Abstract
AbstractThe Anthropocene epoch, characterized by human-caused planetary-scale transformations like climate change and ocean acidification, today is usually associated with the period beginning in the mid-twentieth century. Taking an oceanic perspective on the Anthropocene in Asia, the article argues that oceanic and terrestrial energy regimes synchronized since the 1950s when, for the first time in history, oceanic ghost acres turned marine spaces into a major fuel source. Despite global connections between offshore oil regions located in North America, Asia, and other places going back to the late nineteenth century, Asia’s contingent offshore oil field locations and their physical geographies, combined with political factors, inhibited large-scale offshore drilling before the 1950s. These characteristics of marine spaces meant that Asian political elites and their developmentalist agendas became the guiding force in exploring offshore fields, a process that was hardly dominated by corporate capitalism or structural choice limitations due to the legacies of colonialism.
Highlights
In Asia’s Anthropocene, Asia’s marine spaces have no narrative
What can be called a first wave of humanities and social science publications on the Anthropocene largely shifted responsibility for climate change and other planetary-scale transformations to a small group of Euro-American economic elites: these economic elites set in motion the transatlantic capitalist economic system that the authors associate with New World plantation economies and exploitative slave labour regimes
In the process of analysing Asian political elites, in particular cabinet members and senior bureaucrats, as the main guiding force of offshore fossil fuel development projects in Asian waters, I expand this new oceanic Anthropocene narrative to start a dialogue with recent studies on the global histories of development, the environment, and technology: in its temporal dimension, the analysis ranges from the first offshore wells drilled during the 1880s to decolonization, the Cold War, and the United Nations’ first and second ‘Decades of Development’ in the 1960s and 1970s
Summary
In Asia’s Anthropocene, Asia’s marine spaces have no narrative. The Anthropocene epoch refers to the new and growing human impact on biogeochemical cycles of planetary scale, such as climate change, ocean acidification, or atmospheric nuclear pollution. Today, the Anthropocene is usually associated with the period beginning in the mid-twentieth century. In the process of analysing Asian political elites, in particular cabinet members and senior bureaucrats, as the main guiding force of offshore fossil fuel development projects in Asian waters, I expand this new oceanic Anthropocene narrative to start a dialogue with recent studies on the global histories of development, the environment, and technology: in its temporal dimension, the analysis ranges from the first offshore wells drilled during the 1880s to decolonization, the Cold War, and the United Nations’ first and second ‘Decades of Development’ in the 1960s and 1970s. The article increases our understanding of the role of Asian political elites in moving part of the world ocean into the Anthropocene, the corresponding changes in terrestrial and oceanic energy regimes, and the relationship between the globalization of technological advances, contingent geographical locations of oil fields, and related local physical geographies. The very limited number of power plants in the centralized grid, high upfront investment costs, long construction periods, and other barriers to entry meant that such market conditions hardly encouraged competition and very likely resulted in a natural monopoly or oligopoly. The few attempts to create a decentralized power generation structure, such as Mao Zedong’s biogas digester campaign during the 1970s, were highly experimental and almost completely abandoned as soon as possible. The military importance of electrical grids and the need to purchase or expropriate private land or use national park land to build connection lines all emphasize that private companies would encounter extreme challenges and that strong governmental involvement over almost all of the globe was no voluntary decision. Grid extension to ‘remote’ places even despite economic infeasibility is the strongest evidence for Chatterjee’s argument regarding a moral project, but even today nationwide access is not fully realized in numerous Asian countries, as she confirms. Altogether, such electric grids exemplify that on land the agency of Asian political elites was drastically more inhibited by structural choice limitations originating in colonial legacies or infrastructural and technological systems than was the case for the marine spaces that will be investigated here
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