LITMIR.BIZ

      Foreword

      John Bellamy Foster

      For it is because we are kept in the dark about the nature of human society—as opposed to nature in general—that we are now faced (so the scientists concerned assure me), by the complete destructibility of this planet that has barely been made fit to live in.

      —BERTOLT BRECHT¹

      The Anthropocene, viewed as a new geological epoch displacing the Holocene epoch of the last 10,000 to 12,000 years, represents what has been called an “anthropogenic rift” in the history of the planet.² Formally introduced into the contemporary scientific and environmental discussion by climatologist Paul Crutzen in 2000, it stands for the notion that human beings have become the primary emergent geological force affecting the future of the Earth System. Although often traced to the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century, the Anthropocene is probably best seen as arising in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Recent scientific evidence suggests that the period from around 1950 on exhibits a major spike, marking a Great Acceleration in human impacts on the environment, with the most dramatic stratigraphic trace of the anthropogenic rift to be found in fallout radionuclides from nuclear weapons testing.³

      Viewed in this way, the Anthropocene can be seen as corresponding roughly to the rise of the modern environmental movement, which had its beginnings in the protests led by scientists against above ground nuclear testing after the Second World War, and was to emerge as a wider movement following the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962. Carson’s book was soon followed in the 1960s by the very first warnings, by Soviet and U.S. scientists, of accelerated and irreversible global warming.⁴ It is this dialectical interrelation between the acceleration into the Anthropocene and the acceleration of a radical environmentalist imperative in response that constitutes the central theme of Ian Angus’s marvelous new book. It is his ability to give us insights into the Anthropocene as a new emergent level of society-nature interaction brought on by historical change—and how the new ecological imperatives it generates have become the central question confronting us in the twenty-first century—that makes Facing the Anthropocene so indispensable.

      Today it seems likely that the Anthropocene will come to be linked within science to the post–Second World War era in particular. Nonetheless, as in the case of all major turning points in history, there were signs of minor spikes at earlier stages along the way, going back to the Industrial Revolution. This reflects what the Marxian philosopher István Mészáros calls the “dialectic of continuity and discontinuity,” characterizing all novel emergent developments in history.⁵ Although the Anthropocene concept arose fully only with the modern scientific conception of the Earth System, and is now increasingly seen as having its physical basis in the Great Acceleration after the Second World War, it was prefigured by earlier notions, arising from thinkers focusing on the dramatic changes in the human-environmental interface brought on by the rise of capitalism, including the Industrial Revolution, the colonization of the world, and the era of fossil fuels.

      “Nature, the nature that preceded human history,” Karl Marx and Frederick Engels remarked as early as 1845, “no longer exists anywhere (except perhaps on a few Australian coral islands of recent origin).”⁶ Similar views were presented by George Perkins Marsh, in Man and Nature in 1864, two years before Ernst Haeckel coined the word ecology, and three years before Marx published the first volume of Capital, with its warning of the metabolic rift in the human relation to the earth.⁷

      It was not until the last quarter of the nineteenth and the early twentieth century, however, that the key concept of the biosphere, out of which our modern notion of the Earth System was to develop, arose, with the publication, most notably, of The Biosphere by the Soviet geochemist Vladimir I. Vernadsky in 1926. “Remarkably,” Lynn Margulis and Dorian Sagan write in What Is Life?, “Vernadsky dismantled the rigid boundary between living organisms and a nonliving environment, depicting life globally before a single satellite had returned photographs of Earth from orbit.”⁸

      The appearance of Vernadsky’s book corresponded to the first introduction of the term Anthropocene (together with Anthropogene) by his colleague, the Soviet geologist Aleksei Pavlov, who used it to refer to a new geological period in which humanity was the main driver of planetary geological change. As Vernadsky observed in 1945, “Proceeding from the notion of the geological role of man, the geologist A. P. Pavlov [1854–1929] in the last years of his life used to speak of the anthropogenic era, in which we now live…. He rightfully emphasized that man, under our very eyes, is becoming a mighty and ever-growing geological force…. In the 20th Century, man, for the first time in the history of the Earth, knew and embraced the whole biosphere, completed the geographic map of the planet Earth, and colonized its whole surface.”⁹

      Simultaneously with Vernadsky’s work on the biosphere, the Soviet biochemist Alexander I. Oparin and the British socialist biologist J. B. S. Haldane independently developed in the 1920s the theory of the origin of life, known as the “primordial soup theory.” As summed up by Harvard biologists Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin, “Life originally arose from inanimate matter [what Haldane famously described as a ‘hot dilute soup’], but that origination made its continued occurrence impossible, because living organisms consume the complex organic molecules needed to recreate life de novo. Moreover, the reducing atmosphere [lacking free oxygen] that existed before the beginning of life has been converted, by living organisms themselves, to one that is rich in reactive oxygen.” In this way, the Oparin-Haldane theory explained for the first time how life

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