1

Björn Johnson

Gert Villumsen

November 2017

Sustainable Development in the Anthropocene

(DRAFT)

Our aim with this paper is to introduce the notion of the Anthropocene to the IKE group and to

discuss how the Anthropocene changes the notion of ‗sustainable development‘, which, perhaps, is

a part of an implicit normative base of innovation studies.

1. The Anthropocene.

This paper is about how the notion of sustainable development changes, in fact partly dissolves,

when placed in the context of a transition from the Holocene geological epoch to the Anthropocene.

We will discuss major aspect of this conceptual change and tentatively suggest some alternative

signposts for development strategy and policy.

The Holocene denotes the geological epoch following the last ice age, 11,700 years ago according

to the International Chronostratigraphic Chart of the International Commission on Stratigraphy.

This Commission is expected soon to decide if a new epoch called the Anthropocene is to be

introduced into the Chart, and, if this would be the case, on a date of time for the succession of the

Holocene epoch by the Anthropocene.

It has often been noted (see for example Chesworth 2010) that only during the Holocene the

landscape (understood as a geological/environmental entity within the biosphere possessing

attributes dependent on climate, hydrology, soils, organisms, and historical development within

which human societies are placed) has taken on for us well-known forms, i.e. with forests, lakes,

rivers, grasslands, swamps, polar ice sheets, fisheries, hydrological cycles, and so on. The Holocene

has been a period with a remarkable stable climate with regular rainfall patterns and average global

temperature staying within a range of 10C. This is widely believed to have helped, and maybe

preconditioned, the development of human civilization. The ―Holocene stability‖ is now coming to

an end. Human activities such as production, consumption and transportation are increasingly

affecting the landscape. Some of the consequences for nature and for human societies depending on

―natural resources‖ are climate change on a global level, habitat destruction (especially by

deforestation), soil degradation, and overexploitation of many abiotic as well as biotic resources.

On this background, it has been proposed that the we do not any longer live in the Holocene but in

the Anthropocene (Crutzen 2002). The Anthropocene denotes a new geological epoch in which

human societies have become a planetary force, comparable to volcanism, tectonism, glaciation and

weathering making all ecosystems ―Anthropogenic‖. This may at first, at least to some people,

sound like a good thing: The Anthropocene is ―the age of Man‖, when we (the humans) ultimately

take control over nature, which has niggardly dominated us during our whole existence and

establish a ―sustainable and equitable stewardship of Earth's ecosystems for optimal functioning

2

both globally and locally‖ (Singularity University). We can now manage the biosphere according to

our needs and wants. At last, Francis Bacon‘s prediction that science will establish ‗Regnum

Hominis‘, the kingdom of Man, can become reality and nature reduced to an instrument for human

needs.

But a moments reflection reveals this as wishful thinking. Civilization is developed under and

depends on crucial stability properties of the biosphere like predictable seasonal winds,

temperatures and rainfall patterns. If the Holocene stability comes to an end and gives way to

radical changes in the behavior of the Earth System, seen as a total system in which the biosphere,

the cryosphere, the hydrosphere, the atmosphere and the lithosphere constitute interacting

subsystems, the Anthropocene implies that much of the existing knowledge about the interactions

between human society and its natural environment becomes obsolete. Our power to affect nature

vastly exceeds our knowledge about the consequences.

One important aspect of leaving the Holocene stability is that the rate of change of Earth System

characteristics like atmospheric green-house gas concentration, stratospheric ozone distribution and

concentration, ocean acidification, tropical forest loss, global warming, biosphere degradation (for

example biodiversity loss), etc. increase significantly. This will make it much more difficult and

costly for societies to adapt to such changes.

On an aggregated (and quite abstract) level Gaffney and Steffen (2017) has described the idea of the

Anthropocene as an increased rate of change of the Earth System due to human activities: In

general, the Earth System (E) changes as a result of Astronomical forcing (A), Geophysical forcing

(G), Internal dynamics of the Earth system (I), and Human forcing (H). The rate of change of the

Earth System can, thus, be written as:

‗A‘ includes radiation and gravitational effects of the sun and other planets and impact events from

big meteorites. ‗G‘ includes volcanism, tectonism and weathering. ‗I‘ includes evolutionary

processes in the biosphere interacting with the geosphere. ‗H‘ includes results from activities like

production, consumption and transportation in an increasing population.

In a geological perspective of ―deep time‖ H is an entirely new forcing. It is unique in the sense that

it now dominates the ―old‖ forces and drives the changes of the Earth System. It also substantially

increases the speed of the different sub-process within the Earth system. For example, over the past

45 years the rate of temperature change has risen to 170 times the Holocene baseline. Therefor we

can at the highest rate of abstraction write the ―Anthropocene equation‖ in the following way

(Gaffney and Steffen 2017):

where A, G and I are approaching zero. (A, G, I 0)

In the Anthropocene, the characteristics and processes of the biosphere and the whole Earth System

change by human action, but so far not by human design. There is no clear reason to believe that a

spontaneous order of benign stability of the Earth System will emerge within a for human societies

3

relevant time horizon. The Anthropocene is a concept that places the state of the biosphere and the

present environmental problems within deep time. Nobody knows if a new, from the perspective of

human civilization sufficiently stable landscape will eventually emerge out of the present transition

phase of the Earth System. Normally changes in the structure of the Earth system occur in a time

scale completely different from what human societies operate in.

Local level interactions between changes of the landscape and human societies have been quite

common during the Holocene and some of them are well documented. Sometimes such interactions

have led to severe landscape degradation with critical consequences for social life and sometimes

even to collapse of societies and cultures. (See for example Diamond 2005 and Martini and

Chesworth, eds. 2010, ch.4, 6, 7, 9, and 23). However, the Anthropocene challenges societies in

ways and on levels never experienced before and the risk for collapse moves from the local to the

regional, national and even global level. (Johnson et al. 2017) The accumulated effects of human

activities are forcing the Earth System out the relative stability of the Holocene. It is now in

transition to another, yet unknown, state. Seen in a deep time perspective this is not very

remarkable. The Earth System has gone through dramatic changes many times before, where long

periods of relative stability have been followed by (in a deep time perspective) fast transitions into a

new relative stability. The dominant view of the development of the Earth amongst geologists today

is not one of gradual incremental change over its almost five billion years of existence, but a rather

more ―catastrophic‖ view where the structure and behavior of the system has changed many times.

Every transition from one geological epoch to another is a kind of generalized disruption. This

probably means that returning to the Holocene stability through a reduction of our present

environmental impacts to more modest levels of earlier times is not an option. If it is correct, as we

think it is, that the Earth System already is in transition from the Holocene into something else the

Holocene can‘t be preserved by keeping within some specified ―planetary boundaries‖. The

transition process may be affected by policy but it can´t be reversed. (Johnson & Villumsen 2017).

We should observe that there is an important factor missing in this way of describing the onset of

the Anthropocene. Even if ‗human forcing‘ is taken as the driver of the disruptive change of the

earth system all kinds of human agency and agenda are left out. In the most common Anthropocene

narrative population growth, technical change, and economic growth come together and take the

form of objective, impersonal, neutral forces. Actors, specific interests, politics and institutions are

downplayed. This is a ―geologist‘s view‖ characterized by neutral forces interacting with each other

over very long periods of time. This way of thinking has clear merits and it was the background for

putting the Anthropocene on the agenda in the first place. However, since the development of the

Anthropocene is driven by interactions, including feedback loops, between biogeophysical and

social processes it is crucial to understand not only the character of the former but also the latter

processes. It is the structure and character of ―human forcing‖ that is at the bottom of the transition

between the Holocene and the Anthropocene and it will determine if ―desirable Holcene-like

conditions‖ (Donges et al 2017) can be sustained

2. From Growth to sustainable development

2.1 The rise of hegemonic growth

The most important factor beside population growth behind the ―human forcing‖ of the

Anthropocene discussed above is economic growth. To understand the Anthropocene we need to

4

understand economic growth. It is, like the Anthropocene itself, a relatively new phenomenon in

human history. Thinking about growth can roughly be divided into three historic periods. First, the

period from mid-18th

century to mid-19th

century (often labelled the First Industrial Revolution by

historians). The central growth-related question for the ―worldly philosophers‖ of the time was if

there were any limits to continued economic expansion (in Adam Smith words: ―continual increase

of national wealth‖ or ―progress of opulence‖). Could societies continue to improve general living

standards or would limiting factors (mainly shortness of agricultural land) at some point halt the

process? The general agreement was that an end of economic expansion was unavoidable and for

most of the thinkers (Smith, Ricardo, Malthus) this was quite deplorable. Policy could extend the

process (for example by removing tariffs) but not forever.

During the second period, from mid-19th

century to the mid-20th

century (roughly the period

labelled the Second Industrial revolution with mass production by mean of electricity), mainstream

economists gradually came to take economic expansion for granted and growth lost its status as an

issue of high importance. Marx analyzes of accumulation and extended reproduction contained a

theory of economic growth but for obvious reasons Marx‘s labor-based theory of value with its

emphasis on exploitation was more popular in the emerging labor movements than among

capitalists. In the class struggle capitalists found support in the new neoclassical theory of value

based on marginal utility, which expelled the idea of exploitation to the history of economic

thought. The theoretical focus and main political objectives now became stability and efficiency.

Economic growth/progress was difficult to handle in a general equilibrium system and was mostly

regarded as exogenously determined by technical change. The expelling of growth from the

economic discourse was so clear-cut that Arthur Lewis (an economist known for his contributions

to development theory) wrote: ‖No comprehensive treatise on the subject of economic growth has

been published for about a century‖ (Lewis 1955). Furthermore, growth was also absent from the

policy discourse in this period: ―Hardly a line is to be found in the writings of any professional

economists between 1870 and 1940 in support of economic growth as a policy measure.‖(Arndt

1978).

The third period of growth thinking (often labelled ―modern economic growth‖), where growth is

becoming more and more important as a policy goal that can be influenced via planning and

economic policy, coincides first with the cold war and later with the third industrial revolution,

where electronics and information technology became generic and broadly introduced in the

economy. Usually we think about the cold war as a period with mutual military armament.

However, the rivalry was also about achieving the fastest growth and progress. Growth accounting

became a tool both used to compare between nations and to set goals for the development in the

years to come. Instruments of macroeconomic planning and technology policy were introduced and

gradually in this process GDP and its growth became ends in themselves.

It is interesting to note that the most important theoretical ―weapons‖ in the competition between

capitalism and socialism (macroeconomic planning and growth accounting) was originally

developed by ―the enemy‖. Ideas of economic progress based on planning and national accounting

were developed in Russia and in the Soviet Union in the first decades of the 20th

century. These

were partly incorporated in economic policy in the 20s and some of the insights (but not many of

the intellectuals behind them) survived Stalin´s purges. In terms of industrial production the Soviet

Union was quite successful and in 1938 its share of world industrial production was estimated to

near 20%, which has to be compared to a share of 4% a decade earlier (Rosenberg 1982). Many of

the founding economists behind modern economic growth were of Russian origin. Some of them

5

got their basic training in economic theory and mathematics in Russia and the Soviet Union before

emigrating to Germany or the United States. Most famous are probably Simon Kuznets (national

accounting) and Wasilly Leontief (input-output analysis) but there were many others. ―Thus to

some extent the concerns of Russian economics before 1929 survived by proxy, ironically in the

homeland of its future Cold War adversary itself‖ (Barnett 2008)

The economic war against ‖the real existing socialism‖ was in the 1960s institutionalized through

the formation of OECD (Schmelzer 2016, p46). OECD became the new economic NATO setting

growth targets for its member states. A result of the growth targets often mentioned by historians

was the emergence of an imagined community of countries and notably the imagined community of

―the West‖(Anderson 1983). Another result was that growth targets ―could inspire, galvanize and

unite the nation‖ (Tobin 1964). (On a more speculative level this might be seen as one of the

mechanism leading to the development of fierce competition between nation-states and the growing

nationalism in the following decades. But this will not be discussed in this paper). During the cold

war GDP growth was exalted to become a responsibility states had to take on, an imperative that

could not be evaded and the one preeminent requisite and priority. (Schmelzer 2016 p. 185). An

early awareness of the emerging paradigm is demonstrated in Tobin‘s keynote speech to The

American Economic Association: ―Growth has become a good word. And the better a word

becomes, the more it is invoked to bless a variety of causes and the more it loses specific meaning.

It has become a new synonym for a good thing in general and a fashionable way to describe other

economic objectives.‖ (Tobin 1964).

2.2 Environmental issues, limits to growth, sustainable development

The possibility of serious negative effects of economic growth, not least the effects on the

environment, was not neglected in the economic war between East and West. In fact, almost all the

great minds of modern economic growth (for example Abramovitz, Kuznets and Solow) had

concerns about negative externalities. But it was not until the growth paradigm was challenged in

the 70s and 80s that environmental problems became a central issue on the agenda. The challenge

came from two directions: (a) the economic slump with low growth rates and (b) a growing concern

about negative environmental consequences and resource exhaustion not only for local and regional

economies but also for the whole global economy. These concerns were first formulated by the

Club of Rome, and later in the Bruntland report (―Our Common Future‖). The concerns were

backed by new key statistics showing the picture of ―a hockey-stick‖ for all critical variables:

population, pollution, water use, etc. (Angus, 2016). There was, in other words, a new and growing

concern about planetary-scale limits and possible ecological feedbacks.

How were these environmental issues threated in OECD? According to Schmelzer (2016), before

the economic slump there was an open-minded approach. ―Environmental problems cannot be

dissociated from the economic context because these problems are largely byproducts of economic

activities, general operations of production and consumption and therefor have to form part of

economic policy‖ (from Meeting of Council at Ministerial level, May 1970). The awareness of

negative effects of economics growth was also reflected in many seminars organized by OECD

where leading scholars in the field of ecological economics were invited to develop methods of

analysis and evaluation, and to formulate policies to handle economics externalities.

However, the combination of declining GDP (growth) and increasing unemployment changed focus

and priority and the perspective became decidedly marked-oriented: ―Thus environmental factors –

6

clean air and water, for example – can be brought into the economic calculus along with the more

traditional factors of production: they can be given a price. This approach has been considered the

most efficient way to reduce pollution and the one less likely to distort international economic

exchanges, if no subsidies are given.‖ (OECD at Work for the Environment, 1973); here cited from

Schmelzer (2016). The faith in liberalized market, the faith of prices as the main regulating

mechanism, and the shift from demand to supply-side economics as the dominant paradigm was

part of the restoration of growthmanship in governments and OECD in the 1970s and 80s. Concerns

about ―limit to growth‖ was not any longer a main issue in those circles. They were mostly present

in popular discourses.

In the period after the second World War economic development theory emerged as a broader and

more multifaceted view on progress than growth of GDP. It was emphasized that growth and

development are not the same thing. Often, however, this problem is sidestepped by using the term

―economic growth and development‖. Even if development has become theoretically rather well-

defined it continues to be interpreted in many different ways by different persons and in different

contexts: ―Anyone who asked articulate citizens in developed or developing countries what they

meant by this desirable objective of ―development‖ would get a great variety of answers. Higher

living standards. A rising per capita income. Increase in productive capacity. Mastery over nature.

Freedom though control of man‘s environment. Economic growth. But not mere growth, growth

with equity. Elimination of poverty. Basic need satisfaction. Catching up with the developed

countries in technology, wealth, power, status. Economic independence, self-reliance. Scope for

self-fulfillment for all. Liberation, the means to human ascent. Development, in the vast literature

on the subject, appears to encompass almost all facets of the good society, everyman‘s road to

utopia.‖(Arndt 1987)

The situation today remains unresolved. Everyone agrees that development is something more than

growth and that GDP growth is a poor measure of welfare and living standard. In order, not to have

to choose between the two measures the term ―economic growth and development‖ have become a

standard notion. Furthermore, terms like green growth, clean growth and sustainable growth have

become common. This, of course, doesn‘t solve the problem of priority and in times of economic

stagnation or crisis economic growth (i.e. good old GDP growth) still takes precedence over clean,

green or sustainable growth. Also, the notion of development has got its own adjectives. In fact,

―sustainable development‖ and also ―inclusive development‖, have become standard notions of

substantial political importance (compare the UN Sustainable Development Goals).

We have come a long way from economic growth to sustainable development. The importance of

this should not be underestimated. It signifies an increasing awareness of the complexity and

conflicts that characterize development and implies that the struggle for development around the

world has to be fought on many fronts and in many ways. At the same time, when a word contains

so many connotations, it is clear that when adding ―sustainable‖, which in itself has several

meanings, there will be many and contradicting views on what to sustain.

3. Sustainable development – an inherently vague notion.

3.1 The mainstream notion.

7

It has become a common view, almost a mantra, that growth and development needs to be

―sustainable‖ and the idea that a combination of technical change and government regulation can

implement this is almost hegemonic. However, the realization that we live in the Anthropocene (or

perhaps more correctly in the transition between the Holocene and the Anthropocene) puts the

notion of sustainable development in a new light, or rather lack of light. Since the Holocene

stability is coming to an end, many conditions for human and social life change and it becomes

increasingly difficult to pinpoint what it is that needs to be sustained. If the notion of sustainable

development is to retain any meaning at all, it can‘t be about how to preserve the Holocene climate

and landscape, which is its core meaning today. The meaning of the concept has to shift into

something, which is about how to cope with fast changing Earth System characteristics. It has to be

adapted to the Anthropocene reality and become more about how to ―navigate the Anthropocene‖

than on how to preserve well-known landscape characteristics of the Holocene.

Immediately, the notion of sustainable development seems simple and clear. ―Sustainability‖ refers

to the ability to last, to go on over time and sustainable development is development that can go on

without running out of steam and without encountering any serious limits. The most well-known

formulation is probably the one from the so called Brundtland Report: ―Sustainable development is

development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future

generations to meet their own needs‖ (Brundtland 1987). Following the Brundtland report it has

become standard procedure in the literature to note that sustainable development has several

interrelated dimensions. It is, for example, often pictured as three partly intersecting circles or

ellipses illustrating social, economic and environmental development, where the intersection of

circles defines sustainable development. Or it may be pictured as a building where three pillars (a

social, an environmental, and an economic) together support a roof denoted sustainable

development.

It is of course true that sustainable development doesn‘t refer only to society‘s natural environment.

Even if the natural environment remains healthy, development may bump into different kinds of

limits if the social or economic systems for some reason become undermined in the process. But it

is misleading to put the natural environment at the same level as the social and economic systems.

Nature (thought of for example as the biosphere) can survive without being environment to

economic and social systems, in fact it did so for about 3 billion years, but neither human

individuals nor human society can survive without the biosphere. It is clear that sustainable

development has to be a concept with several levels and that the health of the biosphere takes

precedence over social and economic ambitions also if we take an anthropocentric view and regard

human wellbeing as the ultimate goal in development.

But it is not only the relation between the different layered subsystems (the economic, the social

and the environmental) that has to be taken on board when thinking about sustainable development.

There are also differences in expected lifetime of the subsystems. The sustainability of a system

necessarily has a time dimension. It can‘t be sustained indefinitely. We can for example relate a life

span to each type of subsystem within the natural environment ranging from relative short lives for

individual cells over the lifetime of individual animals to longer periods for species and ecosystems

and finally to the planet as a biological system (the biosphere) with a much longer life span

(Costanza and Folke 1996). Different social and economic systems (and their subsystems) also have

very different expected lifetimes, which are shorter than the systems of the natural environment

they are interacting with. Nothing lasts for ever and it is unsatisfactory to define and discuss

sustainable development without taking the expected life-spans of the different subsystems into

8

account, which is often the case today. In a way sustainability is a notion in conflict with our

knowledge about fundamental laws of biological processes; in nature, there is basically no

sustainability, only change governed by the process of evolution.

The Brundtland report tries to avoid the problem of different lifetimes for different subsystems by

focusing on capabilities rather than concrete aspects of the Earth System. It is the capability to meet

the needs of the population that is supposed to be sustained over present as well as future

generations. This aligns the Brundtland formulation with most modern notions of economic

development. These are also formulated in terms of capabilities or ―freedoms‖, as in the well-

known texts of Amartya Sen (1999). It is, of course, a strength of the Brundtland definition of

sustainability that it fits so well into present mainstream development theory. It is not always

recognized, however, that this also makes it utterly anthropocentric. The only thing that matters is

human needs. The natural environment of the socio-economic system is supposed to have

(instrumental) value only if it contributes directly or indirectly to the fulfilment of human needs. It

is primarily regarded as natural resources, i.e. as input in the production process. In addition to this

it may provide ecosystems services, i.e. the benefits people obtain from ecosystems such as soil

formation, carbon sequestration, watershed protection, purification of water, wild food for example

game and spices, recreational and aesthetic services, etc.

The natural environment is obviously crucially important for the fulfilment of human needs.

However, it doesn‘t seem to have a value of its own in excess of this. There are no substantial or

intrinsic values connected to nature in the standard definition of sustainable development, only

instrumental values. In environmental ethic this is, as we will see below, a somewhat problematic

position. Furthermore, it risks making environmental policy myopic and short-sighted, since only

issues that in the views of present policymakers seem important for human well-being are put on

the agenda. Experience shows that these views change over time and that people seem to find it

difficult to think and identify with others over more than three generations.

3.2 The great divide between culture and nature.

As argued above, the mainstream notion of sustainable development implies that different

subsystems (social, economic and environmental) can be at least approximately defined and

separated from each other. It is often recognized that very precise empirically meaningful

definitions and borderlines are almost impossible to formulate, but the notion of sustainable

development still presupposes that it makes sense to distinguish the different subsystems from each

other. It is especially important to be able to distinguish between nature and society. Nature is

thought of as an environment to society and since no system that destroys its environment can

survive, sustainable development means that different processes in society, like production,

consumption and trade, should not allowed to wear down or outright destroy the natural

environment.

This separation between nature and society plays a role in the present sustainability discourse. It is

often connected to ‗modernity‘ and it has, allegedly, prevented us from understanding ecological

issues and the interactions between nature and society. It is commonly thought that the

sustainability issue was discovered only recently (say from the beginning of the 20th

century) by

first science and then environmental and ecological political movements. After this it became

increasingly important in the political and economic discourse. However, this picture is in many

9

ways incorrect. First, modernity is not responsible for constructing the ―great divide‖ between

nature and society. This idea and the corollary that nature has to be conquered and transformed into

an instrument for fulfilment of human needs and wants (regnum Hominis) is older than modernity.

Tamed nature as an ideal, prominently illustrated by the notion of a ‗garden‘, can for example be

found in the Bible‘s story of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden (i.e. not in the wilderness) and

gardening is as old as civilization itself. Thinkers of the antiquity had already established and

discussed the value of a conceptual division between nature and culture and modernity has from its

beginning included knowledge that emphasise that humans belongs to and are part of an order of

nature. Environmental reflexivity is much older than modern environmentalism (Bonneuil and

Fressoz 2016).

The great divide between nature and society is, thus, both old and much discussed and it, still, plays

a role in the sustainability discourse. It is however becoming less and less helpful for our thinking

about sustainable development. It obscures rather than clarifies the issues. Partly this is because

nature is a very complex word, which can mean very different things. Sometimes it refers to the

essential quality and character of something (the human nature, the nature of the bees, the nature of

football, etc.). Other times it refers to the material world itself, with or without human beings (as it

is studied by the natural sciences). In patent law, for example, there is a distinction between nature

and human invention. Phenomena of nature can‘t be patented but a firm can take a product of

nature, for example a seed, change its properties and then patent it. This distinction is supposed to

be clear-cut, but court praxis shows that it can be quite difficult to handle. Finally, very often the

word nature simply refers to a tract of land relatively untouched by human activity. This is basically

how nature is understood in the context of the great divide between nature and culture.

One reason for the decreasing conceptual usefulness of the nature/society divide is that phenomena

that used to be regarded as ―natural‖, acts of nature or resulting from processes in nature now have

turned out to be partly cultural and social phenomena. For example, famines have often been seen

as caused by crop failures resulting from droughts and described as natural disasters. However, it is

now clear that social institutions and economic policy to a very large extent determines if a period

of drought leads to a famine or not (Sen 1999, Davis 2001). The distinction between nature and

society has turned out to be blurred. Another reason is that an increasing proportion of the human

population lives in surroundings, which are clearly very much affected by human activity, for

example in towns and cities, or in intensely cultivated landscapes. Contacts with landscapes that are

only marginally untouched by human activity have become rare and as a consequence people are

redefining their notions of nature. It has become common to refer to any place where you can find

living plants or animals as nature. Parks, gardens and jogging lanes in the cities, Christmas tree

plantations and planted windbreaks in the countryside and other places far removed from anything

resembling wilderness now count as nature. This ―conceptual drift‖ is also present in environmental

science. For example, a recent publication from PNAS (2017) investigating potentials for reduction

of greenhouse gas emissions refer to conservation, restoration and/or improved land management

actions in agriculture and grasslands as natural climate solutions. The main reason, however for the

increasing elusiveness of the divide is the Anthropocene itself. Wilderness has become very rare

and it is becoming increasingly difficult to find land where human activities haven‘t significantly

interfered with ecosystems or vital biogeochemical cycles like the carbon-, nitrogen- and

phosphorus cycles. The divide between the man-made world and the natural world dissolves.

Nature is now anthropogenic.

10

To refer to nature when discussing environmental sustainability is becoming more and more empty.

Nonetheless, this is the way we tend to think about the natural environment to the socio-economic

system: The Holocene landscape is still identified with nature and essential aspects of this

landscape like forests, grasslands, rivers, lakes, swamps, stable weather patterns and so on must be

sustained if development of the human society is to be sustainable. But this is not very helpful. One

reason for this is that the Holocene landscape is to some extent an ―imagined landscape‖. It has

varied substantially over time and space and each new generation has a new image of it in their

minds. Another and more basic reason is that we already are in transition from the Holocene to the

Anthropocene. The whole landscape is anthropogenic and the Holocene can‘t be used as a baseline

landscape for sustainable development. It is necessary to be more precise. What exactly is it that

should be sustained in sustainable development?

3.3 Visions of sustainable development: What should be sustained and how could it be done?

Increasingly realizing that we no longer live in the Holocene seems to give rise to new images of

sustainable development, of what it is and what it could and should be. In the discourse, it is

possible to identify a number of partly overlapping ―visions‖ of sustainability in the Anthropocene.

Each of the visions is connected to more or less precise ideas about what it is that should be

sustained and about possible instruments for this.

Sustain economic growth: In the first and most conservative or mainstream vision it is economic

growth, often with an adjective like ―green‖ or ―clean‖, that should be sustained. Growth continues

to be the most important goal, trumping everything else. It is supposed to be compatible with and

partly also a precondition for high environmental standards if accompanied by well-designed

regulations and policies supporting development and utilization of green technologies. The relative

focus on how green growth should be may change with the rate of growth, being strong when the

economy grows fast and weaker when the economy slows down and unemployment rises. Such a

relaxed approach to environmental sustainability is regarded as acceptable since it seen as a quite

long-term issue. This vision may be regarded as a crude version of another slightly bolder vision.

Sustain the Holocene. Here sustainable development is strongly linked to commonly hold images of

the ―Holocene landscape‖ referred to above. Human activities have resulted in economic growth,

population growth, urbanization, globalization, and increased use of natural resources and energy.

Degradation of air, soils, forests, fresh water resources, habitats, biodiversity, the nitrogen and

carbon cycles, etc. have followed. There are different ways of listing and describing the effects of

the human activities but the core idea is that the basic aspects of the Holocene landscape is

changing and the health of the biosphere is threatened. Sustainable development then implies that

crucial Holocene landscape characteristics must be preserved through a number of defensive

measures: Limit climate change, stop the loss of biodiversity, protect specific landscapes like

tropical rainforests, coral reefs, mangroves, etc. This vision differs from the first one primarily by a

much more active and many-faceted environmental policy and much a stronger climate policy.

Economic growth is not necessarily a problem but the structure of the economy has to reflect the

―needs‖ of the environment and the biosphere much more than it does today.

A stronger and more ambitious version of this vision may be formulated as sustain desirable

Holocene-like conditions (Donges et al 2017). The idea is that taking departure from an Earth

System science approach it is possible to formulate rather precisely a number of ―planetary

11

boundaries‖. These boundaries delimit a ―safe operating space‖ for human activities which defines

the Holocene-like landscape conditions that should be sustained. The Stockholm Resilience Center

has pioneered the research along these lines and identified and quantified 9 planetary boundaries:

climate change, novel entities, stratospheric ozone depletion, atmospheric aerosol loading, ocean

acidification, biogeochemical flows, freshwater use, land system change, and biosphere integrity.

Two of these boundaries – climate change and biosphere integrity - have been identified as crucial

since each of them on its own has the potential to drive the Earth System into a new state. To keep

humanity within the safe operating space a broad spectrum of policies are necessary, including deep

institutional changes addressing both social inclusion and global governing of crucial environmental

issues. The vision of ―sustaining desirable Holocene like conditions‖ is, like the ―sustain the

Holocene‖ vision, anchored in the Holocene landscape and uses the Holocene stability as a lead star

for policy making, but it is more activist and forward looking. Anticipating negative environmental

consequences of human activities is a crucial part of the Earth System based analysis, while

designing and implementing policy responses also calls for insights in social sciences.

While the third vision described above relies on the ability to identify and mitigate environmental

threats rather precisely, the fourth vision – sustain the health of the biosphere – focuses broadly on

preconditions for biodiversity and evolution. There should remain enough nature to sustain biotic

integrity. That means less concern for a managed planet and more for the inherited biosphere. This

has been formulated in the following way: ―The ―sustainable biosphere‖ model gives priority to a

baseline quality of natural environment. In any ethical environmental governance, the economy

must be worked out ―within‖ such a policy for environmental quality objectives (clean air, water,

stable agricultural soils, attractive residential landscapes, forests, mountains, rivers, rural lands,

parks, wildlands, wildlife, renewable resources). Winds blow, rains fall, rivers flow, the sun shines,

photosynthesis takes place, carbon recycles all over the landscape. These processes have to be

sustained. The economy must be kept within an environmental orbit.‖ (Holmes Rolston III 2015).

This means a partial shift from anthropocentric to eco-centric focus in environmental policy:

Preserve a variety of basic landscape types and specific biotopes. Protect soils, forests, freshwaters,

etc. Keep the biosphere in a state so that it can support a rich variety of life forms and continued

evolution.

There is also a geo-engineering vision: sustain the Anthropocene. In this vision humankind

embraces a new role of Earth System managers. The idea that we have an obligation to sustain

biodiversity for its own sake is scrapped in favor of only taking care of eco-systems that have a

value to people. The ambition is to take on ―the design and management of novel ecosystems that

provide valued eco-services (e.g. carbon sequestration) yet bear little resemblance to historical

landscapes‖ (Minteer 2012). The argument is that since ecosystems in the Anthropocene are already

anthropogenic i.e. hybrids of culture and nature, they should (and could) be planned and managed

by society. Take climate change as an example. Scientists are already developing different types of

―geoengineering‖ technologies, which, supposedly, can be used to reverse global warming (The

Royal Society 2009). Carbon dioxide may be removed from the atmosphere in different ways. For

example, carbon absorbing materials could be mined and spread out or tipped into the oceans and

plants could be grown to absorb carbon from the air, which then could be captured and stored.

Another approach is to intercept or reflect some of the heat radiation from the sun. This might be

done by spraying seawater into the air and by spraying sulphur into the stratosphere. The ―sustain

the Anthropocene‖ vision may perhaps be described as including a maximum risk and radical

uncertainty strategy to sustainability. It relies heavily on technology push policies without much

consideration for the connected distributive and institutional issues.

12

Even if geoengineering is the main idea in the ―sustain the Anthropocene‖ vision engineering that

changes the meaning of human life itself (human-engineering), and thus its relations to the natural

environment is, increasingly, accompanying it. This may have drastic consequences. Biodiversity is

crucially important in the ―sustain the biosphere‖ vision described above. This is because it is

fundamental for biological variety, which keeps the ability to adapt to environmental change open.

But Harari (2015) mentions three ways in which technological change may replace natural selection

with something quite different: Biological engineering, cyborg engineering (i.e. combinations of

organic life and inorganic, mechanical parts) and engineering of inorganic life (i.e. computer

programs that can evolve by themselves). Adding these kinds of engineering to geoengineering

makes the Anthropocene even more unpredictable and the meaning of the notion sustainable

development completely loses its substance.

3.4 Governing the Earth System?

The view of planet Earth as a total system of interacting subsystems was pioneered by Kenneth

Boulding (1985). His analysis included systems of very different kinds and time scales and was

groundbreaking in its new understanding of the interactions between social, biological, chemical

and physical systems. Today his contribution is not so often recognized as it should be in the new

surge of system thinking in the sustainability discourse related to the Anthropocene.

The Anthropocene notion was introduced by geologists but it was soon picked up by environmental

science and social science. Even if the chronostratigraphic discussion about if and when the

Anthropocene started may seem a bit irrelevant for social sciences, it is, we think, crucial to take the

interactions between biogeophysical and socioeconomic forces on board when discussing

sustainable development. The notion of the world as a total system and the insights of Earth

Systems science are fundamental in this context. Traditionally, the Earth System is described as a

total system in which the biosphere, the cryosphere, the hydrosphere, the atmosphere and the

lithosphere constitute interacting subsystems. This may be an adequate model for the geological

epochs before the Anthropocene. Now, however, human activity has become the major driver of

Earth System change and the global socioeconomic system and its interaction with the biological

and physical Earth System have to be included in the Earth System.

The task has been described as understanding these interactions and develop strategies and methods

for governing the system within the normative context of sustainable development (Bierman et al

2010). Terms like ―governing (or managing) the Earth System‖ and ―governing the Anthropocene‖

have become common. But governing the Earth System in the Anthropocene sounds like

anthropocentric hubris (Regnum Hominis). In any case it won‘t be easy. The biogeophysical and

the socio-economic systems have mainly been studied in very different scientific domains that don‘t

communicate very much with each other. This means that the interactions between these systems

are poorly understood. The Earth System is characterized by social-ecological feedbacks, which

may lead to non-intuitive tipping points in vital subsystems and seems very difficult to model.

Furthermore, the increasing rate of change of the Earth System, which is a hallmark of the

Anthropocene, implies that the normative framework for governing the system, i.e. ―sustainable

development‖, also change. As showed above it is not totally clear what it is that should be

sustained. Add to this a lack of institutions for Earth System governance, problems of agency and

accountability, conflicts of interest and conflicts of distribution of wealth and power, etc. and any

13

ambition of managing or governing the Earth System from a sustainable development point of view

(or for that matter any point of view) seems out of reach in a foreseeable future. However, if Earth

System science is right about the complexity, instability, unpredictability (because of numerous

feedback loops and tipping points) and fast rate of change of the Earth System and if the

experiencers from social sciences of a high degree of unpredictability and non-governability of the

world economy continues to hold, then some kind of basic policy approach for ―navigating the

Anthropocene‖ is required.

If the term ‗navigating the Anthropocene‘ is to be meaningful it should not be about navigating in

the sense of applying reliable methods for sailing across a sea from a known point of departure to a

known point of destination. It would rather be about developing skills and techniques (like

Odysseus?) to sail on a sea the size of which you don‘t know, with a very vague idea of the

destination, with unfamiliar weather conditions and where different kinds of nameless monsters

may lurk. To navigate the Anthropocene includes to negotiate a way through the transition between

the Holocene and the Anthropocene and to go on adapting to continuing and unavoidable change

and high levels of uncertainty – expecting the unexpected. Navigating the Anthropocene requires a

capability approach. Capability to identify planetary boundaries and to adapt behavior in order to

stay within them. Capability to adapt to faster rates of change of the environment than usual.

Capability to adapt to unexpected outcomes of Earth System dynamics. Our capacity to navigate the

Anthropocene comes from the diversity (in cultures, ideologies, values, information, knowledge,

learning, etc.) and not from a bio-geo-engineering Anthropos. Earth System science has to be

developed and better communication between social and natural sciences is needed.

The lead star is not to escape from the Holocene crisis into a forever sustainable world liberated

from geo-history. It is something more demanding - to live within a continuing crisis and struggle to

influence its course. In fact, we have to move away from the idea of sustainability towards

ecological pluralism and reconnection with the biosphere, i.e. working for the survival of complex,

plural ecosystems. Embracing compassion and empathy for the grizzly bears in the age of

uncertainty and unpredictability. Biodiversity is a basic quality since it is the precondition for the

dynamics and change, which constitutes the biospheres capacity to evolve and survive. This means

that a variety of ecosystems and societies and basic resources like habitats, soil, forests and fresh

water reserves need to be uphold.

The Anthropocene is here and it can‘t be undone. There is no way back to the Holocene stability.

The change in our way of thinking about sustainability and the new development approach that is

needed has is still very far away. Maybe the first that needs to be done is writing the history about

how the Anthropocene happened including the conflicts, institutions, actors, wars, consumerism,

globalization, etc. in order to get a better understanding of the character and seriousness of the

problem ahead.

4. The need for an environmental ethics for the Anthropocene.

That society is still largely unprepared for many of the technical, institutional and political

challenges of the Anthropocene is reflected by ethical unpreparedness. When society and its natural

environment become more and more intertwined, new ethical issues are raised – but with a

significant time lag. The American environmentalist Leopold (1949) observed that ―there is as yet

14

no ethics dealing with man‘s relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it …

The land ethics simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to in addition to people also

include soils, waters, plants and animals, or collectively: the land‖. He sums up the land ethics in

the following often quoted way: ―A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability

and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise‖

The relevance of Leopold‘s land ethic is increasing in the Anthropocene. It may be seen as an early

reaction to this in the sense that its sees people and societies as interwoven with and not separate

from nature. But preservation of local biotic communities, which has been interpreted as the main

heritage from Leopold, is not any longer a sufficient reaction. Global environmental problems (like

climate change and biodiversity loss) are connected to overexploitation of the ―global commons‖,

(like the biosphere, the atmosphere, and the oceans), which can‘t any longer be seen primarily as

sources and sinks to the economic system but have to be recognized as preconditions for human

civilisation as such. This means that there are problems of collective action within and between

nation-states emanating from, for example, prisoner‘s dilemma situations and free riding behaviour

(Williston 2015). To cope with this there is a need for ethical considerations.

The present ethical deficit is aggravated by a lack of awareness and identification of environmental

problems. Vetlesen (2015) calls this a ―denial of nature‖. Nature has become artificial and lost its

meaning to many people. Humans do not any longer think of themselves as part of something

bigger than us. According to Vetlesen anthropocentrism is a hallmark of the Anthropocene.

Everything is seen from the perspective of humans and aspects of nature like plants, animals and

ecosystems have no intrinsic value. They have instrumental value for human needs and wants,

which through their limitless character take precedence over everything else. Animals, plants, and

ecosystems may in addition to their instrumental value also have some substantive value, for

example recreational value for people through zoos, parks, nature reserves, accessible open

landscapes and so on. But the dominant perspective is anthropocentric and nature is void of intrinsic

value.

Vetlesen (2015) sees the denial of nature as a process. It is sustained by a lack of personal, direct

experience with nature since we don‘t usually defend something we don‘t know from personal

experience. It is also driven by technical change. Modern technology, especially ICT, seems to

make everything immediately accessible everywhere. We lose some of our sense of time and space.

This changes the society–nature relationship. Our willingness to react against destruction of nature

decreases as our experiences with it decreases and it becomes more veiled and indirect.

Furthermore, the baseline for evaluating the state of environment drifts over time through a kind of

generational environmental amnesia. We tend to use the environment we grow up with as the norm

against which we evaluate the environmental degradation we encounter later in life. We accept what

seem to be reasonable small losses with the consequence that next generation starts from a lower

baseline.

There are, however, some countertendencies to the denial of nature. First, the widespread

inclination to regard animals as ―non-sentient‖ creatures, unable to suffer and in general quite

incomparable with humans, which goes back at least to the 17th

century and Descartes, is now

increasingly challenged. It is more and more recognised that animals are sentient in many ways and

have more advanced cognitive capacities than thought earlier. There is not much doubt any longer

that they can suffer and have other feelings as well. In many species animals relate to each other

and learn from each other. When animals become more like humans it becomes more difficult to

look upon nature as being purely instrumental for economic growth without any substantial value at

all.

15

Second, within environmental ethics different forms of ―ecocentrism‖ have gained influence. The

focus is more on wildlife than farm-life and it is more on species, habitats and ecosystems than on

individual animals. Environmental ethics has become quite complex and there is a scale of positions

from pure ‗anthropocentrism‘ to extreme ‗ecocentrism‘ (Garner 2015). Anthropocentrism in this

context means that environmental sustainability should be pursued only when it benefits humans.

Ecocentrism on the other hand means that intrinsic values can be found in nature regardless of

human benefits or even human presence. Such values are not primarily connected to individual

animals but rather to species and ecosystems. This position is usually tracked back to Aldo

Leopold‘s ―Land Ethic‖, later developed further by for example Baird Callicott (1989). Moderate

ecocentrism, which lately seem to have gained some influence, can be regarded as a counterforce to

the denial of nature.

The question of intrinsic versus instrumental value of aspects of the natural environment is quite

complex. It is true that the value of the environment can‘t be considered without considering its

impact on human lives. Take the example of small pox eradication. Biodiversity has been reduced

but we don‘t think that the environment has become poorer because the smallpox virus has been

wiped out. The value of the environment can‘t be divorced from the lives and needs of people. But

to see people only in terms of their needs is not enough. People certainly has needs, but they also

have values. Especially they cherish their ability to reason, appraise, choose, participate and act. In

doing so, however, we have moral responsibilities. For example, since we are enormously more

powerful than other species we have obligations to them. When thinking about the relations about

people and the natural environment it is important not to have a narrow view of peoples‘ identities

and for example regard them as primarily consumers of goods and services. There is no

contradiction in valuing the preservation of a specific species, for example a certain frog living in

some parts of Fælleden in Copenhagen, even if it has no significant effect on our living standard.

We may strongly value specific ecosystems even if they have (seemingly) nothing much to do with

human living standards (Sen 2009).

Third, ―animal welfare‖ in agriculture has become a political issue in some countries. Farm animals

pose specific ethical problems. The ways cows, pigs and chicken are treated in their roles as inputs

in a process of production become morally disturbing when you start to look upon them as sentient

and in many ways intelligent. Even if domesticated animals have their roots in nature the value

issues connected to them have gradually been separated from how we think about wild animals.

Farm animals are let down by almost everyone. The discussion of animal welfare in agriculture is

so far mostly about the physical health and condition of the individual pig or cow without much

regard for their species-specific behaviour in terms of genetically based needs for space, activity,

bonding with other animals, herding and so on. Even so the fact that animal welfare is becoming a

moral and political issue is connected to the increasing importance of environmental ethics.

To handle the ―expected unexpected‖ and proliferating environmental problems in the

Anthropocene we need ethical consideration to prepare us for at least five types of problems. First,

we need environmental ethics to balance between anthropocentrism and ecocentrism in

environmental policy. Related to this, we also need help in finding pragmatic and undogmatic

solutions to the many problems of animal welfare in modern food production. Second, since the

costs and benefits of environmental change are unevenly distributed and much environmental

protection has to be internationally coordinated, we need an ethic to address relations between the

global prosperous and the global poor. Third, present generations of people need to engage more

actively in a communication with imagined future generations. Taking up the perspective of future

generations looking back at what we did to the biosphere may act as a moral constraint on present

actions (Williston 2015). Fourth, the Anthropocene has developed into a situation where we have

16

knowledge and capacity to interfere deeply with the natural environment but without knowledge

about the full consequences. We can‘t separate the workings of the socioeconomic and

biogeophysical systems and we need an ethic to define acceptable and non-acceptable interventions

in the systems (Williston 2015). Finally, we need to handle these ethical questions without

preventing the innovativeness that is a precondition for keeping the systems within the planetary

boundaries. The ethic for the Anthropocene needs to support creativeness and innovation as part of

the solution and not as part of the problem.

The present lack of ethical preparedness for the Anthropocene is based in a complacent narrative of

an imagined world of non-sentient animals, well-behaved climate change, super-resilient

ecosystems, and very innovative humans, always able to solve all unexpected problems. When this

narrative becomes challenged by a more realistic one based on awareness of entering the

Anthropocene, Earth System thinking and new visions of sustainability, a new ethic for the

Anthropocene may also be developed. We can‘t, however expect this to come by itself. In a recent

book Michael Ignatieff (2017) takes up the question if globalization driven by increasing trade,

capital movements, travelling and migration is followed by a new global moral order, moral

globalization. Especially he discusses if stronger national and international support for human rights

is developing to cushion and counteract negative redistributive consequences of the globalization

process. The answer seems to be in the negative. For example, new information about the amount

and consequence of tax evasion following globalization indicate a certain lack of moral order.

Globalization has sharpened the conflict between universal moral principles and national and local

democratic self-determination. The Anthropocene narrative strongly invokes a picture of a single,

common world – the planet Earth described as a total system. Global environmental problems are

strongly connected to the economic and political globalization process. The need for moral

globalization in this area is obvious. The vision of sustaining a healthy biosphere introduced above

clearly has to include ideas of a global moral order. Environmentalism could be an example of

moral globalization, but in practice the process is paralyzed by conflicts between countries about

the distribution of responsibilities, instruments, costs and benefits.

5. Denial

To realize that we live in the Anthropocene doesn‘t necessarily mean that we accept it or want to

react to it. Denial seems to accompany the Anthropocene at least in some countries and population

segments. Not even supposedly objective and unbiased organizations like universities are free from

a kind of Anthropocene denial. In the field of economics for example, topics like sustainability,

climate chance, inequality, migration and, especially, the relation between these are either absent in

basic textbooks or at best granted minor appendices. Studying the relation between the economic

system and the Earth System is not part of the discipline. This ―Grand Challenge deficit‖ is

mirrored in the relatively small volume of research at economic departments dealing with

sustainability issues. This is not because of an information deficit, regarding how important

planetary boundaries and the risk of transgressing them are for humanity. It is rather a reflection of

what economics traditionally sees as its main topic, i.e. what economics ―is about‖. In ‗economics‘

the main challenge remains how to achieve static and dynamic efficiency, i.e. how to allocate given

resources efficiently and how to keep production and productivity growing.

One reason often mentioned for the neglect of grand challenges is the huge increase in enrollment

of university students in OECD countries in recent decades. This has led to an increase in private

funding of universities. Education in business and economics in most universities therefore tend to

aim at jobs supporting and promoting growth and competitiveness of society and firms. In countries

17

where universities are to a high degree publicly funded, politicians mirror this request. Education

should be ―useful‖; it should contribute to economic efficiency, growth and productivity.

Increasingly, higher education is considered as a factor enhancing competitiveness at all levels from

firms to nation-states. A similar mechanism also holds, more broadly, for university research. Not

only relative higher private funding but also demand from governments request research to support

growth and productivity. As long as economic growth is the main political imperative, education

and research will reflect this.

The changing funding structure and the movement away from Humboldtarian universities is not,

however, the only reason for the relative neglect of ―Grand Challenges‖ in education and research.

Increasing specialization in science may also play a role. When disciplines grow they tend to split

up into sub-disciplines. Academic careers then depend on formulating and answering specific

questions within narrow fields naturally neglecting the broader issues. We think that also

‗Innovation Studies‘ exemplifies this development. Although innovation research is

multidisciplinary in essence, it is now gradually aligning with logics and scientific quality criteria

from mainstream economics and management studies. As innovation scholars very well know, a

complex system cannot be adequately described by dividing it into subsystems. Murray Gell-Mann

(2005), a Nobel Laureate in physics, provocatively put it this way: ‖People must get away from the

idea that serious work is restricted to beating-to-death a well-defined problem in a narrow

discipline, while broadly integrative thinking is relegated to cocktail parties. In academic life, in

bureaucracies and elsewhere, the task of integration is insufficiently respected‖.

Psychological and socio-psychological factors blocking for integrating grand challenges may also

be important, especially those related to climate change. While most research on ‗denial‘ has been

in psychology, e.g. how people develop different kinds of defense mechanism, Kari Marie Norgaard

(2011) shows that from a sociological point of view denial is produced by social interactions

affected by social norms. In many societies, social norms tell you to be optimistic, successful and

maintain control. This, sometimes, leads to feelings of fear and helplessness. The conflict between

emotions and norms leads to emotion management strategies such as ―don‘t think too far ahead‖ or

―focus on something you can do‖. Another group of emotions is guilt and identity threats (fear of

being insufficient as a person). People in the North may for example feel that they are responsible

for global warming. Here (again related to climate issues) the corresponding emotional norm is to

be proud (of what your country does). This contradiction leads to a strategy of perspectival

selectivity: ―we (my country) are not as bad as (all) the others‖; ―we are a minor player in the game

so it doesn‘t matter what we do‖. Although widespread in the population, Norgaard finds these

emotion management strategies used more frequently by educators, men and public figures. This

may also be a factor behind the denial of the big challenges of our time.

The Anthropocene denial we can observe in research and education is, of course, not limited to

these realms, but, rather, a reflection of broader phenomena in society. A number of things may

explain why society at large seems to lack the ability to react adequately to the contemporary grand

challenges. There are many examples of societies that have mobilized their resources to resist

extreme danger for example in situations of war. But the dangers accompanying our trespassing of

planetary boundaries are anonymous in character and materialize rather slowly. This gives room for

―landscape amnesia‖ as discussed in section 4 above (Diamond 2005, Vetlesen 2015)

Another possible mechanism for Anthropocene denial is to fall back on false analogies to what may

have worked before. One such false analogy is that since societies always have been able to solve

their environmental problems before there is no reason to doubt that this will be done also in the

future. Technological advancements and resource substitution will be enough, and besides, there is

18

no reason to rush into premature solutions since the environment always must be balanced against

the economy. Jared Diamond (2005) shoves that this widespread belief is indeed false and gives

many examples of environmentally induced collapses of societies.

Adequate responses to grand challenges may also be blocked by clashes of interest between

different stakeholders and by the fact that the people who are in the strongest positions to react

often are the ones who are least affected by the problem, at least in a short- and medium-term

perspective. Furthermore, standard reasons for suboptimal behavior identified in economic theory

(such as free riding, prisoners‘ dilemma, and tragedy of the commons) may also block effective

counteraction.

Finally, an important reason for inadequate response to the challenges which accompany the

Anthropocene is that large groups of people tend to stick to old values, which may have been

socially beneficial before but now turn into the opposite. Individual choice and maximization of

consumer satisfaction at the micro level and highest possible economic growth on the macro level

may have worked well as basic values supporting increasing levels of living as long as human

activities didn‘t trespass the planetary boundaries. Now the same values tend to undermine adequate

response to the grand challenges of our time. As discussed in section 4 above the value system in

contemporary high-income countries is still underdeveloped in relation to the changes brought

about by the Anthropocene.

One thing is why and how individuals as well as firms are pressed by both social norms and

contexts of competition to disregard or even deny the great challenges of our time. Quite another

thing is how and why the political system of a whole country fails to rise above the level of

competing individuals and firms and meet the challenges. The responsibility to meet the great

challenges is, necessarily, a political responsibility. It seems that this responsibility is avoided by

national governments, that see themselves as pressed and bound by international competition and

tend to pass on the problems to an, as yet non-existing, global level of decision-making.

6. An Unpretentious Conclusion

The arguments in this final section are somewhat speculative and loose. They may be regarded as

input to a discussion rather than conclusions in the normal sense. That‘s why we call the conclusion

unpretentious.

We have shown that the notion of sustainable development tends to lose its meaning when the Earth

System moves from the Holocene into the Anthropocene. It is futile to cling to a vision of

sustaining what is irrevocably changing. It might be better to develop a new vision of how to cope

with radical changes without endangering vital properties of the Earth System. Such a vision should

include both a selection and description of vital Earth System characteristics and basic values to be

defended in a long-term perspective. It should also include medium-term goals concerning

development of freedoms and capabilities in the sense these terms are used in economic

development theory i.e. including both substantive and instrumental values. The vision should apply

for the world as a whole as well as for its interacting individual countries.

Within such an overall vision (maybe something like the vision of ―sustaining a viable biosphere‖

presented in section 3.3 above) a more concrete and detailed political-economic strategy should be

formulated and constantly reformulated. If we use the term ‗navigate‘ in the flexible and open sense

19

described above we may formulate a strategy for navigating the Anthropocene. Such a strategy

would walk on two legs:

1. Prolong the Holocene stability as far as seems feasible: Develop a broad spectrum of

technical and institutional innovation in a prolongation of a learning and innovation

approach to development.

2. Increase the capabilities to adapt to the Anthropocene by developing institutions and

policies to care for, or nurture, a diversity of habitats, ecosystems and basic resources of

nature, i.e. care for the health of the biosphere. This also means to reveal the mechanism of

Anthropocene denial and support development of an environmental ethic for the

Anthropocene

The strategy would have at least three parts: It would describe the main problems to attend to, the

basic approach for attacking the problems, and the type of solutions strived for.

The Problems. The first part is a description and public reasoning of the main problems or ―grand

challenges‖ to address:

1. Inequality in terms of income, wealth, power, access to information, learning and

knowledge.

2. financial instability,

3. population growth and migration

4. climate change,

5. loss of biodiversity

6. soil degradation

7. and in general terms the transition from the Holocene epoch to the Anthropocene.

The Approach. The second part is a discussion (including public reasoning) of the basic approach

(main policy methods, policy perspectives) in meeting the challenges:

1. Capability building

2. Experimentation

3. Adaptation, acclimatization

4. Public reasoning about ethics for the Anthropocene

5. Support for ―ordinary virtues‖ (Ignatieff 2017)

The Solutions. The third part consists of a description and discussion (including public reasoning)

of the major types of ―instruments‖ that may be used to address the challenges:

1. Reformed and new institutions

2. New (or improved) technologies. Breaking out of old trajectories and giving new directions

to the processes of learning and innovation. (Lundvall 2016).

3. Policies for income generation and distribution

20

In an implementation of the third part of the strategy innovation and innovation policies will get a

major responsibility. The ability to adapt and react to the grand challenges will have to draw heavily

on capabilities for knowledge creation and utilization. Many kinds of innovation will be needed, but

it seems likely that institutional innovation will be even more important than technical innovation.

Technical innovations create new possibilities, but if these improve the lives of people or not

depends on institutions. New technologies may present themselves as solutions to problems caused

by nature (natural disasters), but if they will in fact be used to reduce human suffering will depend

on institutions and policies. For example, the telegraph and the railroad, new to the Indian continent

in the late 19th

century, were believed to prevent starvation to follow from crop failures caused by

drought. Information about crop failure in one region could quickly be sent to surplus regions and

food could be shipped by railroad to the starving people. But this was not what happened during the

repeated famines in 1876-1878, 1888-1891 and 1896 1902. Quite the contrary, the telegraph

informed about rising food prices in Europe and food was shipped out of India while people starved

to death beside the railroad tracks (Davis 2001). The problem was colonial policy and institutions

and not lack of technology and capital. Democracy, media, public reasoning, inclusion, equity, all

depending on institutions of different kinds, may together with policies for income generation and

redistribution help societies to overcome the niggardliness of nature and use new technologies to

safeguard or improve peoples‘ living standards. This general lesson may prove valuable also for

navigating the Anthropocene.

References

Anderson, B., 1983. Imagined communities : reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism 5.

impr., London: Verso.

Angus, I., 2015. When Did the Anthropocene Begin and Why Does It Matter? Monthly Review,

67(4), pp.1–11. Available at: http://archive.monthlyreview.org/index.php/mr/article/view/MR-

067-04-2015-08_1.

Arndt, H.W., 1987. Economic Development. The History of an Idea., Chicago and London: The

University of Chicago Press.

Arndt, H.W., 1978. The Rise and Fall of Economic Growth: A Study in Contemporary Thoughts,

Melbourne: Longman Chesire.

Baird Callicott, J., 1989. In defense of the land ethic - Essays in Environmental Philosophy, SUNY

Press.

Barnett, V., 2008. Russian Émigré Economists in the USA. In Zweynert, Joachim and Vincent

Barnett,(eds.) Economics in Russia : Studies in Intellectual History,. Taylor and Francis.

Biermann, F. et al., 2010. Navigating the anthropocene: The Earth System Governance Project

strategy paper. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 2(3), pp.202–208.

Bonneuil, C. & Fressoz, J.-B., 2016. The Shock of the Anthropocene, The Earth, History and Us,

Verso.

Boulding, K.E., 1985. The world as a total system, Beverly Hills, London, New Delhi: Sage

Publications.

Brundtland, G.H., 1987. Our Common Future: Report of the World Commission on Environment

and Development,

Chesworth, W., 2010. Womb, Belly and Landscape in the Anthropocene. In I. P. Martini & W.

Chesworth, eds. Landscapes and Societies Selected Cases. Springer, pp. 25–39.

Costanza, R. & Folke, C., 1996. The structure and function of ecological systems in relation to

21

property-rights regimes. In Hanna, Susan S., Folke,Carl and Mäler, Karl-Göran (eds.): Rights

to nature - Ecological, economic, cultural, and political principles of institutions for the

environment. Washinngton D.C., Covelo: Island Press.

Crutzen, P., 2002. The anthropocene. Journal de physique IV France, 12, pp.1–5.

Davis, M., 2001. Late Victorian Holocausts. El Nino Famines and Making of the Third World,

Verso.

Diamond, J., 2005. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Viking Press.

Donges, J.F. et al., 2017. Closing the loop: Reconnecting human dynamics to Earth System science.

The Anthropocene Review, 4(2), pp.151–157. Available at:

http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2053019617725537.

Gaffney, O. & Steffen, W., 2017. The Anthropocene equation. The Anthropocene Review, 4(1),

pp.53–61. Available at: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2053019616688022.

Garner, R., 2015. Environmental politics, animal rights and ecological justice. In Kopnina, H.,

Shoreman-Ouimet, E. (eds.) (2015) Sustainability. Key Issues. London, New York: Routledge.

Harari, Y., 2017. Homo deus - a brief history of tomorrow, London: Vintage Books.

Harari, Y., 2014. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, London: Vintage Books.

Ignatieff, M., 2017. The Ordinary Virtues, Moral Order in a Divided World, Harvard University

Press.

Johnson, B., Lema, R. & Villumsen, G., 2017. Research on Innovation and Development in the

Anthropocene, Globelics Working Paper Series 2017-01.

Johnson, B. & Villumsen, G., 2017. Environmental aspects of natural resource intensive

development: the case of agriculture. Innovation and Development, pp.1–22. Available at:

http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2157930X.2017.1317915.

Kari Marie Norgaard, 2011. Living in Denial - Climate change, Emotions and Everyday Life,

Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

Leopold, A., 1949. A Sand County Almanac: And Scetches Here and There, Oxford: Oxford

University Press.

Lewis, W.A., 1955. The Theory of Economic Growth, Homewood: R.D.Irwin.

Lundvall, B.-Å., 2016. The Learning Economy and the Economics of Hope, Anthem Press.

Martini, I.P. & Chesworth, W. eds., 2010. Landscapes and Societies, Springer.

Minteer, B.A., 2012. Geoengineering and Ecological Ethics in the Anthropocene. BioScience,

62(10), pp.857–858.

Murray Gell-Mann, 2005. Murray Gell-Mann on ―Thinking About the Future—The Big Picture‖ »

Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future | Boston University. Available at:

http://www.bu.edu/pardee/9-27-05/.

Rolston III, H., 2015. Environmmental ethics for tomorrow. In Kopnina, H., Shoreman-Ouimet, E.

(eds.) (2015) Sustainability. Key Issues. London, New York: Routledge.

Rosenberg, N., 1982. Inside the Black Box: Technology and Economics, Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Schmelzer, M., 2016. The hegonomy of Growth - The OECD and the Making of the Economic

Growth Paradigm, Cambridge University Press.

Schot, J. & Steinmueller, W.E., 2016. Framing Innovation Policy for Transformative Change :

Innovation Policy 3 .0, SPRU.

Sen, A., 2009. The Idea of Justice, Penguin Books.

Singularity University, 2017. Global Grand Challenges. Available at: https://su.org/about/global-

grand-challenges [Accessed November 22, 2017].

The Royal Society, 2009. Geoengineering the climate,

Tobin, J., 1964. Economic Growth as an Objective of Government Policy. American Economic

22

Review, 54(3), pp.1–20.

Vetlesen, 2015. The Denial of Nature, London, New York: Routhledge.

Williston, B., 2015. The Anthropocene Project- Introduction Climate Change, Oxford University

Press. Available at:

http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198746713.001.0001/acprof

-9780198746713.