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28/01/21 09:06 AM IST

Ethical challenge before the human race

Context

The Anthropocene era has placed an ethical challenge before the human race.Only a drastic reduction of the global population to half the present number in the next 30 years and a practice of ascetic life can save the planet

Issue
  • With the rapid advance of the manufacturing sector and deeper penetration of the global market since the Second World War — what is known as the Great Acceleration — the emission of carbon dioxide increased in geometric proportions.
  • The Keynesian revolution from the 1940s to the beginning of the 1980s made massive investments in infrastructure with the aim of increasing demands.
Changes
  • In the mid-1980s, the Thatcher-Reagan joint economic regime dismantled the welfare system of the previous decades and heralded the turn towards neoliberalism.
  • The transformation of the social into a mere extension of the economy being complete, every human affair could be explained in market terms. With the rise of digital, virtual, and biotechnological systems from the 1990s, capital could operate as an integrative, hermetic bind transforming itself into a rationalised regime of the projective calculation for the market like never before.
Argument
  • The argument that the Anthropocene emerged dialectically from the contradiction of capitalism and nature, however, is problematic and has influential detractors.
  • It can be conjectured that had the entire world gone socialist after the Russian Revolution, it would have produced more, and not less, greenhouse effect since the equitable distribution of resources across the population would have meant more purchasing power on a global scale.
  • The figure of the Anthropocene has now been constructed as the ultimate test of humanity’s capacity for self-overcoming through technologistic solutions.
Anthropocene
  • The Anthropocene Epoch is an unofficial unit of geologic time, used to describe the most recent period in Earth’s history when human activity started to have a significant impact on the planet’s climate and ecosystems.
  • Earth’s history is divided into a hierarchical series of smaller chunks of time, referred to as the geologic time scale. These divisions, in descending length of time, are called eons, eras, periods, epochs, and ages. 
  • These units are classified based on Earth’s rock layers, or strata, and the fossils found within them. From examining these fossils, scientists know that certain organisms are characteristic of certain parts of the geologic record.
  • The study of this correlation is called stratigraphy. 
  • Officially, the current epoch is called the Holocene, which began 11,700 years ago after the last major ice age.
  • However, the Anthropocene Epoch is an unofficial unit of geologic time, used to describe the most recent period in Earth’s history when human activity started to have a significant impact on the planet’s climate and ecosystems. 
Source: Indian Express

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