Location, Representation and Imagination
of the Human Space in the Anthropocene: A Reading of Dipesh Chakrabarty's “The
Climate of History: Four Theses”
The problematic
of locating nature appears to be the byproduct of the reciprocation of culture
in the process of its assimilation of ecology. This reciprocation often appears
to be in the form of a critique of events in the history of social development
or as activism in the wake of decisive changes in the order of nature. Both
entail streams of knowledge that incessantly produce and reintroduce existing
paradigms of preservation of nature, a process validated by the assessment of a
crisis in nature. This mode of thinking locates the crisis exclusively in
nature or ecology rather than within the locales of cultural discourses. This
knowledge therefore undermines the very notion that ecology, because its
existence is evaluated through a process of cultural deduction, is primarily a
cultural entity. Nature in its unmediated sense does not exist in human
consciousness or in the discourses initiated by enlightenment rationalism. Perhaps,
in a pre-enlightenment era the thought processes that conceived nature often
juxtaposed it with the Creation Theory and Divine Will. This will be discussed
in detail, later in this paper. This paper looks into the human spaces that are
being located, mapped, and imagined in an era known as the Anthropocene. The
topography of this paper maps social, cultural, political as well as religious
spaces that have been previously identified with preeminent presence of humans
polarized in constant othering with ecology and address the issue of the need
to reimagining these human spaces in the wake of the new epoch.
Often,
environmental activism and social engagement with nature produce uncertain
results in ecology. However, “these responses saturate our sense of the now” (CH
197). With the notion of ‘now’ Dipesh Chakrabarty arrests all human interaction
with ecology in the present moment. Chakrabarty elicits the significance of
addressing the subliminal reciprocation of cultures towards ecological changes
on the temporal plane. Chakrabarty's argument holds a fresh angle due to its
alacrity in bringing the temporal into the discourse of eco-cultural interaction.
Forwarding
his assessment of the significance of utilizing the temporal significance of the
human-ecology discourse, he suggests a reading of The World Without Us by
Alan Weisman.
"Even if you live in a denatured, postmodern
subdivision where heavy machines mashed the landscape into submission,
replacing unruly native flora with obedient sod and uniform saplings, and
paving wetlands in the righteous name of mosquito control—even then, you know
that nature wasn't fazed. No matter how hermetically you've sealed your
temperature tuned interior from the weather, invisible spores penetrate anyway,
exploding in sudden outbursts of mold—awful when you see it, worse when you
don't, because it's hidden behind a painted wall, munching paper sandwiches of gypsum
board, rotting studs and floor joists. Or you've been colonized by termites,
carpenter ants, roaches, hornets, even small mammals” (Weisman
15).
Through
elaborating the relentlessness with which nature penetrates the human culture,
just as culture has always been attempting to assimilate ecology, Weisman attaches
two signifiers to the notion of the ‘now’. One is the ‘denatured, postmodern
subdivision’. The next is the grasping of this relentlessness of nature as an
inevitable consequence of human encroachment into ecology. It is on the edge of
this concept that Chakrabarty builds his argument regarding the threat of
extinction of species. Weisman sees nature not just as an intellectualized
concept or notion, but as a tangible and collective force that constantly infiltrates
the sense of civility, order, and sophistication in culture. He offers a
horizontal and vertical vision about ecology and its relentless interaction
with culture as a closed space. Often such interactions as termites eating away
at the base of a wooden structure or invisible pores penetrating the interior
of houses are seen as blemishes on artifacts produced and maintained in order
by human culture. This ecological infiltration into cultural spaces could be
seen as a conflict with a preexisting lack of solution. In fact, nature does
not offer anything pro-cultural.
Thus,
Chakrabarty reflects on Weisman’s suggestion of considering the sensibility towards
the present, the “now” in two ways. This juncture could be seen as an attempt
to read nature as a text written within a certain time frame in the
anthropocentric background, which requires being deciphered in terms of two
coordinates namely historicity and present-day understanding of ecology. However,
the textuality ascribed to nature has historical underpinnings because it
undermines the present within its premises. The problematic of the ‘present’,
at the same time brings into play observations on historicity as well as the need
to adopt fresh strategies on conceiving the collective future of the ecosystem.
Such an argument essentially directs one towards the earlier substantiated
otherness of nature from human cultural space. This suggests that understanding
of ecology is driven by what had been deciphered historically in terms of the
time and space of the act of observation. Inevitably, any activism or
exhibition of empathy towards nature invokes the time of the act, which in turn
manifests in the complex levels of outcome the culture-nature interaction would
bring forth. Chakrabarty apparently follows this take in reading Weisman.
Chakrabarty draws his major argument that of
locating nature-cultural interaction from a temporal perspective through
discussing the ‘thought experiment’ undertaken by Weisman in his seminal book.
“I am drawn to Weisman’s experiment as it
tellingly demonstrates how the current crisis can precipitate a sense of the
present that disconnects the future from the past by putting such a future beyond
the grasp of historical sensibility. The discipline of history exists on the
assumption that our past, present, and future are connected by a certain
continuity of human experience” (CH 197).
Chakrabarty’s
argument does not estimate the epistemological continuum attached with the
sense of history and time once the future is ‘without humans’. The collapse of
anthropocentrism would bring with it a landscape of vacant spaces in the
understanding of history. He observes the vision of future in Weisman as an
instance divulging inept tendencies in addressing the future of human space,
and as a matter of fact, the historicity of ecology. The ecology would still
exist in its locale while culture crumbled into dust. The World Without Us argues about the benefits that
ecology might receive after the disappearance of human beings from the earth.
He quotes the prediction of Cooper Union civil engineering chair Jameel Ahmad and says that
“[b]iodiversity
will increase even more…and lime from crushed concrete raises soil pH, inviting
in trees, such as buckthorn and birch, that need less-acidic environments”
(Weisman 28).
A
distinct faculty in thought, language, and imagination should be activated in
order to assess the collective future of humanity. In Weisman’s thought
experiment, the world without humans may have a history of lineage, but that
history would inevitably carry the vacuum of human space. Chakrabarty notices
that “[w]e normally
envisage the future with the help of the same faculty that allows us to picture
the past. Weisman’s thought experiment illustrates the historicist paradox that
inhabits contemporary moods of anxiety and concern about the finitude of
humanity" (CH 197).
He
reads ‘historicist paradox’ in Weisman’s argument that foregrounds the
essentiality of imagining the absence of the human to picture the presence of
the future, a future without human beings. This absence is at the centre of
Weisman’s book that disrupts the infinity of the sense of the future by
superimposing the landscape of vacant human spaces one may encounter in the
stretch of historicity propagated in the traditional format of dissemination of
knowledge. This experiment also accounts for human anxiety over a highly
limited sense of the future. If we use the same faculty in understanding
history as that we use in our understanding of such a future, the sense of
history that is the ability to picture ourselves in time and place “inaccessible
to us personally” (CH 198) become subject to chaos. This happens because in
visualizing a future without human beings, we have ruptured the very sense of
human history, its linear existence.
Historicity
involves the presence of humans in order to acquire meaningfulness. The
problematic of locating nature within history, and the changes that affects it,
that we normally identify as degradation are expressed in Chakrabarty’s
arguments. The understanding of the causes of natural degradation in a cause-effect
pattern presupposes agents such as “excessive accumulation in the atmosphere of
greenhouse gases produced mainly through the burning of fossil fuel and the
industrialized use of animal stock by human beings” (CH 198) as the key factors.
The historicity of the present is characterized by this awareness. Climate
change has altered this perception gravely and edged history out of the
equation in the discourse on the future of culture and ecology. Chakrabarty
states that recent understanding about climate change “challenges not only the
ideas about the human that usually sustain the discipline of history but also
the analytic strategies that postcolonial and post imperial historians have
deployed in the last two decades in response to the postwar scenario of
decolonization and globalization” (CH 198). The analytic strategies of history fail
to deploy its mechanisms in the present scenario of global warming.
“Scientific studies
of global warming are often said to have originated with the discoveries of the
Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius in the 1890s, but self-conscious discussions
of global warming in the public realm began in the late 1980s and early 1990s,
the same period in which social scientists and humanists began to discuss
globalization” (CH 198-99).
He suggests that only in the 1990s that the notion of global warming took
root in the epistemological interactions of general public. In Chakarabarty's
argument this period coincide with the time when social scientists and
humanists started discussing the same. Although this triggered a debate on
globalization, the impacts upon nature, global warming wasn't addressed until
2000. Global warming was looked upon as a result of industrial development.
This point of view dominated scholarly debates and arguments over a period of
several years. In other words, globalization was looked upon as a triggering
factor in bringing up the levels of global warming. Zalasiewicz puts it thus:
“They conclude that the relevance of studying
ancient warm climates is not in the search for a direct analogue for
twenty-first century global warming, but in the assessment and calculation of
the response of global temperatures to increasing CO2 concentrations in the
longer term (over multiple centuries), and in the assessment of the abilities
of climate and Earth system models to predict future climate” (839).
The levels of CO2 concentration, although a
scientific factor, were seen as the direct result of the growth of industrial
models. Zalasiewicz locates logic for the relationship of human history with
ecological history in its present fashion. The logic, suggests Zalasiewicz, is
to find out models of comparison from different time periods, the various
factors that change and transform in present day ecology. The temporal purpose
of history of global warming exists to underscore the significance of the time
period of observation as well as the certain factor of ecology under
observation. This also heightens the significance of mapping the present for
comprehending fluctuations in the ecosystem. Chakrabarty notes it thus:
“For as the idea
gains ground that the grave environmental risks of global warming have to do
with excessive accumulation in the atmosphere of greenhouse gases produced
mainly through the burning of fossil fuel and the industrialized use of animal
stock by human beings, certain scientific propositions have come into
circulation in the public domain that have profound, even transformative,
implications for how we think about human history or about what the historian
C. A. Bayly recently called “the birth of the modern world” (CH 198).
In other words, the point of contact between
nature and man has been under the threat of breaking down into fragments of raw
material that in turn polluted the earth and its environment. This also
establishes the biased scientific perception that has been propagated about
global warming. Burning of fossil fuel and industrialized use of animal stock
are semiotic representations of the aftermath of developments in industrial
culture. The bias of the culture centered on production and reproduction of
resources marginalized the existence of the world without similar rates or
quantities of production. Capitalism has, thus, amplified global warming. Along
with droughts, forest fires, drastic changes in weather conditions are all
indicative of a grand scale of shift in the temperature of the earth
(Chakarabarty). The scientific community identifies
these massive changes in ecology as Anthropocene.
“In 2002, the Nobel
Prize- winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen resurrected the concept of the
Anthropocene to denote the current interval of time on Earth in which many key
processes are dominated by human influence. The word quickly entered the
scientific literature as a vivid expression of the degree of environmental
change on Earth caused by humans, and is currently under discussion as a
potential formal unit of the geological time scale” (Zalasiewicz 835).
Zalasiewicz denies that the changes in nature are merely a side effect
of industrial changes. He also denies the premise that human evolution holds
exclusive status in relation to the existence of nature. Intricately related to
the environmental epochs, human existence itself is seen, in Paul Crutzen's
observations (qtd. In Zalasiewicz) as the trigger for the contemporary changes
in nature. Perhaps global warming was an initial sign of the so-called natural
order going chaotic. This chaos wasn't thought of as an era in the history of
the earth, but merely a moment in the long history. However, by labeling the
crucial changes in ecology as Anthropocene, the changes themselves have been
given historic significance. Thus it could be called an epoch.
“The influence of
humans is felt more strongly towards the end of the Pleistocene epoch, with the
demise of much of the ‘megafauna’ that included the saber-toothed cats in North
America or the woolly mammoths of Siberia. On many continents, the
disappearance of the megafauna appears to coincide with the arrival of modern
humans” (Zalasiewicz 836).
The disappearance of species is a crucial feature of Anthropocene. The
absence of any species other than humans themselves marks the epistemological
vantage point where Anthropocene is located presently. The interpretation of
the disappearance of other species also carries ominous signs of future
disaster concerning humans. Another major event other than industrialization
that triggered changes in nature is urbanization.
“Urbanization is a
direct result of a population explosion. Since 1800, global population has
risen from roughly 1 billion, to 6.5 billion in 2000 and a projected 9 billion
by 2050. That population growth is linked with the Industrial Revolution, which
supplied the power and technology to feed those extra mouths. Cities, and
especially megacities like Jakarta, Rio de Janeiro or Shanghai, are now the
most visible expression of human influence on the planet. The growth of cities
is therefore a characteristic feature of the Anthropocene” (Zalasiewicz 836).
Urbanization triggers multidirectional
interaction between nature and culture. These interactions are mostly on a
scale large enough to identify with existing techniques of observation.
However, most often, these interactions fall within the category of
quintessential elements for sustenance of global industry. This attaches the
prerogative upon the community that utilizes natural resources to exploit
natural resources without restraint. The “global footprint of a human population”
(Chakrabarty) can be identified in two ways: one-through conducting an
assessment of the growth of industrial establishments that tax on natural
resources and utilize them, two-by conducting assessments on the extinction of
species. Assessments based on historical tools suggest that the extinction of
many species coincides with the growth of human population. This crisis
presents concerns for the continued existence of humans upon planet earth
because it replaces linearity of human existence with randomness of extinction.
Extinction in any pattern applied to other species sharing the earth with human
beings would not be exclusively for the Others. The Otherness of nature has
always been the central argument of human cultural practices, including various
religious practices. Science attempted to bridge this otherness by making
nature a subject of study thereby proposing that the Other can be studied and
classified. This attempt has its results in the later blind use of natural
resources by various cultures, in the post-industrialized world. Therefore, the
Anthropocene poses challenges not just to the science community. Chakrabarty
suggests that the humanities and social sciences also must grapple with the
aftermath of this massive shift in the alignment of nature. Contrary to
preconceived notions of the change in environment as the result of one or two
elements of human interaction, humanity itself has appeared to be the
ecological factor that brings about decisive change in nature. Chakrabarty
suggests of an epistemological shift that unveils its presence at the moment of
this realization.
“As the crisis gathered momentum in the last
few years, I realized that all my readings in theories of globalization,
Marxist analysis of capital, subaltern studies, and postcolonial criticism over
the last twenty-five years, while enormously useful in studying globalization,
had not really prepared me for making sense of this planetary conjuncture
within which humanity finds itself today” (CH 199).
The methodologies that enabled the
understanding, location, and imagination of globalization function outside of
the perimeter of what is now known as the Anthropocene. This disables any
modality rooted in existing understanding of nature and environmental changes.
“The term Anthropocene suggests: (i) that the
Earth is now moving out of its current geological epoch, called the Holocene
and (ii) that human activity is largely responsible for this exit from the
Holocene, that is, that humankind has become a global geological force in its
own right. Since its introduction, the term Anthropocene has become widely
accepted in the global change research community, and is now occasionally
mentioned in articles in popular media on climate change or other global
environmental issues” (Steffen, et al 843).
This suggests that prior to Anthropocene, the
earth has occupied a certain geological event termed Holocene. Forwarding the
argument further, this holds poof for the fact that the Anthropocene is also an
epistemological rupture from the linearity in understanding the history of the
earth and the collective history of human beings. This event also marks the
shift of humanity from the status of a species into the status of a 'global
geological' force. Steffen et al discusses the earlier attempts to grasp the Anthropocene
before Crutzen's formalization of the concept.
“Following William
Clark, the lead author of the IIASA project entitled Sustainable Development of the Biosphere [12], Crutzen recognized
the early precedent of the ‘anthropozoic era’ proposed by a noted Italian
geologist and Catholic priest [13]. Stoppani was quoted by George Perkins Marsh
in the second edition - significantly entitled The Earth as Modified by Human Action [14] - of his celebrated Man and Nature of 1864 [15]. Another
significant early work was Man as a Geological
Agent [16].
Further development
of the concept was interrupted by the two world wars of the twentieth century.
Only in 1955, at the Princeton symposium on 'Man's Role in Changing the Face of
the Earth' [17] did a remarkable revival of Marsh's theme emerge. Much later,
with the symposium entitled The Earth as
Transformed by Human Action [18], and some other meetings like the seminar
organized at the Fundación César Manrique in Lanzarote [19], did the concept
again fully re-emerge” (Steffen, et.al 844).
Discussions on
massive environmental changes and fluctuations in the ‘order of nature’ exist
within the domain of scientific and historic systems of epistemological
activity. However, the mythological elements that suggest connections between
man and nature are seldom studied.
Substantiating
the existence of nature as a byproduct of the Creation Theory has its downsides.
Religious faith often foregrounds nature as the subservient to God’s authority
and commands. The Divine Origin provides the grounds of origin for both nature
and man. But occasionally man finds superiority in the midst of other living
creatures on the earth. This sense of superiority, coupled with the positioning
of nature within the divine paradigm provides the earlier basis for shifts in
the order of natural proceedings. The great flood during the time of Noah could
be located as the central argument in showcasing natural impacts of human
presence. The Bible suggests that God’s wrath resulted in the great flood. The
reason for the wrath of the Divine Being of the scriptures, who controls nature
and all that exists within and without it, is the many schemes humans employed
in order to ignore His ordinance. The aberration of moral values and
denigration of human spirit are reasons that unveiled God’s rage. At this point
of reference, one may observe a dual system of influences—man and God. Both
these factors triangulate the impact upon nature to be the disastrous flood
that wipes out all major species of flora and fauna. Similar examples could be
drawn from the Book of Exodus as well. Within the landscape of Hindu mythology,
one may also observe patterns that suggest poignant imagery of destruction of
flora and fauna on a large scale due to the dual influences of man and God. In
this binary of God and man, nature occupies an intermediary position. The
potential of the Divine Will dissolves the necessity for human interference
towards stabilizing the ecology.
“There
is not one mode of thought only, upon this subject in the Scriptures but there
are traces of a variety of influences. Even an intermediary between God and the
world in creation is suggested in certain parts of the New Testament. The world
which we know had its origin in God's will, its pattern in his intelligence,
its governing principle in his plan. Men were made in his image. They fulfilled
the divine will in obedience, if they would. Even if disobedient, they were
never beyond his power. What measures God took to meet the consequences of the
self-will and sin of men and to save some, like Noah, or to call some, like
Abraham, were still all within his larger purpose” (Moore 7-8).
Chakrabarty
quotes Peter Newell and Matthew Paterson in his article “Climate and Capital:
On Conjoined Histories” to suggest the larger purpose in a moral context within
the nature-culture binary. A theocentric universe presupposes the place of
origin of nature as the same as that of men. This forms the essential bond
between the idea of nature and the logic of exploitation of nature. “Despite
often being talked about as a scientific question, climate change is first and
foremost a deeply political and moral issue” (CC 9). Environmental activism
often identifies its roots with reference to this moral and political premise. Such
a premise has its unmistakable underpinning in religious scriptures. Lack of a
certain moral value or the inability of a human being to adhere to a particular
moral code resulted in the quest for redemption. Only the Divine Center could
grant redemption and therefore perform the ultimate act of freeing the
individual from his sins. This notion permeates Christian dialectics.
Chakrabarty resorts, in his attempt to identify and re-imagine global warming
induced by the epoch of Anthropocene, to morality and codified values. These
two signifiers are both part of traditional societies and modern. Argument of
morality juxtaposes the will of nature with the will of the Divine centrality,
which in turn marginalizes the totality of human intervention. This goes
against the definition of Anthropocene, as this phenomenon underscores the
impact of human species as an ecological factor. The moral side of the crisis
argues for redemption.
“Redemption,
as in the prophets, and again in the epistles, had God for its author. Men's
prayers have their place in this view. Though the ways of God are past finding
out, yet his favor is with those who put their trust in him. Sometimes events
which we should now call entirely natural were thought of as molded to men's
devout desire. I have introduced the word nature here cautiously because the sense
of contrariety of the natural with the divine will did not yet exist” (Moore
7-8).
Chakrabarty’s argument on moral
consciousness extends towards the capitalist “model of economic growth in the
world” (CC 9) though. He does not imprison the crisis within a set of
deficiencies in human morality alone. Within the premises of such a model, “[t]he
driving force is a society based on class, inequality, and acquisition without
end” (Agarwal and Narain qutd in CC 10). Such an economic model foregrounds the
acquisition of wealth as the basic necessity for a social and cultural wellbeing.
Chakrabarty connects this argument with the crisis of capitalist consumption by
stating that the discourse of justice appears to be the crucial strategy in
dealing with this situation. Chakrabarty proposes that the argument raised by
those like Sha Zukang deviates from the notion that developing countries are
the producers of greenhouse gases, crucial components in enhancing the impacts
of global warming. The developed countries have contributed significantly to
the damage the ecology currently bears upon its course. He quotes from Sha
Zukang:
“The
climate crisis is the result of the very uneven pattern of economic development
that evolved over the past two centuries, which allowed today’s rich countries
to attain their current levels of income, in part through not having to account
for the environmental damage now threatening the lives and livelihoods of
others” (10).
Capitalism
appears to be the economic factor that triggered massive shifts in atmospheric
temperature and resultant disorders in the environment. Progress achieved by
developed countries locates the immoral consumption of natural resources and
interference with nature on a massive scale as a mechanical act. Nature, for
the capitalist endeavor, to extend Zukang’s argument, is a machine that
requires no maintenance and therefore is expected to provide infinite productivity
within the minimal scale of expense. As per this view, one may also expand the
norm as to suggest that this mechanized view of nature does not approve of it being
location of sentience and consciousness. Nature thus could be claimed to be the
lifeless abode and machine that provides shelter for human beings at the same
time supplying the resources for humanity’s survival. This notion presupposes
the notion that nature human space is unproblematic in conceiving biosphere.
However, the symptoms of Anthropocene dissolve this certainty and problematize
the human space.
Perceiving nature within the capitalistic
paradigm provides for the scope of admonishing the developing countries in
cases of excessive consumption of natural resources. One may suggest this
situation as a coordinate of lack of moral as well as political balance. Instead
of considering nature as n organic entity, capitalism robbed nature of its
living status and provided it with the image and identity of a machine with
endless lifecycle. It is interesting at this juncture to re-read the religious
texts on their views about the mechanizing of nature.
“There
are, to be sure, passages in the Old Testament where a divine indwelling in men
and in nature is implied. In Jesus’ teaching, and still more perhaps in Paul's,
this rises to moments of startling insight. Detached utterances, here and
there, seem to imply quite another theory of the universe, namely, the notion
of an organism, rather than a mechanism; of a world whose God is its life
within, rather than its artificer without” (Moore 9).
Moore
suggests how nature appears to be more or less an organism in religious texts.
Contrary to the capitalist imagination of nature, which is all machine-like and
impersonal, inorganic, religious scriptures wrote about nature in terms of its
organic space in culture. This view of nature unifies human sensibilities with
ecology through the ‘divine indwelling’. Cultural enveloping of nature cannot
be denied in both these cases. However, locating culture as an organism serves
the purpose of installing the discourse of politics and morality into play. Moore
goes on saying:
“It
is a world in which nature is supernatural to the core, and the supernatural is
natural to the limit. It is a world in which those historic magnitudes are not
even separated the one from the other. They have coalesced. In Browning's
phrase, “All’s law, and yet all’s love.” Nature is alive not dead. It has its
power and its intelligence within itself, still only in the process of
development. It is an organism, not a mechanism. It is dynamic, not static” (13).
Moore proclaims
the dynamism of nature just as Chakrabarty asserts the relevance of inserting
morality into the discourse of the politics of global warming.
The question of morality shouldn’t be
addressed without considering what Chakrabarty identifies as “intrahuman
injustice”. Without acknowledging “intrahuman injustice” as well as the impacts
of human force upon nature, the argument on morality fails. An egalitarian and
just society may provide more room for consumption of natural energy resources.
This may result in increased accumulation of waste products resulting from the
burning of fossil fuels and the industrialized use of cattle.
“Our
collective carbon footprint would only be larger—for the world’s poor do not
consume much and contribute little to the production of greenhouse gases—and
the climate change crisis would have been on us much sooner and in a much more
drastic way. It is, ironically, thanks to the poor—that is, to the fact that
development is uneven and unfair—that we do not put even larger quantities of
green-house gases into the biosphere than we actually do” (CC 11).
Chakrabarty’s
attempt at bringing the irony of the poor being the factor in slowing down the
growth in greenhouse gases in biosphere negates the possibility for egalitarianism
in areas of production and consumption in the Anthropocene.
Locating the human space in the epoch of
Anthropocene requires a new model. This new model is evocative of the evolving
paradigm of epistemological endeavor taken up by the scientific community that
labels humans as a geological force. However, such interaction among the
developed countries has discounted the factor of responsibility among the same
as nonessential. Through this act of discounting they have shifted the weight
of responsibility upon the developing countries. The ironical stand taken by
Chakrabarty in stating that those in the lower strata of economic interaction
and welfare deserves to be identified as the reason for the slowing down in the
emission of greenhouse gases, has to be read as evidence of this imbalance in
the taking up of responsibility. The development of industrial societies has
alternate impacts upon selective ecology, although as a collective totality it
has ruptured the human space.
Weisman
elaborates on sustainable methods of saving birds that evolved quite accidently
through the process of evolution of human civilization. He narrates about a
particular conservation movement funded by hunters in 1900s in the United States.
Their association was titled Ducks Unlimited (Weisman 193). Ducks Unlimited
protected several species of game birds that were facing extinction. Although
this attempt by the hunters of the US appear to be rooted in the direction of a
consumer politics, the byproduct of such an attempt caused the number of birds
to go high, according to Weisman. This narrative must be read with reference to
the attitude of developed nations across the world towards the responsibility
in protecting nature. These associations, although with narrow interests, can
be seen as precursors of nature reserves in the modern world. Although nature
reserves are seen as positive move towards ‘saving’ and ‘protecting’ the
environment, the consumption of green grass as well as the accumulation of
animal and bird droppings concentrated in and around a particular area may
hinder attempts to create reduced production of greenhouse gases. Such a
situation would inevitably establish the chance for added release of greenhouse
gases. This may, in turn, affect the ways in which the composition of
atmospheric air is currently outlined.
Anthropocene
has another side that attaches itself with the epoch of human intervention with
nature. Humanity’s footprint has reached the gravity of undeniable weight that
may shrink any possible chances to reclaim the earth’s original ecosystem that
was prior to the evolution and massive exploitation by humanity. However, such
attempts as going back and creating an undamaged earth have been underway. The
location of these efforts, however, is not the earth. Interplanetary travel and
interstellar possibilities have pushed human invention and intervention to the
dimension of terraforming other planets. Plant Mars is one example to this
trend. The undercutting politics of sending unmanned missions to Mars has been
to study the conditions on the planet to terraform its climate. “The water
flows could point Nasa and other space agencies towards the most promising
sites to find life on Mars, and to landing spots for future human missions
where water can be collected from a natural supply” (Sample). NASA scientists
acknowledge the fact that the future of manned missions to Mars is not science
fiction. This statement is verified by the recent acknowledgement by NASA of
the available water samples on the planet and the political importance attached
with this discovery. Terraforming Mars may entail complexities that are beyond
the purview of direct human experience today. Considering the measures that the
Anthropocene is forcing the human species to take for their own survival, this
may appear even more complex.
Anthropocene
holds not just a political dimension or an intellectual one. It stands for the
potential mass extinction for many species along with humans.
“As
Wake and Vredenburg (2008) wrote, “Human activities are associated directly or
indirectly with nearly every aspect of the current extinction spasm” (p.
11472). These activities have taken many forms… The most devastating and
far-reaching anthropogenic direct drivers that are affecting global
biodiversity are habitat modification, fragmentation, and destruction;
overexploitation of species; the spread of invasive species and genes;
pollution; and climate change (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment [MEA], 2005;
World Wide Fund for Nature [WWF], 2008)” (Wagler 79).
Wagler
foregrounds extinction as an inevitable aftermath of Anthropocene. The notion
is extinction becomes problematic when it is viewed strictly within the limits
of the Other. In the anthropocentric worldview, mass extinction of species
always implies the extinction of species other than humans. However, this does
not account for the drought, changes in weather pattern, and epidemics within
human space. Destruction on an ecological scale transgresses boundaries and
approaches human precincts, causing fatal damage, just as it may, to the other
species. The view that extinction of species is always on the Other side or the
non-human side, is the direct aftermath of the existing distinction between
human history and natural history. In “The Climate of History: Four Theses”,
Chakrabarty suggests that “[w]e could begin with the old Viconian-Hobbesian
idea that we, humans, could have proper knowledge of only civil and political
institutions because we made them, while nature remains God’s work and
ultimately inscrutable to man” (CH 201). In the argument proposed by
Chakrabarty, the Viconian notion of nature was acquired by later historians as
a commonsensical notion. Thus, the idea of nature as separate from man became
rooted in the intelligentsia. The distinction between nature and culture seems
to follow into the Twentieth century as well.
The
period within which changes occur in nature is longer in relation to the period
of events occurring in human culture. This has been used by Stalin to reject
the notion of nature having any relation with human history (CH 204). The changes
in geography are in no way parallel to the changes in history. Chakrabarty
notes “man’s environment did change but changed so slowly as to make the history
of man’s relation to his environment almost timeless and thus not a subject of
historiography at all” (CH 204). He argues that the negotiations made by human
culture with nature are in several ways mutual; however, due to the bias
towards the certainty of a history of nature existing inside an exclusive
terrain drained the possibility for further understanding the agency of humans
in engraving deep changes upon nature.
“If
Braudel, to some degree, made a breach in the binary of natural/human history,
one could say that the rise of environmental history in the late twentieth
century made the breach wider. It could even be argued that environmental
historians have sometimes indeed progressed towards producing what could be
called natural histories of man. But there is a very important difference
between the understanding of the human being that these histories have been
based on and the agency of the human now being proposed by scientists writing
on climate change. Simply put, environmental history, where it was not
straightforwardly cultural, social, or economic history, looked upon human
beings as biological agents” (CH 205).
Chakrabarty
asserts that the historical perspective has been that of a biological agency of
human beings. This position marks a significant change in the attitude of the sciences
as well as humanities in acknowledging the geological status of human beings. Another
dimension of this significant shift in perspectives regarding the human agency
is the status change of humans from merely being a species to being geological
agents. The earlier distinction did not provide explanation for the depth and
breadth of human impact upon nature. The signature of human existence could be
seen as the increase in greenhouse gases as well as changes in weather
conditions.
Lack of rupture in the binary of natural/
human history in contemporary psyche could be validated through identifying the
type and level of material resources used. Coal usage, for example, has a
political side that suggests how the users contribute to global warming. The
use of coal follows the problematic of ‘need’ versus ‘greed’ paradigm. As Chakrabarty
is clear about this paradigm, his statement underscores the indistinguishable
complexity in practice in the use of coal. He cites examples from newly
emerging financial powers such as India and China. The politics of coal is
integrated into the sense of financial growth as well as capitalist interests. Coal
provides the users with low coast energy requirements. Mapping the energy
requirement and consumption with the global scale as a singularity may inherit
a set of problems that persisted within the colonial and imperialist paradigm. On
the other hand, by importing notions of ethics and morality Chakrabarty assumes
an egalitarian sensibility to govern attempts to slow down the corrosion of the
biosphere.
Chakrabarty
also discusses the changing status of human with reference to the preexisting
notions of the binary of human/natural history. Chakrabarty argues that the
discourse of human freedom has undercutting tones of epistemological
interactions of historical and cultural diversity. Chakrabarty invokes Gadamer
in furthering his argument. The concept of diversity has been a metonymy for
freedom within the intellectual discourses carried out to map human history. “Freedom,
one could say, is a blanket category for diverse imaginations of human autonomy
and sovereignty” (CH 208). In other words, Chakrabarty juxtaposes human freedom
with sovereignty and autonomy. He also sandwiches this notion with the notion
of diversity. Within a cultural landscape of diversity, the notion of freedom
attains full presence.
Chakrabarty
drives the discussion toward the visibility of humans. He rhymes with the
notion that human beings are not just a species. The species definition,
according to Chakrabarty, does not stand in the wake of the current crisis in
the biosphere that endanger not just human existence itself but also the
existence of many other species. In this context, locating humans as species
would result in a hologram of information jumble that does not explain the
crisis at hand. To meet this challenge, another angle must be explored to
install human identity with reference to their existence in the biosphere. This
identity, according to Chakrabarty, is that of a ‘geological agent’, as
mentioned above. This poses the challenge of reimagining the various struggles
of freedom undertaken by marginalized communities around the world because
freedom in the human paradigm of existence may have an altered significance
other than it philosophical undertone.
“In no discussion of freedom in the period since the
Enlightenment was there ever any awareness of the geological agency that human
beings were acquiring at the same time as and through processes closely linked
to their acquisition of freedom. Philosophers of freedom were mainly, and
understandably, concerned with how humans would escape the injustice,
oppression, inequality, or even uniformity foisted on them by other humans or
human-made systems. Geological time and the chronology of human histories
remained unrelated. This distance between the two calendars, as we have seen,
is what climate scientists now claim has collapsed” (CH 208).
While attempting
to comprehend the Anthropocene in social sciences, one may be forced to incorporate
the findings of biologists, geologists, as well as physicists on this phenomenon.
Written in the making of Anthropocene is the presence of human agency. Every
change that is seen affecting nature has human signature as a prominent cause.
Earlier discourses on human history
often located human beings within the identity of species. This no longer
exerts weight as the impact of human interaction has already exceeds what may
be expected from any organism or groups of organisms existing on the earth. The
limited space, ideological as well as biological incorporated into species-specific
locales is proof that on the species level, nature exerts its influence in
interaction flow from without. However, the Anthropocene adds to this scenario
the challenge of relocating an identity for humans. Since human interaction
with nature is no longer relevant on a species level, it could be said that the
identity of humans had been sucked in by the Anthropocene mode of history. In
the Anthropocene, the interaction flow is from human agents to nature,
predominantly. This offers significant shift from the species-specific paradigm
in understanding human space. Freedom in the earlier contexts such as
Pleistocene of the Ice Age or the warmer Holocene, which supposedly includes
human existence in modern times, is more or less the event in the
socio-politico-cultural argument for acknowledging the egalitarian treatment of
individual species within the collective species. Now that climate change is
anthropogenic, the distinction of Holocene must be considered outmoded.
“Now
that humans—thanks to our numbers, the burning of fossil fuel, and other
related activities— have become a geological agent on the planet, some
scientists have proposed that we recognize the beginning of a new geological
era, one in which humans act as a main determinant of the environment of the
planet” (CH 209).
Chakrabarty did not rule out the
role played by capitalism in setting environmental changes into motion. However,
he is also careful in entrusting the whole blame upon capitalist systems for
the present crisis in human comprehension of ecological epoch. The crisis of
climate change cannot be fully understood simply by resorting to the critiques
of “capital globalization”. “But these critiques do not give us an adequate
hold on human history once we accept that the crisis of climate change is here
with us and may exist as part of this planet for much longer than capitalism or
long after capitalism has undergone many more historic mutations” (212). Chakrabarty
denies the role of capital management in amplifying global warming and
ecological changes.
“While
there is no denying that climate change has profoundly to do with the history
of capital, a critique that is only a critique of capital is not sufficient for
addressing questions relating to human history once the crisis of climate
change has been acknowledged and the Anthropocene has begun to loom on the horizon
of our present. The geologic now of the Anthropocene has become entangled with
the now of human history” (CH 212).
Analogous to the
earlier analysis of religious scriptures to identify and test the notions of
culture-nature interaction and to search for the roots of the present crisis,
an academic approach is necessary. Chakrabarty proposes the same in his third
thesis. Academic investigations must not deny the space of capitalism in
provoking damaging effects upon the face of the culture-nature binary in the
present. Culture, more specifically human influence has shaped ecology. “At the
same time, the story of capital, the contingent history of our falling into the
Anthropocene, cannot be denied by recourse to the idea of species, for the
Anthropocene would not have been possible, even as a theory, without the
history of industrialization” (219). “[T]he high-energy-consuming models of
society that capitalist industrialization has created and promoted” (217)
contributed heavily to the Anthropocene. The human space is represented as the
byproduct of such industrial growth. In the epistemological interactions
preceding the awareness of Anthropocene too carry similar implications. In
other words, the representation is human space, which was always in relation to
industrialization, in the Anthropocene, for the first time gathered momentum
towards finding representation in terms of ecological forces.
The shift from the status of species
to the status of an ecological force carries the necessity to re-imagine the
human space. “There could be no phenomenology of us as a species,” (220) notes
Chakrabarty. “[T]he wall between human and natural history has been breached,”
(221) Chakrabarty asserts. The history of nature inevitably draws causes for
affluent shifts from the history of humans, thus locating the human space
within the broader rim of nature.
Works Cited
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PDF file.
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