De-intellectualising Criticism is Fundamental to Moving Forward

Interview for the Ballast website, 18 June 2018  

The word Anthropocene has taken its place in environmental debate. Humans are said to have become a geological force capable of changing the Earth system. While the concept has some merit, it has the unfortunate tendency to unify humanity in an undifferentiated way; in fact, to designate the human species as responsible for the environmental crisis is to forget the economic, social and colonial relations that have conditioned climate change under the sway of the dominant class. Co-author, with Christophe Bonneuil, of The Shock of the Anthropocene, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz is a historian of science and technology: by questioning the categories and narratives that allow us to think about the climate crisis, he hopes to repoliticise the long history of the Anthropocene. We met the historian in a Toulouse bookshop. 

The history of the environmental crisis is often told in the mode of ‘awareness’ of the problem, with a before – the obscure past when human beings were unaware of the consequences of their actions – and an after – when they have the knowledge and can no longer ignore the effects of their activities. How is this ‘awakening’ story a fable?

First of all, a historian’s observation. In my thesis, while working on complaints and trials against polluting factories in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, I was very struck by the omnipresence of arguments linking the environment to health.^[1] Petitions spoke of air, miasma, and fumes, while doctors spoke of circumfusa – ‘surrounding things’ in Latin – to explain how smoke had deleterious effects on people’s health, and even, in the long term, on the shape of their bodies. In a sense, the environment was much more important at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries than it is for us now. Yet despite these medical theories that made the environment very central, industrialisation, with its untold pollution, did take place. The story is one of disinhibition rather than awareness. This observation applies to many other dimensions, including the global one. With my colleague Fabien Locher, we are completing a long-term investigation that traces all the knowledge that has existed on climate change since the sixteenth century.^[2] It may seem strange or anachronistic, but climate has been a central focus for thinking about the consequences of human action on the environment, and in return what the environment does to humans. It was a crucial focus for the environmental reflexivity of past societies. Since the seventeenth century and especially at the end of the eighteenth, deforestation was seen as a threat to the water cycle, a global cycle linking the oceans to the atmosphere and the soil, as well as a providential cycle that ensures the fertility of temperate regions. Through the issue of deforestation, the issue of climate change lay at the heart of the political concerns of the time, for a very simple reason: all or almost all energy came from wood. In what historians call ‘organic’ economies, there is indeed a constant trade-off between forests and fields, between energy to produce things and grain to feed the population.

The issue of the link between deforestation and climate change was very present at the end of the eighteenth century, and France played a pivotal role in its global diffusion. The reason for this was quite cyclical: after the nationalisation of church property in 1789, to pay off the monarchy’s debts, the French state found itself at the head of a huge forest estate compared to other European countries. Every time the sale of a piece of national forest to pay off debts was discussed, climate was brought up again. As a result, as early as 1792, the National Assembly was already talking about deforestation, climate change, soil erosion, flooding, etc. But this does not mean there is nothing new under the sun! The climate change at that time was not the same as ours, for one main reason: the issue at stake was the water cycle and not the carbon cycle. Of course, in the meantime there has been the development of a huge scientific apparatus.^[3] But there are also impressive continuities: at the beginning of the nineteenth century, climate was already thought of as average temperature, it was already thought of at the global level, and very good science was being done on this issue; it was at this time that the evolution of glaciers, the timing of the grape harvest, etc. was being studied. Finally, the change was considered irreversible, because cutting down forests produced a climate change that made it impossible for forests to grow again. Deforestation could therefore produce a degradation of both climates and the populations that inhabit them.

Happy Apocalypse

by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz

Translated by David Broder

Being environmentally conscious is not nearly as modern as we imagine. As a mode of thinking it goes back hundreds of years. Yet we typically imagine ourselves among the first to grasp the impact h...

If we tell the story of the transformation of environments as the story of societies that act on them without really caring, it is not very interesting: it is more a historical ecology than an ecological history. So, we need to see how people perceived the transformations they were making in the environment. Told in this way, environmental history takes us out of the Ulrich Beck theories of reflexive modernity. According to these theories, there was a first, blind, modernist phase; then in the 1970s there was a kind of revelation, a fundamental break in modernity – a historical change in the same way as the transition from feudalism to capitalism. The obvious problem is that nothing has happened since we made this so-called ‘environmental revolution’: production methods are continuing on their current path, there has been no great change, the CO₂level has only increased, etc. So, it’s not a matter of awareness. The challenge is to de-idealise these issues, to take the question of the environmental crisis out of a clichéd narrative of modernity seen as responsible en bloc; at each stage of it we were well aware of the consequences of what we were doing. It also takes us away from the very gratifying idea that we are the first generation or so to care about the environment and that awareness is redemption – now that we’ve understood it, everything will be fine. Well, no, it’s not: it’s actually getting worse.

The dominant discourse is that of overcoming classical politics by the ecological question: we should move forward together beyond divisions... This is because the Anthropocene is supposed to bring everyone together, abolishing certain borders (nature and culture, living and non-living, etc.). On the contrary, you think that such oppositions should be reaffirmed...

Absolutely. On this point again, the question of the age of reflexivity is important. In France, the environmental question was taken up in the 1980s and 1990s by two major philosophers: Michel Serres and Bruno Latour. In Serres’ The Natural Contract, the environmental issue was placed within political philosophy. This project was taken up and deepened by Latour in his Politics of Nature. This gave an essentially philosophical and institutional framework. Modernity supposedly produced a dual vision of the world, with society on one side and nature on the other; politics with its institutions on one side and science with other institutions on the other. Basically, the environmental crisis would require a new Rousseau, a new constitution: a ‘parliament of things’, giving spokespersons to non-humans, and imagining forms of dialogue between experts, citizens, and industrialists. All this is extremely interesting, but it does pose several problems. Firstly, I don’t believe that modernity has separated nature and society. On the contrary, we have not stopped thinking about the two in an intertwined way and acting accordingly; we have not been rendered ‘blind’ by a modern ‘great division’. Since the seventeenth century, we have constantly asked questions about the environment, the climate, soil depletion, the status of animals,^[4] etc. In a supposedly modern cosmology, jurists have also shown great creativity. For example, in England in the nineteenth century, in order to make railway companies pay for accidents, they brought out a tool from medieval law, the deodand, which allowed objects to be declared guilty! In short, if Latour is perfectly right to say that ‘We have never been modern’, we must add that either we have always known it, or that this whole business of modernity is a philosophical straw man.Secondly, this grand narrative is both very radical and very consensual: by calling everything into question, we are not attacking anything or anyone precisely. How can we bring about a cosmological and ontological revolution? Through aesthetics? Through culture? This gives a great deal of space to intellectuals and artists, less to workers, peasants, or railway workers, who are nevertheless the ones who organise and manipulate matter. In short, I’m afraid it’s a rather academic discourse, fascinating but not very concrete. In its more pragmatic version, the idea is to give rivers and forests legal personhood. This is undoubtedly a step forward, but we know the gulf between great principles and their application. If we have been modernising for two centuries despite awareness, this also means that capitalism is very efficient at ingesting, digesting criticism, normalising situations, limiting extreme cases like Nauru while giving the impression that we have understood everything. For example, if you put the main principles in the constitution without considering modes of production and life, you can be sure that capitalism will swallow the rights of nature whole. I’m sorry if this sounds intellectually unexciting compared to the great cosmological refoundations proposed by philosophers, but, given the urgency of the issues at stake, and the fact that we need to act everywhere and now, the contemporary environmental crisis forces us to act in the political and geopolitical world as it currently exists.

What needs to be done is fairly obvious: to subdue the lobbies and the polluting and extractivist companies, to leave carbon in the ground, to stop industrial agriculture, to set up ecological rationing (on CO₂ for example), to change the tax system, to change modes of transport and food, to punish attacks on the environment with equal severity as attacks on goods and people. This doesn’t sound revolutionary compared to ‘concrete utopias’ and projects for cosmological change, but it may be more so.

You use the concept of Capitalocene: why would this be more appropriate than Anthropocene?

Anthropocene is the worst possible name for the environmental crisis because it carries Malthusian overtones: that the problem is anthropos as a biological species. Demography obviously plays a role, but it is probably not the determining factor. Between 1800 and 2000, the number of people on the planet rose from one to six billion, but energy consumption increased by a factor of 40 and capital by a factor of 134 (to take Thomas Piketty’s figures). So, there are many variables that are far more important and decisive. If we had only one word to explain the environmental crisis, it would probably be Capitalocene. It’s certainly better than Anthropocene – though obviously, geologists will never adopt the term Capitalocene... Now, it’s not a very interesting debate and there’s no reason to limit ourselves to a single word, a single lens. In my book with Christophe Bonneuil, The Shock of the Anthropocene, I put great stress on the role of the Second World War, which cannot simply be subsumed into the history of capitalism. It is much less talked about than the Capitalocene, but the Thanatocene is also important – and it is probably the interaction of the two that plays a key role.

Let’s look at the term Thanatocene for a moment. When we talk about the relationship between environment and war, the first image that comes to mind is often the Vietnam War. But beyond this destruction, the environment is thought of militarily as a space to be developed: what can military history tell us about environmental history?

What struck me in writing this book is that the history of the environmental crisis is already largely written, but it is not necessarily to be found in environmental history as such or among ecological historians. The most enlightening books for understanding the Anthropocene are often those by historians who are military economists. I am thinking in particular of Alan Milward, who wrote a book on the industrial military mobilisation of the United States for the Second World War, Adam Tooze, with the same questions on the Third Reich, or David Edgerton, on the British economy and the Second World War. Obviously, acting to destroy the enemy’s environment is very old, even if it acquired greater industrial and technological proportions with the Vietnam War. The most important thing is the extent to which military action contaminates civilian technologies. And as this is a function of the choice of power rather than of efficiency, it leads to a fork in the road towards very energy-intensive, very polluting technologies. The same technologies of destruction against humans are then applied to living beings in general: pesticides, the nylon thread used for fishing comes from parachutes; aviation and highways are all very polluting elements that come from the military. The interaction of all this with capitalism is the crux of the matter.

The Shock of the Anthropocene

by Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz

Translated by David Fernbach

The Earth has entered a new epoch: the Anthropocene. What we are facing is not only an environmental crisis, but a geological revolution of human origin. In two centuries, our planet has tipped int...

The history of energy is supposedly accompanied by a search for greater efficiency. You take an example that undermines this idea: intensive and mechanised agriculture is less efficient – in terms of energy – than traditional agriculture, since it takes more calories to produce one calorie of food. Is energy progress a myth?

The energy system may not be efficient, but that doesn’t matter: if there is plenty of cheap energy, who cares, that’s the problem. As long as there’s cheap oil, you can process a lot of oil to get an agricultural product that contains little energy. Agriculture is exactly that: industrial farming may be energy-deficient – there are debates, depending on what you’re comparing, which cereals, which products – but that doesn’t stop it from conquering the world. That’s also why the argument that the party’s over because the EROI (energy return on investment) is decreasing – it takes more and more calories to recover one calorie of oil – has never seemed very conclusive to me. If we look at the EROI of the first coalmines, it was disastrous: water had to be pumped out and there were a lot of people working in these mines (close to a million miners in England at the end of the nineteenth century). Yet it was these energetically inefficient coalmines that launched fossil capitalism. So, there have been trajectories that were set off with very bad EROIs. Whatever the EROI is, as long as there’s a financial incentive to do it, it will be done. In the late 2000s, oil companies seriously considered installing nuclear power plants to recover the bituminous oil in Alberta. And if the price of oil rises again, there is a chance that these projects will re-emerge. You have to take into account the EROI but also put this purely energy-centric view of the story into perspective. What I find interesting are the political histories of energy that show the strategic, capitalist, etc. stakes,^[5] which are much more important explanatory factors.

While the quantification and pricing of nature are widespread today, certain principles, such as ‘polluter pays’, are long-established. How old is this idea?

This business of compensating for damage for which one is responsible is an old idea from Roman law taken up by the elites of industrial capitalism at the beginning of the nineteenth century. From the beginning of the industrial revolution, there was a very important project of stabilising industrial property with strong property rights. And so, whatever the complaints against pollution, the industrialists had to be guaranteed their right to practice and not be forced to move. The ‘solution’ that was put in place, with the 1810 decree on classified establishments, was to award damages to those who suffer nuisance. As we know, this does not solve the problem of pollution, but it does ease neighbourhood conflicts. It is obviously smoke and mirrors. Today, it takes much more impressive, more subtle forms, with the idea that one can even compensate for the loss of ecosystemic services (what is the value, not just of a meadow, but of the pollinating activity of the insects that live there, for example); but the logic remains fairly equivalent and so does the end result. What is dangerous in this business of ecosystem offsetting is the equating of financial values with nature: the idea that one can go and destroy woodland in the Vendée and then buy biodiversity ‘bonds’ elsewhere in France. This is based on land that an institution (e.g. the Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations Biodiversité) commits to conserving for a limited period of time (around 20 to 30 years) – a way of disinhibiting, giving a clear conscience by saying, ‘We're going to concrete here and protect there.’ The reality is that we risk concreting both here and there.

How can we get away from such an economistic and accounting vision?

 Since the nineteenth century, many things have been invented to protect nature: bans on fishing, deforestation, excessive pollution, and so on. These are very old tools. In the nineteenth century, natural parks were created, especially in the United States, with the aim of preserving a place outside economic logic. This kind of park has been heavily criticised by historians and postmodern philosophers. By historians, because in the nineteenth century, parks were also used to expel the people who lived there, the Native Americans in the United States in particular, and their land was taken from them under the pretext of preserving nature. And also by postmodernists, since it meant separating nature from man. I understand their arguments, but parks remain an effective environmental protection tool and it is important to rehabilitate them. Similarly, all the corridors allow animals to migrate, move and reproduce. This is not a financialisation of nature nor an attempt to value an ecosystemic service but rather involves considering the right organisation of human activities to avoid these encroaching too fundamentally on those of other species.

The notion of ‘sustainable development’ is quite criticised now, but another expression is less questioned, that of ‘energy transition’. What about this?

The term ‘energy transition’ appeared in English around 1975, to replace the notion of an energy crisis: it’s much more reassuring and gives the impression that there’s some kind of managerial rationality. It came from the energy companies and nuclear energy professionals. They said that if there isn’t enough oil – we’d passed the peak of conventional oil in the United States – we could go nuclear, move from coal to fuel from the liquefaction of coal, and to shale oil. This notion of energy transition was then reused in the 1980s, especially in Germany (‘energy turn’), to designate the transition to renewable energies with solar and wind power – even though it is a very naive idea of what an energy system is. It’s a notion that has been used to allay fears. The second problem is that historically there has never really been an ‘energy transition’ but mostly ‘energy additions’. We didn’t go from wood to coal, then from coal to oil, then from oil to something else: we just added these energy sources together. Peak coal did not occur in the nineteenth or even the twentieth century, let’s hope it will soon occur in the twenty-first... When we talk a little too lightly about ‘energy transition’, we must realise that this is an unprecedented transformation.

There is still the question of innovation. We should not be technophobic, because there is no reason to be more suspicious of a new technique than of the old techniques that have led us to the present situation. But we should not be naïve either: given the considerable inertia of technical systems, and given the great urgency (reducing global emissions by 75 per cent before 2050), the probability that ‘green innovation’ will get us out of the crisis seems to me to be close to zero.

 The philosopher Catherine Larrère states that the success of the Anthropocene concept ‘is undoubtedly due to its name: we like the fact that a geological epoch (no less!) is named after humans’.^[6] Is the Anthropocene becoming a new anthropocentrism?

It can be, especially in the discourse of the ‘good Anthropocene’. There is a whole group of scientists, the ecomodernists, who popularise the concept and tend to reduce it to very ancient processes by saying that we already entered the Anthropocene with the Neolithic age (the increase in methane around 4000 BCE was not natural) and that we must now enter a ‘good Anthropocene’ enlightened by Earth system science. In this way scientism draws on ecology. This theme of the ‘good Anthropocene’ is very anthropocentric. These ecomodernists are pessimistic, assuming that we will not be able to change the trajectory of development – in a sense, they are not entirely wrong – and that we must open the door to geo-engineering. Earth system science would allow us to manage the planet at the global level through technological solutions: man would then consider himself the guarantor of the planetary balance. A pretty crazy idea.

My explanation for the success of the Anthropocene concept lies in its aesthetic appeal. The Anthropocene is not a scientific breakthrough or a new paradigm, it is just a brilliant way of renaming the achievements of Earth system science from the 1960s to the 1990s. The Anthropocene uses the very classical aesthetic of the sublime, a concept theorised by the seventeenth-century English conservative philosopher Edmund Burke: this is the feeling of terror in the face of the vastness of nature, but also mixed with pleasure. He uses an example: if London were devastated by an earthquake, many people would come to see it and take a certain pleasure in it.^[7] The sublime of the Anthropocene transfers the aesthetic pleasure we used to get from contemplating the vastness of nature – earthquakes, volcanoes, etc. – onto the human species. So, it reverses the polarities. From now on, the human species is compared with geological forces, which we had learned to fear but also to revere. This idea surfs on another branch of the sublime: the technological, i.e. admiration for immense human achievements (think of the Millau viaduct). The discourse of the Anthropocene, like geo-engineering, reactivates this junction between the grandness of nature and a technology that competes with it, since it is now on a similar scale. Moreover, the philosophers and theorists of modernity used to tell us that there was no longer a ‘grand narrative’, that modernity was over, that communism was no longer a prospect: the Anthropocene has made it possible to re-establish a majestic grand narrative, where we know what is going to happen. This also appeals to certain philosophers, for whom something metaphysical has occurred in that humanity has become a conscious geological agent.^[8]

Chaos in the Heavens

by Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and Fabien Locher

Translated by Gregory Elliott

Nothing could seem more contemporary than climate change. Yet, in Chaos in the Heavens, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz and Fabien Locher show that we have been thinking about and debating the consequences o...

You say that ‘objecting to Anthropocenic action’ involves carrying out a generalised protest (defending the forest, questioning machines, innovations, and industrialism, opposing pollution and nuisances), taking up and extending critiques (Gorz, Illich, Ellul, etc.). What concrete spaces for struggle can be found without finding oneself totally marginalised, which the system is quite happy with?

Personally, I would like to get away from the glamour given to some critical intellectuals of the 1950-1970 period. As a historian, what strikes me is the extraordinary banality of their critique of technologies, especially the most disgusting ones. To take a key example: the automobile. In its early days, everyone complained about it, everyone grumbled about cars, they were a nuisance for 99 per cent of the population and a luxury for 1 per cent.^[9] Children were run over en masse and, in the 1920s, memorials were even erected to them. There were huge anti-car demonstrations in the cities. So, it was in no way small, marginal, romantic-ecological groups that led these battles. Faced with the most important technologies of the Anthropocene – those that have really turned us around – there was general opposition because they transformed lifestyles and environments. The automobile is typically the kind of ecological project where we could imagine a very broad political front: there is no reason why this should be confined to a few social groups. I’d rather insist on this than highlight a few intellectuals who supposedly understood everything before anyone else. That said, we can find some interesting arguments, in Illich and Gorz, about the counter-productivity of certain technologies, and these should still fertilise our imagination. There are many technologies that are imposed and yet counterproductive – think of the electric car, in terms of pollution and energy efficiency. But de-intellectualising criticism is fundamental to progress.

We must also do justice to common environmental decency, to adapt Orwell’s expression. In the case of CO₂emissions, we can imagine the need for a new intellectual object such as Gaia, seen as reacting to our actions, and so on. We can also say to ourselves: isn’t it strange to take matter that has been putrefied for millions of years and burn it up in the middle of everyone? From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, everyone realised this was dangerous. The French even blamed coal for making the English surly. There is an almost hygienic sensibility that should be brought up to date: when a disgusting engine belches black fumes in our faces, we don’t need to change our cosmologies to understand that this poses a problem. We have been taught to be wary of germs, to be afraid of dirt – this is what institutions managed to do in the nineteenth century. Reactivating good hygienic schemes that separate the clean from the dirty, the healthy from the unhealthy, is the kind of operation that needs to be done. The anti-extractivist movement is also key here: the important thing is not to take carbon out of the soil. Anti-extractivist struggles, which are long-standing, are perhaps the most important thing for the climate. In Nigeria, the Niger Delta has been completely ransacked by the oil industry, by Exxon, allied with the federal government in particular. There is an Ogon movement, MEND, which has succeeded in getting the oil companies to back down: production fell by a third in the 2000s. But it is a quasi-civil war, with violence and deaths on both sides. And in a country like Saudi Arabia, I don’t really see the anti-extractivist struggle succeeding... But, in simply logical terms, that’s what we should do. 

What do you think of the avenues put forward by the engineer Philippe Bihouix, who proposes using low-tech, very sustainable and easily recyclable ‘low technologies’ geared less to power and performance than to energy efficiency and sobriety?

Bihouix’s book^[10] – and the idea of low tech – is very interesting because it takes us out of the conventional discourse of green innovation. The problem is that he develops his argument in the perspective of peaks. He transposes the perspective of peak oil to the peak of rare metals and rare earths (needed for renewable energy production). The problem is that we are likely to have the same phenomenon with rare earths as with oil. As soon as they become expensive, mines will be reopened, prospecting will be done, deeper digging will be done, investments will be made, etc. The issue of energy scarcity has taken on an inordinate importance, whereas the issue of climate change will arise much earlier. Three-quarters of the economically exploitable coal, oil and gas reserves must be left in the ground so as not to exceed planetary heating of 2°C by 2100. To say that nature will impose limits on us is to risk depoliticising the issue. We have to manage to impose limits on ourselves. The most depressing thing is that extractivist capitalism is doing well, it can go on like this for a long time, it can screw up the planet long before it runs out of fuel. The question of limits is more like one of pushing against soft borders without realising that in many areas we have already passed ‘limits’ and are continuing on our way, with the effects coming much later, and in different ways. This is also the whole theme of collapsology and a certain degrowth idea, inherited from the peak oil shock and the Club of Rome. It’s more an ecology of the ‘rich’, not necessarily in the negative sense of the term; it’s the rich countries that are anxious about energy collapse. For a farmer in Bangladesh threatened by rising waters, the shortage of certain rare metals that will prevent electric cars from running is hardly a serious problem. It is not necessary to fight over who is right and who is wrong, but it is important to have a political ecology that is not based on a fragile foundation.

Translated by David Fernbach