Stumbling Off the Anthropocene Cliff
Richard Gale and Gary Null
Progressive Radio Network, May 18, 2022
Climate scientists and environmental activists now refer to our postmodern era as the Anthropocene Age. Indeed modern civilization’s heavy reliance upon fossil fuels is destroying the planet unwittingly. Our carbon footprint is evidenced everywhere we look. Our addiction to carbon-based energy should be more transparent than ever the past couple months after the Biden administration its European Union allies declared sanctions against Russia’s special military operations in Ukraine. Aside from the sanction’s utter failure to weaken Putin, the hysteria over rising energy costs and natural gas and oil shortages reveals how far we have fallen behind in transitioning to renewable energy sources. We observe how developed nations’ economies completely rely upon fossil fuels, and for the EU that means Russian natural gas. Unless the Russia-Ukraine conflict reaches a quick diplomatic solution, the EU will certainty experience a very harsh and cold winter. The Greens, who now control the German government, have even had to warn Germans to have sufficient warm sweaters come autumn. And it is technically impossible for the US to fill in the shortfall of the EU’s loss of energy resources if and when Russia decides to turn off the spigot.
In addition, many analysts are warning of global food shortages in much of Europe where food prices have already spiked 30 percent and beyond. The EU’s agricultural base heavily relies on fertilizers manufactured in Russia, and this too requires fossil fuels to manufacture. The EU imports 50 percent of its high grade ammonium nitrate from Russia. In 2021 the US purchased $1.2 billion of Russian fertilizer. The food that reaches our dining table has a history of greenhouse gas emissions, and 40 percent of it comes from fertilizers that are synthesized from atmospheric nitrogen and natural gas. For the sake of comparison, 1 ton of nitrogen fertilizer requires as much energy as 2 tons of gasoline. Likewise all of our automobiles, mobile phones, computers, appliances, out-control weapons development, and clothing are energy intensive. The costs of these and much more will continue to rise. Washington dishonestly blames this on the “Putin price hike”, but the truth is that this is largely due to Biden’s sanctions. Yet for the past three decades, every administration in the White House has failed dismally to heed the climate warnings and aggressively pursue renewable energy sources and technologies.
When we speak about climate change and the possible solutions to better transition away from its most detrimental anthropocentric contributors, the boundaries that divide national interests become irrelevant. Climate change and the heating planet is a global crisis of our own making. Very little is being done at either the political domestic and international levels to abate the sources and causes of this emergency.
In less than 70 years, humans have already removed twice the number of trees in the world’s forests and jungles. There would be three times more fresh water. And there would be over 30 percent less greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere. What is equally important is the gloomy scenario that during this same 70 year period, as the resources to global capitalism’s insane economic pursuit in the name of progress, the world population steadily increases. Since 1950 (2.5 billion people) the global population has more than tripled to 7.9 billion today. The simple math is clear that humanity is headed towards extremely dark and frightening times in the very near future.
It is comforting to become complacent and simply consider the gradual decay and death of the planet’s ecosystems as unusual or freaky coincidences. Rarely do we give thought about the deeper causal factors that point directly back to our individual and collective behaviors. Winters start later; spring arrives earlier. Prolonged rainfalls and extreme weather incidents are perceived as mere aberrations, as are months of excessive heat and drought. Scientists are fond of saying this is the new “normal” just as the mainstream media would have us believe fear, loathing, and depression are the new norm in a post-Coivid-19 world. But life continues. We passively accept the adverse changes subtlety affecting our lives. Assimilation and adaptation to inimical change is far easier and more comforting than waking up from our ignorance or denial of life-threatening problems. People simply say, “that was a weird year” or “the weather has been very strange lately,” and assume everything will return to a median range the following year. Everything is supposedly cyclic, right? But the later years of normalcy don’t reappear. Each year witnesses new record-breaking weather events somewhere in the world. And this is part of what the Anthropocene Age reflects.
So what is meant when we say that humanity and all other species, and the very planet itself, have entered the Anthropocene Age? The Anthropocene means more than what humanity does today or has done in the past since the dawn of modern industrial society over two hundred years ago when the steam engine rolled on tracks. The term is not only descriptive of our present century but refers to an entire age in geological time. Earlier geological ages also experienced catastrophic changes. The last and more recent Holocene era began at the end of the ice age approximately 11,700 years ago. But these changes were based upon natural geophysics and phenomena occurring within the planet’s geological systems. Or they were accidental such as the case of an asteroid, roughly 6 miles in diameter, smashing into the Earth’s surface and overnight altering the atmosphere and global temperature, which gave rise to the Cenozoic Era.
Therefore the Anthropocene is unique in geological time. It is not only the geophysical rhythms altering the planet naturally. During the past two hundred years, a new agent driving geological and climate change has appeared: modern Homo sapiens and the emergence of an industrialized civilization alienated from Nature and its origins. This agent has become so pervasive and independent from its natural lifeline, so alienated from its natural home which brought it forth, that humanity has morphed into an alien power affecting and reshaping the atmosphere and the eco-systems, which would otherwise keep the Earth in a state of equilibrium and balance.
In 1873, an Italian geologist named Antonio Stoppani observed that humans were increasing their influence upon the world thereby adversely affecting the Earth’s ecological systems. He proposed that the planet was entering a new phase in its evolutionary history, which he called the “anthropozoic era,” the seventh geological age since the Earth formed in the Solar System as a cluster of gas and dust 4.6 billion years ago. During his lifetime Stoppani’s insights and predictions failed to take hold in the scientific community. Western civilization was still in the midst of the Enlightenment’s euphoric high over the sudden burst of modern science, industry and the powers of reason over instinct. It was during this Age of Reason that Darwin’s theory of human evolution took hold of the intellectual imagination and gradually merged with utopian myths of infinite industrial and economic progress. The myth has since solidified into the Western consciousness, creating a worldview that today perceives our species as the masters and gods of creation, the supreme rulers of its terrestrial destiny.
The geological sciences would have to wait another hundred years before a Dutch atmospheric chemist and Nobel Prize laureate Paul Crutzen, who first observed the hole in the ozone layer, defined modernity as the arrival of a new epoch in Earth’s geological history. Crutzen observed that human activity had passed a threshold whereby it had become the dominating and overwhelming force shaping the planet’s internal systems. According to Crutzen and his colleague Eugene Stoermer, a biologist at the University of Michigan, it was towards the end of the eighteenth century that the Anthropocene Age commenced after the first scientific evidence of two greenhouse gases, CO2 and methane, being generated by human industrial society.
But what does it mean for the Earth to have entered a new geological epoch? To better understand the full significance of the Anthropocene as a new geological era, imagine for a moment that all humans suddenly disappeared from the face of the Earth tomorrow. Or imagine we have all been beamed up into outer space by an alien race to free the Earth from humanity’s destructive propensities. Even with humanity absent, for the next ten to fifteen thousand years, all subsequent geological and climatic events will have a direct or indirect relationship to past human activities. Our civilization’s footprints are so pervasive across the Earth’s geo- and atmospheric systems that they will linger for many millennia — perhaps well after our species goes extinct. And it is with this arrival of the Anthropocene that humanity has emerged as the primary perpetuator of ecocide, the ruler and destroyer of the planet’s environment, ecosystems and habitats.
A former member of the Australian government’s Climate Change Authority, Clive Hamilton, writes, “The arrival of the Anthropocene contradicts all narratives, philosophies, and theologies that foretell a preordained and continuous rise of humankind to ever-higher levels of material, social and spiritual development.” In his 2017 book, Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene, Hamilton warns of the scientific hubris driving western nations to imagine we can geoengineer the weather, reduce the destructive threats of greenhouse gases, and assure the further growth of human capital and technological development to solve all of our civilization’s and planet’s problems as they arise. For Hamilton, the Anthropocene demands that everything we have taken for granted about our civilization–economic development, globalization and trade, politics and foreign policy, social structures, and more–needs to be reevaluated. More important there is an urgent demand for humanity to discover a completely new relationship with the Earth and other species. Finally, it is time for nations, its rulers, and the leaders of industry to come to terms with the fact we are no longer able to turn back the geological clock.
If we limit our definition of the Anthropocene solely to climate change, we fail to grasp the larger picture and won’t recognize what is truly at stake. Climate change has obviously been the primary rationale for the term’s coinage. Yet humans are altering the planet’s geology, ecosystems and biodiversity in numerous other ways that are either indirectly related to the warming planet or something quite different. These other human activities too are extremely energy intensive and depend upon fossil fuels. They coincide with the burgeoning post-industrial technology and humanity’s desire to conquer, dominate and manipulate Nature solely for its own greed and needs.
Richard Heinberg, director at the Post Carbon Institute in California, warns that the continual expansion of modern civilization has long over-shot the Earth’s capacity to provide the necessary resources upon which our lives depend. This problem, argues Heinberg, is the result of a severe imbalance in our human systems. The problem was laid bare in 1972, when a group of MIT researchers released the now prophetic study Limits of Growth. The report quite accurately predicted many of the threats our societies face due to resource depletion, food production, manufacturing industries, overpopulation, rising pollution, etc. It was the first important study to confirm that our civilization’s worldview that infinite economic progress is possible and necessary would depend upon finite natural resources. This belief, the report warned, is a recipe for catastrophic collapse.
Technology itself, including “green” technologies such as solar power and wind turbines, also relies upon resources that leave a carbon footprint that can offset their climate benefits. Solar panels require the use of arsenic, aluminum, cadmium, copper, gallium, silver, tellurium and other metals. Wind turbines require steel alloys, nickel, chromium, aluminum and manganese. Most of these metals require mining, and all mining operations emit enormous amounts of greenhouse gases. The amount of energy required to manufacture an electric car, especially its lithium-dependent battery, would have to be driven for a minimum 6 years before properly being considered actually green. For sure, technologies might buy time. But none is the silver bullet to slam on the breaks of accelerated warming. Perhaps one of the only promising solutions is an enormous scaling back on progress and development, which follows the old 1970s mantra “reduce, reuse, recycle.” But such a policy is contradictory to the entire neoliberal economic machine that fuels corporate globalization and expanding markets. In short, climate change and the environment are moral issues, and free market capitalism, according to Jerry Mander and founder of the International Forum on Globalization, is fundamentally amoral and without any human value other than currency.
When we step back and take a look at our culture’s anthropogenic footprint, we must also take into account other activities besides burning fossil fuels. Globally, tens of billions of tons of concrete, perhaps one of the most damaging substances on the environment ever invented, is used in construction and development. The rate of concrete production today is equivalent to every person on the planet consuming three tons worth annually. Private corporations smelt huge amounts of aluminum annually, which is an energy-intensive process. Energy spent on aluminum production is today more costly than the actual cost of the metal. Our soil, our rivers, lakes and the oceans are littered in plastic. It is estimated that 150 million metric tons of plastic circulate in the world’s oceans with an additional 8 million metric tons dumped annually. And the plastic industry is petroleum-based. WorldWatch estimates that 4% of petroleum consumed goes into the manufacturing of plastics.
Because Earth changes are driven by economic and industrial pursuits in the free-market, some researchers, such as Jason Moore at Binghamton University, argue our present age should be called the Capitalocene. For Moore and his followers, this is an age where our ecological degradation is being fueled by “inequality, commodification, imperialism and more.” Moore is certainly correct in many respects. However, the capitalist agenda is not the sole culprit now destroying the planet and human lives.
Today there is a growing consensus among many thought leaders who have spent much of their lives in the environmental movement that only widespread systemic change will ward off the colossal human suffering looming before us in the not too distant future. This requires forward-thinking action at every level of our modern society. And this begins with ourselves, and the dramatic changes that must be undertaken in our personal lives and then expanding into our neighborhoods, towns, communities. “Even if our efforts cannot save consumerist industrial civilization,” notes Richard Heinberg, “they could still succeed in planting the seeds of a regenerative human culture worthy of survival.” This systemic approach, coupled with a “moral awakening,” Heinberg believes, is the only real hope for survival before us.
