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In early 2017, there was a widely reported story about the death of the Great Barrier Reef. This natural wonder, off the coast of Australia, stretches over 100,000 square miles. It has been built and maintained for thousands of years by billions of tiny organisms, and it sustains a complex population of aquatic life. The reef has now become yet another victim of human-induced climate change. The culprit is a phenomenon known as “coral bleaching,” caused by warming ocean waters. The coral polyps that create the reef overheat and expel algae that live in their tissue, turning white. Over time, this leads to the death of the polyps, and thus the death of the reef ecosystem. The problem of coral bleaching has been known for some time, but recent studies have found that the process is proceeding much faster than expected — large sections of the reef are already dead. In a March 2017 New York Times article, an Australian scientist reports finding a level of destruction not expected to occur for thirty years. Reactions to the story followed predictable environmentalist narratives. For some, it was grist for the mill of green moralizing, yet another testament to the undeniable imperative to move to a zero-carbon-emissions world. For others, it was a dispiriting call to nihilism. After all, this was just the latest demonstration that climate change is happening much faster than even the most pessimistic scientists had believed. In such circumstances, it is easy to abandon hope that political institutions can address the crisis on the time-scale it demands. There was, however, another story about the reef, one which hinted at a different political imaginary for the response to climate crisis. A group of researchers at the University of Sydney released a study in which they proposed to protect the reef by means of a technique known as “cloud brightening.” The idea is simple to describe, yet radical in its ecological implications. The objective is simply to make clouds reflect more sunlight. This decreases the amount of light that reaches the Earth’s surface, thereby cooling it. In one of the most commonly considered implementations, this would be done by ships that traverse the ocean, converting seawater into salt particles, and then dispersing those particles into the atmosphere. The scientists proposed a local cloud brightening effort, focused specifically on protecting the reef. By preventing a few degrees of warming, they argued, it might yet be possible to save it. This may or may not be realistic. Indeed, recent accounts suggest that time may have run out for the Great Barrier Reef. But the researchers were suggesting an approach to the climate crisis that has been discussed on a much larger scale, one which is extremely controversial among those concerned with the breakdown of the ecological systems that sustain civilization.

The World We Made Geoengineering, in the definition offered by Oxford University’s geoengineering program, is “the deliberate large-scale intervention in the Earth’s natural systems to counteract climate change.” Cloud brightening is only one item on the agenda. These proposals entail either reducing the amount of solar energy that reaches Earth, as cloud brightening does, or actively removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere through some type of capture and sequestration. Such ideas have attracted the interest of rich investors like Bill Gates and Elon Musk. It is at this point that many on the Left jump ship. Geoengineering can easily be dismissed as a fantasy, the most absurd iteration yet of the Promethean delusion that we can exercise mastery over the natural world. Even if the possibility of these efforts is acknowledged, it’s disturbing to think that it is our current ruling class that would implement them, with their characteristic combination of hubristic short-term thinking and disregard for workers. And finally, some simply find it abhorrent to tamper with nature in this fashion, disrupting the Earth’s metabolic process. The last objection is the easiest to dispense with, but also perhaps the most important. We have to recognize that we are, and have been for a long time, the manipulators and managers of nature. Even those who acknowledge this in one breath will still fall back on metaphors like reduced “carbon footprint” — as if we could just step more lightly and allow nature to repair itself. This is, paradoxically, one of the most anthropocentric positions imaginable, since it presumes that it is the eternal and natural state of the world to be habitable for humans. But God didn’t create the world specifically for us. Natural history is indifferent to humans and every other living being, and is characterized by chaotic change and mass extinctions, not homeostatic balance. Moreover, we have irreversibly transformed the natural world already, often to our detriment. “You broke it, you bought it,” as the retail expression goes. And we have most definitely bought it. This is the case made by science journalist Oliver Morton in his 2015 brief in favor of geoengineering, The Planet Remade . In it, he takes up the popular idea of the “Anthropocene.” The term originates with geologists, who have proposed that we have left the Holocene period for a stage in the history of the Earth that is specifically characterized by the human transformation of the ecosystem. There are geographical criticisms of this proposal, but there are also some serious political ones. Left scholars like Elmar Altvater, Andreas Malm, and Jason Moore have called into question the entire notion of the Anthropocene. It would, these critics say, be better called the Capitalocene , since the degradation of nature is really attributable to the ruling class’s methods of capital accumulation, rather than human civilization in general. Though this argument is based on sound historical analysis, it is limited as a guide to politics. Calling out the Capitalocene amounts to an argument from moral righteousness: it was you ruling elites who broke the world, not us! But be that as it may, any society that succeeds capitalism will inherit the world that previous societies have made — and we have been actively making it for longer than many people realize. Morton’s book illustrates this by way of an intervention into nature that gets quite a bit less attention than the carbon cycle that fuels global warming: the nitrogen cycle. Nitrogen is essential to life, and it is plentiful in the atmosphere. But in order to be usable for plant growth, inert nitrogen atoms must be “fixed” to another element, a process that for millions of years was done almost exclusively by soil bacteria. That is, until industrial capitalism came along.

It All Comes to Shit The history of human management of the nitrogen cycle is a literal history of shit. Our story starts in nineteenth-century Europe, with the German chemist Justus von Liebig. It was he who noted the significance of nitrogen for plant growth, and therefore food supplies. Moreover, he noted the particular way that capitalist industrialization had disrupted the traditional nitrogen cycle. In an agrarian society, food is consumed where it is grown, and the waste, in the form of manure and compost, is returned to the soil. But in Victorian England, this cycle was disrupted by industrialization, which drew huge numbers of people to cities. There, they consumed food grown in the countryside. Their waste, rather than returning to the soil, went into the streets of London, producing squalor in the city and diminished soil fertility in the country. Karl Marx, in an expression later popularized by sociologist John Bellamy Foster, called this disjuncture in the ecosystem capitalism’s “metabolic rift.” This, in turn, led Britain to confront an urgent geopolitical problem: an insufficient supply of shit. Off the coast of Peru, it was discovered that birds had, for thousands of years, been depositing their droppings on islands, where they built up into huge amounts of a nitrogen-rich substance known as “guano.” This could be used as fertilizer, a substitute for the lost nitrogen of an urbanized economy, and a means to escape any Malthusian limit to the ability of a given territory to feed a growing population. During the period of “guano imperialism,” wars were fought to secure these supplies — but by the end of the nineteenth century, they had been mostly depleted. It was at this point that capitalist societies took a decisive leap into human management of the nitrogen cycle. In 1909, German chemist Fritz Haber developed a process for artificially fixing nitrogen into ammonia, a process which is still used to produce commercial fertilizers. It was now possible to escape the dependence on shit, but at a cost: the process was extremely energy intensive. Thus we come back around to the climate crisis — so long as energy generation depends on fossil fuels, all food is, in essence, a petroleum product. Decades on, we now live in a world where more nitrogen is fixed in factories than in the soil, and consequently we can support a global population of over seven billion. It is certainly true that we could support that population more efficiently were we free of the artificial scarcities and wastes imposed by capitalism. And the production of excess nitrogen, like the emission of excess carbon, has serious environmental impacts that scientists are still figuring out how to address. But it is hard to see how we could ever completely leave behind industrial nitrogen fixation, humanity’s first great geoengineering project.