ANTHROPOCENE

10 LIVING IN THE ANTHROPOCENE: UNCERTAINTIES,
RISKS AND
OPPORTUNITIES

In an interview given in 2005, at the age of 96, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, of the French Academy, made an observation that captured in a very concrete way the dramatic singularity of the historic moment we are experiencing. Asked about the future of humanity, he responded:

We are in a world to which I no longer belong. The world I knew, the world I loved, had 2.5 billion inhabitants. The world today has 6 billion human beings. And tomorrow’s world, peopled by 9 billion men and women – even if this is the peak population, as we are assured in order to console us – prohibits me from any forecast.1 [1].

Lévi-Strauss’ insight goes far beyond the nostalgia we might expect from an elderly man lamenting the present in comparison with the good times of his youth. Nor is it a message of generic nostalgia, which would fit different moments of history. In his view, he points out a much deeper issue: during his lifetime, the lifetime of a single individual, the world changed radically and will continue to do so in the coming decades. The speed and scale of transformations are so intense that any attempt at prediction is marked by uncertainty. Indeed, we are living at a time that is radically different from everything human beings have experienced so far.

Population size is just one of the variables to be considered in this context, albeit a very significant one. The milestone of 1 billion inhabitants was reached globally around 1810, roughly 200,000 after the appearance of our species, so-called Homo sapiens. The population rose to 3 billion in 1950. This was more or less the world in which Lévi-Strauss lived, and which he deeply loved. As of 2005, when he gave his interview, the population was rising swiftly from 6 to 7 billion (between 2000 and 2010), and there were projections that it would reach 9 billion in 2050 and then possibly stabilize at this level (although some analysts talk of the possibility of there being 12 billion people by around 2100). [2].

However, as stated before, it is necessary to consider other variables. The population does not exist in a vacuum, but rather in the context of geographical spaces, economic and technological systems, institutions and cultures. The world that Lévi-Strauss loved, always taking 1950 as the benchmark, had around 40 million motor vehicles, the urban population was close to 30%, and there were 76 cities with more than 1 million inhabitants. At the moment, the number of vehicles is more than 1 billion, 54% of people live in urban centers, and 417 cities have more than 1 million inhabitants.[3].

It is important to note the systemic consequences of the new scales of human life on the planet. The production and circulation of vehicles, for example, consumes large quantities of steel, zinc, lead, rubber, aluminum and oil. The metabolism of large cities – which constantly interact, in material and informational terms, with extensive non-urban areas of agriculture, forestry and mining – involves colossal consumption of water, iron, wood and other renewable and non-renewable resources. The waste produced in urban areas, on the other hand, including enormous amounts of plastic, paper, organic waste and chemical substances, returns to the planet’s ecosystems, taking its toll in terms of ecological degradation. In general, the establishment of an urban-industrial civilization on a global scale requires the everyday renewal of gigantic flows of matter and energy. These flows cannot cease, because even if they were halted temporarily, this would generate a succession of crises endowed with different levels of complexity.

From the 1970s, people started to speak with more intensity about the multiplication of “environmental problems” in different regions of the planet (pollution, industrial accidents, spillages, and erosion of landscapes). [4]. Today it is becoming clear that such problems should not be understood as isolated malfunctions or accidents. Rather, they represent symptoms or signs of something much deeper: we are living in a new phase of history, a change in the level of human presence on Earth. Explosive population growth, which led us to the current mark of 7 billion people, with a projected population of 10 billion people by the mid-21st century, is a historic and social reality that has lasted for a little over 200 years.

We are living in a new phase of history, a change in the level of human presence on Earth. Explosive population growth, which led us to the current mark of 7 billion people, with a projected population of 10 billion people by the mid-21st century, is a historic and social reality that has lasted for a little over 200 years.

The idea of the “Anthropocene” – propagated since the start of this century by Paul Crutzen, a joint winner of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry – has turned into the main conceptual instrument for understanding this historic change. In an article published in 2000 in the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme’s bulletin, written in collaboration with Eugene F. Stoermer, Crutzen stated that the Anthropocene is a “new geological era” that emphasizes the historically recent “central role of humanity in geology and ecology.” [5] In other words, the term may be understood as the era in which the human species is no longer an animal like any other, living by appropriating a relatively small fraction of the natural matter and energy flows existing on the planet, and becomes a global geological agent. Based on this change in level, the human presence has started to impact the “Earth System” as a whole, above all the atmosphere, biosphere (the set of living beings), the water cycle and some biochemical cycles on a planetary scale (such as the nitrogen, phosphorus and sulfur cycles).

It is important to place the emergence of the Anthropocene within the context of a global macro vision of human history. A comprehensive timeline has been proposed by historians such as John McNeill, [6], according to whom this new era may be seen in three stages.

The first stage goes from 1800 to 1945, with the formation of the industrial era. The energy base for this great transformation, which continues to be widely dominant in the present, was massive expansion of the use of fossil fuels (especially coal and oil). As a result, this new moment of history is called the “Fossil Fuel Age” by some. The extraction of fossil fuels located inside Earth permitted an enormous expansion of production forces, promoting simultaneous growth of unparalleled intensity in population, urban-industrial structures and consumption of natural resources. From the year 1800, when the industrial system began to expand beyond England, to the year 2000, global economic output increased 50-fold and energy consumption rose 40-fold.

It was the use of fossil fuels, in fact, that made it possible to go past the scales to which human presence on the planet had previously been restricted. The growth of the human population on Earth therefore cannot be seen as a regular, homogeneous and merely cumulative process, i.e. as a purely biological process. It experienced radical breakthroughs related to major changes in the socioeconomic, technological and cultural fields.

However, it is important to note a second phase of the Anthropocene, which started around 1945 and is still in full force. It has been called “the great acceleration.” This phase was gestated in the context of the period following the Second World War, when the availability of abundant, cheap oil – associated with the rise of Arab producers – was crucial to the dissemination of innovative technologies. This process resulted in an explosion of mass consumption (of automobiles, telephones and televisions). Subsequently, new technological waves continued to contribute to the further expansion of consumption on a large scale, such as computers and cell phones. Some of the indicators of this “great acceleration” were discussed above, as they precisely express the transition from the world that Lévi-Strauss loved to the world he no longer recognized.

With regard to the history of the industrial or fossil fuel age, whose structural foundations remain in place, the “great acceleration” phase is notable for the enormous quantitative expansion in production and consumption (and the consequent qualitative change in the human presence on Earth). The image is like a gale that unfolds into a hurricane: the winds of the industrial revolutions – which already represented a great change in relation to preindustrial standards of production and consumption – became squalls capable of radically multiplying the social and environmental consequences of human action. The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is a clear indicator of this change in the Anthropocene’s rhythm: growth was relatively modest between 1900 and 1957, rising from 297 to 316 parts per million (ppm). By 2010, however, the figure had risen to 395 ppm!7 [7]

A summarized vision of this change in level that occurred in the mid-20th century can be seen in the following chart of global energy consumption between 1850 and 2009.8 One may observe the extraordinary rise in energy consumption as of 1950, driven by the explosion in the use of oil and the arrival on the scene of new sources (such as nuclear energy and growing use of hydropower). However, it is important to note that, in the context of the “great acceleration”, even sources that strongly marked the past – such as biomass in the pre-industrial world and coal in the industrialization processes of the 19th century – continued to present significant growth in consumption over the course of the 20th century.

HISTORY OF GLOBAL ENERGY CONSUMPTION BY SOURCE [9]

Given this radical set of changes, what challenges present themselves for the future of humanity in the age of the Anthropocene? This is where a third phase, which could be called the “self-aware Anthropocene”, comes in. This would be the moment when global public opinion, in the context of the very emergence of the concept, could recognize that there has been a change in the scale of human presence on the planet. Recognition of the risks inherent to this change – which manifest themselves, for example, in the potential dramatic consequences of global warming and loss of biodiversity – would demand a conscious discussion about our future. It would be necessary to reflect collectively about the new ethical responsibility of human beings, while we look for possible paths to sustainability and social development in the different socioeconomic and cultural contexts existing in the world. There is no single, monolithic solution. The realistic and lasting confrontation of the global crisis needs to involve the intelligent coordination of a variety of strategies and policies.

The great objective that presents itself for the future is the joint tackling of the environmental and social inequality crisis on a planetary scale.

It also needs to be clear that this third phase represents a desire or possibility above all. In concrete terms, we are living in the midst of the “great acceleration.” The total volume of goods transported across the oceans, including grains, oil and minerals, increased from 2.6 billion metric tons in 1970 to 9.1 billion metric tons in 2012. [10] Furthermore, taking into account that the risks of the “great acceleration” are becoming ever more present in international discussions, especially in the environmental field, it is also notoriously difficult to create and implement institutions, laws and policies that are truly effective at achieving sustainability. Nevertheless, although it is not a dominant reality today, this next phase is already being nurtured through numerous meetings, studies and debates that are multiplying across the planet in the pursuit of a sustainable future – and also in the countless conflicts related to the resistance of communities or social groups to the advance of environmental devastation. One positive fact is that this mobilization is not limited to resistance, but also promotes a large number of social projects and experiments aiming at sustainable forms of living and working.

Thus, we need to recognize that we are facing realities and problems that are completely unprecedented. For this same reason, the political solution to the new situation is still shrouded in uncertainty. This is the case with doubts raised by the international scientific community about the pace and biophysical consequences of global warming – even though the overwhelming majority of scientists recognize that it exists and that human action plays an important role in its manifestation.

The great objective that presents itself for the future is the joint tackling of the environmental and social inequality crisis on a planetary scale. Thanks to strong progress in collecting and processing information, we now have a very accurate picture of the unequal reality of human societies. There are different global castes when it comes to the consumption of goods, resources and energy. Every year, a group of 2 billion people with very high or high income consumes more than 80% of the natural resources transformed into economic goods, while 4 billion people live in poverty and 1 billion live in miserable conditions. [11] Untying the knot of this unsustainable inequality, while carrying out the structural, technological and existential reforms needed to tackle the global environmental crisis, will be the major challenge of the coming decades.

Faced with the combination of so many social and environmental crises we now see in the world, the potential for chaos and the unraveling of the international order is very concrete. Nevertheless, there are new possibilities and factors that could modify the terms of the equation: one of them is what sociologists such as Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck call “reflexive modernization.” [12] One of the key points of this concept concerns the ever higher number of literate people associated with the speed of communications media and the establishment of numerous spaces for the meeting of opinions – elements that have contributed to the formation of societies increasingly capable of discussing their present and future, both on the international level and inside each country and region. There have never before been so many people able to read and write, who can readily process information and participate actively in discussions about the fate of societies. On a global level, 82% of the population is considered able to read and write, albeit to a rudimentary extent in many cases. Among the 1 billion wealthiest members of humanity, the literacy rate is 98%. However, to many people’s surprise, basic literacy is already 66% among the 1 billion poorest people. [13]

This striking increase in the circulation of information and human capacity to incorporate it into thought and action is one of the positive aspects of the contradictory historic process that gave rise to the Anthropocene. Perhaps it is also a decisive as well as unprecedented factor for the establishment of a new international political dynamic.

The collective conflict of humanity with the planet, even if differentiated by classes and regions, is a new reality and a challenge that puts us at the crossroads of our own history.

Given the advances in knowledge production and technologies for storing and distributing information, we can today speak of “humanity” in a much more concrete way than the first philosophers of modernity (such as Locke, Smith and Marx) did. We can know, much more accurately, how we are distributed across the planet’s space; where the rich, poor and destitute are; how the technical tools and consumption of energy and matter are divided among individuals and social classes. Moreover, notwithstanding all the uncertainties, we have access to much more accurate knowledge about the planet’s ecological systems and the potential consequences of our actions.

The collective conflict of humanity with the planet, even if differentiated by classes and regions, is a new reality and a challenge that puts us at the crossroads of our own history. In the time in which we live – and especially in the coming decades – we need to take crucial decisions for the future of our species. The possibility of facing this task in a conscious manner may represent a great improvement in quality in the establishment of a new politics, both at an international level and within different countries, enabling us to meet the ethical challenges that living in the Anthropocene poses for the whole of humanity.

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