A few years ago I read Affluenza: When Too Much is Never Enough by Clive Hamilton and Richard Denniss. The authors examine the ubiquity of over-consumption in Western societies, what drives it, why we keep doing it even though it doesn't make us happy, and some ideas for countering it.
I remember agreeing with it, but largely from the standpoint that I had heard it before. Back in 1975, the English theologian and later bishop John V Taylor wrote a little book called Enough is Enough which urged Christians to resist the temptation to over-consume. I still remember his advice to families watching TV - when the ads come on, cover your ears and shout 'Who are you kidding?'.
I haven't really been paying attention to Hamilton since then, but recently I saw a reference to his book Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene in an article I was reading and decided to check it out. I'm both glad and sad that I did. Glad because it is a brilliant book, beautifully written. Sad because its message is hugely challenging and I'm not sure I wanted to hear it. It's hard to do it justice in a short review like this but I'll give it a go.
Hamilton's starting point is that we have entered a new geological epoch known as the Anthropocene, an epoch in which human activity has a decisive influence on the life of the entire planetary system. This is not Hamilton's idea, it is an idea much discussed by Earth System scientists and rapidly gaining currency in environmental debates.
The principal reason for Earth scientists' belief that that the planet has shifted out of the previous epoch, the Holocene, lie in the rapid increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and its cascading effects throughout the Earth system. The system-changing forces of ocean acidification, species loss and disruption of the nitrogen cycle add to the case. Human disturbance of the climate system is now detectable from the beginning of large scale coal burning at the onset of the Industrial Revolution. The rise in atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide was gradual for the next 150 years, but became steep after World War II.... "The last 60 years have without doubt seen the most profound transformation of the human relationship with the natural world in the history of humankind."
This new era is qualitatively different from what came before. It means that many of our ways of seeing the world need to change. Many of the intellectual and practical tools which have served us up until now need to be revisited. This is not easy for even the most educated of us to do, and thinking and conversation about the Anthropocene frequently slips back into talking in ways that do not do it justice.
The confronting nature of this new understanding brings out a number of responses. One of these is to deny that it is true. We are all familiar with climate denial. Some of my friends, and many intelligent people, have fallen for it, despite its implausibility. This is, of course, fed by those in the fossil fuel industries who would like to go on profiting from environmental damage, but this is not the full story.
If the invention of the lies of climate deniers can be attributed to Exxon, the willingness to believe them cannot be. The seeds of doubt have been broadcast on fertile soil.
We would like to believe it is not so. The truth is frightening and it is easier, at least for a short time, to believe a lie.
Hamilton doesn't spend much time on this denial. He is more concerned with two other ways of thinking which accept the science but propose what he sees as mistaken responses. The first he refers to as 'eco-modernism', the idea that the same processes and ways of thinking that produced our current crisis can be used to solve it.
Most who read the Earth System scientists' papers on the Anthropocene - and especially the projections of climate scientists - understand the new epoch as a consequence of the industrial growth process whose harms will range from severe to calamitous. Severe harms are evident already. However, a rising chorus of writers and intellectuals actually welcomes its arrival, expressing a certain excitement or exhilaration. At the entrance to the first scientific conference devoted to the new epoch in 2012, a huge sign proclaimed 'Welcome to the Anthropocene'. I interpreted the slogan as ironic. It was only over the next two or three years that I realised it was not dark humour but a true expression of the sentiment of those who see disturbance of the Earth System as a wonderful opportunity for humankind to prove our ingenuity and technological faculty.
This attitude leads to proposals for technological solutions to climate change, such as sowing the atmosphere with ammonia to reduce the penetration of solar radiation, or locating an orbiting reflector over the Arctic Circle to deflect the sun's rays and reduce ice melt. Some at least of these solutions are technologically feasible but it is doubtful that they would solve the problem. The effects of the Anthropocene are varied - we are not simply warming the planet, but crossing a number of planetary boundaries at the same time. Reducing warming will not uncross these other boundaries. At the same time Earth System science tells us, if it tells us anything, that the Earth is complex and not particularly amenable to human control - less so as we push its boundaries and it pushes back. We have no way of knowing how the results of massive scale geo-engineering would actually play out. In the end, eco-modernism provides a smokescreen for humans to continue our unsustainable exploitation of the Earth.
However, his also critical of the opposite tendency, the desire to cancel anthropocentrism altogether and see humans as no more than another creature, a glorified chimpanzee or the moral equivalent of a mollusc.
Although these attempts to cut humans down to size are well motivated, aimed as they often have been at countering the unending violence committed against other creatures by humans inured to the sufferings of others or possessed by a sense of species entitlement, there is something desperate about arguments that equate human beings with chimps, dolphins and dogs when on any measure the unbridgeable gulf between humans and the rest of creation is blindingly apparent. When we consider, if only for a moment, the vast scale of human achievement - writing, cities, mathematics, agriculture, medicine, splitting the atom, space travel, literature and art galleries, not to mention theorising about our equality with animals - the rudimentary tools, 'language' and cultural products of the animal kingdom pale into insignificance.
He dwells at some length, and very wittily, on the irony, say, of novelist Will Self saying during a panel discussion at a writers festival that humans are no more to be valued or respected than molluscs, as if the fact of discussing this question at a writers festival were not in itself evidence of profound difference.
However, there is also a more important practical reason why these arguments are counter-productive in the Anthropocene. In the previous epoch, it was at least theoretically possible for humans to slip into the ecological background and vanish without a trace. However, the defining feature of the Anthropocene is that this is no longer the case.
What is new, and will prompt me to argue for a new anthropocentrism, is the arrival of a geological epoch in which humans now rival the great forces of nature. The future of the entire planet, including many forms of life, is now contingent on the decisions of a conscious force, even if the signs of it acting in concert are only embryonic (and may be stillborn). In the face of this brute fact, the defining truth of the age, denying the uniqueness and power of humans becomes perverse.
Even if humans become extinct in the near future, the signs of our presence will continue for millennia. The changes to climate and oceans, the mass extinction of species, the disappearance of glaciers and polar ice, will not be magically reversed by our passing. We have changed the earth permanently.
This, then, brings Hamilton to his point. Our old forms of anthropocentrism will no longer do. We can no longer view the Earth as a passive stage on which we live our lives, as inert matter for us to shape with our reason and technological prowess. The 'subject/object divide', first conceived by Kant and implicit in our present relations with the earth, has become untenable. The Earth, so to speak, has awakened and is having its own say.
From Earth System science it ought to be apparent by now that humans can never master the earth; its power is too great and will always prevail, whatever local 'victories' humans may have. If in the Anthropocene the 'giant has been wakened' and is flexing its muscles, the continued belief that we can master such a fractious and uncontainable beast becomes not mere hubris but crazy-brave.
What Hamilton proposes instead is a 'new anthropocentrism', one based not in any sense of moral superiority and entitlement, but in the acceptance of the fact that what we do has profound impacts on the Earth and that if we do not take care these impacts will rebound to not only our own harm but the harm of the millions of other creatures with whom we share the planet and who do not have the same capacity to influence the Earth System. This imposes a great responsibility on us and we need to find ways of thinking and acting which guide that responsibility.
The duty to protect and placate the Earth System can be seen as self-justifying; it arises from the responsibility that goes with great power. others may justify it in terms of its effects - for traditional anthropocentrism, the continued flourishing of humans, and, for non-anthropocentrism, the continued flourishing of other forms of life and ecosystems too. Alternatively, the duty to protect nature and placate the Earth can be justified by way of teleological anthropocentrism such as the claim that humans were destined to be the dominant creature and this dominion always carried with it the obligation to use our special position responsibly.
In the latter part of the book he tentatively begins the attempt to recast the story of humanity in a way that is appropriate to the Anthropocene. He does not offer these retellings as 'the answer' but as stimulus for further and better thought. Here is one way he puts the story.
The new story has a new main character, no longer the protagonist of modernity, the autonomous subject blessed with conscious reason and so the capacity to decide. The newbon anthropos is a conception centred on humankind's world-making practices, the power to shift the Earth, for good or ill. We might speak of the transformation of humankind into the shackled super-agent, torn between two irresistible forces - a self-assertion that, convinced of its independence, aspires to transcend all boundaries, but which is up against the limits imposed by an Earth that remains implacable and ever-more recalcitrant.
Within this story we need to find an ethic which can guide our actions. Hamilton is not hostile to traditional religion - indeed, he uses a lot of religious language and metaphor himself - but he does not believe that such religious belief will serve us in a post-enlightenment age. Instead, he puts hope in an ethical and realistic appraisal of the scientific world-view.
The path to realising our destiny was no longer a spiritual journey but an intellectual and physical one, building on the 'epistemic distance' opened up by the scientific worldview. Ultimately, however, it was a power-struggle between contending social forces, the forces of neglect - power-hunger, greed, growth fetishism, hedonism, and psychological weakness - against the forces of care: self-restraint, respect for the natural world, love of ones children, the desire for civilisation to flourish.
Personally I would question his characterisation of these two contending forces as something different from spiritual forces. Walter Wink, for one, would see this as a profoundly spiritual battle, a battle with the Powers. But I'll go into that another day. Here, I'd like to appreciate the gift Hamilton has given us.
First of all, he is unflinching in facing the reality of the Anthropocene and the dangers we are facing. He doesn't sugar-coat it, or propose superficial solutions. He is not setting out to alarm us, but the picture itself is frightening and to face it the way he has takes great courage.
Secondly, the world is awash with scientific books and reports on climate change and the ecological crisis, and technological and economic analyses of impacts and solutions. Hamilton, although more than capable of writing about these subjects, has taken us into a place we rarely examine, the underlying philosophy and ethics which sit behind our political, technological and ecological choices. He does this not in facile 'think outside the square' management babble, but in a way which engages with the fundamental narrative about who we are. Reading it in the midst of an election campaign characterised by soporifically shallow debates about the 'cost' of climate action is a slap of cold water to wake me up.
Finally, he challenges us to change - not to just do what we do a bit better, or to update our technology and 'green' our neo-liberal market economy, or any of the other ways in which we try to change while staying the same, but to see ourselves differently, to see the earth differently, and to act very differently as a result.
I'm not sure if we can make these changes. I don't have the gift of seeing the future - even the present is a bit of a mystery - and I waver between hope and despair. But I do know that we need to take up the challenge, not avoid it. The Anthropocene has already begun, and we need to begin the task of learning to live in it.
I remember agreeing with it, but largely from the standpoint that I had heard it before. Back in 1975, the English theologian and later bishop John V Taylor wrote a little book called Enough is Enough which urged Christians to resist the temptation to over-consume. I still remember his advice to families watching TV - when the ads come on, cover your ears and shout 'Who are you kidding?'.
Hamilton's starting point is that we have entered a new geological epoch known as the Anthropocene, an epoch in which human activity has a decisive influence on the life of the entire planetary system. This is not Hamilton's idea, it is an idea much discussed by Earth System scientists and rapidly gaining currency in environmental debates.
The principal reason for Earth scientists' belief that that the planet has shifted out of the previous epoch, the Holocene, lie in the rapid increase in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and its cascading effects throughout the Earth system. The system-changing forces of ocean acidification, species loss and disruption of the nitrogen cycle add to the case. Human disturbance of the climate system is now detectable from the beginning of large scale coal burning at the onset of the Industrial Revolution. The rise in atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide was gradual for the next 150 years, but became steep after World War II.... "The last 60 years have without doubt seen the most profound transformation of the human relationship with the natural world in the history of humankind."
This new era is qualitatively different from what came before. It means that many of our ways of seeing the world need to change. Many of the intellectual and practical tools which have served us up until now need to be revisited. This is not easy for even the most educated of us to do, and thinking and conversation about the Anthropocene frequently slips back into talking in ways that do not do it justice.
The confronting nature of this new understanding brings out a number of responses. One of these is to deny that it is true. We are all familiar with climate denial. Some of my friends, and many intelligent people, have fallen for it, despite its implausibility. This is, of course, fed by those in the fossil fuel industries who would like to go on profiting from environmental damage, but this is not the full story.
If the invention of the lies of climate deniers can be attributed to Exxon, the willingness to believe them cannot be. The seeds of doubt have been broadcast on fertile soil.
We would like to believe it is not so. The truth is frightening and it is easier, at least for a short time, to believe a lie.
Hamilton doesn't spend much time on this denial. He is more concerned with two other ways of thinking which accept the science but propose what he sees as mistaken responses. The first he refers to as 'eco-modernism', the idea that the same processes and ways of thinking that produced our current crisis can be used to solve it.
Most who read the Earth System scientists' papers on the Anthropocene - and especially the projections of climate scientists - understand the new epoch as a consequence of the industrial growth process whose harms will range from severe to calamitous. Severe harms are evident already. However, a rising chorus of writers and intellectuals actually welcomes its arrival, expressing a certain excitement or exhilaration. At the entrance to the first scientific conference devoted to the new epoch in 2012, a huge sign proclaimed 'Welcome to the Anthropocene'. I interpreted the slogan as ironic. It was only over the next two or three years that I realised it was not dark humour but a true expression of the sentiment of those who see disturbance of the Earth System as a wonderful opportunity for humankind to prove our ingenuity and technological faculty.
This attitude leads to proposals for technological solutions to climate change, such as sowing the atmosphere with ammonia to reduce the penetration of solar radiation, or locating an orbiting reflector over the Arctic Circle to deflect the sun's rays and reduce ice melt. Some at least of these solutions are technologically feasible but it is doubtful that they would solve the problem. The effects of the Anthropocene are varied - we are not simply warming the planet, but crossing a number of planetary boundaries at the same time. Reducing warming will not uncross these other boundaries. At the same time Earth System science tells us, if it tells us anything, that the Earth is complex and not particularly amenable to human control - less so as we push its boundaries and it pushes back. We have no way of knowing how the results of massive scale geo-engineering would actually play out. In the end, eco-modernism provides a smokescreen for humans to continue our unsustainable exploitation of the Earth.
However, his also critical of the opposite tendency, the desire to cancel anthropocentrism altogether and see humans as no more than another creature, a glorified chimpanzee or the moral equivalent of a mollusc.
Although these attempts to cut humans down to size are well motivated, aimed as they often have been at countering the unending violence committed against other creatures by humans inured to the sufferings of others or possessed by a sense of species entitlement, there is something desperate about arguments that equate human beings with chimps, dolphins and dogs when on any measure the unbridgeable gulf between humans and the rest of creation is blindingly apparent. When we consider, if only for a moment, the vast scale of human achievement - writing, cities, mathematics, agriculture, medicine, splitting the atom, space travel, literature and art galleries, not to mention theorising about our equality with animals - the rudimentary tools, 'language' and cultural products of the animal kingdom pale into insignificance.
He dwells at some length, and very wittily, on the irony, say, of novelist Will Self saying during a panel discussion at a writers festival that humans are no more to be valued or respected than molluscs, as if the fact of discussing this question at a writers festival were not in itself evidence of profound difference.
However, there is also a more important practical reason why these arguments are counter-productive in the Anthropocene. In the previous epoch, it was at least theoretically possible for humans to slip into the ecological background and vanish without a trace. However, the defining feature of the Anthropocene is that this is no longer the case.
What is new, and will prompt me to argue for a new anthropocentrism, is the arrival of a geological epoch in which humans now rival the great forces of nature. The future of the entire planet, including many forms of life, is now contingent on the decisions of a conscious force, even if the signs of it acting in concert are only embryonic (and may be stillborn). In the face of this brute fact, the defining truth of the age, denying the uniqueness and power of humans becomes perverse.
Even if humans become extinct in the near future, the signs of our presence will continue for millennia. The changes to climate and oceans, the mass extinction of species, the disappearance of glaciers and polar ice, will not be magically reversed by our passing. We have changed the earth permanently.
This, then, brings Hamilton to his point. Our old forms of anthropocentrism will no longer do. We can no longer view the Earth as a passive stage on which we live our lives, as inert matter for us to shape with our reason and technological prowess. The 'subject/object divide', first conceived by Kant and implicit in our present relations with the earth, has become untenable. The Earth, so to speak, has awakened and is having its own say.
From Earth System science it ought to be apparent by now that humans can never master the earth; its power is too great and will always prevail, whatever local 'victories' humans may have. If in the Anthropocene the 'giant has been wakened' and is flexing its muscles, the continued belief that we can master such a fractious and uncontainable beast becomes not mere hubris but crazy-brave.
What Hamilton proposes instead is a 'new anthropocentrism', one based not in any sense of moral superiority and entitlement, but in the acceptance of the fact that what we do has profound impacts on the Earth and that if we do not take care these impacts will rebound to not only our own harm but the harm of the millions of other creatures with whom we share the planet and who do not have the same capacity to influence the Earth System. This imposes a great responsibility on us and we need to find ways of thinking and acting which guide that responsibility.
The duty to protect and placate the Earth System can be seen as self-justifying; it arises from the responsibility that goes with great power. others may justify it in terms of its effects - for traditional anthropocentrism, the continued flourishing of humans, and, for non-anthropocentrism, the continued flourishing of other forms of life and ecosystems too. Alternatively, the duty to protect nature and placate the Earth can be justified by way of teleological anthropocentrism such as the claim that humans were destined to be the dominant creature and this dominion always carried with it the obligation to use our special position responsibly.
In the latter part of the book he tentatively begins the attempt to recast the story of humanity in a way that is appropriate to the Anthropocene. He does not offer these retellings as 'the answer' but as stimulus for further and better thought. Here is one way he puts the story.
The new story has a new main character, no longer the protagonist of modernity, the autonomous subject blessed with conscious reason and so the capacity to decide. The newbon anthropos is a conception centred on humankind's world-making practices, the power to shift the Earth, for good or ill. We might speak of the transformation of humankind into the shackled super-agent, torn between two irresistible forces - a self-assertion that, convinced of its independence, aspires to transcend all boundaries, but which is up against the limits imposed by an Earth that remains implacable and ever-more recalcitrant.
Within this story we need to find an ethic which can guide our actions. Hamilton is not hostile to traditional religion - indeed, he uses a lot of religious language and metaphor himself - but he does not believe that such religious belief will serve us in a post-enlightenment age. Instead, he puts hope in an ethical and realistic appraisal of the scientific world-view.
The path to realising our destiny was no longer a spiritual journey but an intellectual and physical one, building on the 'epistemic distance' opened up by the scientific worldview. Ultimately, however, it was a power-struggle between contending social forces, the forces of neglect - power-hunger, greed, growth fetishism, hedonism, and psychological weakness - against the forces of care: self-restraint, respect for the natural world, love of ones children, the desire for civilisation to flourish.
Personally I would question his characterisation of these two contending forces as something different from spiritual forces. Walter Wink, for one, would see this as a profoundly spiritual battle, a battle with the Powers. But I'll go into that another day. Here, I'd like to appreciate the gift Hamilton has given us.
First of all, he is unflinching in facing the reality of the Anthropocene and the dangers we are facing. He doesn't sugar-coat it, or propose superficial solutions. He is not setting out to alarm us, but the picture itself is frightening and to face it the way he has takes great courage.
Secondly, the world is awash with scientific books and reports on climate change and the ecological crisis, and technological and economic analyses of impacts and solutions. Hamilton, although more than capable of writing about these subjects, has taken us into a place we rarely examine, the underlying philosophy and ethics which sit behind our political, technological and ecological choices. He does this not in facile 'think outside the square' management babble, but in a way which engages with the fundamental narrative about who we are. Reading it in the midst of an election campaign characterised by soporifically shallow debates about the 'cost' of climate action is a slap of cold water to wake me up.
Finally, he challenges us to change - not to just do what we do a bit better, or to update our technology and 'green' our neo-liberal market economy, or any of the other ways in which we try to change while staying the same, but to see ourselves differently, to see the earth differently, and to act very differently as a result.
I'm not sure if we can make these changes. I don't have the gift of seeing the future - even the present is a bit of a mystery - and I waver between hope and despair. But I do know that we need to take up the challenge, not avoid it. The Anthropocene has already begun, and we need to begin the task of learning to live in it.
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