Geo-Politics and the Disaster of the Anthropocene (original) (raw)
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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.
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.
Geosocial Formations and the Anthropocene
Theory Culture & Society, 2017
For at least two centuries most social thought has taken the earth to be the stable platform upon which dynamic social processes play out. Both climate change and the Anthropocene thesis – with their enfolding of dramatic geologic change into the space-time of social life – are now provoking social thinkers into closer engagement with earth science. After revisiting the decisive influence of the late 18th-century notion of geological formations on the idea of social formations, this introductory article turns to more recent and more explicit attempts to open up the categories of social thought to a deeper understanding of earth processes. This includes attempts to consider how social and political agency is both constrained and made possible by the forces of the earth itself. It also involves efforts to think beyond existing dependencies of social worlds upon particular geological strata and to imagine alternative ‘geosocial’ futures.
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 Formations: Environmental Security, Geopolitics and Disaster
Theory, Culture & Society, 2015
The discussion of the Anthropocene makes it clear that contemporary social thought can no longer take nature, or an external ‘environment’, for granted in political discussion. Humanity is remaking its own context very rapidly, not only in the processes of urbanization but also in the larger context of global biophysical transformations that provide various forms of insecurity. Disasters such as the Fukushima nuclear meltdowns and potentially disastrous plans to geoengineer the climate in coming decades highlight that the human environment is being remade in the Anthropocene. Humanity is now a geological actor, not just a biological one, and that insight, captured in the term Anthropocene, changes understandings of both security and environment in social thought, requiring a focus on production of environments rather than their protection. Disasters help clarify this key point and its significance for considering geosocial formations.
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
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.
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 ...
International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 2nd edition, 2020
After a brief account of the emergence of the Anthropocene idea in the Earth sciences, I consider the reception of the hypothesis by critical geographers. Having addressed the issue of who speaks for the Earth we turn to questions of how the Earth might speak or act through us – bringing us to the work of geographers who are beginning to experiment with new ways of thinking with and through planetary processes. This in turn opens up tricky questions about what close conversation with the geosciences might mean for the urgent task of decolonizing our thinking about the Earth.
Varieties of the Anthropocene: A Transition from Geology to the Philosophy of History
Contrastes, 2019
¿Is the Anthropocene a new geological epoch? There is an open scientific and professional controversy, which stresses, even more, its cultural-theoretical and practical-moment, hard to resume under a single concept unifying all the threads of that denomination. This paper aims at [84] delivering, from a philosophical point of view, a semantic field for «Anthropocene» enabling to put an order in and understand the very extensive present literature on the subject.