ABSTRACT
Trying to get one’s head round the aetiology and morphology of anthropogenic climate change is a little like doing the same for genocide, except much more so. We might begin with the recently coined notion of the Anthropocene. The climate change equivalent to Raphael Lemkin’s big idea – in this case, with the responsible neologists, earth scientists, Paul Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer1 – accepting the proposition would be to acknowledge that humanity writ-large now constitutes a geological actor on the planetary stage with the ability to change ‘the most basic physical processes of the earth’,2 albeit involving a trajectory towards epochal terminus so rapid that the Anthropocene will register as little
more than a blip in earth history. Humanity, at least as we have normatively come to understand it since the onset some 10-11,000 years ago of the last great, natural shift at the Pleistocene-Holocene boundary, has always operated within ‘parametric conditions’, in other words a relatively stable climate which (mostly) year on year, millennium upon millennium, has allowed for cereal grasses to grow and for humankind to prevail in large numbers.3 By contrast, the Anthropocene, whose beginnings c. 1750-1800, can be quite precisely dated in terms of increasing (previously constant) carbon emissions into the atmosphere as a direct consequence of the anthropogenic burning of fossil fuels (i.e. sequestrated solar energy from earlier geological eras), is now having biospheric consequences so profound that before the planet re-balances its own dynamic thermal equilibrium a great extinction event, as has happened at other geological boundaries, cannot be ruled out.4 This would suggest an appropriate terminology not of genocide but omnicide. Or to put the matter tersely, in the light of what the science is telling us, the entirety of the ‘developed’ world’s standard operating procedure encompassing economics, technologies, socio-cultural behaviour, not to say fundamental value systems, can no longer be sustained as viable or beneficial for ourselves, let alone for the planet’s many millions of other species upon whom we also fundamentally depend. The knock-on effects for all academic disciplines, genocide studies included, are equally stark. Either we rethink some of our first principles, not to say standard modus operandi in the light of anthropogenic climate change, or we literally consign ourselves to the dustbin of history.
