Life has impacted Earth systems for billions of years, fundamentally altering the planet’s atmosphere, hydrosphere, and lithosphere. The novelty of the Anthropocene is that for the first time a species making such changes has become aware of doing so and, given its moral agency, is accountable for its actions. Yet to the extent that the Anthropocene curtails the Holocene, I allege that it does not fully actualize the human moral agency that makes the epoch unique. I call this the ontological Anthropocene irony and argue that it foregrounds the Holocene biosphere as a discrete moral register. Further, I delineate an ethic that corresponds to this register and describe its tension with other moral registers. Finally, although this ethic entails deliberately making the Anthropocene least biologically and physically conspicuous, I contend that civilizational adherence to it would render the Anthropocene most morally and metaphysically distinctive by resolving two other Anthropocene ironies that show why achieving this distinctiveness matters.
That the Anthropocene is most distinctive when least conspicuous is hardly its only irony. The prodigious advances in human flourishing attained through the last 80 years’ “Great Acceleration” are marvelous achievements worthy of acclaim. However, these advances have also exacerbated wealth inequality and wrought environmental devastation (McNeill, The Great Acceleration). Moreover, insofar as the Anthropocene signals the end of the Holocene climate that furnished the conditions for civilization’s emergence, it augurs significant civilizational stress (Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia). Nevertheless, despite a profusion of data on the multidimensional environmental calamity and robust awareness of its myriad ruinous consequences, the growth curves of the Great Acceleration continue to climb. Yet the sophisticated worldwide scientific community capable of cataloguing these anthropogenic planetary changes in exquisite detail and anticipating their potential effects has been fostered by the very transformation of the global environment about which they currently warn. This link between the remarkably refined comprehension of the Holocene climate’s unusual favorability to human civilization that such civilization has come to afford and this civilization’s now knowing termination of that climate is an illustration of what E. O. Wilson identified as “the ultimate irony of organic evolution: that in the instant of achieving self-understanding through the mind of man, life has doomed its most beautiful creations” (Wilson, The Diversity of Life, 344).
This noetic Anthropocene irony suggests a second—moral—Anthropocene irony. As Willis Jenkins explains, “the Anthropocene is an epoch of ethics because it is an epoch of dominion by a moral species. The duration and meaning of this epoch will depend on whether humanity can … sustain its capacities of moral response” (Jenkins, The Future of Ethics, 2). Furthermore, because the Anthropocene undermines humanity’s capacities of moral response by truncating the climate that made civilization possible, Anthropocene immorality is not simply wrong but imperils humanity’s ability to comprehend the concept of wrongness correctly.
The moral Anthropocene irony therefore signals a third—ontological—Anthropocene irony. Since climate change “poses a cultural problem that calls into question our ability to keep sustaining our humanity,” the Anthropocene—a new geological epoch distinguished by global human influence—threatens to impair its most distinctive feature (Jenkins, The Future of Ethics, 17). Accordingly, if the Anthropocene is to constitute something genuinely different, human beings must deliberately maintain the Holocene climate and biosphere as an exercise of collective moral agency. The is an ontological Anthropocene irony since it concerns the nature of the Anthropocene itself.
The ontological Anthropocene irony also indicates the content of the morality that would make the Anthropocene meaningfully unique, which I formulate by adapting Aldo Leopold’s land ethic as “a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the Holocene biosphere. It is wrong when it tends otherwise” (Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 224-225). However, just as the Anthropocene ironies are not simply the result of ignorance, failure, and self-defeat but also the calamitous consequences of extraordinary human success, not all human activity displacing the Holocene biosphere and climate is simply immoral. Instead, once morally permissible behavior and much activity that remains morally good disturb the integrity, stability, and beauty of the Holocene biosphere. Indeed, the Anthropocene ironies attest that the Anthropocene is what I call bivalent, by which I mean that the tremendous value and terrible loss that quantitatively distinguish the Anthropocene are not just coincident but inextricably entwined. Bivalence denotes the same intrinsic connection between positive and negative realities as Edward Farley’s tragic (Farley, Good and Evil). However, while tragedy connotes evil and guilt due to its literary provenance, bivalence simply implies disvalue and responsibility. Bivalence also describes the same intrinsic connection between value and disvalue as Holmes Rolston’s cruciform creation (Rolston, “Disvalues in Nature”). Yet whereas cruciform creation elides the difference between nature and culture, bivalence distinguishes “disvalues in nature” from sin and evil.
While it is too simple to ascribe all Anthropocene disvalues to immorality, it is equally inadequate to attribute all Anthropocene disvalues to bivalence. That is why the Anthropocene is rife with irony and not merely a manifestation of bivalence. Moreover, insofar as the disvalues that humans endure and impose owe more to culpable human overreach than the world’s inherent bivalence, human life is more ironic than tragic (Niebuhr, Irony of American History). Yet although the Anthropocene ironies disclose a moral obligation to preserve the Holocene biosphere, this obligation does not supplant or annul human beings’ other moral duties. So much that is morally relevant makes no difference to the Holocene biosphere and hence an ethic for that biosphere is not suitable to those central dimensions of morality. Nevertheless, an ethic for the Holocene biosphere does not simply complement these other dimensions of morality but affects them, too, since the activities that enable people to respect, promote, and enjoy the values that are paramount in these other moral dimensions are displacing the Holocene biosphere and thus jeopardizing these values. Still, because these moral tensions are not just due to immorality but also bivalence, the ethical task in the Anthropocene is to live responsibly amidst these tensions rather than to attempt to resolve them.
Since life has affected Earth for eons, the Anthropocene is distinguished by moral agency’s planetary influence. Accordingly, insofar as the Anthropocene’s intensification undermines that agency, the Anthropocene becomes less unique. I argue that this irony discloses a moral duty to preserve the Holocene. However, the Anthropocene is ironic and not simply immoral because not all human activity disturbing the Holocene is immoral. Instead, much of that activity is necessary to fulfill other moral duties. I contend this moral tension reflects a link between value and disvalue that is endemic to life. Yet because not all human activity disturbing the Holocene is due to such bivalence, the Anthropocene also manifests immorality. Indeed, the Anthropocene is ironic rather than tragic because its disvalue is suffused with immorality. Still, given that the Anthropocene is bivalent, this tension between moral duties cannot be entirely resolved and thus morality mandates living responsibly amidst it.