What Happens If We Don't Take Nature For Granted? PDF

## CHAPTER 3 What happens if we don't take nature for granted? Simon Dalby ### The question FROM ENVIRONMENT TO BIOSPHERE ### Illustrative example CLIMATE CHANGE ### General responses HOW DO WE FRAME THE ISSUE IN TERMS OF GLOBAL POLITICS? ### Broader issues CHALLENGING CARBONIFEROUS CAPITAL...

## CHAPTER 3 What happens if we don't take nature for granted? Simon Dalby ### The question FROM ENVIRONMENT TO BIOSPHERE ### Illustrative example CLIMATE CHANGE ### General responses HOW DO WE FRAME THE ISSUE IN TERMS OF GLOBAL POLITICS? ### Broader issues CHALLENGING CARBONIFEROUS CAPITALISM ### CONCLUSION ### THE QUESTION FROM ENVIRONMENT TO BIOSPHERE We are part of a complicated biosphere: a thin layer of air, soil, ocean and life surrounding a small planet (Smil 2003). The food we eat, the water, and other things, we drink, the clothes we wear, the buildings we live in, the cars we drive, and yes, the sewage we flush away each day, are all essential to human life, and as such, matters that concern how we organise our lives and how we interact with each other. In other words they are very much a matter of politics even if they are frequently not thought about in quite this way. Environment is technically a word that means what surrounds something else. Originally the word 'environs' usually meant the area around a town. Updated in the twentieth century, it came to mean what surrounds humanity, the outside factors of air, land and water that provide the context for human living. Environmental discussion from the 1960s onwards focused in part on the human disruptions of parts of this environment. Oil spills and smoke, pesticide poisonings and chemical contamination combined with discussions of urban congestion and suburban sprawl to suggest that humanity was doing damage to the environment, and wasting resources in the process (Ward and Dubos 1972). This concern about wasting, or running out of, key minerals, fuel supplies and even food added to the worries about pollution. Conservation of resources linked up with the pollution discussions in this discourse of environment, which arrived on the political scene as a series of protest movements in developed countries in the late 1960s and 1970s (Sandbach 1980). Governments responded in various ways and most states now have environment departments; environmental movements became a new and powerful international political force (Wapner 1996). Seeing environment as separate - a question of nature outside cities, a matter of rural affairs or a distant concern - has gradually given way to understandings, however vague and imprecise, that we all live in a single interconnected biosphere. In the last few years this recognition has led to intense discussions about how we should understand our place in the world. The sheer scale of human activity means that we have effectively become a force of nature, changing the planet to such an extent that geologists are discussing what is now widely called a new period in earth's history, the Anthropocene (Angus 2016). The implications of this are profound for thinking about world politics, because although we have been slow to realise it, humanity has taken its fate into its own hands. Indeed, some of the earth system scientists who are thinking through how interconnected things are in the biosphere have suggested that we are living through a second Copernican revolution, one where once again our understanding of our place in the universe is being changed profoundly (Schellnhuber et al. 2005). Now we understand ourselves as nature, as part of the biosphere that we are rapidly changing. We aren't on earth; we literally are earth. Life isn't an afterthought on a rocky planet partly covered by oceans; it dramatically shapes the world, and the dominant life form now remaking the biosphere is industrial and urban humanity. Humanity, or at least the rich and powerful parts of us, are deciding what kind of a planet future generations will live in, and changing it in ways that are similar in scale to some of the massive extinction events of the ancient geological past (Kolbert 2014). ### ILLUSTRATIVE EXAMPLE CLIMATE CHANGE Over long geological time scales of the past, forests and other life forms have absorbed carbon dioxide from the air. Some of them, when they died, have been covered with silt and buried. There, over millions of years, various chemical processes underground have turned the organic matter into coal, petroleum, and natural gas. In the last few centuries humanity has been rapidly reversing this long-term trend. Now, by literally turning rocks into air - for that is what we are doing every time we burn coal to make electricity, drive a car with an internal combustion engine, or use fossil fuels in countless other ways - we are changing the makeup of the atmosphere and in the process changing the systems that drive the biosphere's climate and creating a new set of circumstances for humanity (McNeill and Engelke 2016). Environment is no longer something 'out there', separate from humanity, but something we are increasingly remaking by our actions. ### CAPITALISM AND INDUSTRIALISATION Climate change is especially important in any discussion of global politics, both because it has global ramifications and because its causes stem from how we collectively organise our contemporary urban society. While coal and, to a very small degree, petroleum have been used by people for thousands of years, it is only since the beginning of what is called the Industrial Revolution late in the eighteenth century that using them has begun to have a noticeable effect on the earth's atmosphere. Once the steam engine was put in motion, first in railway engines, then as the power system for steamships, the global economy rapidly became connected: 'Suddenly the price of wheat in Liverpool and the rainfall in Madras were variables in the same vast equation of human survival' (Davis 2001: 12). The substitution of fossil fuels for labour both dramatically changed the structure of British, and subsequently other, societies and simultaneously set in motion the accumulation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere while European imperialism linked other parts of the world into the new industrial economy. This whole process of what Lewis Mumford (1934) once called carboniferous capitalism - because the coal that powered industrial society came from the carboniferous period in geological history - was accelerated dramatically when petroleum was refined and oils and gases started being used for lighting, heating and then, crucially, in the internal combustion engines used to power cars and lorries. When one adds in the energy used in road, parking lot and bridge construction, a very substantial part of the energy used in contemporary society is directly related to automobiles and their infrastructure. Cars have become status symbols, recreational toys, temporary offices and much more than transportation in our lives. They are frequently advertised as instruments of the domination of nature and of freedom to go anywhere without consequences (Paterson 2007). They are key symbols of modernity. ### BOX 3.1 GROWTH AND THE ENVIRONMENT In the early 1970s some thinkers revived concerns usually linked to the name of Thomas Malthus that resources would run out, stopping economic growth. In the much-discussed report on the Limits to Growth, early computer projections about when resources would run out were coupled to pessimistic concerns about pollution, and the eventual collapse of industrial society was forecast (Meadows et al. 1972). The arguments about the limits to growth in the 1970s suggested that the planet was running out of essential resources so development would have to come to a halt one way or another. It also suggested that pollution would be a major cause of societal collapse. All of which suggested that economic growth couldn't go on indefinitely on a small planet. Vehement criticisms came from many who argued that the poor would be denied the benefits promised by economic development. Thus, to make environmental concerns palatable, discussions focused on a strategy to overcome the deleterious aspects of economic growth in terms of sustainable development. Designed to promote economic activity that would not deny future generations the necessities for their livelihood, sustainable development was the key theme in the widely cited final report of the World Commission on Environment and Development (1987) headed by Gro Harlem Brundtland, Our Common Future. The suggestion in its pages, that development had to continue to add to human wealth so as to deal with problems of poverty and all the social and health ills that came with it without destroying the global environment, became the core of the discussion about development and environment in the United Nations and provided the background for the huge Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Sustainable development continues to be the overarching framework for United Nations discussions of the future goals for humanity. In 2015 the United Nations adopted a series of sustainable development goals, and a long list of targets to be achieved by 2030, to focus development efforts in ways that will improve human wellbeing, reduce poverty, and extend both human rights and equity while, specifically in goal 13, dealing with climate change dangers under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, initially launched at the Earth Summit. But clearly this implies that assumptions of growth will have to be rethought quite fundamentally; an economic system that doesn't rely on ever greater use of resources, and fossil fuels in particular, has now become necessary if the next stage of the Anthropocene is going to be one in which humanity can flourish (Raworth 2017). Developing sustainability is now a priority! ### BOX 3.2 CLIMATE CHANGE CONTROVERSY In the last few years the public discussion about climate change has been noteworthy for its rancour, and a very noisy and visible group of pundits and think tank experts who have persistently disputed the findings of climate science, attempting to ridicule the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and reduce public confidence in other scientists who are raising the alarm about accelerating climate change. Much of the controversy is driven by political concerns in the United States in particular to constrain the role of government in regulating businesses, and the oil industry in particular. Many of the books denying the reality of climate change can be directly connected to a network of conservative foundations and think tanks (Oreskes and Conway 2010). Part of the problem has been repeated media practices of providing 'balance' to a story by interviewing one or two scientists who dispute some aspects of climate science and suggesting that these views are equally important as those of the vast majority of scientists that are doing the science and have no doubts that the planet is warming and that human disruptions of many natural systems are the cause (Boykoff 2011). Further difficulties come when media accounts simplify complicated scientific issues, arguing that science should provide certainties that it simply can't (Hulme 2009). Holding science up against such unrealistic expectations frequently allows claims to be made that there is a debate about whether climate change is real. This despite the fact that the vast majority of scientists actually doing the research, rather than those making comments in the media, have been tracking the changes in environmental systems for decades. What is much less clear is how the changes already set in motion will play out in coming decades, and with what impacts on particular people in vulnerable places, like low lying cities close to shore. But this is very different from claiming that change isn't happening, as numerous conservative politicians, and President Trump in particular, have done in the United States. ### BOX 3.3 GREENHOUSE GASES Carbon dioxide is a relatively large molecule among atmospheric gases, and large molecules trap infrared radiation, keeping the heat that would otherwise escape back into space in the atmosphere. Methane is an even more potent greenhouse gas; human activities have so far caused nearly a doubling of methane in the atmosphere, but it stays in the atmosphere a much shorter time than carbon dioxide. The CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) that are the cause of so much worry about ozone layer depletion are also very potent greenhouse gases. (The international agreement in the late 1980s to phase out the production of CFCs will also in the long run help reduce the amount of this greenhouse gas in the atmosphere [Soroos 1997].) Water vapour too is sometimes a powerful greenhouse gas. Cloudy nights in temperate climate zones are usually less likely to have frost than clear ones. But in daytime when those clouds reflect sunlight back into space they act to cool the surface. This makes water a very difficult gas to work into predictions of climate change. Other ironies of atmospheric change include the fact that while aeroplanes flying high in the atmosphere are pouring carbon dioxide into the air they are also emitting other polluting gases, or aerosols, that act to reflect sunlight and cool the earth's surface, which counteracts the warming of the carbon dioxide. This strange fact was confirmed by measurements over the United States in the few days after September 11, 2001 when air traffic was grounded. Likewise air pollution in Asia from fires and inefficient engine combustion is both a local health hazard and probably reducing the warming from the sun by its shading effects when it reflects sunlight, but ironically warming the air when the soot absorbs heat. ### Accelerating change and unpredictable effects Climate has been relatively stable for the last 10,000 years or so since the end of the last ice age. But mostly over this period of the planet's existence, climate has stayed within a fairly narrow range close to what we became familiar with before the 1980s. While some societies, perhaps most notably the Maya civilisation in the Americas, have possibly collapsed due to environmental change, this stable set of circumstances allowed for the emergence of agricultural societies and the beginnings of human civilizations (Diamond 2005). Now, numerous indications of climate change are becoming obvious, not only to scientists and those who use satellites and weather stations to monitor change, but also to birdwatchers who pay attention to bird migrations, gardeners and farmers who have to plant and harvest according to the seasons, not to mention the people who plan such things as winter snow removal budgets in many cities of the Northern Hemisphere. ### BOX 3.4 THE UN AND THE ENVIRONMENT The Conference on the Human Environment held in Stockholm in 1972 marked the first attempt by the United Nations to discuss global environmental matters in a comprehensive manner (Ward and Dubos 1972). While the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) was established in the 1970s to deal with environmental matters, it was not a major United Nations priority in the years that followed. Nonetheless in the 1980s UNEP was involved in the discussions about the global atmosphere, stratospheric ozone depletion, and the establishment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the scientific body that evaluates and summarises climate change science for governments. The early IPCC (see www.ipcc.ch/index.html) technical reports fed into the deliberations at the huge Earth Summit, the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), which was held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 (Chatterjee and Finger 1994). Among the agreements that came from this conference attended by most of the heads of state on the planet was the Framework Agreement on Climate Change (Soroos 1997). This in turn produced the much more talked about Kyoto Protocol late in the 1990s; an agreement that entered into force in 2005 but which has now been mostly overtaken by the Paris Agreement in 2015. But most of this remains a matter of regulating emissions, and frequently of intense arguments about how to allocate responsibilities, quotas and measurements. Neither the Kyoto Protocol nor the Framework Convention is a forum for planning global sustainable development or ensuring the rapid spread of technological innovations such as photo-voltaic cells, solar water heaters or green building designs. Even the December 2015 Paris Agreement on Climate Change remains mostly focused on environment, rather than on building a sustainable economy, although newer programmes like the clean development mechanism suggest that the United Nations is playing a more active role in building a green economy. The real test for the United Nations system and its ability to shape the future will be what comes in the next few years as the practicalities of the Paris Agreement come into play. This isn't a binding agreement or formal treaty, but rather a substantial series of national commitments that most states have agreed to work towards. Nationally determined emission reductions goals will be, if the agreement is followed, rolled out in coming decades with increasingly ambitious targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. While the commitments so far to govern fossil fuel use fall well short of those needed to keep the average global temperature rise under 2°C, much less the aspirational target of 1.5°C announced at Paris to ensure that ecosystems can effectively adapt to their new circumstances in the Anthropocene, at least most governments, with the exception of the Trump administration in Washington, now agree that these matters need urgent attention. ### GENERAL RESPONSES HOW DO WE FRAME THE ISSUE IN TERMS OF GLOBAL POLITICS? But how are we to understand all this politically? What modes of thinking might we invoke to think through these new circumstances? In this section, three different ways of thinking about this issue - drawing from environmental history, indigenous perspectives and geopolitics - address the question of whether human-centric, or perhaps more precisely, modern urban human perspectives, are all that are required. Looking back into history, we can see how the current ecological circumstances came about and come to understand in what senses our climate change predicament is really new. Looking outside Western thinking to the sometimes very different views from indigenous peoples who were conquered by modern societies provides an interesting contrast with modern understandings of environment. Finally, by looking at where fuels come from and the consequences of the waste products from their combustion, we can see where the problem lies and how power at the largest scale matters. ### ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY The crux of recent environmental history is captured in the title of one of the key texts in the field, Alfred Crosby's (1986) _Ecological Imperialism_, where matters of imperialism are linked directly to the ecological consequences of European conquest. Although it is frequently not thought of in these terms, the history of imperialism is all about changing landscapes and ecologies. Much of this is not done deliberately, but the introduction of horses and cattle in the Americas, not to mention rabbits to Australia, has dramatically altered the environments of these continents. In addition, growing wheat and other crops, as well as clearing large forests to make agricultural fields, involves a complete change of the plants and animals in areas where colonisation occurs. Looking to the huge changes wrought on the landscapes of North America, in particular in the nineteenth century, as what quickly started to look like an American empire spread rapidly across the continent, suggests clearly that what we now take for granted as 'the environment' is much more of an artificial construction than a natural entity. Widespread slaughter of the buffalo herds, the eradication of many bird species and the clearing of forests for cultivation of crops changed the ecology of the continent fundamentally. On the western frontier, beyond the area easily farmed, the 'wild west' became ranching country, the buffalo replaced by roaming cattle overseen by the ever-present 'cowboy'. This part of ecological imperialism has become part of popular American, and now global, culture where the Western has generated a genre of movies and books. The wilderness was enclosed, farmed, and above all rendered tame and safe for European settlement while Chicago grew into a city of stockyards and the centre of the meat industry (Cronon 1991). But this expansion of human control over environments, and the conversion of wilderness into tamed landscape, is a larger part of the human experience as agriculture has gradually eliminated or pushed hunter-gatherer peoples into marginal areas. It has been followed by the emergence of an urban civilisation, one that has expanded dramatically in the last century to appropriate minerals, fuel and land from the distant corners of the planet to supply essential materials to the cities (Dauvergne 2008). The human species, this colonising medium-sized mammal, has expanded its range to the whole planet, and the consequences are so dramatic that we are now shaping the evolution of the biosphere in new ways. ### INDIGENOUS PERSPECTIVES In the process, not only have animals and plants, trees, fish and birds been displaced and frequently simply annihilated, but indigenous cultures have also perished. Much of the expansion of European power, and its appropriation of land and resources through direct colonisation in the Americas and Australia, was done at the expense of the indigenous cultures that were there before Europeans encountered them. Indigenous perspectives on history make this clear. Many cowboy movies are about fighting 'Indians' in the wild west, a theme that reflects the fact that the native societies were caught up in the conquest and frequently fought back in the face of invasion. The cavalry didn't always get there in time. One of the key assumptions in the conquest of the Americas was that the land Europeans were entering was ‘empty', at least in the sense that it wasn't being farmed and used 'productively'. If native peoples were using the land they weren't doing so in ways that the European conquerors thought were significant, so the removal of the natives wasn't seen as a problem. The legal doctrine of _terra nullius_ literally specified the land as empty. Civilisation was about dominance and control over land and resources; the benefits of civilisation came only with the adoption of these modes of controlling the environment. The fact that indigenous peoples frequently had complicated and sophisticated understandings of their local ecosystems, and that they often harvested animals in ways that ensured their reproduction in the long term, was rarely understood by settlers. Native cosmologies in North America, and frequently in the case of indigenous peoples elsewhere, do not start with the assumptions of a humanity apart from nature. Living within ecosystems, native peoples frequently don't make that fundamental separation between people and everything else (LaDuke 1999). What 'modern' societies might designate as native religion, but what might be much better understood as an integral part of local cultures, frequently requires some notion of respect for the animals one captures and kills to eat. This is not a picture of an environment external to humanity to dominate and control, an external entity to mine and exploit for resources and commodities; it is seen as a place to inhabit, a home that provides the necessities of life and will continue to do so if cared for appropriately. Thus long-term consequences, and the possibilities of ecological renewal, are integral to the political considerations of native cultures. These connections between life and land are ignored by modern modes of thinking that reduce fecund ecologies to resources, and land to a commodity that should be exploited for short-term commercial gain. None of this is to take a romantic view of traditional societies. The assumption that native societies and environments were a paradise prior to the disruptions of colonisation is neither historically accurate nor politically helpful, but the dramatic contrast in cosmologies is useful in thinking about the assumptions of an external nature that can be managed in present circumstances. Native cosmologies challenge the separation of nature and society that modernity is based upon. ### GEOPOLITICS Looked at in the big picture, that of geopolitics and power at the global scale, the pattern of resource exploitation, and disruption of local ways of living continues as ever larger appropriations of resources are made to feed and fuel consumption in the metropoles. Nowhere is this more evident than in the case of petroleum, the substance that is at the heart of the problem of climate change, and a matter once again of geopolitics (Klare 2009). Because it is used so widely in contemporary society, petroleum has become an essential commodity. Some of the oil wells in current use are in remote places where indigenous peoples live. These peoples have been involved in numerous struggles against the environmental despoliation caused by wells and pipelines. Many of the oil production facilities on the planet are far from where the petroleum is refined and used. In the Persian Gulf region a struggle to control the oil trade has plunged local states and Western powers into conflict repeatedly. Violence comes with oil. It is valuable enough to fight over. Given its importance for the global economy, those who would control that economy are tied into struggles to control both the supplies directly and the profits that can be made from selling the products. American efforts in particular to control the petroleum supplies in the Gulf are tied directly into rivalries with Iran and formerly with Iraq (Bacevich 2016). But this is not a simple matter of the American government doing the bidding of the oil companies to protect their supplies. It's a much more complicated situation than that, not least because oil company profits go up when supplies are tight and prices rise. Here the most obvious contradictions in the global politics of our times become very evident. The violence involved in trying to control the petroleum trade is in fact a violence to perpetuate the production of a substance that is a direct threat to the stability of the planet's climate. Thus, America is at war in the Middle East in part to protect an unsustainable global society; it is fighting to maintain a way of life that is imperilling all our futures. In part it is doing so out of sheer inertia: things have long been done this way so they continue to be done this way. It's a mode of existence that simply doesn't think that environment matters that much. It perpetuates the assumption that environment is an externality to the important matters of human society, to the provision of commodities and status in particular. ### BROADER ISSUES CHALLENGING CARBONIFEROUS CAPITALISM We now have to think about environment, social change and geopolitics simultaneously to try to see how political economy links all of them together, tying the fate of marginalised people into the economic and security priorities of political elites in the metropoles. But we also need to think about arguments that challenge the continued operation of carboniferous capitalism and about how social change might happen if environment and the consequences of imperial geopolitics for indigenous peoples were taken into account. We can no longer operate on the assumption that there is a separation between us and the planet; there is no external nature that we can manipulate without having to deal with the consequences. The changing composition of the air makes this fact unavoidable; modernity has, as the phrase 'carboniferous capitalism' implies, been a matter of getting wealthy and dominating the planet too by burning things, mostly fossil fuels, to power our societies (Dalby 2018). Now, as climate change is making clear, the products of our combustion are coming back to haunt us as the atmospheric changes we have set in motion are showing up as climate change and the very worrying matter of oceanic acidification. There is no distant place we can safely put our waste, pollution or sewage. Neither can we ignore the consequences of our modes of consumption for the lives of marginalised people growing the crops we use or struggling with the disruptions caused by mines, oil wells and pipelines in many places (Dauvergne 2016). Despite the growing recognition of this as the appropriate starting point, and all the climate change negotiations over the last decade, the growth in the use of fossil fuels has continued apace. Asian economies are booming and the large economies of India and China in particular have seemed determined to catch up with Western models of urban carboniferous capitalism. Only in the last few years, partly spurred on by the 2015 Paris Agreement, have Asian policy makers begun to think seriously about renewable energy and the need to curtail combustion. Car ownership is rising rapidly; national pride is linked to the existence of national car production facilities in many states. This economic growth is still mostly based on petroleum fuels, following on from American, Japanese, and European practice rather than innovating with new fuels. Oil is still king. This is not surprising for developing economies where playing catch-up is the dominant mode of economic activity, but as oil becomes increasingly scarce and supplies are potentially disrupted by instabilities and wars in the Middle East, the wisdom of such a development strategy seems highly doubtful. If climate change is taken seriously this is doubly so. While environmental change isn't new in the human experience, as environmental historians have made clear, the potential for rapid shifts in climate makes numerous people vulnerable now in ways that are perhaps similar to the late nineteenth century when famine swept through parts of the European empires, in part because of the economic disruptions caused by the globalisation of the grain trade and the effects this had on regional agriculture (Davis 2001). If all this happens while hurricanes and droughts become more severe, there is a potential for major human disasters. Beyond that, the most worrisome dimension of environmental change is the potential for a dramatic flip in the climate system that radically changes the whole arrangement of climate zones. While no one expects a series of changes on the scale of the plot of the 2004 Hollywood disaster movie _The Day After Tomorrow_, the possibility of a very nasty climate surprise is of great concern, especially because there is little evidence that, at least at the moment, international political institutions could deal effectively with such an event. The political and economic arguments against tackling environmental change have usually asserted that change is simply too expensive. Only in the last decade have economists and politicians begun to take seriously the opposite and altogether more compelling argument, that it will be a lot cheaper to act now to reduce the dangers, rather than paying potentially huge costs later. As the Stern Report on climate change, the British government document that investigated in detail the costs of climate change, put it: 'we have never seen a market failure like this' (United Kingdom Treasury Department 2006). Which brings the discussion back to politics, and who should do what to deal with the 'failure' of the existing focus on economic growth to consider the consequences of our modes of life for the future, or for marginalised native peoples struggling to adapt to the influx of modernity on their lands and cultures. There is currently no mechanism in human affairs to decide on what should be produced, or how and where to ensure that humanity lives within its planetary boundaries. Global agreements on everything from ozone depletion through bans on the trade of endangered species to climate change are attempts to rectify this gap and keep us within our planetary boundaries. But mostly they look to limit damage rather than change modes of living so as not to do damage in the first place. Growth has for so long seemed like the key to everything, but measuring it in terms of gross national product or conventional economic measures is no longer appropriate in the Anthropocene (Gopel 2016). The focus in environmental efforts to deal with the worst excesses of industrial 'growth' is frequently on regulations and legislation that are highly technical matters worked out by experts in the industries being regulated. Reducing politics to such technical negotiations suggests that what matters are fine details about chemical formulae, trading quotas and industrial standards. The big questions about what kind of a society is best, how we might live together and what needs to be done to ensure the safety and wellbeing of our children and those in distant places too, are frequently squeezed out of discussion. But the sheer scale of human induced change means that these questions keep coming back; the politics of climate change are now simply unavoidable (Klein 2014). These questions have not been ignored by the business community or by regulators in Europe in particular over the last decade, where numerous initiatives have been taken to try to use market mechanisms to change economies so that they use less fossil fuel. To do so the policy has been to put a price on carbon, cap the overall amount of fuel that various sectors of industry and business can use and regulate the overall use of carbon-based fuels. Issuing carbon use permits, and allowing businesses to trade those that they don't use, should in theory encourage efficiency improvements, and allow efficient businesses to make extra money by selling their carbon credits on a market for such things. This 'climate capitalism' has begun to change how businesses in Europe in particular do things (Newell and Paterson 2010), but given the low price on carbon didn't generate the kind of progress its proponents initially hoped. There have been numerous attempts at extending these arrangements to the global scale, and while getting the pricing of carbon wrong in some cases hasn't generated the kind of fuel use reductions that advocates might have hoped for, clearly new forms of climate governance are emerging from these initiatives, ones that pose profound questions about politics in terms of where the sources of authority for making these kinds of decisions and regulations lie. ### CONCLUSION Facing major changes in the circumstances of human existence, which is what the climate change in particular, and the larger Anthropocene discussion in general, is all about, demands that different questions be posed, and the big issues of how to live collectively in a changing biosphere are discussed much more carefully. We clearly need institutions that arrange matters so that we produce the things we actually need to live well without completely disrupting natural cycles in the biosphere. Our existing political institutions have so far mostly failed to grapple effectively with the new circumstances of human existence, despite the frequency with which they invoke security to justify many things (Dalby 2009). Native cosmologies, and their insistence that we are all part of the cycles of life, might have many lessons to teach about how we reconsider those institutions and think about how to live well within a small, vulnerable biosphere. Ecological science too shows us that we are part of the environment, not the masters of it. It's not out there in the wild spaces distant from civilised cities; it's part of the systems of life that we have dramatically changed by our industries and our profligate use energy and materials. Climate change challenges many of the modern assumptions about politics. The whole modern mode of thinking, of managing an external environment to maximise the production of things, rather than human wellbeing, has shaped public administration and regulation in national and international discussions. Assuming that a stable nature will always be there for us is no longer a sensible assumption. Science has now made it abundantly clear that we are living in a biosphere that our actions are reshaping, and that now we need to rethink these modern assumptions if we are to shape the Anthropocene in ways that ensure human civilisation continues. Environment is no longer just a matter of pollution and resource constraints, parks and conservation. It is now a much more important matter, which enters directly into any discussion of how we should live, the key theme in the discussion of the Anthropocene, and what kind of politics is now needed to tackle matters of climate change, global inequality and development simultaneously (Klein 2014). New institutions and new ways of making decisions about what we make, and hence what kind of world we produce for future generations (Rockström and Klum 2015), need a whole lot more attention from politicians and scholars, But we can learn from history as well as from science. The indigenous focus on living within one's surroundings, inhabiting rather than controlling, is one valuable lesson. Another lesson is that distinctions between rural nature and urban civilisation are no longer useful when it comes to thinking about politics or public administration. A focus on the flows of material and energy in the biosphere becomes necessary; looking at the connections between things and people makes political responsibility for one's actions unavoidable in the Anthropocene. In short, starting from natural systems and thinking about the interconnections between our actions and distant places where the energy and commodities we use come from, rather than thinking from the viewpoint of modern consumers disconnected from the rest of the world where nature is taken for granted, makes life more complicated but in turn gives us a very useful perspective on global politics. ### FURTHER READING Vaclav Smil's (2003) guide to _The Earth's Biosphere_ is precisely what its title suggests and useful for the rest of the science that matters in discussing environmental politics. _The Anthropocene_ has been discussed widely; Iain Angus' _Facing the Anthropocene_ (2016) is especially clear on the key issues. Mike Hulme's book _Why We Disagree About Climate Change_ (Cambridge University Press 2009) is the essential guide to why climate change became so controversial. My own _Security and Environmental Change_ (2009) links the early versions of Anthropocene discussion to questions of vulnerability and the politics of avoiding disaster. Peter Dauvergne traces the global implications of consumption in his _Shadows of Consumption_ (2008) and the inadequacies of environmentalism for tackling the scale of contemporary problems in his _Environmentalism of the Rich_ (2016) while Christian Parenti discusses the convergence of neoliberal geopolitics and the practicalities of climate change in his _Tropic of Chaos_ (2011). Rockström and Klum's _Big World Small Planet_ (2015) emphasises the importance of technological innovation viewed in terms of ecological systems as the way to move forward while Naomi Klein's _This Changes Everything_ (2014) is passionate and persuasive about the importance of political action in numerous places to change the contemporary economic system into one that is both more just and which tackles climate change simultaneously. ### WEBSITES The rapidly changing science of global change is summarised by the International Geosphere Biosphere Program (IGBP) at www.igbp.kva.se/. The 2007 Nobel prize-winning Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) can be found at www.ipcc.ch/. The United Nations Environment Programme's Global Environmental Outlook programme monitoring environmental change round the world is online at www.unep.org/geo/. Real Climate, at www.realclimate.org/, is where scientists keep the general public up to date with the science of climate change. The World Watch Institute at www.worldwatch.org/ publishes numerous well-researched articles and reports on many environmental matters including climate change. The World Wildlife Fund publishes periodic useful summaries of the state of the world's ecosystems in its Living Planet Reports available at www.wwf.panda.org/. Matters of technical and political innovation are covered in the Anthropocene Magazine at www.anthropocenemagazine.org/. ### REFERENCES Angus, Iain (2016) _Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System_ (New York: Monthly Review Press). Bacevich, Andrew (2016) _America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History_ (New York: Random House). Bonneuil, Christophe and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz (2016) _The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History, and Us_ (London: Verso). Boykoff, Max (2011) _Who Speaks for the Climate? Making Sense of Media Reporting of Climate Change_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Chatterjee, Partha and Matthias Finger (1994) _The Earth Brokers: Power, Politics, and World Development_ (London: Routledge). Cronon, William (1991) _Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West_ (New York: W. W. Norton). Crosby, Alfred (1986) _Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe 900-1900_ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Dalby, Simon (2009) _Security and Environmental Change_ (Cambridge: Polity). Dalby, Simon (2018) 'Firepower: Geopolitical Cultures in the Anthropocene', _Geopolitics_ 23, 3: 718-42. Dauvergne,