The geological community needs material markers to substantiate the Anthropocene, but historians seek the immaterial markers behind the geological ones. These immaterial markers include not just the activities precipitating planetary geological change, but also the political values behind those actions. Looking for the immaterial markers of the Anthropocene alongside the material ones broadens our scope from physical impacts and technologies to the intellectual and ethical commitments that drove human societies—or, rather, many of them—to precipitate the permanent and dangerous alteration of our cosmic oasis, the lush green planet which is our only home. Ignoring the power of ideas to alter the planet would be unwise, and this is especially true in the mid-twentieth century when societies around the globe became more uniform in their aspirations.11Christopher Bayly argues that there is a distinction between “uniformity” and “homogenity” because although modern people share the same ideas and concepts of government, hard work, apparel, and desire for wealth, they still want distinctive identities. See Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, p. 14. As I’ll argue here, we cannot trace the development of the Anthropocene without understanding its immaterial markers—the hopes as well as the greed—behind its physical manifestations. In essence, modern political ideals shaped Earth’s geology, and were shaped by the geological understanding of their time. The tragic irony is that desires for growing liberty, justice, and prosperity, while not bad in themselves, were premised on utopian visions of endless planetary bounty. Hopeful though they were about bettering the human condition, their result has been disastrous.

Putting modern intellectual history together with the history of geological science, we can reconstruct a string of potential immaterial markers for the Anthropocene. Here, I focus on utopian hopes for expanding liberty, justice, and abundance as Anthropocene markers for several reasons. First, to a surprising extent, these modern hopes were—and are—intimately entwined with geological ideas of planetary time and Earthly conditions. Second, modern political hopes rested on a profound misunderstanding of Earth’s resources as limitless. It’s humbling to realize that the expansiveness looked so good to so many has turned out to be so dangerous to human wellbeing. If our worst ideas and actions had been the sole causes of trouble, it’d be easier to see what to do. Third and finally, because there is little time to mitigate the worse effects of the Anthropocene, I will argue that we need to transform our hopes as much as we need to lessen energy demands and protect biodiversity. Today, as the conditions of the early Anthropocene limit our choices, understanding hope as resolutely non-utopian could transform our mitigation efforts.

This essay nominates three documents as containing the immaterial ideological markers of the Anthropocene. I propose Thomas Jefferson’s 1776 “Declaration of Independence” as exemplifying the utopian political energies that led to the “Great Acceleration” as surely as James Watt’s blueprint for the steam engine. Jefferson’s notions were part of the slow, global reorientation of politics toward greater democracy on the basis of expanding prosperity. Authors as different as Condorcet in France and Hilary Teague in Liberia also helped articulate this ideal.22Condorcet published the Essay on the Application of Analysis to the Probability of Majority Decisions in 1985.  See, for instance, Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001; and David Williams, Condorcet and Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Born in slavery, Hilary Teague brought Jefferson’s ideas to Liberia where he went as a boy with his family who had managed to buy their way out of bondage. See C. Patrick Burrowes, From Virginia Slave to African Statesman: Hilary Teague. Bomi County, Republic of Liberia: Know Yourself Press, 2019. Second, I suggest that the United Nations’ 1945 Charter marks the emergence of the Anthropocene itself, a culmination of the forces initiated in the eighteenth century and universalizing the hope of freedom from injustice and want. Finally, Rebecca Solnit’s Hope in the Dark may be seen as an essential waymarker for replacing these modern hopes with an anti-utopian realism appropriate to our altered circumstances. Her alternative form of hope could help steer the Earth System’s trajectory toward a mitigated Anthropocene. Each of these documents represents a shift in understanding society’s potential in relation to planetary time and space. Most importantly, the overall trajectory of the rise, apotheosis, and relinquishment of utopian hope offers a key to mitigation on our destabilized planet.  Our ideals as well as our actions must change.

A short past, but a long future: Late-eighteenth century

As an Enlightenment scientist, Thomas Jefferson had a time problem. It was far too short. In Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), the future American president looks down on the dramatic scene where the Potomac River pushes its way through the Blue Ridge Mountains, imagining “a war between rivers and mountains, which must have shaken the earth to its center.”33Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden. New York, NY: W. W. Norton and Company, 1954, p. 20. This scene, “one of the most stupendous” in nature, “hurries our senses into the opinion that this earth has been created in time.” Jefferson envisions an enormous primordial ocean filling the Shenandoah Valley before its restless waters broke through the mountain ridge in a cataclysm of tumbling rocks. This long-ago tumult ultimately created the river with its “placid and delightful” foreground.44Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, p. 18. This foreground—and the peaceful river—were celebrated in paintings in Jefferson’s time and thereafter.

Note Jefferson’s phrasing. This scene, he says, “hurries our senses,” perhaps too precipitously, into imagining creation happening “in time”—and that’s a problem. While it’s true that Scottish geologist James Hutton (1726–97) and the French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon (1707–88) were muttering darkly about a deeper past for the planet, they were outliers. Before Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology (1830–33) had stretched Earth’s age beyond a few millennia, there was not enough time for Jefferson’s war of geological forces, and he knows it.  The “young Earth” theory gave the planet and everything on it only about six thousand years.  Famously Archbishop Ussher had calculated that Earth was created by the Christian God in 4004 BCE on October 23, just around the cocktail hour. While Jefferson was not an adherent of this particular calculation, he was hard pressed to fit the geological events he imagined into the short span allotted Earth by most natural scientists.

On the other hand, as a political visionary in the “Declaration of Independence,” Jefferson had time on his side. The “young Earth” theory meant that human civilization had risen only a few thousand years earlier, and was still young and vigorous enough to take advantage of the “new hemisphere of freedom” in America. While the crowded Old World was bent under the sway of despotism, the New World could fulfill the democratic virtues of ancient Greek philosophy and the promise of reason itself. America had all the space it needed, especially after Jefferson’s 1803 Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of the United States, and all the time it needed to create an “empire of liberty”—or so he thought. With ample space and ample time, the United States could make good on “the pursuit of happiness” (an idea taken from Epicurus) that Jefferson had inserted into the 1776 “Declaration of Independence.” Yeoman farmers with their stalwart independence rooted in the soil (rather than Alexander Hamilton’s “craven” urban dwellers) would carry Arcadian virtues into America’s bright future. As Jefferson put it in his first Inaugural Address, Americans possessed a “chosen country, with room enough for our descendants to the hundredth and thousandth generation.” Expand and multiply. For Jefferson, Earth’s past was too short for geologic war, but America’s future was ample for eventual liberty, justice, and abundance for all. These ideals would travel far and wide. As historian Christopher Bayly puts it, in that revolutionary era, the political and ideological conflicts that accompanied “wider aspirations to power, ownership, justice, and sanctity” had achieved a global scale even “before economic uniformities were established.”55Christopher Bayly, Birth of the Modern World, p. 7. Jefferson’s hopes, shared by many, spurred the rise in population, conquest and colonization of “new” lands, biosphere degradation, and so much more that characterizes the Great Acceleration in America and elsewhere.

This view of planetary and human time as having “a short past but a long future” shaped the dynamic between the human systems of American politics and the Earth. As Jefferson wrote to a fellow scientist, Joseph Priestley, on March 21, 1801, just as he assumed the presidency, “we can no longer say there is nothing new under the sun.” America was new, young not only geologically but also politically and culturally. It promised equality and independence for all, but it promised them in time. Future time. This changes politics in two ways. First, if there’s plenty of time for liberty and justice to emerge, why hurry? Urgency is dangerous in politics because it can lead to deadlock and revolution, as Jefferson knew well, having been a revolutionary himself and, like many in his class, concerned with even more revolutionary ideas from non-elites. The balance of power in the United States Constitution was crafted to allow compromise and gradual progress. Future time would sort things. For the enslaved people of America, including those working at Monticello, Jefferson’s home, this meant that liberty and justice were promised but delayed. Jefferson never freed his slaves during his lifetime nor did he manumit them in his will due to his heavy debts—even as he foresaw a time when slavery would fall away.

The idea that the long future would sort things out was pertinent as well to Jefferson’s rival, Alexander Hamilton, who argued that instead of Jefferson’s agrarian empire, the United States needed banks and manufactures. Instrumental in founding the institutions of American capitalism, Hamilton took the promise of the long future to include growth in industry, population, and wealth.

The result of embracing a long future was—and is—utopianism. If we have all the time in world on our side, why not hold out for perfection? The premise of an ample future seduces politics away from mundane hopes to utopian delusions. Chasing perfect liberty, justice, and prosperity became the hallmark of modernity. Jefferson located them in America, but they soon became global. These ideals inspired the systems and organizations that allowed human beings to commandeer wildly disproportionate amounts of energy, land, and water by the mid-twentieth century—all the while thinking that these predations were good in themselves, and portended even greater good.

A longer past and a long future: Mid-twentieth century

Within a century of Jefferson’s death on July 4, 1826, Earth had aged considerably. Instead of being just a few thousand years old, Earth was an astounding 1.6 billion years old according to new calculations. These were made in 1913 by a twenty-three-year-old British geologist named Arthur Holmes using radiometric dating. Holmes would also contribute to the idea of plate tectonics developed by Alfred Wegener. With Holmes’ new timeframe and the drama of Wegener’s theory of continental drift, Jefferson’s geological wars began to make sense. His beloved Blue Ridge mountains contain some of the oldest rocks in the region, formed “1.1 billion years ago as continents merged to create the supercontinent called Rodinia, which preceded the more famous Pangea.”66National Park Service, “Geology of Potomac Heritage National Scenic Trail,” Potomac Heritage, February 26, 2018: https://www.nps.gov/pohe/learn/nature/geology.htm. We now know that the rouge Pawtomac river (as he spelled it) had eons to bore its way through the rocks.77For a fascinating consideration of the way the deep history of continents shapes the contemporary world, see Alison Bashford, Pratik Chakrabarti, and Jarrod Hore, “Towards a Modern History of Gondwanaland,”
Journal of the British Academy, vol. 9s6, no. 6 (September 30, 2021): pp. 5–26.

By the early twentieth century, human time had also been granted a deep past through new discoveries, particularly Darwinian evolution. But this scientific understanding of our species’ development did not make much impact on those who thought about human history. In the minds of most Americans and Europeans, classical Greece remained “ancient” in civilizational terms, and served as the origin of democratic hopes. The Greek Way, published in 1930, made educator Edith Hamilton a household name in the United States where the assumption held firm that there was plenty of time for the ideas of liberty, inaugurated in Athens 25 hundred years earlier, to be established for all. As historian Daniel Lord Smail points out, “by the early twentieth century, most professional historians had abandoned sacred history. Yet the chronogeography of sacred history and its attendant narrative of rupture has proved to be remarkably resilient… The otherwise meaningless date of 4000 B.C. [drawn from Bishop Ussher’s work] continues to echo in our histories.”88Daniel Lord Smail, On Deep History and the Brain. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008, p. 39. Strangely, despite advances by physical anthropologists and archeologists, human beings remained almost as young as we had been in Jefferson’s time, ready for new adventures, barely encumbered by predilections and pathways developed over hundreds, let alone hundreds of thousands, of years. Moreover, the sense of an ample future remained. The promise of liberty held, even as fascism rose, as exemplified by Benedetto Croce’s History as the Story of Liberty (1938) written despite the rise of Mussolini.

In the first half of the twentieth century, long-term utopian hopes were not just the phantasm of a few intellectuals, but, like Jefferson’s ideas, had concrete impacts on the world through political institutions: these immaterial markers are intimately linked to material ones. The United Nations, formed in 1945, embodied the push for globalized liberty, justice, and abundance and a bright future for all. The “Preamble” of the UN’s “Founding Charter” heralds peace, security, and “social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom.” This mantra brought together countries in the West, the Soviet bloc, and non-aligned nations. Despite disagreements as to means, no nation overtly advocated lowering living standards or minimizing freedom.99There were dissident positions, of course. Most famously, Mahatma Gandhi suggested that growth was an inadequate measure of value and a false hope.

Again in 1945, as with Jefferson in the American Revolution, there is a sense of beginning, something new under the sun. In these founding years, the emphasis was on expanding economies around the world. The destruction of the Second World War and the widespread hunger and poverty afterwards emboldened those who had come to see economic growth as government’s primary responsibility. One of the central reasons that all modern states, whether capitalist, communist, or otherwise, sought to expand industrial and agricultural production was the underlying assumption that economic growth would almost magically fix the inequality problem, domestically and internationally.1010As Thomas Piketty points out in Capital and Ideology, the system actually generated increasing inequality and the grotesque imbalances of wealth we see today within nations between elites and the masses and among nations. See Thomas Piketty, Capital and Ideology, translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020. The techniques learned during the war for managing the economy were central to postwar states—and to the global vision of a more prosperous and more equal world. To those at the time, the greatest threat to this vision of an endless future seemed to be the dark shadow of nuclear annihilation, and the UN addressed that too through its Security Council, with its five permanent members: China, France, the USSR, the UK, and the US. By this point, Earth’s age had been established to be about 4.5 billion years, and the future—including the human future—seemed almost as long. Political and economic hopes were unimpeded by planetary constraints of time and space.

In the wake of long-delayed decolonization, the UN Human Development Agency was founded in 1965 to focus especially on poverty reduction, measuring progress in terms of metrics such as GDP per capita in the West or GNP in the USSR. In the face of rising populations, programs to meet basic needs for food and shelter were essential, but more than this: new energy sources, commercial fishing, industrial fertilizers, large dams, and much else had to be built—testaments of modernity’s promises. In 1992, Larry Summers, Chief Economist of the World Bank (which is closely tied to the UN and has almost the same membership) reiterated this core tenet: “There are … no limits to the carrying capacity of the earth that are likely to bind any time in the foreseeable future.” Summers then went further, warning against the very thought of limits: “There isn’t a risk of apocalypse due to global warming or anything else. The idea that we should put limits on growth because of some natural limit, is a profound error and one that, were it ever to prove influential, would have staggering social costs.”1111David V. J.Bell and Yuk-kuen Annie Cheung, eds., Introduction to sustainable development – Volume I. Oxford: EOLSS Publishers, 2009, p. 393. The United Nations’ Charter can be described as an immaterial Anthropocene marker; it heralded a new world of hope based on growing liberty and prosperity, just as Jefferson had heralded a new hemisphere.

A much longer past and a very short future

Today, the relatively short past and long future framing the hopes of Jefferson and the UN have been reversed.  Now we have a much deeper planetary and human past, but little time for a decent future. “Ancient” Greek philosophers appear as callow youngsters in comparison with our growing understanding of human patterns established long before the Holocene. Scholars in the humanities and social sciences now look with wonder beyond Homo sapiens’s approximately 300,000 years of existence to the almost three million years of our genus’s development from Homo erectus. The period is now vast during which we and our ancestral species gained the capacities to overwhelm the Earth System. Mastering fire and making tools preceded H. Sapiens by millennia. The wanderlust that caused hominins to spread out of Africa and over much of Asia, and Europe—and into many of the smaller islands of the Indian Ocean and Pacific—is also deeply rooted. H. sapiens’ push out of Africa into Eurasia about 100,000 years ago, into Australasia about 63,000 years ago, and into the Americans about 22,000 years ago, coincided with deforestation, megafauna die-offs, and land use change, even if the exact correlation in particular places is still debated. The momentum of these Pleistocene developments accelerated in the Holocene through domestication of even more species, the development of farming, urbanization, and much else, providing a platform for the twentieth-century Great Acceleration.1212In the past twenty years, historians have expanded their view to encompass humanity’s deep history. See, for instance, David Christian with William McNeill, Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2005; with Cynthia Stokes Brown and Craig Benjamin, Big History: Between Nothing and Everything. New York, NY: McGraw-Hill Education, 2014; Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. New York, NY: Harcourt Brace, 2015 and Origin Story: A Big History of Everything. New York, NY: Little, Brown Spark, 2018; and David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021. For an incisive critique of this form of history, see Ian Hesketh, “The Story of Big History,” History of the Present, vol. 4, no. 2 (Fall 2014): pp. 171–202. It took, we now realize, enormous amounts of time to create the foundation for the global networks of knowledge, institutions, and communication that supported the quadrupling of the human population from around 1920 to today’s almost 8 billion.

While the human past is now understood to be much longer, the human future in the Anthropocene, or at least the hope of human flourishing, seems a truncated affair, a puff of smoke wafting away on the morning’s breeze. Bluntly put, time is too short for modernity’s promises of liberty, justice, and abundance for all.

Anthropogenic change is gaining in speed and force, measured now in decades and sometimes shorter periods as thresholds are crossed, often unexpectedly. Our disrupted future is attested to in an avalanche of scientific papers. Take, for instance, Will Steffen et al.’s bombshell paper “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene.”1313Will Steffen, Johan Rockström, Katherine Richardson, et al, “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 115, no. 33 (August 2018): pp. 8252–8259; here p. 8252. This paper builds on Will Steffen, Reinhold Leinfelder, Jan Zalasiewicz, et al, “Stratigraphic and Earth System approaches to defining the Anthropocene,” Earth’s Future, vol. 4 (2016): pp. 324–345. See also Mark Williams, Jan Zalasiewicz, Colin N. Waters, et al, “The Anthropocene: a conspicuous stratigraphical signal of anthropogenic changes in production and consumption across the biosphere,” Earth’s Future, vol. 4 (2016). Appearing online on August 12, 2018, by August 19 it had 270,000 downloads.1414Jonathan Watts, “World is finally waking up to climate change, says ‘hothouse Earth’ author,” The Guardian (19 August 2018) https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/aug/17/world-waking-up-to-reality-climate-change-hothouse-earth-author It asked when and how the Earth System might stabilize, now that Holocene conditions have been transgressed. Highlighting the problem of tipping points and thresholds, Steffen and his colleagues gave us only two options: bad and unimaginably horrible.1515Will Steffen, et al., “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene,” p. 8252.  To choose the better-though-still-bad option, humanity as a whole would need to commit itself to immediate action in the next decade or so, turning us into “planetary stewards” intent on creating “Stabilized Earth.” Cooperating as we’ve never done before, humanity would embrace its role as an “integral, interacting component of a complex, adaptive Earth System” and immediately move to manage biogeochemical feedback loops and avoid further tipping points.1616Steffen, ibid., p. 8256. The list of what needs to be done includes “decarbonization of the global economy, enhancement of biosphere carbon sinks, behavioral changes, technological innovations, new governance arrangements, and transformed social values.”1717Steffen, ibid., p. 8252. All beginning now—or, better still, yesterday. Should these titanic efforts succeed, the result will still be “warming more intense than that of any of the interglacial intervals of the later Quaternary” of around 2^oC (3.6^oF) with higher sea levels, a greatly diminished biosphere, and the constant political efforts to continue active, persistent planetary management.1818Steffen, ibid., p. 8257. But this is better than the destination reached by the business-as-usual trajectory: “Hothouse Earth.” Maintaining our current pressures on the Earth System may see us careening over ruinous tipping points, producing a planet we can’t live on.

Other papers have likewise highlighted the dangers and the lack of time. Chi Xu, et. al. have demonstrated that depending on different scenarios of population growth and warming, up to 3.5 billion people “are projected to be left outside the climate conditions that have served humanity well” within the next fifty years. The movement of refugees could be reduced to roughly 1.5 billion with “strong climate mitigation,” but even then the number is staggering.1919Chi Xu, Timothy A. Kohler, Timothy M. Lenton, Jens-Christian Svenning, and Marten Scheffer, “Future of the Human Climate Niche,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 117, no. 21 (May 2020): pp. 11350–11355. (By comparison, the UNHCR estimates that 82.4 million people were displaced worldwide by the end of 2020.2020“Figures at a Glance,” The United Nations Refugee Agency Global Trends 2020, June 18, 2021: https://www.unhcr.org/en-us/figures-at-a-glance.html) In 2020, recalculation of future trajectories from Limits to Growth, the 1972 study showing the dire consequences of expanding populations and economies on natural resources, strongly suggest that we’re currently on track for the “collapse of civilization” in about ten years time.2121Gaya Herrington, “Update to limits to growth: Comparing the World3 model with empirical data,” Journal of Industrial Ecology, vol. 25, no. 3 (June 2021): pp. 614-626. That chimes with the United Nation’s warning in 2018 that we had only twelve years to avert climate catastrophe.2222Jonathan Watts, “We have 12 years to limit climate change catastrophe, warns UN,” The Guardian, October 8, 2018: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/08/global-warming-must-not-exceed-15c-warns-landmark-un-report And, there’s little doubt that we’re well on our way to the Sixth Great Extinction event. In short, certainty darkens—and shortens—the human future.

Because hopes for liberty, justice, and economic growth are functions of time, the current understanding of Earth’s elongated past and truncated future stops utopian hope in its tracks. In the Holocene, utopianism held up a candle to a future where all the wrongs of the past might be righted. In the Anthropocene, with only a few years to perform the miraculous transformation of everything from values to the protection of bivalves, hope can no longer indulge in dreams of redressing all past wrongs. Instead, for those who recognize that we live a new epoch, hope becomes resolutely anti-utopian, and justice pivots to address not the past, but the immediate future. Fortunately and not coincidentally, the most vulnerable communities today are often those most victimized in the past, so this reorientation is not without ameliorating aspects.

Writer Rebecca Solnit recognizes this need to redefine hope away from utopianism. In Hope in the Dark and other books, she describes scenes of disaster in Haiti and elsewhere, pointing out how these conditions transform categories.2323Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities. New York, NY: Nation Books, 2004, 2006. From the old perspective, the man breaking into a hardware store for tools is looting; from the new perspective, he is helping his community get what it needs to build shelters. Disasters alter ideas of justice; the shortening of time dismantles larger plans for the sake of urgent needs. We might say that Solnit deliberately relinquishes the hopes for perfection that fed the Anthropocene for an alternative vision. Her new vision rests on small communities seeking not to expand and thrive, not to address all past wrongs, but simply to live as decently as possible in the present. Her sense of time is immediate, and her sense of space is local. Her sense of time is immediate, and her sense of space is local. On a destabilized planet, focusing on producing dense human and ecological networks in situ provides a bulwark against the Anthropocene’s inevitable shocks. Global thinking permits us to imagine sacrifice zones as necessary; local engagement resists such callous cruelty.

Solnit launches a winged creature she calls “the Angel of Alternative History” in opposition to Walter Benjamin’s tragic Angel of History. Writing in the 1940, Benjamin described his angel as being blown forever backward by the fierce winds of historical catastrophe, the wreckage mounting at the angel’s feet. Benjamin’s angel is a despairing figure; Solnit’s angel is a comic being. Her angel looks around and celebrates small acts of compassion, the social solidarity that mitigates disaster, and the political solidarity that says “we” in the largest sense not “I” or “my people,” The Angel of Alternative History looks to what might be done today, next week, and in the next few years, forgoing perfection. It is not utopian; it is not even optimistic. At times, it laughs inappropriately in the face of the Anthropocene. This angel’s feet are muddy, on the ground with the refugees, in the rice paddies ruined by rising salt water, in the rain with those resisting armed forces, with the coalminers in their ruined mountains, the small farmers, and the fishermen; this angel urges them to look to their strengths. As Solnit puts it, Benjamin’s “Angel of History says, ‘terrible, but this angel says ‘could be worse.’ They’re both right but the latter angel gives us ground to act.”2424Solnit, Hope in the Dark, p. 76.

In the Anthropocene, late Holocene hopes may very well prevent needed action. We should relinquish them. Solnit’s thinking diverts such hopes into a different channel.2525Others attuned to this political sensibility are Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015. And Bathsheba Demuth, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Co., 2019. She forgoes utopianism; argues for community not individual liberties; and sees justice as decency in the present and the immediate future, not the righting of past wrongs. She also lets go of growth as the goal, replacing it with greater equality; she rejects hierarchical institutions for networks of knowledge; she rejects perfection for getting by. Her model for Steffen’s “behavioral changes, technological innovations, new governance arrangements, and transformed social values” is local, provisional, and attentive to small negative feedback loops at ground-level. Through these methods, we may begin to stabilize a destabilized Earth.

Some institutions are taking note. The 2020 United Nations Human Development report was titled “The Next Frontier: Human Development and the Anthropocene.” Thirty years ago, UNDP did away with growth in GDP as the sole measure of development, and began to rank the world’s countries “by whether people in each country have the freedom and opportunity to live the lives they value.” Now they are groping toward a standard of “nature-based human development” that will help “tackle three central challenges of the Anthropocene together—mitigating and adapting to climate change, protecting biodiversity and ensuring human wellbeing for all. Nature-based human development is about nesting human development—including social and economic systems—into ecosystems and the biosphere, building on a systemic approach to nature-based solutions that puts people’s agency at the core.”2626“Human Development Report 2020,” United Nations Development Programme, December 15, 2020: http://hdr.undp.org/en/2020-report. But this vision is still shaky. On the one hand, the report declares “nothing short of a great transformation—in how we live, work and cooperate—is needed to change the path we are on;” on the other, they call for “expanding choice” and being “in line with competitive well-functioning markets,” phrases relying on Holocene utopianism. We are still at the stage of mixed messages. The contemporary marker of moderate hope is faint.

Three markers in conclusion

Ideas drive human impacts. Taking “The Declaration of Independence” (1776), the United Nations Charter (1945), and Hope in the Dark (2004) as markers charting the origins of the Great Acceleration, the Anthropocene, and where we are today, we see that it was not just bad ideas such as pouring toxins into air and waterways, colonialism, imperialism, and exploiting labor, but also the good ideas, especially utopian hopes, that spurred humans to overwhelm the great forces of nature. Whether we will ever be comfortable with “could have been worse” is hard to say, but we cannot understand our chances in the Anthropocene without asking ourselves what now, in today’s circumstances, counts as “hope.”

Julia Adeney Thomas is Associate Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame, focusing on the intellectual history of Japan and the Anthropocene.

Please cite as: Thomas, J A (2022) Modern Political Hopes as Immaterial Markers of the Anthropocene. In: Rosol C and Rispoli G (eds) Anthropogenic Markers: Stratigraphy and Context, Anthropocene Curriculum. Berlin: Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. DOI: 10.58049/hsg7-jw93