{"id":65747,"date":"2015-11-02T12:00:39","date_gmt":"2015-11-02T12:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=65747"},"modified":"2015-10-30T14:07:44","modified_gmt":"2015-10-30T14:07:44","slug":"anthropocene-or-capitalocene","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/11\/anthropocene-or-capitalocene\/","title":{"rendered":"Anthropocene or Capitalocene?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Humanity as a whole did not create global warming. Modern humans did.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Photo:<\/a>

Photo: Reuters<\/p><\/div>\n

27 Oct 2015 \u2013 <\/em>A few months ago, I received a statement of anthro-exceptionalist hubris from an American academic:<\/p>\n

\u201cI love and respect the life, beauty, and intelligence of other animals, BUT, as the American Museum of Natural History reminds us, \u2018Our intelligence and creativity go well beyond those of any other animal. Humans have long communicated through language, created and appreciated art and music, and invented complex tools that have enabled our species survive and thrive, though often at the expense of other species\u2026we owe our creative success to the human brain and our ability to think symbolically\u2026.only humans can use symbols to re-create the world mentally and contemplate endless new realities [while]\u2026symbolic consciousness has given us the capacity for spirituality and a shared sense of empathy and morality.\u2019\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Yes, I responded, and what has our glorious species done with these marvelous and unmatched qualities? What other species can remotely match supreme homo sapiens when it comes to destroying lives, including both those of other species and our own? It has recently become clear to Earth scientists that the history of our planet has resided for some time now in a new geologic epoch called \u201cthe Anthropocene\u201d (successor to \u201cthe Holocene\u201d). It is an era in which, in the words of leading experts<\/a> Will Steffen, Paul Crutzen, and John McNeil, \u201cHuman activities have become so pervasive and profound that they rival the great forces of Nature and are pushing the earth into planetary terra incognita. The Earth is rapidly moving into a less biologically diverse, less forested, much warmer, and probably wetter and stormier era.\u201d It is \u201ca no-analogue state\u201d in which \u201cthe Earth system has recently moved well outside the range of natural variability.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Smokestack<\/a>

Smokestack at sunset. (photo: Flickr)<\/p><\/div>\n

The new Earth epoch bearing its species\u2019 mark and name is nothing for homo sapiens to boast about. The changes introduced by humanity are ecologically unsustainable for decent life. Thanks to the Anthropocene, the world is in the middle of \u201cits sixth great extinction event, with rates of species loss growing rapidly for both terrestrial and marine ecosystems. The atmospheric concentrations of several important greenhouse gases have increased substantially, and the Earth is warming rapidly,\u201d Steffen, Crutzen, and McNeil note. As Noam Chomsky has observed:<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cThe world that we\u2019re creating for our grandchildren is grim\u2026The level of species destruction in the world today<\/a> is about at the level of sixty-five million years ago, when a huge asteroid hit the earth and had horrifying ecological effects. It ended the age of the dinosaurs; they were wiped out. It kind of left a little opening for small mammals, who began to develop, and ultimately us. The same thing is happening now, except that we\u2019re the asteroid\u2026Human civilization is tottering at the edge\u2026\u201d <\/em><\/p>\n

Humans have \u201csurvived and thrived,\u201d the American Museum of Natural History raves. But not for long if it doesn\u2019t act soon to avert the environmental calamity that is already showing signs of dark and potentially irreversible arrival before the births of \u201cour grandchildren.\u201d The nightmare threat isn\u2019t about anthropogenic global warming marching along slowly in a linear fashion, with the planet getting a little hotter year by year. It\u2019s about tipping points and the question of civilizational survival<\/a> producing abrupt and irreversible climate change with catastrophic outcomes. A recent report<\/a> from the prestigious and normally restrained Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggest very strongly that the Earth is appro\u00e5\u00e5aching such tipping points \u2013 the melting of polar ice and Arctic permafrost, the acid-bleaching of global coral reefs, and the drying out of the Amazonian rain forest \u2013 at a pace and in ways that had not been anticipated.<\/p>\n

My aforementioned academic correspondent\u2019s accolade to his species reminded me of something Chomsky wrote in Hegemony or Survival<\/a> (2003). Reflecting on biologist Ernest Mayr\u2019s observations that the average life expectancy of a species is roughly 100,000 years and that evolutionary history suggested longer biological success for less intelligent species than more intelligent ones, Chomsky argued that \u201cWe are entering a period\u2026that may provide an answer to the question of whether it is better to be smart than stupid\u2026If it receives a definite answer, that answer can only be that humans were a kind of \u2018biological error,\u2019 using their allotted 100,000 years to destroy themselves and, in the process, much else.\u201d<\/p>\n

Here, however, we need to be careful about falling into ahistorical and bourgeois misanthropy. The concept of \u201cthe Anthropocene\u201d has rich geological validity and holds welcome political relevance in countering the carbon-industrial complex\u2019s denial of humanity\u2019s responsibility for contemporary climate change. Still, we must guard against lapsing into the historically unspecific and class-blind uses of \u201canthros,\u201d projecting the currently and historically recent age of capital onto the broad 100,000-year swath of human activity on and in nature. As left environmental sociologist Jason Moore reminded radio interviewer Sasha Lilley last March<\/a>, \u201cIt was not humanity as whole that created \u2026large-scale industry and the massive textile factories of Manchester in the 19th century or Detroit in the last century or Shenzen today<\/a>. It was capital.\u201d And it is only during a relatively small slice of human history \u2013 roughly the last half-millennium give or take a century or so \u2013 that humanity has been socially and institutionally wired from the top down to wreck livable ecology.<\/p>\n

Moore and other left analysts argue with good reason that it is more appropriate to understand humanity\u2019s Earth-altering assault on livable ecology as \u201cCapitalocene<\/a>.” After all, it is only during the relatively brief period of history when capitalism has existed and ruled the world system (since 1600 or thereabouts by some academic calculations, earlier and later by others) that human social organization has developed the capacity and inner accumulation- and commodification – and \u201cproductivity\u201d – and growth-mad compulsion to transform Earth systems \u2013 with profitability and \u201cproductivity\u201d dependent upon on the relentless appropriation of \u201ccheap nature\u201d (cheap food, cheap energy, cheap raw materials and cheap human labor power or cheap human nature). Moore maintains that human destruction of livable ecology is best explained by changes that capitalism\u2019s addictive and interrelated pursuits of profit and empire imposed on humanity\u2019s relationships with “the web of life” since \u201cthe long sixteen century\u201d starting in 1450.<\/p>\n

In terms of measurable material consequences, it is true, the real destructive and Earth-altering impact dates from more recent history. The original geological Anthropocene argument pegged the major changes with the onset of the Industrial Revolution around 1800 but recent Earth science findings point to 1945 and the post-WWII era of US-led global monopoly-capitalist economic expansion as the real material onset of the Anthropocene\/Capitalocene. Still, the social, historical, political and class-historical DNA of the eco-cidal disease crystalized during Europe\u2019s transition from feudalism to capitalism in the wake of the Black Death.<\/p>\n

This matters for those who want to avert catastrophe. There is no desirable remedy without a proper historical diagnosis. Those who want to avert a new Black Death on a planetary scale need to confront the imperial world system that emerged in feudalism\u2019s aftermath \u2013 capitalism \u2013 if prospects for a decent future are to be saved. We cannot afford stupidity about systems of class rule any more than we can afford stupidity about our species\u2019 impact on planetary life systems.<\/p>\n

______________________________<\/p>\n

Paul Street is an author in Iowa City, Iowa, USA.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 telesurtv.net<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Analysts argue with good reason that it is more appropriate to understand humanity’s Earth-altering assault on livable ecology as ‘Capitalocene.’ After all, it is only during the relatively brief period of history when capitalism has existed and ruled the world that human social organization has developed the capacity, inner accumulation, and growth-mad compulsion to transform Earth systems. And kill them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[61],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-65747","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65747","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65747"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65747\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}