Review by Michael Warren
There is a distinct temporal, political, perhaps even metaphysical slippage inherent to our understanding of anthropogenic (human induced) climate change. Perhaps no one has provided more insight to this problematic and what it means for the engagement of climate change from the perspective of the humanities than Dipesh Chakrabarty, who ran a recent masterclass on climate and capital at the University of Sydney. How can we interpret human agency in such a sui generis existential crisis? The juggernaut-like unfolding of global change implicates “humanity” as a seemingly non-human and geological force on a planetary time-scale, much beyond any of our possible means of interrogating the past. At once our culpability as a species becomes clearer in view of more immediate contingencies emerging out of conspicuously modern phenomena, namely our reliance upon fossil fuels in conjunction with the rapid pace of Western industrialization and the global capitalist imperative of endless growth.
As British philosopher John Gray has recently remarked in his review of Naomi Klein’s book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate, we should nonetheless be wary of assuming a one dimensional critique of modern political economy when it comes to climate change. He points to the environmental crises brought about by various centrally planned economies during the twentieth century, the Soviet Union and Maoist China in particular. Klein’s emphasis upon “extractivisim”, the resource intensive orientation of developed industrial societies, for Gray at least, should also take into account a deeper historical processes that first allowed humans to influence the carrying capacity of their environment. Agriculture, less capitalism and globalisation tout court, thus comes to mind as the genesis for our understanding of global warming and the challenges it poses. Should this development mark the beginning of what we have come to understand as the beginning of the Anthropocene, and not more recent technological and economic developments?
However we frame our understanding of humankind’s impact upon the biosphere it is difficult to refute Chakrabarty’s designation of the Industrial Revolution, its intensity since the twentieth century in particular, as the most profound development which has accelerated this process. Our existence as biological agents, a feature of environmental histories for some time, is one thing, but the extent of human agency suggested by climate science is something else entirely. “In unwittingly destroying the artificial but time-honoured distinction between natural and human histories,” Chakrabarty writes, “climate scientists posit that the human being has become something much larger than the simple biological agent that he or she always has been. Human beings now wield a geological force.”
This interplay of discourses, between planetary science and the humanities in particular, is a fundamental platform of Chakrabarty’s engagement of planetary climate change, with some sobering implications for whatever hope exists to moderate its impact being the result. He is clear on the point that it wasn’t environmentalists who first brought our attention to the possibility of the Earth warming. It was in fact the work of planetary sciences such as NASA’s James Hansen on neighbouring planets such as Venus who raised the prospect of our planet becoming too warm to maintain the relatively optimal homeostasis humankind has experienced throughout the Holocene. With the awareness that our enjoyment of natural resources, fossil fuels in particular, play a role in regulating the overall liveability of the planet the political imperative of course logically becomes one of limiting the overall greenhouse emissions produced by an increasingly developed world.
Yet for Chakrabarty there is a discursive dissonance inherent to this nexus of revelation. One field is proposing a geological process being set in chain that, with or without human action, will take place over thousands of years with a clear understanding that such events have taken place before. Human activity simply means that a global increase of two degrees in temperature has become a feature of a process beyond human reckoning. It is the blind animus of this phenomenon which finds Chakrabarty alongside other thinkers, including Grey and Clive Hamilton, who underline adaptive strategies to global warming before advocating more profound structural shifts in political economy. Less utopian thinking, more insuring that those who are projected to suffer the most, those in developing countries in particular, are central to such strategies.
This maintains the prerogative of the subaltern familiar to Chakrabarty’s broader sense of social justice. With some irony, and perhaps some discomfort for environmentalists, this logic questions the ethics of limiting fossil fuel use in developing countries given their potential to alleviate poverty. As Chakrabarty makes clear, phasing out coal emissions in countries such as India and China “seem unacceptable to governments and business around the world”. And so persists an economic reciprocity between the hopes of developing nations such as India and more advanced industrial nations such as Australia. This has in fact allowed the Australian government to make the completely disingenuous claim that their ongoing approval of long term coal mine projects is driven by the imperative of bringing the third world out of poverty, alongside the more plausible rhetorical claim that “coal is the foundation of prosperity” for Australians.
Whatever the political animus that imbues Chakrabarty’s thinking on climate change, his project is overwhelmingly one of handling the mental vertigo that comes with imagining a problem on such a deep scale of time; a crisis beyond our control yet something we have fundamentally set in train. In reconciling the many “moods” from fear to optimism that accompany our culpability in causing global warming, a sensibility that requires an “epochal consciousness”, in his recent Tanner lectures Chakrabarty calls upon Heidegger’s idea of throwness: “the shock of recognition that the world-earth is not there simply as our place of dwelling…an awakening to the awareness that we are not always in practical and/or aesthetic relationship with this place where we find ourselves.”
To add a metaphysical dimension to this sobering human-planet dialectic, one could likewise call upon an earlier and less popular figure who prefigured the philosophy of phenomenology: Arthur Schopenhauer. Perhaps the bridge between our self-representation as material agents and our “epochal consciousness” requires us to take into account Schopenhauer’s insight that our phenomenal existence is a mere representational manifestation of a relentless numinous force, what he referred to as the “will” driving the movement of every object and living thing. When we talk human agency, we are then talking about something seemingly beyond our control. But is it entirely? The key moral implication of this philosophical “truth”, often overlooked for an otherwise pessimistic world-view, has some merit as we consider how we deal with global warming and environmental crises more broadly, at least in the West: if suffering is an inevitable function of human life as “will”, our object becomes an ascetic one.
Michael Warren is a PhD student in the History Department at The University of Sydney.
There is a distinct temporal, political, perhaps even metaphysical slippage inherent to our understanding of anthropogenic (human induced) climate change. Perhaps no one has provided more insight to this problematic and what it means for the engagement of climate change from the perspective of the humanities than Dipesh Chakrabarty, who ran a recent masterclass on climate and capital at the University of Sydney. How can we interpret human agency in such a sui generis existential crisis? The juggernaut-like unfolding of global change implicates “humanity” as a seemingly non-human and geological force on a planetary time-scale, much beyond any of our possible means of interrogating the past. At once our culpability as a species becomes clearer in view of more immediate contingencies emerging out of conspicuously modern phenomena, namely our reliance upon fossil fuels in conjunction with the rapid pace of Western industrialization and the global capitalist imperative of endless growth.
As British philosopher John Gray has recently remarked in his review of Naomi Klein’s book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate, we should nonetheless be wary of assuming a one dimensional critique of modern political economy when it comes to climate change. He points to the environmental crises brought about by various centrally planned economies during the twentieth century, the Soviet Union and Maoist China in particular. Klein’s emphasis upon “extractivisim”, the resource intensive orientation of developed industrial societies, for Gray at least, should also take into account a deeper historical processes that first allowed humans to influence the carrying capacity of their environment. Agriculture, less capitalism and globalisation tout court, thus comes to mind as the genesis for our understanding of global warming and the challenges it poses. Should this development mark the beginning of what we have come to understand as the beginning of the Anthropocene, and not more recent technological and economic developments?
However we frame our understanding of humankind’s impact upon the biosphere it is difficult to refute Chakrabarty’s designation of the Industrial Revolution, its intensity since the twentieth century in particular, as the most profound development which has accelerated this process. Our existence as biological agents, a feature of environmental histories for some time, is one thing, but the extent of human agency suggested by climate science is something else entirely. “In unwittingly destroying the artificial but time-honoured distinction between natural and human histories,” Chakrabarty writes, “climate scientists posit that the human being has become something much larger than the simple biological agent that he or she always has been. Human beings now wield a geological force.”
This interplay of discourses, between planetary science and the humanities in particular, is a fundamental platform of Chakrabarty’s engagement of planetary climate change, with some sobering implications for whatever hope exists to moderate its impact being the result. He is clear on the point that it wasn’t environmentalists who first brought our attention to the possibility of the Earth warming. It was in fact the work of planetary sciences such as NASA’s James Hansen on neighbouring planets such as Venus who raised the prospect of our planet becoming too warm to maintain the relatively optimal homeostasis humankind has experienced throughout the Holocene. With the awareness that our enjoyment of natural resources, fossil fuels in particular, play a role in regulating the overall liveability of the planet the political imperative of course logically becomes one of limiting the overall greenhouse emissions produced by an increasingly developed world.
Yet for Chakrabarty there is a discursive dissonance inherent to this nexus of revelation. One field is proposing a geological process being set in chain that, with or without human action, will take place over thousands of years with a clear understanding that such events have taken place before. Human activity simply means that a global increase of two degrees in temperature has become a feature of a process beyond human reckoning. It is the blind animus of this phenomenon which finds Chakrabarty alongside other thinkers, including Grey and Clive Hamilton, who underline adaptive strategies to global warming before advocating more profound structural shifts in political economy. Less utopian thinking, more insuring that those who are projected to suffer the most, those in developing countries in particular, are central to such strategies.
This maintains the prerogative of the subaltern familiar to Chakrabarty’s broader sense of social justice. With some irony, and perhaps some discomfort for environmentalists, this logic questions the ethics of limiting fossil fuel use in developing countries given their potential to alleviate poverty. As Chakrabarty makes clear, phasing out coal emissions in countries such as India and China “seem unacceptable to governments and business around the world”. And so persists an economic reciprocity between the hopes of developing nations such as India and more advanced industrial nations such as Australia. This has in fact allowed the Australian government to make the completely disingenuous claim that their ongoing approval of long term coal mine projects is driven by the imperative of bringing the third world out of poverty, alongside the more plausible rhetorical claim that “coal is the foundation of prosperity” for Australians.
Whatever the political animus that imbues Chakrabarty’s thinking on climate change, his project is overwhelmingly one of handling the mental vertigo that comes with imagining a problem on such a deep scale of time; a crisis beyond our control yet something we have fundamentally set in train. In reconciling the many “moods” from fear to optimism that accompany our culpability in causing global warming, a sensibility that requires an “epochal consciousness”, in his recent Tanner lectures Chakrabarty calls upon Heidegger’s idea of throwness: “the shock of recognition that the world-earth is not there simply as our place of dwelling…an awakening to the awareness that we are not always in practical and/or aesthetic relationship with this place where we find ourselves.”
To add a metaphysical dimension to this sobering human-planet dialectic, one could likewise call upon an earlier and less popular figure who prefigured the philosophy of phenomenology: Arthur Schopenhauer. Perhaps the bridge between our self-representation as material agents and our “epochal consciousness” requires us to take into account Schopenhauer’s insight that our phenomenal existence is a mere representational manifestation of a relentless numinous force, what he referred to as the “will” driving the movement of every object and living thing. When we talk human agency, we are then talking about something seemingly beyond our control. But is it entirely? The key moral implication of this philosophical “truth”, often overlooked for an otherwise pessimistic world-view, has some merit as we consider how we deal with global warming and environmental crises more broadly, at least in the West: if suffering is an inevitable function of human life as “will”, our object becomes an ascetic one.
Michael Warren is a PhD student in the History Department at The University of Sydney.