Atlas de L’Anthropocène [Atlas of the Anthropocene] Deuxième edition actualisée et augmentée. F. Gemenne, A. Rankovic. Atelier de cartographie de Sciences Po. Science Po Presse. 2020.

Mark Harvey, Emeritus Professor, Department of Sociology, University of Essex 

All translations of the French text are the reviewer’s

The updated and expanded Atlas of the Anthropocene provides an invaluable resource which can either be dipped into as a book of reference or read through as an account of ‘the ecological crisis of our times’. Unlike some conventional atlases, it combines a narrative text for each of its sections alongside compelling graphic representations with graphs, maps, block charts, timelines, and other visual devices.

The Atlas is topped and tailed with a preface by Jan Zalaseiwicz and a postface by Bruno Latour, respectively a geologist and philosopher. Latour plays the idea of Atlas, the mythological Titan able to bear the crushing weight of the planet on his shoulders, against the atlas of Mercator, a symbol of human power dominating the planet. Invoking the need to escape from the present despair of humans now threatened by the planet’s revenge of climate change, he presents this Atlas as a way of informing decisions that will reverse socio-political decisions that provoke that revenge. 

Zalaseiwicz approaches the relation between humans and the planet from the rather different angle of a geologist from the Anthropocene Working Group determining whether and when a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene began. In its particular way, it too confronts the issue of whether natural, indeed cosmological, or human forces determine a change in geological epoch. As an opening into this Atlas, it shapes the whole way in which it is framed. For, by application of geological and stratigraphical criteria for determining the beginning of the new epoch of the Anthropocene, he and the formal body of the Anthropocene Working Group, set the date of its commencement at 1950.[1]

Geologically speaking, there is a reason given for this precision. Geological definitions of its temporalities of eons, periods, epochs and ages are evidenced in terms of pan-global novel strata of sediments in rocks and other trace media (e.g., ice cores) which are widely synchronous across the planet. Thus, the layer of radionucleotides that emanated from atomic bomb testing initiated at the Trinity Alamogordo site New Mexico in 1945 and finally largely terminated by the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty banning atmospheric and sub-surface nuclear testing in 1999, perfectly met the geological criteria. No human activity previously had presented such a neat timeline with evidential impacts in rock strata and other trace media across the world.[2]

The geological temporalities of eons, periods, epochs and ages have largely been determined by cosmological regularities related to the way in which the earth rotates around the sun with increasing or decreasing insolation in regular 100,000 and 23,000 year cycles, producing successive ice ages and interglacial periods. These cyclical variations result in stratigraphical records by which geological periodisation is established – with the addition of rare catastrophic exogenous causes such as a major asteroid strike. Because of this connection between cosmological cycles and stratigraphical deposits, the geological determination of temporal periods, its eons, periods, epochs and ages, were entirely appropriate.

But the example of the AWG’s use of radionucleotide deposits for defining the start of the Anthropocene demonstrates just how inappropriate a stratigraphical approach is for analysing politically and socially induced environmental change. Atomic bomb testing began and ended in a very short period, and although some radioactive residues have a very long life, and although the tests put biological life of all kinds at risk, it has had minimal planetary impacts. Testing had little significance for climate change or global warming, and even less connection with those processes such as burning fossil fuels or land-use change, which did. 

Perhaps more fundamentally, it illustrates the up-to-now insufficient but necessary dialogue to happen between natural and socio-historical sciences – in both directions. The natural science approaches, including the geologists of the AWG, quite rightly treat the planet as a physical system and measure and analyse the physical effects of human activity. The term anthropogenic is thus slightly misleading, because they deal with the anthropotopic, rather than the socio-economic processes generating those physical effects, the impacts rather than the genesis. A socio-historical perspective therefore theorises the sociogenesis of environmental change, looking at how different socio-politico-economies interact with and exploit the environmental resources over which they have control, so impacting the environment.[3] In so doing, and necessarily, sociogenesis involves different temporalities and periodisations than those of geologists.

This difference can be well illustrated by examining the consequences for the Atlas in adopting a geological framing of temporalities. Having set the start-date for the Anthropocene at 1950, the Atlas then follows with a section on a phase which, with the AWG scientists, they call the Great Acceleration, referring to the post-Second World War period that exhibited a spread and rapid growth in the exploitation of fossil energy. They have a crude way of portraying this: ‘With the conversion of a very large number of individuals to consumerism, the Great Acceleration takes over the whole world.’ (p.22). Setting aside for the moment the key aspect of sociogenesis involving inequalities in both consumption and production within and between countries, the charts that accompany this statement directly undermine it. Indeed, taking their indicators of the ecological system (e.g., carbon and methane cycles, acidification of oceans, loss of tropical forest) or their socio-economic indicators (use of primary energy, GDP, use of chemical fertilizers, urban population), none display a sharper increase after 1950 than before. Some of the indicators stretching back to 1750, others from 1900. Only the growth of telecommunications and direct foreign investment, whose climate change significance is uncertain, display anything akin to a rapid acceleration.

The Atlas further undermines a stratigraphical periodisation by effects rather than socio-economic causes by later displaying the significance of the two major aspects generating climate change, exploitation of fossil fuels and land-use change. In the text, it is noted that CO2 concentrations during the Holocene never exceeded 285pmm before 1700, but consequent on the exploitation of coal, and in particular British coal, concentrations ‘suddenly increased’ to beyond that limit by 1850 (p.42). By 1900, it had reached 296 pmm,[4] and from the next two major waves of fossil fuel exploitation, electric power generation and the combustion engine, it continued to accelerate reaching 311pm by 1950. There is no question that after 1945 there was a further, indeed, great acceleration to reach the present levels of above 420pmm. But it was a steadily and increasingly sharp upward curve driven by a limited number of leading economies from 1800 onwards. Indeed, when Crutzen, and Crutzen and Stoermer first coined the term Anthropocene, they assigned a key responsibility to James Watt’s steam engine.[5] But, sociogenically, the use of steam power in industrialisation could not have occurred without the source of those raw materials used in manufacture, notably cotton. This was achieved as a consequence of a dramatic acceleration of land-use change, especially in North America with the ethnic cleansing and genocides of Native American subsistence farmer and hunter-gatherer societies, replaced by commercial, indeed capitalist, agricultures of slave plantations and settler colonialization.[6] The Atlas does demonstrate this latter aspect in dramatic maps and graphs of ‘the metamorphosis of terrestrial landscapes’, showing this acceleration to have begun in 1700 through to 1900 and then 2000 in an ever-expansionary process (p.68-69). Strangely, coming in the section on diminishing biodiversity, the link is not made with climate change. 

This sharply exposes the weakness of taking geological stratigraphical criteria of pan-global synchronicity as the basis of socio-historical periodisation. The central aspect of sociogenic temporalities of climate change is that they attest to the unequal rather than pan-global character of economic growth. Indeed, they point to the significance of the ‘Great Divergence’ between the European and North American socio-economies and previously relatively equally wealthy countries of India, China, Japan, Africa, and so on.[7] The unevenness and distinctiveness of different historical socio-economic trajectories of growth unequally generated the combination of greenhouse gases driving climate change.

The Atlas then proceeds with sections on the damage to the ozone layer, impacts on the climate, biodiversity, pollution, demographics and the politics of the Anthropocene. As is typical of the United Nations scientific reports, many of the graphical representations and accompanying texts deal with aggregate impacts of human activity on the planet considered as a physical system, again, effects not socio-economic causes. Such data is unquestionably of considerable value – we need to understand how the physical planet is affected, and all human activity does aggregate up to result in such impacts, irrespective of societally unequal contributions. So, any critical reflections that follow are not intended to diminish the Atlas’ contribution.

The strengths and weakness of the Atlas are well illustrated by the representation of one of the most striking impacts on the earth’s atmosphere, the destruction of the ozone layer with an expanding hole, resulting in exposure of living beings to excessive ultraviolet radiation. Presented as an effect of globalisation, the increase in refrigerator and air conditioning units using chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) was responsible for the crisis, which the Atlas displays in charts of growing gas emissions and maps of the expanding ozone layer hole. It also makes the important argument both that there was a relatively easy technological fix by substituting CFCs with hydrofluoroolefins (HFOs), and that the international Treaty, the Montreal Protocol banning CFCs in 1987, pioneered agreements of this kind. The Treaty provided the initial model for the Kyoto conference later to deal with global warming. Presenting the aggregate impacts of CFCs in refrigerators and air-conditioning, however, masks the socio-economic and societal dimensions. The US, even amongst advanced economies, had the highest refrigerator ownership in 2008 at 99.9%, compared with China at 55.5% and India at 15% (World Bank Development Indicators, 2008). Moreover, US refrigerators are double the size of European or Japanese appliances. 90% of households in the US have air-conditioning, compared with 60% in China, 10% in Europe, with the US consuming 50% of the global total energy for air-conditioning of workplaces.[8] The Atlas could develop innovative graphics for these socio-economic dimensions of the ozone layer depletion.

The next section provides a wealth of indices on the impacts of climate change: the varied impact of a global rise in temperatures above 2.5C, affecting especially Northern regions; dramatic graphics of the shrinking icecaps; the consequences on the Mekong Delta, the Mississippi Delta and the North Sea coast of rising sea levels; acidification of oceans, and the effects on biodiversity. But it opens with a classic representation of the aggregate contributions in CO2 emissions driving global warming, contrasting 1960 when Europe had 42%, the US 33% and Asia (including Japan) 16% with 2020, when Asia now contributes 48%, N America 17% and Europe 15%. They conclude that ‘the struggle against climate change from now depends on the development trajectories of the countries of the South.’ (p.44). Again, from a sociogenic perspective, the Atlas would benefit from charts and graphs of carbon energy intensity, with the US consuming 2.5 times more electricity per capita than China, and over nine times more energy per capita than India. Surely, the most carbon energy intensive, most developed and wealthiest countries have an obligation to decarbonise fastest from their high plateaus, while the countries of the South face their very different challenges of green development?

The sections of biodiversity and pollution provide some excellent maps and graphs of deforestation, the global patterns uncontrollable fires, the ‘hell on the sea’ of industrialised fishing, the 5,000 billion pieces of plastic that have formed a continental size surface in the North Pacific. The final section on the politics of the Anthropocene plots the growth of environmental NGOs, of climate change conferences, of protest movements and school strikes, the financing of climate change denial. So, the Atlas undoubtedly can claim to have captured in maps and graphs ‘the ecological crisis of our times’. 

But, to conclude, it could have been so much richer if it had mapped the inequalities of climate change and environmental destruction, both within and between nations. Maps of environmental resource inequalities and consequent trade flows of fossil energy and food – including from Russia to Europe, Australia to Japan, Brazil to Europe and China – let alone the distribution of key mineral resources. Trade flows of embodied carbon in manufactures would also re-balance the graphic impact of national aggregates of greenhouse gas from manufacturing production, visualising the flows of steel in all its forms, for example. We need maps of the asymmetries of economic power in addition to those of global aggregates. And, above all we need a vision of the dynamic linkage between wealth inequalities and the sociogenesis of climate change, and more broadly, the ecological crisis.

Notes

[1] Zalasiewicz, J., Waters, C.N., Summerhayes, C.P., Wolfe, A.P., Barnosky, A.D., Cearreta, A., Crutzen, P., Ellis, E., Fairchild, I.J., Gałuszka, A. and Haff, P., 2017. The Working Group on the Anthropocene: Summary of evidence and interim recommendations. Anthropocene, 19, pp.55-60.

[2] Waters, C.N., Zalasiewicz, J., Summerhayes, C., Barnosky, A.D., Poirier, C., Gałuszka, A., Cearreta, A.,Edgeworth, M., Ellis, E.C., Ellis, M. and Jeandel, C., 2016. ‘The Anthropocene is functionally and stratigraphically distinct from the Holocene.’ Science, 351(6269); Waters, C.N., Zalasiewicz, J., Summerhayes, C., Fairchild, I.J., Rose, N.L., Loader, N.J., Shotyk, W., CearretA., Head, M.J., Syvitski, J.P. and Williams, M., 2018. ‘Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP) for the Anthropocene Series: Where and how to look for potential candidates.’ Earth-Science Reviews, 178, pp.379-429.

[3] Harvey, M. 2021. Climate Emergency. How societies create the crisis. Emerald.

[4] Steffen, W., Grinevald, J., Crutzen, P. and McNeill, J., 2011. The Anthropocene: conceptual and historical perspectives. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, 369(1938), pp.842-867. 

[5] Crutzen, P.J. and Stoermer, E.F. 2000. ‘The “Anthropocene”’. Global Change Newsletter, 41, 17-18; Crutzen, P.J. 2002. ‘Geology of mankind’, Nature, 415, 23.

[6] Harvey, M. 2021.

[7] Pomeranz, K. 2000. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton University Press. Princeton.

[8] IEA 2018 (International Energy Authority), The future of cooling: opportunities for energy-efficient air conditioning. www.iea.org.