From the late 1960s onwards, grievances and conflicts related to so-called “environmental problems” started growing swiftly in different regions of the planet. In the beginning, such problems were treated in a fragmented and isolated manner. They were externalities, dysfunctions, or accidents in the context of advancing urban-industrial modernization in different countries, and in international trade.
As the decades passed, the necessity to adopt a more integrative focus, which would allow dealing with the structural and persistent condition of such problems, becomes clear. It is not just a passing crisis. The environmental issue, in its different manifestations and intensity degrees, has been emerging in the wake of a “great transformation” in human history (to use the term coined by Karl Polanyi in 1944 to express the deeper dimension of the industrialization process and the commodification of work and nature from the eighteenth century on).
In search of a more integrative focus, it is possible to use many concepts already adopted by historians to think about the “great transformation,” such as modernity, capitalism, or urban-industrial civilization. The concept of Anthropocene, however, introduced by Paul Crutzen (Chemistry Nobel Prize, 1995) in the year 2000, has become the most influential conceptual tool to think about the environmental intensity of that historical transformation. Its starting point is the radicalization of an integrative focus. Numerous environmental problems from the last decades come to be understood as a set of symptoms, signals, and indicators of a new historical period, a real shift in the material presence of human beings on Earth. Such vision, radically integrative, constitutes a great strength and also the main weakness of the concept of Anthropocene, as we will see.
Each of the concepts mentioned above, including the Anthropocene, has its limits and potentialities. The idea of Anthropocene is basically material and quantitative (although it is not difficult to reflect on its deep social and cultural implications). Its strength resides on the visceral absorption of the planet into human history, and of human history into the dynamics of the planet. In the trajectory of human societies, before the great transformation discussed here, the presence of the planet, whenever noted, was a mere abstraction. Human societies related to a number of spaces and specific sets of existing beings in the context of the ecological diversity of the planet. Such societies reproduced through appropriation and management of a relatively small portion of the matter and energy flows that exist in the planet’s nature. But they did not touch the macrostructures of the Earth – and that is the Anthropocene’s greatest news. The planet becomes the locus that measures the scale of human presence on Earth. Human action, perceived in a very aggregated way, acquires the weight of a geological agent.
The statement becomes more concrete in the context of a periodization of the Anthropocene. The empirical starting point has been the construction of graphs that compare, in the long term, aggregated indicators of human action (such as population growth, and energy consumption) and indicators of changes in the so-called “Earth system” (such as the loss of biodiversity, and the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere). These graphs have been revealing a strong upward turn in the curves of each variable from the nineteenth century on, and an extraordinary growth, a true uprighting of the curves, from 1945 on (Steffen et al. 2004). By 2005, the renowned environmental historian John McNeill, working with other researchers, started using the term “Great Acceleration” to identify that excessive growth from mid-twentieth century on. Incidentally, the initial use of the term was inspired on Polanyi’s “Great Transformation” (Steffen et al. 2015, 2).
Based on that set of indicators, a very comprehensive preliminary periodization has been suggested (Steffen et al. 2011, 849). The first stage of the Anthropocene would be the industrial era formation, between 1800 and 1945. The dissemination of fossil fuel in the economic production, especially coal and oil, stands for the great ecological differential to be considered. Fossil fuels allowed for a large expansion of productive forces, fomenting a significant expansion of urban-industrial structures and of the consumption of natural resources. Of course, this energy foundation would not be able to define the period. The use of fossil fuels cannot be divorced from the technological, economic, institutional, and cultural changes pointed out by so many analysts of modernity (Kumar 1986). But it is also true that such remarkable increment in the global population and economy would be unthinkable without the existence of such an abundant energy source, of relatively easy extraction and transport in the context of available technical means from the eighteenth century on.
The second stage of the Anthropocene, which starts around 1945 and is still going on, refers to the Great Acceleration. In spite of the rise of new energy sources – such as large hydroelectric dams and nuclear plants – fossil fuels remain the bedrock of the system. In fact, what happened was an enormous quantitative expansion. It is as if the winds generated by the industrial revolution – which were already a rupture with pre-industrial rhythms and volumes of production and consumption – had become a hurricane capable of radically multiplying the environmental consequences of human action. The Great Acceleration was historically generated in the context of the post-Second World War, when availability of cheap and abundant oil – associated to the ascension of Middle East producers – interacted synergically with the dissemination of innovative technologies that catalyzed an explosion in mass consumption (telephones, cars, TVs etc.). Afterwards, new technological waves continued to contribute to further expand large-scale consumption, as in the case of computers and cell phones. In order to have a more realistic vision of the political challenges involved in the Anthropocene issue, one must consider that such growth increased in an unprecedented way the expectations and consumption patterns of the working class, especially at the vanguard of the industrialization process. The Great Acceleration is mostly the world of social democracy, where the distribution (rather than redistribution) of wealth and opportunities allowed a notable increase in the base level of consumption, without strongly reducing the concentration of wealth and the super-consumption of the rich (Przeworski 1986). The counterpart comes mostly through a rise in the destructive pressure on the ecological resources of the planet.
However, some analysts argue in favor of a third stage in the history of the Anthropocene, possibly called “Self-Conscious Anthropocene.” It would be the moment when international public opinion, recognizing the risks inherent to its new planetary insertion, would promote a conscious debate toward finding feasible ways for sustainability. Dissemination of new ethical assumptions, new institutions, new technologies, and new socioeconomic configurations would allow a conscious transition to that goal (Steffen et al. 2007). It is clear that a third stage of that kind represents basically a will or a possibility. In concrete terms, we are still living in full the Great Acceleration. The total volume of goods moved through the oceans, for instance, including oil, minerals, and grain, grew from 2.6 billion tons in 1970 to 9.8 billion tons in 2014 (UNCTAD 2015, 6). As much as it might be real, though, the third stage is being generated in numerous meetings, studies, and debates around the world, all seeking a sustainable future. It is also present in countless social conflicts and experiments against the increase of environmental destruction and for sustainable ways of life and work. The volume and quality of such social mobilization cannot be overlooked, but it is still too soon to assess its possible consequences in the future.
Common but differentiated Anthropocene: the case of Brazil
In any case, the terms of the political debate about the Anthropocene are far from a definition. One of the main problems is precisely the character of the concept – excessively integrative. Social scientists may present numerous questions, such as “who is the ‘anthropos’ in the Anthropocene?” Although the database on global environmental changes is quite robust, the issue cannot be approached in a homogeneous and merely quantitative fashion. The idea of defining the “limits” of humanity on the planet, for instance, is not easily feasible, as it needs to consider important differences in the cultural and perception patterns (Palsson et al. 2013). Differences must also be noted concerning the social forces that promoted the historical construction of the Anthropocene, and the social and environmental consequences of its advancement.
Jason Moore, for instance, deems it historically superficial to think that the transformation occurred due to the action of a generic “anthropos,” of “humanity as an undifferentiated whole.” Thus, his proposition of calling the new moment “Capitalocene,” clearly indicating that the intense biophysical transformations observed in the last few centuries are directly related to “a historical era shaped by relations privileging the endless accumulation of capital” (Moore 2014, 2–5). About this kind of analyses, Depesh Chakrabarty argued, in a thought-provoking way, that changes in the planet’s environment, such as climate change, go beyond the history of capitalism. There is a deeper issue, “a question of human collectivity, an us, pointing to a figure of the universal that escapes our capacity to experience the world. It is more like a universal that arises from a shared sense of a catastrophe.” That “us” has an unprecedented materiality, as nobody can escape this new relationship to the Earth. There are no lifeboats, not even for the rich and privileged (Chakrabarty 2009, 221).
These two perspectives are not completely antagonistic. One can say, using a formula often adopted in the current climate of diplomacy, that the responsibility for the Anthropocene is common but differentiated. In the Anthropocene, one needs to simultaneously recognize the integrative dimension of the problem – the aggregated impact of human action became a geological force – and the differentiated dimension of real human life. No one can escape or be alien to the new period in the interaction between humanity and the planet. But not all contributed equitably to its historical construction, and not all equally experience its consequences, not in the same shape or degree. In a sense, the new environmental reality unifies the whole of humanity. In another, there is a visceral inequality.
The difference could be thought about on the basis of numerous categories, such as class, culture, production and consumption patterns, geographical realities etc. Another possibility is to work the Anthropocene theme in the context of existing different countries. In my opinion, the importance of the latter is adamant in the face of the contemporary political reality. It is true that the current international system is far from being a model of rationality and balance. When the focus is on the environment, for instance, one realizes that the historical events of the last few centuries generated countries with different sizes, and very different availability of natural wealth. Nonetheless, in spite of many sociological prophecies about the weakening of national states in the context of globalization’s dynamics, most political and economic decisions about the future of such wealth are still taken on the basis of each country’s political reality, or stem from diplomatic maneuvers that generated various associations and treaties at the macro-regional or international levels. None of these associations or treaties, though, has the capacity to neutralize the relevance of political struggles at the national level. It is not about ignoring numerous social actors that move in a transnational way, and their dynamics. But the fact is, the logic of national states, including in the economic sphere, has been showing a considerable resilience. Thus, the history and the future of the Anthropocene as a historical period also needs to be examined in the context of each country.
Brazil is very suitable to develop that kind of analysis. It clearly reveals that the entry of different countries in the Anthropocene cannot be seen homogenously. There are remarkable differences in terms of historical timing and mode of insertion. The analysis needs to encompass at least three types of links: (1) the level of national societies’ participation in the distinctive production and consumption patterns of the Anthropocene as a historical period; (2) the contribution of each national society, especially its intellectuals and scientists, in the formulation of the kinds of knowledge and ideologies that constitute what could be called the “Anthropocene culture”; and, (3) the role of each national economy as supplier of human and natural resources to enable the insertion of other countries and regions into the Anthropocene’s patterns of production and consumption.
It is true that the Brazilian case has a few singularities that distinguish itself from the median historical situation of modern countries. Particularly its territorial and ecological dimension put it in a preeminent place within the debate about the future of the planet’s environment.
Among the five largest national territories, Brazil is the only one completely within the tropical and subtropical world, including about 60 percent of the Amazonian gargantuan water-forest complex. It is a continental territory, not only large (around 8.5 million square kilometers) but also very rich in renewable natural resources, a feature that acquires new significance within the imperative to decarbonize the global economy in the next decades. Other features are the great concentration of tropical forests (around 30 percent of the remaining tropical forest cover on the planet), biodiversity (between 10 percent and 20 percent of the global stock), and a huge network of rivers grouped in eight large hydrographic basins that, added to at least two large aquifers, concentrate around 12 percent of the global fresh water stock (Santos and Câmara 2002, 32; Dabene and Louaut 2013, 38). Furthermore, the territory has a strong incidence of solar rays, and a great capacity to reproduce biomass and store carbon. Concerning minerals for industrial use, Brazil is the largest world producer of niobium, the second largest of iron, manganese, and tantalum, and the third largest of bauxite and graphite. Even in the case of oil, offshore findings indicate the existence of very expressive reserves (Mérenne-Shoumaker 2015, 76). It is not surprising, thus, that Brazil’s international image be marked by its territory, either for its ecological wealth or for the destruction of such wealth.
It is important to note the ecological design of that territory, also to better understand some aspects of its history. The kaleidoscope of ecosystems existing within it has been aggregated, to facilitate a synthetic view, in six large biomes. It is clear that such division may not be taken rigidly or absolutely. Each biome is a set of different ecosystems, even if they are considerably similar. There are also many transition areas, with mosaics of different kinds of vegetation. To proceed to regional analyses, it is necessary to focus in more detail on the ecosystems’ features and combinations. In a historical analysis of the country as a whole, though, the biome classification is very revealing. When the Europeans arrived in the sixteenth century, the present Brazilian territory, in the North and in the...
