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The past is never dead. It's not even past

Not Even Past

The Anthropocene and Environmental History

By Jesse Ritner

The Trinity test, a proposed starting point for the Anthropocene (via Wikipedia)

If you open a textbook on geology and flip through to the chapter on geological time it will tell you we are currently living in the epoch of the Holocene.  The Holocene started approximately 10,000 years before present with the end of the last ice age.  However, research by a diverse array of scientists, who specialize in geology, climate, historical ecology, archeology, and a host of other fields, have begun to question whether or not human impacts on climate mean that we have entered a new epoch in geological time.  They call this new epoch the Anthropocene.

The concept of the Anthropocene is on one level quite simple.  It is based in part on the science of climate change, which has quite convincingly shown that human activity is the most important driver of global warming.  However, the science itself is quite complicated.  The problem is that it is impossible to study historic changes in climate in of itself.  Instead, scientists use proxies, such as methane or carbon dioxide concentrations in ice cores to measure greenhouses gases, pollen and charcoal in lake cores to measure ecological change and fire frequency, deuterium isotopes to estimate temperature, and a host of other proxies to try and trace how things like greenhouses gases have increased or decreased over time.  In of itself, this is fairly routine, although by no means simple, work.

Another problem is that the concept of the Anthropocene is dependent on the idea of the human species as the ultimate driver of climate change.  As such, scientists often have to work with archeologists or historians to discover if there is a corollary human action that may cause the climate anomaly they discover through their proxies.  Proving these correlations is quite difficult, and often involves people with a number of specialties in order to account for long lists of variables.  While radioactive dust dated to 1945 has a clear human cause in the dropping of nuclear bombs, other connections are harder to prove.  As scientists look further back in time for earlier and earlier human impacts thousands of years ago, historical and archeological evidence becomes scarcer, making it more difficult to correlate climate change with human action.

(For a short video on the Anthropocene click here!)

Despite an immense increase in studies over the past two decades, scientists have been slow to officially adopt the Anthropocene as a new epoch.  Difficulty in determining a starting point is perhaps the most famous objection, but concerns about human agency, anthropocentrism, and the validity of the proxies have caused some scientists to question the utility of the designation.

A Depiction of Epochs and Periods as Understood Through Geological Time Scales ( via Earth Environments)

Despite debate within the scientific community, the Anthropocene as a discourse has taken on a life of its own among humanists and social scientists. Their engagements can be split into three camps: those concerned with defining the Anthropocene, those concerned with the political ramifications, and those concerned the ethical relationship between nature and humans.  For instance, historian John McNeill has written about the history of the great acceleration, its human causes, and how energy systems which result in high carbon emissions became standard.  Others, like Dipesh Chakrabarty (also a historian), raise questions about the implications for contemporary politics if we begin to think of humans as a species, when humans do not all have equal impacts on climate.  Issues of race, class, gender, and histories of capitalism and imperialism are all at risk of being overlooked by discussions about species level solutions to Anthropocene problems.   Lastly, philosophers like Donna Haraway have critiqued the anthropocentrism of the idea that humans are just now changing climate.  Haraway argues for what she calls the Chthulucene, a world in which humans begin to understand themselves as a part of nature, rather than outside of it.  For better or worse, the Anthropocene is now unavoidable in conversations about the environment.

For historians in particular, the Anthropocene demands an integration of climatic and ecological change with the cultural, social, and political changes historians already study.  This idea is not totally new. Classic works of environmental history, such as Alfred Crosby’s Columbian Exchange and William Cronon’s Changes in the Land, both written decades before the Anthropocene existed as a concept, examine the historical effect of people on environments and the relationship between people and nature historically.  But, ideas connected with the Anthropocene have caused a resurgence of historical work on the environment.  Recent books such as James Scott’s Against the Grain and Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz’s The Shock of the Anthropocene explore how historians can contribute to discussions about the Anthropocene, both in placing its origin, in critiquing its anthropocentrism,  in studying the differential impacts of humans on the environment, and in reverse, the impact of the environment on humans.

At Not Even Past, we want to help people work through these complicated questions.  So here we are offering a growing list of book reviews and articles related to the environment and the Anthropocene.  We hope this brief introduction, and the list below, can act as a resource for teachers looking to build curriculum on environmental histories, while also providing an easy and accessible portal for curious readers to scholarly debates regarding history and the environment.

Books on Environmental History

Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England, by William Cronon (1983)

Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation, by Karl Jacoby (2003)

Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption & Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States by John Soluri (2005)

 

Fordlandia by Greg Grandin (2010)

The Deepest Wounds: A Labor and Environmental History of Sugar in Northeast Brazil by Thomas D. Rogers (2010)

The Republic of Nature by Mark Fiege (2012)

The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us by Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz (2015)

City in a Garden: Environmental Transformations and Racial Justice in Twentieth-Century Austin, Texas by Andrew M. Busch (2017)

Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott (2017)

A Primer for Teaching Environmental History: Ten Design Principles. By Emily Wakild and Michelle K. Berry (2018)

Articles on Environmental History

Oil and Gas Drilling in the Gulf of Mexico

Boomtown, USA: An Historical Look at Fracking

Climate Change in History

The Public Historian: Quilombola Seeds

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6nMulSoBvw&feature=youtu.be

Enclaves of Science, Outposts of Empire

Of How a Hopi Ancient Word Became a Famous Experimental Film

Big Bend – “Some sort of scenic beauty”

Naming and Picturing New World Nature

For Native Americans, Land Is More Than Just the Ground Beneath Their Feet
Underground Santiago: Sweet Waters Grown Salty

The Empire of the Dandelion: Environmental History in Al Crosby’s Footsteps

US Survey Course: The American West, Native Americans, and Environmental History

The Environment in History & History in the Environment

Great Books and a Film on the Amazon

The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us by Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz (2015)

By Marisol Bayona Roman

Though the authors of The Shock of the Anthropocene apply their skills as historians of science throughout, the book is far more than a straightforward history. Written at the intersection of science, history, and the broader humanities, Bonneuil and Fressoz provide well-reasoned and well-founded arguments that surgically take apart the dominant view of the Anthropocene as an epoch of human-provoked environmental crises that have only recently come to our attention, and for which scientific advances and sustainability-oriented mindsets are the only solution.

The book is divided into three parts, each oriented toward a particular goal. The first part introduces the scientific data on greenhouse gas emissions, biosphere degradation, changing biogeochemical cycles, and energy mobilization upon which the definition of the Anthropocene rely. Fressoz and Bonneuil show how the distinction between the realms of nature and culture—think, for example, of the opposition that emerges in Europeans’ quests to conquer the wilderness of the New World and impose their ways onto “savage” and “uncultured” natives in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—is no longer so clear-cut, and how placing the blame for the environmental crises of the Anthropocene on an ambiguous human whole can propagate a hegemonic narrative. These observations set up part two of the book, in which the authors reintroduce the political and break down the hegemonic qualities of the Anthropocene discourse. They show the ways in which scientific research has helped produce an undifferentiated and distanced view of the Earth and the anthropos that minimizes the key role of major nation-states in the development of today’s environmental crises, and the dangers of designating the scientist as the ultimate hero of the epoch. This completes the foundation for part three, a collection of seven histories that expose the imprecision inherent in the concept of the Anthropocene by focusing on one aspect of its development. For example, in their history of energy—the Thermocene, as they call it—the authors note how the dominant account, which asserts that the transitions from wood to coal to oil have been driven by a search for efficiency, obfuscates responsibility for the negative consequences of these decisions. Bonneuil and Fressoz demonstrate instead that the history of energy is one of successive additions (i.e. wood and coal and oil) shaped by political, military, and ideological decisions that have often gone against principles of efficiency and technological progress. The authors close this history by addressing the political on a global level, highlighting the key role of Anglophone countries such as the United States and Great Britain in the technological changes and environmental consequences of the Thermocene.

This publication is of great merit. The sheer breadth of knowledge on which the authors rely is a wonderful example of interdisciplinary research, and the clarity with which they synthesize and present the information is impressive, to say the least. However, this feat produces a dense text that limits its potential readership. The section “The discourse of a new geopower,” for example, is crucial to the transition between Part Two and Part Three because it reveals how the current “authorized narrative” of the Anthropocene represents, reproduces, and supports certain hegemonies on a global scale. But in order to follow the thread of this chapter, the reader must contend with Michel Foucault’s notion of biopower, Peder Anker’s imperial ecology, and Vladimir Vernadsky’s biosphere, all introduced in the span of three pages. These concepts are explained briefly and cited appropriately, but their complexity prohibits this book from being a leisurely read for those who are not already familiar with the ideas. These shortcomings aside, The Shock of the Anthropocene is a welcome and necessary read for scholars of any field concerned with the status of the concept of the Anthropocene.

Other Articles You Might Like:

City in a Garden: Environmental Transformations and Racial Justice in Twentieth-Century Austin, Texas
Her Program’s Progress
Boomtown, USA: An Historical Look at Fracking

Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott (2017)

By Steven Richter

Beginning with the title and continuing through the final pages, James C. Scott’s Against the Grain seeks to subvert the historical narrative of  inevitable progress toward civilization that has been dominant for millennia. Instead of framing agriculture as a driver of enlightened civilization, he conceives of it as a social and ecological building block that spawned early states that were more coercive than civil. Scott may not have launched the first attack of this kind, but his clear prose synthesizes evidence from a broad range of disciplines to craft a well-reasoned barrage of arguments, causing irreparable damage to a foundational element of western thought – that, since the first agricultural civilizations, the organized state has brought about enlightened and morally superior society.

Beginning from the perspective of a “thin” Anthropocene, a historical approach that emphasizes the ways in which human action has shaped the environment and landscapes, Scott emphasizes the richness of social-ecological relations before organized states appeared. The more traditional “thick” Anthropocene claims the environmental impact of modern industry has so thoroughly transformed the planet that it constitutes a new geological epoch. The “thin” perspective points out that that human activity, especially ecosystem niche creations through fire, so pervaded the landscape that it is difficult to think of ancient nature as separate from human influence.

Early settled communities built around the diverse and abundant sustenance activities along rivers and wetlands slowly domesticated plants and animals millennia before states first emerged. These novel arrangements, which Scott terms the “late Neolithic multi-species resettlement camps,” constituted the core of a long, slow transition. Contrasting with the more abrupt “Neolithic Revolution,” such a transition yielded not only plants with bigger seeds and more docile animals, but also dangerous new organisms that thrived in larger communities – diseases. Only through the combination of elevated birthrates and inherited immunity in settled communities could states eventually coagulate. But in many ways, these states represented, to borrow a phrase from Chief Seattle’s 1854 speech, “the end of living and the beginning of survival.”

Scott primarily defines states through the presence of tax collection, officials, and walls, with grain serving as the keystone to the political-economic system. Predictable, transportable, and calorie-dense, grain represented a surplus that could be monitored, collected, and, crucially, controlled. Put another way, grain was the perfect resource for taxation, allowing for the emergence of a ruling class. Despite the advantages yielded by such a surplus – a large, non-agricultural workforce – grain-derived civilization remained fragile. A single bad harvest could throw an early state into disarray, and even without catastrophic floods or drought, extractive agricultural and forestry practices often led to a slower demise. When combined with this ecological instability, the laborious nature of agrarian life made it so unappealing that early states likely built walls for restriction as much as for protection.

An Ancient Egyptian Statue of Grinding Grain (via Wikimedia)

Early states had to overcome tremendous social and ecological friction, so much that they typically were short lived. Only through the control and acquisition of its primary resource – people – could early states persist. The incorporation of human assets, whether by conquest of small neighboring communities or through slave trade, invigorated early states. Such a capricious system lacks robustness, and state failure could come from without or within. Such narratives of “collapse,” as it has often been framed, should be viewed critically. Scott argues what may appear to an archeologist as the catastrophic downfall of a monumental capitol may be more accurately, though not exclusively, thought of as disassembly into decentralized, independent communities. It is crucial to keep in mind that, perhaps as late as 1600, non-state peoples constituted the vast majority of global human population. States were “small alluvial archipelagos,” surrounded by hordes of ungoverned people who provided valuable trading and military allies, at least when they weren’t raiding and pillaging.

By incorporating innovative forms of evidence, Scott illuminates a critical perspective on the origins of modern states. He should have pointed out the difficulties of life outside states to create a more balanced narrative, but this omission takes little away from the central argument. Crucially, Scott compels the reader to be cognizant of the invisible or illegible, both historically and in our present lives. To make his argument, Scott relies on historical sources, such as dental analysis of ancient teeth, that prove just as informative as formal edicts or other, more visible historical sources. In a time with so much information, Against the Grain reminds us to be critical of whose story is told and why. For this reason, Scott’s work should have a place in courses focused on both the present and the future, not just the past. It suggests that students ask about the role coercion and bondage play in the twenty first century, or if our economy is built around appropriation or ecological wisdom. The reader, while learning about the distant past, cannot help but ponder what about our daily lives we take for granted and which narratives or stories should be elevated, and which should be relegated to the past.

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Steven Richter is currently a PhD Student in the Community and Regional Planning program in the University of Texas School of Architecture whose focus is on sustainability, regional land use, and natural capital.

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You May Also Like:

A Primer for Teaching Environmental History
Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation
Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption & Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States

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