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Thinking the Earth: New Alliances in the Anthropocene
In recent years, the anthropocene has been subject to considerably controversy
both within the natural sciences and the humanities. Travelling from its origins
in geology and into social science, environmental humanities and popular
culture, the anthropocene has set in motion a wide-ranging set of debates. In this
paper, I explore what these varied discussions might mean for reconfiguring the
ecology of knowledge practices. Specifically, I argue that the implications of the
anthropocene can only be adequately grasped on the basis of new alliances
between divergent forms of knowledge.
Regardless of the problems posed by the term, the importance of the
climatological and environmental evens it aims to characterize is indisputable. It
seems clear that global warming is bound to dramatically transform ecologies
across the world. In the summer of 2016, the arctic melting process was reported
as literally “off the charts.”1 Currently circulating maps show that major cities
will be ‘hit’ by climate change within the next few decades.2 And researchers
argue that the earth has crossed several thresholds thought to maintain global
ecological stability: if this process does not stop soon, earth systems may spin
into positive feedback loops with unpredictable and likely catastrophic
outcomes. There is little doubt that the changes currently happening are hugely
important, and that their impacts, though differential, will be felt almost
everywhere.
While these changes unfold in the physical world, they are also
reconfiguring academic worlds. As the anthropocene entered social science and
the humanities it was immediately subjected to critique focusing on its
universalism and inability to grapple with capitalist legacies and colonial
histories. Anthropologists further noted that the term assumes a distinction
between nature and culture that has no purchase in many parts of the world.
1 See http://gizmodo.com/the-arctic-heat-wave-is-literally-off-the-charts-right-1778868261.2 See https://weather.com/science/environment/news/20-cities-most-lose-rising-sea-levels-20130822?pageno=2#/1, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/10/09/map-these-are-the-cities-that-climate-change-will-hit-first/.
At the same time, however, the catastrophic potentials of the
anthropocene seems to have acted as a catalyst for creative thinking in a range of
humanities and social science fields, including literary theory (e.g. Cohen 2016),
environmental and anthropocene arts (e.g. Davis and Turpin 2015), and the
conglomerate environmental humanities described by Rosea et al (2012) as
drawing together literature, history, anthropology and the arts.
Yet due to recurrent suspicions about the universalism of the
anthropocene and its exclusion of politics and history, the boundary of these new
conjunctions of knowledge practices is generally drawn at the border of natural
science. What is thereby overlooked is an unfolding reverse movement in which
social scientific knowledges, pertaining for example to colonial and
environmental history, the inequalities of global trade, and the socio-technical
transformations of capitalism are already being drawn in to geological
discussions about the implications of the anthropocene.
These developments send a clear signal that creative and effective
responses to problems classified under the anthropocene cannot be based in, or
on, single, compartmentalized disciplines. What is required is a more general
transformation of disciplinary ecologies (Serres 1995, Zylinska 2014). Thinking
the new earth, I argue, calls for the creation and nurture of new alliances (cf.
Prigogine and Stengers 1984) and the making of sophisticated conjunctions
between and across the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences.
Geologies and Environments of ‘Mankind’
In 2000, the chemist Paul Crutzen and the ecologist Eugene Stormer coined the
term the anthropocene to describe a situation in which various conditions that
are assumed to have held the earth’s ecologies relatively steady for the last
several millennia have been breached. This breach, they argued, was due to
human activity. Since then, the word has spread like wildfire. Noting that the
anthropocene may become a ‘keyword’ in the sense of Raymond Williams
(1981), the geographer Noel Castree (2014: 437) argues that the contagious
effect of the term is due to its depiction of “human impacts on the Earth’s surface
of such magnitude, scope and scale as to present an existential threat.” And
indeed, the anthropocene is often connected with evidence that we are presently
in the midst of the sixth planetary mass extinction of species; this one set in
motion by human activity.
Crutzen (2002) popularized the concept of the anthropocene through the
publication in Nature of “Geology of Mankind.” This intervention were followed
by a flurry of studies, including Steffen et al’s important 2007 paper “The
Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature,”
published in Ambio. A few years later, the geologist Jan Zalasiewics and co-
authors noted that the evidence shows “global change consistent with the
suggestion that an epoch-scale boundary has been crossed within the last two
centuries” (2011: 835).
By speaking of the crossing of an epoch-scale boundary, these scientists
were suggesting that the Holocene had come to an end. The Holocene itself
draws a whole picture of mankind’s history. Around 11.500 years ago,
agriculture intensified in the Middle Eastern ‘fertile crescent’ and extended
gradually to Europe. This “change from hunting to cultivation” (Zalasiewics
2011: 836) is readable from the fossil record. Forest clearing may have led to
rising CO2 levels much earlier than the industrial revolution. Due to agriculture,
people could live in villages or larger towns. Urbanization proceeded, and very
large cities were established in the late medieval period. The industrial
revolution gave rise to massive population growth, from 1 billion people in 1800
to 6.5 billion in 2000 and a projection of 9 billion by 2050 (Zalasiewics 2011:
836). Today, many cities are inhabited by upwards of 20 million people, and they
keep growing.
In turn, these huge urban conglomerates required massive interventions
that created unprecedented changes in erosion and sedimentation patterns.
Radical interventions in the landscape -- sometimes referred to as ‘terraforming’
(originally a science fiction term) -- was needed to support megacities, and are
characteristic of the entry into the Anthropocene. Even so, Zalasiewicz et al
argued that these massive physical structures are likely to be more impermanent
than the “biological and chemical signals left by humans” (2011: 836). For
example, they refer to increased ocean acidity due the dissolution of atmospheric
CO. The pH value of oceans is constantly dropping, leading to coral bleach and a
decline in marine plankton, which is at the bottom of the ocean food chains. The
consequence will be biodiversity decline, which will itself “produce a distinctive
event in the future fossil record” (836).
In short, as Zalasiewicz et al argue, and as Castree (2014: 439)
summarizes:
Earth has endured changes sufficient to leave a global stratigraphic
signature distinct from that of the Holocene … encompassing novel biotic,
sedimentary and geochemical change. These changes, though likely only
in their initial phases, are sufficiently distinct and robustly established for
suggestions of a Holocene–Anthropocene boundary in the recent
historical past to be geologically reasonable
Debates about the formal adoption of the Anthropocene revolve on technical
issues, revolving around which kind of stratigraphic markers would be
sufficiently robust to be acceptable for geologists in the far future.3 Suggested
markers have indicated lake sediments, greenhouse gas concentrations, and
artificial isotopes produced by nuclear detonation (Castree 2014: 439).
Centrally, however, “the driving force” of the anthropocene is seen to be
“firmly centred in human behaviour, particularly in social, political and economic
spheres” (Zalasiewics 2011: 838). Evidently, as the anthropologist Marilyn
Strathern (1995: 424) wrote (in a different context), the time when “a creative
future was projected against a stable natural environment” seems “irretrievably
locked in the past”.
Accordingly, the anthropocene diagnosis is far from an exclusively
geological affair. Instead, it relates to the concerns of a great many disciplines,
scientists and environmental organizations and activists, who may not be
particularly interested in the formal definitions of geology, but who are very
interested indeed in what the emergent and changeable relations between
human and natural history might mean in terms of biodiversity and species
survivability, including that of humans.
3 Steffen et al (2007), for example, argue for a three-stage transformation from ‘the industrial revolution’ (1800-1945) to the ‘great acceleration’ after WW2), and a hoped for period of “Earth Systems Stewardship” starting – now. Others argue for earlier ‘take-off’ periods in the middle age (Ruddiman et al 2011) or relating to the colonization of South America (Lewis and Maslin 2015).
For some scientists, this question is engaged through an effort to identify
a set of crucial parameters that keep earth systems in relative equilibrium. These
parameters are referred to as ‘planetary boundaries.’ For Rockström et al.
(2009), for example, the main distinction between the Holocene and the
Anthropocene, is that we know that the former was relatively stable. They locate
the source of stability in parameters that include ocean acidity, aerosols,
biodiversity, land use types, nitrogen and phosphorous cycles, and ozone
density. Crossing these boundaries may move the earth into unknown ecological
territory – precisely the territory of the Anthropocene (Castree 2014: 441).
Accordingly, these planetary boundaries define what the authors, echoing
Buckminster Fuller’s (1963) Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth call “a safe
operating space for humanity” (Rockström et al. 2009: 472). As Castree observes,
these arguments, while also scientific, are “less politically neutral and more
overtly normative” (2014: 441). No surprise, therefore, that they have led the
anthropocene to travel outside the bounds of natural science.
Anthropocene Travels
As the anthropocene travelled into the environmental and ecological sciences, it
gained a complementary set of political and social meanings, relating to present
unsustainable modes of inhabiting the planet. As it entered popular culture, the
term “helped normalise the idea that certain human actions can significantly
transform environmental processes at a global scale and with enduring effects”
(Castree 2014: 443). As described by Castree, this ‘normalization’ occurred in
part through a series of high-profile features including in The Economist (May
2011), National Geographic (March 2011), The New York Times (December
2011), Time Magazine (2012) and a four part television series by the English
BBC. Around the same time, Mark Lynas (2011) published the best-selling The
God Species. More generally, environmental arts focusing on anthropocene
problems.
Within the social sciences, too, the anthropocene has exploded as a topic.
The term is vigorously discussed in geography, anthropology, history,
philosophy, cultural theory, and among artists (e.g. Davis and Turpin 2015,
Haraway et al 2016, Lorimer 2015, Malm and Hornborg 2014, Swanson, Bubandt
and Tsing 2015, Wark 2015). proliferate, and climate fiction (cli-fi) is blooming
(Trexler 2015). Crucially, however, this is a not a simple movement from science
to culture. Instead, as I discuss below, the anthropocene is testimony to a
complicated and heterogeneous set of relations and movements between
different kinds of natural science, social science, humanities and popular culture,
including reverse flows from social and cultural fields of knowledge into natural
science.
Noel Castree (2014) points to two central reasons for these anthropocene
transformations. First, the anthropocene posits a world where multiple, disjoint
actions have emergent effects at many different scales up to the whole earth. For
this reason, the term evokes the need for enhanced forms of inter- or trans-
disciplinarity, and this is equally felt within the natural sciences and within the
social sciences and humanities. Exemplifying these movements in quite different
registers, we are witness, on the one hand, to the emergence of Earth Systems
Science, a generalized natural-social science that aims to integrate knowledge
about the earth’s interlocked systems in a coherent whole and, on the other, to
the emergence of environmental humanities which is no less daring in its call for
rethinking disciplinary relations.
Secondly, the anthropocene attracts attention because it heightens and
intensifies the stakes of the already well-known fact that “man” has transformed
the “natural” world. At this point, the anthropocene tells us, “man” is actually
well on the way to breaching the boundaries that keep the planet stable for
human inhabitation. This poses urgent questions about how to respond, and this
is why the anthropocene creates a sense of urgency and a “powerfully forward-
facing” discourse (Castree 2014: 244). From the point of view of social science,
the anthropocene is further worthy of interest because of its profoundly political
nature. It raises the question of what kind of world is being produced for future
generations, and how alternatives might be pursued.
The anthropocene, we might say, is a gigantic, yet diffuse, future-
generating device. Because we are all part of “it” and because it is prognosticated
to affect people “in all dimensions”, it invites not only descriptive and theoretical
engagement but also ethical, political and aesthetic responses. Indeed, the
anthropocene can be seen as a ‘science fiction’ concept in a double sense
(Swanson, Bubandt and Tsing 2015). On the one hand, the concept is fictional,
since it remains undetermined and controversial whether it actually has an
acceptable scientific meaning. On the other hand, it is fictional since it points to
the inherent unknowability of the future, and thus to processes of imagining
what it will bring. In combination, the scientific and fictional components of the
anthropocene is going to shape the world we – or anyone else – will be able to
know and experience, even in the relatively near future.
In the following, I sketch some of the main controversies to which the
anthropocene has given rise within social science. Some of these arguments, I
suggest, hold potential for the making of a new ecology of knowledge. Yet, this
ecology can thrive only by nurturing cross-disciplinary alliances and forms of
scholarly practice that include the natural sciences. Vigilant critique, that is, must
be complemented by the careful construction of sophisticated conjunctions
between and across the natural and social sciences, and the humanities.
Anthropocene or Capitalocene?
The anthropocene has entered a range of discussions in social science and
humanities. Unsurprisingly, however, it has not proven convincing or appealing
to everyone. The key disagreements revolve around whether or not the
anthropocene is a useful notion, and the reasons why it is, or isn’t.
Much of the social scientific controversy around the anthropocene centers
on its claim to universality. After all, the anthropocene trades in various forms of
oneness. There is one globe, and its current transformation is mainly due to one
species; namely the human. This runs against much social scientific and
humanities thinking, which tends to emphasize diversity and variability.
The article “Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change”,
written by the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty (2012), offers a clear outline of the
issues. Here, Chakrabarty deploys a contrast with the notion of globalization,
which, has held so much social scientific attention. Chakrabarty observes that
globalization was initially described as a homogeneous and homogenizing
process. Yet, anthropologists and others quickly saw it as a way of illuminating
cultural and political differences and translations.
The problem is that it’s difficult to transform the anthropocene in a
similar way because of its ‘oneness.’ After all, again, there is only one globe.
Moreover, the scientific discussions take a species-level perspective. The human
species is thus also seen as ‘one’; that is, as “a collectivity whose commitment to
fossil-fuel based, energy-consuming civilization is now a threat to that
civilization itself” (2012: 2).
Accordingly, the anthropocene is met with two kinds of quite different, in
some ways even opposed, forms of social scientific critique. The predominant
objection is that the responsibility for climate change cannot be located at the
level of the species. This homogenization overlooks all historical, cultural and
political evidence. Anders Malm and Alf Hornborg (2014), for example, forcefully
object to the idea that it is humanity in general that has generated climate
change. Far from the whole of humanity, only a particular sub-set of people is
responsible. Specifically, massive changes in production and consumption
originated with Western Colonialism and the Industrial Revolution, and
accelerated with the neo-liberal world order, which depends on a constantly
growing, fuel-based economy. It is therefore both historically wrong and
politically unfair to assign blame for climate change to ‘humanity.’ By mistaking
the whole for only a part, the anthropocene makes it impossible to assign blame
where it is really due; namely to Europeans and Americans. Rather than living in
the anthropocene, Malm and Hornborg (2014) conclude that we live in the
capitalocene.
It might appear that the capitalocene critique solves the problem. If the
problem is indeed the ‘exceptionalism’ of the “industrial ways of life”,
Chakrabarty asks, “why could not the narrative of capitalism – and hence its
critique – be sufficient for interrogating the history of climate change and
understanding its consequences?” (Chakrabarty 2012: 217).
Chakrabarty, however, rejects this solution, arguing that it is short
circuited by the fact of uncontrollable climate change itself. The industrial way of
life, he suggests, “has acted much like the rabbit hole in Alice’s story; we have
slid into a state of things that forces on us a recognition of some of the
parametric (that is, boundary) conditions for the existence of institutions central
to our idea of modernity” (217), or, indeed, to human existence as such.
As we see, then, Chakrabarty is unsatisfied with the capitalocene
diagnosis not because it is historically wrong, but because it is limited, or even
inconsequential, in terms of the present and future. No matter that the present
situation is not the historical fault of either ‘the poor of the world,’ or Japan, or
China (216). No matter, even, that China or India may be seen as ‘prospectively
guilty,’ given their accelerating emissions of carbon dioxide. The key point,
rather, is that the anthropocene “has brought into view certain other conditions
for the existence of life in the human form that have no intrinsic connection to
the logics of capitalist, nationalist, or socialist identities” (217).
In this context, critically diagnosing who is historically at fault is less
important than the prospective, future-oriented task of figuring out how to
handle the mess in which we are now all, in one way or other, finding ourselves,
or going to find ourselves. But such prospective engagement cannot be carried
out on the back of an updated critique of capitalism (author). This is not only
because the mess has extended everywhere, including into non-capitalist, or
para-capitalist spaces, but also because we are now in a situation that nobody,
capitalist or otherwise, can either foresee or control. This leads us to the second
social scientific critique of the anthropocene.
Anthropocentric or Non-Anthropocentric?
Environmentalists typically emphasize the destructive powers of human agency in
order to better curtail them. The capitalocene has a similar emphasis; only it
assigns these destructive powers more or less exclusively to Western capitalism.
Others, however, make the very different argument that while it is true
that the destruction is due to human powers, the only remedy is to use these
powers even more forcefully to reverse the situation. Under the heading ‘the
good anthropocene’, some even suggest that given our technological and
scientific capacities we can engage in global climate- or geo-engineering to
improve the climate.4
While climate- and geo-engineering is dear to the heart of those who
support the ‘good anthropocene,’ social scientists view it as an intensified
4 See e.g. http://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/dialogue/can-we-have-a-good-anthropocene.
version of the same hubris that created the anthropocene in the first place.
However, it often goes unnoticed that the possibility of climate engineering was
made not in the name of the infinite powers of humanity, but rather as a sign of
despair. As Clive Hamilton (2013: 34 of ebook) notes
In the 1990s proposals for geoengineering were regarded by the
mainstream as fanciful and a distraction from the real task of reducing
emissions… almost all climate scientists took the view that the availability
of an alternative to cutting emissions, even if manifestly inferior, would
prove so alluring to political leaders that it would further undermine the
will to do what must be done. To canvass climate engineering, let alone
advocate it, would be unethical
Believing that climate engineering would likely be just as dangerous for the
climate as the problems it was meant to respond to – if not worse -- climate
scientists long refrained from even mentioning this possibility. It was only due to
continuous political inaction in the face of constantly worsening predictions that
Paul Crutzen’s “Albedo Enhancement by Stratospheric Sulfur Injections: A
Contribution to Resolve a Policy Dilemma?” published in the journal Climatic
Change in 2006 broke the taboo.
Far from positioning himself as a hubristic ‘earth master’, Crutzen
brought climate engineering to the table only because hope for a future
sustainable future for the planet seemed to be quickly vanishing. Since then
various more or less far-fetched proposals for engineering the climate have been
made. Some focus on removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and
depositing it elsewhere, like in underground quarries, or in oceans, soil or
vegetation. Others center on cooling the planet by solar radiation management,
which entails finding a way of reflecting solar radiation back into space. The
common assumption is that scientists indeed have the capacity to modify global
environmental processes in a manner both safe and controllable, not to mention
likely to be extremely profitable to their advocates. As Clive Hamilton (2013)
argues, there are good reasons to be worried about these schemes.
In spite of their many differences however, environmentalists,
proponents of the capitalocene, and advocates of climate engineering, have one
thing in common. Differences aside, everyone sees anthropocene causes as well
as solutions as centered on human agency and capacity, which can be used to
either destroy or save the planet.
In contrast to this view, the second line of critique of the anthropocene
centers specifically on problematizing reigning understandings of the
anthropocene for this anthropocentrism. This line of critique offers a non-
anthropocentric interpretation in order to bypass the dualism between humanity
and earth, and between nature and culture, which is located at the heart of the
anthropocene. The consequence of this dualism is that far too much power and
agency is ascribed to humanity – as when all the problems are ascribed to
capitalists, or all solutions are put in the hands of climate engineers.
Once again, we can turn to Chakrabarty’s argument. He readily admits
that the anthropocene up to this point has been largely the consequence of
human agency. But the take away point is that we are now in a situation where
anthropocene effects are out of our hands. Paradoxically, the balance of agency
has shifted: we have produced a world in which our powers are henceforth far
more uncertain, and probably diminishing. What this means is that the
anthropocene requires a much deeper understanding of the powers and agencies
of nonhumans.
This is indeed the key lesson social scientists like Kathryn Yusoff (2015)
and Nigel Clark (2011), and literary scholars like Timothy Morton (2013) take
from the anthropocene. Connecting with the philosophical current variously
called speculative realism and object-oriented ontology (e.g. Bryant et al 2011),
they argue that the anthropocene requires a rethinking of the anthropocentrism
of social science and humanities scholarship. In light of climate change, even the
social sciences are obliged to find new ways of paying attention to, and making
sense of, the power of things like storms, electromagnetic waves, melting glaciers
and sub-atomic particles.
Thinking the New Earth
In the mid-nineties, Marilyn Strathern (1995: 433) noted that for the (European)
anthropologist, “the concept of culture is already problematized.” Contrary to
conservative culture warriors, she insisted that the ambiguity of what is natural
and what is cultural was not primarily a consequence of postmodern theories
but rather of the fact that “we now live in a world that makes explicit to itself the
ability to breach the difference.” Strathern was discussing new reproductive
technologies but the anthropocene only underscores her observation more
forcefully, since the very name signals that culture is now situated at the very
core of what we thought was nature.
As critics emphasize, the anthropocene reconfiguration of nature-culture
relations is far from unproblematic. Even scholars, who accepts the
anthropocene as a working concept for social science, like Kathryn Yusoff (2015:
4), are concerned that it at once “naturalizes ‘humanity’ (culture is made into
nature) and reintroduces the nature/culture split” (4). Yet, rather than using this
as a cause for rejection, Yusoff and others ask how the concept can be enhanced
as a mode of thinking the future earth. Thus, with reference to the mad scientist
Dr. Strangelove, the literary theorist Timothy Morton (2014) explains how he
“learned to stop worrying and love the term anthropocene.” For Morton, the
anthropocene is centrally a sign for the sixth mass extinction in the 4.5 billion
year history of the earth. No reference to social construction or Foucault’s
discourses of man removes the fact that this extinction is unfolding, caused by
people, but now out of their control.
Morton summarily dismisses the standard critiques of the anthropocene.
Even if the anthropocene was originally the child of Western expansion
colonialism, its consequences are not exclusively colonial, since people all over
the world presently want air-conditioning. Even if the anthropocene mutation
has been caused by people this does not mean that humans are located above all
other species, but rather indicates their present vulnerability alongside other
species. Pointing to the profound vulnerability rather than the immense powers
of people, for Morton, the anthropocene is precisely not hubristic. Indeed, he
concludes that the anthropocene “is the first truly anti-anthropocentric concept.”
Agreeing with this diagnosis, Kathryn Yusoff (2015: 5) proposes to view the
anthropocene as a “new password.” But what is it a password to? Which
pathways does it open and which does it close?
To answer this question, Yusoff (2015: 6) outlines two broad possibilities.
One is the path of the aforementioned earth systems science, which centers on
the understanding of planetary thresholds and the specification of various forms
of climate intervention and engineering. Another can be seen as a vision for
environmental humanities that would come to terms with the Anthropocene by
recognizing it as the outcome of “geopolitical formations that are deeply
enmeshed in the mobilization of earth forces.” Yet, echoing Morton, she insists
that a merely “semantic” critique of the anthropocene and its scientific
vocabulary makes impossible the urgent task of “thinking a new earth”.
In Excess of Nature and Culture
Even within the Western discourses of modernity and science, the anthropocene
evidently gives rise to radically divergent interpretations of the relative
importance of people in relation to each other, and in relation to their
environments, up to the scale of the whole planet. If we move outside the West,
these interpretations vary even more significantly. Accordingly, the question of
what is required to take into account in order to adequately “think the new
earth” also expands.
The anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena (2015), for example, has argued,
that the reception of the anthropocene is complicated because the term assumes
a dualism between nature and culture that holds no purchase in many parts of
the world (see also Danowski and Viveiros de Castro 2017). Atsuro Morita
(2015) argues that this problem extends to Japan, where the anthropocene has
garnered relatively little attention, and only recently received a somewhat
awkward translation.
Identification of such cosmological differences is very important. But,
again, its significance is not in offering ammunition for the critique of the
anthropocene in the name of cultural variability. Far more is at stake than
linguistic differences or terminological quibbles. After all, even if cultural
categories and interpretive schemes vary the overwhelming evidence still
indicates that climate change is accelerating across the globe with all kinds of
dire consequences.
Yet even if cultural variability does not make the anthropocene go away it
poses other problems. Prominently, it makes clear that the anthropocene tends
to make invisible a whole range of ‘environmental’ processes that do not fit
neatly within its dual scheme of nature and culture. Moreover, the nature-culture
dichotomy makes it difficult to map back onto, and activate within, the
anthropocene discourse, the many analyses, arguments and practical responses
that originate from traditions -- intellectual, indigenous, or both -- that do not
make sense of the world in terms of this dualism. Obviously complicating the
question of what an adequate formulation of the anthropocene would look like, it
also raises the question of how to create openings for the active engagement of
the many social scientists and humanities scholars, and concerned people all
over the world, who are not interpellated by the nature-culture dichotomy in the
first place.5
An important dimension of this challenge is articulated by de la Cadena’s
(2015) notion of the anthropo-not-seen, which refers to the “the world-making
process through which heterogeneous worlds that do not make themselves
through the division between humans and nonhumans” unfold. De la Cadena
illustrates the anthropo-not-seen with the warnings made by the leaders of the
Awajun-Wampi who speak of the destruction of the world by invoking their
siblingship with the Amazon: “The river is our brother, we do not kill our brother
by polluting and throwing waste on it.”
On the one hand, this warning is a response to modern pollution, enabled
by separating nature from culture. Yet, on the other hand, it works by refusing
this separation and changing the modern storyline, redefining rivers, plants and
animals as kin rather than resources. As de la Cadena says, anthropo-not-seen
responses are called forth by the nature-culture distinction but they also exceed
it. It is because of the excess of the nature-culture scheme that such responses
can challenge what she follows John Law (2015) in calling the ‘one-world world’
of modernity. In certain parts of South America, at least, these kinds of response
currently do offer such challenge with an “unprecedented degree of publicity.”
5 See for example the comments by Noburo Ishikawa in Haraway et al (2015).
The possibilities thus opened, she argues, “must be cared for”, and it is part of the
job of social science and humanities to engage in such forms of care.
De la Cadena’s argument opens an exciting path for the environmental
humanities. Doing so, it travels down one of Yusoff’s paths towards the new
earth. Yet, Yusoff’s vision of two divergent pathways – one for the humanities
and one for earth sciences – is problematic. As I discuss below, not only is it
empirically incorrect, in that it ignores already existing conjunctions of social
and natural science knowledge, but it is also far too limiting in imaginative terms.
Rather than revivifying C. P. Snow’s (1993) discredited thesis of the “two
cultures,” we might see disciplines as internally complex and mutually
interacting, forming drifting archipelagos, where ideas and forms of
collaborative engagement travel in many directions, informing and transforming
one another.
New Alliances
Rather than parallel developments in the humanities and science, and certainly
rather than a hierarchy in which firm scientific facts underpin more fanciful
humanistic interpretations, the archipelagic picture defines the anthropocene
landscape as one of many possible conjunctions. Thus, as the philosopher of
science Isabelle Stengers writes, it is
because of models running on more and more powerful computers and
observational data … [that] the many diverse disruptions already
witnessed, by Inuits, Amazonians or fishermen of Capetown are now to be
recognized as having nothing transitory about them, as referring to the
same ongoing process, bound to affect all and every people on this earth,
human and nonhuman6
In this picture, there is no opposition between data sciences and indigenous
narratives. Rather, scientific modeling holds potential for supporting the many
observations and analyses that anthropologists, geographers and environmental
6 Available at https://osmilnomesdegaia.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/isabelle-stengers.pdf .
historians and indigenous people have already been making by other means.
Moreover, as Heather Swanson (2016) notes, natural scientists debating the
meaning and implication of the anthropocene are, in fact, increasingly required to
turn to humanities and social scientific research.
In a careful analysis of Lewis and Maslin’s (2015) Nature article “Defining
the Anthropocene,” Swanson observes that the authors draw on a range of
historic and geographic evidence in the attempt to make a sound scientific
determination of the starting point of the anthropocene. Some locate the
anthropocene starting point as the Industrial Revolution and the beginning of
fossil fuel use, while others draw on archaeology to claim a beginning 10,000
years earlier, around the Neolithic revolution. Considering these possible
starting dates, Lewis and Maslin (2015) further examine what they call the
“Great Acceleration” after WW2. But they are particularly interested in what
following the environmental historian Alfred Crosby (1972), they call the
“Columbian exchange”.
Crosby used this term to designate the “mass movement of animals,
plants, and pathogens among continents that began with the wave of exploration
and exploitation that followed Columbus’ initial voyage” (Swanson 2016: 160), a
wave that led to “a swift, ongoing, radical reorganization of life on Earth without
geologic precedent” (Lewis and Maslin 2015: 174). As Lewis and Maslin explain
one can detect lowered global CO2 levels as a result of mass death in the
Americas, because the slaughter led to a decline in farming, expansion of forest
and an uptake of atmospheric carbon (Swanson 2016: 160, paraphrasing Lewis
and Maslin 2015: 175).
Rather than being concerned with the correctness of this analysis,
Swanson makes several incisive observations about the form of the argument.
For one thing, she observes the anomaly (from the point of view of the two
cultures logic) that controversies about the scientific definition of the
anthropocene involve a large amount of social scientific scholarship, pertaining
to histories of colonialism, archaeology, anthropology and geography. Even
further, she highlights the explicit normative and political impulse guides these
discussions. Whereas some scientists argue that pushing the anthropocene
starting date back to the Neolithic could be problematic, as it might normalize
the idea of global environmental change, while locating the anthropocene onset
of the Industrial revolution would enable assignment of “historical
responsibility…to particular countries or regions” (Lewis and Maslin 2015: 171),
others worry that such a late starting date may suggest that everything until the
Industrial revolution was “natural,” thereby “wrongly stereotyping pre-industrial
peoples as primitives who were in harmony with nature” (Swanson 2016: 159).
Criticizing the anthropocene as a depoliticizing concept (Malm and
Hornborg 2014), social scientists appear oblivious to the reverse movement
whereby the political issues they urge us to address are already being
internalized in scientific discussions about the very meaning that might be given
to the concept. Meanwhile, Lewis and Maslin are drawing extensively on social
science, to make the argument – in Nature – that the anthropocene is not only a
stratigraphic but also a political matter, relating to colonialism, global trade and
power relations.
Swanson concludes that the anthropocene might itself be seen as
generative of a new political ecology. This would be an ecology in which new
cross-disciplinary alliances hold potential not only for “new forms of scholarly
practice” (Swanson 2016: 162) but also for leading to a new politics of
knowledge. Though resonant with Yusoff’s call for thinking the earth, at stake is
not the opening of parallel pathways, but rather a recognition of existing cross-
disciplinary entwinements and a willingness to seek out travel companions with
which to nurture new forms of knowledge and practice.
In this paper, I have indicated that the anthropocene holds rich potential
for the creation of such new alliances not only within the social sciences and
humanities, as exemplified by the emergence of environmental humanities, but
also across the natural and social sciences, as evinced by the mutual traffic
between geology, ecology, anthropology and history. In place of traditional
epistemological hierarchies (with natural science on top) or more superficial
interdisciplinary collaborations, in which different forms of knowledge are not
really allowed to trouble one another, the anthropocene calls for increasingly
sophisticated conjunctions between divergent fields of knowledge.
The stakes are high. What is needed are disciplinary formations capable
of drawing on diverse forms of scholarship, evidence and theory, in order to
deliver informed and imaginative analyses of anthropocene developments and
consequences: for society, politics, infrastructure, science and technology and for
philosophy. Ultimately, the anthropocene question is about nothing less than
figuring an emerging ethics for the inhabitable future earth.
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