Tragedy of the Anthropocene
It may be serendipity or maybe editorial nous, but those looking for evidence to support the theory of the Anthropocene (14 July) only needed to flip a few pages to read of a permanent drought in Spain, and a tsunami of plastic bottles. As Timothy Morton argues in his inimitable style, the ecological crisis is as real as the rising of the sun. The tragedy is that it has clearly still not entered the political imagination.
Thus elsewhere, in Comment & Debate, Hans Kundnani attempts to persuade us that the real problem facing Europe is its failure to increase its defence spending, and we read of Donald Trump’s peevish and pathetic posturing at the G20 when faced with the climate agreement.
Whatever you may think of some of Morton’s wackier ideas, his basic premise is inarguable: so long as the many symptoms of human impact are simplified into manageable problems, we are losing time. The paradox is that, contrary to the leftist critique of Morton’s thinking, the ones who will suffer are the poor, the weak and the coming generations. Faced with this inevitability, politicians seem bankrupt, bogged down in 19th-century ideas of progress.
Neil Blackshaw
Barbizon, France
• The decline of the US and the rise of the Anthropocene are arguably the two great interconnected challenges of this century and beyond. One heralds the uncertainty of increasing economic and political change. The other is the certainty of climate change. Donald Trump and Brexit are second-order matters.
One is a recurring human phenomenon as empires, civilisations and more recently capitalist world-systems rise, triumph and fall over centuries. The other is a new concept describing a new dynamic encompassing catastrophic planetary change over millennia.
Both are connected, joined at the hip you might say, by the imperative of endless growth that is central to capitalism. It is economic growth that drives the rise of China and the others; it is economic growth that drives the Anthropocene.
The question, as crystallised by Kate Raworth of Doughnut Economics fame, is whether we can create a future capitalism that replaces endless growth with thriving in balance with both nature and human needs. If not, then what?
Stewart Sweeney
Adelaide, South Australia
• Your piece on philosopher Timothy Morton says how convinced he is, like most of us, “that irreversible global warming is under way”, and that our current Anthropocene age is proof of how “enmeshed we are with other beings”. Eclectic and whimsical, Morton has already published, at 49, 12 books with two on the way, along with 14 essays. He has also boasted, as mentioned in your six-page feature, that he has “racked up 350,000 air miles for the year”. Is this merely perseverance, or, in terms of his carbon footprint, evidence, of overkill?
Richard Orlando
Westmount, Quebec, Canada
Repelling invasive species
Jules Howard’s article about our attitude towards invasive species (14 July) really hit a chord. His horror about baby brushtail possums being drowned in buckets in front of primary school children echoes my own about so-called invasive birds being gassed in Perth.
I have been berated on Twitter for posting a photo of a gorgeous rainbow lorikeet hanging upside down from a palm tree frond. It is not the fault of the bird that it takes over the nesting hollows of native birds. It is not the fault of the kookaburras and corellas that they are not “native” to Western Australia and have, despite this, multiplied. Despite periodic “culling” of these bird species, they stubbornly persist.
I agree with Howard. The most damaging pests on the face of this planet are humans. They are the true “ferals”, and while I do not advocate that they should be drowned in buckets, they should certainly take a long, cold shower before lecturing others.
Jennifer Dodd
Perth, Western Australia
• So Jules Howard doesn’t count himself as one who can kill possums in a bucket of water in front of children at a school fundraiser. For what it’s worth, I suspect that the vast majority of New Zealanders would put themselves in the same category for this thoughtless thuggery.
But very few of us here hesitate to kill them by every other reasonable means – Timms traps, a .22 bullet to the head or under our car’s front wheels if the opportunity presents itself. For it is these furry gifts from across the ditch that have single-handedly decimated our national trees and vegetation more than any other one factor (excepting humans, of course). Let alone the destruction they wreak on domestic gardens even in inner-city areas.
On a recent trip to Melbourne I was dumbfounded to see trees in an inner-city park riddled with these little suckers, much to the amusement of locals who were cooing at their cuteness and feeding them. I had to restrain myself from taking to them, but I did in a country where they are protected. Besides, there were no buckets of water available.
John Benseman
Auckland, New Zealand
Briefly
• Regarding your story Trial to help endangered birds (7 July): albatrosses do not “only breed on three remote Tasmanian islands”. They also breed on the Otago peninsula on New Zealand’s South Island; a local ornithologist, Dr Lance Richdale, found the first egg on Taiaroa Head in 1920.
Richard Holland
Grafton, Ontario, Canada
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