The Anthropocene and Histories of Inequality

Crutzen and Stoermer date the Anthropocene to the industrial era: “We propose the latter part of the 18th century … Such a starting date also coincides with James Watt’s invention of the steam engine in 1784.” (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000, 17-18). This is a scientific periodization that brings analytical and experimental narratives of planetary health into collision with historical narratives of sustainability. The latter tend to be socially-embedded narratives that commonly include accounts of industrialization, urbanization, colonialism, and global economies of extraction. The late eighteenth century is often described as the Age of Reason’s high point. Rhetorically, a new agent of history was summoned into being: a reasonable, evidence-seeking man who was autonomous, freed from the bonds of religion and tradition; who was rational, objective, and whose actions were guided by science, in the universal interests of humanity. This is the agent of history who is implicitly called to action in the abstract ethical calls for climate protection. A twenty-first-century Universal Man must act, it seems, to right an eighteenth-century wrong. Since we – humans – have altered the earth’s climate in ways that promise to make the planet inhospitable to future generations, the argument goes, it’s up to us to clean up our mess, so that our planet might remain habitable for our grandchildren. In practice, this abstract ethical argument has run into obstacles, because of the ways in which it obscures more complex global histories of science and technology. I will argue for the importance of colonial and post-colonial environmental histories in thinking through the practical challenges of the Anthropocene. Thinking from complicated global histories of the environment might offer us ways to think about ecological futures that link the notion of the ‘human’ with the histories of ‘difference’ in which it is implicated.