Origins of the Anthropocene: Another Sciency Story
by Asa Boxer
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The words anthropocene and anthropogenic are new coinages with that sciency flavour that gives believers in TheScience™ a warm, fuzzy feeling—that sense of intelligence and righteousness so valuable to a social-media identity. The self-loathing these terms bestow and the way they impugn white, colonial oppression on a global scale are immensely satisfying. These words hit every funny bone in the woke body and tickle those brains most pickled in the voice of Richard Attenborough.
Humanity is an infestation, a plague on the planet, and something must be done to stop its disgusting proliferation before it destroys its own habitat and every ecosystem with it. Anthropocene implies a geological epoch of enormous impact, equal to that of the Eocene, the Oligocene, the Miocene, the Pliocene, the Pleistocene, the Holocene and so forth. All of these “-cenes” are terms used by geologists to refer to identifiable strata in the layering of sediment built up over millions of years. If these strata are understood to represent pages in the great book of Gaia, those that attest to the period of humanity are the damning final chapter. Everything previous to us was nature, but we are not nature; we are an affliction that got out of control and killed it all, ourselves included, forever.
The late poet laureate of England, Ted Hughes (1930-1998), pointed out that a word can essentially trigger a story in one’s mind. As Hughes put it: “A single word of reference is enough — just as you need to touch a power-line with only one finger.” Such is the power of the words anthropocene and anthropogenic. The story they tell is cosmically tragic and all owing to a hateful and inherently selfish humanity. But who wrote this story? Where does it come from? Is it true? According to believers, TheScience™ told the story and it’s not just true; it’s not even a story; it’s a fact!
As it happens the tale of anthropogenic climate change is rooted in a deranged ideology promulgated by a misanthropic think tank that goes by the ominous name of The Club of Rome. On the surface an organisation concerned with the welfare of humanity, The Club of Rome manages—through its deeply flawed and oversimplified modelling of exponential growth—to turn its humanitarianism into anti-humanitarianism. Its chief analogy is the machine, and it treats the globe and humanity as a kind of clockwork with a few main gears which it tells us are growing larger and larger teeth rapidly and expanding in circumference at an alarming rate in a disastrous feedback situation that cannot be corrected without immediate, coordinated globalist intervention.
The main drivers of their prophesied disaster are population and industry, that it claims are devouring our resources at an exponential rate such that once the problems of overcrowding and dearth are apparent, it will be too late for a correction due to lag times (“delays”) between interventions and results (Limits to Growth 81, 97-8, 168-69, 182-3). To halt the exponential growth scenario (which is a patently false and entirely debunked model), The Club of Rome insists that human fertility must be curtailed along with polluting industry to achieve a balanced system—which resembles a ledger in which gains balance against losses (of people and goods). In their thinking, one may observe the machine model applied at the planetary scale: global humanity is a machine, resource uptake is a machine and the climate too is a machine, and all these machines have levers we can pull and knobs we can turn up or down as we sit at the mixing board of the universe like the Wizard of Oz.
Shot through with contradictions, their publications reveal a logic unworthy of being entertained as intelligent. For instance despite repeated insistence that humanity must change its priorities and quit being essentially consumerist, its entire philosophy is predicated on the desire (of an elite group) to live in material luxury. And while it argues that interventions must be immediate due to time lags, and that the global population must be reduced and find a ledger-book balance of births and deaths, it assumes a perfectly stable environment without the sort of disasters that might require natural population conditions to survive. Apparently time lag is not in play when a population is decimated, only when it threatens the wealth of the global elite.
Most glaring is that their globalist perspective loses sight of individuals, families, ethnicities and regional demographics. This is how their apparent humanitarianism turns sinister. Their megalomania, their playing at God, their notion that all human affairs must be centrally managed necessarily leads to a dehumanising dispensation that subordinates individuals to the global collective, to be directed by what they perceive as a benevolent tyranny. They themselves, of course, the elites, those whose concerns have been elevated from the day-to-day concerns of feeding themselves and their families, are the philosopher kings who will be in charge of the horrifying Plato’s Republic they envision. In case you had any doubts, they provide a graph of this logic (see below) that places them at the pinnacle of human concerns (Limits to Growth 18-19). Talk about crackpot pseudoscience!
A scientiphysized millenarian fear (that the prophesied apocalypse is upon us) is the motive engine of their thinking—founded in 1968, their orientation was the state of global resources by the year 2000—and alarmism is the flavour of their messaging. Over and again the literature insists that their oppressive, global empire must come to fruition before the end-times descend upon us. These are the ideas promulgated in their “reports”—the first, published in 1972, entitled The Limits to Growth, and the second, called The First Globalist Revolution published in 1991.
“In the world that is emerging, decision making can no longer be the monopoly of governments and their departments, working in, yes, a vacuum”
from The First Globalist Revolution (Club of Rome)
The first text truly appears altruistic until the final chapter where it states rather grimly, in condescending and dehumaising terms, that “The world system is simply not ample enough nor generous enough to accommodate much longer such egocentric and conflictive behaviour by its inhabitants” (192). And it concludes, “Entirely new approaches are required to redirect society toward goals of equilibrium rather than growth.” And though this statement alone may seem reasonable, we find the following sinister sentiment a few sentences downstream: “Although the effort may initially focus on the implications of growth, particularly of population growth, the totality of the world problematique will soon have to be addressed” (193). That was in 1972 when the think tank was in its infancy. By 1991 their misanthropy had found stronger formulations:
The need for enemies seems to be a common historical factor. States have striven to overcome domestic failure and internal contradictions by designating external enemies. The scapegoat practice is as old as mankind itself. When things become too difficult at home, divert attention by adventure abroad. Bring the divided nation together to face an outside enemy, either a real one or else one invented for the purpose. (108)
They are quite literally using Machiavelli and Orwell’s 1984 as handbooks. Their next move in The First Globalist Revolution was to dispense with democracy in a chapter entitled “The Limits to Democracy” (110-115). These philosopher emperors of the world after all require dictatorial powers to allow for their immediate and desperate interventions on an international scale, and they were plotting (quite openly) how to manage a behind-the-scenes takeover: “In the world that is emerging, decision making can no longer be the monopoly of governments and their departments, working in, yes, a vacuum” (114).
And to complete the transformation from humanitarianism to sinister misanthropy, they reasoned that to get the world on board with their vision, we needed “a new enemy to unite us”:
In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill. In their totality and in their interactions these phenomena do constitute a common threat which demands the solidarity of all peoples. But in designating them as the enemy, we fall into the trap about which we have already warned, namely mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy, then, is humanity itself. (115)
And voila! The diseased (glaringly ironic) reasoning process is complete. The nascent idea of self-hatred on a global scale was initiated. It took time to coin the terms anthropocene and anthropogenic as derogatory epithets to attach to “climate change,” but there’s the root of the sick fruit emerging from a misguided and desperate megalomania.
Through a multipronged approach to disseminate their message, they channelled their misanthropic ideology along multiple avenues as expressed openly in their literature: via the UN, various grassroots efforts, and via a “world forum where statesmen, policy-makers, and scientists can discuss the dangers and hopes for the future global system without the constraints of formal intergovernmental negotiation” (Limits to Growth 197). Those who have not yet heard of the World Economic Forum (WEF), or who believe it to be a benign association, might want to bone up on the goals and strategies they employ because they have sinister, imperialist plans underway.
Have any doubts? Take a few minutes to watch interviews with lead author of The Limits to Growth, Dennis Meadows. In the following clip, you can watch him talking about the need for a dictatorship, since democracies cannot deal with global populations much larger than one billion. And he further expresses a hope that humanity will accept depopulation civilly and peacefully.
Asa Boxer’s poetry has garnered several prizes and is included in various anthologies around the world. His books are The Mechanical Bird (Signal, 2007), Skullduggery (Signal, 2011), Friar Biard’s Primer to the New World (Frog Hollow Press, 2013), Etymologies (Anstruther Press, 2016), Field Notes from the Undead (Interludes Press, 2018) and The Narrow Cabinet: A Zombie Chronicle (Guernica, 2022). Boxer is also the founder and editor of analogy magazine.
This is one of those moments where I’d rather be sitting around a table with some food and drink and batting around ideas… These are complex interwoven themes at play here.
Some “big names” and thinkers have said “our greatest danger is X” where X equals climate change, racism, centralized government, (or perhaps, even X itself standing in as proxy for the media.)
I believe such observations are downstream of the actual problem.
I believe the actual problem (or challenge, if you prefer more comforting language) is that the ramifications of our technology have exceeded our planning and forecasting abilities. We don’t understand the implications of our technology. We think that “good intentions” alone are sufficient to guarantee a good outcome.
This is not the case.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions and we’re building 12 lane divided mega highways, proud of our civil engineering ability.
If only there were some way or space or means of having our wisdom and vision catch up with our doing/making ability.
I certainly don’t want us to return to sitting around the campfire and having grandfather and grandmother tell sage stories about Great Bear but neither do I want to live in a perfected transactional soulless technological hellscape that has been optimized by centralized geniuses.
A bit of a ramble here… if you’re still reading thank you…. it really would be better to sit around the table and talk about such things.
Above all, thanks as always to our host here for the venue and the topics. 🙏
We can no longer say that we have not been warned. Dennis Meadows announced it as clear as can be said, the calamity they are planning to unite us to fall into their trap. Here is hoping the enough of us have learned not to succumb, the way we did when they tested us with Covid.
But for that, we need articles like this one to show the way we are being used.