Human and Nature Revisited: The Industrial Revolution, Modern Economics and the Anthropocene

The Aral Sea disappeared due to overuse of water to cultivate cotton, causing the largest-scale environmental catastrophe in the 20th century. Taking cotton as an example, this chapter aims at revisiting the interrelationship between human and nature, collapse of which is a great concern of our society. The modern economics have regarded nature just as an endowed “bundle of resources”, and this perspective may have contributed to the socio-economic prosperity in part at the unprecedented level in the human history while the accumulative negative impacts on the environment since the Industrial Revolution disrupt the Earth system in whole, leading to the new geological era, the Anthropocene in the Earth history. Then, cotton played a decisive role in the Industrial Revolution, and its industrialized production and associated market system drastically changed the relationship between human and nature, and thus denaturalized our economy. The changes of the Earth system, represented by climate change, imply that the natural condition the modern economic paradigm has assumed as “given” for more than two centuries may be no longer granted. In our Kyoto Manifesto context, a view of nature and human expressed by a Japanese painter in the 18th century in Kyoto, provide a way from where we relink with nature and adopt ourselves to the coming Anthropocene.