The Anthropocene addresses us: it compels us to re-think how we—as researchers from fields of anthropology, geography, philosophy, and the arts—carry out investigations in the world. In this essay, we propose forms of creative experiments and play as a way to follow the life of materials. Such an endeavor is part of a particular ontological commitment to new ways of knowing in the Anthropocene. This contribution is a statement of purpose for radically interdisciplinary modes of research that emerged from a series of animated conversations about creative experimentation at the Anthropocene Campus.
Modern disciplines are organized around orientations to particular spheres and zones of life. However, based on the ecologies of practices they enlist, disciplines can also be thought of as particular ways of being affected. If, following Brian Massumi, we accept that affect is as much about a capacity to be affected as it is a capacity to affect and act in return, this poses larger, global questions when considering affect as a proposition for an anthropocenic re-assembling of disciplinary boundaries. What would a reframing of discipline offer our performance of research in a planetary context, in which being affected is an urgent political and ethical condition?
The question: “What is the Anthropocene?” is still an unanswerable one. Despite the array of proposals for various “markers” for this geologic epoch—from traces of Strontium 90 to the topographical stamps of plantations—there is doubt about our capacity to adequately define this era, and its relation to planetary history. However, the Anthropocene certainly affects our practices as scholars, thinkers, and sentient beings. It forces us to reconsider our notions of time, nature, work, and the human. The demands of the Anthropocene do not operate only at the level of research presentation, but clash in the liminal realm of methods, devices, and concepts. In many ways, the Anthropocene does more than just resist our categorizations: it addresses what we mean by knowing, and enrolls us as cognizant beings in a world of multiple ontologies that exceed the human. We suggest that this blur should be taken as an opportunity: if we cannot “address the Anthropocene”—in the way that modern disciplines hoped to address objects situated in the world—we must at least explore its contours. We begin, here, by paying attention to the ways in which the Anthropocene affects us. We prioritize the ways it moves us and demands our attention; we remain open to the questions it poses to our established convictions. Here, our ambition is not to define the Anthropocene, nor to affix its boundaries as an object of research. Rather, we propose a reinvigoration of experimental, creative practices as privileged processes of knowing, and a “following” of materials that multiplies the repertoires in which we can speak about life in the Anthropocene.
Crucially, our attention to creative experiments is an endeavor to revive experimentation as an open source ecological practice, and to equate it with experience once again. The separation of experience from experiment was a project of the Enlightenment, one that sought to strip the mythology of the personal (subjective) from the rational order and canon of scientific knowledge. Here, in parallel with an emergent hegemony of rational thought, an epistemological weight was ascribed to experiment stripped of its subjective character—and thus denied its ability to respond to those experiential elements not yet quantifiable or describable by the language of logic.1. Within this movement, the “experiment” came to stand for first-order, observable, or reproducible qualia, with experience relegated to the position of secondary, internal, or subjective qualia. The experiment has come to be equated with a kind of secluded ritual space, with specific properties that circumscribe the scope of “valid” knowledge, and root it in multiple forms of violence. This violence is notably one of the methods—an obligated, unitary access to the world, brandished against all others which are doomed for elimination.2. It is also the violence of the current process of writing, in response to research calls and proposals, with its attendant need for ethical protocols, risk assessment, pre-framing of methods, well-defined objects, boundaries of fieldwork, and expected results. However, similar difficulties can also be encountered in a phenomenological approach that adopts experience as the category of establishing knowledge; this approach ignores the subtleties of difference and fails to nuance the complex ways in which people experience their environments.3. Subjective experience—while always historically and culturally situated—informs knowledge production. As such, it intersects with the realm of objective knowledge. Subjective qualia cannot be cleanly segregated from the seemingly “objective” first-order qualia.
The creative experiments compelled by the Anthropocene are not those that would codify processes and events such that they can be replicated in particular assemblages, ready to be reconstructed; as such practices risk denying us the possibility of being affected by the experiment. What we mean by experiment has a different tenor: experimentation as that which places knowledge at risk, questions what we know and how we know it, and seeks to reinstate knowledge as grounded in subjective, self-reflexive, and transforming practices. Creative experiments are careful, exploratory engagements through which we follow, act, react, record, and trace the often-messy material convergences of concept, matter, and energy in the universe.
Knowledge is in and of the world. To recognize this is to expose our knowledge to change or challenge. It is to be open to the unexpected, to accidents and coincidences, to “embrace failure,”4. and to welcome serendipity. In creative experiments, knowledge is not the result, but that which is generated along the experimental process. In the History of Modern Fact, Mary Poovey demonstrates that paying attention to the process of fact-creation allows one to critically reflect on knowledge itself.5. Knowledge is not viewed here as a discrete category, but as one that constantly intersects with its specific epistemological frames and thought traditions. Creative experiments must embrace this trait by accounting for the unfolding processes inherent to objects of research. We propose inquiries that make, assemble, grow, and curate in ways that cannot be assessed in pre-established outputs: the processes of these experiments’ unruly deployment “change[s] the end in changing the means.”6.
By beginning with the Anthropocene, and how it affects us and demands a reformulation for understanding and studying it, we find ourselves proposing “creative experiments”: a material play-cum-experimentation that attends to and follows the movements and ontologies that emerge at the level of experience. This is our opportunity to reconcile experience with experiment, to re-insert “value” into the experiential as a way of understanding and thinking about materials. Importantly, the experimental trajectory of material play is never predetermined by the “already-givens” of material science. This is not to suggest that material play blinds itself to empirical data or the mechanics of scientific experimentation; rather, these scientific givens offer up a set of conditions through which such play might emerge. Here, the endless treatise, methodologies, and theoretical data with which scientific experimentation has gifted us exist as invitations; as nominative thresholds to be tested, probed, and manipulated through a playful interaction with materials, which seek to link that empirical data with an experiential knowledge—embodied, intuited, unfolding. What is offered is the experimental possibility of bringing together first- and second-order qualia at the level of enquiry, and a re-formulation of objects and method, such that each communicates the same thing, through the condition of raw experience.
Feeling/Following
Given the difficulties that the Anthropocene poses, we propose the creative experiment as a process of discovery. At its heart lies a radical openness that makes it possible for the researcher to engage with his or her chosen object of study without being bound-up in and limited by pre-established grids of knowledge. In this section, we draw from Henri Bergson to help articulate the nuanced ways in which we, as researchers, hope to creatively experiment with the Anthropocene.
In Matter and Memory (2004), Bergson argues that a purely rational reading of material and space limits us only to the realm of what is already known. Our normative reading of material and space is subtractive: from the wealth of information, movement, and change given in and of our milieu and relations, we tend to extract only those elements of which we estimate that we can make some functional use.7. To overcome these dominant narratives—that is, to shift beyond the limits of a purely logical and linear reading of materials and milieu—requires a twist in our perceptual frames and devices, such that we are able to attend to something other.
For Bergson, the primary method of attuning and attending to this otherness was his concept of intuition, which he attempted to elevate to the level of scientific method by gifting intuition its own precise methodology.8.
Here, intuition as a method broadly asks for a process of thinking and attending which is located in the flow and rhythm of duration—that is, in the subjective experience of the passage of time. It is here, by attending to the internal rhythm of one’s own duration, that Bergson claims we are able to move outward, and seek a sympathetic resonance with the rhythm of the objects, materials, and elements surrounding us. This sympathetic durational resonance is at the heart of an intuitive understanding of matter and material. It is here, also, that we might locate a different basis for perceptual selection and reification in creative experiments and material play, guided by intuitive resonance rather than by utility or habit. Importantly, an intuitive understanding of material is underwritten by the condition of primary, sensory experience: experience as it happens, experience prior to logical codification, experience as it emerges in the passage of time. Creative experiments and material play thus require a different kind of attention, one that moves beyond the filters normatively imposed on one’s perceptual framework by the hegemonic tropes of linearity, utility, and habit. This kind of creative play both enables and requires a shift in perceptual hierarchies, such that we can attend equally to the minor and the peripheral, the occluded and the “useless,” the mutating and the fleeting. In breaking with these filters—in attending to an excluded otherness—we are able to open onto possibilities for experimentation that are guided by intuition, sensation, and experience. We are able to draw from the realm of the “unknown.”
Creative experiments, for us, are fundamentally about feeling and following materials. Embedded in this logic is our conviction that the Anthropocene obliges us to think of knowledge without the schema of traditional disciplinary frameworks: it invites us to invent different ad hoc disciplinary paths and diagrams, to multiply them, to follow new or ancient grains in the textures of thought. This, to us, is less a methodology than a procedure of discovery.
We take inspiration from what makers and artisans have always done: splitting timber, for instance, “is a question of surrendering to the wood and following where it leads.”9. As Tim Ingold argues, to describe the properties of things in a processual world is to describe their stories as they flow and metamorphose.10
Breaking with “methods” whose aim is to purify phenomena by isolating them from “background noise,” following is to embark on a quest through the Anthropocene in its open-ended multiplicity. To follow the opacity and obduracy of the Anthropocene, we must let it initiate its own terms of enquiry. Following anthropocenic materials will lead us into terrains where we find contradictions. Rather than trying to resolve these, creative experimentation and material play identifies the shifting contours within which the Anthropocene is made explicit.
“Following,” as an orientation for research, is also resonant with the ethos of Isabelle Stengers’ metaphor of the “solitary hunter.” According to Stengers, the solitary hunter “takes his time”; the art of the solitary hunt is “empathy.”11. The German word for “empathy”—Einfühlung— translates directly as “feeling into.” Without taking too many liberties with Stengers, we read “the art of [feeling into]” as a negotiation between the pull of the one followed, and the acuity of the one following. The task of the hunter/huntress is to suspend his or her own logic in order to be radically open to the logic of the “prey.” This meaning of feeling/ following articulates our methodological affinity for research that is as much about apprehending the trajectory of specific concepts (e.g. kinds of pain, or affective atmospheres) as it is about tracing the many impressions of these concepts in a “milieu,” or “field.” An empathic practice of “feeling into” requires a shift in the understanding of our roles as researchers, and of what is possible within these roles. To find ourselves thoroughly immersed in spaces of dense relations to carry out research—spaces that are at once concrete and enigmatic—is to trace sequences of material impressions through radically interdisciplinary landscapes.
As in Stengers’ metaphor of the hunt, following is not a static logic but an athletic one. It is not a passive engagement, but an ontological commitment to allow oneself to be affected by threads that reach far beyond one’s “home” discipline. This notion of collaboration with materials, therefore, works to reconstitute disciplinary zones, even to abolish entirely the gaps between them, instead tracing various filaments across fields of study.
1Raymond Williams, Keywords: A vocabulary of culture and society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976, pp. 115‒17.
2Isabelle Stengers, “Wondering about materialism,” in: Levy Bryant et al. (eds), The Speculative Turn: Continental materialism and realism. Melbourne: re.press, 2011, pp. 368‒80.
3Robert Desjarlais, Shelter Blues. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997.
4Erin Manning and Brian Massumi, Thought in the Act: Passages in the ecology of experience. Minneapolis, MN, and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
5Mary Poovey, History of Modern Fact: Problems of knowledge in the sciences of wealth and society. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
6Bruno Latour, “Morality and technology: The end of the means,” Theory, Culture and Society, vol. 19, nos 5/6 (2002): pp. 247‒60, p. 252.
7Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, tr. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer. New York: Dover Publications, 2004, p. 30.
8Bergson, Henri, The Creative Mind: An introduction to metaphysics, tr. M. L. Andison. New York, NY: Dover Books, 2007, p. 20; Gilles Deleuze,Bergsonism. New York, NY: Zone Books, 1991, p. 13.
9Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. New York, NY: Zone Books, 2004, p. 451.
10Tim Ingold, “Materials against materiality,” Archaeological Dialogues, vol. 14, no. 1 (2007): pp. 1‒16.
11Isabelle Stengers, Power and Invention: Situating Science. Minneapolis. MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.
There is no harmony in the universe. We have to get acquainted to this idea that there is no real harmony as we have conceived it. —Werner Herzog
In the experience of deep sadness, the world itself seems altered in some way: colored by sadness, or disfigured … [This originates] in desolation, in the sense that the world is frozen and that nothing new is possible. This can lead to terrible paroxysms of destruction, attempts to shatter the carapace of reality and release the authentic self trapped within; but it can also lead away from the self altogether, towards new worldly commitments that recognize the urgent need to develop another logic of existence, another way of going on. —Dominic Fox
The Anthropocene is the era in which man’s impact on the earth has become the single force driving change on the planet, thus giving shape to nature, shifting seas, changing the climate, and causing the disappearance of innumerable species, including placing humanity on the brink of extinction. The Anthropocene thus announces the collapse of the future through “slow fragmentation towards primitivism, perpetual crisis and planetary ecological collapse.” Instead of being conceived as speculative images of our future economic and political system, the Anthropocene has been reduced to an apocalyptic fantasy of human finitude, world finitude, and the manageable problem of climate change. In the last decade, films about the end of the world have been characterized by an apocalyptic and doomsday narrative that may end with moral redemption—from The Day After Tomorrow (2004), and 2012 (2009), to Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011) and World War Z (2013). In parallel, we have seen in the mass media a narrative presenting climate change as a fixable catastrophe, just like any other (such as the 2008 financial crisis, or the 2010 BP gulf oil spill). Neither our condition of finitude nor the world after the human has been imagined, and the massive environmental impact from the industrial era onward, with its long-term geomorphic implications, has become unintelligible.
This object was on display in Jean-Luc Godard’s “Voyage(s) en utopie” at the Centre Pompidou, Paris 2006. Photo: Michael Witt.
The Anthropocene has meant not a new image of the world, but rather a radical change in the conditions of visuality and the subsequent transformation of the world into images. These developments have had epistemological as well as phenomenological consequences: while images now participate in forming worlds, they have become forms of thought constituting a new kind of knowledge—one that is grounded in visual communication, and thereby dependent on perception, demanding the development of the optical mind. The radical changes in the conditions of visuality under the Anthropocene have brought a new subject position, announced by the reformulating trajectories between impressionism and cubism, and those between cubism and experimental film. While cubism culminated with the antihumanist rupture of the picture plane and converted the visual object, along with surrealism, into “manifestation,” “event,” “symptom,” and “hallucination,” experimental film introduced a mechanical, posthuman eye conveying solipsistic images at the sensorimotor level of perception. The consequence of these developments is that images, as opposed to being subject to our “beliefs,” or being objects of contemplation and beauty, came to be perceived as “the extant.” This involves a passage from representation to presentation, that is, instead of showing a perpetual present in a parallel temporality in order to make the absent partially present, the image has become sheer presence, immediacy: the here and now in real time. Made up of particles of time, wrested out of sensation and turned into cognition, the image deals more with concepts and saying than with intuition and showing.
With its break from the Renaissance point of view, cubism decomposed anthropomorphism. Based on linear perspective, Renaissance perspective had normalized a viewing position as a centered, one-eyed static entity within a mathematical, homogenous space. Creating the illusion of a view to the outside world, Renaissance perspective made the pictorial plane analogous to a window. Images constructed with traditional perspective bestow identities and subjects given a priori, configured by the point of view provided by the picture plane. Cubism, in contrast, turned space, time, and the subject upside down, redefining spatial experience by rupturing the picture plane. If classical representation conveys a continuous space, cubism invented discontinuous space by subverting the relations between subject and object, making identity and difference relative, questioning classical metaphysics. The cubist image renewed the image of the world by dissociating gaze, subject, and space, but without estranging them from each other, bringing about a new, antihumanist subject position. Moreover, with cubism, temporality—duration—and a multiplicity of points of view became embedded in the picture plane.
With North American experimental (or structural) film in the 1960s and 1970s, notably influenced by Andy Warhol’s filmic work, duration became a key component of aesthetic experience, grounded in an exploration of the filmic apparatus and seeking to make it analogous to human consciousness. By creating cinematic equivalents or metaphors of consciousness, experimental film brought about a prosthetic vision giving way to solipsistic visual experiences. A futuristic technoscape, Michael Snow’s experimental film La Région centrale (1971) is exemplary in this regard. In the film (as in all of his work), Snow explores the genetic properties of the filmic apparatus, using it to intensify and diminish aspects of normal vision. La Région centrale shows images from the wilderness collected by a machine specifically designed to shoot the film (De La). The machine was able to move in all directions, turn around 360 degrees, and zoom in and out, reaching places no human eye could perceive before. The resulting footage was independent of any human decisions and framing vision: a three-and-a-half hour topological exploration of the wilderness, a “gigantic landscape.”
Because De La extracts gravity from the situation as well as human (preconstructed or given) referential points of view, La Région hypostazises the cubist relativization of identity and difference and its rejection of a priori space. Furthermore, the film puts forth an experience of matter within, decentering the subject, which is constituted by the experience of the work itself. To paraphrase Rosalind Krauss on minimalism, the film subverts the notion of a stable structure that could mirror the viewer’s own self—a self that is completely constituted prior to experience. That is to say, the film formulates a notion of self that exists only at the moment of externality of that particular experience. By presenting every possible position of the framing-camera in relationship to itself, La Région releases the subject from its human coordinates, creating a “space without reference points where the ground and the sky, the horizontal and the vertical inter-exchange.” The references to human coordinates are the screen’s rectangular frame and the breaks made by the intermittent appearance of a big glowing yellow “X” against a black screen. Every time the X comes up, it fixes the screen and transfers the movement in a different way or direction; thus, the Xs are the point of view embodying the apprehension of the passage from chaos to form. In viewing the film, the present is experienced as immediacy, a pure phenomenological consciousness without the contamination of historical or a priori meaning; the world is thus experienced as self-sufficient, pure presence, foregrounding an awareness of the presence of the viewer’s own perceptual processes. As Snow stated:
My films are experiences: real experiences … The structure is obviously important, and one describes it because it’s more easily describable than other aspects, but the shape, with all the other elements, adds up to something which can’t be said verbally and that’s why the work is, why it exists.
In general, experimental film sought to posit alternatives to the mimetical inscription of lived experience into simulacral images (signs) by artistic neovanguardist practices that came to be embedded within the logic of spectacle—not in order to dislodge subjectivity (early modernism) or to constitute subjects by mapping out signs (postmodernism), but by exploring through film the conditions of cognition and perception. And while there is something in the image delivered by La Région that shares something with the condition of thought, it yields a solipsistic subject at the genetic level of perception; beyond auditory or optical perceptions, it delivers motor-sensory perceptions. Therefore, the machine delivers a posthuman, prosthetic enhancement of vision, inaugurating three important developments in the history of perception.
First, the machine introduces the incipient normalization of perception as augmented reality and the solipsistic visualization of data. Second, as Donna Haraway posited, the prosthetic enhancement of vision brings about the notion of limitlessness and an “unregulated gluttony” that desires to see everything from nowhere, spreading the assumption that anything can and is seen. Third, with La Région, machinic vision becomes an epistemological product of a centered human point of view (with the Xs) without stable reference points, foregrounding the conditions of contemporary visuality. While cubism embodies the antihumanist scission of the subject and the possibility of the construction of many psychical planes, La Région embodies the displacement of the human agent from the subjective center of operations. Both epitomize modernity’s fragmentation by mechanization, its alienating character, its inability to give back an image or to serve as a reflective mirror—it can never do this because the antihumanist image is indifferent to me. And yet, this was always going to be the fate of an image and of art based on contemplation. These works also attest to the fact that the foundational experience of modernity is to refuse, in advance, the “given” as a ground for thought.
In the British Channel 4 series Black Mirror, episode “The National Anthem,” the prime minister is blackmailed into raping a pig live on television.
The Transformation of Everything into Data-Images
As previously explained, the Anthropocene era implies not a new image of the world, but the transformation of the world into images. Humanity’s alteration of the biophysical systems of earth is parallel to the rapid modifications of the receptive fields of the human visual cortex announced by cubism and experimental film. This alteration is also accompanied by an unprecedented explosion in the circulation of visibilities, which are actually making the outcome of these alterations opaque. For instance, the exhaustive visualization and documentation of wildlife is actually rendering its ongoing extinction invisible. Aside from having become shields against reality, images are not only substitutes for first-hand experience, but have also become certifiers of reality, and, as Susan Sontag points out, they have extraordinary powers to determine our demands on reality. In discussing the democratization of tourism in the 1970s, Sontag further described tourists’ dependence of photographic cameras for making real their experiences abroad:
Taking photographs … is a way of certifying experience, [but] also a way of refusing it—by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir … The very activity of taking pictures is soothing, and assuages general feelings of disorientation that are likely to be exacerbated by travel.
Almost forty years later, posing for, taking, sharing, liking, forwarding, and looking at images are actions that are not only integral to tourism; they actually giveshape to contemporary experience. Arguably, representation has ceased to exist in plain view and manifests itself as experience, event, or the appropriation and sharing of a mediatic space. Instead of representation, we have media objects (i.e., a twitterbot) that purport to provide vague participatory representational events that ground our cultural and social experience. Thus, as Stephen Shaviro points out, in the contemporary world, the opposition between reality-based and image-based modes of presentation breaks down, and the most intense and vivid reality is precisely the reality of images.
In other words, images have in themselves become opaque cognitive and empirical experiences. Each episode of the recent British science-fiction television series Black Mirror explores the implications of this precise phenomena—of images becoming not only an intrinsic part of our empirical experience but also our cognitive experience at large. The “black mirror,” then, is nothing other than the LCD screen through which we give shape to reality.
One of the show’s early episodes, “The Entire History of You” (2011), imagines a world in which almost everyone has a “grain” implanted behind their ear. This grain has the capacity to transform human eyes into cameras that record reality and projectors that can reproduce it, thereby amalgamating lived experience, memory, and image. In a later episode, “Be Right Back” (2013), a woman is able to revive her dead partner with a program that rebuilds him—first his writing habits, then speech patterns, and eventually his very self via a cloned, synthetic body—solely from the proliferation of information he uploaded on the internet when he was alive. The deathless and bodiless information, images, and signs—the inert map of a life—becomes embodied by an avatar that exists in actual, not virtual, reality, and that has the (albeit limited) capacity to exist and interact directly with humans. In the episode, the fabrication of subjectivity from data—which implies the automatization of subjectivity—foreshadows the relationship between determinist automatisms and cognitive activity, which, according to Franco Berardi, is the core goal of the Google Empire: to capture user attention and to translate our cognitive acts into automatic sequences. The consequence is the replacement of cognition by a chain of automated connections, seeking to automatize the subjectivities of users.
Aside from the fact that images and data are taking the place of or giving form to experience, automating our will and thought, they are also transforming things into signs by welding together image and discourse, bringing about a tautological form of vision. With the widespread use of photography and digital imaging, all signs begin to lead to other signs, prompted by the desire to see and to know, to document and to archive information. Thus the fantasy that everything is or can be made visible coexists with the increasing automation of cognition, which, following Franco Berardi, is the basic condition of semiocapital (the valorization and accumulation of signs as economic assets).
In the pilot episode of Black Mirror, “The National Anthem” (2011), an alleged terrorist group kidnaps a nationally beloved British princess in the early morning hours. In order to free her, the anonymous group demands that the prime minister have sex on live television with a pig at four o’clock that same afternoon. The video in which the princess announces the “price” of the ransom goes viral and the whole nation pressures the prime minister to fulfill the kidnappers’ demands. At the end of the episode, postcoitus, it is revealed that the kidnapping was a singular artist’s gesture, intended in its successful implementation to point critically to the obscenely inflated role the media has in shaping public opinion and official policy. The artist’s action, in other words, illuminates the highly visceral shift in power brought on almost instantaneously by the ransom video’s circulation in the infosphere. Insofar as the episode unfolds montages of the whole nation glued to televisions in the pub, workplace, and waiting room at four o’clock, the artist highlights how connective interfaces actually govern, as they have the direct capacity to manipulate and coordinate behavior on almost every level.
Under the conditions of semiocapitalism, images and signs acquire value and/or power by means of being seen, largely through “likes” and retweets. The fact that sign-value has supplanted exchange-value means moreover that we no longer consume material things, but rather swallow cognitive signs embedded in and around them. Aside from consuming “experiences” or “moods,” we buy immaterial commodities (in the name of lifestyle and branding) and consume signs for “equality,” “happiness,” “wellness,” and “fulfillment.” In Don Delillo’s White Noise (1985), Jack Gladney describes a trip to the supermarket and makes clear how the signs found in the brands and labels of products that he and his wife buy have the power to relieve them of the mysteries and anxieties brought about by everyday life:
It seemed to me that Babette and I, in the mass and variety of our purchases, in the sheer plenitude those crowded bags suggested, the weight and size and number, the familiar package designs and vivid lettering, the giant sizes, the family bargain packs with Day-Glo sale stickers, in the sense of replenishment we felt, the sense of well-being, the security and contentment these products brought to some snug home in our souls—it seemed we had achieved a fullness of being that is not known to people who need less, expect less, who plan their lives around lonely walks in the evening.
What becomes evident in this paragraph is Baudrillard’s assertion that objects are no longer commodities whose message and meaning we can appropriate and decipher, but rather, tests that interrogate us. For him, commodities are a referendum, the verification of a code, circularity as well as sameness and homogeneity: here the commodities bring a well-being that reflects the well-being of the consumer and his or her lifestyle. Furthermore, the acceleration in proliferation of cognitive signs since the time of Delillo’s novel is another of the features of communicative capitalism’s subjugation, submitting the mind to an ever-increasing pace of perceptual stimuli, and in so doing generating not only panic and anxiety, but also destroying all possible forms of autonomous subjectivation. Under communicative capitalism, images transformed into signs embody the current concatenation of knowledge and machines—that is, the technological organization of capitalism to produce value. With the enabling of the visualization of data by machines, images have become scientific, managerial, and military instruments of knowledge, and thus of capital and power. In this context, seeing means the accelerating perception of the fields of everyday experiences, or rather, the field of trivial visual analogies of experience: a kind of groundless, accelerated tautological vision derived from passive observation. This is for Berardi another of communicative capitalism’s forms of governance, as this kind of vision generates technolinguistic automatisms by carrying information without meaning, automating thought and the will.
An astronaut floats off in space in this film still from Cuarón’s 2014 movie Gravity.
Images as Cognition and thus Forms of Power
Images circulating in the infosphere are also charged with affect, exposing the viewer to sensations that go beyond everyday perception. Hollywood cinema, for instance, delivers pure sensation and intensities that have no meaning. In Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity (2013), the main characters try to survive in outer space by solving practical and technical problems. The movie repudiates a point of view and a ground for vision in favor of immersion, transforming images into physical sensations mobilized by the visual and auditory (especially in its 3-D version), and thus into affect. The becoming-affect of images derives from communicative capitalism’s ruthless conversion of sensation and aesthetic experiences into cognition: its transformation of these experiences into information, sensations, and intensities without meaning is precisely what enables them to be exploited as forms of work and sold as new experiences and exciting lifestyle choices. One of the problems that arises is that affect cannot be linked to a larger network of identity and meaning. Gravity also presents itself as a symptom of the normalization of a groundless seeing brought about by modernity’s decentering of the subject parallel to our exposure to aerial images (for example, Google Earth). The hegemonic sight convention of visuality is an empowered, unstable, free-falling, and floating bird’s eye view that mirrors the present moment’s ubiquitous condition of groundlessness.
Installation view of “Voyage(s) en utopie” at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2006. Photo: Michael Witt.
According to many thinkers, this groundlessness characterizes the Anthropocene. The current fragmentation and transience of sociopolitical movements attests to the fact that we are first of all lacking ground on which to found politics, our social lives, and our relationship to the environment. Second, as Claire Colebrook put it, with the Anthropocene we are facing human extinction, as well as causing other extinctions, thereby annihilating that which makes us human. We are thus all thrown into a situation of urgent interconnectedness, in which a complex multiplicity of diverging forces and timelines that exceed any manageable point of view converge. In this context, criticality is both in trouble and spinning on its head. Many questions arise: How do we redefine the ground of deterritorialized subjectivation beyond the subsumption of subjectivity by the modes of governance of accelerated tautological forms of vision and communicative capitalism? How can we transform our relationship to the indeterminacy of deterritorialization and the multiplicity of diverging points of view in order to provide a heightened sense of place, giving way to the possibility of collective autonomous subjectivation and thus a new sense of politics and of the image?
In an era of ubiquitous synthetic and digital images dissociated from human vision and directly tied to power and capital, when images and aesthetic experience have been turned into cognition and thus into empty sensations or tautological truths about reality, the image of the Anthropocene is yet to come. The Anthropocene is “the age of man” that announces its own extinction. In other words, the Anthropocene thesis posits “man” as the end of its own destiny. Therefore, while the Anthropocene narrative keeps “man” at its very center, it marks the death of the posthuman and of antihumanism, because there can be no redeeming critical antihumanist or posthuman figure in which either metaphysics or technological and scientific advances would find a way to reconcile human life with ecology. In short, images of the Anthropocene are missing. Thus, it is necessary to transcend our incapacity to imagine an alternative or something better. We can first do this: draw a distinction between images and imagery, or pictures. Although it is related to the optic nerve, the picture does not make an image. In order to make images, it is necessary to make vision assassinate perception; it is necessary to ground vision, and then perform (as in artistic activity) and thinkvision (as in critical activity).
Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville, The Old Place, 2001. Film still.
Images to Come
Following Jean-Luc Godard, who operates in his work between the registers of the real, the imaginary, and art, only cinema is capable of delivering images as opposed to imagery, conveying not a subject but the supposition of the subject and thus the verb (substance). Alterity is absolutely necessary for the image, as the image is an intensification of presence—this is why it is able to hold out against all experiences of vision. In this light,Godard’s cinematic project can be interpreted as a conception of the image as a promise of flesh. For Godard, the image is incertitude, it is “trying to see” and the possibility of “giving voices back to their bodies.” For the filmmaker, images do not show; rather, images are a matter of belief and a desire to see (which is different from the desire to know or to possess).
An essay-film Godard made with Anne-Marie Miéville, The Old Place (2001), addresses the Anthropocenic concerns of life after the extinction of man, the current groundlessness of vision, and the lack of images of the world and of humanity. While we see images from outer space, Miéville and Godard discuss “CLIO,” the archaeological bird of the future, a microsatellite sent into space in 2001. The satellite is supposed to come back to earth in five thousand years to inform its future inhabitants about the past. Aside from carrying traditional human forms of knowledge, the bird will deliver messages written by the current inhabitants of the globe addressed to its future inhabitants. Miéville and Godard ponder whether humanist messages such as “Love each other,” or “Eliminate discrimination against women,” will be included in the satellite (they doubt it). Later on, they conclude:
We are all lost in the immensity of the universe and in the depth of our own spirit. There is no way back home, there is no home. The human species has blown up and dispersed in the stars. We can neither deal with the past nor with the present, and the future takes us more and more away from the concept of home. We are not free, as we like to think, but lost.
Here Godard and Miéville paint the termination of a world, its exhaustion and estrangement from its conditions of possibility. As they underscore the lack of a home for the spirit, they highlight the loss of a sense of origin and destination, implying that the active principle of the world has ceased to function. The last line is spoken while we see the image of a mother polar bear staring at her dead cub, followed by an image of Alberto Giacometti’s sculpture L’homme qui marche (Walking Man, 1961): life persists irrationally, not given form by imagination, ceasing to cohere into a higher truth.
In The Old Place, Godard and Miéville explore the image of humanity throughout the Western history of art, underscoring the fact that for two thousand Eurocentric, Christian years, the image was sacred. We also see images of violence, torture, and death juxtaposed with beautiful sculpted and painted figures and faces created throughout all the ages of humanity: people by turns smiling, screaming, or crying.
For Godard and Miéville, the image is also something related to the origin that reveals itself as the new but that had been there all along: an originary landscape always present and inextricable from history. Marking the passage to the current regime of communicative capitalism, where images are permeated by discourse and tautological truths about reality, they state: “The image today is not what we see, but what the caption states.” This is the definition of publicity, which they further link to the transformation of art into market and marketing represented by both Andy Warhol, and by the fact that “The last Citroën will be named Picasso,” which has as a consequence that “The spaces of publicity now occupy the spaces of hope.” And yet, in spite of the ubiquity of communicative capitalism, for them there is something that resists, something that remains in art and in the image. Meanwhile, we see a blank canvas held by four mechanical legs moving furiously. This evokes the resisting image to come; this resisting image is a question of (sensible, un-automated) purity and, in post-Christian secular sense, of the sacred and redemption, of an ambivalent relationship between image and text, foreign to knowledge and intrinsically tied to belief. At the end of The Old Place, the filmmakers posit the Malay legend of A Bao A Qu as the paradigm of the image of these times in which “we are lost without a home,” as they state. “The text of A Bao A Qu is the illustration of this film.” The legend is rewritten by Jorge Luis Borges in his Book of Imaginary Beings:
To see the most lovely landscape in the world, a traveler must climb the Tower of Victory in Chitor. A winding staircase gives access to the circular terrace on top, but only those who do not believe in the legend dare climb the tower. On the stairway there has lived since the beginning of time a being sensitive to the many shades of the human soul known as A Bao A Qu. It sleeps until the approach of a traveler and some secret life within it begins to glow and its translucent body begins to stir. As the traveler climbs the stairs, the being regains consciousness and follows at the traveler’s heels, becoming more intense in bluish color and coming closer to perfection. But it achieves its ultimate form only at the topmost step, and only when the traveler is one who has already attained Nirvana, whose acts cast no shadows. Otherwise, the being hesitates at the final step and suffers at its inability to achieve perfection. As the traveler climbs back down, it tumbles back to the first step and collapses weary and shapeless, awaiting the approach of the next traveler. It is only possible to see it properly when it has climbed half the steps, as it takes a clear shape when its body stretches out in order to help itself climb up. Those who have seen it, say that it can look with all of its body and that at the touch, it reminds one of a peach’s skin. In the course of the centuries, A Bao A Qu has reached the terrace only once.
In their film, Godard and Miéville explore the imprint of the quest of what it means to be human throughout the history of images. Humanity transpires as a mark that is perpetually reinscribed in a form of an address. A Bao A Qu is an inhuman thing activated by the passage of humans wishing to see the most beautiful landscape in the world. The act of vision is a unique event, and what delivers the vision of the landscape and of the creature are the purity and desire of the viewer. A Bao A Qu is an image of alterity; it stares back with all of its body. A Bao A Qu is an antidote to the lack of imagination in our times: an inhuman vision that undermines the narrative that holds the human as the central figure of its ultimate form of vision and destruction.
In the voiceover of his most recent film, Adieu au langage (Farewell to Language, 2014), Godard quotes Rilke: “It is not the animal which is blind, but man. Blinded by consciousness, man is incapable of seeing the world.” With a strident palette and saturated sound, the film evokes abstract, fauvist, cubist, and impressionist painting, and is Godard’s most radically experimental film (as in the genre, because all his work is experimental and radical) to date. Rilke’s quote, together with an aphorism he attributes to Monet, frame Godard’s quest in this film: “It is not about seeing what we see, because we do not see anything, but [it is about] painting what we cannot see.” In parallel, Godard revives the romantic poet’s wish to “describe” immediate reality, to hit the viewer with electroshocks that make a real visible and audible world emerge from language. In the film, as a way to enable a new form of communication beyond tautological digital communication (Godard points out that with texting there is neither the chance to interpret a code nor room for ambiguity) and to reestablish harmony between the couple in the movie who can no longer communicate face to face, Roxy Miéville’s dog appears. Roxy becomes the metaphor for the possibility of an “other” post-anthropocentric language “between” humans. In the movie, the dog asks, “What is man? What is a city? What is war?” Rocky’s comings and goings between the couple bear the possibility of giving back freedom to the face-to-face encounter. Godard compare’s Roxy’s “other” language to the lost language of the poor, the excluded, animals, plants, the handicapped—those who are out of the frame. In sum, the movie is a giant mirror that reflects a grammar of thought that no longer resides in enunciation (and this is the farewell to language): marking the absence of a relationship between the characters by using Roxy—the third person, the post-anthropocentric “other”—as a vehicle of communication.
In both The Old Place and Adieu au langage, Godard addresses spectacular modernity’s (semiocapitalism’s) crisis of visuality, which causes a lack of imagination, or even blindness. He also posits alternatives: an inhuman vision beyond a humanist-centered view, a post-anthropocentric “other.” In contrast to post-humanism, the filmic camera and technology are not what enable vision in these films. Rather, vision is enabled by a mythical being (A Bao A Qu) and by Roxy the dog, which, at the end of Adieu, barks in unison with the cry of a newborn baby, announcing the new to come.
Notes
Werner Herzog,Herzog on Herzog (New York: Faber and Faber, 2003), 164.
Dominic Fox, Cold World: The Aesthetics of Dejection and the Politics of Militant Dysphoria (London: Zero Books, 2009), 1.
Nick Srnieck and Alex Williams, “#ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics,” May 14, 2013, par. 23 →.
Stan Brakhage, “From ‘Metaphors on Vision,’” The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism, ed. P. Adams Sitney(New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1978), 120.
Georges Didi-Huberman, “Picture = Rupture: Visual Experience, Form and Symptom According to Carl Einstein,” Papers of Surrealism 7 (2007): 5.
Ibid., 6.
Anthology Film Archives is a theater in New York where in the late sixties and early seventies filmmakers and artists (Snow amongst them) would gather to watch films. At the time, the theater had wing-like chairs that isolated the viewer sensorially in order to “equate” her field of vision to the screen, thereby delivering a solipsistic experience.
Michael Snow, The Michael Snow Project: The Collected Writings of Michael Snow (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1994), 56.
Krauss, 50.
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema I: The Movement-Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 84.
Snow, The Michael Snow Project, 44.
Deleuze, Cinema I, 85.
Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective” Feminist Studies, vol. 14, no. 3 (Autumn 1988): 575–99, 582.
Didi-Huberman, “Picture = Rupture,” 9.
Melissa McMahon, “Beauty: Machinic Repetition in the Age of Art,” in A Shock to Thought: Expression After Deleuze and Guattari, ed. Brian Massumi (London: Routledge, 2002), 4.
Ibid., 8.
Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 12.
Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 80.
Ibid., 177
Stephen Shaviro, “Post-Cinematic Affect: On Grace Jones, Boarding Gate and Southland Tales,” Film Philosophy 14.1 (2010): 12.
Franco “Bifo” Berardi, “The Neuroplastic Dilemma: Consciousness and Evolution,” e-flux journal 60 (Dec. 2014): pars. 21–23 →.
Ibid., par. 3.
Franco “Bifo” Berardi, The Uprising: On Poetry and Finance (New York: Semiotexte, 2012), 15.
Don Delillo, White Noise (New York: Picador, 2002), 20.
Jean Baudrillard,“Toward a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign,” trans. Carl R. Lovitt and Denise Klopsch, SubStance, vol. 5, no. 15 (1976): 111–116.
Franco “Bifo” Berardi, “Accelerationism Questioned from the Point of View of the Body” e-flux journal 46 (June 2013): par. 11 →.
Benjamin Bratton,“Some Trace Effects of the Post-Anthropocene: On Accelerationist Geopolitical Aesthetics,” e-flux journal 46 (June 2013): par. 16 →.
Berardi, The Uprising, 41.
Shaviro, “Post-Cinematic Affect,” par. 14.
Hito Steyerl, “In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective,” e-flux journal 24 (April 2011): par. 6 →.
Claire Colebrook and Cary Wolfe, “Dialogue on the Anthropocene,” Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, Jan. 23, 2013 →.
Serge Daney, “Before and After the Image,” Revue des Études Palestiniennes 40 (Summer 1991): par. 2 →.
Didi-Huberman, “Picture = Rupture,” 17.
Georges Didi-Huberman, “The Supposition of the Aura: The Now, the Then, and Modernity,” Walter Benjamin and History, ed. Andrew Benjamin (New York: Continuum, 2006), 8.
Daney, “Before and After the Image,” par. 2.
Fox, Cold World, 7.
Ibid., 70.
I have been unable to locate the author, title, date and location of this evocative mechanical sculpture.
Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Imaginary Beings, trans. Andrew Hurley (New York: Viking, 1967), 2.
I would like to thank π who knows why and Romi Mikulinski for her feedback and comments on an earlier version of this essay, which is a chapter from Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies, eds. Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, forthcoming 2015).
Irmgard Emmelhainz is an independent translator, writer, researcher, and lecturer based in Mexico City. Her work about film, the Palestine Question, art, cinema, culture, and neoliberalism has been translated to Italian, French, English, Arabic, Turkish, Hebrew, and Serbian and she has presented it at an array of international venues. She is member of the editorial board of Scapegoat Journal, and has recently finished a book on neoliberalism as a sensibility and common sense embedded in urban planning, work and life, culture, social movements, mourning, and women’s struggle.
LONDON — There are 8 million artifacts in the British Museum. But to commence his tale of existential jeopardy, risk expert Luke Kemp made a beeline for just two items housed in a single room. On a visit in early fall, beyond a series of first-floor galleries displaying sarcophagi from pharaonic Egypt, we stopped beside a scatter of human bones.
The exhibit comprised two of the 64 skeletons unearthed from the sands of Jebel Sahaba, in northern Sudan, in 1964. Believed to be over 13,000 years old, the bodies in this prehistoric cemetery were significant for what they revealed about how their owners died. Of those 64 skeletons, at least 38 showed signs of violent deaths: caved-in skulls, forearm bones with parry fractures from victims staving off blows, or other injuries. Whether a result of organized warfare, intercommunal conflict or even outright massacre, Jebel Sahaba is widely considered to be some of the earliest evidence of mass violence in the archaeological record.
According to Kemp, these shattered bones were a foreshadowing of another object in this room. Ten feet away, displayed at knee-height, was the Palette of Narmer. Hewn from a tapering tablet of grey-green siltstone, the item on display was an exact cast of the 5,000-year-old original — discovered by British archaeologists in 1898 — that now sits in Cairo’s Egyptian Museum.
At the center of the stone stands the giant figure of Narmer, the first king of Egypt. His left hand clasps the head of an enemy, presumed to be a rival ruler of the Western Delta. In his raised right hand he holds a mace. The image is thought to depict Narmer bludgeoning his greatest opponent to death, an act that solidified his sovereignty over all Egypt. Beneath his feet lie the contorted bodies of two other victims, while overhead a falcon presents Narmer with a ribbon, believed to represent the god Horus bestowing a gift of the Western Nile. “Here we have perfect historical evidence of what the social contract is. It’s written in blood,” Kemp told me. “This is the first depiction of how states are made.”
In the British Museum’s repository of ancient treasures and colonial loot, the palette is by no means a star attraction. For the half hour we spent in the room, few visitors gave it more than a passing glance. But to Kemp, its imagery “is the most important artwork in the world” — a blueprint for every city-state, nation and empire that has ever been carved out by force of arms, reified in stone and subsequently turned to dust.
Systematizing Collapse
When Kemp set out seven years ago to write his book about how societies rise and fall — and why he fears that our own is headed for disaster — one biblical event provided him with the perfect allegory: the story of the Battle of the Valley of Elah, recounted in 1 Samuel 17. Fought between the Israelites and the Philistines in the 11th century BCE, it’s a tale more commonly known by the names of its protagonists, David and Goliath.
Goliath, we are told, was a Philistine warrior standing “six cubits and a span,” or around 9 feet, 9 inches, clad in the alloy of copper and tin armor that would give his epoch its name: the Bronze Age. As the rival armies faced off across the valley, the giant stepped onto the battlefield and laid down a challenge that the conflict should be resolved in single combat.
For 40 days, Goliath goaded his enemy to nominate a champion, until a shepherd named David came forward from the Israelite ranks, strung a stone into his slingshot and catapulted it into Goliath’s brow, killing him at a stroke, and taking his head with the giant’s own sword. For centuries thereafter, the story of David and Goliath has served as a parable challenging the superiority of physical might. Even the most impressive entity has hidden frailties. A colossus can be felled by a single blow.
According to Kemp’s new book, “Goliath’s Curse,” it’s a lesson we would do well to heed. Early on, he dispenses with the word “civilization,” because in his telling, there is little that might be considered civil about how states are born and sustained. Instead, he argues that “Goliath” is a more apposite metaphor for the kind of exploitative, hierarchical systems that have grown to organize human society.
“‘Goliath’ is a more apposite metaphor for the kind of exploitative, hierarchical systems that have grown to organize human society.”
Like the Philistine warrior, the Goliath state is defined by its size; in time, centralized polities would evolve to dwarf the hunter-gatherer societies that prevailed for the first 300,000 years of Homo sapiens. Ostensibly, it is well-armored and intimidating, exerting power through the threat and exercise of violence. And, in kind with the biblical colossus, it is vulnerable: Those characteristics that most project strength, like autocracy and social complexity, conceal hidden weaknesses. (A more modern allegory, Kemp writes, can be found in the early Star Wars movies, in which a moon-sized space station with the capacity to blow up a planet can be destroyed by a well-placed photon torpedo.)
Kemp is, of course, by no means the first scholar to try to chart this violence and vulnerability through the ages. The question of what causes societies to fail is arguably the ultimate mission of big-picture history, and a perennial cultural fixation. In the modern era, the historian Jared Diamond has found fame with his theories that collapse is usually a product of geographical determinism. The “Fall of Civilizations” podcast, hosted by the historian Paul Cooper, has over 220 million listens. Perusing a bookshop recently, I spotted a recent release, entitled “A Brief History of the End of the F*cking World,” among the bestsellers.
What distinguishes Kemp’s book from much of the canon is the consistencies he identifies in how different political entities evolved, and the circumstances that precipitated their fall. A panoramic synthesis of archaeology, psychology and evolutionary biology, “Goliath’s Curse” is, above all, an attempt to systematize collapse. Reviewers have hailed the book as a skeleton key to understanding societal precarity. Cooper has described it as “a masterpiece of data-driven collapsology.”
Moreover, it is a sobering insight into why our own globalized society feels like it is edging toward the precipice. That’s because, despite all the features that distinguish modern society from empires of the past, some rules hold true throughout the millennia.
Becoming ‘Dr. Doom’
In September, Kemp traveled down from Cambridge to meet me in London for the day. Given his subject, I half-expected a superannuated and eccentric individual, someone like Diamond with his trademark pilgrim-father beard and penchant for European chamber music. But Kemp, 35, would prove to be the antithesis of the anguished catastrophist. The man waiting for me on the concourse at King’s Cross was athletic, swarthily handsome and lantern-jawed. He’d signed off emails regarding our plans to meet with a puckish “Cheerio.”
Kemp’s background is also hardly stereotypical of the bookish scholar. He spent his early years in the dairy-farming town of Bega in New South Wales, Australia, where cattle outnumbered people three-to-one. It was “something of a broken home,” he told me. His father was an active member of the Hell’s Angels, involved in organized crime, a formative presence that would later germinate Kemp’s interest in power dynamics, the way violence is at once a lever for domination and for ruin.
Escaping to Canberra, after high school, Kemp read “interdisciplinary studies” at the Australian National University (ANU), where he found a mentor in the statistical climatologist Jeanette Lindsay. In 2009, it was Lindsay who persuaded him to join a student delegation heading to COP15 in Copenhagen, where Kemp found himself with a front row seat to what he calls “the paralysis of geopolitics.”
At one stage, during a symposium over measures to curb deforestation, he watched his own Australian delegation engage in endless circumlocutions to derail the debate. Representatives from wealthier countries, most notably America, had large teams that they could swap in and out of the floor, enabling them to filibuster vital, potentially existential questions to a deadlock. “If you’re from Tuvalu, you don’t have that privilege,” Kemp explained.
Afterward, Kemp became preoccupied by “a startling red thread” evident in so many spheres of international negotiation: the role of America as arbiter of, and all too often barrier to, multilateral cooperation. Kemp wrote his doctoral thesis on how pivotal issues — such as biodiversity loss, nuclear weapons and climate change — had grown captive to the whims of the world’s great superpower. Later, when he published a couple of academic articles on the same subject, “the ideas weren’t very popular,” he said. “Then Trump got elected, and suddenly the views skyrocketed.”
In 2018, Kemp relocated to the United Kingdom, landing a job as a research affiliate at Cambridge University’s “Centre for the Study of Existential Risk” (CSER, often articulated, in an inadvertent nod to a historical avatar of unalloyed power, to “Caesar”). His brother’s congratulatory present, a 3-D printed, hand-engraved mask of the Marvel character “Dr. Doom,” would prove prophetic. Years later, as Kemp began to publish his theories of societal collapse, colleagues at CSER began referring to him by the very same moniker.
“Goliath hierarchies select for assholes — or, to use Kemp’s preferred epithet, ‘dark triad’ personalities: people with high levels of psychopathy, narcissism and Machiavellianism.”
It was around this time that Kemp read “Against the Grain,” a revisionist history of nascent conurbations by James C. Scott. Kemp had always been an avid reader of history, but Scott’s thesis, which argued that the growth of centralized states “hadn’t been particularly emancipatory or even necessarily good for human wellbeing,” turned some of Kemp’s earlier assumptions about human nature on their head.
Such iconoclastic ideas — subsequently popularized in blockbuster works of non-fiction like Rutger Bregman’s “Humankind” (2019), and “The Dawn of Everything” (2021) by Graeber and Wengrove — would prompt years of research and rumination about the preconditions that enable states and empires to rise, and why they never last forever.
‘Hobbes’ Delusion’
“Goliath’s Curse” opens with a refutation of a 17th-century figure whose theories still cast a long shadow across all considerations of societal fragility. In “Leviathan” (1651), the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes proposed that the social contract was contingent on the stewardship of a central authority — a “Leviathan” designed to keep a lid on humanity’s basest instincts. Political scientists refer to this doctrine as “veneer theory.”
“Once civilization is peeled away, chaos spreads like brushfire,” Kemp surmises. “Whether it be in post-apocalyptic fiction, disaster movies or popular history books, collapse is often portrayed as a Hobbesian nightmare.”
For decades now, the predominant version of history has been beholden to this misanthropic worldview. Many of the most influential recent theories of collapse have echoed Hobbes’ grand theory with specific exemplars. Diamond has famously argued that the society on Rapa Nui, or Easter Island, unraveled due to self-inflicted ecocide before devolving into civil war. That interpretation, in which the islanders deforested the land in the service of ancestor worship, has since been held up as a species-wide admonition — evidence, as researchers John Flenley and Paul Bahn have written, that “humankind’s covetousness is boundless. Its selfishness appears to be genetically inborn.” In “The Better Angels of Our Nature” (2011), Steven Pinker estimated that 15% of Paleolithic people died of violent causes.
But Kemp was struck by a persistent “lack of empirics” undermining these hypotheses, an academic tendency to focus on a handful of “cherry-picked” and emotive case studies — often on islands, in isolated communities or atypical environments that failed to provide useful analogs for the modern world. Diamond’s theories about the demise of Rapa Nui — so often presented as a salutary cautionary tale —have since been debunked.
To further rebut such ideas, Kemp highlights a 2013 study by the anthropologists Jonathan Haas and Matthew Piscitelli of Chicago’s Field Museum. In what amounted to the most comprehensive survey of violence in prehistory, the authors analyzed almost 3,000 skeletons interred during the Paleolithic Era. Of the more than 400 sites in the survey, they identified just one instance of mass conflict: the bones of Jebel Sahaba. “The presumed universality of warfare in human history and ancestry may be satisfying to popular sentiment; however, such universality lacks empirical support,” Haas and Piscitelli wrote.
If there was any truth to the Hobbesian standpoint, the Paleolithic, with its absence of stratified social structures, should have been marked by mass panic and all-out war. Yet the hunter-gatherer period appears to have been a time of relative, if fragile, peace. Instead, conflict and mass violence seemed to be by-products of the very hierarchical organization that Hobbes and his antecedents essentialized. Cave art of armies wielding bows and swords dates only to around 10,000 years ago. “As soon as you start tugging on the threat of collapse, the entire tapestry of history unravels,” Kemp told me.
But if Hobbes was wrong about the human condition — if most people are averse to violence, if mass panic and mutual animosity are not the principal vectors of societal disintegration — what then explains the successive state failures in the historical record? Where or what, to mix metaphors, is Goliath’s Achilles’ heel?
What Fuels Goliath?
In seeking to disentangle a template of collapse from this historiography, Kemp turned to historical data, searching for traits of state emergence and disintegration shared by different polities. “When I see a pattern which needs to be explained, it becomes a fascination bordering upon obsession,” he told me.
A central pillar of his research was the Seshat Global History Databank, an open-source database incorporating more than 862 polities dating back to the early Neolithic. Named after the Egyptian goddess of wisdom, Seshat includes a range of metrics like the degree of centralization and the presence of different types of weaponry; it aggregates these to create nine “complexity characteristics” (CCs), including polity size, hierarchy, governmental framework and infrastructure.
“Wherever Goliath took hold, ‘arms races’ followed, as other status-seeking aspirants jostled for hegemony. And Goliaths were contagious.”
Using this and other sources, Kemp set out to collate his own novel dataset, this time focusing on the common features not of complexity, but of collapse. In keeping with Seshat’s old-god nomenclature, he dubbed it the “Mortality of States” index, shortened to “Moros”, after the Greek god of doom. Covering 300 states spanning the last five millennia, the resulting catalogue is, Kemp claims, “the most exhaustive list of state lifespans available today.”
To some extent, Kemp’s data told a story that has become received wisdom: As Earth thawed out from the last ice age, we entered the Holocene, a period of warmer temperatures and climatic stability. This shift laid the terrain for the first big inflection point: the advent of agriculture, which encouraged our previously itinerant species to settle in place, leading to greater population density and eventually proto-city-states. These early states rose and fell, often condemned by internal conflict, climatic shocks, disease or natural disasters. But gradually the organization of human societies trended toward higher levels of complexity, from the diffuse proto-city-states, through the birth of nations, then empires, to the globalized system of today. The violent paroxysms of the past were merely hiccups on a continuum toward increased sophistication and civility, and perhaps someday immortality. Such is the tale that is commonly framed as the arc of human progress.
But trawling through the data in more detail also revealed unexpected and recurrent patterns, leading Kemp to an early realization: states observably age. “For the first 200 years, they seem to become more vulnerable to terminating. And after 200 years, they stay at a high risk thereafter,” Kemp told me.
The other glaring commonality concerned the structure of these societies. “The common thread across all of them is not necessarily that they had writing or long-distance trade,” Kemp said. “Instead, it’s that they were organized into dominance hierarchies in which one person or one group gains hegemony through its ability to inflict violence on others.”
Kemp argues that dominance hierarchies arise due to the presence of three “Goliath fuels.” The first of these is “lootable resources,” assets that can be easily seen, stolen and stored. In this respect, the advent of agriculture was indisputably foundational. Cereal grains like wheat and rice could be taxed and stockpiled, giving rise to centralized authorities and, later, bureaucracies of the state.
The second Goliath fuel is “monopolizable weapons.” As weaponry evolved from flint to bronze, the expertise and relative scarcity of the source material required for early metallurgy meant that later weapons could be hoarded by powerful individuals or groups, giving those who controlled the supply chain a martial advantage over potential rivals.
The third criterion for Goliath evolution is “caged land,” territories with few exit options. Centralized power is predicated on barriers that hinder people from fleeing oppressive hierarchies.
In Kemp’s telling, every single political entity has grown from one of these seeds, or more commonly, a combination of all three. Bronze Age fiefdoms expanded at the tip of their metal weaponry. “Rome,” Kemp writes, “was an autocratic machine for turning grain into swords,” its vast armies sustained by crop imports from the Nile Valley, its endless military campaigns funded by the silver mines it controlled in Spain. In China, the Han dynasty circumscribed its territory with its Great Wall to the north, intended both to keep Xiongnu horseback raiders out and the citizenry in. Europe’s colonial empires were built, in Diamond’s famous summation, by “Guns, Germs and Steel.”
For millennia, the nature of forager societies kept these acquisitive impulses to some extent contained, Kemp argues. The evolutionary logic of hunting and gathering demanded cooperation and reciprocity, giving rise to “counter-dominance strategies”: teasing, shaming or exile. With the advent of Goliath polities, however, the “darker angels of our nature” were given free rein, yielding social arrangements “more like the dominance hierarchies of gorillas and chimpanzees.”
“Rather than a stepladder of progress,” Kemp writes, “this movement from civilization to Goliath is better described as evolutionary backsliding.” Moreover, Goliaths “contain the seeds of their own demise: they are cursed. This is why they have collapsed repeatedly throughout history.”
In Kemp’s narrative, our retrograde rush toward these vicious social structures has been less about consensus than the relentless ascent of the wrong sort of people. Goliath hierarchies select for assholes — or, to use Kemp’s preferred epithet, “dark triad” personalities: people with high levels of psychopathy, narcissism and Machiavellianism. Consequently, history has been shaped by pathological figures in the Narmer mold, dominance-seekers predisposed to aggression. Reinforced by exceptionalist and paranoid ideologies, these strongmen have used violence and patronage to secure their dominion, whether driven by a lust for power or to avenge a humiliation. Several of the rebellions that plagued dynastic China, Kemp points out, were spearheaded by aggrieved people who failed their civil service examinations.
“Whether societies collapsed through gradual depopulation, like Çatalhöyük, or abruptly, as with Teotihuacan’s conflagration, Kemp argues that the triggers were the same.”
Wherever Goliath took hold, “arms races” followed, as other status-seeking aspirants jostled for hegemony. And Goliaths were contagious. The growth of “one bellicose city-state” would often produce a domino effect, in which the threat of an ascendant Goliath would provoke other regional polities to turn to their own in-house authoritarian as a counterweight to the authoritarian next door.
In this way, humankind gravitated “from hunting and gathering to being hunted and gathered,” Kemp writes. Early states had little to distinguish them from “criminal gangs running protection rackets.” Many of the great men of history, who are often said to have bent society to their will, Kemp told me, are better thought of as “a rollcall of serial killers.”
The 1% View Of History
Back downstairs, on the British Museum’s ground floor, we walked into a long gallery off the central atrium containing dozens of megalithic totems from the great ages of antiquity. The giant granite bust of Rameses II sat beatific on a pediment, and visitors peered into a glass cabinet containing the Rosetta Stone. Kemp, slaloming through the crowds, murmured: “The 1% view of history made manifest.”
Along both walls of an adjacent corridor, we came upon a series of bas-reliefs from the neo-Assyrian city of Nimrud, in modern-day Iraq. Depicting scenes from the life of the Ashurnasirpal II, who ruled Nimrud in the 9th century BCE, the gypsum slabs were like an artistic expression of Kemp’s historical themes: Ashurnasirpal sitting on a throne before vassals bearing tribute; Ashurnasirpal surrounded by protective spirits; Ashurnasirpal’s army ramming the walls of an enemy city, rivals dragging themselves along the ground, backs perforated with arrows. The entire carving was overlaid with cuneiform script, transcribed onto signage below, with sporadic sentences translated into English: “great king, strong king, king of the universe. … Whose command disintegrates mountains and seas.”
Across the atrium, in a low-lit room containing a bequest from the Rothschild family’s antique collection, Kemp lingered over an assortment of small wooden altarpieces, with biblical scenes and iconography carved in minuscule, intricate detail. Elite status could be projected in the imposing size of a granite statue, he said. But it could just as well be archived in the countless hours spent chiseling the Last Supper into a fragment of boxwood.
It is, of course, inevitable that our sense of history is skewed by this elite bias, Kemp explained. While quotidian objects and utensils were typically made of perishable materials, the palaces and monuments of the governing class were designed to be beautiful, awe-inspiring and durable. In the hours that we spent on the upper floors, we spied just one relic of ordinary life: a 3,000-year-old wooden yoke from Cambridgeshire.
Likewise, early writing often evolved to reinforce the “1% view of history” and formalize modes of control. The predominance of this elite narrative has produced a cultural blind spot, obscuring the brutality and oppression that has forever been the lot of those living at the base of a pyramid, both figurative and actual.
From all this aristocratic residue, Kemp sought to extract a “people’s history of collapse” — some means of inferring what it was like to live through collapse for the average person, rather than the elites immortalized in scripture and stone.
The Curse Of Inequality
If Kemp’s research revealed that historical state formation appears to follow a pattern, so, too, did the forces that inexorably led toward their demise. To illustrate how the process works, Kemp provides the example of Çatalhöyük, a proto-city that arose on the Konya Plain in south-central Turkey around 9,000 years ago, one of thousands of “tells,” mounded remnants of aborted settlements found throughout the Near East.
Excavations of the site’s oldest layers suggest that early Çatalhöyük was notable for its lack of social differentiation. Crammed together in a dense fractal of similarly sized mud-brick dwellings, the settlement in this period exhibits no remnants of fortification and no signs of warfare. Analysis of male and female skeletons has shown that both sexes ate the same diet and performed the same work, indicating a remarkable degree of gender equity.
This social arrangement, which the Stanford archaeologist Ian Hodder has described as “aggressively egalitarian,” lasted for around 1,000 years. Then, in the middle of the 7th millennium BCE, the archaeological record starts to shift. House sizes begin to diverge; evidence of communal activity declines. Later skeletal remains show more evidence of osteoarthritis, possibly betraying higher levels of workload and bodily stress. Economists have estimated that the Gini coefficient, which measures disparities in household income, doubled in the space of three centuries — “a larger jump than moving from being as equal as the Netherlands to as lopsided as Brazil,” Kemp writes. Within a few centuries, the settlement was abandoned.
“In almost every case, [societal] decline or collapse was foreshadowed by increases in the appearance of proxies of inequality.”
The fate of Çatalhöyük established a template that almost every subsequent town, city-state and empire would mirror. Its trajectory resounds throughout the historical record and across continents. Similar patterns can be discerned from the remnants of the Jenne-Jeno in Mali, the Olmecs of Mesoamerica, the Tiwanaku in Titicaca, and the Cahokia in pre-Columbian North America.
Occasionally, the archaeological record suggests a fluctuation between equality and disparity and back again. In Teotihuacan, near today’s Mexico City, the erection of the Feathered Serpent Pyramid by an emergent priestly class in around 200 CE ushered in a period of ritual bloodletting. A more egalitarian chapter followed, during which the temple was razed, and the city’s wealth was rechanneled into urban renewal. Then the old oligarchy reasserted itself, and the entire settlement, beset by elite conflict or popular rebellion, was engulfed in flames.
Whether societies collapsed through gradual depopulation, like Çatalhöyük, or abruptly, as with Teotihuacan’s conflagration, Kemp argues that the triggers were the same. As Acemoğlu and Robinson explored in “Why Nations Fail” (2012), the correlation between inequality and state failure often rests on whether its institutions are inclusive, involving democratic decision-making and redistribution, or extractive: “designed to extract incomes and wealth from one subset of society to benefit a different subset.” Time and again, the historical record shows the same pattern repeating — of status competition and resource extraction spiraling until a tipping-point, often in the shape of a rebellion, or an external shock, like a major climate shift or natural disaster, which the elites, their decision-making fatally undermined by the imperative to maintain their grip on power, fail to navigate.
In almost every case, decline or collapse was foreshadowed by increases in the appearance of proxies of inequality. A rise in the presence of large communal pots indicates an upsurge in feasting. Deviation in the size of dwellings, preserved in the excavated footprints of early conurbations, is a measure of social stratification, as wealth accumulates among the elite. Graves of that same nobility become stuffed with burial goods. Great monuments, honoring political and religious leaders or the gods who were supposed to have anointed them, proliferate. Many of the most lucrative lootable resources throughout history have been materials that connote elevated social standing, an obsession with conspicuous consumption or “wastefully using resources,” that marked a break from the hunter-gatherer principle of taking only what was needed. (Kemp wears a reminder of the human compulsion to covet beauty as much as utility, an obsidian arrowhead, on his wrist.)
All the while, these signs of burgeoning inequality have tended to be twinborn with an increasing concentration of power, and its corollary: violence. War, often instigated for no more reason than the pursuit of glory and prestige, was just “the continuation of status competition by other means,” Kemp writes. On occasion, this violence would be manifested in the ultimate waste of all: human sacrifice, a practice custom-made to demonstrate the leadership’s exceptionality — above ordinary morality.
Better Off Stateless
As Kemp dug into the data in more detail, his research substantiated another startling paradox. Societal collapse, though invariably catastrophic for elites, has often proved to be a boon for the population at large.
Here again, Kemp found that the historiography is subject to pervasive and fallacious simplifications. In his book, he repudiates the 14th-century Tuscan scholar Petrarch, who promulgated the notion that the fall of classical Rome and Greece ushered in a “dark age” of cultural atrophy and barbarism. His was a reiteration of sentiments found in many earlier examples of “lamentation literature,” left behind on engraved tablets and sheaves of papyrus, which have depicted collapse as a Gomorran hellscape. One of Kemp’s favorites is the “Admonitions of Ipuwer,” which portrays the decline of Egypt’s Old Kingdom as a time of social breakdown, civil war and cannibalism. “But it actually spends a lot more time fretting about poor people becoming richer,” he said.
In reality, Kemp contends, Petrarch’s “rise-and-fall vision of history is spectacularly wrong.” For if collapse often engulfed ancient polities “like a brushfire,” the scorched earth left behind was often surprisingly fertile. Again, osteoarcheology, the study of ancient bones, gives the lie to the idea that moments of societal disintegration always spelled misery for the population at large.
Take human height, which archaeologists often turn to as a biophysical indicator of general health. “We can look at things like did they have cavities in their teeth, did they have bone lesions,” Kemp explained. “Skeletal remains are a good indicator of how much exercise people were getting, how good their diet was, whether there was lots of disease.”
“Societal collapse, though invariably catastrophic for elites, has often proved to be a boon for the population at large.”
Prior to the rise of Rome, for example, average heights in regions that would subsequently fall under its yoke were increasing. As the empire expanded, those gains stalled. By the end of the Western Empire, people were eight centimeters shorter than they would have been if the preceding trends had continued. “The old trope of the muscle-bound Germanic barbarian is somewhat true. To an Italian soldier, they would have seemed very large,” Kemp said. People in the Mediterranean only started to get taller again following Rome’s decline. (In a striking parenthesis, Kemp points out that the average male height today remains two centimeters shorter than that of our Paleolithic forebears.)
Elsewhere, too, collapse was not necessarily synonymous with popular immiseration. The demise of the extravagant Mycenaean civilization in Greece was pursued by a cultural efflorescence, paving the way for the proto-democracy of Athens. Collapse could be emancipatory, freeing the populace from instruments of state control such as taxes and forced labor. Even the Black Death, which killed as much as half of Europe’s population in the mid-14th century, became in time an economic leveler, slashing inequality and accelerating the decline of feudalism.
It’s a pattern that can still be discerned in modern contexts. In Somalia, the decade following the fall of the Barre regime in 1991 would see almost every single indicator of quality of life improve. “Maternal mortality drops by 30%, mortality by 24%, extreme poverty by 20%,” Kemp recounted from memory. Of course, there are endless caveats. But often, “people are better off stateless.”
Invariably, however, Goliaths re-emerged, stronger and more bureaucratically sophisticated than before. Colonial empires refined systems of extraction and dominance until their tentacles covered diffuse expanses of the globe. Kemp, never shy of metaphor, calls this the “rimless wheel,” a centripetal arrangement in which the core reaps benefits at the margins’ expense.
At times, such regimes were simply continuations of existing models of extraction. In 1521, when the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés unseated the Aztec ruler Moctezuma II, it was merely a case of “translatio imperi” — the handing over of empire. The European imperial projects in the Americas were an unforgivable stain, Kemp said. But, more often than not, they assumed the mantle from pre-existing hierarchies.
Endgame
In the afternoon, we walked north from the British Museum over to Coal Drops Yard, formerly a Victorian entrepôt for the import and distribution of coal, now a shiny vignette of urban regeneration. The morning rain had cleared, and Granary Square was full of tourists and office workers enjoying the late summer sun. Kids stripped to their underwear and played among low fountains; people chatted at public tables beneath a matrix of linden trees. Kemp and I found an empty table and sat down to talk about how it could all fall apart.
As “Goliath’s Curse” approaches its conclusion, the book betrays a sense of impending doom about our current moment. The final section, in which Kemp applies his schema to the present day, is entitled “Endgame,” after the stage in chess where only a few moves remain.
Today, we live in what Kemp calls the “Global Goliath,” a single interconnected polity. Its lootable resources are data, fossil fuels and the synthetic fertilizers derived from petrochemicals. Centuries of arms races have yielded an arsenal of monopolizable weapons like autonomous drones and thermonuclear warheads that are “50 trillion times more powerful than a bow and arrow.” The land — sectored into national borders, monitored by a “stalker complex” of mass surveillance systems and “digital trawl-nets” — is more caged than ever.
We have reached the apotheosis of the colonial age, a time when extractive institutions and administrative reach have been so perfected that they now span the globe. However, the resulting interdependencies and fetishes for unending growth have created an ever-growing catalog of “latent risks,” or accumulated hazards yet to be realized, and “tail risks,” or outcomes with a low probability but disastrous consequences. Kemp characterizes this predicament, in which the zenith of human achievement is also our moment of peak vulnerability, as a “rungless ladder.” The higher we go, the greater the fall.
“We have reached the apotheosis of the colonial age, a time when extractive institutions and administrative reach have been so perfected that they now span the globe.”
Under a series of apocalyptic subtitles — “Mors ex Machina,” “Evolutionary Suicide,” “A Hellish Earth” — Kemp enumerates the existential threats that have come to shape the widespread intuition, now playing out in our geopolitics, that globalized society is sprinting toward disaster. After the post-Cold War decades of non-proliferation, nuclear weapons stockpiles are now growing. The architects of artificial intelligence muse about its potential to wipe out humanity while simultaneously lobbying governments to obstruct regulation. Our densifying cities have become prospective breeding grounds for doomsday diseases. Anthropogenic climate change now threatens to shatter the stability of the Holocene, warming the planet at “an order of magnitude (tenfold) faster than the heating that triggered the world’s greatest mass extinction event, the Great Permian Dying, which wiped away 80–90% of life on earth 252 million years ago,” Kemp warns.
The culprits in this unfolding tragedy are not to be found among the ranks of common people. The free market has always been predicated on the concept of Homo economicus, a notional figure governed by dispassionate self-interest. But while most people don’t embody this paradigm, we are in thrall to political structures and corporations created in that image, with Dark Triad personalities at the wheel. “The best place to find a psychopath is in prison,” Kemp told me. “The second is in the boardroom.”
Now, deep into the Global Goliath’s senescence, several of the indicators that Kemp identifies as having historically presaged collapse — egalitarian backsliding, diminishing returns on extraction, the rise of oligarchy — are flashing red. Donning his risk analyst hat, Kemp arrives at the darkest possible prognosis: The most likely destination for our globalized society is “self-termination,” self-inflicted collapse on a hitherto unprecedented scale. Goliath is more powerful than ever, but it is on a collision course with David’s stone.
Lootable Silicon
All of this seemed hard to reconcile with the atmosphere of contented civility in Granary Square on this sunny September afternoon. I proposed that an advocate for global capitalism would doubtless view our current circumstances as evidence of the Global Goliath’s collective, trickle-down bounty.
“We should be thankful for a whole bunch of things that started, by and large, in the Industrial Revolution,” Kemp said. “Vaccines, the eradication of smallpox, low infant mortality and the fact that over 80% of the population is literate. These are genuine achievements to be celebrated.”
Kemp argued that most redistribution has been a product of “stands against domination”; for example, the formation of unions, public health movements and other campaigns for social justice. Meanwhile, underlying prosperity still depends on the rimless wheel: the hub exploiting the periphery. “If we were here 150 years ago, we’d be seeing child laborers working in these courtyards,” he said, gesturing at the former coal warehouses that are now an upmarket shopping mall and that once served as a nerve center of the fossil fuel industry that built the modern age.
The same dynamics hold sway today, albeit at a further remove. Just south of us, across the Regent’s Canal, sat the London headquarters of Google, a billion-dollar glass edifice. At first glance, Kemp gave the building an enthusiastic middle finger.
Later, he explained: “The people sitting in that building are probably having a pretty good time. They have lots of ping pong tables and Huel. But the cobalt that they’re using in their microchips is still often dug up by artisanal miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo, getting paid less than a couple of dollars a day.”
Like much of the oligarchic class, the boy-gods of Silicon Valley still cleave to Hobbesian myths to justify their grip on wealth and power. Their techno-Utopian convictions, encapsulated in Bill Gates’ mantra that “innovation is the real driver of progress,” are merely a secular iteration of the divine mandates that Goliaths once used to legitimize their rule. Promises of rewards in the afterlife have been supplanted by dreams of a technological singularity and interplanetary civilization.
Another plausible eventuality, which Kemp dubs the “Silicon Goliath,” is a future in which democracy and freedom are crushed beneath the heel of advanced algorithmic systems. He is already at work on his next book about the evolution of mass surveillance, an inquiry that he told me “is in many ways even more depressing.”
Slaying Goliath
Toward the end of “Goliath’s Curse,” Kemp imagines a scenario in which the decision of whether to detonate the Trinity atomic bomb test in New Mexico in 1945 was made not by a Department of War but by a “Trinity jury,” an assembly of randomly selected members of the public.
“Now several of the indicators that Kemp identifies as having historically presaged collapse — egalitarian backsliding, diminishing returns on extraction, the rise of oligarchy — are flashing red.”
In such a counterfactual, with the Nazis defeated, Japan already inches from surrender and Manhattan Project physicists warning of a non-zero possibility that the test could ignite the whole atmosphere and exterminate all life on Earth, Kemp contends that a more inclusive decision-making process would have changed the course of history. “If you had a random selection by lottery of 100 U.S. citizens and asked them, ‘Should we detonate the bomb?’ What decision do they come to? Almost certainly ‘No,’ he told me.
As Kemp sees it, the widespread adoption of such open democracy is the only viable route to escape the endgame. These citizen juries wouldn’t be free-for-alls, where the loudest or most outrageous voice wins, but deliberative procedures that necessitate juror exposure to expert, nonpartisan context.
Such assemblies wouldn’t be enough to “slay Goliath” on their own, Kemp told me. “Corporations and states … [must] pay for the environmental and social damages they cause … to make the economy honest again.” Per capita wealth, Kemp added, should be limited to a maximum of $10 million.
I challenged Kemp that this wish-list was beginning to sound like a Rousseauvian fever-dream. But seven years immersed in the worst excesses of human folly had left him in no mood for half-measures. “I’m not an anarcho-primitivist,” he said. There was no point trying to revivify our hunter-gatherer past. “We’d need multiple planet Earths!” Kemp conceded. And yet the urgency of our current circumstances demanded a radical departure from the existing status quo, and no less a shift in mindset.
His final demotic prescription, “Don’t be a dick,” was an injunction to everyone that our collective future depends as much on moral ambition as political revolution. Otherwise, Goliath won’t be just a Bible story. It could also be our epitaph.
The human species has been recognized as a new force that has pushed the Earth’s system into a new geological epoch referred to as the Anthropocene. This human influence was not conscious, however, but an unintended effect of the consumption of fossil-fuels over the last 150 years. Do we, humans, have the agency to deliberately influence the fate of our species and the planet we inhabit? The rational choice paradigm that dominated social sciences in the 20th Century, and has heavily influenced the conceptualization of human societies in global human-environmental system modelling in the early 21st Century, suggests a very limited view of human agency. Humans seen as rational agents, coordinated through market forces, have only a very weak influence on the system rules. In this article we explore alternative concepts of human agency that emphasize its collective and strategic dimensions as well as we ask how human agency is distributed within the society. We also explore the concept of social structure as a manifestation of, and a constraint on, human agency. We discuss the implications for conceptualization of human agency in integrated assessment modelling efforts.
1. Introduction
The Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris Agreement set very ambitious goals that, if taken seriously, would result in a rapid transformation of human-environmental interactions and decarbonization of the global socio-economic system (United Nations, 2015a, United Nations, 2015b). What the agreements do not specify, however, is how the transformation should be achieved and who the transformation agents would be. In most modern scientific assessment of global human-environmental interactions, including Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs), alternative futures do not evolve from the behavior of the population in the simulated region or market, but are externally chosen by the research teams (e.g. Moss et al., 2010). The human agency that can be broadly understood as the capacity of individual and collective actors to change the course of events or the outcome of processes (Pattberg and Stripple, 2008) is only weakly represented in the commonly used global system models. For example, Integrated Assessment Models are not capable of modelling abrupt changes and tipping points in both natural and human systems (e.g. van Vuuren et al., 2012) that may imply severe and non-linear consequences for the Earth system as a whole (Lenton et al., 2008). There is, however, a relatively rich body of literature in social sciences, primarily in political science and institutional theory, that conceptualizes human agency in the governance of social-ecological systems (e.g. Ostrom, 2005; Kashwan et al., 2018) and in Earth system governance (e.g. Biermann et al., 2012, Biermann et al., 2016). The aim of this paper is to assess the representation of human agency in Earth system science and integrated assessment modelling efforts and to examine how the rich body of literature on human agency in social sciences could be used to improve the modelling efforts.
The cornerstones of social sciences are built on the tension between agency and structure in social reproduction – the force of self-determination versus the embeddedness of social institutions (Dobres and Robb, 2000). Just as bio-physical laws determine the coupling between chemical and mechanical processes, social structures, including norms and institutions, impose constraints on the shaping of human interactions (North, 1990); they specify what people may, must, or must not do under particular circumstances and impose costs for non-compliance (Ostrom, 2005). Social institutions also have a function in expressing common or social interest and in channeling human behavior into what is socially desired (Coleman, 1990). Unlike bio-physical laws, however, social institutions are man-made structures and they are constantly being transformed by human action. In general, the smaller the social entity the less durable it is. The size, scale, and time-frame of the social entity push it towards a durable structure and stability (Fuchs, 2001). Numerous authors have contributed to this long and fruitful debate on micro- and macro-level social structures and interactions within social sciences. However, very little of that knowledge has so far been applied by the global environmental change modelling community. To give an example, the IPCC Report on Mitigation of Climate Change underlines the role of institutional, legal, and cultural barriers that constrain the low-carbon technology uptake and behavioral change. However, the diffusion of alternative values, institutions, and even technologies are not incorporated in the modelling results (Edenhofer et al., 2014). Little is known about the potential for scaling-up of social innovations, let alone the possible carbon emission reductions they could drive if applied on a larger scale. How quickly would such innovations diffuse into virtual and face-to-face social networks, and what would the agency of different actors, and groups of actors, be in such a diffusion process? The purpose of this work is to analyze how social theory could be better integrated into the global environmental change assessment community, and how relevant social theory could be incorporated in modelling efforts.
The paper is structured as follows. We start by reviewing how human agency has been incorporated within Earth system science and integrated modelling efforts so far. We then move to the exploration of the concept of human agency and social structure and review the relevant social stratification theories. We propose how the concept of human agency could be incorporated in global human-environmental system models, and finally we conclude.
2. Human agency in Earth system science and integrated assessment modelling
The recognition of the human species as the driving force of modern global environmental challenges, occurring at the end of the 20th Century, brought a new perspective to environmental and Earth system sciences. Lubchenco (1998) called directly for the integration of the human dimensions of global environmental changes with the physical-chemical-biological dimensions. In this context, Crutzen (2006) proposed the distinction of the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch, where the human species becomes a force outcompeting natural processes. As one possible framework to assess human agency in the Anthropocene, Schellnhuber (1999) developed the notion of “Earth System” analysis for global environmental management in which the human force has been conceptualized as a “global subject”. The global subject is a real but abstract force that represents the collective action of humanity as a self-conscious force that has conquered the planet. The global subject manifests itself, for instance, by adopting international protocols for climate protection.
The conceptualization of the human species as the global subject has been applied in Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs). IAMs refer to tools assessing strategies to address climate change and they aim to describe the complex relations between environmental, social and economic factors that determine future climate change and the effects of climate policy (van Vuuren et al., 2011). IAMs have been valuable means to set out potential pathways to mitigate climate change and, importantly, have been used in the IPCC’s assessments of climate change mitigation (Clarke et al., 2014). However, the development of Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) coincides in time with the supremacy of the rational choice paradigm. Rational choice theory emphasizes the voluntary nature of human action and the influence of such actions on decisions, assuming human beings act on the basis of rational calculations of benefits and costs (Burns, 1994). According to this paradigm, rationality is a feature of individual actors and the world can be explained in terms of interactions of atomic entities. Humans are rational beings motivated by self-interest and consciously evaluate alternative courses of action. Markets are seen as the mechanisms linking the micro and macro levels and allow the combination of the concrete actions of individuals, e.g. buyers and sellers (Jaeger et al., 2001). The rational choice paradigm is reflected in welfare maximization assumptions underpinning the development of computable general equilibrium (CGE) models that are widespread in IAMs. CGE models are computer-based simulations which use a system of equations that describe the whole world economy and their sectoral interactions. The analysis of scenarios in CGE models compares a business-as-usual equilibrium with the changes introduced by one or several policies and environmental shocks — e.g. a carbon tax or emissions trading scheme under several climate scenarios — which generate a new equilibrium (Babatunde et al., 2017). It is important to understand that the policy shock in such models is introduced externally; it does not evolve from the model and does not consider the dynamics behind the agency of different actors and groups of actors. In fact, human societies in CGE models are only reflected in aggregated population numbers by world region. The institutional settings within the human societies operate are given and cannot be endogenously changed. CGE models place a strong emphasis on the market as a solution to all kinds of problems including environmental and social issues (Scrieciu, 2007). Furthermore, state-of-the-art IAMs model aggregate datasets of sub-continental size. For instance, the IAM known as REMIND considers just 11 world regions, while the energy component of IMAGE considers only 26. The order of magnitude of the population of each of these regions is between 287 M and 680 M inhabitants (ADVANCE, 2017). Similarly, in the global land use allocation model MAgPIE, the food energy demand for ten types of food energy categories (cereals, rice, vegetable oils, pulses, roots and tubers, sugar, ruminant meat, non-ruminant meat, and milk) in ten world regions differentiated in the model is determined exogenously by population size and income growth, assuming that, for example, higher income is related to a higher demand for meat and milk (Popp et al., 2010). The impacts of changing lifestyles and the implications of demand-side solutions can be explored only manually by varying the underlying assumptions.
In context of the definition of human agency used above, IAMs reflect an agency of a rational consumer who decides on the choice of an optimal action having access to perfect information about the alternatives. By analyzing energy, land use, and their implications on global emissions (e.g. van Vuuren et al., 2012; Hibbard et al., 2010) IAMs can compute an economic setup to maximize welfare functions. Nevertheless, the welfare functions do not cover the diversity of human preferences. Complex distinctions of qualitative aspects, such as networks or influencers that can drive these processes, do not exist.
This drawback has been noted by the IAM community and attempts have been made to integrate human agency related behavior towards the political economy, social behavioral and interaction patterns (Riahi et al., 2017), or regimes of effort sharing (van den Berg et al., 2019) have been made. Some models also consider inequality and a diversity of consumption patterns (Hasegawa et al., 2015; McCollum et al. 2018). However, these approaches are still driven by exogenous quantifications and are unable to sufficiently inspect dynamics of human agency. Although IAMs are able to design pathways combining multiple strategies to achieve the 1.5 °C target of the Paris Agreement, which include human agency related actions such as lifestyle changes (van Vuuren et al., 2018), many questions remain. For example, how can human agency be triggered to achieve the lifestyle changes, at an individual level, necessary to achieve the 1.5 °C target? Also, how can the necessary institutional dynamics be brought into play? So far, these aspects are rarely considered in IAMs.
Novel and promising modelling approaches to incorporate human agency are being developed in complex network science (Borgatti et al., 2009) and social-ecological system modelling (Pérez et al., 2016). Complex networks usually consist of a set of nodes representing individual agents or representative aggregations thereof (such as business parties, geographical regions or countries) which are connected by different types of linkages, such as business relations, diplomatic ties, or even acquaintance and friendship (Newman, 2018). This type of framework has been developed in the past, and applied successfully to describe heterogeneous datasets from the social sciences, and to establish conceptual models for socio-economic and socio-ecological dynamics (Filatova et al., 2013). Nevertheless, most of such models are still based on theoretical assumptions with weak links to empirical data. A closer link with empirical data has so far only been achieved at case study level, focusing on particular local socio-environmental phenomena such as fishery or water management with agents representing local resource users or managers (e.g. Suwarno et al., 2018; Troost and Berger, 2015). The questions driving this work are: (i) how can similar models be conceptualized in order to represent the whole World-Earth system of human societies and their bio-physical environment (Donges et al., 2018) and (ii) how can they be linked with empirical data?
3. The concept of human agency in social sciences
Dellas et al. (2011) refer to agency in the governance of the Earth system as the capacity to act in the face of earth system transformation or to produce effects that ultimately shape natural processes. Agency in Earth system governance may be considered as contributing to problem solving, or alternatively it could include the negative consequences of the authority to act. Lister (2003) and Coulthard (2012), in their research on agency related to environmental and citizenship problems, distinguish two dimensions: (i) ‘everyday agency’ being the daily decision-making around how to make ends meet, and ‘strategic agency’ involving long-term planning and strategies; and (ii) ‘personal agency’ which reflects individual choices and ‘political and citizenship agency’ which is related to the capacity of people to affect the wider change (Lister 2003). Personal agency varies significantly across human individuals. However, there are powerful examples of social protests and movements demonstrating that even individually disempowered people can have a strong voice if they act collectively (Kashwan, 2016). In the context of natural resources and environmental management, there are empirical examples of self-organized local and regional communities and grassroots movements crafting new institutions that limit the control of national authorities (García-López, 2018; Dang, 2018). To give an example, civil society groups in Mexico managed to shape the REDD+ policies to protect the rights of agrarian communities (Kashwan, 2017a). In this context, Bandura (2006) proposes the differentiation of individual, proxy and collective agency (2006: 165). Individual agency refers to situations in which people bring their influence to bear through their own actions. This varies substantially from person to person with respect to individual freedom to act and the consequences of action. Individual agency is influenced by a whole set of socio-economic characteristics including gender, age, education, religion, social, economic and political capital. In many cultures, the individual agency of women is limited, for example, by inheritance law or by informal norms restricting their mobility or educational opportunities (Otto et al., 2017). However, individual agency also varies with an individual’s ability to change the system rules. For example, very wealthy or influential people might find it easier to set new market trends or influence public decision-making processes than those with fewer resources (Otto et al., 2019). Proxy, or socially mediated agency refers to situations in which individuals have no direct control over conditions that affect their lives, but they influence others who have the resources, knowledge, and means to act on their behalf to secure the outcome they desire. Collective agency refers to situations in which individuals pool their knowledge, skills, and resources, and act in concert to shape their future (Bandura 2006: 165). These dimensions of agency are visualized in Fig. 1.
The dominant view of human agency in Earth system science and integrated modelling approaches has so far focused on the left upper corner of Fig. 1, i.e. on the everyday agency of individual human agents. This would correspond to, for example, modelling the effects of food consumption on land use patterns (e.g. Popp et al., 2010). Interestingly, although opinion formation and election models are well advanced in game theory (e.g. Penn, 2009; Ding et al., 2010), they have not yet been applied to the formation of international environmental policy in IAMs. At the same time the recent so-called protest voting shows that a small fraction of voters can push public policy down a radically different pathway. Some studies link the protest voting and rising populism with increasing inequalities and the political and social exclusion of the poor and underprivileged (Becker et al., 2017). In some cases, radical policy changes might also be achieved by individual acts of civil disobedience and, in a destructive manner, by terrorist attacks. Civil disobedience represents the peaceful breaking of unjust or unethical laws and is a technique of resistance and protest whose purpose is to achieve social or political change by drawing attention to problems and influencing public opinion. Terrorism is defined as an act of violence for the purpose of intimidating or coercing a government or civilian population.
Furthermore, radical policy changes and social tipping points can emerge due to changes in the collective behavior and preferences. The term ‘tipping point’ “refers to a critical threshold at which a tiny perturbation can qualitatively alter the state or development of a system” (Lenton et al., 2008), hence the mere existence of tipping points implies that small perturbations created by parts of such a system can push the whole system into a different development trajectory. Examples of tipping-like phenomena in socio-economic systems include financial crises, but could also include the spread of new social values, pro-environmental behavior, social movements, and technological innovations (Steffen et al., 2018). To give an example, social movements and grassroots organizations played an important role in the German energy transition that was initiated in 2011 as a reaction to the nuclear disaster in Fukushima in Japan. It was, however, preceded by about 30 years of environmental activism (Hake et al., 2015). Finally, tipping-like phenomena can also be achieved by consumer boycotts and carrotmob movements. Consumer boycotts coupled with environmental NGO campaigns led, in Europe, to changes in the animal welfare regulations and the implementation of fair trade schemes (Belk et al., 2005). Carrotmobs refer to consumers collectively swarming a specific store to purchase its goods in order to reward corporate socially responsible behavior (Hoffmann and Hutter, 2012).
At the same time, cultural values and the ethical interpretation of behavior might vary in some respects across different countries and world regions and will lead to different manifestations of agency. Cultural values provide a strong filter of the actions perceived as good or responsible, as well as the consequences of violating norms (Belk et al., 2005). In the climate change context, some authors link the public acceptance of climate policy instruments to the belief and value systems in place, and the perceptions of the environment (Otto-Banaszak et al., 2011).
4. The manifestation of human agency: the layers of social structure
Biermann and Siebenhüner (2009) propose a distinction between actors and agents in Earth system governance. Actors are the individuals, organizations, and networks that participate in the decision-making processes. Agents are those actors who have the ability to prescribe behavior. The collective prescriptions and constraints on human behavior are usually referred to as the social structure (Granovetter, 1985; Dobres and Robb, 2000). The social structure is composed of the rule system that constitutes the “grammar” for social action that is used by the actors to structure and regulate their transactions with one another in defined situations or spheres of activity. The complex and multidimensional normative network is not given, but is a product of human action; “human agents continually form and reform social rule systems” (Burns and Flam, 1986: 26). The social rule system can also be framed as social institutions that are involved in political, economic, and social interactions (North, 1991). Similarly, Elinor Ostrom defines institutions as “the prescriptions that humans use to organize all forms of repetitive and structured interactions. Individuals interacting within rule-structured situations face choices regarding the actions and strategies they take, leading to consequences for themselves and for others” (Ostrom, 2005: 3). Social norms are shared understandings of actions and define which actions are obligatory, permitted, and forbidden (Crawford and Ostrom, 1995). Social order is only possible insofar as participants have common values and they share an understanding of their common interests and goals (King, 2009). Williamson (1998) proposes differentiating different informal institutions such as norms, beliefs and traditions, and formal institutions that comprise formal and written codes of conduct.
The process of shaping of the social rule system formation is not always fully conscious and intended. Lloyd (1988: 10) points out that a social structure is emerging from intended and unintended consequences of individual action and patterned mass behavior over time “Once such structures emerge, they feedback on the actions” (Sztompka, 1991: 49). For Giddens (1984) human action occurs as a continuous flow of conduct and he proposed turning the static notion of structure into the dynamic category of structuration to describe the human collective conduct. Human history is created by intentional activities but it is not an intended project; it persistently eludes efforts to bring it under conscious direction (Giddens, 1984: 27). As pointed out by Sztompka (1994), Giddens, embodies human agency in the everyday conduct of common people who are often distant from reformist intentions but are still involved in shaping and reshaping human societies. This process of the formation of social structure takes place over time; the system which individuals follow today have been produced and developed over a long period. “Through their transactions social groups and communities maintain and extend rule systems into the future” (Burns and Flam 1987: 29).
Another element of the social structure that is identified by several authors corresponds to the network of human relationships that, just like the shapes in geometry, can take different forms and configurations (Simmel, 1971). The network of relationships among the social agents is also referred to as governance structures, or sometimes as organizations. North (1990: 73) defines organizations as “purposive entities designed by their creators to maximize wealth, income, or other objectives defined by the opportunities afforded by the institutional structure of the society.” Williamson (1998), focusing on the types of contracts, distinguishes three basic types of governance structures: markets, firms, and hybrids. In markets, transaction partners are autonomous; in firms, partners are inter-dependent and integrated into an internal organization. Hybrids are intermediate forms in which contract partners are bilaterally dependent but to a large degree maintain autonomy (Williamson 1996: 95–98). Studying communication networks and social group structures allows us to distinguish more social network relationship patterns (Sztompka, 2002: 138).
Finally, the social structure is also shaped and influenced by large material objects such as infrastructure and other technological and industrial structures, that some authors call the technosphere (Spaargaren, 1997: 78). Herrmann-Pillath (2018) defines the technosphere as the encompassing aggregate of all artificial objects in opposition to the natural world, and more specifically, establishes the systemic separateness of the technosphere relative to the biosphere. Just as social norms impose on one hand certain constrains on human behavior, however, on the other hand, structure the human interactions and also provide certain opportunities, the technosphere can be viewed as a humanly designed constructs that provide certain opportunities as well as they limit certain choices of individuals operating at different geographical and time scales (Donges et al., 2017a).
The system is fully interconnected, and the social structure layers are interrelated. The slow changing layers of social structure impose constraints on the layers that change more quickly. The faster changing layers of social structure, however, are also able to change the slow slayers through feedback mechanisms (c.f. Williamson, 2000). Human agency is manifested through the maintenance, reproduction and modifications in the social structure layers (Burns, 1994). Interestingly, infrastructure objects in the technosphere layer show a similar order of change as the informal and formal institutions, and thus might constrain the social change in the faster changing levels. Thus artefacts become co-carriers of agency (Herrmann-Pillath, 2018). Nevertheless, sharp brakes from the established procedures rarely happen. Such defining moments are an exception to the rule and usually emerge from massive discontents such as civil wars, revolutions, or financial crises (Williamson, 1998). Institutions can also lock the society into a path-dependence (Beddoe et al., 2009). The capacity to undergo a radical restructuring, however, is a unique feature distinguishing social systems from organic or mechanical ones. Restructuring the social structure is a product of human agency and is grounded in the interaction between structures and human actions that produces change in a system’s given form, structure or state (Archer, 1988: xxii). However, the transition of institutions is frequently driven by crises (Beddoe et al., 2009).
Burns (1994: 215-216) introduces the notion of ‘windows of opportunity’ that are very relevant for analyzing social transformations. Interactive situations lacking social equilibria, which typically occur after catastrophes and other shocks, usually give rise to uncertainty, unpredictability, and confusion, and motivate actors to try, individually or collectively, to restructure the situation. In such restructuring activities, actors typically engage in reflective processes and make “choices about choice” and participate in meta-games (Burns 1994: 208). The actors may structure and restructure their preferences, outcomes, and outcome structures, and occasionally also the entire decision and game systems in which they participate. Through such structuring activity, human agents also create, maintain and change institutions and collective or organized agents such as movements, the state, market and bureaucratic organizations (Burns and Dietz, 1992; Burns, 1994: 215–216).
Transformations are the moments in history when the meta choices – “choices about choices” are made. The outcomes of such choices and the new type of system depend largely on the agents that get involved in the collective process of designing the new system. This process could be exclusive and incorporate only a narrow group of decision-makers as frequently happens in “quiet” transitions to authoritarian regimes. Alternatively, they can be more open and include representatives of various social groups, as happened in the political and economic transformation in Eastern Europe. Taking this example, Burns (1994) proposes that transformations are a co-evolutionary process sometimes driven by contradicting actors’ interests. Transformations might entail shifts in core societal organizing principles and systems of rules. As a result, agents with vested interests may struggle to maintain established systems or to limit the changes within them. Other agents act openly or covertly to modify or transform the system. Table 1 summarizes the above discussion and tries to link the social structure layers to the dominant type of human agency that can to be used to transform them.
Table 1. The layers of social structure, the dominant type of agency and the order of change.
Even in periods of radical change, however, the actors never start from scratch. They cannot choose a completely new system and they always depart from the ongoing social order in which they are embedded. The future evolves from practical activities, experiments, learning, conflict and struggle (Burns, 1994: 216). A similar point of view is presented by evolutionary institutional economists, in which transformations are seen not as a simple replacement of old institutions by new ones, but as a recombination and reworking of old and new elements and groups of actors (e.g. Stark, 1996; Bromley, 2000).
5. Distribution of human agency: differentiating socio-metabolic agent classes
Following the rational choice paradigm could lead us to a conclusion that the society is a sum of individuals (Burns, 1994) and that any forms of agency should be equally distributed among the individuals in the society. Such an approach is typical for integrated assessment models in which human systems are usually separated into population and economic sectors. The parameters that describe population are usually mainly population number, and economic production determines the use of resources and pollution emissions in the model (e.g. van Vuuren et al., 2012).
It is, however, enough to observe the world to know that such assumptions are very simplistic. People’s resource use and pollution emissions differ according to income, place of abode, type of occupation, and possessions. Moreover, their goals and interests, and the likelihood of them being fulfilled also differ. There are powerful individuals and groups in society who successfully strive for their interests, and there are individuals and groups who, despite struggling, never achieve their objectives. There are also masses of individuals who just strive to make ends meet. The questions are what types of agents or organizations can be incorporated in the models and what sort of agency do they have? Is there a need for a new social class theory taking access to energy and related carbon emissions as the base of social stratification?
Most social differentiation theories follow either the Marxist distinction between physical and capital endowments or the Weberian approach which differentiates classes through inequalities in ownership and income (Kozyr-Kowalski, 1992: 53). Some class theorists also highlight the development stages and inequalities across different countries and world-regions (Offe, 1992: 122). One more dimension that has not been discussed so far by social differentiation theories is the socio-metabolic profile of social classes, which constitutes the common ground for social and natural sciences. Social metabolism refers to the material flows in human societies and the way societies organize their exchanges of energy and materials with the environment (Fischer-Kowalski, 1997; Martinez-Alier, 2009). Social classes can be differentiated based on their metabolic profiles (Martinez-Alier, 2009). The use of energy by human beings can be divided into two main categories. The first one refers to the endosomatic use of energy as food, and the second one refers to the exosomatic use of energy as fuel for cooking and heating, and as power for the artefacts and machines produced by human society. Thus one person a day must eat the equivalent of 1500 to 2500 kcal to sustain their life functions, which is equivalent to about 10 MJ (megajoules) of energy per day or 3.65 GJ per year (Martinez-Alier, 2009). This amount varies only slightly among human beings. A rich person physically cannot eat much more, and even poorer individuals need the equivalent energy in the form of food to survive. Dietary composition and the amount of waste produced, however, will differ across the social strata. Nevertheless, there are still people suffering from hunger, unable to meet their basic needs.
The exosomatic energy use varies to a greater degree. The poorest social groups, who have no permanent access to electricity in their homes, who obtain energy for cooking and heating from the combustion of biomass products, who use overcrowded buses and trains to travel, use in total about 10 GJ of energy per person per year (Martinez-Alier, 2009) and constitute the lowest, socio-metabolic underclass. A more detailed picture can be derived by comparing the carbon footprint of different socio-economic groups. Personal CO2 emissions are released directly in fuel combustion processes in vehicles, airplanes, heating and cooking appliances, and indirectly through electricity use and consumption of products that generated emissions in the upstream production processes. The authors include CO2 emissions from energy used directly in homes (for space heating, lighting, etc.), for personal transportation (including personal vehicles and passenger aviation), and from the energy embedded in the production of goods consumed. Kümmel (2011) proposes the term “energy slaves” to describe the exosomatic energy use from fossil fuels by modern human society. On average, the daily energy consumption of a human being is equivalent to the men power of 15 people. Inhabitants of the most energy intensive Western Societies (i.e. the U.S.) consume, per person, the equivalent of the work of 92 people every day.
The results from UK households show that CO2 emissions are strongly income, but also location, dependent. The highest emissions can be generated by people living in suburbs, mostly in detached houses, and having two or more cars. Emissions of such households equated to about 26 CO2 tonnes in 2004. This amount was 64% higher than the emissions of the group with lowest emissions of 16 CO2, which comprised mostly of older and single person urban households as well as the unemployed living mostly in urban areas (Druckman and Jackson, 2009). UK household emissions can be compared with emissions from households located in less developed countries. For example, household emissions in Malaysia, as in the UK, are strongly dependent on income and location. However, Malaysian households with the lowest emissions were found in villages as well as in low-income urban squatter settlements. The urban squatter settlement households emitted on average 10.18 CO2 tonnes. The village households emitted on average 9.58 CO2 tonnes per year. Households with the highest CO2 emissions were located in high cost housing areas and they were responsible on average for 20.14 CO2 tonnes per year (Majid et al., 2014).
On the other end of the social ladder, there are super-rich hyper-mobile individuals with multiple spacious residences, and whose live-styles are characterized by conspicuous consumption patterns. They are less than 1% of global population and their consumption related greenhouse gas emissions could be over 170 times higher than the world’s poorest 10% (Oxfam, 2015). They can be characterized by extremely high levels of all types of agency. The influence and roles of many super-rich in the world of politics, media, culture, business and industry are often inter-related. In contrast to the super-rich in pre-industrial societies they have almost unlimited mobility, owning properties in different counties, with their homes being guarded and fortified. They have the ability to switch countries of residence, taking the advantage of ‘nondomiciled’ tax status, i.e. being the national of a certain country while not actually living there (Paris, 2013). Table 2 presents a first attempt to stratify the global population according to their socio-metabolic profiles that is based on disaggregated data on consumption related carbon emissions (Oxfam, 2015; Otto et al., 2019).
The proportions in Table 2 are striking. The top 10% of the global population is responsible for almost 50% of global consumption related greenhouse gas emissions. The wealthiest 0.54% of the human population is responsible for more lifestyle carbon emissions than the poorest 50% (Otto et al., 2019).
Energy use, as well as carbon dioxide emission, can also be used to analyze the socio-metabolic profile of economic sectors, companies and other organizations. From 1854 to 2010 12.5% of all industrial carbon pollution was produced by just five companies – Chevron, ExxonMobil, British Petroleum, Shell and Conoco Philipps (Union of Concerned Scientists, 2018). To give an example from a different sector – in 2015 Saint-Gobain, a French multinational building materials manufacturer emitted 9.5 million metric tonnes CO2e (Carbon Disclosure Project, 2016: 22). For a comparison, emissions from industrial processes in France in 2013 equated to 17.6 million tonnes CO2e (General Directorate for Sustainable Development, 2016: 25) (GTM, 2018).
The socio-metabolic profile of social classes, nations, and organizations can be directly linked with their agency in the Earth system. The global socio-metabolic underclass is obviously characterized by a very low degree of agency. There are rare exceptions of mass protests initiated by the poorest social groups that can collectively influence formal institutions and change their governance (Kashwan, 2017b). However, these people are mostly occupied with making ends meet and have low organizational capabilities. In contrast, the global socio-metabolic upper classes are those who are characterized by a high level of individual agency as well as having the organizational capabilities to actively exercise their agency. Due to their resource incentive life-style they also have the moral obligation to be the agents of a transformation in global sustainability.
6. Improving the representation of human agency in integrated assessment modelling
In this section we ask how the above conceptual discussion could be summarized into guidelines improving the operationalization of human agency in Earth system science and integrated assessment modelling. In order to incorporate the different aspects of human agency as discussed in the previous sections, there is a need to introduce agents with heterogeneous goals, opinions and preferences into the models. The agents should be able to form networks that represent their mutual interrelationships and interactions between them. These system interaction rules should ideally refer to the social structure layers differentiated in Table 1, forming a nested hierarchical embeddedness of each agent.
Conceptual models, that incorporate the above requirements have been successfully developed and studied in the recent past. Their core properties might thus form a proper basis for extending IAMs to include heterogeneous agency on the level of (representative) individuals. Such models have been utilized to study opinion, and the associated consensus-formation specifically under the assumption of heterogeneous agents. Most of these works are based on the voter model in which agents exchange discrete (sets of) opinions in order to reach some consensus on a given (possibly abstract) topic or problem (Clifford and Sudbury, 1973; Holley and Liggett, 1975). Acknowledging that in its standard version the voter model considers all agents to have identical agency, extensions have been based on social impact theory (Latane, 1981) that specifically include heterogeneous relationships between single actors or groups (Nowak et al., 1990). Such extended models generally account for proximities between agents in some abstract space of personal relationships which is commonly modeled by assigning agents unique values of persuasiveness and supportiveness, describing their agency with respect to influencing as well as supporting others. While being of generic nature such classes of models can be easily modified to account for various kinds of processes related to social behavior, such as social learning (Kohring, 1996) or leadership (Holyst et al., 2001), which are again directly related to the notions of (heterogeneous distributions of) human agency. Certain models include additional layers of complexity by also accounting for the heterogeneous distribution of different group sizes (Sznajd-Weron, 2005) and certain majorities within those groups (Galam, 2002) when determining criteria for consensus in opinion dynamics.
One particular model of general cultural dynamics that has attracted great interest in the social science community, and that should be highlighted here, is the so-called Axelrod model (Axelrod, 1997). In its core, it accounts for two commonly observed tendencies in large groups of individuals or aggregations thereof: social influence (i.e. agency) and homophily (a process that dynamically influences each individual’s agency over time). The Axelrod-model not only specifically accounts for heterogeneity in the different agents but also (and to some degree unintuitively) allows emerging cultural diversity to be modeled in its convergent state. In general, such flexible approaches allow incorporating individual human agency in terms of the different ties an agent might have with others (Emirbayer and Goodwin, 1994; Granovetter, 1977). Additionally, each tie can be associated with different strengths, thus also incorporating heterogeneity in the human agency (Castellano et al., 2009). Network modelling approaches further allow us to explicitly resolve the associated social structure (as well as the temporal evolution thereof) through an evaluation of the overall topology of the network on the meso- or macroscale (Costa et al., 2007).
A necessary step in operationalizing human agency in IAMs includes differentiating global socio-metabolic agent classes with heterogeneous metabolic profiles linking them with the material and energy flows in the bio-physical environment as well as heterogeneous social profiles that specify their preferences, opinions, and positions in social networks. Such efforts could be linked to the emerging research on downscaling planetary boundaries (Häyhä et al., 2016) as well as the established research on differentiating social milieus (e.g. Bauer and Gaskell, 1999). Some authors also propose model co-development, together with citizens and citizen groups (Figueres et al., 2017). Some authors also recommend abandoning the search for one gold-standard model, and instead explore future pathways based on a multitude of different concepts and representations of people and human agency (Donges et al., 2017b). For example, Donges et al. (2018) propose a modelling framework allowing incorporation of large sets of different models and concepts, in a standardized form, in order to assess and compare different future trajectories.
7. Conclusions
The Anthropocene has emerged unintentionally as a side effect of the industrialization of human societies (Crutzen, 2006). There are only a few examples of the human ability to internally interact with planetary geological forces, with the Montreal Protocol being the most often referred to example (Velders et al., 2007). At the same time historical examples show that there are instances of rapid transitions in societies (Bunker and Alban, 1997). Achieving policy challenges as outlined in the Sustainable Development Goals require a certain degree of societal transformation. The concept of agency is central to implementing transformations needed to limit global warming and achieve the SDGs. Most of the IAMs that dominate the scientific assessments of global environmental changes do not include a representation of human societies that would have a capacity to undertake system transformations. At the same time, there is a relatively rich social science theory that can be used to improve the operationalization of human agency in integrated assessment modelling efforts.
In this paper we show that human agency can actively shape the World-Earth system (c.f. Donges et al., 2018) through interventions at different layers of social structure. Human agency, however, is not evenly distributed across all human individuals and social groups. We postulate a differentiation of socio-metabolic agent classes that could be integrated into integrated assessment modelling efforts. More socio-economic sub-national and sub-population group data is needed for this purpose (c.f. Otto et al., 2015). Social institutions for sustainable management of global, regional, and local ecosystems, however, do not generally evolve spontaneously, but have to be consciously designed and implemented by the resource users (Gatzweiler and Hagedorn, 2002; Kluvankova-Oravska et al., 2009). Each social transformation contains a disruptive component that implies a destruction of existing patterns of social interaction and institutional structures, and creation and emergence of new patterns and structures. Introducing more dimensions of human agency into IAMs, and co-creating scenarios and pathways for modelling exercises together with citizens and institutions, would help break the barriers that disconnect peoples’ actuality and agency with models, a discourse which has been gaining weight among policy makers (Figures, 2016). This disconnection can be broken by co-developing with citizens and various resource users the elements of global human-environmental system models, and by considering the people behind the numbers and the possible ways of funneling their agency. We encourage the integrated modelling community to work more closely with social scientists as well as we encourage social scientists to explore the methods and concepts applied in natural sciences.
Acknowledgments
The authors are grateful to two anonymous reviewers for their feedback that helped them to improve the paper. I.M.O., J.F.D., and R.C. are grateful for financial support by the Earth League’s EarthDoc programme. I.M.O. is supported by funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 821010. J.F.D. is grateful for financial support by the Stordalen Foundation via the Planetary Boundary Research Network (PB.net). M.W. is financially supported by the Leibniz Association (project DominoES). This research has been carried out within the COPAN – Co-evolutionary Pathways Research Group at PIK.
Axelrod, 1997Robert AxelrodThe Complexity of Cooperation. Agent-based Models of Competition and CollaborationPrinceton University Press, Princenton (1997)Google Scholar
Beddoe et al., 2009Rachael Beddoe, Robert Constanza, Joshua Farley, Eric Garza, Jennifer Kent, et al.Overcoming systemic roadblocks to sustainability: the evolutionary redesign of worldviews, institutions, and technologiesPNAS, 106 (8) (2009), pp. 2483-2489CrossrefView in ScopusGoogle Scholar
Bromley, 2000Daniel BromleyMost Difficult Passage: The Economic Transition in Central and Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union(2000)(In . Berlin)Google Scholar
Bunker and Alban, 1997B.B. Bunker, B.T. AlbanLarge Group Interventions: Engaging the Whole System for Rapid ChangeJossey-Bass Publications, San Francisco (1997)Google Scholar
Burns, 1994Tom R. BurnsTwo conceptions of human agency: rational choice theory and the social theory of actionPiotr Sztompka (Ed.), Agency and Structure. Reorienting Social Theory, Gordon and Breach Science Publishers, Yverdon, Camberwell, Paris (1994)Google Scholar
Burns and Flam, 1986Tom R. Burns, Helena FlamThe Shaping of Social Organization: Social Rule System Theory and its ApplicationsSage, London (1986)Google Scholar
Coulthard, 2012S. CoulthardCan we be both resilient and well, and what choices do people have? Incorporating agency into the resilience debate from a fisheries perspectiveEcol. Soc., 17 (1) (2012), p. 4Google Scholar
Donges et al., 2018F. Donges Jonathan, Jobst Heitzig, Wolfram Barfuss, et al.Earth system modelling with complex dynamic human societies: the Copan:CORE World-Earth modeling frameworkEarth Syst. Dyn. Disc. (2018), 10.5194/esd-2017-126Google Scholar
Donges et al., 2017bJ.F. Donges, R. Winkelmann, W. Lucht, S.E. Cornell, J.G. Dyke, J. Rockström, J. Heitzig, H.J. SchellnhuberClosing the loop: reconnecting human dynamics to Earth system scienceAnthropocene Rev., 4 (2) (2017), pp. 151-157, 10.1177/2053019617725537View in ScopusGoogle Scholar
Edenhofer et al., 2014O. Edenhofer, R. Pichs-Madruga, Y. SokonaMitigation of Climate Change. Contribution of Work-ing Group III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate ChangeCambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK and New York, USA (2014)Google Scholar
Figueres et al., 2017Christiana Figueres, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Gail Whiteman, Johan Rockström, Anthony Hobley, Stefan RahmstorfThree years to safeguard our climateNature, 546 (7660) (2017), pp. 593-595CrossrefView in ScopusGoogle Scholar
Figures, 2016Christina FiguresPlenary talk by Ch. Figueres, executive secretary of the United Nations Fremework convention on climate changePlenary Talk at the Adaptation Futures Conference, Rotterdam, 10–13 May 2016, Amsterdam (2016)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOvDeIpVM8wGoogle Scholar
Filatova et al., 2013Tatiana Filatova, Peter H. Verburg, Dawn Cassandra Parker, Carol Ann StannardSpatial agent-based models for socio-ecological systems: challenges and prospectsEnvironmental Modelling & Software, Thematic Issue on Spatial Agent-Based Models for Socio-Ecological Systems, vol. 45 (2013), pp. 1-7, 10.1016/j.envsoft.2013.03.017(July)View PDFView articleView in ScopusGoogle Scholar
Fischer-Kowalski, 1997M. Fischer-KowalskiSociety’s metabolism: on the childhood and adolescence of a rising conceptual starThe International Handbook of Environmental Sociology, Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham, UK (1997)Google Scholar
Giddens, 1984Anthony GiddensThe Constitution of Society. Outline of the Theory of StructurationUniversity of California Press, Berkley and Los Angeles (1984)Google Scholar
Granovetter, 1977Mark S. GranovetterThe strength of weak ties11this paper originated in discussions with Harrison White, to whom I am indebted for many suggestions and ideas. Earlier drafts were read by Ivan Chase, James Davis, William Michelson, Nancy Lee, Peter Rossi, Charles Tilly, and an anonymous referee; their criticisms resulted in significant improvementsSamuel Leinhardt (Ed.), Social Networks, Academic Press (1977), pp. 347-367, 10.1016/B978-0-12-442450-0.50025-0View PDFView articleView in ScopusGoogle Scholar
Hasegawa et al., 2015Tomoko Hasegawa, Shinichiro Fujimori, Kiyoshi Takahashi, Toshihiko MasuiScenarios for the risk of hunger in the twenty first century using shared socioeconomic pathwaysEnviron. Res. Lett., 10 (1) (2015)Google Scholar
Hibbard et al., 2010Kathy Hibbard, Anthony Janetos, Detlef P. van Vuuren, Julia Pongratz, Steven K. Rose, Richard Betts, Martin Herold, Johannes J. FeddemaResearch priorities in land use and land-cover change for the earth system and integrated assessment modellingInt. J. Climatol., 30 (13) (2010), pp. 2118-2128, 10.1002/joc.2150View in ScopusGoogle Scholar
Holley and Liggett, 1975Richard A. Holley, Thomas M. LiggettErgodic theorems for weakly interacting infinite systems and the voter modelAnn. Probab., 3 (4) (1975), pp. 643-663Google Scholar
Jaeger et al., 2001Carlo C. Jaeger, Ortwin Renn, Eugene A. Rosa, Thomas WeblerRisk, Uncertainty, and Rational ActionEarthscan Publications Ltd, London and Sterling (2001)Google Scholar
Kashwan, 2016Prakash KashwanInequality, democracy, and the environment: a cross-national analysisEcol. Econ. (131) (2016), pp. 139-151Google Scholar
Kashwan, 2017aPrakash KashwanDemocracy in the woodsEnvrionmental Conservation and Social Justice in India, Tanzania, and Mexico, Oxford University Press, New York (2017)Google Scholar
Kashwan et al., 2018Prakash Kashwan, Lauren M. MacLean, Gustavo A. García-LópezRethinking power and institutions in the shadows of neoliberalism: (an introduction to a special issue of world development)World Dev. (2018), 10.1016/j.worlddev.2018.05.026MayGoogle Scholar
King, 2009Anthony KingOvercoming structure and agency. Talcott Parsons, Ludwig Wittgenstein and the theory of social actionJ. Class. Sociol., 9 (2) (2009), pp. 260-288View in ScopusGoogle Scholar
Kluvankova-Oravska et al., 2009Tatiana Kluvankova-Oravska, Veronika Chobotova, Lenka Slavikova, Sonja TrifunovovaFrom government to governance for biodiversity: the perspective of central and eastern European transition countries – 0f3175391c2efbd10d000000.PdfEnviron. Policy Gov., 19 (2009), pp. 186-196CrossrefView in ScopusGoogle Scholar
Kozyr-Kowalski, 1992Stanislaw Kozyr-KowalskiEconomic ownership and partial and combined classes of society. An attempt at a postive critique of post-Marxian MarxismOn Social Differentation. A Contribution to the Critique of Marxis Ideology, Adam Mickiewicz University Press, Poznan (1992)Google Scholar
Kümmel, 2011Reiner KümmelThe Second Law of Economics: Energy, Entropy, and the Origins of WealthSpringer Science & Business Media (2011)Google Scholar
McCollum et al., 2018David L. McCollum, Charlie Wilson, Michela Bevione, Samuel Carrara, Oreane Y. Edelenbosch, Johannes Emmerling, Céline Guivarch, et al.Interaction of consumer preferences and climate policies in the global transition to low-carbon vehiclesNat. Energy, 1 (2018), 10.1038/s41560-018-0195-zJulyGoogle Scholar
Nowak et al., 1990A. Nowak, J. Szamrej, B. LatanéFrom private attitude to public opinion: a dynamic theory of social impactPsychol. Rev., 97 (3) (1990), p. 362View in ScopusGoogle Scholar
Majid et al., 2014M.R. Majid, S.N. Moeinzadeh, H.Y. TifwaIncome-carbon footprint relationship for urban and rural households of Iskandar MalaysiaIOP Conf. Ser., 18 (012164) (2014), pp. 1-5Google Scholar
Moss et al., 2010Richard H. Moss, Jae A. Edmonds, Kathy A. Hibbard, Martin R. Manning, Steven K. Rose, et al.The next generation of scenarios for climate change research and assessmentNature, 463 (2010), pp. 747-756, 10.1038/nature08823View in ScopusGoogle Scholar
Offe, 1992Clauss OffeThe welfare state, new class differentiation and diminution of social conflictOn Social Differentation. A Contribution to the Critique of Marxis Ideology, Adam Mickiewicz University Press, Poznan (1992), pp. 97-130Google Scholar
Ostrom, 2005Elinor OstromUnderstanding Institutional DiversityPrinceton University Press, Princenton (2005)Google Scholar
Otto et al., 2015Ilona M. Otto, Anne Biewald, Dim Coumou, Georg Feulner, Claudia Köhler, Thomas Nocke, Anders Blok, et al.Socio-economic data for global environmental change researchNat. Clim. Chang., 5 (2015), pp. 503-506CrossrefView in ScopusGoogle Scholar
Otto et al., 2017Ilona M. Otto, Diana Reckien, Christopher P.O. Reyer, Rachel Marcus, Virginie Le Masson, Lindsey Jones, Andrew Norton, Olivia SerdecznySocial vulnerability to climate change: a review of concepts and evidenceReg. Environ. Chang. (2017), 10.1007/s10113-017-1105-9FebruaryGoogle Scholar
Otto-Banaszak et al., 2011Ilona Otto-Banaszak, Piotr Matczak, Justus Wesseler, Frank WechsungDifferent perceptions of adaptation to climate change: a mental model approach applied to the evidence from expert interviewsReg. Environ. Chang., 11 (2) (2011), pp. 217-228, 10.1007/s10113-010-0144-2View in ScopusGoogle Scholar
Paris, 2013Chris ParisThe homes of the super-rich: multiple residences, hyper-mobility and decoupling of prime residential housing in global citiesGeographes of the Super-rich, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham, UK; Northhampton, MA, USA (2013)Google Scholar
Riahi et al., 2017Keywan Riahi, Detlef P. van Vuuren, Elmar Kriegler, Brian C.O. Jae Edmonds, Neill Shinichiro Fujimori, Nico Bauer, et al.The shared socioeconomic pathways and their energy, land use, and greenhouse gas emissions implications: an overviewGlob. Environ. Chang., 42 (January) (2017), pp. 153-168, 10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2016.05.009View PDFView articleView in ScopusGoogle Scholar
Simmel, 1971Georg SimmelOn Individuality and Social Forms. Selected WritingsThe University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London (1971)Google Scholar
Spaargaren, 1997Gert SpaargarenThe Ecological Modernization of Production and Consumption. Essays in Environmental SociologyUniverstiy of Wageningen, Wageningen (1997)Google Scholar
Steffen et al., 2018Will Steffen, Johan Rockström, Katherine Richardson, Timothy M. Lenton, Carl Folke, Diana Liverman, Colin P. Summerhayes, et al.Trajectories of the earth system in the AnthropoceneProc. Natl. Acad. Sci. (2018), 10.1073/pnas.1810141115August, 201810141Google Scholar
Suwarno et al., 2018Aritta Suwarno, Meine van Noordwijk, Hans-Peter Weikard, Desi SuyamtoIndonesia’s forest conversion moratorium assessed with an agent-based model of land-use change and ecosystem services (LUCES)Mitig. Adapt. Strateg. Glob. Chang., 23 (2) (2018), pp. 211-229, 10.1007/s11027-016-9721-0View in ScopusGoogle Scholar
Sztompka, 1991Piotr SztompkaSociety in Action. The Theory of Social BecomingUniversity of Chicago Press, Chicago (1991)Google Scholar
Sztompka, 1994Piotr SztompkaEvolving focus on human agency in contemporary social theoryAgency and Structure. Reorienting Social Theory, Gordon and Breach Science Publishers, Yverdon, Camberwell, Paris (1994)Google Scholar
van den Berg et al., 2019Nicole J. van den Berg, Heleen L. van Soest, Andries F. Hof, Michel G.J. den Elzen, Detlef P. van Vuuren, Wenying Chen, Laurent Drouet, et al.Implications of Various Effort-sharing Approaches for National Carbon Budgets and Emission PathwaysClimatic Change, February (2019), 10.1007/s10584-019-02368-yGoogle Scholar
van Vuuren et al., 2011Detlef P. van Vuuren, Jason Lowe, Elke Stehfest, Laila Gohar, Andries F. Hof, Chris Hope, Rachel Warren, Malte Meinshausen, Gian-Kasper PlattnerHow well do integrated assessment models simulate climate change?Clim. Chang., 104 (2) (2011), pp. 255-285, 10.1007/s10584-009-9764-2View in ScopusGoogle Scholar
van Vuuren et al., 2012Detlef P. van Vuuren, Laura Batlle Bayer, Clifford Chuwah, Laurens Ganzeveld, Wilco Hazeleger, Bart van der Hurk, Twan van Noije, Brian O’Neil, Bart J. StrengersA comprehensive view on climate change: coupling of earth system and integrated assessment modelsEnviron. Res. Lett., 7 (2012), pp. 1-10CrossrefView in ScopusGoogle Scholar
van Vuuren et al., 2018Detlef P. van Vuuren, Elke Stehfest, David E.H.J. Gernaat, Maarten van den Berg, David L. Bijl, Harmen Sytze de Boer, Vassilis Daioglou, et al.Alternative pathways to the 1.5 °C target reduce the need for negative emission technologiesNat. Clim. Chang., 8 (5) (2018), pp. 391-397, 10.1038/s41558-018-0119-8View at publisherView in ScopusGoogle Scholar
To most conservationists and many parents, it seems obvious that it is a good thing to teach children to value the natural world. Not only does connection with nature support their development and well-being, but it also supports ongoing efforts by humans to sustain the natural world.
However, there are incontrovertible trends towards a diminution of the state of nature as a consequence of human activities.
In this context, as a thought experiment, we address a rather grim question: Should we still encourage children to be connected to nature, to care for it and be concerned about it?
We first consider the meaning of connection to nature in the Anthropocene, and then turn to a consideration of several ethical dimensions of this problem, including the potential trade-off between well-known health benefits of time in nature and the long-term psychological impacts of loss of nature (e.g., ecological grief and solastalgia).
While there is no simple answer to our question, our analysis does highlight underappreciated ethical dilemmas of the Anthropocene as well as the value of the local, urban forms of nature to which children around the world are increasingly exposed and engaging with in unprecedented ways.
A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article.
The end of nature probably also makes us reluctant to attach ourselves to its remnants, for the same reason that we usually don’t choose friends from among the terminally ill. I love the mountain outside my back door … But I know that some part of me resists getting to know it better—for fear, weak-kneed as it sounds, of getting hurt. … There is no future in loving nature (McKibben, 1989).
1 INTRODUCTION
On an evening in early spring, one of us (BL) brought his 5-year-old son to see two species of mole salamanders crossing a small road to travel from a woodland, where they overwinter underground, to a breeding pond. It was cool and rainy, so the conditions were salutary for salamanders, and father and son observed about 30 of them make their way. From our perspective as environmentalists and parents, this scene is a positive one because a member of the next generation was learning to value living beings and the natural world. At one point in the evening, however, upon finding a dead salamander that had been crushed by a car, the child broke down in tears. We cannot help but wonder whether his sorrow was outweighed by the benefits of this excursion, by the pleasures and wonder of a first-hand connection with these beautiful creatures (see Carson, 1998).
Our aim here is to pose a related question, although at a much larger scale: whether, in this era of mass extinctions and environmental degradation, children should still be encouraged to be emotionally invested in the natural world (and if so, why).
The prevailing view is not only that parents should encourage connection with nature, but that it is critical that they succeed. In his classic book, Richard Louv (2008) documented the growing disconnection of children from nature, with increasingly urban children spending less time outside and more time looking at screens (or capturing virtual Pokémon creatures outside; Dorward et al., 2017), and argued that it is essential to overcome ‘nature-deficit disorder’.1 More recently, Soga and Gaston (2016) reviewed the causes (i.e. loss of opportunity and orientation) and consequences (i.e. changes in health/well-being, emotion, attitude and behaviour) of the resulting ‘extinction of experience’, and proposed ways to reverse it. Accordingly, Abson et al. (2019) consider reconnection with nature to be one of three ‘transformational “sustainability interventions”’. This growing body of research has contributed to a veritable parenting movement to get children outdoors.
There is a curious disconnect, however, between this invocation to connect children with nature and the state of said nature.2 Nature has changed dramatically over the past several decades, and it continues to change, with many indicators revealing seemingly inexorable declines wrought by human activity (e.g. IPBES, 2019). It is the sum total of these human impacts, evidenced by certain geological markers, which has given rise to the proposal that humans now inhabit the Anthropocene epoch (Corlett, 2015).3 Although diverse commentators, poets and scholars are asking hard questions about how to face up to the Anthropocene (e.g. Bringhurst & Zwicky, 2018; Ghosh, 2016; Major, 2018; Scranton, 2015; Tsing et al., 2017; Wallace-Wells, 2019; Wapner, 2010), most people generally proceed as though humans will figure things out and reverse the trends, despite the evidence of the growing challenge to doing so (e.g. IPCC, 2021; Jewell & Cherp, 2019; UNEP, 2019). People behave as if it were not the case that ‘around 1 million animal and plant species are now threatened with extinction, many within decades, more than ever before in human history’ and the ‘average abundance of native species in most major land-based habitats has fallen by at least 20%, mostly since 1900’ (IPBES, 2019). These changes are already creating sadness and anxiety among children (Chawla, 2020). Despite recognition that nature’s ‘baseline’ is changing (Soga & Gaston, 2018), parents go on parenting as though their children will inherit a world that looks much like the one they have known.4
Assume, for the purpose of this thought experiment,5 that dramatic climate change, biodiversity loss and other environmental harms are largely irremediable, so the state of nature will continue to precipitously decline. We strongly hope this assumption is false, yet we are interested in exploring its implications. In particular, we ask an important—albeit unsettling—question for anyone invested in raising and educating children6: Should we continue the common practice of trying to connect children to nature? If so, why? The environmental crisis is likely to impose all sorts of costs on children already. Should we at least minimize the emotional burdens associated with the decline of nature?7
We approach these questions as nature-loving parents ourselves, parents who feel that the lives of our children would be much, much diminished with fewer connections to the natural world. We cannot help but recoil in raising this question. Nonetheless, insofar as views about raising children have been shaped by prior, pre-Anthropocene ways of thinking, conventional wisdom may need to be overturned in the Anthropocene (e.g. Hamilton, 2017; Head, 2015; Latour, 2018; Lövbrand et al., 2015). For example, although some readers might consider our argument to be anthropocentric given its focus on human well-being rather than the well-being of other species, our thought experiment begins with the assumption that it is too late for many of those other beings—and the very concept of anthropocentrism is being challenged giving the prevalence of human impacts in the Anthropocene (see Hamilton, 2017). We approach these questions in the spirit of promoting better dialogue among conservationists and naturalists, parents and educators, all of whom are wrestling with questions about how to raise children and teach them about nature and its value in this new epoch.
Ultimately, we argue that several of the reasons people might offer for connecting children with nature are weaker than many might be inclined to suppose, at least given the assumptions we make here. Still, some notable reasons remain: first, as a way for people to connect with their children; second, as an attempt to slow the inevitable; and third, as a way to live out our own love for nature.
2 CONNECTION TO NATURE IN THE ANTHROPOCENE
We begin by clarifying the meaning of ‘connecting to nature’ in the Anthropocene.8 Connection to nature is generally considered to include an emotional and a cognitive component. The emotional component is something like loving nature, which comprises both deep appreciation and affection for the object of love. The cognitive component involves developing a self-concept that incorporates an interdependence with the natural world—by locating oneself in relationship to nature. A visual analogue can be seen in the ‘inclusion of nature in the self scale’ developed by Schultz (2001). It asks people to rate their connection to nature by identifying the appropriate distance between two circles, one of which represents the self and one of which represents nature.
But what, exactly, is it that environmentalists want their children to connect to? The idea of connecting to nature is contentious (Fletcher, 2017; Zylstra et al., 2019), mainly because a number of scholars have argued that it is untenable to define nature as a realm distinct from human influence (e.g. Clayton et al., 2017; Fletcher, 2017; Hamilton, 2017; Lorimer, 2012). Consequently, we are not focused here on nature in terms of a wilderness ideal, but on nature in its diverse manifestations, from more or less urban regions through to more ‘wild’ landscapes (e.g. Caro et al., 2011). It is important to recognize that—although connection to nature can be both activated or suppressed among adults—the foundations for connection are laid in childhood, and children who have early experiences with wild nature are more likely to experience that connection (Chawla, 2020; Hosaka et al., 2017).
As this last point suggests, connection to nature occurs along a continuum. At one extreme, imagine a child who rarely leaves the center of a metropolis, whether Mexico City or New York or Tokyo, a child whose connection to nature is largely limited to interactions with a few trees, the occasional bird and glimpses of sky. Soberingly, on a global scale, such a child would often inhabit a slum, whether Khayelitsha in South Africa or Neza in Mexico City, and the visible parts of nature would be filtered through smog. Moving towards the other extreme, a child may be commonly immersed within a natural space (whether a lakeshore, a savannah, or a forest), although these landscapes will vary in the degree to which they have been impacted by humans. Obviously, not all families live in places that have been damaged equally in the Anthropocene—nor are their abilities to connect to nature equitable. For simplicity’s sake, we focus on children raised in relatively urban locations, as this will be the normal experience for children given global trends (UN, 2018).
Connection to nature is also both particular and selective. It is particular in the sense that, at least when children are young, they do not connect with something as abstract as the entire natural world, but instead with particular flowers, trees and charismatic megafauna—or even bees, snakes and worms. They may also have little concern for abstractions that matter to adults. Genovart et al. (2013), for example, found that Spanish adolescents are better able to recognize exotic species of mammals and fish than native ones, probably because they encounter them more frequently.
Connection to nature is selective in the sense that positive emotions are not typically linked to all parts of nature equally. Nature, of course, is not all beautiful vistas and majestic megafauna.9 It is, in addition, hurricanes and cancer and animals dying of thirst during droughts. Additionally, it is extinction events and climate change—both of which can have natural causes, although the recent examples of concern are obviously anthropogenic. The point is just that when people talk about wanting their children to connect to nature, they generally have in mind the parts of nature that somehow serve their interests, whatever those interests may be—aesthetic, spiritual, cultural and material. They are less keen on the parts that are actively harmful; children who became overly concerned that coronaviruses were going to be eradicated might be a cause for concern. Most people have no objection to their children being attached to nature selectively; indeed, it seems like a good thing. Appreciating the selectivity matters, though; in order to inculcate connection to nature, we must be more precise about what, exactly, children are being connected to.
Returning to the main thread: Parents may have several motivations for wanting to connect their children to nature. On the face of it, this seems reasonable, both relative to the values of individual parents and from a more general environmental perspective. If parents do not connect their children to nature, those children will likely care less about it and be less aware of its continued deterioration, and thus be less likely to pass along these values to their own children, etc. This could undermine the basis for conservation efforts. As Kahn et al. (2009) observed, ‘It is hard enough to address environmental problems, such as global climate change, when people are aware of them; it is all the harder when they are not. Thus, the problem of environmental generational amnesia may emerge as one of the central psychological problems of our lifetime’. Psychologists have indeed found that parents’ environmental values have a strong influence on those of their children (e.g. Casaló & Escario, 2016) and that time in nature as a child (rather than knowledge per se) is one of the strongest predictors of ‘environmental citizenship’ as an adult (e.g. Asah et al., 2018).
Nonetheless, adults have to consider the extent to which our reasons for connecting children to nature, including the desire to share our values with them, hold up in the Anthropocene. Our argument here turns on recognizing that nature is no longer stable in the way we have come to assume in the Holocene, and that it will continue to change—perhaps more and more rapidly—even under the most optimistic scenarios. Strikingly, for example, children are currently receiving education about a world that is arguably fading away: a world with polar bears and orangutans and rhinos. The pioneering work of Glenn Albrecht et al. (2007) was the first to describe a new form of psychological distress people may suffer: ‘As opposed to nostalgia—the melancholia or homesickness experienced by individuals when separated from a loved home—solastalgia is the distress that is produced by environmental change impacting on people while they are directly connected to their home environment’. This is a particular form of distress for those who are connected to nature—one echoed in the quotation from Bill McKibben that opens this paper and in the commonplace observation that environmentalists inhabit ‘a world of wounds’. And it merely compounds more widespread versions of environmentally inflected psychological burdens, such as climate change depression, climate change anxiety and ecological grief (see Burke et al., 2018; Clayton, 2020; Cunsolo & Ellis, 2018).
Perhaps, then, promoting a love for nature is a bit like promoting a yearning for the Roman Empire. There is no real possibility of recovering that world, and a child who values it may be both dissatisfied with, and unfit for, modern society. Likewise, if there is no real possibility of recovering the natural world that people have so long valued, a child who acquires those values may simply inherit a nostalgia for a world that is no longer available.
With all that in mind, perhaps it is better to prepare children for a future that is increasingly likely rather than for a past for which adults feel nostalgia. Again, we say this not as technophiles who wish to escape to the stars, but as nature-loving parents who are considering how best to navigate our unfortunate present.
3 SOME ETHICAL CONSIDERATIONS
Does it make sense to raise children differently given the severity of the environmental crisis? How might this question be addressed? The most obvious way to approach it is to ask whether it is good for children to have certain values. This leads us to examine the nature of human well-being. There are several theories that philosophers have developed about what makes human lives go well—that is, about what is good for individual human beings, rather than what is good for society, the environment or anything else. Two of the most prominent theories are hedonism and the objective list theory. We consider their implications in turn.
3.1 Hedonism
Hedonism is not the view that people crave sensual pleasures. Rather, it is the view that positive and negative affective states—pleasures and pains, happiness and unhappiness—are the only things that contribute to someone’s well-being. All else equal, hedonism says that your life goes better insofar as it has more positive affective states; it goes worse insofar as it has more negative affective states. Given this theory of well-being, the question of whether it is good for children to have certain values boils down to this: does having those values produce more positive versus negative affective states?
Insofar as a child who is connected to nature values experiences in nature and thus is more likely to pursue those experiences, it is possible that the experiences do indeed produce more positive versus negative affective states. After all, there appear to be many important benefits to such experiences (see Children & Nature Network, 2021). Consider this summary from Kuo (2015):
Contact with nature has been tied to health in a plenitude of studies. Time spent in and around tree-lined streets, gardens, parks, and forested and agricultural lands is consistently linked to objective, long-term health outcomes. The less green a person’s surroundings, the higher their risk of morbidity and mortality – even when controlling for socioeconomic status and other possible confounding variables. The range of specific health outcomes tied to nature is startling, including depression and anxiety disorder, diabetes mellitus, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), various infectious diseases, cancer, healing from surgery, obesity, birth outcomes, cardiovascular disease, musculoskeletal complaints, migraines, respiratory disease, and others … Finally, neighborhood greenness has been consistently tied to life expectancy and all-cause mortality.
However, we caution against drawing unduly optimistic conclusions from these studies. Insofar as children have limited access to nature, valuing and enjoying it may be a source of frustration rather than various benefits. This is, of course, the main concern that drives our paper. Promoting love for nature makes sense if children will have access to what they love. But if the object of love is lost, promoting love of nature seems like a way of making children vulnerable rather than happy (Chawla, 2020).
There is also a risk of overstating the significance of the research on connection to nature and various health outcomes. What many of these studies show is that there are appreciable benefits associated with being around trees and running water; they do not necessarily show that human beings benefit from extensive wild nature per se, and certainly not the kind required to, say, conserve many of the species that are currently being lost. Although some research has demonstrated the importance of greater biodiversity for human mental health and a great deal of research shows the importance of healthy ecosystems for physical health, much of the research on nature’s psychological benefits uses fairly minimal standards for nature—a view out a window, a plant in an office, or even a painting on a wall (Aerts et al., 2018). It seems plausible that some of these health benefits could be explained by factors not inherently tied to nature, much less to the kind of nature that is at issue in the environmental crisis. One can imagine, for instance, creating artificial environments that are less stressful and have superior air quality, which may well have the same effects as the natural environment. It is also the case that greenspaces can be preserved without our managing to preserve polar bears or coral reefs; even if there are benefits from being around trees per se, that does not necessarily mean being around native trees, or extensive biodiversity, or what have you (although see Lev et al., 2020).
So, while there may be a sense in which experiences of nature benefit children, it would be cold comfort to environmentalist parents if the ‘nature’ they experience is simply a manicured park. This strongly suggests that while environmentalist parents probably do want to benefit their children by teaching them to love nature, it is a particular sort of nature they want their children to value. The target is not ‘whatever provides certain psychological and health benefits’, but rather the rich biological and ecological diversity that, of course, is now so severely threatened.
3.2 The objective list theory
Consider a second theory of well-being. Objective list theorists say that some things are good for you even if they do not produce more happiness. For instance, it may be good to know certain truths about the world, even if they are not comfortable or encouraging. In the current context, for instance, there are the truths about the ways in which people are damaging the natural world: on balance, any particular individual might not get any pleasure (and indeed, might experience some significant psychological discomfort) when staring down the fact that they may soon live in a world with no Great Barrier Reef. Still, you might think that it would be bad for that person to put their head in the sand—not just because they thereby ensure that they will not be some small part of broader solutions, but because they are less in touch with reality as a result of not knowing. It is bad for them, not just bad for the world.
This view is sometimes developed by appealing to the idea of eudaimonia or flourishing. According to ancient Greek thought, beings achieve eudaimonia when they are operating as they ought to operate, when they are living out their natures and being the best versions of the kinds of things they are. On such views, things can be good for you without affecting your affective state. It is often thought that when humans achieve eudaimonia, they will have a sense of purpose and meaning, as well as personal autonomy and feelings of connection (Deci & Ryan, 2008). Perhaps not surprisingly, then, a sense of connection to nature is associated with this particular approach to well-being (Cervinka et al., 2012).
Even if we grant the objective list theory of well-being, though, we do not yet have an argument for the importance of loving, or connecting to, nature, but only for knowing things about nature. To get that stronger claim, someone might insist that it is good for us to love things that are valuable; and, since nature is valuable, it is good for us to love nature—even if it is sometimes costly, in hedonic terms, for us to do so.10 This is sometimes how people think about appreciating art. The view is something like: it is good to be the sort of person who experiences awe in front of masterpieces, as that means you have developed the ability to be sensitive to—and richly appreciate—certain forms of value.
Note, however, that there are at least three problems with this argument. First, even if it is good for us to love things that are valuable and nature is indeed valuable, the objective list theory does not imply that it is good for us to love nature all things considered. After all, the objective list theory agrees with hedonism that happiness and unhappiness are relevant to well-being; it simply disagrees with hedonism that they are the only things relevant to well-being. If the hedonic costs of loving nature are high enough—as, we worry, they will be for many children—then it is not good for them to love nature all things considered, even if it is good for them in one respect.
Second, while it may be good to love things that are valuable, it does not follow that it is good to love everything that is valuable. It may be that there is only so much room in a life to devote attention and effort to the things that are loved. This suggests the need to be selective in terms of the values that adults promote in our children. Additionally, there is a significant difference between loving nature and appropriately appreciating its value. We are raising the possibility that adults should not teach children to be enamoured with nature, not that they should not teach them to see its worth. This is akin to discouraging children from being enamoured with Jackson Pollock’s paintings, although it may still be important for them to see why they are valuable as works of art. You can appreciate the value of a thing without being depressed by its loss, as demonstrated by most people’s ability to watch the news without descending into despair. Again, promoting love for nature may be a bit like promoting love for the Roman Empire, rather than an appreciation for the way it advanced some people’s interests at the time.
Third, this argument for loving nature depends on nature having intrinsic value. For those already enamoured with the environment, this may be an attractive view. But it is worth wondering how it could be defended. After all, it is notable that many environmentalists retreat to instrumental defences of nature in public fora: they appeal to ecosystem services (but see Dempsey & Robertson, 2012). This may be some indication that the arguments for the intrinsic value of natural systems are less persuasive than they may at first appear (see Newman et al., 2017). Moreover, even in private, conservationists would likely acknowledge that the view that nature has intrinsic value has some unpalatable implications if not carefully qualified: recalling the earlier points about coronavirus extinction, very few of us want to say that all dimensions of nature are valuable.
3.3 What is good for parents?
Perhaps we have taken too atomistic of an approach. We are writing as environmentalists, so our reasons for wanting our children to love nature are not simply about promoting the good for our children. Compare: if we love classical music, we might want our children to love it as well simply because we think that classical music is worth valuing. But we also might want our children to love classical music because having shared values makes them people to whom we can relate. Shared values can enhance our relationship in a way that divergent values may not. It is like passing along a culture, and thus extending our legacy. Many Indigenous peoples, for example, describe relationships with the natural world and experience this as a component of health and well-being. If children were to reject this worldview (as they were sometimes forced to do by colonizing forces), it might be seen as a disturbing rejection of those cultural values.
Granted, people often fail to pass on their values. When these values are not central to our identity, the differences between us and our children can be occasion for celebration—we learn their unique contours as individuals. But when these values are more central to who we are—when our children reject our religious tradition (or our lack of one), when they are not concerned about the causes we hold dear—such differences can create distance. In many cases, that is not the end of the world. But the gulf is no less real for that.
In any case, some people may find themselves emotionally constituted such that, if their children were not to have certain values with respect to the environment, they would find it hard to relate to their children. So, even if it is not good for our children to have certain values with respect to the environment, we may well find ourselves determined to pass these parts of ourselves along. In so doing, are we acting selfishly? Very possibly. And yet it is hard to criticize selfishness in this context, as it is in service of sustaining the relationships that are most central to our lives. Many people would find it difficult to shrug off their values with respect to the environment as simply one of the many differences between generations. To the contrary, these values feature prominently in their identities as environmentalists and nature lovers. So this may be one of many cases where who we are has an enormous influence on what it makes sense to do.
Obviously, this is a far cry from the defence of environmental parenting we might have wanted. If the best we can say is that we are trying to connect our children to nature so that we can connect to our children, then while we will have a perfectly understandable rationale, it is no longer a rationale that is really about nature. Nature is, on this view, just one more means to an end—an attitude that, of course, is part of what led to the environmental crisis in the first place. Obviously enough, this charge could be levelled just as fiercely against the previous attempted justification, the one that tried to explain the aim of connecting children to nature in terms of their own well-being. Still, we have indeed found a reason to encourage our children to love nature, and that is notable. Can we, perhaps, strengthen that reason with some additional considerations?
3.4 What is good for nature?
At this juncture, the obvious move is to revert to more traditional arguments about creating the next generation of environmentalists for nature’s sake—not ours or our children’s (even if they also benefit). The thought might be that teaching children to love nature is the best protection against the myriad cultural and economic forces that promote a purely instrumental view of nature’s worth.
There are two problems with this. The first is that if this really is an era defined by foregone environmental conclusions—if humans are past the point of being able to prevent numerous species losses, climate change and the loss of various ecosystems—then it will be harder to defend teaching children to love nature for nature’s sake. Many of the valuable things people would hope to preserve simply cannot be preserved. Likewise, it will be difficult to defend teaching children to love nature for society’s sake. After all, the ultimate reason why conservationists want certain values to be common in society is because those values can, in the aggregate, make a difference to the environmental crisis. If humans can indeed avert that crisis, then it makes sense for parents to do their part and raise their children accordingly. But under the assumption that this crisis cannot be averted, then parents’ reason to do their part evaporates.
Second, and rather bleakly, it is not clear that children would be making a mistake in having a more instrumental view of nature’s worth—or, at least, an instrumental view of the worth of the nature that they will inherit. To appreciate this point, imagine a beautifully maintained classic car, perfectly detailed and lovely in all the ways such a vehicle can be. Now suppose that this car is used and abused to the point where all its aesthetic virtues have been lost; it is only good for short trips to and from the grocery store. In such circumstances, there is no mistake in having an instrumental view of the car, even if it would have been a mistake not to have appreciated it differently in its former glory. Likewise, if much of nature’s value is bound up with its beauty, diversity and complexity, then it may not be a mistake—or much of one—to devalue an uglier, more homogenous and flattened natural world.
3.5 What is good—Revisited
There may, however, be some better arguments for encouraging children to love nature. First, from a nature-centric perspective, it is generally accepted that people who feel connected to nature are more likely to act on its behalf. While it is certainly true that humans cannot completely prevent species loss and ecological degradation at this point, we recognize that it is not an all-or-nothing scenario. Even given the assumption that radical change is inevitable, people may still be able to slow it, thereby increasing the longevity of what evolution has wrought—both for its own sake and for those who will be able to enjoy it. Teaching children to feel a connection to the natural world will, we hope, make it more likely that larger steps are taken to protect it. This pushes the problem back, of course: our children may not be able to run this argument for their children, or at least not for their grandchildren. But we are not looking for reasons that will last until the end of time; we are looking for reasons that can guide parents making choices in the present.
Second, from an anthropocentric point of view, connecting to nature does seem to have benefits for people. The biophilia hypothesis proposed by sociobiologist E.O. Wilson (1984) suggested that people have an instinctive tendency to connect to the natural environment. Ecopsychologists and others have interpreted this to mean that such a connection is necessary for mental health (Kahn & Hasbach, 2012). As stated above, there is evidence that a connection to nature is associated with indicators of psychological well-being; and exposure to natural scenery appears to enhance people’s social relationships and not just their individual well-being (Castelo et al., 2021; Cervinka et al., 2012; Olivos & Clayton, 2017). It is unclear how much nature, and what kind of nature, is necessary to establish a connection, but establishing a connection to nature appears to have benefits beyond merely a positive mood.
Finally, promoting love for nature can be important as an expression of our own love for nature, where the odds of success are largely irrelevant to whether we act on its behalf. For those of us who are already environmentalists, the destruction of the natural world is a vision of hell. Accordingly, we continue to raise our children to love the natural world in the hope that our actions will make a difference, even if the odds are very long (e.g. Bain & Bongiorno, 2019; Ojala, 2017; Pihkala, 2017). This is the view that is expressed powerfully in an arresting exchange in Barbara Kingsolver’s (2012) novel, Flight Behaviour, between Ovid, a scientist studying monarchs and Dellarobia, the protagonist:
Ovid: ‘Not everyone has the stomach to watch an extinction’.
Dellarobia: ‘So you’re one of the people that can? … Watch an extinction’.
Ovid: ‘If someone you loved was dying, what would you do?’
Dellarobia: ‘You do everything you can … And then, I guess, everything you can’t. You keep doing, so your heart won’t stop’.
4 CONCLUSION
These arguments are tentative, and leave out a great many important issues. For instance, even if adults should try to promote connection to nature, there remain difficult questions about methods. Our children may connect to nature quite differently than past generations, not only because of the shifting-baseline syndrome (Soga & Gaston, 2018), but also because their lives are caught up in swirling socio-cultural and technological changes that remain (and will remain) foreign to most parents (Clayton et al., 2017). It is possible, for example, that digital games and screen time may help connect children to nature, although that is hardly clear (e.g. Edwards & Larson, 2020; Fletcher, 2017). There are also hard problems about how children’s connection to nature should be informed by the need to engage with issues of justice. How can children engage in conservation that ‘takes seriously our economic system’s structural pressures, violent socio-ecological realities, cascading extinctions and increasingly authoritarian politics’ (Büscher & Fletcher, 2019)? As children engage with nature in the ways of the future, it may be even more important for parents, and other involved adults, to facilitate other ways of knowing and to actively encounter ‘the paradoxical tension between endings and possibilities’ (Moser, 2019) and the mourning (Cunsolo & Landman, 2017) demanded by the times. As parents and also as teachers and as a society, we need to investigate ways to provide children with the tools that will give them emotional resilience in a time of existential crisis (Baker et al., 2021; Ojala, 2017; Ojala & Bengtsson, 2019).
Our aim here has not been to provide definitive answers to fraught questions about whether and how to promote connection to nature among children. Obviously, individual parents will have to apply their own wisdom to the unique experience of raising each particular child. We have instead tried to prompt a more systematic conversation about these questions — a conversation that, as parents and environmentalists, we hope our children will eventually join.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We appreciate comments on the draft manuscript from Rachael Edwards and Clare Palmer and from the editors and reviewers, including Thomas Beery and Dave Kendal.
CONFLICT OF INTEREST
The authors declare no conflict of interest.
AUTHORS’ CONTRIBUTIONS
B.M.H.L. conceived the project; B.M.H.L. and B.F. wrote the first draft of the manuscript. All three authors contributed to revisions and have approved the manuscript for publication.
ENDNOTES
1Our edition of Louv’s book concludes with a ‘field guide’ containing ‘100 actions we can take’.
2Although it is perhaps not such a curious disconnect if one recalls the proportion of humanity that has little regard for nature and its value; for a brilliant satire on this point, see Chapron et al. (2018).
3We adopt this term with awareness that it is controversial; for discussion, see Bilgrami (2020), Hamilton (2017), Haraway (2016) and Tsing et al. (2017), among many other commentators. We are also wary of our question being interpreted as an apologia for the destruction of nature, which we wish to unequivocally declare that it is not.
4Other scholars have considered the reasons for our denial and inaction as well as the inertial and psychological reasons we assume for the best (e.g. Hulme 2009; Hamilton 2010; Norgaard 2011).
5For a related, entertaining and thoughtful engagement with ‘despair’, see McMurry (2018).
6One might think that this would be all of us, although many commentators take a decidedly less optimistic view of the human race–not to mention the decision many couples have made to not have children.
7Someone might object to the very question. They might say that if we are going to change the way we encourage our children to relate to nature for the sake of their well-being, then why would not we change the way we encourage them to relate to other things for the sake of their well-being? For instance, it is awful to lose pets and romantic partners. Should we discourage our children from loving pets and people, in the interest of preventing them from suffering loss? By way of reply, we should note that parents sometimes do discourage children from loving too much; they recommend maintaining perspective on the objects of their affection. For example, some parents may have had pertinent conversations with their teenagers about high school relationships. Accordingly, something similar may be good advice when it comes to nature. The obvious difference is that, at some point, we hope our children will form lasting bonds with people (and perhaps other organisms, too). If that is the aim, then there comes a time when reserve is inappropriate. At some point, most romantic relationships require you to be ‘all in’. Our partners expect us to invest in our relationships in ways that assume their longevity. But your relationship with nature is not like that: nature itself has no expectations.
8Although we focus on the concept of ‘connection to nature’, our argument could alternatively be couched in terms of the ‘extinction of experience’. Using the classification of Gaston & Soga, 2020, we are considering whether, to some extent, reduced childhood interactions with nature may be adaptive at this point in human history. Note that we are not promoting the absolute extinction of these interactions, although perhaps shift emphasis to interactions with living organisms as opposed to wild nature [which Gaston and Soga (2020) refer to as a ‘broader’ view].
9E. O. Wilson’s (1984) biophilia hypothesis, notably, implies that a negative emotional response to some aspects of nature can also indicate a connection, albeit not the kind most relevant here.
10We can get a similar result via an indirect route. People might think that it is good for our children to develop a sense of wonder and intellectual curiosity. And they might think that one important way to do that involves promoting love for nature. In that case, it might be good for them to love nature even if loving it involves some hedonic costs: the price of a sense of wonder is being saddened by the way that nature is being damaged, but wonder is worth the price.
Asah, S. T., Bengston, D. N., Westphal, L. M., & Gowan, C. H. (2018). Mechanisms of children’s exposure to nature: Predicting adulthood environmental citizenship and commitment to nature-based activities. Environment and Behavior, 50, 807–836. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013916517718021ViewWeb of Science®Google Scholar
Bain, P. G., & Bongiorno, R. (2019). It’s not too late to do the right thing: Moral motivations for climate change action. Wires Climate Change, 2019, e615. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.615Google Scholar
Baker, C., Clayton, S., & Bragg, E. (2021). Educating for resilience: Parent and teacher perceptions of children’s emotional needs in response to climate change. Environmental Education Research, 27, 687–705.ViewWeb of Science®Google Scholar
Bilgrami, A. (Ed.). (2020). Nature and value. Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Bringhurst, R., & Zwicky, J. (2018). Learning to die: Wisdom in the age of climate crisis. University of Regina Press.Google Scholar
Clayton, S., Colléony, A., Conversy, P., Maclouf, E., Martin, L., Torres, A. C., Truong, M. X., & Prévot, A. C. (2017). Transformation of experience: Toward a new relationship with nature. Conservation Letters, 10, 645–651. https://doi.org/10.1111/conl.12337ViewWeb of Science®Google Scholar
Edwards, R. C., & Larson, B. M. H. (2020). When screens replace backyards: Strategies to connect electronic-media-oriented young people to nature. Environmental Education Research, 26, 950–968.ViewWeb of Science®Google Scholar
Hulme, M. (2009). Why we disagree about climate change: understanding controversy, inaction and opportunity. Cambridge University Press.ViewGoogle Scholar
IPCC. (2021). Summary for policymakers. In V. Masson-Delmotte, P. Zhai, A. Pirani, S. L. Connors, C. Péan, S. Berger, N. Caud, Y. Chen, L. Goldfarb, M. I. Gomis, M. Huang, K. Leitzell, E. Lonnoy, J. B. R. Matthews, T. K. Maycock, T. Waterfield, O. Yelekçi, R. Yu, & B. Zhou (Eds.), Climate change 2021: The physical science basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Jewell, J., & Cherp, A. (2019). On the political feasibility of climate change mitigation pathways: Is it too late to keep warming below 1.5°C? Wires Climate Change, e621. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.621Google Scholar
Kahn Jr., P. H., & Hasbach, P. H. (Eds.). (2012). Ecopsychology: Science, totems, and the technological species. MIT Press.Google Scholar
Latour, B. (2018). Down to earth: Politics in the new climatic regime. Polity Press.Google Scholar
Lev, E., Kahn, P. H., Chen, H., & Esperum, G. (2020). Relatively wild urban parks can promote human resilience and flourishing: A case study of Discovery Park, Seattle, Washington. Frontiers in Sustainable Cities. https://doi.org/10.3389/frsc.2020.00002ViewGoogle Scholar
Louv, R. (2008). Last child in the woods: Saving our children from nature-deficit disorder (updated and expanded). Algonquin Books.Google Scholar
Lövbrand, E., Beck, S., Chilvers, J., Forsyth, T., Hedrén, J., Hulme, M., Lidskog, R., & Vasileiadou, E. (2015). Who speaks for the future of Earth? How critical social science can extend the conversation on the Anthropocene. Global Environmental Change, 32, 211–218. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2015.03.012ViewWeb of Science®Google Scholar
Major, A. (2018). Welcome to the Anthropocene. University of Alberta Press.Google Scholar
Newman, J. A., Varner, G., & Linquist, S. (2017). Defending biodiversity: Environmental science and ethics. Cambridge University Press.ViewGoogle Scholar
Norgaard, K. M. (2011). Living in denial: Climate change, emotions, and everyday life. MIT Press.ViewGoogle Scholar
Ojala, M., & Bengtsson, H. (2019). Young people’s coping strategies concerning climate change: Relations to perceived communication with parents and friends and proenvironmental behavior. Environment and Behavior, 51, 907–935. https://doi.org/10.1177/0013916518763894ViewWeb of Science®Google Scholar
Olivos, P., & Clayton, S. (2017). Self, nature and well-being: Sense of connectedness and environmental identity for quality of life. In G. Fleury-Bahi, E. Pol, & O. Navarro (Eds.), Handbook of environmental psychology and quality of life research (pp. 107–126). Springer.ViewGoogle Scholar
Tsing, A., Swanson, S., Gan, E., & Bubant, N. (Eds.). (2017). Arts of living on a damaged planet. Ghosts and monsters of the Anthropocene. University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Institute for Interdisciplinary Research into the Anthropocene 