Utopia in the Anthropocene

A Change Plan for a Sustainable and Equitable World

Michael Harvey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367614843
• eBook ISBN: 9780429859557
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Infrastructure
• Index: Business

Utopia in the Anthropocene takes a cross-disciplinary approach to analyse our current world problems, identify the key resistance to change and take the reader step by step towards a more sustainable, equitable and rewarding world. It presents paradigm-shifting models of economics, political decision-making, business organization and leadership and community life. These are supported by psychological evidence, utopian literature and inspirational changes in history.

The Anthropocene is in crisis, because human activity is changing almost everything about life on this planet at an unparalleled pace. Climate change, the environmental emergency, economic inequality, threats to democracy and peace and an onslaught of new technology: these planetwide risks can seem too big to comprehend, let alone manage. Our reckless pursuit of infinite economic growth on a finite planet could even take us towards a global dystopia. As an unprecedented frenzy of change grips the world, the case for utopia is stronger than ever. An effective change plan requires a bold, imaginative vision, practical goals and clarity around the psychological values necessary to bring about a transformation.

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of the environmental humanities, sustainability studies, ecological economics, organizational psychology, politics, utopian philosophy and literature – and all who long for a better world.

Part I

The burning platform

1 The Anthropocene crisis

Change mismanaged

In change-management circles a crisis in urgent need of a solution is known as ‘a burning platform’. When two geological epochs meet we can expect something even greater – a conflagration of crises. For some time, social scientists have recognized that precarious volatility is an essential aspect of the modern world, christening it a ‘risk society’ (Beck, 1992), but the full range of hazards and uncertainties that we face at the beginning of the Anthropocene have probably never been fully acknowledged.

So be prepared for a rocky ride through our current world situation. I ask for your patience in advance because I know that some of this won’t be easy. But our tendency to ignore the negative is usually most pronounced when there is no positive alternative to it or if it’s seen as being impossible to change. That’s not the case here. Like every crisis, the Anthropocene crisis is made up of dangers and opportunities. In fact, the carrot and the stick have never been bigger. This analysis of our current world situation is not presented from a pessimistic perspective, or out of a desire to sensationalize or alarm, but from the conviction that unless we frankly and fully recognize the dangers of the Anthropocene we will not be in a position to take advantage of the immense opportunities it offers. Real change requires the truthful acceptance of ‘what is’.

I’ll focus, as briefly as I can, on the following areas of risk in our world system.

• Climate change

• Attrition of natural resources

• Population issues – especially overpopulation

• Income and wealth inequality

• The challenge to democracy

• The dangers of war

• The gamble on new technology

All these areas represent challenges which are virtually without historical precedent. They are closely linked together but usually dealt with as though they were separate; they are treated as though they occupied their own individual time dimensions, yet they all bear down on us simultaneously: here and now. Together they reveal the current, precarious state of the sloping world, tilting perilously on one axis. But as in any change plan, we need to calmly analyse the problem if we are to move towards a solution. Let’s look at each factor in turn.

Climate change

Global warming represents one of the biggest imbalances humanity has ever created in its relationship with its environment. Since 1750, the concentration of CO₂ and other greenhouse gases such as methane and nitrous oxide has increased from the average for the Holocene of 280 parts per million (ppm) to over 400 ppm today. These emissions have risen by over 90% since 1970 which has already been enough to cause an increase of 1°C in global air temperature since the pre-industrial period (IPCC, 2014). Average air temperatures conceal more extreme differences between land and sea, cities and the countryside and different regions of the world. The Arctic, for instance, which plays a critical role in the weather systems of the Northern hemisphere, is experiencing alarmingly rapid warming, with temperatures as much as 20°C hotter than average. Globally, the 20 warmest years on record have occurred in the last 22 years, including the hottest ever year in 2016 (WMO, 2018). The incidence of extreme weather has increased five-fold since the pre-industrial period. Events such as floods or droughts, violent hurricanes or days of extreme heat, which used to occur once in a century, now happen with alarming frequency.

The world has been attempting to manage the climate crisis for over three decades now. In 1992, at the Rio Earth Summit, humanity, through the agency of the United Nations and its International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), committed itself to ‘stabilize the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at a level which prevents dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system’ (UNFCCC, 1992). In 2007 this level was set at 2°C, even though this would involve a degree of climate disruption unprecedented in the Holocene. However, the world’s governmental leaders failed to agree anything of note in the shambles of the UN climate conference in Copenhagen in 2009, leaving it until Paris in December 2015 to breathe new life into global climate management. The Paris Climate Agreement set a new ‘aspirational’ target of 1.5°C, and at least proved that 194 nations can work together, but it was never going to be able to make up for lost time or counter the political and corporate influences on the IPCC (as many of us protesting in the streets of Paris at the time feared). The accord’s emissions targets were too low, it was over-reliant on unrealistic assumptions about non-existent ‘negative-emissions’ technology and it lacked legal consequences for individual countries which breach their targets (more in Chapter 7). ‘There is not a cat in hell’s chance’ of meeting the Paris targets was the damning verdict of one climate scientist (Simms, 2017).

Sure enough, in 2018, alarmed by the existing evidence of climate breakdown, the IPCC issued a special report which lowered its official target to 1.5°C, aiming for a 45% reduction in CO₂ emissions by 2030 (compared to 2010) and net zero emissions by 2050. It acknowledged that this would require ‘rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society’ (IPCC, 2018). But the December 2018 UN climate talks in Katowice failed to endorse the IPPC report (largely due to the resistance from oil-producing giants, the USA, Russia and Saudi Arabia), let alone set new, ambitious emissions targets. The fact remains that as of January 2019, the planet is on course for global warming of 3–4°C by the end of the century, according to the vast majority of climate scientists. This would be true even if the entire world adopted the EU’s current emissions trajectory, while if every nation on the planet followed the example of the United States the result would be over 4°C of global warming by 2100. Emulating the greenhouse-gas pollution of China, Russia or Saudi Arabia would lead to a planetary temperature rise of over 5°C (Robbiou du Pont and Meinshausen, 2018).

Warming in the region of 3–4°C would be a catastrophe which could take many parts of the planet close to collapse. It would mean that extreme weather events become 65 times more frequent than in 1750. Superstorms could rage from pole to pole, as James Hansen warns (2009), with heavy and longer bouts of rainfall, disrupting the monsoons on which so much of the Asian economy depends. Deserts will expand even faster, while rainforests contract – and with it their ability to absorb CO₂, further intensifying the warming effect. Sea levels could rise by between 0.5 and 1.3 metres by 2100, threatening the hundreds of millions of people worldwide who live in coastal areas and many of the world’s mega cities from Mumbai and Dhaka to New York, Miami and Shanghai (Potsdam, 2016). An increase in sea levels of 1 metre would put 74,000 square kilometres of land in East Asia and the Pacific region at risk of permanent inundation – displacing up to 40 million people (Dasgupta, 2018) – and if ice cliffs continue to collapse in Antarctica and Greenland considerably greater rises could be expected (NOAA, 2017).

Incredibly, it could be even worse. A recent study, based on an analysis of sediment and ice samples rather than computer modelling, argues that warming in an interglacial period such as ours could result in a temperature rise of over 7°C by the end of this century (Friedrich et al., 2016). Even at lower temperatures, the danger of runaway climate change is very real, in particular due to the possible release of large quantities of methane gas from the frozen seabed or tundra permafrost (methane being much more effective at trapping heat than CO₂ in the short term). Continuing on our current business-as-usual trajectory is a reckless gamble that could transform the Earth from the comparatively temperate planet which has enabled humanity to grow by the billion into an environment far more hostile to human life.

The effects of climate change beyond 2°C will be as tragically uneven and unfair as anything in our sloping world. Hardest hit will the global South rather than the global North which is largely responsible for human-made climate change. Over half of the roughly 40 billion tons of CO₂ which the world pumps into the atmosphere every year is produced by just three emitters (China, the USA and the EU), while the bottom 100 countries only account for 3.5% (World Resources Institute, 2017). Likewise, Europe and North America – less than a sixth of the world’s population – are responsible for 60% of global private consumption, while the poorest third of the world who live in Africa and Asia only account for 3.2% of consumer spending and are reliant on local, small farming for almost all of their food (Worldwatch, 2012). Agriculture is highly sensitive to climate change and even small variations in temperature can devastate harvests. Melting glaciers and reduced snowfalls will disrupt water supplies and threaten the hundreds of millions of people who already have limited access to clean drinking water. Famine, drought and disease could lead to a phenomenal increase in mass migrations, adding to the 21 million refugees who are currently displaced by weather-related hazards such as floods, storms and wildfires, with Asia suffering the most (UNHCR, 2016). A recent World Bank estimate forecasts that there will be 143 million climate refugees by 2050 – and the total thereafter could be much higher (Rigaud et al., 2018).

Shocking as this picture is, the situation is not hopeless. In spite of opposition from the fossil-fuel industry, the 2018 UN Climate Change Convention in Katowice made some progress towards a rulebook for implementing the Paris Climate Agreement. Efforts to ratchet up national and local emissions targets to a realistic level continue, with scientists and campaigners throughout the world determined not to give up on preventing climate collapse. Green technology and sustainability initiatives are laying down the foundations for the radical changes which we’ll have to make in order to protect the precious equilibrium of our climate, as we’ll see in Part III. But for now we need to stick with the big picture, for climate is one only aspect of the Anthropocene crisis.

The attrition of nature: the environmental crisis

The truth is that we’ve been falling out of balance with nature for a good while. In the Holocene, when natural resources were abundant, it was perhaps understandable that we should treat the fertile land, nutrition-rich marine species and the vast forests of our planet as though they were inexhaustible. But in the Anthropocene, acting as though ‘we’re only passing through’, as Janine Benyus puts it (1997:249), turning a resource into a wasteland and then moving on, is no longer an option. We are now, almost literally, destroying the ground under our feet in a reckless frenzy of environmental destruction that has no precedent.

Researchers in Stockholm, studying the earth systems necessary to sustain the conditions in which humanity has been able to flourish, have identified nine planetary boundaries. Of these, at least four are already in a state of ‘increasing or high risk’: climate change, genetic diversity, land exchange use and biochemical flows (Steffen et al., 2015). Geographer Jared Diamond (2005) outlines other ecological threats that arise from the destruction of natural habitats, such as the invasion of alien species of weeds and pests and even a possible ceiling to the Earth’s ability to create photosynthesis, on which all life depends. The scale of air, soil and water pollution being experienced by China alone, perhaps the country with the greatest influence on our future, is staggering.

Planetwide, we face non-climate related threats to food production, through the depletion of almost a third of the world’s topsoil, which takes 1,000 years to regenerate itself nutritionally. Marine life, the source of 20% of the world’s animal protein (and up to 50% in parts of Asia) is severely threatened by overfishing. According to the UN, less than a third of fish species are currently harvested at a biologically sustainable level and the ten most productive species are now all fully fished or overfished (FAO, 2016). Acidification due to warming seas also threatens marine species, already menaced by millions of tons of non-degradable plastic deposited in our oceans each year. Dead zones in coastal waters, such as the giant area in the Gulf of Mexico linked to pollution from the meat industry, have increased ten-fold since 1950, threatening the 350 million jobs dependent on fishing (Breitburg et al., 2018). The Great Barrier Reef, the largest living structure on the planet, suffered one of its biggest bleaching events ever in 2016, and the IPCC (2018) forecasts that 99% of corals would be destroyed by 2°C of warming.

Throughout history, trees have been one of our greatest natural resources but they continue to be decimated. Half of the planet’s original great forests have disappeared over the last 8,000 years, with a quarter of what remains likely to follow suit in the next 50 years (Diamond, 2011). Deforestation of an area the size of India by 2050 could be on the cards, with Indonesia, for example, destroying twice as much forest as Brazil (Morgano et al., 2014). As legal and illegal logging marches on, the inestimably valuable ‘ecological services’ which trees perform, including mitigating climate change and reducing the ambient air pollution that currently kills 4.2 million people a year worldwide, will decline (WHO, 2018b).

Another precious resource for life, clean water, is also being used up fast, as aquifers and wells sink to perilously low levels. And we are ransacking the Earth’s store of precious minerals at an alarming rate. A Club of Rome report (Bardi, 2014) finds that, in addition to easily accessible oil, which is almost exhausted, we are ‘hollowing out the Earth’, depleting it of many minerals vital to modern life. As writer Nafeez Ahmed (2014) notes,

US Geological Survey data analysed by the report shows that chromium, molybdenum, tungsten, nickel, platinum-palladium, copper, zinc, cadmium, titanium, and tin will face peak production followed by declines within this century.

What this all adds up to is a catastrophe for biodiversity, as flora and fauna which have taken millions of years to evolve vanish forever. A total of 468 vertebrates have gone extinct since 1900, compared to a normal, background rate of nine (Caballos et al., 2015). According to the World Wildlife Fund (2018a), there are now 60% fewer animals in the world than in 1970. This represents a rate of decrease in animal populations of 2% a year, caused by agriculture, deforestation, climate change and the hunting of species to near extinction. In just the past 50 years a staggering 89% of vertebrates have been eliminated in Latin America, prompting the World Wildlife Fund to warn that ‘nature is dying’ (2018b). Freshwater fish populations are also massively down, by 83%. Three-quarters of flying insects have disappeared in Germany over the past 30 years, and, across Europe, similarly devastating rates of disappearance of bees and other vital pollinators and contributors to the food chain are being recorded.

No wonder, then, that scientists say we that are now experiencing ‘the sixth mass extinction’ of species. But whereas the five previous mass extinctions were the result of natural causes and took place over thousands of years, the Anthropocene extinction rate is much faster, and it’s humanity which is bringing it about. The current trend is 1,000 times faster than it would be without human impact, which, if it continues unabated, will lead to the extinction of one in six species by 2100, according to evolutionary biologist Mark Urban (2017), who calls for the launching of ‘a biological Manhattan Project’ of international species protection.

It’s hard to be optimistic about such an initiative because attempts to manage the environmental crisis across the world are constantly thwarted by the prevailing economic and management philosophy. Even the simplest legislation can have significant ameliorative effects – like the UK government’s introduction of a small charge for plastic bags which reduced their use by 85% virtually overnight – but these measures always seem to be ‘too little, too late’ (which is really just a euphemism for chronic mismanagement). In the meantime, the depletion of our greatest human resource, our planet and the life it sustains, accelerates.

Population

The climate and environmental crises are both related to another source of imbalance: the fact that there are so many of us now on this planet. It took humanity over 200,000 years to reach the half a billion mark at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Since then the population has grown by 1,500% to 7.5 billion and it’s now rising by about half a billion every six years. The United Nations’ projections through the century see a continued rise to 9.7 billion by 2030 and 11.2 billion by 2100. This assumes a medium fertility rate. A low rate would reduce the totals, while a higher rate would increase them, producing an end of the century estimate of 16.6 billion (UN, 2015a).

Of course, predictions of doom about overpopulation have been with us since Thomas Malthus’s time but the interwoven challenges of the Anthropocene mean it’s time to take the possibility of population catastrophes more seriously. For some ecologists, the Earth’s sustainable ‘carrying capacity’ is inherently limited, but for me, the question that really matters is how the world’s resources are managed. The biggest concern is overpopulation in the poorest parts of the world. The majority of th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• About the author
• Introduction: the case for utopia
• PART I: The burning platform
• PART II: The growthist world system
• PART III: The change plan: 12 steps towards a people-planet utopia
• PART IV: Conclusion
• References
• Index