The Anthropocene

 Another disturbing fact reported in that David Wallace-Wells essay I was just writing about in the previous post: there is essentially no such thing anymore as wildlife. At least not as we tend to think of it. 96% of mammalian biomass on the planet—he notes—is now made up of humans and livestock. The animal kingdom, in short, is increasingly composed only of our species—and the animals we farm in order to feed ourselves. Everything else—that flaps or swims or crawls upon the earth—we have destroyed. 

Wallace-Wells uses this statistic—that haunting "96%" datum—as one more reason to think that the "natural world" as such no longer exists. We are living "after nature"—to borrow the name of a poem by W.G. Sebald. One section of Sebald's poem tells the story of Georg Steller, for instance—a hero to science, who brought back some of the first reports from the Russian far east about the previously unknown sea mammals who lived there. 

And what did humanity do with this information, once Steller provided it? Sebald observes: they immediately used Steller's reports to hunt these newfound creatures to extinction. There is a reason the "Steller sea cow"—for instance—no longer exists. 

And so it has gone with one species after another. To quote Wilfrid Scawen Blunt: 

.... From the deep Central Seas

To the white Poles, Man ruleth pitiless Lord of these,

And daily he destroyeth. The great whales he driveth

Beneath the northern ice, and quarter none he giveth,

Who perish there of wounds in their huge agony.

He presseth the white bear on the white frozen sea

And slaughtereth for his pastime. The wise amorous seal

He flayeth big with young, the walrus cubs that kneel

But cannot turn his rage, alive he mangleth them,

Leaveth in breathing heaps, outrooted branch and stem.

In every land he slayeth. 

Scawen Blunt had married Lord Byron's granddaughter, and the poem from which this passage is taken—Satan Absolved—bears more than a little of His Lordship's imprint. The poem's subtitle—"A Victorian Mystery"—gestures toward the dramatic poems that Byron conceived as "mystery" plays in the medieval mode—Cain and Heaven and Earth. Satan Absolved also resembles these works in its playful heterodoxy and revisionist takes on Biblical myths.

Most of all, though, Scawen Blunt carries over Byron's distinctive and admirable sympathy for animal kind—as well as his interest (which Bryon reflected especially in Cain) in the lost megafauna of the past. 

The bulk of Scawen Blunt's dramatic poem concerns Satan's efforts to absolve himself in God's eyes by convincing the latter that the creation of mankind had been a mistake all along—just as Satan had predicted. In order to prove his point, Satan points to the ravages of British imperialism—indeed, the poem is probably the most stirring and bitter and sweeping condemnation of the British Empire ever written by a British poet. 

Scawen Blunt describes in the poem—much as J.A. Hobson would do in prose just a couple years later, in his Imperialism: A Study—how nineteenth century colonialists had imposed slavery by another name on much of the Global South—driving people off their land in order to force them to toil in mines and quarries. 

But of course—the world's self-appointed overlords declared—this was not slavery, because the newly-dispossessed received a wage for their efforts (indeed, many European nations justified the colonial enterprise in the late nineteenth century by declaring it was necessary to root out slavery!)

But when people are driven into the wage-relationship by being coercively deprived of any alternative means of subsistence—dispossessed of their ancestral lands, e.g.—Hobson pointed out—was this not indeed a form of "forced labor"? 

Scawen Blunt makes essentially the same point in Satan Absolved. He imagines the following typical interchange between a dispossessed native and their would-be colonizer—who purports to be doing the former a service by elevating them to "civilization": 

 "Sirs, but the crop is gone."--"There is your land in lots."

 "The land? It was our fathers'."--"Curse ye for idle sots,

 "A rascal lazing pack. Have ye no hands to work?

 "Off to the mines and dig, and see it how ye shirk."--

 "As slaves?" "No, not as _slaves_. Our principles forbid.

 "_Free labourers_, if you will. We use that word instead.

But—especially relevant to our topic today—Scawen Blunt's objection to colonialism is not only that it destroys and enslaves nonwhite nations—but also that it destroys the natural world. One imagines that he would agree with Burns's sentiment: "I'm sorry man's dominion / Has broken nature's social union." Or that he would endorse whole-heartedly Giacomo Leopardi's characterization of the European colonial enterprise: 

Oh kingdoms of wise nature, undefended

from our evil greed! Our boundless rage

storms her shores and caves and peaceful forests,

drives her assaulted natives to strange labor

and desires they never knew[.] (Galassi trans.)

Scawen Blunt's other point in the poem, in short, is that—as Europe has treated the other human inhabitants of the Earth, so it has treated animal kind—namely, with rapine and extermination. 

Even though he was writing in 1899—he foresaw all this. He foresaw the "post-nature" world that "civilized" humanity was creating. He foresaw the ultimate terminus of this progression: a world where the vast majority of living, breathing, animal biomass on the planet belongs to humans as part of our bodies or else as food for our bodies. 

I was browsing in an art museum gift shop earlier this week, and I found a haunting little book called the Bestiary of the Anthropocene. Inspired by medieval bestiaries—the book imagines how we might record the strange hybrid creatures—half-natural and half-artificial—to which humanity's "dominion" has given rise in our era: birds stuffed full of plastic waste; chickens raised for human consumption that bear no resemblance to their wild ancestors; etc.

It's the world we have made. The anthropocene we have inherited. A world without wildlife. A world "after nature." 

And what Devil's advocate will plead for us in Heaven's Court—for the travesty we have made of creation?