The Birth of the Anthropocene

I end with a kind of parable about what it means to bear witness to the birth of the Anthropocene, even though doing so goes against a principle of mine in this book and briefly lets one person’s voice stand in for that of all humankind.
The nuclear bomb tests that provide the best marker for the coming of the new epoch involved more than just scientists and technicians. Investigating strategies for the nuclear battlefield, the U.S., Soviet, and British armies conducted training maneuvers amid the aftermath of the test shots. James Yeatts took part in the U.S. Army’s Desert Rock exercises in 1952. Some years later he lost the teeth from his mouth, pulling them away with his bare hands. His son was born profoundly deformed

But ongoing struggles for environmental justice still have the power to influence what will emerge from the Holocene’s terminal crisis. If the planet is living through the birth of an epoch, then the world’s green movements face the responsibility of helping shape a turning point within the vast reaches of the geological timescale

But the carbon cycle’s economic mechanism may be hampered by activist-led divestment from fossil fuel companies, which has the potential to accelerate cautious shareholders’ retreat from firms whose value rests on their ownership of assets that may never be usable. The share prices of the largest fossil fuel reserve owners have become the critical variable of the planet’s carbon cycle. Thus the idea of the Anthropocene offers a new context for understanding the fossil fuel divestment movement and, in particular, the way in which its organizers have sought to make visible the connections between the carbon dioxide readings at Mauna Loa and the institutions of global finance. Divestment from fossil fuels is a geological act, an intervention in the linchpin biogeochemical process of the earth system.

This book has sketched out the political implications of the version of the Anthropocene epoch that has been constructed since 2008 by the stratigraphers of the ICS Anthropocene Working Group. If a new epoch, in a formal geological sense—the thirty-ninth one of the Phanerozoic eon—may be said to have begun in 1952, then t

Environmentalists’ goal should not be to call off that transition and replace it with indefinite sustainability, but instead to intervene in it by guarding and rebuilding ecological pluralism. Construing the environmental crisis in these terms implies that the cutting edge of environmental praxis is the environmentalism of the poor in the global South, and that geological thought experiments can teach a lesson in how human societies really work; it implies that agribusiness is an indispensable target for environmentalist critique, and that fossil fuel divestment is a way of getting at the crux of how the planet’s biogeochemical systems are changing.

directing attention to fluctuations in the carbon cycle through geological time, the stratigraphic version of the Anthropocene encourages a change of focus from the demand side to the supply side of the fossil fuel industry. In geological terms, the real novelty is not a species maximizing the energy available to it but the recent scale of the “selective erosion” of fossil fuels, the mining and drilling processes that bring them to the surface. Recall the figures given in chapter 1: 240 billion metric tons of carbon accumulated in the atmosphere from 1750 to 2011, but a total indicated reserve of 780 billion tons of fossil-fuel carbon remains underground. The widespread concern with cutting back on the use of fossil fuels only tackles the issue indirectly. What ultimately matters is keeping most of that remaining carbon in the groun

The economic phase is not only the newest phase in carbon’s biogeochemical cycle but also the one most vulnerable to disruption. If you want to interrupt the passage of carbon between subterranean and atmospheric reservoirs, the economic moment of the cycle, in which carbon is simultaneously underground and already present in balance sheets and stock market valuations, is the choke point that you might target. Only national governments have the strength to close that passage off, and they have strong incentives not to do so.

Thus the idea of the Anthropocene denormalizes industrial agriculture. It suggests that the routine practices of Smithfield Foods and Archer Daniels Midland should be as readily subject to environmentalist critique as Indonesian palm oil plantations or Monsanto’s biotechnology patents. Agribusiness lies at the heart of the capitalist world-ecology. The U.S. National Grain and Feed Association, for instance, notes that its membership includes “commodity futures brokers; . . . banks; railroads; barge lines; grain exchanges; biotechnology providers; engineering and design/construction firms; insurance companies; computer/software firms; and other companies.” And even fossil fuels themselves are organic products, of course. The single most important struggle at the birth of the Anthropocene is not to protect old-fashioned organic technologies against high-tech encroachment but precisely the reverse: to replace coal, oil, and gas with nonbiological sources of electricity

From the mass extinction at the end of the Ordovician period to the Pleistocene glaciations, everything affects the climate system, and climate affects everything. At the center of this central system is the earth’s paradigmatic biogeochemical loop: the carbon cycle. Carbon builds the whole biosphere, flows through the oceans, sediments, and atmosphere, and in its atmospheric phase decisively inflects the quantity and distribution of energy around the surface of the earth.

Antonio Stoppani’s and Jan Zalasiewicz’s thought experiments about future alien geologists investigating the traces of human societies invite their readers to reimagine cities, roads, and cemeteries as incipient fossil assemblages. Doing so yields a bracing sense of how human labor participates ineluctably in much older ecological processes.