A Critical Analysis of Human Impact on the Ecosystem

Introduction

Anthropocene refers to the current epoch of the ecosystem, reflecting significant climate change and degradation of ecosystem. Humans have become the dominant environmental force on Earth, and have destructively touched every terrestrial system. This essay will discuss the concept of anthropocene considering the figures of humans as a race, class and imperialist.

This essay will discuss the concept of anthropocene and its role with respect to the anthropogenic climate changes. Anthropocene has its roots to historical developments caused by humans, as the dominant force on this Earth. The capitalist system has arguably racialised human populations and environments. This essay will discuss the capitalism factor in understanding effects of reading anthropocene with racial aspect of capitalism. particularly in the area of environmental studies dissertation help.

The social metabolism with nature, such as the Industrial Revolution, might have caused anthropocene unintentionally. This essay will review anthropocene in the capitalist form of social relations and will attempt to identify value-directed social production that has caused any class relations friction. This essay will attempt to understand whether decommodification of social activities of humans is possible through broadening class consciousness in order to enforce and implement ecological political economy.

Human activities are imperialist in nature considering the expansive exploitation of the ecological system. This has created large uneven balance between the actors and friction patterns between them. The extra high profits objective drives the process of commodity production, which results to use-value transfer where ecological imperialism exploiting ecological system in a poorer occurs without proportionate reciprocity. It leads to high level of unevenness between groups of nations, dividing the world into the rich and the poor. This essay will review the concept of anthropocine with imperialism and attempt to study the effect of the imperialist exploitative behavior of humans on the global natural resource system. It will attempt to identify the gap that deals with issues of intrahuman justice with respect to uneven impacts of climate change.

Concept of anthropocene and its relation with race, class and imperialism

Humans are arguably the dominant environmental force on Earth. Evidence could be their contribution to megafaunal extinction on North American and Australia. This is a reflection of significant change of climate and degradation of ecosystem and its loss of immunity to alteration in species composition. All kinds of pollution, whether that is of air, water or land, are widespread. It has reportedly reached the Antartica. Activities of human have destructively touched every terrestrial system. This current epoch is referred to as Anthropocene by Crutzen. The use of this term has implication of viewing that nowhere in the Earth is natural anymore. This term may also give a negative connotation of a pervasive human-caused change that may create hopelessness for people attempting conservation of nature and at the same time may be an impetus for changes is land use accelerated by the motive of profit. An alternative argument is that humans have caused lesser influence at smaller extent with respect to specific regions and ecosystem. There is a doubt that humans have caused alteration everywhere, though they have at least caused marginal influence on most of the world’s biomes (CARO et al., 2012). This paragraph reflects the entire pattern of factors involved in the geological changes of the Earth. It touches on the race of humans, their drive to conserve nature, but more significant and complex is their activities, driven by motive of profit or their exploitive nature, evidently harming the ecosystem. This essay will address the implication of viewing the concept of anthropocene from race perspective and deal with: i) whether human race as whole impacts the concept, whether there is a specific category of human race that is closely related with the concept; ii) whether there is a specific class of society, economic or political, who impacts the concept or has caused the current epoch of the geological system; or iii) whether activities of imperialism has any direct link with the epoch.

Anthropocene has its roots to historical developments. The industrial revolution of the 19th century; its 1945 acceleration where atomic bomb was constructed, population, economy, exploitation of nature resources grew exponentially; and the 21st century with high tech scientific evolution and consensus on anthropogenic character of global warming. In the international circuit, most of the states do not seem to comply with the goal of universal goods, whether it is in finance, trade, human rights or even climate change relations. Some of the countries are reformist and some are conservative or moderate conservative. Dominant position, a characteristic of globalisation, exercised by a few states defines the course of events and development in the international relations. These states are driven by their sovereign power and their short-term bases, demonstrating a lack of drive for common good, which poses the challenge of lack of interdependence and global governance. Demands of the Anthropocene include abandoning such short term bases and the common practice seen in global environmental forums of grouping the countries into developed and developing countries. Environment issues always take the secondary position when it compares to other international issues, such as covering economics and defense and security. It is left to the individual states, which is also supported by international norms, such as Principle 2 of the 1992 Rio UN Declaration that recognises the sovereign right of the states to exploit their own resources. Even more, international environmental regimes also focus on specific issues, such climate change or persistent organic pollutants and do not extend the focus on environmental area itself (Franchini et al., 2017). This conduct of human as a society is a testimony to the fact the viewing the concept of anthropocene with the activities of human as a race is the right way to understand challenges and also reformist strategies to meet demands of anthropocene. Without understanding the race, the concept of anthropocene and its challenges and demands to tackle relevant issues cannot be understood. However, as seen above, there is a certain level of division of the states, which are also not interdependent and not on a common enforceable platform to tackle the current epoch of the geological conditions.

Anthropocene may be termed racial as it arguably flows out of a capitalist system, which might have racialised human populations and environments. Such racial capitalism might occupy a central category while explaining onset of anthropocene. The era of colonisation and slavery might have been necessary to develop modern globalisation. However, capitalism may be claimed to have embarked on its own to a perpetuating destructive trajectory with the advent of industrialisation. A structural racism came into being and is still continuing to shape global ecological crisis (Saldanha, 2020). Political ontology of race refers to the human limits to struggle against hierarchy based on race. Historically, humans have been deemed sub-humans or human-animals, as was seen during the time of slavery. Anthropocene arguably started in 1610 with colonisation, which led to huge displacement of human population due to establishment of global trade networks. So, even a theoretical approach move to think past the nature or culture divide and account for non-human in political theories cannot explain the human problems of marginalisation, exclusion or injustice. (Chakrabarty, 2012) posed some arguments showing the stake in rethinking human figure with anthropocene. There are three figures of human: i) universalist-enlightenment humans who are potentially the same at every place; ii) postcolonial-poststructuralist humans endowed with differences of class, race, sexuality, history, gender, etc; and iii) humans in anthropocene, who are the geophysical forces linked to nonhuman and nonliving agency, which is a threat to human civilisation. The three views do not supersede one another (Chakrabarty, 2012). Anthropocene might usher into a new figure of humans, but the other figures of humans are still in existence. They are all operative (Zeiderman, 2019). Crisis of climate change might be routed through all anthropological differences. This alternatively means the absence of corresponding humanity or its oneness that could act as a political agent. Thus, there is a gap that deals with issues of intrahuman justice with respect to uneven impacts of climate change (Chakrabarty, 2012).

(Luke, 2020) critically reviews concept of anthropocene with respect to its role in today’s trends of anthropogenic climate change. Anthropocene influences contemporary research debates as humans have allegedly caused the climate changes. However, on a elaborate scale, destructive material by-products of material inequalities existing between races, ethnic and class groups, which are result of unequal economic growth between small percentage of winners and larger percentage of losers due to historical conflicts. Such destructive material by-products are apparently registered in geological time due to the rapid change of climate. This however calls for social theory and collective action to challenge Anthropocene concept in its construction of theoretical binaries, such as self and other, nature and culture. Concepts of anthropocene might have been politically interpreted in respect to environmental anthropogenic events, which may wrongly be attributed to humans as a species when arguably they are caused by a few privileged white human races in wealthy Western countries. Social factors with respect to specific political, financial, cultural and technological capacities reproduce enlightenment as being whiteness. These forces are apparently more responsible for the significant anthropogenic changes behind the concept of anthropocene than humanity as such. The white human races may derive special benefits from the outcome of these changes, and as planetary managers, they may deploy scientific and technical authority to impose on the managed group heavy costs for managing the changes (Luke, 2020). Each actor in the management of the changes seek to safeguard their own interests and due to the inequalities, there is an uneven authority, balance and negotiation between the actors and the friction patterns that are a product of the unevenness. Climate justice thus calls for urgently addressing the ecological crises that threatens human life. This stems from the concerned issue of whether the human understanding of anthropocene and whether it be considered as capitalocene in the effort to address the depletion of environment due to capitalism demand the need to reframe the historical narratives of racial or climate justice (Bhattacharyya, 2018). Alternatively, it is to be noted here that the inequality generated from the material effects of inequality alter global environments, and therefore concept of anthropocene is a political problem, which should be critically reconsidered (Luke, 2020).

Anthropocene is an unfulfilled promise restraint constrained by fetishism and class relations, like the ways freedom is constraint in capitalism. It might be termed as an unintended side effect arising out of social metabolism with nature. For example, during the Industrial Revolution where there was new mobile energy source, industries could move to cities where the cheap labor was to undertake massive coal extraction (Cunha, 2015). Reviewing anthropocene in the capitalist form of social relations arguably create a value-directed social production. In this kind of production, there is minimisation of socially labor time, which resulted to the objectified material production and social life describable by “objective” laws. Such objective law based on value has objectified time, space, and technology (Cunha, 2015).

(Marx, 2015) states that humans are the agents of the “valorization of value”. He termed capitalist as the personified capital and the worker as personified labor. Humans perform their social activity as “character [masks],” or “personifications of economic relations” (Marx, 2015). Capitalism has disruptive character in respect with ecology. This is evident in the self-referential valorisation of value when its limitless expansion and abstraction of materia content leads to exploitation of labor. As such, the development of productive forces is also the simultaneous development of destructive forces (Burkett, 1999). However, the ecological destructiveness, if specific to capitalism, could be overcome. Social metabolism with the nature is not always destructive. Reviewing or viewing race with anthropocene may have the impact of anthropocene externalising alienated labor and its logical material conclusion. The global disruption of the nature could be tackled by decommodification of social activities of humans or by just overcoming capitalism. In place of valorisation of value, material wealth should be freed from the value-form. Ecological, social, ethical and aesthetic considerations would be responsible for social production. Technology would translate new values and shape the world with abundant material wealth and with conscious social metabolism with the nature (Cunha, 2015). The class consciousness needs to be broadly defined so as to enforce and implement ecological political economy. It should make inaction and its political and economic costs unacceptable. The current epoch of geological conditions directly affects working people in their daily lives (Angus, 2016). Anthorpocene concept has class basis and is associated with class conflicts and relations. The labourer class, working the natural resources industry, are also considered makers of anthropocene. This is found in fossil energy sector where the need of capitalism to substitute workers drives reliance of fossil energy. However, the sites where fuels are extracted witness labour and class conflicts. In mining and oil energy section, the labourer power is essential to fossil capital. They produce devastated landscape because of their activities, but cannot do much against it as they need wages. Hence, the study of anthropocene cannot ignore the contradiction produced by such class relations and the dynamics of the working class (Dyer-Witherford, 2018) .

The discussion so far has seen human activities, especially related with capitalism, created large uneven balance between the actors and friction patterns between them. Such unevenness has undermined the aspect of a healthy human metabolic relation with the environment. The global imperialist system, in which there is a division of the world into categories of nations, has to be understood for the problems occurring on the Earth. Imperialism is an important aspect to be considered in the existing anthropocene (Foster & Clark, 2019).

A key characteristic of imperialism is the ultimate goal of extra high profits. It involves the process of commodity production, which takes the forms of exchange-value transfer, and use-value transfer (Amin, 2018). The use-value transfer is significant in the current discussion. It involves the process of ecological imperialism, which signifies resource extraction causing devastation of the poor countries, appropriated of their natural resources without any equivalent or reciprocity and left to suffer the ecological costs of the extraction (Foster & Clark, 2019). An imperialism society is characterised by the dominance of large MNCs, which create global commodity chains integrated with increasing long-term transfer of physical raw material resources from poor nation to the rich. The rich nations have larger “material footprints” (Wiedmann et al., 2015). Imperialism aspects have to be tackled while dealing with issues of anthropocene. This may enable understanding the extent of expropriation of global natural resources and identify the stakeholders and their strategies of expropriation. Imperialism in the ecological perspective is evident common space, such as the oceans or the atmosphere. After the 1982 Law of the Sea, nation-states have claimed half of the world’s ocean, mostly within their designated “exclusive economic zones.” This has accelerated ocean resource expropriation. However, the rich nations have already claimed most of the space, including the permissible atmospheric space of the South region. Climate change is a reality and its effect is aggravating the existing global economic inequalities. The South region suffers from such inequalities and it is highly probable that it would be the most affected by the catastrophic effects of climate change (Burke et al., 2015). Imperialist strategy of the dominant nations aims for expansive oil and natural gas production and pipelines. This yearning for global dominance defies all concerns over the affect of climate change. Excessive industrialisation causing greenhouse gases is also a result of imperialist strategy over accelerated global water cycle. This would lead to disruptive global water cycle and affect food production severely that might accelerate hunger levels in regions, such as in Latin America and most of Africa (Foster & Clark, 2019).

The imperialist practices raise sustainability concerns, which impact current actions on the ecosystem, society and the environment. Corporate houses should reflect in their policies sustainability concerns and adopt strategic sustainable development planning. They should adopt long term sustainable practices focused on inclusive set of responsibilities (Ameer & Othman, 2012).

Conclusion

The ulterior motive of higher profits is encouraging the richer nations to employ available natural resources as their weapon to advance their imperialist objectives. Anthropocene, as a climate crisis, is a symptom of human defiance of the ecological demands. The issues of inequalities, exploitation, and conflict patterns between different nations, races, or class of people are man-made, and so is anthropocence. Climate justice, as to justice to issues related to anthropocene, should not be a reflection of humans’ own self interests, but the actual justice of the climate in itself.

This essay finds that human race as whole is the cause of anthropocine. The cycle of production and value drive approach towards dominance and higher profits principle has managed to cover all races, class and society as a whole. It has divided the nations into groups, the societies into classes and all driven by competing stakeholders in the exploitation of the Earth. The uneven balance is apparently caused in the ecological system, affecting the economy and politics of the world. It is to be determined of who should be made liable for the current epoch, whether the blame should go to the ever expanding dominant nations or group of people that view human and natural resources as commodities. If it is to be, the issue is who should be chosen (and more important how to choose), to be the regulator or manager of the issues the world, especially the exploited regions and race or class, is currently facing. It is definitely sure that the industrial activities, the capitalistic view and the imperialist conduct of humans are the problem. Hence, they are absolutely necessary to be analysed for the concept of anthropocene. As s concluding note, it is not only race, class and imperialism to be thought for the concept, but more with concept of climate justice in its totality.

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