Histories for Changing Times: Entering the Anthropocene?

Abstract

In 2000, Paul Crutzen proposed that the Earth had entered a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, where humanity is changing planetary systems. Since this time, the Anthropocene has figured prominently (and controversially) in global change science, and increasingly in the humanities. The Anthropocene offers a new way to regard humanity, and provides a locus for a new planetary discourse of our times. This short reflective paper suggests a role for history in understanding the different expertise favoured to manage Earth's resources and global change. The discussion focuses on an anthology of historical documents about global change science, The Future of Nature, using this as a ‘worked example’ of history in action.

Notes

¹Wallace S. Broecker, ‘Unpleasant Surprises in the Greenhouse’, Nature, no. 328 (1987): 123–6.

²‘Greenhouse effect’ is the term used in the media of the 1980s. See Broecker.

³Mike Hulme, Exploring Climate through Science and in Society (London: Routledge, 2013). This term was used extensively in media in the northern hemisphere in the late 1980s.

⁴P. J. Crutzen, ‘Geology of Mankind’, Nature, no. 415 (2002): 23; P. J. Crutzen and E. F. Stoermer, ‘The “Anthropocene”’, IGBP Newsletter, no. 41 (2000): 17–18.

⁵Jan Zalasiewicz et al., ‘Are We Now Living in the Anthropocene?’ GSA Today (Journal of the Geological Society of America) 18, no. 2 (February 2008), 4–8; Jan Zalasiewicz, Mark Williams, Alan Haywood and Michael Ellis, ‘The Anthropocene: A New Era of Geological Time?’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, 369, no. 1938 (2011): 835–41; Jan Zalasiewicz, ‘The Geological Basis for the Anthropocene’ (paper presented at ‘The History and Politics of the Anthropocene’, conference at University of Chicago, 17–18 May 2013, convened by Dipesh Chakrabarty and Fredrik Albritton Jonsson).

⁶W. D. Conybeare and William Phillips, Outlines of the Geology of England and Wales, Part I (London: William Phillips, 1822), 323.

⁷Crutzen and Stoermer, 17.

⁸Crutzen and Stoermer, 17.

⁹One example is the work of Erle Ellis; see E. C. Ellis and N. Ramankutty, ‘Putting People in the Map: Anthropogenic Biomes of the World’, Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 6, no. 8 (2008), 439–47; Jed O. Kaplan, Kristen M. Krumhardt, E. C. Ellis, William F. Ruddiman, Carsten Lemmen and Kees Klein Goldewijk, ‘Holocene Carbon Emissions as a Result of Anthropogenic Land Cover Change’, The Holocene 21, no. 5 (2011): 775–91.

¹⁰William F. Ruddiman, ‘The Anthropogenic Greenhouse Era Began Thousands of Years Ago’, Climatic Change 61, no. 3 (December 2003): 261–93.

¹¹Donald Macdonald, Gum Boughs and Wattle Bloom, Gathered on Australian Hills and Plains (London: Cassell, 1887).

¹²Tim Flannery, Here on Earth (Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2010).

¹³M. A. Smith, The Archaeology of Australia's Deserts (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

¹⁴Tim Flannery, The Future Eaters: An Ecological History of the Australasian Lands and People (Melbourne: Reed Books, 1994).

¹⁵George Seddon, ‘The Man-Modified Environment’, in A Nation Apart: Essays in Honour of Andrew Fabinyi, ed. John McLaren (Melbourne: Longman Cheshire, 1983), 10.

¹⁶W. Steffen, A. Sanderson, P. D. Tyson, J. Jäger, P. A. Matson, B. Moore III, F. Oldfield, K. Richardson, H. J. Schellnhuber, B. L. Turner and R. J. Wasson, ‘Executive Summary’ of Global Change and the Earth System: A Planet Under Pressure (Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 2004), 4–39. Will Steffen, Keynote address, The Anthropocene Project, HKW, Berlin, 10 January 2013.

¹⁷William F. Ruddiman, Plows, Plagues and Petroleum (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 5.

¹⁸J. T. Houghton, G. J. Jenkins, and J. J. Ephraums, eds, Climate Change: The IPCC Scientific Assessment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

¹⁹Robert T. Watson and the Core Writing Team, eds, Climate Change 2001: Synthesis Report (Geneva: WMO; UNEP, 2001; Beijing: IPCC, 2001).

²⁰Spencer Weart, ‘The Development of the Concept of Dangerous Anthropogenic Climate Change’, in The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society, eds John S. Dryzek, Richard B. Norgaard and John Schlosberg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 67–81.

²¹The fifth report of the IPCC is due in 2014.

²²W. Steffen, A. Sanderson, P. D. Tyson, J. Jäger, P. Matson, B. Moore III, F. Oldfield, K. Richardson, H. J. Schellnhuber, B. L. Turner II and R. J. Wasson, Global Change and the Earth System: A Planet under Pressure, IGBP Book Series (Berlin and New York: Springer-Verlag, 2004).

²³Will Steffen, Jacques Grinevald, Paul Crutzen and John McNeill, ‘The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, 369, no. 1938 (March 2011): 842–67.

²⁴Joseph Masco, ‘Bad Weather: On Planetary Crisis’, Social Studies of Science 40, no. 1 (February 2010): 7–40.

²⁵Saffron O'Neill and Sophie Nicholson-Cole, ‘“Fear Won't Do It”: Promoting Positive Engagement with Climate Change through Visual and Iconic Representations’, Science Communication 30, no. 3 (March 2009): 355–79.

²⁶Miyase Christensen, ‘Media and Arctic Climate Change’, Higher Seminar, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, 29 April 2013. This figure was based on content analysis of the New York Times, the Guardian and Dagens Nyheter (Stockholm). It is corroborated by Sheila Jasanoff, ‘Cosmopolitan Knowledge: Climate Science and Global Civic Epistemology’, in The Oxford Handbook of Climate Change and Society, 129–43, and similar figures are widely quoted in media analysis.

²⁷Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming (New York: Bloomsbury, 2010); Robert Manne, ‘A Dark Victory: How Vested Interests Defeated Climate Science’, The Monthly, no. 81 (August 2012).

²⁸Jasanoff, 140.

²⁹Jasanoff, 130.

³⁰Edward O. Wilson, ‘The Riddle of the Human Species’, New York Times, 24 February 2013.

³¹Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’, Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter 2009): 197–222.

³²Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).

³³Jacob von Heland and Sverker Sörlin, ‘Works of Doubt and Leaps of Faith: An Augustinian Challenge to Planetary Resilience’, Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 6, no. 2 (2012): 151–75 (‘anaemic’, 170). Von Heland's (unpublished) use of Anthropocene Imaginaries (plural) follows Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004). The literary tradition is singular, represented by Rosanne Kennedy, ‘The Anthropocene Imaginary’ (paper presented at ‘The History and Politics of the Anthropocene’, conference at University of Chicago, 17–18 May 2013, convened by Dipesh Chakrabarty and Fredrik Albritton Jonsson). The only published version of the phrase is Gillian Whitlock, ‘Posting Lives’, Biography 35, no. 1 (Winter 2012): v–xvi. Whitlock uses the term ‘Anthropocene imaginary’ (xiii), about the work of W. G. Sebald as critiqued by Rosanne Kennedy.

³⁴David Christian, ‘A Single Historical Continuum’, Cliodynamics 2, no. 1 (2011): 6–26; David Christian, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).

³⁵Libby Robin and Will Steffen, ‘History for the Anthropocene’, History Compass 5, no. 5 (2007): 1694–719.

³⁶Libby Robin, Sverker Sörlin and Paul Warde, eds, The Future of Nature: Documents of Global Change (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013).

³⁷Mike Hulme, ‘Reducing the Future to Climate: A Story of Climate Determinism and Reductionism’, Osiris 26 (2011): 245–66.

³⁸Steffen, ‘Commentary’, The Future of Nature: Documents of Global Change, 486.

³⁹Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).

⁴⁰Robin, Sörlin and Warde, 3.

⁴¹Robin, Sörlin and Warde, 10.

⁴²Robin and Steffen, 1694–1719.

⁴³Ian Lowe, Bigger or Better: Australia's Population Debate (Brisbane: University of Queensland Press, 2012), 187.

⁴⁴Aldo Leopold, In a Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There (1949; reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 129.