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The Dr Dark Memorial Lecture delivered at the Carrington Hotel, Katoomba on 19th May 2014 and the Sydney Writers Festival on 22nd May 2014
Clive Hamilton argues we need to rethink everything. The modern belief that we are free beings making our own future by taking control of our environment is now indefensible. We have rendered the Earth more unpredictable and less controllable; a disobedient planet. And it's too late to turn back the geological clock.We must face the fact that humans are at the centre of the world, even if we must give up the idea we can control the planet. These truths call for a new kind of anthropocentrism, a philosophy by which we might use our power responsibly and find a way to live on a defiant Earth.
This book goes to the heart of the unfolding reality of the twenty-first century: international efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions have all failed, and before the end of the century Earth is projected to be warmer than it has been for 15 million years. The question “can the crisis be avoided?” has been superseded by a more frightening one, “what can be done to prevent the devastation of the living world?” And the disturbing answer, now under wide discussion both within and outside the scientific community, is to seize control of the very climate of the Earth itself./divDIV /divDIVClive Hamilton begins by exploring the range of technologies now being developed in the field of geoengineering--the intentional, enduring, large-scale manipulation of Earth’s climate system. He lays out the arguments for and against climate engineering, and reveals the extent of vested interests linking researchers, venture capitalists, and corporations. He then examines what it means for human beings to be making plans to control the planet’s atmosphere, probes the uneasiness we feel with the notion of exercising technological mastery over nature, and challenges the ways we think about ourselves and our place in the natural world./div
We continue to plan for the future as if climate scientists don’t exist. The greatest shame is the absence of a sense of tragedy
We continue to plan for the future as if climate scientists don’t exist. The greatest shame is the absence of a sense of tragedy
In all previous instances, transitions from one division to the next in the geological time scale came about because the great forces of Nature came together in a particular way, but always unconsciously and unintentionally. In the Anthropocene, the “human imprint on the global environment has now become so large and active that it rivals …
Various authors have identified ‘precursors’ of the new concept of the Anthropocene, with most frequent reference made to Antonio Stoppani, Vladimir Vernadsky and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The effect, intended or otherwise, of finding forerunners is to deflate the significance of the proposed new geological epoch. We argue there were no precursors to the notion of the Anthropocene, and that there could not have been because the concept (put forward in the year 2000) is an outgrowth of the recent interdisciplinary understanding of the Earth as an evolving planet inaugurated in the 1980s by the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme and Earth system science. Earlier scientists who commented on ‘the age of man’ did so in terms of human impact on the environment or ‘the face of the Earth’, not the Earth system. Moreover, earlier Western conceptions relied on a progressive and linear evolutionary understanding of the spread of humankind’s geographical and ecological influence, whereas the Anthropocene represents a radical rupture with all evolutionary ideas in human and Earth history, including the breakdown of any idea of advance to a higher stage (such as Teilhard’s ‘noösphere’).