The Anthropocene and survival of man on Earth

Gandhi knew how cannibalistic fossil capitalism was. He said if India adopted it, the earth would be barren in a few decades.
Image used for illustrative purposes only. (Express illustration | Soumyadip Sinha)
Image used for illustrative purposes only. (Express illustration | Soumyadip Sinha)

There are stories that need to be told repeatedly from different perspectives. There are stories, particularly in science, which need to unfold across disciplines, unravelling both as an epic and critique. There are stories that cannot be confined to colourful newspaper supplements but need to be detailed, like confessions. One such example is the idea of the Anthropocene.

The Anthropocene officially emerged when the Dutch atmospheric chemist and Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen objected to the word Holocene at an international conference. The Holocene embodied the age of agriculture and sedentary civilisations. Crutzen wanted a word that captured man’s interference in the world, the transformations which literally made him an equal to a geological force. He stumbled on the word Anthropocene.

Such hesitant christening signalled the unsettling nature of the term. The first problem arose with the very dating of the phenomenon. When did man’s interference with the earth begin? In the 16th century, with the genocide of the American Indians? With the steam engine and the industrial revolution? With the atomic bomb? But this much is clear: by 1950, man’s interference with the earth was marked. We had entered the age of the Anthropocene before we had recognised it.

An Anthropocene, as a word, requires multiple readings. It demands that we go beyond the sense of the global as a chronicle of speed and efficiency to an understanding of the earth as a habitat and place of belonging. But this raises a question of whether such a return is marked by hubris or humility. One sense in many a sense of arrogance marked by the sense of the managerial. Or at least, the capitalist man still feels he can manage the earth. As James Lovelock emphasises, one needs a sense of humility to grasp that man may not be essential to the earth and that it could shrug him off like any species in a thousand years. If the debates on the Anthropocene swing between hubris and humility, they also alternate between first and third world. The West appropriates the totality called man, and Anthropos becomes a western history. It is in this context that one must emphasise that almost all the pollution and damage was done by western capitalists.

Many scholars have demanded that the Anthropocene be called the Capitalocene to identify the crime called fossil capitalism. Men like Gandhi knew how cannibalistic fossil capitalism was. He said if India adopted such a lifestyle, the earth would be barren in a few decades. His ideas of swadeshi and swaraj are useful: While swadeshi has to protect the local from the devastations of capitalism and colonialism, swaraj has to provide an alternative imagination to capitalist violence. The search for soft energy paths is thus both scientific and ethical.

The Anthropocene as ethics needs to be emphasised. Ivan Illich has shown that a cybernetic view of life emphasises a sense of the whole which removes the personal responsibility of the crime. The person is erased by the system’s logic as a system’s world has no sense of the person. Illich and others have added that even words like stewardship and control still smack of hubris. Once again, the Gandhian idea of trusteeship, caring, and sacrifice needs to be summoned. Trusteeship is devoid of the possessiveness of ownership.

In this context, we have to look at time and nature differently. A few years ago, the  Uttarakhand HC declared the Ganges as a person. The legal sense of rights is also patriarchal in that the Ganges was declared as a legal minor to be taken care of by a secretary. The Ganges sounded more like a PWD department than a mythical river.

Secondly, we cannot think of ethics in the short run. The cycles of the Anthropocene run for a few billion years. We cannot dismiss them in Keynesian style by declaring that in the long run, we will all be dead. We need a rethinking of life as a network between life, life world, livelihood, lifestyle, livestock and life cycle. Today, ethics has to dream of connectivities and complexities that it has yet to think about.

Thirdly, we have to realise that the idea of the Anthropocene has to eliminate our sense of ethnocentricity. We cannot have a biased western history or an economy emphasising coal and oil. We also have to think of nature beyond man and appreciate the role of bacteria. The relationship between nature and the variety of nature changes with the Anthropocene. But more importantly, we need a new knowledge system and a new knowledge economy where the expert senses an impoverishment, and interdisciplinarity becomes not just a mode of connectivity but a new style of cognitive trusteeship.

Yet the Anthropocene cannot be restricted to the geographical imaginations of nation states and the narrowness of management models. It needs the vitality of the creation myths and the resonance of civilisation metaphors. Nature is no longer a mere resource. This is the point that the Brazilian indigenista leader Davo Papanova made when he said western forestry could not understand the forest except its timber and paper. The West has no mystical sense of connectivity to the forest as a cosmos. The impoverishment of western science is now obvious. We need new cosmologists to liven western science, and language becomes critical here.

The Anthropocene, for all its challenges, cannot be seen as hubris. One needs humility to confront risk, uncertainty and complexity in an ethically creative sense. Civil society and folklore have to play a creative role here. How does society look at the damage artificial fertilisers have created? How do you save a coral reef?

Here, ethics, theology and literature have to play more active roles. Literature has to add to the power of science’s storytelling. One needs to dream of a science of diversity and plurality. We cannot regress to growth economics and development when we need to dream of new kinds of commons challenging the enclosures and panopticons of our time. The Anthropocene has to be part of education, a holistic one, but regardless of the fashionable or parochial ideas of the two cultures, the split between humanity and the sciences is no longer relevant.

Democracy now includes nature in its logic of representation, while ethics is more sensitive about time. Our Constitution and syllabus must be rethought in line with the idea that man has to survive amiably with the earth. This effort demands a new kind of storyteller to capture the future as an epic and ethic of survival.

Shiv Visvanathan

Social scientist associated with THE COMPOST HEAP, a group researching alternative imaginations

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