This post is the third of three on the philosophy and politics of the Anthropocene. The first post can be read here and the second post can be read here.
Environmental ethics
By characterising the Earth as ‘defiant’ in my book of that name I am pushing against generations of environmental literature that has characterised Earth as the victim of human neglect and abuse. In fact, it goes against both the old environmentalist picture of Earth as fragile victim and the ecomodernist view of Earth as inert material to be managed and exploited. (I have more to say about ecomodernism below.) I am restoring, in the new conditions of the Anthropocene, something like ‘agency’ to Earth without lapsing into animism, Gaia mysticism, or flat-world post-humanism. The Earth isn’t conscious, so cannot have agency (Alf Hornborg is very good on the distinction between consequences, purposes and intentions in defining agency), but nor is it passive. This calls for a rethinking. If Earth has something like agency so that (anthropomorphising) it ‘pushes back’ against our abuse of it and ‘punishes’ us, does it make sense to speak only of human obligations toward it, or must we think of something more like a relationship between two parties neither of whom fully controls the other? To repeat one of my favourite phrases from the leading Earth System scientists concerning human history and Earth history in the Anthropocene, ‘the fate of one determines the fate of the other’.
This has fairly devastating implications for environmental ethics. If the Earth is now a co-produced object—partly geological, partly technological-industrial, and irreversibly hybrid—then it is no longer straightforward to regard ‘nature’ as something outside human history and used to judge it. This goes beyond the ‘end of nature’ thesis to something like what I have called ‘neo-nature’. If there is no pristine baseline to restore, no pre-lapsarian state to mourn, environmental ethics cannot be fundamentally restorative or conservationist in character. It has to be something like compositionist (to borrow a term from Bruno Latour). Instead of asking ‘how do we return to nature?’ we need to wrestle with another question: Even if our options are narrow and our plans may go awry, what kind of entangled Earth-human system we should aim to compose for the future?
So the new anthropocentrism (see the first part) undermines both the modern ambition of mastery and nostalgic return-to-nature fantasies. Environmentalism itself often remains trapped in modern dualism despite repudiating it. Humans over here damage nature over there and should therefore ‘protect’ it. But this division is now partially (but by no means totally) dissolved (although Bruno Latour would say there was never a division). Humans are not outside the Earth System; nor is the Earth System outside politics and political agency.
The latent implication here is striking. If the Anthropocene destabilises the subject-object divide because it undermines the society/nature division, then many inherited political categories—externality, environment, natural resources, conservation, and ‘nature’ itself—become questionable.
Ecomodernism as theodicy
The debate over ecomodernism, quite prominent in the early 2010s, has faded now but the practice lives on in other forms of techno-optimism (transhumanism, long-termism, accelerationism, and a softer liberal variant in the recent book Abundance). An Ecomodernist Manifesto published in 2016 remains a kind of theoretical justification of techno-capitalism as such. The ecomodernists, who gathered around The Breakthrough Institute based in San Francisco, reframed the Anthropocene as an event to be celebrated rather than lamented and feared. Instead of final proof of the damage done by techno-industrial hubris, the ecomodernists welcomed the new epoch as a sign of humankind’s ability to transform and control nature, while also calling for areas to be conserved for their environmental values.
I have characterised ecomodernism as a form of theodicy because it was founded on a belief in the ultimate benevolence of the whole, a goodness that in the end transcends and defeats the structural obstacles, sufferings, and moral lapses that seem to threaten humanity’s future prosperity and happiness. Leibniz developed the idea of theodicy: God is omnipotent and mysterious so everything evil must be in the service of the greater good. For Hegel, evil, here read as ecological damage, is construed as a contradiction essential for driving history forward towards the realization of the Absolute, here read as unstoppable progress towards universal prosperity. In fact, the ecomodernists say they look forward to a ‘good Anthropocene’, even a ‘great Anthropocene’, achieved through technology, clever management and confidence in the human project. The juxtaposition of ‘good’ and ‘Anthropocene’ is objectionable, given the great suffering and disruption of lives that will be experienced by multitudes of vulnerable people (and not-so-vulnerable people).
So ecomodernism has the deep structure of a religious worldview, specifically the Leibnizian argument that apparent evil resolves into a greater good. Theodicy is also the hidden grammar of transhumanism and long-termism where present harms are redeemed by promises of vast future flourishing. We might push this further to suggest that this Anthropocene optimism is not just a denial of the material reality but the default cognitive response to civilisational guilt. When the wrongdoing is too large to accommodate emotionally, the psyche constructs a theodicy; it’s so bad, in my mind I will turn it into a something good. Denial and optimism are not opposites but consecutive stages of the same defence, so perhaps ecomodernism can be seen as a way of bargaining with the future, bargaining in the Kubler-Ross sense.
I think the gulf between ecomodernism—which is both an Earth-oriented techno-optimism and the justification for business-as-usual—and Anthropocene thinking—which sees the world through the tragic actuality of the new epoch—is a contest between ontologies. One side still inhabits the old world—nature as background, economy as primary, freedom as expansion, politics as bargaining among humans. The other is beginning to inhabit the new one—Earth as actor, limits as sovereign, freedom as constraint, politics as planetary accommodation.
That might make the direction of the climate culture war intelligible at a deeper level. The conflict is not only over carbon dioxide and the seriousness of climate change but also over the nature of the world we now live in. Anthropocene thinking assumes that the era of humanism is finished, not because humans no longer matter, but because ‘the human’ can no longer be imagined separated from atmosphere, oceans, microbes, energy systems, extinction rates and inherited damage. In that case, the essential question of politics is no longer, ‘What kind of society do we want to construct?’ but ‘What kind of creature are we, now that the Earth has answered back? And how can this creature live on a broken world?’
Theological murmurs
Shifting to an even more speculative mode, Earth System science has produced something functionally analogous to an omniscient gaze. Humanity suddenly confronts itself from a planetary perspective—as a species capable of altering atmospheric chemistry, ocean circulation, and evolutionary trajectories. There is no divine judge, only delayed material consequences. The Anthropocene destabilises secular assumptions and revives the questions of judgement, hubris, guilt, redemption, sacrifice, and apocalypse that belonged to the (Western) world prior to the Scientific Revolution and modernity. That is why climate change feels morally uncanny. (Glenn Albrecht has explored this creatively.)
Here is the problem, though. The Anthropocene restores the structure of sin, judgement and punishment, but without the counterbalancing of providence, forgiveness and redemption. The implication, perhaps, is that secular modernity discovers limits to its own secularism. The Anthropocene revives questions modernity thought it had buried: What are humans for? What obligations do the living owe the unborn? And, with apologies to Bruno Latour who hated all ‘two-level’ theories, is there a higher order of conformity to planetary laws against which civilisation can be judged?
One could even argue that the Anthropocene marks the return of the sacred in material form. I am not invoking the re-enchantment of the world but pointing to the rediscovery of non-negotiable limits imposed by Earth-system reality. So I mean ‘sacred’ in the sense of that which is set apart and untouchable, and that cannot be violated without consequence. We cannot bargain with the carbon cycle. While the climate debate revolves around emissions, carbon taxes and governance, beneath it all a reactive Earth bringing floods, fires and super-storms, has been destabilising the deepest assumptions of modernity—history, freedom, sovereignty, nature, secularism, and the supreme assumption of the desirability and inevitability of continued progress.
The dream of modernity
Occasionally one comes across a data point or a chart that shifts the way one sees the world. The chart below had that effect on me when I first saw it a decade or so ago. It shows (in red) the temperature variations on Earth since the time Homo sapiens emerged. The red splodge on the right-hand side shows the unusual stability of the last 10,000 years of the Holocene epoch. (The blue line shows carbon dioxide concentrations.) The Anthropocene, which will appear as a spike on the right edge reaching perhaps 3ºC and quite possible 4ºC and beyond if we cross one or more tipping points that result in continued warming and something like pre-Holocene levels of volatility over thousands of years.
Consider the wild gyrations humans lived through before the Earth settled down ten millennia ago. The climate was unpredictable, food sources were precarious, and coastlines were shifting. Our ancestors during these epochs roamed as small, scattered bands of hunter-gatherers, perpetually at the mercy of a climate that could, and repeatedly did, collapse ecosystems, dry up water sources, and force entire populations into refugia or extinction within just a few generations.
Scholars have shown that the development of agriculture had to wait for a benign and geologically unprecedented climatic window. That stability enabled not only agriculture but also permanent settlements, surplus production, cities, states, and eventually civilisation itself. Modern thought has universalised experiences that may have been temporary products of Holocene conditions.
The modern idea of progress, perhaps three centuries old, depended on the expectation that tomorrow will be materially better than today, at least it did for the Western middle classes who supplied the intellectuals. Endless accumulation becomes plausible only under conditions of expanding energetic surplus and environmental predictability. The expectation makes less sense in a world of recurrent ecological breakdown, unstable food systems, and constant adaptation to climatic shocks.
Even capitalism itself may look different in this light. Capitalism (in fact, industrialism) depended on massive energetic subsidies from fossil fuels. Before that, prosperity, where it occurred, depended on climatic conditions conducive to rising agricultural productivity, maritime trade, colonial conquest, and expanding populations. The market was never floating free of nature; it was riding atop an unusually accommodating Earth System.
The advent of the Anthropocene may not be so much a crisis within modernity but the event that discloses modernity as a temporary hallucination made possible by Holocene stability. In that case, many of the assumptions modern societies took to be permanent features of reality are in fact contingent on an extraordinarily unusual interval in Earth history. Categories such as ‘human nature’, ‘progress’, ‘economic growth’, and ‘freedom’ may actually have been artefacts of geological history. In that case, modernity misrecognised the conditions that made it all possible. It imagined its achievements (both intellectual and material) arising primarily from reason, markets, science, liberal institutions, and industrial ingenuity, while silently presupposing a remarkably stable Earth background that was in fact just a blip in Earth history.
The hallucination lies in mistaking contingent conditions for universal truths. Moderns came to believe that humans stand outside nature, growth can continue indefinitely, history is open-ended expansion, and technology can overcome all limits. The Anthropocene destabilises each assumption because the Earth System is no longer providing the stable background conditions but is defying human plans. Melting ice masses, ecosystem collapse, mass extinctions, acidifying oceans, and ubiquitous artificial chemical compounds reveal that moderns could not transcend dependence on planetary conditions. They merely forgot it.
This is why, for those who take notice, the Anthropocene feels psychologically disorienting in a deeper way than earlier environmental problems. It is not simply that we face risks. Rather, the metaphysical backdrop of modern civilisation—the assumption of a stable world available for endless manipulation—is dissolving.
Perhaps the modern era resembles a kind of civilisational dream produced by a one-off conjunction of Holocene climatic stability, fossil-fuel abundance, colonial extraction, demographic expansion, and temporary Earth System compliance. Within that window, humans mistook historically exceptional conditions for the permanent structure of reality itself. In that case, the arrival of the Anthropocene is the moment we stir from our slumber.