The Daily Planet #72: Metabolic Sovereignty Revisited, Part 3

In today's Daily Planet, I discuss Dipesh Chakrabarty's influential theses on "The Climate of History."

The discourse on climate change challenges traditional historical frameworks by collapsing the long-standing distinction between natural history and human history. Historically, thinkers like Vico, Croce, and Collingwood separated human affairs from the broader, often inscrutable processes of nature. However, contemporary climate science reveals that humans have become geological agents, fundamentally altering Earth's physical systems through activities such as fossil fuel combustion and deforestation. This transformation ushers in the Anthropocene, a proposed new geological epoch marked by significant human impact on the planet, beginning around the mid-18th century with the advent of industrialization.

This new reality complicates conventional narratives of human freedom and cultural diversity, which have traditionally ignored the geological consequences of human actions. The Anthropocene demands a rethinking of history that integrates both the global histories of capitalism and the deep, species-level history of humanity. While capitalist industrialization and imperial domination have undeniably driven much of the environmental crisis, the scale and nature of climate change transcend economic and political histories, implicating the very biological and geological conditions that sustain human life.

Understanding climate change requires acknowledging humans as a species embedded within the broader history of life on Earth, whose survival depends on stable environmental parameters established over millennia. This perspective challenges historians to expand their analytic frameworks beyond recorded history to include deep history, encompassing genetic and cultural evolution over hundreds of thousands of years. The crisis also calls for a new form of universal history - one not based on identity or dialectical progress but on a shared sense of catastrophe that demands global collective action.

Ultimately, climate change exposes the limits of traditional historical understanding, urging a synthesis of scientific knowledge and historical critique to address a crisis that is simultaneously ecological, economic, and existential. It compels us to confront a "negative universal history," a collective human condition shaped by the unintended geological agency of our species and the urgent need for sustainable reasoned politics.

The Climate of History: Four Theses on JSTOR

Dipesh Chakrabarty , The Climate of History: Four Theses, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 35, No. 2 (Winter 2009), pp. 197-222