Old Gods, New Enigmas. Mike Davis
a proposed geological epoch without previous analogue, defined by the biogeochemical impacts of industrial capitalism, was still largely confined to earth science circles. Since then the term has expanded at meme speed to encompass not only these debates but virtually everything else. A quick perusal of recent and forthcoming books under the heading “Anthropocene” reveals titles like World Politics in …; Learning to Die in …; Love in …; Bats in …; Virtue in …; Poetry in …; Hope and Grief in …; Coral Reefs in…; and so on. The Anthropocene, in other words, has morphed far beyond the original parameters of earth-system processes and stratigraphical markers to become post-modernism’s successor in the double sense of a vast and at times meaningless blanket thrown over everything novel and a permit for wild and undisciplined speculations about “post-natural” ontologies. Radical critics have justifiably focused on the false universals conflated in promiscuous discussions of the Anthropocene: “Man as geological agent” (instead of capitalism); “the threat to human survival” (the rich will assuredly survive; the existential threat is to the poor majority); “the human fossil fuel footprint” (“What did you say, kemosabe?”); and so on.
“Ark” is an argument with myself. In the first half, I make the case for pessimism: there is no historical precedent or rational-actor logic that would lead rich countries (or classes) to repay their “ecological debts” to the poor countries that will suffer the greater part of the catastrophic consequences of rich counties’ historic emissions. Likewise, the chaos of the Anthropocene is indissolubly linked to the broader civilizational crisis of capitalism. A large portion of the labor-power of the planet, for example, needs to be devoted to the unmet housing and environmental needs of poor cities and their adaptation to extreme climate events. But global capitalism is no longer a job machine; quite the contrary, the fastest-growing social classes on earth are the unemployed and the informally employed. There is no realistic scenario in which market forces would mobilize this vast reservoir of labor to meet the challenge of the Anthropocene, nor is there any likelihood of adopting the kind of policies that would accommodate the human migrations necessitated by mega-droughts and rising sea levels. That would require a revolution from below of a scope far beyond anything imagined by Marx and Engels.
In the second half of “Ark,” I focus on the false choice defined by environmentalists who argue that there is no hope of reconciling a universally high standard of living with the requirements of sustainability. If capitalist urbanization is in so many ways the chief problem, responsible for the majority of emissions, groundwater deficits, and major pollutant flows, I propose the city as its own possible solution. We must transform private into public affluence with a zero carbon footprint. There is no planetary shortage of “carrying capacity” if we are willing to make democratic public space, rather than modular, private consumption, the engine of sustainable equality. We need to ignite our imaginations by rediscovering those extraordinary discussions—and in some cases concrete experiments—in utopian urbanism that shaped socialist and anarchist thinking between the 1880s and the early 1930s. The alter monde that we all believe is the only possible alternative to the new Dark Ages requires us to dream old dreams anew.
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