Expanding our Empathy in the Anthropocene
First, if you’re not familiar with the Anthropocene, it’s the new geological epoch we’ve entered. We’ve left the Holocene, that delightful 10,000 years when we could more or less assume that important things like sea level, snow/rainfall, and seasonal temperatures were going to stay more or less the same. That pleasant predictability allowed agriculture and human civilizations to blossom. Our global population grew, as did our technologic prowess, and we began to damage the air, water, and soil wherever we lived. Then we discovered fossil fuels, a rich and portable source of energy, and both our numbers and our capacity to alter our environment grew rapidly.
Now, there are 8 billion of us, and we’re capable of damaging the planet not just locally, but on a planetary scale. In fact, humans are now the dominant force for change in the biological, chemical, and geological processes of Planet Earth. That’s why we’ve named this new epoch after ourselves: the Anthropocene, from the Greek anthro for “man”, and cene for “new”. Yes, we humans are making everything new, but not necessarily better.
And what is empathy? It’s the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. We can usually manage empathy when the “other” is someone close to us, our child, our spouse, our parents and siblings, for example. Most of us also feel and express empathy in a wide array of other circumstances. Some random child with a skinned knee; media photos of a hungry mother and infant in Sudan; news of oppressed women in Iran; images of starving polar bears in the Arctic . . . even some stranger we encounter in the lineup at Starbucks, whose spouse is dying, can arouse us to care.
What seems to be harder for us is feeling empathy at a global level, or beyond the present as we experience it. But now that we’re capable of permanently altering the entire planet, not only for ourselves, but for all humans, present and future, we desperately need to expand our capacity for empathy. It is no longer enough to care only for those within our circle, our tribe, our community, or even our nation. And it’s no longer enough to care only for the moment, the week, the year, or even the decade. In the Anthropocene, we must answer to all of humanity, to all life on this planet, and to future generations. We created this challenging new reality, and it requires us to grow our capacity to care, and manifest that care in our actions.
Let me offer two examples. The first is very individual and close to home. Remote car starters! Out on my street, the SUVs and light trucks have been idling in driveways for 15-20 minutes each morning, in -1C weather. What’s that got to do with empathy? Well, the idling might be out of consideration for the short-term comfort of a loved one. We humans can be nice people. But what about the air pollution and greenhouse gases coming out the tailpipes? Those are contributing to the ill health of the community, and to the climate crisis, which is harming people all over the planet, now and into the future. Caring about all that requires expanded empathy.
And what of COP27, which drew to a close in Addis Ababa last Monday? Believe it or not, the 27-year-old COP process has yet to produce a clear statement about the need to phase out fossil fuels. And what’s that got to do with empathy? It’s about our failure to care, at the national and political level, about the harm we’re doing to other people and other species in other places, both right now and in the future.
That future, by the way, is not eons from now. It’s the future our children are and will be living in.