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Miles S.H., and Craddock S. (2018) Ethics for the Anthropocene Epoch. In: Dominick A. DellaSala,

and Michael I. Goldstein (eds.) The Encyclopedia of the Anthropocene, vol. 4, p. 21-27. Oxford:

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Ethics for the Anthropocene EpochSH Miles and S Craddock, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, United States

© 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Setting the Stage

It is necessary, although difficult; to describe a field of ethics to address what has been called the crisis of the Anthropocene Epochhereafter referred to as the Anthropocene. We first state some conceptual assumptions and propose characteristics to define thisfield. Then, we outline the history of the concept of the Anthropocene in order to elucidate its internal values. Third, we propose thatthis field of ethics be called “Biome Ethics” and distinguish it from bioethics, eco-ethics, and environmental ethics. Finally, wesuggest principles and values for biome ethics.

Designators like Anthropocene are coined to crystallize or prioritize a concept that has become salient over a longer time. It is fairto conclude that related ideas such as ethics for such concepts also came into existence before the coinage of the neologism.Examining this history can reveal values, crises, and issues that may be relevant to the current discussion.

Humans are causing enormously disruptive effects on the environments although people argue about the date of the onset of anAnthropocene epoch. If global environmental change is a predictable outcome of human population growth and activities (e.g.,combustion-based technology, concentrating in ever-larger settlements), then the Anthropocene far antedates the Industrial Age.Agreement on the date of onset, however, is not needed in order to discuss the ethics of this concept.

The Anthropocene refers to the conclusion that human activity is changing relationships between life forms and the biome that isoutpacing the ability to prevent a global disruptive disequilibrium. The concept refers to: (1) global, (2) catastrophic, (3) ecosystemchanges that are (4) caused or remediable by human activity and that (5) adversely affect the biosphere in a manner that willprofoundly adversely disrupt human habitation. There is a conceptual split in the perspective on anthropocentrism and theAnthropocene epoch. In 1967, the journal Science published White’s “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis” pointing outthat Christianity’s anthropocentric view of man’s dominion over the Earth generated the environmental crisis and that thereforeanthropocentrism should be counterbalanced with a view that gave greater value to nonhuman life forms and their biomes.Although, as we shall see, the environmental movement largely embraces such an eco-centric (as opposed to anthropocentric)rebalancing, public policies, however, continue to reflect short- or intermediate-term economic priorities and privilege humaninterests over either long-term environmental changes or nonhuman life forms that are not deemed to be immediately relevant tohuman survival. In that public policy perspective, the threatened extinction of a nonhuman life form is prioritized if it can bedirectly argued the extinction specifically signals and can be used to monitor a human-deleterious change in the ecosphere.

“Terraforming,” a staple of science fiction since the 1940s, presents an interesting contrast to Anthropocene environmentaldamage. Terraforming is a form of engineering to create a habitable biome on a nonterrestrial planet. Ironically, such stories usuallyposit terraforming as necessary because human activity has degraded the Earth’s environment to a degree that the Earth cannot bereversed and so that human survival requires extraterrestrial resettlement.

Ethics traverses the distance from what “is” to what “ought to be.” An ethics for the Anthropocene would systematically generateand evaluate proposals to prevent, mitigate, or reverse the dysfunctional relationship between human activities, nonhuman lifeforms, and biome. Any ethics system exists in a situational frame. The labels of such ethics frames (e.g., business ethics, militaryethics, theological ethics, clinical ethics), reference circumscribed sets of problems, activities, or values. Sometimes, norms of moralreasoning that are intrinsic to the activity are foundation for the ethics. For example, the value “sportsmanship” commendscomplying with the rules of any game; the games’ rules define the play but are not ethics. Some activities have external normsapplied to them. In clinical medicine, the recent elaboration of a legal concept of “informed consent” empowers patients to choosemedical treatments according to how they see risks, burdens of treatment and the value on prolonging life. Cultural biases (such asracism or class) can distort systems of ethics. For example, clinical ethics pays inordinate attention to dilemmas arising within firstworld medical centers and to the relative neglect of issues such as access to health care, public health, or health disparities betweenmore and less privileged groups. This suggests that the ethics for the Anthropocene should look both within the historical evolvingframes for their internal values and to the larger cultural and governmental for extrinsic values to create a comprehensive ethics forthe issues of the Anthropocene crisis.

A History of Ethics for the Anthropocene

Origins

Obviously, concerns about adverse human effects on the biosphere antedate Crutzen’s and Stormer’s coining of Anthropoceneepoch in 2000. One may also assume that conceptionalization of the moral implications of human-made biome change proceededin tandem with the dawning recognition of such biosphere effects. For example, a certain policy agenda, which implies underlyingvalues, is implicit in Gilbert Plass’ coinage of “climate change,” the recognition of industrial greenhouse gases in 1956, the first EarthDay in 1970 or Wallace Broeker’s use of “global warming” in 1975. Such recent works bespoke of a need to act to address anecological threat to human habitation. However, the roots of this perception are deeper in time.

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The proper beginning of the articulation of an ethic for the Anthropocene is within the Industrial Age after the 18th centuryEnlightenment. The reason for this dating is that the identification of the Anthropocene crisis and the corresponding public policyresponses requires a scientific orientation. Older religious injunctions to respect all life or be stewards of the Earth were not based onthe belief that humans could disrupt the global biosphere. Ancient religions’ stories of eco-catastrophes depicted such events asdivine punishment for moral transgression. The Babylonian epic, Atra Hasis (18th century BCE), recounts how gods punishedBabylon with famines and plagues for creating noisy, irreverent crowded cities. It ends with a divine promise to “never again to harmthe people of the land.” The Vedas (1700 to 1100 BCE) urge harmony with nature but do not posit a causal correlation betweenhuman activity and degradation of the biosphere. Noah’s flood of Christian, Jewish, and Islamic faiths is a divine punishment forimmorality and not the ecological consequence of human activity. Some Christians who anticipate that God will return to judgehumanity reject the possibility of an Anthropocene crisis by citing Genesis 9:11 where God, after Noah’s flood, promised, “I willestablish my covenant with you; neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of a flood; neither shall there anymore be aflood to destroy the Earth.” The natural disasters described Homer’s works (c.1000 BCE) were divine judgment on moral trans-gressions. The naturalistic analyses in Herodotus, Thucydides, Oppian or in the Hippocratic corpus do not show a perception ofsubstantial human damage to the environment. In sum, until a scientific analysis of and prescription for environmental damage waspossible, apocalypse was a divine prerogative.

Two works, Thomas Malthus’ 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population and George Marsh’s 1864 Man and Nature: PhysicalGeography as Modified by Human Action, roughly mark the beginning of envisioning an Anthropocene crisis. These works complementeach other. The first predicted a conflict between population growth and agricultural production; the second considered potentiallyhuge and unexpected environmental effects of human industry. Malthus proposed that human population grew exponentially butthat food production increased linearly to inevitably result in famine. Malthus’ pessimistic view of the catastrophic outcome of theEngland’s reflected dogmatic biases of the inherent differences between the rational and small upper class with the thoughtlessbreeding of persons in lower classes. In this sense, his theory presaged the modern political confrontation between rich developednations and poorer developing nations that confounds political solutions to the Anthropocene crisis. Marsh’s fascinating booksurveys the effect of human activities including canals, mass tillage, dams, and deforestation on land, rivers, seas, and aquifers.

Malthus andMarsh exemplified a broad intellectual debate during the first half of the 19th Century. In 1800, Edwin Gardner wrotea Malthus-like tract, Reflections upon the Evil Effects of an Increasing Population upon the Present High Price of Provisions although it is notclear he was familiar with Malthus’ work. In 1820, William Godwin’s “Of Population: An Enquiry Concerning the Power of Increase in theNumbers of Mankind” argued that Malthus’s extrapolations of a geometric population growth outstripping linear growth in food supplywere not grounded in data. TheMarquis de Condorcet andWilliamGodwin rebuttedMalthusian pessimismwith optimism about thedirection of human progress. Robert Angus Smith followed Marsh’s analysis and scientifically proved that industrialization wasacidifying rain, rivers, and well water in a manner that was destructive to agriculture. His work led to the Alkali Act 1863. John Ruskin’slecture series entitled, The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century, also discussed atmospheric effects seen in industrial England. Thesevarious figures argued for and against public policies to prevent ecosystem damage. Malthus, for example, urged limiting populationgrowth to slow increases in consumption and forestall famine. Smith focused on smokestack emissions that acidified rain.

Marsh, however, went beyond proposing policies to propose a value to inform policy. He argued for a principle of prudencewhen the consequences were momentous and the short- and long-term risks unclear. He wrote, “The human activities . . . act in waysascribed to them, though our limited faculties are at present, perhaps forever, incapable of weighing their immediate, still more theirultimate, consequences. But our inability to assign definite values to these causes of the disturbance of natural arrangements is not areason for ignoring the existence of such causes in any general view of the relations between man and nature and we are neverjustified in assuming a force to be insignificant because its measure is unknown.” Thus, Marsh (1867) deserves credit for being thefirst ethicist of the Anthropocene.

By the end of the 19th century, the structural elements for the debate about Anthropocene effects were in play. Scientists weremeasuring human effects on the biosphere. Analysts recognized that models would be needed to interpret data but that data and theformulas for extrapolations were difficult to create and debatable as increasingly far-reaching projections were derived from them.There were optimists and pessimists about progress and the perfectibility of human society. Finally, Marsh named the first ethicsprinciple, a call for prudential decision-making.

The Twentieth Century

Although some post-Enlightenment intellectuals, mostly Malthusians, predicted that civilization was facing crisis of its ownmaking,the concept of a collapse of the global biome is a 20th century invention. It arose from the sequential entwining of three strands ofthought. Conservationism arose as a largely esthetic appreciation of the need to preserve natural spaces and wild species. Then,Environmentalism focused on harms caused by chemical agents or life forms and viruses. The final strand was a secularApocalypticism that posited an impending global catastrophe engendered by human activity. Conservationism, Environmentalism,and Apocalypticism fused in a triple helix: the Anthropocene. Each strand contributed intrinsic values and possible policyapproaches.

ConservationismThe concept of preserving natural land for pursuit of outdoor activities or enjoyment is centuries old. Most parks began as privatepreserves for wealthy patrons. English Deer Parks is a 1000 years old. Royal hunting preserves in China, India, and other places date

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back at least hundreds of years. Art and literature show an esthetic of elite privilege, pleasure, and hunting. Henry David Thoreau’Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854) is a convenient place to define the articulation of an ethics for conserving natural spaces.He argued that humans need natural spaces in order to maintain a right relationship with the world. Although not againstcivilization or urbanization, he argued that living in proximity to nature enabled humans to appreciate their own finitude andthe importance of living in a balanced relationship with nature. The recreational use of cemeteries and the development of parkswithin and proximate to cities in the mid-late 1800s suggest that this nature-respecting ethic of conservation found publicsympathies. John Muir founded the Sierra Club in 1892 and this expanding movement eventually spurred the creation of the USNational Park Service in 1916 about the same time as many private preserves, first in Europe and somewhat later in Asia, becamepublic spaces. African game preserves were an early 20th century invention.

Conservation ethics contributed to the subsequent Anthropocene ethic by positing a biologically and morally essentialrelationship between humans and the natural world. It recognized that human development was displacing natural environments.It concluded that public policies were needed to protect and preserve those natural spaces and the species native to them. However,it largely saw the natural spaces and corresponding threats as geographically or biologically as discrete, local matter rather thantaking a holistic, global view of the environment. The Anthropocene thought globally.

EnvironmentalismEnvironmentalism arose from scientific recognition of the adverse effects of industrial activity or the movement of exotic life formson biomes. It aimed to preserve the greatest diversity, carrying capacity, and health of life forms. Today, we think of pollutants asinherently toxic; however, the idea of unaesthetic filth (a conservation ethos) preceded the recognition of toxicity. For example, TheCoal Smoke Abatement Society formed in London in 1898 to remedy a black pall of smoke over London even though the toxiceffects of urban air pollution on humans were not recognized until the 20th century. In the late 1940s and early through the early1960s Rachel Carson, Paul Ehrlich, and others described the effect of the insecticide dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) onpollinators, noninsect species, and agriculture. In response to such environmental threats, the Nature Conservancy formed in 1951.It was distinguishable from the conservation ethic of the 59-year-old Sierra Club years earlier although the two organizations,exemplifying earlier Conservation and later Environmentalism, soon had an overlapping mission to save habitats and species fromdevelopment and pollution. Many industrialized countries soon enacted air and water pollution control acts as epidemiologistsbecame capable of detecting increased death rates from urban smog.

In 1973, Arne Naess’ article, “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement: A Summary,” defined deep andshallow ecology. Deep ecology understood environmental threats in the context of an encompassing, nonanthropocentric reverencefor life. By contrast, shallow ecology was anthropocentric, prioritizing ecological conservation from the perspective of human use(e.g., products or natural experience). He endorsed technological solutions from pollution controls to recycling in accordance withmaximizing the environment’s utility to shorter- and longer-range human needs. In 1994, George Sessions reviewed the intellectualorigins of environmentalism in Deep Ecology for the Twenty-first Century.

Environmentalism, even fused with Conservationism, differs from an Anthropocene perspective. Although environmentalism orconservation might address global issues (e.g., ozone hole or endangered species), neither movement necessarily envisioned acatastrophic collapse of the global environment endangering human civilization or leading to mass multispecies extinctions. Evendeep ecology had room for optimists, such as Naess. The Anthropocene crisis is inherently an apocalyptic vision even for those whobelieve that the catastrophe can be delayed or perhaps avoided with drastic public policies.

ApocalypticismThis refers to the belief that the world is entering a radically disruptive end time. This belief is typically based on religion, largelywithin sects that are marginal to the broader religious communities. Apocalyptic faiths are generally promulgated by corecharismatic leaders (limiting the intrusion of contradictory voices) and claim to have an esoteric knowledge that can only becorrectly interpreted by those who believe in the apocalyptic vision. The latter half of the 20th century saw several secular forms ofapocalyptic thought. In the 1980s, scientific predictions that a thermonuclear war would cause the collapse of complex civilizationsand that a Nuclear Winter would compound this with a collapse of the global ecology spurred negotiation of substantial reductionsand containment of nuclear weapons. The widely heralded Y2K disaster in which computers large and small would crash thebanking, health, defense, and government sectors because of the inability of computers designed for the 20th century to processyears beginning in 2 is another example of a secular apocalyptic thinking. Other secular or new age apocalyptic sects includeextremist groups that foresee a collapse of civilization due to race wars, terrorists, as well as wacky UFO cults, the Mayan calendarapocalypse, and so forth.

To say that belief in an Anthropocene crisis is apocalyptic says nothing about the validity of the claim or the mental balance ofthose who make it. It simply characterizes that belief as saying that civilization is approaching an end time. Identifying theAnthropocene as apocalyptic makes it possible to consider historical parallels with its ethics or reception. Garret Hardin, as weshall see, delineated the similarities between religious apocalypticism and the secular Anthropocene.

Apocalyptic environmentalism arose after the horrors of World War II, by which time the conservation and environmentalmovements were well established. The first phase was neo-Malthusian in the sense of predicting that population would outrun foodproduction. For example, two 1948 books, Fairfield Osborne’s Our Plundered Planet and William Vogt’s Road to Survival, made thisargument. In 1954, Hugh Moore used his Dixie Cup fortune to fund Planned Parenthood and he published an influential tract,Population Bomb. In 1964, Paul Ehrlich, a biologist who knew Vogt’s and Moore’s work published a new book also entitled, The

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Population Bomb. He neglected to list his wife Anne, an environmentalist and conservationist, as a coauthor. His charisma and thebook’s spectacular (but erroneous) predictions of a global Malthusian die off within 15 years popularized this argument. ZPG (ZeroPopulation Growth) became the apocalyptic side to the movement for women to control their reproductive lives.

The second phase of the apocalyptic strain transitioned from a binary Malthusian model in which population growth outstripsresources to a multifactorial model in which population, food production, resource depletion, and pollution were in an inter-connected, internally amplifying spiral to catastrophe. In 1972, the popular and beautifully graphed book, The Limits to Growth,powerfully depicted how rising population, consumed resources, and rising pollution would cause the collapse of civilization. Theprolific Lester Brown was another exemplar of apocalyptic environmentalism although he has notably argued for the ability toforestall the crisis. As at its Malthusian inception, apocalypticism whether binary or multifactorial usually goes with a racial orsocioeconomic privileging whether arguing against the irresponsible population growth in developed countries or blaming suchcountries for inefficient burning rather than looking at the extraordinarily per-capita pollution by citizens of economicallydeveloped countries.

In 1968, the journal Science published a cover article by Garret Hardin, entitled, “The Tragedy of the Commons” (Hardin, 1968).His Malthusian argument that personal greed would destroy resources held in common was not new. Its novelty was how it assessedthe relationship between apocalyptic science and civil governance. In his view, huge policy changes would be required to prevent theAnthropocene catastrophe but civil society would opt for minor, temporizing technical reforms that would delay needed funda-mental reforms as the nearing crises made ever more far-reaching policy changes necessary. Furthermore, the public and policymakers would view the predictions and proposals of scientific experts as speculative, autocratic, impractical, and improperlyinfringing on personal liberties. Whatever the scientific merits of The Tragedy of the Commons, Hardin nicely describes theproblems of any apocalyptic cult in which an elite claims to have special insight into the significance of esoteric knowledge andthat claim is rejected by a majority of society who believe that the end time is unimaginable. The example of the temporizingresponse to warnings of global warming shows Hardin’s prediction of the rejection of esoteric and elite warnings. One can look atHardin two ways. He is either an astute analyst of the social reception of scientific Anthropocene predictions or he is simplydescribing the situation of all those who preach the coming of end times.

The internal values of the concept of an Anthropocene epoch arise from the fusion of conservationism, environmentalism, andapocalypticism. Conservationist brought an esthetic perspective of valuing the necessary relationship of humans with the naturalworld. In somemysterious way, we are physically and psychospiritually nourished by the natural world and the species in it. For thisreason, we need to preserve our capacity to encounter the natural world. The environmentalists identified a broad set of causalinteractions between human activity and the natural world. Bees are necessary for agricultural pollination and are poisoned byagricultural pesticides. Tiny, but anomalously trending, changes in atmospheric gasses can portend huge changes in relationshipsbetween humans, the physical environment, plants, and all creatures great and small. The apocalyptic vision of Anthropoceneenvironmentalism added two more ingredients: the pressure of dire urgency and the claims for legitimacy for an elite’s analyses,predictions, and prescriptions.

These remarks on the history of the internal ethics of Anthropocenic thought bring us to the issue of the nature of ethics beyondthe values of conservationism, environmentalism, and apocalypticism that can address the challenges of an Anthropocene age.

Nomenclature: Biome Ethics

We propose “biome ethics” as preferable to Anthropocene ethics. The word Anthropocene is scarcely 20 years old. It rests on adisputed nomenclature for a period either within or succeeding the Holocene Age. Biome has been used since 1908 and describesthe relationship between environments and their various, interrelated life forms. The concept of the Anthropocene epoch refers tothe adverse effects of human activity on the life-sustaining capability of the terrestrial biome. Although, in normal parlance, biomecan be parochial, referring to microenvironments and their life forms, biome ethics should be understood to refer to the globalbiome with its comprehensive relationships between human activity, all life forms, and the environment.

Bioethics is a less satisfactory term. In 1926, a German pastor, Fritz Jahr, coined bioethics in an essay entitled, Life Science andMorality. The following year, his more extended work, Bio-Ethics: A Review of the Ethical Relationships of Humans to Animals and Plants,argued for a pietistic ethic of solidarity of humans with all life forms. This pietism was not, however, grounded on a sense of anAnthropocene crisis. In 1970, Van Rensselaer Potter recoined “bioethics” and in 1971 expanded on this term in, Bioethics: Bridge tothe Future. As Potter put it, Bioethics, he wrote, was “humanistic knowledge to forge a science for sustainable medical andenvironmental survival.” Potter, a biochemist, was an environmentalist in the tradition of Aldo Leopold. His re-coinage of bioethicsmight have become relevant to the Anthropocene but the resulting field evolved to become so confined to issues inside academicclinical centers that it has probably lost the ability to re-expand to engage issues pertaining to the global biome. Theologians of earlybioethics such as James Gustafson, Paul Ramsey, and H. Richard Niebuhr wrote on human responsibility for conserving the naturalworld. Hans Jonas was perhaps most influential in attempting to preserve a bridge between bioethics, politics, and the emergingAnthropocene perspective. He was foundational in the creation of Germany’s Green Party. His 1979 work, The Imperative ofResponsibility: In search of an ethics for the technological age, argued for a value of future-looking responsibility that reflected“solidarity with the organic world” and a duty to ensure “the permanence of genuine human life.”

Eco-ethics and environmental ethics also contend as nomenclature. They are applied to diverse problems that often do not relateto the global biome and need not take the characteristic apocalypticism of the Anthropocene.

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A subset of environmental ethics, restoration ethics, does respond to the direct threat and reality of global warming. Restorationethics emphasizes the urgent need to address current geographies of environmental degradation from massive garbage dumps,industrial waste sites, or water system contamination because these have become toxic to supporting life forms, including humanbeings. They are also evidence of anthropogenic harms that come from industrial and consumer economies. Restoring thesedamaged ecosystems to the “original” forests, clean lakes, and rivers that predated their degradation, for restoration ethics, providesneeded redress of the widespread environmental threats underpinning the current epoch. This approach, however, remains limitedby its ahistoricism. What does “original” mean when restoring ecosystems? Going back to preindustrial times? Medieval? And howtemporary or even futile are these restoration projects if they do not in turn address those practices and policies maintainingecosystem degradation?

The complexity of restoration ethics is further clarified by considering the 1972 United Nations Conference on the HumanEnvironment (Stockholm) and the 1992 Earth Summit (Rio de Janeiro). Both conferences recognized extensive human-causedenvironmental destruction and both urged attention to environmental protection, restoration, and sustainability. Both, especiallythe Rio conference, expanded attention to the manufacturing and other production processes generating environmental toxins, andto the association between resource consumption especially in affluent countries and environmental degradation. The Rioconference specifically articulated that a healthy environment is not simply measured by pollutants; it is assessed by the interre-lationship of population, social development, human rights to clean air and water, food security, and access to housing andeducation. The Rio conference predated the word “Anthropocene” by a decade but its Agenda 21 roughly prefigured what an ethicsof the Anthropocene might look like by acknowledging that managing the environment required addressing poverty, promotinghealth, changing consumption patterns, and recognizing human rights, especially of marginalized persons who invariably are mostexposed to degraded environments. In other words, it presaged a global health ethics consisting of both rights and responsibilities.

The policy failures and ensuing demonstrations at subsequent world environment conferences, such as Rioþ10 in 2002 and Rioþ20 in 2012, evidenced that an ethics of rights and responsibilities would get nowhere if it could not remedy the toxic politics ofnational sovereignty, global inequality, corporate power, and disenfranchisement of historically colonized populations. Similarissues dogged annual Climate Conferences and Earth Summits that, since 1995, have been convened to redress the policies andpractices believed to be responsible for climate change. The countries attending these conferences generally agree with the scientificevidence that human activities producing greenhouse gases (GHGs) are warming the Earth’s atmosphere, and that this warmingeffect will have increasingly disastrous consequences for coastal and island conurbations, food production, health, refugeemovements, and political stability. Reducing GHG production is where an ethic of responsibility for a healthy stable globalbiome quickly confronts tensions between low- and high-income countries over who has greater responsibility for GHG produc-tion, and over the inequitable geographical impacts of climate change and the immense costs of stabilizing the rate of change andremediating the damage.

Principles and Values for Biome Ethics

The question then becomes how to think about an ethics for the Anthropocene that goes beyond a focus on responsibility orprudentialism. Finding possible answers to this question means first understanding that the Anthropocene is not a neutral concept.It is the product of particular histories of colonization and capitalism that did not just produce an over-abundance of carbondioxide, but did so through various mechanisms of oppression, exploitation, and displacement “of thousands of already impover-ished individuals.” Colonization disrupted local economies by appropriating the most fertile land for commercial agriculture,taxing households, and commandeering labor for extractive industries. The resulting increases in profound poverty and underem-ployment continued after independence, as evidenced by a rise in those indices of poor health and poverty such as infant andmaternal mortality rates, and by significant immigration flows to former colonizing countries. Capitalist practices are founded onimperatives of continual economic growth and accumulation, and on generating profits through low wages. The inauguration ofneoliberal capitalism in the 1980s with its focus on privatization of services, diminished government support, and market forcescompounded levels of poverty and increased economic inequalities across the globe. These points are important because any biomeethics must take into account the full context of how our biome is configured and why. Affluent countries, and affluent individualswithin countries, generally produce the most carbon dioxide. It is the millions of poor, however, who bear the brunt of the costbecause they have the most exposure to climate-related infectious diseases, food shortages, and land loss, but are the least resilient inovercoming these challenges.

Biome ethics then most importantly needs to find ways to keep this larger context in mind when addressing a way forward, whilenot getting forestalled by the relentless politics of reparation and responsibility. The following values are not a comprehensive ethic.They are elements of an ethic that would focus on modes of being and behavior that acknowledge past and present inequities thatcreated the present Anthropocene moment and that point beyond the political impasse.

Connectivity

As a way to reduce GHG production, many environmentalists and climate scientists call for individuals to reduce their consump-tion. This is based on the fact that all commodities—whether food, clothing, cars, houses, or other items—require the consumptionof fossil fuels in production, marketing, or operation. Reducing commodity purchases would reduce GHG production. However, as

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Simon Dalby argues, exhortations from environmentalists to reduce consumption have had little impact because they are based oninstilling a personal sense of responsibility in each individual. Obliging persons to decrease consumption is difficult to sustain inthat the cost of any product in carbon dioxide emissions, resource extraction, and labor exploitation is not evident. Dalby maintainsit is necessary for each person to be able to seeing how personal consumption affects the wellbeing of the Earth and the globalcommunity. He says that society needs to shift from what he calls autonomy to connectivity so that people can recognize that everypersonal actions has repercussions even for those living worlds away. The visible relationship between commodity production,wellbeing, and GHG levels will promote personal sensitivity to the full costs of each act of consumption and a desire to want toreduce consumption rather than feeling obliged or responsible to do so. Such an ethics and environment of connectivity sidestepsdebates over who, the “haves” and the “have nots,” is more responsible for reducing consumption. Promoting connectivity makesdiminishing consumption not just good with regard to the natural environment, but moral in the context of belonging to a globalenvironment.

Human and Nonhuman Continuum

The Anthropocene clearly shows that connectivity extends beyond humans to encompass nonhuman life forms. Though the causesof climate change, ozone depletion, and other forms of environmental degradation are predominantly due to humans, the impactsgo much further. Mass erosion, species migration, desertification, abnormal floods, melting glaciers, and rising oceans aredisrupting human beings all over the world and disrupting vertebrate and invertebrate animals, plants, and micro-organisms.The impact on nonhuman life forms affects human health and industry.

An ethics of the Anthropocene—a biome ethics—should take all of the biome into consideration prudentially accepting that alllife forms are related and interdependent. Ethics, according to Gibson-Graham and Roelvink (2009), starts by de-centering ofhumans and a moving away from a hierarchical subject/object, or human/discounted other-than-human rankings characterizingnorms for environmental belief and practice. This is an ethics of caring for all organisms, nurturing, and healing through what BrunoLatour (2004, 205) calls “learning to be affected,” that is, opening human sensibilities to allow compassion to encompass all lifeforms. Learning to be affected is not just an awareness of connectivity but also an experience of being transformed by connectivityand coexistence. Gibson-Graham and Roelvink then suggest that once we achieve this shift in not just attitude but fundamentalvalues, an economic ethics of the Anthropocene will follow. Compassion for all life forms will lead to more community-centeredeconomies that mitigate practices of exploitation and find new ways to promote mutual productivity. As with the ethics ofconnectivity, which focuses on the relationship between personal consumption and environmental costs, a sensibility of thehuman-nonhuman life continuum refocuses economics and policy from growth to negotiated interdependence in the service oflong-term life survival (2004).

Shared Suffering

This approach to a biome ethics is similar to the preceding concept except that it focuses on shared suffering with, rather thancompassion for, all life forms. As defined by Donna Haraway, shared suffering shifts from a cognitive understanding of the deepconnection among the Earth’s inhabitants, to an empathic feeling for this connection. More specifically, it recognizes that much ofhow humans thrive depends on the suffering of other humans and other species. Industrial agriculture, for example, often causeshuman suffering by using low-wage, unregulated migrant labor. It causes animals to suffer by crowding and inhuman slaughteringpractices. Thus the foods that we eat come at the expense of suffering. The willingness to be open to such suffering is a deeplyembodied ethics, one that admittedly often uncomfortable and not easy to attain or sustain. However, it is also profoundlytransformative because it enables us to become, as Haraway puts it, “response-able” to the suffering of life forms and tomitigate thatsuffering through decreasing the consumption of environmentally costly animals and crops or by improving conditions of animalson industrial farms or by labor who improve the health and decrease toxic exposures (Greenhough and Roe, 2010).

Biome ethics, by focusing on changes in attitude, sensibilities, and values, move away from the imperatives of “responsibility”and “obligation” that are always doomed because they dictate what has to be and should be done rather than reconfiguring what isdesirable. Despite, or because of the presence, however, implicit of an ethics of responsibility and obligation, there has been animpasse on amending the worst harms of the Anthropocene. Countries continue to wrangle over which have more responsibility toreduce their own emissions, which have obligations to help other countries reduce emissions, or which claim no responsibility. So,too, the carbon cap-and-trade treaties continue even though they perpetuate production of carbon dioxide and other GHGs,maintain high- and middle-income country advantages, and put the burden of reforestation and other green measures on poorcountries. In other words, treaties and the high-stakes conferences of which they are a part presume to be about creating ethicalapproaches to production and consumption that will be effective in slowing down carbon dioxide levels, and possibly avert theworst of what climate change can bring. Instead, they do the opposite.

Biome ethics, by contrast, shifts away from this dead-end approach by focusing on the interconnectedness of all life forms andcreating sensibilities of care, compassion, and shared suffering. “Fundamentally, however, rights are hierarchical constructsemerging from assumptions of unequal power. They incorporate demands typically derived within high-level policy organizationsrather than localized settings, and are often based on contested criteria. Their fulfillment requires obligations and sacrifices fromcountries or populations who might not be willing to concede these. There is a reason why rights, then, need to be formalized in

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treaties and guidelines, and equally why they are often ignored: they were never agreed upon, highlight regional differences innotions of rights and expectations, and trod on national sovereignty” (Greenhough and Roe, 2010).

Moving away from any notion of rights and instead focusing on the welfare of all forms of life means that biome ethics do notneed enforcement. That is, they do not need to be formally written up into treaties or elaborated in guidelines. They are a “lived”ethics generating changed values and mindsets, and thus informing all practices, everyday acts, consumer choices, and modes ofproduction anywhere we live. They create desires for ways of being in the Anthropocene that begin to seriously address thosesystems and institutions that have generated incalculable anthropogenic harm. They bypass governments and go straight to thepeople who constitute those institutions, creating desires from the ground rather than from above. A biome ethics is an ethics thathas the potential to heal on multiple levels the longstanding damages to the Earth and all its inhabitants. And it finally portends afuture full of possibility and life, rather than one of apocalyptic threat.

See also: Finding an Ethical Foundation for Economics in the Anthropocene.

References

Gibson-Graham JK and Roelvink G (2009) An economic ethics for the anthropocene. Antipode 41(S1): 320–346.Greenhough B and Roe E (2010) From ethical principles to response-able practice. Environment and Planning: Society and Space 28: 43–45.Hardin G (1968) The tragedy of the commons. Science 162(3859): 1243–1248. http://www.geo.mtu.edu/�asmayer/rural_sustain/governance/Hardin%201968.pdf.Latour B (2004) How to talk about the body? The normative dimension of science studies. Body and Society 10: 205–229 http://bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/77-

BODY-NORMATIVE-BS-GB.pdf.Malthus T (1798) Essay on the principle of population. London. http://rescuingbiomedicalresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Malthus-1798.pdf.Marsh GP (1867) Man and nature: Physical geography as modified by human action. p. 549 New York: Charles Scribner https://archive.org/details/manandnatureorp01marsgoog.

Further Reading

Club of Rome, Meadows DH, Meadows DL, Randers JR, and Behrens WW (1972) The limits to growth. New York: Universe Books. Available as pdf at https://www.clubofrome.org/report/the-limits-to-growth/.

Dalby S (March 2004) Anthropocene ethics: Rethinking ‘the political’ after environment. In: Paper presented at the International Studies Association Annual Conference, Montreal.http://www.academia.edu/25564972/Anthropocene_ethics_Rethinkingthe_politicalafter_environment.

Haraway D (2007) When species meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Jonas H (1984) The imperative of responsibility: In search of an ethics for the technological age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Naess A (1973) The shallow and the deep, long-range ecology movement: A summary. Inquiry 16: 1–4.White L (1967) The historical roots of our ecological crisis. Science 155(3767): 1203–1207. http://www.uvm.edu/�gflomenh/ENV-NGO-PA395/articles/Lynn-White.pdf.

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