The ontological crisis of the Anthropocene

By Dr. Luis Fernández Carril (IPCC lead author), Tecnológico de Monterrey

The world is currently in the throes of a serious environmental crisis. Despite the severity, we fail to act upon the challenges. Could our mental configurations, values and principles forged in prosperity prevent us from adapting to a changing world?

 The Anthropocene is not only a concept with geological purposes. Above all, it implies an epoch of profound changes and consequences on a global scale. The gentle and stable climate of the Holocene is giving rise to what is coming to be a chaotic and turbulent world. The diversity of crises caused by human activity such as climate change, scarcity of resources, mass extinction of species, collapse of ecosystems, loss of fertile soil and pandemics, which have long been known as risks, are being transformed into threats and impacts. In this way, we find ourselves on the threshold of the Anthropocene.

 The Anthropocene presently unfolds, not as an unexpected and sudden black swan, but as a series of threats announced for decades that have been ignored. Now it will not be possible to ignore these environmental threats and keep them under the carpet like all the environmental risks we have been alerted to since the 1970s through works such as Silent Spring and The Limits of Growth.

 The information deficit model is constantly used to explain the inaction of human beings in the face of the ecological crisis. This model assumes that what is needed is information to act. Nonetheless, after a vast number of scientific reports warning of environmental risks and international conferences designed to face the environmental challenges that continuously fail, we can clearly affirm this is not the case.

 Anthony Giddens (2011) states in his book The Politics of Climate Change, that only imminence would be able to make us react to environmental risk. The problem of climate change lays in its intangibility, as an abstract reality unrelated to our lives. In this way, Giddens explained, only when environmental impacts touch our daily lives will we act upon it.

 The corollary of Giddens' paradox, which we have learned both from the unfolding of climate change and from the current pandemic, is alarming. It turns out that it is not even imminence, the threat in front of our eyes capable of shaking our consciousness and modifying our life patterns. Nothing is more tangible and imminent than the current pandemic, with the millions infected and the more than 2 million dead worldwide; however dramatic, it does not seem to be enough to modify our consciences and habits. Worse still, not only are these not enough, but there is even a desire and deliberate will to deny their reality, to reject what has happened as a conspiracy or, on the other hand, to downplay their impact or relevance. Likewise, faced with the imminent impacts of the Anthropocene, there is a strong resistance to leaving the comfort of the status quo at the governmental, economic or individual level no matter the scientific warnings of the past decades.

 At the same time, we also presuppose the dominion over nature, the control of humanity in the face of climatic circumstances, regardless of the seriousness of the crisis we are provoking and underestimate its impacts. We are blindly confident in our ability to resolve, that our ingenuity and technology will be able to solve all environmental crises and thus maintain the status quo and the present way of life.

 For instance, with the current pandemic we assume that everything will soon return to normal and this will have been a mere inconvenience. We are one vaccine away from a return to the comfortable convenience of ‘the normal’, unaware of how it all originated in a prosperous, abundant world and an illusory stability.

 Thus, a collapse or a radical change in the world that modifies our permanence, or our way of life is unthinkable, unimaginable. In such a comfortable world, no other way of being or living in the world than the ontological configuration of modernity and its various political or ethical dimensions is unthinkable. Life, capitalism, modern institutions, and political and economic systems seem inevitable, perennial, and immortal. As captured by the by now famous adage: “it is easier to imagine the end of time than to imagine the end of capitalism”[1].

 The ontology of prosperity

These life configurations and values are directly related to the environment. We live in a globalised consumer culture with an ontology installed and established in the assumption of stability, prosperity and uniformity of nature. It is from these foundational assumptions that we have built the mental order in which we position ourselves in front of reality, in front of the universe, in front of nature, and we build society as perceptions, guides and systems of meaning-making. From these foundational assumptions stem not only attitudes, but the very configuration of the world, its modern institutions and political and economic systems. It is from environmental stability and prosperity that the illusion of progress, of technological mastery, of manifest destiny emerge. The world-system of the culture forged in Western modernity as a whole presupposes such stability, uniformity and prosperity, and from its hegemonic dominance has extended its foundational assumptions to permeate over other cultures and ontologies.

 It is from this (supposed) stability, uniformity and prosperity that our illusion of control and dominance and superiority emerges. Without knowing it, we build reality from stability, and this, in turn, provides a worldview, of how to relate to oneself, to nature and to others. From here, we build fictions such as nations and borders; imaginaries on which our institutions are built.

 It is also in this same assumption that the self-determination of the individual as the axis of the universe emerges. The mechanistic worldview, materialism, narcissism, and individualism can only thrive under conditions of abundance and prosperity. Only a prosperous world can sustain the voracity of today's hyper-consumerist way of life, where we live ‘to be happy’ and think only of ourselves and everything else, can be ignored.

 However, this is mere illusion. They are foundational assumptions based on the stability that the Holocene gave us but made us think that they were perennial. Now with the advent of the Anthropocene, we are facing a changing world with a fixed mental apparatus, unable to assimilate a changing world.

 And so, the imagined order and mental configuration that presupposes stability and prosperity will clash with the reality of the Anthropocene, as this configuration assumes and presupposes a permanent status quo in a changing world, on one hand, and is abhorred by the incommodities of change. Even worse, our confidence in perennial stability is such, that our current socioeconomic systems are now locked-in, entrenched, unable to change. This is a recipe for catastrophe.

 In this manner, the mental configurations, narratives, visions, values, attitudes, institutions and systems that originated in environmental prosperity and abundance cannot survive in a world of scarcity and turbulence, but they will resist dying out. The imaginary order that has been created in prosperity will resist change and disappear. And it is in these circumstances that they erode and in their own degradation and decadence generate violence, chaos. The concept of the nation state, national identity, unlimited growth or the neoliberalism idea of freedom, will collide with the changing reality and the collapsing environment. Nationalisms and Fascism arise while a growing number of climate refugees arrive from uninhabitable places. The concept of borders is irreconcilable in a world of sea level rise and inhospitable regions; national sovereignty is incompatible in an interdependent world in need of cooperation. Hyper consumerism without limitations cannot subsist in the conditions and limitations caused by scarcity and other destabilizing environmental impacts.

 This resistance to change, ironically, is what will end up consolidating the turbulent conditions of the Anthropocene epoch, as the Greek destiny that is fulfilled the more one seeks to avoid it.

Towards an ontology of precarity

In this way, the various impacts of the global ecological crisis, including the current pandemic, are gradually showing us that we have left the comfort of the Holocene to enter the unchartered waters of the Anthropocene. We are resisting to assimilate what is happening now with all our strength and, above all, with all our beliefs, assumptions and derived mental configurations. We are now faced with a changing world with people, institutions, socioeconomic systems uncapable of transformation because they were programmed for prosperous, stable, controlled circumstances. A chaotic world begins to manifest itself in the daily life of beings with a mental apparatus and an imaginary order gestated in prosperity, trained for individualism, but that are now demanded to sacrifice their comfort and conduct themselves with temperance and frugality.

 As this dying ontology of prosperity agonizes, new imaginaries, worldviews will emerge with new relationships with the world, new visions, principles, values and behaviours, as the product of precariousness, scarcity and turbulence.

 The great task to avoid aggravating the crisis and transition in a less violent way to the Anthropocene, will be to forge the emergence of an ontology of precariousness with views, principles and values such as interdependence between living beings, frugality, austerity, vulnerability, compassion, solidarity, which can only flourish in a deeply degraded world. Cultivating these values and principles will give us the opportunity to create the mental configurations required to adapt to the conditions of existence of the Anthropocene.

 References

Giddens, A. 2011. The Politics of Climate Change. Cambridge: Polity.

About:

Dr. Luis R. Fernández Carril is a researcher in environmental ethics and international climate policy and professor at Tecnológico de Monterrey in Mexico. He serves as Climate Change officer within the same institution.

 He is currently a lead author of Working Group II Contribution to the 6th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

[1] For an account that traces the origins of this statement, see: Beaumont M. (2014) Imagining the End Times: Ideology, the Contemporary Disaster Movie, Contagion. In: Flisfeder M., Willis LP. (eds) Žižek and Media Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137361516_7