Venice has become a symbol of climate change and the undesirable impact of our industrial societies on the planet. The watery city is threatened by the very element that makes it so special, as rising sea levels threaten to submerge 1600 years of history and culture. The situation is exacerbated by subsidence (slow natural sinking), which was accelerated in the 1960s and 70s by the massive exploitation of underground water reserves. The future of the hydropolis—and the future of its historic treasures—depends on our ability to regain environmental balance on a global and local scale. Against the backdrop of these concerns, the idea of Venice as a paradigmatic city of the Anthropocene has emerged.

The Anthropocene is a neologism coined in 2000 by Paul Crutzen, Nobel laureate in chemistry, famous for his atmospheric studies on ozone. The term designates a yet-to-be-ratified geological epoch in which human beings, the “anthropos,” become a fundamental force of geological transformation, effectively bringing the geological epoch in which human civilizations flourished—the Holocene—to an end. To be precise, it is not all human beings, but rather the capitalist, technoscientific societies of the Global North that have come to affect the Earth system and its cycles to such a degree that the hypothesis that the Holocene has come to an end is plausible. The parameters of the past have been profoundly altered.

The disjunction between the multiple temporalities of Earth, civilizations, and historical events is evident. How does less than a hundred years of human history compare to the hundreds of millions of years of geology? Current consensus places the beginning of the Anthropocene in the middle of the twentieth century. Around 1950 the curves of the graphs of significant social and natural indices record a “great acceleration”—including dramatic increases in gross domestic product, world population, atmospheric CO₂ concentration, and global temperatures.

Understanding and responding to the Anthropocene demands a unification of natural and human sciences, particularly geology, sociology, and cultural history—a challenging task because the methods and concepts of the various disciplines are very different. Since 2009, the Anthropocene Working Group (an interdisciplinary research group established by the International Commission on Stratigraphy) has been concerned with the identification of global, measurable traces of human geological impact. This would allow the Anthropocene to be formally ratified according to the stringent criteria of the International Union of Geological Sciences. Among the strongest candidates for material, measurable evidence of human geologic impact are radioactive isotopes from Cold War nuclear bombs testing and the spread of fly ash, a type of carbon particle related to industrial combustion.

While geologists have worked assiduously on gathering such evidence, doubts and ideological skirmishes have multiplied in the humanities. Who would be the undifferentiated “anthropos” of the geological epoch? How to apportion responsibility in a world of asymmetrical relations between hegemonic and subaltern or colonized countries? What about the economic and ecological factors of the issue: capitalism and a mass extinction crisis? Attempts have been made to address these questions through alternative neologisms, including sociologist Jason Moore’s suggestion of “Capitalocene” and ecofeminist Donna Haraway’s “Chthulucene.”

However we term it, the basic issue at stake is clear: we need to rethink the relationship between humankind and nature. This is, among other things, a historical, social, and technological relationship. A broad consensus has emerged, in various disciplines, that it is necessary to recognize that the assumed separation between human and natural history is constructed and must be dispensed with. It is not enough to affirm this. In order to understand it, it is useful to turn to the study of realities in which the artificial separation between civilization and environment has already dissolved.

Venice is a striking example. At the recent international forum, Anthropocene Campus Venice (2021), the image of Venice as a cyborg city was proposed. The island, the lagoon, and the territory of Venice are neither natural nor artificial, but both at the same time: the city, a product of history, is a living artifact.

Let’s start with the lagoon. In the sixteenth century there was a political and scientific battle to which we owe much of the current geomorphological structure. Around 1501, a commission of water experts, the so-called Savi alle Acque (the water officers), was created to take care of the lagoon, coast, and rivers on behalf of the Serenissima Republic of Venice. This institution became the Magistrato alle Acque (Magistrate for the Waters), and survived until recent years. It was suppressed in 2014, in the wake of scandals related to the creation of mobile dams as part of the MOSE project: a technology intended to defend Venice against high water.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Renaissance engineer Cristoforo Sabbadino, famous technician and scientist of the Venetian Republic, strenuously advocated for the insular character of Venice and the protection of the waters of its lagoon, which risked being silted up by incoming sediments. He argued for the crucial importance of the water both for military defense and for the maritime interests of Venice, while an opposing faction, led by the speculator Alvise Cornaro, advocated agricultural interests and vast reclamation projects. The victory of Sabbadino’s “water party” resulted, over the centuries, in huge works to divert rivers—in particular the Brenta and the Sile—out of the lagoon. If today Venice still looks like the center of a lagoon archipelago, we owe it to constant anthropic intervention that followed the directive of Sabbadino. He gave his injunction in one of his sonnets, which addresses the city:

Rimuovi i fiumi, et alle voglie ingorde
Degl’huomini poni ‘l fren; che poscia ‘l mare,
Restato sol, sempre t’harà obedita.11Cristoforo Sabbadino, Il sistema Laguna a metà Cinquecento: Opere scelte pubblicate nel 450° della morte, ed. Pier Giorgio Tiozzo Gobetto (Mestrino, PD: Il Leggio, 2011), p. 5.

One could translate these lines as:

Venice, remove the rivers and arrest
the greedy desires of men. The sea
will always obey, once its waters are alone.

The liquid geography of Venice presents us with a first level of understanding of the interaction between humans and nature. The lagoon is the archive of its own history—a history of humans and their natural environment, of technical and political decisions. Today’s struggle to protect Venice concerns a territory that is the product of a historical process, and its present and future are marked by this previous evolution.

Alongside geomorphological alterations, another level of interaction emerges: the ecological one, which is determined by the relationship between society and ecosystems. In this regard too, Venice is a unique case for studying social practices and environmental policies. The State Archive of Venice preserves records of landscape engineering projects of the Magistrate for the Waters and fishing regulation and legislation from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries. From the Middle Ages to the end of the Ancien Régime, legislation is surprisingly consistent with regard to fishing seasons and legitimate methods. Regulations aimed to respect the reproductive cycles of various species and prevent the use of tools that could kill juveniles, the fish of tomorrow. As stated in a 1760 proclamation posted in the fish markets of San Marco and Rialto, “Our ancestors’ wisdom always astutely warned against the fishing of young fish, upon which the relied-upon abundance of food largely depends. They distinguished the times, places, the use of nets, and [the legitimate] arts [for fishing].”22Archivio di Stato di Venezia, Compilazione leggi Pesca, Pescaria, Pescatori, Pesce (1314–1786), f. 538r. Likewise, we read in the Orders of the College of Fishmongers of 1595 that “no one should dare fishing the Gò fish with hands at the time when they produce their eggs. […] Those who violate this rule will be punished: they will be sentenced to row a galley for two years with irons at their feet.”33Collegio delle Pescarie, Ordini presi (Venezia: Antonio Pinelli, 1595), f. A2r. And finally, as one reads in the same Orders: “Thick nets [i.e. nets with a narrow mesh], which the Burano fishermen and others recently introduced, are perpetually forbidden. One catches new, young fish with them but an infinite number are exterminated in order to put a small quantity of them in baskets.”44Ibid., f. A2v. Even the prices of the fish were regulated and moderated to ensure fair prices.

A similar historical case to fishing is found in the wise management of the local forests, which were of vital importance for Venice for several reasons: timber was precious for both architecture and the maintenance of its fleet, while standing trees prevented the erosion of the mountains that resulted in excessive sediment being deposited in the lagoon by the rivers.

The need for wise resource management is clearly evident to any society that has had to confront the finite nature of the material basis of its existence. Resource renewability is an important issue for almost all economies in history—with the exception of the imperial and colonial societies that, through constant conquest and expansion, lulled themselves into the illusion of having unlimited resources.

The question of the finiteness of resources and the need for renewability comes up again in the Anthropocene, but now on a planetary scale. Examples taken from the past help us to think about our relationship with the environment in terms of collective responsibility and decisions, instead of succumbing to the fatalistic perspective of an inexorable anarchy of individual selfishness that marks much of the discourse on the unintended consequences of our actions.

The Venetian story invites further consideration of the human-environment relationship with respect to what the philosopher Francis Bacon called our “second nature,” or the social, material and technological structures of humans. This, from the systemic perspective of the Anthropocene debate, cannot be separated from our “first nature,” or the non-human environmental context. The most interesting fact that emerges from the lagoon policies of the past is their participatory character, since water was perceived as a common good and public domain.

According to specific prescriptions, the various fishing communities were always consulted about interventions that could alter the territory, “because—as is stated in a decree of the Magistrate of Waters in 1536—no one understands better the course and trends of the waters of these lagoons than the fishermen who fish them day and night.”55 Giovanni Scarpa, “Premessa” to Mariegola della Scuola di Sant’Andrea de’ Pescadori 1569–1791 (Sottomarina, VE: Il Leggio, 1996), pp. 9–44, p. 28. The archives preserve questionnaires and interviews with the oldest and most experienced fishermen, conducted to evaluate, for example, the consequences of the diversion of the Brenta in 1610.

The culmination of the alliance between the fishing community of Venice, the Nicolotti (the name of the fishing community, named after their Protector, Saint Nicolaus), the political authorities, and scientific institutions took place in 1684. At the request of this alliance, the Senate commissioned water experts to map the lagoon “in order to delimitate Public Waters with zeal towards the Homeland concerning the most important matter of the lagoon and harbors, upon which [Venice’s] preservation, health and freedom depend.”66 State Archive of Venice, Compilazione leggi Pesca, Pescaria, Pescatori, Pesce (1314-1786), f. 1050r. The purpose of this intervention was to restrict the actions of private individuals who, by claiming exclusive rights over fishing areas, impeded the free movement of fishermen and their activities.

Such historical documents confront us with community models of land-and-water management and science in historical contexts that are different from our own. We can draw inspiration from them for democratic and non-destructive policies for today. We live in an age in which imagination struggles to free itself from the contradictory aesthetics of capitalist realism—a contradictory aesthetics that, by naturalizing the present, obscures the profound historicity of reality. Too often we forget that humankind is not only able to transform territory, ecosystems, and technology, but is also able to change society and the social pact underlying political systems.

The cultural and material history of Venice offers to the Anthropocene debate a paradigmatic case of human-environment interaction that teaches us not to absolutize the present. There is no intrinsically destructive human nature, an inexorable Promethean incendiary instinct. Local geo-anthropological contexts such as that of Venice help us to reflect on the historicity of our world and to recognize the need for a more cautious management of the natural assets that are common goods.

This is the edited English translation of an episode of an Italian podcast series issued by Ca’ Foscari University of Venice in collaboration with Storie Libere.