Most sectors struggle to move past business as usual — past the capitalist ethos of growth, the modernist faith in unending sociotechnical progress.
“The Anthropocene is many things. But above all else, it is a line,” writes Reinhold Martin. “Though it did not appear graphically at first, it is fundamentally — if deceptively — a concept that traces a path from one point to another.” The concept of the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch was proposed in 2000 by chemist Paul Crutzen and biologist Eugene Stoermer as a way “to emphasize the central role of mankind in geology and ecology.” A few years later climate scientist Will Steffen and colleagues traced “the trajectory of the Anthropocene” in a path-breaking article that was, in part, a collection of lines. One set of lines tracked “earth system trends” (carbon dioxide, methane, ocean acidification, domesticated land, forest loss, etc.); a parallel set tracked “socioeconomic trends” (urban population, energy use, tourism, transportation, fertilizer consumption, etc.). These sets of lines are entangled, conjoined; not so much interrelated as, in essence, the same line, drawn across different contexts, isolated in different graphs but all climbing upwards, and all contributing to the line of the “Great Acceleration,” which shows, in the scientists’ words, “the dramatic change in magnitude and rate of the human imprint from about 1950 onwards.”
Still, some lines are drawn more optimistically; or perhaps disingenuously. The author-provocateurs of “The Ecomodernist Manifesto” envision a very different trajectory in which the rising lines of economic growth are “decoupled” from the rising lines of ecological devastation. The result, in their cheerful assessment, will be “a good, or even great Anthropocene” — an era of continuing human consumption, of innovation underwritten by “a new generation of nuclear technologies.”
From the
Sixth Assessment Research Report, published by the IPCC in 2023; this diagram appears on page 31 of the report.
All the while
the IPCC has been drawing its own lines — lines which are, above all,
contingent, searing in their multiplicity, in their numerous possible trajectories. These lines point to a future that
might be possible
if only — if only “multiple interacting choices and actions can shift development pathways towards sustainability”; if only government, industry, and culture can align, and act urgently, effectively. These lines are thick with possibility, inflected with hope, but often overwhelmed by other lines that point to another future, to “maladaptation … increasing climate risks … ecosystem degradation.”
These lines are paths we are traveling together, for better or worse, towards survival or doom. How bad, they ask, will we let things get?
All these lines are perhaps the issue. The architectural discipline is still, on the whole, a bit drowsy, still awakening, rousing itself from the long
20th-century dream of progress and modernity, the dream of a clear path ahead. A dream that has been a nightmare for so many; the arrow of progress is a problematic line, riddled with inequity. We are still configured by capital, overwhelmed by regulation, eager to embrace the latest technologies and solutions.
Le Signal, in Soulac-sur-Mer, on the Atlantic coast of France, whose 75 inhabitants are the victims of the first French climate expropriation, due to erosion of the fragile shoreline; photographed in January 2023, just before its demolition. [Duffour/Andia, Alamy]
As the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty famously, though circumspectly, put it, “The mansion of modern freedom stands on an ever-expanding base of fossil fuel use.” This mansion — this architecture — was designed by and constructed for elites,
reliant on exploited labor and extractive economies; yet the fossil fuel system, what author-ecologist Andreas Malm calls a “socio-ecological structure,” also brought freedom, or at least relative prosperity, to some. The modern world, the world of the Anthropocene, was made on the premise, the promise, of never-ending growth, a line of expansion ever upward. It is a forced line, all the same: every barrel of oil, every automobile, every mile of pavement, every carefully conditioned house promoting possibilities for some, constricting opportunities for others. And when we consider the future, and people in the future, our own selves and our descendants, we can see that the mansion is shabby, poorly constructed, value-engineered, patched up and rotting as floods and fires encroach. A mansion, a refuge, a prison. In
Fossil Capital, Malm disavows this linear thinking:
[T]he fossil economy is an altogether historical substance. It must have undergone its own birth once upon a time. The causal powers it now exerts are emergent properties: they were not always there. Agents must have created it through events amounting to a moment of construction, much as, once erected, a building’s structure is now an enduring feature of the world; entrenched in the environment, it conditions the movements of the people inside. Eventually it appears indistinguishable from life itself: business-as-usual. But the fossil economy was once constructed and has since been reproduced and enlarged, and anything built over time can potentially be torn down (or escaped).
Architects today are exploring options:
reuse, retrofit, renovation. Becoming expert in repair, working with existing structures to take advantage of their embodied carbon, to find creativity within new constraints, in the heavy historical and material weight of existing conditions: for architects this is a growth opportunity. Or better, a de-growth opportunity. A repositioning of designers as agents of decarbonization. And here the lines become circular; they point us to the past, productively, to the richness of seemingly forgotten knowledge of how to build, how to live, before fossil fuels; they clarify the historical awareness that architectural modernism was based, in no small part, on the delegitimizing of traditional, vernacular, and customary practices of designing and building — on “making it new.” (Laughter from the flood-soaked audience).
Architectural modernism was based, in no small part, on delegitimizing traditional practices of designing and building — on ‘making it new.’
Much of the problem in architecture, and elsewhere, is that this line, the line that would separate the oil-soaked past from the decarbonized future, has been hidden, suppressed — sent to the background layer of the file. How can we cross the line, if we can’t see it? A serious question: how is it that architects, a well-educated group of mostly well-intentioned people, continue to provide carbon-laden professional services despite the science that makes it indisputably clear that the materials and systems they are specifying are leading, and will continue to lead, to the instability of the climate, the destruction of cities and habitats, and the death of millions, if not the entire species? A provisional answer: the economic and cultural apparatus of building design has obfuscated the intensity of the effects of these practices. Architects (along with so many others) have been attempting to make the situation manageable, reasonable, transition-able, rather than face existential terror.
