Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System
by Ian Angus
280 pages / $19 / 9781583676110
Reviewed by Claudia Antunes for Samauma
SUMAÚMA – Many people have questioned the decision by the International Union of Geological Sciences’ sub-commission not to endorse the idea that we have entered the Anthropocene. Could this decision lend support to climate change deniers?
IAN ANGUS – You have to understand that this is a formal process that takes place within the geological organization, which has historically been very conservative. And from the beginning of this discussion of the Anthropocene, many in the older generation of geologists have been hostile to the whole process. First of all, this is because the discussion didn’t start with geologists; it started with earth system scientists, so it came from outside. Secondly, what’s very clear is that this is a huge social and economic crisis, in addition to a natural crisis. And you’re dealing here with people, many of whom spent their whole lives working for oil companies or mining companies, since that’s what geologists mostly do. So there’s resistance to the idea in general, and there’s just a lot of resistance to any change. In some sense, it’s not surprising this happened. But in this case, we have the addition of political currents that influenced the process and are strongly opposed to social change. There will be lots of appeals against the decision.
What political effects will that have?
I suspect the people who deny climate change will use this. They’ll say: “See, the geologists don’t agree with you.” But the reality is also that the concept of the Anthropocene, whether or not the geologists formally endorse it, has been widely accepted in the world of the earth sciences. Most other disciplines and very large numbers of geologists have already accepted the concept is here.
Some claim the sticking point was about when the Anthropocene began. Some argue that, more broadly, it can be said that the Earth system began changing with agriculture. Does this argument make sense?
Certainly that’s the main argument behind the decision. But what they’re doing is ignoring the distinction between change and qualitative change to the system. There is no question that human beings have been changing their environments for thousands of years. What we haven’t had before the past 70 years, 50 years, is change that actually alters the way the earth system works, an actual break with the conditions that have been dominant on Earth for some 12,000 years. The people who voted against formally endorsing the new geological epoch say we’ve been changing things all along. I don’t think most of these people are climate change deniers; they would say, yes, the climate is changing, but technology is going to fix it. The basic argument is: we’ve changed the planet before, we’ve invented new ways of doing things, and we’ll continue to do so. In some sense, they’ve taken the word Anthropocene, which comes from human in Greek, and say humans have been doing things forever. They’ve rejected the idea that the new epoch is the result of radical changes in human society that are modifying Earth.
In your book, you offer a clear explanation of the previous role of carbon in the atmosphere, and how this has changed in recent decades as a result of human activities. Could you summarize this explanation a little?
If we go back some two billion years, there have been times when the earth was frozen solid and other times when the whole earth was tropical and even more than tropical. These shifts occurred naturally, as a result of the way the earth’s orbit works and other factors. But we know that for the past two to three million years at least, the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has varied within very small limits. Somebody has described carbon dioxide as our thermostat: Turn it up a little bit, it gets hotter; turn it down a little bit, it gets colder. We can look at the record of carbon dioxide, which is preserved mainly in the ice in Antarctica and in Greenland, and we can show how the earth’s climate has changed closely in line with the variation in the amount of carbon dioxide. And the range of changes was very small. During the last Ice Age, which ended 12,000 years ago—a very short time in Earth history—the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was not much less than it has been until recently. It only took a small shift [for the transition to the Holocene to occur]. To be precise, in the last 11,700 years, the Earth’s climate has been stable enough that it has been a good place for human civilizations. All the great human civilizations developed during this period, when you had a climate warm enough for agriculture, when ice was restricted to certain limited parts of Earth, and so on. We’ve had variations, but small ones. And then in the past century, and really in the past 40 or 50 years, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has started to soar. It’s getting close to double what it was for that long period. And we can already see the consequences of this. The climate is shifting. We see this happening in real time and much, much faster than it has ever happened by natural processes. When you go back into some of the big extinctions that were caused by periods of shifting climate, if you look at the geological record, you’ll see that the amount of carbon dioxide rose or fell, and then a million years later, the consequences were felt in the climate. Whereas we’re seeing the consequences in a matter of years or decades.
You mentioned that some people believe humans will invent technology to deal with this. But even the International Energy Agency, formed of 31 member countries and 13 association countries, doesn’t think so. According to the agency, carbon capture technologies fall far short of what is needed to control global heating and extreme weather events.
Exactly. It’s really a part of capitalist ideology that no matter what the problem, there’s a technical fix. Because if there’s no technical fix, then there’s something wrong with the society, and the defenders of the society don’t want to believe this. But for any serious science on the topic, even if tomorrow we invented a carbon capture technology that would remove CO2 from the atmosphere effectively and quickly, it would still probably be centuries before it had any significant effect. Today, a very small number of carbon capture projects are removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, and the amount collected is the equivalent of taking a few hundred automobiles off the roads. It just is nothing compared with the size of the problem.
I’d like to situate the ideas about ecosocialism that you set out in your book, including your emphasis on the concept of metabolic rift in the history of anti-capitalist thought. What kind of current of thought do you represent and who are your predecessors? Who has inspired your thinking?
I’ve been involved in socialist movements here in Canada my whole life, since I was a teenager. In the 1960s and 1970s, we tended to say socialism would solve everything—sort of the socialist equivalent of the capitalist idea that technology would solve it all. The environmental issue wasn’t considered a big deal. Now that’s not fair to the whole of the left. [U.S. sociologist] John Bellamy Foster has written a book called The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology, which shows how there were radical scientists from the time of Marx into the late 20th century who were seriously looking at these questions and showing how economic and ecological change are related and need to be addressed together. But it was really from the 1980s onwards that a layer of socialists started to call attention to environmental destruction. Initially, they didn’t talk so much about global warming but about pollution, loss of biodiversity, the over-exploitation of Nature.
But did Marx talk about this in his works?
There has been a tendency to think Marxism had nothing to say about this. Sometimes I think it’s because people have read only three or four books by Marx. But Marx wrote an enormous amount, as did [Friedrich] Engels [Marx’s intellectual partner, who lived from 1820 to 1895]. In this debate, the people who influenced me the most were two American scholars. One is John Bellamy Foster, who I’ve just mentioned, a professor at the University of Oregon and the editor of the [U.S. socialist journal] Monthly Review. And the other was Paul Burkett [1956-2024], who was a professor at the University of Indiana. Almost simultaneously but working separately, they published two very powerful books. Foster’s was Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature [Monthly Review Press]. And Burkett’s was Marx and Nature: a Red and Green Perspective [Monthly Review Press]. What they did was go back to Marx’s work to see what Marx actually had to say, not what people thought he had to say. And don’t forget that a lot of what people thought Marx had to say was influenced by the Soviet Union’s intensive production policies. What you saw in the USSR was a tendency to copy what the capitalist countries had done. People who were environmentally conscious looked at that and saw no difference. So they tended to write off Marxism because of the activities of one specific group of Marxists. Well, what both Burkett and Foster did, but from very different angles, was to show that Marx’s work contained a deep ecological analysis. The word “ecology” hadn’t been invented, nor did Marx ever write “I’m an ecologist.” Marx, as we know, was a materialist. His starting point was that people have to eat before they can do anything. We have to eat; we have to meet our physical needs. In order to do that, we have to produce, and it’s the economy at large that actually creates humans. It’s our interaction with Nature that makes all this possible. All of that is there, but people didn’t look for it because they weren’t thinking about the environmental issue. Foster, Burkett, and then other people who followed them did. One of the things that came out of this search, and that Foster particularly emphasized, is how much Marx used the concept of metabolism, which was a brand-new idea then. The word originally appeared in German as Stoffwechsel in 1815. Around the 1840s, it started to become a big thing in science. Scientists discovered the cell, they discovered how soil worked, and they realized all life depended on this constant exchange and interaction of energy and material. Life wasn’t possible without taking materials from Nature, but also returning materials to Nature. And all of these processes were cyclical. If Nature didn’t constantly recycle everything, life wouldn’t have lasted. This led to the emergence of a new category, the “life sciences.”
Did Marx follow this debate?
These sciences developed in the 1840s and 1850s, at the same time that Marx was writing. He probably got the idea from a man named Roland Daniels, a communist who took part in the uprisings of 1848 in Germany. Daniels was a doctor and scientist, and wrote a book called Mikrokosmos, which took the concept of metabolism and applied it to how society worked. Marx had already been using these concepts, but without the words. In the 1850s, however, he began integrating them into his more general analysis of society and the economy. This appears in the texts he wrote in the 1850s, called Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy [Penguin Classics], and particularly in the 1860s, when he was writing Capital. Marx was especially influenced by a man named Justus von Liebig [1803-1873], a German chemist. England had a problem with declining agricultural productivity, while their population was growing. Liebig was invited by their agricultural associations to examine the problem. He looked at things and said, “You’re taking all of the nutrients out of the soil and you’re not putting any back. You can’t do that forever. There’s a metabolism here that you have to maintain.” That’s the initial point of this concept of a link between how the economy at large works, how we feed people, how Nature works, how we grow our food. Marx read von Liebig and in the 1860s, when he was working on Capital, he wrote to Engels and said he’d learned more from reading von Liebig than all the other German economists put together….
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