Bonneuil Christophe - The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us

What exactly has been happening on Earth in the last quarter of a millennium?

The Anthropocene.

Anthropo-what?

We already live in the Anthropocene, so let us get used to this ugly word and the reality that it names. It is our epoch and our condition. This geological epoch is the product of the last few hundred years of our history. The Anthropocene is the sign of our power, but also of our impotence. It is an Earth whose atmosphere has been damaged by the 1,500 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide we have spilled by burning coal and other fossil fuels. It is the impoverishment and artificializing of Earths living tissue, permeated by a host of new synthetic chemical molecules that will even affect our descendants. It is a warmer world with a higher risk of catastrophes, a reduced ice cover, higher sea-levels and a climate out of control.

The Anthropocene label, proposed in the 2000s by specialists in Earth system sciences, is an essential tool for understanding what is happening to us. This is not just an environmental crisis, but a geological revolution of human origin.

We should not act as astonished ingnues who suddenly discover they are transforming the planet: the entrepreneurs of the industrial revolution who brought us into the Anthropocene actively willed this new epoch and shaped it. Saint-Simon, the herald of what was already called industrialism, maintained in the 1820s that:

His pessimistic counterpart, Eugne Huzar, predicted in 1857:

In one or two hundred years, criss-crossed by railways and steamships, covered with factories and workshops, the world will emit billions of cubic metres of carbonic acid and carbon oxide, and, since the forests will have been destroyed, these hundreds of billions of carbonic acid and carbon oxide may indeed disturb the harmony of the world.

The present book sets out to comprehend this new epoch through the narratives that can be made of it. It calls for new environmental humanities to rethink our visions of the world and our ways of inhabiting the Earth together. Scientists have built up data and models that already situate us beyond the point of no return to the Holocene, on the timetable of geological epochs. They have produced figures and curves that depict humanity as a major geological force. But what narratives can make sense of these dramatic curves?

This is by no means a theoretical question, as each account of How did we get here? makes assumptions through which we frame What to do now?

There is already an official narrative of the Anthropocene: we, the human species, unconsciously destroyed nature to the point of hijacking the Earth system into a new geological epoch. In the late twentieth century, a handful of Earth system scientists finally opened our eyes. So now we know; now we are aware of the global consequences of human action.

This story of awakening is a fable. The opposition between a blind past and a clear-sighted present, besides being historically false, depoliticizes the long history of the Anthropocene. It serves above all to credit our own excellence. Its reassuring side is demobilizing. In the twenty years that it has prevailed, there has been a great deal of congratulation, while the Earth has become ever more set on a path of ecological unbalance.

In its managerial variant, the moral of the official account consists in giving the engineers of the Earth system the keys to Spaceship Earth; in its philosophical and incantatory variant, it consists in calling first and foremost for a revolution in morality and thought, which alone will allow the conclusion of an armistice between humans and non-humans, and reconciliation of all of us with the Earth.

To see the Anthropocene as an event rather than a thing means taking history seriously and learning to work with the natural sciences, without becoming mere chroniclers of a natural history of interactions between the human species and the Earth system. It also means noting that it is not enough to measure in order to understand, and that we cannot count on the accumulation of scientific data to carry out the necessary revolutions or involutions. It means deconstructing the official account in its managerial and non-conflictual variants, and forging new narratives for the Anthropocene and thus new imaginaries. Rethinking the past to open up the future.