Hannah Ritchie, Not the End of the World: Surprising Facts, Dangerous Myths and Hopeful Solutions for Our Future on Planet Earth, London: Vintage, 2024.
Gaia Vince, Nomad Century: How to Survive the Climate Upheaval, London: Penguin, 2023.
Martin Wikelski, The Internet of Animals: Discovering the Collective Intelligence of Life on Earth, Melbourne: Scribe, 2024.
The notion of the Anthropocene was first proposed twenty-four years ago by the atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen. It denotes a geological epoch defined by human activity, and remains an unofficial designation, with the International Commission on Stratigraphy—whose processes appear to be geologically slow—yet to approve it for technical use. Nevertheless, in that quarter of a century it has become ubiquitous in both specialist and non-specialist circles, and especially in conversations about anthropogenic climate change and its attendant ecological crises. The reason isn’t hard to fathom: as a description of how humanity has transformed the planet’s environment, the Anthropocene is also a prescription enjoining it to clear up its mess. The question is what kind of prescription the Anthropocene ‘narrative’ lends itself to.
The answer, I think, is that it lends itself to a techno-scientific prescription—one that predates by at least three decades Crutzen’s off-the-cuff designation. Indeed, if one were to select a moment that symbolises the Anthropocene narrative—a marker equivalent to the ‘golden spike’ that will symbolise the beginning of the epoch should the ICS decide it’s a goer—the first images of the Earth from space would no doubt prove to be a strong contender. For it was at around this point in the late 1960s, and thanks in part to the Earthrise photograph and its equivalents, that a ‘planetary’ consciousness began to emerge and to fuse with an incipient technological optimism. The Moonshot was also, and equally, an Earthshot: an event that gave humanity not only a God’s-eye view of the planet, but also a Promethean sense of what it might be possible to do to it once technology advanced to a certain point. The journey of a figure like Stewart Brand is in this sense an instructive one. In the first issue of the Whole Earth Catalog (1968), which bore a satellite image of Earth on its cover, Brand declared, ‘We are as gods and might as well get good at it’. But in Whole Earth Discipline (2009), Brand has changed his motto to ‘We are as gods and have to get good at it’. By his own account, the first statement was made in the spirit of a libertarian technics, the second in a spirit of ‘ecopragmatism’. Countercultural techno-libertarianism has yielded to technocratic ecomodernism.
Though it continues to appear rather wacky to many, such technocratic ecomodernism—a project that takes us decisively beyond the era of the Green New Deal (that is, swapping out dirty technologies for clean ones) and aims to actively reconstitute nature through geoengineering, biotechnology, nanotechnology and nuclear power—is now becoming the dominant discourse in mainstream environmental circles. It is also something much more interesting than neoliberal capitalism in a striking new outfit.
Hannah Ritchie is the lead researcher at Bill Gates’s website Our World in Data, which gathers statistical information on matters of international concern and makes it accessible to a general audience. Her new book Not the End of the World (2024) is very much an extension of that role, and overlaps somewhat with Gates’s own book on anthropogenic climate change, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster (2021). But it also has a polemical edge that marks it out from other studies of a broadly ecopragmatist character. Framed as a rejection of the ‘doomer’ mindset that in Ritchie’s view dominates green politics, much of it is aimed at encouraging readers to ‘stress less’ about such lifestyle factors as energy-efficient lightbulbs, packaging and plastic bags, recycling and eating local foods. Though not as techno-utopian as Brand, who has nevertheless endorsed the book, Ritchie is no less strident in her support of nuclear power and transgenic crops, and just as wedded to the ideal of ‘radical abundance’ as any nanotechnology enthusiast. In keeping with the Anthropocene narrative, the book is vertiginous in its scope and sweep, covering pollution, climate change, deforestation, species depletion, ocean plastics, agriculture and global fish stocks. Readers who’ve spent any amount of time with the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and the literature inspired by them will recognise the register: here’s the problem; here’s the solution; here’s a technology or a policy that makes the solution possible. Neither politics nor social analysis is especially important for Ritchie. Indeed, she appears to regard such concerns as incidental to the kind of whole-Earth analysis needed to rise to the challenge of climate change: ‘Researchers tend to zoom into a problem … We [at Our World in Data] zoom out.’
Ritchie’s most controversial assertion is that modern humans may be the first ‘generation’ to leave the environment in better shape than they found it. Rejecting implicitly the conservationist tradition in ecology and environmentalism, she thus paints ‘sustainability’ as something in humanity’s future, rather than something it needs to get back to. Here she is drawing, consciously or not, on a key element in the Anthropocene narrative: that humanity has always changed the environment—that it has never been ‘to one side’ of it—and that it therefore makes no sense to accuse it of having ‘overstepped the mark’. On the contrary, what is necessary is for Homo sapiens to marshal its technological powers in pursuit of a world of fairness and abundance: ecomodernism’s teleology in a nutshell.
As revealed in a painful interview with Mongabay, Ritchie’s claims about the progress made so far towards decoupling are poorly evidenced; and there are plenty of other instances of faulty reasoning sprinkled throughout the book. In one passage, for example, she asserts that nuclear power is safer than fossil fuel-based energy because more people have died as a result of the latter, which is a bit like saying that thermonuclear weapons are safer than the bow and arrow. But it is the overall framing of Not the End of the World that should concern us as much as its questionable logic. Ritchie wants to say that the ‘doomers’ are wrong to emphasise Earth’s biophysical limits, and that their assertions are both paralysing and a gift to denialists. And yet there are plenty of pessimistic scientists who remain objectively optimistic in their interventions, and plenty of activists who take to the streets despite believing that the world is fucked. Why, then, does Our World in Data’s lead researcher want to argue in this vein at all? And why does she trail her Oxford robes by giving her book such a trite-sounding title, one dripping with (ironic?) fatalism? The answer, surely, is that the book is in fact precisely the thing she claims it isn’t: a political treatise through and through.
Indeed, for all its datasets Not the End of the World is suffused with the evangelical register common to ecomodernism. In her preface, Ritchie relates how her pessimism was extinguished through an encounter with Hans Rosling, the Swedish physician and public speaker whose TED-talk shtick garners huge enthusiasm in can-do techno-solutionist circles. It is less Rosling’s solutions to problems, however, than his Steven Pinker-style contention that things are heading in the right direction—whatever that means—that inspired the young researcher. Ritchie is an optimist, though optimism, she says, does not imply blind optimism (significantly, pessimism is not afforded the same indulgence). Indeed, she’s come to believe that optimism is a central plank of science itself, ostentatiously renouncing her adolescent belief that ‘cynicism was one of [science’s] founding principles’. But of course it’s scepticism, not cynicism, that constitutes a founding principle of science, and as far as optimism versus pessimism goes, that quality doesn’t have a dog in the fight. Ritchie must assert that it does, however, if she is to maintain her polemical edge. It is in this way that technocratic ecomodernism is blossoming into a political movement.
In her new book Nomad Century (2023), Gaia Vince provides a taste of the thinking entailed in such a politics. A British journalist, author and broadcaster who writes for The Guardian and the BBC and has worked as an editor for Nature and New Scientist, Vince is an influential expositor of the concept of the Anthropocene, as well as an exponent of the whole-Earth thinking that habituation to it appears to engender. In her 2014 book Adventures in the Anthropocene, she suggested that the environmental emergency leaves humanity with no other option than to assume the role of ‘masters of our planet’. In Nomad Century, she is similarly expansive, suggesting that confronting the climate crisis will necessitate demographic policies of staggering ambition and complexity. And while her suggestions will strike many readers as ridiculous, for anyone seeking to understand how a certain style of ‘planetary’ thinking is spreading through the expert classes her book is not without importance.
In contrast to Ritchie, Vince makes no attempt to inflate her readers’ sense of optimism: in her opinion, the ‘four horsemen’ of climate change—fire, heat, drought and flood—are galloping towards us at a thumping velocity. But her main thesis has less to do with the science of climate change and how to mitigate it than it does with how to adapt to its effects. In a perverse dialectic, she suggests that the catastrophe is pregnant with its own solution, or rather that the forced migration to which the climate crisis will lead can be used to meet the emergency of an ageing population in the Global North! This will involve building many new cities, some of them in polar regions, and substantially changing many others to accommodate the migrating billions. ‘We are facing a species emergency—but we can manage it’, writes Vince, ‘with a planned and deliberate migration of the kind humanity has never before undertaken … We need to plan pragmatically now, adopting a species-wide approach to ensure our human systems and communities have the resilience to weather the shocks to come’. Obviously, such a mammoth project needs some ideological underpinning, and so Vince presents us with a simple formulation: we need to stop thinking of ourselves as tribes, and to start thinking of ourselves as ‘Citizens of Earth’. Zooming out, indeed…
As with Not the End of the World, there are many practical objections one could make to Vince’s sweeping analysis. She vastly underestimates the political problems that would result from such a radical program of migration, and seems to have momentarily forgotten, in her comments on the positive correlation between migration and economic growth, that economic growth was the problem in the first place. But again, it’s the overall framing that’s interesting. The book is imbued with a sort of faux anthropology, the organising observation of which is that humanity is a migratory species—that it is in fact through the process of migration that humanity became what it is. We are, writes Vince, ‘the planetary primate’, and have been since setting out from the cave: ‘The benefits of trade forced us to cooperate with other tribes with different social norms, genes and technologies. It thus expanded our social networks and our society’s collective knowledge, and encouraged us to explore our environment in search of valuable raw materials’. At one point she even characterises economic globalisation as migration: ‘I type this paragraph now using components dug from Congolese rock, wearing clothes made in Vietnam, having lunched on potatoes grown in Peru. Human ecology is planetary’. To call this unhistorical would be to put it delicately, but of course it is only by zooming out from what is conventionally understood as history that technocratic ecomodernism can present itself as planetary saviour.
If people are susceptible to such a vision, it is partly because their world is increasingly rendered in abstract terms, as so much data to be analysed with a view to finding the most efficient solution to whatever problem presents itself. Contemporary environmentalism is no exception to this trend: indeed, it is in the ecological space that information technologies are regaining some of the distinction they lost following the sudden and unsolicited infliction of generative AI in 2022. In a strange reversal, the very digital technologies that threaten to destroy the world (in some of the more caffeinated versions of this story) are now being used to help environmentalists understand how it is actually being destroyed by anthropogenic climate change. Thus we find algorithmic systems being used to map and monitor reefs, track and forecast weather systems, and analyse data on energy usage, building materials and traffic flow with a view to reducing carbon emissions. No doubt there is some greenwashing in this space, but greenwashing is not all there is.
In The Internet of Animals (2024), the Max Planck Institute’s Martin Wikelski gives an interesting and entertaining account of how he and his colleagues developed ICARUS, or International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space—a network of sensors aimed at tracking the behaviour of thousands of nonhuman species with a view to both protecting those species and helping our own gain a deeper understanding of the planet’s interrelated systems. Built to operate in communication with the Russian module of the International Space Station, this project has been set back significantly by Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Thus does pesky history crimp the otherwise smooth development of revolutionary techno-science! Nevertheless, the ICARUS project is a fascinating example of informational ecology, and of the kind of thinking to which it might lead.
Wikelski’s worldview is a peculiar mix of conventional conservationist thinking and techno-solutionist sentiment. On the one hand, it is the ethos of extraction—of viewing the planet as a resource to be exploited—that has set us on the road to ruin. But on the other, it is the human genius for transformative technology that will lead us back to sanity. Wikelski clearly has a passion for animals and a genuine appreciation of their complexity and intelligence, but it’s also clear that he conceives of ICARUS as a sort of early warning system tailored to mostly human needs—as a network that can alert authorities to the onset of an El Niño event or the buildup of toxins in a particular region. At best, and in Wikelski’s own telling, this represents a scaling up of an Indigenous ethos of collaboration and a prelude to the Interspecies Age (‘the next chapter in human evolution’). At worst it’s the usual instrumentalism and hubris masquerading as such.
I’ve no doubt Ritchie, Vince and Wikelski are motivated by the best intentions. But in these three titles, and many others besides, I think we can discern the lineaments of a ‘climate leviathan’ rising over the land—rising so far over the land, indeed, that it is losing all sense of the human scale, like William Anders with his Hasselblad camera careering towards the moon’s horizon and the blue marble sitting just above it, or Icarus flying too near to the sun, the wax on his arms beginning to soften.