Narrating the Anthropocene historically – but how?

by Ernst Langthaler

This text was first published in German: https://anthrowrite.hypotheses.org/235

Since Paul Crutzen proclaimed the ‘Anthropocene’ in 2000, thus creating a mythical history of humanity and planet Earth [1], the narratives about the ‘age of man’ have diversified considerably. According to Christophe Bonneuil, four master narratives can be distinguished in the Anthropocene discourse – without claiming to be exhaustive. The mainstream is characterised by the naturalist narrative, according to which the human species has achieved planetary agency using fossil energy since the Industrial Revolution. It is now up to geoscience to make the public aware of the associated risks and to educate political and economic decision-makers about appropriate countermeasures. The post-nature narrative understands nature as a human construction and calls for the reflexive use of modern technology to create an optimised world (good Anthropocene). The eco-catastrophist narrative sees modern civilisation on the path to an ecological catastrophe that can only be averted by a less resource-intensive way of life. The eco-Marxist narrative attributes the transgression of planetary boundaries not to the anthropos per se, but to capitalist accumulation and geopolitical domination. Its proponents, such as Jason Moore, speak of the ‘Capitalocene’ rather than the ‘Anthropocene’. [2]

These master narratives not only stand on their own, but also provide traces of the overarching order of the Anthropocene discourse. Two order-creating dimensions can be identified. One, more analytical dimension distinguishes between the poles of the geologisation of the social, represented by the naturalist narrative, and the socialisation of the geological, represented by the eco-Marxist narrative. The other, more normative dimension distinguishes between the poles of the critique of modernity, represented by the eco-catastrophist narrative, and eco-modernism, represented by the post-naturalist narrative. There are undoubtedly other dimensions to the Anthropocene discourse, but these two dimensions alone characterise a discourse order that enables and limits scientific thought and speech – and thus also action.

What can historians “do” with the Anthropocene, not only in terms of discourse, but also in terms of actual history? First, it is important to critically question the master discourses of the Anthropocene and their respective perspectives. Each of these narratives contains manifest and latent attributions of meaning that refer to points of view based on interests and values. Perspectivity is most evident along the dimension between a critique of modernity and eco-modernism. But the other dimension is not free of interests and values either, since it is about the hegemonic struggle between the natural and social sciences.

The next step is to make the plurality of master narratives fruitful. Each of these narratives contains important elements of a theory of planetary thinking [3]: the naturalist narrative entails a requirement to think planetary and human time scales together; the post-naturalist narrative the need to extend agency to include ‘more than human’ networks; the eco-catastrophist narrative the idea of irreversible tipping points of the Earth system; and the eco-Marxist narrative the impact of capital and power interests, social inequality and cultural hegemony on the planet.

In addition to multi-faceted descriptions, it is also important to generate differentiated explanations of the dynamics of the Anthropocene. This is precisely the core competence of the social and cultural sciences in general and history in particular. While the geosciences have strong descriptive data sets and methods that are inaccessible to most historians, their explanations – especially when it comes to anthropogenic aspects – are often weak. Historians can counteract this shortcoming by means of empirically saturated and theory-led explanations. [4]

Finally, historians who are not part of multi- and interdisciplinary project teams with ample resources need to find a focus in order to meet all these demands. In my research, I take a commodity-historical perspective on the Anthropocene. The soybean, a key commodity of global capitalism in the 20^th century, serves as a prism. I distinguish several regime phases in the period from 1870 to 2020, which frame cycles of regional soybean expansion and global soybean trade, as well as regime crises and transitions in between.

Translation: Anna-Lena Eick and Tom Vanassche

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[1] Anna-Lena Eick, Achim Landwehr und Tom Vanassche, Wie vom Anthropozän erzählen?, https://anthrowrite.hypotheses.org/63

[2] Christophe Bonneuil, The Geological Turn: Narratives of the Anthropocene, in: Clive Hamilton, Christophe Bonneuil und François Gemenne (ed.), The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis. Rethinking Modernity in a New Epoch, London and New York: Routledge, 2015, 17-31.

[3] Nigel Clark und Bronislaw Szerszynski, Planetary Social Thought. The Anthropocene Challenge to the Social Sciences. Cambridge: Polity, 2021.

[4] Julia Adeney Thomas, Mark Williams und Jan Zalasiewicz, The Anthropocene. A Multidisciplinary Approach, Cambridge: Polity, 2020, 112-135.

[5] Ernst Langthaler, Soy, in: Jeannie Whayne (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Agricultural History, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023, 304-324.

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