Edited Volume Read Along - The Human Age: The Anthropocene and Climate Change
As people, we face many global challenges. Recently the COVID-19 pandemic has painted many global successes and failures in stark relief. In his chapter “Peace, Violence, and Inequality in a Climate-Disrupted World,” author Dr. Simon Dalby speaks about a different worldwide problem: Climate Change. While the accumulation of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere and the accompanying changes in temperature, ocean levels, currents, and weather patterns should concern everyone, the effects are not equally distributed. Internationally, the global south is facing the brunt of the negative effects, yet they are not the main contributors to the problem. Within countries, the poor, sick, and elderly, face much higher difficulties when faced with climate impacts like fires, floods, and hurricanes. In America, this also means these problems disproportionately affect non-white Americans.
When we hear the word Jurassic images are conjured of an age of dinosaurs, our imaginations helped along by the blockbuster movie and the book it was based on. Academics have a name for the current age of the earth as well. It is called the Anthropocene, specifically highlighting that our current era is shaped by man-made climate change. Dalby argues that we need to look at human history, and the future, in terms of ecological systems. For example, he notes that we cannot extricate the upheaval and struggles faced by much of the world in the 1600s from the fact that there was a miniature ice age. In America, when we are taught about the first settlers as children, we normally don’t closely examine the idea that people in houses were freezing to death in Virginia, a place where now it gets cold enough to snow only a few days a year.
Despite the near-unanimous agreement of the scientific community that climate change is real and a major concern in the immediate future, there are still pushes to convince people it does not exist or is not related to human action. Wealthy leaders in industries like fossil fuel, cars, air travel, utilities, and many others have extreme monetary incentives to delay or arrest any changes made to the status quo. Our current reliance on oil, personal travel, and consumer consumption are the things that impact climate change but also the things that make CEOs billions of dollars.
The globalization of economies and resource pipelines have created some major benefits. Through our interconnectedness, we are better able to render aid to those impacted by natural disasters or epidemics caused by climate change and pollution. Yet at the same time, the way our system of globalization currently works perpetuates larger systems of inequality. Land owned by global farming corporations contributes significantly to local pollution, yet most of the food grown on corporate farms, especially in the global south, is exported, and the communities see little to no benefit, they only receive the negative complications as trees are cut down to make fields, methane is over produced, and the nitrogen in fertilizer runs into their water systems.
Not only do we face the scientific and logistical issues created when trying to transform social and economic systems, there are people actively working against those interests for the sake of short-term monetary profit. As Dalby points out, most people who are adults now will likely not face the worst-case scenarios. The children, like the ones who engaged in the climate strike, have no power or control, yet watch as those who will never face the consequences of their actions invest in ways to lobby the government to let them drill in protected wild spaces rather than work to shift our reliance away from the fuel sources that are clearly running low.
Rather than holding factories that spill smoke into the air and ash into the water, the fracking companies, or the governments that allow pollution and unsustainable practices to run rampant, there is a push for personal responsibility. We are told to recycle, conserve water, and be resilient in the face of natural disasters. Socially, people are shamed for not recycling and praised for things like personal composting. Yet there is no way that an individual ripping the top off their pizza box to throw away the bottom and recycle the clean lids, taking five-minute showers, or wearing thrifted clothes is going to do anything in the face of the climate crisis. Even if every person on earth became as eco-friendly as possible there would still be no impact as long as the large corporations, farms, and factories, continue to operate as they do. It’s like telling us not to use plastic straws to save turtles, when turtles’ habitats are increasingly acidified, full of golf balls and microplastics, and there is a giant trash island floating around the ocean.
Dalby also points out the clear link between climate change and conflict. Resource shortages and competition will inevitably lead to clashes and even war. Already there are concerns about the idea that certain countries own the headwaters of major rivers, and dams or irrigation could totally decimate the access of people downstream. He also highlights the example that geo-engineered solutions that only consider benefits to one nation could have disastrous consequences for people in another part of the globe. While there are still people who outright deny that climate change exists, there is another developing ideology around the idea that stopping or slowing climate change is not worth the major transformations it would require. In this view competition, violence, and disaster are the inevitable end of the road we are on, so those in affluent positions should find ways to extend their ways of life as long as possible and let everyone else fend for themselves.
A major thread I have found as I have mane my way through this edited volume is that as long as there are people profiting off of a problem, a genuine solution will never be implemented. Many of the topics in this volume are very serious and sometimes difficult. Reading about and discussing climate change can be particularly frustrating, as the injustice and cynical nature of capitalist societies are so plain to see. The chapters in this book often try to offer solutions or reasons for hope, though in this case, it is difficult. Dalby notes that a good place to start is the necessary shift in how we see nature. The earth can no longer be viewed as a stable stage on which humans perform their lives. We are fully integrated into the ecological systems of the world, and as such, we impact them as much as they impact us. Destroying our environment will ruin us as well. The idea that we are the stewards and guardians of mother earth responsible for her care has not worked. Instead, we need to think about how ecology is tied to history, and the ways that changes to the climate will create changes in our societies and systems. It is not too late, but it will be soon.
About The Author
Stella Hudson is a Graduate Assistant with the Baha’i Chair for World Peace. She graduated from the College of William and Mary in 2021 with a B.A. in English. She is attending the University of Maryland and pursuing a Master’s of Library and Information Science.