Author: David R Cole

J. Peter Byrne

Georgetown University Law Center, byrne@law.georgetown.edu
This paper can be downloaded free of charge from:
https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/facpub/1982
https://ssrn.com/abstract=2982596

Human-induced climate change threatens perilous risks for our physical homes. It also poses a serious challenge to our legal institutions. Several scholars already have remarked on the disruption climate change has brought to specific legal areas, such as tort, standing, and national security. This essay argues that climate change will also disrupt fundamental ideas about real property. Prior work has explored the need for fresh approaches to land use regulation and a shift in regulatory takings law. This essay looks at the more fundamental assumptions and principles of property law. It maintains that the growing need for human management of dynamic natural forces, distorted by greenhouse gas emissions, will erode the foundations of physical stability and owner autonomy that shape basic doctrines of property law.
A firm scientific consensus holds that human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide and methane, into the atmosphere have been, and will continue, working unprecedented changes in our climate.2 The effects of such emissions are apparent in phenomena such as global warming, rising sea levels, aggravated drought and wildfires, and more extreme storms and flooding.3 Legislative efforts to reduce emissions and rationally address these threats have been stymied at the national level and in many states by a combination of entrenched interests, discounting of future risks, conceptual complexity, and existential fear. Nonetheless, some states and many local governments have begun planning even taken significant steps to reduce emissions and prepare for inevitable environmental changes.4
Courts, too, have begun to alter legal doctrines to address or accommodate the effects of climate change. The Supreme Court arguably expanded its approach to standing in order to allow a state to sue the Environmental Protection Agency (“EPA”) for failing to regulate greenhouse gas emissions,5 and a federal district court recently surely did the same by allowing a group of minors to sue the United States for failing to address climate change.6 Legal scholars have noted that climate change has disrupted established doctrines in other areas of law. Douglas Kysar, for example, has written about tort law: “Built as it is on a paradigm of harm in which A wrongfully, directly, and exclusively injures B, tort law seems fundamentally ill-equipped to address the causes and impacts of climate change .… courts in
all likelihood will agree with commentators that nuisance and other traditional tort theories are overwhelmed by the magnitude and the complexity of the climate change conundrum.”7 Many statutory
areas are straining to meet the challenges of climate change as well. 8

It stands to reason that property law, which deals directly with the rights and duties of ownership of elements of the natural world, also will be disrupted by climate change.9 This essay will focus on real property law, which historically has assumed stability in the physical world and the capacity of an owner to exercise effective dominion over land.10 Climate change calls both these assumptions into question because many parcels of land will teeter on physical convulsions, and government help will more frequently be needed to keep such forces at bay. The essay considers three types of changes in property law principles: growth of publicly as opposed to privately owned land, greater scope for land use regulation, and government liability for management mistakes. The changes will not occur immediately; the effects of climate change have begun to show themselves, but more dramatic changes lie in the future. Property law is a conservative field, guarding reliance. But over time its tenets adapt to a changing physical and social environment.11 This essay is, frankly, speculative, aiming to stimulate discussion and further research.
First, changes in property law will be brought about because sea-level rise, enhanced storms, and fire will physically destroy or degrade many parcels of land and their improvements. Some coastal areas will simply sink beneath the waves, engulfing the homes built upon them. More properties will be
destroyed by intense storms, such as hurricanes strengthened by climate change—as happened in Hurricane Sandy—or by growing wild fires in the increasingly arid west. Market forces have not yet seriously guarded against these losses.12 The National Flood Insurance Program, 13although insolvent without the backing of the U.S. government,14 continues to provide assistance where the premiums do not cover the risk. Developers build and sell new homes along the shore within shorter timeframes than the timeline for losses from climate change, perhaps even aggravating their incentives to develop coastal land in the fastest possible schedule. Sellers of existing coastal buildings and realtors compensated by a percentage of the sales price retain every incentive to remain silent about the risks of sea-level rise. Mortgage lenders who bundle and sell mortgage-debt packages to investors collect fees and retain no continued exposure to loss. The investors in bundled mortgage-debt instruments have their risks diluted by the scale of other mortgages making up their exposure. Local governments at the coast typically rely on real property taxes and probably hesitate to require warnings that could crash property values. Buyers should attend to risk but often are distracted by more immediate concerns such as securing mortgage funds or keeping insurance premiums low.15 Thus, without strong regulatory intervention, much development could be destroyed, yet regulation has been slow to evolve.
This reality will drive changes in property rules that may have made sense on the assumption that nature was stable but seem absurd in the dynamic context of climate change. Climate change will not amount to a move from one relatively stable state to another; change at a rate faster than historic norms will continue for the foreseeable future, regardless of when emissionsof greenhouse gases can be significantly reduced. Moreover, eventhe rate of change will not be constant but probably will
conti nue to accelerate, as scientists have observed in recent years.16 Thus, rules about land use will exist in a state of physical flux, even though historically land law has assumed, even relied upon, perpetual stability. The entire edifice of estates in land, future interests, and perpetuities, for example, assumes practically that the land lasts forever as, to differing degrees, do the laws of mortgages, prescription, and conservation easements.
Some aspects of land law will not be able to survive the changes. One example is the significant but obscure principle that a property owner enjoys a right of access to the public highway system, and government action eliminating such access amounts to a taking requiring the payment of compensation for the reduction in value of the marooned land.17 Recently, this rule has been found appropriate to support a takings action against a local government based upon its failure to maintain a road connecting a barrier island that had repeatedly flooded.18 As seas rise and floods increase, however, the burden that such a rule places on the public fisc becomes irrational; no government constructs roads and bridges on the assumption that the facilities would have to be continually rebuilt to higher elevations and mounting costs. Also, the traditional rule creates perverse incentives for coastal homeowners who may rationally seek to recover the value of their flooding homes by bringing takings claims. While it may be that courts, appalled by the prospect of sea-level rise, may grow more rigid and formalistic in their application of this rule in the short run, they will need to revise it as cases and costs multiply with losses. Doctrinal change could be applied either to the easement of access or to the takings analysis.19
Not only will sea-level rise physically destroy or damage land and improvements, but private property rights themselves will be terminated. Pursuant to the public trust doctrine, the public owns the beds of tidelands seaward of the mean-high-tide line. As the tide line moves landward, the doctrine of accretion will transform private dry land into public subsurface, wetland, or tideland.20 No taking requiring the payment of compensation is effected, because the transformation is considered to have been accomplished by nature not by the government.21 Then, if the government steps in to restore the sunken land, as when the government rebuilds a beach with dredged sand, the restored beach usually is considered public property.22 This result stems from the doctrine of avulsion, whereby a sudden change in the tide line, even if purposefully brought about by a government agency, does not change the boundary line—though a gradual change would under the doctrine of accretion. The justification for the result under avulsion, however, may be due to the public resources used to rebuild the beach. Pertinently, Professor Flourney has recently inquired whether sea level rise should change the application of the accretion/avulsion approach. Historically, the justice of this rule was based upon the bidirectional and unpredictable movement of the tide line, but now sea-level rise will push the tide line inexorably inland.23 Professor Flourney persuasively shows that both the physical assumptions and policy justifications for the traditional approach have changed significantly because of sea-level rise and argues generally for greater protection for free-access submerged and tidal lands subject to the public trust.
Second, large scale government investments in protecting private property from the effects of climate change likely will increase the scope and weight of the public interest, justifying regulation of private land use. Sea-level rise again provides the clearest instance of this. There are three categories of regulatory responses to adapt to sea-level rise: fight, accommodate, and retreat.24 Fighting involves the public or private construction of physical barriers or drains to keep sea waters away from private property. Thus, sea walls, levees, dune and wetland construction, pumps, and drains can forestall inundation or storm surges (up to a point).25 This approach has obvious attractions, especially if the public will pay for the new infrastructure,because it preserves the current boundaries of the lot and extant buildings and generally allows established land uses to continue. Public infrastructure has an additional crucial advantage over private efforts because it can be constructed across property lines according to the physical characteristics of the site. But there are engineering, environmental, and economic limits to the capacity of government to build such protections.26
Such large-scale public investments, both of money and expertise, must expand the scope of regulatory power that government may exercise over the protected private property. When government has built sophisticated infrastructure at public expense to protect private property, its interest in that property must grow. One cannot consider the private owner as enjoying “sole and despotic dominion”27 when her property would be destroyed without public expenditure and management. One might argue that from an economic perspective, the public has put equity into the protected property to preserve its market value. Moreover, to the extent that government has prevented the tide line from moving landward, it has suspended its future ownership rights over the private land it is now protecting. The public’s right to regulate the use of protected private land for environmental benefits or to mandate forms of public access surely will grow. Of course, it always has been the case that government action has been necessary to secure property rights through judicial and executive enforcement of such rights, but the financing, construction, and maintenance of physical barriers to natural destruction of private property go far beyond any “night watchman” type of state action and toward a persistent “control of nature.”28
Some indication of how courts may reshape property doctrines may be gleaned from the unanimous post–Hurricane Sandy decision of the New Jersey Supreme Court in Borough of Harvey Cedars v. Karan.29 The Borough condemned a perpetual easement over a portion of the Karan’s shorefront lot for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to construct, largely at federal expense, a dune barrier to storms and erosions. In calculating the compensation to be paid, the trial court permitted the jury to consider the obstruction of the view from the house but not the benefit accruing from increased storm and erosion protection, on the ground that such protection was general to many protected properties. The New Jersey Supreme Court reversed this decision and held that any “reasonably calculable benefits—regardless of whether those benefits are enjoyed to some lesser or greater degree by others in the community—that increase the value of property at the time of the taking should be discounted from the condemnation award.”30 The court rejected as outdated the traditional distinction between specific benefits to the retained property, which can be considered, and benefits general to the community, which cannot.31
Harvey Cedars found absurd the traditional approach, which considers offsetting benefits in compensation calculations, when faced with a large government project to protect private homes from the sea. The Court did not abandon protection of private property; it presumed the right of the owners to compensation for the easement and affirmed the propriety of compensation for impairment of their ocean view. But mandating consideration of off benefits may practically eliminate and certainly will radically reduce payment of compensation for such a project.32 The State of New Jersey is aggressively using Harvey Cedars as a point in negotiating the donation of easements for dune construction. The increase in sea-level rise caused by climate change will greatly increase the risk to shorefront property and the pressure for protective public works, while rendering less persuasive the claims of property owners’ recognition of the niceties of their rights. None of this means that New Jersey’s dune construction project or any particular government property protection scheme is a sensible or fair
response to climate risks. But the logic of such public protection will be to make property more amenable to public control.
There are many things that may be required of protected property owners: public access on dry sand beaches, public access for maintenance of works, owner maintenance of habitats or wetlands, water management, protection of viewsheds, and the like. At a minimum, government’s physical protection of private property against sea-level rise should, as a constitutional matter, authorize any regulation or public access reasonably necessary to realize public benefits from managing sea-level rise.
Government regulations to require property-owner accommodations to climate change could lead to extensive additions to building codes and site plans, but they do not seem constitutionally or conceptually difficult. New houses on lots threatened by sea-level rise may be required to be elevated or placed upon high ground; landscaping or water engineering may be mandated for those threatened by wildfires.33 While these may increase costs, courts are unlikely to take seriously due process or regulatory takings challenges to a wide range of accommodation regulations.
More problematic are regulations requiring retreat. From an environmental perspective, the best response to sea-level rise, drought, and fire threat would be to simply prohibit new development in the areas most at risk. The reasons to mandate retreat from areas at risk from climate change include protection of residents from harm, avoidance of dangerous and expensive rescue efforts, coordination of cessations of public services, and minimization of damage to ecosystem services.34 But the economic effects of such bans could be devastating for investors and even for local government finances. More immediately, they risk triggering the per se rule of Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council, that land use regulations that eliminate all the economic value of a parcel constitute regulatory takings.35 The peculiar threat of Lucas is that it requires compensation unless the use of the land would constitute a nuisance at common law. In the case of sea level rise or other environmental threats, however, traditional nuisance law is inapplicable. According to the Restatement, a nuisance arises from an owner’s unreasonable use of his land that causes harm to another landowner or to the public at large.36 Nuisance law can (imperfectly) address environmental harm when the defendant is polluting neighbors from his own land. But it would seem not to address situations where the risk stems from changes in nature that are caused by human activity throughout the industrialized world. In Lucas, where a taking was found from a prohibition of building within a flood zone, Justice Scalia noted derisively that construction of a single family house does not constitute a nuisance.37 In practice, retreat has been limited to generous voluntary buyouts of homes after destruction from floods or fires. 38
So to mandate retreat through legislation, the Lucas facts must be avoided, the doctrine must bend, or nuisance law must expand. In a prior article, I discussed avoiding the factual premise of Lucas through rolling development restrictions, which permit development for time but then prohibit it when the sea rises to within a certain distance of a dwelling or building site.39 In another article, I have described climate exactions, which might permit such development but at a price that reflects the environmental or public costs it generates.40 Here, I briefly want to suggest that at some point maintaining a house in the face of sea-level rise or other increasing climate risks may be considered a public nuisance.
A public nuisance would be the unreasonable use of property that imposes significant harm on the public generally.41 In the era before comprehensive land use regulation, local governments enacted ordinances identifying certain uses in certain locations as public nuisances; public authorities such as attorney generals or corporation councils would bring actions to enforce such ordinances through injunctions.42 In some cases, land uses thought reasonable at one time came to be seen as nuisances when the environs around them had changed. For example, a cement plant in Los Angeles was unobjectionable when settlement was sparse but was deemed a nuisance when a neighborhood of houses grew up around it.43 People building or living in houses could come to be considered nuisances when the risk of inundation, storm surges, or fire reaches a threshold where disaster assistance would become too dangerous or costly, when they threaten failure of septic or sewer systems, or when construction prevents migration inland of environmental systems providing the community with important ecological services. Of course, the actual factual circumstances and the normative meanings that the public attaches to nuisances in the future would be determinative, but climate change could so change which land uses are considered reasonable that such “essential uses” as building a house could become nuisances in many locations. 44
The third category of property law change to be expected from climate change would be an increase in government liability for losses resulting from its environmental management. Currently losses from extreme natural events, such as hurricanes, generally are considered “acts of God,” for which no entity is primarily responsible. If government has no authority and makes no effort to control the forces of nature, there is no legal basis to hold it accountable for natural disasters.45 But when government comes to manage the effects of climate change, through construction of levees, for example, courts may come to hold the government responsible for its mistakes or inadequate precautions. Thus, if reconstructed sand dunes erode faster than estimated and a storm surge destroys houses in the locality, or forests thinned of overgrown or dead vegetation still host raging wildfires that consume homes, the government may be blamed. Lawyers for private owners bearing such losses may seek to hold the government liable.
This tendency is evident in recent court decisions using the Takings Clause to facilitate liability on the United States for its management of flooding on the Mississippi River. Since the 1920s the US Army Corps of Engineers has been tasked with reducing flooding as well as aiding navigation on the river. The legislation authorizing their flood control efforts also contained a statutory exemption from government tort liability arising from such efforts.46 But flooding of private land near the river still results from the enormity of the task, whether from inadequate water management or from agency choices among competing constituents. In recent years, courts have expanded the basis upon which the Corps can be held liable for flooding under the Takings Clause, which cannot be limited by statute. In Arkansas Fish and Game, the Supreme Court departed from prior law in holding that a takings claim can be based upon a single or finite series of flooding events.47 Subsequently, the U.S. Claims Court held that the Corps effected a taking by its construction and negligent management of the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet, which enhanced the flooding in St. Bernard Parish from Hurricane Katrina.48
Of course, the government has never managed coastlines with the thoroughness that the Corps has managed the Mississippi River. But the vulnerability of coastal property to sea-level rise suggests that government may play a much larger role in defending against rising seas to preserve private property values. In doing so, it would seem to take on a duty to perform its many protective functions without negligence. Because the government would be choosing structures to prevent the risks foreseen by sophisticated scientific analyses, it seems inevitable that sometimes the government would be wrong in its predictions or would engineer inadequately based on mistakes, inadequate findings, or the sheer difficulty of the task. To be sure, government can find some defense in the discretionary function immunity to the Federal Tort Claims Act, but generally speaking this immunity extends only to intentional and not negligent acts of government employees.49
Government will also be threatened with liability for its intentional decisions about protection from climate effects through takings claims. The scale of climate effects and the immensity of affected areas means that government will protect some areas and not others.50 Choices will need to be made
about limited resources and know-how, and likely will be based on the value of protecting different places.51 For example, urban areas are more likely to be protected than rural. Physical characteristics of some places, such as land subsidence or porous bedrock, may make some places much more difficult or expensive to protect. Politics also inevitably will play a role. Thus, government will make imperfect and unpopular decisions about which localities will be protected from flooding, which will be allowed to flood, and which the government will intentionally flood in order to divert flood waters. Losers will seek compensation. Such cases will be brought as takings because the decisions to flood or not protect from flooding will be characterized as intentional implementations of policies.
The structure of such a problem can be seen in the Quebedeaux case.52 There the Corps estimated that high water descending from the Mississippi would overflow levees in Baton Rouge and New Orleans, so it opened the Morganza Spillway, diverting floodwaters into the Atchafalya River basin and destroying numerous farms, homes, and businesses. Affected landowners sued, claiming a taking. The Court of Federal Claims denied the government’s motion to dismiss for failure to state a claim. Judge Allegra relied on the recent decision in Arkansas Fish and Game53 to hold that a single instance of intentional flooding could be found to be a taking and also rejected the government’s argument that a flooding victim who benefited from a flood control project could not recover unless he showed that the cost of the flooding exceeded the benefits from the project as a whole.54 Thus, flood victims who would have had to bear their own losses if the government had taken no action could obtain compensation if the government chose to flood them in order to avoid a greater disaster downstream.
Government engineering may never reach the level of control over coastal flooding that the Corps has reached on the Mississippi, but one can easily imagine that government choices over which areas it will protect against ocean storm surges may result in similar takings claims—for example, government construction or permitting of a seawall to protect residences in one location along the Gulf Coast, knowing that such a seawall may increase the likelihood of erosion or flooding on nearby farmland. There may be subtle issues of causation raised regarding the extent to which the government or nature caused the loss,55 but the breadth of government control we can anticipate to protect owners from the effects of climate change suggests that at some point losses may be attributed to the government. Professor Serkin has put this scenario at the center of his theory of passive takings: “Whether the government prohibits or builds sea walls, its near-total control over the allocation of the inevitable harm serves as a doctrinal hook for passive takings liability.”56

Thus, we can anticipate that government will be entrusted with the choice over which private property will be protected at great government expense and which will be flooded. Several property doctrines may protect the government from takings liability in such circumstances. In Miller v. Schoene, the Supreme Court held that a Virginia statute mandating the destruction of cedar trees to protect the state’s apple trees from a contagious plant disease did not amount to a taking because the government had to act to prevent harm in circumstances where the failure to act would have caused more harm.57 From one view, the decision increases the probability that government failure to protect an owner could amount to a taking because the Court seems to treat government action and inaction as equal policy choices that can cause harm. But more fundamentally, the Court expressly stated that “it is obvious that there may be, and that here there is, a preponderant public interest in the preservation of one interest over the other.” Thus even in cases where government action causes harm, as when opening a floodgate, the government may escape takings liability when not doing so could cause a greater harm to the public. The vitality of Miler v. Schoene in modern takings law, however, is questionable, as it relies on a deference to the police power that the Supreme Court has moved away from.58
This essay has considered ways that climate change may push changes in property law. Sealevel rise, flooding, fire, and drought undermine the stability of improvements to land and, indeed, of land itself. Managing these increased risks will lead to greater government construction and management of protective infrastructure. Paradoxically, greater public physical protections will both expand the regulatory reach of government and expose government to increased liability for property damage from events historically considered “natural” but that will become seen as the results of government choice or negligence. This fundamental change in the relationship between government and private property owners will bring significant change to the property law in some ways suggested here and in other ways not yet anticipated.

1 J. Hampton Baumgartner, Jr., Chair in Real Property Law, Georgetown University Law Center. This paper evolved from a talk given at the Brigham Kanner Property Rights Conference in October 2016. Thanks to Lynda Butler for encouraging me to write.
2 See, e.g., INTERGOVERNMENTAL PANEL ON CLIMATE CHANGE, CLIMATE CHANGE 2014: SYNTHESIS REPORT (2014), http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/syr/.
3 See, e.g., Svetlana Jevrejeva et al., Coastal Sea Level Rise with Warming Above 2 °C, 113 PROC. NAT’L ACAD. SCI. 13342 (2016), http://www.pnas.org/content/113/47/13342.abstract; John T. Abatzoglou et al., Impact of Anthropogenic Climate Change on Wildfire Across Western US Forests, 113 PROC. NAT’L ACAD. SCI. 11770 (2016), http://www.pnas.org/content/113/42/11770; Asiak Grinsted et al., Projected Atlantic Hurricane Surge Threat from Rising Temperatures, 110 PROC. NAT’L ACAD. SCI. 5369 (2013), http://www.pnas.org/content/110/14/5369.abstract.
4 See, e.g., S.B. 32, 2015–16 Leg., Reg. Sess. (Cal. 2016), amending CAL. HEALTH AND SAF. CODE § 38566 (2017). On the many efforts at adaptation see GEORGETOWN CLIMATE CENTER, ADAPTATION CLEARING HOUSE, http://www.adaptationclearinghouse.org/ (last visited Feb. 11, 2017).
5 Massachusetts v. EPA, 549 U.S. 497 (2007).
6 Juliana v. United States, No. 6:15-CV-01517-TC, 2016 WL 6661146 (D. Or. Nov. 10, 2016).

7 Douglas A. Kysar, What Climate Change Can Do About Tort Law, 41 ENV’T L. REP. 1, 3-4 (2011). Kysar went on to observe: “[T]he effort to fit the mother of all collective action problems into the traditional paradigm of tort reveals much about how that paradigm more generally needs to shift.” Id. at 44.
8 See, e.g., J.B. Ruhl, Climate Change Adaptation and the Structural Transformation of Environmental Law, 40 ENV’T L. REP. 363, 401 (2010); Richard J. Lazarus, Super Wicked Problems and Climate Change: Restraining the Present to Liberate the Future, 94 CORNELL L. REV. 1153 (2009).
9 See Holly Doremus, Climate Change and the Evolution of Property Rules, 1 U.C. IRVINE L. REV. 1091 (2011). Professor Doremus gives a thoughtful account of how property rules evolve and what forces can delay or prevent change. This essay takes the simple-minded view that courts will eventually change doctrines when physical, social, and economic changes make inherited legal approaches seem nonsensical. Also, it avoids the important question whether changes in property doctrine are better accomplished by courts or legislatures.
10 Water law, another key element of property law, also will need to adapt because climate change will cause regional shortages. See Robin Kundis Craig, Adapting Water Law to Public Necessity: Reframing Climate Change Adaptation as Emergency Response and Preparedness, 11 VT. J. ENV’T L. 709, 724 (2010).
11 See, e.g., Joseph L. Sax, Property Rights and the Economy of Nature: Understanding Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council, 45 STAN. L. REV. 1433, 1446 (1993).
12 See Neumann, J.E. et al., Joint Effects of Storm Surge and Sea-Level Rise on US Coasts: New Economic Estimates of Impacts, Adaptation, and Benefits of Mitigation Policy, 129 CLIMATIC CHANGE 337 (2015).
13 42 U.S.C. § 4001 et seq.
14 U.S. GOV’T ACCOUNTABILITY OFFICE, GAO-15-290, HIGH RISK SERIES: FEBRUARY 2015 UPDATE 385–90 (2015), http://www.gao.gov/assets/670/668415.pdf.

15 Ian Urbina, Perils of Climate Change Could Swamp Coastal Real Estate, N.Y. TIMES, Nov. 24, 2016,
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/24/science/global-warming-coastal-realestate. html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=second-columnregion& region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news.
16 See Chris Mooney, U.S. Scientists Officially Declare 2016 the Hottest Year On Record. That Makes Three in a Row, WASH. POST., Jan. 18, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/01/18/u-sscientists-officially-declare-2016-the-hottest-year-on-record-that-makes-three-in-arow/?
utm_term=.f9305c433622.
17 See, e.g., Jordan v. Town of Canton, 265 A.2d 96 (Me. 1970).
18 Jordan v. St. Johns Cty., 63 So. 3d 835 (Fla. Dist. Ct. App. 2011).

19. There are internal complexities in the law of abandonment of public access, such as whether a private easement of access survives public renunciation. See, e.g., Luf v. Town of Southbury, 449 A.2d 1001, 1006 (Conn. 1982).
20 See Joseph L. Sax, The Accretion/Avulsion Puzzle: Its Past Revealed, Its Future Proposed, 23 TUL. ENV’T L.J. 305 (2010).
21 J. Peter Byrne, The Cathedral Engulfed: Sea Level Rise, Property Rights, and Time, 73 LA. L. REV. 69, 80 (2012).
22 See Stop the Beach Renourishment, Inc. v. Fla. Dep’t of Env’t Prot., 560 U.S. 702 (2010); City of Long Branch v. Jui Yung Liu, 4 A.3d 542 (N.J. 2010).
23 Alyson C. Flourney, Beach Law Clean-Up: How Sea-Level Rise Has Displaced the Accretion/Erosion/Avulsion Framework (Dec. 30, 2016) (unpublished working paper) (on file with author).
24 See J. Peter Byrne & Jessica Grannis, Coastal Retreat Measures, in THE LAW OF ADAPTATION TO CLIMATE CHANGE 267, 269 (Michael B. Gerrard & Katrina Fischer Kuh eds., 2012).
25 See Robert R.M. Verchick & Joel D. Scheraga, Protecting the Coast, in THE LAW OF ADAPTATION TO CLIMATE CHANGE 235, 24–44 (Michael B. Gerrard & Katrina Fischer Kuh eds., 2012). Recent legislation strives to make such new infrastructure as cost effective and environmentally friendly as possible.

26 See, e.g., Elizabeth Kolbert, The Siege of Miami, NEW YORKER, Dec. 21 &28, 2015.
27 2 WILLIAM BLACKSTONE, COMMENTARIES *2 (facsimile ed., 1979).
28 The phrase comes from JOHN MCPHEE, THE CONTROL OF NATURE (1989).
29 Borough of Harvey Cedars v. Karan, 70 A.3d 524 (2013).
30 Id. at 543.
31 Bianca Iozzia, Putting a Price Tag on an Ocean View: The Impact of Borough of Harvey Cedars v. Karan on Partial- Taking Valuations, 25 VILL. ENVT’L L.J. 501, 521 (2014).

32 The Karans eventually settled for $! in compensation, and subsequently a jury awarded another couple three hundred dollars for a similar taking to construct a protective dune. Press Release, N.J. Att’y Gen., Acting Attorney General Hoffman Announces Legal Victory for Beachfront Easement Acquisition Efforts in Harvey Cedars: Owner Sought Hundreds of Thousands of Dollars; Jury Awards $300 (June 30, 2014), http://nj.gov/oag/newsreleases14/pr20140630b.html.
33 On building codes requiring freeboard and other measures to accommodate to sea-level rise, see Adaptation
Toolkit: Sea Level Rise and Coastal Land Use, GEO. CLIMATE CTR., (Feb. 11, 2016),
http://www.georgetownclimate.org/adaptation/toolkits/adaptation-tool-kit sea-level-rise-and-coastal-landuse/building-codes.html.
34 See Byrne & Grannis, supra note 24, at 268–70.
35 Lucas v. South Carolina Coastal Council, 505 U.S. 1003 (1992).
36 RESTATEMENT (SECOND) OF TORTS § 826 (1979).

37 “It seems unlikely that common-law principles would have prevented the erection of any habitable or productive improvements on petitioner’s land; they rarely support prohibition of the ‘essential use’ of land.” Lucas, 505 U.S. at 1033 (quoting Curtin v. Benson, 222 U.S. 78, 82 (1911)).
38 GOVERNOR’S OFFICE OF STORM RECOVERY ET AL., NY RISING BUYOUT AND ACQUISITION PROGRAM POLICY MANUAL 15 (2015).
39 Byrne, The Cathedral Engulfed, supra note 21, at 109–12.
40 J. Peter Byrne & Kathryn A. Zyla, Climate Exactions, 75 MD. L. REV. 758 (2016).
41 RESTATEMENT (SECOND) OF TORTS § 821 (1979).
42 See John E. Bryson & Angus McBeth, Public Nuisance, the Restatement (Second) of Torts, and Environmental Law, 2 ECOLOGY L.Q. 241 (1972).
43 Hadacheck v. Sebastian, 239 U.S. 394 (1915).
44 The plausibility of this prediction may be enhanced when one recalls that the essential use of land protected against regulation in the case cited by Justice Scalia in Lucas, was the driving of cattle over roads through Yosemite National Park and grazing them on a private enclosure within the park. See Curtin v. Benson, 222 U.S. 78, 86 (1911) (“The right of appellant to pasture his cattle upon his land, and the right of access to it, are of the very essence of his proprietorship.”). No one could doubt that the National Park Service today has authority to prohibit driving cattle through and grazing them on private land within a national park.

45 Government does provide assistance to affected persons and businesses under disaster relief statutes and through ad hoc legislation. The Stafford Act provides the statutory authority for most Federal disaster response. 42 U.S.C. 5121 et seq (2016).
46 33 U.S.C §§ 701–709b (2016).
47 Ark. Fish & Game Comm’n v. United States, 133 S. Ct. 511 (2012).
48 St. Bernard Parish Gov’t v. United States, 121 Fed. Cl. 687 (2015).
49 Amy M. Hackman, The Discretionary Function Exception to the Federal Tort Claims Act: How Much is Enough?, 19 CAMPBELL L. REV. 411, 413 (1997).

50 The public needs to have the authority to regulate or prohibit the private construction of sea walls to protect neighboring properties as well as tidelands. Byrne, The Cathedral Engulfed, supra note 21, at 100-04. A common law rule, already weakened, that sea-level rise should eliminate is the “common enemy” rule permitting landowners to fend off flood waters in any direction without liability to neighbors injured by the redirected waters. See generally Daniel H. Cole, Liability Rules for Surface Water Drainage: A Simple Economic Analysis, 12 GEO. MASON L. REV. 35 (1990).
51 See JOHN MCPHEE, THE CONTROL OF NATURE (1989).
52 Quebedeaux v. United States, 112 Fed. Cl. 317 (2013).
53 Id., at 324-25 (discussing Arkansas Fish & Game Comm’n v. United States, 133 S. Ct. 511 (2012)).
54 Id., at 321.
55 See Teagarden v. United States, 42 Fed. Cl. 252 (1998) (rejecting takings claim on the ground that the forest fire caused destruction of the plaintiffs’ trees rather than the United States Forest Service’s choice to not protect the
plaintiffs’ property).

56 Christopher Serkin, Passive Takings: The State’s Affirmative Duty to Protect Property, 113 MICH. L. REV. 345, 394 (2014).
57 Miller v. Schoene, 276 U.S. 272 (1928).
58 See Lucas v. S.C. Coastal Council, 505 U.S. 1003, 1022–23 (1992) (“The ‘harmful or noxious uses’ principle was the Court’s early attempt to describe in theoretical terms why government may, consistent with the Takings Clause, affect property values by regulation without incurring an obligation to compensate—a reality we nowadays acknowledge explicitly with respect to the full scope of the State’s police power.”). Another obscure corner of takings law that will come into play when the government assumes control of nature are cases of actual necessity, such as when government blows up buildings to prevent the spread of fire. See, e.g., Bowditch v. Boston, 101 U.S. 16 (1880). This exception to takings liability is narrow and has not been revisited in many years.

Though its use has grown in the last decade, the Anthropocene concept has been around since the 19th century.

1. Duncan Cook Senior Lecturer in Geography, Australian Catholic University

Dr Duncan Cook receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Australian Catholic University provides funding as a member of The Conversation AU

Republished from the Conversation

Disastrous fires, ongoing drought, and heat extremes have refocused Australians’ attention on the human contribution to climate change.

For decades experts have known (and warned) of the consequences for Australia, but for many, there is a realisation that our environment has shifted beyond “normal” boundaries, and that humans have played some part in this. This is fertile ground for the idea we occupy a new human-dominated phase of planetary history: the Anthropocene.

Use of the term Anthropocene (the root “anthropo” means human, the suffix “-cene” signals a geologic time epoch) has been growing for more than a decade. No longer the exclusive domain of geoscientists, it has jumped from academic journals to pop culture while many are still asking “the what now?”

A very short history

It has been 20 years since Dutch Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen and colleagues used the term to describe the human modification of the planet since the industrial revolution. However, the concept dates back to at least the mid- to late-19th century when Italian Catholic priest, geologist and palaeontologist Antonio Stoppani proposed an “anthropozoic era”.

There has been a push in the last decade to have the Anthropocene formally recognised as the current piece of Earth history.

Last year, the Anthropocene Working Group of the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) agreed to a proposal for a formal Anthropocene period with an onset marked by the distinct chemical signatures of mid-20th century atomic bomb fallout that we can detect worldwide.

Some scholars have questioned the need for an Anthropocene epoch at all. Others recognise its usefulness but debate when between the mid-18th and mid-20th century AD the period started.

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While there are good arguments for such a recent start date, it potentially excludes the impact of thousands of years of human deforestation, agriculture, and building that are the environmental antecedents of the world we see today (a so-called Early Anthropocene, or a Palaeoanthropocene model).

Re-writing the past

One issue here is that our knowledge of human impacts in the distant past is being rapidly re-written. Take the Maya lowlands of Central America, where our research team used the term Mayacene to describe early Anthropocene deforestation, agriculture and urbanisation. In a new paper, my colleagues have shown Pre-Columbian Maya wetland agricultural systems in present-day Belize were five times larger (and older) than previously thought.

We are only now beginning to understand the long history of human modification, in tropical forests and elsewhere, that may have increased greenhouse gas emissions and altered climate long before the industrial revolution.

History tells us trying to pin down when (and where) major human disturbance first occurred is a great challenge. The stratigraphic (and historical and archaeological) evidence suggests an Anthropocene that is time-transgressive, with many different beginnings (and some declines) globally. We can say it had transformed much of the planet by 3,000 years ago.

Escape from acadaemia

An undecided start date has not prevented the Anthropocene idea spreading rapidly through many academic disciplines.

Highly regarded journals, such as Anthropocene and Anthropocene Review, publish an expanding body of human-impacts research.

Across the humanities and social sciences, the Anthropocene has become an important frame for re-examining human-environment relationships. Historian Dipesh Chakrabarty’s 2009 essay, for example.

Offshoot Anthropocene ideas have sprouted, including the Technoscene (the influence of technology), the Capitalocene (the influence of economies), and (my favourite) the Chthulucene that imagines a future re-worlding where multispecies groups learn to live in harmony with nature.

Despite the viral spread and mutation of the term, what remains is the recognition of the enormity and permanence of human environmental modification, and the (usually) negative consequences.

The 2010s were marked by important Anthropocene books, documentaries and movies, marking the spread of the term into the public discourse.

In 2014, Anthropocene was added to the Oxford English Dictionary; six years later, Google’s search engine shows some 6.4 million internet hits on the term. In The Atlantic last year, science writer Peter Brannen wondered whether the concept was an arrogant human folly:

The idea of the Anthropocene inflates our own importance by promising eternal geological life to our creations.

The cultural impact of the Anthropocene is seen in major art projects and museum exhibitions, and you can now find the word (and the ideas) in many songs and albums. Canadian musician Grimes’ announced her upcoming release Miss Anthropocene is a “concept album about the anthropomorphic Goddess of climate change”.

On social media, Anthropocene has become a byword for the severe human impacts on the environment we see around us – in posts about bushfire smoke, plastic beach flotsam, and expanding farmlands.

Lasting impact

It’s not often ideas and terminology from the geosciences escape and find a home in society, so the journey of the Anthropocene, from neologism to global catch phrase and environmental rallying point is fascinating.

The Anthropocene is not (yet) a formally defined geological unit, and so for now, we continue to live in the Meghalayan Age of the Holocene epoch.

The Anthropocene has arguably become a “charismatic mega-concept”. It brings together the sciences, humanities, and the public realm, stimulating ongoing debate and new research.

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Perhaps this is the “global awareness” ANU’s Will Steffen and colleagues anticipated in their 2007 Anthropocene model?

Time will tell if this shared terminology and understanding can translate into action, to repair (or at least slow) millennia of human impacts on the Earth …

Reinhold Leinfelder

Freie Universität Berlin*

1 Introduction

An outstanding characteristic of the human species is its ability to think ahead into the future. However, such foresight is a major challenge if it is to go beyond one’s own personal environment. The future is therefore difficult to grasp – also depending on which temporal and spatial scales are adopted. Geologists predict probable Earth plate constellations even up to 250 million years in advance.1 Paleontologists may agree to “what if” future scenarios based on plausibility conditions, such as in the BBC fiction “The Future is Wild”, produced with the participation of paleontologists, in which, in 20- 200 million years, fish could actually have conquered the air and octopuses the land2. In general, science fiction films often shape our ideas for the future – in fact, they have anticipated technical developments, such as tablet computers, 3D visualizations or ‘intelligent assistants’. However, many think of the future in terms of socio-political and environmental challenges on a local, regional and global scale or of many euphemistic promises of the industry. Hence, it is no surprise that very often fears of the future prevail or the topic future is simply ignored. We do not want that robots take over our work, nor do we want to be made personally responsible for all these problems. The complexity of the closely interlinked challenges seems too much for us: The future seems cloudy, pixelated, not an integral picture. The usual, especially western dualistic, dialectical approach of discursive categorization into close vs. strange, good vs. evil, beautiful vs. ugly, right vs. wrong, nature vs. culture, human vs. technology etc. is counterproductive and does not help (Schwägerl & Leinfelder 2014, Leinfelder 2017a). Cheap, psychologically quite comprehensible self-excuses promote populist attempts for splitting societies, which are currently experiencing an alarming boom (Leinfelder 2013a, 2018, Levandowsky et al. 2018). Can a new scientific concept derived from the Earth system and geosciences, the Anthropocene, help here? Does it have the right name? Doesn’t it promote an apocalyptic, fatalistic attitude or, quite contrary isn’t it a gateway for positivistic, technocratic delusions? And how is a concept that has grown out of the “deep past”, i.e. the history of the Earth, supposed to have any relevance for the future? Once again we seem to be trapped in our simplifying, dualistic “either-or” ideas, into which we want to categorize new concepts as fast as possible.

The purpose of this article is to present the concept of the Anthropocene also with regard to its potential for a systemic sustainability analysis and the resulting responsibilities, commitments and design options. Perhaps the most exciting thing about the Anthropocene concept is the challenge of abandoning dualisms in favor of a diverse spectrum of graduations, new approaches and new solution pathways. However, the different levels of the Anthropocene approach should be distinguished, so that it is always clear what we are exactly talking and debating about.

2. Paul Crutzen – the Father of the Anthropocene

Atmospheric chemist and Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen first used the term “Anthropocene” at a large conference of the Earth system sciences in Mexico in 2000. Earth system scientists are trying to understand the processes of the Earth system and thus the interplay of the lithosphere, pedosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, and atmosphere. Recently the influence of humans (sociosphere or anthroposphere, sensu WBGU 1993) on these natural spheres and thus on the stability of the Earth system has also been evaluated. Crutzen was horrified by the extent of human intervention in the Earth system and – emotionally moved – claimed in an interim remark that we would no longer live in the Holocene, but in the “Anthropocene”. Since then, the new term has entered the scientific and public discussion.3 Following the conference in 2000, it was Crutzen who, together with the ecologist Eugene Stoermer (who had been using the term Anthropocene in his lectures for some time), published a short concept of the Anthropocene in the newsletter of the International Geosphere Biosphere Program (IGBP) that hosted Mexico Conference (Crutzen & Stoermer 2000). This was followed by his highly regarded article “Geology of Mankind” in the renowned journal “Nature” (Crutzen 2002). Crutzen thus implicitly put forward three theses: First, that today’s Earth system does not correspond to the Holocene Earth system anymore, so humankind has become a crucial factor of the Earth system. Second, by using the term in linguistic analogy to the more recent geological epochs (Paleocene, Eocene, Oligocene, Miocene, Pliocene, Pleistocene and Holocene) he hypothesized that these interventions were also geologically detectable, permanently manifested in new sedimentary characteristics, and thus required the formal definition of a new geological epoch. Third, he did not stop at this analytical approach, but also formulated that its outcome must have consequences for future human action, and that not politics alone, but also science and technology must make a significant contribution to this. The Anthropocene concept can therefore best be described by these three levels, a) the Earth system level, b) the geological stratigraphic level, and c) the consequential meta-level (Leinfelder 2016a, 2017a, b).

3. The Multi-Level Approach

3.1 The Earth System Level of the Anthropocene Concept

Human intervention in the environment has reached dimensions that are difficult to imagine – quantitative estimates of this can illustrate this: so far, humanity has reshaped more than three quarters of the ice-free solid Earth – a “pristine nature” no longer exists here4 . Today’s natural landscapes are therefore mostly cultural landscapes. The situation is similar in the oceans, where overfishing has reached enormous proportions and where temperature increase, acidification, overfertilization and other pollutants endanger coral reefs, plankton and other marine life5 . Overall, the situation of biological diversity is critical. Although only about 0.5-2% of vertebrate species have become extinct since the beginning of the 18th century (Waters et al. 2016), this is still 100-1000 times faster than before the beginning of human influences happens (Barnosky et al. 2012, Ceballos et al. 2015).

When monitoring 16,704 populations of 4005 vertebrate species, their population size has declined by 60% since 1970 (Grooten & Almond 2018). The change is even more dramatic when considering the ratios of biomass proportions. For example, despite the large number of individuals (almost 7.5 billion), humans only represent 0.01% of global, carbon-based biomass – most of it, namely 82%, is contained in plants and, in turn, in tree trunks. However, humans and their mammalian livestock, in particular cattle, sheep and pigs, represent 96% of the biomass of all living mammals (humans 36%, livestock 60%). All wild animal species together therefore represent only 4% of the carbon biomass of all mammals. In birds, even 70% of the biomass is accounted for by breeding poultry (Bar-On et al. 2018).

The extent to which non-renewable resources are used also plays a very special role. Humans use fossil fuels, which have accumulated over hundreds of millions of years from biomass. Their combustion causes today’s anthropogenic climate change within a very short time. In addition, we also use vast quantities of other raw, non-renewable materials such as sand, limestones, clays, iron ore, other metals or rare earths to produce buildings, infrastructure, machinery and appliances, the construction and operation of which in turn requires enormous amounts of energy. Our scientific estimate of the magnitude says that humankind has so far produced the unimaginable amount of 30 trillion tons of technosphere. 40% of this technosphere is located in and under the cities of the world (Zalasiewicz et al. 2017a). Other technical products, such as plastics in particular, are spread all over the Earth. Humans have produced a total of about 8.3 billion tons of plastics (Geyer et al. 2017). While pre-war production was minimal and only about 1.5 million tons were produced in 1950, annual production has now risen to around 400 million tons, which is more than the biomass of all living humans (cf. Zalasiewicz et al. 2016, Leinfelder & Ivar do Sul 2019, Fuhr et al. 2019). 2.5 billion tons of the total plastic produced are currently still in use, but only a very small part is recycled or incinerated worldwide, while about 4.9 billion tons, i.e. about 60% of all plastic produced up to now, has been released into the environment, either still dumped in geologically non-permanent landfills or directly distributed on land and in the sea (Geyer et al. 2017).

The construction and operation of technical machines from such non-renewable resources then in turn enabled other resources, such as phosphates, to be extracted. The majority of the mined phosphates are added to agricultural land in the form of artificial fertilizers in order to generate renewable biological resources. Between 1910 and 2005 the human-made share of the net primary plant production (NPP) doubled from 13 to 25% of global vegetation, which led to a doubling of the input of reactive nitrogen and phosphorus into the environment and which also required huge amounts of fossil energy for agricultural production. In 2014, 225 million tons of fossil phosphates were mined and 258 million tons are projected for 2018. The scenarios for the human share of total primary crop production by year 2050 amount to 27-44% NPP. 6

Humans are thus removing whole mountains, cutting new valleys, allowing lakes to flow in or out, determining where and what is sedimented, which organisms live where and where they do not, raising sea levels and changing the climate. 7 Humankind has not only changed the Earth system qualitatively and quantitatively, but also made these changes at an enormous and increasing speed. The sciences refer to this as the coupled “Great Acceleration” of geoecological and socioeconomic processes (Steffen et al.2007, 2015). The danger of tipping over into a completely new Earth system status is great, especially if it is not possible to limit anthropogenic global warming to a maximum of 2° C globally, although even a warming of “only” 1.5-2° C is already well outside the range of the Holocene (Leinfelder & Haum 2016a, Steffen et al. 2016).

In summary, the Earth system hypothesis of the Anthropocene concept states that humanity has already changed the Earth system in a way that is not only comprehensive, but that also makes these changes largely irreversible. Unfortunately, all of the available data now seem to confirm this. However, it depends upon our future actions, how far the new Earth system actually will differ from that of the Holocene. Can it still be designed in such a way that it can support human societies and that these societies can develop as freely and democratically as possible? Or do we fall into a “hothouse” phase, with in detail unpredictable tipping point cascades, in which humanity will only be able to survive in the reaction mode (Steffen et al. 2016, 2018)?8

3.2 The Geological-Stratigraphic Level of the Anthropocene Concept

The enormous anthropogenic changes in the Earth system are also permanently documented in the present and future sediments as geologically detectable signatures. Caused by water regulation, agriculture, infrastructure, construction and mining, sedimentary processes today differ largely from natural processes. Adding to this, characteristics of the sediments have also changed, now showing completely new geosignatures and components. The Working Group set up by the International Stratigraphic Commission on the ‘Anthropocene’ (AWG) 9 includes geologists together with other Earth system scientists, as well as representatives from many other disciplines. This group has been investigating for several years to what extent the changes in the Earth system are also manifested in altered sedimentary signatures that are characteristic of the Anthropocene.

This is the basis for the further assessment of whether the Anthropocene should be formally defined as a new geological epoch, and if so, where the lower limit of this epoch should then be positioned. The fact that the Anthropocene should be considered as a new epoch is meanwhile largely undisputed within the AWG. Various proposals are discussed within and outside the AWG, such as the anthropogenic changes in the Neolithic, the “upsurge” of the Industrial Revolution after the perfection of the steam engine around 1800, or the enormous increase in sedimentary geosignals due to the “Great Acceleration” (sensu Steffen et al. 2007, 2015a) since the mid-20th century. The AWG now favors the latter by a large majority, since both synchronicity and worldwide detectability are given for the first time. This lower limit would be characterized in particular by 1) the radioactive fallout of the atomic bomb tests in the 50/60s, 2) the strongly accelerated increase of “technofossils” such as plastics, elementary aluminium, industrial ash particles, concrete fragments since 1950, and 3) relics and geosignatures of our “grow-use-dispose” societies, with are constantly embedded in the sediments. 10

3.3 What’s Next? The Consequential Meta-Level of the Anthropocene Concept

From a physician treating us we not only expect that his examination methodology is adequate and that his diagnosis is correct, but also that he presents this diagnosis in an understandable way, suggests further action, monitors the treatment and, if needed, urgently advises us to change our life style (if necessary with emphasis on the risks if we do not follow). In the same way, the social relevance of the Anthropocene analysis requires further attention and care, including scientific support, as well as recommendations for urgent behavioral change. This needs translation, dialogue and discourse skills, communicative interaction, ethical discourse, transdisciplinary cooperation with all social groups as well as scientific monitoring of all implementation processes. This is referred to here as the consequential metalevel of the Anthropocene concept.

In fact, not only researchers from the Earth sciences, but also from ecology, archaeology, sociology, philosophy, education, environmental, historical, literary, political, design, technical, architectural and other cultural studies and the arts are increasingly using the term “Anthropocene” and are thus discussing all aspects of the immense environmental change caused by humans (“Anthropos”) as well as their effects and potential consequential reactions to it11. This consequential metalevel of the Anthropocene can be formulated as a further hypothesis: Humans, which have become an immense geological force – albeit to a very different extent and responsibility (cf. Allen et al. 2018) – has brought the Earth system to the brink of a possible tipping. For ethical reasons and on the basis of its now very comprehensive knowledge, humanity should also be in a position to help shape the Earth in a “knowledge-gardening”, sustainable manner and in compliance with the precautionary principle in such a way that we humans become an integrative part of a permanently functional, Anthropocene Earth system that is habitable for humanity and all other diverse life. In the best case, this would create the basis for fair and just development opportunities for present and future generations worldwide.

In the following, five conceptual approaches to solving this problem are briefly outlined.

Interdisciplinarity approach: A complex science challenge such as the full analysis and monitoring of the Anthropocene and its resulting transformative relevance can hardly be achieved with the prevailing scientific method of confining scientific studies to small, manageable problems, which are then studied in great detail and depth. Multidisciplinarity, which only means that certain research objects are examined by different disciplines in their respective disciplinary context, also cannot create the necessary cross-linkages. Only full interdisciplinarity, in which different disciplines analyze problems together under a common objective and develop joint proposals for solutions, can achieve the necessary systemic analysis and enable transformative research and transformative education (sensu WBGU 2011).

On the one hand, the Anthropocene concept is thus a science-based analytic and monitoring instrument which, first and foremost, underlines the need to expand systemic and interdisciplinary research. The necessity of interdisciplinarity begins with the analytical inventory of human-made changes. This integrated approach makes it possible, for example, to correlate historical data from archaeology and historical research closely with the sedimentary archives. Since not all historical facts have been recorded by humans, there is a great added value here: An Anthropocene sedimentology and stratigraphy makes the spread of crops, the introduction of invasive species, the distribution of hazardous substances, the warming of the climate, or the omnipresence of plastics traceable regardless of historical records and thus allows to complements them.

On the other hand, the concept is also a docking point and an ethical imperative for a major social transformation in which science and education systems jointly research and teach in an interdisciplinary and transformative manner and in which dedicated groups from civil society, science, authorities, business and politics work on sustainable solutions in a transdisciplinary manner, from the municipal to the national, multi-national and UN level (WGBU 2011). In order to ensure that this social contract not only remains virtual, but also has the prospect of political implementation, the legal systems, again at all levels, i.e. from private law to municipal regulations to international law, must be reconsidered from this perspective and, if necessary, adapted or supplemented (Leinfelder 2017a).

Systemic sustainability approach: The integrative view of the Anthropocene also requires a complete rethinking of the concept of sustainability. The concept used in politics and business up to now is based on the three-pillar model of the Brundtland Report (UN 1987) and defines sustainability as the intersection between economic, social and ecological sustainability. Unfortunately, in most cases, both the ecological and the social aspects are subordinated to the economic aspects, often with the argument that otherwise there would be social hardships. Very often, the social factor is largely atrophied, resembling the “mitochondrion of the economy”, while the ecology is only considered as an “environment” surrounding (ie environing) us at a certain distance (in the sense of a world just “around us”, also ref. to the German expression “Umwelt” for environment). Though being valued by many, for most it only functions as a “nice to have” or “perhaps worth protecting” addition (cf. Leinfelder 2018). Fortunately, the theme-based Sustainable Development Goals – as adopted by the UN in 2015 – now interlink areas of life and environmental issues, which is a step in the right direction (UNSDGs 2015). However, it does not yet adequately show how all our activities, productivity, nourishment, security and well-being is strongly dependent upon a functioning Earth system. The approach known as “Wedding Cake”, linking Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) with a concentric model of sustainability (cf. Griggs et al. 2013, Rockström & Sukhdev 2016) is a further step forward, but it embeds economic and social issues only in the biosphere and leaves the rest of the Earth system largely unconsidered. Also, the term “environment” (“Umwelt”) itself assigns to ecology just this excluding, distanced area, and does not show how much our livelihoods depend on it. Possibly the metaphor of an “Usworld” (in German: “Unswelt”) could be an eye-opener here, pointing to the need to rethink that the economy must serve the social/cultural system, and both, economy and social/cultural spheres have to be seen as an integrated, embedded part of the Earth system (Leinfelder 2011, 2013b, 2018).

Ethics Approach: Rethinking our embedding in the Earth system and our strong dependence on the history of the Earth not only requires to redesign the concept of sustainability, but also increases the “responsibility imperative” for action even further: If there is hardly any untouched nature left and if we have become a dominant Earth system factor as well as a geological force by our cumulative actions, then there is no real difference between nature and culture. Humankind should therefore see itself as being an integral part of the Earth system (see above: “Usworld”). Living a human life only from the Earth system, not with the Earth system is impossible, at least in a permanent, sustainable way. The main challenge of the Anthropocene concept is actually the insight into a completely new ethical relationship with the Earth: Everything I and others do has an effect on the Earth system, often in a completely unexpected and unforeseeable way. Each individual and all communities are therefore responsible. Politics or even the economy cannot be discharged from their responsibility, but alone they also cannot guarantee our Earth system integration. The use of the Earth by everyone also obliges everyone to a compatible, sustainable, and possibly even in a resource-augmenting behavior. The contrast between human necessities and the intrinsic value of nature (i.e. anthropocentric versus bio-/physicocentric) would then also resolved in an interdependent, integrative way. If the well-being of humanity depends on the well-being of nature, and vice versa the well-being of nature depends on Earth-system-compatible behavior of humans, then anthropocentric “parasitism” would transform into a genuine “mutual symbiosis” of humans and nature – this could then be described as an “anthropocenic” view (Leinfelder 2013b, 2016).

Design approach: Our knowledge society is complex, it is based not only on scientific knowledge, but also on experiences and convictions. Thus, a multimodal approach should be chosen for sustainability communication, in which facts are not only described but are also interwoven with metaphors, narratives and real images. Through narratives and visualizations, emotional access and insights can be enabled, and motivation can be generated (see following section). Facts should also be provided simultaneously in order to prevent any manipulative character (cf. Leinfelder et al. 2015, Leinfelder 2014, 2016b). Personal participation, which could start with individual trial and error approaches might further extend to active participation in environmental Citizen Science monitoring, school laboratories, maker fairs, future workshops, or artistic environmental and design projects. All this supports the necessary “permanence” of approaches and strengthens fundamental and goal-forming mental resources (cf. Hunecke 2013). In the context of the Anthropocene, a combination of narrative, participatory and creative approaches should hence help giving meaning to individual and societal future life histories that can still be shaped in a spirit of solidarity and sustainability, and should also strengthen personal experiences of self-efficacy and corresponding cooperative behavior and action through active participation (cf. Leinfelder 2018).

In this context, it is extremely gratifying that the responsibility of science and higher education is increasingly being expressed through public dialogue forums. The University of Coburg is exemplary in this respect, where 16 experts/lecturers from all six faculties plus experts from the science and culture centre have initiated an interdisciplinary, problem-oriented discourse on the Anthropocene. In this way the university consciously and exemplarily assumes responsibility for the “Future of the Earth” both internally within the circle of scientists and for students in higher education. In doing so, it also visibly demonstrates – and hopefully encourages followers – that the education of university graduates is seen as the key to shaping the future.

Narrative approach: How could such a reflection of the human being on the necessity for repositioning as an integrative part of the Earth system be achieved? An interesting approach for a new connection with nature is to use images, metaphors and narratives that – far from any false eco-romanticism – make us aware that not only renewable resources, but also fossil fuels and other raw materials such as limestone, sand, iron, manganese, copper, rare earths, phosphates etc. are finite. Such resource limitation is real for quite some substances owing to nearly complete exploitation of reserves in the foreseeable nearer future. However, most resources are not scarce per se at present, but owing to immense mining costs and negative externalities their availability is, or should be, extremely limited, particularly for environmental reasons. Apocalyptic narratives are certainly no solution, they promote powerlessness rather than motivate for action. Culture, education, science and entrepreneurs should therefore use new optimistic narratives, locations, interventions, experiments and prototypes to help politicians and society as a whole to develop new and diverse solution approaches12.

Excursus

One example is the Anthropocene narrative “Machines must also be fed”: Of the 30 trillion tons of technosphere generated since about 1950 (see Section 3.1), each living human being accounts for about 4000 tons, consisting of buildings, infrastructures, vehicles, machines, appliances, gadgets, human-made soils, etc. If these materials were evenly distributed on the Earth’s surface, there would be 50 kg of these substances per square meter, both on land or at sea. For comparison: Although we are currently almost 7.7 billion people, each of us, statistically speaking, has an average of about 7 soccer fields (again, related equally to land and sea). We often forget that it is not only the raw materials necessary for our technical products that we explore, mine, transport and assemble into products with a high energy requirement, but that the buildings, machines and equipment created by this process also require other resources, in particular energy, in order to become comfortable (houses) or to do work for us: They drive, fly, swim, transport, calculate, illuminate, rinse, sew, wash, store, heat or cool for us. This narrative could help to underline the need for renewable energies and the importance of improved efficiency and, above all, the permanent recycling of resources.

4. Future? Futures!

How could the obstacles to dealing with the future described at the beginning of this article be overcome conceptually? Our culture of discussion about future solutions often suffers from the fact that possible future scenarios and possible pathways to get there are usually hard to imagine and are therefore immediately discarded – here, too, it usually feels better to remain caught in the familiar than to get involved in something that is difficult to imagine (Leinfelder 2015). Desire research shows that we wish above all for what others already have, i.e. what is therefore conceivable (cf. Helbig 2013, Fischer 2016). Since it is easy to outline and easier to update, the sciences – and then also media, film and pop culture – tend to use business-as-usual scenarios, i.e. explorative, probable, thus imaginable futures. Far too little attention is paid to possible alternative futures and even less to normative, desirable futures. In the Anthropocene context, desirable futures should be compatible both with the planetary boundaries and with SDGs. Nevertheless, the window of opportunity is wide enough to design different possible future pathways and thus to increase their imaginability, to strengthen the capacity for discourse, to then distill desirable futures and, based on that, to develop mixed solution portfolios to reach there.

For such purposes the author proposed a set of possible ideal-type future scenarios, and distinguishes – besides the usually undesired 1) Business-as-usual path (BAU) – between 2) a reactive path, 3) a lessis-more path, 4) a bio-adaptive consistency path and 5) a path characterized by innovative high-tech elements (Leinfelder 2014, 2016b). These pathways or “futures” can then be used to illustrate possible future everyday life settings such as energy supply, living, mobility, work, health and nutrition. In the field of nutrition, for example, the BAU scenario would correspond to a further increase in the consumption of meat and further extension of resource-intensive agriculture. A reactive scenario could include the optimization of sewage treatment plants, further end-of-pipe solutions and possibly an increase in productivity through new breeding and biotechnologies. A sufficiency scenario is based on local and seasonal, preferably vegetarian or even purely vegan diets, and avoids packaging and artificial fertilizers. A bioadaptive scenario tries to take nature as a model and redesign it. Food could be produced worldwide where this is best possible in a very resource-saving way. Energy for processing and transport would come from renewable energies, packaging would be completely compostable or even edible. Alternatively or additionally, nature’s closed water and nutrient cycles could be mirrored and automated locally, e.g. by combining vegetable and fish farming (Kuhlemann 2017). In animal breeding, a switch could be made to insects, which are already consumed by two billion people and can be bred in a very resource-saving manner (Huis 2017). If this is not desirable for our culture, at least the aquaculture of carnivorous fish could be switched to insect feed. A nutritional high-tech scenario could include meat from the laboratory, “functional food” made of synthetic components and the 3D printer, or food production in farm scrapers in the middle of the cities, where most of the people will live anyway in the future. 13 Further examples on the subject of nutritional futures as well as other living world futures can be found in Leinfelder (2014, 2016b, 2017b) and Liebender et al. (2017).

5. Conclusions

The Anthropocene concept is a comprehensive conceptual “toolbox” for systemic analysis, interdisciplinary monitoring and a new understanding of the gigantic current impact of human activities on the Earth system. At the same time, it neither implies a fatalistic acceptance of an apocalypse, nor does it promote a simplistic “everything will be fine” positivism, but rather allows differentiated observations from different perspectives. Precisely because of its systemic and interdisciplinary approach, the concept does not narrow possible pathways for the development, propagation and application of future options. On the contrary, the Earth system sciences, social sciences, cultural studies and the humanities together and very clearly express that in order to achieve global development goals such as justice, food security, health, peace and other goals for sustainable development (SDGs) (UNSDGs 2015), we keep on needing “assessable” and predictable conditions of an Anthropocene Earth system (Steffen et al. 2016). In order not to completely switch from the relative stability of the Holocene to incalculable risks, but rather to transform the Anthropocene Earth System into a different, but permanently habitable Anthropocene, it is necessary not to exceed planetary boundaries (sensu Rockström et al. 2009, Steffen et al. 2015b) and to see the SDGs as a compass. For this purpose, continuous monitoring of the state of the Anthropocene Earth system is indispensable. Only then both safe shelter spaces and a creative leeway for shaping the Anthropocene remain guaranteed. Within this framework, and depending on the region, the culture, the social requirements and the sociopolitical goals, it should be possible to negotiate very freely where the future journey should go. Necessary for that is a generally more holistic, systemic view of the integration of humankind into planetary processes, which means an integration of all societal groups, i.e. politics, science, business, administration, civil society groups and individuals. Another prerequisite is the improvement of future literacy via education in schools, universities, companies etc., with the goal to develop skills for better imagining alternate futures, depicting desirable futures, and designing solution portfolios for them.

Dichotomous “right or wrong” solutions, or even simple “silver bullet” solutions do not exist. Thus, even for “ideal-type” solution scenarios sensu Leinfelder (2014, 2016) there are not only various transitions and mixed forms, but these scenarios are even explicitly intended to generate such mixed solution portfolios. None of these ideal-type solution approaches has a fundamental advantage over the others, as they can also be implemented differently in terms of their temporality. Reactive solutions can be implemented directly in some cases, while complete recycling management and other innovative high-tech systems will only be available in the future, not only because of technical, but also of social, legal and cultural challenges. On the other hand, reactive solutions that can be quickly implemented today must not prevent the further development of complex recycling management or other high-tech systems. Mixed portfolios can also include an experimental trial character and should be open for continuous recomposing whenever new solutions become available. This will make it possible to shape the future Anthropocene in a more open, but also much more creative and innovative way.

The proclamation of the Anthropocene alone will definitely not solve any environmental and social problem of the Earth. But it would result in a strong impulse for rethinking our role as part of a single and unique Earth system, which for this very reason should not be seen as an exploitable resource, but rather as a functioning overall system, similar to a foundation. In an ideal world all nations would take on the role of trustees for the functioning of the entire Earth system (cf. WBGU 2013, Leinfelder 2017a). But even in an imperfect world it holds true that if every part of our society – from politics, business, administration, science, designers, the education system, civil society groups to the individual – would participate in the necessary “anthropocenic” transformation, we would be on the way to a future-proof Anthropocene epoch that could permanently carry, support and protect humanity. It is high time not to shy away any longerfrom this, but to start now with this transformative design in a creative, inclusive and future-oriented way.

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Prof. Dr. Reinhold Leinfelder is Professor of “Invertebrate Paleontology and Geobiology” at the Freie Universität Berlin. His teaching and research include coral reefs, geological history, the Anthropocene, future transformation and new methods of knowledge communication. After studying at the LMU Munich, he did his doctorate and habilitation at the University of Mainz. He held professorships at universities in Stuttgart, Munich and Berlin, as well as directorships for various museums and natural history collections, including the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin. From 2008-2013 he was a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Federal Government on Global Change (WBGU). He has been a member of the international Anthropocene Working Group since 2013. From 2012-2014 he was founding director of the Future House / Futurium, Berlin. Since 2018 he has also been a lecturer at the Institut Futur of Freie Universität. In addition to scientific publications, Leinfelder’s portfolio also includes exhibitions, participatory projects and knowledge comics

* This article is based on a keynote talk given by the author at the Coburg Design Days 2018, and originally has been published as Leinfelder, R. (2019): Das Anthropozän – Die Erde in unserer Hand.- In: Schwinger, E. (ed.) Das Anthropozän im Diskurs der Fachdisziplinen, pp.23-46. Weimar bei Marburg (Metropolis-Verlag, ISBN 978-3-7316-1394-7). This is a partly modified and slightly shortened English version of Leinfelder (2019b), to make it available to a wider audience.

For citation please either cite the original German paper (Leinfelder 2019b) or cite this english version as: Leinfelder, R. (2020): The Anthropocene – The Earth in Our Hands.- Refubium Freie Universität Berlin, https://www.refubium.fu-berlin.de (https://tinyurl.com/refubium-EarthInOurHands).

Author’s address: Prof. Dr. Reinhold Leinfelder, Freie Universität Berlin, Institute of Geological Sciences, Malteserstr. 74-100, Haus D, D-12249 Berlin, Germany. Email: reinhold.leinfelder@fu-berlin.de

 1 See Scotese C.R. (1998ff.), Pangea Ultima: http://www.scotese.com/future2.htm (as of Feb 2020).

2 See Dixon / Adams (2016) and http://www.thefutureiswild.com (as of Feb 2020).

3 The history of ideas from the Anthropocene dates back to the 19th century when the Italian geologist Antonio Stoppani spoke of an “anthropozoic era”. The Russian geologist V.I. Vernadsky took a similar view in 1926 by referring to the “Noosphere”, introduced by Teilhard de Chardin as a world of thought, in order to emphasize the role of human thinking in shaping one’s own future and one’s own environment. The biologist Hubert Markl spoke of a “change into the Anthropozoic era” in the early 1990s and described “nature as a cultural task”. Science journalist Andrew Revkin used the term “anthrocene” in one of his books (Leinfelder 2012, Trischler 2016).

4 See Ellis / Ramankutty (2008), Ellis et al. (2010), Ellis (2011).

5 WGBU (2013), Leinfelder / Haum (2016a, b), Leinfelder (2019a).

6 Williams et al. (2016), Leinfelder (2017b), reference also for additional literature.

7 Waters et al. (2016), Leinfelder (2017a, b, 2018), reference also for additional literature

8 Further in-depth resources on Chap. 3.1. see e.g. Barnosky et al. (2012), Brown et al. (2013), Ellis et al. (2013), Leinfelder (2017a), Steffen et al. (2015a, b), Waters et al. (2016), Williams et al. (2016)

 9 http://quaternary.stratigraphy.org/working-groups/anthropocene/

10 See e.g. Waters et al. (2016, 2018), Zalasiewicz et al. (2017b, 2019a, b) for detailed recent statements, also for the further process. Current results of the voting in the AWG on May 21, 2019 see http://quaternary. stratigraphy.org/ working-groups/anthropocene / (as of Feb 18, 2020).

11 For example, articles in Möllers et al. (2015) and in Renn / Scherer (2015), see also Hamann et al. (2014), Leinfelder et al. (2016); for discussions and criticisms – including terminology – see the author’s Anthropocene blog at http://anthropocene.de

12 For more on narratives, including other examples, see Leinfelder (2017a, b, c, 2018), Leinfelder et al. (2015, 2017).

13 From Leinfelder (2017a). For information on the future of nutrition, see also Leinfelder et al. (2016, 204f.), Krausse et al. (2017).

Issue: 172 (initial article link)

Posted on 17th October 2021

Eve Croeser

If Karl Marx and Frederick Engels were writing the Communist Manifesto today, it is not inconceivable that they would begin with the sentence: “A spectre is haunting humanity—the spectre of extinction.” Even before the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in 2019, humanity was facing a complex of interconnected environmental, ecological, socio-economic and political crises caused by the expansion and intensification of capitalist relations of production. The current confluence of these crises suggests that capitalism is experiencing what Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci referred to as an “organic crisis”—one in which the system’s “incurable structural contradictions” reach maturity and threaten the ruling class’s hegemony.1 In contrast to “conjunctural” crises, which are less historically significant, organic crises arise when “the necessary and sufficient conditions…exist to make possible, and hence imperative, the accomplishment of certain historical tasks. These tasks become imperative because any falling short before an historical duty increases the necessary disorder and prepares more serious catastrophes”.2 Although the environmental, socio-economic and political crises are deeply interrelated and exacerbate one another in complex ways, here we shall analyse capitalism’s organic crisis by focusing on the climate emergency.

This article begins with a brief overview of the severity and urgency of the climate crisis. It goes on to argue that capitalism both causes the climate crisis and is also unlikely to be capable of solving it effectively. This is despite the establishment of an international treaty, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), designed for this very purpose. Signatories to this treaty (who are referred to as “parties” of the treaty) send delegates representing their states to formal annual meetings, called a “Conference of the Parties” (COP). There, they negotiate targets for reducing the greenhouse gases causing climate change. The 26th annual Conference of the Parties (COP26) is scheduled to convene in Glasgow, Scotland, from 31 October to 12 November 2021. Distinguishing between climate action and climate justice, this article provides an overview of some of the contentious issues that will be negotiated at COP26. It also looks at the role of the COP26 Coalition, a Britain-based coalition of groups and individuals mobilising in favour of climate justice during the COP26 negotiations. The article concludes with a brief overview of Marxist responses to the climate crisis, offering some suggestions for further consideration and debate.

The severity of the climate crisis

As COP26 delegates prepare to meet for yet another set of negotiations, people’s lives in various parts of the globe are being disrupted and threatened by the effects of extreme droughts, wildfires and floods whose unprecedented severity is a result of anthropogenic climate change.3 These extreme weather events include the severe floods in Western Europe and China in July 2021 that resulted in hundreds of deaths, the displacement of millions of people and the destruction of infrastructure worth billions.4 Over the past few months, several severe, destructive wildfires have also burned across Europe, North America and Russia. Many of these fires were still burning at the time of writing, fed and exacerbated by persistent climate change-induced droughts and extreme temperatures that give rise to “fire weather”.5 Other symptoms of climate change are abundant. The last five years have been the warmest on record, and an unprecedented number of fires have burnt in the Arctic. Some 1 million tonnes of ice per minute were lost from the Greenland ice sheet in 2019, and 28 trillion tonnes of ice have been lost globally since 1994.6

As some Earth system scientists point out, however, the climate crisis is likely to be even more serious than these individual signals suggest due to the possibility of crossing “tipping points”. These could lead to a cascade of other environmental changes, shifting our complex, interconnected “Earth system” into a new state “with which humans have no experience of dealing”.7 There are already worrying signs that some important tipping points, such as the collapse of the Gulf Stream and the Greenland ice sheet, are in danger of being crossed. Meanwhile, the Amazon rainforest now emits more carbon dioxide than it absorbs, becoming a source of, rather than a sink for, greenhouse gas emissions.8

The climate crisis caused by anthropogenic global warming is also exacerbating the extensive anthropogenic damage being done to ecosystems. We have witnessed an “exceptionally rapid loss of biodiversity over the last few centuries, indicating that a sixth mass extinction is already under way”.9 The predicament we face is neatly summarised by Earth scientist and palaeoclimatologist Andrew Glikson in his aptly titled article, “While we fixate on coronavirus, Earth is hurtling towards a catastrophe worse than the dinosaur extinction”.10 Glikson is one of many scientists who draw attention to the severity of the climate emergency—and the wider environmental crisis it is both embedded within and exacerbating—as well as the need for immediate action to stop the practices causing these crises. Such warnings about the climate crisis have acquired a new urgency with the publication of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) on the physical basis of climate change. Though AR6 largely confirms previous reports’ findings regarding the scientific evidence of global warming and the resulting effects, it is notable because this is the first time that an IPCC report states that this warming is unequivocally due to “human influence”.11

Institutional responses to climate crisis: the IPCC and UNFCCC

The IPCC was formally established under the auspices of the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) in 1988.12 Public administration expert Larry Luton describes it as “a designedly political organisation”. Unlike the Advisory Group on Greenhouse Gases, which had been established by a group of scientists in 1986 as an advisory panel to guide climate policy, from its inception the US government played a leading role in shaping the IPCC.13 Indeed, the US delegation to the first IPCC meeting in November 1988 had a team of 24 members, greatly outnumbering the number of delegates attending from other countries.14 In contrast to the WMO and the UNEP, which were increasingly marginalised, US scientists, bureaucrats, and “special interest groups such as the fossil-fuel lobby…wielded considerable influence” in the IPCC’s subsequent development.15

The IPCC is organised into three discrete working groups: Working Group I reports on the science of climate change; Working Group II analyses the expected impacts of climate change on socio-economic and natural systems; and Working Group III reports on possible policy responses to the issues identified by Working Groups I and II.16 The US government’s decision to chair Working Group III—whose work is the “most contentious” since it involves selecting “policy-relevant” information—has also enabled it to work with its allies to control the policy narrative emanating from IPCC reports.17 This ensures that suggested policies favour the interests of US (and global) capital.18

The IPCC’s stated mandate is restricted to producing reports that are “­policy-relevant” but not “policy prescriptive”.19 Determining policies for dealing with climate change falls under the auspices of the UNFCCC, which establishes the legal and institutional framework that underpins the COP conferences.20 Delegates representing nation-states that are parties to the UNFCCC meet annually at these conferences in order to agree on which measures they will take to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. There have now been more than two decades of negotiations at the COPs, which began in 1995, resulting in several accords, plans of action and declarations. These include the 1997 Kyoto protocol and, most recently, the 2015 Paris agreement. Yet, despite all of this, carbon dioxide levels and emissions of other greenhouse gases continue to rise relentlessly.21

“Civil society” responses to climate crisis: climate movements

Although traditional environmental groups were already alert to the issue of climate change in the 1980s, it was only one of several issues on their agenda. However, according to several analysts, the failure of governments and policymakers to institute measures that effectively deal with the deepening climate crisis over time has led to the formation of a distinct “climate movement”. This movement extends beyond the traditional environmental groups and is made up of a loose network of activists and grassroots movements that focus on climate change.22 The demands of climate movement actors range from moderate calls for “climate action” to somewhat ambiguous (but potentially radical) calls for “system change.”

Many climate movement actors point to the existence of a wide range of existing technologies that could be deployed to shift to a “zero carbon economy”.23 Some of these actors attribute the failure to shift to available renewable technologies on the required scale to a “lack of political will” and call for more “ambitious targets” for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.24 However, arguments that attribute this policy failure to a “lack of political will” fail to acknowledge the power dynamics that present obstacles to such action. Moreover, they demonstrate a failure to understand (or perhaps an inability to acknowledge) that capitalism is incapable of being reformed in the ways required to solve the climate crisis. Other calls for reforms are more nuanced, emanating from activists who seek to use such interim reforms as a platform for more radical and fundamental change.

COP26: climate action, climate justice or greenwashing?

The capitalist class is neither blind nor unresponsive to the dangers that the current moment presents to its wealth, power and privilege. However, different factions of the ruling class favour different tactics for achieving their common overall strategy of ensuring the survival of capitalism as a system. Of course, powerful vested interests continue to lobby against taking any action to address climate change, at least for now. However, proponents of “green capitalism” have embarked on a variety of projects aimed at saving the capitalist system while getting the working class and the poor to pay for these projects.25 The green capitalist agenda often represents different corporate interests to the dominant fossil fuel sector. On the opposing side, powerful factions of the ruling class such as the oil and gas industry and large-scale agricultural corporations are sabotaging attempts to “decarbonise” the global economy and are aided in this by capital’s most powerful financial institutions.26

Both these ruling class responses are dangerous to the working class and threaten the future of humanity and all life on Earth. Fossil capital’s response is dangerous because it is on a collision course with reality. It could ultimately lead to dubious large-scale “geoengineering” experiments that deliberately attempt to “rebalance” the Earth system, such as solar radiation management, carbon sequestration and ocean fertilisation.27 Yet, although the global expansion of capital has inadvertently altered the Earth system—changing the chemical composition of the atmosphere and the operations of its major geochemical cycles—it is foolish to believe that humans can control the Earth system. Geoengineering experiments on a planetary scale are highly likely to have unforeseen, unpredictable and potentially existentially threatening results.28 It is important to be aware of this issue when reviewing the outcomes of COP26 (and future COPs); as some analysts point out, article 4 of the Paris agreement permits states to use technical geoengineering “solutions” to meet their “nationally determined contributions” to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.29

“Green” capital’s response to the climate crisis is dangerous because it too is unlikely to address the climate crisis effectively. Moreover, it is simultaneously implementing what climate justice activists refer to as “false solutions.” This term refers to policies that exacerbate existing inequalities and intensify the challenges faced by most of the population of the Global South—the people who are least responsible for causing this crisis. Some of the important issues that will arise in the COP26 negotiations are discussed in a series of online presentations organised by the COP26 Coalition.30 These points of contention, conceived in “Global North versus Global South” terms, include both efficacy and equity issues. For example, the “net zero” greenhouse gas emission target being promoted by many influential Global North policymakers and corporations, who plan to establish carbon markets, is identified as a form of“greenwashing”: a delaying tactic that is susceptible to fraud and speculation and is deeply unjust. Pointing to the historical failure of previous attempts to establish carbon markets, climate justice activists argue that market solutions are unlikely to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Carbon markets are also likely to lead to large land grabs in the Global South to serve as carbon sinks, displacing many people and depriving them of their means of subsistence and their livelihoods.

Another important point of contention that will arise at COP26 is the demand by Global North negotiators that Global South countries commit to equal (rather than equitable) reductions of greenhouse gas emissions. This is despite the fact that the advanced capitalist countries are responsible for the vast majority of cumulative emissions up to the present day. According to one of the COP26 Coalition climate justice presenters, COP26 is really about finance. Powerful Global North negotiators are not only demanding equal greenhouse gas emission commitments from the Global South; they also oppose providing the financial and technology transfer assistance needed for the Global South to develop their use of renewable energy and adapt to the effects of climate change. Many of these effects are already taking a toll through prolonged droughts, unprecedented wildfires and floods, and other “extreme” weather events.

In summary, ruling class efforts to address the climate crisis in order to save capitalism focus on false solutions. These include technical targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions as well as market mechanisms such as carbon trading schemes and “payment for ecosystem services”. Dubious technological solutions are also put forward, including carbon removal, carbon sequestration and other geoengineering schemes. According to Gramsci, during an organic crisis, “the political forces which are struggling to conserve and defend the existing structure itself are making every effort to cure…the ‘incurable structural contradictions’, within certain limits, and to overcome them”.31 In the context of climate change, the phrase “within certain limits” is particularly apt—the reformist path of “green capitalism” has, to date, patently failed to address the climate crisis. It has only managed to use various market instruments and promises of future technologies as smokescreens for delaying decarbonisation.32 As the green capitalist project is implemented, it progresses capital’s inherent drive to privatise everything and incorporate all of life into its spheres of circulation. The more it does this, the more it will exacerbate existing inequalities and sabotage chances of preserving Earth’s habitability.33

Marxist responses to the climate crisis

Many climate justice activists point out that there is no reason to expect COP26 to result in effective climate policies. However, they also emphasise the great importance of joining the school students’ climate movement, Extinction Rebellion and other social movement actors in mobilising for protests during COP26 in order to advocate meaningful interim reform policies and socially just alternatives to the official policy responses. In the short term, Marxists can adopt the tactic of joining with social movement actors mobilising around the conference. In the longer term, it is also important to support community campaigns at the intersection between ecological issues and the existing fault lines of capitalism: exploitation, inter-imperialist conflict and oppression. These struggles include anti-war movements and fights over access to housing, public transport and clean water. Indigenous communities’ resistance to the building of pipelines transporting fossil fuels through their land is also a key site of struggle.

In addition to supporting activist groups, it is important to follow Marx and Engels’s habit of reading about the major scientific discoveries of the day and understanding their socio-economic implications. Like Marx and Engels, we should be updating our knowledge and understanding of emerging issues in both climate and Earth system science and the politics of climate change. We should also be drawing links between the many current crises and how these relate to the climate crisis. This entails reading broadly; indeed, many of these links are often reported in scientific journals. For example, a recently published article in Science of the Total Environment found evidence of a relationship between the coronavirus pandemic and climate change. The authors argue that “climate change has shifted the global distribution of bats” and that this “may have played a key role in the evolution or transmission of SARS-CoV-2”.34

As shown by some Marxists who have been focusing on ecological issues since the 1990s, Marxism is a powerful analytical tool capable of understanding the complexities of the current moment—particularly as it relates to the planetary emergencies we face.35 Writers such as John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark have also highlighted the substantive contribution that Marx and Engels can make. Our current understanding of climate change and environmental breakdown can be usefully informed by their concept of “metabolic rift”. This is the idea that the capitalist mode of production generates ecological crises that manifest “as a ‘rift’ in the metabolism between society and nature”. This rift deepens as capital’s needs “are imposed on nature, increasing the demands placed on ecological systems”.36

Committed to the long-term project of building a socialism that is based on sound ecological principles, a number of Marxists have revisited Marx and Engels’ work in order to identify its ecological content. These writers have developed a large body of literature to inform our understanding and responses to the ecological crisis. The many books and texts they have been written provide excellent resources for Marxists and labour movement activists. Though far from exhaustive, an introductory reading list of Marxist works that prioritise ecological issues would include Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature by John Bellamy Foster, Marx and Nature: A Red-Green Perspective by Paul Burkett, The Political Economy of Global Warming: Terminal Crisis by Del Weston, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming by Andreas Malm, Land and Labour: Marxism, Ecology and Human History by Martin Empson, Ecology and Socialism: Solutions to Capitalist Ecological Crisis by Chris Williams, Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System by Ian Angus, and The Tragedy of the Commodity: Oceans, Fisheries, and Aquaculture by Stefano Longo, Rebecca Clausen and Brett Clark.

However, as Marx famously wrote in “thesis 11” of his Theses on Feuerbach, “Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it”.37 Though the long-term strategy is a socialist society that collaborates to repair the damage capital has wrought on the Earth’s biosphere, the question of how to achieve this is, as always, concrete and tactical. Our challenge is how to build the foundations of an ecological, cooperative and radically democratic society while simultaneously doing all we can to contribute to socially just ways of mitigating further environmental destruction in the here and now. Marxists who are prioritising the climate crisis in their research and activism have engaged in several important debates regarding tactics, some of which are summarised in my own book, Ecosocialism and Climate Justice: An Ecological Neo-Gramscian Analysis.38 In the immediate future, it is also important to think about how we can help our communities and the wider world adapt to the effects of the anthropogenic climate change. These effects are already unfolding (and will continue to unfold) because of the cumulative nature of greenhouse gas emissions.

Throughout all our discussions and actions, we need to clearly distinguish between the concepts “climate action” and “climate justice.” Everyone, including liberal defenders of the status quo, pays lip service to “climate justice”. Nevertheless, the structural inequalities inherent in capitalist relations of production prevent the adoption of measures that would really support the working class and vulnerable groups as the climate crisis unfolds. This becomes clear when one considers, for instance, the “conundrum” about what to do with “climate refugees”, a term that is itself rejected by the leaders of the advanced capitalist economies.39 This rejection is undoubtedly motivated by the fact that recognising climate refugees might put pressure on governments and policymakers to act. One cannot, therefore, rely on governments and policymakers to provide true climate justice. Instead, Marxists must work with working class communities and vulnerable groups to establish organisations and practices (based, for instance, on mutual aid) to defend against environmental catastrophes. We must also continue to talk about the root causes of these calamities at every opportunity. These tasks are difficult, but we have no choice. We must tackle them head-on. Failure to do so will result in unimaginable consequences as the integrity of our biosphere unravels.

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Eve Croeser is the author of Ecosocialism and Climate Justice: An Ecological Neo-Gramscian Analysis (Routledge, 2020), a university associate at the University of Tasmania, and a fellow at the Global Centre for Climate Justice.

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Notes

1 Gramsci, 2012, p178.

2 Gramsci, 2012, p178.

3 See www.worldweatherattribution.org/about

4 Kreienkamp and others, 2021; McGrath, 2021.

5 Climate Central, 2021; Melanovski, 2021; Sullivan, 2021.

6 Trewin and Canadell, 2020; Thomas, 2020; Carrington, 2020; Davis, 2020.

7 Marshall, 2020. For analyses of the concept of “tipping points”, see Steffen and others, 2018 and Lenton, 2013. The existence of tipping points within the Earth system is particularly problematic because, according to Joachim Spangenberg and Lia Polotzek, all four policy scenarios presented in the IPCC’s “Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C” foresee temporary overshoots of greenhouse gas emissions and temperature increases above the 1.5°C threshold. Yet, “Physics doesn’t negotiate… In dynamically evolving, self-organising systems such as the environment, society and the economy, systems changes emerging during the overshoot period are irreversible and initiate path-dependent developments: you never cross the same river twice, and you never visit the same town twice.”—Spangenberg and Polotzek, 2019, pp202-203.

8 Carrington, 2021.

9 Bradshaw and others, 2021; Ceballos and others, 2015.

10 Glickson, 2020. See also Brimicombe, Sainbury, Powell and Chain, 2020.

11 Many of the scientific findings regarding anthropogenic climate change have been summarised in the six major IPCC reports published so far (in 1990, 1996, 2001, 2007, 2014 and 2021). The IPCC also publishes special reports on specific topics, including the threat to the world’s oceans and cryosphere, and the impact of climate change on land— see IPCC, 2018, 2019a and 2019b. The IPCC’s 2018 “Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C” concludes that effects on the Earth system and humans will be less severe if anthropogenic global warming is limited to 1.5°C than the original “target” agreed at official climate negotiations of 2°C.

12 Luton, 2015, p153.

13 See Croeser, 2021, chapter 4, for a detailed discussion of the US’s role in shaping the IPCC and the UNFCCC, which has sought to render them effectively powerless.

14 Boehmer-Christiansen, 1995.

15 Agrawala, 1998, pp622-623.

16 For an overview of critiques of the IPCC, refer to Croeser, 2021, chapter 4.

17 Hecht and Tirpak 1995, p385; Corbera, Calvet-Mir, Hughes and Paterson, 2015.

18 Low and Boettcher, 2020; Spangenberg and Polotzek, 2019.

19 IPCC, 2010.

20 Bodansky, 2001.

21 For an overview of a scientist’s assessment of the Paris agreement, see Anderson, 2016.

22 Croeser, 2021, chapter 5.

23 For example, see Hawken, 2017.

24 Figueres, 2018.

25 Kenis and Lievens, 2016.

26 Oil Change International and others, 2020.

27 Greenfield, 2021; Lawrence and others, 2018.

28 Cziczo and others, 2019; ETC group, 2020; ETC Group and Biofuelwatch, 2017; Kawa 2016; Williamson, 2018.

29 Craik and Burns, 2016.

30 The six-part series, Boiling Point, is available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vPMCJ2mm9w

31 Gramsci, 2012, p178.

32 Low and Boettcher, 2020.

33 Kenis and Lievens, 2016.

34 Beyer, Manica and Mora, 2021.

35 Croeser, 2021.

36 Foster and Clark, 2016, p16.

37 Marx, 1845.

38 See Croeser, 2021, particularly chapters 3, 5 and 6.

39 Royle, 2021.

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References

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Mark Bould

While sci-fi novels are replete with references to climate change, sci-fi cinema leave a lot to be desired in their narration of the effects of the climate crisis. But what if we watch them against the grain? Here, Mark Bould rewatches some recent alien invasion movies to uncover the Anthropocene unconscious at work in them.

Climate change is not going to happen. It is already happening, and deep down our culture knows it.

Science fiction – including ‘cli-fi’, that odd offshoot that spends so much time denying it’s sf – has for three decades conscientiously and imaginatively reported upon the escalating anthropogenic crises we are living through.

Well, prose sf has. Think of Octavia Butler’s Parables novels, Gwyneth Jones’s Bold as Love cycle, Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 and The Ministry for the Future…. Sf cinema, however, leaves a lot to be desired. Sure, there are movies set after the catastrophe, from Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) to the little Vietnamese gem, Nuoc 2030 (2014), but for actual treatments of climate change, it’s pretty much a toss-up between The Day After Tomorrow (2004) and Geostorm (2017).

Unless, that is, we look at the less literal – and sometimes unconscious – ways sf films process climate catastrophe. Then, it’s a whole other can of worms.

Take Chris McKay’s recently released The Tomorrow War (2021). It might the dumbest film of the year so far – competition remains stiff – but even so it uses sf’s metaphoric potential to express climate anxieties. The film features extended CGI-heavy action sequences and numerous bits plundered from other movies and cranked all the way up to 11. Dan (Chris Pratt) is an Iraq War special ops veteran turned public high school science teacher who yearns to do science in the private sector instead. He lives with his wife, Emmy (Betty Gilpin), and young daughter, Muri (Ryan Kiera Armstrong), in a large suburban home, but is estranged from his father, James (J.K. Simmons). A traumatised Vietnam vet who decades earlier abandoned his wife and son to protect them from his anger and violence, James is now a government-distrusting, kinda off-grid, possible merc – as heavily bearded as he is armed.

The Anthropocene Unconscious by Mark Bould

In December 2022, soldiers jump back in time from 2051 on a mission to recruit their parents and grandparents for the future war against extra-terrestrial invaders. Called White Spikes, the aliens are more implacable than Terminators: ‘They have no use for prisoners, government, technology, money, nothing. We are food. And they are hungry.’ In just three years, they have reduced the global human population to under 500,000.

So the film is organised around an appeal across time for the present to save the future from what is explicitly described as ‘an existential threat’ and ‘an extinction-level event’.

And there’s more. Dan is conscripted to fight in the future – alongside, to no one’s very great surprise, his grown-up daughter. When he returns to 2023, he works out that the White Spikes did not land in 2048, but much earlier. Beneath a talon ripped from an alien corpse is volcanic ash from the circa 946AD climate-disrupting Millennium eruption, one of the largest in the last 5000 years. And since the White Spikes first appeared in northern Russia, this can mean only one thing: in 2023, their crash-landed spaceship is still buried frozen beneath the ice of the Academy of Sciences Glacier on Komsomolets Island – which global-warming projections predict will melt by 2048, thus unleashing the alien apocalypse.

And still, there’s more.  

The centre of future military operations and the site of humanity’s last stand is Deepswell-9, a fortified oil rig in the Caribbean. In Dan’s classroom, there’s an electronic display about habitat destruction and species die-offs. On the wall of Muri’s bedroom is a massive picture of a butterfly, that emblem of non-linear determinism familiar from chaos theory, time-travel stories and the complex, tipping-point causation of climate change…

So if a movie this dumb knows it’s about climate change, what about a more nuanced one?

Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival (2016) also uses alien visitors to imagine climate change as a single ruptural event that changes everything. But unlike The Tomorrow War, it does not announce that that is what it is doing – possibly because it does not even know that that is what it is doing. Frederic Jameson argues that to unlock the unconscious of a text, we must reimagine it ‘in terms of a particular master code’. Which is easier than it sounds. For example, when Brokeback Mountain (2005), supposedly ‘the first gay western’, was nominated for the Best Picture Oscar, host Jon Stewart introduced a sequence of ostensibly straight moments from earlier westerns that suddenly looked very queer indeed. The montage ditched the master code of unthinking compulsory heteronormativity in favour of one that simply asks what happens if you stop assuming everyone in these films is straight. Admittedly, it reduced queer theory to a parlour trick, but it nonetheless revealed the currents of desire flowing through the genre – in that part of the textual unconscious Pierre Machery describes as the ‘things which must not be said’.

And to unlock the Anthropocene unconscious of Arrival, we must do something similar: stop assuming that, just because it lacks The Tomorrow War’s bluntness, it is not also about climate change.

The nature and design of its extra-terrestrials is key. There is something genuinely alien about the heptapods: they do not possess the bilateral symmetry we take for granted; they experience time differently to us, simultaneously rather than sequentially; and they come not just from the depths of space but also from the abyss of time. That is, they come from the Weird, that realm associated with H.P. Lovecraft that was revived and revised in the twenty-first century, often as a way to think about climate change – as in China Miéville’s ‘Covehithe’ – and to re-entangle us in the often very strange web of life – as in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy.

Physically, the heptapods resemble banyan trees, but also squid. Their limbs flex like tentacles but are sometimes jointed like crab legs. The end of one limb opens out into a seven-digited ‘hand’ that looks like the underside of a starfish, and from it sprays cephalopodic ink. These intertidal and aquatic associations – including the darkly clouded skies into which their spaceships seem to dissolve on departure – imply a world and a future submerged. Thus, they foreshadow our rising tides, the coming loss of low-lying islands, major river deltas and coastal cities. Of countless lives, human and otherwise.

The heptapods visit present-day Earth because in 3000 years they will need our help, which requires humankind to unite and thrive. The film displaces the risks of climate change onto more familiar conflicts, presenting China, Russia, Pakistan, Sierra Leone, Sudan and Venezuela as inherently violent hotheads, and the US as fundamentally committed to peace, co-operation, rationality and reasonableness, and only reluctantly turning to military options. Such risible geopolitics capture something of the way in which the long history of imperialism and ongoing international power struggles both drive climate change and distribute its impact on peoples, countries and regions.

When the heptapods arrive, the US military recruits linguistics professor Louise Banks (Amy Adams) to translate the aliens’ language. But as she learns it, it rewires her brain. She starts to experience time simultaneously – and the film gets to play its famous trick on the audience. Banks suffers traumatic flashbacks to her daughter’s childhood, adolescence and slow death from a rare debilitating disease, only for it to then be revealed that they are actually flashforwards to things that will happen. So, the film asks, with such foreknowledge should Banks still have a child?

It is an impossible decision, with no right answer. And it is not unlike the dilemma that faces us all. We know that massive climate disruption is locked in. That it will kill at least millions and condemn billions more to lifelong immiseration. So what is to be done?

Perhaps surprisingly, The Tomorrow War can be of help. Although again, we need to move from what it consciously does – uses aliens as a metaphor for climate change – to what it does without thinking.

After teasing the first major action sequence, the film opens with a vision of suburbia, nestled among trees on a gently sloping hill. Christmas lights edge pristine detached houses, each with a double garage and a car in the driveway. Illuminated inflatable festive ornaments cluster on immaculate lawns. More lights drape over manicured trees and shrubs. Dan parks his shiny black SUV. There is a party in his house, with dozens of guests, but it never seems crowded. A massive TV dominates the wall above the fireplace. Food and drink are in lavish supply. Fairy lights tastefully abound. And, for some reason I cannot fathom, the Christmas tree revolves.

At the end of the movie, after reconciling with his father and leading a plucky ragtag mission to kill the White Spikes before they defrost, Dan returns home. Some upturned garbage bins on the sidewalk are the only trace of the rioting that swept the globe. James parks his sleek old slab of Detroit muscle in the road and Dan, having just saved the world, rights his bin and wheels it up the drive. Emmy and Muri race out to embrace him, and James meet his grand-daughter for the very first time. In voiceover, Dan – sounding just a little like Dorothy fresh from Oz – says of Muri, ‘I never told her about our seven days together nor how, in a future that now will never happen, she changed me. Forever. I’m never going to leave her. I’ll never leave this family. Because my best future it turns out was always right in front of me.’

All of which is unremarkable, unless you stop to remark upon it.

This climactic sentimental platitude is the moment when the terms of the aliens-as-climate-change metaphor are severed. Dan is back in the suburban bubble to stay. And since the White Spikes have been killed, there is no longer any reason to do anything about global warming.

To be fair, The Tomorrow War does disrupt the apparent normalcy of suburban plenitude. In the opening sequence, a lawn Santa rotates to reveal scary Krampus lurking beneath the red hood, and Emmy proudly displays a tuna Santa that is frankly grotesque (later, the hirsute James will be referred to as ‘conspiracy Santa’). In a similar vein, although the film, like pretty much all contemporary Hollywood, slavishly valorises the US military, it does also show glimpses of veterans with shattered minds and bodies. Such queasy images betray a quickly suppressed uneasiness with the way things are. They are harbingers of the things that cannot be said.

Such as the fact that the peculiar nature of American suburbs was largely determined by the automotive and fossil fuel industries. That along with real estate developers, they successfully argued that public transport infrastructure – streetcar and rail lines – was a matter of private investment, but the roads from which they benefitted were a public good and should be paid for through general taxation. That SUVs were the second largest contributor to increased global CO₂ emissions in the 2010s. That defence spending – another massive transfer of public money to private profit – likewise drove Sunbelt suburban developments around aerospace and other military industries. That the Pentagon is the world’s largest consumer of fossil fuels. That, as Amitav Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse explains, a ‘non-nuclear aircraft carrier consumes 5,621 gallons of fuel per hour … as much fuel in one day as a small midwestern town might use in a year’, with ‘a single F-16 consum[ing] a third as much fuel  in one hour of ordinary operations – around 1,700 gallons’ and if its ‘afterburners are engaged … two and a half times as much fuel per hour as an aircraft carrier – 14,400 gallons’. And so on.

If we reimagine The Tomorrow War in terms of this different master code, every house, every lawn, every light and plastic ornament Dan drives past, and the car in which he drives past them – each of these unconscious things that the film, in Macherey’s words, ‘is compelled to say in order to say what it wants to say’ – is revealed as yet another node in the petrocultural web scorching the Earth.

That is the existential threat we face – the tomorrow war that is already being fought today.

And frankly, we are getting our asses handed to us.

By us.