The Anthropocene and the Humanities: From Climate Change to a New Age of Sustainability.

Carolyn Merchant. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2020).

           The Anthropocene and the Humanities: From Climate Change to a New Age of Sustainability, written by environmental historian Carolyn Merchant, provides a brief history of the Age of the Anthropocene in Western art, science, and culture.^[1] Merchant uses the definition of the Anthropocene created by scientists Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer as an era that started in the late 1700s with the invention of the steam engine and that continues into the present with our dependence on fossil fuels. She states that according to scientific research, humans have impacted the Earth so much that it may cease to exist as we know it, and rethinking nature and our relationships with nature, “has profound implications for reconceptualizing, not only the sciences, but the humanities themselves.”^[2]

           Merchant’s purpose for this work is to understand what it will take to move past the Age of the Anthropocene and to enter an Age of Sustainability. She reviews history, important people, and key developments in Europe and North America to provide her readers a basic understanding of what the Anthropocene is and why the climate crisis is a result of human actions. She divides her book into categories: history, art, literature, religion, philosophy, and ethics and justice.

           In the introduction proceeding these chapters, Merchant provides a definition and historical explanation for climate change, and she describes how it has been studied and presented to the public. She also discusses pertinent literature from scholars on this subject so that readers can further educate themselves on the debate. For example, the starting time of the Anthropocene has been challenged. There has been discussion of this period that labels it as the Capitalocene, moving the date back to European colonial expansion in the fifteenth century that led to global capitalism and industrialization. Before moving into deeper discussions in her chapters, Merchant address the limitations of her scope. This book is a short synthesis with a focus on Western cultures. She believes further research should be conducted and amassed for the origins and meanings of the Anthropocene for other nations and cultures throughout the world.

            In addressing the Anthropocene, first one must know what it is and why it is happening. Merchant does this in her first chapter addressing history. She discusses the steam engine and the key people and developments of science and industry since that invention. Industrialization began the mass emitting of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuel into the atmosphere, which has been worsened by internal combustion engines in automobiles and airplanes, leading to global warming and climate change. This progression of industrialization and expansion has been documented by humans through art. Trains were the dominant focus of art representing change and expansion in Europe and the Americas. Merchant explains that the “smoke and steam from steamboats, trains, and factories become symbols of human dominance” in the nineteenth century.^[3] Paintings such as Claude Monet’s Arrival of the Normandy Train and John Gast’s American Progress depict this. However, today they take on new meanings as symbols of human progress and environmental decline simultaneously.

            Literature through the Age of the Anthropocene has documented experiences and feelings about environmental changes through prose and poetry. In the nineteenth century, the poet William Wordsworth viewed the smoke from trains as a threat to nature and humans. For the writer Henry David Thoreau in Walden: or, Life in the Woods, the train ruined the wilderness and pastoral ideal. More recently, authors like Barbara Kingsolver write of ecological stressors and changes in the environment that influence human and non-human inhabitants. Her story Flight Behavior influenced the Obama Administration to commit $3.2 million to monarch butterfly conservation.  Merchant then examines the role of mainstream religions “in mitigating the problems of climate change and the ways in which forms of spirituality can become moral guidelines for individual actions.”^[4] She spends most of this chapter discussing Christianity and its relationship to nature, a relationship in which the religion has historically sought dominance over the non-human environment and its inhabitants. Over the past couple centuries, we see Christianity in the rise of capitalism, colonialism, and resource extraction. However, recent Christian leaders such as Pope Francis have advocated for science and religion to “join together to combat climate change.”^[5] Merchant also suggests looking past Western Christianity and advocates for listening to Eastern world beliefs and Native American cultural teachings to change destructive relationships with the environment.

            Next, Merchant discusses philosophy in the Anthropocene. She highlights prominent philosophers through time and focuses on the idea of unpredictability and chaos theory. She states, “The idea of the Anthropocene as a system of nature that can be controlled by human beings through mathematics, experimentation, and technology is thus being increasingly challenged by concepts of nature as chaotic, complex, discordant, and unpredictable.”^[6] Moving into her last subject, ethics and justice, Merchant expands on humans needing to work with nature, not against it. She proposes a new approach, partnership ethics, “as a way to bring humanity and nature into an interactive relationship that recognizes the needs of both nature and humans as a basis for mutual survival in the twenty-first century.”^[7] New theories for justice are also put forth, arguing that the impacts of climate change are being felt the most by marginalized communities. For an Age of Sustainability to be achieved, Merchant puts forth five principles that need to be followed: 1) equity between the human and non-human communities; 2) moral consideration for both humans and other species; 3) respect for both cultural diversity and biodiversity; 4) inclusion of women, minorities, and nonhuman nature in the code of ethical accountability; and 5) ecologically sound management that is consistent with the continued health of both the human and the nonhuman communities.^[8]

            Overall, The Anthropocene and the Humanities is a brief introduction and overview of the history and current state of the Anthropocene in Western culture. Merchant wrote this book to be accessible and understandable to the public. It can be used as a guide to further educate one’s self about climate change by following up on the key people, events, and scientific developments that she mentions throughout the narrative. It was not meant to be all-encompassing. There is no doubt that it is Eurocentric; however, Merchant makes it clear from the beginning that this is a Eurocentric history that is a part of a global history that should also be researched. It does not give much advice on how the globe can move into the Age of Sustainability, but Merchant references many people who are working on this very problem. She purely puts forth her understanding of the issues, develops the “partnership ethics,” and advocates environmental humanities in helping solve the problems of the human-induced Anthropocene.

Sharlene O’Donnell

Western Carolina University

[1] Carolyn Merchant, The Anthropocene and the Humanities: From Climate Change to a New Age of Sustainability, (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2020).

[2] Merchant, Anthropocene, x.

[3] Ibid., 47.

[4] Ibid., 90.

[5] Ibid., 96.

[6] Ibid., 124.

[7] Ibid., 127.

[8] Ibid., 131.