The following is a
review of Living in the Anthropocene: Earth in the Age of Humans, a collection of short essays edited by W.
John Kress and Jeffrey K. Stine. There are 32 essays in the collection.
Collections of essays do not lend themselves to speedreading and scanning, and
this is even more true of large collections. Commenting on every essay would
have been overly time consuming, but I offer commentary on well over half.
Living in the
Anthropocene begins with a foreword by Elizabeth Kolbert, who notes that
the term Anthropocene was coined by Dutch chemist Paul Crutzen in the 1970s.
(ix) Crutzen helped identify the cause of the depletion of the ozone and was
rewarded with a Nobel Prize for this work in 1995. The fact that the person who
coined the term for the subject of this book was also a crucial figure in a
movement that addressed a global environmental dilemma is remarkably
propitious. It provides a glaringly obvious opportunity to discuss the
international efforts that reversed the damage to the ozone and to then draw
lessons from this history that can be applied to the Anthropocene. As discussed
below, this inexplicably never happens in Living
in the Anthropocene. The ozone layer is mentioned later just once, as is
Crutzen. Both are mentioned merely in passing.
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| "Dawn in the Anthropocene" by Cugerbrant |
Scientists divide the history of the Earth into eons,
eras, periods, and epochs. Our current epoch is the Holocene, which began
12,000 years ago with the end of the last ice age. (1) However, as described in
the introduction, our impact upon the Earth has led to proposals to designate a
new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, or the Age of Humans. Incidentally—and
this is not offered as a critique, as it is a very recent development—humans
did not appear only 200,000 years ago, as Kress and Stine state in the
introduction. Recent discoveries in Morocco have pushed this date back to
300,000 years. These discoveries have also challenged our previous
understanding of the territorial range of early humans, as Morocco is quite
distant from Ethiopia, the location of the sites that led researchers to
believe that humans appeared 200,000 years ago.
The first essay is J. R. McNeill’s “The Advent of the
Anthropocene.” In it, he addresses the question of when the Anthropocene began.
Competing proposals include the harnessing of fire, the Neolithic Revolution,
and the Columbian Exchange. This diversity of opinion as to the start of the
Anthropocene implies differences of opinion on a variety of fundamental
questions. For instance, should we prioritize our paleontological footprint,
meaning our impact on the fossil record, or should we prioritize our
contribution to the composition of the atmosphere? What degree of anthropogenic
change in either category would merit the naming of a new epoch? Indeed, the
diversity of opinion on these fundamental questions suggests that geological
epochs are defined rather arbitrarily, perhaps by whichever discipline manages
to place its field’s favored evidence at the forefront of scientific
discussions.
Nonetheless, McNeill argues that the Anthropocene should
be regarded as having begun around 1950. He offers a number of statistics, as
he has in other publications, that demonstrate the rapidity with which the human
impact on the natural environment accelerated at that time. Most fundamentally,
total energy use by humans quintupled between 1950 and 2015. And other
statistics tell similarly steep stories. For instance, more than 75% of the
greenhouse emissions of human beings were produced since 1950. (10-15)
These changes have come to be called The Great
Acceleration. McNeill notes that the Great Acceleration has already waned in
rapidity and will likely continue to slow. However, the changes it has wrought
will last much longer. The durability of these changes inspires the contributor
of the second essay, Scott Wing, to call for humans to begin planning on
geological time scales. Drawing on an essay by Aldo Leopold published in 1949, Wing
refers to such a long view of our ecological impact as “thinking like a
mountain.”
Douglas McCauley looks at the marine Anthropocene. He begins
with some statistics on the impact of human activity on land. For instance, 40%
of the Earth’s land surface is used for agriculture. (23) And there have been
more than 600 extinctions of land species in the past 515 years. (24) Human
activity has been less drastic in the oceans, but has been nonetheless
profound. For instance, some shark
and whale populations have been reduced by more than 90%. (24)
It appears that more profound changes are in store.
Humans consume wild fish as well as aquaculture fish, and in 2014, for the
first time in history, most fish consumed by humans was produced by
aquaculture. (24) And Aquaculture is just one manifestation of the Marine
Industrial Revolution. This term refers to the increasing use of marine
settings for mining, power generation, oil and gas extraction, and other
economic activities. While we have long harvested marine organisms for food and
raw materials, we are now increasingly expropriating their habitats for
industrial purposes. (25)
McCauley’s essay is especially well written. He writes
that “…white sharks investigate the palatability of about one and a half
California beachgoers annually.” (23) And he notes that “Nothing happens fast
in a 352-quintillion-gallon water bath….” (26)
McCauley suggests that one of the purposes of mitigating
climate change is to give organisms time to adapt. (26) This perspective seems
to accept that humans are going to disrupt ecosystems. Rather than imagining a
pristine past to which we need to return the oceans, this perspective suggests
we need to accept that we have wrought irreversible changes but that we need to
slow those changes.
Rick Potts’s “What Will It Mean to Be Human?” was the
first essay in the collection that I did not enjoy reading. It struck me as
making trite points in pretentious language. It also begins with this: “The
narrative of human origins…is a six-million-year journey of evolutionary
forebears….” (27) The significance of six million years ago is that it was
around then that our ancestors began walking on two legs. However, this is an arbitrary
point at which to mark the beginning of human ancestry. Humans, like all of
Earth’s life, trace back to a single common universal ancestor almost 4 billion
years ago, and our bodies carry the legacy of every stage of that evolution. In
other words, our evolutionary history prior to six million years ago is just as
significant as our evolutionary history over the last six million years, an
observation most effectively disseminated to the public by paleontologist Neil
Shubin in recent years. The human story does not begin with bipedalism, and the
story of “our forebears” extends backwards at least 3.8 billion years, so
there’s nothing six million years old about the narrative of human origins.
Humans are able to plan and to think abstractly. And we
possess the capacity for expanding our social unit to include all people, not
just a subset, such as a family or nation. These are among Potts’s
observations, albeit paraphrased. In addressing the challenges of the
Anthropocene, we will need to plan, and we need to consider the impact of our
actions on other people. Potts also seems to be pointing out that the environment
is always changing. It was changing in the past, and it will change in the
future. And humans have contradictory impulses about change. We value
preservation, but we are also creative, and this entails altering the
environment.
Potts certainly sounds like he is making profound
statements. “We dream, as all predators do, and in those dreams lie utopias and
nightmares,” he writes. This reader, however, would have preferred a more
straightforward presentation.
In Paula Caballero and Carter Brandon’s “Rethinking
Economic Growth,” the authors argue that while sustainable development and
investment in natural capital do not produce immediate returns, such
investments can eventually produce high rates of return. For instance, the
benefit-to-cost ratio of the Clean Air Act was 25:1 by 2015 and will be 31:1 by
2020. (34-35)
The sixth chapter is contributed by Stephen Pyne. Pyne
occupies a unique scholarly niche. He’s the fire guy. For most of us, if we
know of him at all, he’s the only fire guy. If we want to know about the
history of fire on Earth and the history of humankind’s use of fire, he’s our
only source. That’s what makes his works so disappointing.
Pyne is a creative writer and presumably an enjoyable
read if you are looking for creativity. However, if you are looking for information
clearly presented, Pyne is not your man. “We need a Prometheus who is not a
fire thief but a fire tender….” (43) Uh huh. Right.
My recommendation would be to skip Potts and Pyne.
Wade Davis points out that the Anthropocene was brought
on by a relatively small number of people. What these people had in common was
a mechanistic view of nature. While this view emerged in Europe, it spread to
segments of populations all over the world. (45)
Most human cultures have not adopted a scientific,
mechanistic view of the universe and nature. Davis talks about growing up in
British Columbia and viewing the forest as something to be cut down. First
Nations, on the other hand, view the forest as the home of spirits that young
men travel into the forest to confront as part of an initiation ritual.
Davis points out that the existence of diverse human cultures
offers evidence of the capacity for cultures to change. (47) Yet, how malleable
is the mechanistic, scientific worldview? Davis treats this view as just one
among many, but it really isn’t. A scientific worldview is fundamentally
different from traditional ways of understanding the universe. For instance,
the polytheistic cultures of the ancient Mediterranean and Southwest Asian
worlds frequently incorporated elements of each other’s religions. But scientific
paradigms do not display this fluidity. The gluon will never be replaced with a
cherub. A mechanistic view of nature has permitted progress in, if nothing
else, the capacity of human beings to manipulate nature. Replacing one god of
wisdom with another would be a rather inconsequential act compared to replacing
a mechanistic view of nature with a more traditional one. The latter act would
bring scientific progress to a screeching halt, and the consequences would be
dire. For this reason, a mechanistic worldview is perhaps more entrenched. Once
you’ve become dependent upon it, abandoning it entails great inconvenience
and suffering.
But is a mechanistic view of nature really as inimical to
a sustainable future as Davis portrays it? I highly doubt it. Consider the
following two propositions. First, the most extreme version of a mechanistic
view of nature holds that the human mind itself is a manifestation of natural
laws, and so we lack free will. Second, the few people who subscribe to this
most mechanistic view of nature are opposed to the wanton destruction of the
natural world. I cannot muster the evidence to support these claims at the
moment, but I will tentatively put them forward. If they are true, it is a very
damaging blow to the claim that a mechanistic view of nature is incompatible with
support for sustainability. Nonetheless, Davis’s contribution is insightful and
thought-provoking.
Lindsay Clarkson, quoting both Pope Francis and poet W.
S. Merwin, attempts to apply psychoanalysis to explaining human interactions
with the natural world. She writes, “How we interact with the natural world
depends on the inner emotional climate we inhabit most of the time.” (52) While
I am intrigued by the notion that our inner world might manifest itself in our
interactions with nature, Clarkson’s essay was ultimately about as edifying as
Potts’s and Pyne’s.
Sean McMahon gives a concise overview of the human
relationship to temperate forests throughout history in his essay “Temperate
Forests: A Tale of the Anthropocene.”
For most of human history, forests served as obstacles to growing crops and
raising livestock. They also served as sources of threats. McMahon mentions
wolves, though he doesn’t mention banditry and raiding. He draws attention to
those who viewed the clearing of forests for agriculture as an expansion of
civilization. (54)
Later, forests came to be viewed as a natural resource to
be exploited. British domination of the ocean, for instance, required massive
quantities of wood, as much as six thousand oak trees to produce a single ship.
(54) During the nineteenth century, societies began to reverse the extensive
deforestation that had taken place over the prior centuries. 75% of New England
is forested today, whereas only 25% had been in 1840. (55) McMahon describes
some of the sophistication of our scientific understanding of forests, and he
calls for global cooperation to use our scientific understanding of forests to
prevent a deforestation of the tropics. Unfortunately, McMahon does not offer
any statistics regarding forest coverage in the tropics. Were the tropics not
deforested on a scale comparable to the deforestation of the temperate regions
of the Earth over the previous centuries? It is implied that they were not, but
it would have been helpful to have a clearer picture of the history of
deforestation in the tropics.
In “Urban Nature/Human Nature,” Peter Del Tredici looks
at the impact of cities on plant life. More than half of the world’s population
lives in cities, and cities produce more than 70% of fossil fuel emissions.
Cities, however, occupy a mere 3% of the Earth’s land surface. (58) Cities
possess three types of vegetation. First, there are the remnants of the native
landscape, such as native plants that have survived human settlement. Second,
there are the managed horticultural landscapes, such as parks. Finally, there
are neglected landscapes, which can comprise up to 40% of some cities. Del
Tredici notes that the plants that occupy neglected areas perform vital
functions, such as removing excess nutrients and converting carbon dioxide into
biomass. (58-9)
Del Tredici describes some of the ways in which urban
habitats differ from natural habitats. Construction and maintenance of
infrastructure alters soil composition. Impervious structures such as streets
and sidewalks obstruct the flow of water and air into the soil, as does
compaction of the soil by pedestrian and vehicular traffic. (59)
On the other hand, some plant species are “pre-adapted”
for survival in an urban setting. For instance, there are plants that are
evolved to thrive on limestone cliffs. Such plants are well suited to survive
in the vicinity of marble and brick buildings, which “…are analogous to
naturally occurring limestone cliffs.” (60) Other plants prefer a high pH, and
deicing salts can create such conditions. The serendipitous existence of plants
well suited to an urban setting is a positive sign for Del Tredici, who writes,
“…now is the time for people to acknowledge the role that spontaneous urban
vegetation can play in helping to clean up the ecological mess that we have
made of the planet.” (61)
Del Tedici’s essay is highly informative and clearly
written. I wonder, however, about its implications for addressing the
challenges of the Anthropocene. It seems to suggest that, at least in regard to
urban vegetation, a sharp change of course is not in order. Build with brick
and use deicer and pre-adapted species will pop up to replace at least some of
the native species inevitably displaced by the construction of cities.
Kelly Chance’s “Atmospherics and the Anthropocene” looks
at the history of our understanding of the human impact on the atmosphere. Chance
identifies three ways in which humans have altered the atmosphere. First, we
have increased greenhouse warming by increasing the quantity of greenhouse
gases. Such gases include carbon dioxide, but also methane,
chlorofluorocarbons, and nitrous oxide. (62) Second, we produce significant
quantities of emissions that directly affect human health. Chance refers to
this category as tropospheric pollution. For instance, some human activities
produce nitrogen oxides. When nitrogen oxides interact with sunlight, ozone is
produced, and this ozone is harmful to people with asthma or heart disease.
(64) Finally, we produced the chlorofluorocarbons that created the hole in the
ozone.
Chance’s contribution is highly informative, if quite
dense, and provides a discussion of the history of the discoveries of these
impacts. Chance mentions Svante Arrhenius’s discovery of atmospheric greenhouse
warming in 1896. She also discusses the Great Smog of London in 1952, which
killed as many as 12,000 people, and the discovery of the stratospheric ozone
layer in 1913. Yet, for some reason, while Chance mentions that the use of
Freons has mostly ceased, she does not elaborate upon the forging of an
international agreement to accomplish this goal and the success of this
agreement in not only halting the growth of the ozone hole but in permitting
its regeneration. This success story might have provided a fitting conclusion,
but instead Chance seems to lose focus. After listing the contradictory ways in
which humans impact the atmosphere, she notes that “Drawing conclusions is more
difficult than framing questions….” (65) Yeah. So why bother?
Lisa Rand’s “Beyond the Biosphere” is one of the standout
contributions to the collection. It is informative, clearly written, and addresses
the Anthropocene from a novel angle by looking at the human impact on outer
space. Citing the work of anthropologists Alice Gorman and Valerie Olson, she
describes, among other things, the contraction of the thermosphere as a consequence
of CO2 emissions, the proliferation of space junk, and the frightening descent of
the nuclear-powered Cosmos 954 satellite in 1978. (66-69)
It would be interesting to know what Rand makes of the Patrick
Principle. Discussed in Thomas E. Lovejoy’s essay “Can We Redefine the
Anthropocene?” the Patrick Principle holds that for abiotic environmental
change to hold significance, it must have an impact on the biotic environment.
In other words, life must be affected by the change for it to be regarded as
having positive or negative consequences. (157) At times, Rand seems to take
issue with the Patrick Principle. For instance, she writes that “Although the
nearest reaches of outer space are popularly portrayed as an empty void—the
opposite of the green-and-blue nature portrayed by environmentalists and
artists alike—in truth they support an abiotic ecosystem defined by energy
exchanges, radioactivity, natural rocky objects and energetic plasmas, and
gravity variations.” (67) While statements like these do not explicitly reject
the Patrick Principle, they make it easy to imagine that Rand might have a
broader sense of what changes should be regarded as positive or negative. Yet,
her discussion of the significance of our impact on outer space clearly invokes
it. All of the harms are harmful because they harm life.
Torben Rick addresses the relevance of archaeology to the
Anthropocene in “Archaeology and the Future of Our Planet.” Archaeologists
believe that overexploitation of the natural environment was a factor in the
collapse of some ancient civilizations. For instance, deforestation may have
been among the factors that led to the collapse of Classical Mayan
civilization. (75) Rick points out that these past examples have sometimes been
invoked as cautionary tales. He does not mention Jared Diamond’s Collapse. However, as probably the most
famous example of such an invocation of the cautionary significance of the
collapse of ancient societies, Rick likely has Collapse in mind.
Rick’s unique contribution is to point out that we can also
draw positive lessons from past civilizations. While the Classical Mayan
civilization eventually collapsed, it had endured for centuries. Rick’s primary
argument, however, is that the field of archaeology can contribute to understanding
past human interactions with the environment and their effects. Specifics are
sparse, though Rick does provide one example of the kind of research he is
evidently imagining. He cites the work of an interdisciplinary team that
studied the ecosystems of the Channel Islands off California, research from
which provided the benchmarks used by the National Park Service and the Nature
Conservancy in their environmental management plans. (75-6)
In “Living on a Changing Planet: Why Indigenous Voices Matter,”
Igor Krupnik eulogizes indigenous peoples. Surely, indigenous peoples deserve
to have their voices heard in discussions of climate change. As Krupnik notes,
they are disproportionately affected, and as other contributors to the
collection note, they are not responsible for having caused the changes to
which they are being forced to adapt. That said, this essay contains virtually
no information, and the claims that can be teased out are dubious. For
instance, Krupnik predicts that scientists will soon be asking indigenous
peoples to help them interpret their data, writing, “We may argue that
scientists and policymakers will look to indigenous peoples not as much for new
data as for a general philosophy to interpret the data they already possess.” (79)
Sure.
Krupnik also suggests that the engagement of indigenous
peoples “…puts a human face on the international climate change negotiation
process, which is often dominated by government-to-government politics and
ideology and conflicting national claims.” (81) Huh? Indigenous peoples have
ideological and national claims, and these claims conflict with those of other
peoples, for instance their territorial and sovereignty claims. Indigenous
peoples do not exclusively make claims to which all peoples universally assent.
As for indigenous people’s faces being of unique political utility, the leaders
of national governments have faces, as do their citizens. Texans affected by
Hurricane Harvey and Puerto Ricans devastated by Hurricane Maria have faces.
What is so special about indigenous faces?
As I scan Krupnik’s essay looking for something worth
commenting on, I find myself wondering, “Can’t an indigenous person ever just
be an ordinary bloke?” For some people, indigeneity seems to be a brand, a
brand that combines ancient wisdom, virtue, and social and environmental
justice. Just as prepending “ancient Chinese secret” to some dehydrated
vegetation is sufficient to persuade many of its miraculous powers, branding
something “indigenous” or “traditional” bestows powerful connotations. Krupnik,
for instance, is highly enamored with “indigenous knowledge.” They know things
we don’t, those virtuous repositories of ancient secrets. In fact, they know so
much that our scientists will soon be turning to them to interpret their data!
Lonnie G. Bunch III is the director of the National
Museum of African American History and Culture. He contributes the essay “Black
and Green: The Forgotten Commitment to Sustainability.” Bunch points out that
African Americans disproportionately experience the effects of pollution,
mentioning the drinking water scandal in Flint, Michigan. (83) He also offers
some inspiring thoughts on the mission of the Museum, writing, “This museum
uses African American history as a lens to better understand what it means to
be an American.” (85)
However, regarding his primary argument, Bunch is
surprisingly unpersuasive. He argues that sustainability and environmentalism
are part of the African American experience because, well, between Emancipation
and the Great Migration of the 1920s, most African Americans were poor farmers.
Of course, most people throughout history have been poor farmers. So, basically
everyone ever has been an environmentalist? While it is worth reminding
Americans, who likely closely associated African Americans with cities, that
there was a long agricultural period of African American history following Emancipation,
this agricultural period doesn’t render African Americans any more “green” than
any other farmers. Moreover, it is a mistake, to say the least, to equate being
a poor farmer with being “green.” While practicing agriculture is “green” in
the sense that one is working with plants, farming is one of the greatest
threats to the natural world. As noted elsewhere in the collection, 40% of the
Earth’s land surface is now dedicated to agriculture. (23, 95) Accomplishing
this involved deforestation and driving wild organisms to endangerment or
extinction, in addition to expropriating the lands of indigenous peoples.
Indeed, of all human activities, agriculture has historically had the greatest
impact on biodiversity. (95) What Bunch has really reminded us of in his essay
is not that African Americans are uniquely “green.” He has reminded us that African
Americans have participated in, albeit in a supporting role, dispossession of
indigenous peoples and the obliteration of forests and biodiversity.
In “Forest Succession and Human Agency in an Uncertain
Future,” Robin L. Chazdon argues that humans impact forests. It’s an astounding
observation, sure to revolutionize his field. He adds that “We need to help new
forests establish, grow, and prosper….” (89) Neat idea.
Chazon’s offering is among the batch of dull
contributions. It tells you very little, if anything, that you didn’t already
know but in highfalutin language. Among the aspects of this essay that I found
annoying, Chazdon claims that we face “…an increasingly uncertain future.” (87)
Really? When did this increase in uncertainty begin? Wasn’t it always pretty
difficult to predict the future, particularly of human societies? “There are
too many interdependent variables to allow predictions of how all these factors
will interact and affect future forest dynamics and landscape change.” (89) Was
there a time when this wasn’t true, when there weren’t lots of interdependent
variables that influenced the development of forests? If he’d been alive
hundreds of millions of years ago, would Chazdon have predicted the Permian
Extinction, or Great Dying, which wiped out most forests? That’d be a feat
since even in retrospect scientists still debate its causes. But supposedly
those were simpler times, when variables weren’t interdependent?
Chazdon makes much of the fact that models of forest
succession do not include consideration of human influences on forests. Chazdon
proposes a “socioecological paradigm” that would do just this. In doing so, Chazdon
makes a common mistake, which is to take a textbook model of something, note
that it does not consider all of the possible factors that might influence the
phenomena it purports to explain, and then imagine that one has achieved a
revelation. A perfect example of this sort of mistake comes from John Lewis
Gaddis’s The Landscape of History,
which I reviewed in 2014. Gaddis contrasted a “reductionist” approach to an
“ecological” approach. The ecological approach, according to Gaddis, not only studies
the components of a phenomenon but studies their interactions. What I pointed
out in that review is that physicists use idealized models to isolate variables
such as gravity, but this does not prevent them from understanding that
friction interacts with a falling object. Indeed, using an idealized model to
more fully understand gravity actually allows an even more precise
understanding of the interaction of gravity with friction. Chazdon’s
dichotomization between the idealized model of forest succession and his own
socioecological paradigm is analogous to Gaddis’s dichotomization between a
“reductionist” approach and an “ecological” approach. These models are all simply
tools for addressing different problems. Would Chazdon’s colleagues really be
surprised to learn that humans influence forest succession? If they would not
be, then this demonstrates that using an idealized or reductionist model for
one purpose does not preclude you from using an ecological model for another
purpose.
At the bottom of such confusion is the premise that there
can be only one model of reality. In some deep, philosophical sense, maybe this
is true. But our models of reality are tools, and you can have many tools.
Insofar as Chazdon is simply proposing adding a new tool to the kit, I suppose
there is no reason to object. His presentation suggests he thinks that he is
replacing a tool, however.
J. Emmett Duffy, in “Ocean 2.0,” is among the
contributors who make clear that reverting to a state of pristine nature, or
even to some previous state with which we are familiar, should not be our goal
in addressing the challenges of the Anthropocene. Instead, we should accept that
the nature of tomorrow will be different from the nature of any previous era. Though,
we should nonetheless still strive to render it “healthy and productive.” (94)
Duffy is also one of at least two contributors who
specifically address the ways in which the ocean is increasingly no longer a
wilderness. Duffy notes that technology is allowing us not only to gain new
understandings of the ocean but to promote conservation. For instance, Duffy
mentions SkyTruth, a nonprofit that uses near-real time satellite imagery to
monitor human activities in the oceans. One of SkyTruth’s objectives is to
identify illegal fishing, which is a major threat to ocean life. (92) Such satellite
tracking was recently used to detect a ship exploring for oil off the coast of
Belize in violation of their conservation laws. Duffy also discusses the
Smithsonian’s Marine Global Earth Observatory, otherwise known as Marine-GEO.
Marine-GEO is establishing a global network of researchers using advanced
technology to understand marine ecosystems and how they are changing. (93)
Duffy finds hope in, among other things, rapidly evolving attitudes about
racial equality, gender equality, and animal welfare.
In “The Earth is a Garden,” Ari Novy, Peter Raven, and
Holly Shimizu point out, as was pointed out by Douglas McCauley earlier in the
collection, that 40% of the Earth’s land surface is used for agriculture,
though Novy, Raven, and Shimizu use 36% rather than 40%. (23, 95) They also
note that there were about 1 million people on Earth in 8,000 B.C., about 1 billion
in 1810, and that there are about 7.4 billion today. They note that 750 million people are
malnourished and 100 million are on the precipice of starving to death. The
quantity of energy that we currently use is unsustainably high, according to
the Global Footprint Network. Yet, there will be about 10 billion people alive
in 2050. If we are lucky, global warming will result in a mere 2 degrees
Celsius increase in temperatures. Even this quantity of warming will negatively
impact farming, and this is the most optimistic case. The authors point out
that more than 80% of Americans live in cities, as do more than 60% of people
worldwide, and they argue that city-dwellers should become more productive
horticulturalists and better educated about ecosystems.
“The Earth is a Garden” is an informative essay, but its
proposals are a bit vague. Specific examples of the sorts of productive urban
gardening the authors are imagining would have been useful. And the title
doesn’t really make any sense at all. 70% of the Earth’s surface is covered
with water, and though other contributors discuss aquaculture, Novy, Raven, and
Shimizu do not. Even if by “The Earth” the authors are only referring to land,
as they themselves point out, well over half of the Earth’s land surface is not
used for farming. Finally, their only specific proposal is to reduce the amount
of land on which people farm by 20% by 2100. (96) Not only is the Earth not a
garden, but the authors want even less of it to be a garden. So, what’s with
the title?
George E. Luber contributes the essay “Human Health in
the Anthropocene.” Luber notes that global warming will have disastrous health
effects by, for instance, increasing the severity and frequency of extreme
weather. However, global warming is only one dimension of the Anthropocene that
will have a negative influence on human health. For instance, as is frequently
noted throughout the volume, most people worldwide now live in cities. The rise
of temperatures in cities as a result of global warming is compounded by
several factors collectively known as the urban heat island effects, or UHI
effect. These include the absorption of heat by blacktop roads; low ventilation
as a consequence of tall buildings, which create artificial canyons; and the
heat emitted by cars and air conditioners. (100) An increase in heat-related
illnesses and respiratory illnesses will be one result.
Luber notes a curious fact in his opening passage. He
writes, “Today, almost a third of Earth’s arable land has been converted to
cropland or pasture….” (99) Implicitly, about 70% of land that could be used
for agriculture today is not used for agriculture. That’s a larger number than
I would have guessed by the tone of the volume, and it would have been helpful
to have its significance elaborated upon.
Luber does not adopt the false dichotomy between
collective action and individual action. We need to transition to renewable
energy sources, but we also need to eat less meat, for instance. (102)
Part IV of Living
in the Anthropocene consists of six articles on the “Visual Culture” of the
Anthropocene. It is thought-provoking and enjoyable, as are the handful of
color images that are included in the volume. Joanna Marsh writes about the art
of Alexis Rockman. (108) Karen E. Milbourne writes about African artists whose
work deals with environmental issues. (113) They are both worth reading, but I
was unable to comment on them before I decided that I needed to call it a day
with Living in the Anthropocene. The
following are my comments on four of the essays in this section.
In “Why Polar Bears? Seeing the Arctic Anew,” Subhankar
Banerjee describes the ways in which polar bears have been portrayed since the
1970s. She begins with the Inuit artist Pauta Saila’s Dancing Bear stone sculpture, which was fun, celebratory, and
humorous. In 2003, a photograph of a scavenging polar bear taken by Banerjee was
used by California Senator Barbara Boxer in opposing drilling in the Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge. (118) Since then, portrayals of polar bears have
emphasized their distress and reinforced the association of polar bears with
climate change. Banerjee is also among the several contributors who note that poor
societies have contributed the least to climate change but are the most
affected by it.
In Banerjee’s conclusion, he provides a quotation from Naomi
Klein in which Klein states that the cliched use of polar bears repels her from
films about environmental change. Klein is a journalist and activist whose
books include No Logo and This Changes Everything, and given her
politics, I wasn’t exactly surprised that a contributor to this anthology
referenced her. It seemed an awkward conclusion, however, given that both the
first and last portrayals of polar bears discussed by Banerjee are the
creations of Inuit artists. The quotation suggested that Klein would be bored
with this indigenous art. (120) My confusion subsided, however, when I realized
that Banerjee was not quoting Klein fawningly but was actually taking a minor
swipe at her. In defense of artistic portrayals of polar bears, Banerjee writes
of Klein’s statement, “Such a reductive assessment fails to capture the
complexity in images of polar bears—achieved through visual depiction, literary
allusion, memory, and performance—which collectively stand as an emblem of
political ecology, connecting the bear and its home, the Arctic, with its
people, the Inuit, and the rest of the planet in many unexpected ways,
encouraging us all to see the Arctic anew.” (120)
I found myself immediately disliking Luc Jacquet’s “The
Return of the Boomerang.” It manifested an off-putting combination of privilege
and melodrama. Poor Luc Jacquet, for instance, found his sojourn to Antarctica
unsatisfying, as it was not as pristine as he had hoped. What is worse, it was
Jacquet’s misfortune to have been “…born too late to live on a generous and
resilient Earth….” (121) Who is this
jerk? I wondered. Flipping to the author biographies at the end of the collection,
I learned that Jacquet was the director of March
of the Penguins, one of my favorite films.
Jacquet complains that “The system into which I was born
and the values that had been handed down to me were, from all evidence,
lethal.” (121) All evidence? How
about human demographic evidence? The very success of “the system into which [Jacquet]
was born” in promoting and sustaining human life is the cause of the
Anthropocene. Human history has been lethal for much of the biosphere. But it
has also promoted the existence of other lifeforms, including humans. Our
lethality for other creatures is to a substantial degree a consequence of a
vast increase in the number of human lives. Vastly increasing the number of
human lives is a rather counterintuitive consequence for purportedly “lethal”
values to have.
Jacquet’s personal response to the challenges of the
Anthropocene are genuinely pathological. He writes that his food is
“unwholesome.” He complains that “…the air I breathe is polluted….” And for Jacquet,
“…a blue sky is an indication of a high-pressure area and so of pollution….”
(122) In other words, Jacquet is immiserated by eating, breathing, and bright
sunny days.
Jacquet concludes by discussing the power of art to
change minds. My experience with his essay considerably supports his views. Jacquet’s
essay drove me crazy; his film captivated me. Jacquet writes that film “…speaks
the language of empathy and emotion….” (124) It’s a language that he speaks far
more persuasively than the language of essays.
In “Filmmaking in the Anthropocene,” John Grabowska
describes the ways in which the Eastern Woodlands of the United States are
different than they were before the Columbian Exchange, if not earlier. Today,
tall branchless trees crowd together, a type of tree known as a dog hair wood.
They are the secondary growth that established itself following the removal of
cattle, and the pastures that fed the cattle displaced an even earlier
ecosystem. (125)
Some of the changes that Grabowska describes are not
obviously negative, at least to a layman such as myself. For instance, he notes
that apex predators have been eradicated in the Eastern Woodlands. But doesn’t
that very eradication make his treks through those woodlands possible? Is being
shredded to pieces along the Potomac really part of Grabowska’s “…primordial
fantasy”? (125)
Presumably not. But either way, Grabowska offers a clear,
informative, and thoughtful discussion of nature film documentaries. He begins
with Robert Flaherty’s 1922 Nanook of the
North. Arguably the first documentary film, it emphasized the exotic, the
charismatic, and vicarious adventuring. Pare Lorentz’s 1936 The Plow That Broke the Plains, however,
offered a critique of human management of land resources. It also used music to
guide the viewers’ emotions. (126)
Grabowska argues that filmmakers need to balance a
message of doom with a message of optimism. He cites Al Gore’s optimistic
outlook with approval, and he also mentions Jane Lubchenko’s 2016 speech
“Enough with the Doom and Gloom!”
Grabowska ends with a pretty uninspiring attempt to see
the glass as half full when it comes to the Eastern Woodlands. “Even in my sad,
sorry, lovely woods, the natural world has the capacity to thrill, inspire, and
enlighten….” (128) Sad and sorry. I’m not sure that you can pretend to feel
good about something that you regard as sad and sorry. It would be interesting
to see Grabowska respond to Duffy’s admonition to accept that the nature of
tomorrow will not be the nature of today nor yesterday. (94) Indeed, the
reality that things change and that you must accept it is really a useful rule
of thumb in all domains of life.
In “Picturing Planetary Peril: Visual Media and the
Environmental Crisis,” Finis Dunaway points out that not all people have
contributed equally to global warming, and he argues that graphs of such things
as increases in CO2 emissions and global temperature obscure this fact. According
to Dunaway, “too often, mainstream depictions of the movement have emphasized
notions of universal vulnerability and universal responsibility, framing all
people, no matter where they live, no matter their class or race, as equally
susceptible to environmental harm and equally
culpable of causing the environmental crisis.” (131)
These statements make my head spin. First, we actually have
all contributed, rich and poor, to creating the Anthropocene. Even traditional
societies alter their environments. The first human-driven extinctions in North
America, for instance, preceded agriculture, never mind the Columbian Exchange.
Our destruction of biodiversity is so ancient as to potentially include the
eradication of other humans during the Paleolithic. And the greatest threat to
biodiversity is farming, according to the authors of “The Earth is a Garden.”
(95) Most people throughout history, including the poor, have been farmers.
Even poor people who don’t farm, who live in cities and barely survive, derive
their food, ultimately, from the rest of the biosphere. Even the poorest people
sewing in sweatshops are engaged in work that involves a significant impact on
the natural environment. If nothing else, masses of poor people produce massive
quantities of human waste.
But who regards the poor as equally to blame for the
negative changes that characterize the Anthropocene? I strongly suspect that
literally 100% of people recognize that ExxonMobil is more to blame for climate
change than the Hadza hunter-gatherers of Tanzania. Obviously, when the needs
you are satisfying are fundamental to survival, having a negative impact on the
environment is far less blameworthy than, say, air conditioning your mansion
and feasting on beef on a nightly basis. Every literate person understands that
some societies are more to blame for climate change than others. I think a
similar argument could be made regarding Dunaway’s claim that someone out there
thinks that the negative impacts of the Anthropocene are being experienced by
everyone equally.
Dunaway also adopts the popular false dichotomy of
personal versus collective action. The first objection to make to this false
dichotomy is that an aggregate of personal actions is collective action. But
putting this point aside, who proposes addressing climate change via canvas
shopping bags and nothing else? He contrasts the green consumerism of An Inconvenient Truth to the approach of
those activists who are “…imagining collective responses to global warming and
other environmental crises-in-the-making.” (132) Collective responses, you say?
You mean like, say, an international treaty? Perhaps international negotiations
could be held in which the world’s nations commit themselves to reducing their
carbon emissions. We could hold these negotiations in Paris. If only Al Gore
wasn’t so narrowly focused on “personal responsibility,” he could participate,
at least informally, and make a movie about it. He could call it An Inconvenient Sequel and release it
last year at the Sundance Film Festival. But, alas, we live in a world where
you must choose between using reusable efficient light bulbs or participating
in “collective responses.”
Dunaway’s coherence degenerates entirely in his last
passage. For example, he extolls those activists who are “…challenging the
short-term, profit-making interests of corporations…” rather than “…succumbing
to a fatalistic outlook on the future….” (133) Green consumers have a
fatalistic outlook on the future? Al Gore has a fatalistic outlook on the
future? Dunaway didn’t even make this claim earlier in the essay but abruptly
introduces it in the conclusion.
Part V of Living in
the Anthropocene addresses “The Way Forward.” It contains six essays. Though
they appear worth reading, by the time I reached them, I had already spent way
too much time on this review. I only comment on one of them.
In “Why Scientists and Engineers Must Work Together,” G.
Wayne Clough argues for closer collaboration between climate scientists and
engineers. Clough is a former director of the Smithsonian and a former
president of the Georgia Institute of Technology. At the Smithsonian, he
interacted with scientists, and at the Georgia Institute of Technology, he
interacts with engineers. He describes some of the accomplishments of
engineers. For instance, the cost of solar energy was reduced by 70% between
2009 and 2016. Yet, these same engineers “…were not aware of a context that
would help them appreciate how much difference their work could make in the
effort to mitigate the effects of climate change.” (143)
Conclusion
Overall, this is an impressive collection in regard to concision
and readability. On the other hand, it is a surprisingly frustrating collection
in at least three other respects. First, many of the essays just don’t say much
of anything. This includes “Thinking like a Mountain” and “Dragons in the
Greenhouse.” I can fathom the existence of readers to whom those essays would
appeal. But what such readers would like about these essays would be the
creativity of the language, and that’s about it.
Second, a couple of the essays make some surprisingly
foolish claims. Lonnie Bunch III tries to argue that there is something “green”
about African American history because, following Emancipation, African
Americans participated in what other contributors note has traditionally been
the greatest threat to biodiversity, agriculture. (95) Luc Jacquet says our
values are lethal despite the glaring contradiction that the problems we face
are a consequence, in large part, of our immense success at promoting human life.
Finis Dunaway pretends that it is commonly believed that everyone is equally to
blame for climate change and that the burdens of the Anthropocene are equally
distributed.
Finally, Living in
the Anthropocene, given the quantity of contributors, addresses far too
narrow a range of topics. The foreword and one of the essays mention the
international effort that reversed the growth of the hole in the ozone layer,
but merely mentioned it, despite the obvious significance of this effort for
the Anthropocene. It would also have been very welcome if waste management had
been addressed. What affects do landfills and dumps have on ecosystems? What
are the effects of sewage on ecosystems? Another intriguing dimension of the
Anthropocene would be the disposal of our dead. One dimension of the naming of geological
epochs is the fossil record, and surely human remains are a significant feature
of the layers of soil being created today. Another obvious topic of relevance
that is not addressed at all is previous geological epochs. How different is
the human impact on the environment from the impact of the cyanobacteria that
produced the Oxygen Holocaust? And to what extent can humans be thought of as
an invasive species? It would have been welcome if particular human activities
were explored in detail. For instance, an essay on the impact of nuclear waste
on the environment would have been very intriguing. A discussion of the minds
of other animals would have also been greatly welcome. Suffering is not
uniquely human, but it is also not universally experienced by life, certainly
not in identical ways. Even Peter Singer is okay with eating scallops, for instance.
So, what are the lives of animals like? Such an essay could have discussed wild
animals, livestock, and pets, and it could easily have identified positive as
well as negative influences of human beings on the suffering of other creatures
with minds.
One topic that is very insufficiently discussed in Living in the Anthropocene is economics.
The collection would have benefited from a much fuller description of the
wealth generated by our exploitation of the environment. This wealth is
sometimes noted. For instance, Caballero and Brandon note that the proportion
of people living in extreme poverty in 2015 was at a historic low of 9.6%. (32)
Our exploitation of the environment is what achieved this. Moreover, this
wealth could have been more evenly distributed. Instead of arms races, we might
have dramatically improved medicine and education, and the wealth with which we
would have accomplished these things would still have been derived from
displacing other lifeforms, altering landscapes, and engaging in activities
that produce pollution. The volume does not make clear that there are
tradeoffs.
Famed entomologist and evolutionary theorist E. O. Wilson
contributes the afterword to the volume. In it, he points out that we actually
have a very minimal understanding of what we are destroying when we destroy
ecosystems and diminish biodiversity. (162) I admire E. O. Wilson, and I
wondered to what extent this admiration shaped my receptiveness to his writing.
If a different contributor had written the same words, would I have been as
moved by them? I don’t know. Nonetheless, I found Wilson’s afterword to be one
of the high points of the volume.
“There is a momentous moral decision confronting humanity
today,” he writes. “It can be put in the form of a question: what kind of a
species, what kind of an entity, are
we, to treat the rest of life so cheaply?” “Does any serious person really
believe that we can just let the other ten million or so species drain away,
and our descendants will somehow be smart enough to take over the planet and
ride it like the crew of a real spaceship?” he asks.
One admirable feature of Wilson’s afterword is the
boldness of its proposal. We can’t preserve biodiversity without preserving
habitats, but today only 15% of the Earth’s land surface and 3% of the Earth’s
oceans are protected. Wilson proposes increasing each to 50%, writing “Only the
preservation of much more natural habitat than hitherto envisioned can bring
extinction close to a sustainable level.” (164)
Hoffman, Hillel J. “The Permian Extinction—When Life
Nearly Came to an End.” National
Geographic online, no publication date provided. Accessed February 20,
2018: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/prehistoric-world/permian-extinction/.
Kress, John W. and Jeffrey K. Stine (eds.). Living in the Anthropocene: Earth in the Age
of Humans (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 2017).
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