Posed: Good or Bad Anthropocene?
It depends on you.
I had two ambitious ideas for resource Friday today, but I’m going to punt on both. I was sitting in the dentist chair this morning getting a crown on a cracked tooth, and my jaw hurts.
In any case, apropos of yesterday’s essay, this new post from Breakthrough just hit my inbox, and it’s right down our alley here at Trying-to-Be-Good-Humans-in-the-Anthropocene Central.
The post is about the recent AWG’s (Anthropocene Working Group’s) rejection of the label “Anthropocene” for our present age. The rejection was appropriate not so much because of the overly-specific proposed dating (it can all be pinpointed to 1952, don’t ya know?) — although there is that — but because the proposal was felt to be politically motivated and ideologically rigged to an inevitably bad Anthropocene.
Formalizing a moral indictment of our species into the geologic record was not, officially, the goal of the AWG, the committee of mostly stratigraphers which launched in 2009 to determine whether and when the Earth had shifted from the Holocene to a new epoch. But it is clear that moral clarity is precisely the work many on the committee were hoping “The Anthropocene” would do in the discourse.
Also:
[Australian ethicist Clive] Hamilton, for one, made his intentions clear in his 2014 essay. “Things are bad,” he wrote, “and if we carry on as we are, things will be very bad.” The purpose of the stratigraphic Anthropocene, to its partisans, was explicitly to advance an anti-consumerist and anti-industrial ecological politics.
All things considered, rejecting a politically and moralistically motivated proposal does not mean that the economics and politics — and ethics — of it all shouldn’t take center stage. It’s that the answer shouldn’t be pre-determined from the outset, as if “written in stone” by geologists themselves.
So, wisely, the IUGS (International Union of Geological Sciences) recognized the importance of the Anthropocene as a useful concept.
“the Anthropocene as a concept will continue to be widely used not only by Earth and environmental scientists, but also by social scientists, politicians and economists, as well as by the public at large.” (Source PDF)
The concluding remarks of Breakthrough’s post go to the heart of what I’m doing here at Pose Ponder.
The scholars who advocated a hard end to the Holocene did so relying on shabby science for a transparently political agenda. One or the other might be excused—science is alway messy, and never totally apolitical. But the combination gave good reason for the IUGS to reject their recommendation. The rest of us, meanwhile, should breathe a sigh of relief, as this decision marks a break with the long history of outsourcing sociocultural questions of value to the ideological scientism of naturalists, ecologists, and conservationists. Because at the end of the day, the question of whether modern humanity’s existence is a good thing or not—whether we can make a Good Anthropocene—is a question for society, not stratigraphy.
As Taming Complexity also reminds us, science is never apolitical. Whether it has become “ideological scientism” is a more extreme accusation I can’t answer. But I can certainly agree that responsible citizens and humans living not only in the Anthropocene but in a free society must break with any “long history of outsourcing sociocultural questions of value” to whomever we might be tempted to do so, whether to scientists, economists, politicians or policy wonks, big business, or media pundits.
At the end of the day, The Question posed, to be pondered and acted upon, is whether modern humanity’s existence is going to be a good thing or not.
It is a Question for us.
