Who is We?
9/22/22 – How do I responsibly describe human impact?
Hello everyone:
Just a reminder for my Maine-based readers that I’ll be appearing on a panel called Writing the Natural World on Saturday, October 8th, from 2:50 to 3:50 PM in Monument Square, Portland. The panel discussion is part of the Maine Lit Fest, and is free and open to the public.
As always, please remember to scroll past the end of the essay to read some curated Anthropocene news.
Now on to this week’s writing:
I’ve been thinking about the word “we” this week, and it strikes me as one of the most powerful words in English. With a mere two letters “we” conveys love and contains family (We are one), strengthens friendship or rivalry (We stand together/apart), instills pride and patriotism (We the people), and elects politicians or generates revolutions (Yes we can). It offers hope to the lonely and grief-stricken (We can help), suggests threat to the bullied (We’ll get you), and rouses a sense of belonging – perhaps the most vital emotion experienced by our intensely social species – in all of us. ”I” may be the vital self, but “we” is its context.
We – that’s you and I and the other humans alive right now – are living in what is arguably the most important time to exist in human history. I say this not because of the incredible strides made to enrich, improve, and prolong human life in the past century or two, but because of the footprints those strides have made. The ground is trampled. Now, right now, decisions we make and the policies we enact seem likely to sharply define the quality of life on Earth (including human life) in the decades and centuries ahead.
That this moment is a crux in both human and natural history is both terrifying and hopeful. We know what to do, for the most part, but we need to act against what for centuries has been falsely described as our own best interest. There’s no precedent for the scale of what needs to be done, but it can be done.
Anthropocene civilization and culture are forms of human theater that take place in the real world, which is defined by ecology and physics and the sciences that lie between them. Whatever dramas occur in the theater, however fascinating they may be to us, what matters from an ecological perspective is whether they make our species more or less fit to exist within the limits of the lush, biodiverse world that birthed us. We like to forget that beyond the theater doors we are still constricted by ecological principles and physical laws. Our evolutionary fitness seems very much in question, given the rapidly intensifying stresses our “ecological Ponzi scheme” has been putting on the web of life which continues, uncertainly, to sustain us.
We have a lot to do, and a lot to admit to.
But who is the “we” in we?
I think we’re all aware that a wealthy minority of nations have been, and still are, largely responsible for most of the damage. As Bill McKibben, our great climate sage, recently wrote in a post titled What Planet Do I Live On?, “It’s a deeply unjust planet, because the people who caused the temperature to rise are not usually the people who suffer the most from that rise.” In another post about this summer’s catastrophic floods that covered a third of Pakistan, he wrote that
there’s no doubt that the people of Pakistan are not to blame for their tragedy. On average each Pakistani is responsible for about one fifteenth as much carbon dioxide as each American, and even that is fairly recent. Over the whole span of the fossil fuel era, America has produced a quarter of the earth’s greenhouse gases; Pakistan, with about 220 million people, produces about one half of one percent of the world’s emissions. And yet, before the flooding, they suffered through a savage springtime heatwave; urban temperatures reached 121 Fahrenheit in a place where, as of 2018, there were fewer than a million air conditioners.
You can see the global inequity well illustrated in the graphics above. In the upper chart (“By Income Group”) in the first graphic, which is a 2016 snapshot of emissions, we see that the wealthiest 16% produced 38% of global CO2 emissions and that the poorest 49% produced just 14%. In the chart below that we see, in terms of regions, that North American and European emissions were 34% of the global total despite having only 15% of the world’s population.
In the second graphic, which is a portrait of cumulative emissions throughout the fossil fuel era, the top 20 emitters are shown. As McKibben noted, the U.S. is in a league of its own, despite having a small fraction of the world’s population. (Look here for a great interactive visualization of U.S. emissions.)
You should pause to imagine how little CO2 has been produced by the other 175 nations not listed here.
Climate, of course, is just one symptom of the Anthropocene. The same unequal pattern is clear in terms of who is driving habitat loss, ozone depletion, and the pollution from mining and agriculture and industrial production, among the long litany of planet-stressing activities. A handful of wealthy nations, first to grab the prize in the industrial/capitalist gold rush built on the unsustainable use of fossil fuels, increased their populations, intensified their affluence, and developed a host of resource-hungry technologies. Europe and the UK, and then a few of their colonies (particularly the U.S. and Australia), either exhausted many of their own resources or found that they could simply force developing nations to part with theirs. (There are countless examples, but perhaps the most bizarre is the British harvesting of tons of bones from battlefields and cemeteries around its global empire as a source of phosphorus for its nutrient-deprived farms at home.)
Which means that there’s an ugly truth about the cumulative CO2 emissions and habitat loss ascribed to many developing nations. The cascade of harms to the natural world in poorer countries are often the responsibility of the wealthy nations shopping at a discount for those resources (or simply taking them by political, economic, or physical force). Look above in the second graphic at the bars for Brazil and Indonesia, for example. The dark green segments represent emissions from land use and forestry. But the rampant destruction of rainforest for timber or to create space for palm oil plantations and cattle grazing is not being done for local markets. It’s for those of us in countries that can afford to pay others a cut-rate price to ravage their own lands.
This inequity is still playing out in many ways, of course, and complicates the necessary global response to the climate and biodiversity crises. Just to cite one current example, there’s discussion this week at the U.N. about encouraging a natural gas boom in Africa. (We need to stop calling it “natural” gas, which is an advertising fiction. Call it methane gas, or fracked gas, since much of it is derived from fracking.) Gas burns cleaner than coal, but it’s still a dirty fossil fuel and, when leaked unburned (which happens constantly in vast quantities), it heats up the atmosphere 26 times faster than CO2. But according to the International Energy Agency, 600 million people in Africa have no access to electricity while 970 million (mostly women and girls) burn dirty wood fuels in their kitchens. Shouldn’t the people in African nations be allowed to develop economically with some of the cheap and abundant fossil fuels that Europeans used?
Ethically, yes, but that’s an answer within the human theater. Outside it, in the world of ecology and climate physics, the answer (ideally) is no. And anyway, development of gas reserves are unlikely to actually serve many African people. History suggests otherwise, certainly, since Nigeria is the largest producer of oil in Africa but few Nigerians benefit from it. In fact, oil has been a “resource curse” for the nation, which suffers from an entrenched multidimensional poverty. Most of the gas would be exported to Europe, say critics. The Times quotes Mohamed Adow, a Kenyan climate campaigner:
“Attempts to expand gas production in Africa are not being done to tackle energy poverty but for export, largely to rich, energy-hungry countries in the Global North,” he said. “This dash for gas is to make a quick buck whilst countries in Europe face a short-term energy squeeze.”
So, given the gross inequities in this profit-driven, resource-squandering civilization which has run the ecological Ponzi scheme and generated its impacts, the “we” in “we are ravaging the Earth” is mostly a powerful minority. That minority, we should admit, includes me and you and most if not all of my readers. Looking closer, though, it’s clear that there’s a minority within the minority. Much of the responsibility rests on the shoulders of those in business and government who shape policy. Most of us merely go along to get along with the shape of the world we’ve been given. We are both trapped and complicit.
As a writer focused on the cumulative and ongoing human impact called the Anthropocene, how do I honestly attribute blame for the past and present while fairly apportioning responsibility for the future? Every week I’m writing about what “we” have done and putting humans on the hook for the dark synergy of crises impacting life on Earth. For all its linguistic power, “we” is a broad brush that does not offer much nuance.
Knowing all this, I’ll admit to a slight inner wince when I write that “we throw lit matches everywhere amid the community of life,” or that “we are reshaping and diminishing” the world, or that “we are, though a combination of ignorance and arrogance, driving microbial evolution.” Each week I offer up another hot take on “we,” because any conversation about the Anthropocene is about “we” and “the world,” however you might define either of the terms.
I’ve been aware of the risk from the beginning of this Field Guide, and made a point early on of addressing it:
…grotesque inequities notwithstanding, nearly everyone now participates in the Anthropocene to one degree or another. There’s no avoiding it, particularly as once-poor nations create wealth and a consumption-driven middle class. From our perspective, the ongoing impacts of slavery and colonial despotism and deliberate impoverishment are all too obvious, as is the unfairness of blaming subsistence farmers alongside ExxonMobil, but from the vantage of a coral reef it little matters whether its obliteration occurs because of American CO2 emissions or a poor Filipino fisherman's stick of dynamite. The victim of a victim is still a victim.
So is "we" a convenient fiction that glosses over the inequities? Or is it an awkward truth that admits that the blame is radically unequal but still shared? As developing nations increase their populations, affluence, and technology, are they still largely innocent or are they accomplices merely late to the crime scene? If they're on track to make the same mistakes and cause the same harm, then isn't it enough for me to note their historical innocence even as I include them in the ongoing "we" that is transforming the planet?
The measure of truth here is made not in the theater but outside it.
My writing needs to remain rooted in the real world, while also consistently noting that where the blame is greatest so is the responsibility. When I talk about the need for population decline, I should be clear that the U.S., Europe, and other more developed countries should lead by example. When I describe the quandary between environmental necessity, racial justice, and economic justice regarding the provision of affordable clean energy to nearly a billion people in Africa, I have to acknowledge the colonialism, corruption, and corporate malfeasance that prevented fair energy distribution in the first place, and admit that some gas production and distribution may be necessary in the interim. When I describe the absolute necessity of stopping deforestation, particularly in the remnant rainforests of the world, I need to point first and foremost to stopping the upstream demand for that deforestation.
And so on. As a writer, I don’t know how to get around the “we” as I talk generally about human impact on the fate of life on Earth. I could, every time I want to say “we,” specify that I mean mostly the wealthy capitalist societies and especially the policy makers and shapers in the current and former colonial powers and imperial nations. That kind of language becomes ungainly and awkward pretty quickly.
But more than that, as my long quote above indicates, I think saying “we” is the right thing to do. I haven’t changed my mind on this. From the perspective of most other species – and the more we consider their perspective the healthier civilization will become – the human cultural truths about colonialism and corporate greed don’t matter as much as the consequences: the greenhouse effect, ocean acidification, habitat loss, ecosystems unraveling, and a path ahead lit by the memorial flares of extinctions.
That said, there is no cure for the Anthropocene that does not include racial justice. As the seas rise no one should drown because they’re moored to the cruelties of the past. Clean, efficient energy systems and healthy, complex ecological communities must be available at the front door of all human communities. The language necessary to get us from here to a better world should reflect this human reality, even if the use of “we” is traumatically unfair.
Finally, I should be clear that there’s no reason for the theater of human culture to be so abusive or so ignorant of the natural world beyond our doors, even as it shapes that world to its needs. A paper entitled “People Have Shaped Most of Terrestrial Nature for At Least 12,000 Years” makes an excellent case for a profound truth, one that we should all learn as quickly as possible. The damage caused in the modern Anthropocene is not to pristine ecologies but to better managed ones. Humans have always shaped the world, but we’ve forgotten how to do it in a rational way:
“Human societies have been shaping and sustaining diverse cultural natures across most of the terrestrial biosphere for more than 12,000 years. Areas under Indigenous management today are recognized as some of the most biodiverse areas remaining on the planet, and landscapes under traditional low-intensity use are generally much more biodiverse than those governed by high-intensity agricultural and industrial economies. Although some societies practicing low-intensity land use contributed to extinctions in the past, the cultural shaping and use of ecosystems and landscapes is not, in itself, the primary cause of the current extinction crisis, and neither is the conversion of untouched wildlands, which were nearly as rare 10,000 years ago as they are today. The primary cause of declining biodiversity, at least in recent times, is the appropriation, colonization, and intensifying use of lands already inhabited, used, and reshaped by current and prior societies.”
I’ll be writing much more someday on the necessity of shifting more of the planet back into Indigenous management. For now, though, just remember that we have a long, long history of living within the natural world rather than in opposition to it.
We can do it again.
Thanks for sticking with me.
In other Anthropocene news:
From Science News, an excellent long-form explainer article on the roots of the climate crisis and the history of climate science.
From Five Media, a dive into the challenges facing the first nations that have granted rights to nature. In related news, the AP has several articles on the fate of the world's most sacred rivers.
From EcoWatch, the Great Salt Lake is now at 1/3 of historic levels, and its dry lake bed is becoming a source of toxic arsenic-laced dust sweeping into Salt Lake City and the region.
From Outside, an article about a thorough and thoughtful study which offers an ambitious plan to rewild public lands in the west with wolves and beaver. It is, as the researchers note, absolutely necessary in the face of the biodiversity and climate crises. It is also absolutely opposed by many western politicians.
From Yale e360, a fascinating article on a phenomenon I hadn’t heard about: “wind drought,” or “global stilling.” Rising global temps seem to be slowing winds around the world, which if true and here to stay means that the virtues of wind power will have to be reassessed. More importantly, perhaps, it may have major implications for ocean currents and plant life.
Also from Yale e360, bad news for salmon populations, especially Atlantic salmon, as waters warm and change oxygen levels and food distribution.
From Orion, the first article in a series called Deny and Delay: Inside the Climate Disinformation Machine. This one, Defiant Energy, investigates the dirty work done by the electric utility industry to push climate denial and delay.
Thank you for another thought provoking essay. I’m off to a conference about Rewilding today. Glad to have read this before going