Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, the Department of History/Conceptual and Historical

Studies of Science, The University of Chicago

“Growth”

DRAFT paper for Workshop on “Rethinking Economic History in the Anthropocene,”

organized by Prasannan Parthasarathi and Julia Adeney Thomas, Boston College,

March 23-25, 2017.

DO NOT CITE WITHOUT PERMISSION OF AUTHOR. 1

The dream of earthly abundance has deep roots. We can track a rich variety of

words in the English language for improvement, growth and development from early

modern alchemy to neoclassical economics. Cornucopia, transmutation, and the Great

Instauration were key terms for the magicians and projectors of the Stuart Age. During

the Enlightenment, the lexicon of abundance shifted to ideas of political arithmetic,

agricultural improvement, the progress of opulence, commercial empire, and compound

interest. Victorians in turn dreamed of useful knowledge, Carboniferous fuel, steam

power, and frontier expansion. In the twentieth century, the language of plenty expanded

to include concepts of substitution, gross national product, takeoff, information society,

and present value. Curiously, this cornucopian vocabulary emerged more or less in

tandem with a language of limits, including words such as soil exhaustion, the stationary

Many thanks to Julia Adeney Thomas for her helpful comments on a previous draft.

1 This essay draws in part on a previously published essay entitled “The Holocene

Hangover,” The Guardian, December 7, 2016.

1
state, arithmetic increase, surplus population, the coal question, degeneration, and

environmental disaster. That parallel movement is hardly a coincidence. Competing

visions of abundance and scarcity have fed on each other across the modern period. The

prospect of accelerating change has provoked countervailing visions of physical limits.

These imaginaries of growth closely reflect a material context of technological

innovation, market integration, globalization as well as demographic strain and ecological

degradation.2

In recent years, the debate about the future of growth has produced a new

constellation of words and names: the Anthropocene, the Great Acceleration, and

Planetary Boundaries. As the demands of economic development began to put pressure

on planetary stocks and sinks in the second half of the twentieth century, the worries

about physical limits to economic growth entered a new stage. In one common image of

the Anthropocene, we encounter a cluster of J-curves spiking upward together over the

last two hundred and fifty years. Among the twenty-four indicators we find a mixture of

social and physical trends: carbon dioxide, tropical deforestation, shrimp aquaculture,

paper production, dam building, and urban population growth. In each curve, the second

half of the twentieth century marks a moment of steep increase: the Great Acceleration

after 1950. By juxtaposing social development with earth system trends, the graphs

illustrate how human activities have been reshaping the global environment. The speed

and magnitude of these anthropogenic changes have come to exceed the non-human

cycles in the earth system. Such a conception of the Anthropocene recognizes the central

importance of climate change as a driver of global change but also insists that climate

2
Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, “The Origins of Cornucopianism: a Preliminary Genealogy,”
Critical Historical Studies, vol. 1 (2014), no. 1, pp. 1–18.

2
change is only one among many growing threats to the stable functioning of the

biosphere.

Figure 1. “The Great Acceleration.” International Biosphere-Geosphere Programme.

Downloaded March 16, 2017.

http://www.igbp.net/news/pressreleases/pressreleases/planetarydashboardshowsgreatacce

lerationinhumanactivitysince1950.5.950c2fa1495db7081eb42.html

In recent years, many of the leading scholars of the Anthropocene have adopted

the Planetary Boundaries concept. This precautionary model predicts that unsustainable

3
economic development will trigger irreversible and non-linear changes to the earth

system. The global climate is only one of nine earth system processes under threat. Land

use is changing rapidly thanks to urbanization, agriculture, and population pressure. The

rate of biodiversity loss (changes in biosphere integrity) is increasing in many

ecosystems. Acidification is affecting marine biodiversity as well as the capacity of

oceans to absorb carbon dioxide. The supply of fresh water in many regions is

deteriorating. Aerosol loading and ozone depletion threaten the stability of the earth

system’s atmosphere. Industrial agriculture has perturbed the global nitrogen and

phosphorus cycles. Finally, the introduction of novel entities such as microplastics,

organic pollutants and radioactive particles may pose a risk not just at the local or

regional level but also worldwide.3

“Planetary boundaries” represent approximate quantitative values for thresholds

of environmental risks beyond which we can expect nonlinear and irreversible change on

a continental or planetary level. Most famously, climate scientists have warned that any

carbon emissions above 350 parts per million (ppm) signify unacceptable danger to the

welfare of the planet and humanity. The big rise in emissions that brought us past this

threshold happened in the past three generations. While the origin of fossil fuel burning

goes back to the Industrial Revolution (which set us on an emissions path beyond the

Holocene’s natural variability of 260 to 285 ppm), the truly dramatic rise in carbon

3
Johan Rockström, Will Steffen et al, “A Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” Nature,
Vol 461, 24 September 2009; Will Steffen, Jacques Grinevald, Paul Crutzen and John
McNeill, “The Anthropocene: conceptual and historical Perspectives,” Phil. Trans. R.
Soc. A 2011 369, 842-867; cf. Will Steffen, Åsa Persson, Paul Crutzen, et al, “The
Anthropocene: from Global Change to Global Stewardship,” Ambio 2011, pp. 1-23; Will
Steffen and Johan Rockström, ”Planetary boundaries: Guiding human development on a
changing planet,” Nature, January 2015.

4
dioxide emissions, from 310 to 400 ppm, has occurred between 1950 and 2015.

Figure 2. “Planetary Boundaries.” Stockholm Resilience Center. Downloaded March 16,

2017.

http://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-boundaries.html

A third widely circulated image from the International Geosphere Biosphere

Program focuses not on the Anthropocene itself but its climatological and evolutionary

prelude.4 The curve here marks temperature changes over the past 100,000 years, as

measured by changes in δ18O (the difference in the ratio between isotope 18O and 16O).

This graph bridges the conventional divide between history and prehistory, seeing them

as part of a single story. Early human migration in the Pleistocene took place in the

context of sharp temperature oscillations between glacials and interglacials. Agriculture

emerged once temperature stabilized in the long plateau of the Holocene. Will Steffen

defines the Holocene as the “environmental envelope,” which made possible the growth

4
“Anthropocene” International Geosphere and Biosphere Programme
http://www.igbp.net/globalchange/anthropocene.4.1b8ae20512db692f2a680009238.html

5
of complex societies. It is the “only global environment that we are sure is ‘safe operating

space’ for the complex, extensive civilization that Homo Sapiens has constructed.” A

stable environment is the prerequisite for development as freedom. The Holocene gave

“humanity… the freedom to pursue long-term social and economic development.” It

follows that the “overarching long-term goal for humanity” requires that the Earth

System remain in a “Holocene-like” state. In concrete terms, Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark

Williams point to the crucial role of sea levels in fostering economic development. The

relative stability of sea levels over the last five thousand years have permitted the build-

up of fertile sediments on coastal plains and in river deltas across the planet. Such

“additions to the terrestrial landscape” have been “most amenable for human life” by

spurring intensive agriculture, population growth, urbanization, and coastal trade.5

5
Steffen, 2011, p. 9; Jan Zalasiewicz and Mark Williams, Goldilocks Planet: the 4
Billion Year Story of Earth’s Climate (Oxford University Press, 2012), 211-213
Steffen also argues that biodiversity is as important as a stable climate for human
development. Notice that the evolution of our current level of biodiversity extends far
deeper into geological time than the Holocene, see Steffen and Larsson (2011).

6
Figure 3: Graph from International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme website on the

“Anthropocene.” Downloaded March 16, 2017.

http://www.igbp.net/globalchange/anthropocene.4.1b8ae20512db692f2a680009238.html

Many scholars, from Mike Hulme to Julia Adeney Thomas, have drawn attention

to the ideological and normative assumptions that frame the Anthropocene debate. Some

see the record of human evolutionary history as proof of human resilience and adaptation.

More cautious observers view the passing of the Holocene as a tragic moment, a

dangerous step towards planetary tipping points and economic hardship for those most

vulnerable to environmental change. Some radical voices argue that the only viable path

is one of degrowth and ecological economics, forcing affluent societies to abandon the

cornucopian expectations that have nourished politics for the past few decades.6

Yet most of the debate about the Anthropocene so far has focused on its

stratigraphic validation, its historical starting point and causes, and how best to think

about the problem of collective agency. Far less has been said about the Anthropocene as

a theory of economic development. One inference from the argument about

climatological stability is that the “environmental envelope” of the Holocene made

possible not only sedentary, agrarian society but also (in conjunction with fossil fuels) the

Industrial Revolution and the Great Acceleration. In the Holocene, economic

development did not yet interfere with the basic functions of the earth system (the

6
Mike Hulme, Why We Disagree about Climate Change: Understanding Controversy,
Inaction and Opportunity (Cambridge University Press, 2009); Julia Adeney Thomas,
“History and Biology in the Anthropocene: Problems of Scale, Problems of Value,”
American Historical Review (December, 2014): 1587-1607; John Brooke, Climate
Change and the Course of Global History (Cambridge University Press, 2014); Amitav
Ghosh, The Great Derangement (University of Chicago Press, 2016).

7
economy was growing within a “safe operating space”). Although anthropogenic changes

in the earth system became increasingly common during the early decades of the Great

Acceleration, it still enjoyed a level of environmental stability comparable to the late

Holocene. In part, this relatively easy entry into the Anthropocene can be attributed to the

temporal lag between carbon dioxide emissions and their material effects. Such

generational lags will be a central feature of Anthropocene experience. But in the long

run, serious environmental instability must be expected. Several Planetary Boundaries are

now in danger of being breached: climate change, biodiversity, and nitrogen flux, among

others. The Great Acceleration produces waste products and pollution on such a scale that

they can no longer easily be absorbed by our planetary sinks. What we used to think was

infinite and inexhaustible – the ocean and the atmosphere – turn out to be all too finite.7

For historians concerned with economic development, the science of the

Anthropocene raises questions of causation. The Working Group on the Anthropocene

now favors a starting point of 1950 over earlier dates. By stressing large-scale planetary

effects rather than underlying causes, this shift is likely to provoke resistance among

historians. The Great Acceleration rested to a significant degree on technologies,

ideologies, and social systems that had been pioneered before 1950. For example, the

coming of cheap synthetic fertilizer was closely connected with the development of

munitions production in the world wars. The development block that linked the

combustion engine, oil and Fordism was also firmly established before 1950. Robert

7 Natural sinks might be engineered to absorb increased levels of waste and pollution, for

example through bio-energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS). The Paris
Agreement includes an ambitious program of carbon sequestration, the construction of
artificial sinks over coming decades. But it is currently unclear whether these
technologies can deliver results on a scale that matches the emerging threats.

8
Gordon and Vaclav Smil argue that the productivity gains and technologies introduced in

the second industrial revolution 1870-1914 have been far more significant than any of the

innovations of the postwar period. We also need to consider the worldwide expansion and

industrialization of agriculture in the period 1800-1950 that gave rise to the first “mega-

cities” – London and New York. British imperialism and American expansion in turn

rested on the development block of coal, iron and steam, which took shape between the

invention of the Newcomen steam engine of 1712 and the beginning of steam powered

cotton production in the 1830s. Finally, John Brooke and Chris Otter suggest that pre-

modern land clearance and frontier agriculture produced significant green house gas

emissions before the advent of the Industrial Revolution. For anyone concerned with the

historical causes of development, the starting point of 1950 seems much too late.8

Such a “prehistory of the Great Acceleration” calls for renewed attention to

energy in economic history. A strong causal connection between rising income and

energy use is evident when we compare rich and developing countries in the present. But

we still know quite little about how energy use has shaped social and political structures

across time, from households and social classes to states and empires. One pioneering

project of this sort now under way is a comparative study led by Frank Trentmann, which

8
For nested scales, see Daniel Lord Smail, “Scale” in Deep History: the Architecture of
Past and Present (University of California Press, 2012), pp. 242-272; Hugh S. Gorman,
The Story of N: A Social History of the Nitrogen Cycle and the Challenge of
Sustainability (Rutgers University Press, 2013). Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste
Fressoz, L’Événement Anthropocène (Seuil, 2013); Robert Gordon, The Rise and Fall of
American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living since the Civil War (Princeton University
Press, 2016); Vaclav Smil, Creating the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations of
1867-1914 and Their Lasting Impact (Oxford University Press, 2005); James Belich,
Replenishing the Earth: the Settler Revolution and the Anglo-World 1783-1939 (Oxford
University Press, 2011); John Brooke and Chris Otter, “The Organic Anthropocene,”
Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 49, no. 2 (2016) pp. 281–302.

9
aims to investigate national energy regimes in twentieth century Britain, East Germany,

Canada and Japan.9

Modern ideologies have arguably gained much of their credence from the cheap

energy fueling economic and technological development, as Dipesh Chakrabarty

suggests. But we should be careful to assume too neat a coincidence of political thought

and popular culture with its energy base. We need to recognize that political and cultural

interest in energy consumption has been uneven and intermittent rather than steady and

uniform. Sometimes confidence in the forces of industrialization may have tempted

thinkers away from considering its energy basis (Marx had relatively little to say about

coal). Debates about the significance of coal to the economy appear to have reached a

high mark during the 1860s and 1870s when fears of coal exhaustion haunted leading

Victorian figures like John Stuart Mill and William Gladstone. Perhaps we need to think

of fossil fuel culture as a steady oscillation between cornucopian amnesia and moments

of heightened awareness in the face of perceived exhaustion?

The history of energy as ideology raises profound epistemological and

disciplinary questions about the relation between political economy and the

environmental sciences. Paul Warde and his colleagues Paolo Malanima and Astrid

Kander observe that energy has long been excluded from the production function in

standard models of growth accounting. Have economists in fact fundamentally

underestimated the place of energy in the making of modern economies? On the left,

9
Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History,” 208; Frank Trentmann, “Material
Cultures of Energy,” http://www.bbk.ac.uk/mce/; strangely William Cronon left out coal
in his path-breaking environmental history Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great
West (W.W. Norton, 1992).

10
Andreas Malm suggests that fossil fuel and carbon dioxide emissions must be introduced

into the MCM formula of Marxist analysis.10

The neglect of energy and environment in economic and social theory is surely

symptomatic of a broader cornucopian tendency in modern life. We can trace some of

this confidence all the way back to the Enlightenment. For Adam Smith and his allies, the

natural world was fundamentally stable and benign. Famine was a product of bad

government, never a natural occurrence. Crucially, the self-regulating properties of the

market reflected an underlying economy of nature. In this way, Smith refused to conceive

of a world where society and nature could be fundamentally at odds. However, a darker

picture of the human condition emerged in the works of Smith’s successors. Worries

about demographic strain and diminishing returns undercut Smith’s Enlightenment

optimism. But in the final decades of the nineteenth century, liberal political economy

lost its long-standing Malthusian obsession with the finite supply of land. Agriculture and

overpopulation faded away as central topics of analysis. Models of economic

development became increasingly abstract and quantitative. During the Great

Acceleration, the promise of long-term growth became the cornerstone of democratic

politics in the West as well as Communist dictatorship in the Soviet Bloc. Economic

development was now measured in the statistical language of national income (GNP). In

a final twist, the rise of the information economy has encouraged some economists to

think of growth primarily in terms of useful knowledge and information, decoupled from

10
Astrid Kander, Paolo Malanima, and Paul Warde, Power to the People: Energy in
Europe over the Last Five Centuries (Princeton University Press, 2014), 6-7, 387-94
(Appendix A); Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of
Global Warming (London: Verso, 2016); Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother:
The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (Basic
Books, 1984).

11
the material world. For them, human ingenuity is the “ultimate resource.”11

Such optimism may seem quite perverse from the perspective of the Planetary

Boundaries model. John McNeill and Peter Engelke warn that our “systems of thought

and ideologies,” “customs and habits,” and “institutions and policies” still remain firmly

rooted “in the Late Holocene.” “Adjustment to the Anthropocene, has only just begun.”

Amitav Ghosh in turn suggests that the dominant conception of reality underpinning

modern culture has more in common with nineteenth century uniformitarianism than the

science of the Anthropocene. It is tempting to view modern cornucopianism itself as an

ideological manifestation of Holocene environmental stability. After almost 12,000 years

of the Holocene’s “Long Summer,” is it any wonder that we now espouse deep-seated

habits and ideas about the harmony of the natural world? Yet the historical account above

seems to suggest that such confidence has been very late in the making. In a telling irony,

cornucopianism appears to have reached a peak in the postwar period, just as the

Holocene came to a close.12

In fact, Anthropocene science may already have produced a self-consciously

cornucopian ideology of its own. The “ecomodernist” group associated with the

Breakthrough Institute – including its leaders Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger,

has proposed that the Anthropocene should be seen in a positive light, not as a dangerous

11
Fredrik Albritton Jonsson, “Rival Ecologies of Global Commerce: Adam Smith and the
Natural Historians,” American Historical Review, December 2010, pp. 1342-1363:
Timothy Mitchell, “Economists and the Economy in the Twentieth Century,” in George
Steinmetz, ed. The Politics of Method in the Human Sciences: Positivism and Its
Epistemological Others (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); Stephen J. Macekura,
Of Limits and Growth: the Rise of Global Sustainable Development in the Twentieth
Century (Cambridge University Press, 2015).
12
John McNeill and Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of
the Anthropocene Since 1945 (Harvard University Press, 2016), p. 211

12
deviation from Holocene stability, but rather as an opportunity for technological

creativity and cultural flourishing: the “good Anthropocene.” Along with this anti-

declensionist view of the future comes an exuberant account of human adaptation in the

Pleistocene. The geographer Erle Ellis insists that the entire period of the Holocene

should be renamed the Anthropocene in recognition of how deeply humans have

transformed the biosphere in the past. More recently, Ellis and paleoecologist Mark

Maslin have pushed the starting point even further back into the Pleistocene. Preferring a

starting date for the Anthropocene 50,000 years ago, they note that “human social and

cultural capacities to alter its environmental processes” have “accumulated” and “scaled

up” in “complex and historically contingent ways.” In a similar spirit, the Hall of Human

Origin at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, an exhibit funded by the David H.

Koch foundation, presents human evolution as a series of adaptations to prehistoric

climate change. Material constraints here serve as foils for biological and technological

innovation. The instability of climate in the Pleistocene epoch figures not as an

impediment to complex society but as the crucible for what we might call a

transcendental form of ingenuity.13

The structural analogy between the Pleistocene past and the Anthropocene future

rests on a series of controversial assumptions. By starting the Anthropocene in the

Pleistocene, Erle Ellis and Mark Maslin reject the special significance of the

13
Ted Nordhaus, Michael Shellenberger, and Jenna Mukuno, “Ecomodernism and the
Anthropocene,” Breakthrough Journal, Summer 2015; Erle Ellis et al, “Involve Social
Scientists in Defining the Anthropocene,” Nature, December 7, 2016, corrected January
13, 2017; Ruth Defriez, The Big Ratchet: How Humanity Thrives in the Face of Natural
Crisis (Basic Books, 2014); for critical commentary see Ian Angus, “Another Attack on
Anthropocene Science,” http://climateandcapitalism.com/2017/01/24/another-attack-on-
anthropocene-science/; William J. Burroughs, Climate Change in Prehistory: the End of
the Reign of Chaos (Cambridge University Press, 2005).

13
climatological stability of the Holocene. They also conflate two dramatically different

landscapes of human development. Why should evolutionary adaptation in a virtually

unpopulated world serve as a credible model for modern life in the Anthropocene? Other

ecomodernists tend to downplay the political, technological and ethical difficulties

surrounding a transition to renewables. Because they assume that high growth rates will

be possible in the foreseeable future, they show little interest in environmental justice

problems and planetary boundaries. The force of human ingenuity will overcome

apparent limits.

No doubt, the ecomodernist position makes politics of evolutionary biology. But

the cornucopian approach also encourages us to think more critically about the special

status of the Holocene in Anthropocene science. Can we give a more precise empirical

account of the significance of the Holocene “environmental envelope”? The connection

between sea levels and civilization suggested by Mark Williams and Jan Zalasiewicz

might provide a concrete test case. How important have stable coastlines been to the

development of complex societies, in terms of agricultural productivity, population

growth, urbanization and commerce? Could complex societies have prospered without

coastal connections?14

This empirical question of Holocene stability is in turn connected to a normative

subtext. The planetary boundaries model seems to imply that we have inhabited a

14
Yet another way to assess the question of stability would be to examine climate
variability in food production, including drought and heat tolerance in different crops
over time. In part, we might estimate the significance of Holocene stability by assessing
losses due to Anthropocene variability for crop yields (taking into account changes in
practice like plant breeding and synthetic fertilizer). The concept of ecosystem services
might also provide a model for how to evaluate the importance of stable ecological
functions, from pollination to freshwater filtration. To what degree could we
conceptualize Holocene stability in terms of planetary ecosystem services?

14
Goldilocks climate precisely right for civilization, as if it had been designed for our

wellbeing. Before and after the Holocene lurks a strange and dangerous planet, prone to

extremes and instability. The idea of the “environmental envelope” seems to involve a

naturalistic or even quasi-providential idea of a strong fit between the natural and the

social world. The Holocene ideal also contains a developmental bias. The aggregate

picture of the Holocene as the “environmental envelope” of “civilization” is strongly

oriented towards the present (although these texts seem to shy away from overt defenses

of liberal democracy). The advocates of Holocene stability do not wish to preserve any

other part of Holocene society than the very end of it. This “late Holocene” orientation

combines the stable climate of the Holocene with the scientific and technological

potential of an economy based on renewable energy and ecological principles.

The final and most difficult normative problem raised by the Anthropocene

literature is the future of growth itself. Will Steffen and Johan Rockström suggest in their

2009 essay “A Safe Operating Space for Humanity” that human civilization must be

reoriented towards the biophysical context of development according to the principles of

“ecological economics.” Yet at the same time, they also emphasize the possibility of

long-term economic development within the Planetary Boundaries: “The evidence so far

suggests that, as long as the thresholds are not crossed, humanity has the freedom to

pursue long-term social and economic development.” In a more recent article on

planetary stewardship, Steffen and his co-authors seem to take a more critical

perspective, citing John McNeill’s classic environmental history Something New Under

the Sun.

15
 A core value of post-World War II contemporary society is ever-increasing

material wealth generated by a growth-oriented economy based on neoliberal

economic principles and assumptions, a value that has driven the Great

Acceleration but that climate change and other global changes are calling into

question.

In fact, the Planetary Boundaries approach seems designed to avoid hard questions about

the distribution of ecological footprint and environmental justice. It sets aggregate

boundaries, but does not comment on the social distribution of emissions. Can equal

levels of economic development be made available to all people on the planet, without

disrupting the basic cycles of the earth system? A quick search of recent articles on

Planetary Boundaries seems to reveal a disconcerting pattern. They speak again and again

of planetary stewardship, but never of justice.15

15
Steffen and Rockström (2009), pp. 474-75; Steffen and Larsson (2011), p. 13; John
McNeill, Something New Under the Sun: an Environmental History of the Twentieth
Century World (W.W. Norton, 2000); cf. Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement:
Climate Change and the Unthinkable (University of Chicago Press, 2016).

16