Understanding the Anthropocene: Promise, Pitfalls, and Environmental Justice
1. What is the Anthropocene? NIXON 2014 The Anthropocene: The Promise and Pitfalls of an Epochal Idea
Nixon details the Anthropocene: Advanced by Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and ecologist Eugene Stoermer in 2000.
- They argued that the Holocene was history: the Earth had entered a new, unprecedented geological epoch, triggered by human actions.
- We have decisively altered the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle and the rate of extinction.
People that believe Anthropocene is a potentially “good” thing
- Erle Ellis, who believes “we must not see the Anthropocene as a crisis, but as the beginning of a new geological epoch ripe with human-directed opportunity.”
- Mark Lynas (author of The God Species) and Ronald Bailey who insists that “over time, we will only get better at being the guardian gods of the earth.” As their mantra, these Anthropocene optimists cite Stewart Brand’s exhortation: “we are as gods and must get good at it.”
People that believe Anthropocene is a potentially “bad” thing
- Mike Hulme, there is a direct line between such megalomaniacal thinking and the reckless adventurism of a small, powerful set of geo-engineers and their billionaire backers who harbor ambitions to “reset the global thermostat.” To which I’d add this: we should not equate human planetary impact with human planetary control, as either a possibility or an ideal.
- Environmental philosopher Kathleen Dean Moore goes further, suggesting that the Anthropocene would have been better named Unforgiveable-crimescene
2. Ellis, Erle, “Overpopulation is not the problem,” New York Times, Sept. 13, 2013
- The conditions that sustain humanity are not natural and never have been. Since prehistory, human populations have used technologies and engineered ecosystems to sustain populations well beyond the capabilities of unaltered “natural” ecosystems.
- The only limits to creating a planet that future generations will be proud of are our imaginations and our social systems. In moving toward a better Anthropocene, the environment will be what we make it.
3. Ostrom, E., Governing the Commons. (1990)
Case 1: Commons Torbel Switzerland
- Cows sharing grazing land
- Benefits all sharing the land, steepness of hills, access to sunshine
- Propensity to allow your cows to “over graze”
Case 2: Japanese Villages Sharing Land
- Each Villager had work assignments to care for common land, timing restriction for land use, etc.
- Violations: Incomplete work, Using land before “opening day”
Successful Commons
- Low cost to monitor violations
- Low benefits to breaking common laws
- Central monitoring or private monitoring of common land
4. Ostrom, E., and H. Nagendra, “Insights on linking forests, trees, and people from the air, on the ground, and in the laboratory.” (2006) PNAS
- Notion/Study Focus: Governing natural resources sustainably is a continuing struggle. Major debates occur over what types of policy ‘‘interventions’’ best protect forests, with choices of property and land tenure systems.
- Evidence from all three research methods challenges the presumption that a single governance arrangement will control overharvesting in all settings
- We conclude that simple formulas focusing on formal ownership, particularly one based solely on public ownership of forest lands, will not solve the problems of resource overuse.
- The Solutions (none forwarded in paper) must come from a multidisciplinary focus.
5. Brown, Phil, “Popular Epidemiology Revisited. (1997)
- Popular Epidemiology represents two related phenomena
- A form of citizen science in which (lay) people engage in lay ways of knowing about environmental and technological hazards
- A type of social movement mobilization action which increasingly plays a major part in modern political culture
- Traditional Epidemiology
- Studies distribution of disease and factors of influence
- Popular Epidemiology includes social structure influences as part of the disease/illness/etc chain.
- Details of the process – Conclusion is PE remains a useful concept (DAH@!!)
- Example 1972-1979 Woburn Well Water contamination
- Closed in 1979
- Anne Anderson first tracked data (lay person) after son Jimmy got sick and died
- She put together the first data and asked the state to investigate in 1975
- Expanded to community
- Litigation
- Activists experts
- Then local government/experts
- Then broader government action
6. O’Keefe, Phil, Ken Westgate, and Ben Wisner, “Taking the naturalness out of natural disasters,” Nature Vol. 260 April 15, 1976
- No major geological or climatological changes over the last 50 years adequately explain the rise in the occurrence of disasters
- Authors argue that precautionary planning and prevention/defense against “natural” disasters is needed
7. Oliver-Smith, Anthony, “Anthropology and the Political Economy of Disasters,” in The Political Economy of Hazards and Disasters, EricC. Jones and Arthur D. Murphy, ed., (2009).
- Disasters are densely interwoven with anthropology’s research agenda, particularly in regard to adaptation. Since the field’s nineteenth century emergence first focused on human biological and cultural evolution, adaptation has been one of the central concepts in anthropology
- FOCUS: Hazards come from
- 1st Location geography – vulnerability to disasters
- 2nd behavior of individuals, organizations, and institutions in the disaster moments, mostly the threat, impact, and immediate aftermath stages- preparation and aftermath assistance following disasters
- CONCLUSIONS:
- The combination of increasing population, population density, increasing poverty, and occupation of hazardous sites has accentuated vulnerability to both natural and technological hazards and increases the probability of severe impacts of disasters.
8. Bullard, R. “Environmentalism and Social Justice,” in Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality (1990)
- Environmentalism first forwarded by white effluent groups
- Minorities and poorer groups are disproportionately exposed to pollution where they live and work
- Social justice suggests that racism includes exposure to pollution and technological hazards
- Greening the Ghetto
- Social justice as a environmental construct
- Conclusions
- Economic growth creates waste
- Waste is improperly disposed of
- Poor and minority communities bear the brunt of the costs and do not reap the majority of the benefits.
9. Schlosberg, D. “Theorizing environmental justice: the expanding sphere of a discourse,” (2013)
- The idea of environmental justice has been a central concern for academics in a range of disciplines, and both the concept and its coverage have expanded substantially in the past two decades.
- examines the potential of further extension of environmental justice discourse to communities and, crucially, to the human relationship with the nonhuman world
- environmental justice is now also about the material relationships between human disadvantage and vulnerability and the condition of the environment and natural world in which that experience is immersed
10. Jasper, James M. “Social Movement Theory Today: Toward a Theory of Action?” Sociology Compass 4/11 (2010)
- Pragmatism, feminism, and related traditions are encouraging a rethinking of collective action.
- As scholars return to issues of motivation and the ends of action, to people’s points of view, they can give better answers than the irrationalists of the distant past or the rationalists of the recent past
- If we ignore theory in social movement research, we will make more conceptual mistakes. But the most productive way to do theory today may be to avoid big theories and concentrate on small ones.
11. Bruce E., Johansen. 2003. “Nigeria: The Ogoni: Oil, Blood, and the Death of a Homeland”
- The 500,000 tribal Ogoni of the Niger delta in southern Nigeria have watched as their traditional fishing and farming livelihood has been laid waste by Shell Oil’s extraction of oil, with full complicity of the national government, which has allowed large parts of the Ogonis’ homeland to be ruined.
- Shell has extracted oil from the Niger Delta since 1958. Shell operates a joint-venture consisting of Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, Elf and Agip. Shell is by far the largest foreign oil company in Nigeria, accounting for 50 per cent of Nigeria’s oil production. Nigeria generated roughly 12 per cent of Shell’s oil production world-wide in the late 1990s
- The Ogonis’ protests of such conditions have been met with brutal repression by Nigerian police. During 1990, people in the village of Umuechem protested oil pollution of their homeland, to be set upon by the notorious Mobile Police (known locally as the “Kill and Go”) who bombarded the village, killing more than 100 people, as they looted many homes. Survivors were forced to leave their homes.
- The Death of Friday Nwiido The tensions between the oil companies and people in the Niger Delta are a regular feature of daily life that often result in deaths, illustrated by the death of one young man, Friday Nwiido.
12. Marcos, and Juana Ponce de Leon. 2001. Our word is our weapon
- Chipaas are tormented by local government
- They took over 1.2 Trillion pesos and left only 600 Billion,
- Oil
- Natural gas
- Left behind
- Ecological destruction
- Waste
- Alcoholism
- Prostitution
- Government changed rules to make all this action legal
13. Oreskes, N. and E. Conway, “The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future,” Daedalus, Vol 142, No. 1 (Winter 2013)
- many societies rose and fell, but few left as clear and extensive an account of what happened to them and why as the twenty-first-century nation-states that referred to themselves as Western civilization. Even today, two millennia after the collapse of the Roman and Mayan empires and one millennium after the end of the Byzantine and Inca empires, historians, archaeologists, and synthetic-failure paleoanalysts have been unable to agree on the primary causes of those societies’ loss of population, power, stability, and identity
- Science has known the dangers of CO2 etc.
- Little concern pre 1850 however
- Still little concern as Industrial revolutions started
- In the 1970s, scientists began to recognize that human activities were changing the physical and biological functions the planet in consequential ways – giving rise to the Anthropocene Period of Geo- logical History
- Historians view 1988 as the start of the Penumbral Period. In that year, scientists created a new hybrid scientific/govern- mental organization, the Intergovern- mental Panel on Climate Change (iPCC), to communicate relevant science and form the foundation for international
- The year 2009 is viewed as the “last best chance” the Western world had to save itself, as leaders met in Copenhagen, Denmark, to try, for the fifteenth time since the UNFCCC was written, to agree on a binding, international law to prevent disruptive climate change.
- climate change was intensifying. In 2010, record-breaking summer heat and fires killed more than 50,000 people in Russia and resulted in over $15 billion (in 2009 USD) in damages
- Though ridiculed when first introduced, the Sea Level Rise Denial Bill would become the model for the U.S. National Stability Protection Act of 2022, which led to the conviction and imprisonment of more than three hundred scientists for “endangering the safety and well-being of the general public with unduly alarming threats.”11 By exaggerating the threat, it was argued, scientists were preventing the economic development essential for coping with climate change. When the scientists appealed, their convictions were upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court under the Clear and Present Danger doc- trine, which permitted the government to limit speech
- Intension is to show
- Signs that are ignored
- Outcomes that could happen
- “crazy” situations that might next occur
- Are we on our way out like the past great societies?
14. Nisbet, Matthew C., “Communicating Climate Change: Why Frames Matter for Public Engagement” Environment Magazine March/April 2009
- Simply citing scientific data is insufficient to communicate the impact of climate chage
- Difficult to understand
- Framing on the opposition keeps public from believing or feeling urgency
- New media if more fragmented
- More outlets
- More people can seek their idealogy out and not have to hear anything else
- 2009 poll only 30 percent feel climate change is important
- Frames are useful organizations to forward arguments/positions
- Frames are useful – past studies illustrate this clearly
- Frames are essential
- Table 2 frames
- Social Progress
- Economic development and competitiveness
- Morality and Ethics
- Scientific and technology uncertainty
- Pandoras box/Frankenstein’s monster/runaway science
- Public accountability and governance
- Middle way/alternative path
- Conflict and Strategy
- How frames have been used
- Right
- Climate chang is too exapensive to handle
- Competitive disadvantage
- Left
- Climate change would create job/grow economy (reframing)
- Moral and ethical requirement
- It is not enough, however, for research in this area to simply track, explain, and draw attention to this paralyzing divide. Social science expertise and knowledge needs to take steps to solve this communication problem.
15. Marco Giugni1 and Maria T. Grasso2, Environmental Movements in Advanced Industrial Democracies: Heterogeneity, Transformation, and Institutionalization” Environment Magazine March/April 2009
- Environmental movements are networks of informal interactions that may include individuals, groups, and organizations engaged in collective action motivated by shared identity or concern about environmental issues
- Social movements form a constitutive part of contemporary societies. Some have spoken of a social movement society to highlight this feature (1). Social movements can be defined as “a sustained challenge to power holders in the name of a population living under the jurisdiction of those power holders by means of repeated public displays of that population’s worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment” (2, p. 257; italics in original). This qualifies them as a specific form of contentious politics
- four main aspects of environmental movements that are discussed in the extant literature: social bases and values, mobilizing structures (organizations, resources, and networks), the role of context and in particular of political opportunities, and framing processes and identity.
- Our review has underlined three main features of environmental movements: heterogeneity,transformation, and institutionalization.
16. Kyle Powys Whyte C, Indigenous Experience, Environmental Justice and Settler.
- Environmental justice (EJ) commonly refers to the problem that people of colour, indigenous peoples, women and people with disabilities, among others, are more likely than privileged white populations to live in toxic environments that are bad for human health and community cohesion
- Settler colonial theory, on my interpretation, offers a structure of oppression based on one society’s interference with and erasure of another society. Given that the process described earlier is deeply ecological, settler colonial theory is always about environmental injustice. That is, settler societies seek to establish their own collective continuance at the expense of the collective continuance of another society