BUS268: Corporate Strategy and
Environmental Change
Lecture 3: The ecological problem: How did we get here?
Dr Elena Baglioni
Reader in Global Supply Chain Management and Sustainability
School of Business and Management
From previous weeks
The earth system
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From previous weeks
Ecological debt
Food miles
Carbon offsets Planetary boundaries
Ecological footprint
Less complex More complex
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Todays’s goal
Understand that the ecological problem
is a socio-economic problem
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What problems does this talk seek to examine?
1. What is the Anthropocene?
2. When is (and why!) the Anthropocene?
3. Who is the Anthropos-cene?
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1. What is the Anthropocene?
4,500 million years ago: Earth
245-66 million years ago: dinosaurs
2.4 million years ago: humans
315,000 years ago: sapiens
11,500 years ago: Holocene
Today: the Anthropocene?
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8 (Bonneuil and Frezzos 2015)
What is the Anthropocene?
• Systematic increased
pressure on resources
• Release of greenhouse gases
• Loss of biodiversity
• Extinctions
(Steffen et al 2015)
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2. When is the Anthropocene?
Colonialism, Imperialism Industrial revolution Great acceleration
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When is the Anthropocene? 1750s - onwards
Industrial revolution
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When is the Anthropocene? Industrial revolution
Technology
Energy
Workers
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When is the Anthropocene? 1950s- onwards
Great acceleration
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When is the Anthropocene? Great acceleration
Technology
Energy
Workers
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When is the Anthropocene?
“The Anthropocene did not arise fully armed from
the brain of James Watts, the steam engine and
coal, but rather from a long historical process of
economic exploitation of human beings and the
world, going back to the sixteenth century and
making industrialisation possible”
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(Bonneuil and Fressoz 2017: 229)
When is the Anthropocene? 1500-1600 / 1950s-60s
Colonialism, imperialism
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When is the Anthropocene? Colonialism, imperialism
Technology
Workers
and/as
Energy
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Why’s the Anthropocene? Capitalocene
Great Acceleration
Industrial revolution
Colonialism, imperialism
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3. Who is the Anthropos-cene?
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Who is the Anthropos?
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Who is the Anthropos?
Niinimäki et al 2021 Nature
Outsourcing of production and
environmental change
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Who is the Anthropos?
“Most people on this
planet have precisely
not lived and exercised
the same kinds of
processes that break
generations, that
radically simplify
ecologies, that
drastically force labour
in a mass way that
creates a kind of global
transformation and
global wealth that is in
and of itself genocidal
and exctintionist”
(Tsing 2017)
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Who is the Anthropos?
(Source: carbonbrief.org)
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Who is the Anthropos?
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Anthropocene?
1. Simultaneously an ecological and socio-economic revolution
producing winners and losers
2. The notion of humanity collectively responsible in equal measure
for this epochal shift needs to be challenged
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