FRAMING THE ANTHROPOCENE: THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY (original) (raw)

Anthropocene Discourse: Geopolitics after Environment

Much more than has been the case with environmental politics for the last half century, the Anthropocene formulation focuses on the planetary scale transformations currently underway. Only most obviously these are phenomena under the label of climate change and the reduction of biodiversity in the sixth planetary extinction event. While environmental discourse has largely been about protecting a supposedly fairly stable external context from the depredations of ‘development’, the Anthropocene suggests much more clearly that the rich and powerful parts of humanity are reshaping the planetary system in processes that are about production much more than environmental protection. Holocene biomes have been so thoroughly changed that terrestrial biota and the human systems they support are being reconfigured in novel anthrome geographies in an increasingly artificial biosphere. This reassembling of living and artificial components is making the future Anthropocene one shaped by political decisions about investment, infrastructure and new forms of urban life and rural resource extraction. Whether this is a relatively benign future for most of humanity, or a violent one involving forcible control by the rich and powerful over the remains of a rapidly degrading biosphere and its peoples, is now the overarching question of geological politics.

Geo-Politics and the Disaster of the Anthropocene

The Sociological Review, 2014

Recently, earth scientists have been discussing the idea of the ‘Anthropocene’ – a new geologic epoch defined by human geological agency. In its concern with the crossing of thresholds in Earth systems and the shift into whole new systemic states, the Anthropocene thesis might be viewed as the positing of a disaster to end all disasters. As well as looking at some of the motivations behind the Anthropocene concept, this article explores possible responses to the idea from critical social thought. It is suggested that the current problematization of planetary ‘boundary conditions’ might be taken as indicative of the emergence of a new kind of ‘geologic politics’ that is as concerned with the temporal dynamics and changes of state in Earth systems as it is with more conventional political issues revolving around territories and nation state boundaries: a geo-politics that also raises questions about practical experimentation with Earth processes.

Earth ’ sFuture Which Anthropocene is it to be ? Beyond geology to a moral and public discourse

2014

The Anthropocene is a newly proposed geological epoch, the age of humans [Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000]. It acknowledges that human activity is in effect a geological process, and that we are generating a physical and biological environment that is distinct from anything before and that is likely to leave a substantial trace in the geological record of Earth’s history. A long, well-established process has started to consider whether the Anthropocene should be formalized within the geological timescale, led by the Anthropocene Working Group of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy [Zalasiewicz et al., 2010]. If the Anthropocene is to be acknowledged as a geological epoch, the AWG must demonstrate that there is a high probability that a distinctly Anthropocene stratal unit (with its attendant distinct environmental characteristics) may be recognized by Earth scientists working today, and will be preserved in Earth’s future, and that a so-called golden spike marking the beginning ...

The politics of the anthropocene: a dialogue

Geo: Geography and Environment

This paper stages a dialogue between a human geographer and a physical geographer about the concept of the Anthropocene. The aim of the dialogue is not to arrive at an agreement about how the Anthropocene should be defined, but rather to open up the question of the politics of the concept and its definition. The dialogue revolves around three issues: (1) the politics of the debate about the geoscientific definition of the Anthropocene Epoch; (2) the relation between the geoscientific debate about the Anthropocene and the burgeoning literature on the Anthropocene in the social sciences and humanities, including human geography; (3) the relation between geoscientific and political concepts.

The Politics of the Anthropocene: a dialogue (2016)

On the Dangers of an Anthropocene Epoch: Geological Time, Political Time and Post-Human Politics

Political Geography, 2019

‘When’ is the Anthropocene and who are its subjects? This article seeks to demonstrate the ways in which engaging with the question of the ‘who’ of the Anthropocene also entails assumptions about the ‘when’ which rely on a transposition of geological onto historical and political periodization. The idea of the Anthropocene as a new epoch, with the associated focus on appropriate starting dates, novelty, and periodization, raises difficulties for attempts to construct alternatives to the ecologically problematic temporal discourse of modernity, the subjects thereby produced, and the critical resources with which to engage these. The inscription of these temporal boundaries in the anthropocene debate provides a framework which limits attempts to engage with the mobility of the human/nature border and associated arguments for an expanded (in both spatial and species terms) political constituency through which to engage the ecological challenges of the anthropocene. Such a framework obscures the ways in which the non-human is already integral to dominant political conceptual structures and the article proposes that instead of a focus on whether the non-human can/should be brought into an Anthropocene politics, we need first to re-examine how it already is.

Where is the Anthropocene? IR in a new geological epoch

International Affairs, 2020

Several disciplines outside the natural sciences, including International Relations (IR), have engaged with the Anthropocene discourse in order to theorize their relevance and translate their practical value in this new phase of the Earth's history. Some IR scholars have called for a post-humanist IR, planet politics, a cosmopolitan view, and ecological security, among other approaches, to recalibrate the theoretical foundations of the discipline, making it more attuned to the realities of the Anthropocene. Existing discussions, however, tend to universalize human experience and gravitate towards western ontologies and epistemologies of living in the Anthropocene. Within this burgeoning scholarship, how is the IR discipline engaging with the Anthropocene discourse? Although the Anthropocene has become a new theoretical landscape for the conceptual broadening of conventional IR subjects, this review reveals the need for sustained discussion that highlights the differentiated human experiences in the Anthropocene. The existing IR publications on the Anthropocene locates the non-spatial narratives of vulnerability and historical injustice, the non-modernist understanding of nature, the agency of the vulnerable, and the amplification of security issues in the Anthropocene. It is in amplifying these narratives that the IR discipline can broaden and diversify the discourse on the Anthropocene and, therefore, affirm its relevance in this new geological age.

Anthropocene Geopolitics: Practicalities of the Geological Turn

A short paper pondering the importance of thinking about combustion as the key geophysical process that has both allowed humanity to transform the biosphere and recently generated the current climate change crisis. The Anthropocene specifies matters in terms of geology, and humanity as a geological actor, the only species in planetary history to use fire as a technology.

FRAMING THE ANTHROPOCENE: THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY (original) (raw)

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