No Link- universal human connectedness is established by earth systems science, not Eurocentric western bias

(Daniel, Kainos Anthropos: Existential Precarity and Human Universality in the Earth System Anthropocene new formations: a journal of culture/theory/politics Lawrence & Wishart Volume 107-108, 2022)

Since the 1950s, the disturbing prospect that humankind as a whole might die together has helped to drive a revolutionary research programme revealing the myriad ways in which humankind lives together and sustains its existence in inextricable entanglement with the rest of earthly life. As the nonlinear lineaments of the Earth System increasingly entered into scientific awareness, so too did the realisation of how easily they could be severed, altered or nudged towards new self-reinforcing dynamics. Crutzen – co-discoverer of nuclear winter and populariser of the Anthropocene – received his 1995 Nobel Prize for his prominent role in identifying how the decay of CFCs drives atmospheric ozone depletion. The chemist used the opportunity of his Nobel Lecture to warn of what a near miss the ozone crisis had been. Bromine, he noted, operates much like chlorine (the first C in CFCs), but turns out to be almost 100 times more dangerous for ozone than chlorine (itself disastrous) on an atom-for-atom basis. ‘This brings up the nightmarish thought,’ he cautioned, ‘that if the chemical industry had developed organobromine compounds instead of the CFCs … then without any preparedness, we would have been faced with a catastrophic ozone hole everywhere and at all seasons during the 1970s, probably before the atmospheric chemists had developed the necessary knowledge to identify the problem and the appropriate techniques for the necessary critical measurements. Noting that nobody had given any thought to the atmospheric consequences of the release of Cl [chlorine] or Br [bromine] before 1974, I can only conclude that mankind has been extremely lucky …’81 My contention here is that Crutzen was not naively reintroducing Enlightenment ‘Man’ or a ‘universal format of humanity’ when claiming that ‘mankind has been extremely lucky’ in not inadvertently flensing away the ozone layer and subjecting all life on land to a drastic increase in ultraviolet radiation whose effects on mice, humans, moss and ‘the interconnected web of life are not within the realm of the calculable’ (The Fate of the Earth, p82). There are surely many instances in which the systemic totality that takes shape as the Anthropos of the Earth System Anthropocene can be used to engender ‘mystification and political paralysis’. However, I propose that the single most politically urgent aspect of the Kainos Anthropos is the disquieting awareness that the universally interconnected, mutually sustaining flows of life on Earth were discovered against the backdrop of universal death. Whether or not the ‘bomb spike’ laid down by global fallout eventually comes to serve as the stratigraphic marker for a distinct geological epoch, the new sciences that culminated in Crutzen’s Cuernavaca declaration that ‘we’re in the Anthropocene’ have always carried an explicitly existential edge – one that has only grown sharper as the dynamics of a delicately balanced Earth System come more clearly into focus. In his landmark 1966 study The Order of Things, Michel Foucault famously asserted that ‘man is an invention of recent date’ produced by ‘a change in the fundamental arrangements of knowledge,’ proceeding to propose: ‘If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, if some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility … were to cause them to crumble … then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea’.82 Writing at the high water mark of the ‘cybernetics craze,’83 Foucault could not have made a safer bet. Already, ‘the fundamental arrangements of knowledge’ that had been used to inscribe so many humanist definitions of the abiding essence of Man were giving way to cybernetics-inspired systems approaches ‘whose object would be the relations among the elements of a whole rather than the elements themselves—a science of the totalities generated by these relations’ (as one particularly apt observer put it).84 In this sense, the Kainos Anthropos of the Earth System Anthropocene was born quite literally post-humanist by systems thinkers who held that whatever may be most essentially true about human beings resides not at the core of their substance, but arises actively in the mutually sustaining connections that they form both with one another and all the other systems that they inhabit and that inhabit them – from the cellular to the planetary. Rather than reprising the dictum that ‘the whole is the false’ or continuing to ‘wage a war on totality’,85 one of the most politically pressing challenges facing those alive today involves taking the Earth System Anthropocene on its own terms and existentially risky terrain. Seventy years after the detonation of the first hydrogen bomb, political and critical theorists have still barely begun to make political sense of what it means to belong to a collective of beings capable of authoring their own total erasure. For the first time, it has become possible to claim that ‘we are all in this together’ based on the scientifically sound awareness that ‘everything is connected’. The increasingly precise knowledge of the shape these connections take makes establishing previously unconsidered forms of solidarity within the Kainos Anthropos possible. The ever-encroaching spectre of universal death makes it necessary.