The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities

Ursula Heise, Jon Christensen, Michelle Niemann, Ursula Heise, Jon Christensen, Michelle Niemann, Ursula K. Heise, Jon Christensen, Michelle Niemann

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781317660187
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities provides a comprehensive, transnational, and interdisciplinary map to the field, offering a broad overview of its founding principles while providing insight into exciting new directions for future scholarship. Articulating the significance of humanistic perspectives for our collective social engagement with ecological crises, the volume explores the potential of the environmental humanities for organizing humanistic research, opening up new forms of interdisciplinarity, and shaping public debate and policies on environmental issues.

Sections cover:

• The Anthropocene and the Domestication of Earth

• Posthumanism and Multispecies Communities

• Inequality and Environmental Justice

• Decline and Resilience: Environmental Narratives, History, and Memory

• Environmental Arts, Media, and Technologies

• The State of the Environmental Humanities

The first of its kind, this companion covers essential issues and themes, necessarily crossing disciplines within the humanities and with the social and natural sciences. Exploring how the environmental humanities contribute to policy and action concerning some of the key intellectual, social, and environmental challenges of our times, the chapters offer an ideal guide to this rapidly developing field.

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Part I

THE ANTHROPOCENE AND THE DOMESTICATION OF EARTH

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1

THE ANTHROPOCENE

Love it or leave it¹

Dale Jamieson

One of the central themes of classical philosophy is the persistence and puzzling nature of change. Throughout the history of philosophy this concern appears, disappears, reappears, and never completely goes away. There is a similar oscillation in our sciences between an interest in equilibrium states and a fascination with the sources and persistence of disorder. Which is primary, order or disorder, change or permanence? Perhaps it is a coincidence that the period and place in which I grew up (1950s America) was characterized by an obsession with “progress,” but a dislike for change. Both nature and the economy sought equilibrium, and the nation itself was on the way to a more perfect union. Or so it seemed to me that it seemed to my elders.

These human frames and constructions can sometimes obscure the fact that we live in a violent neighborhood in a universe given to cataclysms. Even our own little planet is constantly changing. The forces driving these changes include variation in solar radiation, movements in tectonic plates, volcanic activity, meteor strikes, shifts in orbit, and changes in the tilt of the Earth on its axis. Life itself is among the forces that have changed the Earth, from cyanobacteria that produced the first oxygen on Earth to human beings who are now increasing the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

In 1997, a distinguished group of scientists published an influential article in which they assessed the human impact on the Earth (Vitousek et al.). They calculated that between one-third and a half of Earth’s land surface had been transformed by human action; that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had increased by more than 30 percent since the beginning of the industrial revolution; that more nitrogen had been fixed by humanity than all other terrestrial organisms combined; that more than half of all accessible surface freshwater was being appropriated by humanity; and that about one-quarter of Earth’s bird species had been driven to extinction. They concluded that “it is clear that we live on a human-dominated planet” (494).

In recognition of the increasing human domination of the planet, some scientists have proposed that we have entered a new geological era—the Anthropocene. A proposal to declare the Anthropocene a new epoch in Earth’s history is under formal review by the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), the authoritative scientific body that makes decisions about the geologic time scale. Even if the ICS declines to declare the Anthropocene a geological epoch, it can still be an important concept for understanding our present condition. There is no guarantee that a record of who we are, how we lived, and how we found meaning in our lives will be encoded in the Earth’s crust.

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Some humanists (and others) have been suspicious of the concept of the Anthropocene. They see in the very name the glorification of the human domination of the planet. They are not wrong to think that how we categorize can be relevant to what we think is permissible. Categorizing a plant as a weed, an animal as a pest, or a person as a thug has implications about how they may permissibly be treated. But sometimes a category is just a category. Think of triangles. You may treat a triangle as if it were a square, but that would only be wrong in the stupid sense of “wrong,” not in any richer normative sense. Geological categories are somewhere in between. The Holocene is not a logical notion in the way that triangle is. The term was not invented until 1867 (and then in French), not proposed as an epoch until the Third International Geological Congress in 1885, and not formally adopted by the US Geological Survey until 1967. Despite the fact that this term was carried over into English from a French term that was constructed from Greek materials less than one hundred fifty years ago, it is not viewed with suspicion in the way that “Anthropocene” is. What accounts for the difference?

Part of the explanation is surely that the historical classifications that we are born into typically form part of an unquestioned baseline: they are “naturalized.” When it comes to the Anthropocene, the sausage is being made before our very eyes. And as with actual sausage, it is not hard to think that there is something unseemly about the process. Another concern is the implicit reference to humanity that is contained in the term “Anthropocene.” Some seem to think that to name an epoch with a term that refers to humans is to glorify humanity and its domination of nature. But surely this does not follow. We can speak of the Warring States Period in China, as scholars often do, without glorifying warring states.

Another view, often more implied or suggested than asserted, is that the Anthropocene has been around as long as there have been people. There is nothing new about the Anthropocene. What is new is that people are waking up to it.

What matters for the demarcation of the Anthropocene as a morally and culturally interesting category is that some region in time can usefully be spoken of as qualitatively different from some previous region. There can be vagueness between these periods, and the qualitative distinction that marks the Anthropocene can supervene on quantitative differences rather than resting on irreducible differences of kind. It is against this background that Vitousek et al.’s study is a good marker. A study like this, done a thousand years earlier, would have produced radically different results. Yes, life has always affected the Earth, but there is something new and different about the way humanity affects the planet and thereby itself. Whether or not this is of geological interest, it is of great cultural and moral moment.

The most obvious feature of the Anthropocene is the growing human population and its demand for energy, food, goods, services, and information, along with the need to dispose of its waste products. At the beginning of the Holocene there were probably about six million people living as hunter-gatherers. Today there are more than seven billion people, most living in urban societies, many with a command over resources that only the nobility would have had a few centuries ago.

Technology is an important part of the story of the Anthropocene. The humanity that has transformed nature is now organized in highly complex systems bound together by air travel, oil and gas pipelines, electrical wires, highways, train tracks, fiber optic cables, and satellite connections. In 1907 the French philosopher Henri Bergson wrote: “In thousands of years … our wars and revolutions will count for little … but the steam engine, and the procession of inventions of every kind that accompanied it, will perhaps be spoken of as we speak of the bronze or of the chipped stone of pre-historic times: it will serve to define an age” (138–139). Technology enables “action at a distance” that would once have seemed inconceivable, whether as a sexual encounter in virtual reality with someone on the other side of the world, or as the instantaneous transfer of wealth, resources, and power. Some would even say that technology is no longer something that we use; it is an integral part of who we are. On this view our minds extend to devices and configurations of objects far beyond our skulls and even our skin: We are “natural born cyborgs” (Clark).

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The conjunction and effects of large population, high consumption, and technology have affected the nature of our relationships and our conception of agency. In some respects we feel empowered. We can save a child in a far-away land by making a phone call and pledging a contribution. The swipe of a credit card can deliver goods and services from remote parts of the world (thank you, Amazon). A few clicks at a computer allow us to register our opinions about everything from Iran’s nuclear program to a woman who left her dog in a car with the windows rolled up in a parking lot in Kansas. A man in Las Vegas controlling an unmanned drone can stalk and kill a single individual on the other side of the world. Together we can change climate, drive species to extinction, and acidify the ocean. Never have humans been so powerful. Hence the name “Anthropocene.”

Yet, at the heart of the Anthropocene is a widespread sense of the loss of agency. We say money controls politics as if elections are not decided on the basis of who gets the most votes. Many people in both developed and developing countries feel trapped in their classes and social roles. The main obstacle to taking action on climate change is the deep sense of its inevitability and our powerlessness to affect its course.

The Anthropocene has also brought confusion. In a world in which everything affects everything else and no one feels decisive over much at all, the distinction between causation and complicity has become fraught. When I drive my SUV to the 7–11 for a slurpy, am I causing climate change, contributing to it, complicit in it, or does it matter at all what I do? Do these distinctions even matter? Is San Diego Gas and Electric giving me what I want, or manipulating me because I have no real choice but to pay the bill? The list of questions could go on. And on and on. The sense of powerlessness and confusion they reflect and engender is part of why so many of us retreat to private life.

But what is private life in the Anthropocene? Technology has brought with it increased transparency (good) and a loss of privacy (bad). I can read police reports from the jurisdiction of my choice and find the salaries of my colleagues who work in public universities. But if I were to investigate myself, I would be shocked by how much is readily available. And in the technology-driven world of the Internet and social media, the distinction between intersubjective validity and just plain repetition threatens to break down. What does this do to an outlook, such as that of traditional liberalism, in which the distinction between public and private is central?

In a world of greater resources and fewer well-insulated spheres of life, everything becomes increasingly fungible, from wombs to kidneys to artworks to lives themselves. Tradeoffs between the near and dear and the remote and strange become possible in a way they never were before. Sitting in his rooms in Cambridge, Henry Sidgwick could read about famine in Bengal, but there was little he could do about it in real time except decry it. I, on the other hand, can immediately empty my bank account and make something happen on the ground in Nepal (for good or ill). Or instead I could go in for some online gambling on my children’s future; or I could just leave everything to my canary. Everything seems possible but nothing seems to matter.

This leads to a crisis in meaning. Human life has traditionally been lived against the background of a nature that is seen as largely independent of human action. The biblical book of Matthew tells us that the sun shines on the just and unjust alike. Once geoengineering is perfected, we may be able to fix this oversight of nature. But what becomes of the message of humility and compassion that this teaching evokes?

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What emerges from all this is not clear. Together we are remaking the planet, though no one seems to have ever decided that this was a good idea. Many of us feel as though we have choices over matters that were once fixed, yet feel powerless over things that we once had power over. The old order is shaking. Some new thinking in needed. Welcome to the Anthropocene.

The most fundamental choice the Anthropocene presents us with is whether to love it or leave it. Some writers seem to think that there is no choice here at all; that the Anthropocene is a natural end state—an inevitability—perhaps because they believe that we have always been in the Anthropocene. This is a fundamentally unscientific view. There are no natural teleologies. The Anthropocene will pass away like previous historical epochs, and so will humanity. It is up to us whether to willfully intensify the human domination of nature, accept it, or try to reduce it. To present this as anything other than a choice is bad faith.

However, it is also true that we are living in the Anthropocene and will do so for the foreseeable future even if we desire to exit. Whether we embrace the Anthropocene or want to exit from it, we need to develop ways of life that will allow humanity to flourish in this period. We need an ethics of the Anthropocene.

An ethical system regulates behavior within a social group, helps to coordinate behavior to address collective problems, informs relations with those outside the group, and provides meaning for those who are members of the group. Ethical systems are often dynamic, incomplete, and sometimes incoherent and inconsistent. Most such systems embody ideals of character, criteria for right action, and conceptions of what is morally valuable. Ethical systems are collective constructions, not legislated by single individuals. Agency, its meaning, and its importance are defined by and reflected in an ethical system, and for creatures like us, agency as it is experienced phenomenologically is tightly bound to the proximate: what presents itself to our senses and causally interacts with us in identifiable ways.

From the beginning, ethics has primarily been concerned with the proximate. However, what is proximate is flexible. Stories, music, relics, sacred space, and even the establishment of a common language are all ways of bringing into view what would otherwise be invisible. The expanding circle of ethics, which to a great extent coincides with globalization, has made the distal proximate through new living arrangements, forms of travel, and kinds of imagery enabled by technological innovation. However, there is a limit to what can be made proximate to creatures like us. Carbon dioxide emissions are among those phenomena that are difficult to bring close and make visible. One consequence of this is that if we want to reduce our emissions, we need proxies that will support us in doing that.

A conception of the green virtues—character traits, dispositions, and emotions—can fill that role to some extent. The green virtues ar...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Routledge Companion to the Environmental Humanities
• Also Available in this Series
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: planet, species, justice–and the stories we tell about them
• Part I The Anthropocene and the Domestication of Earth
• Part II Posthumanism and Multispecies Communities
• Part III Inequality and Environmental Justice
• Part IV Decline and Resilience: Environmental Narratives, History, and Memory
• Part V Environmental Arts, Media, and Technologies
• Part VI The State of the Environmental Humanities
• Index