hell-bound train, we will not be able to stop it.
Nearly fifty years ago, the pioneering environmentalist Barry Commoner warned that “the environmental crisis reveals serious incompatibilities between the private enterprise system and the ecological base on which it depends.”2 It is now time—it is past time—to hear his warning and change that system.
Acknowledgments
I owe a particular debt of gratitude to John Bellamy Foster, editor of Monthly Review and prolific writer on Marxist ecology and economics. He provided frequent advice and gave me detailed comments and suggestions as my work proceeded, beginning when I proposed a short article on the Anthropocene. This book literally would not have been written without his constant support and encouragement.
Clive Hamilton, Robert Nixon, Peter Sale, Will Steffen, Philip Wright, and Jan Zalasiewicz took time from their work to respond to my emailed questions about their areas of expertise.
Jeff White carefully proofread several drafts, checked the reference notes and identified weaknesses in the text. Lis Angus, John Riddell and Fred Magdoff offered criticisms and insights that helped me to think the subject through and express my ideas more clearly.
The team at Monthly Review Press, Michael Yates, Martin Paddio, and Susie Day, have been a pleasure to work with. Erin Clermont copy-edited my final draft and prepared it for publication.
Parts of Facing the Anthropocene were previously published in Climate & Capitalism, Monthly Review, and other publications. All have been rewritten and updated for this book.
Many thanks to Drew Dellinger for permission to include a verse from “hieroglyphic stairway,” first published in the collection Love Letter to the Milky Way (White Cloud Press, 2011).
“System Change Not Climate Change” in chapter 12 was written by Terry Townsend for Green Left Weekly in 2007. Terry, who edits the indispensable Links Journal of International Socialist Renewal, kindly granted permission to publish an updated version here.
“The Fertilizer Footprint” in chapter 10 was first published in September 2015 by the nonprofit organization GRAIN, which makes its excellent materials freely available, without copyright.
Third printing, 2018: The description of the Carbon Cycle, on pages 123–4, has been revised.
Metric Measures
All scientific research uses the International System of Units (SI), commonly called the metric system, and this book follows that standard. Temperatures are given in degrees Celsius (°C). One degree Celsius equals 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit, so restricting the global average temperature increase to 2°C means restricting it to 3.6°F. Distances are given in meters and kilometers. One meter equals 3.3 feet. One kilometer equals 0.6 miles. A tonne, sometimes called a metric ton, is 1,000 kilograms, just over 2,200 pounds.
PART ONE
A NO-ANALOG STATE
For nearly a decade after it first appeared in scientific literature in 2000, the word Anthropocene remained the exclusive property of specialists in Earth sciences. It was seldom heard, and even less often discussed, outside scientific circles.
But in 2011, a web search for Anthropocene produced over 450,000 hits, “Welcome to the Anthropocene” was a cover headline on The Economist, the Royal Society devoted an entire issue of its journal to it, the Dalai Lama held a seminar, and the Vatican commissioned and published a report.
There are now three academic journals devoted to the Anthropocene. It has been the subject of dozens of books, hundreds of academic papers, and innumerable articles in newspapers, magazines, websites, and blogs. There have been exhibitions about art in the Anthropocene, conferences about the humanities in the Anthropocene, novels about love in the Anthropocene, and there’s even a heavy metal album called The Anthropocene Extinction.
In the comic strip Dilbert, when Bob the dinosaur asked his smart watch for the time, the watch replied, “This is the Anthropocene epoch.”1
Rarely has a scientific term moved so quickly into wide acceptance and general use. Even more rarely has a scientific term been the subject of so much misinformation and confusion. As Australian environmentalist Clive Hamilton has justly complained, much of what is written about the subject appears to have come from “people who have not bothered to read the half-dozen basic papers on the Anthropocene by those who have defined it, and therefore do not know what they are talking about.”2
This book does not attempt to address all the political and philosophical debates the Anthropocene has generated, nor does it discuss specialized technical questions. It aims, rather, to provide essential background and context for activists who need to understand what the Anthropocene is and why it is important. Such an understanding is essential to the development of an effective ecosocialist movement today, and will be even more critical for building a post-capitalist society tomorrow.
Part One discusses how scientists came to identify a qualitative change in Earth’s most critical physical characteristics, and what the implications are for all living things, including humans.
1
A Second Copernican Revolution
In terms of some key environmental parameters, the Earth System has moved well outside the range of the natural variability exhibited over the last half million years at least. The nature of changes now occurring simultaneously in the Earth System, their magnitudes and rates of change, are unprecedented. The Earth is currently operating in a no-analog state.
—AMSTERDAM DECLARATION ON GLOBAL CHANGE1
The word Anthropocene has been coined three times.
In 1922, the Soviet geologist Aleksei Petrovich Pavlov proposed Anthropocene or Anthropogene as a name for the time since the first humans evolved about 160,000 years ago. Both words were used by Soviet geologists for some time, but they were never accepted in the rest of the world.
In the 1980s, marine biologist Eugene Stoermer used the word in some published articles, but no one seems to have followed his lead.
The third time’s the charm. Atmospheric chemist Paul J. Crutzen reinvented the word in February 2000, at a meeting of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Will Steffen, then executive director of the IGBP, was a witness:
Scientists from IGBP’s paleoenvironment project were reporting on their latest research, often referring to the Holocene, the most recent geological epoch of earth history, to set the context for their work. Paul, a vice-chair of IGBP, was becoming visibly agitated at this usage, and after the term Holocene was mentioned yet again, he interrupted them: “Stop using the word Holocene. We’re not in the Holocene any more. We’re in the … the … the … (searching for the right word) … the Anthropocene!”2
Five years earlier, Crutzen had won a Nobel Prize for work that helped prove that widely used chemicals were destroying the ozone layer in Earth’s upper atmosphere, with potentially
