The Daily Planet #70: Metabolic Sovereignty Revisited, Part 1

This week, I am back to metabolic sovereignty after a deepish dive into energy and compute sovereignty in the previous two weeks. My main goal is to show that the Anthropocene is:

Willy-nilly an exercise in metabolic sovereignty for all humans

Unfortunately, that human-wide metabolic sovereignty has justified an enormously unequal metabolic pyramid.

And even if we could ensure distributional justice for all humans, we would still be mistaken, because we can't ensure metabolic stability until we expand the scope of sovereignty to include non-humans as well.

Let's see if we can meet all these criteria in 6 daily planets. Let's start with the introduction of the term 'Anthropocene' - very metabolic, if I may say so.

The term "Anthropocene" was first used informally by biologist Eugene F. Stoermer in the 1980s, but it was popularized and formally introduced in 2000 by atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen at a scientific meeting focused on global environmental change. Crutzen argued that human activities had altered the Earth so fundamentally—through population growth, industrialization, and environmental impacts—that it warranted recognition as a new geological epoch distinct from the Holocene.

When I first read Crutzen's account, I was a little disappointed. The Anthropocene was described entirely in quantitative, physical terms as if it was entirely about stuff and how that stuff moves from A to B. Here's how Crutzen describes it:

Supported by great technological and medical advancements and access to plentiful natural resources, the expansion of mankind, both in numbers and per capita exploitation of Earth’s resources has been astounding (Turner et al. 1990). To give some major examples:

During the past 3 centuries human population increased tenfold to 6000 million, growing by a factor of four during the past century alone (McNeill 2000). This growth in human population was accompanied e.g. by a growth in the cattle population to 1400 million (McNeill 2000) (about one cow per average size family). Urbanisation has even increased 13 times in the past century. Similarly large were the increases in several other factors, such as the world economy and energy use (see Table 1.2.1). Industrial output even grew forty times (McNeill 2000). More than half of all accessible fresh water is used by mankind. Fisheries remove more than 25 % of the primary production of the oceans in the upwelling regions and 35 % in the temperate continental shelf regions (Pauly and Christensen 1995).

There's no mention of the economic system or power relations and even the industrial scale of the technologies that are deployed for purposes of power or profit. That felt inadequate to me, a deliberate attempt at naturalizing something that was clearly social in origin. In his defense, he was lobbying for a new geological age, and it would be weird to club capitalism with dinosaurs.

Nevertheless, much ink has since been spilled on the false naturalism behind the term 'Anthropocene.' That criticism is correct, but of late, I am OK with it. The reason being: Crutzen's description is entirely metabolic, and gives us a starting point to describe social processes metabolically as well.

The “Anthropocene”

Human activities are exerting increasing impacts on the environment on all scales, in many ways outcompeting natural processes. This includes the manufacturing of hazardous chemical compounds which are not produced by nature, such as for instance the...