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NATURE IS NO
A dark, disturbing, provocative and entirely original work,
LONGER NATURE. WE HAVE ENTERED A NEW EPOCH.
DEFIANT EARTH
which should be read by everyone genuinely interested in
the future of humankind.
ROBERT MANNE
FASSA, Emeritus Professor of Politics and Vice-Chancellors Fellow,
La Trobe University
DEFIANT
Humans have become so powerful that we have disrupted the
functioning of the Earth, bringing on a new geological epoch:
the Anthropocene. The stable environmental conditions that
allowed civilisation to flourish are disappearing.
What does it mean to have arrived at this point, where human history
EARTH
and Earth history collide? Clive Hamilton argues we need to rethink
everything. The modern belief that we are free beings making our own
future by taking control of our environment is now indefensible. We
CLIVE HAMILTON
have rendered the Earth more unpredictable and less controllable, a
disobedient planet. And its too late to turn back the geological clock.
We must face the fact that humans are at the centre of the world, even
if we must give up the idea that we can control the planet. These truths
call for a new kind of anthropocentrism, a philosophy by which we might
use our power responsibly and find a way to live on a defiant Earth.
THE FATE OF HUMANS IN THE ANTHROPOCENE
Clive Hamilton is Professor of Public Ethics at Charles Sturt University. One
CLIVE
of Australias leading thinkers, he is author of the bestselling Requiem for a
Species, The Freedom Paradox and Growth Fetish.
Every effort has been made to trace the holders of copyright material. If you have
any information concerning copyright material in this book please contact the
publishers at the address below.
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2 A New Anthropocentrism 36
To doubt everything 36
Anthropocentrism redux 39
The antinomy of the Anthropocene 45
The new anthropocentrism 50
The world-making creature 58
The new anthropocentrism versus ecomodernism 66
In praise of technology 72
CONTENTS
Notes 163
Index 176
Preface:
On Waking Up
vii
PREFACE: ON WAKING UP
enough to change the course of the Earth yet seem unable to reg-
ulate ourselves, contradicts every modern belief about the kind of
creature the human being is. So for some it is absurd to suggest
that humankind could break out of the boundaries of history
and inscribe itself as a geological force in deep time. Humans are
too puny to change the climate, they insist, so it is outlandish
to suggest we could change the Geological Time Scale. Others
assign the Earth and its evolution to the divine realm so that it is
not merely impertinence to suggest that humans can overrule the
Almighty but blasphemy. Many intellectuals in the social sciences
and humanities do not concede that Earth scientists have any-
thing to say that could impinge on their understanding of the
world, because the world consists only of humans engaging with
humans, with nature no more than a passive backdrop to draw on
as we please. The humans-only orientation of the social sciences
and humanities is reinforced in mediatized societies where total
absorption in representations of reality derived from various forms
of media encourages us to view the ecological crisis as a spectacle
that takes place outside the bubble of our existence.
It is true that grasping the scale of what is happening requires
not only breaking the bubble but also making the cognitive leap to
Earth System thinking. It is one thing to accept that human influ-
ence has spread across the landscape, the oceans, and the atmos-
phere, but quite another to make the jump to understanding that
human activities are disrupting the functioning of the Earth as
a complex, dynamic, ever-evolving totality comprised of myriad
interlocking processes. But consider this astounding fact.
With knowledge of the cycles that govern Earths rotation,
including its tilt and wobble, paleo-climatologists are able to
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PREFACE: ON WAKING UP
predict with reasonable certainty that the next ice age is due in
50,000 years time.2 Yet because carbon dioxide persists in the
atmosphere for millennia, global warming from human activity
in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is expected to suppress
that ice age and quite possibly the following one, expected (other
things being equal) in 130,000 years. If human activity occurring
over a century or two can irreversibly transform the global climate
for tens of thousands of years, we are prompted to rethink history
and social analysis as a purely intra-human affair.
How should we understand the disquieting fact that a mass
of scientific evidence about the Anthropocene, an unfolding event
of colossal proportions, has been insufficient to induce a reasoned
and fitting response? For many, the accumulation of facts about
ecological disruption seems to have a narcotizing effect, all too
apparent in popular attitudes to the crisis of the Earth System,
and especially among opinion-makers and political leaders. A few
have opened themselves to the full meaning of the Anthropocene,
crossing a threshold by way of a gradual but ever-more disturb-
ing process of evidence-assimilation or, in some cases, after a real-
ization that breaks over them suddenly and with great force in
response to an event or piece of information in itself quite small.
In German, Erlebnis can simply mean an event or occurrence
in the course of life, the type of personal experience that was the
hallmark of nineteenth-century Romanticisms appeal to feeling.
But it can also refer to an intense disruptive episode, one that
makes an indelible impression, changing a life course, the kind of
experience not so much integrated into a life but which relegates
the old life to the past and inaugurates a new sensibility, some-
thing unforgettable and irreplaceable, something whose meaning
ix
PREFACE: ON WAKING UP
x
PREFACE: ON WAKING UP
mute when climate change was raised. He had nothing to say. For
most of the intelligentsia, it is as if the projections of Earth scien-
tists are so preposterous they can safely be ignored. Perhaps the
intellectual surrender is so complete because the forces we hoped
would make the world a more civilized place personal freedoms,
democracy, material advance, technological power are in truth
paving the way to its destruction. The powers we most trusted have
betrayed us; that which we believed would save us now threatens
to devour us. For some, the tension is resolved by rejecting the
evidence, which is to say, by discarding the Enlightenment. For
others, the response is to denigrate calls to heed the danger as a loss
of faith in humanity, as if anguish for the Earth were a romantic
illusion or superstitious regression. Yet the Earth scientists con-
tinue to haunt us, following us around like wailing apparitions
while we hurry on with our lives, turning round occasionally with
irritation to hold up the crucifix of Progress.
xi