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Can Karl Polanyi Explain the Anthropocene? The Commodification of Nature and the Great Acceleration

The most important historical work on the Anthropocene to date is J. R. McNeill and Peter Engelke’s The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945 (2016). The authors argue that the Anthropocene began in 1945, not in the eighteenth century, as some scientists have proposed. They single out unintentional “human actions” as the driving force behind the significant changes in biogeochemical processes unfolding since the middle of the twentieth century (McNeill and Engelke 2016, 4, 208). The main title of their book mimics a phrase first used at a 2005 conference on the future of the planet and refers to the escalating human threats to the so-called Earth System. The title was meant to parallel Karl Polanyi’s The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (1944). Born in 1886 in Hungary, Polanyi became one of the world’s greatest economic historians. In an endnote to their book, McNeill and Engelke explain that Polanyi saw the “market economy” as a recent invention that “must be understood as embedded in social traditions, customs, and habits of the mind.” Likewise, they continue, human impacts on global ecology “are embedded in societies and their traditions” (McNeill and Engelke 2016, 213). That the authors relegated Karl Polanyi to the endnotes is not an accident. Although they borrow from Polanyi in their book’s title, McNeill and Engelke have a very depoliticized understanding of his work as a whole, which fits their focus on bland developments—increasing cities and cars, for example—as they try to unpack the “human actions” responsible for the Great Acceleration. They write as if the human transformation of the environment by means of cars and cities is some neutral process and not the result of a system in which the accumulation of profits rests on growing the economic pie and the overdevelopment of nature through the exaltation of the price mechanism. A more serious engagement with Polanyi’s work, in other words, can help us understand the Great Acceleration that set the Anthropocene in motion. In McNeill and Engelke’s rendering, the Great Acceleration began when human beings emerged as the paramount factor influencing the carbon, nitrogen, and water cycles and other aspects of the Earth system. The last sixty-five years have seen stunning increases in population, motorized vehicles, plastics, fertilizer use, the size of cities, and nuclear wastes. This was also a period