By Martin LeFevre
Geologists are well into a decade-long debate about whether to name the present period of tremendous human impact on the Earth the Anthropocene Age. It’s a deeply flawed philosophical exercise masquerading as science.
The movement to codify the term Anthropocene Age is an attempt to impose scientific credibility and neutrality on man’s increasing fragmentation of the Earth. It’s deceptively separative, seeming to remove the agents of destructiveness on Earth – us, humans, Homo sapiens – from our destructiveness by giving it a patina of geologic inevitability.
Rather than face the precipitous loss of biodiversity at human hands, the Anthropocene Age, by definition and implication, extols it.
Colin Waters, a geologist and chair of the Anthropocene Working Group, exemplifies a labyrinthine dissociation this way: “If you were around in 1920, your attitude would have been, ‘Nature’s too big for humans to influence,’” The last century however, “has been a shock event, a bit like an asteroid hitting the planet.”
Marco Lambertini, the director general of WWF International, the world’s largest environmental organization, doesn’t cloak the crisis in scientific detachment: “The figures are terrifying. We’ve lost almost half the forests, half the coral reefs. It’s really, really bad.”
One million species are now at risk of extinction, and many wildlife populations have declined by nearly 70% in the last 50 years. Yet how many people even knew about COP-15, the biodiversity conference in Montreal, which came on the heels of COP-27, the recent climate conference in Egypt?
About 190 countries agreed in Montreal on a plan to halt the decline of wildlife and ecosystems. Whether that means anything more than the paper it’s written on (much less the trees cut down for the paper) may be an exercise in faith, hope and rarity, since the 23 “targets” for 2030 aren’t legally binding. And the dying elephant in the room, the United States, isn’t even a signatory to the Convention on Biodiversity, maintaining it’s a “threat to our sovereignty and commercial interests.”
There were some advances at COP-15 with respect to monitoring and financing. But the agreement is extremely complex, much more complex than the climate change agreement. And many of the targets are the same as the last biodiversity conference, in 2010, which also had ten-year goals, none of which were met.
The very fact that global warming and loss of biodiversity are treated as two separate things attests to the ineffectuality of these inter-governmental conferences, and the error of their basic premises.
In the parlance of the day, the Anthropocene Age begs many questions, and science, unlike the distinct discipline of philosophy, cannot fill the vacuum.
It apparently doesn’t occur to the scientists, or to any philosophers I know of for that matter, to ask why human activity is “like an asteroid hitting the planet.” Rather than some ivory tower debate over whether to give this age a scientific stamp in an infinitely regressive drive for objectivity, philosophers as well as scientists should be delving into these questions:
In evolutionary terms, how did a sentient, potentially sapient species acquire the power to bring about an extinction event equivalent to the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs? How is a lifeform that evolved along with all other lifeforms in the web of life able to operate so at odds with the web of life that it is ripping it to shreds?
Instead, scientists are worried about the “political reverberations” of naming or not naming the human impact on the planet. In failing to label this period the Anthropocene Age, Martin J. Head, a working group member and earth scientist at Brock University, argued,
“People would say, ‘Well, does that then mean the geological community is denying that we have changed the planet drastically?’”
That kind of convoluted political thinking is part of the problem, reflecting the lack of deeper philosophical inquiry into the roots of human destructiveness.
After the insights of Einstein and the breakthroughs of quantum physics about 100 years ago, science became increasingly mathematized, and the search for coherent explanations of phenomena, especially human phenomena (the purview of philosophers) receded into insignificance.
Science stepped into the vacuum when philosophers ceded the field of inquiry into the anomaly of man. Eventually this led to the absurdity of a decade-long debate among geologists over whether to scientifically classify this as the Anthropocene Age.
So what makes Homo sapiens so different from all other life on Earth? How did evolution confer on us an adaptive strategy — conscious separation of ‘things’ in nature – that’s inimical to the seamless unfolding of life? And why are we so destructive in our application of our unique adaptive strategy?
Clearly the ability to remove, remember and rearrange things in nature was not accompanied by the insight to use the adaptation wisely. When we lived in nature, there were continual reminders that we are not actually separate from nature, and the traditions of indigenous peoples reflected it.
But separativeness began to run amok with the Agricultural Revolution (which also ushered in organized warfare), and greatly intensified with the Industrial Revolution. And man’s fragmentary tendencies became completely out of control with the Digital Revolution.
Even so, with faith in humanity and diligence of self-knowing, what scientists are straining to call the Anthropocene Age will be seen in the future as a period when man’s separativeness and fragmentation led to inescapable destructiveness and disorder in natural and human systems.
It boils down to right observation. Science requires an observer to advance, but maintaining the observer, the human being and human race are regressing. To end mistaken and harmful separation, which leads inevitably to division, conflict and fragmentation, we have to end the observer within ourselves.
What is this observer that seems to be separate from what it is observing, within and without? By asking, with curiosity and passion, this question while sitting quietly at sunset outdoors or in a darkening room, awareness grows quicker than the habit of separation as the observer.
There’s the insight that the observer is an inextricable part of the movement of thought. And in observing thought as a single movement, attention gathers unseen, and completely quiets the mind.
