I have been pre-occupied with the Anthropocene lately as I am writing two book chapters on the subject, one on the possibility of a political philosophy of the Anthropocene and another on the idea of ‘planetary politics.’ Various related thoughts have been pushing themselves forward so I thought I would set them down in the form of three Substack posts, each of 1,500 or so words. They are aimed at specialists in the area, so quite a bit of background knowledge is assumed, but others interested in environment-related political theory or philosophy may also find them helpful. Comments are welcome.
Much of what I write below riffs on my previous writings on the Anthropocene, here, here, here, here, here, here (with Jacques Grinevald), here, and especially in my book Defiant Earth (here), but towards the end it becomes more speculative.
Scene setting
My starting point is always with the science (unlike many social scientists working in the area). Earth System science begins with the fact that the Earth is a single, dynamic, total, unified system. It cannot be understood by studying any one part in isolation. Yet many scholars writing about the Anthropocene (which revolves around climate change) treat the Earth as an aggregation of landscapes, ecosystems, biomes, or what is loosely referred to as ‘nature’ or ‘the environment’.
This basic misunderstanding means they misconstrue the Anthropocene as such because the new epoch describes a shift in the functioning of the Earth System taken as a whole. It’s a phase shift in how the planet works rather than a continuation at a higher level of the spread of human impact across the Earth. The Anthropocene Working Group concluded that the new epoch began after World War II because it was only from that point that a shift in the functioning of the Earth System was discernible. (Previously it had been thought to begin with the industrial revolution, or around 1800.) It coincided with the Great Acceleration that saw exponentially increasing consumption, resource use, fossil fuel combustion, and pollution of various kinds including greenhouse gases.
Against the standpoint of Earth System science (which as a discipline only began to emerge in the 1980s), a common feature of various misreadings of the Anthropocene—through the lenses of landscape ecology, social geography, archaeology, or soil science—is that by locating its origins hundreds or thousands of years ago they divorce the Anthropocene from modern industrialisation and the burning of fossil fuels. As a result, the Anthropocene no longer represents a rupture in Earth history but a continuation of the kind of impact humans have had for millennia. (This difference is similar to the debate in early geology between uniformitarianism vs. catastrophism, with the former insisting Earth’s history was shaped by slow, continuous, forces and could not be subject to sudden, violent, global-scale events.)
So, when archaeologists date the inception of the Anthropocene from the beginning of agriculture, or geographers from the first forest clearances, or others from the 15th century European invasion of South America (after which global carbon emissions actually declined), they make climate change seem like the result of humans doing what humans do rather than a specific, Earth-changing consequence of fossil industrialisation. Their conceptual move radically deflates the significance of the Anthropocene, and it is exculpatory.
The powerful animal
The arrival of the Anthropocene has some profound implications for social science and philosophy, implications not visible if the new phenomenon is crammed into accustomed ways of thinking and established theories, as is often the case.
The most challenging observation is, in a way, too obvious, yet it is so contrary to received ways of thinking among (progressive) social scientists that many cannot internalise it. The advent of the Anthropocene tells us that humans have become so technologically powerful that we have changed geological history. We have diverted the Earth, the planet, from its 4.5-billion-year arc determined by the blind forces of nature. Earth System scientists now describe humans as a force of nature, akin to others that have shaped Earth’s history, such as volcanism, solar fluctuations, or asteroid impacts.
In recent decades, a vast wave of theory, argument and advocacy has aimed to demonstrate that humans are much like other animals or that we are so deeply integrated into natural processes that we do not stand out. Think biocentrism, ecofeminism, Gaia theory, post-humanism, and Indigenous relational ontologies. The Anthropocene is a blunt reminder that we do stand out, that we are different; no other animal has the power to change geological history and to desist from doing so. This fact cuts against decades of green philosophy aimed at decentring the human, of treating Homo sapiens as just one species among others. In short, the arrival of the Anthropocene repudiates all attempts to undercut anthropocentrism. We, anthropos, are at the centre, although not in the way previous modes of thought have imagined.
I have been making three basic claims.
- We need to separate the fact that humans are uniquely powerful from the moral claim that we have a right to exploit the Earth’s resources as we please and the hubris that goes with it.
- At the same time, we need to recognise that we are deeply integrated into and dependent on natural systems, despite centuries of attempts to control nature and make ourselves independent of it (the basic project of modernity, practically and philosophically).
- By attempting to treat the Earth as a repository of ‘resources’ for our use and having no respect for its ecological functions (the essential starting assumption of economics), we have disrupted the functioning of the Earth System as such so that the behaviour of the Earth has become unstable, uncontrollable and dangerous to our well-being (and that of other creatures) and perhaps even to our existence on the planet. This is what I call the ‘defiant’ Earth. The Anthropocene is not humanity’s triumph over nature but the moment nature resumes command through feedbacks, breached thresholds and cascading consequences.
The bottom line is that we are more powerful than ever, but the Earth is more ‘powerful’ too—no longer the inert, stable, and cooperative backdrop to human affairs provided by the Holocene’s 10,000 years of steady climatic conditions. To capture this change in the Earth’s operation, Earth scientists resort to metaphors such as ‘the angry beast’.
Anti-anthropocentric standpoints are self-contradictory. First, they deny or deflate human significance at precisely the time humans have become so powerful that we have changed the geological history of the Earth. Secondly, by promoting a flat ontology that spreads human agency across all creatures and all ecological features in order to cut humans down to size, anti-anthropocentric standpoints leave no-one to take responsibility for repairing the planet. Posthumanism and deep ecology, by dissolving human distinctiveness, actually disables the political subject capable of taking responsibility. To repeat, they confuse the actual power of humans with moral claims of superiority and try to deny both. Anthropocentrism does not have to be anthropo-supremacism.
A new anthropocentrism
In Defiant Earth, I proposed a ‘new anthropocentrism’ (not a great descriptor, I admit, but I could not think of a better one) to capture the idea that humans are both inescapably enmeshed in and dependent on nature and have become a geological force capable of destabilising the Earth System. This puts humans in a unique position of planetary responsibility. Put another way, when we breach a planetary boundary, we both prove our power to burst through the Earth’s regulatory limits and make ourselves the victim of doing so. Humanity occupies a historically exceptional position not because it is metaphysically superior (although it may be), but because it has acquired dangerous power over planetary processes. The Anthropocene therefore imposes ethical and political obligations of reflexive self-awareness and restraint, even while reminding humans that the Earth ultimately exceeds human control.
I have argued that the problem is not that we are anthropocentric but that we are not anthropocentric enough. It’s a deliberate provocation, but I use it to challenge all those who repudiate anthropocentrism—the various ‘new materialists’ who dissolve the human into networks, assemblages, or multispecies entanglements and who include post-humanists, actor network theorists and object-oriented ontologists—to accept the reality that attempts to decentre humans are, in the Anthropocene, an evasion from the truth that humans are unlike other animals. We have become a force of nature, the only one with volition. (Cyanobacteria made no decisions.) Adding this new element of volition to geological forcing causes an ontological rupture in the Earth’s functioning because, for the first time, the bio-geological evolution of the planet is enmeshed in social and technological systems. The imposed order of human intention mixes with the spontaneous order of nature.
The ‘new anthropocentrism’ is a kind of anti-humanist anthropocentrism, anti-humanist in the sense that it rejects the Enlightenment conceit that humans are the masterful, rational subjects who stand above and control nature. So it is an anti-humanism in the service of a recovered humanism, one that rejects human arrogance while insisting on human accountability.
Some have found all this hard to swallow. Anthropocentrism! How could you? But I don’t see any way around it, other than globs of wishful thinking or just carrying on as if nothing fundamental has changed. Some readers will be champing at the bit, demanding that I justify this argument politically. It’s all very well to talk about how humans have responsibility, but which humans exactly? And if you are talking about responsibility, why are you not also talking about blame (hint: it’s rich people and fossil fuel lobbyists). These are legitimate points (personally, I am big on blame) with no easy response, unless we are satisfied with keeping politics and philosophy in separate mental boxes. (Which in practice means keeping the philosophical foundations of politics hidden.) I will return to the question of politics in the next parts.
The second part can be found here.