Gray environmentalism

https://www.threads.net/@ezraklein/post/C6MTBXNO7KC/?xmt=AQGzo6ciiw-XFPTvBvW3pqpHEG9iiRtpFR9fKQtRYaEnfw

Nature, poetry, love, Ada Limón

The brilliant folks in the audio department at @nytopinion turned my conversation with poet laureate Ada Limón into a beautifully distilled little podcast. Eight and a half minutes of love for the natural world and love for poetry. Pure joy.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/25/opinion/poetry-nature-solastalgia.html?unlocked_article_code=1.nE0.tGcQ.rtyCVXvvz0mQ&smid=url-share

Documenting climate change

"Adventure with a purpose" Photographer James Balog has become one of the foremost chroniclers of human-caused climate change, as his cameras have tracked the dramatic effects – vanishing ice, rising seas, fires, and the toll climate change is taking on all living things. He tells correspondent Ben Tracy that his photos are his testimony, a record of our past and present, and a message for the future.

How wildlife crossings protect both animals and people

To protect the movement of wildlife impeded by busy roadways, a series of manmade overpasses and underpasses throughout the United States helps animals big and small safely get across the street, preventing collisions and saving lives. About 1,500 of these structures already have been built. Correspondent Conor Knighton looks at how they have protected genetic diversity in animal populations while also greatly reducing roadkill. He also visits the site of the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing near Los Angeles, which when complete will help cougars cross one of the busiest highways in the country.

The Weight of Nature

 

How deeply felt and embodied is our connection to the wellbeing of the planet? 

Neuroscientist and environmental journalist Clayton Aldern has travelled the world to meet scientists and doctors working at the intersections of environmental science, psychology and neuroscience to synthesize a new, interdisciplinary approach to a novel field — the neuroscience of climate change. 

His new book The Weight of Nature is an impassioned work of research and storytelling, documenting the emotional and physical toll of a warming climate on our minds, brains and bodies. In the book, he explores how our beliefs, language, communities, family ties, cultural narratives, imagery and soundscapes are all being warped by the repeated shocks and stresses of climate change, reshaping our very humanity, and contributing to a growing public health crisis that has gone largely unreported. 

Join Clayton Aldern at the RSA as he argues that it is only by living in fuller intimacy with our planet that we will apply the compassion, resilience and courage to act to save it.

From Past to Present - Philosophy of the Anthropocene - Section 5

      This week we turn our focus to a new text, The Task of Philosophy in the Anthropocene: Axial Echoes In Global Space, edited by Richard Polt and Jon Wittrock. In the Introduction, Polt and Wittrock explain that this book aims to rethink the responsibilities of philosophy in this new era – the Anthropocene. They state:

Anthropocene: the word has quickly become a byword for what many sense is a turning point in human and planetary history, an urgent new condition. It is surrounded not only by dread but also by curiosity: if we are truly entering an unprecedented and unpredictable epoch, new ways of understanding and dealing with ourselves and our world are bound to emerge in the coming decades and centuries. (p.ix)

     They then explain that the Anthropocene has exposed unique problems in many fields: science, technology, politics, history, literature, art, and, yes, philosophy. The authors state:

What do philosophers –  these often ignored, quarreling theorizers –  have to contribute to these issues? Are they irrelevant? In fact, it can be argued that they have a special responsibility to participate in the discussion. Like every major phenomenon, the Anthropocene demands to be understood philosophically; furthermore, modern philosophy was itself a major contributor to the rise of modern technology and thus to the dramatic transformation of the earth. The methods and distinctions of thinkers such as Descartes can be credited, but also blamed, for humanity's accelerated ability to analyze and alter its environment. More broadly, the philosophical aspiration to transcend the particular by rationally investigating essences eventually led to the universalizing theories of nature and humanity that have, in the modern age, dissolved former ecosystems and traditions. Thus, beyond the task of understanding the Anthropocene and its roots, philosophers may have a responsibility to ask whether there is anything that they, as philosophers, can do. Can we affect the future for the better? (p.x)

These are the questions that the writings in this text seek to grapple with.

     The authors next discuss their methods and some distinctive features of the writings in this text. Firstly, they have challenged the contributors to think on a scale as grand as the issues of the Anthropocene itself: “...a perspective that takes into account the entire history of philosophy and the history of the Earth itself.” (p.x) Secondly, they “...have focused less on concrete, short-term recommendations than on exploratory ideas that may stimulate new directions.” (p.x) Lastly, in one of my favorite excerpts from this text, they claim that they “…except the full and daunting scope of the task that philosophy has traditionally been assigned:

[T]o offer holistic views of history and the contemporary world, to critically scrutinize fundamental assumptions of other disciplines and within society at large, to venture into new areas of questioning (which may later develop into more precise sciences or areas of concrete inventions), and to offer new and arresting concepts, investigating their implications and visualizing unexpected connections. (p.x-xi)

To me, this sounds like it could be part of ‘the philosopher’s code’.

     However, to affect the future in positive ways, philosophy may have to acknowledge some of its potential missteps. One of these missteps, as the title of the text alludes to, is the idea of the “Axial Age” proposed by Karl Jaspers and the ideas of progress that accompanied it. The authors explain that Jaspers’s proposed Axial Age arose out of a whole host of “axial traditions” that carry with them their own issues. (p.xi) “Axial traditions conceptualized divisions between an imminent domain, or a world of the senses, and a transcendent domain, which provides an ultimate orientation for the former, and the promise of salvation or liberation from its woes.” (p.xii) However, as is discussed later by another contributor, this also helped divide man from the natural world and see themselves as superior to the world they rely on for survival. The authors write:

What we must not do is simply assume that our established conceptual systems are up to the task of thinking through the Anthropocene, as if they were not laden with a history that is entangled with the rise of modern science, technology, and industry. It has not been possible for this volume to address all the major axial traditions nor do all our chapters focus on exploring them, but all our contributors agree that it is against the backdrop of millennia of cultural history that humanity is now facing the planet-wide effects of its growth and activities. Axial echoes resound through global space. Indeed, one of the major points of bringing up Jasper's contested notion is that it immediately emphasizes that the Anthropocene is becoming the new “axis” on which the entire globe turns…

Furthermore, while science and technology can make clearly defined progress in some regards, it may well be that philosophy is challenged to return perpetually to its beginnings and to the most basic issues –  and the ideal of progress may be one of the presuppositions of modernity that philosophy must call into question. An unthinking insistence on progress may block the arrival of genuinely new ideas, phenomena, and ways of life. (p.xii-xiv) 

     The authors then proceed to give a brief description of each of the contributions to the texts, which we will skip here. Instead, we will examine one of those works in detail. 

    The work we will examine is The Coming of the Post-Axial Age by John Michael Greer. He begins by pointing out the reduction in popularity experienced by philosophy since the 1950s. He explains:

Though philosophy was never really part of the cultural mainstream at that time, it had the same kind of widespread following as jazz or science fiction. Attendees at any reasonably large cocktail party had a reasonable chance of meeting someone who was into philosophy, and those who knew where to look in any big city or college town with pretensions to culture could find at least one bar, bookstore, or all-night coffee shop where philosophy geeks talked earnestly into the small hours about Kant or Kierkegaard. (p.23) 

     However, today philosophy’s continuation, even within the collegiate atmosphere, is up for debate. The author points out that, though those of us who still engage in this ancient practice may be disheartened by this fact, we would be remiss to ignore the facts and not try to get ahead of it. Greer points out that “...philosophy has died at least once in the history of Western philosophy itself, during the dark ages that followed the fall of Roman civilization.” (p.24) And, he states:

The idea that an era of intellectual sophistication and subtlety can give way to an era of superstition and crude empirical generalization is unthinkable to many educated people today, even though history shows no shortage of examples… Behind that reaction lies the metanarrative of progress, the modern world's most widely accepted way of interpreting history.

At the heart of the metanarrative of progress is a rhetorical strategy that assigns certain arbitrarily chosen events of past and present the status of irreversible forward steps in the grand march of humanity, and tacitly assigns a less significant status to events that failed to further movement in whatever direction the grand march of humanity is held to follow. (p.24)

Greer thinks this is a dangerous metanarrative and questions its validity. He begins his next section by attacking Karl Jaspers’s theory of the Axial Age as “...the most important turning point in history.” (p.24)

     Greer explains that Jaspers’s theory “...built on the foundations laid by Hegel’s philosophy of history, but – like most twentieth-century European historiography –  it also reacted against the ideas of a more controversial figure in German intellectual life, the historian Oswald Spengler.” (p.25) To help understand these two competing ideas of history, the author writes:

Hegel famously argued for a theory of history in which the ancient civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia, the classical civilizations of Greece and Rome, and the modern civilizations of Europe formed the three stages of a single narrative of human progress, to which the historical experiences of all other societies were mere addenda…

[Whereas,]...Spengler argued that each great culture traces out its own historical trajectory, subject to common laws of development and decline, and this history unfolds in a predictable series of stages from birth to death. The intellectual life of a great culture is thus as distinct as its history: “Each culture has its own new possibilities of self-expression which arise, ripen, decay, and never return. There is not one sculpture, one painting, one mathematics, one physics, but many, each in its deepest essence different from the others.” 

From Spengler’s standpoint, as a result, the metanarrative of progress is a twofold falsification. To begin with, our civilization has risen but not yet fallen, and therefore judges its own history as well as that of other civilizations through the distorting lens of an incomplete experience of the historical process. On a deeper level, to Spengler, our idea of progress is simply a reflection of our own civilization's necessarily ethnocentric sense of values… 

Jaspers sought to prove that the rise of modern industrial civilization marked a permanent change in human affairs and not, as Spengler argued, the prelude to the Western world's decline and fall. The concept of the Axial Age was born out of that search.

Jaspers argued that the period between 800 and 200 BC represented an irrevocable turning point in human thought, a hinge of history dividing a lower from a higher realm of cultural and intellectual phenomenon. Before the Axial Age, mythic thought, primitive superstition, the timeless repetition of archaic irrationalities; after it, philosophy, reason, revealed religion, humanity set free to pursue its truly human capacities –  this, at least, according to Jaspers. (p.25-26)

But, was this hubris? In America, at this moment, one has to wonder if philosophy and reason will prevail. And, throughout the world, as we face the ecological issues resulting from the age of men, we have to ask if our intellect is enough to save us. 

     This author asks several questions that must be addressed, even if we accept Jaspers’s claim of “the irrevocable nature of progress.” (p.26) “What exactly was it that appeared with the Axial Age? Can anything be said about the cause of this apparent break with the past? And is Jaspers correct that the change heralded by the coming of the axial age is an irreversible event in human history?” (p.26) These questions remain unanswered by Jaspers or any other modern philosopher. There is one aspect of Jaspers’s argument that Greer does not dispute, however, and that is that the rise of philosophy did occur in the time and places that Jaspers claims. In the next section of his work, Greer proposes to answer some of his own questions. 

     Greer states that Jaspers admitted that there must be a cause for the coming about of the Axial Age. “He concluded, however, that it is impossible to identify any historical cause for the coming of the Axial Age, while pleading gamely that he was not trying to suggest a supernatural cause for the phenomenon. Whether or not this surrender to the unknowable was an attempt to create an opening for a Christian apologetics of history, along the lines of the famous “God of the gaps” argument…it is by no means required by the evidence.” (p.27-28) For Greer, the spread of “...literacy beyond a scribal class” is one feature that was evident in this time and these places. (p.28) And, he alludes to the fact that Jaspers may have intentionally ignored this fact because it would have detracted from the romanticism and supposed preordained nature of the Axial Age. 

     However, Greer points out, referring to the work of William V. Harris, that there are several important occurrences when a society transitions from scribal literacy to craftsman’s literacy. Scribal literacy is Harris’s term “for the possession of literacy solely by a scribal elite associated with palaces and temples, who use writing solely for record-keeping and other practical tasks…In contrast, [c]raftsman's literacy is Harris's term for the possession of literacy by a significant minority of the male population, including skilled craftspeople, landowners, public officials, and the like, while unskilled male laborers, farmers, the poor, and women generally remain illiterate.” (p.28) And, when a society transitions from a primarily oral society, with only scribal literacy, to one where a large minority can read, the changes are profound. Greer writes:

When literacy is no longer limited to a professional class but spreads through a significant minority of the population, writing and reading are no longer bound to the context of public performance, and the individual reader, pondering a document in solitude, becomes a recognized phenomenon. One crucial consequence is that for the first time, language can be detached from the other elements of oral communication and experienced in isolation. The meaning of words, rather than the character and intentions of speakers, accordingly becomes central to learned discourse.

The impact of this change can best be understood by observing the difference between mythology, the standard intellectual discourse of oral and scribal societies, and philosophy the standard intellectual discourse of societies that have achieved craftsman's literacy. Every mythology is a description of the actions and intentions of persons; every philosophy, by contrast, is a description of the properties and relations of abstractions. Mythology thus comes naturally in a society in which every linguistic act is part of a personal performance. Philosophy, in turn, comes naturally in a society in which words have become separated from the other, nonverbal elements of personal communication can therefore be experienced and understood on their own as impersonal markers for abstract ideas. (p.29)

     What does this mean for a society in which literacy rates are plummeting? Greer provides one stirring answer to this question from history. “In post-Roman Europe, to cite only one of the many examples, literacy once again became the preserve of a very small body of religious scribes, and mythology promptly replaced philosophy as the common mode of intellectual discourse.” (p.29) Could this still happen in today’s age? Has it already begun in some places?

     Greer continues by adding that, if an increase in literacy were what caused the coming of the Axial Age, it would help explain the “triumph of the logos.” (p.30) He explains this curious development as “...the conviction that the truth about the world consists of ideas that can be expressed in verbal formulae, and that the rest of reality is merely an expression of the truth known in words. Put perhaps too bluntly, it is the belief that words are more real than the experiences they describe.” (p.30) He provides some examples of this phenomenon:

When Parmenides placed in the mouth of a goddess that the world known by reason is the true world, and the world experienced by the senses was purely illusory, he sounded the keynote of the Axial Age…Plato's concept of the Ideas and Aristotle's application of verbal logic to the nonverbal phenomena of nature can usefully be seen as adaptations of the Parmenidean principle in the service of more thoroughly developed accounts of the world. (p.30)

Greer adds that this phenomenon was even more pervasive throughout India and in Chinese philosophical debates. 

     However, Greer explains that this phenomenon is best observed in the religions of these times. He states that the ancient religions, often polytheistic and pagan, focused on “...rituals and customs central to religious life, and either had no sacred writings or assigned them a secondary importance.” (p.31) However, with the rise of the logos, the newly formed religions of the Axial Ages “...makes belief in doctrines taught in a sacred scripture central to religious life and gives to traditional rituals and customs a secondary importance.” (p.31) Additionally, Greer points out that, just as the decline in literacy increases the belief in mythology, it also leads to a rise in ritual and a decline in the focus on scripture. 

     After discussing the emergence of craftsman’s literacy as a potential cause for the ‘triumph of the logos’ and the beginning of the so-called Axial Age, Greer then addresses the idea of progress proposed by Hegel, Jaspers, and others. He points out that throughout the nineteenth-century contentions within the philosophical community “...had the unexpected result of demonstrating that it was impossible to prove the exclusive validity of any one account of the world to the satisfaction of open-minded individuals who had accepted some other account of the world. Among the many consequences of this demonstration was the undermining of any attempt to apply the metanarrative of progress to the history of philosophy.” (p.32) Calling on the work of E.F. Schumacher, Greer states that the central problems of philosophy have divergent qualities. He continues:

Thus, the old dream of an explicit philosophical account of the entirety of the world, the final expression of the old faith in the truth of verbal formulae, falls at last. Along with it falls the hope of a final philosophy to which all lines will eventually converge…

No final philosophy, no all-encompassing and wholly explicit synthesis embracing the fundamentals of human thought will ever exist, and attempts to justify philosophy in terms of its movement toward some such synthesis, along the lines of the metanarrative of progress discussed earlier, and misguided at best. (p.33-34)

     Importantly, however, Greer points out that this does not mean that philosophy has no value. It simply means that we need to reevaluate “...what exactly philosophy is for.” (p.34) And, in the next section of his work, Greer sets out to discuss a new “meaning of philosophy” by comparing the development of philosophical thought with the development of growing grains. (p.34) He explains that cultivating grain crops, as opposed to less durable crops, was what allowed civilization to develop and thrive. The ability of grains to “be transported and stored for long periods without spoilage…allowed modes of economic centralization no earlier form of human subsistence had made possible.” (p.35) However, though the cultivation of grain was also heralded as an “irreversible forward step in the grand upward march of humanity,” there are many places on earth where grain cultivation faltered and civilizations then failed. 

     Greer argues that there is something to be gained, even through the losses. He writes: 

The failures as well as the successes deserve attention in any meaningful understanding of the consequences of growing grains.

I suggest that the same approach might usefully be applied to the consequences of expanded literacy, philosophy among them. Like the practice of growing grain, the practice of diffusing literacy beyond a scribal elite opened up possibilities no one imagined in advance and set in motion a cascade of consequences that laid the groundwork for a great deal of modern culture. In both cases, those possibilities and consequences emerged promptly whenever the underlying practice became sufficiently widespread.

Neither the practices nor their results were irreversible…Neither the practices nor their results, for that matter, were inevitable…A strong case can be made that, barring some event drastic enough to abolish either practice and put their recovery out of reach, both grain agriculture and more-than-scribal literacy, with all their consequences, represent enduring additions to the range of possibilities open to human societies and individuals…

If philosophy and the other products of the Axial Age are understood as possibilities rather than destinies, then human history presents no single line of progress. Instead, it offers a smorgasbord of options from which individuals and societies are within their rights to pick and choose, without that act of choice somehow making them less than…human. (p.36)

     In light of these findings, Greer suggests we work to retool philosophy into a practice more appropriate for the Anthropocene. He expounds:

Another lesson that can be drawn from the history of grain agriculture, though, has much to offer philosophers as our species moves deeper into a challenging future…As current stocks of fossil fuels, groundwater, topsoil, and other necessities are exhausted, the areas suited for agriculture can be expected to shrink considerably, forcing human societies in those areas to choose between retooling their subsistence strategies and going extinct…

A similar project on a more abstract plane presents itself as an essential project for today's philosophers, and those of tomorrow, should philosophy as a living tradition survive the troubles of the near future…Some part of the responsibility for the rising spiral of crises now besetting the industrial world, in fact, might reasonably be assigned to habits of thought that fixate on such abstractions as the metanarrative of progress, and ignore gritty realities such as the dependence of changes arbitrarily singled out as “progressive” on the rapid depletion of nonrenewable resources and the wholesale dumping of poisonous waste into the biosphere. At the same time, the extraordinary development of abstract reflection and philosophical thought set in motion by the Axial Age has yielded much that may turn out to be of value to the human societies of the far future. (p.36-37)

     Therefore, Greer suggests three projects, or tasks, for philosophers to focus their engagement on in the near future. He writes:

[O]ne of the most significant tasks toward which philosophers might choose to devote their time and effort just now is the act of reassessing the heritage of philosophy from the Axial Age to the present, sorting out those ventures that proved to be productive from those that turned out sterile, those that taught useful ways of thinking from those that encouraged people to lose themselves in dysfunctional habits of mind, and so on…The reassessment I am proposing thus does not aim at a final synthesis of philosophy, but a diverse set of explorations from which the future will make its own choices…

Another worthwhile project relevant to the future of philosophy is the presentation of core philosophical ideas in forms suited to the ordinary literate public…It was largely in the form of summaries, encyclopedias, and popularizations written in late Roman times that philosophical thinking survived in the West after the fall of Rome, and it was from the sources that philosophy was rekindled as scribal literacy gave way to craftsman's literacy in the Muslim world and medieval Europe.

The same thing might be worth aiming for as industrial civilization moves deeper into crisis, with an eye toward the rekindling of philosophy as a living tradition after the deindustrial dark ages ahead. The same principle that led botanists to establish a seed bank on the Arctic island of Svalbard might inspire philosophers to create an idea bank; ideas, fortunately for such a project, can be stored in much more compact forms than seeds and do not require refrigeration to stay viable for the long term. 

A third project, more challenging in some ways than the ones already mentioned, would involve sustained reflection on the incongruity between the mass literacy, universal education, and claims to intellectual superiority of contemporary industrial civilization, on the one hand, and the remarkable futility of attempts to turn contemporary industrial civilization from a self-destructive course by rational means. The failure of environmental activism to gain more than lip service from political institutions, even when the evidence of imminent crisis was overwhelming and the cost of inaction catastrophic, is a sobering lesson in the limits of reason. (p.37-39)

     Greer concludes by stating:

The impetus of the Axial Age has thus taken the project of human civilization as far as it can…I suggest that the age before us might be best understood simply as a post-Axial Age, a period not yet amenable to any more substantive definition, in which attempts to make sense of the intellectual legacies of the Axial Age will have to grapple with the failure of our time to make good on the apparent promise of abstract reasoning.

     Though we were not able to fully examine more of the works in this text, I highly recommend it to any philosopher who is engaging with the issues of the Anthropocene. There are eleven individual works compiled in this text, each examining a different way that philosophy could be used to aid in the crises brought on by the age of man. A couple more of my favorites include: On Nature and Liberation by Timothy Sean Quinn and The Voices of Nature: Toward a Polyphonic Conception of Philosophy by Thomas M. Alexander. I hope you will check it out for yourself.

Our next, and final, section will explore the text Anthropocene: A Very Short Introduction.

Why Aren’t We Saving the Urban Forests?

… Today is Earth Day and Arbor Day is on Friday. Both will be celebrated across the country by a great communal effort to plant trees.

I get it. There's something very heartwarming about watching a community come together to install a whole row of ornamental trees on a nature-impoverished city street, or to pick up a free seedling from one of the many tree giveaway efforts that sprout up among conservation nonprofits at this time of year. It feels good to dig a hole to the right depth and the right diameter, to set a baby tree down inside it and pat the soil gently around its roots. We are a tenderhearted species, and it feels very good to nurture a baby tree.

We just need to remember how good it feels to sit beneath the cooling shelter of mature trees, too. And we need to fight just as hard to save them as we work to replace the trees we've already lost.

Margaret Renkl

Happy Earth Day

Writing a newsletter about the unfolding catastrophe that is climate change offers less of a chance than I would like for unbridled good news. I sometimes imagine readers looking at the screen through their fingers, like the audience at a slasher film. But today—well, 54 years ago on this day 20 million Americans took to the streets—ten percent of the then population—and really gave birth to the modern environmental movement. So in their honor, I’m offering up only encouraging news today. Like the fact that California has now generated more than one hundred percent of its power needs from sun, wind, and hydro for big parts of almost every day this spring... Bill McKibben

The Fate of Earth Day

...liberals have come to take as a core creed the urgent need to reckon with global warming, and limit carbon emissions. To turn concern into action requires politics. The science of carbon emissions is there. The politics is not. On its anniversary, Earth Day is worth not just celebrating but also studying—as a story with political lessons. ♦

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/04/15/when-the-earth-moved?_gl=1*eh8bq7*_up*MQ..&gclid=05dc19316ca81fce994f7f12f1af4029&gclsrc=3p.ds

Earth Day & Silent Spring

Earth Day was largely inspired by Rachel Carson's book "Silent Spring." Here is the bittersweet story behind how and why she wrote it: https://www.themarginalian.org/2017/01/27/rachel-carson-silent-spring-dorothy-freeman/

In a nutshell

Carbon Dioxide Levels Have Passed a New Milestone

There’s 50 percent more carbon dioxide in the air than before the Industrial Revolution.

...Even if global emissions were brought down to half of their current value, we would still continue to add carbon dioxide to the air, causing further warming.

“You need to bring them essentially down to zero in order to stop warming,” Mr. McNeall said.

How much more warming will occur depends on how long it takes for this to happen.

On one hand, clean energy investments are booming, and renewable energy production is rising globally. But energy demand is also projected to rise, coal power plants are still being built, and some sectors of the economy — like construction and manufacturing — are harder to decarbonize, making the task ahead a steep challenge.

Even if the world exceeds the 1.5-degree threshold, “every fraction of a degree matters,” Mr. McNeall said.

“The closer that you can get to that threshold, the better.”

nyt

The “Epic Row” Over a New Epoch

Scientists, journalists, and artists often say that we live in the Anthropocene, a new age in which humans shape the Earth. Why do some leading geologists reject the term? Elizabeth Kolbert

Fall 2024

 Returning to MTSU, Fall 2024

PHIL 3340, Environmental Ethics

TEXTS:

• Paul Hawken, Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation –describes how an inclusive movement can engage the majority of humanity to save the world from the threat of global warming, with climate solutions that directly serve our children, the poor, and the excluded… with initiatives that include but go well beyond solar, electric vehicles, and tree planting to include such solutions as the fifteen-minute city, bioregions, azolla fern, food localization, fire ecology, decommodification, forests as farms, and the number one solution for the world: electrifying everything.
• William MacAskill, What We Owe the Future –argues for longtermism: that positively influencing the distant future is our time’s key moral priority… if we make wise choices now, our grandchildren will thrive, knowing we did everything we could to give them a world full of justice, hope and beauty.
• Bill McKibben, ed., American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau –can be read as a survey of the literature of American environmentalism, but above all, it should be enjoyed for the sheer beauty of the writing.
• Greta Thunberg, The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions –she shares her own stories of demonstrating and uncovering greenwashing around the world, revealing how much we have been kept in the dark. This is one of our biggest challenges, she shows, but also our greatest source of hope. Once we are given the full picture, how can we not act?
• David Wallace-Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming –a travelog of the near future and a meditation on how that future will look to those living through it—the ways that warming promises to transform global politics, the meaning of technology and nature in the modern world, the sustainability of capitalism and the trajectory of human progress.
• For more information contact Dr. Oliver – phil.oliver@mtsu.edu

From Past to Present - Philosophy of the Anthropocene - Section 4

      Continuing our journey, we complete The Great Acceleration, by J.R. McNeill and Peter Engelke. The last section of this book focuses on the effects of the Cold War and the rise of environmental movements around the world in its wake. The authors explain how the mindsets of the global powers during the Cold War era were focused so heavily on militarization and competition that they completely disregarded the effects of their actions on the natural world, and, often, even the human tolls.  They write:

One of the distinguishing features of the Cold War was its sustained militarism. In modern history, most countries, after major wars, reduce their military spending sharply, stop buying mountains of materiel, and cashiered most military personnel…During the Cold War, however, the major powers maintained high levels of military spending decade after decade. (p.155)

     Another characteristic of this time era was “gigantic state-sponsored infrastructure projects and development campaigns.” (p.156) Some examples of this are provided:

The United States in 1956, for example, authorized unheard of sums for the world's largest engineering project. The building of the interstate highway system reshuffled American landscapes, hastening suburbanization and altering wildlife migrations, among other effects. Like most acts of government, this decision had many motives behind it, but prominent among them was military preparedness in expectation of war with the USSR. In 1958 Mao's China launched a frenetic campaign to overtake Britain and the United States in economic production within only a few years, a quixotic quest known as the Great Leap Forward, and in 1964,...it undertook to build a new military-industrial complex from scratch. After the Sino-Soviet split, the Soviet Union for its part built a second Siberian railroad line, which provided a more secure link to its Pacific ports because it stood further back from the Chinese border than the old Trans-Siberian Railway. This rail line opened up vast new possibilities for accelerated harvesting of timber, furs, and minerals in the Soviet Far East. (p.156)

     An additional byproduct of the politics of this era was that China and the USSR felt the need to develop their own economies and become self-sufficient, especially in light of U. S. sanctions and embargos. And, these efforts to create thriving economies of their own led to devastating environmental issues. The authors discuss several examples of these environmental effects:

In the late 1950s, for example, after Stalin's death, his successors chose to convert dry swaths of Central Asia into cotton land. This required massive irrigation works drawing water away from the rivers that fed the Aral Sea, so that by the early 1960s that salt lake began to shrink. Today it stands at a tenth of its 1960 size and is divided into several salty puddles. The strangulation of the Aral Sea evolved into one of the twentieth century’s signature environmental disasters, what will the vanished fisheries, desiccated delta wetlands, a tenfold increase in the seawater’s salinity, airborne salt blown onto the croplands by dust storms arising from the newly exposed lake beds, and a dozen other problems. But the Soviet Union needed cotton, and in the Cold War context importing it from India or Egypt entailed risk that Stalin's successors wished to avoid.

Equally attracted by the vision of economic autarky, Mao's China concocted the ambition to grow rubber in the rainforest corner of Yunnan Province called Xishuangbanna, a prefecture in the Mekong River watershed near the border with Burma and Laos…It was a strategic good, necessary for tanks and aircraft (all airplanes use natural rubber tires). Inconveniently for Moscow and Beijing, most of the world's rubber came from Malaya, then a British colony, and Indonesia, ruled by anti-communist generals allied to the United States…In China's most biologically diverse region, they cut trees over thousands of square kilometers, destroying animal habitat and obliging the local Dai population to migrate to higher elevations, which put them in conflict with other minorities…[In the end,] The replacement of forest by rubber plantations over an area the size of Lebanon even altered local climate, bringing a sharper cycle of drought and flood and far fewer days of fog. Rubber processing also filled the nearby rivers and lakes with chemical pollution all of it destined for the Mekong River. (p.157-159)

     The authors also discuss the environmental effects of the various guerrilla wars that popped up around the world in the wake of the Cold War. They write:

The United States and the USSR especially, but also China, Cuba, France, and South Africa from time to time, thought it cost-effective to support separatists, revolutionaries, resistance movements, and their ilk wherever that could weaken their rivals. Thus, in places such as Angola, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Somalia, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Nicaragua, the Cold War superpowers waded into local power struggles, backing their preferred factions with arms, training, money, and occasionally troops. Guerrilla struggles normally involved a large component of environmental warfare – burning forests and crops, slaughtering livestock, flooding fields – because one side or the other typically used forests as cover, and because peasant populations had to be punished for supporting (or merely tolerating) one's enemies. Moreover, these wars produced legions of refugees, people fleeing combat zones or on the move because militias and armies had destroyed their livelihoods. Refugee movements, like other migrations, brought environmental changes both to the lands people left and to those where they settled. (p.159-160)

     The authors next go into great detail about what might be the most quintessential element of the Cold War, the proliferation of nuclear weapons by the major powers at the time, and the environmental havoc that was wrought by their production and testing. They state: “All nuclear powers developed Atomic archipelagos, networks of special sites devoted to nuclear research, uranium processing, and weapons manufacture and testing.” (p.160) Often, part of these archipelagos, their testing sites, were not part of the mainland of the countries that were testing there, and many times these areas were inhabited. The authors explain: 

Remarkably, in retrospect, statesmen often took a relaxed attitude toward radiation risk. In Oceania, the Americans, British, and French tested nuclear weapons beginning in 1946, 1957, and 1966, respectively.  Atomic explosions shook various remote atolls again and again. The appeal of Oceania for atomic experimentation was that population was sparse, so testing did not immediately imperil many people – and most of the imperiled people were not citizens of the United States, Britain, or France. They were Polynesians and Micronesians with little formal education or political voice, which made it easier for statesmen to take risks with their health. Beginning eleven months after the end of World War II, American nuclear testing exposed the islanders of Bikini and adjacent atolls to repeated dangerous doses of radiation. Their experiences provided useful information about the susceptibility of the human body and its genes to radiation-related illness and mutations. They, and some US military personnel, were essentially human guinea pigs in the early days of atomic testing. (p.162)

And, the Oceanic islanders would continue to suffer various degrees of poisoning and death throughout the tests conducted by Britain and France. 

     However, some of the worst environmental damage occurred within the USSR’s nuclear archipelago. The Chelyabinsk region became one of several ‘sacrifice zones’ throughout the world. The authors explain:

Chelyabinsk region, once a landscape of birch and pine groves amid thousands of lakes, became a main cog in the Soviet military-industrial complex during World War II, when it produced half the tanks used by the Red Army. It was far from the vulnerable frontiers of the country and had plenty of water, as well as metallurgic and chemical industries, all of which recommended it for nuclear weapons production. For fifty years it has been the most dangerously polluted place on Earth. 

The Mayak Chemical Complex opened in 1948, creating the USSR's first plutonium. Over the years, at least 130 million curies…of radioactivity has been released at Mayak, affecting at least half a million people. Most of that occurred in its early years, especially 1950-1951, when nuclear wastes were dumped into local rivers, tributaries to the Techa from which thousands of people drew their drinking water…

A small and shallow pond used after 1951 as a dump for nuclear wastes, Lake Karachay is now the most radioactive place on Earth. It contains about twenty-four times as much radioactivity as was released in the disaster at Chernobyl in 1986. Today standing at its shore for an hour would provide a fatal dose of radiation…In all the contamination from Mayak affected about 20,000 square kilometers. (p.163-164)

     Other parts of these nuclear archipelagos reached into our atmosphere and the world’s oceans and seas. The authors point out:

Atmospheric test (of which there were more than five hundred) scattered about four hundred times as much radioactive iodine-131 to the winds as did Chernobyl. The Soviet navy used dumping sites at sea for its spent nuclear fuel and contaminated machinery, polluting inshore waters of the Pacific and the Arctic Oceans, especially around Novaya Zemlya. Surprisingly, perhaps, the world's most radioactive marine environment was not Soviet responsibility, but Britain's. The Windscale site (renamed Sellafield in an attempt to shed notoriety), which produced weapons-grade plutonium for the United Kingdom's nuclear arsenal, released radioactivity into the Irish Sea, especially in 1965-1980. The Irish Sea’s currents do not disperse pollutants quickly, so the radioactivity lingers and turns up in British seafood. (p.165)

     However, out of all the bad that the proliferation of nuclear weapons has produced, some silver linings came out of this era. Firstly, as the authors discuss, was the development of unlikely wildlife preserves. They write:

In one of the many ironies associated with the Cold War, some of its nuclear weapons development sites became de facto wildlife preserves. The Savannah River Site [in the United States], for example, produced plutonium and tritium, and its 300 square miles were kept free of routine human activities. As a result of banning humans in the interest of building bombs, ducks, deer, snakes, 250 species of birds, and the largest alligator ever found in Georgia (not an atomic mutant) flourished despite 35 million gallons of high-level nuclear waste scattered around. The Rocky Flats Arsenal in Colorado, which produced plutonium until the mid-1990s, became a prairie wildlife preserve, a protected home where the deer and the antelope play under the watchful eye of up to a hundred bald eagles. The Hanford stretch of the Columbia, where the first atomic bombs were built, hosted the healthiest population of chinook salmon anywhere along the River. (p.166) 

Secondly, “...One of the world's first international environmental agreements arose from nuclear testing…In late 1963 the USSR, United States, and United Kingdom signed a partial test ban (meaning no atmospheric testing), and many other countries soon followed, although not France or China, each of which prized its own independence in matters of nuclear politics.” (p.166) 

     Additionally, the Cold War itself produced some unexpected positive environmental consequences. The authors explain: 

The Cold War also created a few war-zone wildlife refuges. These were not combat zones but corridors in the shadow of the Iron Curtain. Churchill in 1946 famously called the line that separated zones controlled by the USSR from those of the West “the Iron Curtain.”  It ran from the Baltic coast, where West and East Germany met the sea, to the Adriatic,…from the border of Hungary with Austria all the way to the Baltic, the Iron Curtain was a no-go zone for forty years, bristling with barbed wire and military observation towers. Unauthorized human visitors risked their lives by entering.

As a result of exclusion of ordinary human activity, the Iron Curtain gradually became an unintended nature preserve, a north-south wildlife corridor in the heart of Europe. Border police served unwittingly as park wardens, maintaining ecosystems and wildlife through exclusion of humans. Rare insects survived because no pesticides were used. Deer and boar proliferated. Along the Baltic shores, where the Iron Curtain met the sea, coastal species flourished…The Rhodope Mountains form the border between Bulgaria and Greece, another prohibited corridor during the Cold War. Consequently, the mountains hosted a wealth of rare and endangered species, with perhaps the greatest biodiversity in the Balkans. In Berlin the area immediately around the wall became a de facto Sanctuary for urban species. 

When the Berlin Wall fell and the Iron Curtain parted in 1989, a German doctor gathered allies to campaign for the preservation of the unusually rich environment the Cold War left behind. With the help of nature conservation organizations in Germany, and eventually the IUCN, long stretches of the former frontier have been set aside as parkland in a project known as Europe's Green Belt. 

The same thing could conceivably happen in Korea. Since the end of the Korean War in 1953, a demilitarized zone (DMZ)  has separated North Korea from South Korea…It contains a broad cross-section of Korean ecosystems, from coastal marshlands to mountain moors. It is home to dozens of endangered species, some fifty mammals in all, including bear, leopard, lynx, and a very rare mountain goat. It hosts still more species of birds and fish. Many of East Asia's migratory birds, including several kinds of majestic cranes, use the DMZ as a rest stop on their travels between Siberia and warmer climes. Red-crested cranes, now exceedingly rare, are symbols of good luck and longevity in Korea and throughout East Asia. The DMZ, the last frontier of the Cold War has given them a new lease on life. (p.181-183)

     The last topic discussed in this section is the rise and growth of environmental movements around the world during the Cold War era. The authors explain in a section that harkens back to Hegelian dialectic:

Economic expansion threatened environmental conditions in a great many places. This caused a reaction among those concerned about their lives, health, and livelihoods. A global economic thesis generated its own antithesis, environmentalism. (p.184-185)

This leads one to wonder: What is the natural synthesis that history will reach between this thesis and antithesis? Hopefully, it contains some understanding of the harmony that must be reached between human endeavors and the natural world. But, I digress; back to the development of the environmental movement. 

     Beginning by discussing the environmental movement in the United States, the authors explain:

The beginning of the mass environmental movement in the United States is often tied to the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring in 1962. Songbirds, Carson argued, were caught in a chemical web of contamination that might lead to their elimination. But behind the book’s evocative imagery of lost birdsong stood a stark message for humankind, namely, how chemicals such as DDT were destroying the very basis of life itself. Modern chemistry was leading humanity to its own doom…

But as environmental historians point out, it is a gross oversimplification to pin the emergence of a mass, heterogeneous, and global movement on a single book. Over half a century before Carson, the United States had gone through a debate about the proper use of public lands, in particular forests. It had created national parks and had busily expanded that system throughout the 20th century. [This was thanks, in no small part, to John Muir.]...

Moreover, the times were right for the message in Carson's book…By 1960  some influential Americans were becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the side effects of prosperity. One was the Canadian-born economist John Kenneth Galbraith, whose best-selling book The Affluent Society, published in 1958, argued among other things that wealth entailed adverse effects upon nature. Grassroots groups across the country, many led by women, were linking suburbanization, the ultimate expression of American post-war prosperity, to the destruction of the countryside. (p.185-186)

     The authors then explain the rise of the global environmental movement. They write:

Global environmental activism intensified rapidly after 1970. For the first time, environmentalists could mobilize large numbers of people in mass demonstrations. While the most famous of these might have been the first Earth Day (April 22, 1970) and the mass protest against nuclear power in Western Europe later in the decade, such demonstrations occurred in a great many places and for a great many reasons. Older conservation organizations were put on the defensive as more confrontational groups formed, motivated by frustration over tactics and a more critical outlook based in the ecological sciences…In the early 1970s a new wave of publications appeared that questioned economic growth itself. The Limits to Growth, a report issued in 1972 by the Club of Rome…, was by far the most significant of these. It sold twelve million copies in thirty languages and helped to trigger an intense debate among intellectuals about industrial society, pollution, and environment that would last for decades. (p.188)

     Next, the authors discuss the ‘environmentalism of the poor’. They explain that, as the developed countries of this era sought to expand their economies, their demands for materials and resources also increased. And, those who suffered the most from this mad dash to extract more and more from the natural world were the poor, indigenous, and marginalized groups who depended on these resources for survival or lived on the lands that industries sought to exploit. They write:

As extractive industries began their operations (or intensified existing ones), the worst outcomes fell on the poor residents of these places. These outcomes were of two types. One resulted from extraction processes,  which produced all manner of unpleasant and even deadly problems. Mines produced huge piles of tailings and polluted drinking water for miles around. Timber extraction denuded steep mountain slopes, leading to soil erosion and mudslides. Hydroelectric projects flooded large areas where rural people lived. A second outcome concerned access to natural resources. The rural poor depended for their existence on the very same resources that were now being extracted by far more powerful and rapacious industries. Fishing villages that had relied on small boats and low technology, for example, were now confronted by industrial trawlers able to wipe out entire fisheries. 

These outcomes fueled what is known as “the environmentalism of the poor.” The idea originated during the 1980s, when Indian intellectuals subjected environmentalism in the richer parts of the world to intense scrutiny. In their view, environmentalism in the United States and other wealthy countries had been motivated by concerns for idealized (and constructed) forms of nature such as wilderness. Thus, it failed to address the root causes of environmental degradation – in particular, consumption –  whether in their own countries or other parts of the world.  In addition, some North American and European intellectuals had subscribed to a “postmaterialist” theory of environmentalism's origins. According to this theory, people in the West had become environmentalists only because their basic needs had been securely met. Environmentalism, so this theory went, had begun in the rich world because wealth allowed people there to stop worrying about their next meal and start caring about whales, bears, and wilderness. Poor people in poor countries had other environmental priorities because they were busy trying to stay alive. (p.190-191)

     One of the best, and well-known examples of ‘environmentalism of the poor’ is the Chipko movement out of India. Though the book does not discuss it, this movement has its origins in another revolutionary act that had terrible consequences but left an indelible mark in the memories of the Indian people. The Bishnoi movement (1730) may be the forerunner to all non-violent environmental movements, such as the Chipko movement. It was led by the local Bishnoi women, who hugged their sacred trees in hopes that the King’s soldiers would not cut them down to build the prince’s palace. The soldiers began to kill the local activists, and, hundreds lay down their lives for the trees before the Maharaja ordered the killings stopped. This is where the people of the Chipko movement learned their tactics. The authors explain:

[I]n 1973…a group of villagers, including women and children, stopped a timber operation by threatening to bind themselves to the trees. This act gave the movement both its name, Chipko (roughly, “to hug”) and everlasting renown. Chipko's initial successes allowed it to expand for a time to other parts of the Himalayas, after which it faded. Besides earning environmentalists everywhere the “tree-hugger” moniker, Chipko provided the iconic example of the environmentalism of the poor. (p.192)

     Then the authors discuss the struggle of those in communist countries to enact environmental changes. They explain that the people of China and the USSR were no different than other citizens in their desire for a cleaner environment; but, they were far more constrained by their leaders because the communists saw environmental issues as a capitalist issue. The authors explain: “Socialist orthodoxy simply defined environmental degradation as a capitalist problem. Pollution occurred under capitalism because profit-maximizing firms foisted their pollution on society as a way to save costs. Soviet theorists maintained that pollution could not exist under socialism.” (p.193-194) Despite these opinions, many ordinary citizens still worked to better their environment. However, it was a much slower process in these countries and was often met with heavy resistance and the potential for dangerous outcomes if a group became too outspoken or seemed to be taking a political tone. 

     Lastly, the authors discuss how the emergence and popularity of environmentalism may be yet another sign of the times. They write:

Modern environmentalism, perhaps, represents a stage in the development of the Anthropocene. For many decades people tinkered with the basic biogeochemical cycles of the Earth without recognizing that they were doing so. As the scale of these unwitting interventions grew, more and more people noticed that, in some ways at least, humans could have an impact on the Earth. By the 1950s, if not before, a few saw that human action could affect matters as vast and important as atmospheric chemistry and global climate. Popular environmentalism from the 1960s prepared the way for a fuller recognition of the scale and scope of human impact, to the point where, in the early twenty-first century, scientists and journalists began to adopt the term “Anthropocene.” 

So far humankind has influenced basic Earth systems without consciously managing them. It is as accidental by-products of actions undertaken for other reasons that we have our powerful impacts on the global carbon and nitrogen cycles. If we elect to try to manage Earth systems, that is, if we undertake explicit geo-engineering, that will amount to yet another stage of the Anthropocene –  whether it goes well or badly. (p.205)

In the next leg of our journey from past to present, we will engage with a few of the writings in The Task of Philosophy in the Anthropocene: Axial Echoes in Global Space (The Task of Philosophy in the Anthropocene).