Clive Hamilton is an Australian academic and the author of a number of books, including Growth Fetish (2003) and Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change (2010). He is currently writing a book on the larger meaning of the Anthropocene. Clive was the founder and executive director of the Australia Institute, the nation’s leading progressive think tank. He is currently Professor of Public Ethics at Charles Sturt University in Canberra.
I t is natural to understand the new by using the ideas we already have. How does it fit in? Where do I need to make additions or modifications to what I already know? But occasionally something comes along that is so radically unique that it defies our existing concepts. If we attempt to squeeze it into what we already know, then we cannot avoid distorting its meaning and significance.
And so it is with the Anthropocene. We have known for a long time that humans have transformed landscapes, modified ecosystems and messed with the environment. Yet if we think that the Anthropocene has anything to do with landscapes, ecosystems, or the environment then we will miss its novelty and fail to understand its extraordinary significance.
The new epoch is not about any of these old concepts. The Anthropocene concerns the Earth System
The Earth System is the Earth, taken as a whole, in a constant state of movement, driven by interconnected cycles and forces, from the planet’s core to the atmosphere and out to the moon, and powered by the flow of energy from the Sun. It is a single, dynamic, integrated system. It is not a collection of ecosystems but encompasses and transcends all previous objects of understanding including ‘the landscape,’ ‘ecosystems,’ and ‘the environment.’
The Anthropocene is a change in the way the Earth System functions, a change caused by human activities, most notably human-induced climate change, which affects not only the atmosphere but every ‘sphere’ that makes up the Earth System – the atmosphere, the biosphere, the hydrosphere, the cryosphere (icy parts), and even the lithosphere, the rocky crust of the planet.
Humans have been transforming their environments since before the Holocene, such as by the use of fire, and since then with broad-scale agriculture and forest clearing. Yet according to Earth System scientists it is only in the last 200 years or, to be absolutely sure of it, since the end of the Second World War in 1945, that the human impact has been so great as to rival the great forces of nature in determining the course of the system as a whole.
So the Anthropocene is not just a further extension of human impact on the landscape or ecosystems, something we already know about but taken a bit further. Nor is it just a helpful organizing concept for our existing stock of knowledge about
human relationships with nature. It is hard to overstate the profound significance of the arrival of the Anthropocene. It equals and exceeds the arrival of modernity and perhaps of civilization itself. For it threatens to transform the conditions of life on the planet and to do so for millennia. There will be no going back. For instance, once the massive ice-sheets of Greenland and the West Antarctic begin to melt there will be no stopping them and the several meters of sea-level rise that will follow.
The advent of the Anthropocene forces us to reconsider our identity. We have become a force of nature, a geological force, with the power to alter the future trajectory of the planet. For the first time in its 4.6 billion years the evolution of the Earth is influenced by a willing, conscious, and ‘intelligent’ force.
It may take several generations, but we will be compelled to rethink the human relationship to the world around us. Since the advent of modernity some four centuries ago, we in the West have come to see the natural world as a kind of inert backdrop to the drama of human affairs. History is understood as the story of what humans do to one another – of our progress, wars, politics, technology, and social upheavals.
Even those who have recognized the role of the environment— environmental historians, political scientists, psychologists, philosophers—have viewed the natural world as that which is beyond us, ‘over there.’ Indeed, the sharp distinction between the Subject who knows and acts and the Object that is known and is acted upon is the philosophical foundation stone of modernity. Culture here, Nature there.
It is through this bifurcation that we have learned to perceive ourselves as egos existing inside bodies that are isolated from the surrounding world by our skins. Such a perception of personal identity is both recent and western. In the Anthropocene this philosophy and psychology seem of decreasing tenability. We are implicated, even if for the time being we appear to be woven into the Earth System only in an abstract, collective way. Yet gradually the abstraction and collective nature of our involvement in the Earth System will turn into a very concrete and highly personal engagement.
So future generations are destined to inhabit a different planet, one that will require more management—what landscape architects benignly refer to as stewardship—but for which we will need new philosophies. The fundamental questions humankind now faces are these: who will manage the Earth? What kind of principles will they follow? And how will the Earth react?
