The history of the world is presented as a split civil reality. At one level, there is an attempt to survive creation myths like the Anthropocene of mother Earth, the rise of Gaia. Science recovers and regains its source of the sacred. The Anthropocene is one of the most life-giving myths we can dream of.
At another level, we confront the immediacy of climate change, of gigantic destruction. As a result of man’s attitude to nature, control of nature, human beings’ stay on Earth has become unfeasible. The reason climate change activists attribute to it is that industrialism was a liminal act of the West.
Secondly, the capitalist attribute to nature was one of treating it as a resource, a commodity. As a result, man has turned ecocidal towards nature. What the activists say is true. Climate change is not only an act of asymmetric violence, it is an injustice. The West owes Earth and the Global South a promissory note of redemption.
Unfortunately, the West is in no mood to sustain the earth. It is looking for pragmatic solutions that might benefit it more than the third world. What we need is an extended form of governance for which the nation state is not a parochial idea. The nation state is a 19th century concept that does not fit 21st century governance.
The word ‘Anthropocene’ was coined by Dutch scientist Paul Crutzen, a Nobel laureate, to talk of the damage at the geological level that man has created. There is a slight irony here as more time is divided to meeting the Anthropocene than critically investigating man’s destructive role.
Historian and ecologists have offered a scene of a possible moment of genocide in history. The first date suggested is the 16th century after the Spanish conquest of the Americas. The second is the beginning of the industrial revolution. The third date, more contemporary, is the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. All three moments are critical irreversible genocidal changes in history, for which man was the trigger.
The Anthropocene debate has to be a long and intensive one, more on the lines of the truth commission, where ethical repair sought frameworks beyond justice. We need the affirmations of a Desmond Tutu more than the drama of the Nuremberg trials. The third world has to rescue the first, and to do that, one has to go beyond mere political economy. We need a new reconciliation between East and West, a mode of redemption, a search for cognitive justice.
The industrial-scientific West has to be theoretically re-read and a new sense of diversity and justice created so that the sense of trusteeship of commodities does not become one of mere management. One requires a cognitive and ethical revolution to accompany the transformation of industrialism.
This needs a different notion of time that demonstrates that the ideas of progress are impoverished. One needs a sense of cyclical, cosmic time, a different sense of memory, of a science where one realises hegemony is not truth.. One needs a more pluralistic and dialogic sense of the universe.
One must insist that the nation-state provide a sense to the Anthropocene. The state is too parochial. One needs civilisations as a framework of values. One needs a dense network of institutions from civilisations, constitution, civics, the syllabus, citizenship and the commons to weave a new response to the Anthropocene.
Maybe one could create a new kind of Unesco to visualise new rituals with regard to nature and culture. One needs tribal memory about soil as epistemologies. Nations and cultures need a new set of choreographies. One must listen to tribal epistemologies. The American tribes have elaborate notions of trees, rituals of connectivity and solidarity. One needs the life-giving aspects of folklore, where local terms and concepts play a significant role.
Mahatma Gandhi’s echoes of Swadeshi are not merely local. It embraces the vernacular. Swaraj goes on to other worlds to get a deeper sense of Earth. For instance, the Gaia hypothesis took not only evolutionary time but brought out the role of bacteria in sterilisation of Earth for a million years. Earth’s atmosphere needs a different sense of cosmology and epistemology. One cannot be content with textbook science.
The Anthropocene is a virtual act of confession where man admits to the violence he has inflicted on Earth. He now has to look at the condition for ethical and ecological repair. The idea of ethical repair was raised during the Tutu commission. It seeks a greater holism and a deeper understanding of violence. Man has to learn a different way of interacting with nature and a different sense of time.
A lot of aid will have to go into the understanding of third-world nature. There is a need for a ritual process by which man mourns life he has destroyed. A cosmology needs to retain the sense of the sacred, a nuance of the gift and perspectives which take it beyond any material perpetuation.
Unfortunately, most groups are reluctant to give legitimacy to the idea of the Anthropocene, taking cues from official science that refuses to endorse it. In February 2024, an international scientific committee voted against creating a new geological time period called the Anthropocene. The move, coming after two decades of debate, dashed the hopes of many in the environmental community who wanted a scientific endorsement of the notion that human-driven changes had shifted the trajectory of the planet.
But the Anthropocene has to go beyond the clerical. It has to create a carnival of nature that can interact with the carnival of science. It has to look for new celebrations where nature is sacred, a gift, and a testimony of man’s creativity blending with the ecological structure of time. In that sense, the Anthropocene recovers cosmology and epistemology in creative and democratic ways. It is an invitation to innovation and justice of the prolonged kind.
Shiv Visvanathan
Social scientist associated with the Compost Heap, a group researching alternative imaginations
(Views are personal)
(svcsds@gmail.com)