Gabrielle Hecht, a Stanford professor of nuclear security, writing at aeon, walks us through the landscape of the Anthropocene, the era of modern humans, and shows us how environmental degradation, bigotry, and economic inequality go hand in hand:
Natural and social scientists argue passionately about almost everything Anthropocenic, from the nuances of nomenclature to the start-date of the new geological epoch, but most agree on one thing: the Earth will outlive humanity. What’s in doubt is how long we will populate the planet, and under what conditions.
But who, exactly, are ‘we’?
Consider the cover of Nature in March 2015, in which two Earths, one blue-green and one grey, are entangled in a human body. The title emblazoned across the man’s six-pack invites us to see this body as representative of ‘the human’. But there’s no such thing as a generic human, of course; the image repeats the centuries-old conflation of human with white man.
The dominant conceptual frame of modern ‘Western’ culture propounds white, cis-gender, hetero maleness as the archetype, the reference standard against which all humans are measured, and ranked socioeconomically, morally, and legally. Michael Morris, in an article for the California Law Review , concisely explicates how Whiteness as the normative standard functions to reify ‘not- White’ as deviant, and consequently situated outside the protection of the law, presumptively denied its benefits, which Whites are automatically afforded:
Whiteness serves a normative function by defining the expected or“neutral” range of human attributes and behavior. Other racial categories emerge as deviations from this norm, which places them outside the protection of the law and civil society. The normative function of whiteness has important, but unappreciated, implications for the treatment of whiteness as a legal category... White normativity accommodates and acknowledges the shortcomings of whites while simultaneously maintaining white privilege and whiteness’s centrality in the U.S. racial classification scheme. (pg. 952)
Hecht shows us the lasting, destructive imprint of European colonization and its industrial-scale exploitation of people and natural resources:
While the Anthropocene continually inscribes itself in all our bodies – we all have endocrine disruptors, microplastics and other toxic things chugging through our metabolisms – it manifests differently in different bodies. Those differences, along with the histories that generated them, matter a great deal – not just to the people who suffer from them, but also to humanity’s relationship with the planet.
What picture of the Anthropocene, for example, emerges when we begin our analytic adventure in Africa instead of in Europe? Minerals from Africa played a big role in motivating colonialism and powering industrialisation. Their extraction fueled the Anthropocene. (emphasis added)
The fallout (literal and figurative) of industrial processes on human health is devastating, but obscured from public awareness. It is, in fact, responsible for more illness and death than any other cause— by a wide margin— but these health effects do not accrue to all people equally:
In 2017, the prestigious medical journal The Lancet published a robust research report that showed pollution is the world’s leading environmental cause of disease. Pollution caused some 9 million premature deaths in 2015, and 16 per cent of all deaths worldwide – ‘three times more deaths than from AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria combined, and 15 times more than from all wars and other forms of violence’, the report added. The vast majority of these deaths took place in low- and middle-income countries, and in the poor communities of rich countries.
While the toxic residue of industrialization is dispersed globally , and the degradation of huge swaths of the landscape stretches around the globe, the impact on the health and living conditions is concentrated in communities that are not-majority white, which are, not incidentally, economically disadvantaged.
But this is not simply a matter of economic inequality, or exclusion from political power; the day to day conditions, almost the very existence of ‘not-white’ communities, are excluded from consideration in public discourse and scientific research:
Similarly, scientific research pays disproportionately little attention to African cities. In part this is because of the difficulty in obtaining good data, due to the near-absence of infrastructures for monitoring air quality, but that is not the only reason. Among large sections of the scientific community, there’s a tacit assumption that since so much of Africa is rural, outdoor air pollution isn’t a major concern. But Africa currently has the highest rate of urbanisation in the world. So the casualties from outdoor air pollution are climbing quickly, and will continue to accelerate. The ultra-rapid growth of cities intensifies pollution problems, especially in poor countries, where public services can’t keep up with the population increase. Many city-dwellers inhale a toxic synergy of both outdoor and indoor air pollution, the latter from burning the likes of wood, coal or plastics in the home – another way in which the Anthropocene etches itself onto African lungs.
By rendering communities invisible, they can be exploited economically:
Until recently, the inattention to air quality in African cities helped to obscure a startling fact. The diesel fumes emitted by motorists in Accra, Bamako or Dakar contain substantially higher proportions of deadly pollutants, measured in parts per million, than those breathed by denizens of Paris, Rome or Los Angeles.
This is not a matter of consumer choice or carelessness. Rather, the high contaminant content results from a deliberate strategy on the part of fuel brokers such as Trafigura and Vitol. These commodity traders blend the fuel stocks that they purchase from refineries, using different recipes for different destinations. Taking advantage of relaxed (or non-existent) regulatory limits across much of Africa, commodity traders maximise their profits by creating high-sulphur blends that are outlawed in Europe and North America.
As Hecht shows us in stark terms, the economic injustices perpetrated by multi-national carbon profiteers, facilitated by complicit, anti-democratic political institutions, are inextricably linked to environmental and social injustice.
This pattern is repeated around the world, and camouflaged by narratives that posit environmental, economic and social injustice as distinct, unrelated phenomena. If we view these issues as isolated from each other, we will pursue inadequate, exclusionary approaches to remedy them.
Hecht tries to correct the misleading narratives:
Obviously, capitalism plays an inescapable role in these historical and biophysical connections. But it is too blunt and inadequate a tool for analysing many of the other dynamics that shape these connections: hydrological patterns, radioactive particles, security imperatives, informal economic activities, and much else besides. We need social scientists and humanists to trace the connections between North American cars and African lungs. But we also need natural scientists and medical doctors to detail the molecular compositions that make air and water toxic to biological life. Putting these studies in conversation under the rubric of the Anthropocene clarifies connections between planetary and individual suffering…
Confronting the Anthropocene, in Africa and elsewhere, requires fresh sources of imagination. And these sources must be found at the frontlines of planetary transformation – from the urban advocates for cleaner air and water, to intellectuals who challenge European and North American paradigms for studying the world. That’s why Africa plays a huge role not only in our planet’s present, but also in its future, as the Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe, the Senegalese economist Felwine Sarr and other African scholars have argued. Africa is the continent where population growth is projected to be the highest. It contains 60 per cent of the world’s uncultivated arable land. Some pockets of Africa lie at the forefront of decentralised energy systems (such as solar power) that promise to mitigate climate change. And that’s only for starters.
If the Anthropocene is to have real value as a category of thought and a call to action, it must federate people and places, not just disciplines. It requires thinking from, and with, Africa. ‘They’ are ‘us’, and there is no planetary ‘we’ without them. (emphasis added)
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