The existential dimension of development

The early twenty-first century sits at the apex of the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch that has come into being over the last century. The Anthropocene is marked by what Christopher Chase-Dunn (2013) has called a converging set of social and environmental catastrophes, ranging from climate crisis and mass extinction events to sharp increases in social inequality, and the re-entrenchment of authoritarianism in response to global precarity. The Cenozoic Era in which the Anthropocene more broadly is placed is known as the Age of Mammals, and given the demise of large mammals and birds occurring now, the climate scientist Roger Barry (2020) suggests that Cenozoic may be ending.

Unlike previous mass extinction events, however, ours has been induced by human activity, wrought by our dependency upon fossil fuels and more than 4,700 forever chemicals, comprised of per-and polyfluorinated alkyl substances (PFAS) that do not occur in nature (Chambers et al, 2021). Introduced in the 1940s, PFAS now are found in everything, from food packaging and cookware, to cosmetics, electronics, cleaning fluids and fire-fighting foams. PFAS have been found in every ecosystem on Earth, including in the blood, breastmilk, and umbilical cords of humans and other species, and magnifying across recent generations via a process of bioaccumulation (Kempisty and Racz, 2021).