The Anthropocene is a term geologists have begun using to refer to a new geological epoch, in which the action of humans has had such a dramatic effect upon the Earth’s climate, land, oceans and biosphere that humanity itself must now be considered a geological force in its own right1. Whilst there is some disagreement over when precisely the Anthropocene began, scientists generally date it to the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, mainly because of the newly-invented steam engine and the enormous expansion in the use of fossil fuels. The evidence adduced for the ‘Anthropocene’ is a series of stratigraphic signals – that is, lithological, geochemical and palaeobiological traces that are measured and interpreted by geologists in the present, or which will be read by imagined geologists in the future2.
Superficially, of course, there is no real problem with this. Within the strict limitations of geology as an academic discourse, the ‘Anthropocene’ is a relatively harmless term. The dangers arise, however, when geologists enter the political arena, calling for collective ecological intervention on the basis of their conception of the Anthropocene. For there exists something like a ‘spontaneous ideology’ of the scientists who have written on the Anthropocene, and whether they are aware of this problem or not, they have produced an implicit philosophy of history. This philosophy has as its theoretical corollary a specific type of abstract, naturalistic materialism, about which Marx himself wrote the following: ‘The weaknesses of the abstract materialism of natural science, a materialism which excludes the historical process, are immediately evident from the abstract and ideological conceptions expressed by its spokesmen whenever they venture beyond the bounds of their own speciality’3.
It is just such ‘venturing beyond,’ and the incoherent discourse which inspires it, that I oppose. At the heart of the Anthropocene lies the Anthropos: the human. But what or who is this ‘Anthropos’ exactly? No clear definition is ever given, and yet the literature on the Anthropocene regularly refers to such phenomena as ‘the human enterprise’. The problem with this is that, as Marx pointed out in his ‘Theses on Feuerbach,’ such a conception of humanity presupposes ‘an internal, ‘dumb’ generality which naturally unites the many individuals’4, as opposed to a historical conception of humanity as internally differentiated and constantly developing via internal contradictions. To speak of the ‘human enterprise’ is to make of humanity an abstract corporation in which ‘we’re all in this together’ – the David Cameron maxim of 2009 – thus belying the reality of class struggle, exploitation and oppression.
Moreover, the dating of the Anthropocene to the Industrial Revolution – because of the advent of the steam engine – points to its technological bias. Indeed, the Anthropocene discourse is a prime example of technological determinism: the notion that technological innovation is the motor of history, as opposed to the Marxist understanding in which historical development is driven by class struggle. As Jason W. Moore has observed, the historical roots of the phenomena covered by the term ‘Anthropocene’ lie, not in the invention of the steam engine, but in ‘the rise of capitalist civilization after 1450, with its audacious strategies of global conquest, endless commodification, and relentless rationalization’5 ; this marked ‘a turning point in the history of humanity’s relation with the rest of nature, greater than any watershed since the rise of agriculture and the first cities’6. Thus, inherent to the Anthropocene discourse is a conception of historical causality which is purely mechanical: a oneon-one billiard ball model of technological invention and historical effect, which is simply inadequate to explain actual social and relational modes of historical causation. The fact that technology itself is bound up with social relations, and has often been used as a weapon in class war, plays no role in this discourse whatsoever. Marx’s dictum that ‘[i]t would be possible to write a whole history of the inventions made since 1830 for the sole purpose of providing capital with weapons against workingclass revolt’7 is unthinkable within such a purview. To put it bluntly, then, for the Anthropocene technology is not political.
Even from a literary-critical perspective the Anthropocene is problematic. Take this representative passage, for instance: ‘Pre-industrial humans, still a long way from developing the contemporary civilization that we know today, nevertheless showed some early signs of accessing the very energyintensive fossil fuels on which contemporary civilization is built’8. Just as Sartre remarked in Les mots, the biographies of ‘great men’ only ever see the child as the retrospectively projected necessity of what came after, thereby voiding the past present of its true contradictory presence, so the Anthropocene can only ever think the past in its proleptic trajectory towards our present. Its specific narrative mode translates the time of initiative and praxis into the time of pure physical necessity. Moreover, precisely because of this, it can only explain our own present as part of the empty, homogeneous time of linear succession, which increasingly contracts as ecological catastrophe approaches.
This implicit philosophy of historical temporality goes hand in hand with a Whig view of history as one endless story of human progress and enlightenment. The following two quotations clearly exemplify this tendency:
‘Migration to cities usually brings with it rising expectations and eventually rising incomes, which in turn brings an increase in consumption’ ‘The onset of the Great Acceleration [scientists’ name for the period of increased ‘human’ activity following WWII] may well have been delayed by a half-century or so, interrupted by two world wars and the Great Depression’9 (my italics)
The first sentence seems almost wilfully blind to the history of mass urban poverty, gentrification and accumulation by dispossession, whilst the second seems to claim that the bloodiest century in human history – including Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the Dresden bombing, the Gulags, and the Holocaust – is a mere blip on the rising line of progress. Needless to say, such a view of human history is, at best, problematic.
Finally, and as a logical consequence of the four preceding problems, the majority of the solutions proposed by scientists are technical (mass climate- and geo-engineering projects, and so on) and managerial in nature – often couched in the language of ‘governance systems’ – rather than political. The scientists arrive at such apolitical solutions precisely because they never pose the Anthropocene as a political problem in the first place. Kim Stanley Robinson’s recent claim that ‘Justice has become a survival technology’10 is practically unthinkable within the presuppositions of the scientific representations of the Anthropocene. Just as they cannot see technology as a political force, so they cannot see politics as a material force. Indeed, they have a problematic conception of materiality as such.
Thus, we can see quite clearly that the mode of presentation of a particular problem will to a large extent determine the range and quality of the possible solutions one is able to develop. Sketching out the theoretical basis of a Marxist approach to the same phenomena to which the Anthropocene itself refers may help to make the political stakes – and hence the possible political solutions – somewhat clearer. Jason W. Moore’s suggestion that we replace the ‘Anthropocene’ with the term ‘Capitalocene’ – the age of capital, which would of course begin with the dawn of capitalism itself – is a very useful corrective, not only because it puts capitalism as an economic and social system at the heart of its theory, but also because it forces us to find a middle way between humanist and posthuman thought11.
Capitalocene and World-Ecology
Moore defines world-ecology as a ‘framework of historical interpretation that dialectically unifies capital, power and nature’12. As in Nancy Fraser’s recent work, Moore argues for an expanded conception of capitalism, one which goes beyond the purely economic: for him, capitalism is ‘a civilization that is co-produced by humans and the rest of nature’13. Thus, Moore’s principal aim is to overcome all accounts of human (and capitalist) history which are premised upon what he calls the ‘Cartesian divide’14 between man and nature (or nature and society).
Central to Moore’s world ecology is his reconceptualization of Marxist value theory.He writes that ‘[w]hile Marxist political economy has taken value to be an economic phenomenon with systemic implications, I argue that value-relations are a systemic phenomenon with a pivotal economic moment’15.To simplify Moore’s innovation, one might say that classical Marxism has always focused on value as ‘abstract social labour’ – and its concomitant: socially necessary labour time – within what Moore calls the ‘zone of exploitation,’ that is, the ‘hidden abode’ of capitalist commodity production, ruled by the capital-labour relation. Moore does not dispute the classical labour theory of value, but he emphasises its immanent relation to another zone: the zone of appropriation. This refers to all those realms of human and extra-human ‘unpaid work’; from women’s domestic labour or social reproduction to the colonial expropriation of natural resources. That is, capitalism cannot be reduced to the realm of paid work alone, since without the constant appropriation of unpaid work – again, human and extra-human – it could not expand and perpetuate itself. He summarizes the main points of his position thus:
If we take the nexus paid/unpaid work as our premise – implicitly suggested by ecological and feminist scholars – the implications are significant. Capitalism and value relations cannot be reduced to a relation between the owners of capital and the possessors of labor-power. To repeat: the historical condition of socially necessary labor-time is socially necessary unpaid work. This observation opens a vista on capitalism as a contradictory unity of production and reproduction that crosses the Cartesian boundary [nature/society]. The crucial divide is between the zone of paid work (the exploitation of commodified labor-power) and the zone of unpaid work (the reproduction of life). This contradictory unity works by creating a relatively narrow sphere of commodity production within which laborpower can be said to yield either rising or falling productivity … This narrow sphere, premised on the exploitation of labor-power within commodity production, operates in relation to a much more expansive sphere of appropriation, through which the diversity of nature’s ‘free gifts’ – including the reproduction of life from the family to the biosphere – may be taken up into commodity production, but not fully capitalized.16
In other words, what Moore is emphasizing is that there are two fundamental contradictions which structure capitalism as a civilization: that between capital and labour, and that between the zone of exploitation (commodity production) and the zone of appropriation (unpaid work).
Alongside ‘abstract social labour,’ then, Moore posits the existence of something he calls ‘abstract social nature’: ‘the family of processes through which capitalists and state-machineries map, identify, quantify, measure, and code human and extra-human natures in service to capital accumulation’17. It is those sets of activities and methods that seek out and make amenable to capital realms of ‘unpaid work’ which, following Maria Mies, he summarizes as ‘women, nature and colonies’.18 Moore distinguishes ‘abstract social nature’ from what Stephen Shapiro has called the ‘cultural fix,’ which Shapiro defines as follows (Moore’s parentheses and emphases): ‘[It comprises those] social and cultural matters involving the reproduction of class identities and relations over time lengths greater than a single turnover cycle [of capital]’, which are ‘intrinsic, not superficial, to the [accumulation] of capital’.19 The cultural fix thus seems to refer to all those hegemonic and ideological processes which legitimate the long-term reproduction of the social relations of production. Moore summarizes the distinction between ‘abstract social nature’ and the ‘cultural fix’ thus: ‘If cultural fixes naturalize capitalism’s punctuated transitions in the relations of power, capital, and nature, abstract social natures make those transitions possible’20.
The problem here, however, is that the distinction between abstract social nature and the cultural fix works only so long as it is provisional, yet there is a danger that the distinction will be rendered into discret categories. There is, in other words, a danger of returning to the very dualism that worldecology seeks to avoid. For treating mapping and rationalization processes as ‘scientific,’ and ideological legitimation as ‘cultural,’ may prove insufficiently relational. Indeed, retaining the distinction may prevent Moore from taking the step that would finally allow us to overcome the binary of man and nature at the level of theory. The problem originates in the specific aims and focus of the world-ecology framework itself. Moore has developed a truly groundbreaking argument that understands historical capitalism as a series of world ecological regimes, each of which produces a unique ‘historical nature’21 arising out of, and ending in, ‘developmental’ or ‘epochal’ crisis (the latter being the case with feudalism and, potentially, neoliberalism). That is, Moore is primarily concerned with the different configurational weights that come into play during both the transition from one accumulation regime to the next and the ‘normal’ operation of those accumulation regimes in the period of their consolidation and boom. But by equating those cyclical periods of transition and stabilization with abstract social nature and the cultural fix respectively, he is in danger of overlooking the extent to which each of these processes is dialectically constituted by the other – and hence the way in which both processes are present in both periods of transition and consolidation of worldecological regimes, albeit in shifting relations of dominance. Thus, one possible development of Moore’s work would be to argue that culture is a constitutive moment of abstract social nature, and vice versa, and hence, more broadly, that it is the dialectical interrelation of abstract social nature and culture which is a constitutive moment of the value relation.
To try and make this point a little clearer, I shall give two brief examples. The purpose of these examples is not to provide an alternative model of historical explanation to Moore’s but rather to tease out one under-theorized aspect within it. The examples show the mutual imbrication of abstract social nature and the cultural fix within any period of historical capitalism, yet they do not account for the shifting configurations between abstract social nature and culture in any historically singular period of transition or consolidation. This would require a far lengthier engagement with the minutiae of Moore’s wealth of empirical examples. Nonetheless, the basic insight still holds.
In his recent book, River of Dark Dreams, Walter Johnson describes the way in which slaves’ bodies were standardized for the market: ‘The reports [filed by slaving firms] formalized a system of grading slaves – “Extra Men, No. 1 Men, Second Rate or Ordinary Men, Extra Girls, No. 1 Girls, Second Rate or Ordinary Girls”, and so on – which allowed them to abstract the physical differences between all kinds of human bodies into a single scale of comparison based on the price they thought a given person would bring in the market’22. Here, we see in practice what Moore refers to as ‘abstract social nature’: the bodies are being standardized and made measurable for the market. But it must be added that one of the conditions of possibility of this process of standardization is an ideological-hegemonic configuration capable not only of legitimizing this practice but of, firstly, producing the callousness of the human gaze necessary to effect this standardization and, secondly, the social and material pay-off for doing so. Indeed, in a later section on the development of racial ideology in the American South, Johnson himself writes with remarkable insight into the co implication of both what Moore would term ‘abstract social nature’ and ‘cultural fix’:
The agricultural order of the landscape, the standing. The agricultural order of the landscape, the standing order of slavery, the natural order of the races, and the divine order of earthly dominion were not separable for a man like Harper [a slaveholder]; they were fractal aspects of one another. His eschatology was rooted in his ecology. … Slaveholders were fully cognizant of slaves’ humanity – indeed, they were completely dependent on it. But they continually attempted to conscript – signify, channel, limit, and control – the forms that humanity could take in slavery. The racial ideology of Harper and Cartwright [another slaveholder] was the intellectual conjugation of the daily practice of the plantations they were defending: human beings, animals and plants forcibly reduced to limited aspects of themselves, and then deployed in concert to further slaveholding dominion.23
What Johnson achieves in this passage is something approaching a mode of historical writing which fuses ‘abstract social nature’ and the ‘cultural fix’. As already noted, however, a stand alone example like this tells us very little about the shifting mutuality of abstract social nature and the cultural fix through different world-ecological regimes.
The second example comes from Silvia Federici’s Caliban and the Witch, in which she explicates the systematic violence perpetrated against women in the transition to capitalism. This included not only the enclosure of the commons, which had been such a vital source of sociality and relative power for women in the Middle Ages, and the patriarchy of the wage – in which only men had the right to the wage, and women’s labour was simply appropriated – but also a whole series of legal, spatial, disciplinary and ideological attacks. An entire discourse was developed with the sole purpose of the vilification and inferiorization of women. Thus, if, as Marxist-feminism has made clear, women’s unpaid labour has been historically vital to the functioning of capitalism, then we must conclude from such examples that culture is not only a force of ideological legitimation, but is itself a materially constitutive moment in the value relation. The ideological attacks on women were precisely about controlling them and making their unpaid work appropriable by capital. Thus, whilst ‘abstract social nature’ and ‘cultural fix’ can be analytically separated, in practice they always go together.
The political upshot of all this is quite dramatic, since, at the extreme, it means that the battle against the capitalist production of climate change must be waged at several levels simultaneously: of course, we must attack self-evidently ‘ecological’ phenomena such as new oil pipelines, deforestation, fracking, and such like, but – and this is crucial – we must also attack those elements of capitalist civilization which appear to have no immediate relation to ecology, but which are in fact internal conditions of its possibility: violence against women both literal and symbolic, the structural obscurity of domestic labour, institutional racism, and so on. For, at its outer limit, ecological struggle is nothing but the struggle for universal emancipation. In this light, it then becomes clear why ‘world-ecology’ is potentially politically relevant: it unifies these struggles at the level of theory.
I wish to end on a more polemical note. In an otherwise thought-provoking and sophisticated 2008 article on the Anthropocene, the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty wrote that global warming will ultimately affect rich and poor alike: ‘Unlike in the crises of capitalism,’ he says, ‘there are no lifeboats here for the rich and the privileged’24. Consequently, he suggests that we should understand humanity, not as a ‘Hegelian universal arising dialectically out of the movement of history, or a universal of capital brought forth by the present crisis,’ but rather as a ‘negative universal’ that ‘arises from a shared sense of a catastrophe’25. Chakrabarty’s argument must be categorically rejected for two reasons. Firstly, it is an example of the genre that we might call ‘survivalist reasoning’: that type of reasoning which places human survival in the abstract and at all costs above all other political commitments. I argue, however, that if Marxism for Althusser was a theoretical anti humanism, then it should also be seen as a theoretical anti-survivalism. There is no commitment more vital than the overthrow of capitalism, and – paradoxically – if there is even to be any hope of human survival in the abstract, it will come about only through the struggle against capital.
Secondly, Chakrabarty’s argument is also an example of the genre we might call ‘catastrophism’: that type of reasoning which sacrifices all determinate negations in the face of the one abstract negation of a general doom. Marxism, however, must also be a theoretical anti-catastrophism. Its ultimate horizon is not the impending doom of ecological catastrophe and human extinction: it is the capitalist mode of production and its dismantlement. Martin Luther, when asked what he would do if the world were to end tomorrow, replied that he would plant a tree; the Marxist should reply: we will call for a general strike. I jest, of course, but it is only by fostering such indifference to catastrophe that we can ever hope to avert it. ———————– 1 Crutzen 2002; Steffen et al. 2011; Zalasiewicz et al. 2011 2 The temporality of the Anthropocene as a periodising category is bizarre indeed, shifting as it does between the present, a retroactively posited past and an imagined future 3Marx 1981: 494 4Marx 1975: 423 5Moore 2014a: 5 6ibid., 17 7Marx, 1981: 563 8Steffen et al. 2011: 846 9Steffen et al. 2011: 850; 10Kim Stanley Robinson et al (et al. 2010: 213) 11 One of the many paradoxes of the current theoretical conjuncture is that at the very moment in which scientists are using the term Anthropocene – forcing us to focus on our natural existence as a human species and collective human agent – the speculative realists and object-oriented ontologists are trying to problematize or go beyond the ‘human’ as such. The two appear to be flipsides of one another and, arguably, equally politically toothless. 12Moore, 2014a: 2 13ibid.: 1 142014b: 3 15(ibid.). 162014b: 9 17ibid., 12 18 cited in Moore 2014b: 22, As an example, one might think of those nineteenth-century American land surveyors who measured, mapped, rationalized and parceled out the land in order to sell it to investors Cf. Johnson 2013: 34ff 19cited in Moore 2014b: 15-16; 20ibid.: 16 21ibid.: 12-19 22 2013: 41 23Johnson 2013: 206-208 25 2009: 221 25ibid.: 222
Based on recent ethnographic fieldwork at an intensive dairy farm, this chapter examines the usefulness of posthuman critical theory for developing a new sociolinguistic approach to nonhuman animal agency. We explore how dairy cows, as encaged sentient beings whose mobility is profoundly restricted by bars and fences, negotiate their environment as a material-semiotic resource in linguistic acts of place-making. Drawing on the fields of critical posthumanism, new materialism and sociolinguistics, we explain how dairy cows imbue their physical space with meaning through materiality, the body and language. By developing a non-anthropocentric approach to language as a practice of more-than-human sociality, we argue for establishing egalitarian research perspectives beyond the assumptions of human exceptionalism and species hierarchy. The chapter thus aims to contribute towards a new understanding of nonhuman agency and interspecies relationships in the Anthropocene.
Human thinkers in the western philosophical tradition have long relied upon the silencing of nonhuman animal others to confirm the exceptionalism of their own species. Since Aristotle, philosophers and scientists have defined “man” as a “rational animal” distinguished from other animals by his—and, more recently, her or their—capacity for a special kind of thinking, variously described as self-consciousness, reason, or representational thought (Cull 2015, 19). If, as Eva Meijer asserts (2016, 73), in this tradition “humans are viewed as radically different from other animals,” then language is commonly seen as “one of the main ways in which this difference is expressed.” The idea that language is what makes us human, or more precisely, that the possession of language allows humans to separate themselves from nonhuman nature, including their own animality, is indeed a key component of philosophical humanism and its exclusionary conceptions of individual and collective personhood. The philosopher Giorgio Agamben (2004, 33) uses the term “anthropological machine” to refer to the process by which the human is defined over and against what is nonhuman or animal, thus dividing the human subject from more-than-human forms of sentience, sociality, intelligence and communication. The strict identification of the human with language, or what Agamben (2004, 38) calls an articulation between “speaking being” and “living being,” is central to the functioning of the anthropological machine, that is, the ways in which humans ought to continually create themselves as speaking political beings by creating hierarchies between human, animal, vegetable and mineral species. The traditional humanist understanding of the human as a unique creature, one that rises above the natural world of animals, plants and the physical environment, thus rests on a fundamental denial that nonhuman animals might be capable of language and other forms of complex symbolic communication.
In this chapter, we wish to move beyond the assumptions of human exceptionalism and species hierarchy in order to advance an understanding of language that displaces the centrality of the human subject. Specifically, we will explore how dairy cows, as caged living beings or what sociologist Rhoda Wilkie (2010, 115) has called “sentient commodities,” negotiate their environment as a material-semiotic resource in the production of a meaningful world. While their physical mobility is profoundly restricted by bars and fences, we will examine how dairy cows enact social and linguistic agency through complex assemblages formed by human and nonhuman bodies, materials and environments. Starting from the assumption that, within the context of dairy farming, the subjectivities of cows and humans are continuously co-produced, we want to highlight how recognizing the linguistic agency of dairy cows may allow us to resist anthropocentric understandings of interspecies relationships and to formulate a new perspective on language as a social practice of human-nonhuman interaction. The central aim of this chapter, therefore, is to elaborate a radically post- or non-anthropocentric sociolinguistic approach that may help foster more egalitarian relationships to and between different species, or, as Agamben (2004, 83) phrases it, to bring to a “standstill” the anthropological machine that has historically articulated humanity and animality through their mutual exclusion.
The chapter has four sections. The first section examines how traditional humanist conceptions of language have structured dominant philosophical and linguistic understandings of human-animal relationships. The second section discusses the cognitive, emotional and social capacities of cows as sentient and intelligent beings, and proceeds to argue for the usefulness of posthuman critical theory for expanding the linguistic research agenda to include the study of nonhuman animal languages. This sets the stage for the third section, which discusses recent fieldwork at an intensive dairy farm in order to explore how cows, as social actors, engage in processes of linguistic place-making. Drawing, on the one hand, on recent work at the intersection of critical posthumanism and applied linguistics (Pennycook 2018) and, on the other, on new materialist conceptions of agency as a distributed phenomenon (Bennett 2010), we will elaborate a non-anthropocentric approach to human and nonhuman language practices. In the last and concluding section, we consider some of the implications of our findings for negotiating, or renegotiating, contemporary questions of nonhuman animal agency. As a whole this chapter argues that acknowledging nonhuman linguistic agency is essential for thinking through and responding to the specific conditions and challenges of the Anthropocene, where the advent of the human as a global geophysical force has muddled conventional distinctions between culture and nature, human and nonhuman, self and other. If, as Donna Haraway suggests, nonhuman animals “are not here just to think with,” but rather they are here to “live with” (Haraway 2003, 5, emphasis added), then we must indeed embrace modes of inquiry suited to the task of confronting human and nonhuman acts of language, sociality and world-making.
2. Language and the Politics of Human Exceptionalism
The view that nonhuman animals have no speech, and therefore cannot establish themselves as ethical, juridical and political subjects, goes back at least to the ancient Greeks. In a well-known passage of his Politics, Aristotle associates the formation of political community with the supposedly unique human capacity for reasoned speech. Aristotle insists that the capacity for speech informed by reason (logos) is what separates “man”, as a political animal, from the mere beasts who do not speak but simply produce sound (phonè):
And so the reason why man is a political animal more than any bee or any gregarious animal is clear. For nature, as we often say, does nothing in vain; and man alone of the animals possesses speech (logos). The mere voice (phonè), it is true, can indicate pain and pleasure, and therefore is available in the other animals as well (for their nature has been developed so far as to have feelings of pain and pleasure and to signify them to one another), but speech, for its part, is designed to express the useful and the harmful and therefore also the just and the unjust.1
Because nonhuman animals are incapable of speech, Aristotle argues, they cannot express the civic and moral virtues that he considered essential for the wellbeing of the household and the city-state. Aristotle, as Derrida explains in The Beast and the Sovereign (2009, 343–349), thus makes a categorical distinction between human and nonhuman animals to posit an inextricable link between language and the political sphere. His philosophy therefore not only delimits political agency to certain privileged human beings—the free adult male citizens that make up the polis—but also actively excludes nonhuman animal voices from the definition of language itself.
Many later philosophers have followed Aristotle in rejecting the linguistic and cognitive abilities of nonhuman animals (Meijer 2016, 75–76). Descartes, for example, argued that animals do not think because they cannot speak: he regarded nonhuman animals as machines, governed by the laws of physical matter alone and hence devoid of mind and self-awareness.2 Although he did recognize that animals such as magpies and parrots can utter words, and that dogs make noises that might resemble speech, Descartes maintained that other animals “cannot speak as we do: that is, they cannot show that they are thinking what they are saying” (Descartes 1985, 140). Heidegger, despite his phenomenological critique of Descartes, also claimed that nonhuman animals are incapable of language and therefore lack access to what he called “world-formation”, that is, the ability to form true and conscious relationships with others and with their environment. According to Heidegger, nonhuman animals are unable to apprehend the world as such—that is to say, in the world-forming ways that language, understood as logos, allows for—because they are captivated by their instincts and bound to their environments. Animals do have access to the world—they are not, like stones and other inert objects, what Heidegger calls “worldless” (weltlos)—but their relationship to it is an impoverished one: Heidegger calls nonhuman animals “poor in world” (weltarm), whereas humans are deemed to be world-forming (weltbildend). Insofar as an animal is essentially absorbed in its environment (Umwelt), it cannot truly act in relation to the world (Welt) as such, or, as Heidegger puts it (1995, 239), an animal “behaves within an environment but never within a world.”
Although Heidegger repeatedly observes that “the relation between poverty in world and world-formation does not entail hierarchical assessment” (1995, 192), he does nonetheless privilege human beings to the extent that, in his view, only language, by which he means human language, is capable of disclosing the world as an intelligible and meaningful place. “Language alone,” he writes, “brings what is, as something that is, into the Open for the first time. Where there is no language, as in the being of stone, plant, and animal, there is also no openness of what is, and consequently no openness either of what is not” (Heidegger 1971, 73). In foregrounding human language as central to the practice of world-formation, Heidegger not only seeks to demarcate human from nonhuman animals, but also postulates a distinction between language and communication that echoes Aristotle’s assumption of a fundamental difference between speech and sound, between logos and phonè, as well as Descartes’ view on animals as mindless machines. For Heidegger, language is “not only and not primarily an audible and written expression of what is to be communicated” (ibid.), but rather it serves to manifest the world as such as a field of significance: an open space of possibilities, as opposed to an animal’s instinctual captivation. Language, in this view, is thus what separates human being-in-the-world, or Dasein, from the being of other animals, which, as Heidegger writes, “has nothing to do with the selfhood of the human being comporting him- or herself as a person” (Heidegger 1995, 238–239).
Linguistics, no less than philosophy, has long reiterated the humanist understanding of language as a fundamental dividing line between human and nonhuman animals, thus reinforcing the predominant view of language as the essence of human personhood. Aristotle’s distinction between logos and phonè is still holding ground in concepts of language as either a mental or social construct in two dominant contemporary linguistic theories, namely generative grammar (Chomsky 2002, 2006) and (variationist) sociolinguistics (Labov 1994, 2001). The generative framework, advanced since the late 1950 s by Noam Chomsky and others, theorizes language as a human mental construct where processes of thinking and knowledge about abstract symbols are generated: a cognitive system or “inner mental tool” (Berwick and Chomsky 2016, 164) that works independently from phonetics or the speaking voice (phonè), which is assigned to language-in-use. This view consolidates the older assumption that the primary function of language is for human thought rather than for external communication. Even though language can, of course, be used to communicate with others, most of speech is inner speech, or, as Chomsky (2002, 148) puts it: “almost all the use of language is to oneself.” In suggesting that language, defined in the narrow sense of an abstract computational system for thought, does not occur beyond the human brain, Chomsky gives a new inflection to the Cartesian understanding of language as essentially disembodied and non-social, while at the same time reinforcing the anthropocentric idea that language constitutes “a yawning chasm between what we [humans] can do and what other animals cannot” (Berwick and Chomsky 2016, 110).3
Language, in generative linguistics, is thus seen as a species-specific ability that sets human beings apart from nonhuman animal others: “When we study human language, we are approaching what some might call the ‘human essence’, the distinctive qualities of mind that are, so far as we know, unique to man (sic)” (Chomsky 2006, 88). Even though, in a paper coauthored for Science, Chomsky has acknowledged that “available data suggest a much stronger continuity between animals and humans with respect to speech than previously believed” (Hauser et al. 2002, 1574), he nonetheless maintains his faith in a uniquely human property of language, located either in the capacity for recursion—the ability to “generate an infinite range of expressions from a finite set of elements” (ibid.)—or in what he calls the “creative aspect” of language use, that is, the “distinctively human ability to express new thoughts and to understand entirely new expressions of thought” (Chomsky 2006, 6).4 And while Chomsky, as Donna Haraway notes, has been cautious enough to present the idea of linguistic uniqueness as “a testable hypothesis, not an assumption rooted in premises of human exceptionalism” (Haraway 2008, 373 note 44), there is no doubt that the tradition of anthropocentric thought assumed in the generative framework has been a serious obstacle to investigating the linguistic, rather than communicative, abilities of nonhuman animals.
In contrast to Chomsky’s non-social view of language, sociolinguistic research has built on the pioneering work of William Labov and others to theorize language as both dependent on cognition and interconnected with the workings of society and culture.5 In the sociolinguistic framework, language is understood as a social construct stemming from the need to contextualize how humans use language in interaction with others, aiming to find out how and why languages vary and change, and how (groups of) speakers employ linguistic resources to shape individual and collective identities, communities and social hierarchies. This view converges with recent approaches to language as an embodied (Bucholtz and Hall 2016), multimodal (Müller et al. 2013) and multisensory (Pennycook and Otsuji 2015) phenomenon that includes not only verbal speech but, among others, bodily gestures and facial expressions, actions, movements, sensorial practices of meaning-making through tasting, touching, seeing and smelling, as well as the mediation of embodiment by material objects, spaces and environments. Encompassing a wide range of research areas, including the social meaning of different language varieties, the role of stylization in language use, the construction of social identity categories like class and gender through language practices, bi- and multilingualism, and social norms and attitudes towards linguistic diversity, sociolinguistics has opened valuable new avenues for researchers interested in the manifold relationships between language, identity and power.
Although much sociolinguistic research remains faithful to the human as the most important user of language—in fact, the very notion that humans may use certain linguistic skills and resources is in no small part dependent on liberal humanist conceptions of choice and agency—this framework is nevertheless promising for a linguistics that wishes to be inclusive of human and nonhuman actors (Cornips 2019). By approaching language as both embodied and embedded in a variety of interactive social practices, contexts and environments, sociolinguistic studies challenge the anthropocentric understanding of a language as an exclusively verbal, decontextualized object that is completely autonomous, inaccessible from outside the mind, and therefore somehow fixed in character. In this perspective, embodiment is central to the production and interpretation of language as a form of social practice, while bodies, in turn, are themselves part of the semiotic landscape as they are “imbricated in complex arrangements that include nonhuman as well as human participants, whether animals, epidemics, objects, or technologies” (Bucholtz and Hall 2016, 186).
Broadening up the concept of language (grammar) to include multimodal and multisensory practices of meaning-making allows us to foreground nonhuman semiotic capacities, including specific sensorial abilities such as olfactory ones for cows and dogs, as language-specific grammatical means. It thus provides a useful framework to analyze differences between and among human and nonhuman animals in terms of grammatical possibilities and expressions instead of simply ascribing deficiencies to the latter (Kulick 2017, 373). For example, if a cow in an indoor dairy farm steps back and withdraws her face through the iron bars when humans approach her, this bodily movement combined with head positioning, gaze direction and the sound of the moving iron bar may be analyzed equally to how human animals phrase negation as in the sentence do NOT approach me (Cornips and van Koppen 2019). Further below, we will demonstrate how recent scholarship produced at the intersection of sociolinguistic theory and critical posthumanism will allow us to take the study of language beyond the speaking human subject and into the more-than-human material world. But first, let us discuss the linguistic abilities and communicative competence of cows in more detail. What can a non-anthropocentric approach to language contribute to our understanding of the ways in which cows speak to each other and to humans? And how can this understanding, in turn, help us confront, and respond to, the enabling and constraining conditions under which dairy cows, as speaking beings, participate in the formation of a meaningful world?
3. Cows as Social and Linguistic Beings
Human thinkers, as we have seen, have produced the idea of language as a uniquely human trait by categorically marginalizing nonhuman animal speakers, denying them recognition as linguistic subjects. But, as Eva Meijer suggests, learning about how other animals use language “can help us understand them better, and build new relations with them; challenging an anthropocentric view of language can help us see animals of other species, and their languages, differently” (Meijer 2016, 74). Recent research into how different animal species communicate, ranging from birds and bees to whales, apes and cephalopods, indeed suggests that there may not be a “sharp divide between human language and nonhuman communicative systems” (Evans 2014, 258; see also Meijer 2019). This does not mean that human and nonhuman forms of communication are the same, but, as Alastair Pennycook (2018, 82) notes, “it is an argument against human exceptionalism.” In this chapter, we take the view that both human and other animals create meaning through language conceptualized as a social, spatial and artefactual resource. By theorizing language in terms of material-semiotic assemblages and spatial repertoires (Pennycook 2017), we wish to avoid an anthropocentric definition of language that not only a priori excludes nonhuman animals, but also neglects all other aspects of language beyond the “distinctive qualities of mind” so often privileged in philosophy, linguistics and cognitive science.
Cows, including domestic dairy cows, have distinct personalities and stable personality characteristics and have a clear capacity to lead rich and socially complex lives. Measured assessments of cows’ cognitive, emotional and social abilities provide scientific support for what people familiar with cows already know, namely that cows demonstrate intelligence, experience a range of emotions and display a high level of social complexity, including social learning, in ways that human animals can recognize (Marino and Allen 2017; Colvin et al. 2017). When given the opportunity, cows form strongly bonded social groups, with mother cows and calves sharing an especially powerful emotional connection that, in part, depends upon the possibility for the mother to be able to lick her child for several hours after birth (Marino and Allen 2017, 484). Cows are competent learners and possess both short- and long-term memories: they are capable of discriminating between different objects, colors and geometric shapes, and are able to learn and recognize individual differences among humans, as well as conspecifics, under a variety of circumstances.6 These abilities show that cows do not merely respond to external stimuli but engage in the formation and categorization of mental concepts (Colvin et al. 2017, 7). Moreover, cows display emotional reactions to their own learning and in response to each other’s feelings, which has been suggested to reflect sophisticated levels of psychological capacities such as self-awareness and empathy (Hagen and Broom 2004; Marino and Allen 2017, 482–483).7
As social mammals, cows depend on each other for interaction and emotional support; social isolation therefore inflicts great stress on them, as does the immediate, and life-long, postpartum separation of mothers and calves in intensive dairy farming. In commercial settings, where human-cow relations are deeply instrumentalized and commodified, the possibilities for cows to express species-appropriate behavior are severely compromised by periods of confinement in indoor housing, health problems due to higher milk yields and distress caused by various forms of social separation. As caged living beings, with little or no opportunity to escape their exploitation by humans, cows raised for food in factory farms experience “unnatural conditions from birth to slaughter” (Marino and Allen 2017, 474), including procedures that cause severe pain and suffering such as dehorning and disbudding. In these circumstances, where young calves are raised individually and cows are killed before their time, social bonding formation is extremely difficult to establish and maintain (McLennan 2013), which has devastating consequences for their well-being and welfare. It is decidedly problematic, then, that most research into the lives of cows is done within the framework of their use as “livestock” for human consumption. As the scientific literature on cow psychology and behavior is dominated by an applied science perspective mainly relevant to human practices of intensive farming (e.g. training cows to use automatic feeders) (Marino and Allen 2017, 475), there is a felt need to understand, and relate to, cows on their own terms.
While it is undeniable that dairy cows are always already caught in the anthropological machine of industrial animal production—an “apparatus” (Despret 2008) that essentially prevents them from experiencing a full quality of life—we do believe that an inquiry into how dairy cows make use of language, conceptualized in a non-anthropocentric manner, can help human animals to get to know cows better and to understand them as “the someones they actually are” (Colvin et al 2017, 3). This will, in turn, allow us to respond to the question of nonhuman animal agency in new ways that not only serve to challenge established structures of species hierarchy, but also entail a fundamental rethinking of how agency is enacted in and through language as a practice of human-nonhuman sociality. In the context of what has been termed the “cage age,” it is routinely assumed that the restrictive and monotonous captive environments in which domesticated animals usually live, will “limit the frequency and diversity with which [their] agency is expressed” (Špinka and Wemelsfelder 2011, 34). Yet, as we will demonstrate below, these same restrictive conditions can, paradoxically, also give rise to new modes of linguistic agency and resilience, revealing the copious ways in which dairy cows, as speaking beings, orient themselves towards the world.Dairy farmers bring their own perspectives on how cows, as social and sentient beings whose freedom of movement is nevertheless severely restricted, give meaning to their physical environment and negotiate their housing conditions. A female dairy farmer based in the south of the Netherlands recently provided this chapter’s first author with a hand-written letter with some of her thoughts in preparation of an interview addressing how cows and farmers communicate with each other.8 She wrote:
A true story: Cows are herd animals and they have a leader who will inform the others what to expect. Mientje was always the first waiting by the fence for the farmer to collect them [from the meadow] to be milked. The cows would first be treated to snacks in the barn which is a feast. They might become so impatient as children, and Mientje always watched carefully how the farmer would unlock the fence. An iron slide bolt. For days she would be licking that bolt and the farmer assumed she liked the taste of it, but actually she was practicing how to accomplish that [unlocking the bolt] by sliding it across with her tongue bit by bit long enough, and yes the farmer stayed away for too long and she opened the fence by herself, moved a bit backwards so that the fence could open further and so she managed to steer all the cows to the barn where there were no snacks present since it was no milking time yet. The barn was an overshitted barn that first had to be cleaned with very restless cows back in the meadow. The blacksmith made a new bolt.
Mientje, in the narrative above, is clearly positioned as an actor, even though her actions arise from within a state of unfreedom that makes it difficult, if not impossible, to draw sharp boundaries between action and passion, between doing and suffering. Seemingly functionless activities such as repetitive licking and/or biting of non-food objects, including bars and fences, are common stereotypic behaviors in captive ungulates and are caused by the frustration of natural behavior patterns or by repeated attempts to deal with some problem (Bergeron et al. 2006). Tongue rolling, object licking and biting at fences—important indicators of compromised animal welfare—are especially prevalent among intensively housed cattle, as they are routinely deprived of the freedom to pursue natural patterns of grazing and rumination (Moran and Doyle 2015, 47). Nevertheless, it is also clear that Mientje’s actions are not at all inconsequential or meaningless. On the contrary, by unlocking the bolt, leading the herd to the barn in the expectation of finding some snacks and by shitting the barn when they find nothing there, Mientje and the other cows not only spur their humans into action (cleaning the barn, producing a new bolt) but also engage in linguistic acts of place-making by transforming their shared living space into a site for negotiating, or renegotiating, the semantics of power, resistance and belonging.
A place, in the sociolinguistic sense, is not simply a fixed geographic location but rather a changeable site of symbolic meaning as well as a material assemblage of objects or things that mediate social processes and relationships (Johnstone 2011; Cornips and de Rooij 2018a; Peck et al. 2019). Place-making, then, involves the assigning, through interaction and other forms of connectivity, of social meanings to physical (and, increasingly, digital) spaces, thereby “creating places that are perceived as the basis of belonging” (Cornips and de Rooij 2018b, 7–8). In contrast to other branches of linguistics where languages are seen as “naturally” anchored to specific spaces—a view that only holds if a language is conceptualized as a monolithic and identifiable object detached from real-time practices—a sociolinguistics of place takes a practice-based approach focused on speakers and their activities. This shifts the focus from the linguistic system or structure to a whole range of situated practices in which speech is produced, so that what is typically labelled as a language is reconceived as a linguistic resource that only becomes socially meaningful in combination with other material-semiotic resources distributed across people, places and environments (Pennycook 2017).
Although previous sociolinguistic research has conceptualized place-making primarily or even exclusively in terms of human practices and institutions, we suggest that other animals, like cows, also engage their senses, thoughts and emotions in the material-semiotic production of the world as a meaningful place. This entails a clear break away from the previously discussed humanist conceptualizations of language as a computational system located exclusively within the human mind—a view on language which, as we have seen, is itself informed by a desire to place the human above all other animals—and steers us towards an understanding of language as a distributed phenomenon, an emergent property deriving from the interactions and interrelations between human and nonhuman actors, including spatial resources and things usually seen as inanimate (Cowley 2011; Pennycook 2017). This shift in thinking corresponds to the critical posthumanist “turn” that has been put on the linguistic research agenda recently by Alastair Pennycook, who urges us “not just to broaden an understanding of communication but to relocate where social semiosis occurs” (Pennycook 2016, 446). Once we acknowledge that, as Pennycook (2018, 51) notes, “linguistic and other semiotic resources are not contained in someone’s head, nor just choices available within a speech community, but are spatially distributed,” we can begin to explore how dairy cows, such as Mientje, engage in linguistic place-making in relation to other cows, farmers, fences, iron bars and spaces such as barns and meadows, as well as through embodied acts of looking, smelling, licking, walking, eating, defecating, playing and listening.
4. Linguistic Place-Making in an Intensive Dairy Farm
In the previous section, we suggested that cows, as sentient and intelligent beings, engage their cognitive, emotional and social abilities in practices of linguistic place-making. Just as for people, we assume that the formation of meaningful bonds between cows and a place is “a powerful factor in social life… and is often based on the social relationships that are enacted in a place” (Schieffelin 2018, 35). In this section and the next, we will examine in more detail how intensively housed cows engage in place-making through language, understood as a distributed phenomenon emerging from within “material webs of human and nonhuman assemblages” (Pennycook 2017, 279). Drawing on recent fieldwork at an intensive dairy farm, we seek to demonstrate how in this context linguistic place-making occurs through multimodal and multilingual repertoires where human and nonhuman bodies, materials and environments come together in co-shaping motion. We will pay special attention to the questions of material and nonhuman animal agency, not merely because “processes of place-making and place itself are always sensible to power dynamics and asymmetries” (Schieffelin 2018, 34), but also because these questions are crucial for thinking through the challenges of human-nonhuman coexistence in the current context of the Anthropocene.
First, a cow becomes connected to her place as a “territory of knowledge” (Schieffelin 2018, 30, citing Århem 1998) through her verbal practices. While cattle vocalizations are often proposed as indicators of animal welfare, scientific analysis of naturally occurring contact calls produced by crossbred beef cows and their calves have provided insight into the acoustic structure and information encoded in these vocalizations. One study showed that calf calls encode age, but not sex, and are produced (F0 = 142.8 ± 1.80 Hz) when separated from their mothers and preceded suckling (Padilla de la Torre et al. 2015, 58). Also, indoor housed calves produce individually recognizable calls to their mothers and vice versa whereas indoor housed cows signal verbally that they are hungry, sexually aroused, and experience milking delay in distinctive ways (Jahns 2013, 247). Thus, although cow sounds may be meaningless to most human animals, they constitute meaningful signs recognizable by mother cows and their calves, as well as by fellow cows as a sociolinguistic community of practice.
Further, cows establish place-making through visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory and tactile practices, as well as through creative behavior such as play. Sight is a cow’s most dominant sense, with a field of vision of at least 330° and a fine eye for details. Cows pay more attention to moving objects than ones that remain still, such as bars, and they are often “spooked” by sudden movements. A cow’s hearing is better than that of horses, but she is less able to locate sounds compared to goats, dogs and humans. She has an acute sense of touch, which enables her to enjoy some forms of tactile contact, such as scratching behind the ears, but it also means that the conditions of industrial farming cause her considerable pain. Olfaction plays an important role in cows’ social lives, and there is evidence that they can detect the scent of stress hormones present in the urine of fellow cows (Marino and Allen 2017, 475–476). Cows engage in all forms of play found in mammals, including gamboling and running, playing with objects such as balls and social play with members of other species. While play is an important indication of an animal’s pleasure, curiosity and capacity to innovate, and as such it “forms the basis for complex object-related and social abilities” (Marino and Allen 2017, 481), play behavior in captive animals is also dependent on their housing conditions; for example, being released from confinement will increase the frequency of movement-based forms of play such as galloping and bucking. In what follows, we will discuss specific examples from field research to demonstrate how dairy cows can mobilize these structural constraints to imbue their environment with linguistic meanings and thus negotiate their positioning within an anthropological machine that is, by and large, designed to deprive them from the opportunity to speak.
4.1 The Fieldwork Site
From May 2018 through 15 February 2019, this chapter’s first author conducted fieldwork in three dairy farms in the south and west of the Netherlands and in one small dairy farm in Norway. The observations presented in this chapter are based on data collection at Farm 1 in the south of the Netherlands, where the first author spent several weeks during her holidays in May and which subsequently became the site for three days of ethnographic observation, including two days of gathering audio- and video recordings.9 The dairy farm counts about 150 adult cows, heifers and calves. The dairy cows are milked by robots, while an automatic feeder takes care of pushing the food towards them, minimizing embodied practices between farmers and cows. A small camp site and some holiday apartments accompany the farm, as so often in the south. Many tourists, children in particular, seek contact with the newly born calves, as well as with the older calves and heifers to be discussed below, petting them and speaking to them. Feeding the newly born calves, who are housed individually in fiberglass cages outside the barn, is an especially popular activity among the human visitors. During the on-site observations, the cows would often reach through the bars and fences to touch the farmers, tourists and field worker through licking and nuzzling. They would also establish contact through nonverbal interactions such as eye gaze and body positioning, as well as by using language in the form of rumbling, calling, hooting, sniffing and coughing. These practices would happen frequently, even though neither humans nor cows were able to traverse to sharing space with each other directly.Farmers usually assign dairy cows to fixed places in artificial groupings based on their age without male peers, revealing extreme power asymmetries between cows and humans. In the farm under observation, cows are assigned to eight distinct places differentiated by age: new-born calves, older calves up until a few weeks of age, young heifers, older and oldest heifers, dry cows (pregnant cows), and dairy cows. As noted, new-born female calves are separated from their mothers immediately after birth and isolated in fiberglass enclosures, so-called “igloos,” for about three weeks. In Farm 1, these igloos are placed in the open air facing the dairy cows in the open barn. After this period, the somewhat older calves are housed together with their age mates in igloos holding up to four or five animals, positioned sideways to the open barn so that visual contact with the older cows is much more restricted. Growing older, the calves are placed in the so-called jongveestal (young cattle barn) in four different age groups (see Fig. 1). The dry cows are housed in a separate space and the dairy cows reside in the large open barn that also contains three milking robots. In spring and summer, the dry cows and dairy cows can graze in the meadow during the day and, when it is very hot, during the late evening and night. The assignment to specific physical places in distinct housings prevents the calves, heifers and cows from forming a natural herd that would include a matrilineal social structure with strongly clustered networks and many non-random attachment and avoidance relationships (Marino and Allen 2017, 488). It also prevents the younger ones from engaging in processes of cognitive and social learning, and deprives them from being comforted by older conspecifics, including mother cows.
Fig. 1. Jongveestal (“young cattle barn”), housing 36 calves and heifers (Friday 17 August 2018, 2.30–6 p.m.)
The fieldwork took place in the jongveestal, where audio and video recordings were made while observing the calves and heifers. The jongveestal is an oblong building, about twenty by ten meters, with half bowed windows, touching the house where the farmer’s family lives. It is the oldest barn on site with a main entrance in the middle of the long front side and a full opening at one of the short sides. The cattle stay indoors: their day includes some combinations of eating, lying and standing. The oldest heifers were about one year old during the fieldwork.10 In May, swallows would fly in and out to take care of their new-born in the many nests they had fabricated under the beams of this old building. The floor of the jongveestal consists of cubicle divisions for calves and heifers to lie down and stand up (see Picture 3 below), while in-between the cubicles, they can stand or walk on discrete beams where feces and urine pass.
In the jongveestal, the calves and heifers (n = 36) were spatially positioned in four sections divided by iron bars, as illustrated in Fig. 1. The calves and heifers in the jongveestal are thus profoundly restricted in their mobility—much more so than the adult cows who are able to graze in the meadow, but less than the new-born calves confined to the small igloos. Consequently, from birth onwards throughout their lives, calves, heifers and dairy cows—either individually or with same-sex and age mates—are confined to human-made physical spaces. How, then, do they manage to assign their own meanings to the restricted environment in which they are placed?
4.2 Place-Making Through Practices of Sociality and Multilingualism
The housing conditions of the jongveestal not only restrict mobility but also limit the visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory and tactile practices that calves and heifers may display under less restrictive conditions. This significantly affects their modes of sociality and processes of belonging: calves and heifers cannot touch and/or allogroom each other cross-sectionally; a lack of daylight hinders optimal vision and the walls obstruct a far vision; the sound of tractors may penetrate; calves and heifers are dependent on the farmer for how to lie down as well as for when, what and how to eat (with no attention for individual food preferences); ventilation is often not optimal so that calves and heifers, whose sense of smell is far superior to that of humans, deal with omnipresent scents of ammonia, carbon dioxide, methane and hydrogen sulfide (Vallez 2013, 12); and the beams on the floor, often slippery due to feces and urine, impede playing and running (see Picture 3). Limited space allowance furthermore makes it difficult to maintain a preferred distance to neighbors with whom the individual likes to bond or not. The spatial distance that cows establish between each other is affected by their relationship and proximity might indicate the existence of a social bond (McLennan 2013, 26). Under more natural conditions, cows seem to engage with particular individuals with whom they prefer to spend their time, creating voluntary bonds while grazing and lying together in close proximity (McLennan 2013, 49–50). In the captive environment of the jongveestal, however, a calf or heifer who is a non-preferred partner may stand, lie down or eat in closer proximity than would naturally occur, which may lead to feelings of uneasiness and has been suggested to have negative consequences for animal welfare (McLennan 2013, 52).How, if at all, do calves and heifers in the jongveestal create sociality under these conditions? And how is this sociality mobilized in and through material-semiotic practices of place-making? Fieldwork observations show that the calves and heifers in their cubicle divisions (see Fig. 1) may not show any sign of interaction or connectivity, thus is it not self-evident for individuals who are placed in a restricted space to construe it together as a social place. Picture 1 shows an example: four older calves stand in the second section of the jongveestal. Although they share a restricted physical space, their body positioning does not reveal any form of co-shaping the act of standing together. The calves position their bottoms to each other, taking diverging positions, avoiding eye contact and body contact. Although the calves in the right corner seem to align sideways, there is no form of interaction. Their bodies don’t touch and while the calf in the middle bows her head, the calf in the right corner is rubbing her chin at the iron bar and wooden demarcation while establishing eye contact with the fieldworker, as shown in Picture 2.
Picture 1. Standing in the jongveestal (Farm 1, 17 August 2018)Picture 2. Calf is rubbing her chin at the fence while establishing eye contact with the fieldworker (Farm 1, 17 August 2018)
Both pictures also show that in the second section of the barn four cows are standing on their feet whereas two cows are lying down in cubicle divisions. The calf to the right in Picture 2 was headbutted by another for about two seconds when trying to move over to the most right-hand section of the barn (not visible in the picture). Picture 3, however, shows calves in section 2 mirroring each other’s body positions when lying down in the cubicles. Although their bodies do not touch and they are not able to lie down in a circle as less restrictive settings, they are able to choose to lie down all together in the same way at the same time. The two calves in the cubicles in the back are facing each other whereas the two shown in the foreground do not. Note that the younger calf in section 1 has decided to look out of the window instead of synchronizing with the others.
Picture 3. Bodily synchronizing in cubicle divisions in the jongveestal (Farm 1, 17 August 2018)
As a material-semiotic resource, bodily synchronizing can be seen as part of what Frans de Waal has described as “identification” with the other, a process of “bodily mapping the self onto the other (or the other onto the self)” which not only relates to a capacity for shared neural representation, but also forms “a precondition for imitation and empathy” (De Waal 2012, 123). During the fieldwork, a clear practice of bodily synchronizing—which we consider here as a social form of meaning-making typical for encaged dairy cows—emerged during the communicative event of feeding (by the farmer) and eating (by the cows). The farmer feeds the calves twice a day by putting upside down a wheelbarrow loaded with food on the ground before them. An iron feed fence separates the human and nonhuman animals during this event while at the same time it mediates the meanings that arise from their mutual interaction. The farmer provides the food from one side of the fence whereas the calves on the other side need to position themselves before individual openings and put their heads through the bars in order to reach the food below. Since there are only as many openings as calves, every individual has to touch her neighbor to secure a place (see Pictures 4 a, b).
Picture 4a. The calves positioning themselves at the feed fence (wheelbarrow on the right); b The. calves are synchronizing during their eating practice
As the calves put their heads through the iron bars they simultaneously bow their heads forward and downward to pick up the food from the ground, taking a slightly more upward head position in order to chew. Within this joint “embodiment of movement,” a collective form of sociality in which each calf will instantaneously “follow and lead” (Argent 2012, 120),11 the calves engage one another and the space around them in bodily acts of identification that articulate the jongveestal as a shared social place. Thus, although for encaged calves feeding is clearly a habitual and routinized practice, from a sociolinguistic perspective it also entails creative acts of place-making through what Argent calls “kinesic, haptic, and proxemic communication modes” (Argent 2012, 119). The synchrony of movement that occurs in and through the spacing of interactional distances not only orients calves to group living, but also enables them to imbue their restricted environment with meaning in the form of social bonding and thus constitute themselves as linguistic agents.
Specifically, we argue that nonhuman practices of place-making in an intensive dairy farm can be seen as a form of bi- or multilingualism peculiar to the context of industrial animal production. The iron bars make sound when the synchronizing calves put their heads through them and move their faces up and down in co-motion to reach for the food on the ground during eating practice. These sounds are not meaningless or arbitrary but constitute a semiotic resource for calves to reinforce social bonding, specifically since the sounds of the iron bars and bodies co-shape each other acoustically. Eating practices in the jongveestal, then, are acts of place-making where calves do not only use their vocal tract to produce language, but also establish themselves as linguistic beings through the rhythmic clattering of the iron bars that shapes the synchronizing bodies into socially meaningful sounds. In other words, these calves engage in a process of nonhuman place-making not only by producing one language with their own bodies, that is, the words or vocalizations for “greeting” and “hunger” which are inextricably combined with multimodal and multisensory ways of meaning-making through body positioning and visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory and tactile practices, but also by producing a second language with the material-semiotic means that both compose and transcend their restricted environment.
Being socialized into the environment of an industrial dairy farm, then, for cows implies being or becoming bilingual, where bilingualism is to be understood as a “complex set of practices” (Heller 2007, 15) which draw on linguistic resources that belong to two codes which are structurally maximally divergent (see Auer, forthcoming, 8), in this case one code produced by vocal tract and one code produced by synchronizing bodies and iron bars. The latter language is more context-dependent than the former because of its restriction to the practice of feeding in conditions of captivity. These two codes thus reveal structural constraints in the linguistic sense: they can combine together in a multimodal way but cannot be mixed. The observations do not show that calves alternate between the two codes within one single discourse—the social practice of eating together—even if both codes are part of the broader material-semiotic assemblage through which place-making is established. In the sociolinguistic framework, the two codes might be said to correspond to different social functions and identities, since different languages, or language varieties, are associated with diverging “processes of construction of social difference and social inequality” (Heller 2007, 15). The “bars and bodies” code will be associated primarily with encaged individuals, suggesting that this form of bilingualism is specific to the complex network of connections among human and nonhuman agents that constitutes daily life at an intensive dairy farm.
Crucially, the material presence of the feed fence, which both enables and constrains the expression of linguistic agency in this context, should be understood not merely as a demarcation of physical space, but as belonging to the spatial repertoire through which language is produced as a “distributed effect of a range of interacting objects, people and places” (Pennycook 2017, 278). As an embodied and embedded practice, linguistic place-making in the jongveestal is thus not simply a conditioned response to an unresponsive environment, nor does it arise from the individual communicative competence of calves and heifers; rather, it emerges from within a complex assemblage of material-semiotic resources distributed across human and nonhuman subjects, artefacts and environments, including the means of confinement by which humans seek to restrict the freedom of other animals. In other words, the conditions of captivity in an intensive dairy farm are not external but intrinsic to how cows engage in acts of place-making that we, in Heideggerian terms, might understand as linguistic practices of world-formation. This view, as we will conclude, has significant consequences for how we may conceptualize the expression of nonhuman animal agency, in particular linguistic agency, in the troubling context of the Anthropocene.
5. Conclusion
From a traditional humanist perspective, domesticated captive animals are doubly barred from entering into a meaningful relationship with the world: not only are nonhuman animals, in this view, by nature captivated in their environment (as Heidegger and many others have suggested), it is also assumed that confinement in cages does nothing but further limit their natural instincts and capabilities. This view effectively renders nonhuman animals, cows in particular, mute and dumb, while at the same time it reinforces a traditional mechanistic worldview where both nature and matter are considered to be passive and inert, available for manipulation by humans and exploitable for profit (Merchant 1992, 48–55). The critically posthumanist perspective developed in this chapter, by contrast, not only acknowledges cows as the social and intelligent speaking beings that they are, but also approaches their material encagement—the bars and fences meant as barriers to prevent calves and heifers from freely going wherever they want—as a social and spatial artefactual resource for building a meaningful world. Paradoxically, then, it is their state of unfreedom that allows dairy cows to open up the restricted environment of industrial animal farming, exemplified here by the young cattle barn, as a linguistically meaningful place.
In drawing attention to the linguistic agency of dairy cows, we do not wish to reiterate the familiar observation that “agency is intrinsic to the way animals behave” (Špinka and Wemelsfelder 2011, 34), nor are we suggesting that the capacity of captive animals to act is somehow “expanded” or “curtailed” through acts of linguistic place-making. In the context of industrial dairy farming, where categorical boundaries between humans and other animals, as well as between organisms and machines, have collapsed—a condition exemplifying the “implosion of nature and culture” (Haraway 2003, 16) that marks the Anthropocene—neither agency nor language can be understood as a property of individual persons or collectivities. Rather, we must account for how different forms of agency, including linguistic agency, emerge from within what political theorist Jane Bennett (2010, 107) has called “agentic assemblages,” that is, networks of human and nonhuman actors living together in relations of systemic inequality. In this chapter, therefore, we have tried to show how a non-anthropocentric approach to linguistic place-making, understood as a practice of more-than-human sociality, can help us reckon with the question of nonhuman animal agency in new ways.
Assemblages, as Pennycook (2017, 278) notes, “describe the way things are brought together and function in new ways” and as such they provide a way of thinking about agency as a distributed force, much like we described language and cognition as spatially distributed. Bennett, indeed, suggests that we think of agency as “distributed across an ontologically heterogeneous field, rather than being a capacity localized in a human body or in a collective produced (only) by human efforts” (Bennett 2010, 23). Linguistic agency, then, is not an individual or collective competence that can be “mastered” or “possessed” but should rather be seen as a processually emergent quality arising from multiple assemblages of human and nonhuman elements, including material things, artefacts and spaces. This conception of agency, rooted in what Bennett (2010) calls a “vital materialism” and what Pennycook (2018) describes as a “posthumanist applied linguistics,” disturbs the traditional understanding of agency as the capacity for self-willed action, linked especially to human subjectivity and intentionality, as well as the corollary presumption that the more-than-human material world—including other animals and the physical environment—is essentially passive, inert and predetermined in its operations.
Throughout this chapter, we have sought to demonstrate the usefulness of a non-anthropocentric approach to language and language practices in light of a long history of human exceptionalism that has routinely denied nonhuman animals the freedom and ability to speak. We have elaborated a posthumanist conception of language as a distributed effect of multiple interacting bodies in order to foreground the fluidity through which a cow, a calf, calves, a wheelbarrow, a farmer, an iron feed fence, a lock, the clattering of bars, sounds of chewing, sounds of puffing, sounds of urinating, the smell of food, urine, feces, other bodies in proximity or distance, movements up and down, become relationally entangled with one another and, crucially, with the anthropological machine of industrial animal production. Furthermore, we have shown how rethinking nonhuman animal agency in terms of material-semiotic assemblages, as an equally distributed effect of linguistic interactions and social processes, allows us to break away from the idea of lifeless matter, including the Cartesian understanding of nonhuman animals as mindless machines, an idea which has shaped the pervasive modes of human exceptionalism and instrumentalism that have traditionally characterized the humanist agenda and which continue to inform ideas about the “muteness” and “bruteness” of nonhuman creatures today. In this way, we hope to contribute to a greater recognition among humans of other animals, not only as sentient living beings, but as intelligent, social, speaking beings, linguistic agents who even under poor conditions form rich and complex relationships with the world to make it a meaningful place.
Footnotes
Aristotle, Politics, 1253a. Translation by Louis van den Hengel.
Most commentators attribute to Descartes the concomitant view that animals, because they cannot think, have no feelings and do not suffer pain, yet some scholars (Harrison 1992; Cottingham 2008, 163–173) have sought to contest this interpretation.
In his Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Heidegger in a similar manner suggests that nonhuman animals are “separated from man by an abyss” (1995, 26, emphasis added). Because nonhuman animals lack language, they cannot apprehend other beings conceptually, as beings: for Heidegger, only humans are capable of grasping that which is as such.
In this view, the linguistic ability to innovate—to form new statements that express new thoughts appropriate to but not directly caused by their immediate contexts—is considered a fundamental factor that distinguishes human language, seen as free from control by any detectable stimuli, from nonhuman animal communication, which is assumed to occur only in response to an external environment or to internal drives.
Neither generative nor sociolinguistic theory has questioned the legitimacy of each other’s discipline, yet attempts to integrate both have not been successful (Cornips and Gregersen 2016).
In one study, cows have been demonstrated, within a few training sessions, an ability to discriminate photographs of different cows’ faces from faces of other species. A later study has shown that heifers can differentiate between two-dimensional facial images of familiar and unfamiliar cows, treating these images as mental representations of real individuals (Marino and Allen 2017, 478–479). So far, there is no knowledge yet on social learning from humans or the use of human-given cues in cattle (Nawroth et al. 2019, 5).
Emotional reactions to learning in cows have to do with “the positive emotions and excitement that go with realizing one is controlling a situation” (Marino and Allen 2017, 482). This does not merely show that cows understand the causal relation between accomplishing a task and receiving a reward, but rather it suggests that they learn to experience task solving as intrinsically rewarding by adopting “an emotional perspective on their own agency” (Hagen and Broom 2004, 212).
The interview anticipated in the letter took place at the second farm (Farm 2) in the south of the Netherlands where the first author conducted her field research which is further discussed below. This interview took place on 15 February 2019 and is not discussed further in the current chapter.
The fieldwork took place on 25 July (observation), 26 July and 17 August 2018 (audio- and video recordings). A written and signed consent form by the owners of Farm 1 was obtained abiding by the guidelines for research as stated in the protocol of the Ethics Assessment Committee Humanities of the Radboud University Nijmegen and adopted by the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). From the perspective of establishing egalitarian research methods for interspecies collaboration, there is a need to examine how to receive permission from the nonhuman animals under study, while at the same time one should interrogate how the bioethical framework of “informed consent” is set up through human-centred discourses of rational agency and choice.
During her holidays in May, the first author frequently visited the jongveestal since there was one heifer who was very much looking for contact with human animals. She was positioned near the main entrance and would nearly jump towards the author to put her head on her shoulder. This extravert expression of contact seeking behavior might be interpreted as indicative of a willingness to engage in interspecies collaboration.
Argent writes about synchronizing between horses and riders.
Notes
Acknowledgements
The first author is very grateful to the participating farmer for all support, the opportunity to make recordings, and time.
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About this chapter
CrossMark Cite this chapter as: Cornips L., van den Hengel L. (2021) Place-Making by Cows in an Intensive Dairy Farm: A Sociolinguistic Approach to Nonhuman Animal Agency. In: Bovenkerk B., Keulartz J. (eds) Animals in Our Midst: The Challenges of Co-existing with Animals in the Anthropocene. The International Library of Environmental, Agricultural and Food Ethics, vol 33. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63523-7_11
Psychologist Sigmund Freud described phenomena that are familiar and foreign at the same time as uncanny. Unheimlich – the German word for uncanny – literally means “unhomely” and captures the paradoxical mix of the homely and the strange that goes into the feeling of the uncanny (Freud 2013 [1919]). Ghosts, gods, spirits, and specters are classical icons of the uncanny. These entities are uncanny because they disturb the proper and familiar separation of things: the separation between the living and the dead, between the imaginary and the real, between the virtual and the actual. Ghosts, gods, specters and spirits are invisible apparitions, a paradoxical NO THING, a “between that is tainted with strangeness” (Cixous 1976: 543). But in 1970, the Japanese robotics engineer, Masahiro Mori, suggested that robots, too, become uncanny when they increasingly approach but still fail to achieve full human likeness. A prosthetic hand that has the fleshy look but not the proper fleshy feel of a human hand is, Mori suggested, as uncanny as a ghost. Mori called the experiential space of such phenomena “the uncanny valley”: the space where the function of increased likeness intersects with the function of decreased familiarity (Mori 2012)
Masahi Mori’s Uncanny Valley (photo credit: Wikipedia)
In Mori’s chart of the uncanny valley, corpses and zombies share quarters with only one human invention: the prosthetic hand. But since 1970, it is fair to say, Mori’s uncanny valley has become radically crowded with new beings far beyond robotics. Advances in genetic technology and bioengineering have added cloned animals, gene-modified crops and a host of other familiar-yet-strange denizens to the uncanny valleys of our time. The overpopulation of these uncanny valleys has also arguably grown exponentially after anthropogenic environmental disturbance has begun denaturalizing nature itself: jelly fish blooms, freak storms, and factory chicken are examples of this kind of environmental uncanniness. What are we, for instance, to make of the fact that the total biomass of the 20 billion chickens in the world’s industrial mega-farms is three times that of all wild birds combined (Bar-On et al. 2018)? A chicken is a very familiar bird for sure. But when the chicken is well on the way to becoming the signature, and one day soon perhaps the only, bird in the world, its very familiarity takes on a distinctly uncanny hue. Ecological uncanniness, one might call this.
SCIENCE AND THE REAL: NATURAL-SUPERNATURAL-UNNATURAL
If the uncanny represents a “crisis of the natural” (Royle 2003: 1), the Anthropocene is a truly an uncanny time, a time when the proper separation between things – between culture and nature, subject and object, human and nonhuman, life and non-life – is collapsing. The concept “Anthropocene” was born when geologists and climate chemists had to acknowledge that their natural objects of study was infused by human agency, but in ways that produced their own forms of more-than-human unpredictability. In the J-curves of the Great Acceleration (Steffen et al. 2015) an uncanny valley opened up when scientists had to acknowledge that the familiar promise of endless growth had led to environmental decline and climatic chaos. Climate change is the perhaps most evident example of a human caused but also uncannily run-away process. Consider, for instance, the uncanny rift between familiar experiences of weather and the statistics of climate. Many people across an ordinarily sun-starved northern Europe welcomed the exceptionally warm May of 2018 as an early start to a great summer. But by the end of the month, May turned out to also be the hottest month of May on record in the northern parts of Europe and the contiguous US (NOAA 6.6.2018). And the heat just continued. The hottest temperature ever in Africa was recorded in Algeria in the summer of 2018, and temperature records were broken in Taiwan, Central Asia, Europe, Canada, and the Western US. What was initially experienced as a pleasantly warm weather streak by heat-starving northern Europeans was by July revealed as the hottest El Niña year on record. The hemispheric scale of the heat meant that it began, eerily, to point to more than itself. In early July, a group of leading climate scientists hypothesized that positive feedback loops between changing climate, ocean currents, and other Earth systems could cause cascading effects that would catapult Earth into a “hothouse” state well before current predictions. This, they suggested, would have massive effects on global environment, societies and economies (Steffen et al. 2018). Hoping against all hope that they were wrong, one of the authors said that it was urgent to pose this possibility in the context of the unexpected nature of the ongoing summer heatwave of 2018. It was, in fact, “one of the most urgent existential questions in science” (Watts 2018b). In the course of a few months in 2018, weather had become uncanny, at once familiar and strange, urgent and unknowable. This meant something: namely a shift in how we will be able to experience weather in the future. After 2018, it has arguably become impossible to enjoy a sunny day without a certain frisson – an emotional shiver that is at once existential and epistemological. For while it is “difficult”, as researchers from the World Meteorological Organization put it, to ascribe any individual hot weather streak to climate change, when taken together, all the hot days across the northern hemisphere in 2018 became strong indications of global warming (Watts 2018a). On its own, each freak event is nothing. Together however, the freak events point to a new freaky climate reality, made all the more uncanny by being both perceptible and imperceptible (Hulme 2009). Climate, like ghosts and witches, teeters on the border between being-there and not-being-there (Bubandt 2014). In a time of global warming, weather is no longer innocent and given: from now on, weather is by necessity always-already haunted by the specter of anthropogenic climate change.
But weather is not alone in having become eerie in the Anthropocene. Nature has, too. What may once have been “natural” (but then who knows?) increasingly evades experience and language because “nature” itself has lost its proper place. Natural events have increasingly become “unnatural” by default, uncannily monstrous rather than homey and seemingly maternal (Stengers 2015). Take, the 2011 tsunami and nuclear power disaster in Japan, a disaster both natural and thoroughly unnatural (Bestor 2013). As a result, “nature” takes on the uncanny characteristics of those forms of the supernatural that never had a proper place of their own in the modern West: spirits, monsters, ghosts (Bubandt and van Beek 2011). This uncanny monstrosity gels poorly with hegemonic accounts of the Anthropocene where humans are said to be forceful agents acting upon a passive world. But far from being an epoch when humans have become “a force of nature” (Steffen et al. 2007), the Anthropocene names a time when human industry has conjured into existence nonhuman life forces that the modern prophets of industry – those who announced humans to be the only true agents in the world – had declared to be dead. The Anthropocene is a time when ghostly forces come to life in ways that are tainted through and through with strangeness. Take, for instance, the unpredictable agency of anthropogenic earthquakes in the fracked landscapes of Oklahoma (Hand 2014), the explosive but still contested methane flammability of a thawing Siberian tundra (The Siberian Times 2017), or the rapid but poorly understood decline of flyinginsects from the landscapes across Europe in the last 25 years (Carrington 2017). Or, take the global spread of the chytrid fungus by that favored medical animal, the African clawed frog, which is exacerbating the extinction crisis of the world’s amphibians. Or take the vanishing of the bees, or the collapse of fish stocks following the uncontrolled blooms of the planktonic ctenophore Mnemiopsis in the Black Sea and other central Asian bodies of water (Measey et al. 2012; Shiganova and Bulgakova 2000): all ghostly events marked by eerie disappearance or proliferation; all events that straggle the borders between life and death.
BIOLOGICAL HAUNTINGS
In the midst of such disastrous versions of ghostliness out there in the world, ghosts well up in enigmatic forms within science labs and science literature as well. Biology, for instance, is haunted by new insights that challenge conventional ideas about its research object: life. Take tardigrades, a phylum of over 1200 species of microanimals found on both land and in water. Some land-based tardigrades have an ability called cryptobiosis that allows them to lay dormant for decades, entirely desiccated, only to come back to life, when conditions change. Other species of tardigrades are hardy enough to survive almost any imaginable astronomical (or human-caused) disaster. They can, for instance, withstand radiation energy blasts that would be enough to evaporate the planet’s oceans (Temming 2017). The indestructibility of tardigrades, beings also known as “water bears”, has made them prime candidates for optomechanical experiments that seek to establish where the mind-bending laws of quantum mechanics end and the physical laws of “classical reality” begin. Dutch scientists plan to place a tardigrade on a millimeter-size silicon nitride membrane. Using a laser beam, the researchers hope to bring the membrane into an oscillation pattern that is so fast that it, and the tardigrade on it, will be pushed into a quantum superposition – a condition of being where the tardigrade would be nowhere and everywhere on the oscillation curve at the same time (Folger 2018). The tardigrade in a quantum superposition would cease to “be there” in any classical physical or common-sensical way. It would be the first biological entity to be scientifically induced into a ghostly state of pure potentiality. “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” as the so-called third law of science-fiction writer, Arthur C. Clarke, has it (1962: 21). The possibility of a scientifically produced ghost tardigrade begs the question: what are we, in turn, to make of the reality of magic in the face of such technology?
Tardigrade (photo credit: io9.gizmodo.com and Sciencephotolibrary)
If the charismatic-looking tardigrades are the ghosts of biology – uncanny specters at the beginning and the end of the world as we know it – then Symbions are its category-breaking queer spirits. Symbions are microscopic symbiotic animal that live on the mouthparts of some Atlantic shellfish, where they feed on food leftovers. Legless and with a nervous system that is entirely unique in the biological world, Symbions belong to their own phylum called Cycliophora, named by AURA collaborator and biologist, Peter Funch, along with colleague Reinhardt Kristensen in 1995. Symbions have a strange and complex reproduction system: they reproduce sexually as well as asexually. Every adult Symbion has a female inside its body. This female is fertilized, inside the adult body, by males that have been produced and grown inside a different larval form also produced by the adult. The fertilized female leaves the adult body and settles elsewhere on the lobster mouth part, where – inside its body – a new larvae destined to become a new adult, is produced. A Pandora’s box of beings within beings, multiply sexed and cryptically reproducing, Symbions have what some have called “the most bizarre life story on Earth” (Marshall 2010). The evolutionary origin and phylogenetic position of the Symbion are still debated, failing as they do to properly fit the morphological and ontogenetic criteria of animal life.
Symbions (photo credit: Peter Funch)
TOWARDS A NONSECULAR ANALYTIC OF THE ANTHROPOCENE
There is, so it seems to us, an absence of sustained, empirical exploration of the ephemeral, spiritual, magical qualities of the nonhuman agency that has come to take center stage in the Anthropocene. We mean empirical in a critical not a naïvely empiricist sense. Wealso think of being empirical in a non-normative sense, an empirical attention to the world that seeks to study the ephemeral in ways that move beyond the sterile choice between secular or religious sympathies. The lack of a critical, non-normative and empirical approach to the ephemeral and uncommon sensical in Anthropocene scholarship is all the more jarring given what one might call the latent promise of the Anthropocene debate: namely, its claim that in Anthropocene scholarship the “common-sensical” divide between the human and the nonhuman, the living and the non-living is no longer operable. In the wake of this claim, studies of the nonhuman remain strikingly and one-dimensionally secular. Inspired by the epistemological instability between the human and the nonhuman, between life and non-life, that the Anthropocene portends, we ask: Does not the nonhuman entail more than flora, fauna, and geology? How do we include spirits, specters and ghosts in the study of the nonhuman or more-than-human? Might the break-down of the human-nonhuman divide, which destabilizes the distinction between humans and nature and the distinction between humans and technology, not also destabilize the distinction between the material and the spiritual, the natural and the supernatural, the skeptical and the superstitious? Might the Anthropocene, in other words, not also be a nonsecular Anthropocene?
The concept “Anthropocene” is the buzzword, the mot de jour, of the current moment. Like other buzzwords before it which sought to describe something essential about “the current moment” – modernity, globalization, capitalism, democracy – the word Anthropocene means different things to different people (Swanson et al. 2015; see also Howe and Pandian 2016). The conventional Anthropocene story, the story of the Anthropocene that most often makes it into the public news, is however an “all-to human” story: “we humans”, so this story goes, have through our carbon-driven industry caused massive changes to the ecological and bio-chemical systems of the globe (Crutzen 2002: 23). This all-too-human story is one of tragic irony, a story of harvesting the sour grapes of our own progress. It is a Zivilizationskritik as told through the human destruction of the fragile environment around us. It is an apt and useful story, but also a very specific story: one that insists, yet again, on putting Man (capital M) and Western Man (capital W and capital M) at its center. It is a story which has one of two endings: either apocalypse of one kind or another or salvation through some technological fix (embodied in dreams of machines to sequester carbon, of gene banks to store the DNA of extinct species, or of an exodus to Mars) (Haraway 2016).
We want to tell other and more-Earthbound stories of the Anthropocene that challenge this anthropocentric and euro-centric story. We want to tell multi-species stories about the more-than-human socialities that we humans cultivate, in many different ways, with the bacteria, the fungi, the protists, the animals and the plants around us. This interest in more-than-human-socialities have drawn us into collaboration with biologists, through whom we have come to learn hugely interesting stories about the magic of symbiotic evolution, about the alien and space-defying life-cycles of the tardigrade, and about the uncanny reproduction of the Symbion. And it is here that the conversation about “lack” and “latent promise” comes in: for what kind of conversation might be possible, we wonder, between these biological insights into the magic, the alien, the uncanniness of the lives of animals, plants and fungi on the one hand, and the anthropological engagement with the magic, the alien and the uncanny in fieldwork, on the other? Might we learn to take both kinds of magic – the magic of the natural world and the magic of what is erroneously called “the supernatural world” – equally seriously? To think critically and curiously across the realities opened up by each of them? To think of magical ecologies as both biological AND full of the unknown, the magical, the unusual? To engage empirically with the unnatural in order to better understand a natural world gone awry (Bubandt 2017)? More-than-human sociality might in this light, for anthropologists, be more than a foray into new terrains of biology, technology, and geology but also a rediscovery of some old terrain: the anthropological study of that which our secular language does not allow us to say without secretly snickering: the spiritual, the cosmological, the magical, the ancestral. Secularist reason, ironically, obliges us to dismiss and distance ourselves from these dimensions in spite of the fact that the magic, the alien, the spiritual is found not only in exotic settings far away but may also be found in our global financial markets, in “natural” disasters, in voting booths, and on an optomechanical membrane. Far more than that, magic – so we suggest – is woven into the very fabric of co-species relations of a ruined world.
So could not, and should not, Anthropocene scholarship also be an engagement with and a critique of the secular language and secular common-sense that shore it up? For this language and the common-sense view of the world that it affords prevent us from properly – that is, critical and empirically – exploring the uncommon and uncanny forms of agency and enchantment that are called into being in the Anthropocene (Szerszynski 2017; Buck 2015; Latour 2014). The idea of a nonsecular Anthropocene, for us, does not point to a place, a domain outside of the secular. Rather a nonsecular Anthropocene seeks to name an analytical perspective, a different kind of language and a different way of seeing. In fashioning the vocabularies and spectacles for this perspective, we are helped a great deal by existing research. Elisabeth Povinelli’s study of geo-ontologies seeks to probe the distinction between animate and inanimate the structures modern, neo-liberal and secular power – a distinction that is fundamentally challenged on its own terms in a time when both rivers and companies have become legal persons (Povinelli 2016). Marisol de la Cadena’s notion of cosmo-politics and her argument that the Anthropocene is haunted by the Anthropo-unseen also points to what we call a nonsecular Anthropocene (de la Cadena 2015), as does Timothy Morton’s call to magical re alismas a necessary perspective for the study of hyper-objects such as global warming and species extinction (Morton 2013).
And like the recent publication Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (Tsing et al. 2017), we ask what kinds of ghosts and monsters, ancestors and gods inhabit the ruined landscapes of the Anthropocene. How, in other words, might the study of biological landscapes be brought into a conversation with the study of the uncanny valleys of the Anthropocene? By bringing the empirical study of landscape ecology into conversation with the critical study of the multiple ontologies of the uncanny valleys of the new reality named the Anthropocene we hope to build a nonsecular approach to the more-than-human ecologies of contemporary environmental crisis. Such an approach might, we propose, begin with an empirical study of the eco-theologies of co-species life to then ask questions about the links between political ecology and political theology. If political ecology seeks to describe the relationship between politics and the environment, and political theology that between politics and the realm of gods and spirits, the study of an Anthropocene uncanny would seek to explore what happens in the links between these. For how do the politics of nature and the politics of religion relate in the Anthropocene? Bruno Latour began an answer to this question in his 2013 Gifford lectures on Gaia which he subtitled Six Lectures on the political theology of nature (2013; see also Latour 2017). In these lectures, he started by dismissing “religion” and “nature” as useful categories in the Anthropocene, partly because, as he put it, “they share too many attributes”, and partly because they fail to adequately name “the agencies that populate the Earth”: those humans and nonhumans that are called into being and into action by the changing world they inhabit together. So, the Anthropocene seems to be a critical moment in which to reinquire into how we might best study those beings that used to be contained either in “nature” or in “religion”. Beings that used to be neatly separated into each their proper domain – ghosts, spirits, gods and specters within the domain of “belief” and “religion” and tardigrades, carbon particles, methanogenic bacteria within the domain of “fact” and “nature” – now roam the same uncanny valleys of the Anthropocene. The contributions to A Nonsecular Anthropocene make a common call to study these uncommon beings and their reality effects on all of us. There is no easy way to study the afterlives of nature and religion in these uncanny valleys, but they are too omnipresent and important to be ignored.
When US President Donald Trump in 2017 announced the withdrawal of the US from the Paris Agreement on climate change, following pre-election tweets that he believed global warming to be a Chinese hoax perpetrated to financially trick America (White House Briefing 2017; Pierre-Louis 2017), he was roundly criticized for withdrawing from the global accounting system for a nation-based reduction to carbon-emission (itself not an ideal system) – not only by other political leaders, but also by Pope Francis. In his 2015 Encyclical letter, Pope Francis had already declared the climate to be a common good and the earth the “common home” of humankind. Following earlier Papal calls for a “global ecological conversion”, Pope Francis announced the need for a dialogue between science and religion to address an ecological crisis that was caused by humans and through which “humanity has disappointed God” (Pope Francis 2015: 44). The entanglements of belief and skepticism, of the homely and the uncanny, are thick and spectacularly ambiguous in this melting pot of political doubt, scientific truth and religious morality. In an Anthropocene twist of modernity, belief and skepticism have themselves become unrecognizable, uncanny: doubt today aligns easily with populism and corporate-financed conspiracy theory (Oreskes and Conway 2010), while science today finds new alliances with theology. If it is true that nature has no proper place in the Anthropocene, it is equally true that “politics”, “religion”, and “science” longer look the same either. A nonsecular approach to the Anthropocene begins by taking this twist seriously by studying how – in contrast to conventional accounts of secular modernity – environmental and climatic crisis appears to give center stage to new alignments of truth and belief, politics and doubt in multiple ways and how in the wake of these realignments the possibility of gods and ghosts irrupts from within the politics and sciences that not so long ago insisted on banishing ghosts and gods to a putative elsewhere – to the exotic other, to the naïve and uneducated or to our own pre-Enlightenment ancestors. This banishment from the realm of the real is no longer so easy to maintain. Unexpectedly, and unwantedly, ghosts and monsters have now come to occupy the place of the real, of the deadly serious, in novel and unexpected ways. Nature-as-we-knew-it may be have ceased to be, but what has taken its place? What is the reality of nature after its death? Nature as ghost? As imagination? As calculation? As conspiracy? As hyper-object? As monster?
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Abstract This paper evaluates the implications of global emissions budget distribution between three large geographical areas (China, OECD countries, and the rest of the world) in the context of Anthropocene and the structural crisis of the capitalist world system. Two plausible emissions distribution principles are considered. Under neither the inertia principle nor the equity principle, can continuing economic growth be made compatible with requirements of climate stabilization in all three regions. This conclusion does not change significantly when plausible acceleration of emissions intensity reduction in the future is taken into account. To limit global warming to not more than 2 degrees Celsius by the end of this century, at least two of the three large regions need to reorganize their economies to operate with zero or negative growth. Such a reorganization cannot be achieved under a capitalist economic system given the inherent tendency of capitalism towards endless accumulation. Neither is it likely to be achieved under any conceivable economic system dominated by market relations.
ISSN: 1076-156X | Vol. 26 Issue 2 | DOI 10.5195/JWSR.2020.977 | jwsr.pitt.edu Journal of World-System Research | Vol. 26 Issue 2 | Li 289
The Anthropocene refers to the Earth’s most recent geologic period in which geochemical, biological, atmospheric, and other earth system processes have been transformed by significant human impact (Waters et al. 2016). Although significant human impact began about eight thousand years ago when agricultural civilizations emerged, massive and fundamentally unsustainable human impact has taken place only during the modern capitalist era. The capitalist world system is based on the pursuit of endless accumulation of capital. Statistically, this is reflected by economic growth at exponential rates. Modern economic growth has been based on the massive consumption of fossil fuels, which lead to the emissions of greenhouse gases as well as anthropogenic climate change which is threatening the human civilization with existential risks.
To prevent catastrophic consequences, it is necessary to limit global warming to not more than 2 degrees Celsius relative to the pre-industrial time. A global emissions budget (allowance for future carbon dioxide emissions) can be defined based on the historical relationship between cumulative carbon dioxide emissions and observed global average surface temperatures. However, the required decline of emissions may not be compatible with continuing growth of the global economy during the rest of the 21st century, which is a necessary condition for the stability of the capitalist world system.
Moreover, interstate competition is a necessary political condition for the operation of the capitalist world system. For global emissions reduction to take place, it is necessary to divide up the global emissions budget between the competing national states. This paper considers two plausible emissions distribution principles: inertia and equity. Under the inertia principle, each country is entitled to a share of the global emissions budget that equals its current share in global emissions. Under the equity principle, each county is entitled to a share of the global emissions budget that equals its current share in global population. The entire world is divided into three large geographic areas: China, OECD (countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), and the rest of the world. This paper will demonstrate that neither the inertia principle nor the equity principle can be made compatible with continuing economic growth in all three regions.
The next section briefly summarizes the arguments that Anthropocene has arrived as a new geological era and discusses the potentially catastrophic consequences of the anthropogenic climate change. The third section discusses the capitalist world system and the geographical pattern of carbon dioxide emissions. The fourth section argues that it is no longer possible to limit global warming to not more than 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of this century and it would be a reasonably ambitious objective to limit global warming to not more than 2 degrees Celsius. The section then establishes a global emissions budget associated with the two-degree objective. The fifth section considers three large regions of the world (China, OECD, and the rest of the world) and evaluates the implications of emissions budgets under the inertia principle and the equity principle for the three regions. Neither the inertia principle nor the equity principle can be made compatible with continuing economic growth in all three regions. The sixth section considers the possibility for accelerated technological progress to achieve climate stabilization without sacrificing economic growth. Despite optimistic assumptions about future potentials of emissions intensity decline, emissions budgets consistent with less than two-degree global warming remain incompatible with continuing economic growth in some regions. The seventh section discusses strategies for climate stabilization in the context of the structural crisis of the capitalist world system. It argues that “de-growth” is a necessary condition for both climate stabilization and ecological sustainability. Neither capitalism nor market socialism is likely to deliver zero or negative economic growth required for climate stabilization.
Anthropocene and the Impending Climate Catastrophe
A growing number of geologists are currently proposing that the earth system has entered into a new geological epoch that should be named as “Anthropocene” in which the humans are altering the long-term global geologic processes at increasing rate. While some propose an “early Anthropocene” that began with the spread of agriculture and deforestation, others recognize that the most dramatic change has taken place since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution around 1800. Modern industry has created and disseminated globally novel materials such as aluminum, concrete, and plastics. Residues from various chemical products have changed the geochemical signatures in sediments and ice. Soil nitrogen and phosphorus inventories have doubled in the past century. About 50 percent of the earth’s land\ surface has been transformed for human use. Biological extinction rates since 1500 have been far above the background per-million-year extinction rates. Global sea level is now rising at a rate of about 3 millimeters per year and is already higher than at any point during the past 115,000 years. The combination of these developments suggests that humans have already changed the earth system sufficiently to produce a stratigraphic signature that is distinct from the Holocene epoch (the last geological epoch that began about 11,700 years ago) (Waters et al. 2016). In May 2019, the Anthropocene Working Group of the International Commission on Stratigraphy under the International Union of Geological Sciences voted to make a formal proposal to the International Commission on Stratigraphy that Anthropocene should be treated as a formal chrono-stratigraphic unit (SQS 2019).
Among the various anthropogenic changes (environmental changes caused by human activity) that have taken place over the past two hundred years, anthropogenic climate change is one of the most important in the sense that uncontrolled climate change poses existential risks to human civilization. While this paper focuses on climate change and its implications for global emissions budget and the capitalist world system, I fully recognize that anthropogenic climate change is only one aspect of various interacting physical, chemical, biological, and human processes currently taking place in our planet. Climate change is only one dimension of the multi dimensional challenges brought about by the Anthropocene and success in climate stabilization by itself does not automatically lead to successful management of other environmental damages caused by anthropogenic geochemical changes (Thomas 2019).
Modern economic growth has been based on the massive consumption of fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas). The combustion of fossil fuels and other industrial processes result in emissions of greenhouse gases (such as carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and various minor gases). Carbon dioxide is the most important greenhouse gas, currently accounting for about 66 percent of the global radiative forcing from all greenhouse gases (NOAA 2019a).
Figure 1 shows the global economic output (gross world product in constant 2011 international dollars) in comparison with global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels combustion from 1820 to 2018.
Sources: Gross world product from 1990 to 2018 in constant 2011 international dollars is from World Bank (2019), linked to world GDP in constant 1990 international dollars from 1820 to 1990 from Maddison (2010). World carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels combustion from 1820 to 1964 is from Boden, Marland, and Andres (2017). World carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels combustion from 1965 to 2018 is from BP (2019).
Historically, world economic growth has been closely correlated with carbon dioxide \ emissions. From 1870 to 2018, gross world product grew from 1.9 trillion dollars to 121 trillion dollars or by 62.4 times; during the same period, world carbon dioxide emissions grew from about 540 million metric tons to 33.9 billion metric tons or by 62.9 times. Although emissions growth has slowed in recent years, the emission levels are now far above what are absorbed by oceans and terrestrial ecological systems and about one-half of the annual emissions ends up in the atmosphere (Hansen 2019, Figure 16).
Figure 2 shows the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide over the past one thousand years in comparison with global average surface temperature based on the modern record (1880-2018). Global average surface temperature is shown as the difference between the annual average temperature and the average temperature from 1880 to 1920 (known as “global average temperature anomaly”). The average temperature from 1880 to 1920 is used as a proxy for the pre-industrial global temperature (Hansen and Sato 2016).
Sources: Atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide from AD 1000 to 1958 is from EPI (2015). Atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide from 1959 to 2018 is from NOAA (2019b). Global average temperature anomaly from 1880 to 2018 is from NASA (2019).
In the late Holocene period, atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide was very stable. It stayed around 280 parts per million (ppm) until the early 19th century. Since then, atmospheric carbon dioxide has grown at accelerating rates. In recent years, atmospheric carbon dioxide has grown at an average annual rate of 2.3 ppm. It reached 409 ppm in 2018. If this growth rate is continued, atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide will exceed 450 ppm in 18 years and exceed 550 ppm in 61 years. In the modern period, global average temperature has followed closely the growth of atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide. In 2016, global average temperature reached 1.28 degrees Celsius higher than the 1880-1920 average. This is the highest global average temperature in the modern record. For the period 2009-2018, ten-year average global temperature was 1.04 degrees Celsius higher than the 1880-1920 average.
If global warming rises to more than 2 degrees Celsius relative to the pre-industrial time, West Antarctica ice sheets may disintegrate causing sea level to rise by 5-9 meters over the next 50-200 years. Bangladesh, European lowlands, the U.S. eastern coast, North China plains, and many coastal cities will be submerged (Hansen et al. 2016). If global warming rises to more than 3 degrees Celsius relative to the pre-industrial time, global sea level may rise by 25 meters and world food supplies would be critically endangered; rising sea level, famine, and drought could turn billions into environmental refugees. Moreover, global warming by more than three degrees may lead to uncontrolled climate feedbacks leading to runaway global warming. For example, Amazon rainforest may degenerate into savanna releasing massive amounts of carbon dioxide which alone could generate 1.5 degrees Celsius of additional warming (Spratt and Sutton 2008: 29-31). Hansen (2007: 140-171) argued that, through various long-term climate feedbacks, a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide (a doubling of atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide from the pre-industrial level would approximately be 550 ppm) would eventually lead to global warming by 6 degrees Celsius and a world nearly free of ice sheets with sea level 75 meters higher than today.
A human body cannot survive in an environment with “wet-bulb temperature” (the temperature with 100 percent humidity) at 35 degrees Celsius or above for more than a few hours without suffering from metabolic failure (Sherwood and Huber 2010). For people who have to do outside work exposed to the sun, the practical tolerance limit is likely to be significantly lower. Currently about 60 percent of the world population lives in areas where the annual maximum wet-bulb temperature is 26 degrees Celsius or above and the highest instantaneous wet-bulb temperature anywhere on earth is about 30 degrees Celsius. Global warming by more than 6 degrees Celsius would turn a part of the earth surface literally unsuitable for human inhabitation and impose hitherto unknown heat stress to more than one half of the world population. To understand how the world has arrived at such a turning point where the very survival of human civilization is at stake, it is necessary to examine the socio-economic system in which we live – the system of capitalism.
The Capitalist World System and Carbon Dioxide Emissions
Sustained and exponential economic growth is a distinct feature of the modern capitalist system. While all class societies have been based on the appropriation of the surplus product by a ruling class that accounts for a small fraction of the total population, capitalism is unique in its tendency to use a relatively large portion of the surplus product for accumulation of capital or the expansion of the society’s material production capacity. The regular reinvestment of a large portion of the surplus product for accumulation has led to exponential growth of material production and consumption, statistically reflected by economic growth.
Immanuel Wallerstein defined capitalism as the historical system driven by the pursuit of “endless accumulation of capital” (Wallerstein 2007: 24). The necessary political condition for “endless accumulation of capital” is a world system that consists of multiple political structures (rather than dominated by a single political structure). Interstate competition forces the “national states” to compete for the mobile capital controlled by the capitalists and provides motivation for the states to undertake and promote capitalist accumulation (Arrighi, Hui, Hung, and Selden 2003: 266-268; 276-281).
Moreover, within each capitalist state, allocation of productive resources is dominated by market relations. Market competition forces each capitalist to use a large portion of the surplus value to accumulate capital and pursue “expanded reproduction.” Those capitalists that fail to accumulate capital and expand production successfully may become bankrupt and cease to function as capitalists (Marx [1867] 1967: 554-561). According to the world system theoretical framework, states within the capitalist world system are divided into three structural layers: the core, the semi-periphery, and the periphery. While the core states specialize in monopolistic, high-profit activities; the peripheral states specialize in highly competitive, low-profit activities. Semi-periphery plays an indispensable role in the system by serving as the politically stabilizing “middle stratum” and the preferred location to receive obsolete industries relocated from the core during times of crisis (Wallerstein 1979: 18-23; 69-71). However, there has not been a set of uniformly accepted empirical definitions of the three structural layers. The various country groups defined by mainstream international organizations (such as the World Bank) either fail to match the three structural layers conceptualized by the world system approach or, at best, can provide no more than an imperfect proxy.
Empirical studies on geographical patterns of environmental impact often use various measures that divide the capitalist world system into different groups of “developed” and “less developed” countries. For example, in their study on whether there has been “decoupling” between economic growth and environmental impact, Jorgensen and Clark (2012) defined “developed countries” as those in the upper quartile of the World Bank’s income classification of nations. In a study on the relationship between renewable energy consumption and economic growth, Thombs (2017) divided the countries in the world into four groups: high income, upper-middle income, lower-middle income, and low income.
This paper is mainly concerned with the relationship between the capitalist world system and carbon dioxide emissions. What is clear is that the more “developed” capitalist countries have been responsible for most of the historical carbon dioxide emissions. From 1751 to 2018, the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, and Japan accounted for 24.8 percent, 5.6 percent, 4.8 percent, and 3.9 percent of the world’s total cumulative emissions respectively. In addition, “Rest of Europe” (excluding Russia) accounted for 16.2 percent, and Canada and Australia accounted for 3 percent. Therefore, total historical emissions by the developed capitalist countries accounted for about 58 percent of the cumulative carbon dioxide emissions that have taken place since the Industrial Revolution (Hansen 2019, Figure 27). In mainstream economic studies, developed capitalist countries are often represented by the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) described as a “club of rich countries” (Buttonwood 2017; Davis 2016; Noble 2019). OECD includes all “high-income economies” defined by the World Bank except high-income small islands, a few city states, and high-income oil exporters (OECD 2020; World Bank 2020). Using OECD countries in empirical studies has the benefit that the definition of this country group is consistent across different economic and energy statistical reports. In recent years, carbon dioxide emissions from the OECD countries have declined but continue to account for a large part of the world’s total emissions. In 2018, OECD countries accounted for 36.6 percent of the world’s total carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels consumption (BP 2019).
On the other hand, in recent years, China has emerged as the world’s largest carbon dioxide emitter. In 2018, China alone accounted for 27.8 percent of the world’s total carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels consumption (BP 2019). Thus, China and the OECD countries together now account for about 64 percent of the world’s total emissions. It is obvious that any global effort towards climate stabilization cannot succeed without active and serious participation by both China and the OECD countries.
Global Emissions Budget
According to the Fifth Assessment Report by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, cumulative total emissions of carbon dioxide and global mean surface temperature have been approximately linearly related and future global warming will be largely determined by the range of cumulative carbon dioxide emissions (IPCC 2013: 27).
Figure 3 shows the relationship between global cumulative carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels combustion since 1750 and the ten-year trailing average global surface temperature from 1880-89 to 2009-18. Global average surface temperature is shown as the difference between the annual average temperature and the average temperature from 1880 to 1920. The average temperature from 1880 to 1920 is used as a proxy for the pre-industrial global temperature (Hanse and Sato 2016). Ten-year trailing averages are used to smooth out short-term fluctuations
Sources: World carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels combustion from 1750 to 1964 is from Boden, Marland, and Andres (2017). World carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels combustion from 1965 to 2018 is from BP (2019). Global average temperature anomaly from 1880 to 2018 is from NASA (2019). In Figure 3, the linear trend fits the historical observations very well (regression R-square is 0.94). The linear trend implies that for each increase in cumulative carbon dioxide emissions by one trillion metric tons, global average temperature tends to rise by 0.68 degrees Celsius.
Global average temperature over the period 2009-2018 is 1.04 degrees Celsius higher than the pre-industrial time. If the global objective is to limit global warming by the end of the 21st century to not more than 3 degrees Celsius, the additional warming that can be allowed for between 2018 and 2100 would be 1.96 degrees Celsius and the implied global emissions budget (allowance for future carbon dioxide emissions) during 2019-2100 would be 2.88 trillion metric tons (based on the statistical relationship shown in Figure 3, 1.96/0.68 = 2.88). However, global warming by more than 3 degrees Celsius will lead to global sea level rise by 25 meters over the coming centuries and it carries the substantial risk of runaway global warming which will probably bring the civilization as we know it to an end.
According to the Paris Climate Agreement signed by 195 United Nations member countries in December 2015, the signatory countries officially undertook to keep “a global temperature rise this century well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 degrees Celsius” (UNFCCC 2019). If the world would actually be committed to the objective to limit global warming by the end of this century to not more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, the additional warming that can be allowed for between 2018 and 2100 would be only 0.46 degrees Celsius and the remaining global emissions budget during 2019-2100 would be about 680 billion metric tons. The global carbon dioxide emissions in 2018 were about 34 billion metric tons. Therefore, the remaining global emissions budget required for 1.5 degrees warming would be completely used up in twenty years if the world were to keep generating emissions at the same rate as in 2018. For all practical purposes, it is no longer realistic to expect global warming to be limited to not more than 1.5 degrees Celsius. In fact, despite the grand objective announced by the Paris Climate Agreement, the combination of the national “pledges and targets” regarding their intended emissions reduction is currently consistent with global warming by 2.9 degrees Celsius by the end of this century (Climate Action Tracker 2019).
This paper assumes that a reasonably ambitious objective is to limit global warming by the end of this century to not more than 2 degrees Celsius relative to the pre-industrial time. Such an objective will not be able to prevent all aspects of dangerous climate change (for example, global sea level will rise by at least several meters if global warming reaches two degrees). Moreover, such an objective does not rule out the possibility of further global warming in the 22nd century and beyond. Global warming by two degrees by the end of this century roughly corresponds to the upper range of the scenario of RCP 2.6 (RCP stands for “representative concentrated pathways”) (IPCC 2014: 13). Such a scenario implies atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide equivalent (including carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases) rising to 550 ppm by 2100. This would represent a doubling of atmospheric greenhouse gases compared to the pre-industrial level and if this level is sustained, the long-term global warming over the course of coming centuries and millennia will be at least 3 degrees Celsius and could rise to 6 degrees or more when various long-term climate feedbacks are taken into account (Hansen 2007: 140-171).
Nevertheless, the two-degree objective is “reasonable” in the sense that it will at least substantially reduce the risk of runaway global warming in the next one or two centuries and, as a result, buy the humanity the necessary time to adapt and develop new technologies to reverse global warming in the coming centuries (perhaps through a global effort to extract and store carbon dioxide from the atmosphere on a massive scale). On the other hand, the objective would still be “ambitious” in the sense that, most likely, it cannot be accomplished under the existing capitalist world system. If the global objective is to limit global warming by the end of this century to not more than 2 degrees Celsius, the additional warming that can be allowed for between 2018 and 2100 would be 0.96 degrees Celsius. Based on the statistical relationship shown in Figure 3 and described above (for each increase in cumulative carbon dioxide emissions by one trillion metric tons, global average temperature tends to rise by 0.68 degrees Celsius), the remaining global emissions budget during 2019-2100 would be about 1.41 trillion metric tons (0.96/0.68 = 1.41). This is the global emissions budget I will use for the rest of the paper. As is explained above, global warming by two degrees roughly corresponds to the upper range of the IPCC scenario of RCP 2.6 (IPCC 2014: 13). According to IPCC (2013: 27), the cumulative carbon dioxide emissions from 2012 to 2100 consistent with the various pathways under RCP 2.6 range from 510 billion metric tons to 1.5 trillion metric tons. Therefore, the global emissions budget used in this paper is consistent with the upper end of the cumulative emissions allowed for under the IPCC scenario of RCP 2.6. Compared to the IPCC scenario, the global emissions budget used in this paper is based on updated data and is calculated using carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels consumption only. Data for carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels consumption are considered to be the most reliable among all types of greenhouse gas emissions data (Hansen 2007: 118-120).
The future global carbon dioxide emissions pathway can be derived from the global emissions budget. If the global carbon dioxide emissions were to begin declining in 2019 and decline at a uniform annual rate between 2019 and 2100, global emissions need to decline by 1.85 percent each year in order to stay within the global emissions budget of 1.41 trillion metric tons. Any delay in the beginning of emissions decline would make the required decline rates higher for later years. The emissions intensity of GDP is defined as the ratio of carbon dioxide emissions over real gross domestic product (GDP in constant prices or corrected for inflation). Therefore, real GDP equals carbon dioxide emissions divided by emissions intensity of GDP:
Real GDP = Carbon Dioxide Emissions / Emissions Intensity of GDP (1) The above formula, in growth rate format, can be approximated as: Economic Growth Rate (real GDP growth rate) ≈ Emissions Growth Rate – Emissions Intensity of GDP Growth Rate (2)
Since the decline rate of emissions intensity of GDP is negative growth rate of emissions intensity of GDP, therefore approximate equation (2) can be re-written as: Economic Growth Rate ≈ Emissions Growth Rate + Emissions Intensity of GDP Decline Rate (3)
Similarly, as the decline rate of carbon dioxide emissions is negative growth rate of emissions, approximate equation (3) can also be written as: Economic Growth Rate ≈ Emissions Intensity of GDP Decline Rate – Emissions Decline Rate (4)
From 1990 to 2018, world GDP grew at an average annual rate of 3.4 percent and world carbon dioxide emissions grew at an average annual rate of 1.67 percent. The global economy’s average emissions intensity of GDP thus fell at an average annual rate of 1.67 percent from 1990 to 2018 (note that, mathematically, the sum of the growth rate of carbon dioxide emissions and the decline rate of emissions intensity of GDP is only approximately equal to the economic growth rate; the precise mathematical calculation is not elaborated here for simplicity). Data for world GDP and carbon dioxide emissions are from World Bank (2019) and BP (2019) respectively (world GDP is measured by constant 2011 international dollars).
Therefore, if the global economy’s average emissions intensity continues to decline according to its historical trend (with a decline rate of 1.67 percent) and the world carbon dioxide emissions were to decline by 1.85 percent each year (required by the global emissions budget consistent with global warming by less than two degrees), world economy will have to contract by 0.18 percent each year (see the approximate equation 4 above). As the world population is still growing at about 1.1 percent a year, a decline of world economy by near 0.2 percent a year would translate into a decline of world average per capita GDP by near 1.3 percent each year. Historically, global capitalist economy has needed a certain level of economic growth rate to remain economically and politically stable. During 1913-1950, a historical period that included two world wars and the Great Depression, the world economy as a whole actually managed to grow at an average annual rate of 1.8 percent (Maddison 2010). Since 1950, global economic growth rate has rarely fallen below 2 percent. It is difficult to imagine that the capitalist world system can remain stable if the world average per capita GDP is in constant decline. Moreover, in a world system based on interstate competition, there is not a world government to implement and enforce the global emissions budget. Instead, the global emissions budget has to be divided between and implemented by individual national states.
China, OECD, and the Rest of the World
The capitalist world system includes about two hundred independent national states. In principle, it is possible to conduct a detailed study to evaluate the implications of different emissions budgets for each individual country. However, this paper is mainly interested in demonstrating the political difficulties for reasonable climate stabilization to be achieved within the capitalist world system. For this purpose, it is sufficient to divide the entire world into several large geographical areas and consider the implications of different emissions budgets for economic growth in each of the large regions. In this section, three large geographical areas are considered: China, OECD countries, and the rest of the world. Data for population and GDP for the three large regions are from World Bank (2019). Data for carbon dioxide emissions for the three large regions are from BP (2019). Both the World Bank data and the BP data cover the entire world. China refers to mainland China. OECD countries include all member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The rest of the world’s population is derived by subtracting China’s and the OECD’s population from the world population. Similarly, the rest of the world’s GDP is derived by subtracting China’s and the OECD’s GDP from the world GDP and the rest of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions are derived by subtracting China’s and OECD’s emissions from the world total emissions.
China is currently the world’s largest economy (measured by purchasing power parity) and the largest carbon dioxide emitter, deserving to be considered by itself. In 2018, China alone accounted for 18.3 percent of the world population and 27.8 percent of the world carbon dioxide emissions. The OECD countries includes all “high-income economies” defined by the World Bank except high-income small islands, a few city states, and high-income oil exporters. In 2018, the OECD countries together accounted for 17.2 percent of the world population and 36.6 percent of the world carbon dioxide emissions. The United States alone accounted for 41.5 percent of the total emissions by OECD countries or 15.2 percent of the world total emissions.
This leaves the rest of the world that accounted for 64.5 percent of the world population and 35.6 percent of the world carbon dioxide emissions in 2018. Note the interesting fact that the rest of the world’s share of world emissions is almost exactly the same as the combined share of China and OECD countries in the world population and the rest of the world’s share of world population is almost exactly the same as the combined share of China and OECD countries in the world carbon dioxide emissions. In an earlier study on emissions budget, Peters, Andrew, Solomon, and Friedlingstein (2015) proposed two politically plausible principles to divide up the global emissions budget between countries: the inertia principle and the equity principle. Under the inertia principle, each country is entitled to a share of the global emissions budget that equals its current share in global emissions.
Under the equity principle, each county is entitled to a share of the global emissions budget that equals its current share in global population. The inertia principle favors the “developed” capitalist countries as well as some large carbon dioxide emitters (such as China). By comparison, the equity principle is more favorable for the “developing” countries. In this paper, “developed” capitalist countries can be represented by the OECD countries and “developing” countries can be represented by “the rest of the world.” While other proposals to divide up the global emissions budget are conceivable, any politically plausible scheme for global emissions distribution is likely to fall within the range defined by the inertia principle and the equity principle. As is to be explained below, it is highly unlikely for the rest of the world to find the inertia principle acceptable. Thus, any proposal that divides the global emissions budget in a way that is more favorable for the developed capitalist countries than is proposed by the inertia principle will almost certainly be rejected by the rest of the world. Similarly, it is highly unlikely for the OECD countries to find the equity principle acceptable. Thus, any proposal that divides the global emissions budget in a way that is more favorable for the developing countries than is proposed by the equity principle will almost certainly be rejected by the developed capitalist countries.
As is explained in the previous section, the global emissions budget consistent with global warming by less than 2 degrees Celsius by the end of this century is calculated to be 1.41 trillion metric tons of cumulative carbon dioxide emissions during 2019-2100. Under the inertia principle, China, OECD, and the rest of the world would receive 27.8 percent, 36.6 percent, and 35.6 percent of this budget respectively (based on their share in world carbon dioxide emissions in 2018). China would be entitled to a total emissions budget of 392 billion metric tons, the OECD countries would be entitled to a total emissions budget of 516 billion metric tons, and the rest of the world would be entitled to a total emissions budget of 502 billion metric tons. Each of the three regions would be assigned a budget that is about 42 time of its emissions in 2018.
Under the equity principle, China, OECD, and the rest of the world would receive 18.3 percent, 17.2 percent, and 64.5 percent of the global emissions budget respectively (based on their share in world population in 2018). China would be entitled to a total emissions budget of 258 billion metric tons (about 27 times of China’s emissions in 2018), the OECD countries would be entitled to a total emissions budget of 243 billion metric tons (about 20 times of the OECD countries’ emissions in 2018), and the rest of the world would be entitled to a total emissions budget of 909 billion metric tons (about 75 times of the rest of the world’s emissions in 2018).
Figure 4 compares China’s historical carbon dioxide emissions from 1990 to 2018 and China’s future emission pathways under the inertia principle and the equity principle.
Sources: China’s historical carbon dioxide emissions are from BP (2019).
From 1990 to 2018, China’s GDP grew at an average annual rate of 9.61 percent and China’s carbon dioxide emissions grew at an average annual rate of 5.12 percent. It follows that China’s emissions intensity of GDP declined at an average annual rate of 4.1 percent (on the relationship between economic growth rate, emissions growth rate, and emissions intensity of GDP decline rate, see approximate equation 3 in the previous section).
Under the inertia principle, China’s carbon dioxide emissions should begin to decline in 2019 and decline at a uniform annual rate of 1.85 percent in order to stay within China’s emissions budget of 392 billion metric tons; by 2050, China’s emissions should fall by 45 percent from the 2018 level and by 2100, China’s emissions should fall by 78 percent. Under the equity principle, China’s carbon dioxide emissions should begin to decline in 2019 and decline at a uniform annual rate of 3.31 percent in order to stay within China’s emissions budget of 258 billion metric tons; by 2050, China’s emissions should fall by 66 percent from the 2018 level and by 2100, China’s emissions should fall by 94 percent.
If China were to maintain its historical decline rate of emissions intensity of GDP (4.1 percent), then the economic growth rate consistent with the inertia principle would be 2.17 percent and the economic growth rate consistent with the equity principle would be 0.65 percent (on the relationship between economic growth rate, emissions intensity of GDP decline rate, and emissions decline rate, see approximate equation 4 in the previous section). If China delays emissions reduction for a few more years, it is highly likely that the economic growth rate consistent with China’s emissions budget under the equity principle would be turned into negative.
Figure 5 compares the OECD countries’ historical carbon dioxide emissions from 1990 to 2018 and OECD’s future emission pathways under the inertia principle and the equity principle.
Sources: OECD countries’ historical carbon dioxide emissions are from BP (2019).
OECD’s total emissions peaked at 13.63 billion metric tons in 2007 and declined to 12.31 billion metric tons in 2016. In 2018, OECD’s total emissions recovered to 12.41 billion metric tons. From 1990 to 2018, OECD’s total GDP grew at an average annual rate of 2.16 percent and OECD’s total carbon dioxide emissions grew at an average annual rate of 0.24 percent. It follows that OECD’s emissions intensity of GDP declined at an average annual rate of 1.88 percent.
Under the inertia principle, OECD’s carbon dioxide emissions should begin to decline in 2019 and decline at a uniform annual rate of 1.85 percent in order to stay within OECD’s emissions budget of 516 billion metric tons; by 2050, OECD’s total emissions should fall by 45 percent from the 2018 level and by 2100, total emissions should fall by 78 percent. Under the equity principle, OECD’s carbon dioxide emissions should begin to decline in 2019 and decline at a uniform annual rate of 4.78 percent in order to stay within OECD’s emissions budget of 243 billion metric tons; by 2050, OECD’s total emissions should fall by 79 percent from the 2018 level and by 2100, total emissions should fall by 98 percent.
If the OECD countries were to maintain their historical decline rate of emissions intensity of GDP (1.88 percent), then the economic growth rate consistent with the inertia principle would be 0.03 percent. To be consistent with the equity principle, the OECD economies need to decline by 2.96 percent each year. As no capitalist country can survive permanent absolute economic decline, the equity principle would be absolutely unacceptable for the OECD countries. As the OECD countries currently have an average population growth rate of 0.56 percent, even the economic growth rate under the inertia principle would imply that the OECD’s average per capita GDP needs to decline by about 0.5 percent each year.
Figure 6 compares the rest of the world’ historical carbon dioxide emissions from 1990 to 2018 and the rest of the world’s future emission pathways under the inertia principle and the equity principle.
Sources: Rest of the world’s historical carbon dioxide emissions are from BP (2019).
From 1990 to 2018, the rest of the world’s total GDP grew at an average annual rate of 3.65 percent and the rest of the world’s total carbon dioxide emissions grew at an average annual rate of 1.78 percent. It follows that the rest of the world’s emissions intensity of GDP declined at an average annual rate of 1.8 percent.
Under the inertia principle, the rest of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions should begin to decline in 2019 and decline at a uniform annual rate of 1.85 percent in order to stay within the rest of the world’s emissions budget of 502 billion metric tons; by 2050, the rest of the world’s total emissions should fall by 45 percent from the 2018 level and by 2100, total emissions should fall by 78 percent. If the rest of the world were to maintain its historical decline rate of emissions intensity of GDP (1.8 percent), then the rest of the world’s total economic output needs to decline by 0.05 percent each year to be consistent with the inertia principle. As the rest of the world’s population continues to grow by 1.4 percent a year and many countries have population growth rates greater than 2 percent, the inertia principle would be absolutely unacceptable by the rest of the world.
There are a variety of conceivable emission pathways that can be made compatible with the rest of the world’s emissions budget under the equity principle. I assume that the rest of the world’s future emission pathway under the equity principle will follow a logistic curve, rising in the next two decades before declining at accelerating rates during the second half of the century. This approach allows the rest of the world to maintain economic growth rates similar to their recent growth rates in the next decade or so. Although the rest of the world’s total emissions still need to peak in 2040 and the emissions decline rate needs to gradually accelerate from 0.45 percent per year in 2041-2050 to 3.61 percent per year in 2091-2100. The above analysis makes it clear that neither the inertia principle nor the equity principle can be made compatible with continuing economic growth in all three regions. Only China can have positive economic growth under both the inertia principle and the equity principle (although the economic growth rate consistent with the equity principle is less than 1 percent). While the equity principle is absolutely unacceptable for the OECD countries, the inertia principle is absolutely unacceptable for the rest of the world. This analysis, of course, has not yet taken into account the difficulties that will arise when the emissions budget needs to be further distributed between individual countries of OECD and the rest of the world.
Technology Comes to the Rescue?
The last section assumes that, in the future, emissions intensity of GDP in China, OECD countries, and the rest of the world will decline at the same rates as their historical average rates. If the world is committed to rapid decarbonization and spend more resources on energy efficiency improvement and growth of renewable energies, it is conceivable that emissions intensity of GDP will decline at a more rapid pace. But by how much? Emissions intensity of GDP (the ratio of carbon dioxide emissions over GDP) can be decomposed into emissions intensity of energy (the ratio of carbon dioxide emissions to energy consumption) and energy intensity of GDP (the ratio of energy consumption to GDP): Emissions Intensity GDP = Emissions Intensity of Energy * Energy Intensity of GDP (5)
The above formula, in growth rate format, can be approximated as: Emissions Intensity of GDP Growth Rate≈ Emissions Intensity of Energy Growth Rate + Energy Intensity of GDP Growth Rate (6)
Since the decline rate of a variable is the variable’s negative growth rate, therefore approximate equation (6) can be re-written as: Emissions Intensity of GDP Decline Rate≈ Emissions Intensity of Energy Decline Rate + Energy Intensity of GDP Decline Rate (7)
Let us first consider the future potential of decline of energy intensity of GDP. Lightfoot and Green (2001) and Baski and Green (2007) calculated the long-term potential of world-wide energy efficiency improvement by estimating the physical limits to energy intensity decline within each economic sector and evaluating the impact of a range of plausible economic structural change. Under the most optimistic scenario they calculated, world average energy intensity of GDP is projected to fall by 77 percent from 1990 to 2100, implying an average annual decline rate of 1.34 percent.
From 1990 to 2018, world GDP (measured by purchasing power parity) grew at an average annual rate of 3.4 percent and world primary energy consumption grew at an average annual rate of 1.93 percent (BP 2019). It follows that the world average energy intensity of GDP declined at an average annual rate of 1.42 percent, slightly higher than the long-term decline rate estimated by Baski and Green (2007). However, if world GDP is measured by market exchange rate, the world’ average annual economic growth rate from 1990 to 2018 would be 2.81 percent (World Bank 2019) and the average annual decline rate of energy intensity of GDP would be 0.86 percent, significantly below the long-term decline rate estimated by Baski and Green (2007). Using the estimate made by Baski and Green, I assume that from 2018 to 2100, world average energy intensity of GDP will decline at an annual rate of 1.34 percent. By 2100, world average energy intensity will fall by 67 percent from the 2018 level. Now let us consider the future potential of decline of emissions intensity of energy. From 1990 to 2018, world average emissions intensity of energy declined at an average annual rate of 0.26 percent. By how much can the pace of decarbonization be accelerated in the future? The answer to this question depends, on the one hand, on how rapidly the share of fossil fuels (oil, natural gas, coal) in world energy consumption can be reduced in the future, and on the other hand, on what type of fossil fuels the world will use for the part of energy consumption that cannot be provided by nuclear or renewable energies.
In 1990, fossil fuels accounted for 88 percent of the world primary energy consumption. In 2018, fossil fuels still accounted for 84.7 percent of the world primary energy consumption, nuclear electricity accounted for 4.4 percent, hydro electricity accounted for 6.8 percent, wind and solar electricity accounted for 3 percent, and other renewable electricity accounted for 1 percent (BP 2019). With the exception of biofuels, all commercial nuclear and renewable energies are consumed in the form of electricity. Thus, the share of electricity in the world’s energy consumption will largely set the upper limit to the future expansion of nuclear and renewable energies. To compare electricity with primary energy consumption, electricity needs to be converted into primary energy using a formula known as “thermal equivalent” (that is, how much primary thermal energy it takes to produce a unit of electricity). The BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy assumes that one unit of electrical energy is equivalent to 2.632 units of thermal energy (equivalent to the assumption of 38 percent efficiency of a modern conventional thermal power plant) (BP 2019). Using this assumption, the world electricity generation’s thermal equivalent was 33.3 percent of world primary energy consumption in 1990 and 43.4 percent in 2018. In the past, electrification of world energy has taken place in sectors that can be relatively easily electrified. In the future, further electrification may face serious economic and technical difficulties. In the transportation sector, although passenger transportation on roads may be electrified in the near future, there are major challenges that could prevent electrification of heavy trucks, airplanes, and ships. High-temperature industrial processes and the production of chemical inputs can be electrified in principle. But it has not yet been demonstrated that electrification in these areas can be made economically feasible (Heinberg 2015).
While world-wide electrification has proceeded steadily, electrification appears to have stalled in advanced capitalist countries in recent years. In the United States, the electricity share of primary energy consumption was 44.7 percent in 2010 and declined to 43.9 percent in 2018. In the European Union, the electricity share was 42.8 percent in 2010 and rose slowly to 44.0 percent in 2018. In Japan, the electricity share was 51.8 percent in 2010 and increased slightly to 52.4 percent in 2018 (calculated using data from BP 2019). Despite potential difficulties that may prevent steady progress of electrification in the future, I assume that world-wide electrification will continue to proceed according to its historical pace. From 1990 to 2018, the electricity share of world energy consumption increased at an average annual rate of 0.36 percentage points. If this rate is continued from 2018 to 2100, then by the end of this century, the electricity share of world energy consumption will rise to 72.9 percent.
How much of the future electricity generation will come from nuclear and renewable energies? In recent years, nuclear electricity has stagnated and the growth of renewable electricity is mainly led by wind and solar electricity. But wind and solar are intermittent sources of electric power. They cannot be effectively connected to electric grid without the backup of large-scale storage or fossil fuels. The current large-scale storage technology remains prohibitively expensive (Andrews 2018). In addition, wind and solar electricity has very large land requirements. According to Capellan-Perez, Castro, and Arto (2017), a transition to 100 percent solar energy may be physically unfeasible for most European countries and Japan as the land requirement of solar electricity exceeds all the available land in these countries.
In 2017, an intense debate took place among the world’s top energy experts. Jacobson et al. (2017) proposed a plan to transform the world’s energy infrastructure and build a new electric grid based on 100 percent renewable electricity. Clark et al. (2017) criticized the proposal by Jacobson et al. and argued that while an electricity system that is approximately 80 percent decarbonized may be built with reasonable cost, an electricity system with 100 percent renewable electricity faces formidable and perhaps insurmountable economic and technical difficulties. Goldman School of Public Policy of the University of California Berkeley recently proposed a plan to achieve 90 percent “clean” (carbon-free) electricity by 2035 in the United States (Goldman School of Public Policy 2020). Notwithstanding the controversies concerning the future potential of decarbonization in the electricity sector, it is obvious that 100 percent sets the maximum limit to the extent of decarbonization. I assume that, by 2100, all the world electricity generation will be provided by nuclear or renewable energies. Therefore, about 73 percent of the world energy consumption will be completely decarbonized (because electricity will account for about 73 percent of the world energy consumption by 2100). I further assume that the remaining 27 percent of the world energy consumption will be provided by natural gas, the cleanest type of fossil fuels. That is, oil and coal consumption will be completely eliminated.
In 2018, the world average emissions intensity of energy is 2.44 metric tons of carbon dioxide for each metric ton of oil equivalent (“oil equivalent” is a measure of energy consumption). Each metric ton of oil equivalent of natural gas emits 2.35 metric tons of carbon dioxide (BP 2018). Therefore, if 73 percent of the world’s energy consumption is completely decarbonized and the remaining 27 percent is provided by natural gas, the world’s expected emissions intensity of energy in 2100 can be calculated as: 73% * 0 + 27% * 2.35 = 0.63 metric tons of carbon dioxide for each metric ton of oil equivalent. Therefore, by 2100, the world average emissions intensity of energy is projected to fall by 74 percent from the 2018 level, implying an average annual decline rate of 1.63 percent.
Combining the projected decline rate of energy intensity of GDP (1.34 percent) and the decline rate of emissions intensity of energy (1.63 percent), the world average emissions intensity of GDP will decline at an average annual rate of 2.95 percent from 2018 to 2100 (see approximate equation 7 above). In 2018, the world average emissions intensity of GDP is 0.28 kilograms of emissions per dollar of GDP (world GDP is measured in constant 2011 international dollars). Based on the above assumptions, by 2100 the world average emissions intensity of GDP will fall to 0.024 kilograms of emissions per dollar of GDP or decline by 91.4 percent from the 2018 level. What will happen to the regional emissions intensity of GDP? In 2018, China’s emissions intensity of GDP was 0.418 kilograms per dollar of GDP, the OECD average emissions intensity of GDP was 0.241 kilograms per dollar of GDP, and the rest of the world’s average emissions intensity of GDP was 0.264 kilograms per dollar of GDP. It seems reasonable to assume that the region currently having higher emissions intensity will have more opportunities of technological catch-up and will experience more rapid decline of emissions intensity in the future.
Assuming that the three regions’ emissions intensity of GDP will gradually converge in the future and all regions will have the same emissions intensity of GDP as the world average by 2100, it can be calculated that China’s emissions intensity of GDP will fall by 94.3 percent from 2018 to 2100 (implying an average annual decline rate of 3.43 percent), the OECD average emissions intensity of GDP will fall by 90 percent (implying an average annual decline rate of 2.77 percent), and the rest of the world’s average emissions intensity of GDP will fall by 90.9 percent (implying an average annual decline rate of 2.88 percent). Under the inertia principle, the three regions’ total carbon dioxide emissions should decline by 1.85 percent each year from 2018 to 2100. Using the new decline rates of emissions intensity of GDP calculated above, China’s economic growth rate consistent with the inertia principle would be 1.64 percent, OECD’s economic growth rate consistent with the inertia principle would be 0.95 percent, and the rest of the world’s economic growth rate consistent with the inertia principle would be 1.06 percent (for the relationship between economic growth rate, emissions intensity of GDP decline rate, and emissions decline rate, see the approximate equation 4 in the section on “Global Emissions Budget”). With its population growth rate being 1.4 percent, the rest of the world would still suffer from absolute decline of per capita GDP. The OECD countries’ per capita GDP growth rate would be barely positive.
Under the equity principle, China’s carbon dioxide emissions should decline by 3.31 percent each year and the OECD total emissions should decline by 4.78 percent each year from 2018 to 2100. Using the new decline rates of emissions intensity of GDP, the Chinese economic growth rate consistent with the equity principle would be only 0.12 percent (virtually zero growth) and the OECD economies would have to decline by 2.07 percent each year to be consistent with the equity principle.
Structural Crisis of Capitalism and The Imperative for De-Growth
According to Immanuel Wallerstein, all historical systems have “lives” and capitalism is not an exception (Wallerstein 2007: 76). A historical system operates through various cyclical rhythms that help the system to self-adjust and restore equilibrium. In the capitalist world system, the cyclical rhythms have taken the form of short-term business cycles, half-a-century-long Kondratieff long waves, and multi-century hegemonic cycles. Giovanni Arrighi referred to the last type of cycles as “systemic cycles of accumulation” (Arrighi 1994).
However, each cyclical adjustment results in certain change in the system’s underlying parameters that have generated secular trends. As these secular trends approach their respective asymptotes, the system encounters problems it can no longer resolve within its own framework and the system enters into its structural crisis. The system then bifurcates, opening up the historical space for alternative solutions to the crisis. Wallerstein argued that, because of the secular trends of rising labor cost, environmental cost, and taxation cost, the capitalist world system had entered into its own structural crisis (Wallerstein 2003: 45-68; 2007: 76-90). Using Wallerstein’s concept of “structural crisis of the capitalist world system,” the current trend towards rising greenhouse gas emissions and global warming can be understood as one of the secular trends generated by the underlying laws of motion of the capitalist world system. As a system driven by the pursuit of “endless accumulation of capital,” it produces exponential growth of material production and consumption which in turn requires rising levels of energy consumption. The growth of energy consumption has historically taken the form of rising consumption of fossil fuels with its environmental impact overwhelming the absorptive capacity of the earth’s ecological systems. The previous sections of this paper have argued that the secular trend of global warming has created a crisis of human civilization that can no longer be resolved within the existing framework of the current world system.
According to Wallerstein, during the time of structural crisis, the future of the world is inherently uncertain. We are currently in a global struggle that could lead to either a highly unequal, hierarchical, post-capitalist system or a relatively egalitarian and democratic system (Wallerstein 2007: 89). Assuming that the global struggle in the coming decades can create the necessary political conditions for a global collective effort to achieve reasonable climate stabilization (that is, to limit global warming by the end of this century to not more than 2 degrees Celsius), what strategies should be taken for climate stabilization to be achieved? Obviously, society should mobilize its available resources to achieve decarbonization as rapidly as practically possible and reduce the emissions intensity of GDP at the maximum possible pace. However, unless the economic logic of capitalism is fundamentally transformed, any reduction of emissions intensity of GDP could be largely or even more than offset by economic growth.
The previous sections have established that both the OECD countries and the rest of the world have to accept near zero growth under the inertia principle of global emissions budget distribution and both China and the OECD countries have to accept near zero or negative growth under the equity principle of global emissions budget distribution. Therefore, a necessary condition for global climate stabilization is for a large part of the world (especially China and the OECD countries that have been responsible for most of the carbon dioxide emissions) to accept either zero growth or negative growth. While this paper focuses on climate stabilization, there has been a growing literature on “de-growth” arguing that zero or negative economic growth is a necessary condition not only for climate stabilization but also for ecological sustainability in general (Alier 2009; Hein and Rudelle 2020; Hickle and Kallis 2019; Kallis 2019; Kallis and March 2015; Schor and Jorgensen 2019; Van den Bergh and Kallis 2012). But how can the economic system be restructured to accommodate the demand for zero or negative growth?
To begin with, can the existing capitalist economic system be reformed to be made compatible with the requirements of climate stabilization? The previous sections have already argued that it is highly unlikely that a purely technical solution in the form of rapid reduction of emissions intensity of GDP would be sufficient so long as the capitalist economies continue to pursue positive economic growth. Capitalism is a historical system which distinguishes itself through its tendency towards “endless accumulation of capital.” This tendency derives, on the one hand, from the competition between multiple states in the world system, and on the other hand, from the dominance of market relations within each capitalist economy. While markets have existed through the entire history of human civilization, only capitalism has been characterized by the dominance of “production of commodities” (Marx [1893] 1967: 33). So long as an economy is based on the dominance of market relations, the pressure of market competition would constantly force capitalists to use a large portion of the surplus value at their disposal to accumulate capital and capital accumulation in turn leads to economic growth. Moreover, according to the world system approach, interstate competition forces each state within the capitalist world system to promote capitalist accumulation, reinforcing the system’s overall tendency towards endless accumulation.
In the unlikely event, even if the capitalist state somehow decides to be committed to de-growth and succeeds in limiting economic growth to zero or negative in the capitalist context, it would generate other undesirable consequences. The capitalists may respond to the disappearing of growth opportunities by capital flight or “investment strike” (cessation of not only new investment but also replacement investment needed to maintain existing capital), creating a massive economic crisis. Moreover, if labor productivity continues to rise in a zero-growth capitalist economy, unemployment will keep rising relentlessly creating a socially unsustainable situation (Magdoff and Foster 2011). If capitalism cannot be made compatible with climate stabilization to the extent this requires zero or negative economic growth, can some form of market socialism help to succeed where capitalism has failed?
Historical examples of “market socialism” such as the experiment of “workers’ self-management” in Yugoslavia or the Chinese “socialist market economy” have not provided encouraging evidence. These historical precedents demonstrate that “market socialism” is likely to be inherently unstable. Whatever is the initial structure in a market socialist economy, market competition inevitably generates tendencies towards inequality and concentration of wealth in the hands of a new capitalist class. For the purpose of this paper, it is sufficient to point out that so long as the market is the dominant mechanism of exchange and distribution, it will impose constant pressure on business enterprises (whether these are privately owned, publicly owned, or collectively owned) to accumulate capital and to expand as rapidly as possible. The market works because it rewards the commodity owners that produce more or better at lower cost with higher money income. Therefore, in an economy dominated by market relations, commodity owners are inevitably motivated to use the difference between their revenue and cost (whether you call it “profit” or “surplus value” or not) to either expand production or develop better technologies (that will lead to more production for a given level of inputs). If some commodity owners successfully expand their production and lower their costs (lower costs often help commodity owners to capture a bigger share of market and stimulate more expansion), those who fail to do so will be threatened by lower money income, bankruptcy, or complete elimination by competition. Therefore, eventually, most (if not all) commodity owners will be under constant and intense pressure to pursue capital accumulation and production expansion. This is perhaps one area where neoclassical economists, Marxist political economists, and world system theorists can all agree. Therefore, even if in the unlikely event, we can discover an economic system that is dominated by market relations but does not degenerate into capitalism, as far as capital accumulation and economic growth are concerned, it would still generate essentially the same dynamics as in capitalism.
The human beings have known only two types of institutional arrangement for the purpose of allocation of productive resources in an economy with large-scale division of labor. Society- wide allocation of productive resources can be done either through the market (based on trade or exchange between independent commodity owners) or “planning.” Here, planning refers to any institutional arrangement that allocates productive resources according to decisions made by a “political” institution and the term “political” is defined in its broad sense. To the extent that society-wide planning gives the society as a whole the power to allocate most (if not all) of the productive resources, it presupposes social ownership of the means of production. If an economic system based on the dominance of market relations is unlikely to deliver de-growth required for climate stabilization and ecological sustainability, this leaves the economic system based on society-wide planning as the only conceivable alternative. The conventional critique of the 20th century “socialist economies” based on centralized economic planning was that these economies were hopelessly inefficient because they could not rationally process the massive amount of information required for the operation of a modern economy and could not provide sufficient motivation to individuals without private property. The traditional critique of socialist inefficiency is probably exaggerated as the Soviet economy had outperformed most of the capitalist economies in economic growth for about half a century and the causes of economic stagnation in the 1970s and 1980s were complicated (Allen 2003).
But here the question is no longer about which economic system can most efficiently achieve economic growth. Instead, the question is about which economic system has the best chance to achieve climate stabilization under conditions of zero or negative growth. In this regard, an economic system based on social ownership of the means of production and society-wide planning has the unique advantage in that it allows the society as a whole to have overall control over the society’s surplus product. Therefore, if the necessary political conditions are created and the population is genuinely committed to the objective of climate stabilization (this is of course a big “if”), the society as a whole can use society-wide planning as the economic tool to allocate the surplus product for purposes other than capital accumulation (for example, the surplus product may be used for decarbonization, environmental cleaning, or projects that help to advance the general mental and physical potential of the population). An economic system based on social ownership of the means of production and society-wide planning does not have to mean the complete elimination of market. But it does require the market play a secondary or non-dominant role in the allocation of productive resources.
Conclusion
This paper evaluates the implications of global emissions budget distribution between three large geographical areas (China, OECD countries, and the rest of the world) in the context of Anthropocene and the structural crisis of the capitalist world system. Under neither the inertia principle nor the equity principle, can continuing economic growth be made compatible with requirements of climate stabilization in all three regions. This conclusion does not change significantly when plausible acceleration of emissions intensity reduction in the future is taken into account. To limit global warming to not more than 2 degrees Celsius by the end of this century, at least two of the three large regions need to reorganize their economies to operate with zero or negative growth. Such a reorganization cannot be achieved under a capitalist economic system given the inherent tendency of capitalism towards endless accumulation. Neither is it likely to be achieved under any conceivable economic system dominated by market relations. By comparison, an economic system based on social ownership of the means of production and society-wide planning, may provide the society with the necessary economic tool to achieve de-growth and climate stabilization.
Society-wide planning, by itself, does not guarantee the success of climate stabilization. There are unresolved issues such as what type of world system may replace the capitalist world system. Capitalism has brought about a world system with multiple national states. This raises the question whether interstate competition may force the national states to pursue growth-oriented policy even in a post-capitalist world and how such competition may be eliminated or brought under control through alternative world-system arrangements. In his early works, Wallerstein (1979: 1-36) considered our current historical epoch to be in the transition from the capitalist world system to a future “socialist world-government.” Less promisingly, Arrighi (1994: 355-356) worried that the existing world system could be replaced by a “world-empire.” Although Arrighi also contemplated the possibility of a more egalitarian world “market economy,” de-growth was not a central theme in Arrighi’s writings. It is beyond the task of this paper to resolve these great questions that neither Wallerstein nor Arrighi resolved during their life time. I hope that the paper has at least demonstrated what cannot work for the purpose of climate stabilization and de-growth. Knowing what cannot work should help to limit the range of social experiment with which we want to engage in the future. It is in this sense that a system based on social ownership of the means of production and society-wide planning probably offers the best hope for the humanity.
About the Author: Minqi Li is a professor of economics at the University of Utah. He is the author of The Rise of China and the Demise of the Capitalist World Economy (Pluto 2009), China and the Twenty-first Century Crisis (Pluto 2015), and Profit, Accumulation and Crisis in Capitalism (Routledge 2020).
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Abstract: Cities are rapidly increasing in importance as a major factor shaping the Earth system, and therefore, must take corresponding responsibility. With currently over half the world’s population, cities are supported by resources originating from primarily rural regions often located around the world far distant from the urban loci of use. The sustainability of a city can no longer be considered in isolation from the sustainability of human and natural resources it uses from proximal or distant regions, or the combined resource use and impacts of cities globally. The world’s multiple and complex environmental and social challenges require interconnected solutions and coordinated governance approaches to planetary stewardship. We suggest that a key component of planetary stewardship is a global system of cities that develop sustainable processes and policies in concert with its non-urban areas. The potential for cities to cooperate as a system and with rural connectivity could increase their capacity to effect change and foster stewardship at the planetary scale and also increase their resource security.
Keywords: Urban; Rural; Resources; Sustainability; Planetary stewardship; Global Governance
INTRODUCTION
Human activities now rival or exceed biogeophysical drivers in transforming the planet to the extent that this time in history warrants an epoch of its own, increasingly referred to as ‘‘the Anthropocene’’ (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000; Crutzen 2002; Steffen et al. 2011). Increasing size and urban concentration of world population, coupled with changing lifestyles and associated consumption patterns, have led to unprecedented resource use and waste generation during the twentieth century. This expanding level of demand requires a portfolio of responses that address environmental, social, and economic issues at the planetary scale. The interconnected nature of problems, the multiple scales and rates involved, and the geopolitical constellations make this a formidable yet urgent challenge. Research approaches as well as governance responses to date have focused largely on single issues (e.g., air pollution, population, climate, water, etc.) and on the search for solutions and treaties that often do not match the magnitude of the problems. In contrast, many issues are interconnected, the drivers and effects cross many space and time scales, and encompass environmental and socio-economic dimensions. In addition, political imperatives and difficulties in assigning and quantifying responsibilities have contributed to lack of action and slow progress. Here, we build on and extend previous thinking on earth and planetary stewardship (e.g., Steffen et al. 2004, 2011; Chapin et al. 2011). We define planetary stewardship as the active shaping of trajectories of change on the planet, that integrates across scales from local to global, to enhance the combined sustainability of human well-being and the planet’s ecosystems and non-living resources. To support planetary stewardship a coordinated polycentric governance approach is required that is informed by a deeper understanding of the complex, multi-scalar, and interconnected nature of today’s global environmental challenges. Given the increasing importance of urbanization and concomitant pressure on resources, we contend that one of the necessary elements for achieving stewardship is the sustainability of the emerging global system of cities, including their hinterlands.
In 1800, when the world population hovered around 1000 million people, the only city with more than a million inhabitants was Beijing (Chandler 1987). By 1900, about 16 cities had crossed this threshold, a number that swelled to 200 at the beginning of this millennium. If the trend continues, by 2025 there will be around 600 cities worldwide with populations of a million or more. By 2100, the global population is projected to be 3000 million more than today, with 70–90 % of people living in urban regions (UN 2011). This increase in urban population is projected to be not only from global population increase but also from immigration from rural areas. Currently, more than half of the global population lives in urban areas (UN 2011), although urban areas account for only about 2 % of global land surface (Akbari et al. 2009). These are global centers of production and consumption (Seto et al. 2010). By some accounts, more than 90 % of the world’s gross domestic product (GDP) is produced in urban regions (Gutman 2007). Consequently, urban regions, in both developed and developing countries, use a large amount of energy and other resources (Dhakal 2009). Approximately, 70 % of energy-related carbon emissions, 60 % of residential water use, and 76 % of wood used for industrial purposes is attributed to cities globally (Brown 2001; World Energy Outlook 2008).
GLOBAL FLOWS AND INTERCONNECTED ISSUES
With increasing globalization, materials and energy are drawn in great quantities from all over the world—often from large distances to the primarily urban locus of consumption and waste generation. Such distal flows and dependencies provide a global perspective of the more traditional view of the urban–rural nexus. For example, fish meal is imported from marine ecosystems worldwide to feed shrimps farmed in ponds in Thailand which are then exported to primarily urban global markets (Deutsch et al. 2007). Folke et al. (1997) estimated that people living in 744 large cities worldwide appropriate 25 % of the globally available shelf, coastal, and upwelling areas for their seafood consumption. The connection of urban regions to globally dispersed areas of terrestrial production is illustrated by the global, spatial analysis of the link between plant production required for food, feed, fiber, and bioenergy supply and the location of the consumption of these products (Erb et al. 2009). It is not only land use related to the production but also implications of the water used to produce the food that is of concern. Globally, the volume of virtual water ‘‘embodied’’ in international food trade more than doubled in the period from 1986 to 2007 (Dalin et al. 2012). Studies of the urban metabolism of specific cities have documented the inflows, transformations, and outflows of resources and wastes (e.g., Warren-Rhodes and Koenig 2001; Kennedy et al. 2007). Ecological footprints of cities provide another approach. For example, an ecological footprint analysis of London indicated that around 80 % of food consumed in London is imported from other countries (Best Foot Forward Ltd. 2002 cited in Satterthwaite 2011).
However, the geographic distribution of resource extraction and waste generation by individual cities is not yet available, although insights are provided by analyses of the global reach of resource use by highly urbanized countries such as The Netherlands and Japan. An analysis by Rood et al. (2004) documented the global distribution of land used by The Netherlands (Fig. 1). To supply the food and fiber needs of The Netherlands’ population, required an area four times larger than this small and highly urbanized country. This emphasizes the dependence on rural land and communities in other countries. The distal flows and connections between urban and non-urban regions are an important driver of land-use change (Seto et al. 2012). Some countries and corporations are now even attempting to assure their food and energy security via land lease arrangements in other countries (e.g., in Africa; Mbow 2010), which has impacts on land use as well as potentially negative and positive implications for local livelihoods. As with many issues, land use does not stand alone but rather is interrelated with the use of other resources, including water and nitrogen. This is illustrated by the global analysis of the use of these resources in livestock production and trade (Galloway et al. 2007). For example, the consumption of meat (pork and chicken) in highly urbanized Japan is supported by the use in other countries (e.g., Brazil, USA, China) of over 2 million ha of land mainly for feed crop production, 3500 million m3 of water for irrigation and processing, etc., and 2.2 9 105 metric tons of N fertilizer which contributes to aquatic eutrophication. As the global urban population and its consumption increase, it is not only the sheer physical use of the planet’s resources, primarily from the hinterlands, that is of concern, but also the impacts on society and the environment. These impacts occur at many scales and the critical thresholds in many cases are crossed first at local and regional scales nearer the locus of resource use—with more immediate social and biogeophysical repercussions for regional food supply, water pollution as noted above, migration, social inequality, etc. For example, with increasing urbanization, emigration from rural areas to urban centers may not only erode rural communities but also continue to shift the focus of governments away from rural areas; this can lead to poor governance of the regions which are critical to the successful delivery of resource flows and ecosystem services to urban areas (Stafford Smith and Cribb 2009).
Given the complexity of systemic environmental and social issues now facing us, we should seek solutions that have positive, multiple synergetic effects and which, in combination, address the three dimensions of sustainability: social, economic, and environmental. Air pollution in many urban regions, including increasingly in Asia and Africa, poses major human and environmental health risks. At the same time a number of air pollutants also affect climate. To address the interrelated issues of climate and air pollution, Shindell et al (2012) identified a suite of pollution-control measures. If these were to be implemented simultaneously with ambitious CO2 emission reductions, they suggest that global warming might be limited to \2 “C during the coming 60 years, with substantial direct co-benefits for human health and improved crop productivity. Recent studies suggest that global food supply would need to roughly double by 2050 to meet the food and dietary changes of the primarily (70 %) urban global population (Royal Society of London 2009; Godfray et al. 2010; UN 2011). Doubling global food supply without extensive additional environmental degradation to nonurban areas presents a major challenge (Foley et al. 2011; Tilman et al. 2011). Foley et al. (2011) suggested an approach to double food supply using a combination of measures to decrease the yield gap, decrease waste, and decrease meat consumption primarily in developed countries, while at the same time protecting key carbon sequestering ecosystems, biodiversity, and water quality. International co-operation in the form of technology transfer between rich and poor regions could be a key component of meeting food demands and at the same time reduce environmental degradation (Tilman et al. 2011). Technology transfer resulting in moderate intensification in croplands in under yielding nations could reduce, by 2050, land clearing by 80 %, land use-related GHG emissions by 1 Pg CO2-eq y-1, and N pollution of land and water.
In summary, the sustainability of a city can no longer be thought of in isolation from the combined resource use and impacts of cities globally. Urban areas are supported by human and natural resources often drawn from far distant regions. Multiple cities often draw on the same regions for their resource requirements. Therefore, interconnected solutions and new governance systems that take into account the planet’s limited resources are needed.
Fig. 1. Land use for consumption in the Netherlands in 2000. Areas smaller than 50 000 ha are not shown (modified from Rood et al. 2004)
BRINGING STEWARDSHIP TO PRACTICE
Planetary stewardship must take into account the planet’s limited resources, interconnected issues, increasing urban population, and the reliance of urban areas on rural resources and their communities. Urban and rural are no longer useful boundaries to make with regard to planetary stewardship. It has become clear that urban activities drive much of the global changes we see, whether in energy use, resource depletion, land-use change, etc. Yet, we do not have adequate information on resource flows and their impacts or a conceptual framework for governance that takes into consideration the combined use of resources by cities and their interconnections with rural areas. At local scales efforts have been made to bridge the urban–rural divide and integrate social and ecological systems in regional urban planning (e.g., Alfsen et al. 2011). But how to address the planetary scale challenges. Many recent analyses have questioned the benefits of an exclusive reliance on a single global governance solution for tackling climate change and other environmental and socio-economic challenges (Ostrom et al. 1961; Biermann 2010; Ostrom 2010; Young 2011). The diverse and interconnected issues facing the planet warrant a cross-scalar, multi-agent approach to planetary stewardship. Because urban regions will likely remain key loci of intensive processing of global resources, they must take corresponding responsibility and that responsibility must connect to rural regions. In addition, the sustainability of an individual city must be seen within the context of the combined resource use by cities globally (Fig. 2).
Fig 2. A global system of cities cooperating with rural regions for sustainable management of planetary resources
Collaboration across a global system of cities could and should provide a new component of a framework to manage sustainable resource chains and their impacts (Fig. 2). The geographical and cultural diversity within a system of cities can provide powerful support for creative action (Ernstson et al. 2010; Olsson and Galaz 2012). However, sustainability practices and policies for a global system of cities must consider the urban teleconnections and therefore must be developed with a two-way dialog with distal rural areas. The potential for cities to cooperate as a system and with rural connectivity—as a positive component of the Anthropocene—could not only increase their capacity to effect change and foster stewardship at the planetary scale but also increase their resource security. Cities are already engaging in cooperative partnerships and beginning to take an active role in the management of resources and impacts on the regional or even global scale. For example, complementary to national and international efforts to curb greenhouse gases, initiatives have emerged such as the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group and the World Mayor’s Council on Climate Change. However, additional cooperative partnerships among urban and nonurban places are needed and these must extend to other global environmental issues, and address their interconnections and impacts on our planet. A global system of cities must also operate within a framework of other actors such as national, regional and local governments, multinational corporations, and civil society (Fig. 3).
Fig. 3 A collaboration across a global system of cities and rural areas must operate within a framework of actors at multiple scales
Each of these actors has important roles to play in managing planetary resources. How to move forward given the magnitude and the complexity of the challenge, and insufficient knowledge, tools, and experience? Planetary stewardship of the sort proposed in this article is essentially untested. Experimental case studies that include cities across a range of geographic, development, and cultural settings are an essential first step. In addition, we suggest three priority areas of user-engaged research that are needed to bring planetary stewardship to practice. Co-design, co-production, and analysis of results by scholars, professionals, decision makers, and civil society should be a component in each of these.
Resources: Sustainable solutions require a deeper understanding of the geographic distribution of the planet’s resources, flows, interconnected uses, resultant wastes and stressors, and environmental and social impacts. The response of the social-ecological system to shocks (e.g., hurricanes, earthquakes, severe droughts) must be a component of such studies (Chapin et al. 2011). Studies should be developed within a fuller cost accounting context considering the externalities of rural production and urban use. Building on existing and new knowledge a suite of user-friendly tools that allow analysis of future scenarios of resource use and impacts within a societal context should be developed.
Governance: We need empirical data on, for example, how the growing power and centrality of cities is appropriately connected to rural areas in terms of their empowerment and subsidiarity. This requires research on multi-dimensional networks that encompass different cities as well as the governance units along resource chains. Some specific questions to address include: what can facilitate better coordination between governance units at the same as well as different levels? How can polycentric governance increase resilience while at the same time minimizing the transaction and communication/coordination costs?
Information: Continuously updated information about coupled social-ecological systems is critical to achieve stewardship. Modern information technologies can support a system for monitoring and analysis of planetary conditions and support decision making at all levels. Putting this into practice will require sustainability services—an extension of the concept of the emerging climate services—to provide easy access to the data and analysis tools and a shared knowledge platform for communities of practice. At the same time, experimentation with novel models of governance will generate a pool of experience to draw on depending onthe physical and socio-economic context.
Planetary stewardship that is mindful of society and the planet is the challenge of the Anthropocene. Effective stewardship must consider the multi-scale, interconnected resource chains, and their diverse actors. Urban regions must take an increased responsibility for motivating and implementing solutions that take into account their profound connections with and impacts on the rest of the planet.
Acknowledgments: The text of this article is based on the outcomes of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme workshop on Planetary Stewardship, June 13–15, 2011 in Stockholm, Sweden. Institutional partners were the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, SIDA, and the Stockholm Resilience Center.
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Institute for Interdisciplinary Research into the Anthropocene 