Hope and Grief in the Anthropocene

Re-conceptualising human–nature relations

Lesley Head

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781138826441
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317576433
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

The Anthropocene is a volatile and potentially catastrophic age demanding new ways of thinking about relations between humans and the nonhuman world. This book explores how responses to environmental challenges are hampered by a grief for a pristine and certain past, rather than considering the scale of the necessary socioeconomic change for a 'future' world. Conceptualisations of human-nature relations must recognise both human power and its embeddedness within material relations. Hope is a risky and complex process of possibility that carries painful emotions; it is something to be practised rather than felt. As centralised governmental solutions regarding climate change appear insufficient, intellectual and practical resources can be derived from everyday understandings and practices. Empirical examples from rural and urban contexts and with diverse research participants - indigenous communities, climate scientists, weed managers, suburban householders - help us to consider capacity, vulnerability and hope in new ways.

1 The spectre of catastrophe

DOI: 10.4324/9781315739335-1

The news is not good. It feels as though we are hurtling down a hill without any brakes, through an unfamiliar landscape, to an uncertain destination. The evidence is mounting that we are well past the point where climate change response can be a planned, gradual transition. It is much more likely that profound and unwanted change in the next few years will make a mockery of current policies on climate change and other issues. We need to deal with at least the possibility of catastrophe. Yet daily life continues more or less unchanged, in varying combinations of struggle and contentment. We are in collective denial. We are grieving.

A central argument of this book is that an under-acknowledged process of grieving – with all its complexity, diversity and contradiction – is part of the cultural politics of responding to climate change and associated environmental challenges. Specifically, I argue that grieving helps explain the denial we face and experience in accepting the scale of the changes required in ways of living. My perspective is Australian, but it is increasingly apparent that these conditions are shared across much of the affluent West (Randall 2009, Doherty & Clayton 2011). This is the converging, congealing grief at the loss of the conditions that underpin contemporary Western prosperity. It is grief for the approaching demise of the conditions sustaining life as we know it – the thing most of us did not know was called the Holocene. It is grief for the loss of a future characterised by hope. A Swedish colleague with a young child put it to me in this way: ‘I would be completely OK with living a much simpler life, but it's deeper than that … I feel as if I can never be completely happy ever again’.

Figure 1.1 Main road into Kinglake, Victoria, two weeks after Black Saturday, February 2009. Photo: David Bruce and Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC.

These are difficult issues to discuss in contemporary Western society. We debate climate change at length, mostly framed in the spurious terms of whether the science is settled enough for us to make some long-term decisions. But even those who know the science most intimately face strong social pressures to be optimistic about the future. There is deep cultural pressure in the West not to be ‘a doom and gloom merchant’. Hence, even when the evidence points towards the strong possibility of some catastrophic scenarios, the tendency is to focus policy and action on the most optimistic end of the spectrum of possibilities. But at least some of us should be thinking systematically about worst-case scenarios. In this book I attempt to do this, engaging carefully with what the implications might be. If we have at least the possibility of catastrophic outcomes, what should our response be? I reject the cultural assumption that even to canvass these issues is to give in to them, to give up or to assume the worst. Rather I argue that a relentless cultural disposition to focus disproportionately on positive outcomes is itself a kind of denial. I argue that grief is a companion that will increasingly be with us. It is not something we can deal with and move on from, but rather something we must acknowledge and hold if we are to enact any kind of effective politics. Or, to put it differently, it needs to become an explicit part of our politics.

The challenges facing us have been well rehearsed elsewhere. Climate change is not a stand-alone issue, but interacts with long-standing negative human impacts; biodiversity loss, land and water degradation, pollution (Sutherland et al. 2014, Whitehead 2014). This combination of processes has come to define the Anthropocene, as a geological age in which human activities dominate earth surface processes. Nevertheless, the most urgent implication of climate change science is that we need to keep 60–80 per cent of the fossil fuel reserves already listed on world stock exchanges in the ground to have a chance of avoiding global warming of 2^oC (Carbon Tracker 2014). Specifically, this requires that a third of global oil, half the gas and over 80 per cent of current coal reserves need to remain unused to meet the 2^oC target (McGlade & Ekins 2015). Pricing in the risk to current investments of these ‘stranded assets’ would lead to a significant financial crisis. Put another way, we need to decarbonise at the rate of 9–10 per cent per year for at least a decade to avoid two degrees of warming. There is no historical analogy for how to do this; the 2008 Global Financial Crisis led to only a 1.4 per cent decrease, which was quickly reversed. If business as usual continues – and many scientists think it is already too late to avoid two degrees of warming, due to the lag effects of emissions already in the atmosphere (Anderson & Bows 2011) – then we are on track for 4–6 degrees of warming with an increase in extreme events, and fundamental changes in underlying conditions. It does not sound like much, but that is the temperature difference between now and the last ice age, in the opposite direction.

The ‘unburnable carbon scenario’ poses significant challenges to human survival, and thus to the scale of socioeconomic transformation that we face. The possibilities seem to include ‘planned economic recession’ (Anderson & Bows 2008, p. 3880) or economic collapse forced by climate change. Either way, we must imagine that drastic changes to everyday life are in the offing. Transformational rather than incremental change refers not only to the possibility of a 4°C warmer world (Stafford Smith et al. 2011, Park et al. 2012), but also to the increased level of surprise associated with rapid change in complex systems. These are terrifying thoughts, given that humans are not good at voluntary restraint, and given the way all our lives and wellbeing in the more affluent parts of the world are tied into and dependent on a fossil fuel economy. We do not yet know how much transformation will proceed deliberately and how much will be forced on us, but it is likely that we will be forced as much as governed to low carbon pathways.

This scale of transformation should shift our thinking in diverse ways, including from scarcity to abundance. For a number of decades now, we have thought of resource crises in terms of how to make non-renewable resources last longer. We were taught, and have taught our students, that the fossil fuel age must necessarily end because the resources were non-renewable. We did not know what they would be replaced with, nor when it would happen, but the exponential growth curves of the second half of the twentieth century, spinning out into the future, have always been presented as signals of impending scarcity – of food, energy, land and water, fuelled by population growth and increasing affluence. Many, if not most, of our environmental debates have been framed in terms of scarcity and running out of things – peak oil, peak phosphorous, peak lots of things, loss of biodiversity. Because of the challenge of keeping coal and oil in the ground, it now looks to be abundance, not scarcity, that we must address first, and in our own lifetimes rather than an unimaginable future time. Yet we do not really have a vocabulary, conceptual or otherwise, that links abundance and excess with environmentally good outcomes.

Of course, these issues have been around for several decades now. Re-reading overviews of climate change response such as Rayner and Malone (1998), one is struck by how much of the debate and knowledge was well established more than fifteen years ago. However, one big thing has changed, arguably due to the failure of society to deal with climate change issues when they were still potentially manageable – the sense of urgency is much stronger today, together with increasing awareness of likely non-linear changes whose specifics will be impossible to predict. In contrast, Rayner and Malone depicted the situation as still possible to deal with via deliberate and incremental change:

In the grand scheme of things, climate change is probably not the deciding factor in whether humanity as a whole flourishes or declines. The resilience of human institutions and their ability to monitor and adapt to changing conditions seems to be more important.

(1998, p. 29)

These days Rayner works on geoengineering,¹ as a potential response to worst-case scenarios. If we are at the point of systematically considering ‘deliberate large-scale intervention in the Earth's natural systems to counteract climate change’,² my contention is that we need to systematically consider the concept of catastrophe, and the way in which our socioeconomic systems could potentially unravel. In the case of geoengineering most of us would prefer to avoid such considerations, and many would be concerned by, and want to contest the hubris implicit in, the idea that humans could ‘manage’ the climate. In the case of a potentially catastrophic dismantling of the basis of much everyday life in the twenty-first century, we need to be able to think about this without the easy charge of ‘doom and gloom merchant’. My aim here is to find a calm and hopeful way to think and talk about these painful issues.³

Which Anthropocene are we talking about?

There are many Anthropocenes in current discussion; Dibley (2012) has identified seven. Broadly speaking, we can distinguish between a scientific discussion over whether we have entered a new geological age, and a wider social debate in which #Anthropocene has entered the public discourse as an emblem of the way humans pervade all dimensions of the Earth. The former is currently being debated by the International Geological Commission, and the latter can be seen in social media discussions.

The discussion in this book shifts between the two arenas. I am not seeking to intervene in the geological debates over whether and when we have a golden spike, but I am interested in those debates for what they tell us about how scientists understand the human relations to the more-than-human world. The evidence of the Anthropocene requires us to rebuild its own conceptual scaffolding in order to imagine and enact the world differently (Sayre 2012). This will be a long-term project, in which the maintenance of critical perspectives is essential. It is also urgent!

Such paradoxes seem to lie at the heart of the Anthropocene concept. It challenges the ideal of economic growth that helped propel it, particularly its manifestation over the second half of the twentieth century (Steffen et al. 2011). If human impact on the earth can be translated into human responsibility for the Earth, the concept may help stimulate appropriate societal responses and/or invoke appropriate planetary stewardship (Ellis 2011, DeFries et al. 2012). Even so, while the concept has emerged out of palaeoecological, archaeological and historical perspectives on earth systems, there is great uncertainty about the future, and how we can apply any lessons of the past, since ‘Earth is currently operating in a no-analogue state’ (Crutzen & Steffen 2003, p. 253).

Much of this book will focus on the paradox of the human. The Anthropocene is presented as a time period defined by the activities and impacts of the human, yet it is paradoxically also a period that is now out of human control, due to rapid, unpredictable and non-linear change. Conceptualisations of human–nature relations must recognise both human power and its embeddedness within material relations. We separate out humans at the same time as the evidence shows how deeply embedded we are. Exactly what ‘conceptual scaffolding’ we can best use to live in a world of non-linear change is explored further below.

Several authors have argued that the emergence of the Anthropocene concept is productively a moment of convergence between ‘Earth System natural science and post-Cartesian social science’ (Malm & Hornborg 2014, p. 62, Lorimer 2012, Oldfield et al. 2014). This convergence is characterised by: seeing outcomes as contingent, acknowledging the demise of nature as a realm separable from culture, emphasising non-linear changes and uncertainties, and attending to the material basis of interspecies interactions including those within and between humans and others. The converge...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Acknowledgements
• 1 The spectre of catastrophe
• 2 Grief will be our companion
• 3 Past, present and future temporalities
• 4 More than human, more than nature
• 5 Practising hope
• 6 Rethinking agriculture, rethinking Anthropocene
• 7 Living with weeds
• 8 Governing the ungovernable?
• 9 Beyond fortress and sprawl: retrofitting cities, suburbs and households
• 10 The Anthropoceneans
• Index