THIS POST IS A TRANSCRIPT AND CRITICAL COMMENTARY OF A YOUTUBE LECTURE IN APRIL 2021 BY WILL STEFFEN THE ANTHROPOCENE MAN {WSTAM} ON HIS FAVORITE SUBJECT: THE ANTHROPOCENE.

PART-1: THE TRANSCRIPT

My name is Will Steffen. I am an earth system scientist and I am here to talk about my favorite topic the Anthropocene. The anthropocene is a new concept in the history of our planet that was coined by Paul Crutzen 21 years ago. And he was reacting to presentations given by a wide variety of scientists who had been studying the ocean, the land, the atmosphere, and so on. And they were referencing all they were talking about to the Holocene which of course is the Geological Epoch and the stable state of the earth system that humans have thrived in for nearly 12,000 years.

But all of the evidence that was being given was counter to the use of the word Holocene and Paul Crutzen was getting very frustrated at this meeting and he finally had enough and he interjected and he just burst out and he interrupted the speaker and he said, “Stop saying that we are in the Holocene!, We’re not in the Holocene any more”! We are in the Anthropocene!. And that is where the word came from. The Anthropos are we the humans and the “cene” ending of the word “Anthropocene” describes the geological time period when the humans had taken over as the geological force that is shaping the future of the planet for nearly 12,000 years. And that created an enormous amount of interest in the Earth System Science Community with the question of whether there was substance to the idea that we have left the Holocene and entered the new geological period of the Anthropocene.

{blogger’s note#1: The late Paul Crutzen who played a role in the creation of both the ozone depletion crisis and the climate change crisis was a meteorologist who had won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1995 for his work on the ozone depletion crisis. He is known for his work on the ozone crisis and the climate crisis and for a world view of a human dominated world that had created a planetary crisIs that he called the Anthropocene.}

{blogger’s note#2: earth system science is a new and emerging field that is claimed to be interdisciplinary but the relevant disciplines are not specified or constrained such that it is an undisciplined and unconstrained interdisciplinary discourse that claims to study an undefined entity called “the earth system” and that specializes in scary visions of the future of the humans, of life on earth, and of the planet itself. The Anthropocene features as one of its main obsessions along with things like catastrophic planet destroying climate change.}

{blogger’s note#3: with regard to the history of the planet please note that the planet has been here for 4.5 billion years and modern humans (homo sapiens) have been here for 200,000 years and most of that time we were two legged cannibalistic animals that became civilized in the first Holocene global warming event 8,000 years ago. This means that the creatures who claim to understand the history of the planet and the future of the planet have been here for 0.004% of the life of the planet and have been civilized from its prior cannibalistic animal state for 0.0002% of the life of the planet}

Presented avove is a 100,000-year record of earth’s temperature so you can see the last ice age, the ups and downs, and the general decrease in temperature going down to the depth of the last ice age about 20,000 years ago. But this last nearly 12,000 years of relatively stable conditions compared to an ice age, that is referred to as the Holocene by the geologists. This is when humans first developed agriculture, villages, cities, and we have thrived during this pperiod of the Holocene. So the question is, can we actually gather evidence to say whether or not we are still in the Holocene. This was our primary research question back in the years after 2,000, that was our major task. The research question in this task is whetehr we are still in the Holocene.

So here is the Anthropo-slide where we looked at what we call THE HUMAN ENTERPRISE

What we wanted to go back to 1750 as the date that designates the period prior to the Industrial Revolution. This is because Paul Crutzen had thought that the Anthropocene had begun with the Industrial Revolution. So, what would you measure if you wanted to quantifiy us; who we are and what we do?

So we looked at population, economic activity, resource use, urbanization, globalization, transport, and so on. And what we saw when we plotted the data from 1750 was remarkable. We thought we would see a nice even curve from the beginning of the industrialrevolution in 1750 but we didn’t.

What we saw was gradual and unremarkable rise from 1750 to 1950 {implying that nothing signnificant happened in the evolution of the anthropocene until 1950.

AND THEN WE SEE ALL OF THESE PARAMETERS TAKING OFF.

WHAT THE DATA TELLS US IS THAT THE ANTHROPOCENE BEGAN NOT IN THE 1750 PRE-INDUSTRIAL DATE AS WE HAD THOUGHT BUT THAT IT BEGAN IN 1950 WELL INTO THE INDUSTRIAL ERA.

WHAT WE SEE IN THE DATA IS THAT THE ANTHROPOCENE BEGAN IN 1950 AND SINCE 1950 WE SEE AN ENORMOUS INCREASE IN THESE PARAMETERS OF THE HUMAN ENTERPRISE.

SO THIS IS THE ANTHROPOS. WE SEE THAT THERE IS REALLY SOMETHING UNUSUAL GOING ON HERE IN THE HUMAN ENTERPRISE STARTING IN THE MID 20TH CENTURY (1950).

BUT THEN WE SAID THAT WE HAVE TO LOOK AT THE OTHER PART OF THE WORD ANHROPOCENE, THE “CENE” THAT REFERS TO THE EARTH SYSTEM. CAN WE SEE ANY IMPACT OF THESE RAPID INCREASE IN HUMAN PRESSURES ON THE EARTH SYSTEM? AND WE DID THE SAME THING. WE STARTED FROM 1750 AND WE WENT TO THE YEAR 2015.

SO WHAT WE DID HERE WAS TO LOOK AT 6 PARAMETERS WHICH CHARACTERIZE THE GEOSPHERE, THE NON LIVING PART OF EARTH – THE CLIMATE, OZONE, OCEAN ACIDITY, AND SO ON AND WE START TO SEE THAT THESE ARE MOVING TOO, NOT ALWAYS PRECISELY AT 1950 BUT IT IS REMARKABLE HOW MANY OF THEM SHOWED CHANGES IN THEIR RATE AROUND THE MID 20TH CENTURY . .

AND THE BOTTOM SIX ARE THE BIOSPHERE – THE COASTAL ZONE

SO WE HAVE AMASSED ENORMOUS AMOUNT OF EVIDENCE FROM THE SCIENTIFIC LITERATURE, FROM THE OBSERVATION AGENCIES AND SO ON. AND WE CAN SAY TWO THINGS ABOUT THESE GRAPHS. ONE IS THAT THEY ARE OUTSIDE THE HOLOCENE NORMS. WE CAN GO BACK TO THE PALEO RECORD, THE GEOLOGICAL RECORD AND LOOK AT WHAT THESE LOOKED LIKE FOR THE PAST 12,000 YEARS. THESE ARE ALL OUTSIDE OF HOLOCENE NORMS. THE SECOND THING WE CAN SAY FOR SURE IS THAT THE MAJOR DRIVERS ARE HUMAN PRESSURES, NOT NATURAL VARIABILITY IN THE EARTH SYSTEM.

CRITICAL REVIEW

THE CONFIRMATION BIAS ISSUE

The anthropocene proposition is based on the data presented above. These data show significant changes in “the Earth System” since 1950. Earth System scientists have found no natural explanation for these changes. It is therefore proposed that they must be a creation of the humans. Based on such human cause of changes in the Earth System, it is proposed that humans must now be in control of the Earth System. Based on these arguments, it is proposed that these data imply that since 1950, the Earth System has entered a new geological epoch in which not geology nor the natural processes of the Earth System, but the humans now control and determine changes in the earth system. This new geological epoch is therefore named the ANTHROPOCENE because the anthros are now in control and in charge of the Earth System.

THIS PROCEDURE VIOLATES THE PRINCIPLES OF OBJECTIVE AND UNBIASED SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY. Specifically what we find here is that the anthropocene hypothesis was derived from the earth system data presented in the charts above. How is this hypothesis to be tested? The data used to construct a hypothesis may not be used to test that hypothesis because that kind of hypothesis test suffers from confirmation bias and the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy.

HUMANS WITH ALL THEIR INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION MIGHT AND THEIR RISE TO SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY ARE FUNDAMENTALLY AND NATURALLY SUPERSTITIOUS CREATURES AND MUCH OF OUR THINKING AND LOGIC IS GUIDED BY SUPERSITION AND CONFIRMATION BIAS AS DESCRIBIED IN SOME DETAIL IN A RELATED POST

LINK: https://tambonthongchai.com/2018/08/03/confirmationbias/ .

THE CONFIRMATION BIAS ARGUMENT PRESENTED ABOVE BY WILL STEFFEN IS BEST UNDERSTOOD IN TERMS OF HIS OBSESSION WITH THE ANTHROPOCENE IDEA SUCH THAT IT CREATES THE TENDENCY TO CONFIRMATION BIAS BECAUSE HE HAS ALLOWED HIS SUPERSTITION TO GUIDE HIS METHODOLOGY AND THEREBY TO VIOLATE THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD.

ANTHROPOCENE RACISM:

YET ANOTHER ISSUE IN THIS CONTEXT IS THAT WILL STEFFEN IS OF A PECULIAR RACE OF HUMANS, THE RACE THAT CREATED THE ANTHROPOCENE. SPECIFICALLY, IT IS THE EUROPEAN RACES ALSO DESCRIBED AS THE WEST OR THE GLOBAL NORTH. IN THAT CONTEXT THE DATA PRESENTED ABOVE AS THE HUMAN CAUSE OF PLANETARY DISASTER BY WAY OF THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION OF THE HUMANS IS BEST UNDERSTOOD NOT IN TERMS OF HUMANITY AT LARGE BUT IN TERMS OF A SMALL SUBSET OF HUMANITY IN THE GLOBAL NORTH THAT CREATED THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION.

THAT THE HARM THEY CAUSED WITH THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION MUST BE UNDERSTOOD IN TERMS OF HUMANITY AT LARGE IS INCONSISTENT WITH THE DATA BECAUSE THE EUROPEANS THAT CARRIED OUT THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION AND CREATED THE ANTHRPOCENE REPRESENT LESS THAN 10% OF HUMANITY. THE OTHER 90% HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH IT EXCEPT FOR THEIR ENSLAVEMENT BY WAY OF THE COLONIALISM OF THE GLOBAL NORTH INTO A ROLE IN THE ANTHROPOCENE.

THEREFORE WHAT STEFFEN CALLS THE ANTHROPOCENE IS NOT THE ANTHRO-POCENE BUT THE EURO-POCENE. THE INCLUSION OF THE REST OF HUMANITY INTO THIS ANTHROPOCENE ROLE IS YET ANOTHER FACET OF THE EUROPOCENE WHERE THE ASSUMPTION IS THAT THE GLOBAL SOUTH MUST ULTIMATELY SERVE THE NEEDS OF THE GLOBAL NORTH AND THAT IN THIS CASE THE GLOBAL NORTH NEEDS THE GLOBAL SOUTH TO BE THEIR ANTHROPOCENE VASSALS.

THE REALITY IS THAT THE ANTHROPOCENE IS A CREATION OF COLONIALISM AND THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION OF THE GLOBAL NORTH. THE ROLE HERE FOR THE GLOBAL SOUTH IS THAT OF VICTIMS OF COLONIALISM. THUS THE GREAT GLOBAL ADVANCE MADE BY THE GLOBAL NORTH IN TERMS OF COLONIALISM AND THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION CREATED THE ANTHROPOCENE MENTALITY BECAUSE THE GLOBAL NORTH WAS ESSENTIALLY IN CONTROL OF THE WORLD.

IN THIS CONTEXT, IT IS REVEALING TO NOTE THAT CLIMATE SCIENTIST MARK MASLIN, A DEVOTEE OF THE ANTHROPOCENE PROPOSITION, HAS RECENTLY PUBLISHED A CREATIVE APPLICATION OF ANTHROPOCENE THEORY IN THE CONTEXT OF RACISM. THIS MARK MASLIN ARTICLE IS MADE AVAILABLE IN A RELATED POST ON THIS SITE. LINK: https://tambonthongchai.com/2020/12/24/anthropocene-the-evidence/ .

THE MARK MASLIN ARTICLE WITH THE TITLE “ANTHROPOCENE THE EVIDENCE” SAYS ESSENTIALLY THAT THE ANTHROPOCENE IS A CREATION OF THE ENSLAVEMENT OF THE GLOBAL SOUTH BY THE GLOBAL NORTH AND THAT THEREFORE, RACISM, SLAVERY AND THE CONSEQUENT BLACK LIVES MATTER MOVEMENT ARE ALL CREATIONS OF THE GLOBAL NORTH BY WAY OF COLONIALISM AND THE VIRTUAL ENSLAVEMENT OF THE GLOBAL SOUTH.

RELATED POST ON COLONIALISM AND THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION: LINK: https://tambonthongchai.com/2021/01/08/the-industrial-revolution/

WE CONCLUDE FROM THIS ANALYSIS THAT THE THE ANTHROPOCENE THEORY IS PECULIAR TO THE GLOBAL NORTH AND DERIVES FROM THEIR PECULIAR HISTORY OF COLONIALISM AND THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION THAT CREATED AN ATTITUDE TOWARDS THE REST OF THE WORLD IN THE CONTEXT COLONIALISM AND THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION SUCH THAT THE WHOLE WORLD IS NOW IN THEIR CONTROL . THIS IS THE ESSENCE OF THE ANTHROPOCENE. IT IS A THEORY ABOUT THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN NATURE AND MAN DERIVED FROM THE REALITY OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE GLOBAL NORTH AND THE GLOBAL SOUTH.

THE RELEVANT BIBLIOGRAPHY ON CRITICAL EVALUATION OF THE ANTHROPOCENE PROPOSITION

Ruuska, Toni. “Capitalism and the absolute contradiction in the Anthropocene.” Sustainability and Peaceful Coexistence for the Anthropocene. Routledge, 2017. 51-67. ABSTRACT: This chapter concentrates especially on capitalism in the Anthropocene, and outlines some of the most prominent insights of the so-called eco-Marxist and neo-Marxist literature on capitalism and its treatment of its environmental surroundings. It outlines some of the most prominent eco-Marxist critiques and discusses some of the overall structural logics of capitalism. The chapter illustrates the absolute contradiction between capitalism and ecological sustainability in more detail, and complement the argument by criticizing the so-called green or sustainable capitalist doctrine. Capitalism has quite a few identifying characteristics: the first is obviously the production of commodities for an external body. A second one is production of commodities in order to produce, most often private, surplus, which also entails the existence of an institution and abstraction called private property. A third characteristic of capitalism found everywhere around the planet is evidently wage-labour.

Hartley, Daniel. “Against the anthropocene.” Salvage 1.1 (2015): 107-118. ABSTRACT: Within the strict limitations of geology as an academic discourse, the ‘Anthropocene’ is a relatively harmless term. The dangers arise, however,
when geologists enter the political arena, calling for collective ecological intervention on the basis of
their conception of the Anthropocene. For there exists something like a ‘spontaneous ideology’ of the
scientists who have written on the Anthropocene, and whether they are aware of this problem or not,
they have produced an implicit philosophy of history. This philosophy has as its theoretical corollary a
specific type of abstract, naturalistic materialism, about which Marx himself wrote the following: ‘The
weaknesses of the abstract materialism of natural science, a materialism which excludes the historical
process, are immediately evident from the abstract and ideological conceptions expressed by its
spokesmen whenever they venture beyond the bounds of their own speciality. It is just such
‘venturing beyond,’ and the incoherent discourse which inspires it, that I oppose. At the heart of the Anthropocene lies the Anthropos: the human. But what or who is this ‘Anthropos’ exactly? No clear definition is ever given, and yet the literature on the Anthropocene regularly refers to such phenomena as ‘the human enterprise’. The problem with this is that, as Marx pointed out in his ‘Theses on Feuerbach,’ such a conception of humanity presupposes ‘an internal, ‘dumb’ generality which naturally unites the many individuals’, as opposed to a historical conception of humanity as internally differentiated and constantly developing via internal contradictions. To speak of the ‘human enterprise’ is to make of humanity an abstract corporation in which ‘we’re all in this together’ – the David Cameron maxim of 2009 – thus belying the reality of class struggle, exploitation and oppression.

Cunha, Daniel. “The Anthropocene as fetishism.” Mediations 28.2 (2015): 65-77. ABSTRACT: The “Anthropocene” has become a fashionable concept in the natural and social sciences. It is defined as the “human-dominated geologic epoch,” because in this period of natural history it is Man who is in control of the biogeochemical cycles of the planet.
The result, though, is catastrophic: the disruption of the carbon cycle, for example, leads to a global warming that approaches tipping points that might be irreversible. The exponential growth of our freedom and power, that is, of our ability to transform nature, is now translated into a limitation to our freedom, including the destabilization of the very framework of life. It reaches its highest degree with the problem of global warming. In this context, it becomes clear that the Anthropocene is a contradictory concept. If the “human-dominated geologic epoch” is leading to a situation in which the existence of humans might be at stake, there is something very problematic with this sort of domination of Nature that reduces it to a “substrate of domination” that should be investigated.6 Its very basic premise, that it is humandominated, should be challenged — after all there should be something inhuman or objectified in a sort of domination whose outcome might be human extinction. What is claimed here is that, exactly as for freedom, the Anthropocene is an unfulfilled promise. The same way that freedom in capitalism is constrained by fetishism and class relations — capitalist dynamics are law-bound and beyond the control of individuals; the workers are “free” in the sense that they are not “owned” as slaves, but also in the sense that they are “free” from the means of production, they
are deprived of their conditions of existence; the capitalists are “free” insofar as they follow the objectified rules of capital accumulation, otherwise they go bankrupt so is the social metabolism with Nature. Therefore, I claim that the Anthropocene is the fetishized form of interchange between Man and Nature historically specific to capitalism, the same way as the “invisible hand” is the fetishized form of “freedom.

Robbins, Paul, and Sarah A. Moore. “Ecological anxiety disorder: diagnosing the politics of the Anthropocene.” cultural geographies 20.1 (2013): 3-19. ABSTRACT: The quickly changing character of the global environment has predicated a number of crises in the sciences of biology and ecology. Specifically, the rapid rate of ecological change has led to the proliferation of novel ecologies. These unprecedented ecosystems and assemblages challenge the scientific, as well as cultural, core of many disciplines. This has led to divisive debates over what constitutes a ‘natural’ system state, and over what kinds of interventions, if any, should be advocated by scientists. In this paper, we review the nature of the recent discomfort, conflict, and ambivalence experienced in some sciences. In examining these, we stress emerging and conjoined concerns in ecological scientific communities. Specifically, we identify, on the one hand, an expressed concern that practitioners have been insufficiently persistent and explicit in proselytizing the current risks of human impacts, and on the other hand an obverse concern that many historically common scientific concepts and concerns (like ‘invasive’ species) are already overly normative and culturally freighted. We identify the resulting contradictory condition as ‘ecological anxiety disorder’, announced either as a fearful response to: 1) the negative normative influence of humans on the earth (anthrophobia) or 2) the inherent influence of normative human values within one’s own science (autophobia). We then argue, drawing on the psychoanalytic work of Jacques Lacan, that these paralyzing phobias are born of an inability to address more fundamental anxieties. Only by explicitly enunciating the object of scientific desire, we argue, as Lacan suggests, can scientific practitioners come to terms with these anxieties in a way that does not lead to dysfunction. Using a case example of island rewilding in the Indian Ocean, we provide an alternative mode of resolving and adjudicating human influences and normative aspects in ecology and biology, one that is explicitly political.

Bettini, Giovanni. “And yet it moves!(Climate) migration as a symptom in the Anthropocene.” Mobilities 14.3 (2019): 336-350. ABSTRACT: While the climate-migration nexus raises crucial questions of mobility and climate justice, it is commonly understood through simplistic narratives that reify a complex set of relations. The spectre of environmentally-induced exodus is recurrent in media, policy and activist circles, in spite of numerous studies that reveal the empirical flaws and noxious normative implications of such narratives. This article explores this insistence and the desire(s) for there to be a reified relation between climate and migration such insistence reveals. The article proceeds in three movements. First, it situates discourses on climate migration in relation to the crisis of humanism the Anthropocene signifies. Second, it operates a symptomatic reading of climate migration discourses, drawing on two understandings of symptom elaborated by Lacan – as ‘return of the repressed’ and as ‘Sinthome’. Read as a symptom, the figure of the climate migrant/refugee appears as the return of fundamental contradictions that carve contemporary regimes of socioecological (re)production. Through the concept of ‘Sinthome’, discourses on climate migration can be read as (illusory) attempts to shore up for the waning consistence of modern forms of ‘being human’. Finally, the article proposes a symptomatic reading of the Anthropocene itself, and elaborates on what the dissolution of this symptom/ Sinthome would entail.

Foster, John Bellamy. “Marxism in the anthropocene: Dialectical rifts on the left.” International Critical Thought 6.3 (2016): 393-421. ABSTRACT: Natural scientists have pointed to the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch, with the precise dating not yet decided, but often traced to the Great Acceleration of the human impact on the environment since 1945. Thus understood, the Anthropocene largely coincides with the rise of the modern environmental movement and corresponds to the age of planetary crisis. This paper looks at the evolution of Marxian and left contributions to environmental thought during this period. Although Marx’s ecological materialism is now widely recognized, with the rediscovery of his theory of metabolic rift, the debate has recently shifted to ecological dialectics, including dualism, monism, totality, and mediation, generating a conflict between ecological Marxism and radical ecological monism. It is argued here that only an ecological Marxism, rooted in a materialist dialectic of nature and society, is able to engage effectively with the Great Climacteric that increasingly governs our times.

THE BIBLIOGRAPHY ABOVE SHOWS THAT THERE ARE SIGNIFICANT DISAGREEMENTS IN THE LITERAURE ON THE ANTHROPOCENE IDEA