The Politics of the Anthropocene

British Journal of Political Science, 2014

The unusually stable Earth system of the Holocene epoch of the past 10,000 years, in which human civilization arose, is yielding to a more dynamic and unstable Anthropocene epoch driven by human practices. The consequences for key institutions, such as states, markets and global governance, are profound. Path dependency in institutions complicit in destabilizing the Earth system constrains response to this emerging epoch. Institutional analysis highlights reflexivity as the antidote to problematic path dependency. A more ecological discourse stresses resilience, foresight and state shifts in the Earth system. Ecosystemic reflexivity can be located as the first virtue of political institutions in the Anthropocene. Undermining all normative institutional models, this analysis enables re-thinking of political institutions in dynamic social-ecological terms.

In Arias-Maldonado, M., & Trachtenberg, Z. (Eds.). (2019). Rethinking the Environment for the Anthropocene: Political Theory and Socionatural Relations in the New Geological Epoch. Routledge., 2019

The concept of Anthropocene seems to represent a new opportunity for Earth scientists and social (de)constructivists to definitely abolish the distinction between nature and society, to affirm human power on the planet and to allege the definitive ‘end of nature’. Indeed, the fact that humanity is about to be acknowledged as a new geological force represents the last chance for the Promethean triumphalism, embodied by geo and eco-constructivists (Neyrat, 2015), to prosper upon the wreckage of its own ecological collapse. This position can be summarised in McKibben terms: ‘we now live in a world of our own making’. I will argue, against this view, that to acknowledge that nature and society are more and more intertwined around us - and inside us - is not enough to abandon the analytic distinction between aspects deriving from human societies and those deriving from nature’s ‘non-identity’ (otherness). In other words, natural objects have still agency and human societies themselves are materially anchored in biophysical conditions that transcend them. The contradiction between the claim that humans are new “planetary managers” or “Earth engineers” and our obvious inability to control our environmental impacts on the planet constitutes one major sign of natural agency, or what I call ‘the return of nature’. Moreover, I will show that the concept of Anthropocene aims at pursuing an unapologetically anthropocentric world picture in order to justify further capitalist exploitation of the Earth (Crist, 2013). The Anthropocene promoters, driven by a complex mix of economic, scientific and political motives, tend to encourage the hubristic modern faith in technology to fix problems created by technology itself. Against the arrogance contained in this concept, I argue that the repeated failures of ecological modernisation and environmental managerialism should be an opportunity to re-think our place on the planet and to accept the fragility and vulnerability of the human species in the face of complex and unpredictable natural phenomena. In short, what needs to be developed is not a new form of human hubris but our capacities for gratitude, humility, respect and restraint.

Ambio. A Journal of Environment and Society, 2021

The Anthropocene Review, 2017

This essay argues that the tendency to invoke modern historical thinking in trying to make sense of the Anthropocene amounts to an untenable, self-contradictory, and self-defeating enterprise. There is a fundamental contradiction between the prospect of unprecedented change as entailed by the Anthropocene and the deep continuity of a processual historical change. On the one hand, conceiving the Anthropocene as the prospect of the unprecedented creates a demand for immediate action to prevent future catastrophe. On the other hand, pointing out the inequalities in the historical process of bringing about the Anthropocene creates a demand for social justice. Although both are legitimate and important demands, they are incompatible. They represent different temporalities, different conceptions of change, and different modes of action. Inasmuch as the Anthropocene appears as unprecedented, it does not have a processual history; and inasmuch as it has a processual history, it is not the Anthropocene.

Final version available in Environmental Values 24 (2015): 9–29. The Anthropocene is a radical reconceptualisation of the relationship between humanity and nature. It posits that we have entered a new geological epoch in which the human species is now the dominant Earth-shaping force, and it is rapidly gaining traction in both the natural and social sciences. This article critically explores the scientific representation of the concept and argues that the Anthropocene is less a scientific concept than the ideational underpinning for a particular worldview. It is paradigm dressed as epoch. In particular, it normalises a certain portion of humanity as the ‘human’ of the Anthropocene, reinserting ‘man’ into nature only to re-elevate ‘him’ above it. This move promotes instrumental reason. It implies that humanity and its planet are in an exceptional state, explicitly invoking the idea of planetary management and legitimising major interventions into the workings of the earth, such as geoengineering. I conclude that the scientific origins of the term have diminished its radical potential, and ask whether the concept’s radical core can be retrieved.

2021

Published, 2015, in Cecilia Wee, Janneke Schönenbach, and Olaf Arndt, eds., Supramarkt: A micro-toolkit for disobedient consumers, or how to frack the fatal forces of the Capitalocene. Gothenburg: Irene Books, 69-117., 2015

European Journal of Social Theory

The growing body of literature on the idea of the Anthropocene has opened up serious questions that go to the heart of the social and human sciences. There has been as yet no satisfactory theoretical framework for the analysis of the Anthropocene debate in the social and human sciences. The notion of the Anthropocene is not only a condition in which humans have become geologic agents, thus signalling a temporal shift in Earth history: it can be seen as a new object of knowledge and an order of governance. A promising direction for theorizing in the social and human science is to approach the notion of the Anthropocene as exemplified in new knowledge practices that have implications for governance. It invokes new conceptions of time, agency, knowledge and governance. The Anthropocene has become a way in which the human world is re-imagined culturally and politically in terms of its relation with the Earth. It entails a cultural model, that is an interpretative category by which conte...

History and Theory, 2023

History and Theory 62:2 (2023), 320-333. Dipesh Chakrabarty's The Climate of History in a Planetary Age is, in three respects, far more than a synthesis of over a decade of pioneering conceptual work aimed at making sense of the Anthropocene/planetary predicament and its implications for historical understanding. First, the book makes visible an intellectual trajectory in which Chakrabarty's conceptual struggles with the Anthropocene gradually move from the centrality of the notion of the Anthropocene toward the centrality of the notion of the planet. Second, it highlights the relational complexities with which one needs to grapple when trying to make sense of the current predicament. Third, and finally, the book showcases a series of often overlapping conceptual distinctions that Chakrabarty has developed while navigating these complexities. Through a discussion of the above key aspects, this review essay highlights the achievements of The Climate of History in a Planetary Age and critically engages with its central themes. In dialogue with the book, it pays special attention to exploring the respective benefits and drawbacks of the notions of the Anthropocene and the planet, and to the character and role of human agency in the Anthropocene/planetary predicament. Finally, the essay concludes with a few thoughts concerning the question of what kind of a reinvention of historical understanding might be triggered, respectively, by the notions of the Anthropocene and the planet.

Itinerari: LIX, 2020

The contributions collected in this volume compare the views of phi- losophers, literary and cultural theorists, and political philosophers, con- cerning what in recent years has become a much discussed issue: the Anthropocene. Although there are no longer any doubts about the reality of this new era, understood as the epoch of signi cant human impacts on the planet, a wide and controversial debate has developed around the use of this term and on the de nition to be given to it. The Anthropocene cannot only be understood as the perpetuation of an anthropogenic and anthropocentric perspective, it can also give rise to a critical paradigm of inquiry into a series of problems such as climate and geological changes produced by humans. The complexity of the notion of Anthropocene can also be defined as a semi-empty signifer, which is once of the most interesting and stimulating aspects of the Anthropocene, one that invites and stimulates us, sometimes even provocatively, to imagine different scenarios and ho- rizons as alternatives to the present. The contributions collected here speak to this richness and breadth, and also to the “irritating” nature of this term, Anthropocene.