. Today the rich
economies are well developed and capable of satisfying the material needs of
their populations, and of emphasizing qualitative human development.
Capitalism, however, requires continual value expansion and commodity
consumption, with increasing throughputs of energy and materials.46 This is promoted today by means of a massive sales effort,
amounting to well over a trillion dollars a year in the United States, and
through a vast outpouring of economic waste in the form of synthetic goods that
are toxic to the environment.47 As the Marxian economist Paul Baran wrote in the 1960s, “people
steeped in the culture of monopoly capitalism do not want what they need and do
not need what they want.”48 On top of this vast waste system (including military waste),
which drives accumulation, is a financialized superstructure that has enabled
the system to transfer wealth and income more rapidly to the 0.01 percent at
the top of society.49 In the new financial architecture that has emerged the
credit-debt system dominates over the entire global economy. It is this
irrational system of artificially stimulated growth, economic waste, financialized
wealth, and extreme inequality that needs to be overturned if we are to create
a society of ecological sustainability and substantive equality.
If economic growth in the wealthy countries continues as at
present—even by the standards of our current period of relative economic
stagnation—there is very little or no chance of avoiding breaking the world
climate budget with disastrous global consequences. It is the growth in the
scale of the economy, and the destructive tendencies of our ecologically
inefficient, technologically destructive society, geared to roundabout
production—whereby plastic spoons are made in China and shipped to the United
States where they have a lifetime use of a few minutes before reentering the
waste stream, generating all sorts of toxic chemicals in the process—that are
threatening the biogeochemical processes of the entire planet. Capital’s social
metabolic processes attempt to recreate the planet in its own image, treating
all planetary boundaries as mere barriers to surmount, thus generating a global
metabolic rift on a rapidly warming planet. All of this points to the need to
place limits on economic growth, and specifically on the expansion of today’s
disaster capitalism.
Second,
capitalism is suffering at present from an epochal crisis—both economic and environmental. This is manifested in
overaccumulation, stagnation, and financialization, on the one hand, and
ecological rifts and disruptions, both within each and every ecosystem and on
the level of the planet as a whole, on the other.50 These two long-term structural crises of the system are not
reducible to each other, except in the sense that they are both induced by the logic
of capital accumulation. What we have called ecological crisis proper is
largely invisible to the value accounting of the capitalist system, and is
systematically given a lower priority in relation to economic imperatives.
Society is constantly told that the solution to economic stagnation is economic
growth by any means: usually involving the promotion of neoliberal disaster
capitalism. Yet such an economic solution—which is beyond the power of the
system to effect in a long-term, stable way, but only on a temporary, ad-hoc
basis—would be fatal to the planetary environment, which requires less, not
more expansion of the economic treadmill. The epochal crisis of economy and
ecology within the capitalist system is thus likely to continue, with both fault
lines widening, as long as the logic of capital prevails. This conflict between
economic and ecological objectives is not a contradiction of analysis, but of
the capitalist system itself.
Third, if
accumulation or economic growth is to be halted in the rich countries, even
temporarily, out of sheer ecological necessity, this would require a vast new system of redistribution. As Lewis Mumford
indicated in 1944 inThe Condition of Man, a stationary state or steady-state economy is only possible
under conditions of “basic communism,” a term which Mumford (after Marx) used
to refer to a society in which distribution is organized “according to need,
not according to ability or productive contribution.”51 There must be a vast redirection of society’s social surplus to
genuine human requirements and ecological sustainability as opposed to the
giant treadmill of production generated by the profit system. It is by creating
a society directed to use value rather than exchange value that we can find the
resources to develop a world that is sustainable because it is just, and just
because it is sustainable. Society will need to be reordered, as Epicurus said,
and Marx concurred, according to the principle of enough—that is, through a rich development of human needs, applicable
to everyone.52
Fourth,
Marx provided a model of socialism as one of
sustainable human development.53 In order to meet the challenge of the Great Capitalist
Climacteric it will be necessary to shift power to the associated producers,
who, acting in accord with science and communal values, will need to regulate
the complex, interdependent metabolism between nature and society according to
their own developed human needs and in conformity with the requirements of the
earth metabolism. In today’s context, this will require what Marx called the
“restoration” of the essential human-natural metabolism, healing the metabolic
rift.54 In discussing the principle of “metabolic restoration,” Del
Weston wrote in her book The Political Economy of Global
Warming:
“The need is for human societies to live within metabolic cycles—that is,
production, consumption and waste—thereby forming part of a self-sustaining
cycle in which the only new inputs are energy from the sun…. Nature, in the new
economics, will be recognised as the ultimate source of wealth.”55 Moreover, given the present planetary emergency we have to move
fast to create this new economics and new ecological relation to the earth,
diverting resources massively to creating the new energy infrastructure that
can exist within the solar budget, while at the same time promoting Mumford’s
“basic communism,” or a society based on the principle of to each according to
need.
Fifth, the hoped for revolutionary change can only occur through human
agency.
Although it is widely recognized that the world needs an ecological and social
revolution, the question remains: From whence and by what agency will such a
revolution arise? Ecological Marxists suggest that we may already be seeing
signs of the rise of what could be called a nascent “environmental proletariat”—a
broad mass of working-class humanity who recognize, as a result of the crisis
of their own existence, the indissoluble bond between economic and ecological
conditions.56Degraded material
conditions associated with intermingled economic and ecological crises are now
being encountered on a daily basis by the great majority of the world’s
population and affecting all aspects of their lives. At the ground level,
economic and ecological crises are becoming increasingly indistinguishable.
Food crises, land grabs, electricity shutdowns, water privatization, heightened
pollution, deteriorating cities, declining public health, increasing violence
against oppressed populations—are all converging with growing inequality,
economic stagnation, and rising unemployment and underemployment. In South
Africa, for example, the class struggle is now as much an environmental as an
economic struggle—already exhibiting signs of an emerging environmental working
class.57 The logical result is a coming together of material revolts
against the system—what David Harvey has usefully referred to as a
“co-revolutionary” struggle.58 This is best exemplified by the global environmental/climate
justice movement and through the radical direct action movement that Naomi
Klein calls “Blockadia.”59
Traditional working-class politics are thus coevolving and
combining with environmental struggles, and with the movements of people of
color, of women, and all those fighting basic, reproductive battles throughout
society. Such an ecological and social struggle will be revolutionary to the
extent that it draws its force from those layers of society where people’s lives
are most precarious: third world workers, working-class women, oppressed people
of color in the imperial core, indigenous populations, peasants/landless
agricultural workers, and those fighting for fundamentally new relations of
sexuality, gender, family, and community—as well as highly exploited and
dispossessed workers everywhere.
A
revolutionary struggle in these circumstances will need to occur in two phases:
an ecodemocratic phase in the immediate present, seeking to build a broad alliance—one
in which the vast majority of humanity outside of the ruling interests will be
compelled by their inhuman conditions to demand a world of sustainable human
development. Over time this should create the conditions for a second, more
decisive, ecosocialist phase of the revolutionary struggle, directed at the creation of a
society of substantive equality, ecological sustainability, and collective
democracy. All of this points to the translation of classical Marx’s ecological
critique into contemporary revolutionary praxis.60
In the ecodemocratic phase, the goal would be to
carry out those radical reforms that would arrest the current destructive logic
of capital, by fighting for changes that are radical, even revolutionary, in
that they go against the logic of capital, but are nonetheless conceivable as
concrete, meaningful forms of struggle in the present context. These would
include measures like: (1) an emergency plan of reduction in carbon emissions
in the rich economies by 8–10 percent a year; (2) implementing a moratorium on
economic growth coupled with radical redistribution of income and wealth,
conservation of resources, rationing, and reductions in economic waste; (3)
diverting military spending, now universally called “defense spending” to the defense of the planet as a place of human habitation; (4) the creation of an
alternative energy infrastructure designed to stay within the solar budget; (5)
closing down coal-fired plants and blocking unconventional fossil fuels such as
tar sands oil; (6) a carbon fee and dividend system of the kind proposed by
Hansen, that would redistribute 100 percent of the revenue to the population on
a per capita basis; (7) global initiatives to aid emerging economies to move
toward sustainable development; (8) implementation of principles of
environmental justice throughout the society and linking this to adaptation to
climate change (which cannot be stopped completely) to ensure that people of
color, the poor, women, indigenous populations, and third world populations do
not bear the brunt of catastrophe; and (9) adoption of climate negotiations and
policies on the model proposed in the Peoples’ Agreement on Climate Change in
Cochabamba, Bolivia in 2010. Such radical change proposals can be multiplied,
and would need to effect all aspects of society and individual human
development. The rule in the ecodemocratic phase of development would be to
address the epochal crisis (ecological and economic) in which the world is now
caught, and to do so in ways that go against the logic of business as usual,
which is indisputably leading the world toward cumulative catastrophe.
The logic
of the ecodemocratic phase of the struggle, if it were carried out fully, would
create the conditions for anecosocialist phase in which the
mobilization of the population on their own behalf, and the cultural and
economic changes that this brings about, would give the impetus to the creation
of a society of from each according to ability,
to each according to need.61 The system of social metabolic reproduction would be
reconstituted on a more communal basis taking into account not only present and
future generations, but the Earth system itself and the diversity life within
it. The necessary social and ecological planning would start from local needs
and local communities and would be integrated with larger political-executive
entities responsible for coordination and implementation in relation to these
needs.
Such a
society would be democratic in the classical sense of the word—rule of society
by the people, the associated producers.62 It was this that Marx had in mind when he stressed (as quoted
above) that “socialized man, the associated producers, [would] govern the human
metabolism with nature in a rational way…accomplishing it with the least
expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their
human nature.” For Marx in the nineteenth century this was a struggle for human
freedom; today, in the twenty-first century, it is a struggle for human freedom and human survival.
In 1980,
the British Marxist historian E.P. Thompson wrote a cautionary essay for New Left Review entitled “Notes on
Exterminism, The Last Stage of Civilization.” Although directed particularly at
the growth of nuclear arsenals and the dangers of global holocaust from a
nuclear exchange in the final phase of the Cold War, Thompson’s thesis was also
concerned with the larger realm of ecological destruction wrought by the
system. Rudolf Bahro later commented on Thompson’s ideas in his Avoiding Social and Ecological Disaster, explaining: “To express
the exterminism-thesis in Marxist terms, one could say that the relationship
between productive and destructive forces is turned upside down. Marx had seen
the trail of blood running through it, and that ‘civilisation leaves deserts
behind it.'”63 Today this ecologically ruinous trend has been extended to the
entire planet with capitalism’s proverbial “creative destruction” being
transformed into a destructive creativity endangering humanity and life in
general.64
“The dream
that man can make himself godlike by centering his energies solely on the
conquest of the external world,” Mumford wrote in The Condition of Man, “has now become the emptiest of dreams: empty and sinister.”65The result is a kind of economics of exterminism. Today making war on the planet is fought as a means to the end
of capital accumulation, in which the limits of the earth itself have become
invisible to the narrow value calculations of the system. Turning this
economics of exterminism around, and creating a more just and sustainable world
at peace with the planet is our task in the Great Capitalist Climacteric. If we
cannot accomplish this humanity will surely die with capitalism. The prophesy of
all defenders of the current order over the last century will then be
fulfilled. Capitalism will mark the end of human history by bringing to an end
human civilization—and even human existence.
The Great
Capitalist Climacteric presents us with a fatal choice: System Change Not Climate Change!
Misc. Notes
by Dick mainly from the essay
by Ian Angus, “Anthropocene.” Monthly Review (Sept.
2015).
Anthropocene
has gained rapid
acceptance during last 20 years and the science is developing rapidly.
The earth is
now moving beyond Holocene, its present natural geological epoch, to
Anthropocene.
Anthropocene
is defined as
The incoming
human-created geological epoch replacing the natural interglacial state called
the Holocene. Anthropocene is the term
proposed for this new no-analogue planetary terra incognita bringing with it
potentially catastrophic effects for all life on Earth. --Dick
See essays
in C. N. Waters, et al., eds. A Stratigraphical Basis for the
Anthropocene. 2014.
What caused
this new epoch?
Multiple
origins. Many believe it derives from
the dominant economic system—unregulated capitalism. See my newsletter on Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything. GET LINK See Oreskes and Conway.
Alexandre
Costa: “a crisis engendered by capitalism.”
Who created
the label:
Paul Crutzen
in his 1995 Nobel Prize speech
regarding his research on the chemicals destroying the ozone he said: “human activities” now “could compete and
interfere with natural processes.” By
2000 “he argued that human activity had driven the earth into a new geological
epoch, which he proposed to call the Anthropocene,” http://nobelprize.org (Angus 2).
Early
warnings:
John Mercer,
Paul Ehrlich 1968 (see Oreskes and Conway).
James Hansen
1988.
Paul Sweezy,
“Capitalism and the Environment,” Monthly
Review (June 1989). Actvities harmful to the environment become
dangerously destructive on a global scale, which happened after WWII, producing
the present “environmental crisis.” (5,
Angus 11).
John Bellamy Foster, The Vulnerable Planet, 1994. “Today few can doubt that the system has
crossed critical thresholds of ecological sustainability, raising questions
about the vulnerability of the entire planet” (109, Angus 11).
Significant
early books (contact me for an annotated bibliography):
Global Change and the Earth System: A
Planet Under Pressure by Will Steffen, et al. 2004.
“. . .the Earth System is now in a no-analogue situation, best referred
to as a new era in the geological history of Earth, the Anthropocene” (81).
The word Anthropocene has appeared in the titles of dozens of books (see at
end). [Oh oh, this appraisal is
turning into a bibliographical essay.]
The word
Anthropocene now appears in the titles of several academic journals:
www.journals.elsevier.com/anthropocene/
Elsevier BV
Anthropocene is an interdisciplinary journal that publishes peer-reviewed works addressing the nature,
scale, and extent of the interactions that...
https://www.elementascience.org/
Elementa is an
academic journal publishing original research in the
following knowledge domains: ... Wayne Clough on the Anthropocene and Engineering ...
anr.sagepub.com/
Sage Publications
The Anthropocene Review is a trans-disciplinary journal issued 3 times per year, bringing together
peer-reviewed articles on all aspects of research
pertaining ...
www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/22133054
ScienceDirect
The online version of Anthropocene at ScienceDirect.com, the world's leading platform for
high quality peer-reviewed full-text journals.
anthropocenejournal.com/
May 4, 2014 - Tension is building between Google and me. Google would rather I
didn't use its “incognito” setting regularly. It absolutely will not allow me
to ..
Additional
journals publishing on Anthropocene:
Climate & Capitalism, an online journal; Climatic Change; Nature; Global Change
Newsletter; Scientific American; Quarternary International; Ambio; Earth
Island; probably all journals studying climate.
Significant
organizations:
International
Geosphere-Biosphere Program (IGBP), a large bibliography. . . . .
Ian Angus, “Anthropocene: When Did it Begin
and Why Does it Matter?” Google Search,
August 28, 2015
climateandcapitalism.com
› 2015 › May › 19
May 19, 2015 - by Ian Angus ....
Instead, when the word Anthropocene
startedappearing frequently
in .... Does Anthropocene science blame all humanity?
mrzine.monthlyreview.org/2015/angus190515.html
Monthly Review
May 19, 2015 - by Ian Angus.
"When I use .... Instead, when the word Anthropocene started appearing frequently in academic
journals and mainstream media, Nordhaus and .... 17 Jan Zalasiewicz, et al.,
"When Did the Anthropocene Begin?
www.resilience.org/.../does-anthropocene-science-blame-al...
Resilience.org
Jun 3, 2015 - by Ian
Angus, originally published
by Climate and Capitalism | Jun 3, .... that the new geological epoch began in the mid-twentieth century.
www.resilience.org/author-detail/1152061-ian-angus
Resilience.org
Ian Angus is editor of the ecosocialist journal Climate & Capitalism, and co-author of Too Many People?
... Does Anthropocene science blame all humanity?
www.commondreams.org/.../does-anthrop...
Common Dreams
NewsCenter
Jun 2, 2015 - The charge that Anthropocene scholars
blame all of humanity for the actions of ... Ian Angus ... Recently, some critics have charged that the “Anthropocene .... that the new geological epoch began in the mid-twentieth century.
links.org.au/taxonomy/term/577
Hijacking 'Anthropocene':
Anti-green 'Breakthrough Institute' misrepresents science ... By Serge Mongeau,
translated by Ian Angus, with assistance from Richard Fidler ... The
puzzle is: where did the concept come from? .... This is only
the beginning: the United Nations' 2013 Human Development
Report says that without ...
mronline.org/tag/ian-angus/
Follow-up: Did early humans cause extinction of mammoths? ... Ian Angus says the charge that Anthropocene scholars blame all of humanity for the actions of
a ...
https://degrowthcanada.wordpress.com/.../ian-angus-will-climate-chaos-r...
Jul 2, 2015 - To judge by many accounts of climate change, the twenty-first
century will gradually become a warmer, stormier, and less biodiverse version
of ...
entitleblog.org/.../the-anthropocene-debate-why-is-such-a-useful-concept...
Jul 7, 2015 - In order to keep the 'bad' Anthropocene in check, scientists have proposed using ... Since Paul
Crutzen first proposed the term (he suggested it startedwith the ... As Ian Angus from
Climate and Capitalism argues, ecomodernists have ... Because it applies to
humans as a whole, it does not indicate that our ...
https://starbucks.flipboard.com/topic/anthropocene
Does Anthropocene Science Blame All Humanity? Ian Angus. According to Earth System scientists ... Did the Anthropocene Begin in 1950 or 50,000 Years Ago?
International Commission on
Stratigraphy
Will meet in
2016 “to examine evidence for establishing the Anthropocene as a true geologic
epoch marking when human activities began to have a significant impact on
Earth’s geology and ecosystems.” Some
scientists point to “the 1950s as the starting point.” Others suggest “the first test of a nuclear
weapon” (July 16, 1945). In “Worth Noting,” The Humanist (March-April 2016).
www.amazon.com › ... ›
Environmental Science
Amazon.com, Inc.
Dawn of the Anthropocene - Humanity's Defining Moment - Kindle edition by George
Seielstad. ... Kindle Books by Guests of "The Daily Show with
Jon Stewart"
www.amazon.com › ... ›
Sustainable Development
Amazon.com, Inc.
In The Anthropocene,
environmental journalist Christian Schwägerl ... Browse BestBooks of the Month, featuring our favorite new books in more than a dozen ...
www.amazon.com › ... ›
Earth Sciences › Climatology
Amazon.com, Inc.
Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made [Gaia ...
Adventures in the Anthropocene and over one million other books are ...
Books shelved as anthropocene: Future Evolution by Peter D. Ward, Love Your Monsters: Postenvironmentalism and the Anthropocene by Michael ...
www.synergeticpress.com/.../the-anthropocene-a-new-planet-shaped-by-...
Review by greggw - Jul
31, 2015 - $9.95 - In stock
The Anthropocene was
praised by Achim Steiner, Executive Director of the UN Environment Programme
(UNEP) as an “intellectually exciting book” which ...
Wark explores the implications of Anthropocene through the story of two empires, ... The book makes the case for a kind of political vision and action
we need to ...
Jun 28, 2014 - Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made. ... Gaia Vince's book is an attempt to humanise the concept.
www.telegraph.co.uk ›
... › Books › Book Reviews The Daily Telegraph
Rating: 4 - Review
by Caspar Henderson
Jul 5, 2014 - Until a few years ago the word Anthropocene would bring a puzzled ... This is an excellent book for anyone who wants to make a difference and ...
openhumanitiespress.org/architecture-in-the-anthropocene.html
Books. Series · Titles · The Democracy of Objects: Levi Bryant;
Ontological ... Architecture in the Anthropocene:
Encounters Among Design, Deep Time, ... labeled the Anthropocene by the chemist Paul Crutzen, the consideration of the
merits of ...
Jun 20, 2012 - Welcome to the Anthropocene by David Biello ... The book marks the beginning of a single life
form coming to consciousness about its own ...
For research purposes,
specific subjects can be located in the following alphabetized index, and
searched on the blog using the search box. The search box is located in
the upper left corner of the webpage.
Newsletter Index: http://omnicenter.org/dick-bennetts-peace-justice-and-ecology-newsletters/dicks-newsletter-index/
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END ANTHROPOCENE
NEWSLETTER #1, Jan. 23, 2016
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