Our Home in the Anthropocene

What do we call the age we live in? After realizing that humans had recomposed Earth's chemistry and overwritten its face, the chemist Paul Crutzen and his colleague Eugene Stoermer floated the label Anthropocene, or “the recent age of man." Minus the very deep trenches of the oceans wilderness of the world is largely gone in its "pristine" or "untouched" states. But even the chemical composition of the deep waters of the world are changing as the developed people of the world change the earth's surface and climate.

Over the last few years, more people are advocating shifting our epoch's label from the Holocene to the Anthropocene. From environmentalists like Vandana Shiva to mainstream publications National Geographic (image at right), the Economist, the New York Times, the term is taking off. It's even in the scientific literature.

But the merit of the Anthropocene is contested. To get a sense of why, you can get a rundown at Breakthrough Journal where Erle Ellis argues for it and others, like Bill McKibben, respond. There are some, like Ellis or Bjorn Lomborg who see the Anthropocene as an age of technological advance, discovery, and growth. They see progress. Ellis writes, "our unprecedented and growing powers also allow us the opportunity to create a planet that is better for both its human and nonhuman inhabitants. It is an opportunity that we should embrace." But McKibben and Shiva (who writes elsewhere) see unchecked technological advance and growth as the problem. There are limits. Shiva writes,

"If we continue to understand our role in the old paradigm of capitalist patriarchy based on a mechanistic world view, an industrial, capital centered competitive economy, and a culture of dominance, violence, and war and ecological and human irresponsibility, we will witness the rapid unfolding of increasing climate catastrophe, species extinction economic collapse, and human injustice and inequality."

Whether they like it or not, they agree that humans are the primary ecological force on the planet.

Democracy Now! Manfred Max-Neef and Derrick Jensen

Democracy Now! is something of our big sister program. For a number of years they have spearheaded the progressive radio and internet movement by bringing the world to us, the world as it is often unseen by the dominant corporate media.

On November 26th, they hosted two really compelling leaders, thinkers, and actors on sustainability. Watch it here.

The first is Manfred Max-Neef, a Chilean economist who has worked to understand poverty as it really is instead of an idealized version that we can create by valorizing it or by thinking that it is universally horrible. If you listened to our show with Donaldson Conserve and Shanai Haywood these issues of poverty came up strongly. And, if you listened in just a couple of weeks ago, you heard my interview with Alfredo Sfeir-Younis, also a Chilean economist who is working on some of these same issues. For both, sustainability is a central issue to any kind of development. And sustainability means doing less while being in love and loving everything. "We all know exactly what should not be done but we do it. How do you change that?"

Then Derrick Jensen came on the show and in typical fashion dropped proverbial and verbal bombs about modern society. In short: the modern industrial state must be stopped by people resisting it.

Where are we going? More importantly, what do you think of Max-Neef's assertion that the university is where we need to change things?

World Sustainable Development Teach-In Day

This coming Friday, December 3rd, marks World Sustainable Development Teach-In Day.

Sustainable development is an issue all countries in the world are currently looking at. The degree of emphasis and the level investing resources invested however varies from one country to another; but regardless of whether we are talking about industrialized or developing countries, the quest for environmentally sound, socially just, economically viable and ethically acceptable development needs to be regarded as a priority by all nations of the world.

For many years now, a large number of initiatives have been carried out throughout the world to attempt to stoke up awareness about sustainable development and promote initiatives to achieve it.

The 1987 Report "Our Common Future" produced by the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED), "Agenda 21" produced by the UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and the "Johannesburg Declaration" produced following the World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002 are examples of the type of initiatives being worked on internationally. These have been complemented by the various "National Sustainable Development Strategies" produced prior to UNCED and after Johannesburg.

As a show committed to sustainability, this marks a great opportunity for us to talk about this thing called "sustainable development."

What is being developed and what is being sustained? So far, much of sustainable development seems to have been a global corporate-governmental collusion that has served the advantage of the already wealthy and powerful. Looking at just water issues in India, Bolivia, and Africa, the idea and practice of sustainable development might seem an oxymoron. There is no doubt we have a conundrum on our hands if we hope to bring health and material prosperity to ~6.8 billion people and counting.

Follow Paul Ehrlich's equation:

I = PAT
Impact = Population x Affluence x Technology

The United States has over 300 million people living here, <5% href="http://www.jameslovelock.org/">James Lovelock, father of the "Gaia theory" has called a "sustainable retraction." Maybe it's time to get in on the Transitions Initiatives. Maybe we all just need lifeboats for a coming dog-eat-dog world. Or maybe there is not really much to worry about and the Earth's carrying capacity will hold all of these developed people.

As part of the media we have a significant role to play. What do we hope to sustain? Who do we develop? What and whose purpose does all of this serve? In a world of uncertain futures, how and for whom do we conceive of our teaching?

What should sustainable development look like right here in Central Pennsylvania?

Expanding Sustainability: Rights, Global Economics, and Human Transformation

Reminder:

Expanding Sustainability: Rights, Global Economics, and Human Transformation
A Public Talk with Chilean Environmental Economist, Diplomat and
Spiritual Teacher Alfredo Sfeir-Younis

Tuesday, Oct. 26
Noon —1:30 PM
124 Sparks

Brown Bag Lunch Talk (drinks and dessert provided)
Sponsored by Penn State’s Center for Sustainability & Global Studies Institute

"It is impossible to attain the aims of a sustainable civilization without agreeing on a bundle of rights, be it for this generation or future generations. Sustainable Development embodies a social contract which must unfold from a vision and a set of human values that prove essential to human transformation in our global reality.”
—Alfredo Sfeir-Younis

Learn more about our speaker at: http://www.policyinnovations.org/innovators/people/data/07539