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◆ 1 ◆ INTRODUCTION Ethics in the Anthropocene ✦ Ethics seems imperiled by unprecedented problems.The accelerating expansion of human power generates problems that exceed the competency of our laws,our institutions,and even our concepts.What does justice mean for climate change, a problem in which humans from many nations, traditions , and generations find themselves collectively responsible for how a planetary system will function over centuries? The ethics of climate change is more complicated than applying received norms to novel objects because, as philosopher Hans Jonas puts it, “the qualitatively novel nature of certain of our actions has opened up a whole new dimension of ethical relevance for which there is no precedent in the standards and canons of ethics.”1 Received ideas of justice do not anticipate moral agency exercised cumulatively across generational time, aggregately through ecological systems, and nonintentionally over evolutionary futures.Climate change involves dimensions of human action without precedent in our traditions and institutions of justice. Yet even as they overwhelm capacities of moral response, problems like climate change press ethics into the center of public life. “If the great new fact of our time is that cumulative human activity has the power to affect all life in fundamental and unprecedented ways,” writes religious ethicist Larry Rasmussen, then “this means the ascendancy of ethics for our era, as an utterly practical affair.”2 The rising significance of human action within basic systems of life means that every social project and political decision—from economic policy to health care to zoning codes—carries fundamental ethical questions.What must we sustain, and why?The powers that imperil ethics also make it unavoidable. The atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen calls this planetary condition of human power the “anthropocene,” a new geological epoch characterized by pervasive human influence throughout earth’s systems.3 Consider that INTRODUCTION 2 most of earth’s flowing fresh water has been dammed, impounding gigatons of sediment.The terraform power to reengineer watersheds already leaves a lasting stratigraphic legacy for future geologists. It may also leave clues about the demise of this civilization, for those dams accelerate the sinking of urban deltas, cause the disappearance of riparian life, and in the long run will not last as long as the rivers they seek to control. Similar power and peril lie in the nitrogen cycle. Humans now fix more nitrogen than all other ecological processes combined.Accelerating the nitrogen cycle drives agricultural productivity but also creates eutrophication (“dead zones”) in every major body of water, with unknown consequences for the future of marine life. Climate change represents the anthropocene condition most dramatically : the human energy economy is shifting how the planet regulates solar energy.To reflect the pervasive influence of humanity, some scientists have begun remapping earth’s biomes as “anthromes,” in recognition that most of the planet’s habitats are now “human systems with natural ecosystems embedded within them.”4 In a sense, humanity has become earth’s habitat. It is not unprecedented for a species to transform the biosphere. Upstart bacteria did it several billion years ago, radically remaking the atmosphere and banishing previously dominant species. It is unprecedented that a species should do so knowingly, worrying over the changes it makes, wondering if it imperils the systems on which life depends, if it acts badly, if it risks its hopes for the future. Never before (we think) has a species understood that its story was renarrating life, and asked itself if it was telling the story well.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, in the face of unprecedented problems, sustain its capacities of moral response.The future of humanity, and so of life in the anthropocene, depends on the future of ethics—which stands in jeopardy. Ethics is in jeopardy not because the rise of human power is necessarily evil and destructive. Ethics is imperiled by the difficulties of interpreting and taking responsibility for the complex and ambiguous story of humanity ’s social intelligence growing into a geophysical force.The problems of human power overwhelm ethics because they arise from rapidly hybridizing social and environmental systems.A problem like climate change forces humans to recognize responsibilities for managing earth systems as influential participants. “Management” is a controversial metaphor, risking complicity with arrogance, mastery, and colonization.This book investigates other metaphors of responsibility, but it accepts the basic reality of power behind the...

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