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 could have originated out of inorganic matter, and why the process could not be repeated. Equally significant, life, arising in this way billions of years ago, could be seen as the creator of the biosphere within a complex process of coevolution.10
It was Rachel Carson, in her landmark 1963 speech, “Our Polluted Environment,” famously introducing the concept of ecosystem to the U.S. public, who most eloquently conveyed this integrated ecological perspective, and the need to take it into account in all of our actions. “Since the beginning of biological time,” she wrote,
there has been the closest possible interdependence between the physical environment and the life it sustains. The conditions on the young earth produced life; life then at once modified the conditions of the earth, so that this single extraordinary act of spontaneous generation could not be repeated. In one form or another, action and interaction between life and its surroundings have been going on ever since.
This historic fact has, I think, more than academic significance. Once we accept it we see why we cannot with impunity make repeated assaults upon the environment as we now do. The serious student of earth history knows that neither life nor the physical world that supports it exists in little isolated compartments. On the contrary, he recognizes the extraordinary unity between organisms and the environment. For this reason he knows that harmful substances released into the environment return in time to create problems for mankind.
The branch of science that deals with these interrelations is Ecology…. We cannot think of the living organism alone; nor can we think of the physical environment as a separate entity. The two exist together, each acting on the other to form an ecological complex or ecosystem.11
Nevertheless, despite the integrated ecological vision presented by figures like Carson, Vernadsky’s concepts of the biosphere and biogeochemical cycles were for a long time downplayed in the West due to the reductionist mode that prevailed in Western science and the Soviet background of these concepts. Soviet scientific works were well known to scientists in the West and were frequently translated in the Cold War years by scientific presses and even by the U.S. government—though unaccountably Vernadsky’s The Biosphere was not translated into English until 1998. This was a necessity since in some fields, such as climatology, Soviet scientists were well ahead of their U.S. counterparts. Yet this wider scientific interchange, crossing the Cold War divide, was seldom conveyed to the public at large, where knowledge of Soviet achievements in these areas was practically nonexistent. Ideologically, therefore, the concept of the biosphere seems to have long fallen under a kind of interdict.
Still, the biosphere took center stage in 1970, with a special issue of Scientific American on the topic.12 In that same year the socialist biologist Barry Commoner warned in The Closing Circle of the vast changes in the human relation to the planet, beginning with the atomic age and the rise of modern developments in synthetic chemistry. Commoner pointed back to the early warning of capitalism’s environmental disruption of the cycles of life represented by Marx’s discussion of the rift in the metabolism of the soil.13
Two years later, Evgeni K. Fedorov, one of the world’s top climatologists and a member of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, as well as the leading Soviet supporter of Commoner’s analysis (writing the “Concluding Remarks” to the Russian edition), declared that the world would need to wean itself from fossil fuels: “A rise in temperature of the earth is inevitable if we do not confine ourselves to the use, as energy sources, of direct solar radiation and the hydraulic energy of wave and wind energy, but [choose instead to] obtain energy from fossil [fuels] or nuclear reactions.”14 For Fedorov, Marx’s theory of “metabolism between people and nature” constituted the methodological basis for an ecological approach to the question of the Earth System.15 It was in the 1960s and 1970s that climatologists in the USSR and the United States first found “evidence,” in the words of Clive Hamilton and Jaques Grinevald, of a “worldwide metabolism.”16
The rise of Earth System analysis in the succeeding decades was also strongly impacted by the remarkable view from outside, emanating from the early space missions. As Howard Odum, one of the leading figures in the formation of systems ecology, wrote in Environment, Power and Society:
We can begin a systems view of the earth through the macro-scope of the astronaut high above the earth. From an orbiting satellite, the earth’s living zone appears to be very simple. The thin water-and air-bathed shell covering the earth—the biosphere—is bounded on the inside by dense solids and on the outside by the near vacuum of outer space…. From the heavens it is easy to talk of gaseous balances, energy budgets per million years, and the magnificent simplicity of the overall metabolism of the earth’s thin outer shell. With the exception of energy flow, the geobiosphere for the most part is a closed system of the type whose materials are cycled and reused.17
“The mechanism of overgrowth,” threatening this “overall metabolism,” Odum went on to state, “is capitalism.”18 Today’s concept of the Anthropocene thus reflects, on the one hand, a growing recognition of the rapidly accelerating role of anthropogenic drivers in disrupting the biogeochemical processes and planetary boundaries of the Earth System and, on the other, a dire warning that the world, under “business as usual,” is being catapulted into a new ecological phase—one less conducive to maintaining biological diversity and a stable human civilization.
It is the bringing together of these two aspects of the Anthropocene—variously viewed as the geological and the historical, the natural and social, the climate and capitalism—in one single, integrated view, that constitutes the main achievement of Facing the Anthropocene. Angus demonstrates that “fossil capitalism,” if not stopped, is a runaway train, leading to global environmental apartheid and what the great British Marxist historian E. P. Thompson referred to as the threatened historical stage of “exterminism,” in which the conditions of existence of hundreds of millions, perhaps billions of people will be upended, and the very basis of life as we know it endangered. Moreover, this has its source in what Odum called “imperial capitalism,” imperiling the lives of the most vulnerable populations on the planet in a system of forced global
