Earth Matters
Political thought in the Anthropocene
Master’s thesis in Philosophy Lennart van Loenen
Earth Matters
Political thought in the Anthropocene
1Lennart van Loenen, 12248904
Master’s thesis in Philosophy Graduate School of Humanities (GSH), University of Amsterdam Amsterdam, 4 April 2019 Supervisor: Prof. dr. H.Y.M. Jansen 2nd reader: Prof. dr. M.D. Davidson
1 Cover illustration: J. Lokrantz/Azote based on Will Steffen et al., ‘Planetary Boundaries: Guiding Human
Development on a Changing Planet’, Science 347, no. 6223 (13 February 2015): 1259855. Illustration available at:
“I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth and do not believe those who speak to you of extraterrestrial hopes! They are mixers of poisons whether they know it or not.”2
2 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, ed. Adrian Del Caro and Robert B.
Table of contents
Acknowledgements ... i
Abstract ... ii
Introduction ... 1
1. Waking up from Holocenic slumbers: The Anthropocene as a paradigm shift ... 4
1.1. The Anthropocene hypothesis ... 4
1.2. Paradigm shifts and blurring disciplinary boundaries ... 7
1.2.1. Earth system science ... 7
1.2.2. Humans as a geological force ... 9
1.3. The Anthropocene as a political event ... 13
1.3.1. Earth System Governance ... 14
1.3.2. Critical theories of the Anthropocene ... 19
1.3.3. Moving on ... 24
2. All that is solid… Social imaginaries and the political cosmology of modernity ... 26
2.1. Social imaginaries ... 26
2.2. The Constitution of the Moderns ... 29
2.3. The space and time of the Moderns: the modern imaginary of Earth ... 35
2.3.1. Earth as a globe... 35
2.3.2. History as what leads towards the global ... 37
2.4. Historical and political implications of the modern imaginary ... 41
3. …melts into air: shifting political imaginaries of Earth ... 45
3.1. New faces of the Earth ... 45
3.2. Drawing the face of Gaia ... 48
3.2.1. The Gaia hypothesis ... 48
3.2.2. From the globe to the living planet: the emergence of planetary discourses ... 49
3.2.3. Gaia’s intrusion: a crisis in modern temporality ... 53
3.2.4. Ends and limits in the Anthropocene ... 59
3.3. Terrestriality: freedom at a time of planetary boundaries ... 61
3.3.1. Freedom in the Anthropocene ... 61
3.3.2. Territory and the terrestrial ... 64
Conclusion ... 67
Acknowledgements
Writing a master’s thesis is hard. Writing two in the course of one year: much harder. The task is not made easier when the topic at hand is not just scientifically relevant, but both a source of personal concern and likely to dominate politics for the next century or so. It is, in short, difficult to sit down and write when it feels as if the world – or at least a world – is ending. All in all this has been a very demanding process and I have many people to thank for its completion. I would first like to thank my supervisor prof. dr. Yolande Jansen for our thoughtful discussions – these helped give structure to what I wanted to say. I owe thanks to Lars Dorren for introducing me to Bruno Latour’s work and for being an intellectual sparring partner throughout the process. I would also like to thank my parents Annemarie and Ger, for their unwavering support ever since that sunny afternoon I told them of my idiotic plan to study philosophy. On this topic, I should thank Marieke Berkers for talking me into studying philosophy in the first place, and for being the best roommate I could have dreamt of during those years. I am of course grateful to many others whom I cannot personally mention in this limited space. To them I would just like to say: thank you for your support, your love, and your friendship. You guys help me remember that one does not have to face Gaia alone.
Abstract
This master’s thesis is a philosophical inquiry into the politico-theoretical implications of what scientists over the last decades have come to call the Anthropocene: a new geological epoch defined by the impact of human actions. The main hypothesis is that the geo-ecological predicament of the Anthropocene implies a foundational shift in the relation between ‘us’ and the ‘world’. Starting out with a discussion of the scientific background of the Anthropocene hypothesis, the concept is found to be emblematic of a paradigm shift both in the conception of Earth and of humans. The Anthropocene is then interpreted as signalling the collapse of the dichotomy between the realms of Nature and Society: the geological has become political and vice versa. Next, a critical review of two important reactions to the Anthropocene concept in the social sciences shows that social and political theory has not yet fully grasped this paradigm shift.
This turns the discussion towards the history and function of the opposition between Nature and Society in modern political thought and practice. Through an engagement with the work of Bruno Latour, the Nature/Society dichotomy is identified as a foundational feature of the modern imaginary. It structures the Moderns’ basic assumptions about political space and time, the direction of history, agency, and the relation of humans to the natural world. In this ensemble, the figure of the globe is particularly important, underlying both the idea of Earth a passive and inanimate spatial object and the notion of wholeness and unity that orients the modern notion of history towards the global. It is then argued that the collapse of the Nature/Society dichotomy in the Anthropocene signals a deep crisis for the entire architecture of the modern imaginary. Drawing from recent work by Latour and Isabelle Stengers, the figure of Gaia is analysed as profoundly disorienting the ontological, spatial, and temporal coordinates of modern political thought and practice. Lastly, a tentative reflection on the question of freedom at a time of planetary boundaries explores whether Gaia can function as the foundation of a reorientation of politics towards the Earth.
Introduction
This thesis is concerned with the question of political theory and philosophy in the Anthropocene. Michel Foucault famously remarked that what characterized philosophy since Kant was the question “who are we today, in our historicity”, thus marking the “critical ontology of ourselves” as a defining feature of modern thought.3 Following Foucault, authors across the humanities and social sciences have undertaken the project of writing critical genealogies, excavating the dispersed and complex historical roots of dominant modes of thinking, acting, and being – thus highlighting the contingent practices through which subjectivities and knowledges are constituted.4
For all the value of these ‘histories of the present’, however, they appear inadequate when one wants to understand today’s ecological predicament. As the first serious effects of climate change impose themselves on communities around the world, and the warnings of scientists grow ever more alarming,5 historical critique seems less and less capable of giving us an understanding of where we are. Instead, our sense of who we are seems to be increasingly infused with the future. Hurricanes, typhoons, floods, droughts, heatwaves, wildfires, and collapsing polar vortices: we understand such once rare events as the ‘new normal’, the first signs of a dawning climatic regime of which the contours are only slowly becoming visible. Our understanding of today’s natural world is dominated by images of the most stable and inhuman objects melting away before our eyes – irreversibly, ever-accelerating, a consequence of our actions yet seemingly beyond our grasp. In this precise, disorienting way, our sense of the ecological present is defined by what is still to come.
Of course, the multitude of ecological crises that lies ahead, of which climate change is only the most urgent, is the product of historical processes – notably, the history of European expansion, techno-industrial capitalism, and the creation of mass consumer societies. These factors should not be forgotten. Yet the futurity embedded in our sense of the ecological present indicates that something about the way we understand ourselves as political subjects defies explanations solely in terms of the past. What we are today is defined, at least in part, by the conditions in which we will have to learn to live in the future. To use an analogy: imagine a ball that has been pushed uphill and that has now started to roll down the other side – no longer so
3 Michel Foucault, ‘What Is Enlightenment?’, in The Politics of Truth, ed. Sylvère Lotringer and Lysa Hochroth (New
York City: Semiotext(e), 1997), 101–34; Michel Foucault, ‘The Political Technology of Individuals’, in Power. Essential
Works of Foucault 1954-1984, ed. James D. Faubion, vol. 3 (London: Penguin Books, 2002), 403–17.
4 Michel Foucault, ‘The Subject and Power’, in Power. Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, ed. James D. Faubion, vol.
3 (London: Penguin Books, 2002), 326–48; Colin Koopman, Genealogy as Critique: Foucault and the Problems of
Modernity, American Philosophy (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013).
5 IPCC, ‘Global Warming of 1.5°C. An IPCC Special Report on the Impacts of Global Warming of 1.5°C above
Pre-Industrial Levels and Related Global Greenhouse Gas Emission Pathways, in the Context of Strengthening the Global Response to the Threat of Climate Change, Sustainable Development, and Efforts to Eradicate Poverty’ (Geneva: World Meteorological Association, 2018), https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/; IPCC, ‘Climate Change 2014: Synthesis Report. Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’ (Geneva: World Meteorological Association, 2014).
much pushed by what is behind as attracted by what is ahead. The actions of those who pushed it over the edge are no longer sufficient to account for its movements.6
The Anthropocene, the geological Epoch in which human activities drive planetary evolution, simultaneously designates a rupture in the trajectory of Earth history, an unprecedented moment in human history, and a paradigmatic shift in the architecture of knowledge that renders the received concepts and categories of modernity if not obsolete, then at least insufficient. The recurrence of the phrase “welcome to the Anthropocene” across academic and popular discourse as a title for articles, book chapters, and special journal issues, is a telling sign of this disconcerting sense of novelty.7 Apparently, in becoming a force of geological magnitude humans have entered a world that is so entirely new that readers require a formal welcome (the dark irony being of course that, by all accounts, this new world will not be very welcoming at all). In the words of Bruno Latour, a thinker to whom I will frequently return over the course of this thesis, the geo-ecological mutation signified by the Anthropocene also indicates a “profound mutation of our relation to the world”.8
Latour’s formulation is helpful here, since it indicates that the Anthropocene affects both sides of the relationship between us and the world. As the physical world – the planet – undergoes a phase shift, so does our collective understanding of what this world actually is. And by extension, one might surmise, the place of humans within it. What does the geo-ecological transformation captured by the concept of the Anthropocene imply for the social and political imaginaries of modernity – the fundamental spatiotemporal and agential assumptions that ground our governmental practices, rationalities, and conceptions of political subjectivity? What kind of new possibilities and dangers does this paradigmatic shift open up? And, importantly, to what extent can the concepts and categories of modern political thought still help us navigate the Anthropocene? What can be salvaged, what has to be re-imagined, and what has been rendered incommensurable?
In short, I want to analyse the political implications of the Anthropocene on both ends of the relation between us and the world. To structure my exploration of these issues, I will focus on three main questions:
1) What is the Anthropocene and how does it imply a paradigm shift for social and political thought?
6 This is only an inaccurate analogy with our ecological present insofar as, in reality, some powerful people and
organisations seem to be hell-bent on continuing to kick the ball ever faster downhill while at the same time questioning the existence of gravity.
7 See for instance the introductory chapter in Chrisophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the
Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us, trans. David Fernbach (London: Verso, 2016); as well as ‘Welcome to the
Anthropocene’, The Economist, 26 May 2011, https://www.economist.com/leaders/2011/05/26/welcome-to-the-anthropocene; and ‘Welkom in Het Antropoceen’, Filosofie Magazine, October 2016.
8 Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, UK ;
2) How does the Anthropocene relate to the dominant spatial, temporal, and ontological assumptions of the modern social and political imaginary?
3) What are the political implications, possibilities, and dangers opened up by new imaginaries of Earth – especially the figure of Gaia?
The hypothesis I will be advancing is that the geo-ecological transformation currently underway compels us to rethink the foundations of modern social and political thought. The paradigmatic shift that is reflected in the concept of the Anthropocene, in Earth system science and various strands of Gaia theory, destabilize many of the core assumptions of modern thought and practice. The onset of the Anthropocene brings the whole political cosmology of modernity – its ontological assumptions, its spatial categories, its temporal imagination – into crisis. The figure of Gaia may perhaps serve as the foundation of a new politics and thought.
The argument in this thesis proceeds as follows. Chapter 1 introduces the concept of the Anthropocene and discusses its scientific background. Following Clive Hamilton and Dipesh Chakrabarty, I argue that the Anthropocene is emblematic of a paradigm shift both in the conception of Earth and in the conception of humans. Two strands of social theory are interrogated to question whether they have fully acknowledged the Anthropocene paradigm shift. Chapter 2 introduces the concept of a social imaginary, and discusses the importance of the Nature/Society dichotomy in the modern imaginary through a discussion of Bruno Latour’s work. Moreover, it elaborates on the temporal and spatial assumptions of the modern imaginary, and sketches the connections between the modern imaginary and four major political themes of modernity. Chapter 3 traces the emergence of a new figure of Earth – Gaia – in the sciences and humanities. Discussing Latour and Stengers’ interpretations of Gaia theory, I show how the core assumptions of the modern imaginary are brought into crisis.
1. Waking up from Holocenic slumbers: The Anthropocene as a paradigm shift
In order to lay the groundwork for the main argument of this thesis, this chapter elaborates on the emergence and dispersion of the concept of the Anthropocene. The discussion consists of three main parts. First, the Anthropocene is introduced as a scientific hypothesis in the Earth sciences. Second, the Anthropocene is interpreted as emblematic of a double paradigm shift in the conceptualisation of Earth and humans that blurs disciplinary boundaries and has clear implications for political theory. Third, two contemporary strands of political theory are discussed in relation to the Anthropocene, and are interrogated on the extent to which they have accepted its paradigm-shifting implications.
1.1. The Anthropocene hypothesis
To situate the concept of the Anthropocene, it is useful first to engage in a brief review of the science behind it. Over the course of the last few centuries, human impacts on the planet have grown exponentially. As most people know, the emission of greenhouse gases over the last centuries has increased atmospheric concentrations of especially carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxides. As a result, global mean surface temperature has already risen by 1.1 degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels and is expected to further rise to somewhere between 1.5 and 6 degrees above pre-industrial levels before the end of this century, causing – among other things – rapid retreat of glaciers and polar ice sheets, sea level rise and changing weather patterns.9 It is estimated that human-driven climate change may have already forestalled the next ice age, which, according to geologists, is due in some 50,000 years (due to predictable variations in the Earth’s orbit around the sun).
Yet human impacts on the planet go much further than just climate change. The release of toxic chemicals into the atmosphere, as well as non-toxic chemicals that nonetheless have severe effects (such as the damage to the atmospheric ozone layer), plastics pollution, and radiation left from nuclear explosions in the Cold War could all be seen as lasting geological impacts of humans.10 Due to the use of artificial fertilizer since the discovery of the Haber-Bosch process – which allowed the capture of atmospheric nitrogen – the nitrogen cycle has been disrupted to an extent without analogue in the past 2.5 billion years. The absorption of carbon
9 IPCC, ‘Global Warming of 1.5°C. An IPCC Special Report on the Impacts of Global Warming of 1.5°C above
Pre-Industrial Levels and Related Global Greenhouse Gas Emission Pathways, in the Context of Strengthening the Global Response to the Threat of Climate Change, Sustainable Development, and Efforts to Eradicate Poverty’; IPCC, ‘Climate Change 2014: Synthesis Report. Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’.
10 Jan Zalasiewicz et al., ‘When Did the Anthropocene Begin? A Mid-Twentieth Century Boundary Level Is
Stratigraphically Optimal’, Quaternary International, The Quaternary System and its formal subdivision, 383 (5 October 2015): 196–203; Jan Zalasiewicz et al., ‘The Geological Cycle of Plastics and Their Use as a Stratigraphic Indicator of the Anthropocene’, Anthropocene 13 (1 March 2016): 4–17.
dioxide by the oceans has led to an increase in acidity at a rate not seen for 300 million years.11 The expansion of human activities around the world through massive land conversion has, together with the development of anti-biotics, pesticides and genetically modified crops, produced a homogenization of the global biota and ecological pressures that are likely to alter evolutionary outcomes. Lastly, the current rate of species extinction exceeds the natural background rate by around 100-1000 times – a rate not seen since the extinction of the dinosaurs – indicating the start of a sixth mass extinction event.12
The concept of the Anthropocene was first proposed as a serious hypothesis by atmospheric chemist and Nobel laureate Peter Crutzen and marine biologist Eugene Stoermer in 2000, and was subsequently elaborated by Crutzen in an article in Nature in 2002.13 In these articles, the authors argued that the escalation of human environmental impacts over the last three hundred years had altered the planet so significantly that it required an official addition to the geological timescale – the Anthropocene Epoch.14 Taking from the ancient Greek words for human – Anthropos – and new or recent – Kainos – the Anthropocene was proposed as a formal geological concept, describing a new chapter in the course of the Earth’s history.
This would imply two things. First, the Anthropocene, as the name for a human-dominated chapter in the history of the planet, indicates that human actions have collectively become a geological force, comparable to the influence of volcanoes and plate tectonics. Geologists far in the future – perhaps beyond the existence of homo sapiens as a species – would be able to deduce the profound impact of one set of animal actors on the entire planet just by studying the rocks. Second, the onset of the Anthropocene would also imply that the Holocene, the geological Epoch of the last 10-12,000 years, has come to an end.15 The Holocene, moreover, has been a period of exceptional climatic stability and stretches for a period exceeding the entirety of written human history. This means that the Anthropocene is a literally unprecedented event in human history.
The International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) is, as of today, still considering whether to formally include the Anthropocene as an Epoch in the geological timescale. This
11 Mark A Maslin and Simon L Lewis, ‘Anthropocene: Earth System, Geological, Philosophical and Political Paradigm
Shifts’, The Anthropocene Review 2, no. 2 (August 2015): 108–16.
12 Anthony D. Barnosky et al., ‘Has the Earth’s Sixth Mass Extinction Already Arrived?’, Nature 471, no. 7336 (March
2011): 51–57; Gerardo Ceballos et al., ‘Accelerated Modern Human–Induced Species Losses: Entering the Sixth Mass Extinction’, Science Advances 1, no. 5 (2015).
13 Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer, ‘The “Anthropocene”’, IGBP Global Change Newsletter, no. 41 (May 2000):
17–18; Paul J. Crutzen, ‘Geology of Mankind’, Nature 415, no. 6867 (January 2002): 23.
14 The official Geologic Time Scale consists of a hierarchy of increasingly finer time units, defined by changes in the
functioning of the Earth system. The scale goes down from Eon (hundreds of millions of years) to Era (tens of millions of years), to Period (millions of years), to Epochs, to Ages. Larger changes are classified at higher levels: the Anthropocene is now proposed at the Epoch level. As explained in Andrew Barry and Mark Maslin, ‘The Politics of the Anthropocene: A Dialogue’, Geo: Geography and Environment 3, no. 2 (2016): 1–12.
15 Holocene also derives from Greek, in this case a combination of Kainos and Holon – meaning either “entirely recent”
or “recent whole”. The term was proposed in 1833 by Charles Lyell, a key figure in the development of modern geology.
should not be interpreted as a sign that the hypothesis is very controversial, however. There is in fact little doubt among Earth scientists about the significance and long-lasting nature of human impacts on the Earth’s geological trajectory. As Maslin and Lewis explain:
That human activity has altered Earth fundamentally is rarely questioned within scientific publications. What is now being discussed is exactly how to formally define the Anthropocene Epoch so this paradigm shift can be ratified as part of the Geologic Time Scale, and more easily discussed and debated within and beyond the scientific community.16
The scientific discussion surrounding the Anthropocene Epoch is by no means settled and it might take years for the ICS to reach a final conclusion on formal inclusion and the right starting date. The fact that the ICS has not yet decided on the ratification of the Anthropocene as a formal Epoch has to do with the issue of finding empirical evidence that fits with the ICS’s standards of proof.17 Yet overall, scientists agree that current human actions are significantly driving the Earth’s geological processes and expect that the effects of human behaviour today will be visible in the stratigraphic record for thousands if not millions of years. Future Earth will unmistakably bear the human imprint in its rocks.
One of the most common misconceptions about the Anthropocene – especially in more popular-scientific discourse – is that it is merely a catch-all concept for all human impacts on their environments around the globe. This is one reason for the rapid spread of the concept into broader public discourse, popular-scientific works, and artistic expression. Yet while the concept’s rhetorical force does indeed derive from its capacity to gather a host of ecological crises – of which climate change is only the most vivid and urgent – under a single term, it would be a category mistake to see the Anthropocene as just another container concept for human-driven environmental change. As mentioned above, the Anthropocene is instead a formal hypothesis about the inclusion of a new Epoch in the official Geological Time Scale. To see why this is so easily misunderstood, we have to understand the Anthropocene as emblematic of a paradigm shift in the understanding of both the world and of humans.
16 Maslin and Lewis, ‘Anthropocene’, 111.
17 Units in geologic time are defined by their lower stratigraphic boundaries, i.e. their starting dates. According to
these standards, there are two types of possible evidence for a new geological time unit. One is a so-called Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP). Also called a ‘golden spike’, a GSSP is a marker in a section of rock, sediment, or ice that clearly correlates with evidence of a change in the Earth’s functioning. Another is a Global Standard Stratigraphic Age (GSSA), which is rather a date based on a review of the stratigraphic evidence by a special committee and accepted by a supermajority vote in the ICS. GSSA’s are more common for time units before the Cambrian era (630 million years ago), since it is more difficult to define a GSSP so far back in Earth history. As explained in Barry and Maslin, ‘The Politics of the Anthropocene: A Dialogue’.
1.2. Paradigm shifts and blurring disciplinary boundaries
Thomas Kuhn developed the notion of a paradigm shift in his classic 1962 book on the structure of scientific revolutions.18 In his formulation, a paradigm shift is a change in one or more of the fundamental assumptions in a scientific discipline. The sciences, according to Kuhn, do not progress in a gradual or linear fashion but instead through scientific revolutions in which the whole field of scientific theory and practice is overthrown. The history of science doesn’t show a steady accumulation of knowledge in which previous knowledge is merely expanded upon: rather, it is marked by periodic ruptures in which older paradigms are replaced by new ones. New and old paradigms, moreover, are incommensurable: there can be no simple translation between one paradigm and another. The phenomena captured and explained by the new paradigm cannot be accommodated or even acknowledged as valid in the terms of the older categories of knowledge. Earth scientists have themselves insisted that the Anthropocene constitutes a paradigm shift in precisely this sense. More accurately, the Anthropocene indicates a double paradigm shift. The first shift concerns the object of study: the emergence over the last decades of the field of Earth system science. The second shift concerns the relation of humans to this object of study, in the context of the Earth’s present behaviour.
1.2.1. Earth system science
The Anthropocene hypothesis has to be understood in relation to the development of the Earth system sciences (ESS). This interdisciplinary field of study has emerged over the last few decades and has, drawing on the intellectual contributions of earlier scientists – from Arrhenius and Vernadsky to the work of James Hansen – brought together crucial insights from disciplines previously considered separate. Most significantly, much of Earth system science consists in the academic mainstreaming of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis’ Gaia theory (to be discussed in chapter 3) and presents an approach to the planet as an integrated system. In Earth system science the different geophysical, chemical, and biological processes and cycles of the planet are not treated as separate entities but instead as deeply interconnected parts of a greater system. The different spheres on Earth – lithosphere (rocks), hydrosphere (water), atmosphere (air), and biosphere (life) – are characterized by complex interactions, and changes in any individual sphere may reverberate throughout the system as a whole. The object of study for Earth system scientists is not merely the aggregation of all the different ecosystems on the planet, but rather
the overall systemic interactions, the flows of energy and matter, and the co-determination of the different spheres through the evolution of the planet.19
Within this approach, for instance, human emissions of carbon dioxide are seen as much as a phenomenon in the hydrosphere, due to the absorption of carbon dioxide by the oceans, as a phenomenon of atmospheric warming. The resulting warming and acidification of the oceans is thus seen as inseparably connected to climate change. Moreover, not only are these two phenomena part of the same process, they also interact with each other in complex ways that defy explanations in terms of linear or mechanistic causality.20 For instance, the absorption of carbon dioxide by the oceans has slowed its accumulation in the atmosphere, thereby slowing down the rate of atmospheric warming to some extent. At the same time, the absorption of heat by the oceans has accelerated the melting process of the Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets, which in turn reduces the albedo of the planetary surface. With fewer parts of the Earth covered in white ice sheets, more sunlight is absorbed, further contributing to warming. Hence, the effects of climate change feed back into its causes. The point here is not to give a comprehensive overview of the interactions that Earth system science has uncovered but to give an example of the complexity that results once a view of the Earth as an integrated system is adopted. The different spheres of the Earth system are mutually constitutive and interdependent, and their interactions are characterized by tipping points, threshold levels, and positive and negative feedback loops.
This notion of Earth as an integrated system is crucial for understanding the Anthropocene. If Earth were conceived as merely a collection of different ecosystems or environments without any systematic interconnections, it is unclear how any one element or subsystem could come to drive planetary change. Yet this is of course exactly the thesis of the Anthropocene: that one element of the biosphere – humans – has come to dominate or at least significantly disrupt the other spheres, thus altering the normal trajectory of the Earth’s evolution.
Moreover, in this perspective Earth is seen as having an inherent capacity for self-transformation. This capacity exists independent from the human species: there have been dramatic climatic shifts and mass extinctions well before the first humans walked the Earth. Forces such as plate tectonics have rendered the planet unrecognizable over the aeons. The Earth is not identical with itself through time, is characterized by immense and inherently
19 Clive Hamilton and Jacques Grinevald, ‘Was the Anthropocene Anticipated?’, The Anthropocene Review 2, no. 1 (1
January 2015): 59–72; Clive Hamilton, ‘The Anthropocene as Rupture’, The Anthropocene Review 3, no. 2 (1 January 2016): 93–106.
20 Johan Rockström et al., ‘Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity’, Ecology and
Society 14, no. 2 (2009), https://doi.org/10.5751/ES-03180-140232; Will Steffen et al., ‘Trajectories of the Earth
System in the Anthropocene’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 115, no. 33 (2018): 8252–59.
unpredictable complexity, and has a particular history of its own.21 The Anthropocene thus emphasizes the Earth’s inherent instability as much as humans’ capacity to influence it. Earth has seen many transformations and it just so happens that this last one was triggered by humans.22 It is not simply the background of human history but a site of dramatic activity and change in its own right.
1.2.2. Humans as a geological force
Coming from Earth system science, the Anthropocene hypothesis thus presupposes a paradigmatic shift towards an understanding of Earth as an active, dynamic system. But the Anthropocene hypothesis itself represents a second paradigm shift – namely, with regard to the position of humans in the Earth system. A short detour through geologists’ attempts at determining a starting date for the Anthropocene helps getting this shift into view.
By now the main issue of contention among Earth system scientists is not if the Anthropocene has already begun, but when it exactly started. There have been a number of proposals covering a wide range of starting dates. The Early Anthropogenic hypothesis, for instance, dates the start of the Anthropocene all the way back to the agricultural revolution. The idea here is that early deforestation, agriculture, and the domestication of cattle some eight thousand years ago heightened the concentration of atmospheric greenhouse gases, preventing the occurrence of another Ice Age.23 The exceptional climatic stability associated with the Holocene would then be least in part already the result of human activities. Interpreted as such, the Anthropocene should practically replace the Holocene as an Epoch on the geological timescale almost in its entirety.
Lewis and Maslin’s proposal, instead, traces the start of the Anthropocene less far back, to the year 1610.24 According to their Orbis hypothesis, by the early seventeenth century the so-called ‘age of discovery’ had connected all the different biota around the globe for the first time since the super-continent Pangaea broke apart over 150 million years, putting the planetary biosphere on a definitive track towards homogenization. The authors also argue that in 1610, following the death of up to 90% of the original American population due to a mixture of disease and genocidal European conquest, the rapid expansion of South American rainforests had removed so much carbon dioxide from the atmosphere that it contributed to the Little Ice Age and constitutes a measurable ‘golden spike’ to mark the start of the Anthropocene.
21 Nigel Clark, ‘Anthropocene Incitements: Toward a Politics and Ethics of Ex-Orbitant Planetarity’, in The Politics of
Globality since 1945: Assembling the Planet, ed. Rens van Munster and Casper Sylvest (London; New York, NY:
Routledge, 2016), 126–44.
22 Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Climate and Capital: On Conjoined Histories’, Critical Inquiry 41, no. 1 (2014): 22.
23 William F. Ruddiman, ‘The Anthropocene’, Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences 41, no. 1 (2013): 45–68. 24 Simon L. Lewis and Mark A. Maslin, ‘Defining the Anthropocene’, Nature 519, no. 7542 (2015): 171.
For their part, in their original article Crutzen and Stoermer proposed to date the start of the Anthropocene to the middle of the eighteenth century.25 This point in history coincides with James Watt’s invention of the steam engine, the beginning of the industrial revolution in England, and – as shown by glacial ice cores – the start of significant growth in atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases. Yet, as most Earth system scientists now agree, while the second half of the eighteenth century indeed saw the start of increasing greenhouse concentrations, this was by then still a relatively local phenomenon and did not yet take on Earth system-altering proportions. This is supported by the fact that the vast majority of greenhouse gases have been emitted in the years since the Second World War.
The official recommendation by the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) now being considered by the ICS proposes the first nuclear bomb tests in 1945 as indicating the start of the Anthropocene.26 The radioactive fallout from these and subsequent detonations would provide easily identifiable evidence of human geological impact in the sedimentary strata. Moreover, the dawn of the nuclear age coincides with the start of what the authors call the Great Acceleration: the exponential growth in global population, economic development, technological innovation, the creation of mass consumer societies, and the corresponding exponential increase in greenhouse gas emissions and pollution.27 For this reason the AWG has also proposed the post-1945 global spread of plastics, atmospheric carbon, and industrial fly ash as additional stratigraphic markers.28 Proponents of the 1945 marker, moreover, typically identify a longer trajectory of three phases leading up to the Anthropocene. The first phase, from around 1800 until 1945, saw a gradual increase in carbon dioxide emissions. The second phase, from 1945 until 2000, marked by the first nuclear explosions, saw the Great Acceleration. The third phase, from 2000 onwards, would see the emerging consciousness of human impacts on the planet and the first attempts to mitigate their negative effects.29
From a meta-scientific point of view, the most interesting thing about these debates is not the dating itself but the fact that any discussion of human impacts on the planet brings the messiness of human history and politics into arguments over geology. Every benchmark and explanation produces its own historical narrative and brings a set of problematic assumptions about human societies into the study of the Earth system. Whereas Crutzen and Stoermers’
25 Crutzen and Stoermer, ‘The “Anthropocene”’.
26 Zalasiewicz et al., ‘When Did the Anthropocene Begin?’ The AWG was created by the Subcommission on Quaternary
Stratigraphy of the ICS, to produce a recommendation about including the Anthropocene as a formal unit on the geological timescale.
27 Will Steffen et al., ‘The Trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration’, The Anthropocene Review 2, no. 1
(2015): 81–98.
28 Zalasiewicz et al., ‘The Geological Cycle of Plastics and Their Use as a Stratigraphic Indicator of the Anthropocene’;
Jan Zalasiewicz et al., ‘The Working Group on the Anthropocene: Summary of Evidence and Interim Recommendations’, Anthropocene 19 (2017): 55–60.
29 Will Steffen et al., ‘The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives’, Philosophical Transactions of the
original starting date emphasizes the role of industrialization and the use of fossil fuels, the starting date of 1945 stresses Cold War imperial politics and the birth of consumer societies. Likewise, the Orbis hypothesis includes the history of colonial conquest, while dating the Anthropocene to the start of agricultural civilization erases the specificity of these events and processes altogether. Proposing three stages, Steffen et al instead construct a narrative of ‘reflexive modernization’, in which humanity progresses through time towards an understanding of its impact on the world.30 What we see in these discussions, then, is something quite remarkable and without precedent in modern scientific discourse: the complete blurring of disciplinary boundaries between the natural and social sciences.
Of course, the breakdown of traditional boundaries between the natural and social sciences logically follows from the content of the Anthropocene hypothesis. If the basic functioning of the Earth system is affected by the actions of humans, that is, if humans have become a geological force, then any study of geology henceforth needs to include the complexities of the human sciences into its analytical framework. It was exactly this peculiar phenomenon that postcolonial historian Dipesh Chakrabarty took up for elaboration in a landmark article in 2009 – one of the first discussions of the theme of the Anthropocene in the humanities.31 In that essay, Chakrabarty argued that while modern historians have tended to make a fundamental separation between the realms of natural and human history, the recent discovery that humans are driving fundamental geological processes renders that separation increasingly difficult to uphold. In the twentieth century, authors like Fernand Braudel, who studied the role of the seasons in his works on everyday history, and environmental historians, for instance in works on the ‘Columbian Exchange’, had already developed a more interactive notion of the relationship between natural and human history.32 By and large, however, such narratives of ‘interaction’ still kept the essential separation between ‘humans’ and ‘Nature’ intact, and indeed, would not move that much further than the Marxian notion of a metabolic relationship between man and Nature.33
Yet in Chakrabarty’s reading, “anthropogenic explanations of climate change spell the collapse of the age-old distinction between natural and human history”.34 The Anthropocene hypothesis, in other words, goes a qualitative step beyond the rather uncontroversial claim that humans interact with and influence their environments. And it even goes beyond the bolder
30 Bonneuil and Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us, 74.
31 Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’, Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 197–222.
32 Chakrabarty, 202. The Columbian exchange refers to the exchange and impact of the crops, commodities, and
diseases that were exchanged after Columbus first arrived in the Americas. See also Alfred W. Crosby, The Columbian
Exchange : Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1973).
33 “Labour is, in the first place, a process in which both man and Nature participate, and in which man of his own
accord starts, regulates, and controls the material re-actions between himself and Nature. (…) By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature”. See Karl Marx, Capital, trans. Samuel Moore, Edward Aveling, and Ernest Unterman, vol. 1 and 2 (Hertfordshire, UK: Wordsworth, 2013), 120.
claim that human impacts on their environments now span the entire globe. Rather, the Anthropocene describes a geological Epoch, a section of the Earth’s history that is defined by the impact of humans. Humans have, quite recently and largely unintentionally, come to collectively drive planetary processes on a scale incomparable to any previous era of human history.35 The Anthropocene collapses the separation between human and natural history precisely because in it, the history of the Earth and the history of humans intersect.
If Chakrabarty’s argument is correct, then this means that the Anthropocene not only presupposes a new concept of Earth – the Earth system – but also introduces a re-imagination of the human. As soon as one attempts to define a point in geological time by reference to a point in human time, as the Anthropocene scientists are currently doing, classic definitions of what the ‘human’ is cease to be adequate. As Chakrabarty has elsewhere argued, the convergence of human and Earth history in the Anthropocene leaves humans with an agency on a temporal and spatial scale that vastly exceeds the possibility for direct, individual human experience, and for which there is simply no historical precedent.36 This is a crucial insight: aside from a social, cultural or political being that shapes its natural environment, a part of what humans now are is determined by their effects on the Earth system. The Anthropos of the Anthropocene can no longer merely be the human of the Holocene. Theories that continue to rely on a figure of the human as opposed to nature, as somehow constituted outside the processes of the Earth system, simply cannot provide an understanding of the human as a geological force.37
To summarize, the Anthropocene hypothesis is emblematic of a double paradigm shift: first, in the shift towards study of Earth as an integrated system with its own complexity and history, and second, in the recognition that the history of the Earth is now at least in part driven by the actions of humans. Hence, the Anthropocene signals a transformation in the way the relation between us and the world is conceived. The physical world is partly defined by the collective actions of humans, and humans are partly defined by their existence as a geological force. As we have seen, one of the immediate consequences of this paradigm shift is that the traditional disciplinary boundaries between the sciences become problematic. In the next section I will argue that the implications of the Anthropocene go much further than this convergence of academic disciplines.
35 Hamilton, ‘The Anthropocene as Rupture’.
36 Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change’, New Literary History 43, no. 1
(2012): 13; Zoltán Boldizsár Simon, ‘Why the Anthropocene Has No History: Facing the Unprecedented’, The
Anthropocene Review 4, no. 3 (2017): 239–45.
37 Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘The Politics of Climate Change Is More Than the Politics of Capitalism’, Theory, Culture &
1.3. The Anthropocene as a political event
It should be clear now that the Anthropocene is a deeply political theme. This is so, firstly, in the concrete sense that the Anthropocene points to a set of very serious and potentially catastrophic ecological crises that will each have their own political dimensions: the likely increase in natural disasters, crop failures, conflicts over resources, climate refugees, and discussions over the just distribution of responsibilities. Secondly, the Anthropocene is political in the sense that it defines a geological Epoch by way of a reference to human history, which means that assumptions about the driving factors of human politics and history make their way into discussions about geology. That is: the Anthropocene makes geology a topic of political struggle. This also affects the concrete dynamics of politics since Earth system scientists are often involved as experts in high-level policymaking. The way the Anthropocene is defined in relation to human history, then, is likely to affect what type of policy action will be rationalized.
Yet the third and most fundamental sense in which the Anthropocene is a political event is that it alters the very definition of politics. When the implications of the Anthropocenic paradigm shift discussed above are taken to their logical conclusion, neither the Earth nor humans can still be understood in the same terms as earlier. By bringing human history into discussions of geology, Anthropocene scientists are not just straddling disciplinary boundaries between natural and social science: they are challenging the very separation between Nature and Society that undergirds these disciplinary boundaries. Whatever the world of Nature and the world of humans have been previously, they can no longer be defined in isolation from each other. This means that if politics – however one defines it – is something peculiar to human society, and if the Anthropocene signals a reconfiguration of the Society/Nature relationship, then whatever politics is or can be changes along with it. At a bare minimum, the Anthropocene requires political thought to take up the challenge of thinking through its political implications.
In thinking through the politico-theoretical implications of the Anthropocene, political thought has to take seriously the paradigm shift described above, and be careful not to fall back on concepts derived from what we can perhaps call Holocenic habits of thought. To use Kuhn’s phraseology, the new paradigm of the Earth system and the human as a geological force render the political categories of the Holocene incommensurable. While they may still provide important insights, there is a chance that modes of thought and analysis that continue to hold to a strict separation between Nature and Society may not be up to the task of understanding the geo-ecological present.38 We should be cautious, therefore, of attempts to think the Anthropocene politically that either effectively deny it its novelty, or that in some way or other reintroduce a separation between Nature and Society.
In this section, I will review how the Anthropocene has been received in the social sciences and humanities by focusing on two different strands of political theory: the Earth system governance (ESG) research project, and several critical-theoretical perspectives. Here the main question is: do they sufficiently appreciate the paradigm shift entailed in the concept of the Anthropocene? While there has been important and thoughtful discussion and critique of the concept, by and large the full paradigm-shattering significance of the Anthropocene has been underestimated, either because authors continue to implicitly hold to a Nature/Society-separation or because the reliance on the resources of critical theory prevents thinkers from seeing what is truly new.
1.3.1. Earth System Governance
The need for ethical and political-institutional frameworks of ‘Earth system management’ was already expressed in Crutzen’s original Anthropocene articles and is a staple of scientific texts on climate change and the Earth system.39 For instance, after comparing different scenarios of Earth system change (“Hothouse Earth” versus “Stabilized Earth”) Steffen et al conclude that humankind must face up to its planetary responsibility:
Humanity’s challenge then is to influence the dynamical properties of the Earth System in such a way that the emerging unstable conditions in the zone between the Holocene and a very hot state become a de facto stable intermediate state (…). This requires that humans take deliberate, integral, and adaptive steps to reduce dangerous impacts on the Earth System, effectively monitoring and changing behaviour to form feedback loops that stabilize this intermediate state.40
Such ideas of Earth system stewardship, however, are typically not developed in much detail. To Earth system science, humankind remains a vague concept, a black box knowable only in its effect on the global environment, and merely studying human traces in the stratigraphic record tells us little about their institutions, history, struggles and, hence, the effective political strategies that would stabilize the Earth system.
Over the last decade or so, a number of scholars from the social sciences have sought to integrate the Anthropocene concept with the study of environmental and sustainability governance. The most prominent among these is the Earth System Governance research project (ESG) headed by Frank Biermann.41 This approach is among the first in the social sciences to take seriously the new political and theoretical challenges that emerge with the Earth system
39 Crutzen and Stoermer, ‘The “Anthropocene”’.
40 Steffen et al., ‘Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene’, 8256.
41 Frank Biermann, Earth System Governance: World Politics in the Anthropocene (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014);
Frank Biermann et al., ‘Down to Earth: Contextualizing the Anthropocene’, Global Environmental Change 39 (2016): 341–50.
sciences, going back as far as 2007.42 At its core, ESG accepts the basic scientific data on the functioning of the Earth system. It proceeds from the notion of an Earth that is dynamic, complex, and characterized by non-linear change, and recognizes the interactions between the different biophysical and chemical cycles that make up its sub-systems. It has also explicitly welcomed the Anthropocene as a useful concept that defines a fruitful new interdisciplinary field of social science.
The theoretical contribution of ESG lies in the attempt to develop an understanding of the politics of the Anthropocene that goes beyond the urgent but vague call for responsible management. This approach has a descriptive as well as a normative side. Descriptively, the project studies the emergence and functioning of new multi-level legal and institutional regimes concerned with environmental and climate governance within the present geo-ecological context of the Anthropocene. As a normative project, it seeks to critically evaluate such new and existing institutional arrangements and policies on the basis of the “exigencies of Earth System transformation in the Anthropocene”.43
The project thus explicitly aims to bring the natural and social sciences into contact with each other by adopting a governance perspective. In one key article, Biermann defines the space for political and social-scientific analysis within the context of the Anthropocene by stressing the inherently political nature of humankind:
(…) the human species, as the defining element of this notion of an Anthropocene, remains a highly abstract concept. It masks the multitude and variety of human agency, the differences in human resources and the diversity of human desires. It masks, in particular, the political
nature of human society. Following Aristotle, humans are a zoon politikon, a ‘political animal’
that distinguishes itself from other species by its capacity to collectively organize its affairs through joint institutions. The Anthropocene is political; it has to be understood as a global political phenomenon.44
Biermann is quite right to question the abstract notion of an undifferentiated, single Anthropos and the profound differences it masks. Its emphasis on the fact that humanity is internally divided along political lines, riven by social and economic inequalities, and characterized by a near infinite variety of cultural attitudes and lifestyles, also helps to emphasize the centrality of questions of responsibility and justice within the global debate on climate policy. Indeed, in most elaborations of the research programme the authors go to significant length to stress how the massive global disparities in wealth correlate with equally massive differences in greenhouse gas emissions, and how the technological capacities and historical role of the global North
42Frank Biermann, ‘“Earth System Governance” as a Crosscutting Theme of Global Change Research’, Global
Environmental Change 17, no. 3 (2007): 326–37.
43 Frank Biermann, ‘The Anthropocene: A Governance Perspective’, The Anthropocene Review 1, no. 1 (2014): 59. 44 Biermann, 57.
should translate into them taking more active responsibility. Yet while its attempt to add complexity to the concept of the human is laudable, we should ask two fundamental questions about ESG’s theoretical premises.
First, does the notion of governance suffice to capture the ‘political nature’ of human society? Or, rather: is a governance perspective capable of exhaustively describing the nature of human politics? This is not so much a specific question about environmental issues but rather about the definition of politics in general. Biermann defines the political nature of humans as the “capacity to collectively organize its affairs through joint institutions”.45 Such a definition suggests that politics is essentially a realm for collective deliberation and cooperation. The underlying assumption seems to be that however divided different actors are, however incompatible their interests; the ultimate aim of politics is to come together and form some conception of the common good.
Critics of the notion of governance, from Carl Schmitt to Chantal Mouffe, have long questioned the absence of power and conflict from this definition.46 This is problematic firstly in a descriptive sense, since a perspective of governance may fail to account for the actual functioning of politics. Within a definition of politics as the collective organization of common affairs through joint institutions, where is the role of agonistic or even antagonistic struggle? How could such an approach make sense of a situation characterized by the radical incompatibility of different interests, or where organization proceeds not through the creation of joint institutions but through outright exclusion or domination? Certainly, history spills over with examples of the latter. And is it not true that a significant part of the politics of climate change is an instance of the former – namely, an irreconcilable conflict between the interests of the majority of the human population and a handful of industries intent on maintaining worldwide dependence on fossil-intensive economic growth? If climate change is indeed as real and existential a threat as is claimed by Earth system science – and I do not doubt that they are right in this – it is questionable that the interests of the global population could ever be reconciled with the long-term survival of, say, the coal industry.
This also points to the normative problems of a governance perspective, which derive from its implicit technocratic bias and favourability towards expert rule. Biermann, for instance, leaves to Earth system scientists the task of defining policy requirements for the institutions of global environmental governance. Scientists are thus made responsible for mapping the “safe operating space for humanity”.47 Yet framed in this way, experts are put in a position, as it were, ‘above politics’. Between humans and the Earth, scientists are invoked as objective, independent
45 Biermann, 57.
46 See Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Chantal Mouffe,
Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically (London; New York: Verso, 2013).
47 Rockström et al., ‘Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity’; Frank Biermann,
arbiters responsible for telling humans what they can and cannot do. The problem here is of course not that Earth system science should not have an important role in the formulation of environmental policy, but that letting scientific experts circumscribe the field of politics ‘from above’ is inherently anti-democratic. Right after opening up the Anthropos of the Anthropocene to difference, struggle, and complexity – i.e. politics – the emphasis on governance risks closing off politics once again.
The second question is even more important from the point of view of the paradigm shift of the Anthropocene. Even if the definition of politics as governance were unproblematic, would such an approach not immediately reintroduce the distinction between Society and Nature that the Anthropocene is said to abolish? Let us go back to the first part of that same sentence: “Following Aristotle, humans are a zoon politikon, a ‘political animal’ that distinguishes itself from other species by its capacity [for politics]”.48 It is remarkable that Biermann here attempts to grasp the political implications of a concept as radically unprecedented as the Anthropocene by going back to one of the most ancient formulations of human exceptionality – Aristotle’s zoon
politikon. In this view, humans are animals endowed with a capacity for politics that radically
separates them from non-humans. Humans are constituted as political beings a priori: what makes them specifically human is not their physical existence as animals but their politics. Being political is a trans-historical essence that puts humans in a position of exteriority to the rest of the world. Moreover, if only humans can be political animals – since being political is what makes humans human – then everything else can only be political as the objects of human politics, as the ‘affairs’ to be managed through joint institutions. Human history, as the history of a zoon politikon, this uniquely political being, remains radically distinct from Earth history.
The issue here is not to deny that only humans are political animals. Obviously, non-human species do not have parliaments and written laws. Yet the way in which Biermann frames the relation between humans and Earth reproduces an ontological distinction between political and non-political beings – between Society and Nature – even as he purports to accept a paradigmatic shift whose main implication, we now know, is the collapse of that very distinction. As a result ESG can only understand the Anthropocene politically as an extension of the reach of human agency to the planet as a whole. The Anthropocene, for ESG, does not spell the collapse of the Nature/Society binary as such, but rather a quantitative expansion of the realm of human politics to include everything formerly included under the rubric of Nature. This is of course a wholly one-sided representation of the Anthropocene. Biermann’s Anthropocene is political because the Earth system is driven by human politics; yet human politics itself is not driven by the Earth because politics remains defined as that which separates humans from other Earthly existence. Instead of a mutual co-constitution of Earth and politics, ESG sees the Anthropocene
as marking the objectification of the Earth system within a politics that is essentially external to it.
At best, this understanding of the humans/Earth relationship reproduces the notion of a sovereign humanity that, as the privileged subject of politics, has a particular set of moral responsibilities: towards other humans, future generations, animals, natural surroundings, and perhaps the Earth system as a whole. Stabilizing the climate then becomes a question of human benevolence towards the world. While sympathetic, this is at the very least problematic from the standpoint of political feasibility, since at most it would reproduce a discourse of ‘conservation’ and ‘protection of nature’ that, over the decades, has had only limited success.
At worst, it allows for the resumption of grandiose projects of human domination over nature. This problem is most apparent in ESG’s ambiguity towards geo-engineering: the use and development of technology to control the Earth’s climate. Scientists – including leading Anthropocene theorists such as Crutzen himself – have over time proposed a host of technological interventions to limit or reverse climate change, from spraying aerosols into the stratosphere to block a part of the sun’s rays – a practice called solar radiation management – to techniques for recapturing and storing carbon from the atmosphere.49 The criticism of these proposals is not only that, given the Earth system’s complexity, the potential dangers may be far greater than their benefits, but also that they are ‘techno-fixes’: attempts to get around the more difficult task of reducing the human footprint – and the institutional, social and economic reforms such a reduction would likely require. Although Biermann explicitly states in one text that ESG is not about “governing the Earth’s systems” but about the “societal steering of human activities with regard to the long-term stability of geobiophysical systems”,50 he is nevertheless unable to rule out geo-engineering technologies as possible solutions:
More research on geo-engineering cannot be avoided. One may like it or – for reasons of a risk-averse, precautionary approach – dislike it, but the discourse on geo-engineering is certain to grow in resonance and relevance, largely because of the slow progress in current global negotiations (…). Should we massively pump iron into the Southern ocean to increase algae production, as Gribbin proposed twenty years ago (…)? Should we inject sulfur into the atmosphere to increase albedo, as Paul J. Crutzen (…) and others have proposed?51
This may seem a neutral stance – after all, whether geo-engineering projects should be pursued is left open. But not excluding geo-engineering at the outset in fact already betrays a normative choice. In considering it as an option to be taken seriously, Biermann implicitly assumes that no aspect of the Earth system is intrinsically beyond the prerogative of human politics. That is to say, nothing categorically forbids humans from intervening directly in the Earth system outside
49 Clive Hamilton, Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). 50 Biermann, ‘The Anthropocene: A Governance Perspective’, 59.
of the question of whether humans decide if they “like or dislike it”. For ESG, the viability of geo-engineering depends on the assessment of objective risk and the subjective risk-averseness of human political actors, not on any limits to the extent of human power. The apparent contradiction here, between on the one hand the assertion that ESG is not about “governing the Earth’s systems”, and on the other hand the serious consideration of sulphur injections into the atmosphere to produce a global cooling effect – a perfect example of a direct attempt at steering the Earth system – highlights that in the ESG perspective there is no longer a qualitative difference between governing the Earth and governing Society. Within an understanding of the Anthropocene as the extension of human power to the Earth as a whole, direct intervention in the Earth’s systems can appear as a way for humans to govern themselves.
In other words, for ESG the geological may have become political, but the political has not become geological. ESG does recognize scientists’ notion of Earth as an integrated system, as well as the hypothesis that this Earth’s evolutionary trajectory is now dominated by human activities. Yet it does not recognize a change in the position of humans in relation to that world since they remain, as political animals, defined by way of an original otherness to it. As a result, the geo-ecological transformation of the Anthropocene is principally seen as the Earth-system coming into the purview of global politics and governance, of Earth as a whole becoming an ‘affair’ to be organized by human institutions. Or put a different way, the Anthropocene is understood as the ascension of human power and agency to a planetary scale. It accepts the discovery of a new object of governance without considering that the governing subject can no longer be defined in opposition to the object. In short, For ESG the Anthropos of the Anthropocene remains much like the Human of the Holocene, because it retains a fundamental separation between humans and Earth that, as we will see in the coming chapters, continues the dichotomy of Society and Nature that defined modernity.
1.3.2. Critical theories of the Anthropocene
Following the dispersion of the Anthropocene concept beyond the natural science faculties into other branches of academia and policy circles, a different set of perspectives on the Anthropocene have been developed by scholars employing the tools of social critique. This is not a single body of work but rather a loose set of Marxist, structural, colonial and post-humanist perspectives on different aspects of the Anthropocene hypothesis. It is impossible to discuss this entire literature here, so in this section the emphasis lies on some prominent recent contributions.
Although there are some significant differences, most of these criticisms share some common assumptions and lines of argument. First, criticism is directed at content of the Anthropocene hypothesis, insofar as it touches on questions of social processes and relations.
