HOW TO REVERSE THE ECOCIDE OF ANTHROPOCENE

The Anthropocene is about man admitting to the violence he has inflicted on Earth. We have to change the approach to natural resources from extraction to one of trusteeship

- SHIV VISVANATHAN

THE history of the world is presented as a split civil reality. At one level, there is an attempt to survive creation myths like the Anthropocene of mother Earth, the rise of Gaia. Science recovers and regains its source of the sacred. The Anthropocene is one of the most life-giving myths we can dream of.

At another level, we confront the immediacy of climate change, of gigantic destruction. As a result of man's attitude to nature, control of nature, human beings' stay on Earth has become unfeasible. The reason climate change activists attribute to it is that industrialism was a liminal act of the West. Secondly, the capitalist attribute to nature was one of treating it as a resource, a commodity. As a result, man has turned ecocidal towards nature. What the activists say is true. Climate change is not only an act of asymmetric violence, it is an injustice. The West owes Earth and the Global South a promissory note of redemption.

Unfortunately, the West is in no mood to sustain the earth. It is looking for pragmatic solutions that might benefit it more than the third world. What we need is an extended form of governance for which the nation-state is not a parochial idea. The nation-state is a 19th-century concept that does not fit 21st-century governance.

The word 'Anthropocene' was coined by Dutch scientist Paul Crutzen, a Nobel laureate, to talk of the damage at the geological level that man has created. There is a slight irony here as more time is divided to meeting the Anthropocene than critically investigating man's destructive role.