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By the Anthropocene we normally mean the geological epoch when human action becomes the dominant force shaping the planet. I use the maximalist definition first proposed by Paul Crutzen. It would be possible to speak of human action as a cause of environmental change among many others, but in that case there would be nothing special about the last two or three centuries. Thousands of years ago, humans had already emitted sufficient greenhouse gases – by deforestation, rice cultivation and cattle breeding – to change the global climate. If the Anthropocene is to survive as a distinctive concept we need to approach the simple definition according to which we now live primarily within human rather than natural systems, the latter being subordinate or embedded within the former.
This simple definition, however, is impossible to defend. It might be favoured by environmentalists, but it does not take the environment seriously enough. As John Gray once put it, our epoch may be one "in which human action is transforming the planet. But it is also one in which the human animal is less than ever in charge. Global warming seems to be in large part the result of the human impact on the planet, but this is not to say humans can stop the process." There are two important ideas in this passage. First, if by the Anthropocene we mean the age when human beings are in charge of their natural environment, we would do well to disabuse ourselves of the notion. Climate change is not an example of how human beings have destroyed the planet. The planet will remain very much the same if temperatures on the surface rise 5°C by 2100, a very modest swing by the standards of deep geology. Yes, human beings are able to introduce changes in their natural environment and often they lose control over those changes. What that fact teaches us is not that nature has been replaced by human systems but that we are still struggling - and failing - to control natural forces.
What does the current pandemic prove? Not, in my opinion, that the major threat to our collective existence now comes from the destructive power of human systems, but that it continues to arise from a dangerous and inhospitable natural environment. Adam Tooze has argued that "what we are living through is the first economic crisis of the Anthropocene." But is this actually the case? Is the threat a direct result of human activity? Nothing about the course of events supports the thesis. The virus struck as viruses have struck since time immemorial: a biological threat taking advantage of the inconvenient fact that we too are part of the biological world. And our response has been what the human response has always been, a sustained effort to escape our mortal coil and build a human world protected from natural threats. Most of us, as the pandemic arrived, did not regard the system of economic growth and capital accumulation as the threat. Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. It is a plausible formulation, even in its comical effect. And yet, the current crisis proved the opposite. Were we forced to sacrifice countless lives in order to save the machinery of capital accumulation? Not at all. Everyone seemed ready to place the economy on hold in order to save lives, restarting it only when it was safer to do so.
Tooze argues that the threat of "emerging infectious diseases" is not a mere accident of nature but the inevitable result of the incorporation of animal life into our food chain. Like the climate crises, infectious diseases "have anthropogenic drivers." As he puts it, "If we are going to keep huge stocks of domesticated animals and intrude ever more deeply into the last remaining reservoirs of wildlife; if we are going to concentrate in giant cities and travel in ever larger numbers, this comes with viral risks." But what then should the response be? Not to find a stabler balance with nature and natural forces. "If we wish to avoid disasters we should invest in research, in monitoring, in basic public health, in the production and stockpiling of vaccines and essential equipment for our hospitals."
A related argument is that the pandemic is a child of the jet age. And it doubtless is, but I do not regard that as an especially significant fact. Every human disease will take place within the social and historical context to which it belongs. The Black Death arrived in Europe in October 1347, when twelve ships from the Black Sea docked at the Sicilian port of Messina. Before that, infectious diseases were carried by horse raiders or herds of cattle. There is nothing particularly distinctive about the current pandemic. Infectious diseases have always resulted from the incorporation of wildlife into our diet and they have always taken advantage of our life patters to invade human populations. It should be added that those life patterns and technologies have served both as conduits for spreading the disease and tools used to fight it. The jet age is also the age of vaccines built on messenger ribonucleic acid.
In the old days, alder and flowering willows in the Alaskan Arctic stood no taller than a small child —just a little over three feet. But as temperatures warmed with fossil fuel emissions, and growing seasons lengthened, shrubs started to grow and expand. Gravel and sand bars that were free of vegetation in old photos suddenly host verdant shrubs. Today many stand over six feet. Bigger shrubs drew moose and the process started. Species will shift their range as climate conditions change. Some will carry old diseases into human settlements previously left untouched. In Sweden, lakes and streams previously used for drinking water are now contaminated with the parasite that causes giardia, the human intestinal illness. More remarkably still, new hybrid species are appearing, as species brought together by new climate conditions start to interbreed...
At the same time, encroachment on the natural ecosystem and wildlife by agricultural and urban land uses will expose humans and their domestic animals to areas with higher risks and a wider range of vectors. For example, habitat destruction and fragmentation in Cambodia, Thailand, India, Bangladesh and Madagascar brought fruit bats closer to humans and domestic animals, causing outbreaks of Nipah virus infection. Deforestation in Malaysia destroyed the natural habitat of the fruit bats pushing them out of their ecological niche. Many pig farmers had planted fruit trees around their farms, which attracted the displaced fruit bats. Contaminated fruits fell on the ground and were eaten by the pigs. From the sick pigs the Nipah virus finally hopped to the human host.
Highly transmissible viral diseases like measles and smallpox entered the human population from domesticated animals. Scientists have located the origin of domesticated sheep, pigs and cattle in the upper Euphrates Valley of southeastern Turkey, while goats were domesticated in western Iran. The process, taking place at the beginning of the Neolithic 11,000 years ago, created entirely new opportunities for viruses. The hunter met his prey only at distance and when he could touch the prey, the animal was dead. All known transmission mechanisms like sneezing, coughing or diarrhoea are not any longer operative in the dead animal, but with the domestication of cattle, sheep and goats, humans were suddenly in close contact with sick animals and zoonotic infections became much more likely. Recent analyses show that the measles virus probably arose together with the appearance of the first large cities in Babylon and China. Smallpox seems to have emerged perhaps 5000 years ago.
The link between the climate crisis and disease thus needs to be placed in a broader context. There is no pristine age to which humans can return looking for protection from infectious diseases. All that can be said is that our repeated attempts to escape from the threat of disease have failed. Our links with the natural world run so deep that every attempt to break free has left us exposed to new transmission mechanisms. The Anthropocene is such an explicitly extravagant concept that it seems to have been developed in order to collapse its own essential meaning: it suggests that human beings are now in control and possession of their natural environment only to conclude that "we find ourselves each day a bit more entangled in the immense feedback loops of the Earth system." What the present moment shows is that we never left the past, not that a new age is upon us. We never left the frontier. The line between the wilderness and civilization may shift, or it may be sublimated, but it is as present today as when human beings started to cultivate the soil and build the first large cities.
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