Questioning the Anthropocene and Its Silences: Socioenvironmental History and the Climate Crisis (original) (raw)
Related papers
Anthropocene Narratives and the Ecopolitics of the Climate Crisis
iASK Working Papers, Polanyi Publications, Institute of Advanced Studies Kőszeg, 2021
Natural scientific narratives of the Anthropocene have been criticized by alternative socio-historical narratives for naturalizing and dehistoricizing the climate/environmental crisis, by describing it as the inevitable consequence of a predetermined development, e. g. the technological development of the human species. The first part of this working paper offers an overview of one of these alternative proposals, the so-called “Capitalocene” narrative, which argues that the climate crisis is not caused by humanity as a homogenous transhistorical agent, but by the historically specific relations of re/production and property of capitalist modernity. The second part of the paper proceeds to the normative evaluation of two current ecopolitical projects for climate/environmental crisis mitigation: the “Green New Deal” and “degrowth”.
The Politics of the Anthropocene
2018
The Politics of the Anthropocene is a sophisticated yet accessible treatment of how human institutions, practices, and principles need to be re-thought in response to the challenges of the Anthropocene, the emerging epoch of human-induced instability in the Earth system and its life-support capacities. However, the world remains stuck with practices and modes of thinking that were developed in the Holocene – the epoch of around 12,000 years of unusual stability in the Earth system, toward the end of which modern institutions such as states and capitalist markets arose. These institutions persist despite their potentially catastrophic failure to respond to the challenges of the Anthropocene, foremost among them a rapidly changing climate and accelerating biodiversity loss. The pathological trajectories of these institutions need to be disrupted by advancing ecological reflexivity: the capacity of structures, systems, and sets of ideas to question their own core commitments, and if ne...
Welcome to the Anthropocene! Biopolitics, Climate Change
Biopolitics has engaged emergence, and the contemporary concerns with disease and new forms of life as potential threats requiring numerous processes of security. This discussion has not yet substantially engaged with the "emergence" of urbanity as a "threat" to the Holocene climate system. Now that earth sciences are clear that we are in the Anthropocene, a geological era marked by the industrial production of novel forcing mechanisms in the biosphere, the climate security discussion has to engage biopolitics if the theoretical basis of both is to be informed by the other. None of this suggests either conceptual clarity, nor an obvious set of policy implications, but interrogating climate security as a policy desideratum within the conceptualisations of biopolitics offers some insights into the limits of both. It also raises questions of how Anthropocene futures are imagined and incorporated into political discourse, and how these might change if emergence and life, rather than cartographies of permanence, distance and protection are the lenses through which that future is projected. If stability and safe spaces are exceptions rather than the norm, much needs to be thought differently; not least the geopolitical categories brought to bear on the discussion of climate change.
Global Environmental Change 32, 211-218, 2015
This paper asks how the social sciences can engage with the idea of the Anthropocene in productive ways. In response to this question we outline an interpretative research agenda that allows critical engagement with the Anthropocene as a socially and culturally bounded object with many possible meanings and political trajectories. In order to facilitate the kind of political mobilization required to meet the complex environmental challenges of our times, we argue that the social sciences should refrain from adjusting to standardized research agendas and templates. A more urgent analytical challenge lies in exposing, challenging and extending the ontological assumptions that inform how we make sense of and respond to a rapidly changing environment. By cultivating environmental research that opens up multiple interpretations of the Anthropocene, the social sciences can help to extend the realm of the possible for environmental politics.
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.
The Anthropocene and the challenge of implicated time
Science as Culture
Along with astrophysicists, geologists have been crucial in connecting us to the story of our planet, participating in writing the grand narratives that are cementing an ontological security that is capable of situating ourselves, and the entire planet, in the flux of infinity. This grand narrative is inscribed in stratigraphy, which has recorded the traces of long-gone biochemical and anthropogenic activities trapped in geological depositions, defining in the same time the events that could become known globally as stratigraphic markers in the shape of sediments, rocks or glaciers (Lewis and Maslin 2015). This knowledge has served to create the category of the past, which in turn has given shape to geological time frames such as the Holocene, but more importantly perhaps, it has recast anthropogenic events such as the Grand Acceleration and the collision of Europe with the Americas as foundational events of a new epoch in which humans have become the main factors of environmental change: welcome to the Anthropocene. Outside the impermeable bubble of earth system sciences and geology, anyone who has paid attention to environmental news in the last decades has probably realised that the world seems to be plagued with climate-related hazards and disasters such as droughts, floods, heath waves and wild fires, along with witnessing the melting of the Arctic, and the fast approaching end of emblematic animals such as the giraffe, the lion and the polar bear. Those phenomena have been associated to an unprecedented rate of irreversible transformations such as climate change and rapid wildlife extension. The social sciences and humanities (SSH) have associated this rapid change with a wider moral and political fracture with the non-human world, identifying the ideal of modernity, and thus individuality, free market capitalism and the ideal of democracy as the ingredients that have triggered a frantic spiral of self-destruction that has materialised into the Anthropocene. Above all, the Anthropocene is posing a significant challenge to taken-for-granted epistemological frames serving the edification of new and possible enquiries on the political and what it means to be-with others (including non-humans), that is, to co-exist in an era defined as requiring novel relationships for the development of concepts such as the social, society and the environment (Nancy 1990, 2013, Serres 2003). Part of this enormous challenge has been engaged with in a recent collection of refreshing but short essays assembled in an edited book by Clive Hamilton, Christophe Bonneuil and François Gemenne entitled The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis: Rethinking modernity in a new epoch, which STS scholars working on environmental issues would find useful. While the audience for this book might be those working in the broad field of environmental humanities, the general idea of collecting those essays together (15 in total) is to see how a new geological epoch could potentially serve the discussion, and hopefully political action, outside the dominated realms of eco-modernists and structural-functionalists working hand in hand with earth system scientists in the pursuit of practical solutions
Welcome to the Anthrpocene: Biopolitics, Climate Change and the End of the World as we know it
Biopolitics has engaged emergence, and the contemporary concerns with disease and new forms of life as potential threats requiring numerous processes of security. This discussion has not yet substantially engaged with the “emergence” of urbanity as a “threat” to the Holocene climate system. Now that earth sciences are clear that we are in the Anthropocene, a geological era marked by the industrial production of novel forcing mechanisms in the biosphere, the climate security discussion has to engage biopolitics if the theoretical basis of both is to be informed by the other. None of this suggests either conceptual clarity, nor an obvious set of policy implications, but interrogating climate security as a policy desideratum within the conceptualisations of biopolitics offers some insights into the limits of both. It also raises questions of how Anthropocene futures are imagined and incorporated into political discourse, and how these might change if emergence and life, rather than cartographies of permanence, distance and protection are the lenses through which that future is projected. If stability and safe spaces are exceptions rather than the norm, much needs to be thought differently; not least the geopolitical categories brought to bear on the discussion of climate change.
FRAMING THE ANTHROPOCENE: THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY
The Anthropocene has become a key theme in contemporary speculations about the meaning of the present and the possibilities for the future. While eco-pragmatists argue that present circumstances present opportunities and possibilities for a thriving future for humanity, a ‘good Anthropocene’, critics suggest that the future will be bad for at least most of humanity as we accelerate the sixth extinction event on the planet. These discussions are key themes in the discipline of geography, but the geopolitics of all this, which may be very ugly in coming decades, requires much further elucidation of the common Anthropocene tropes currently in circulation. As with the classic Western movie, in the search for the gold neither ‘the good’ nor ‘the bad’ have the whole story; ‘the ugly’ will probably turn out to be decisive in determining how things play out. How the Anthropocene is interpreted, and who gets to invoke which framing of the new human age, matters greatly both for the planet and for particular parts of humanity. All of which is now a key theme in the discussions of geopolitical ecology that requires careful evaluation of both how geology has recently become so important in global politics and discussions of humanity’s future and how political geographers might usefully contribute to the discussion.
The Anthropocene Divide Obscuring Understanding of Social-Environmental Change
Much scientific debate has focused on the timing and stratigraphic signatures for the Anthropocene. Here we review the Anthropocene in its original usage and as it has been imported by anthropology in light of evidence for long-term human-environment relationships. Strident debate about the Anthropocene's chronological boundaries arises because its periodization forces an arbitrary break in what is a long-enduring process of human alterations of environments. More importantly, we argue that dividing geologic time based on a " step change " in the global significance of social-environmental processes contravenes the socially differentiated and diachronous character of human-environment relations. The consequences of human actions are not the coordinated synchronous product of a global humanity but rather result from heterogeneous activities rooted in situated sociopolitical contexts that are entangled with environmental transformations at multiple scales. Thus, the Anthropocene periodization, what we term the " Anthropocene divide, " obscures rather than clarifies understandings of human-environmental relationships.