Anthropocene Geopolitics: Practicalities of the Geological Turn (original) (raw)

Rock, life, fire: Speculative geophysics and the Anthropocene

2012

If origins are as complex and perturbing as Derrida suggests, then we might ask of the current anthropic environmental predicament: what kind of planet is it that gives birth to a creature capable of doing such things? Biological life may be at its liveliest along the earth's sutures and fault-lines. But so too is fire. If humans are a fire species, then this is a fire planet. From the point of view of a `speculative geophysics', our combustive habits may say at least as much about the deep-seated role of fire in welding together a fractious and differentiated planet as they do about any aberration on our own part. The wave of climate change which is at the forefront of claims for a geological boundarycrossing is primarily the result of an escalating human capacity for combustion. It is hardly surprising that claims about humankind becoming a preeminent geomorphic force have been accompanied by proposals to convert our accidental impacts on earth systems into effects that are intentional and compensatory. After all, as Michel Serres noted in one of the first philosophical inquiries into the ascent of human geologic agency: `[t]o become effective, the solution to a long-term, far-reaching problem must at least match the problem in scope'. 1 Among the battery of proposals for `geoengineering' global climate, the one currently being given most serious consideration involves spraying sulphate aerosols into the stratospherewith the aim of scattering incoming sunlight. This technique effectively replicates one of the impacts of terrestrial volcanism, and indeed, much has been learned about sulphate injection from studies of the volcano Pinatubo. 2 When it comes to removing existing carbon emissions of the atmosphere, high on the geoengineering agenda are plans for widespread application of charred biomass to soil. While the proposed scale is unprecedented, `biochar' productionwhich involves burning vegetation under oxygen-depleted conditions-is a practice that traditional `pyrotechnicians' have deployed for centuries to consume excess plant matter and enhance soil fertility. 3 We are, it seems, gearing up to fight fire with fire. The prominence of combustive processes in both triggering and responding to the geologic boundary-event that has been named the Anthropocene raises a host of geo-political issues concerning fossil fuel consumption, alternative energy sources, ecosystem protection and land appropriation. 4 But the prospect of an anthropic forcing of earth processes into novel states also raises questions about the definitive characteristics of our species and our planet. While overlapping with political issue-formation at certain crucial junctures, these questions are of an ontological nature-and as such they exceed the domains of negotiation and decision-making definitive of the polity. 5 Any exploration of the role of fire in the earth's history, in this sense, involves some questions that are profoundly political, and others that might be referred to, in Claire Colebrook's apt phrase, as `monstrously impolitic' (11). The posing of the Anthropocene as a problem indicates that natural scientistsbucking most of what Bruno Latour has said about the modern constitution 6-are more than willing to implicate the human in contemporary natural processes. But this contemporaneity, we should recall, is a geological eye-blink. Whereas mainstream social and cultural thought has tended to take announcements of the Anthropocene as yet another incentive to decree the `end of nature', its notable that earth scientists have been taking the possibility of a novel geologic boundary-crossing as one more incitement to explore analogies, continuities and discontinuities across a range of epochs, most of which are unequivocally inhuman. A more generous response of the humanities and social sciences to the scientific acknowledgement of human geologic agency , in this regard, would be to join natural sciences in confronting the full range of geologic forces, without which `our' agency would be an abstract and orphan presence in the universe. And this implies engaging with physical forces `in themselves', and not simply `for us'. Promisingly, diverse fields of inquiry are now converging on what might be termed a `speculative geophysics': which I take to include not only a renewed philosophical, cultural and social theoretic interest in the possibilities of earth processes `in themselves', 7 but also the past and present willingness of natural scientists to think beyond the empirical and into the realms of what have been, or might yet be. Deconstruction may not appear to be an obvious source of inspiration for speculative thought of a geophysical nature. It is fair to say that Derrida, while making numerous allusions to the nonhuman, the material, the inorganic, rarely made these dominions an object of sustained inquiry. 8 But Derrida did make it clear from early on that the structural logics he identified worked against the closure or selfsufficiency of the human, and of life more generally. What always interested him, in his own words, was the: `…arch-phenomenon of `memory', which must be thought before the opposition of nature and culture, animality and humanity, etc., …. This trace is the opening of the first exteriority in general, the enigmatic relationship of the living to its other and of an inside to an outside; spacing'. 9 While this excerpt from Of Grammatology may not be unfamiliar, it's worth noting that I sourced it, word for word, from an article in a biology journal. Rather than taking Derrida to task for his scientific or environmental oversights, natural scientists who find his approach useful have recognised that deconstruction characteristically sets out from those experiences, texts and fields with which researchers are accustomed-in order to unleash the strangeness harboured within the familiar (Craw and Heads, 507). Citing Derrida to the effect that `The movements of deconstruction do not destroy concepts from the outside' (Of Grammatology, 24), biologists Robin Craw and Michael Heads, among others, have reworked the resources of their own discipline to explicitly deconstruct `the opposition biology/geology' (510, 513).

FIREPOWER AND GEOPOLITICS IN THE ANTHROPOCENE

As mega fires become more frequent, and fire seasons lengthen, the human response to climate change is now focused on both combustion as well as the extreme precipitation events that often get more attention. Fire is a relatively neglected part of the human transformation of the planet, one that is worth revisiting as a possible way to link climate adaptation, the revived interest in material geopolitics and the possibilities of extending traditional analyses of political ecology to the global scale. As Stephen Pyne has suggested we might indeed understand ourselves as living in the Pyrocene, the fire age, where dramatic landscape transformation as well as climate change results directly and indirectly from human use of combustion: Directly from landscape clearing and wild fire; indirectly because the engineering of combustion spaces in industrial applications and 'internal' combustion engines has extended human capabilities so dramatically in terms of military capabilities and economic production. Focusing on combustion directs attention at the geophysical process at the heart of climate change and adds some potentially very useful insights into the Anthropocene discussion that may help with how the increasingly significant 'humanity factor' can be integrated into Earth System Science.

The Anthropocene Perspective: A geological approach to climate change

Mètode Science Studies Journal, 2022

The most recent division of geological time is based on climate events caused by variations in the Earth's orbit and axis of rotation on a scale of thousands of years. However, the magnitude of geological change caused by humankind through its still young technosphere, particularly since the mid-20th century, is negatively affecting the other classical spheres (atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, and geosphere). This is because of our increasing demand for raw materials and the incomplete recycling of its residues (e.g., greenhouse gases). The massive use of fossil fuels to power the recent boom in industrial development has turned humanity into the new agent of planetary-scale climate change. Some alterations associated with this new Anthropocene climate system are already irreversible and exceed the natural variability of the last few thousand years.

Fiery Arts: Pyrotechnology and the Political Aesthetics of the Anthropocene

GeoHumanities, 2016

The effects of combustion feature prominently in the planetary predicament signaled by the Anthropocene thesis. Historical studies of pyrotechnology—the application of heat to transform earth materials—suggest a wide-ranging inquiry into human fire use might bring new insights to the practical and political challenges of the Anthropocene. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, I use the term pyrotechnic phylum to refer to the multimillennial developments of metallurgy, ceramics, and related “fiery arts” centered on the enclosed fire of the oven, kiln, and furnace. As an engagement with the forces and properties of the Earth, pyrotechnical innovation has a pronounced experimental and playful dimension—opening up possibilities that human geological agency might have aesthetic origins. Pyrotechnic histories also highlight the widely distributed character of innovation, raising questions about a singular thermo-industrial revolution centered on Europe. Bringing together a feeling for the creative, world-shaping aspects of the pyrotechnic arts and a sense of the decentered, collaborative nature of their development, it is suggested that the pyrotechnic phylum might be seen as a kind of a shared platform for political action. Although attentive to its current contraction and marginalization, I speculate about the possible role of pyrotechnology in a political aesthetics for the Anthropocene. Key Words: Anthropocene, art, fire, political aesthetics, pyrotechnology.

Anthropocene in Friction. Dis-Encounters Between Geology and History

Fronteiras, 2019

This article brings attention to the need to introduce social sciences to the Global Environmental Change conversation in order to discuss the notion of the "Anthropocene" postulated by prominent natural scientists (Crutzen & Stoermer 2000; Crutzen 2002). The focus of analysis concentrates on and the way the local and the global are put into friction (Tsing 2005). If natural scientists have achieved to show the dangers Earth currently confronts, what is not yet clear is if they understand how human societies, the main driver of this geological era, work. They tend to consider humans as a specie, so they make a reductionist idea of humans as a compact unity, taking away our knowledge that teaches that they are "social" (Moore 2015). This article starts with a discussion about the apparent common understanding on the "global," by natural and social sciences. This article poses important challenges to social scientists, is critical toward the Anthropocene concept, and aspires to suggest critical thinking contributions on the global and its friction with the local. This article illustrates how, through the idea of the Anthropocene, Geology meets History in ways that are not easy to accept for social scientists because, they are right when they argue that the "anthropos" of the Anthropocene cannot be reduced to a "specie" because he/she is a socio-ecological entity.

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.

Anthropocene: Does the New Geological Age push towards a Metamorphosis of the World

2021

The Anthropocene has created a new cartography. Various disciplines and discourses overlap each other. Two fields of knowledge: geology and anthropology are unified in one single concept. The Axial Age separated everyday practices from an unbiased and objective view of the world. Romanticism, in the nineteenth century, challenged the separation between the natural sciences and the sciences of the spirit. Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer had two distinct parts; a first establishes "a period of time" the second an "epistemic tool". This paper is intended to illustrate the epistemological dimension of the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene defines the present geological epoch as dominated by humans. Eduard Suess, Antonio Stopani, Teilhard de Chardin, Vladimir Vernadsky etc., a century ago, anticipated the concept of Anthropocene. "Noösphere" is a term from the "world of thought". The hypothesis of an earth as a living organism, which is inspired b...

Anthropocene: the enigma of 'the geomorphic fold'

Ben Dibley. ‘Anthropocene: the enigma of “the geomorphic fold.”’ In HARN Editorial Collective, Animals in the Anthropocene: Critical Perspectives on Non-Human Futures, Sydney: University of Sydney Press, pp36-48., 2015

While no doubt a pithy appellation for humanity’s folding into the Earth’s system, the notion of the Anthropocene nevertheless remains an enigma. Enigmatic, I contend, since this concept is at once inescapably anthropocentric, and yet works tirelessly to de-centre the human that it would seemingly enthrone. That is, it announces a human exceptionalism in which humans, not just figuratively with words and signs but literally with their tools and animals, are changing the Earth. Yet the processes that the Anthropocene designates – climate change, ocean acidification, mass extinction and so on – and the temporal scale in which these are enmeshed, necessarily decentre the human as sovereign subject and planetary master. Ironically then, the concept of the Anthropocene puts the anthropos at the centre of the world and being at precisely the moment when the impossibility of disentangling the human and the nonhuman is recognized. At the same time it confirms the human as central to a temporal scale whose geological and cosmic span can only demonstrate the relative insignificance of human life, and thus of the interval in which it appeared and, most likely, will disappear. It is this enigma that this paper seeks to explore

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 ...