THE UNEQUAL ANTHROPOCENE
“A true ecological approach always becomes a social approach,” Pope Francis wrote in his 2015 encyclical Laudato si’. “[We] must integrate questions of justice in debates on the environment, so as to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor.” The pope’s words are exhortatory, but they are also indicative of the astonishing rise of environmental justice movements worldwide. The global ascent of activism among the world’s most environmentally beleaguered communities is one of the most hopeful stories of our time. Not long ago, those outside the wealthy North commonly dismissed environmentalism as green imperialism, as racist, as antihuman and pro-animal, as an indulgent form of politics that only the comfortable could afford. But in the twenty-first century we are witnessing unprecedented efforts to create coalitions of change, however precarious, between those whom the historian Ramachandra Guha and the economist Juan Martínez-Alier call “full-stomach” and “empty-belly” environmentalists.
The odds of achieving anything resembling justice—for themselves or the environments they depend on—remain stacked against Earth’s most impoverished billions. We inhabit an era of short-term, shortsighted plunder, as megacorporations of historically unprecedented wealth, size, and mobility destroy environmental safeguards, creating, in society after society, what George Monbiot calls a globalized “bonfire of regulations.” Unanswerable corporations team up with unspeakable autocrats; even in democracies, we witness concerted attacks on public safety nets and the long-term common good. But the fast-moving, deregulated pillage of the most vulnerable ecological and human communities has triggered a pushback, a desperate, determined surge in environmental justice activism, not least in frontline communities at heightened risk from climate collapse. Such communities are already experiencing the Anthropocene’s accelerated impacts as an ongoing, staggered trauma.
Empty-belly environmental activism now stretches from the equatorial forests to low-lying Pacific islands, from the Sahel to the Arctic, from the deltas of the Ganges and the Niger to the favelas that have joined the sustainable cities movement. Local environmentalists are creating transnational networks to expose and oppose habitat fracture, biodiversity loss, land seizure, unregulated mining, food and water insecurity, infrastructure deserts, runaway emissions, and the failure to decentralize, decarbonize, and democratize energy access.
Another way of voicing Pope Francis’s appeal is to insist that we acknowledge the link between the Great Acceleration and what economists are calling the Great Divide. For the global environmental crisis and the inequality crisis are joined at the hip. In countries as diverse as India, Russia, the United States, Jamaica, South Africa, the United Kingdom, Guatemala, China, and Nigeria, the destabilizing fissure between the megarich and the destitute is widening. In 2010, the 338 most affluent individuals possessed a combined wealth equal to that of the 3.45 billion people who constituted the world’s poorest 50 percent. In 2015, a mere sixty-two tycoons matched the combined wealth of the world’s poorest half. During those same five years, that club of sixty-two gained $500 billion in personal wealth while the wealth of humanity’s poorest half dropped by 41 percent.
In 1962, President John F. Kennedy observed that “our progress in the use of science has been great but our progress in ordering our relations small.” His words remain pertinent, not least in the context of Anthropocene debates, where the dominant buzz is about technological innovation, climate engineering, and designing a sustainable future. Far less attention has been paid to the geopolitics of environmentalism’s geologic turn. Yes, mitigating the Anthropocene’s most destabilizing effects will require technological inventiveness, but the distribution of advances cannot be divorced from questions of political governance and equitable access. Which cabal of engineers gets to decide to reset the global thermostat? Will their experiments be backed by rogue billionaires unanswerable to humanity at large? Will climates be reengineered in the name of humans flourishing and then, in the resource wars to come, be wielded by the rich and for the rich as weapons of mass destruction?
High-consuming humans with energy-intensive lifestyles are leaving knee-deep Anthropocene footprints while billions of others leave so little impress on Earth’s life systems that they barely qualify as geomorphic actors. But such deep disparities among human impacts rarely feature in prognoses by Anthropocene techno-optimists, who prefer to operate in the high ether of species thinking. Thus, for the Nature Conservancy’s Peter Kareiva and his coauthors, what distinguishes humans from other life-forms is “our unlimited creativity and our sense of moral purpose. The Anthropocene is about designing the future….[It is] an extraordinary opportunity to be welcomed and not feared.” The ecologist Erle Ellis cheerily declares that far from being a crisis, the Anthropocene offers a new beginning “ripe with human-directed opportunity.” The science journalist Ronald Bailey is sanguine that “over time, we will only get better at being the guardian gods of the earth.” The writer Stewart Brand is likewise confident in Anthropocene humanity’s surrogate divinity: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.”
Is that splash the sound of Icarus falling into a rapidly warming sea?
Who exactly is the “we” that the Anthropocene’s bright-siders love to invoke? It’s we the species, big-H Humanity, collectively propelled by ethical purpose and technological drive, a superpower whose managerial might is now written in stone. But in a time of deepening divides between concentrated wealth and concentrated abandonment, who will be the unelected deciders, the planetary directors? Which humans will get to stand in for humanity at large? In plutocratic times, the politics of surrogacy can look positively chilling.
The rush toward species thinking that characterizes much Anthropocene thought calls to mind the dispute in the United States that arose around Black Lives Matter when some outside the movement started proclaiming, “All lives matter.” On the surface, this was a generous, inclusive move. But black activists bristled. For the easy universalism of “All lives matter” blurs the focus on systemic discrimination, on the disproportionate burdens of vulnerability borne by black and white Americans. Similarly, viewed through an environmental justice prism, universalizing Anthropocene colloquies about Homo sapiens as problem and solution are self-deluding if they fail to address unequal burdens of Anthropocene risk and unequal access to overstrained resources.
Moreover, by positioning humans as bosses of the biosphere, technophiles risk confusing power with control, impact with mastery. Human geomorphic reverberations across Earth’s life systems are not synonymous with human dominion over life, which would reduce the infinitely complex interplay among countless animate and inanimate forces to one supreme species’ decision making on planetary design. Too often, technophile enthusiasm for the Anthropocene sounds like a hybrid of manifest destiny and selective enlightenment.
To heed, in Pope Francis’s words, “the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor,” we need to advance alternatives to neoliberalism, which encourages profiteering in the present with little regard for future fallout or social equity. A viable planetary future can be achieved only by attending to the environmental struggles and values of ordinary people, only 16 percent of whom globally live above the U.S. poverty line. The new environmental justice movements, from sustainable cities initiatives to the indigenous Idle No More, are becoming ever more forceful and resourceful. They remain indispensable to any transformative vision of Anthropocene possibility, as they refuse the temporal parochialism, the hubris, and the plutocratic plunder that stand between us and an inclusive, enduring earthly life.