This article is adapted from the foreword to Ian Angus,Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System(Monthly Review Press, 2016).
The Anthropocene, viewed as a new geological epoch displacing the Holocene epoch of the last 10,000 to 12,000 years, represents what has been called an “anthropogenic rift” in the history of the planet.2 Formally introduced into the contemporary scientific and environmental discussion by climatologist Paul Crutzen in 2000, it stands for the notion that human beings have become the primary emergent geological force affecting the future of the Earth system. Although often traced to the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century, the Anthropocene is probably best seen as arising in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Recent scientific evidence suggests that the period from around 1950 on exhibits a major spike, marking a Great Acceleration in human impacts on the environment, with the most dramatic stratigraphic trace of the anthropogenic rift to be found in fallout radionuclides from nuclear weapons testing.3
Viewed in this way, the Anthropocene can be seen as corresponding roughly to the rise of the modern environmental movement, which had its beginnings in the protests led by scientists against above-ground nuclear testing after the Second World War, and was to emerge as a wider movement following the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962. Carson’s book was soon followed in the 1960s by the very first warnings, by Soviet and U.S. scientists, of accelerated and irreversible global warming.4 It is this dialectical interrelation between the acceleration into the Anthropocene and the acceleration of a radical environmentalist imperative in response that constitutes the central theme of Ian Angus’s marvelous new book. It is his ability to give us insights into the Anthropocene as a new emergent level of society-nature interaction brought on by historical change—and how the new ecological imperatives it generates have become the central question confronting us in the twenty-first century—that makes Facing the Anthropocene so indispensable. (ibid)
“Nature, the nature that preceded human history,” Karl Marx and Frederick Engels remarked as early as 1845, “no longer exists anywhere (except perhaps on a few Australian coral islands of recent origin).”6 Similar views were presented by George Perkins Marsh, in Man and Naturein 1864, two years before Ernst Haeckel coined the word ecology, and three years before Marx published the first volume of Capital, with its warning of the metabolic rift in the human relation to the earth.7 (ibid)
It is capitalism and the alienated global environment it has produced that constitutes our “burning house” today. Mainstream environmentalists, faced with this monstrous dilemma, have generally chosen to do little more than contemplate it, watching and making minor adjustments to their interior surroundings while flames lick the roof and the entire structure threatens to collapse around them. The point, rather, is to change it, to rebuild the house of civilization under different architectural principles, creating a more sustainable metabolism of humanity and the earth. The name of the movement to achieve this, rising out of the socialist and radical environmental movements, is ecosocialism, and Facing the Anthropocene is its most up-to-date and eloquent manifesto. (ibid)
“Nature, the nature that preceded human history,” Karl Marx and Frederick Engels remarked as early as 1845, “no longer exists anywhere (except perhaps on a few Australian coral islands of recent origin).”6 Similar views were presented by George Perkins Marsh, in Man and Naturein 1864, two years before Ernst Haeckel coined the word ecology, and three years before Marx published the first volume of Capital, with its warning of the metabolic rift in the human relation to the earth.7 (ibid)
It is capitalism and the alienated global environment it has produced that constitutes our “burning house” today. Mainstream environmentalists, faced with this monstrous dilemma, have generally chosen to do little more than contemplate it, watching and making minor adjustments to their interior surroundings while flames lick the roof and the entire structure threatens to collapse around them. The point, rather, is to change it, to rebuild the house of civilization under different architectural principles, creating a more sustainable metabolism of humanity and the earth. The name of the movement to achieve this, rising out of the socialist and radical environmental movements, is ecosocialism, and Facing the Anthropocene is its most up-to-date and eloquent manifesto. (ibid)
