This is an excerpt from Global Climate Justice: Theory and Practice. You can download the book free of charge from E-International Relations.

In his 1989 book The End of Nature, Bill McKibben claims that, because of large-scale climate change produced by human technologies, no place on Earth can be considered natural anymore. In 2000, at a conference in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Paul J. Crutzen proclaimed that we live in the Anthropocene, a new phase in the history of the planet in which humankind has imposed itself as a decisive influence on the global ecology, interfering with its fundamental systems. Is nature truly over? And, if so, are we left with nothing more to do than mourning its end? In this chapter, I reconstruct how humans have allegedly ended nature (Section 1); hence I analyse two different possible readings of the ‘end of nature’ claim, namely the ontological and the epistemological readings, showing that the first one is either false or unfounded, while the second one is possibly true (Section 2). Finally, I show how the analysis previously conducted can help in better focusing the (ontological) target of our conservation actions and the (epistemological) tools at our disposal (Section 3).

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1. How Humans Are Supposed to Have Ended Nature

The view that human activities may have an impact on climate is not a novelty. The German naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt (1769– 1859) was probably the first person to theorise the existence of a link between human activities and climate, pointing out three ways in which the firsts affect the second: deforestation, reckless irrigation and the ‘great masses of steam and gas’ produced by industrial centres (Wulf 2015, 326). The American scientist Eunice Foote (1818–1888) was, by comparison, the first person who tested experimentally the hypothesis that atmospheric gases affect Earth’s temperature, or what we call today ‘the greenhouse effect’. In her 1856 article, ‘Circumstances affecting the heat of the sun’s rays’, Foote related changes in the types and quantities of atmospheric gases – including carbon dioxide (CO2) – to earth’s temperature, concluding that ‘an atmosphere of that gas [CO2] would give our earth a high temperature’ (Foote 1856, 383).

The phenomena underlined by Humboldt were destined to escalate together with the greenhouse effect tested by Foot. The main reasons for this were the massive increase of human population, on the one hand, and energy consumption and related anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases on the other hand.

Starting with population growth, around 1800 there were just one billion human beings on Earth, and it had taken many thousands of years to reach that number. By 1930, the human population had doubled. Then, in the span of one human lifetime, the global population tripled from 2.3 billion in 1945 to 7.2 billion in 2015. Concerning energy, in the late eighteenth century, humankind shifted from an organic energy regime, based on human and animal force for power, and wood and biomasses for heat, to a fossil-based energy regime. According to John McNeill and Peter Engelke (2014, 9), coal became the world’s primary fuel at the end of the nineteenth century, and then oil took up the position in the mid-1960s. At the same time, energy use increased: by 1870, human beings were using more fossil fuel energy each year than the annual global production from all photosynthesis; today they use about 32 billion barrels of oil each year: ‘the burgeoning rate of energy use in modern history makes our time wildly different from anything in the human past’ (McNeill and Engelke 2014, 10). Burning fossil fuels and deforestation are the two main ways through which humans add carbon to the atmosphere: as of 7 June 2021, the Research News Webpage of the United States National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOOA), announced that the atmospheric carbon dioxide measured at NOAA’s Mauna Loa Atmospheric Baseline Observatory reached a monthly average of 419 parts per million (ppm) – compared with the 280 ppm pre-industrial baseline (McNeill and Engelke 2014, 64); this is the highest level registered since accurate measurements began.

At first, the increasing human impact on the biosphere was gradual, but since the mid-twentieth century, the so-called ‘Great Acceleration’ began (McNeill and Engelke 2014; Steffen et al. 2015). The human impact escalated fast, and human actions began to interfere significantly with crucial biogeochemical cycles (the interconnected processes through which the elemental components of organic matter are cycled through the biosphere, such as the carbon, sulphur, nitrogen and water cycles), affecting their capacity for self-adjustment and hence altering global climate. Humans can hence be compared, according to some, to a ‘great force of nature’ (Ellis 2018, 2) that is reshaping the planet, putting an end to the relatively stable conditions that characterized the Holocene – the post-glacial geological epoch that started approximately 11,000 years ago.

The magnitude and the pervasiveness of the phenomena described above have led some authors to decree the end of nature by the hand of humans. In particular, the American environmentalist and journalist Bill McKibben – in an early popular book about climate change, entitled The End of Nature (1989) – denounced the anthropogenic changes to nature that were affecting the entire planet, to the point that ‘we are at the end of nature’ (McKibben 1989; rev. ed. 2003, 7). What makes the difference, according to him, is that even though human activities like deforestation and pollution have had an impact on the environment for a long time, they used to occur on a local scale (they altered the places in which they occurred but not those in which they did not), while climate change is a global phenomenon that involves the entire planet, including places not inhabited by human beings.

Short of widescale nuclear war, global warming represents the largest imaginable such alteration: by changing the very temperature of the planet, we inexorably affect its flora, its fauna, its rainfall and evaporation, the decomposition of its soils. Every inch of the planet is different; indeed, the physics of climate means the most extreme changes are going on at the north and south poles, farthest from human beings (McKibben 1989; rev. ed. 2003, xv).

Short of widescale nuclear war, global warming represents the largest imaginable such alteration: by changing the very temperature of the planet, we inexorably affect its flora, its fauna, its rainfall and evaporation, the decomposition of its soils. Every inch of the planet is different; indeed, the physics of climate means the most extreme changes are going on at the north and south poles, farthest from human beings (McKibben 1989; rev. ed. 2003, xv).

In 2000, at a conference in Cuernavaca, Mexico, Nobel-prize winning atmospheric chemist Paul J. Crutzen stood up in frustration towards his colleagues still referring to our epoch as the Holocene, exclaiming, ‘We are in the Anthropocene!’ (Ellis 2018, 1). As illustrated in a brief note published the same year in the ‘Global Change News Letter’ (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000), during the Holocene human activities ‘gradually grew into a significant geological, morphological force’. The global effect of these human activities had become evident in the latter part of the eighteenth century, the conventional starting date of the Anthropocene. And, unless major catastrophes occur, humankind seems destined, according to Crutzen and Stoermer, to remain a major geological force for millennia, maybe millions of years. (Note, however, that the Anthropocene has not yet been formally recognized by geologists and that several criticisms have been raised against the idea – see, for instance, Santana 2019).

If we take seriously the claim that anthropogenic climate change has ended nature, then – as political scientist Steven Vogel argues in Thinking like a Mall: Environmental Philosophy after the End of Nature (2015) – we would be left with nothing more to do than mourn nature’s end, because, once destroyed, nature cannot be restored. In fact, to restore nature, human intervention would be required, but – by definition – human productions are artifacts, and a newly planted forest, for instance, would be an artifact as well. Accordingly, and paradoxically, restoring nature would result in increasing the number of artifacts on the planet (Katz 1992). The end of nature challenges traditional environmentalism, focused mainly on nature conservation and ecology, studying the workings of intact ecosystems rather than ways to manage them (Editorial 2008). However, such a challenge can be constructive, making us rethink nature and the place of our species in it, and hence helping to better focus our conservation targets and our epistemological tools, bringing to light new possible paths for action.

2. Two Ways of Understanding the Alleged End of Nature

Does the advent of the age of humans mean the end of nature? Is nature actually over? The first step in answering these questions is to clarify what ‘nature’, and hence its end, means. The claim that nature has ended can be understood in both an ontological and epistemological way. While ontology has to do with the world, its entities and processes, epistemology has to do with our knowledge and especially our justified beliefs about the world, its entities and processes.

The ontological reading of the end of nature suggests that once there was something that we called ‘nature’, and that it does not exist anymore because of our activities, especially anthropogenic climate change. But what was it, that something? Limiting our analysis to the western use of the word, there are two main possibilities. The first one is that nature is what is opposed to the supernatural. According to Aristotle (384–322 BC), who first defined ‘nature’ (Owens 1968; Lammer 2016), the technical, philosophical meaning of the term has to be limited to things that change. More precisely, ‘natural’ things have an inner principle of change and being at rest, namely all the – living and not living – things of the visible and tangible universe, as opposed to abstract things, like theorems and numbers, and the unmoved motor. In this sense, since artifacts are not supernatural things, they seem to belong to the ontological........

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