Editorial note: For the figures depicting the standard representations of human activities in relation to the Earth system, please see the original publication.

The Anthropocene is an event, a point of bifurcation in the history of the Earth, life and humans. It overturns our representations of the world. According to the philosopher Bruno Latour, it is ‘the most decisive philosophical, religious, anthropological and, as we shall see, political concept yet produced as an alternative to the very notions of “Modern” and “modernity”’.[1] Continuing the systemic ecology which forty years ago framed human activities in an analysis of the functioning of ecosystems and the biosphere, the Anthropocene idea abolishes the break between nature and culture, between human history and the history of life and Earth.

From Buffon to Lyell and Darwin, biology and geology extended terrestrial time to hundreds of millions of years, creating a context that was seemingly external, almost immobile and indifferent to human tribulations. In parallel with this, the bourgeois and industrial Enlightenment emphasized the value of man, the modern subject, as autonomous agent acting consciously on his history and settling social conflicts by dominating nature. We shall see how this break between nature and society was constructed in the nineteenth century, and the part played in it by the emerging human and social sciences. We shall go on to see how this forceful, even violent, return of the history of the Earth into world history creates a new human condition and requires us to reintegrate nature and the Earth system at the heart of our understanding of history, our conception of freedom and our practice of democracy.

Rethinking the environmental crisis: An end to 'sustainable development'

By offering a reading of the ecological impacts of our model of development over two and a half centuries and on a planetary scale, the concept of the Anthropocene profoundly shifts our understanding of the contemporary ‘ecological crisis’. 

A few decades ago, the ‘environment’ was still understood as that which surrounds us, the place where humans went to extract resources, deposit waste, or even that in certain places was to be left virgin. Economists spoke of environmental degradations as ‘externalities’. In the forms of natural parks, ecosystems and environment, subsequently that of ‘sustainable development’, nature was recognized until relatively recently as essential but separate from us. It hardly seemed to present a serious limit to growth, a watchword intoned in chorus by business leaders, orthodox economists and policymakers. 

The concept of Anthropocene challenges this separation and the promise to perpetuate our economic system by modifying it at the margin. In place of ‘environment’, there is now the Earth system. While triumphant industrial modernity had promised to prise us away from nature, its cycles and its limits, placing us in a world of boundless progress, the Earth and its limits are today making a come-back. We are facing ‘the intrusion of Gaia’, in the words of Isabelle Stengers – Gaia being the Greek goddess of the Earth.[2] The global and profound biogeochemical processes that we have disturbed are forcing their way into the centre of the political stage and of our everyday lives. Instead of ‘masters and possessors of nature’, we find ourselves each day a bit more entangled in the immense feedback loops of the Earth system. There can be no more talk of a linear and inexorable progress that used to silence those who challenge the market-based, industrial and consumerist order by accusing them of seeking to return us to a bygone age; from now on, the future of the Earth and all its creatures is at stake. And this uncertain becoming, strewn with tipping points, scarcely resembles the radiant future promised by the ideologists’ progress of the last two centuries, whether liberal, social democratic or Marxist.

As for the word ‘crisis’, does it not maintain a deceptive optimism? It leads us to believe, in fact, that we are simply faced with a perilous turning-point of modernity, a brief trial with an imminent outcome, or even an opportunity. The term ‘crisis’ denotes a transitory state, while the Anthropocene is a point of no return. It indicates a geological bifurcation with no foreseeable return to the normality of the Holocene.

The warning given by the Anthropocene concept, and the recent advances in the sciences of the Earth system, thus go much further than an anthropocentric view of the ‘environmental crisis’, no matter how alarming. The problem is not only that our environment is being degraded, but ‘resources’ (another category that postulates an external and static character to the Earth and its beings and processes) are being exhausted, increasing social inequalities and thus threatening the planet with major geopolitical disturbances. The double reality that the Anthropocene presents is that, on the one hand, the Earth has seen other epochs in the last 4.5 million years, and life will continue in one form or another with or without humans. But the new states that we are launching the Earth into will bring with them a disorder, penury and violence that will render it less readily habitable by humans. Even if the human species manages to reduce its ecological footprint drastically and invent a more sober civilization, we will not have settled accounts with Gaia. The Earth would take at least centuries if not hundreds of thousands of years to get back to the climatic and geobiological regime of the Holocene. The traces of our urban, industrial, consumerist, chemical and nuclear age will remain for thousands or even millions of years in the geological archives of the planet.

The new sciences of the Earth system also give us a non-linear view of the past and future of our planet. We are no longer in a reassuring model in which x hectares of forests converted into fields leads to the disappearance of n per cent of species, causes y per cent extra greenhouse gas and generates z°C increase in global temperature. In both geological history and their own modelling of the future, scientists have detected climatic tipping points and sudden-collapse thresholds of ecosystems. Thus, noting that for the last 400,000 years the Earth has swung between a cold glacial state and a warm interglacial state, they suspect the existence of a tipping point (around +2°C or +3°C?) beyond which the Earth system will undergo a change of attractor and tend towards a new stable state that is decidedly warmer (some +5°C or even +10°C or more – no climatologist can predict), such as existed some tens of millions of years ago, long before the appearance of the human species, and lasted for millions of years. Well beyond the linear predictions of the International Panel on Climate Change’s first reports, this would be a real leap into the unknown. Living in the Anthropocene, therefore, means inhabiting the non-linear and highly unpredictable world of the Earth system’s (or Earth history’s) responses to our disturbances. For the Earth is ‘perhaps a mother, but an irritable and touchy one’, as Isabelle Stengers reminds us in tracing a mythological portrait of Gaia.[3]

The Anthropocene thus cancels the peaceful and reassuring project of sustainable development. This concept derived from the notion of ‘maximal sustainable yield’ conceived by (ecological) fishery science in the 1950s, which itself came from the notion of ‘sustainable (nachhaltig) management’ developed by German forestry science in the eighteenth century (see Chapter 9). Today it fosters illusions that are belied by the advent of the Anthropocene.

First of all, it supports belief in the possibility of perpetuating economic growth by means of a bit more ‘conservation’ of the environment. Publications from the early 1970s on the impossibility of indefinite growth on a finite planet (the Limits to Growth report of the Club of Rome in 1972, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen's thesis on entropy and degrowth, etc.) were carefully swept under the carpet by the new watchword of ‘sustainable development’. While these writings proposed an economy in the service of society and within the biophysical limits of the planet, the discourse of sustainable development that arose in the 1980s claimed that three well-identified poles could be mutually negotiated: the economic, the social and the environmental. Instead of a concentric view in which the economy is within the social, itself framed by a thousand feedback loops within the biosphere and the Earth system, the environment became a new column in the bookkeeping of big corporations, which gave themselves new sustainable development divisions. The project of the ‘green economy’, born within international institutions in recent years, accentuates this development, with the celebrated ‘ecosystem services’ now being the object of markets: the biosphere, the hydrosphere and the atmosphere appear as mere subsystems of the financial and commodity sphere (see Chapter 9). 

The mechanical theory of maximum sustainable yield was refuted in 1973 by the ecologist Crawford S. Holling, who saw it as a reductionist and linear view that was responsible for the sudden collapse of certain ecosystems such as fishery resources. For him, 'The well-being of the world is not adequately described by concentrating on equilibria and conditions near them ... [The] effort to provide a maximum sustained yield from a fish population ... may paradoxically increase the chances of extinctions.'[4] Accordingly, before cofounding the Resilience Alliance in 1999, Holling had proposed already in 1973 the concept of ‘ecological resilience’ as the capacity of an ecosystem to maintain certain of its features despite and through sudden changes of state.

This systemic and complex view of our planet breaks with the posture of control by scientists and engineers imbued with certainty and able to standardize environmental conditions. We enter a world of limits, which is also marked by a greater visibility of the limits of scientific knowledge. Faced with the highly unpredictable character of ecosystems and the Earth, the uncertainties are structural, and it is no longer a matter of believing that a simple compromise can be found between exploitation and conservation. What can help us to inhabit the Anthropocene collectively, therefore, is not, as Holling already said, 'the presumption of a sufficient knowledge, but the recognition of our ignorance'.[5] Far from the glorious advent of an ‘age of man’, the Anthropocene thus rather attests to our striking impotence.[6]

A geopolitical event

Besides being a geological event, the Anthropocene is at the same time a political event. In the IPCC’s hypothesis (by no means the most pessimistic) of an increase in average temperature of 3.7°C by 2100, the Earth will be warmer than it has ever been for 15 million years. As for the extinction of biodiversity, this is already proceeding at a speed unmatched for 65 million years. This means that human societies will have to face up in the coming decades to changes of state in the Earth system which the genus Homo, which appeared only two and a half million years ago, has never experienced, and to which therefore it is neither biologically adapted nor culturally prepared. The Anthropocene thus opens a new situation for humanity, a new human condition.  

If the climatic stability of the last 10,000 years of the Holocene made possible the rise of cultures and civilizations on five continents, the end of this epoch and the entry into a new one will not be a smooth and steady process for human societies. Global warming means that people will die and countries disappear. The food situation already faces an uncertain future: the climate change of the last few decades has caused a shortfall of 4 to 5 per cent in world wheat and maize production in relation to 1980.[7]

At the present time, 20 to 30 million people each year migrate in the wake of natural disaster, and the UN envisages 50 million environmental migrants a year by 2030, due in particular to changes linked to climate disturbance. Already today, therefore, there are ‘victims of the Anthropocene’,[8] and there will be more in the future. As Harald Welzer suggests, with constraints on both resources and climate, the Anthropocene promises to be violent. The geopolitics of the present century may prove more full of conflict, more barbaric, than the twentieth century. The question in the twenty-first century will be how to inhabit the Earth less frightfully.[9]

What levels of climate change and sea-level rise are acceptable? Which Pacific islands are condemned to disappear? How many other species besides our own will we allow to survive? At what point will the acidification of the oceans and the spilling of toxic substances be declared intolerable? If scientists can cast light on these questions, the answers are political decisions. In the time of the Anthropocene, the entire functioning of the Earth becomes a matter of human political choices. For example, knowing that the warming of recent decades has been limited by urban and industrial emissions of sulphur dioxide (an aerosol reflecting solar radiation), particularly in Asia,[10] the international community finds itself facing the dilemma of reducing SO2 emissions by anti-pollution measures, at the risk of increasing global warming, or instead limiting these measures or even conducting projects of geoengineering that consist in massively spraying SO2 into the atmosphere so as to limit this warming, at the cost of millions of premature deaths from respiratory diseases caused by this gas.

The slogan of the Rio+20 conference was ‘The future we want’. It thus expresses, not without an ambivalence that concedes to Promethean optimism, the fact that the planet will become what humans make of it, more or less voluntarily and more or less democratically. The Anthropocene is thus a political issue as well as a category in Earth sciences. We cannot be content with invoking demographic growth (the population increase of 2.4 times between 1950 and 2000) or world GDP (which multiplied by seven in the same half century) as explanations of the increasing human sway over the Earth (Chapter 4). In the same way, the emission of one kilogram of carbon dioxide or methane does not fulfill the same function for all human beings. For some people it is a question of survival, in the form of the available ration of rice, while for others it is simply increasing a consumption of meat (cattle, like rice fields, are great emitters of methane) that is already excessive from a medical point of view, monopolizing half of the planet’s cereal crop-land for cattle feed and generating 18 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions, or more than the entire transport sector.[11]

We are therefore not in the peaceful and infra-political problematic of a reconciliation of humans with nature: the Anthropocene is political inasmuch as it requires arbitrating between various conflicting human forcings on the planet, between the footprints of different human groups (classes, nations), between different technological and industrial options, or between different ways of life and consumption. The Anthropocene has therefore to be given a political charge in order to overcome the contradictions and limits of a model of modernity that has spread globally over the last two centuries, and to explore the paths of a rapid and equitably divided reduction of the ecological footprint. 

The great temporal and ontological divide between nature and society

Whereas the Biblical account, like many other non-Western origin myths, made it possible for a long time to view human history as closely linked to that of the Earth, and Buffon proposed in his Epochs of Nature a great fresco tracing the common destiny of Earth and mankind, these two domains became increasingly separated in the course of the nineteenth century, as the prehuman history of the Earth became longer. Two major texts from the early 1830s, by the geologist Charles Lyell and the historian Jules Michelet, attest to this great discordance. In Michelet’s universal history of humanity:

Along with the world there began a war that will end together with the world and not before: that of man against nature, of spirit against matter, liberty against fatality. History is nothing else than the account of this interminable struggle … the gradual triumph of freedom … What is bound to encourage us in this endless struggle is that, by and large, the one side does not change, while the other changes and becomes stronger. Nature remains the same, whereas every day man gains some advantage over her. The Alps have not grown taller, while we have driven a road across the Simplon pass; the waves and winds are no less capricious, but the steamship breaks the waves heedless of the caprice of wind and sea. Follow the migrations of the human race from east to west, along the route of the sun and the magnetic currents of the globe: observe it on this long journey from Asia to Europe, from India to France, and you will see at each point the fatal power of nature diminish, and the influence of race and climate become less tyrannical.[12]

Continuing Michelet’s vision, the great historian of the Renaissance, Burckhardt, depicted the modern conception of history as ‘the break with nature caused by the awakening of consciousness’.[13]

In symmetry with this ‘history against nature’, nature dismissed to immobility, at least on the human timescale, Lyell inaugurated with his Principles of Geology a view of the Earth’s geological history as indifferent to human action. An intelligent observer arriving on our planet and assessing the role of human action, he explained:

would soon perceive that no one of the fixed and constant laws of the animate or inanimate world was subverted by human agency, and that the modifications now introduced for the first time were the accompaniments of new and extraordinary circumstances, and those not of a physical but a moral nature … so that, whenever the power of the new agent was withheld, even for a brief period, a relapse would take place to the ancient state of things.[14]

The great discrepancy between a long history of the Earth, impassive to human action, and a history of the emancipation of the latter from any natural determinism, was based on a separation of timescales allowed by the gradual extension in the estimated age of the Earth. Buffon proposed a preliminary estimate of 77,000 years, which already broke with the Biblical canon. This was based on the cooling time of an initially very hot planet, extrapolating to the planet the cooling times of metal spheres as measured in his forge. With Lyell, we advance to a timescale of tens of millions of years. The geologist’s uniformitarianism allowed very slow phenomena to have great effects. He accordingly opposed other theories, championed in particular by Georges Cuvier, known as ‘catastrophist’ because they minimized the Earth’s timescale and had to explain geological formations by the existence in the past of abrupt phenomena that had ceased to play a role since the appearance of man.[15] The history of the Earth that Lyell proposed was one of slow and regular forces on which man had no hold, in relation to which ‘the modifications in the system of which man is the instrument, do not, perhaps, constitute so great a deviation from previous analogy as we usually imagine’.[16] In 1862, the physicist William Thomson (the future Lord Kelvin) gave an age of 400 million years for the Earth (the present estimate is 4.5 billion).[17]

The Lamarckian theory of evolution, for its part, and following it that of Darwin, extended the time frame of the history of life, with the appearance of man from a simian ancestor being only a belated episode in this.

In the nineteenth century, the natural sciences also stripped away the telos from both life and the Earth, while the human and social sciences became teleologically progressive. The former removed from life and Earth their sensitivity to human action, while the latter declared their autonomy by assiduously detaching the explanation of human and social phenomena from natural causes. History applied to the study of ‘human affairs’ the methods of the natural sciences: the quest for archival traces as evidence, after the model of fossil traces; the accumulation and comparison of ‘series’; and, in the twentieth century, the ‘immobile history’, as Fernand Braudel put it, of structural, economic and social evolutions. But within this common paradigm of process and history, forming the cultural matrix of the industrial nineteenth century, a division of fields of authority occurred: the history of the Earth and life was the province of natural scientists, and the history of ‘progress in human affairs’[18] that of historians and social sciences – a division that still casts a shadow today. As we shall see, this great temporal and ontological divide broke with the conception of connections between climate, environment and society that had prevailed in the late eighteenth century (Chapter 8) and formed a cultural precondition for the swing into the Anthropocene, by constructing a great external nature, slow, immense and undaunted, and thereby making invisible the limits of the planet (Chapter 9) and the unequal socioeconomic relations of nascent fossil capitalism (Chapter 10).

Profiting from this open discordance between the time of nature and the time of man, liberal economists such as Jean-Baptiste Say, considering that the exhaustion of natural resources was a matter for a distant future beyond the grasp of economic rationality, broke with Malthus and proclaimed a nature placed outside of economic thought as a free gift: ‘We leave the study of natural wealth to the scholars who deal with natural things.’[19] ‘Natural wealth is inexhaustible … Unable to be either multiplied or exhausted, it is not the object of economic science.’[20]

This divide between the natural and the human sciences was further accentuated between 1850 and 1960. Climatology became the science of an external, global climate, conceived as an averaging out of thermometric data over a very large scale, and no longer as the science of places and topographies, the basis for reflection on the human making of climate and the climatic making of societies.[21] In a related fashion, public health and its revolutionizing by Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch focused medical attention on microorganisms, thus marginalizing the earlier neo-Hippocratic medical paradigm which viewed the body as shaped by a far wider number of elements in the environment such as light, temperature, climate, wind, odour and ‘miasmas’.[22] After 1900, the new science of genetics promoted a ‘modern conception of heredity’ centred on the isolated gene, which ruled out the idea (which only recently came back with epigenetics) of a heredity co-determined by the influence of the environment.[23] With the exception of geography, almost all the social sciences defined their object in a way that assiduously removed it from nature: thus social and cultural anthropology separated off from physical anthropology, and Émile Durkheim excluded climatic parameters from the pertinent causes of suicide, the nascent sociology making a watertight division between society and the natural environment.[24] In this respect, Durkheim followed Comte, who with his Course of Positive Philosophy had founded sociology as a ‘genuine science of social development’ that obeyed the specific laws of the ‘general progression of humanity’ rather than environmental influences.[25] For Comte, in fact, Montesquieu in The Spirit of the Laws had exaggerated the influence of ‘local physical causes’ such as climate on the social and political organization:

The true political influence of climate is misconceived, and usually much exaggerated, through the common error of analysing a mere modification before the main action is fully understood … This error was inevitable under Montesquieu’s necessary ignorance of the great social laws … Montesquieu did not even perceive … that local physical causes, very powerful in the early days of civilization, lose their force in proportion as human development admits of their being neutralized.[26]

Likewise, in the age of empires, an ‘environmental orientalism’ reserved the ‘external’ influences of the environment on human history to discourses on ‘less advanced’ societies, as a counterpoise to an industrial society moved above all by an ‘internal’ logic of progress.[27] Soon after, Freud separated the adult individual from the world, decreeing that the cosmic feeling of ‘being in correlation with the surrounding world’ – Romain Rolland’s ‘oceanic feeling’ – was no more than a childish illusion.[28] He thus separated out a psychic interiority that the analyst could study in abstraction from its vast ecological context.[29]

Beyond the great separation

On one side, therefore, were the natural sciences with their non-human objects, their concept of objectivity and their modern certainties; on the other, humanities and social sciences became ‘a-natural’[30] by conferring on ‘society’ a self-sufficient totality, free from natural determination (despite the observations of Marx, Sergei Podolinsky, Patrick Geddes and many others on socioecological metabolisms; see Chapter 8). The natural sciences postulated a physical continuity between humans and other entities that obscured the social production and social relations of nature, while the field of human sciences was defined by a metaphysical discontinuity postulated between humans and everything else, hence obscuring the natural production and relations of social order by what Peter Sloterdijk has called a ‘backstage ontology’.

The Anthropocene, as the reunion of human (historical) time and Earth (geological) time, between human agency and non-human agency, gives the lie to this – temporal, ontological, epistemological and institutional – great divide between nature and society that widened in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The new geohistorical epoch signals the irruption of the Earth (its temporality, its limits, its systemic dynamics) into what sought to be a history, an economy and a society emancipating themselves from natural constraints. It signals the return of the Earth into a world that Western industrial modernity on the whole represented to itself as above the earthly foundation. If our future involves a geological swing of the Earth into a new state, we can no longer believe in a humanity making its own history by itself. This nature that Michelet saw as the static scene of our exploits has clearly entered the game in the most powerful and dynamic manner possible. The Anthropocene thus requires the substitution of the ‘ungrounded’ humanities of industrial modernity by new environmental humanities that adventure beyond the great separation between environment and society.[31] Environmental history, natural anthropology, environmental law and ethics, human ecology, environmental sociology, political ecology, green political theory, ecological economics, etc., are among the new disciplines that have recently begun to renew the human and social sciences, in a dialogue with the sciences of nature. They sketch new environmental humanities that go beyond the two cultures’ fissure and put an end to the jealous division of territories. In the Anthropocene, it is impossible to hide the fact that ‘social’ relations are full of biophysical processes, and that the various flows of matter and energy that run through the Earth system at different levels are polarized by socially structured human activities.

But how are we to conceive conjointly a society structured by nature and a nature structured by the social? In 1998, the ecologists Fikret Berkes and Carl Folke proposed the concept of ‘socioecological systems’.[32] A whole field of research (continuing the work of Georgescu-Roegen and Howard T. Odum) has since established itself, to integrate the analysis of flows of matter and energy, and of ‘socioecological metabolisms’, into the social sciences.[33] These approaches conceive society and the compartments of the Earth system as two structures connected by exchanges of matter and energy. The diagrams in Figure 3 illustrate the theoretical frameworks employed by the main interdisciplinary projects that study socioecological systems.

In the first diagram (Figure 3a), ‘human activities’ comprise a homogeneous black box, while attention is focused on the ‘natural compartment’ of the Earth system. In the second (Figure 3b), commonly adopted by the ‘socioecological systems’ approach, we have two compartments connected by two paths: the impacts of human management of ecosystems and feedback from the latter. The third diagram (Figure 3c) adds to these two paths an intersection between the two compartments, that of ecosystem services and their use.

This type of representation sins by its excessive simplicity and the functionalism of its description of the social. First of all, the historical, material and cultural dynamics of human societies, their asymmetries and relations of domination, are obscured in a black box. Secondly, in all three diagrams, socio-natural metabolisms are reduced to a play of pressures and responses, whereas what is needed is an understanding of the energy and matter metabolisms operated in and by the social system that is as fine-grained as the analysis of biogeochemical flows in the Earth system. It is hard to grasp what is happening if the Anthropocene is represented by a box of ‘human activities’ that interacts with boxes for the atmosphere, biosphere, etc. We are rather dealing with an intricate network in which social and natural arrangements mutually reinforce each other: European consumer attitudes and the orangutans of Indonesia, markets and rainforests, social inequalities and endocrine disturbance, state powers and the chemical composition of the atmosphere, representations of the world and energy flows. And this ‘socio-bio-geosphere’ in its uncertain becoming can only be understood in a dialogue of disciplines with varying levels of analysis, from the molecular level of environmental effects on our heredity through to the global level of flows of matter and capital organized by the WTO, by way of local scenes at industrial sites or socio-environmental mobilizations.

How then are we to overcome the dualism between nature and society that persists in the approaches supported by the three above diagrams, a relation that remains one of externality even if a connected one? First of all, as proposed by the interdisciplinary field of political ecology, we have to think of ecology and power relations together if we are to understand the formation of social and environmental inequalities.[34] We then have to envisage a double relation of internality:[35]

-- Natures pervaded by the social, by the thousand and one socio-technological interventions that are historically situated, and that are only dimly understood when placed in compartments connected by the ever-repeated ‘pressure-response’ pair. The nature of the Anthropocene is above all a ‘second nature’ secreted by powerful institutions (the great networks of capitalism, technological systems, military apparatuses, etc.), which does not rule out the alterity of nature nor the fact that the Earth is not just a social construct.

-- Societies pervaded by nature, in which social relations and cultural norms are structured and rigidified by mechanisms that organize metabolisms of matter and energy, and that govern the social uses of nature. Far from surrounding the social, the environment traverses it, and the history of societies, cultures and socio-political regimes cannot ignore the flows of matter, energy and information that frame them.

In this perspective of a double-framing internality, each of the two former supposed ‘compartments’ must thus be studied by combining the approaches of the so-called social and so-called natural sciences, rather than by an interdisciplinarity of adjacency in which each would reign over its own compartment. The joint history of the Earth and of human societies then appears as the co-evolution of metabolic (material-energetic) regimes and social orders. In each period, a set of world-views and social relations supports socio-technological arrangements that organize the metabolisms of a given society and world-system and alter the functioning of the Earth system. And reciprocally, the metabolisms thus constructed have also political agency; they make possible, robust and ‘natural’ a certain social order, a hierarchy between nations, a certain type of lifestyle and vision of the world.

Reintegrating nature into history

From the time of Michelet and Jacob Burckhardt, history has been above all the history of ‘human affairs’, those of men making history. It could scarcely interact with the history of nature, the timescales being quite different. After the Second World War, historians following Fernand Braudel[36] distinguished three temporalities: that of nature and climate, almost immobile and not affected by human action; the slow temporality of economic and social facts; and finally, the rapid temporality of events, vibrating to the rhythm of battles, diplomacy and political life. This separation of domains and time frames between nature and society, the legacy of industrial modernity, has had profound consequences for the writing of history. Many historians have related the history of scientific and technological mastery of nature. But until the emergence of environmental history, particularly in the United States in the late 1960s, it was rare indeed for historians – except perhaps in orientalist discourse explaining the inferiority and decline of other cultures – to ‘think like a mountain’, in the expression of Aldo Leopold, i.e., to narrate history from the point of view of animals, ecosystems and other non-human entities. And until the 1960s, few historians addressed the alterations of the environment caused by human action and the effects these in turn had on societies. 

Rather than an environmental history as had developed in the United States, what we had in France first of all was a ‘history of the environment’, a new object for history as defined by the Annales School. The quest for scientific authenticity, taken over from historical climatology, and the view of nature as an environment external to society, led Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie to concern himself with climatic history as a ‘history without men’. This was the basis out of which environmental history painfully emerged in France, its protagonists, unlike their American counterparts, maintaining a cordon sanitaire against the ecological mobilizations of the 1970s.[37]

As an exact opposite of this objectivist history of an environment ‘without men’, other French historians developed a cultural history concerned with environmental representations and sensibilities. Alongside a host of scholarly works on the feeling for nature or the representations of landscapes, Alain Corbin’s Le Miasme et la jonquille, published in 1982, was a magisterial text emblematic of this cultural history. But by reading nature in terms of sensibilities and their historical situatedness, Corbin tended to relegate to the back burner the question of the very material effects of industrial activities on the bodies of workers, local residents and ecosystems.

Basically, the polarity between the objectivist perspectives of an environmental history impassive to human action and the constructivist ones of a cultural history of representations of the environment still reproduced the dividing lines between Lyell and Michelet. Taking the Anthropocene seriously as a historian means rejecting a duality that is unsatisfactory and departing from a Braudelian discordance of time frames that is no longer valid.[38] Thus it is well established today that the little ice age, the cooling of the climate between 1450 and 1800 with a minimum in the period 1640–1730, was not simply a natural development experienced by human societies, but the product of a reciprocal interaction. If a cyclical reduction in solar activity was one factor involved, human action itself was another: the demographic collapse of the Amerindian population by some 50 million after 1492 led to an extension of forests and a fall in atmospheric CO2, hence a reduction in the greenhouse effect.[39] The work of Earth system scientists on the Anthropocene question has thus challenged the externality of the climate in relation to human action even in the immediate pre-industrial age. After the epoch of separate histories of nature and of human societies, only a shared history can do justice to the reality of the Anthropocene. 

Several works of environmental history have sought to combine material readings framed by the ‘hard’ sciences (Alfred Crosby, John McNeill) with political and cultural readings, to integrate socio-natural metabolisms and environmental mutations into a historical account. The notion of a ‘second nature’ shaped by capitalist dynamics, used by William Cronon in his key work Nature’s Metropolis, Edmund Russell’s ‘evolutionary history’ perspective of the interactions between human technology and the responses of living organisms, and the history of Western democracies revisited through the energy prism by Timothy Mitchell, are three stimulating examples taken from the field of environmental history that we shall draw on in the third part of this book.[40]

Rediscovering freedom in the age of attachments

The Anthropocene challenges certain distinctions that were formerly deemed fundamental to the modern West: human exceptionalism[41] and the ontological break between the human being as subject of entitlement and the object of nature. Environmental ethics therefore undertakes a basic rethinking of the foundations of the different moral rules that organize relations between humans and non-humans. A distinction is generally made between three major ethical proposals: anthropocentric (sustainably managing the Earth for man), biocentric (respecting the intrinsic right to existence of every being on Earth) and ecocentric (‘thinking like Gaia’, in the words of J. Baird Callicott, following on from Aldo Leopold). An entire field of philosophy (as well as law and political science) now explores the question of environmental law, or even the rights of nature (already sketched out in the constitution of Ecuador) and the Earth, and relations between nature and sovereignty.[42]

In the same way, the Anthropocene challenges the modern definition of freedom, long conceived in opposition to nature. John Stuart Mill related the freedom and autonomy of individuals to the achievement of ‘a high degree of success in their struggle with Nature’.[43] A freedom understood in this way sets human emancipation against nature, against the Earth as a whole. This modern conception of freedom clearly comes up against global limits in a disturbing way. Benjamin Constant, in ‘The Liberty of Ancients Compared with That of the Moderns’, argued in 1819 that the situation of the citizens of his time, gathered in great national political spaces, could not underpin the same conception of liberty and sovereignty as that of the citizens of the civic democracies of antiquity. 

Dominique Bourg and Kerry Whiteside have taken up this argument to maintain that today, in a time of global ecological disruptions of human origin, we need to invent a new ideal of emancipation different from that of the ‘moderns’.[44] For Constant, liberty was synonymous with ‘security in private enjoyments’, those permitted by a government that limited itself to guaranteeing property and free exchange. For this liberal there was no question of limiting the propensity of individuals to produce, exchange, consume and even waste. If the early socialists opposed to this a different ideal of emancipation, one egalitarian and co-operative, so as to limit the struggle of all against all and the ‘material degradation of the planet’ as Charles Fourier expressed it (see Chapter 11), we have to acknowledge that the actual socialism of the twentieth century was not ecological, and that it is Constant’s market-based, individualist and consumerist view of liberty that is culturally dominant on the planet as a whole.

As the Anthropocene pursues its course, we find ourselves facing these limits, along with a host of non-human beings and caught in the feedback loops and boomerang effects of Earth history striking back. What use is it then to conceive liberty, as did Bacon, Descartes, Michelet or Sartre, in terms of a tearing away from nature? What use is it to believe, with Luc Ferry, that man is a ‘being of anti-nature’, and profess this view of liberty as a ‘glorification of uprootedness, or innovation’?[45] As soon as it is no longer possible to abstract from nature, we have to think with Gaia. One of the major tasks of contemporary philosophy is undoubtedly to rethink freedom in a different way than this wrenching away from natural determinations, to explore what may be infinitely enriching and emancipatory in those attachments that link us with other beings on a finite Earth. What infinity remains in a finite world?

Rethinking democracy in a finite world

Freedom can only be conceived in the context of social arrangements and institutional constructions. But, as the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty observes, these political constructions are themselves put in question by the disturbances of the Anthropocene: ‘the mansion of modern freedoms stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil-fuel use’,[46] which today are either growing scarce or disturbing the climate. How can the ideal of democracy be founded anew when the dream of material abundance is evaporating? How should politics be conceived in the age of the Anthropocene?

Faced with the rise of ecological movements, the first approach of political science was to take these as objects and investigate from outside the relative novelty of their ‘offer’ in relation to other political paradigms. Other authors have used this situation to proclaim the ‘end of modernity’, or at least of the ‘simple’, non-reflexive modernity that environmental and health risks are putting in crisis.[47] Bruno Latour, for example, uses the pertinence of ecology today to argue against those modernizers who sharpen the arrow of time and who manufactured a ‘before’, when nature was supposed to have been less separated from society and society less detached from beliefs and ideologies. He proposes to ‘ecologize’ instead of modernize, and, in the wake of Michel Serres’s The Natural Contract, bring nature into politics by a set of institutions (a ‘parliament of things’) so as to assess the place – irremediably uncertain and controversial – in our common world of a multitude of beings, none of which can any longer serve simply as ‘means’ for others.[48]

After this ‘postmodern’ phase, the aggravation of ecological disturbances indicated by scientists and the rise of the concept of Anthropocene have favoured a third wave of more materialist work on the foundations of democracy. Philosophers, political scientists and historians are shedding light on how deeply the political theories of the past were conditioned by particular eco-biogeochemical metabolisms – either explicitly (with Hobbes or Grotius, the state was justified by the scarcity of resources) or implicitly (in the Fordist compromise based on an unequal exchange with the Third World). Effective democracy is as dependent on material foundations as is liberty, foundations that were unequally assured in the past and seem unsustainable in the future, hence the importance of new political theories that integrate the material and energy metabolisms that are the basis for political representation, the state, security, citizenship, sovereignty, justice, etc. This new field of green political theory (Andrew Dobson, Robyn Eckersley, Luc Semal, etc.) is thus questioning the standard political theory – contractualist, anthropocentric and blind to the limits of the planet.[49] In this way it will be possible to discern the conditions in which the necessary de-carbonification of our societies, or even an overall energy reduction, could change our democracies. Recent texts have thus explored the rise of a post-growth activism and of territorial policy initiatives of energy sobriety. They show that, far from prefiguring a totalitarian regression, these ‘catastrophist’ initiatives (plans for local energy reduction, transition towns, etc.) can open new spaces for strong democracy, new participatory forecasting and policy-making, and new social inclusiveness.[50]

Questions of environmental justice also open up new and challenging fields for the social sciences. Can we speak of an ecological debt owed by the rich countries? How do environmental regulations in these countries, along with globalization, relocate polluting activities to poor regions? How does this affect social groups in these regions differently? Can exposing another party to environmental nuisance and catastrophe be analysed as a form of violence?[51]

To understand what is happening to us with the Anthropocene requires the mobilization of all forms of knowledge. If the natural sciences are essential to understanding the intrinsic dynamics of the Earth and its inhabitants, conceiving the Anthropocene also requires new environmental humanities. For this strange species, the ‘naked ape’ that has plunged the Earth into the uncertain future of the Anthropocene is not simply a biological entity. It is also made up of social and ideological systems, institutions and imaginations, pervaded by power relations that govern an unequal distribution of the benefits and ravages of Gaia, of legitimacy in speaking of and for the planet, and of the possibilities of influencing technological and economic choices – starting with the ability to tell the Anthropocene and its history.

Endnotes

[1]  Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Six Lectures on the Political Theology of Nature, Gifford Lectures, 2013, 77, bruno-latour.fr (accessed 22 June 2013, link since suppressed).

[2]  Isabelle Stengers, Au Temps des catastrophes, Paris: Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond /La Découverte, 2009.

[3] Ibid., 53.

[4] Crawford S. Holling, ‘Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems’, Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics, 4, 1973: 2.

[5] Ibid., 21.

[6] We owe the idea of ‘powerful impotence’ to Michel Lepesant.

[7] David B. Lobell et al., ‘Climate Trends and Global Crop Production since 1980’, Science, 333, 2011: 616-20.

[8] François Gemenne, ‘The Anthropocene and Its Victims’, in Clive Hamilton, François. Gemenne and Christophe. Bonneuil (eds.), The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis: Rethinking Modernity in a New Epoch, London: Routledge, 2015.

[9] Harald Welzer, Les Guerres du climat. Pourquoi on tue au XXIe siècle, Paris: Gallimard, 2009.

[10] Robert K. Kaufmann et al., ‘Reconciling Anthropogenic Climate Change with Observed Temperature, 1998–2008’, PNAS 108:29, 19 July 2011: 11,790–3; see also  ‘Anthropogenic Global Cooling’, blog post, Open Mind, 23 August 2010, tamino.wordpress.com

[11] UN Food and Agriculture Organization, Livestock’s Long Shadow: Environmental Issues and Options, Rome: 2006.

[12] Jules Michelet, Introduction à l’histoire universelle, Paris: Hachette, 1831, 5–7; our emphasis.

[13] Cited by Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’, Critical Inquiry, 35:2, 2009: 197–222. We take up in this section Chakrabarty’s key thesis, according to which the Anthropocene shatters the temporal disjunction between human history and natural history.

[14] Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology, vol.1, London: John Murray, 1830, 164.

[15] On Lyell and uniformitarianism, see Martin Rudwick, Worlds before Adam: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Reform, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008, 297–315.

[16] Lyell, Principles of Geology, 161.

[17] Martin Rudwick, Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

[18] John Dalberg-Acton (Lord Acton) (1896), quoted by E. H. Carr, What Is History?, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965, 111.

[19] Jean-Baptiste Say, Cours d’économie politique, Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1996, 98.

[20] Jean-Baptiste Say, Cours complet d’économie politique pratique, vol. 1, Brussels: Meline, 1832, 83.

[21] Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and Fabien Locher, ‘Modernity’s Frail Climate: A Climate History of Environmental Reflexivity’, Critical Inquiry, 38, Spring 2012: 579–98.

[22] Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, ‘Circonvenir les circumfuse. La chimie, l’hygiénisme et la libéralisation des choses environnantes (1750–1850)’, Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine, 56: 4, 2009: 39–76.

[23]  Christophe Bonneuil, ‘Pure Lines as Industrial Simulacra: A Cultural History of Genetics from Darwin to Johannsen’, in Christina Brandt, Staffan Müller-Wille and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger (eds), Exploring Heredity, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015.

[24] Émile Durkheim, Suicide (1897). See also Chapter 3, ‘Suicide and Cosmic Factors’. One of the first analysts of this ‘social only’ paradigm was Serge Moscovici, Essai sur l’histoire humaine de la nature, Paris: Flammarion, 1968.

[25] The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte, New York: Calvin Blanchard, 1858, 440ff.

[26] Ibid., 443.

[27] Fressoz and Locher, ‘Modernity’s Frail Climate’.

[28] Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, Standard Edition, vol. 21, London: Hogarth Press, 1961, 64–5.

[29] Restoration of this connection is the task of today’s ‘ecopsychology’. See Andy Fisher, Radical Ecopsychology, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2013.

[30] We gratefully borrow this critique of ‘anaturalism’ from a book in preparation by Frédéric Neyrat, Enquête sur la part inconstructible de la Terre.

[31] For the critique of this great separation, see Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.

[32] Fikret Berkes and Carl Folke (eds), Linking Social and Ecological Systems: Management Practices and Social Mechanisms for Building Resilience, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

[33] Not without a totalizing and demiurgic perspective of optimal planetary management. See Chapter 4 below, and Peter Baccini and Paul H. Brunner, Metabolism of the Anthroposphere: Analysis, Evaluation, Design, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012.

[34] Richard Peet, Paul Robbins and Michael Watts (eds), Global Political Ecology. London: Routledge, 2010.

[35] This perspective is located at the junction of Earth system sciences, the philosophies of Whitehead and Deleuze, Bruno Latour and the ‘co-productionist’ studies of the sciences, and the ecologized Marxism of Jason Moore, who talks about ‘society-in-nature’ and ‘nature-in-society’. See Jason Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life, London: Verso, 2015.

[36] Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II (2 vols), London: Fontana, 1966.

[37] See the very significant issue of Annales on the environment, 29:3, (May–June 1974). On the ‘delay’ and specific characteristics of French environmental history, see Geneviève Massard-Guilbaud, ‘De la “part du milieu” à l’histoire de l’environnement’, Le Mouvement social, 200, July–September 2002, 64–72.

[38] Chakrabarty, ‘The Climate of History’.

[39] William F. Ruddiman, Plows, Plague and Petroleum, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005; Richard J. Nevle et al., ‘Neotropical Human-Landscape Interactions, Fire, and Atmospheric CO2 during European Conquest’, Holocene, 21, 2011: 853–64; Robert A. Dull et al., ‘The Columbian Encounter and the Little Ice Age: Abrupt Land Use Change, Fire, and Greenhouse Forcing’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 100:4, 2010: 755–71; Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin, ‘Defining the Anthropocene’, Nature, 519, 12 March 2015: 171–80, nature.com.

[40] William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, New York: Norton, 1991; Edmund Russell, Evolutionary History: Uniting History and Biology to Understand Life on Earth, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011; Timothy Mitchell, Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil, London: Verso, 2013.

[41]  Riley E. Dunlap and William R. Catton, ‘Struggling with Human Exemptionalism: The Rise, Decline and Revitalization of Environmental Sociology’, American Sociologist, 25, 1994: 5–30.

[42] Michel Serres, The Natural Contract, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995; Gérard Mairet, Nature et souveraineté, Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2013.

[43] John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government (1861), Rockville, MD: Serenity Publishers, 2008, 40.

[44] Dominique Bourg and Kerry Whiteside, Pour une démocratie écologique, Paris: Seuil, 2010, 21–5.

[45] Luc Ferry, The New Ecological Order, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995, 92. Jean-Claude Michéa responds that this uprootedness is ‘simply the other name for liberal anthropology’ and shows how the early socialists of the first half of the nineteenth century opposed this. See Jean-Claude Michéa, Les Mystères de la gauche, Paris: Climats, 2013.

[46] Chakrabarty, ‘The Climate of History’, 208.

[47] We shall discuss the theses of Ulrich Beck, Bruno Latour and Anthony Giddens in Chapter 4.

[48] Latour, Politics of Nature, and An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013.

[49] Andrew Dobson, et al., ‘Andrew Dobson: Trajectories of Green Political Theory’, Natures Sciences Sociétés, 22:2, April–June 2014: 132–41; Andrew Dobson, Green Political Thought, London: Routledge, 2007; Andrew Dobson and Robyn Eckersley (eds), Political Theory and the Ecological Challenge, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

[50] Luc Semal, Politiques catastrophistes. Pour une théorie politique environnementale, Paris: PUF, 2015; also Agnès Sinaï (ed.), Penser la décroissance. Politiques de l’Anthropocène, Paris: Les Presses de Sciences Po, 2013.

[51] Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.