Blog

Joachim H. Spangenberg

Helmholtz Centre for Environment Research

Joachim.Spangenberg@ufz.de
BioRisk 9: 1–37. doi: 10.3897/biorisk.9.6105

Abstract

The anthropocene is the age where human influences are determining the development of the planet’s ecosystems and thus the bio-physical basis of future human civilisations. Today China has become the world’s largest economy and its worst polluter with per capita greenhouse gas emissions surpassing the EU average, the world’s largest consumer of all kinds of resources. Even regarding the aggregate contribution to climate change (historical emission residues included), called the climate debt, China has not yet, but will be most probably climbing the top position rather soon. At the same time China is the world’s largest victim of environmental change, including air and soil pollution, water and land scarcity, biodiversity loss and climate change. Thus not only slowing down the increase but reducing emissions should be a top priority for China, and it is: the government has taken some bold steps. China is the world’s largest investor in renewable energies, has the largest afforestation program, and leads the world in reducing carbon dioxide emission reduction. As the largest polluter it has extraordinary opportunities to improve the global state of the environment – is it the world’s last best hope for establishing a global ecological civilisation? Some implications regarding the Chinese environmental policy are discussed, some strengths highlighted and some weaknesses identified. However, despite their magnitude, the efforts–and in particular their implementation are not yet sufficient. We suggest three additional steps which could help China to begin reducing its climate debt within a couple of decades, define a long term perspective for policy planning and adjust its growth model to the challenges of the anthropocene.

Keywords
China, pollution, climate change, land use, HANPP, biodiversity, ecological debt/climate debt, CO2, methane, politics, Common but differentiated responsibility, Earth System Science, environmental justice

Introduction

Naming a new epoch signals earth system change, i.e. a point in time when (ubiquitous) local change in aggregate has begun changing the global system, ending the previous period in which human civilisation emerged, the Holocene. If the term Anthropocene was originally proposed as “a strategy for getting the public to appreciate the extent to which humans were destroying the world” (B. Smith according to Balter 2013), one might consider the beginning of the anthropocene as the time window when evolutionary adaptability of biodiversity and ecosystems could no longer keep up with human alterations of the environment(s).

Such a threshold would coincide with escalating anthropogenic energy consumption, a peak in the human appropriation of net primary production (Erb et al. 2013, Krausmann et al. 2012), with a quantity of materials mobilised by humans, the anthropogenic material flows, exceeding natural flows (Schmidt-Bleek 1994, Peduzzi 2014), and with other drastic alterations in ecosystems mainly caused by land use intensification, including in agro-ecosystems. As a result, humanity as a whole is exceeding the planetary boundaries, leaving the safe operating space of humankind (Rockström et al. 2009).

Contemporary changes are very fast, often abrupt, as compared to earlier transformations by agricultural practices which have evolved over centuries or even longer periods, and thus have offered opportunities for species and species interactions to co-evolve in cultural landscapes (Settele and Spangenberg 2013). The resulting in managed equilibrium-type systems were mostly of high value for conservation, sustainable production and/or cultural ecosystem services. Consequently, the speed and scale of change destabilise the dynamic equilibria characterising the Holocene, and the Earth system threatens to flip into a new (more or less) stable state less accommodating to human civilisations (Rees 1999). Biodiversity loss and climate change are but the most obvious and pressing symptoms of this process of global environmental change. Thus deceleration of change to gain time for evolution (Settele and Kühn 2009) and preventing breakdowns in ecosystem services (Heong 2009) would be key objectives for future-proofing human civilizations and their biological and agricultural basis in the anthropocene (Settele and Spangenberg 2013).

Section 2 describes in some detail the challenges of the transition to the anthropocene, and the driving forces behind it. Section 3 identifies the most relevant nations, and China as a key driver of the process. However, China is not only a driver, but also a major victim of the process, as illustrated in section 4. This insight is growing rapidly in China itself, and the world’s most populous country and largest economy rather naturally has not only a moral obligation, but also the capabilities to take decisive action, beyond the existing policy measures and the ambitious policy goals already formulated. Thus section 5 asks whether China is our last best hope for stabilising humankind’s survival conditions before crossing severe tipping points of the global ecosystem. Section 6 suggests three strategic options how to turn China, on top of its current efforts, from a climate villain into a climate hero. Section 7 offers a brief outlook.

The challenge of the Anthropocene

Driving Forces

The 1950s mark the beginning of the modern international era, the decade in which the modern internationalised world emerged. This is not only testified by the founding of global institutions like the United Nations Organisation UNO (1947) and the World Bank (1946), but–at least as important–also by the beginning of official bilateral development aid programs following the liberation of many so-called Third World countries from colonisation. Even more important in our context, it was the time of the emergence of modern communication and transport, providing for the first time mass access to telecommunication, television, cars and air transport (for the 19th century globalisation of communication and trade see Standage 1998). Both communication and transportation were conditions for outsourcing and globalising supply chains; together with development aid and foreign direct investment FDI they induced a rapid global spread of information and innovation replication (Fischer-Kowalski and Amman 2001). Globally, industrial and labour cultures began to converge towards a standard developed in the early industrialised countries.

Regarding resource consumption, the 1950s have been described as the great acceleration; a phenomenon that started 20 years earlier in the USA and took hold throughout the industrialised countries, capitalist or socialist, before being transferred to the rest of the world. Economic growth reached unprecedented levels and became the leitmotif not only for the industrialised countries and a yardstick in their competition, but also for their former colonies gaining independence in the 1950s and 1960s. A de-colonising global economy, the East-West competition for more economic growth (in which the socialist block was leading in the 1950s – remember the ‘Sputink Shock’), escalating consumption in the West in the 1960s, a shift from coal to oil in the affluent countries, and the Green Revolution coincided, accelerating the global biological and cultural homogenisation. While the outpacing of evolution followed with a certain delay, its reasons are to be found in this decade and the economic changes it saw emerging in most of the world.

The increasing human impact due to ever faster change had two driving forces–technological progress, increasing wealth and population growth amplified resource consumption, and the internationalisation of exchange, both communication and trade, led to the rapid spread of innovations regardless where in the world they had been developed. In their interplay, they enhanced the speed as much as the scale of change to levels unprecedented in earth history–except for the few global catastrophes caused by massive asteroids hitting the planet. Physically this development was based on the massive expansion of energy consumption and the transition from biomass to fossil fuels, first coal and in the 1950s shifting to oil and later complementing gas. In the early industrialising countries different patterns of fossil fuel use coincide with certain stages of the transformation to an industrial society and with changing trajectories of societal development (Fischer-Kowalski and Amman 2001, Wiedenhofer et al. 2013). Other drivers of change growing simultaneously with fossil fuel use include the exponentially increasing consumption of metallic and mineral resources (Schmidt-Bleek 2008). In particular, the extent of and the changing patterns and growing intensity of land use (Bringezu et al. 2012, Haberl et al. 2009, Spangenberg 2007) played an important role, not least promoted by the green (grain), the blue (fish) and the white (milk) revolution (Spangenberg 1991). It was in particular the combination of escalating resource use and these revolutions and their positive feedback loops which caused, with a time lag, the destabilisation of ecosystems by overburdening their evolutionary and adaptive capabilities. Thus it was not one big decisive change but the confluence of globally dispersed, ubiquitous accelerated local changes, synchronised through ideology, technology, power and finance, that caused a massive qualitative change of the global socio-economic-environmental system as a whole.

Today 15% of the world’s population have successfully completed the transition from an agrarian to an industrial (and now post-industrial) society, in the course exhausting if not destroying the capacity of global CO2 sinks, overburdening the global nitrogen and phosphorous cycles and–worst of all–accelerating the loss of biodiversity by a factor 100 and more (Rockström et al. 2009). On top of this, 60% of the world’s current population are undergoing the same transition from agricultural to industrial societies, so far mainly following the Northern development trajectory. The globalisation of this “normal development paradigm”, from agricultural societies assumed to be poor to presumably affluent industrial societies, was propelled by national elites and international financial institutions. As a result, the number of people in absolute poverty has decreased significantly (while the number of people in plain poverty increased), the majority of them now living in middle income countries. Poverty has become a social group problem rather than a developing country problem, making established development concepts obsolete. The solution can no longer be increasing the wealth of a country, but must include redistribution within countries, usually not only of income but also of assets, depending on the national situation.

Pressures: Biodiversity loss, climate change and the ecological debt

The agricultural revolutions, by increasing growth in line with extraction (harvest) did not significantly change the share of natural primary production appropriated by humankind. Although correlations between HANPP and biodiversity loss have been described at smaller scales (Haberl et al. 2004), increased human appropriation was probably not the cause of the disruptions in ecosystem functioning: species loss has accelerated throughout the globe, while the level of HANPP declined in the industrialised countries and remained rather steady in South East Asia (see Erb et al. 2009 for the global distribution of HANPP and Krausmann et al. 2012 for data from the Philippines). Nonetheless the steady but very high levels of HANPP can be read as indicating a high level of anthropogenic pressures on ecosystems (Haberl 2013). Avoiding an increase in HANPP by increasing external input, however, came at a cost: the global nitrogen and phosphorus cycles were expanded beyond the planetary boundaries (Rockstöm et al. 2009, Krausmann et al. 2012). Intensive, often irrigated agriculture in particular in Asia (Figure 1), together with urbanisation and industrialisation, sent water, energy and mineral consumption skyrocketing, undermined water availability and quality and turned agriculture from a net energy provider into an energy consuming industrial sector. This links the agricultural revolutions to the second major threat to ecosystem stability and sustained ecosystem service provision besides biodiversity loss, which is of course climate change (Rockström et al. 2009). Besides industrialisation and growing consumption, logging, irrigation agriculture, aquaculture and intensive animal husbandry significantly increased the emission of potent greenhouse gases like methane (CH4), laughing gas (nitrous oxide N2O) and carbon dioxide CO2.

The most important greenhouse gas is CO2, responsible for about half of the warming effect, followed by CH4, causing about 20% of global warming and N2O with about 6%. Their dynamics are quite different: while CO2 has an average atmospheric residence time of about 120 years, methane’s residence time is 9-15 years, while its radiative forcing (RF) is 25 times higher than that of CO2, but less than that of N2O (298 times, 114 years). As a result of these differences, the contribution of individual gases (and thus of their emitters) to what has been called the climate debt differs significantly in and between countries. This debt has been defined as the remaining climate change effect of the accumulated historical emissions of a country, taking both the RF and the residence time into account (Martinez Alier 2002, Smith et al. 2013). The climate debt is strongly influenced by recent emissions as they are least subject to the residence limit effect, and is a key component of the broader ecological debt.

Methane concentrations in the atmosphere have reached three times the pre-industrial level of about 600 ppb, and continue to rise. Globally, more than 35% are directly or indirectly caused by cattle breeding and some 15% by other biomass use. About half is caused by leakages in extraction, transport and processing of natural gas, including incomplete combustion during flaring of technically not recoverable gas; data for methane emissions from hydraulic fracturing are not yet available.

2013 is the year in which atmospheric CO2 concentrations crossed the 400 ppm threshold–up from 349 ppm in 1987, the year the Brundtland report was published (and the last year when the annual average CO2 level was less than 350 ppm, the level recommended for stabilizing the Holocene climate) and from 356 ppm 1992, at the time of the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. At the Cancun climate negotiations 2011, the countries of the world agreed to commit to a maximum temperature rise of 2°C above pre-industrial levels, and to consider lowering that maximum to 1.5° in the near future. To give a relatively high certainty of not exceeding 2°C, scientists tend to recommend stabilising greenhouse gas concentrations at about 350 ppm CO2eq by 2050 (IPCC 2014). To achieve this, global GHG emissions have to decline by about 2/3 until 2050, with industrialised countries’ greenhouse gas emissions declining by 4/5 or more to about 2 t/cap*yr. Fossil fuel consumption would have to be reduced accordingly. Even remaining below 2°C does not guarantee avoidance of all significant adverse impacts, but if exceed, they are projected to become much more severe, widespread, and irreversible (for current impacts see EEA 2012); if the current global trend of increasing CO2 emissions continues, cumulative emissions will surpass the 2°C limit within the next couple of decades. The climate system would then be likely to cross more dangerous thresholds that could trigger large-scale catastrophic events (IPCC 2014).

Pursuing a 2:1 chance of limiting global warming to, or below, 2°C above preindustrial levels, limits the world’s “carbon budget” (the maximum permissible emissions) to no more than 1.000 Gt (Giga tonnes, 109 metric tonnes) of carbon to be released into the atmosphere from the beginning of the industrial era to the end of this century, of which 531 Gt had been emitted by 2011. Factoring in other climate pollutants than carbon dioxide brings the overall cumulative budget 200 Gt down from the 1012 tonnes of carbon, leaving just 269 Gt of carbon as the remaining budget–the result of two lost decades (IPCC 2013). The total proven international fossil fuel reserves, 2,860 Gt CO2eq according to the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook (IEA 2013), are a multiple of the permissible extraction. Consequently, to stabilise the environmental conditions of the Holocene, 2/3 to 9/10 of the proven reserves will have to be left in the ground, as “unburnable carbon” (Meinshausen et al. 2009) or “unburnable fuel” (The Economist 2013a). Burning all proven reserves would result in an atmospheric CO2 concentration exceeding 550 ppm (and more if unconventional and so far not economically viable resources were extracted, or new fossil fuels discovered), and to dire consequences. Thus Peak Oil, although threatening, will come too late to rescue us from climate change.

Thus, if governments are determined to implement their climate policies, a focus on efficiency, although important, will not be enough, but capping resource use and subsequently decreasing it will be required. However, this urgent turnaround is hampered by the fact that most of the fossil fuel reserves are owned by governments or state energy firms like Gazprom und Rosneft (Russia), Petrobras (Brazil), Pemex (Mexico), Saudi Aramco (Saudi Arabia), or Sinopec, CNPC und CNOOC (China); they contribute significantly to public revenues, about 2*1011 US$ in the OECD countries and unknown amounts in the emerging economies (Haas 2014). Thus while reserves would be left in the ground if governments took their own policy objectives seriously (The Economist 2013a), economic interests dominate. A similar bias is detectable for private energy companies, representing about a quarter of the world’s fossil reserves: their shareholders and investors expect a return. Markets are valuing companies as if all their reserves would be burned, and investors treat reserves as an indicator of future revenues. They therefore require companies to replace reserves depleted by production, even though this runs afoul of emission-reduction policies. If the reserve replacement ratio of fossil-fuel firms falls below 100%, their shares tumble down: an analysis by the UK HSBC bank found that effective climate policy targeted at a maximum of 2° warming would cut the stock exchange value of Australian mining companies by half. As a consequence, although companies already have far more oil, gas and coal than they need (again, assuming temperatures are not to rise by more than 2°C), the 200 largest listed oil, gas and coal companies, with a market capitalisation of 4*1012 US$ at the end of 2012, spent 6.74*1011 US$ on developing new reserves; ExxonMobil alone planned to spend $3.7*1010 a year on exploration each year 2014-2016 (The Economist 2013a). This is a squandering of financial resources for securing those fossil reserves necessary to propel CO2 emissions above 550 ppm–an intention nobody admits to have, despite investing billions of dollars for it (Haas 2014).

China the culprit–in a global context

Past economic growth in China has been lifting hundreds of millions of people out of absolute poverty, and was the main contribution to reaching the UN Millennium Development Goals MDG at least in some respect. It will make China the world’s largest economy already next year, in terms of purchasing power adjusted GDP. Purchasing power parity PPP is calculated by the International Comparison Programme to make national GDPs comparable despite exchange rate fluctuations and diverging domestic prices, by counting a hair cut or a bus ride as equivalents in all countries. It’s latest report, issued April 30th, 2014, but based on 2011 data, suggests that China will be surpassing the USA by 2015 (The Economist 2014a).

This enormous success has led to a massive increase in resource consumption; China’s industries are consuming 40-45% of the world production of copper, steel, nickel, aluminium and zinc. China today imports half the planet’s tropical logs and raises half of its pigs (The Economist 2013b), with significant environmental and social impacts in China and in the countries of origin. At the same time, the massive growth fuelled an accumulation of wealth not only lifting the poorest out of poverty but also establishing a new class of super-rich, swelling the ranks of the world’s billionaires. Today 358 US$-billionaires, 1/5 of the global total are situated in China (The Economist 2014b).

Air pollution–the most frequent reason of premature death–and water security are amongst the best known environmental pressures in China, together with land devastation by mining and the impacts of intensive agriculture. This, and the logging of forests from the 1970s to the 1990s, contributed to a massive threat to biodiversity in China, a megadiverse biodiversity hotspot. However, as these factors, despite their global relevance, primarily affect China itself, they are discussed in section 3, while in this section the focus is on global effects, in particular climate change.

In total, global emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2)–the main cause of global warming– increased by 3% in 2011 and 1.4% in 2012. According to the 2013 report “Trends in global CO2 emissions”, released by the EU Joint Research Centre JRC and the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL), the top emitters contributing to the global 34.5 billion tonnes of CO2 in 2012 are: China (29% – only a quarter of the emissions is for export production, making China still the biggest emitter if embodied emissions in global trade are factored in), the United States (16%), the European Union (11%), India (6%), the Russian Federation (5%) and Japan (4%). However, in the European Union CO2 emissions dropped by 1.6% in 2012 to 7.4 tonnes per capita (t/cap) while in China (without Taiwan) average emissions of CO2 increased by 3% to 7.3 t/cap. The increase in China, although low by historical standards, was equivalent to two-thirds of the net global CO2 increase in 2012. Between 2000 and 2012, China has accounted for about two thirds of the increase in global CO2 emissions, living through the coal and oil phase of development simultaneously; modern energy sources have surpassed traditional bio-based ones (Haberl et al. 2009, Erb et al. 2009).

As a result, China’s CO2 emissions per capita were comparable to those in the EU and by 2014 most probably have surpassed them, making a reduction of about 70% per capita a necessary longer term objective for both, China and the EU. China’s CO2 emissions per USD Gross Domestic Product (GDP) are almost double those of the EU and United States and similar to those of the Russian Federation (Olivier et al. 2013). The United States remain the second largest emitter of CO2, with 16.4 t/cap, despite a significant decline due to the recession in 2008–2009, high oil prices and an increased share of natural gas from fracking (the methane balance of fracking is so far unknown). Only a few Near East countries such as Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Qatar, and isolated islands like the Falklands/Malvinas have higher emissions per capita (Olivier et al. 2013). Coal is the most important fuel, in China and globally, and the most important source of CO2 (Figure 2).

The strongest short-term economic effects of effective climate policies phasing out hard coal use would be felt by the world’s major coal exporters, which in 2012 were Indonesia with 383 Mt = 32.8%, Australia with 302 Mt = 25.9%, the United States (106 Mt = 9.1%), Russia (103 Mt = 9.1%), Colombia (7.0%) and South Africa (6.2%) (IEA 2013). The longer term impacts on producers would arise due to the foregone income opportunities from mobilising and marketing reserves of hard coal (anthracite, bituminous and sub-bituminous); here China itself would be affected economically, holding the world’s 3rd largest coal reserves. Globally, reserves in 2011 were: USA 207.1 Gt (30.0%), Russia 146.6 Mt (21.2%), China 95.9 Gt (13.9%), India 56.1 Gt (8.1%), Australia 39.2 Gt (7%), and Ukraine 3.9 Gt (4.6%) (end-2011 data, WEC 2013). On the other hand, coal (besides oil) is a major factor in the balance of payments and a burden for the major importers, all of them in Asia (2012: China Mainland 278 Mt and 65 Mt Taiwan, Japan 184 Mt, India 158 Mt, South Korea 126 Mt, and Germany 44 Mt) (IEA 2013). Their national economies including the consumption capabilities of consumers would benefit significantly from saving the money spent on these imports.

The Chinese climate debt looms even larger, and with it the responsibility and the future (at least moral) obligation for compensation, when methane emissions are added to the balance. More specifically, in 2005, the last year for which figures are available (Smith et al. 2013), the USA was responsible for 25.1% of the global climate debt from fossil fuel incineration (net anthropogenic emissions) and China only for 11.1% (Russia: 8.5%, Germany 5.1%, Japan 4.8%), but regarding methane already in 2005 the USA/China relation was the opposite. China’s share in methane climate debt was the world’s largest at 18.4%, while the USA was responsible for 9.6% of the global accumulated methane based climate debt, followed by India (8.2%), Russia (7.4%) and Brazil (5.5%). In total (CO2 plus CH4) the ranking changed little, but the distances between countries were shrinking (which most probably has changed the ranking to the detriment of China now, nine years on). The country shares of the global environmental debt were 18.4% for the USA and 13.8% for China, followed by Russia (8.0%), India 5.3% and Germany (3.5%).

Add to this the greenhouse gas emissions from land use change and forestry (LUCF), and the picture changes again: 16.3% of the total climate debt including all the factors (CO2, CH4 and LUCF) were allocated to the USA in 2005, 13.8% to Europe, 13.4% to China (including Taiwan), and 8.0% to the former Soviet Union (Smith et al. 2013). In the nine years since China has certainly surpassed Europe and most probably caught up with the USA’s climate debt level, as the latest emissions are most effective. As a result, the argument that other countries with a long industrial history have higher aggregate impacts is no longer valid as in 2014 most probably the world’s largest climate debt rests with China, and so does the responsibility for climate impacts around the world. Furthermore, despite its moral plausibility, the argument was not ethically valid from the outset as claiming the same right to pollution means justifying own misbehaviour with others’ misconduct, which is no ethical or moral legitimation at all. Today, however, China is not playing catch-up anymore; it is by now doing more damage to the global ecosphere than any other country, with only 1/4 of its CO2 and hardly any of its CH4 and LUCF emissions resulting from export.

When China started its race to the top, the capacity of the atmosphere was already half consumed by nations which underwent the industrialisation process earlier, and by no means any longer available. This justifies a demand on the early industrialisers to set a precedent in emission reduction, but not for any other country to repeat their mistake and become, in a moral sense, at least as guilty as they are. Any effective international climate protection policy would have to respect the different situations (focus on different greenhouse gases and industrial sectors), but also acknowledge the need for support for countries and regions most affected by structural change due to the phasing out of fossil fuels. Also for a number of countries national climate adaptation and risk reduction strategies may need external support. Early polluters have a moral duty to provide such help as part of their wealthy has been built by exploiting the sources and sinks no longer available to the later arrivals.

China the Victim–glimpses on impacts the anthropocene has for China

Far from claiming to be comprehensive, this section highlights some of the key pollution and environmental degradation problems China is struggling with. The transition from the Holocene to the Anthropocene, of which China is a major driver, is causing significant challenges domestically. Besides being culprit, China is also a victim.

The burden created throughout the development process is rather unevenly distributed in the country; economic, social and environmental development are not in a balance. Provincial improvements in aggregate sustainability indices are in most cases due to the socio-economic development, most often with deterioration or stagnation in the environmental dimension (Hara et al. 2009). Those in between, inland but not distinct border regions, with limited resource endowments and semi-stable environments suffer most in environmental terms, without much economic compensation: they exhibit the highest NPP loss. Coastal areas build wealth from imported resources and technology, border regions generate limited wealth, in between regions have to (over-) exploit their own mineral, fossil and biological resources to generate intermediate levels of wealth (Zhao et al. 2011), not least by exporting them to wealthier, more industrialised provinces (Feng et al. 2013).

Air pollution

The urban air in China has long been known as the world’s worst, but in the latest WHO list of most polluted cities there is no Chinese one amongst the top ten any more–Iran, Pakistan and India have conquered that sad crown. And this is not just because the situation got worse in those countries: the air quality has improved in many Chinese cities (except in spike periods like the one in Beijing 2013) and is now at levels commonplace in Japan in the 1970s and in Germany in the 1950s, and improving further.

Recent studies confirm that Chinese government policy has played an important role in causing the pollution (e.g. by providing free winter heating via the provision of coal for boilers in cities north of the Huai River). Burning coal without environmental protection provisions has greatly increased total suspended particulates in the air, and in particular pollutes the in-door atmosphere (Larson 2010). As a result, Chen et al. (2013) estimate that due to such politically induced pollution the 500 million residents of Northern China lose more than 2.5 billion life years of life expectancy. This is a striking example how a policy introduced for social reasons, but without taking its environmental impacts into account, can turn out to be not only environmentally disastrous, but also be backfiring socially.

An additional source of sod, in particular in the Northern provinces, is the habit to burn left-over material from the harvest (mainly straw) in the fields, at about the same time as domestic heating starts. While returning biomass ad minerals to the soils is in principle recommendable, burning straw in the fields is not necessarily the best way of doing it. The dark clouds over the fields signal not only air pollution, but also a loss of organic carbon from the fields, and potentially damages to the habitats of organisms important for pollination and biological pest control.

Biodiversity

China as one of the megadiverse countries of the world faces particular challenges. For instance, the official Chinese Red List classifies almost 40% of the country’ mammals as threatened. The reasons are manifold, but the development pattern has played a crucial role. As a result of growing urban agglomerations due to population growth and urbanisation, lakes around cities have been degraded or lost, or replaced by artificial ponds with high ornamental but low biological value (Figure 4).

Agricultural intensification contributed to the degradation or destruction of natural ecosystems, a development just like the one in Europe few decades earlier. Natural landscape elements suffered, such as wetlands, meadows, hedge rows and other small scale but biodiversity rich landscape structures (Figure 8). Widespread wetland and peatland degradation caused not only biodiversity loss, but also significant amounts of drying emissions of CO2 and CH4. Agricultural modernisation replaced a rich diversity of traditional cereal and vegetable varieties by a limited number of high yielding but not necessary resilient, fertiliser and pesticide dependent varieties from China’s excellent biotech laboratories. Less fertile areas–if not ploughed–suffer from grassland desertification due to heavy grazing, in particular in Inner Mongolia and Northern Gansu, with significant losses of grassland biodiversity.

Mountain areas suffered most from large-scale logging in Northeast China, Gansu, Sichuan and Quinghai provinces from the 1970s to the 1990s; illegal logging is still a problem. Reforestation programs, the world’s largest, affecting 10-15% of the agricultural area, were sometimes successful, but on other occasions suffered from a lack of economically effective incentives (Bennet 2008). On other occasions the economic orientation of local development plans led to afforestation with fast growing species as resource base for the pulp and paper industry instead of planting locally adapted species and varieties, resulting in low resilience tree plantations rather than healthy forests. This constitutes a problem in particular in the ‘Green Belts’ areas where forests have been planted to stop the encroaching desert (Li et al. 2009). A rather recent stress factor for natural and cultural heritage sites and their often unique biodiversity is the growth in domestic tourism; China is now the world’s biggest tourism market. Its spectacular but vulnerable landscapes, from wetlands at the origin of the Yangtze and the Yellow River via nature reserves (see figure 9) to cultural heritage sites like the rice terraces of Yunnan province, a UNESCO cultural world heritage site, attract tourists but mostly lack a biodiversity-conserving management.

Water

Severe water stress is commonplace in China; the water table in Beijing has fallen by 100–300m within two decades (World Bank 2009). The problem is fuelled by inefficient use on top of an uncomfortable hydrogeological situation: four fifth of the water is in the South, mainly in the Yangtze river basin, while half the population and two thirds of the farmland are located in the much dryer North. Even the massive South-to-North Water Diversion Project, transporting water from the Yangtze to the Yellow River basin, can at best moderate but not solve this problem. Water shortage, increasing climatic variability and land use pressures (plus climate change) makes the deserts grow (Li and Huntsinger 2011). Despite Green Belt plantations, farmland dries out and might lay idle due to a lack of clean water supply, and crop yields are plateauing already (The Economist 2013b).

The widespread loss of wetlands contributed to the loss of 27,000 rivers in China (excluding Taiwan, as in most statistics), nearly half of all those estimated to exist in the 1990s, as detected in the water census published by Chinese authorities on March 26th, 2013. Climate, although likely an important factor (this three year study coincided with a multi-year drought in central and southern China, where dramatic drops in lake levels and a shrinking Yangtze River have been well-documented), experts agree that the problem is largely man-made. Besides land use change, overexploiting ground water for industry and agriculture, and destruction forests causing a rain shortage in the mountain areas for agricultural purposes have been named as reasons (Yan 2013).

The situation is made worse by the massive water pollution, rendering a significant share of the scarce water resources unsuitable for human use (Figure 5). For instance, for a full third of its length, the water of the Yellow River was deemed too polluted to be used in agriculture by the Yellow River Conservancy Commission. Within the urban areas, safe drinking water provision is a serious problem: about half of all urban water supplies are unfit even to wash in, let alone drink. Official statistics also showed that 85% of the length of China’s six biggest river systems consisted of water deemed undrinkable even after treatment. The proportion of polluted groundwater rose from 37% in 2000 to 60% in 2013 (The Economist 2014d).

Land

Land is a precondition for at least three kinds of ecosystem services: provisioning services/sources supply vital material and energy resources such as fossil fuels, water, minerals, fibres and food, regulating services/sinks provide waste absorption, waste water purification, water storage, buffering and regulating capacity, and socio-cultural services/ space provision, in particular for hosting human infrastructures such as settlements, production sites, transport infrastructure, but also gardening, recreation sites and places of worship (Erb et al. 2009). This “Triple S” of sources, sinks and space is currently at risk: at least 36,000 hectares, about 10% of China’s farmland, was found to be contaminated with excessive levels of heavy metals such as cadmium and chemicals in 2006 according to a document authored by the Ministry of Environmental Protection of China (the study became public in 2013; current Figures are not available) (Lin 2013). Long-term industrial pollution has resulted in the accumulation of agricultural chemicals, heavy metals, and non-biodegradable organic pollutants in the soils, with most of the pollution occurring in more economically developed regions. In some cities in southern China, half of the farmland was found to be polluted with toxic heavy metals such as cadmium, arsenic, and mercury, as well as petroleum-based compounds. In the Yangtze River Delta, 10 percent of the sampled farmland was found to be no longer suitable for growing crops, because of heavy metal pollution. As a result, 12 million tons of crops harvested in China each year were contaminated, which translates into 20,000 million yuan (2.300 million €) of economic losses every year (Lin 2013).

Furthermore, with economic growth land use for other purposes than agriculture is increasing, as the possibilities for decoupling land use from economic development are limited (Xue 2012a), national legislation was not implemented, land speculation was rife, fuelled by misuse of local power positions and widely spread corruption, with severe effects on local lifelihoods and food production capacities. One reason is the growth of urban agglomerations (Figure 6), another the fact that cities are historically often located on the most productive land (unlike protected areas which are located on land of average productivity) (O’Neill and Abson 2009). While conservation (reforestation) has had positive effects on water retention and reduced erosion, it reduced further the agricultural area. These factors combine with climate change, to the end that Chinese food security is at risk (Wei et al. 2009). Land use change, in particular sealing soil for settlements and soil pollution, also contributes to the loss of other ecosystem services beyond harvest, the provisioning service. Regulatory and socio-cultural services are affected, but damages so far not quantified.

One economically rather marginal, but socially/culturally relevant and environmentally highly important activity is herding in Western and Northern China, an area with relatively low NPP and resource endowments, and a comparably low development standard (Zhao et al. 2011). With about 400 million hectares China has the second largest area of natural grassland in the world. Steppe degradation is a major ecological and economic problem, in particular in the Inner Mongolia steppe region, including the Inner Mongolia province and its neighbours from Gansu via Northern Shanxi and Shaanxi to Heilongjiang (Figure 7), because it reduces grassland productivity and leads to desertification (Tong et al. 2004).

The change in herding practices, from a low-impact land use based on migratory herding, well suited for marginal soils and harsh climates, to a settlement-based way of living, keeping the animals in stables for several months and lorrying them to their up-mountain grazing grounds has severe consequences for culture, lifestyle, social cohesion and not least the fragile environment. As the herds are no longer migrating from summer to winter grazing places, the distance they cover on their hoofs (i.e. not being transported to another grazing place by lorries) and thus the area of land they graze has significantly declined, enhancing the use intensity on the area actually used (for the effects of herd composition changes induced by China in the neighbouring Mongolian steppe see Spangenberg et al. 2014). This is probably one of the main factors of ongoing destruction of top soil and subsequent erosion (Akiyama et al. 2012). Maps underline that large-scale patterns of steppe degradation were related to land use types, with climatic variations playing a minor role (Tong et al. 2004).

Take for instance Quianshan as an example. It was home to about 100,000 sheep in 2012, up from 40,000 in 1995, with the number still growing as market demand kept increasing the prices. In the region already ~90% of the steppe is damaged by excessive grazing, rural development and climate change (Cui 2012). The Chinese government has sought a solution in enforcing strict boundaries for 60% of the land exempt from grazing (including fencing). Economic compensation is paid for those prevented from using it, and financial incentives have been offered to limit the size of herds (however, they are not effective as the price of sheep continues rising with rising demand and limited supply) (Li and Huntsinger 2011). Local complaints are mounting as fencing is against all cultural traditions of the ethnic minority population affected. The restriction of grazing and migration areas has caused tensions; even a rise in crime is expected. Already now livestock theft is commonplace and hard to control with free running herds (Cui 2012). The traditional lifestyle with be finally terminated with new housing and herds kept in stables with feed and fodder imported from outside the region as it has already been practiced for instance in the Gansu province, creating deprived settlements of disrupted communities and thus a potential source of future social unrest.

Climate change

If by 2100 global average temperatures rise by 2.1°C (range 1.4–3.1°C), with atmospheric CO2eq concentrations around 450 ppm, the impact of this still optimistic scenario includes major threats, such as the begin of irreversible melting of the Greenland ice sheet, subsequently (in the 22nd century) increasing global sea levels by about 7 m, affecting China’s richest provinces, economic hubs and harbour cities, and hundreds of millions of people, directly and indirectly (O’Hara 2009). As in China more people live at sea level than in any other country, Chinese climate policy must do both, contribute to minimising global climate change and provide pre-emptive adaption strategies to these challenges. A likely decrease of precipitation in already dry areas by 20-30% poses a risk for Northern and Western China, the expected major drop of crop yields in tropical regions would affect China’s South, and additional 15% to 40% of species could be facing extinction all over the country.

Social sustainability

There has been growing concern over the sustainability of China’s economic growth. The Chinese economy is strongly dependent on investment and exports (a quarter of the CO2 emissions is from export goods production), a pattern that has become increasingly economically unsustainable. The dependence on investment and exports results from insufficient household consumption, which, in turn, reflects rising income inequality and improving but still limited provision of social welfare–a problem of social sustainability. As the economy has been fuelled by public investment into infrastructure and productive capacity, investment into environmental protection had been neglected for decades. In this sense, the economic growth happened at the expense of the environment, and the investment not made earlier already causes significant macroeconomic cost, which will most probably increase rapidly over the next couple of decades.

After the early years, China’s development has been built on industrial development in a model of unbalanced growth. This has left the rural areas trailing urban areas in development. Rural residents earn less than urban residents, have inferior physical infrastructure, and suffer from poor basic amenities. These disparities have contributed to the extensive rural-urban migration. This migration, by leaving residences unoccupied, and depriving the country side of workforce and investment opportunities, has exacerbated inefficiencies in rural land use. However, while reducing inefficiency is an important policy objective in its own right, the current approach by the government suffers from major deficiencies. There exists a link between the relative impoverishment of Chinese peasants, due to declining agricultural prices, amplifying the flow of rural-urban migration, its depressive effect on industrial wages as rural migrants do not enjoy the same rights as registered citizens, the resulting increase in the profits’ share of the total surplus, and rising top incomes. The enrichment of urban top income households drives the increase in the urban-rural gap and fuels the resulting tensions, while labour’s loss of shares of national income ultimately accounts for the overall increase in the Gini index and is a potential source of social unrest.

Institutional challenges

Balancing the relations of nature, society and leadership was at the core of the “harmonious development” promoted by the Communist Party during the last decade. This multiple balancing approach, the Chinese version of sustainable development, has deep roots in the Chinese culture, with elements from Buddhism, Daoism and Confucianism (Shi 2004, Xue et al. 2012). In reality, however, despite massive efforts (Xu et al. 2006), harmony with nature has taken the back seat, falling behind what is needed for China’s sustainable development. The underlying cause has to do with the weakening of China’s state capacity, a problem of institutional sustainability.

On the one hand, “good environmental law only gets you halfway there” as Pan Yue, vice minister of environmental protection, told the state media, highlighting a dear lesson of the last two decades on environment pollution politics. Public and civil society pressure, media and whistle blowers uncovering violations of the law, authorities both with a capacity and the willingness to act are required as well. In particular, the relative lack of enforcement personnel is an obstacle to be addressed if environment politics is to become rigidly effective.

On the other hand, and more fundamentally, despite the basically centralist governance structure, strong state and party organisations in the (rich) provinces mean that the national leadership has often been more in a moderating than in a regulating and enforcing role. With economic growth slowing down (a natural process for ripening economies, in particular as the labour force has almost reached its peak) the pressure was high to refrain from environmental measures perceived as hampering growth, supported and stimulated to do so by European and US Companies, and the US and the EU Chambers of Commerce. Both factors, local power and business pressure, limited the willingness of provinces and cities to neatly implement central government’s orders or legal acts, especially in booming provinces. The necessity to rule them in, in particular but not only on environmental issues, is the background to the current leadership’s campaigns both against corruption and for an ecological civilisation. Easier registration for NGOs (the opposite of what is happening in neighbouring Russia), public interest litigation rights to some NGOs, legal protection for whistle blowers (EU and USA could learn from this) and repressive tolerance towards public actions focussed on environmental issues (demonstrations, strikes, etc.) point to the same direction (The Economist 2014d). Their success demonstrates that China’s state capacity remains relatively strong and its ongoing strengthening will contribute to a more sustainable pattern of economic development.

China–the World’s last best hope?

Institutional change: adjusting development priorities

According to Prime Minister Li Kequiang, China must “declare war on pollution”, and end the “blind development” that has caused serious risks for human health, economic development and nature’s integrity. If indeed the struggle to eliminate such pollution is pressing as hard and proceeding as successfully as the one to overcome poverty, as he promised, both the Chinese population and the world would benefit. In particular, the new legislation announced on March 9th, 2014, toughening the 1989 environmental protection laws and due to enter in force in January 2015, represents not only ambition, but also a number of innovative measures to realise its intentions. It is paving the way for stiffer, possibly unlimited penalties for polluting companies, allowing for fines against polluters to increase daily until a violation is corrected (the one-time payment usual so far, as in Europe, had failed to be effective). It also allows for the suspension or shut down of repeated offenders (Saigon Times 2014), the detention of negligent executives, and penalties for officials failing to enforce the law (The Economist 2014d). The public interest litigation function of some NGOs, and the whistle blower protection rules, together with the encouragement of more critical reporting in official media, plus a certain level of tolerance on internet blogging on environmental and food security issues will help the case.

Measures announced are not only intended to secure private and public business pollution from large, mostly state owned companies; the foreseen massive investment in wind and solar energy has a similar effect. These measures, and the carbon tax to be phased in gradually; are indeed necessary and urgent. The planned investment of some 200 billion € over the next five years to clean up China’s air is most impressive by anyone’s standards. For all these actions, international collaboration and support is more than justified (e.g. by making patented green technology easily and freely accessible).

An ecological civilisation requires not only new infrastructure and production facilities as China is building them with a breath-taking speed on top of the existing ones, but also requires phasing out of environmentally, socially and/or economically unsustainable old installations: innovation is effective only if combined with exnovation. Plans to shut down outdated production facilities in highly energy intensive sectors such as cement, steel and glass making ahead of schedule are promising in this respect. However, as known from modern innovation research, such improvements tend to generate incremental rather than deep structural change. Sustainable development requires three kinds of changes: technological, social and institutional, with increasing importance of social and institutional innovation (Rennings 2000). While social innovation includes the prevailing consumption patterns, the core of institutional innovation is changing the selection mechanisms according to which certain developments, inventions and strategies become dominant, and others do not (Hausknost and Haas 2013). Therefore, it is probably of even greater importance than the innovation/exnovation dualism that–after years of discussion–the Communist Party decided to update its promotion criteria, making the environmental performance an asset to be considered in the selection of cadres for higher level positions, alongside the economic success. In particular this measure, combined with the threat of penalties for non-enforcement, are a carrot-and-stick approach which may be able to provide the effective tools to make the Prime Minister’s declaration operational.

Air quality and industrial emissions

Coal burning for electricity generation and in the energy intensive industries is the main source of air pollution. China has made unprecedented progress in reducing the energy intensity of its economy over the past three decades; in 2013 energy efficiency gains accelerated to a 3.7% decrease of energy consumption per unit of GDP, and a further increase of 3.9% is announced for 2014. The measures taken include efficiency programs, energy quota for state owned companies, and other laws and incentives. They have reduced the primary energy conszmption per unit of GDP from 800 t of coal equivalent (tce) per 1 million US$ of output, down to 390 tce in 2009 (constant 2005 PPP). However, China’s specific energy consumption is still above the global average of 300 tce (World Bank 2013), and the gap between China and the high-income countries is huge. For instance, the primary energy intensity of Germany’s economy was 167 tce per million US$. This is one of the reasons for the Germany’s high international competitiveness–although comparatively small it was the no. 1 export nation until 2011 and overtaken by China only in the wake of the Great Recession–which exemplifies the potential gains for China from further improving its energy productivity, reducing the demand for coal. Thus the 40-45% improvement 2005–2020 foreseen in the current planning is a welcome objective, but it will not easy to achieve: the power plant efficiency improvements are facing limits as the average thermal efficiency has increased from 31% in 2000 to 38%, the same level as Germany (the USA are flat at 33%); the technical maximum is about 45%. Thus efficiency increase in the energy sector, indispensable as it is, is insufficient if not combined with efficient energy use, a substitution of renewable energy sources for coal, and emission reductions from other sectors (including a more sustainable consumption). This requires a corresponding allocation of research funds–economic analysis has shown that there are important conflicts between public and private welfare concerning the direction of energy efficiency research. For enhancing public welfare, the concentration of research should be in greater use efficiency, whereas for the private welfare of the extraction industry (state owned or not) research in extraction innovation would be most helpful (Wils 2001).

An important sector that could benefit from energetic measures is road transport. While gasoline cars are a rapidly growing consumer of fossil fuels, diesel cars and trucks are not only a major source of PM2.5 in the cities, they also place a heavy burden on the country’s infrastructure. Incentives to replace old, polluting and often collapsing heavy lorries with more sustainable means of transport are welcome. The sod emissions of old trucks, together with sulphur dioxide SO2 from the energy sector, are one main origin of the unhealthy smog. Therefore, the rapid reduction of SO2 emissions is a great achievement, with 3.5% reduction in 2013 and another 2% announced for 2014. A Harvard university study characterised the SO2 reduction programme of recent years as “one of the most swiftly effective air-pollution policies ever implemented anywhere” (The Economist 2014c).

However, as long as the efficiency growth lags behind the economic growth rate, the energy demand will continue to increase, and with it coal consumption and emissions unless the composition of sources is changed. This points to the urgent need to continue the rapid expansion of renewable energies such as wind and solar which will be needed to turn the trend on China’s CO2 emissions, bringing them back to sustainable levels by the second half of the century. The development of solar energy will have effects far beyond China itself; it could put the energy systems and politics of affluent countries in Europe and America upside down (Schleicher-Tappeser 2012).

Energy generation and climate change

China has been surpassing the USA to become the biggest investor in renewable energy, spending 50 billion € in 2012, three time the investment in Germany (in all three countries the need to modernise the grid is one of the key obstacles to more and efficient use of wind and solar power). In the meantime, the total installed wind energy capacity in China has surpassed the level reached in the EU. Although it contributes only four to six percent to the national electricity consumption so far, the acceleration foreseen in the five year plan (doubling the already high speed of expansion) can contribute to the desired turn-around. As the investment in solar energy is similarly striking, hydropower has been systematically exploited (sometimes even over the top, given the local social and environmental impacts) and other sources are being explored (e.g. tidal, geothermic), China has become the world’s largest investor in renewable energies research, innovation and installation. It may reach a peak of carbon emissions by the end of the decade, followed by a decrease in absolute terms.

Other options under consideration look less promising: enhancing the nuclear sector comes with high up-front investment, long-term capital fixation, uncertain but extremely high follow-up cost (decommissioning cost in Germany has surpassed 4,000 million € for one plant). The question of nuclear safety is a public concern, so a nuclear expansion strategy carries with it the risk of provoking multiple local resistance, if not even-for the first time-a nation-wide protest movement. Regarding energy provision and safety, nuclear power does not offer the “biggest bang for the buck”; without heavy subsidies, it would not be economical (compared to coal as much as to solar energy made in China). Also the investment in Carbon Capture and Storage CCS seems misguided: judging from the progress made over the last ten years and the projections for further development, CCS–if it works at all–will come too late to prevent a climate collapse. At the same time, it stimulates further coal use, potentially undermining China’s politically set goal to produce 20% of its energy from renewable sources until 2020. It would absorb billions of Yuan which, if invested in energy saving and renewable energies, would have stronger economic, social and environmental effects: investments in renewables are more reliable, are expected to pay-off in a shorter period of time and have the potential to create employment and income opportunities in remote parts of Central and Western China. The energy consumption of CCS (one additional power plant to fuel CCS for each three providing electricity) and the technical uncertainty are additional economic arguments against CCS. For these reasons the CCS euphoria has already declined in most European countries (for instance Island and Norway cancelled their ambitious projects), but it still flies high in the USA– not because technology and cost calculations would be different, but as result of a path dependent development, an attempt to recuperate the sunk cost already invested, and a face saving measure for those who promised a solution to the climate problem from CCS: a sink for money, but not for carbon. China, given its governance structure, should be in a position to opt out of a strategy which was tested and proven to be no solution.

Both CCS and nuclear energy are burdened with economic and safety problems of their long-term legacies: nuclear waste disposal sites, as much as large underground high pressure CO2 storages require continuous surveillance. The resulting cost of guarding and maintaining the deposits for several hundreds to thousands of years are beyond any calculation, but most probably exceed any economic gain from these technologies. For other forms of geo-engineering the uncertainty is even higher, the success more questionable, the cost more worrisome and the side effects more dangerous (Scheer and Renn 2010, Gardiner 2011). For instance, technologies to cool the earth by reflecting sunlight may be able to decrease the temperature, but would result in changing weather patterns, including the possibility of a faltering or relocated monsoon, the main water source for more than 2 billion people, including significant parts of China. Even armed conflicts and pre-emptive strikes to avoid such developments have already been discussed (Grunwald 2010). Beyond CO2 and the energy sector, and CH4 and N2O which are discussed in the next section, some trace gases with extremely high radiative forcing are an element not to be neglected. Insofar the phasing out of hydrofluorcarbons HFCs, a particularly potent class of greenhouse gases, and the cause of stratospheric ozone depletion, is a much welcome voluntary action China has undertaken.

Agriculture and land use policy

Agricultural problems in China have a qualitative and a quantitative aspect. Regarding quality, a recent Greenpeace study found dangerous levels of heavy metals contamination on rice grown near mines and factories, underlining the need to rein in emissions to air, land and water, and ending the sale of contaminated fertiliser (The Economist 2014d). The environmental law will be of importance to address these problems.

On the quantitative side of the coin, the Chinese government correctly perceives the need to redress the rural-urban gap, and sees land consolidation as an appropriate approach not only to rationalise land use but also as an important component of rural development. This approach, together with a number of consolidation models, has been endorsed by many scholars.

China’s new family farm policy is intended to initiate and accelerate the shift from small farms of 0.5 to 5 ha to larger units, more efficiency and more mechanisation. However, US-like mega-farms are neither desirable for social and environmental reasons, nor are they possible. Unlike the Great Plains, much of China’s agricultural area is sloped requiring terrace construction to minimise erosion even in the loess plateau (see Figure 8). Furthermore, managing irrigation rice fields requires units of a maximum size of a few hectares to control the water flow, and the paddy dykes necessary to that behalf, while not excluding mechanisation, still limit its dimensions. Other downsides include that oversized fields, managed not by transplanting but by direct seeding require more of the expensive and energy intensive external inputs and show a declining input/output ratio (Pan and Pan 2012). Farming incomes could be increased through reduced cost and their reliability enhanced by reduced vulnerability to pest infestations by changing the land management to methods such as ecological engineering (restrictions to insecticide use, less fertilisation reducing the attractiveness to pests, larger distances between plants resulting in higher tillerage), substituting pesticide use for supporting biological control mechanisms and organic for chemical fertiliser (Gurr et al. 2012). Such fields are less prone to plant hopper infestations than conventionally managed fields, which pose a serious threat to food security in particular in Southern China–ecological engineering is enhancing food security and by reducing soil and water pollution also food safety (Gurr et al. 2012). The system of rice intensification SRI technique has some commonalities with ecological engineering (except for the biocontrol), and reduces water demand by keeping soils wet but not necessarily flooded throughout the growing season (Noltze et al. 2013). This could be a significant contribution to relaxing China’s water stress.

Reducing external inputs, together with quality standards and control, can also contribute significantly to halting soil pollution in China, which is another reason for concern regarding food security. Airborne soil pollution will be reduced in future by programmes to clean and reduce emissions from energy generation and heavy industries initiated for other purposes.

Biodiversity

Effective biodiversity conservation requires both, protected areas as a retreat for sensitive species, but also between them a landscape which is not a “biological desert”. Ecological engineering in agriculture contributes to the latter by promoting a landscape management not pursuing a monoculture structure without any intermittent structures providing ecological niches.

China has established a number of protected areas, some of them registered under international conventions, such as the Ramsar Convention for the protection of ecologically valuable wetlands (see Figure 9). Although still more could be done, the size and the management of protected areas have been improving. Afforestation is taking place on a large scale (considered as the largest afforestation program in human history), but choice of species could be improved, with a focus on locally adapted ones. This would support biodiversity conservation while at the same time contributing to in the mountain region, both Gansu province 2012. more resilient systems (which can be expected to pay out economically as well, but only in the longer-term).

Finally, for a number of years sealing soil for settlement purposes has been restricted or more or less effectively banned (Xue 2012a, b), which is one reason for the absence of urban sprawl and the mushrooming of high rise buildings in the growing urban agglomerations (Figure 10). A similar space consumption restricting effect can be expected from continuing politically prioritising rail freight transport over road transport, although in both cases implementation could be improved.

Social sustainability

China today is a rapidly growing middle income country, home to a segment of less than 10% of the population living in absolute poverty, a broad middle class and a small super-rich elite, including 20% of the world’s dollar-billionaires. This income polarisation causes a number of problems:

• The social discrepancies in a formerly rather egalitarian country cause dissatisfaction, if not protest. Internationally it is well known that income disparities contribute to conflict, violence and degradation of the social fabric (Wilkinson and Picket 2009).

• High wealth is a key driver of CO2-emissions; consequently, specific policies addressing the rich are needed (Hurth and Wells 2007).

Furthermore, if the Chinese development model were modified to reduce the export and investment dependency, private consumption would have to play a larger role. This requires eliminating the remaining pockets of poverty, strengthening the rural economy, and increasing the median income. Doing so will hardly be possible without redistribution of incomes and assets; growth alone will hardly be able to offer a solution (and has done the opposite in the past). To improve the average standard of living the consumption opportunities for the so-far underprivileged will have to be enhanced, and with it, unfortunately, resource consumption and emissions. This will hardly be possible without massive efforts towards social justice and dramatically increased resource productivity, and sustainable consumption (Lorek 2010, Lorek and Spangenberg 2014). In the past the Chinese leadership has reacted sensitively to social unrest, trying to address the causes of dissatisfaction. However, income and asset redistribution may be a different case as it inevitably produces winners and losers, and the would-be losers tend to be associated with the ruling political and economic/financial elites. Getting towards a more equitable income distribution will require true leadership.

From villain to hero?

China has shown unprecedented efforts to clean up its environmental performance, and plans to continue and even accelerate its progress. Nonetheless, regarding climate change, its net ecological debt keeps growing as its emissions are still the world’s highest, and efforts to reduce CO2 emissions will affect global warming only with a long delay, due to the 120 years atmospheric residence time of carbon dioxide. To avoid interference with the internal affairs of other countries, claim an international leadership role, and to meet its international obligations (Rio Principle 2: “States have […] the responsibility to ensure that activities within their jurisdiction or control do not cause damage to the environment of other States or of areas beyond the limits of national jurisdiction”) China has to start reducing its climate debt rather soon, and stop building up its ecological debt soon after. Here three proposals are presented how this could be achieved: the methane strategy, capping inputs and developing a new growth model.

The Methane strategy–an example of common but differentiated responsibilities

Rio-Principle 7: “[…] In view of the different contributions to global environmental degradation, States have common but differentiated responsibilities.”

So far rather neglected in climate protection policies, due to its physical characteristics methane CH4 could potentially play an important role in short-term effective Chinese climate policies. For instance, if between 2006 and 2050 the global CH4 emissions were reduced by about half the 2005 rate, due to its high radiative forcing RF the result by 2050 would be equivalent (in terms of RF) to a complete phasing out of carbon dioxide emissions over the same period (Smith et al. 2013). With its short residence time, the maximum effect would appear within a couple of decades, while in the longer run the extended residence time of CO2 and N2O dominates the climate effect of current emissions.

So if methane is such an important factor for global climate change, and was in 2005 responsible for 43% of the global climate debt, why is it not discussed more intensively? This is an example of not taking the differentiated responsibility seriously enough. For countries with a share of less than 25–30% CH4 in their climate debt, further reducing this limited contribution is not the most effective climate protection strategy due to methane’s limited atmospheric residence time, and this is the case for most industrialised countries. For instance, the methane share in their national climate debt is 23% for the USA, 21% for the UK and 16% for Germany, but 93% for Bangladesh, 83% for Vietnam, 81% for Brazil, 66% for India and 53% for China (Smith et al. 2013). Thus while early industrialised countries rightfully (and more or less forcefully) focus on reducing CO2 emissions, the developing countries and emerging economies would be well advised to focus on CH4 emission reduction (without neglecting a sustained, mid to long term effort to limit their CO2 emissions), as the most effective and efficient climate change mitigation strategy.

Globally CH4 emissions originate in equal parts from biomass production, use and disposal (with cattle breeding the dominant source), and from fossil energy production, distribution and use. Thus investment to minimise emissions from fossil fuel distribution systems are the first option for minimising CH4 emissions; they reduce losses and are therefore economically beneficial. Similar benefits arise when CH4 emissions associated with coal mining are captured and used as energy source. Reducing methane emissions from biomass use requires a broader strategy, including improved waste management (organic matter in waste disposal sites generates CH4), and by capturing and using the methane, a relatively cheap technology commonplace in Europe. Such measures can be implemented without deep structural changes of the economy, that is, faster and at lower cost than reducing CO2 emissions. Changing consumption patterns, minimising beef in the diet (pork and chicken are less methane intensive) is more challenging, but not impossible in a country like China (Feng et al. 2009). Most importantly, specifically for South and East Asia, agricultural management methods like ecological engineering and some elements of the system of rice intensification are social innovations which together with technical innovations like the choice of appropriate rice varieties may help reducing CH4 emissions. Integrating the low-methane producing varieties developed in China into such innovate land and crop management systems would be an important next step, with reduced N2O emissions resulting from less fertiliser use a welcome side effect.

As this would result in a higher labour force demand in rural areas, financial incentives for shifting to such methods may be a method of choice, combining rural income generation and environmental protection. China has extensive experience with such schemes and how they have to be implemented, not least from their use in the afforestation programs.

Controlling CH4 emissions can be the low hanging fruits to pick, buying enough time for the aggressive CO2 reduction strategies to become effective regarding the climate debt. It does not change the necessary carbon reduction targets, but makes it easier to achieve them.

Unburnable fuels–capping consumption

In the past China has formulated its climate policy targets as reducing greenhouse gas emissions per unit of GDP, resulting in ever increasing emissions in absolute terms. As a result, despite massive efforts, China’s emissions per capita have now surpassed those of the European Union. What is urgently needed is a strategic plan how to bring back greenhouse gas emissions from more than 7 t CO2eq/cap (including CO2, CH4 and N2O but not LUCF) to the level the world’s atmosphere can absorb, about 2 t CO2eq/cap. It will require the combination of technical, social and institutional innovation on both the supply and the demand side. “Peak demand” does not occur on its own and must be brought about politically; only by getting “the Rich and the Dirty” under control can the dynamic of ever increasing consumption and pollution be reverted (Spangenberg 2014). In the context of increasing wealth concentration and poverty gaps, this subject is central to issues of social justice as well as environmental integrity (Hurth and Wells 2007). However, to avoid runaway climate change policies to cut demand are not sufficient; the must be complemented by supply-side policies to stem the flow of fossil fuels.

Leaving 2/3 to 9/10 of all known fossil fuel reserves in the ground has been explained to be a necessity to limit the damages caused by climate change to a level human civilisation can probably handle; this is arguably the biggest challenge in shaping how we will live in the anthropocene. China still lacks a strategy in this respect, including a ranking of fuels to be used from by domestic extraction and from fuel imports. Economically, the book value of proven reserves should be written down accordingly (possible once priorities have been defined), by both public institutions and private corporations, even if that implies losing virtual value (the current overvaluation is similar to the one of the other toxic assets causing the 2009 banking crisis). However, the increasing cost of mobilising such reserves should make it easier to give up on bringing them to the market.

When deciding which kinds of fossil fuels to use, plausibly the most CO2 producing fossil energy carriers should be phased out first, notably lignite (brown coal). This would affect the lignite mining areas in Germany, Australia, the Czech Republic, and Inner Mongolia in China, where some of the largest lignite development projects are under way. Regarding reserves, Germany has the world’s largest ones (40.5 Gt), followed by Australia (37.2 Gt), the USA (30.2 Gt), China (18.6 Gt) and Serbia (13.4 Gt) (WEC 2013). Taking into account not only the lower caloric content of lignite and the resulting high specific emissions, but also other negative side effects and the emissions, lignite is the dirtiest fossil fuel. Add to this the high water consumption in open pit mining, the heavy transport loads on rail and road with all the resulting damages, and the high sulphur content which has caused acid rain particularly in Southern China, investment into lignite is incompatible with climate and general environmental responsibility. The second fossil fuel to be phased out would be hard coal (before oil and gas), affecting a wide variety of producers and consumers (coal is mined in over 100 countries), and in particular China which consumes more than half all coal produced on Earth (2011: China 50.7%, United States 12.5%, India 9.9%, Russia and Germany 3.3% each) and produced almost half of all coal on Earth (2011: China 49.5%, United States 14.1%, Australia 5.8%, India 5.6%, the European Union 4.2%) (Olivier et al. 2012).

Once the decision has been taken which kinds of reserves to explore and exploit, the choice must still be made where to do it, domestically as well as regarding imports. Such a decision should be taken not exclusively based on cost considerations, but on an assessment of social and environmental impacts associated with drilling and pumping oil or gas, and for digging coal in each place. Oil and gas extraction, and coal mining, even using the most modern techniques, will always be dirty business. There is no ethical, environmental or social justification for mobilising reserves with above-average environmental and social impacts, including deep sea oil, tar sands, or hydraulic fracturing for shale gas, destroying riverine delta ecosystems and other wetlands, densely populated farmland, or biodiverse forests. These are places uniquely unsuited for fossil fuel extraction, now and in the future. Halting the fuel frontier should begin in such fragile ecosystems as saving the most vulnerable locations from extraction would avoid huge ecological and social costs. For any mining or drilling operation outside these fragile systems, the environmental impact, in particular the carbon emissions, ecological degradation by specific land use practises and water consumption should be minimised, biodiversity and ecosystems conserved and the social, economic and environmental rights of local resident communities and minority groups safeguarded. Today, some countries are already taking steps to limit their emissions out of a necessity to increase energy independence as much as to reduce pollution.

A new growth model: Degrowth by design, not by disaster

Capping the carbon or total energy input (as foreseen by the Chinese government as a later step after first capping the CO2 output and charging for it) is necessary to complement existing policies and enhance their effectiveness. It requires a growth model in which the increase of resource efficiency Y/R is permanently higher than the economic growth rate Y: d(Y/R) > dY (R total national resource consumption, Y size of the national economy, Spangenberg et al. 2002, Spangenberg 2011). This in turn requires accepting limitations to national affluence (measured in terms of resources consumed), and for reasons of justice and social stability effort towards a more egalitarian distribution of income and assets.

While at first glance this this may sound like a development suppressing policy proposal and big challenge to China, at a second look it is rather an opportunity compared to a strategy of economic growth and the attempt of technical remediation. Today, the cost of soil degradation and health impacts of air pollution amount to 9% of the GDP per year, according to the World Bank. This Figure makes the reported growth rates seem rather hollow; net growth seems to have been in the lower one digit realm. Thus with lower gross growth rates to be expected, one way of securing economic stability is reducing the environmental and health cost, reaching a comparable gain in the standard of living (net growth) with much reduced GDP growth rates. Reducing air and water pollution, conserving biodiversity, limiting land use change and restoring fertile soil are immense tasks, but they have to be tackled with full force in order to sustain the basis for the country’s further development.

Nonetheless an abrupt and massive reduction of energy and resource consumption is no politically viable option. It probably would reverse economic growth into recession, and lead to a collapse of development, if not of the economy, due to a lack of physical inputs. Such a Degrowth by Disaster is the more probable the later the change course is initiated. The choice is between:

• demand side management through higher energy prices, behaviour change involving energy conservation, and lower economic growth but a number of cost saving fringe benefits such as avoidance of acid rain and reduced health care cost, a more healthy and productive labour force and less environmental motives for public unrest, versus

• supply side management focussing on higher growth rates and technology transitions– with probably limited gains for society as the transition investment absorbs the surplus from the higher growth rate.

The higher level of uncertainty lies with the growth strategy as it relies on the development and successful implementation of not-yet-existing technologies for climate management, such as CCS and geo-engineering, solutions expected to be available on large scale in due time and without undesirable side effects.

Outlook

Humankind is at a turning point, and a point of no return: there is no way back, and the prevailing development trajectory is a dead end street we drive down with ever increasing speed. Policies to accelerate growth are policies to increase the speed with which we are going to hit the wall. Having population growth, resource availability and planetary boundaries in mind, it is high time for implementing a development paradigm which allows for a high quality of life at about 1/10 of the current resource consumption. This will require the most ambitious and far reaching innovation program ever, including the “ex-novation” of obsolete, unsustainable technologies and installations. Not adding new and better technologies to the portfolio is what is needed, but replacing outdated, resource intensive production processes and factories, together with a change of consumer preferences towards “prosperity light”. The second element besides reducing the pressures through resource efficiency, renewable energy and sustainable consumption is deceleration of developments, social and technological, to provide nature the time necessary for ecosystems and species to adapt to and co-evolve with a changing environment.

Taking the differentiated responsibility approach seriously requires taking methane and LUCF into account when defining climate policy strategies. While this is a challenge, it also provides additional opportunities for effective climate policies for countries like China. One such option is a strong focus on CH4 emission reduction, which would have a comparably rapid effect on effective warming and thus reduce the climate debt much faster than a reduction of CO2 emissions can do, due to the necessary structural change of the energy and wider economic system, and the atmospheric residence time of carbon dioxide. It enhances the range of policy options available, providing additional short term effective affordable options. For instance, Green belt/ green frontier and afforestation programs are an example of how LUCF emissions can be reduced. They have been implemented by the Chinese government for a number of years now; however, to provide success in the long run, they need to be improved regarding the social and environmental standards applied (better compensation for peasant participants, stakeholder participation, technical advice and education, selection of local species instead of wood production for the pulp and paper industry, …) (Li et al. 2009, Bennett 2008).

If, to cut carbon emissions, we need to limit economic growth severely in the rich countries, then it is important to know that this does not mean sacrificing improvements in the real quality of life–in the quality of life as measured by health, happiness, friendship, and community life, which really matters. However, rather than simply having fewer of all the luxuries which substitute for and prevent us recognizing our more fundamental needs, inequality has to be reduced simultaneously. We need to create more equal societies able to meet our real social neEds Instead of policies to deal with global warming being experienced simply as imposing limits on the possibilities of material satisfaction, they need to be coupled with egalitarian policies which steer us to new and more fundamental ways of improving the quality of our lives. The change is about a historic shift in the sources of human satisfaction from economic growth to a more sociable society. Wilkinson and Pickett 2010

Besides reducing the pressures by redirecting the drivers causing them, immediate rescue measures are needed. They need to be based on a foresight based governance/ management of social and ecosystems which make use of all available potentials and system characteristics to avoid system collapses by enhancing their adaptive capacities, including cultivating carbon sinks by ecosystem restoration. Strengthening the capability of the central government not only to pass legislation (pollution laws and thousands of decrees) but also to enforce their implementation, administratively and legally, may be a necessary step; independent reporting about the local situation–in Europe often a function of civil society organisations– would help the central government to gain a better control of the implementation of its policy measures on the ground and to further improve policy design. That the Communist party included the environment into its four focal areas (Ecological Civilisation) may further help the implementation of necessary measures, in particular as officials will be promoted with a view on their environmental performance, and will be held accountable for their overall execution of his position also long after having taken up other responsibilities. Any country aspiring a leadership role in 21st century should be aware that the majority of humankind, and in most severely G77 country inhabitants, will be negatively affected by climate change. A country that is causing havoc on their lands and people will lose the legitimacy of any such claim for leadership, regardless of its economic or military strength. Thus for social, economic, environmental and geopolitical reasons, a rapid transition towards a sustainable economy, making use of all available means, is an urgent necessity, for Europe, the USA and not least for China.

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful for the experiences he gathered and the discussions he had on visits to China on behalf of the Helmholtz Centre for Environment Research UFZ of the Division of International Nature Conservation, the German Federal Agency for Nature Conservation in particular with Lennart Kümper-Schlacke, the EU-China Biodiversity Programme, the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and the European Commission. Two reviewers deserve gratitude for their helpful comments on the initial version of the paper.

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David Wright

davidgwright52@gmail.com

We were staying at a friend’s house halfway down the New South Wales coast, partly as respite, an escape from the threat of fire that was lighting up the east coast of the nation, and partly as a staging post. Assuming the Currowan fire was past its peak and the highway was opening to traffic, we hoped to travel to our holiday home on 5 acres, midway between Mogo and Malua Bay, 4 and a half hours south of Sydney. It had been a family retreat for 35 years. It was full of stories. The ashes of my mother stood on a shelf in a corner, above jigsaw puzzles, Cluedo, Monopoly and playing cards. Every piece of furniture, every photo on the wall, every plate, cup, saucepan, bed, blanket and toy told a story. The bed bases made by my father. The hole in the fly screen above the kitchen sink, (legacy of a curious possum). Christmas decorations in a box on a shelf in the linen closet and three decades of discarded boogie boards in the laundry. Memories and stories continued outside the house. Trees, hills, rises and falls in the paddock, occasional streams, patches of thistle: the ‘briar patch’, home in recent times to a family of rabbits. Bonfire sites here and there. The tree shelter favoured by kangaroos. And, at the base of the hill below the house there was a dam. Home to eels and mosquitoes, a watering hole for horses and the roo family that traversed the valley. Here This was where ten-year old Jim caught an eel that escaped when it bit through his fishing line and five-year old Owen came back from his first solo tramp with leaches in his boots. And Martin, a friend and near neighbour, declined to help clear scrub on the far side. “Tiger snakes, mate” he said. Five acres is not a lot of land, but it is enough to wander. And wonder. Fallen trees to rest against, tree bark to crunch underfoot, perspective to be gained, imagination to invest: a vege garden (made safe from plundering animals), beehives, solar panels feeding the grid, a tyre swing, a tree house, a music festival perhaps, in our own little amphitheatre.

And yet, distance required that the place was neglected much of the year. Used mainly in school holidays, and not every school holiday, nor for the whole of the holidays. But surprisingly, despite neglect, it was in reasonable condition. Animals kept the grass down. Rain, when it came, kept the pasture a shade of green. Big, arcing gums and smaller mischievous wattles continued to grow, providing privacy and shade. We were almost invisible from the road. Not even Google Earth could spot the house. And the house itself: the walls were sturdy, the roof solid, the front deck sheltered us from the heat of the morning sun and the metal box fire kept us warm through winter. Occasional problems with spiders and rats and snakes and possums but these were manageable. Not a place we could, or would want to rent out, it was for us. I loved this place, and when my parents died I had the privilege of inheriting it, with my family. It became ours. And we loved it as much as they.

Then in the morning of New Years Eve 2019 the wind picked up a fire, burning south of Nelligan, 15km inland and 25km northwest of our place, and threw it in our direction. Since September fires had been raging to the north. Along the east coast forested bush had been primed by months of dry heat. The front of our fire must have been fifteen kilometres wide. The heat, reportedly immense, the air bristling dry, the wind pushed the furnace south and east. I doubt much could have been done. The south of Bateman’s Bay was clipped and some way south the north of the tourist town of Mogo was fiercely set on fire. Back from the highway, numerous houses in the streets of this long standing aboriginal Yuin town were destroyed, along with the recreation of a colonial goldmine and plenty of bush-bound dwellings. And while it skirted but did not ignite the famed Mogo Zoo, more than twenty houses on acreage, on our road, around the corner, exploded: a small portion of the 2,000 or so lost in the area overall.

There were three main torrents of fire that day. All driven by shifting winds. “It just picks it up and throws it at you” said Diane. The first came through from Mogo, through the catchment for the local dam, which backs onto our place. It savaged us and lots nearby, circled, then surrounded Malua Bay, as hundreds huddled on the beach, with children and horses and precious goods. Martin had to double back at 6am when he got the evacuation call. He went towards the fire to collect horses agisted on nearby properties. “Burnt hooves and frightened, but ok.” As in so many cases, the men held back, delayed their departure or doubled back for various reasons and the wives and children were sent to safety, to wait. And fear.

The Malua fire circled south. It enclosed Mackenzie’s Beach It took out everything in North Rosedale, then wound back in our direction again. Another flame front came from the south, it landed at the outskirts of Broulee, which was perfect fodder for fire, flat, open, dry and unprotected, but before much damage could be done the wind tripped this one north as well.

One couple who stayed by their house, towards the sea, across the ridge from our place, saw the fire cross three times as they circled their house with hoses putting out embers for over eight hours. Despite protective clothing their arms, hands and faces were pock marked with burns. Soles of boots melted. Their house survived. Diligence, location, luck and shifting winds. And four sheep survived on another neighbour’s block. While their wooden pole house was condemned to burn, despite three days of hard graft preparing for fire. The sheep gravitated to the gully, and in the mud and moisture managed to live.

We were called by Diane, who was among the last to leave. It was about 10am. She just said, “it’s gone.”

I wasn’t able to go down for ten days. The highway and local roads were closed and most burnt sites were declared too dangerous. When it became possible the journey was through devastation. Outside the towns the highway was lined by burnt forest from south of Nowra almost to Moruya. And that was only the highway and only the route I travelled. Inland, north, south, southwest the devastation must have been unimaginable. In two hours of driving I saw houses that had been saved, some miraculously surrounded by burnt trees and many that had been destroyed and kilometre after kilometre of forest after forest after forest after forest blackened otherworldly. Finally, at our place tree remnants, stumps and logs, were still smoking. I parked on the road and walked down the drive. Fences wrecked. Huge black stalks of trees everywhere. The sky seemed to reflect the darkness. Life in black and grey. The gate was open, the sheds alongside a ruin. The wood that framed them had vapourised. Burnt, buckled metal strewn across the ground. Woodwork tools and steel framed cabinets charred, split apart and discarded, as if, no resistance, no significance. Only the metal trunk my father bought back from WW2 was identifiable. Baked, but identifiable. Then there was the house.

A few months later I was asked to talk in an online seminar organised by the University of Lucknow, India, celebrating World Environment Day. Previously, I had written a book chapter that concluded, “The Anthropocene is not something that is occurring out there. It is local, it is everyday and it is personal. In effect, I am the Anthropocene, and I take responsibility.” The theme of the Lucknow talk was derived from this: we are living the circumstances of our own creation. We are it and it is us. With this in mind I chose to talk about the fires. In retrospect, I had no choice. I was still amidst them, constantly calculating them, they were over this shoulder, then that. This dream, this conversation, this child’s fear, this child’s silence. As a family we seemed to be inhabited by them. In trying to explain my connection to the flames and the social ecology of their creation, I wanted to move my Indian audience beyond what which they already knew. And an Indian audience knows a great deal about the relationship between society and ecology. Their gap between the natural world and human experience is far less cultivated. We in Australia, who encounter the world through screens, hide death behind doors and spend much of our time in urban spaces deliberately designed to keep the natural world at bay, do not tolerate sacred cows in peak hour traffic in the same way as Indians do. In taking responsibility I wanted to treat the fires as something other than a natural event or an alien other arriving to bedevil. I wanted to acknowledge our complicity: our intelligence and our creativity, in relation to fire. In effect, our contribution. I wanted to acknowledge it as damage we did to ourselves. I said,

This is my nature, my land, it was a place for my family, my people, my history, and it is my fire. I live in it and through it. Val Plumwood, an Australian eco-feminist was taken by a crocodile 20 or so years ago. She escaped. She said it was her fault. She said she was in the crocodile’s territory. Was I in the fire’s territory? Or perhaps my house was. Or am I wrong to give fire characteristics of this kind? Learning? Responsiveness? Perhaps they should be given to the wind that blew the flames or the drought that dried the land. Our wind, our drought and our flames. We live within a knowledge system: a complex web of inter-relationships that determines the form that life takes. And how it burns. We built our house. It burned to the ground. I am the fire, and I am that which remains.

The day I travelled down, ten days after the fire, I stood close by while a lone kangaroo, its brown fur soiled, perhaps singed, leapt across our newly darkened land. I saw other roos feeding by the roadside, when previously they would not have. I wondered the fate of the possum that broke the fly wire screen in the kitchen. What consequence, the fire?

I went to the support hub, set up in the aftermath to help those who had been affected. The Salvos made sandwiches. Numerous people asked if I needed to talk. My main priority was getting help to clear the debris, the remains, the tons of wrecked house, from the site and my questions saw me referred from one desk to another. Finally, when I was sent back to the desk I first asked at I gave up, solicited a sandwich and sat in the sun, watching army reservists play cricket with children.

By my next visit gum trees were sprouting new green through charcoal bark. Rain had fallen and burnt branches were caught in the flow of water and emerging growth. The debris remained, but not for long. A government agency cleared the house site. Thank you. What now? I surrendered. I placed the problem at a distance, beyond consideration. No thoughts of the future and despite irregular questions, no thoughts of rebuilding. Why? Why become this vulnerable again? The neighbour on the hill had a steel framed construction in process before the fire. He continued afterwards. It didn’t make sense. I didn’t know him well enough to ask. I returned to Sydney.

Nonetheless, we booked a house nearby for the next school holidays. In that time we came and visited the site and wondered, mostly silently, how we might aid recuperation. We looked more than took action; talked more than did things. It was overwhelming. It was too much. Beyond action. We found fragments of memories scattered in the soil: parts of earthenware bowls, ceramic shards from the purple toilet, bits of primary school pottery. We looked for remnants of the new bathroom, installed in October. Specially chosen tiles and taps and… nothing recognisable. We wandered further. The water tank had melted. 100,000 litres must have cascaded down that hill. Two garden sheds were standing, blown out, the walls convex. Inside the metal ends of garden tools, a rake, a pick, a shovel and a mattock, their wooden shafts non-existent. Only a heavy metal post hole digger retrievable. The orchard nearby, that we had cleaned up two months before, unrecognisable. The hay shed no more than a roof turned into a corrugated iron floor. We bought gloves and a tree saw and heavy-duty branch cutters with the intention of clearing fence lines. A token effort. Bulldozer or, at very least a bobcat required. We sat on our haunches on the old house site and looked down and across the growing grass and the mystifying bleakness of the damage. And to an extent we remembered. Perhaps we were numb no more. Feeling somehow and missing the house and the holidays but more than that, the welcome comfort and convenience of a place we knew deeply – part of ourselves – as distinct from a holiday rental.

Finally, one day, we landed on the possibility of a way forward: an architect’s drawings of an earth-covered house, made of compressed earth blocks. Not only was it beautiful, two tunnels built into the slope, with a soil and grass roof, four bedrooms in one tunnel and the kitchen, dining and living space in the other, and a large sweeping front window that gathered acres of sun. Insulated by the earth, cool in summer and warm through winter, it was in the earth, almost of the earth, not an imposition, built on top. Perhaps this was the answer. Not a target, no exposed timber, not a fire cave to shelter in while fire raged but a house, a home, a perfect fit to an existing site with, according to the architect, near certainty it could survive a conflagration like the last one. Not a place to shelter in while fire raged, but a structure that would not burn to the ground. It would be the ground. Fire shutters would protect the windows; nothing flammable externally. My interest rose from three storeys beneath consciousness. The words mildly enthusiastic might even have been muttered.

We talked further with Steve, the architect. We discussed further possibilities. He sent images of options. The first was two tunnels in parallel, both facing north, with a linking door. Then two tunnels pivoted at 45 degrees, from the rear, one facing north, the other north east; then the tunnels pivoting at 45 degrees from the front with a covered deck providing the link; then parallel again, with one tunnel raised higher than the other to aid runoff and reduce water pooling between the tunnels. So, water pooling was an issue, which means waterproofing is also an issue, and then of course, water collection, because we are not on town water and there is no conventional roof. We talked more with Steve: a genuine, friendly guy, who seemed to know his stuff. We discovered he grew up in the same region as me, knew people I knew, knew people who knew my brother, who is also in the building game. This project was coming home. Then he set up a meeting with his builders on the coast: Harry, who seemed more like the project manager, who had the machine to make the special bricks needed to support the arch, and Frank who led the building team. They answered our questions, all of them, confidently, coherently, comprehensively. They worked to allay our nervousness, they promoted the concept, talked up the site as already ideal, minimal preparation required, reckoned the numbers of earth blocks needed, discussed septic tank and water storage practicalities, described the membrane designed to waterproof the ceiling and joked with us about parking cars on the roof, when finished. And they gave us an early calculation of cost – within budget – and projected a likely finish date. October 2021. “Ready for Christmas.” Fantastic. A practical solution, low impact, exceeding flame zone regulations and affordable. What about Council? “They love it.” They’ve already approved one? “No, they know about it. Four weeks max.” Nothing standing in our way. We imagined our place anew. The view once again off the deck, early morning as the fresh orange sun rose over the trees. The dew on the grass glistening, the magpies warbling, children stirring before rolling over and back to sleep again. Almost quiet. Almost alone. Almost safe and secure. Almost home. All that remained was the actual construction. 

Meanwhile, we booked a tradesman to replace most of the fencing. We arranged a bobcat to clear the line. It was done well. The first lump sum was extracted from the insurance payout. I imagined the ground being prepared for the slab, the slab being poured, and I imagined the truck delivering the first load of locally made compressed earth blocks. This was the earth’s response to the fire, an acknowledgement of the intersection of the social and the ecological, sensitively responding through aesthetically grounding human needs in gently sloping land. Minimising the intrusion, hiding us beneath the ground, looking out, not disturbing. Plants climbing up from below, threading their way through the soil atop the tunnels. Greenery sprouting. Wildlife feeding on our roof. Sacred cows in peak hour traffic across our five acres. I am the fire, and I am that which remains. Human ingenuity synchronised with the cycles of nature. A contribution to forward thinking: to planning for a collective, sustainable future.

Then the phone call came. Human ingenuity, too clever by half. Turns out Harry did not actually have the machinery to make the bricks. Turns out Harry had taken deposits from other people on promise of delivery of bricks, which he did not have the machinery to make. And Steve was refusing to deal with Harry and Frank had unwittingly become the vehicle through which other property owners were billed. And the flame proof underground house was burning down. This time there were no lightning strikes, the flames were lit by humans. This time it was arson. The results were the same. No house, no home, no dream.

The place remains, the land, and we are determined to preserve it and to pass it on. It never was and hopefully never will be just an investment, something to cash in at a later stage. It is valued, cared for and loved for what it is and what it might become one day with careful and considered stewardship. We know our neighbours down the valley, some of them, and our lives intersect as do our access roads, fence lines, pastures and spreading trees. And the animals that jump over and slide through the wires that divide us. They are joint responsibilities, so is our care for our place and our stories of our experience of the valley. All of us dispossessed of our houses, have shared needs. We talk of the present and we imagine possible futures. We hope, lose hope and hope again. This community, these affections extend further, beyond the physical immediacy of our individual and shared environment.

I teach. It has been central to my employment, and to an extent, my identity for thirty years. I have learned from remarkable people and places and experiences and I have integrated this sufficiently to be trusted to deal with the learning of others. I do this with commitment and a strong sense of responsibility. If I am to apportion the role of teacher to the land, to my place, to my environment then perhaps I need to apportion it commitment and responsibility as well. At the very least to respect this potential. Part of my human consciousness seeks agency in the world beyond. In other humans, other vertebrates and invertebrates, in living reality I seek understanding and inspiration. If I, and by ‘I’ I mean ‘us’, for as a species we are cojoined in love, are to survive, we need to do it in relationship to the world beyond our fences. Fire has no cognisance of fences, nor wind, nor drought, nor spreading green. All triggers for us to breath in, breath out and tell stories. I am the fire, and I am that which remains. And remains. And remains.

The word “anthropocene” has become the closest thing there is to common shorthand for this turbulent, momentous, unpredictable, hopeless, hopeful time—duration and scope still unknown

By Andrew C. Revkin

Original article here

My reporting career has taken me from smoldering, fresh-cut roadsides in the Amazon rain forest to the thinning sea ice around the North Pole, from the White House and Vatican to Nairobi’s vast, still-unlit slums. Throughout most of it, I thought I was writing about environmental and social problems and solutions.

Lately I’ve come to realize that my lifelong beat, in essence, has been one species’ growing pains. After tens of thousands of years of scrabbling by, spreading around the planet, and developing tools of increasing sophistication, humans are in surge mode and have only just started to become aware that something profound is going on. The upside has been astounding. Child and maternal mortality rates have plunged. Access to education has soared. Deep poverty is in sharp retreat. Despite the 24/7 distilled drama online and on TV, violence on scales from war to homicide has been in a long decline.

It’s been only a few decades since science began building a picture of the back story to this spectacular ascent. It’s a story about how humans became such a potent environmental influence that a signature of our doings, for good or ill, will be measurable in layered rock for millions of years to come. By altering climate, landscapes, and seascapes as well as flows of species, genes, energy, and materials, we are sealing the fates of myriad other species. And, without a big shift from business-as-usual, we will undermine our own long-term welfare as well.

In 2000, after a century of earlier efforts by scholars, scientists, and at least one journalist (me) to give a name to humanity’s emerging role as a planet-scale force, one word emerged in a heated moment at a global change conference in Cuernavaca, Mexico—anthropocene.

It appears to be here for the long haul. After 16 years of percolation and debate, anthropocene has become the closest thing there is to common shorthand for this turbulent, momentous, unpredictable, hopeless, hopeful time—duration and scope still unknown.

The word is still so novel that no one has even settled on how to pronounce it; the British stress the second syllable and Americans the first. That seems appropriate, given that reactions to the emergence of the term—let alone the actual environmental changes it aims to describe—have come in all colors and flavors. There’s even been a spirited push for alternatives, some rather biting.

I imagine you’ve heard some of the competing words that have bubbled up. We’re actually in the greed-driven Capitalocene, the trash-choked Plasticene, the combustible Pyrocene, the self-loathing Misanthropocene, the testosterone-dominated Manthropocene—even the Obscene. There’s some merit as well as weakness in every label, including the word that sparked it all.

The anthropocene (both the word and the unfolding age) has so much Rorschach-like plasticity that all I can offer as guidance are my informed but subjective reflections based on what I’ve learned and unlearned in my long, quirky journey. I’d argue that what matters most is not resolving some common meaning so much as engaging in deeply felt discussions, fresh lines of inquiry, and new proposals for sustaining the human journey—all of which have been sparked by the emergence of this concept.

Origin Story

©NASA

To navigate this terrain, it’s best to start with the foundational anthropocene idea, as blurted out in February 2000 during a scientific meeting on human-caused global change. A prominent participant was Paul J. Crutzen, who’d won a Nobel Prize for helping identify the threat certain synthetic chemicals posed to the planet’s protective ozone layer. At the meeting, his frustration grew as peers described momentous shifts in Earth’s operating systems, but always anchored them in time by mentioning the Holocene. Holocene is the formal name for the “wholly recent” epoch of planetary history that began at the end of the last ice age 11,700 years ago.

At one point, Crutzen couldn’t hold back. He interrupted a colleague, as the scientist Will Steffen later described: “Stop using the word Holocene. We’re not in the Holocene any more. We’re in the … the … the … (searching for the right word) … the Anthropocene!”

In his 2014 book The Anthropocene, Christian Schwägerl describes how the room fell silent at first, and then the word became the center of conversation. “The scientists in that conference room in Mexico were profoundly shaken,” Schwägerl wrote. “[O]ne of the most frequently cited natural scientists in the world … was not only describing the past with this new term (something to which geologists are accustomed), but he was also redefining and connecting to the future … a new Earth sculpted by humans.”

The broader meaning of anthropocene, not captured in the dictionary, centers on how awareness (in theory) comes with responsibility.

Shortly after that meeting, Crutzen learned that Eugene F. Stoermer, an admired analyst of tiny lakebed diatom fossils, had used the word in the 1980s. The two scientists collaborated on an essay for a newsletter for Earth systems scientists. They laid out a scientific rationale for the term and explained why, even though there was no tradition of naming geological spans for their causative elements, in this case it was justified:

Considering these … major and still growing impacts of human activities on Earth and atmosphere, and at all, including global, scales, it seems to us more than appropriate to emphasize the central role of mankind in geology and ecology by proposing to use the term “anthropocene” for the current geological epoch.

Crutzen and several collaborators refined the concept in subsequent papers. The term quickly spread, propelled in a dizzying array of directions as if filling a linguistic vacuum. It began popping up in peer-reviewed literature in a variety of disciplines and eventually spawned at least three scientific journals (and one magazine) using “Anthropocene” in their titles.

It’s not hard to see why reverberations, pro and con, built so quickly. It was an audacious notion to recommend that a human age deserved to join the Paleocene, Eocene, Oligocene, Miocene, Pliocene, Pleistocene, and Holocene as the epochs of geological history comprising the Age of Mammals. This stretch of time, more formally called the Cenozoic Era, began 65 million years ago, after the mass extinction that ended the dinosaurs’ age and enabled ours. And it could continue for a very long time—if the most powerful mammal, Homo sapiens, demonstrates it can turn the sapience in its name into a sustainable journey.

The proposal of an Anthropocene epoch was particularly audacious because it came from a chemist and an ecologist, not a stratigrapher. Stratigraphy is the discipline within geology that develops and maintains the official Geologic Time Scale and International Chronostratigraphic Chart.

In 2008, a group of stratigraphers and other earth scientists, led by Jan Zalasiewicz of the University of Leicester, published the first careful assessments of the intriguing Crutzen-Stoermer hypothesis. Indeed, they found a concrete and durable human signature—literally. Tens of billions of tons of concrete are part of that signature, along with vast amounts of smelted aluminum and more exotic alloys, distinctive spherical particles of fly ash from power plants, bomb radioisotopes, 6 billion tons (and counting) of plastic, and so much more. In a 2008 paper, Zalasiewicz and others concluded that there appeared to be “sufficient evidence” for an Anthropocene epoch to be considered for formalization by the international geological community.

But a long road lay ahead. The following year, Zalasiewicz and some colleagues began assembling a working group on the “Anthropocene” at the invitation of one of the 16 subcommissions of the International Commission on Stratigraphy. Those quotation marks around “Anthropocene” in the group’s name won’t disappear until some final judgment on the validity of a new epoch is reached.

In 2010 I was invited to join the working group, largely because of a quirky role I had played in the evolution of this anthropocene idea in 1992, when I essentially predicted Crutzen’s Mexico moment and what has unfolded since. Since 1985, I’d been writing articles about human impacts on the climate system. In 1991, I finally got a chance to synthesize what I’d been learning, in a short book that would accompany the first major museum exhibition on global warming, at the American Museum of Natural History. Closing out a chapter on the growing human impact on Earth, I typed an almost offhand proposal that we’d jolted the planet out of the Holocene:

Perhaps earth scientists of the future will name this new post-Holocene era for its causative element—for us. We are entering an age that might someday be referred to as, say, the Anthrocene. After all, it is a geological age of our own making. The challenge now is to find a way to act that will make geologists of the future look upon this age as a remarkable time, a time in which a species began to take into account the long-term impact of its actions. The alternative will be to leave a legacy of irresponsibility and neglect that will manifest itself in the fossil record as just one more mass extinction—like the record of bones and empty footprints left behind by the dinosaurs.

The Human Age could continue for a very long time—if the most powerful mammal, Homo sapiens, demonstrates it can turn the sapience in its name into a sustainable journey.

I vaguely recall musing on how to spell my passing reference to a name for this age. (I can’t probe the floppy disks on which any trace of that process sits.) “Anthrocene” seemed more streamlined than other choices, and I was pretty naïve when it came to word roots in scientific terminology. It didn’t really matter. The book was published shortly after the end of the Persian Gulf War and the planet-cooling eruption of Mount Pinatubo. Public attention was focused elsewhere. I’m sure no more than a few thousand people read it, certainly not Crutzen or Stoermer. It now floats on Amazon.com’s used listings for as little as one US cent (plus shipping, of course)—another kind of anthropocene shard, in a way.

Reflecting on this now, I’m quite certain that when I wrote “earth scientists of the future,” I was thinking generations, if not centuries, into the future. But it took just eight years for scientific rigor to be applied to the idea of an anthropogenic geological age. We do live in fast-forward times.

A fifth-grade classroom in Emerson School, Ann Arbor, Michigan ©Connie Weber

Language constantly evolves. In 2014, the word passed a significant milestone. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) adds batches of words four times a year. The 171 words added in June that year included all manner of obscurities (“cholestasis”), words reflecting trends of the moment (“selfie,” “flexitarian”), and “Anthropocene.”

According to the dictionary’s definition, the Anthropocene is “the era of geological time during which human activity is considered to be the dominant influence on the environment, climate, and ecology of the earth.”

Before including it, the OED editors had wisely let the word percolate for 14 years after it first entered widespread discourse. But I’d argue that they jumped the gun in one important technical way and missed the main, grander meaning of the word. That second point is not a criticism; it just reflects the plasticity and richness of this still-emerging neologism.

The technical problem with the definition? The word, despite having roots springing so directly from stratigraphic nomenclature, could still end up rejected as a formal “era of geological time.”

The Upper-Case Anthropocene

Golden spike emplaced in bed that is Global Standard Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP) for the Thenetian Stage.

©Stan Finney and Lucy Edwards

It was one thing for a couple of environment-oriented scientists, however lauded, to propose a new addition to those colorful stratigraphic charts familiar to millions of earth science students. It’s another thing entirely to gain the approval of a 60-percent supermajority of the leadership of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), the sage timekeepers of geology—and then the grand overarching body, the International Union of Geological Sciences. The working group’s recommendation to the ICS, when completed, would be just the first step in that process.

Of course, the Geologic Time Scale is always evolving, given the continuing emergence of new discoveries in the field. But the charts are living documents in the same way the United States Constitution is a living document: changes are made only with extreme care and conservatism and following strict protocols.

Many influential stratigraphers have expressed deep skepticism that the Anthropocene deserves formal standing. For one thing, any new addition to the time scale must be useful to science. Calling an abrupt end to the Holocene could achieve the opposite, creating confusion in the literature. There are significant debates over when to mark the starting point or lower boundary of the Anthropocene in the time scale.

Other scientists are concerned about all those flavors and colors of meaning that surround the word outside of geology—potentially tainting the time scale with environmental messaging. One of the starkest challenges came last spring in a critique written by two influential geologists, Stanley C. Finney and Lucy E. Edwards. Its title laid out what they saw as a murky and open question: The “Anthropocene” epoch: Scientific decision or political statement?

Jan Zalasiewicz at an Anthropocene Working Group meeting ©Andrew Revkin

There was some basis for such concerns. Many scientists and others pressing for a more sustainable human relationship with the environment had latched onto the word and idea as a rallying point. In a 2011 interview with Elizabeth Kolbert for National Geographic, Crutzen had put it plainly: “What I hope … is that the term ‘Anthropocene’ will be a warning to the world.”

Now in its seventh year, the working group has been under pressure to complete its formal recommendation to the stratigraphic commission. Almost daily, emails fly back and forth among its 35 members, refining drafts of papers (including a response to Finney and Edwards) and planning next steps. There have been three face-to-face meetings of the group’s members, most recently in Oslo in April 2016.

Coincidentally, that meeting kicked off on the 46th Earth Day. We gathered around a long table in an ornate room at the Fridtjof Nansen Institute in a mansion built a century ago by the famed Arctic explorer for whom the institute was named. For two long days, discussions led by Zalasiewicz and Colin Waters of the British Geological Survey centered on a review of the “arguments against formalization.” The 17 bullet points ranged from the technical and straightforward—“stratigraphic record is minimal … based on predictions … ”—to the testy and provocative—“[T]he Anthropocene is political, not scientific.” As if to remind participants of the gravity of the task, there was a plastic-laminated copy of the scale itself at each seat, along with the usual array of writing pads and pens.

My lack of familiarity with norms of stratigraphy prevented me from engaging too deeply, although I’ve been a minor coauthor on several of the group’s papers. What I think I’ve brought to the table is context. In a presentation, I urged the geologists to take comfort in knowing they’re hardly the first discipline to be thrust into policy relevance or to have their norms shaken by disruptive change. I clicked to a slide showing how the “tree of life” envisioned by Darwin had been utterly disrupted now that DNA sequencing allows a more complete view, particularly of microbes. Just days before the Oslo meeting, a new “tree” had been published in which, as Carl Zimmer noted in the New York Times, “All the eukaryotes, from humans to flowers to amoebae, fit on a slender twig” compared to a dizzying spray of lines of bacteria.

And now the revolutionary genetic editing tool CRISPR is poised to imprint humans’ ambitions on that tree at least as profoundly as fossil fuels have changed the physical world. I also noted that the sparring in the stratigraphy community strongly echoed fights that had first erupted in meteorology and climate science 25 years ago, as new lines of evidence and new tools, such as global climate models, pointed to a growing and disruptive human warming influence. “You’re not alone,” I said. But I stressed, using climate change as an example, that it is possible to separate the “is” of science from the “ought” of society’s choices. With some bumps and bruises, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had found a way forward. Now it was geology’s turn.

There was some irony in the stroll each day between our hotel and the Nansen Institute. It took us along the shore in front of a giant Jenga-block scramble of horizontal white towers that belong to Statoil. Norway’s mostly state-owned oil company has contributed substantially not only to Norway’s economy but also to global climate change. Even as Norway was adding incentives for drivers to buy electric vehicles to take advantage of ample domestic hydro-electric power, the company announced plans to expand drilling in the Barents Sea to boost fossil-fuel exports. One got the impression that decisions made in that building would have a bigger impact on world affairs than any conclusions we produced.

But there was a second layer of irony there on the windswept shores of the fjord. The grassy stretch along the sinuous path was also a sculpture park. A vertical slab rose from the grass directly in front of the Statoil building, imprinted with an image of one of Easter Island’s moai—the haunting stone figures carved at the potent pinnacle of the great, but vanished, Rapa Nui civilization.

As August drew to a close, Colin Waters headed to the 35th Congress of the International Union of Geological Sciences in Cape Town, South Africa, to summarize the group’s findings, including the results of a vote of members on critical aspects of the evidence for an Anthropocene Epoch. The key points? “Is the Anthropocene stratigraphically real?” Thirty-four yes, one abstention. “Should the Anthropocene be formalized?” Thirty yes, three no, two abstentions (one of which was me).

In deference to the long chain of approvals that lay ahead, he stressed the work plan, which includes a global quest for an appropriate site for a “golden spike”—an actual physical point displaying the evidence for a Holocene-Anthropocene transition.

We are creating the mother of all stratigraphic marker horizons

While many geologists worry that a human-etched epoch grants us too much power on the basis of too little evidence, a few think the proponents of the geological Anthropocene are thinking way too small. One such expert is Jay Quade of the University of Arizona. After decades of fieldwork and lab analysis on six continents, Quade—whose father and grandfather were geologists—seems to live, breathe, and eat insights from ancient rock. I met him in June at a Santa Fe, New Mexico, gathering of scientists focused on the Quaternary Period. He credited the efforts of Crutzen and scientists such as those in the “Anthropocene” working group for all that they were doing but said his reading of the evidence pointed to an even more massive unfolding geological transition. It could, he believed, be akin to—if not bigger than—the Permian-Triassic mass extinction 250 million years ago and the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction that cleared out the dinosaurs and led to the Age of Mammals—and us.

In his keynote talk, he described the human-driven changes under way on Earth as “creating the mother of all stratigraphic marker horizons.” One slide took the audience 50 million years into the future, projecting what the human imprint would look like after such a span—kind of like what geologists see now in probing previous great events. Our anthropocene moment appears as a brief pulse of trash, rare earths, and the like—along with a profound constriction of mammal species—followed in future ages by a flourishing of surviving and newly evolved mammals. Are humans among them to assess that record? Time will tell.

The Lower-Case Anthropocene

Copenhagen 2009 climate talks ©Andrew C. Revkin

To me, the geological discussion, while vital, is not nearly as important as the wider discourse that has emerged around the word and its implications.

What makes this point in entwined human and planetary history special, and has made this word controversial, isn’t our potency. Cyanobacteria, through the evolution of photosynthesis, started flooding the atmosphere with oxygen more than 2.3 billion years ago. Some earth scientists call that the Great Oxygen Catastrophe. The result was a mass extinction followed, over millions of years, by an extraordinary flourishing of life attuned to that new atmosphere.

But cyanobacteria, as far as we know, weren’t aware of their power. And we are, at least haltingly, starting to recognize ours. It remains to be seen whether the current surge of human-generated carbon dioxide, along with our other environmental impacts, creates what future civilizations might call the Great Carbon Dioxide Catastrophe—or not. The wild card is us. The broader meaning of anthropocene, not captured in the Oxford English Dictionary, centers on how awareness (in theory) comes with responsibility.

There will never be a common comfort level with a word like anthropocene, or with the signals emerging from the biogeophysical world, or with what to do about it. In essence, we are all on different journeys through this consequential juncture in the intertwined history of human beings and their home planet.

Is this the beginning of our end, as some have argued, or the turbulent beginning of a potential new age of enlightened cultural and physical evolution? Can the anthropocene, or Anthropocene, be good?

In June 2014, New Yorker staff writer Elizabeth Kolbert addressed this question in a Twitter post. That year she’d won a Pulitzer Prize for The Sixth Extinction. She’d read “The Delusion of the Good Anthropocene,” Clive Hamilton’s biting critique of a talk I’d given on the prospect of a “good” Anthropocene at Pace University.

Hamilton, known for a dark view and a sharp scalpel, is a professor of public ethics at Australia’s Charles Sturt University and the author of Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth about Climate Change, among other books.

Kolbert’s tweet distilled much:https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?dnt=false&embedId=twitter-widget-0&features=eyJ0ZndfZXhwZXJpbWVudHNfY29va2llX2V4cGlyYXRpb24iOnsiYnVja2V0IjoxMjA5NjAwLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X2hvcml6b25fdHdlZXRfZW1iZWRfOTU1NSI6eyJidWNrZXQiOiJodGUiLCJ2ZXJzaW9uIjpudWxsfSwidGZ3X3NwYWNlX2NhcmQiOnsiYnVja2V0Ijoib2ZmIiwidmVyc2lvbiI6bnVsbH19&frame=false&hideCard=false&hideThread=false&id=479034758413164545&lang=en&origin=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.anthropocenemagazine.org%2Fanthropocenejourney%2F&sessionId=3fb3ff36e50af36ef05e93cd0e652184b0b35e1a&siteScreenName=AnthropoceneMag&theme=light&widgetsVersion=e9dfb5f%3A1627539779275&width=550px

In a subsequent conversation facilitated by the fine Grist blogger Nathanael Johnson, Hamilton and I clarified differences and found lots of common ground. He wasn’t seeking a “bad” anthropocene, for instance, and I didn’t see this as a good time for global ecology. But we agreed on the uniquely consequential nature of this moment and the value of discourse in search of common ground.

We also agree that the broader implications of humanity’s surging planet-scale impacts can be obscured by technical struggles or disciplinary turf battles over stratigraphic signals. As Hamilton wrote in a commentary in Nature in August 2016, “The new geological epoch does not concern soils, the landscape, or the environment, except inasmuch as they are changed as part of a massive shock to the functioning of Earth as a whole.”

The idea of the anthropocene resonates loudest within circles tussling over the best ways to chart a sustainable human journey. A leading proponent of the “Capitalocene” alternative, Binghamton University sociologist Jason W. Moore, has written that a focus on the anthropocene could “obscure more than it illuminates.” However well intended its supporters may be, they are—by presenting humanity as a single entity—glossing over the real drivers of both environmental and social degradation: inequality, commodification, imperialism, and more. His pitch for Capitalocene leaves out environmental ravages committed under Communist regimes in the Soviet Union and China, where destructive policies began under Mao well before that country’s own capitalist tilt. But his point will be vital to consider as discussions flow forward. Who is the “we” when we talk of common human responsibilities?

It took me more than 20 years of regularly using the word “we” in articles or talks on new scientific insights (“we’ve learned”) or global trends (“we’re changing the climate”) before I fully absorbed that, in several important contexts, there is no “we.”

It’s humbling for me now to reflect on the naïve, preachy way I framed my “anthrocene” notion in that 1992 climate book. The passage reads like a sermon. Who was the “we” in that paragraph? Did it include Pacific islanders or rural villagers in India and Africa who scrabble to make a living facing today’s climatic and coastal threats and who contribute no meaningful amount of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere?

The simplest sources of human variability are geographic and economic. If you’re poor and vulnerable or prosperous and protected, an epic storm has completely different meaning. In 2007, I was the lead writer of a special New York Times report describing humanity’s “climate divide” along these lines. A Dutch woman who had bought a riverside house that floats off its foundation safely in a severe flood said, “We’re looking forward to floating,” as if it were an amusement park ride. A farmer in northeastern India had a very different reaction as he surveyed waterlogged fields following an early spring flood on the Baghmati River. Three acres of wheat—a third of his income—were gone. Barley, mustard, and peas were ruined.

But I also learned in examining behavioral studies that there can be fundamental differences—shaped by deep-rooted behavioral traits—in how individuals, rich or poor, north or south, perceive environmental change. Are you an edge pusher or group hugger? You know the answer. The person next to you likely has a different answer. One body of research calls the source of differences “cultural cognition.” This is why there’ll never be a common comfort level with a word like anthropocene, or with the signals emerging from the biogeophysical world, or with what to do about it. In essence, we are all on different journeys through this consequential juncture in the intertwined history of human beings and their home planet.

There is one other area where the “we” question has emerged. Who is the “we” who should be making judgments on the anthropocene, even within the constrained scientific debate? Just as Jason Moore found fault with an overly simplified anthropocene distillation of human civilization, British environmental economist Kate Raworth found fault with the composition of the “Anthropocene” working group itself.

I had written a blog post following the second meeting of the group, in Berlin in 2014; I noted, somewhat in passing, that it was “very white, [w]estern, and male.” Raworth fired an apt salvo on Twitter: “The Anthropocene is bad enough. Spare us a Manthropocene.” She included a photo gallery she’d created of nine female experts in global change. In a welcome move, more women have since been added to the group, including Naomi Oreskes of Harvard University, who combines a geologist’s and a historian’s perspectives.

It’s important not to get too caught up in this rarefied level of discussion. In the real world, however discomfiting this might be to those of us engaged with the word, I’d aggressively wager that at least 90 percent, maybe 95 percent, of humanity has not yet heard the word or considered its implications. Wealthy world citizens are insulated from environmental risk. The poorest are so caught up in survival that the future has little meaning. I haven’t found any polls yet testing awareness of the word “anthropocene.” But try a Google Trends search of “anthropocene, global warming, ISIS” and you can see the relative levels of attention.

In the meantime: Whatever you call this period of history, the biogeophysical and increasingly technological reality is playing out on scales that aren’t amenable to old ways of managing risks and opportunities.

Brad Allenby, a longtime analyst of sustainability and technology at Arizona State University, rejects the term Anthropocene entirely because it’s not nearly big enough to encompass what’s going on. He feels referencing geologic time presumes far too much stability and knowledge. “[A]s humans increasingly integrate with the technology around them, and as the evolution of that technology continues to accelerate, it is questionable that what we will have in 50 or 100 years will still be anything like ‘anthro,’” he wrote on the aptly named Future Tense blog earlier this year. “We are trying to tie geologic time to a windstorm.”

A few years ago, after Allenby and I had an onstage discussion of the Anthropocene at Arizona State, a member of the audience proposed a hopeful architecture for the coming decades:

“The way I would like to see it … in, say, 100 years in the future, the London Geological Society will look back and consider this period … a transition from the lesser Anthropocene to the greater Anthropocene.”

That has a nice feel to it. Fully integrating this awareness into our personal choices and societal norms and policies will take time. I’ve taken to encouraging people to meld urgency and patience, however irrational that might feel.

Reflecting on all that has passed and is to come, I see the prospect of slow but substantial and productive shifts in the human enterprise. They will come along with a rich array of perceptions and responses among and within communities—from the scale of global society to that of the stratigraphic community.

Will this happen fast enough? Who knows. But this is the human way. A big part of engaging with the anthropocene, to my eye, is engaging with and even embracing ourselves as individuals and as a flawed and variegated yet amazing species. In 2003, biologists identified “response diversity” as a source of resilience in ecosystems. I’d assert that the same characteristic is an asset in societies as long as they work to level playing fields, foster education and transparency—and communicate.

Perhaps the last thing the world needs is another word. But in 2011, I offered a name for that kind of engagement. It might make you chuckle, given my earlier effort at naming something, but here goes. Anthropophilia.

Edward O. Wilson’s Biophilia was a powerful look outward at the characteristics of the natural world that we inherently cherish. Now we need a dose of what I’ve taken to calling anthropophilia as well.

We have to accept ourselves, flaws and all, in order to move beyond what has been something of an unconscious, species-scale pubescent growth spurt enabled by fossil fuels in place of testosterone.

In The World without Us, Alan Weisman created a haunting, best-selling, thought experiment—imagining a planet awakening after the vanishing of its human tormentor. The challenge: There is a real experiment well under way, and we’re all in the test tube.

We’re stuck with the story of The World with Us. It’s time to grasp that uncomfortable, but ultimately hopeful, idea. Shall we form an Anthropophilia working group?

___________________________

Andrew C. Revkin has reported on science and the environment for more than three decades, including 14 years at The New York Times. He now writes the Dot Earth blog for the Times. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Senior Fellow for Environmental Understanding at Pace University, and a performing songwriter.

___________________________

About the Header Image: JR is a French photographer and artist who claims to own the biggest art gallery in the world—the streets of the world. His work is designed to catch the attention of people who are not typical museum visitors, mixing art and action and talking about commitment, freedom, identity, and limit.

The image used here is part of the Women Are Heroes Project and was created in an action in Phnom Penh, Open Eyes, Cambodge, 2009.

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npj Urban Sustainability volume 1, Article number: 5 (2021) Cite this article

Abstract

The scale, pace, and intensity of human activity on the planet demands radical departures from the status quo to remain within planetary boundaries and achieve sustainability. The steering arms of society including embedded financial, legal, political, and governance systems must be radically realigned and recognize the connectivity among social, ecological, and technological domains of urban systems to deliver more just, equitable, sustainable, and resilient futures. We present five key principles requiring fundamental cognitive, behavioral, and cultural shifts including rethinking growth, rethinking efficiency, rethinking the state, rethinking the commons, and rethinking justice needed together to radically transform neighborhoods, cities, and regions.

Radical departures

The scale, pace, and intensity of human activity on the planet¹ is driving global biodiversity and ecosystem decline², fundamentally altering earth’s climate system³, and increasing social and economic global connectedness⁴ in ways that threaten stability, resilience, and sustainability of local and regional human and ecological systems⁵. These patterns suggest we are living in what has been described as the Anthropocene Epoch⁶ characterized by rapid and fundamental human-driven alterations of earth systems across the globe⁷. These major shifts to the stocks and flows of human life-support systems^8,9 challenge sustainability at any scale without fundamental and radical transformations in human activities and supporting financial, legal, political, and governance systems¹⁰.

To shift the human enterprise toward a sustainable relationship with, and within, the earth system requires much more than small tweaks and incremental change¹¹. Instead, it will require radical departures from the status quo^{8,12,13,14,15,16} where the complex system of intertwined sustainability challenges¹⁷ are confronted in order to shift multiple unsustainable trajectories toward ‘good’ Anthropocenes¹⁸ where normative goals for sustainability are achieved¹⁹ and political and economic power structures deliver the common good²⁰. Radical change necessitates investments in knowledge, technology, institutions, and modes of business, as well as personal and socio-cultural behavior and meanings. Unlike existing approaches to transformation, radical change seeks to drive major shifts in understanding and actions across a broad range of diverse communities that can lead to shifts at both individual and organizational levels²¹. Tendency to focus on biophysical or economic quantification of the couplings between society and technology or society and ecological systems can overlook a critical element of radical thinking—the necessity to consider underlying social drivers such as capitalist competition and unequal power relations in ways that do not reproduce dominant growth and efficiency logics²². The radical changes required for transforming pathways toward ‘good’ Anthropocenes thus require more holistic, intertwined social–ecological–technological systems (SETS) understanding and approaches²³.

We propose five key principles as necessary preconditions for societal transformation to achieve a good Anthropocene, one that is just, equitable, resilient, and sustainable. These principles include rethinking growth, rethinking efficiency, rethinking the state, rethinking the commons, and rethinking justice. We illustrate the potential to coordinate actions across five principles with the concept of connective tissues to ensure that dynamic linkages and feedbacks among interacting social, ecological, and technological–infrastructure system domains are considered and managed for driving transformation. In doing so, we attempt to reframe the dominant dystopian futures narrative to provide a conceptual framework and example case studies demonstrating how systems-level transformation can be initiated. We seek to open the door to new, more radical, and urgently needed systems-based policy, planning, design, and management approaches intrinsically based on the obligation to deliver positive, desirable futures.

Accelerating challenges

Globally, greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase, global ice has been rapidly disappearing, ocean heat content, ocean acidity, and sea-level rise are trending upward, all while human population, world GDP, air transport, and fossil fuel subsidies exponentially increase⁵. Moreover, average abundance of native species in most major land-based habitats has fallen by at least 20%, mostly since 1900. More than 40% of amphibian species, almost 33% of corals and more than a third of all marine mammals are threatened by human activities². At the same time, rapid urbanization has driven exponential consumptive demand for natural resources, energy, and built infrastructure, largely using outmoded 20th century design and construction techniques²⁴ (Fig. 1). This demand has generated interdependent and cascading risks, and threatens the resilience of human, ecological, and infrastructure systems, especially in urban areas where the majority of humans and infrastructure are concentrated^{25,26,27,28,29}.

The future is therefore unsurprisingly dominated by dystopian narratives³⁰ that stem from business-as-usual projections of current trends in population, economic, and urban growth (Fig. 1). These narratives exist in prominent future scenarios from global bodies such as the IPCC, IPBES and other³¹ economic scenarios, and which represent multiple future Anthropocene-related risks, such as from weather-related extreme events (e.g., drought, heat waves, coastal storms, and fires)³². Extreme events do not pose only future risks but are already impacting human and ecological communities³³ with complex local, regional, and global feedbacks that challenge human ability to innovatively manage the earth system at scale and alter current negative social and environmental trajectories toward more positive, desirable futures. While a return to past functionality or global climate has limited prospects^34,35 owing to its systemic complexity and our fundamental alteration of its dynamic stability, creating, owning, and acting upon positive visions that counter dystopian narratives is possible and critical to chart pathways, create motivation, and drive action in the present^16,17,30. However, visions alone are insufficient. More radical transformative thinking is required that provides systemic leverage, actionable ideas, and supportive governance processes to develop pathways for how local, regional, and national innovations can be upscaled to drive global-scale sustainability transformations. Fundamental, and even radical transformations will require creative ways of connecting different types of actions and feedbacks across subsystems to promote positive tipping points³⁶.

A good Anthropocene

There is much debate on defining the Anthropocene. We follow Hamilton (2016) and consider the Anthropocene as the ‘recent rupture in Earth history arising from the impact of human activity on the earth system as a whole’³⁷. Anthropocene risks emerge from globally intertwined social, ecological, and technological drivers that exhibit cross-scale interactions from the local to the global³⁷. As we improve ways to understand these complex interactions not only within and among systems, but also among resilience and sustainability initiatives, it is becoming clear that to alter earth system trajectories and create alternative pathways toward a better Anthropocene, we need more fundamental and radical transformations that can deliver systemic changes^19,23,28,38. We define a ‘dystopian Anthropocene’ as one that broadly mirrors the present, where the current status quo is maintained into the future with human societies facing rampant inequality, unacceptable social and environmental injustice, economic models and development trajectories focused on growth, law used as a reactive tool to cement the status quo, and environmental ills from human-caused pollution, climate change, and ecosystem degradation unchanged or worse. In contrast, we define ‘good’ Anthropocenes as ones where these trajectories are reversed and the future is environmentally just, socially equitable, ecologically healthy, socially, ecologically, and technologically resilient and sustainable at all scales. To achieve the future we want will require radical changes in human cognition, behavior, and cultural norms but we argue, with others^39,40,41,42 that such change can begin by scaling up ‘seeds’ of positive futures that already exist across the globe. Scaling up such seeds, together with articulated pathways to the future that engage with diverse values, worldviews, knowledge systems, power structures (both political and financial), and scales, can promote transformations toward normative societal goals⁴³. Such seeds of good Anthropocenes can include social movements, new technologies, economic tools, projects, organizations, or new ways of acting that support a prosperous and sustainable future, considering external drivers and cross-scale dynamics, as well as internal drivers of these interrelated systems. Transformation, however, requires more than scaling up current initiatives and innovations, and also a fundamental incorporation of systems approaches in order to be impactful and to have potential to scale at the level needed to meet global challenges facing not only human society, but non-human actors as well.

It is systems all the way down

Social–ecological systems literature demonstrates that social and ecological systems are linked through feedback mechanisms, and display resilience and complexity^28,44,45. Transitions in these literatures are commonly considered as co-evolution processes that require multiple changes in socio-ecological or socio-technical systems or configurations⁴². Modeling approaches have been developed to explain how different policy mixes influence social–ecological^18,46 or social–technical change⁴⁷. However, existing approaches rarely consider the dynamic interrelationships across the full suite of SETS in a holistic manner to inform radical change. We utilize the SETS conceptual framework as a useful starting point for examining whether systems interactions are considered in transformation initiatives because this framework can help to understand the interlinkages or ‘couplings’ between elements of SETS^{32,37,48,49,50}. The SETS conceptual framework (Fig. 2) complements recent scholarship in social–technical or social–ecological systems research^51,52. SETS has been used in multiple cases and projects to enable examination of the interactions and interdependencies of human, environment, and technological–infrastructure interactions^{48,49,50,51,52,53,54,55,56,57} and can be a way to analyze the potential of positive seeds of transformation to grow toward larger scale and more radical changes. The 2020 U.S. National Science Foundation’s call for Sustainable Regional Systems research argues for SETS as the conceptual foundation to anchor systems approaches that can deliver sustainability across urban and rural interlinked systems⁵⁰. SETS thus aims to overcome the limitation of a purely socio-technological approach which tends to exclude ecological functions, or of social–ecological approaches which may overlook critical roles of technology and infrastructure, all of which are fundamental constituents and drivers of, e.g., urban system dynamics⁵⁸. The SETS framework can therefore broaden the spectrum of the options available for intervention⁴⁸ and is a useful foundation to explore sustainability plans, actions, and initiatives, while identifying barriers to change within existing actions, governance frameworks, economic constraints, and value systems.

Here we use the SETS framework to examine the interdependencies across system domains within five key interrelated principles for rethinking human activity on the planet. We suggest that these five principles are among the preconditions for the radical transformations necessary to shift human–environment interactions toward planetary sustainability. Our use of a SETS framework focuses on three main system couplings (Fig. 3 and Table 1): (1) social–ecological (S-E) couplings refer to human–nature or social–ecological relationships, feedbacks, and interactions, such as how urban nature provides ecosystem services to support human health and wellbeing⁵⁹ or linkages between stewardship of urban green spaces and ecosystem change^19,60, (2) social–technological (S-T) couplings refer to the ways in which technology and human social systems interact such as providing ability to communicate globally through social media⁶¹ or the dependence on technological infrastructure to facilitate dense human living in cities; and (3) ecological–technological (E-T) couplings refer to the different ways in which climate and biophysical systems impact technology such as wild fires which cause power outages or rising temperatures driving increased energy use for cooling technology in buildings which in turn contributes to the urban heat island⁶². The SETS couplings are not limited to these examples, but rather provide a starting point for more holistic systems approaches in developing and scaling up sustainability initiatives at multiple scales.

Table 1 Rethinking principles and their manifestations in SETS couplings.Full size table

We cannot solve complex challenges with simplistic approaches. We need more systemic experimentation and learning making it important that relevant SETS couplings be systematically identified, understood, and managed to address climate resilience opportunities or to transform interdependent systems to be more sustainable. We will also never be able to fully understand complex systems given constant change, dynamic feedbacks, and non-stationarity which creates uncertainties that can be reduced, but not eliminated. Thus, the SETS framework provides a middle ground for expanding systems thinking in multiple domains, while providing a starting point from examining linkages between S, E, and T domains in SETS couplings to build up ability to consider interactions, feedbacks, trade-offs, and synergies that exist within any subsystem, also, interacting across systems. We suggest that siloed efforts at transformation in only one S, E, or T domain without considering at minimum S-T, S-E, and E-T couplings and better S-E-T interactions, will ultimately fail precisely because they overlook the interdependent and complex nature of any SETS process, pattern, or dynamic in the Anthropocene, where humans and their technology dominate and undermine natural planetary processes^8,63,64.

Five principles for transformation

While SETS provides a framework for the application of a systems approach to defining options for managing Anthropocene risks, specific pathways and radical principles for realizing a good Anthropocene and operationalizing the SETS approaches are still needed, also, articulation and exploration of the connective tissues that can unite disparate transformation approaches across SETS. We propose five key rethinking principles based on an interdisciplinary literature foundation that recognizes the complexity and scale of the challenges facing humanity. We specifically consider the importance of core principles rethinking growth, rethinking efficiency, rethinking the state, rethinking the commons, and rethinking justice (Table 1) with reference to the S-E, S-T, and T-E couplings that need to be examined together in a specific intervention or initiative (Fig. 3). We provide examples of couplings for each principle, while also acknowledging that these examples are not entirely independent of other couplings, nor fully systems approaches, or even radical enough to achieve transformations at the scales needed. However, where case studies exemplify action on multiple principles, they are instructive of how we can begin to implement all rethinking principles and systems approaches for change. Examples are, however, ‘seeds’ that have potential to be replicated or scaled up, and more importantly, provide examples of how couplings and addressing core rethinking principles can help to set local urban SETS on more transformative pathways. Our framework and the five key principles are intended to reframe scholarly debate on sustainability transformations to a systems-oriented, adaptive, and relational perspective respecting the interlinkages across SETS. The core innovation of this perspective is not that any example or principle is in itself adequately novel or transformational, rather that bringing SETS perspectives and these five principles together can begin to provide the needed development of conceptual and methodological pathways for the radical changes we need to achieve a common and inclusive good for human and non-human species. We challenge planners, decision-makers, regulators, and governments at multiple scales to work together across system domains to develop more integrated strategies to achieve shared normative visions including the Sustainable Development Goals^65,66. Civil society, active citizen groups, local government, local business, and the wider private sector replete with synergistic actions all have an important and obligatory role⁶⁶ in implementing the principles presented here. Processes of mosaic governance including governance sensitive to a diversity of forms of active citizenship, and cross-sectoral industry and government networks⁶⁷ cut across all principles with a view toward building shared ownership and transcending entrenched paradigms³⁸ while shifting toward good Anthropocenes.

Principle 1: Rethinking growth

Existing economies are GDP focused¹¹ and cost–benefit analysis driven with poor inclusion of externalities⁶⁸, which promotes resource exploitation without full non-tradable cost/value inclusions⁶⁹, and which are part of driving global crises³¹. Corporate sector interests in league with political entities are so powerful¹⁰ that push back from transformative ideas is stymied because perpetual profit through an economic growth model is entrenched in policy, law, business, and global economies²². The principle of rethinking growth, we argue, involves, for example, the development and widespread adoption of new ecologically based business models, such as recognition of the co-benefits associated with investment in nature^31,70 and the multiple values of nature. This principle necessitates accounting for not only the social (non-dollar) value of natural capital, human capital, and produced capital⁷¹, but also more diverse values of nature grounded in ethics of care and reciprocity of human–nature relationships⁷². Rethinking growth means viewing degrowth^73,74,75,76 as an opportunity to slow exploitative economies based on shareholder capitalism, and co-create a value proposition that takes a broader stakeholder view incorporating the value–nature nexus accounting for long-term sustainability, social and ecological co-/dis-benefits, and that can drive global trends to deliver the SDGs^77,78. While we acknowledge that ecological economics⁷⁹ and limits to growth theory⁸⁰ has been around since the 1970’s, these theories have not been applied at relevant scales (local to global) nor with the necessary governance framing to achieve the required radical societal transformations. We argue for rethinking growth particularly where economic utilization and adoption is viewed through the market–government collusive lens focussed on economic expansionary growth rather than planetary ecological limits and human well-being ensconced as the major driver for decision-making. Rethinking growth toward good Anthropocenes also requires incorporating alternate indicators of success other than GDP, profits, shareholder capitalism, and regulatory framing in order to counter the influence of a corporate oligarchy that has become increasingly global, politically influential, and financially unaccountable¹⁰. For example, a systemic shift from competitiveness scarcity and bottom line profit-driven, resource-depletive production processes, to ecological system limits, health, and wellbeing would be an important starting point^17,81. Similarly, this principle means also creating a stronger community focus with shared decision-making such as collaborative abundances, participatory budgeting, promoting equity, recognition of altruistic outcomes, and improving opportunities for citizens⁸² to become more effective collaborators and decision-makers⁸³.

New approaches to rethinking growth in urbanization are provided by example of the Cheonggyecheon (which translates to ‘clear valley stream’) Restoration Project in Seoul, South Korea. This project is a large-scale urban greening effort in a densely populated city. The Cheonggyecheon Restoration Project complemented traditional valuation with considerations of social and ecological values over longer time spans by focusing on large-scale urban regeneration including removing a two-tier overpass and landscaping the river channel beneath it. The rejuvenated river system provides flood protection for up to a 200-year flood event, increased overall biodiversity by 639% (between 2003 and 2008), and reduced the urban heat island effect with temperatures along the stream 3.3–5.9 °C cooler than on a parallel road four to seven blocks away. This effort rejuvenated transportation and contributed to a 15.1% increase in bus ridership and 3.3% in subway ridership in Seoul and reduced small-particle air pollution by 35%⁸⁴. Yet, we include this example not only because the urban greening represents a positive form of nature-based solutions^53,59,85, but rather also because citizens were engaged in decision-making through an electoral process, providing active communication and consensus exchange between the government and its citizens⁸⁶. S-E system couplings in this example are about enhancing human–nature value shifts, and broadening the valuation process to become more inclusive, rather than exclusive. The process considered fundamental human well-being, ecosystem functionality, and a recognition of the importance of building human–nature connections and long-term relationships.

S-T couplings in rethinking growth, beyond this case, can also refer to leapfrogging with disruptive technologies that include short to long-term impacts within a blended finance, microfinance, green finance, and crypto-finance regulated framing to help leap ahead of the barriers around implementing more equitable approaches for how investment is delivered to communities. Core to rethinking growth here is the need to breakdown fundamentals of the economic and financial institutions that see profit-shareholder value as the end goal at the expense of communities, nature, and long-term sustainable futures for the subsequent generations. S-T couplings in this principle go further to include bringing disruptive decentralized energy systems, mobility, and autonomous ground and air transportation technologies that move beyond incremental, to fundamental shifts in decentralization, and which localize ownership of essential services and jobs⁸⁷. For example, the Community Power Agency in Australia uses local, people-powered clean energy projects to bring social, environmental, and economic benefits to rural and remote communities⁸⁸.

Principle 2: Rethinking efficiency

Efficiency can be characterized in many ways, but in economics it is defined as Pareto efficiency, a desirable state, a resource allocation mechanism should achieve, in which no one can be made better off without making someone worse off⁸⁹. Thus, efficiency is a welfare criterion for system design, be it a market or some other system. There is another, more intuitive and operational notion of efficiency, which concerns individual business profit maximization by means of increasing scale, specialization, and capital consolidation. Doubting that efficiency in the latter sense eventually leads to Pareto efficiency is deemed ‘anti-market bias’⁹⁰, ‘anti-profit beliefs’⁹¹, or ‘emporiophobia’⁹². However, this link is far from established, given the aggregate negative social and ecological consequences, such as environmental degradation, income inequality⁹³, and food insecurity⁹⁴. We argue that we must rethink efficiency and our default endorsement of the pursuit of business efficiency. We follow others to challenge the dominant efficiency discourse on whether and how it serves normative goals of society and, instead, argue for a view and action that is inclusive of the wider stakeholders that are impacted by business operations. We thus argue for a, seemingly, radical shifting away from consumption-based monetary growth toward one that values and makes decisions based on non-exceedance of critical environmental thresholds^31,95. Efficiency then cannot be viewed in strictly economic resource terms but should be on the basis of ecological limits, environmental health, and human well-being rather than the lowest common denominator of, e.g., widgets per hour per dollar invested. We advocate for effective social and ecological beneficial use rather than efficiency.

Rethinking efficiency involves recognizing that the short-term and segmented pursuit of efficiency can not only harm society but also hinder transformative changes. Rethinking efficiency could illuminate new path-dependencies that can constrain production, transport, energy, and manufacturing transitions⁹⁶ or assist the diversity of stakeholders within these sectors to visualize the advantages of transitions, thereby helping to reframe the economic, political, regulatory, and technical operational framing in which industries, cities, and communities operate⁹⁷. For example, urban farming could be reconsidered as a more holistic regenerative economic and ecological enterprise within open space governance, in which elements of social inclusion, employment welfare and livelihoods, and ecological resilience are considered in unison. Efficiency and productivity are not sole determinants of this regenerative system, rather the emphasis is on the development of a greener and more inclusive city that can deliver multiple benefits.

An urban example is Bybi, a social enterprise that endeavors to achieve such rethinking efficiency goals through bees and honey production in Copenhagen, Denmark (http://bybi.dk/om_bybi/). Bybi is responsible for more than 250 bee colonies across the city of Copenhagen. ByBi rents beehives to public, private, and social organizations in the city of Copenhagen, and in return, they participate in events, tours, and courses facilitated by Bybi. The beehives are housed around the city and Bybi processes and sells the honey and by-products produced by these rented beehives. However, we do not highlight Bybi because it is alone transforming the local SETS or working with all rethinking principles. Rather, we include it here because this initiative is not fundamentally about production of honey, but about creating a multifunctional system that has social and ecological benefits, and works across sectors including companies, social projects, local citizens, cultural life, and institutions. Though a small local initiative, Bybi represents a seed of good Anthropocenes that can be examined for opportunities to scale, both as a specific initiative and as a way to rethink societies’ focus on efficiency over inclusivity.

S-E couplings in this initiative emphasize the involvement of citizens in urban open space governance mediated by the central role insects and plants play to produce services and benefits. Stewardship in this case moves beyond the human as co-producer to encompass human and non-human interactions. Bybi actively employs unemployed people and those from vulnerable groups and provides training opportunities to those seeking new employment pathways. Low-income residents are provided a means of employment, which contributes to development of new skills and experiences necessary for future work. S-E couplings are showcased in how Bybi actively collaborates and engages with diverse stakeholders (residents, children, immigrants, unemployed, businesses, and government agencies) across the city to transport and distribute native and pollinator-friendly flower seeds for planting and pleasure. Here these actors collectively contribute to urban open space governance for people and insects and benefits are not focused on an efficiency model, but rather on shared human and non-human benefits.

Principle 3: Rethinking the state

To date, states have been unsuccessful in protecting the global ecological boundaries of the planet^95,98. We argue that, despite calls for the dissolution of the state^10,99, and recognition of this failure, states do have capacity and obligation to assume a more significant role in generating positive futures while acknowledging their limitations. States are neither all-powerful nor redundant in solving global environmental problems. By rethinking the state, we mean a conception of governance in which the state is not seen only as reacting to market failures with regulation but is an actor that can support emerging multi-scale governance initiatives at global and local levels, inspire markets and people, give societal direction with goals and obligations toward the earth system¹⁰⁰, build capacity, mediate and resolve conflicts, and institutionalize best practices^101,102. Therefore, transformative governance¹⁰³ is important for rethinking the state because it helps define issues of accountability, legitimacy, and transparency of decision-making and ultimately the political–market power relations that influence the implementation of new pathways^102,104. In the 21st century, states must deal with a polycentric reality in which societal power is divided among a variety of public and private actors at all levels of governance ranging from local to global¹⁰⁵ working toward developing institutional flexibility, improved adaptive capacity, and ecosystem reflexivity via adaptive policies¹⁰⁶. By rethinking the state, we seek to avoid the dual trap of negative externalities and societal instability associated with relying on markets alone, and the utopian picture in which powerful states have the political mandate and the power to force markets and people into submission with regulation¹⁰⁷. By rethinking the state and harnessing its positive powers for good Anthropocenes, we also mean addressing how negative market externalities can be reduced and public participation and self-governance strengthened without losing the immense innovative potential that markets and people hold.

Despite compelling arguments illustrating structural barriers for states pushing transformative goals with significant economic and social trade-offs^95,98, there are also examples of states pushing transformative change despite such pushback. For example, the European Water Framework Directive (2000/60/EC) as an example of rethinking the state seeks to improve—and stop the deterioration of—the ecological condition of fresh surface and groundwaters as well as coastal waters within the European Union (EU). The legal obligations stemming from the directive for the EU member states, companies, and citizens are directly linked to ecological system boundaries and latest scientific knowledge. Similarly, impact-based regulatory strategies have been developed at the EU level in other sectors, most notably in climate change mitigation¹⁰⁸ and managing declining biodiversity¹⁰⁹. Although such regulatory strategies can exemplify an advanced form of an environmental state rather than a green state respecting global ecological boundaries⁹⁸, it is notable that for instance in the water context, the Water Framework Directive is gaining transformative impact with ripple effects across most natural resource-intensive sectors with impact on water quality. For example, in 2019, the Supreme Administrative Court of Finland (SACF) declined an environmental permit from an estimated 1.4 billion euro industrial bioeconomy investment due to declining ecological water quality, despite major political controversy over the matter. The case exemplifies that legally binding goals can have a strong impact for sustainability, social and economic trade-offs notwithstanding. In this context, it is important to underscore that states are complex institutions in and by themselves with multiple levels, sectors, and actors¹¹⁰, which have potential to facilitate overcoming structural barriers of transformation.

While the directive establishes a top-down planning and management structure for the EU waters, it also seeks to facilitate public and private collaboration, innovation, and tailored solutions for reaching the goals^111,112. Here, the EU sets the overall, legally binding goals which are then implemented in state-level legislation, and ideally adapted to regional and local conditions in a collaborative process. While the role of such top-down instruments is controversial in societal transformations, research suggests that law can function as a crucial trigger for shifting governance onto a more sustainable pathway^113,114. These shifts are far from linear and no top-down instrument—even one requiring contextualization and local-level involvement—can be expected to offer silver bullets in transforming governance. All such shifts are likely hindered by path dependencies in the governance cultures of institutions tasked with implementing change^111,112. Top-down instruments can, however, plant the seeds toward shared visions of desirable transformations. In so doing, they perform a crucial societal task despite often slow and uneven progress, potentially providing a transformational change toward a steady-state economy that serves to deprioritize growth and market exploitation as state policy⁹⁵.

By considering S-E couplings in this case it is clear that ecological problems related to overuse and pollution of waters have historical roots and strong societal path-dependencies. Achieving good ecological status of waters cannot be solved in isolation of the social context that is producing them. Legitimate and effective governance solutions need buy-in from market and local actors, and also government-imposed direction as well as conflict mediation and resolution such as court proceedings. S-T couplings would also recognize the societal demand for, or the market imposition of, AI, IoT, and other smart solutions that are pushing rapid development in information technology. On a global level, servers and other information technology infrastructures are a major consumer of water. Water is needed to produce energy (either directly through hydropower, or indirectly through cooling nuclear, coal, or other operations), or to cool down servers. Competition over scarce resources escalates demand for conflict mediation and resolution related to water, and also demand for global planning and steering on the most ecologically suitable locations for running servers and other IT hubs sustainably.

Considering E-T couplings underlines the importance of new technological breakthroughs in monitoring of water status, water purification, water efficiency, flood management, and energy production that can help alleviate the ecological stress caused by human activity and help accumulate revenue from water. These technological breakthroughs alone are unlikely, however, to solve the overuse and pollution of waters in the long-term^115,116. New technology creates room for new development which in turn creates new water-related challenges (e.g., a shift from water-intensive production of cotton to oil-based acrylic textiles causes release of vast quantities of microplastics to waters¹¹⁷). In order to foster a sustainable relationship between humans and water, a rethinking of the human–environment interface is required. States may need to impose limits for societally detrimental development with regulation, but the societal pathways toward this end should not be limited. Market and local actors need regulatory direction, and also room to innovate, adapt, and self-govern.

Principle 4: Rethinking the commons

The commons may concern ecological commons such as nature-based solutions¹¹⁸, cultural commons such as music and arts¹¹⁹, knowledge commons regarding social practices around knowledge¹²⁰, co-ownership and cooperatives¹²¹, and also digital and hybrid commons referring to digital domains such as sharing platforms, bartering sites, cryptocurrencies, and open-source data platforms¹²². Rethinking the commons refers to changes in the way we understand, govern, and use physical, cultural, and intellectual commons to ensure their long-term availability to all members of a society.

For example, the recent surge in cities investing in nature-based solutions^27,59 showcase the pathways needed to rethink the natural resources and open space commons beyond the creation of green areas. Emphasis is placed on building trust in local government and the experimentation process, learning from social innovation, improved access, co-creation, and co-implementation^28,123. The commons may serve as powerful opponents to the dominating capitalistic systems, which often counteract quests for more transformative changes toward good Anthropocene futures^17,18. In this way, a commons-oriented approach promotes citizen-led innovation and participation¹²².

Rethinking the commons includes the generation and qualitative improvement of new and existing public urban spaces. Whereas urban development often is focused on private development and the facilitation of car transportation, seeds of good Anthropocenes in urban development illustrates rethinking of urban spaces and an orientation toward more green, just, and healthy neighborhoods¹²⁴, also termed urban recalibration¹²⁵. For example, the City of Barcelona has installed a series of superblocks, a grid of roads with interiors closed to motorized vehicles and above ground parking and gives preference to pedestrian traffic in the public space, combined with recreational areas, meeting places, and more greenery¹²⁶. The interior of each superblock can be used by residential traffic, services, emergency vehicles, and loading/unloading vehicles under special circumstances¹²⁷.

E-T couplings in the Barcelona case could include making digital environmental data available for common use as it is increasingly provided from sensors, satellites, social media, and crowdsourcing. Equitable access to this data could provide both better information about challenges, and also enhanced capacities for co-creating innovative solution strategies sharing not only decision-making, but also the data and diverse forms of knowledge needed for decisions that can transform multiple domains of local SETS. Access to data and innovative use of technology, like other solutions, must be considered in contrast to social and ecological solutions and co-developed with residents to ensure that such urban development innovations are not co-opted by high private investments that prioritize economic returns relating to the establishment of sensor systems, and drive social abuses¹²⁸.

S-T couplings here involve re-emphasizing the role of public infrastructure as shared spaces, resources, and transportation services that can be provided for common use and more equitably. The digital commons can provide new possibilities for citizens to engage in the planning, design, and management of open spaces. In Barcelona, citizen science data is supplemented by data collected using smart sensors. Sensors are integrated into parking and transportation, to trash collection, air quality, and parkland irrigation. The data is fed into the ‘Barcelona Digital City Platform’¹²⁹ which is available to citizens, private companies, and other interested parties, but the city and its people retain ultimate ownership, and decide what constitutes proper access and privacy¹³⁰. Of course, tensions remain and need to be further examined, such as between ideals of the post-capitalism sharing economy or community economy practices, and the way in which the platform economy has developed with exploitative practices¹²⁸.

Principle 5: Rethinking justice

Rethinking justice in the Anthropocene is concerned with transforming the social, climate, economic, and political systems in ways that address disproportionate impacts and injustices. For example, climate change-driven extreme events are increasingly shown to have disproportionate impacts on the poor and marginalized, and there is concern regarding ethical issues around the unevenly allocated benefits of industrialization¹³¹. When considering risks from climate change impacts, this includes managing procedural, recognitional, and distributional justice issues associated with asymmetrical impact and skewed vulnerabilities^131,132. Rethinking justice means also not only taking environmental and social justice movements further, but also advancing ecological justice, which evokes notions of reciprocity and care for humans and non-human entities, and so requires the exploration of new regulations and procedures for recognizing and managing for the rights of the non-human^132,133.

Fundamentally, rethinking justice means examining how, e.g., climate change impacts and climate resilience actions will affect the relationships between people and place¹²⁷, the range of knowledge and experiences of environmental change that impact everyday life for individuals and communities¹³³, as well as considering how these knowledges are integrated into the governance and management of the city¹³⁴. Rethinking justice is also about building adaptive capacity to manage sudden, violent, and catastrophic weather events or slow, long-term destruction such as drought and wildfire through new forms of adaptive and more diverse representational governance¹³⁵.

For example, new forms of digital engagement and civic participation provide opportunities for recognizing the needs and rights of a diversity of interest groups⁶⁶. In Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, East Africa’s fastest growing city, university students and local residents have been engaged in a community-based mapping project called Ramani Huria (http://ramanihuria.org/) to create accurate maps of the most flood-prone areas of the city. Models predicting current and future flood risk are based on the data collected from the participatory mapping sessions digitized into OpenStreetMap and enhanced with GIS analysis and aerial photos from drones. This project drew on the knowledge of residents in an area of Dar es Salaam housing approximately 1.5 million people, the majority living in informal settlements and highlighted how environmental justice is fundamental to understanding climate risks. Results from this citizen science-based risk assessment processes revealed that while the majority of residents in flood-prone districts understand extreme flood risks, they are unable to move due to financial constraints, commuting time, or do not desire to move due to community and family ties.

Examining the S-E couplings in this case helps address elements of distributional and recognition justice in terms of who benefits from natural resources, and where. In a good Anthropocene, all living beings should have a right to access, occupy, and use urban space and exercise democratic control over the current and future development of the city. In Ramani Huria, residents’ place-based knowledge has the potential to strengthen their rights and capability to live in their homes in the future. Residents can share information about flooding patterns and channels, risk of flooding, and flooding occurrence using participatory mapping tools, supporting climate resilience planning and empowering residents to better understand the issues, potential solutions, and methods of communicating climate risks to local authorities¹³⁶.

S-T couplings in Ramani Huria suggest that participatory approaches to digital geospatial technologies provide novel opportunities to investigate elements of procedural and distributional justice. Local knowledge can complement the data availability gap needed to model and predict future risk. This data is a useful source for adaptive community and multi-level governance decision-making about resilience to support residents’ ability to stay in their homes. Next steps could support E-T couplings including multi-species monitoring and decision-making, giving voice and rights to local waterways.

Supporting transformation by connecting across principles

In 2020, society continues to deal with existential challenges generated by the social, political, and economic norms projected largely from the 20th century setting us on a potential path to deliver a dystopian future in which human society and ecological systems collapse. On the current path we can expect to confront the planetary limits of natural resources, not only to provide basic life-support services necessary for human survival, but also to adsorb the by-products generated by food and energy production, material transformations, with concomitant pollution of water, land, and air resources^63,74. Indeed, considering climate change alone, even if all nations meet their carbon emission reduction targets under the Paris Agreement, remaining emissions put the world on climate change trajectory that may lead to a 3 °C or warmer world with dramatic social, ecological, and technological consequences few have been willing to contemplate.

We suggest that by re-evaluating and rethinking through a SETS conceptual approach some of the most important societal drivers of global environmental and social change, we can build pathways that allow for the radical transformations needed to move the human dominated earth system toward a shared urban future we all want. Dominant, conventional principles that need rethinking (among likely others) include: (1) growth: the economic growth paradigm (exemplified by GDP), with capitalism as the vehicle that is maintained as necessary for employment, upward mobility, and technical advance^{74,75,137,138}; (2) efficiency: the efficiency of market systems and the assumption that businesses can efficiently and fully provide the goods and jobs necessary for a prosperous life within ecological limts⁷⁵; (3) the state: the neoliberal narrative about the incompetence and inefficiency of the state and the assumption that the state should play a reactive rather than proactive role in environmental governance^22,11; (4) the commons: that the commons deserve to be privatized or regulated by the state to avoid the potential for shared resources to be overexploited by individual users^105,107 and social–ecological systems frameworks, which provide for the regulation of the commons but often overlook how to facilitate and remove barriers to adaptive governance and self-organization to maintain resources^101,105,139; and (5) justice: that humans and non-human species have unequal or even no rights to a clean and healthy environment¹³⁹.

Consideration of the five principles in isolation of one another will not drive transformations toward urban sustainability. Indeed, any single principle in itself is not necessarily novel, and has been well described in diverse literatures. The contribution we offer is to bring rethinking principles together as core needs that together must all be addressed to achieve the kinds of radical changes needed for fundamental societal transformations. The connections between the principles are foundational to any system change to ensure the integrity of S-T, S-E, and E-S couplings during the implementation of disruptive innovations and to avoid siloing of innovative solutions. Intermediaries, also termed intermediary actors¹³⁹ or knowledge brokers¹⁴⁰, support accelerating transitions toward more sustainable pathways by removing or reducing blockages, pre-empting unintended consequences of change dynamics, and thus connecting different components and domains of the system¹⁴¹ in what we refer to as fostering the ‘connective tissues’ between SETS strands.

Strong connective tissues including strong causal interactions between system components are also necessary for positive tipping points in the form of ‘domino dynamics’ or a ‘tipping cascade’ where one system causes the tipping of another, or to ensure deliberate interventions into a given principle can take the whole system down an alternative path³⁵. Strong tissues can also provide resilience to negative stressors. Following Elmqvist et al. (2019)²⁸, we propose that these tissues enable a system to maintain function in the eve and aftermath of a disturbance.

Recent examples of these tissues include the sudden shift to virtual care in Australia in 2020. While in part driven by COVID-19, this shift also reflects a connection between a rethinking of efficiency, the state, the commons, and justice. On March 13, 2020 the Australian Government added new telehealth items to the Medicare Benefits Schedule enabling health-care providers to offer both telephone and video consultations. This scheme was extended to all Australian patients on March 30. Before then, Australians inside major cities did not have access to these services. With a system change, the total number of consultations rose significantly, from 10.8 million in February to 12.9 million in April, 2020. The telehealth switch also prompted an overnight shift in the way health care is delivered in Australia¹⁴². The government made sudden changes to legislation and regulation, and finance and support programs to enable online treatment (e.g., rethinking the state). Justice principles were also re-thought concurrently with the provision of new apps and technologies for health delivery. To avoid many of the issues associated with patient isolation, AUS$10 million was assigned to the existing community visitors’ scheme and to train volunteer visitors to combat social isolation caused by COVID-19 (e.g., rethinking justice). New apps were developed to enable volunteer visitors to connect with older people both online and by phone¹⁴³. We may expect trade-offs to emerge associated with the rapid delivery of these online support systems, including the increased inequality due to people’s different abilities to afford smartphones or computers, or difficulties to consult over the phone. Time will tell whether this initiative is transformative over the longer term, but it serves as an example that shifts can happen across rethinking principles, and even quickly^144,145,146.

We provide the example to illustrate how strong connective tissues between the principles are needed, and that all five rethinking principles will need to be operationalized together for fundamental SETS transformations. The SETS framework, combined with connections across the rethinking principles, can help to identify potential trade-offs and ways to address them while aiming for transformative change. In this way, the five rethinking principles ‘pull’ the evolution of the coupled SETS strands toward more transformative pathways creating the conditions for good Anthropocene futures, while the connective tissue between the SETS strands can enable a close coupling and a coordinated realignment of societal activities, goals, and opportunities (Fig. 3).

Radical rethinking for good Anthropocenes

We assert that society needs to not only rethink the conventional principles and their underlying drivers that define the status quo and underpin the current trajectories that put us on pathways toward dystopian Anthropocene futures, but also the connections among them to ensure transformative change. In our SETS framing, good Anthropocenes are ones where the steering arms of society including embedded financial, market, legal, political, and governance systems are realigned and coordinated through connective tissues so as to support multi-functionality. The tissues enable connectivity among social, ecological, and technological domains of SETS. We propose that radical rethinking along the five fundamental principles, combined with governance systems to strengthen the connective tissues among them, are paramount to enabling critical transformations toward good Anthropocenes. We have provided some examples of early ‘seeds’ of those rethinking principles in action that provide a starting point, though these are neither perfect examples nor address all principles or all SETS couplings (explore more seeds further at goodanthropocenes.net). There is still considerable need for advancing sustainability research for transformation. We suggest five key actions for research scientists to effectively contribute to this advancement.

1. Take a systems approach to all sustainability research, taking into account the couplings, and interplay between the social–technological (S-T), social–ecological (S-E), and ecological–technological (E-T) systems. The connective tissues between transformation principles are crucial to ensure the operational integrity of the couplings.
2. Go beyond interdisciplinary research to learn new scientific languages, collaborate with other scientific disciplines, and train toward transdisciplinarity throughout the primary, secondary, and tertiary education systems;
3. Co-produce and co-design sustainability research with communities to bring diverse knowledges to research and practice that is grounded at the scales where challenges are experienced;
4. Recognize and take actions that can push your research to question the status quo with and across disciplines, with the five principles described here;
5. Deliberately create positive tipping points in urban and regional systems—strategically identify actions for creating and strengthening tissues between the principles of rethinking growth, efficiency, the state, the commons, and justice.

We encourage further studies to identify similar SETS couplings, to put forward additional principles that must be re-thought, and to support their mainstreaming together to help initiate and foster the radical transformations toward a good Anthropocene urgently needed.

Data availability

The data used for plots in Fig. 1 are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

We thank two anonymous reviewers for comments which helped to improve this paper. Research was supported by the US National Science Foundation through the Urban Resilience to Extreme Weather-Related Events Sustainability Research Network (grant #1444755), Accel-Net program NATURA (grant #1927167), and Convergence program (grant #1934933). Research was also partially supported through the 2015–2016 BiodivERsA COFUND call for research proposals, with the national funders the Swedish Research Council for Environment, Agricultural Sciences, and Spatial Planning; the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency; the German Aerospace Center; the National Science Centre, the Research Council of Norway; and the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, as well as the SMARTer Greener Cities project through the Nordforsk Sustainable Urban Development and Smart Cities program. We thank Claudia Tomateo and Chris Kennedy for graphic design support.

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Open Access funding provided by Stockholm University.

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Affiliations

1. Urban Systems Lab, The New School, New York, NY, USATimon McPhearson
2. Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, Millbrook, NY, USATimon McPhearson
3. Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, Stockholm, SwedenTimon McPhearson
4. Helsinki Institute for Sustainability Science (HELSUS), University of Helsinki, Helsinki, FinlandChristopher M. Raymond
5. Ecosystems and Environment Research Program, Faculty of Biological and Environmental Sciences, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, FinlandChristopher M. Raymond
6. Department of Economics and Management, Faculty of Agriculture and Forestry Sciences, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, FinlandChristopher M. Raymond
7. Department of Landscape Architecture, Planning and Management, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Alnarp, SwedenChristopher M. Raymond
8. Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management, Section of Landscape Architecture and Planning, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, DenmarkNatalie Gulsrud & Anton Stahl Olafsson
9. Institute of Geography, Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, GermanyChristian Albert
10. Department of Geography, Faculty of Earth and Environment, University of Leeds, Leeds, UKNeil Coles
11. The Institute of Agriculture, The University of Western Australia, Crawley, Perth, WA, AustraliaNeil Coles
12. Department of Geography and Geology, University of Turku, Turku, FinlandNora Fagerholm
13. Practical Philosophy and Helsinki Institute of Sustainability Science, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, FinlandMichiru Nagatsu
14. Law School, Center for Climate, Energy and Environmental Law, University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu, FinlandNiko Soininen
15. Environmental Policy Centre, Finnish Environment Institute (SYKE), Helsinki, FinlandKati Vierikko

Contributions

T.M. and C.R. led the conceptual development and framing of the paper. All authors equally contributed to the development of key principles, literature review, case study development, and core writing and editing.

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Correspondence to Timon McPhearson.

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McPhearson, T., M. Raymond, C., Gulsrud, N. et al. Radical changes are needed for transformations to a good Anthropocene. npj Urban Sustain 1, 5 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42949-021-00017-x

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• Received17 April 2020
• Accepted08 January 2021
• Published23 February 2021
• DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1038/s42949-021-00017-x

Stephanie Rutherford

First Published March 19, 2018 

https://doi-org.ezproxy.uws.edu.au/10.1177/2514848618763250

Abstract

This article considers the irreducible indeterminacy of the coywolf and how this shapes human perceptions of the animal, as well as attempts to manage it. The hybridity of the coywolf matters very much to its interactions with humans, as well as the panic that has ensued over its evolutionary success. They are genetic and morphological intermediaries, an admixture of western coyote, eastern wolf, and dog. They hunt in packs like wolves but demonstrate a fearlessness to humans more common of coyotes. They thrive in urban or semiurban environs, moving along our highway, transit, and green space systems in search of food and shelter. I suggest it is the putative ferality of the coywolf—its margin—dwelling between urban and wild, between wolf and coyote—that disrupts our prevailing narratives about how, and on whose terms, animals can occupy the world. But it is also an animal that offers an opening to think about mutual flourishing. I contend this is a fruitful place to start tackling the questions raised by the Anthropocene, and reimagining all creatures as cotravelers.

Keywords Anthropocene, coywolves, more-than-human geographies, urban wildlife, ferality

Introduction

In 2014, PBS ran a documentary entitled Meet the Coywolf, which introduced its viewers to a new urban predator. But it was an animal with which many were already familiar as it was the lead in a series of stories—from Toronto to Chicago—about dog-snatching wolves. Most startlingly, coywolves hit the national media in Canada in 2009, when a 19-year-old hiker in Cape Breton Highlands National Park was attacked by two canids at the time thought to be coyotes. Other hikers came upon the scene and had to scare the animals away from the hiker’s body in what clearly appeared to be a predatory event. The woman later succumbed to her injuries. In response, park wardens set traps for coyotes in the attack area and eventually killed one that appeared to be acting aggressively. Genetic analysis done on the animal’s body indicated that it was not a coyote, or at least not straightforwardly so. Instead, the hiker was taken down by a critter named at turns the “eastern coyote,” “northeastern coyote,” or “coywolf,” a hybrid of eastern wolf and western coyote, with some dog genes thrown in the mix (Way and Lynn, 2016; Way et al., 2010).

This story might have remained a somewhat shocking footnote in the history of Canadian national parks, a stark reminder that wildness still remains. Beyond the Canadian context, it might also have served as an instructive example of what can happen to nonhumans when they transgress human boundaries. But the problem with consigning this story in such a way is that coywolves have not stayed in the wilderness. Instead, like coyotes, raccoons, fox, and sometimes bears and cougars, they have become part of the multispecies assemblages that comprises some of the biggest cities in southeastern Canada and the northeastern United States.

This article contends that notions of indeterminacy that are sometimes embedded in human perceptions of the animal can make it seem unnerving and most certainly out of place. In all respects, the coywolf is an “unsettled mixture” (Tsing, 2012), crossing the supposed species lines between wolf, coyote, and dog; the spatial assignments of wild, rural, and urban; and the categorizations of valued species and vermin. Its indeterminate classification—its resistance to taxa—make the coywolf an indistinct and troublesome creature, and one that works to reveal the instability not just of the boundaries which it exceeds, but the project of boundary making in the first place. As a result, some see it is a form of biological pollution, one that deserves extermination rather than conservation. However, I suggest that the coywolf might also offer an opening that those who care about the more-than-human world would be wise to seize. As Waterton and Yusoff (2017) point out, indeterminacy can work both ways, eliciting all manner of affective responses. Talking about “indeterminacy as a site of political possibility” (p. 6), Waterton and Yusoff show the potential in attending to the unpredictable, unfixed, and incoherent, which requires an acknowledgment not only of the porous relations between animal species, but also between human and nonhuman.

To make these arguments, this article proceeds as follows. First, I situate the case of the coywolf in the broader literature around posthumanism, both within and beyond geography. I also consider the ways that the notion of the Anthropocene has both deepened some of the insights of more-than-human geographies, while presenting new hazards in terms of how we respond to its complexities. Then, I offer an account of the coywolf itself, exploring, as much as possible, the ways in which this creature has come to be in the world, as well as the taxonomic firestorm it generates in its wake. I document the ambivalent reactions these canids engender, where discursive signals often hinge on notions of invasion and impurity, if not toxicity, comparing and contrasting perceptions of the coywolf with historical understandings of wolves. The article ends on the more theoretical question of what the coywolf might teach us about living well in the Anthropocene. It is here that I gesture to notion of ferality (Tsing, 2005; Van Dooren, 2015) as generative, opening up space to rethink multispecies connection.

More-than-human geographies in the Anthropocene

“The animal” has had its moment in the academic sun over the last two decades in (inter)disciplines as varied as political science, anthropology and sociology, English literature, philosophy, psychology, and history. But geography has, in some ways, offered the most sustained engagement with this question. Beginning with early efforts at zoogeography, geographers have been preoccupied with animals since at least the early part of the 20th century. However, the ways that animals have been apprehended in geography have changed through time. As Julie Urbanik (2012: 21–47) notes, there have been three phases in animal geography, with the last taking a posthumanist turn, focusing on the themes of decentering the human while emphasizing animal agency, entanglement, and hybridity (see also Buller, 2014). This has produced what Henry Buller (2014: 310) has called “an emergent scholarly community” where “animals matter individually and collectively, materially and semiotically, metaphorically and politically, rationally and affectively.” As a result of this scholarly community, acknowledging that animals are individuals with lifeworlds of their own, existing in networks with other animals, including humans, no longer represents a theoretical risk. This is thanks to the labors of geographers like Barua (2014, 2016, 2017), Collard (2012, 2014), and Lorimer (2007, 2014, 2015)¹ who have demonstrated the ways that all our practices are formed through interspecies relationality; put another way, and to quote Claude Lévi-Strauss (1970), “animals are good to think with,” allowing for the fact that species other than humans shape the places, landscapes, and practices we encounter on a daily basis.

In recent years, the notion of the Anthropocene has become central to many of these analyses of human–animal relations. Now famously defined by Paul Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer in 2000 as the proposed geological epoch defined by human intrusion into the biosphere, the concept has taken root across the traditional solitudes in academia, spreading like wildfire in the sciences, humanities, and social sciences. This is no surprise; as Jenny Turner (2017) notes, “it has a luscious mouth-feel, and seems just the thing to bring new urgency and direction to all the tired old arguments about climate change, resource depletion, the future of the planet.” As a scholar of environmental studies, I take for granted the salience of the Anthropocene concept, acknowledging as it does that my species (or at least parts of it) have reshaped the world in ways which are sometimes irreparable. But the trouble with depicting humans as a geological force, of course, is that it is at once awfully self-centered and totalizing. It abstracts up both differential cause and effect, rendering the racialized, classed, gendered, and imperial forms of violence that have, in part, created and perpetuated this human defined moment occluded from view. Instead, an undifferentiated Anthropos has ravaged the wild. It might also be taken to mean that to remedy the worst excesses of the Anthropocene, we need a different yet still totalizing new story to tell. By contrast, Donna Haraway (2016) suggests we should talk about the Chthulucene, which rejects both the boastfulness of the Anthropocene as well as the end of the world-ishness of the Capitalocene, proposed by Jason W. Moore as an alternative. Here Haraway (2016: 55) is at pains to emphasize the chthonic: that which is of the Earth. In so doing, she suggests that the “Chthulucene is made up of ongoing multispecies stories and practices of becoming with in times that remain at stake, in precarious times, in which the world is not finished and the sky has not fallen—yet.” So, Haraway points to what is beneath notions of the Anthropocene, hewn as it is to a fiction of separation, is an exaltation of human mastery even as it decries its impacts. Following Bruno Latour, she provides reinforcements here for the broader sweep of her work; the Chthulucene hinges on the notion that we have never been just human, but are always and inevitably an assemblage, a “tentacular” composition constituting and constituted by the more-than-human world. While I take her critique of the Anthropocene seriously and have long accepted the kind of ontology that Haraway has spent a lifetime so brilliantly espousing, I also think the notion of an epoch defined by human-induced change can be generative, implying both acknowledgment of asymmetrical harm and a responsibility to act. The notion gestures toward an ethical thrust. There are political stakes for accountability to both humans and nonhumans which the Anthropocene implies. Following Collard et al. (2015: 323), the idea of the Anthropocene opens up the possibility of thinking through “abundant futures” while recognizing that we live among “capitalist ruins.”

It bears mentioning, however, that neither posthumanism nor the Anthropocene are innocent descriptors of the world; these can be too-slippery shorthands which simultaneously reveal and obscure. Nor were geographers the first or the only people to think about the ontological relationality that characterizes the more-than-human world. As Kim TallBear (2011) writes of the “interspecies communities” so venerated by posthumanism, “It sounds to me like ‘we are all related’,” a long-held truth of Indigenous knowledge. Indeed, she contends that the recent turn to animal studies leaves out much of the nonhuman that is included in Indigenous relational ontologies—for example, glaciers (Cruikshank, 2005)—which may also be considered lively parts of creation. Zoe Todd concurs in a paper which ties the much heralded “ontological turn” directly to colonialism. She writes of the long wait—in vain—for Western scholars to “credit Indigenous thinkers for their millennia of engagement with sentient environments, with cosmologies that enmesh people into complex relationships between themselves and all relations” (2016: 6). In geography Juanita Sundberg (2014), like both TallBear and Todd, has cautioned those who sometimes wield posthumanism as a shibboleth to recall that what they are saying is not precisely new, and often reasserts colonial dividing practices as it seeks to destabilize them. By claiming, as much of the literature in more-than-human geographies does, that the divide between nature and culture has been universal, posthumanist thought can erase ways of knowing not structured in this way while also reifying the very Euro-American dualism being critiqued. TallBear, Todd, and Sundberg remind scholars, then, to be cautious not only of totalizing narratives, but of those that seek to upend them. Thom van Dooren argues for a humbler view, one which acknowledges both the politics and stakes involved in multispecies assemblages. Van Dooren (2016) writes, “There are worlds in which lives are lived in zones of inescapable overlap. My house, my body, are always already others’ territories too; often without our really ever knowing about the others’ existence.” For the remainder of this paper I contend that the coywolf might encourage this openness to the many creatures that make up our daily lives.

Becomings

Coywolves are recent entrants into the biological record, only emerging in the last 100 years or so. Yet in this time they have displayed a remarkable degree of evolutionary plasticity and adaptability, seizing on the areas “dewolfed” by the bounty across Canada and the United States. The bounty system in both countries served as a technology of colonization, one tentacle in an all-out assault that replaced a complex web of Indigenous nationhoods, lifeways, knowledges, and practices with European ones. The aim of extermination is rendered legible in the context of the anxieties that wolves induced, both similar and different to anxieties generated by coywolves. For white settlers, the transformation of appropriated lands to “productive” use—forestry, trapping, ranching, farming, and fishing—was the mainstay of their lives. Wilderness—and the people and animals that inhabited these spatial imaginaries—needed to be eliminated: one landscape replaced by another. As Jones (2002: 104) attests, “The abundance of wolves in the Canadian West symbolized the primitive state of the region, a condition that had to fall before the advance of civilization.” Put differently, wolves (among others, both nonhuman and human) resisted the sweep of colonial transformation, both actually and by what their bodies represented. With relation to the wolf, anxiety was generated on two registers: the fear of becoming a food source (through wolf attack) and the fear of losing their food sources (by way of wolf predation on livestock) (Coleman, 2006). For instance, the howl of the wolf, so often heard across the early frontier, signaled its failure to submit to colonial will. Many of the stories about wolves in Rod and Gun in Canada, the Canadian equivalent to Field and Stream, recount the panic at the howl of a wolf, in part at the fear of becoming an animal’s dinner (Rutherford, 2016). And their adaptation to the changes wrought by colonialism—for example, prey switching to domesticated ungulates like cows and sheep once elk and deer were less abundant—sealed wolves’ fate. Settler relationships with wolves were dominated by fear.

I would contend, along with Coleman (2006) and Wise (2016) that the root of this fear is that wolves were seen as boundary crossers, upending the natural order which placed white European humans at the top of every hierarchy of which they could conceive. Accordingly, wolves were anachronistic animals; their time had passed. Even those who professed love for the wolf—like Ernest Thompson Seton (2009 [1898]), noted nature writer—saw their fate as inevitable. Indeed, the actual and imagined threats posed by wolves were often read as similar to those presented by the Indigenous peoples they sought to displace; both hinged on notions of moral corruption. This was so much the case that wolves were often conflated with Indigenous peoples. Of course, the efforts to put animals and Indigenous peoples in the same discursive space have long been a strategy of colonialism in North America and elsewhere, serving as a mechanism to legitimize the stealing of land (Braun, 2002; Thorpe, 2012). For settlers, wolves and Indigenous peoples were reminders that the colonial project remained unfinished. Nowhere is this made clearer than in the invocation of wolves as part of the “civilizing mission” at Canadian residential schools. For instance, a 1935 letter written by the Acting Secretary of the Department of Indian Affairs to the Principal of the Anglican Indian Residential School in Aklavik, Northwest Territories, asked that nuns embark on a “campaign of education” to convince students they should “destroy wolves” and end the Indigenous “superstition” against wolf extermination. The Principal replied that the school would “make every effort to eradicate the superstition from the native mind” (Correspondence between Parker & Mack, 1935 – 1936). In the kind of nation imagined by the Department of Indian Affairs, neither the wolf, nor Indigenous understandings of it as more than a beast to be eliminated, could survive. A similar conflation can also be seen in the US, where Michael Wise (2016) contends that wolves and Indigenous people (specifically the Niitsitapi) became central to defining a difference between predatory and productive labor. Wolves and the Niitsitapi were put in the same discursive space, both understood as predators in a nation that sought to redefine work as only productive. Wise suggests that one of the key tasks of colonization was boundary making, and both wolves as Indigenous people found themselves on the wrong side of this line of demarcation. Bounties, which spread to each province, territory, and state in Canada and US from the 1700s to the mid-1900s, worked to make the killing of those animals that threatened colonial progress profitable.

Bounties served a variety of aims (in Canada, see Loo, 2006; in the US, see Coleman, 2006), but perhaps chief among them were boundary maintenance and the reinscription of order on a landscape in transition, to ease the anxious settlers’ mind. Wolves were seen by colonial settlers as rapacious beasts and ambassadors of the uncontained wilderness the imperial project sought to subdue (Rutherford, 2013). As vestiges of a supposed uncivilized time, their destruction became imperative. And the bounties in both Canada and the US achieved much of their aim, such that wolves were eliminated from much of their range in both countries at the turn of the 20th century. As a result, by the early 1900s in Ontario, Canada, eastern wolves (Canis lycaon)—something of a hybrid itself, or at least subject to taxonomic debate (Grewal et al., 2004)—were hunted for bounty or killed by government predator control units until near extinction. As keystone predators, wolves limited coyote range extension, which were found in the southwestern US since the Pleistocene (Pennsylvania Game Commission, n.d.). However, the gap created by the bounty meant that coyotes could move east, expanding their population and extending their range. According to Kays et al. (2010: 89), “coyote colonization was fivefold faster via the northern route through Ontario, which exposed them to wolf populations, compared with the southern route through Ohio, where wolves were extirpated prior to coyote expansion.” The speed of this colonization was amplified by the landscape change that coyotes encountered, one in transition to large-scale industrial agriculture. Because wolf numbers had been so decimated, they began to look upon coyotes—animals that wolves would normally drive from their territories—as potential mates (Way, 2013; Way et al., 2010). In this way, human persecution of wolves made the coywolf an evolutionary possibility; we created a window for a new species to emerge, one which thrives in wilderness and disturbed ecosystems equally well (White, personal communication, 2013) and by some estimates, now number in the millions in northeastern US and Canada (—, 2015). In the course of less than 100 years, they have become the largest predator in the region and have taken their place at the top of the food chain (Kays et al., 2010). But this would not have been possible without the enactment of settler anxieties about wolves and the colonial imperative to reshape the land. As Brad White, a geneticist at the forefront of canid research suggests, “this animal is a creation of human impact on the planet” (White in Vyhnak (2009)). Put another way, the coywolf is an animal of the Anthropocene.

Yet, there remains much debate in the scientific literature and amid conservation circles as to whether the coywolf is an actual “thing.” By way of example, one might take a quick look at a recent debate that played out in The Conversation, an online platform meant to deliver academic research and opinion on a range of issues in an accessible and interesting way. In November 2015, zoologist Roland Kays (2015) wrote a piece for the website contesting the use of the term coywolf. The author takes issue with the word because it imputes, in his view, equal gene contribution from wolves and coyotes. Kays asserts that the coywolf remains mostly coyote (somewhere between 60 and 84%) and in some cases there are animals with almost no wolf genes. As such, “there is no single new genetic entity that should be considered a unique species” (Kays, 2015) and hence, no coywolf. He concludes the article with the somewhat testy exhortation, “Call it a distinct ‘subspecies’, call it an ‘ecomorph’, or call it by its scientific name, Canis latrans var. But don’t call it a new species, and please don’t call it the coywolf” (Kays, 2015). In May of 2016, the other side answered. Jonathan Way, who has written extensively on coywolves, including the book Suburban Howls: Tracking the Eastern Coyote in Urban Massachusetts (2007), entered the fray. Way (2016) argues, contra Kays, that the coywolf is in fact a distinct species and should be hailed not as a coyote variant, but as Canis oriens. Way (2016) contends that the animal is “significantly different—genetically and physically—from their parental species since the coywolf is about 60 percent coyote, 30 percent wolf, and 10 percent dog; thus, nearly 40 percent of this animal is not coyote.” He ends his intervention with the suggestion that coywolves might act as something of conservation role model, demonstrating the importance of not only protecting species that live in wilderness, but also those with whom we are more likely to share space.

Whereas Kays’ argument hinges on similarity—coywolves are too much like coyotes—Way’s functions on difference—they are dissimilar enough to be considered their own species. The language seems to matter quite a bit here, working as it does to enforce taxonomic boundaries that reify species divides. These arguments also suggest that the divisions between species are more calcified than they may actually be. For my purposes, this debate is less interesting as a means to determine the truth of species-hood, and more because of its insistence that defining the animal as either a distinct species, or not, is central to understanding it. And so, I use the term coywolf precise to stick with its indeterminacy, for its inability to be contained either by the geographical imaginaries that are imposed upon it, or the species boundaries which its body actively resists.

Dwelling in between

What is interesting about coywolves is the blend of morphological and behavioral traits they display from their progenitors. For example, they fall between wolves and coyotes in size, somewhere between 30 and 55 pounds. They hunt in packs, like wolves, but demonstrate a degree of fearlessness, or at least curiosity, toward humans—more of a coyote trait. They thrive in urban environs, moving along our highway systems, abandoned rail lines, and segmented green space in search of food (Cortorneo, 2013). They are opportunistic omnivores, with the ability to eat deer (because of their larger jaws) or urban compost (cbc.ca, n.d.). There have also been reports that suggest that the animals are “bolder and smarter than regular coyotes” (Vyhnak, 2009). And it appears it is their very hybridity that has ensured their evolutionary success; rather than genetic pollution, interbreeding has led to species strength in the form of adaptability (—, 2015; Velasquez-Manoff, 2014). Coywolves, like Rosemary-Claire Collard’s (2012: 24) cougars, are “hard to pin down.”

The unsettledness of the coywolf has in some cases provoked a fearful response that has been part of the media narrative around the coywolf expansion across southern Canada and the northeastern US. This disquiet follows, at least to some degree, the well-worn grooves laid down by settler interactions with wolves. Like wolves, coywolves are seen as out of place. They occupy places that wild animals should not. For wolves, there very presence marked them for extermination. In the case of coywolves, it is their presence at the margins of city life which generate affective responses in the humans that encounter them. This is especially true because of their ubiquity. Since their first sighting in central Ontario in 1919, coywolves have in recent years become something of a shadowy fixture in urban and suburban areas. As a result, the interactions between coywolves and humans have grown. While they might be difficult to categorize, for many, especially those who have lost a beloved family pet to their predations, coywolves fit the definition of “urban terrorist” assigned to other “trash animals” (Nagy and Johnson, 2013: 2). Predatory wildlife in the city presents challenges to our normative spatial understandings of what belongs where, generating registers of fear and anxiety around wildness radically out of place. As Jennifer Wolch (1996, 2002) suggests, the urban setting offers an illusory sense of separateness from nature, where the ordering and segmentation of space proceeds almost entirely on human terms. But, of course, animals and other nonhumans have always been integral to cities not only in the form of urban wildlife but also pets, livestock, disease vectors like cholera, cockroaches and bedbugs, and so on. Moreover, rather than eschewing contact with humans, some animals may choose to live in close proximity for a number of reason, like access to food or safety from hunters (Thompson, 2007). Despite this evidence, the idea the cities are somehow antinatural is prevalent, causing Jerolmack (2008: 88) to suggest that urban wildlife “signals a cityscape that is not subdued.” As a result, intrusion upon this fiction is often vigorously policed, particularly if the multispecies encounter leads to human loss (property damage, missing pets), or perceived loss (“aesthetic insults”) (Wolch, 1996: 35). For example, the flying fox, a large fruit bat native to Australia, has been purged from its chosen home in Melbourne’s Royal Botanical Gardens (Thompson, 2007). So too have Van Dooren’s (2016) “unwelcome crows” in Hoek van Holland. Along the same lines, the coywolf, with its less predatory cotravelers, like raccoons, rats, weasels, feral cats, and fox, disrupts our narratives about how and on whose terms animals can occupy the world.

It is in part because of the very indeterminacy of the coywolf that how humans encounter its presence in (sub)urban settings is amplified. Writing about coyotes in Toronto, Blue and Alexander (2015: 155) contend they “refuse to remain within such tidy geographical orderings and imaginaries. In transgressing these categories, coyotes can be viewed as out of place and risk inciting potentially dangerous reactions for the human community.” The coywolves’ success in using urban infrastructure—of moving along remnant greenspaces designed for recreation, of using highway off-ramps for dens, of howling at the sound of fire truck sirens—suggests a sense that they can navigate urban terrain capably and without human awareness. They are synanthropes that have adapted to urban environments and “are able to adjust their behavior to habitat fragmentation and human activities” (Birnie-Gauvin et al., 2016: 417). Put differently, coywolves are novel animals for novel ecosystems that show a kind of phenotypic plasticity that some find so troubling.

To determine popular perceptions of the coywolf, I took aim at the proliferation of news sources which have turned their attention to this creature in the northeastern US and southeastern Canada, conducting a systematic search of news aggregator Factiva, spanning the first mention of the coywolf in this source in 1994 to October 2017 (with mentions peaking in 2015). This yielded 193 publications dealing with the coywolf. However, this approach to accessing public opinion has its own hazards. As numerous animal geographers have pointed out, animal subjectivity is lost when a scholar only looks at narrative sources about animals (cf. Hodgetts and Lorimer, 2015; Van Patter and Hovorka, 2017). I agree wholeheartedly with this admonition to pay attention to the lives of animals. However, my goal here is less to understand coywolves’ lived experience (which is better left for another article), than to get at the way their indeterminacy has generated affective responses, often concentrated (though not entirely) around fear and panic.

Some of these articles were reflective think pieces on the emergence of coywolves and their remarkable capacity to live in some of the biggest cities in Canada and the US (cf. Matheny, 2015; Richardson, 2015). Others were more focused on the taxonomic classifications that such critters resist (cf. Miller, 2015). However, a good number displayed angst at a new predatory force that seems capable of moving among our spatial and genetic categories with east. Take, for example, some of the more overwrought headlines:

Victoria Beach under siege by a vicious new predator—Winnipeg Free Press (Owen, 2015)

The super coyote is here…They are here, maybe right in your own backyard, and they’re bred to hunt.—Windsor Star (City Desk, 2013)

Coyotes taking over East Haven backyards—WTNH Connecticut (Simoni, 2014)

This is our town’s Jaws—Motherboard (Knafo, 2015)

Coywolves have taken over the Northeast—Business Insider (Welsh, 2014)

Coywolves, coyote-wolf hybrids, are prowling Rock Creek Park and D.C. Suburbs—(Dingfelder, 2014)

Of course, as mentioned above, these are not the only stories to tell about human–coywolf encounters. Some media outlets have been far more admiring in their depiction of these canid hybrids. But I would suggest that these stories—the ones that dwell on the affective registers of panic, fear, and horror—are the ones freighted with the most potential to impact the lives of coywolves. While, each of these news reports might be read as a hyperbolic lead to attract viewers in a media-saturated market where “click-bait” is prevalent, the degree of fear and disdain is palpable as one delves further into these news reports. For example, in the case of Chappaqua, New York, an affluent suburb in Westchester that is home to Bill and Hillary Clinton, the presence of coywolves has torn community ties precisely along the lines of those who believe the coywolves should be trapped and killed because of an impending “coyote jihad” (sporting freshly made coyote gloves at town meetings to emphasize the point), and others who suggest that maybe we need to find better ways to live together (Knafo, 2015). In the case of Victoria Beach, Manitoba—and in the absence of any documented cases of coywolves—the description given is of a pack of roving (and ravening) canids, completely unafraid of humans (Owen, 2015). Indeed, members of the suburban community indicated they preferred the long-reviled wolf to the coywolf, because it stayed away from humans; wolves it seems, unlike their kin, know their place. Members of Victoria Beach asserted they felt “under siege” from having to keep their pets inside (Owen, 2015). Similarly, in a central Ontario town called Gravenhurst, resident Lori Kennedy recounts being attacked by a coywolf as she attempted to rescue her pet cat. She remarks that since the attack “the neighbours have all been living in fear” (Kenny, 2014). Bette Jean Crew of the Ontario Federation of Agriculture echoes this sentiment: “From what I know talking to farmers, the animals are getting bigger and bolder” (Winsa, 2011). The article goes on to suggest that “in recent years, stories have spread about the hybrid eastern coyote, a once solitary animal that now hunts in packs like a wolf and lures off expensive guard dogs so other pack members can move in for the kill” (Winsa, 2011). Carol Kaesuk Yoon’s (2010) coyotes are wily too, charged with four attacks on children in one summer and leaving the community on alert from this new suburban predator.

Most articles also deal head-on with the indeterminacy of the coywolf, remarking on wolf–coyote hybridity in the US and Canada in sometimes less overstated but no less important terms. For instance, as far back as the early 1990s, the Toronto Star (1990) suggests that “[w]olves are threatened by a lust for coyotes” in ways that “threaten their genetic integrity.” Ron Nowak (1995: 1), a former United States Fish and Wildlife Service zoologist, amplified this concern in a 1995 article for Canid News, where he outlined the taxonomic peril with recognizing hybridization.

The wolves of North America are under a severe new threat from an influential group; not the lumber companies, fur trappers, or stockman, but the zoologists, or at least some among them who are keen to publish claims that wolf populations have hybridized with other species.

A more recent article about wolves in a national park in western Quebec echoes this lack of distinction, suggesting that in the six packs found in Gatineau Park, the lines between wolf, dog, and coyote are blurred (Spears, 2015). Indeed, almost all of the articles I looked at referenced the “canid soup,” the futility in separating out species lines among canid populations as exemplified by the fight about whether coywolves are a distinct species or not. The presence of the coywolf alerts us to the invention of species boundaries in the first place.

The discursive signals in these articles work through fear of a new predatory species or the biological risks it poses, and often hinge on the notion of invasion and intrusion—that coywolves represent some kind of biorisk that needs to be eliminated from the urban landscape. This terrain has been expertly covered both with reference to predatory wildlife (cf. Collard, 2012) and with the broad literature on so-called invasive alien species (cf. Larson, 2008). Invasion carries its own lexicon of political prescriptions, but the vast majority dictate extermination of one species for the conservation of another (Ritvo, 2017)—the one which is “in place” rather than exceeding its spatial or species boundaries. Similar to wolves, those species deemed out of place, either by virtue of geography or taxonomy, unsettle the certitude with which humans navigate the world. And yet, in my estimation, it is not just that the coywolf is wild but that it occupies a space in between that gnaws at the edges of normalcy in urban life. The coywolves’ success in using urban infrastructure—of moving along remnant greenspaces designed for recreation, of using highway off-ramps or overturned canoes for dens, of howling at the sound of fire truck sirens (Meet the Coywolf, 2014; Way, 2009)—suggests a sense that they can navigate the urban terrain capably, making use of the novel ecosystems we have provided for them. Rather than wild, I would suggest it is the instability of coywolves that has induced the kind of moral panic we see elaborated in these news reports. At the root of this is the notion that the coywolf is an abject animal. For Kristeva, the abject has to do with “what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules” (Kristeva, 1982: 4; see also Van Dooren, 2015). The coywolf represents the loss of distinction, of secure moorings with which to define not only the human-dominated landscape of the urban, but even the supposed impermeable divisions between species themselves. Not only does the coywolf resist our spatial categories, it refuses our notions of genetic purity. Its biggest violation is that it insists on being in the first place. It is, as Donna Haraway would suggest, a string figure, emphasizing the knottiness of enmeshed living. This I think, if nothing else, is what is fruitful in the idea of the Anthropocene. For all of its conceits around the importance of humans to the stories of the earth, it does invite a recognition that the world only operates via entanglement. Coywolves, then, can be thought of as an embodiment of the Anthropocene’s most interesting conceptual elements. They call into question what Fiona Probyn-Rapsey (2017) has called the “purifying logic” we apply to the nonhuman world, pointing instead to the evolutionary possibilities of hybridity, of unsettled mixtures, of indeterminacy.

Historicizing hybridity

As mentioned above, some of the responses to coywolves follow a longer lineage of both fascination and revulsion around hybridity. Hybridity, as Homi Bhabha (1995) so famously remarked, is a site of ambivalence. One can see this ambivalence at work when looking at animals like the coywolf that unsettle our taxonomic practices. As Caccavale and Reise (2011) suggest, monsters captivate. Those creatures that do not fit within our classificatory practices are at once bewitching and abhorrent, titillating yet disquieting (see also Ritvo, 1998). This ambivalence is often sutured through a reestablishment of the categories that such creatures unsettle. This is very clear in the insistence that the lines between species are distinct and bounded. However, the emphasis on species boundaries is as much an imaginative act as a biological one, yet one which is “deeply rooted in our culture” (Caccavale and Reise, 2011). Since Ernst Mayr’s elaboration of the biological species concept, based on the notion that species boundaries are calcified through the (im)possibility of breeding, this understanding has become normative way of conceptualizing species distinction (Mitchell, 2016). But, as Mitchell (2016: 34) points out, this move to abstraction can only be maintained by disregarding “the creative promiscuity and proliferation of life forms.”

As Mitchell, Latour (1993) and others have signaled, beneath the boundary policing between species, hybridization thrives. Perhaps because of this, efforts at purification may be redoubled. In revealing the historical contingency of species divides, animals like coywolves are rendered unworthy of conservation (Stronen and Paquet, 2013) in language that often echoes eugenic desires to purge the body of impure elements (Pêgas, 2013). Referring to the instability of these notions, as shown by genetic modification, recombinant DNA and animal hybridization, Caccavale and Reise (2011) go on to suggest “This has provoked a deep anxiety among many people, an anxiety that has been variously described as a rejection of the ‘unnatural’ or a fear of the ‘alien’ or the ‘dangerous’.” Conservation biology is not immune to these views, where, as Rodrigo Vargas Pêgas (2013: 1) attests, hybridization has an “unnatural image.” We see this in Nowak’s panic around an acknowledgment of hybridization, as well as Geise’s (2005: 865) more recent work on coywolves, which asserts “the wolf now faces a new and unlikely threat. Molecular genetics research suggests that gray wolves have hybridized with coyotes in the northeastern United States.” Underpinning this contention is a biopolitical move that carries the resonance of the wolf bounty, but instead of killing wolves, they are saved from genetic swamping. What is interesting, of course, is that this discourse and practice assumes that wolves are somehow pure species, whereas coywolves are not. This essentialism falls apart once we recognize that the eastern wolf, with whom coyotes bred in the first place, is part of the canid soup that makes up the northeastern US and southeastern Canada. The politics of purity has no place in the canine world.

Even so, animals like the coywolf—genetically, spatially, and discursively indeterminate—are remade into threats in need of management. For Mitchell (2016: 30), these are the “unloved” creatures of conservation practice, in this case rendered so because they thrive where they should not. This unlovability is present in both conservationist and popular discourses of the animal. For instance, it is hard to miss the underlying racial logic at play, most obviously in the language of jihad above, but also present through an elaboration of the perils of genetic swamping, or “extinction by introgression” that is pinned on this animal. The coywolf is talked about as an agent of invasion. As Probyn-Rapsey (2016) suggests, “The categories into which animals are made to fit are both cultural and scientific… We have ferals because we have a stubborn insistence on categorical thinking.” Livingston and Puar (2011: 7) stick with the implications of the genetic transgression offered by creatures like the coywolf, arguing that attention must be paid to the “social and affective processes when barriers are breached” and “the hierarchical classificatory system is subverted or reworked.” In this way, the kind of horror expressed by the residents of some of the towns featured in the news makes a little more sense. In many of the accounts presented in the media and some scientific understandings, the coywolf’s eradication is necessary: it inverts some of the certainties through which we order our lives and throws into relief the futility of these attempts at demarcating the world.

Love your monsters

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this story from the perspective of multispecies encounter is that we made the coywolf possible. By attempting to exterminate one species, we allowed another to emerge, one which is highly adapted to human socioecological relations. The critical question, then, is if we made it, what is our responsibility to it? The more predictable reaction charted above does not have to be—and indeed is not—the only one. Just as often as people want to trap and kill the coywolves (and make them into silky mittens!), others want to ensure their continued ability to live in the places that they choose. If the coywolf is an animal of the Anthropocene, then, as Collard et al. (2015: 322) suggest, it invites “the question of how humans ought to intervene in the environment; how to live in a multispecies world.” French philosopher and scholar of science and technology studies, Bruno Latour, tells us to love our monsters. He contends that “Dr. Frankenstein’s crime was not that he invented a creature through some combination of hubris and high technology, but rather that he abandoned the creature to itself” (Latour, 2012). What if we take this seriously, accepting both responsibility for and the humility to learn with more-than-human critters, like the coywolf?

The wolf, the coywolf’s cotraveller and kin, has played an active role in the lives of humans for millennia, even as we spent centuries trying to eradicate them. Indeed, there is evidence of the domestication of wolves since at least the Neolithic period. But what is perhaps interesting about this story is that new research contends that wolves domesticated us, rather than the other way around. The notion that wolves approach us first, perhaps hanging around the edges of a cooking fire in 10,000BCE, suggests a kind of “survival of the friendliest” which is marked by our relationship with dogs today (O’Callaghan, 2013). In the end, we have coevolved. Throughout much of the history of our relationship with and to wolves, we have attempted to deny this coevolution, this multispecies assemblage. Some wolves became dogs, and others remained resolutely part of the wilderness that needed taming. But coywolves show us yet another layer of this coevolution. Fugitives from a feral landscape, their presence jars us into thinking about the stakes of decisions about livability, and how we might rework them—both discursively and materially—if our goal is coflourishing.

So, I think the coywolf is good to think with precisely because it disconcerts. Put differently, it asks how we learn to love our monsters, beings that upset the neatness of our conceptual boundaries, that function as examples of Kirksey’s emergent ecologies (2015). In what ways can we foster intimacy by way of new forms of attentiveness, while at the same time making room for autonomy? What do cohabitation and livability look like for the coywolf? It is here that I think a return to the notion of ferality leads in interesting directions, not to reify a discourse of genetic purity but to deny the political value that an attachment to a fictive purity offers. I contend that the coywolf is feral, but not in the putative sense of a domesticated animal returning to the wild. I would invite a broader interpretation. Ferality points to the ways that some (all?) animals are made possible through human interaction and disturbance and that encounter shapes all those doing the relating. In the case of the coywolf, its relationships to humans, to particular kinds of landscapes, and to wolves brought it into being. In the way I am deploying the notion here, ferality might be a synonym for symbiosis, always entangling multiple actors in a messy and unending negotiation of difference. So, ferality is risky. It shreds certainty and violates limits. Yoon (2017: 136) asserts that the feral “evokes liminal, excessive, inappropriate, and transgressively abject connotations, marking the need to correct, neuter, or even exterminate ecological and political outcasts.” It is the unruliness here which I think it might be important to hang on to, for in my view, it offers a way forward in the politics (and poetics) of ecological revivification and repair. As Haraway and Tsing (2015) tell us, “resurgence is always a multispecies affair.” And it is necessarily relational, often occurring at the “neglected margins or the seams of empire” (Tsing, 2012: 155). The coywolf is an animal of the edge, full of the potential that ferality implies.

And yet, there is much to be critiqued in the flat ontologies that often accompany an unambiguous celebration of resilience in nature. This emphasis on enmeshment, on resilience, on the capacity of the more-than-human world to respond to and shape our shared environment can also work to evacuate politics out of questions of human–animal relations. If we acknowledge that humans are not always, as Steve Hinchliffe and Nick Bingham (2008) suggest, the most interesting place to start, then there is the attendant possibility that an emphasis on agency obscures asymmetry, coercion, and domination. As Rosemary Collard, Jessica Dempsey, and Juanita Sundberg have so insightfully shown, mainstream conservation is becoming more both “neoliberal and postnatural” in its embrace of the Anthropocene, emphasizing ecosystem services over biodiversity protection, where the more-than-human world becomes instrumentalized through new forms of green governmentality. A potential hazard, then, of this posthumanist celebration of entanglement, coconstitution, assemblage, and biopolitical collectivities, is that it actually perpetuates the very circumstances that require nonhuman resilience in the first place. Because, while these creatures have survived the legacy of human-induced environmental change, they may not survive their continued interaction with humans on human-only defined terms. There are better ways of relating to the fact that we are necessarily and inevitably entangled with the nonhuman and that have everything to do with reciprocity, exchange, improvisation, and liveliness than doubling down on the kind of technological utopianism espoused by the folks at the Breakthrough Institute through their Ecomodernist Manifesto (Asafu-Adjaye et al., 2015). Conservation triage or deextinction is not, in my view, options. So, I would suggest we need to find another way.

Put differently, when I say we need to love our monsters, I am gesturing to the ways that rejecting humanism is a political project, and one with real stakes not only for nonhumans but those people who, through the epistemic violence of the nature–culture divide, have found themselves on the wrong end of that boundary. How do we open space for all parts of creation—human, nonhuman, biotic, abiotic, person, polar bear, and lichen? How do Western subjects invite a curiosity and attentiveness to the world outside of the human, a world which fundamentally makes us up even as we have sought to deny this material reality? How do we make life liveable for each other? In this context, the coywolf may offer an example of the degree to which some humans have intruded on and shaped the biosphere, but our reaction to it does not need to continue along this thread. The coywolf is illustrative of the precarity that the Anthropocene implies, but also of the ways that that there is life in the midst of death. Said differently, the coywolf could be considered an agent of “genetic rescue” (Stronen and Paquet, 2013: 391) in the context of the rate of extinction we have wrought. While the Anthropocene presents us with dire indictment of violences against the nonhuman world, it also may not be the end of this story. For J.B MacKinnon, “a story of loss is not always and only a lament; it can also be a measure of possibility” (cited in Collard et al. (2015: 327)). This does not provide an alibi for the destruction of the natural world; rather if gives a place to go that sidesteps the politics of purity. Instead of balking at the environmental change the coywolf represents or denying our role in producing it, those whose lives are enmeshed with coywolves might seek a productive and generative attention to difference and livability in the context of that difference. Rather than panic and issue exhortations around genetic pollution or animals out of place, instead there could be embrace the kind of resilience the coywolf exemplifies, while also recognizing that we need to do more for those animals that cannot live in such close proximity to humans. In cities, what this might look like, at a minimum, is the acknowledgment the urban is a space constituted by multispecies encounters, which cries out for a “transspecies urban theory” (Hovorka, 2008). At a concrete level and at the very least, planners could extend spaces for the coywolf and other predators to survive, establishing nodes, buffers, and corridors, where wildness is a characteristic not defined by proximity, but the chance for autonomy and self-determination (Collard et al., 2015). Or, instead of embarking on ecological restoration projects which deny the value of novel ecosystems, there might be an acknowledgment that sometimes humans increase rather than decrease biodiversity, or at the very least allow for different kinds of biodiversity to emerge and thrive. Some of us may be required to accept the potential for loss—particularly of beloved pets—if we allow them to roam outdoors, negotiating the knotty entanglements of sharing space. Further still, the possibilities for urban wildlife to thrive might be made manifest if we see them not simply as pests or wildlife out of place, or even as victims displaced through the Anthropocene, but as individuals that may have chosen to occupy the city on their own terms. More broadly, Stronen and Paquet (2013: 394) offer an option that is at once common sense and challenging at the same time:

Where hybrids have filled the ecological niche (or parts thereof) of one or more extirpated parent taxa, such as the eastern coyote in the northeastern United States and parts of southeastern Canada, the focus should be on preserving the ecological role currently held by these hybrids.

One wonders about the possibilities for interspecies exchange that are opened up when we allow for the fact all animals, human and otherwise, make choices to pursue their own lifeways. In this context, the existence of the coywolf gives us some reason for hope; they might be our accomplices in dwelling well in the Anthropocene. Either way, it seems, the coywolf invites us to unfix our conceptual rigidity, opening up what Livingstone and Puar (2011: 11) call a “politics of curiosity and vulnerability,” where risky and contingent attachments maybe be formed and reformed in a continuous negotiation of mutual responsibility. Working out how this might make these choices less asymmetrical and more about flourishing is, in my view, the critical task of our time. This curiosity and vulnerability can be put into practice through the politics of encounter where we come to relationality bereft of assumption. Maan Barua (2015: 266) sketches eloquently what this could mean:

Encounters point to taxa being occurrents, inseparable from the heterogeneous bodies, technologies and practices through which they are articulated. Multiple modes of knowledge are fused in classificatory schemes, evident when plicated histories of encounters between colonizer and colonized are unraveled. Encounters scramble genealogical trees: introgression and horizontal gene transfer happen across phyla and scales. They herald involutions, organismic filiations based on contagion and symbiosis.

The choice to encounter requires something of us; apathy becomes an unacceptable response. There is hope here, but not the kind that is blind to the perils we face or the enormity of the task at hand. As historian Tina Loo (2017) has recently suggested, “perfection is the enemy of hope.” Learning to love our monsters is an iterative process, one which we will almost certainly get wrong again and again. Paying attention to one another in ways that are both intimate but also allow for autonomy will be difficult. The likely result will be an inevitably flawed effort to come to know another animal in a way that grants it has lifeways that we may not understand, but are worth attending to. So then, it is important to deploy hope as a verb, as an ethical obligation, and, for my purposes, a way of doing research. If, as Haraway (2016) contends, “it has become literally unthinkable to do good work in any interesting field with the premises of individualism, methodologically individualism, and human exceptionalism,” then political hope must be a relational multispecies affair.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks are due to the research assistants who have aided this project: Adam Marques, James McBride, and Brook Schryer. Thanks also to the editor and three anonymous reviewers whose careful reading and suggestions for revision greatly improved the paper.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Notes

1This list is obviously not exhaustive but rather is meant to be representative of some of the recent and cutting-edge working taking place in animal geographies, and that which has been most influential for me. Other, very accomplished posthuman/animal geographers are also cited throughout the text.

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