Six - The challenge of global inequality in the Anthropocene

Summary

We have become more reflexively aware that we now inhabit a ‘world risk society’. In 1999, Beck defined this in terms of an accumulation of risks – ecological, financial, military, terrorist, biochemical and informational – that have coalesced into an overwhelming presence in our contemporary world. Beck's risks remain real and intimidatory, but it is perhaps the notion of the Anthropocene that has concentrated the minds of scholars across several disciplines into the 21st century and underlined the threat of genuinely globalised hazards. The Anthropocene will be analysed in Chapter Seven, but it will be helpful to define it briefly here because there is a sense in which its impact via climate change has come to symbolise the vital interlinking and interdependence of the populations of a world ‘artificially’ segregated by nation state. Its implications for the human species per se will be considered in the next chapter. All that is required at this point is an abbreviated definition of the Anthropocene. In a paper published in Nature in 2015, Lewis and Maslin cite evidence that the Earth may have entered a new human- dominated geological epoch, the Anthropocene, succeeding that of the Holocene. They consider how best to date the advent of this epoch and highlight two trigger dates, 1610 and 1964. The year 1610, in the ‘long sixteenth century’ during which capitalism took hold (see Box 1.1), was selected because it allegedly marked the beginning of the ‘age of man’: it was when Europeans in the Americas prompted a transition that was to become an unprecedented impact on the planet. It has also been suggested that this was around the time that the low point of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) concentrations was registered (as recorded in ice cores). This, it is hypothesised, likely occurred because of a drastic reduction in farming in the Americas, representing what was to prove an irreversible transfer of crops and species between the new and old worlds. The year 1964 was considered because it witnessed a peak in radioactive fallout following nuclear weapons testing prior to the test ban treaty coming into effect.