Human population growth is slowing down, but there is no end in sight: we are due to reach 11 billion towards the end of this century, and to continue expanding our numbers well into the next. This article discusses why focusing on the rate of population growth as the central problem amounts to a mistaken and misleading approach to thinking about the issue, as does the suggestion that we should aim to “stabilize” population size. Our current population size is already unsustainable, which poses great risks to human beings and wildlife alike. The aim must be to reverse human population growth rather than merely to slow it down or lock it in at some arbitrary, unsustainable size.
High fertility rates are largely a product of social norms. But social norms can change, and this is a powerful argument for active and honest dialogue about the problem of unsustainable human population growth.
Introduction
Human numbers were relatively stable during thousands of years, slowly edging up until reaching our first billion around 1804[2]. After this, growth accelerated, then exploded. By 1927, when beloved naturalist Sir David Attenborough was a baby, humanity had already notched up the second billion. By the time Attenborough narrated the first Life on Earth series in the late 1970s, our numbers had more than doubled again. We are now on course for to reach our third doubling by 2023; there will be 8 billion of us then. Population growth is slowing down, but there is no end in sight: we are due to reach 11 billion towards the end of this century and to continue expanding our numbers well into the next[3]. The number of people added to this planet every year (~80 million) has not changed much since the late 1970s, but it translates into an ever-smaller rate of growth because our absolute numbers are getting larger and larger. For many, this means there is no problem left to solve.
In this article, I briefly discuss how problematising population growth in terms of the speed of growth amounts to a mistaken and misleading approach to thinking about the issue, as do suggestions that we should aim to “stabilise” population size (whether at the national or global level). Population size is not a neutral factor and poses great risks to human beings and wildlife alike. Logically and morally, the aim must be to reverse population growth rather than to merely slow it down or lock it in at arbitrary, unsustainable size. High fertility rates are largely a product of social norms. But social norms can change, and this is a powerful argument for active and honest engagement with the problematic of population growth by scientists, activists and policy-makers.
First, a clarification. In this paper I criticize rhetorical arguments about the problematic of population growth which are frequently put forward by economists, futurists, and policy-makers, but sometimes also by natural scientists and even population concern activists. Any of these actors might be motivated by political expediency, ideological commitment, or a sincere belief that their positions are empirically sound. Whether or not genuinely endorsed by those who proffer them, the arguments I attack are commonly presented to the public as though they represent sound reasons for dismissing concern about population growth, and this is a problem. As I attempt to demonstrate, even a fairly cursory examination shows these arguments to be fallacious. I make no claim that my criticisms or counter-arguments are novel. On the contrary, I take the logical and moral incongruences I identify as fairly self-evident to anyone who has given serious thought to the subject of population and sustainability.
The future of population growth is not set in stone. But if we get the problem wrong, we are bound to misunderstand our options about what can or should to be done to mitigate the risks to all life on this planet, both human and wild.
Too fast, or too much growth?
Concerns about population growth are often articulated in terms of the growth being too fast. Supposedly, we should aim at slowing down growth or stabilising our numbers. In its most intellectually reprehensible incarnation, this framing of the problem translates into the argument that there is nothing to worry about because the rate of population growth is already slowing down. The easiest way to solve a complex ethical and practical problem, as ever, is to deny that it exists.
Current declines in fertility rates are neither irreversible nor inevitable, which is why multiple UN population projections have had to be adjusted upwards in recent years. But more importantly, the rhetoric of “slower growth” or “stable population size” erroneously and misleadingly implies that population size is a neutral factor. If a “stable” population is an ideal outcome, or at least a population that is not growing as fast, then it must follow that any population size is fine; the problem is merely that there is change, or the change is too fast. But this is not the case, however much it may suit one’s ideological inclinations or political aims.
From an environmental sustainability perspective, what matters is the current and cumulative effect of absolute population size, not the rate at which our numbers grow. It makes a great deal of difference to the prospects for human security and wellbeing, and for wildlife survival, if our population is 2 billion, 7 billion, 11 billion or, indeed, 16 billion. Whether a population is sustainable turns on how many consumers there are, consuming as they can be realistically expected to consume[4]. If there are more consumers than can be sustained, the risks will turn principally on how many more and for how long there is an imbalance.
The risks from an unsustainable pattern of resources use do not crystallise overnight. Consider a situation where your one and only source of livelihood is withdrawals from a bank account into which someone placed a large deposit (precise amount unknown). Even if you repeatedly withdraw from the account more than it is earning in interest rates, it may take a long time to empty the account completely; you may come to think it will never happen, even though it is the logical end-point of your trajectory. You may be a very optimistic person who is counting on interest rates going up in future, or on finding a way to diminish your withdrawals before the capital is completely gone. (Another way of looking at it, of course, is that you are reckless with your finances.) But for the time being, your withdrawals are unsustainable. They do not stop being unsustainable because things might change in future. The longer the unsustainable withdrawals go on for, the harder it becomes for you to mitigate the risk that you’ll run out of money. In particular, the longer you keep up your unsustainable withdrawals, the less leeway you’ll have to deal with unexpected expenses, falling interest rates, or simply having misjudged how much there is in the account. As with our planet’s resources, there is no safety net in this thought experiment.
I am quite willing to concede that, from the perspective of provision of public services, the speed of population growth is indeed an independent problem. Rapid population growth can create something of a Red Queen race for societies, where continuously increased public expenditure is needed simply to keep up with growing demand for school places, hospital beds, housing, sanitation, public transport, etc.
But in so far as one accepts that at least some needful resources are finite and depletable – in so far as one accepts that sustainability is or can be an issue independently of the capacity of social structures to adapt to population growth – then it simply cannot be logically supposed that the solution lies in ensuring growth eventually stops, yielding a stable population size. That a population’s size is stable in no way entails sustainability. It may be sustainable, or it may be far too large. This turns on a range of factors, most notably on how big that ‘stable’ population is and on the state of the resource base on which it depends.
Framing population stabilisation as a policy goal – independently of any sustainability assessment – is simply false and bound to mislead the public about the nature of the problem. It reflects an unthinking acceptance of the premise that populations must not shrink, that whatever arbitrary size a population grows to must be locked in and accommodated somehow. The fear of population “decline” or “ageing” is primal and tribal, reflecting macho anxieties of a bygone era where survival was about how many young men one could round up for waging war or fighting off invasions. It makes no sense in today’s world, where the main threats to the long-term viability of human societies are ultimately rooted on there being too many of us, men and women, young and old, doing damage simply by peacefully leading our own lives.
Population, affluence and technology
It is trivially true that the environmental impact of any given population size is modulated by affluence and by the technology available (in addition to cultural and institutional particularities). This broadly corresponds to the familiar “IPAT identity”[5] formula: impact = population x affluence x technology. However, it is often mistakenly assumed that more advanced technology translates into a reduced impact, or that people living in poverty have next to no environmental impact or will remain poor for ever.
Technology can be used to increase efficiency in resource use, allowing us to make more with less. But it can also be used to extract resources faster and more cheaply, masking their scarcity, encouraging overuse, or otherwise accelerating resource depletion. As the Aldo Leopold put it nearly 70 years ago, “few educated people realize that the marvellous advances in technique made during recent decades are improvements in the pump, rather than the well.[6]” There is mounting evidence that the predominant relationship between technology and resource use is one of improvements to the pump, that is, facilitating their extraction rather than creating more resources. A related phenomenon is described in economics as Jevons’ paradox[7], where greater technological efficiency in the use of a resource ultimately increases its overall consumption. In addition, technology can also be used to convert one environmental problem into another, for example where freshwater scarcity is “resolved” via desalination plants that consume vast amounts of fossil fuels, decimate marine life, or generate serious pollution.
Affluence is a similarly multivalent factor. A wealthier population will typically consume much more than a poorer population of the same size, but will also be better able to invest into the development of new technologies that may reduce their impact on resources – or amplify it. But there is nothing inherently “environmentally friendly” about poverty. In much of the world, those who are struggling to find opportunities in the formal economy will turn to extractivist activities[8] to make a living for themselves and their families, often to devastating results: empty forests where most wildlife has been hunted down[9], rampant deforestation for wood fuel and growing food[10], overfished rivers and bays[11]. In addition, it is clear that some environments are better able to support larger human populations than others. Poverty-stricken, rapidly growing populations are too often found in drought-prone, resource-poor, fragile environments such as the Sahel and the Horn of Africa. In such areas, mere subsistence activities are enough to over-exploit natural resources, driving desertification and worsening the already chronic food insecurity[12].
The contribution of population size to our environmental impact is comparatively unambiguous. For any given level of affluence, use of technology, or environmental constraints, and regardless of which way these factors pull, a smaller population size will mean a smaller environmental impact, slower resource depletion, and a greater range of alternatives for coping with resource scarcity (for example, relocating elsewhere). Conversely, a bigger population will have a greater environmental impact, a faster rate of resource depletion, fewer alternatives for coping with scarcity due to the concatenation of multiple scarcities and to greater competition for resources, and a greater number of human lives at risk than what would otherwise be the case.
Population size always matters, and in today’s world, a smaller population is a more resilient one.
The irrelevance of current food production
It is often suggested that we ought not to worry about population growth because we already produce enough food to feed 10 billion people. Supposedly we can, or should, let population growth run its course, whatever it may prove to be, because we are safe on the food front. There are at least three reasons why this reasoning is fallacious.
First, answering the question of how much food is produced now is not answering the question of how much food we can expect to produce over the foreseeable future. Current resource use in agriculture is unsustainable,[13] and this is without taking into account the potentially devastating impact of climate change. Discussions about food waste and expansion of the agricultural frontier typically ignore the reality that not all waste can be prevented, that most productive land worldwide is already in use for agriculture[14], and that what is left is natural habitat that supports important ecosystem services and provides critical sanctuary for what remains of the world’s wildlife.
Secondly, even if it were possible to sustainably produce enough food to feed a population of 10 or even 11 billion – and we have no reason to be confident it will be[15] – food production is not the only issue. People’s ability to earn a livelihood matters to their ability to secure enough food and other basic resources for themselves and their families, to their ability to live lives of dignity, and to the fiscal sustainability of their societies. The International Labour Office has been chronicling a global trend towards higher unemployment and underemployment for years, due to job creation not keeping up with growth in the number of new labour market entrants. This has particularly affected younger workers[16], reflecting the morally problematic asymmetry of all population growth externalities: the costs and risks of population growth are typically worse for younger generations than for the older generations who have made the choices that created or added to the risks. As if these population growth-driven trends were not enough of a threat to the livelihoods of younger generations, in recent years there has been growing concern about the scope for developments in artificial intelligence to cause unprecedented levels of unemployment without concomitant creation of new jobs for those displaced[17], potentially vastly aggravating fiscal unsustainability problems that are already widespread[18].
And thirdly, even if it were possible to secure food and decent livelihoods for 11 billion people, our population may keep on growing well past that already enormous size. This is the trajectory indicated by the latest UN population projections[19] sees the global population continuing to grow well into the 22nd century, and its projected size for 2100 might prove optimistic. Population projections for countries experiencing high fertility are particularly uncertain; these are the countries which are projected to drive the bulk of global population growth from 2050 onwards. Even slightly slower than anticipated fertility declines could result in a much larger population size. The UN’s “high” variant projection assumes fertility rates will remain half a child higher, on average, than the “medium” variant. This yields a 2100 population of over 16 billion. It may be thought that the high variant assumes an increase in fertility; on the contrary, it still builds in a substantial reduction in fertility rates relative to today’s levels. A straightforward extrapolation of current fertility rates would yield a population of well over 25 billion by 2100[20].
While many remain steadfastly optimistic about the prospects for producing enough food to feed 11 billion in a climate changed world with damaged soils and not enough water, this author is not aware of any credible proposals for feeding a world of 16 billion or more.
Already unsustainable
Our current population’s impact on the natural resources on which we depend suggests 7 billion is already an unsustainable population size. Further population growth will increase systemic risks to food security and livelihoods, in particular climate change, mounting unemployment and sub-employment, degradation of agricultural soils, overfishing, and freshwater scarcity.
The Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change recognises population growth as a primary driver of climate change[21], along with economic growth. The IPCC warns that climate change may have severe impacts on food security via higher temperatures, precipitation changes, increased frequency of extreme weather events, the spread of new pests and ocean acidification. Estimates suggest that some 200 million people could be displaced by climate change over the next 40 years[22]. Food production is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions and a dominant force behind diversity loss, degradation of land and depletion of freshwater sources, among other serious environmental impacts. Simultaneously, agriculture is the most weather-dependant of all human activities, and extensively reliant on the same natural resources and ecosystem services[23] it is degrading.
The Food and Agricultural Organisation identifies population growth and economic growth as the primary drivers of the ongoing loss and degradation of agricultural soils, which in turn is a major threat to food security[24]. Global marine fisheries landings have been declining since the late 1980s due to overfishing[25]. The FAO’s analysis of assessed stocks has found a downward trend in biologically sustainable fish stocks since 1974; some 30% of fisheries are already overfished and a further 60% are “fully fished”[26], with pressures on fish stocks largely driven by population growth (but also economic growth). Around 1.4 billion people live in areas where ground water is being drawn at a faster rate than it can be replenished[27]. The UN projects that almost half the world’s population will be living in areas of high water stress by 2030, potentially displacing as many as 700 million people[28]. Water scarcity is driven principally by population growth and – what else – economic growth, is set to be worsened by climate change, and is thought to be a major driver of armed conflict, in particular in Africa[29]. Some of the most water stressed countries are also experiencing very high population growth rates[30]. The UN estimates that nearly 80% of the jobs constituting the global workforce depend on access to an adequate water supply[31].
Population growth contributes to and amplifies every one of these risks while increasing the number of people exposed to those risks. In addition, by expanding the reach and intensity of human pressures on the natural environment, human population growth poses an existential threat to countless other species.
The most recent doubling of our numbers was accompanied by a loss of over half of wildlife numbers, driven by destruction of natural habitats and harvesting of wildlife to meet human needs and aggravated by environmental fouling from human activities.[32] This involves a combination of thinning of wildlife populations and eradication of countless species. A sixth mass extinction event is ongoing, the worst spate of species loss since the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event that saw the end of non-avian dinosaurs and many other lineages of life[33]. Even if our human population eventually stops growing and shrinks back to a sustainable size, the species pushed to extinction along the way will be lost forever.
Those of a particularly extreme speciesist or anthropocentric moral outlook may believe that there is no inherent wrong in causing other species to go extinct. Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that the interests of human beings are the only moral considerations that count. Even then, humanity’s impact on the natural world is a serious moral wrong of reckless risking of livelihoods and safety nets. Many millions of people in Africa, Asia and Latin America rely on wildlife resources for their livelihoods and as a buffer to see them through times of hardship, such as unemployment and crop failures.[34] More generally, the world’s poor are often highly dependent on natural resources for their livelihoods, and the most vulnerable to the effects of defaunation and environmental degradation[35].
For those of us who reject anthropocentrism, or at least do not endorse such an extreme version of it, the permanent loss of biodiversity is a profound moral wrong to the species being annihilated by humanity’s reckless expansionist project. It is also a moral wrong to future generations, condemned to live in a biologically impoverished world where such iconic fauna as elephants, sea turtles, snow leopards, orangutans, rhinos, gorillas and tigers no longer exist in the wild, or at all.
Ideas, values, and behaviours
When we accept a large risk, we must have in mind an even greater benefit that justifies taking that risk, or else we are behaving irrationally and recklessly. Most people should be able to recognise that it is wrong to expose younger and future generations to enormous risks, and bring entire lineages of life to an end, for as trivial a reason as our reluctance to adjust our own behaviour and attitudes in response to changing circumstances, or as disreputable a reason as treating children and wildlife as means to the ends of today’s parents and consumers. We are supposedly a rational species. We have been aware of population growth for decades, and reliable and inexpensive birth control methods have been available for over 50 years. And yet, we hold on to the idea that cultural and individual preferences about family size should be left to drift along, as if the future of humanity and of countless other creatures was not sufficiently important to warrant conscious effort to mitigate population growth.
Where population growth is acknowledged to be a problem, it is commonly suggested that the way to address it is by educating girls, tackling gender discrimination or lifting people out of poverty. Ensuring women and girls are treated with equal respect and afforded the same educational and economic opportunities as men and boys is a matter of justice and basic human decency. The same applies to efforts to secure for everyone the at least the minimum material resources needed for lives free from fear and want. However, it is important to note that tackling gender inequality and absolute poverty are neither preconditions[36] to fertility declines nor reliable ways to achieve declines that are as deep and fast as they need to be to adequately mitigate unsustainable population trajectories.[37] Conversely, high fertility rates pose a formidable obstacle to securing improvements to gender equality and to economic and educational opportunities[38].
Women who are unable to control their bodies can be confidently predicted to bear more children than those who can, and education tends to make larger families less appealing. But it would be a mistake to surmise that women having large families necessarily do so out of ignorance or because they have no choice. It seems more likely that ideas about the role of women and the (instrumental versus intrinsic) value of children spring from the same socio-cultural fountain as preferences about family size. The weight of the evidence suggests the most important factors driving population growth today are persistent preferences for larger family sizes[39] and unintended births resulting from non-use of contraception even where it is available, often due to cultural/religious objections[40]. Both factors are amenable to changes in values and social norms that have a tremendous bearing on individual attitudes and reproductive behaviour, as exemplified by the many successful ideational change campaigns employing entertaining television and radio shows[41].
But the case for changes in values and social norms is undermined whenever and wherever those best placed to understand and explain the risks that are driven or aggravated by population growth stay silent on it, and even more so if the only voices speaking on population are pro-natalist ideologues representing capitalist, patriarchal or religious interests. An unconscionable population +-taboo[42] has developed whereby scientists, activists and policy makers talk around population growth and gloss over or omit reference to the need for smaller family sizes when discussing climate change, food or livelihood insecurity, loss of biodiversity and environmental degradation. In doing so, these actors are complicit in creating an environmentally impoverished world in which many millions, possibly billions of people may starve, become displaced, or have no hope of securing decent livelihoods. This needs to change.
What can be done?
Fundamentally, we must foster a shared sense of responsibility for the size of our human population, and adjust our behaviours and ways of thinking. In the oft-quoted words of Stanislaw Jerzy Lec, no snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible. But we all are. Even the childless by choice are still consumers, and as social beings we all make a contribution, however small, to what ideas live or die.
The logical and ethical response to unsustainable population growth is to reject the primitive rhetoric that irrationally fears population de-growth and ageing while embracing speculative gambles with our collective futures. It is to confront those who promote population growth on the ethically repugnant premise that human beings exist to serve the needs of a supposedly ever-growing capitalist economy, or the political goals of religious leaders. It is to embrace, rather than fear, sub-replacement fertility.
In order for younger and future generations to have a shot at decent lives in a world that is not an environmental wasteland, social ideas about what a normal family looks like need to change. A one-child family ideal is a very small family indeed, but one that prioritises the life chances of children, the long-term stability of human societies, and the survival of the world’s wildlife over the immediate preferences and desires of prospective parents. This is what makes sense, and how it should be.
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Tilman, D et al (2002) Agricultural Sustainability and Intensive Production Practices. Nature 418 (6898): 671–77.
Young, A (1999) Is There Really Spare Land? A Critique of Estimates of Available Cultivable Land in Developing Countries. Environment, Development and Sustainability 1 (1): 3–18.
[1] Doctoral candidate at University College London, School of Public Policy
[3] See United Nations (2015) and Gerland et al (2014)
[4] In the original (and rather more eloquent) words of Paul and Anne Ehrlich (1990: 37-40): “Overpopulation is defined by the animals that occupy the turf, behaving as they normally behave, not by a hypothetical group that might be substituted for them.”
[5] Holdren and Ehrlich (1974); Ehrlich and Ehrlich (1990).
[8] See for example Kerr et al (2004), Duffy and St John (2013), Harrison (2011), Nasi et al (2011), Slingenberg et al (2009), Sreekar et al (2015), McDonald (2016), Gettleman (2015), Lall (2013).
[9] Nasi et al (2008); Nasi et al (2011); Harrison (2011); Nellemann et al (2014); UNEP (2016); Long et al (2017). See also Panjabi (2014) and Maxwell et al (2016).
[10] Kerr et al (2004); Some et al (2007); McCarthy (2011); Hosonuma et al (2012); Nellemann et al (2014); Sedano et al (2016); FAO (2016).
[11] Stobutzki et al (2006); Salayo et al (2008); Keskar et al, 2017.
[12] United Nations (2007), IPCC (2014), Lifland (2012)
[13] International Food Policy Research Institute (2016), The Government Office for Science (2011)
[14] See for example Tilman et al (2002), Cassman (1999), Young (1999)
[18] See for example The World Economic Forum’s 2017 report on global risks, which (as with previous reports) ranks fiscal unsustainability and unemployment/underemployment, along with a host of man-made environmental and humanitarian crises, as high impact, high likelihood risks.
[20] There was no “business as usual” (constant fertility) graph in the UN’s 2015 projections, perhaps because the BAU graph in the 2012 projections was thought to be alarmistic. It is fair to say that a human population of over 25 billion is improbable.
[36] See Campbell and Bedford (2009) for a useful summary.
[37] See Garenne (2012) and Grant (2015) for sobering data on the limited impact of education on fertility rates in Sub-Saharan Africa, and Myrskylä et al (2009) on how advanced levels of socio-economic development can reverse fertility declines.
[38] The population of many Sub-Saharan African countries is set to at least quintuple over this century (See UN, 2015), greatly depressing the scope for those societies to provide decent education and livelihood opportunities for rapidly enlarging cohorts of young people. See for example McNay (2005), Ashraf et al (2013), and Grant (2015). See also Anderson and Kohler (2015) and Recoules (2011) on how low fertility may boost gender equality and how gender equality may in turn boost fertility rates. The relationship between fertility and gender equality appears to be far more complex than commonly assumed.
[39] Westoff (2010); Bongaarts (2011); Bongaarts and Casterline (2013); Madsen (2015). See also INS and ICF International (2013).
[40] This reflects the difference between unmet demand and unmet need for contraception. Where a woman would like to avoid pregnancy but does not intend to use contraception, there is unmet need but no unmet demand. For example, 65% of people in Pakistan, 54% of people in Nigeria and 52% of people in Ghana personally believe that using contraceptives is morally unacceptable; it does not necessarily follow that very large families are wanted [See Poushter (2014) and Pew (2014)]. A recent review of demographic and health surveys [Sedgh et al, 2016] found that a substantial proportion of women in developing countries did not seek family planning services even though they wanted to avoid pregnancy. Opposition to contraception was cited as a reason by 23% of those women, particularly among married women, while lack of knowledge or access to contraception, was cited by fewer than 10% of respondents. The same study confirmed that a preference for large family sizes remains the norm across most of Africa. See also Casterline and Agyei-Mensah (2017). Even if all women who have an unmet need for contraception used it, fertility in sub-Saharan Africa in particular would remain well above replacement levels [Bongaarts, 2011]. One of the most often encountered forms of instrumental valuing of children is parent’s expectation of financial support in old age. Unsurprisingly, there seems to be a robust correlation between increased social security benefits and reduced fertility rates – see Boldrin et al (2015).
[41] See for example Westoff and Koffman (2011), Basten (2009), Ashton et al (2015)
[42] See for example Mora (2014), Coole (2013), Campbell and Bedford (2009), Campbell (2007), Betts (2004), Orenstein (2004), Butler (2004); Beck and Kolankiewicz (2000), Grimes (1998), Maher (1997), Catton Jr, 1996.
Institute of Cultural Studies, Faculty of Anthropology and Cultural Studies, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, 61-712 Poznań, Poland; franciszek.chwalczyk@amu.edu.pl
Abstract: There are now at least 80–90 proposed alternatives to the term “the Anthropocene”, following critique mainly from the social sciences. The most popular seem to be Moore’s Capitalocene and Haraway’s Chthulucene, but there are others, such as: Hornborg’s Technocene, Mann’s Homogenocene, Wilson’s Eremocene, Stiegler’s neganthropocene, Parikka’s Anthrobscene… Furthermore, similar recognitions and critiques have been made in urban studies (Urban Age, Planetary Urbanization…). What should we make of this multiplicity? Those propositions are approached here from the philosophical and cultural studies perspectives, in the spirit of Galison’s trading zones and Bal’s travelling concepts. They are treated with engaged pluralism (introduced through geography and urban studies) and, because of their eschatological dimension, with (secular) negative theology. The Urbanocene is also outlined using Nowak’s ontological imagination. None of the propositions are sufficient on their own. Most contribute to a better understanding of the Anthropocene. Those concerning the role of cities and urbanization (Astycene, Urbanocene, Urbicene, Metropocene) are insufficient. This entails that there is a need for an Urbanocene proposition to be formulated. This proposition draft is briefly outlined here by linking an example of exceeded planetary boundaries (levels of phosphorus and nitrogen) with urbanization, drawing on the works of Mumford and Gandy.
1.1. The Anthropocene—The Epoch of Man and Its (Urban) Context
What epoch do we live in? On a cosmic, geological or biological-evolutionary scale, time and its epochs are the objective external frame, and “man” is simply thrown into it. Is this really the case? It seems that not necessarily, not anymore—with the scale of “human” perpetration still increasing. Time scales and time units must also take into account this increase in impact—and its spatiality and arrangement. Especially given that this perpetration has just reached critical potential and it is not evenly distributed. Its effects and manifestations are noticed, variously demarcated and given a variety of names in different disciplines: global warming or climate catastrophe in climatology [2], the sixth mass extinction in biology [3], and, finally, the epoch of the Anthropocene in geology [4].
The Anthropocene is a much-discussed phenomenon and concept nowadays. As a phenomenon, it is the superhuman scale of perpetration, visible in and measured by, e.g., Planetary Boundaries [5]. As a concept, it is a postulate dating back to around the year 2000 [4], which designated a new geological era—as a part of the Holocene or as its end. The premise is that anthropogenic changes have occurred on a large scale on Earth. Their effects will probably be recognizable in future geological strata, composed of matter we today produce and arrange; and social scientists or humanists would add that we produce and arrange this matter due to our cultures—the ways we live.
This proposition is currently being considered by the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG), composed of scientists of various affiliations—not only geological. Recently, the AWG recommended that the Anthropocene should be posited as taking place after the Holocene and beginning in the mid-20th century. As the clearest example of its indicator around the globe, the AWG postulates radioactive traces of nuclear weapons tests from the 1945 and onward [6]. It is now up to the International Union of Geological Sciences and the International Stratigraphy Commission to familiarize themselves with the AWG results and vote on the new name. However, like most issues in science, this proposal to view and name the new age as the Anthropocene is not limited to the field of science. In the meantime, doubts have been raised within and outside this field. Neither is the field itself homogeneous. Although this proposition of a concept describing an important phenomenon is needed, it is not sufficient from the perspective of other sciences. This is the basic point of departure of this article. I focus here on other suggestions for the name for the epoch—the other “-cenes”. These are the alternative names (Capitalocene, Chthulucene, Urbanocene…) for the geological epoch—all of which have some justification. They are usually proposed as part of the constructive and creative critique of the Anthropocene-concept, but at the same time recognize the Anthropocene-phenomenon. Here I present all of the terms that I found (see Appendix A, Table A1) and I survey them to see what is missing or what is not adequately represented. This allows me to recognize needs and propose how to answer them, but not by just throwing my concept onto the table and cynically riding the wave of popularity of the concept without even considering what alternatives have already been proposed.
These discussions go much further, beyond the AWG, and turn out to be very lively, interesting and copious—as Ewa Bińczyk shows in her article in The Anthropocene Review and in her book [7,8]. She points out that this broad debate about the Anthropocene—involving most of modern science, but also media and business—is fundamental and unique for seven reasons, such as: it offers philosophical reinterpretations of the human’s relations with nature; the scope of human agency and entanglement; and the triad of freedom, power, responsibility. It gathers and unites various disciplines around one subject and goal. Its central problem is irreversibility and unprecedentedness, shrinking possibilities and—resulting from this knowledge—mourning, anger and frustration. Hence, the debate has an eschatological dimension—especially as it is accompanied by apocalyptic motives. And it can serve as a (last) warning, as well as a catalyst for a new perspective—and, consequently, action and change. It may even wake us up from the “marasmus” of the Anthropocene, according to Bińczyk. Hence, if this is a fundamental phenomenon and a key debate, it should be thoroughly studied, but also extended to include sciences whose subjects the Anthropocene-phenomenon touches, but which the concept of the Anthropocene, geology and neighboring disciplines does not cover.
In the sense of a geological proposal, the Anthropocene (Anthropocene-concept) has already been discussed many times in many places and is not the main subject of this paper, while the Anthropocene-phenomenon and alternative concepts and names are. Such a demarcation of the research field is justified by the fact that geologists and related researchers understand the Anthropocene quite narrowly. However, their perspectives are expanding, as tables of contents and the contents themselves of various specialist publications show [9,10]. However, they mainly focus on what geological unit the Anthropocene is and when it started, where to drive a “golden spike”. They do not necessarily take into account the possible political consequences of their findings. Meanwhile, their work on this concept has become very political, as is indicated by alternative propositions.
To put it simply, while geologists and like-minded researchers are interested in the geological side of the phenomenon, the “-cene”, here the question is the “anthropo-”—the social side—or literally the humanist, anthropological side. Especially since it seems that this is currently the most fertile and most important subfield. In the case of research on climate change, the natural and technical aspects are already quite well understood and researched. The result is scientific consensus, reports like that of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), and pretty accurate models [2,5,9,10]. Meanwhile, the social and humanistic side is not so well developed. This is hardly surprising, considering that in the years 1990–2018 natural and technical sciences received 770% more funding for research on climate change than the social sciences. Only 0.12% of the funds were allocated to research on the social dimensions of coping with climate change [11]. In the present situation, the natural sciences can only tell us what is going on and why—with increasing detail—but only taking into account natural causes. Meanwhile, the main causes—as well as the solutions—belong to the social realm and, therefore, fall outside the scope of these disciplines.
As Kathryn Yusoff notes [12], Michel Serres already pointed out the global and “geological” impact of man on the Earth in 1990 [13]. This philosopher wrote about “dense tectonic plates of humanity” [13] (p. 16) affecting the world. In his book he pointed out that we need a new contract—analogous to the social one—but with nature, if only for nature to become a party, a (legal) subject, and for the harm that is being done to it to become somehow visible. As Serres puts it:
“… being-in-the-world transformed into a being as powerful as the world. […] This is the state, the balanced account, of our relations with the world, at the beginning of a time when the old social contract ought to be joined by a natural contract. In a situation of objective violence, there is no way out but to sign it.
At the very least, war [“better” because codified, covered by conventions, noticeable, sometimes also “lighter” violence—ed. F.Ch]; ideally, peace” [13] (p. 20).
The Anthropocene hypothesis and the discussions surrounding it seem to be an attempt and a possibility of such a new contract, at least for Bińczyk. As she points out, this concept, first of all, creates around itself an integrated, scientific systemic perspective on a planetary scale, without disciplinary divisions (Earth System Science—ESS). Secondly, it forces the recognition that humanity is in danger of losing the future and of triggering a cascade of disasters as a result of its activities. Thirdly, it introduces the idea of a planetary “we”, the foundation for political change.
However, for this new contract not to end in the same way as many climate agreements—as a dead declaration or an act favoring the strong under the guise of technocracy—it must take into account a number of details and a great deal of complexity. Not only those concerning one side, the climate, but also the other, the “defendant”, anthropos. That is because this “we” is strongly heterogeneous when it comes to distribution in space, vulnerability, degree of perpetration and many other features. Furthermore, this “we” that underlies constitutions and social systems usually turns out to be severely disabling for some (deliberately or not).
However, there is another aspect to this issue. In the same place, Serres draws attention to something that other authors did not take into account. As he writes:
“Visible at night from orbit as the biggest galaxy of light on the globe, more populous overall than the United States, the supergiant megalopolis Europe sets out from Milan, […]. It’s a social unit comparable to the Great Lakes or the Greenland icecap in size, in the homogeneity of its texture, and in its hold on the world. This plate of humanity has long disturbed the albedo, the circulation of water, the median temperature, and the formation of clouds or wind-in short, the elements—as well as the number and evolution of living species in, on, and under its territory” [13] (p. 16).
Hence the intuition that we should take closer look at the spatial perspective and, within this, especially at cities and urbanization. Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz note that while cities, pastures and fields occupied about 5% of the terrestrial landmass in 1750, today it is almost 30%. Furthermore, 84% of the land not covered with ice is today under the direct influence of homo sapiens, while 90% of photosynthesis on Earth takes place in biomes under its control—taking into account biomes only partially influenced by humans [14] (loc 220). According to many estimates, over 50% of people already live in cities [15]. Eric Swyngedouw cites the following data: 80% of greenhouse gas emissions and most waste are generated by the current urban lifestyle [16] and other research corroborates such intuitions in certain aspects [17]. On the other hand—although also showing the considerable impact of cities—urban and industrial sulfur dioxide emissions have slightly limited the planet’s warming in recent years [14] (loc 475). Elsewhere we can find reports that cities use over 66% of global energy and are responsible for 70% of the emissions [18]. Marina Fischer-Kowalski, along with her co-authors, tried to adequately and quantitatively describe how and when humanity acquired this global agency, focusing not on emissions, but on energy demand. As they write:
“The functional inter-linkage with urban growth is apparent from the beginning: without a source providing heat for a rapidly increasing number of urban households and trades no proto-industrialization would have taken place. But even more so: on the global level, there is a near-perfect fit between urban population numbers and the amounts of fossil fuels used globally, across the next 500 years (see Figure 1)” [19] (p. 20).
Not all population, but urban population. In their conclusions they state that since 1500 there has been a very close relationship between cities and fossil fuels.
Let us take a deeper look. In the long-term perspective it is cities that will leave a lasting impression on the face of the Earth (and beneath it). They will be this new geological layer, future fossils, as indicated by the head of the AWG, Jan Zalasiewicz [20]. A layer extremely diverse in composition, containing and concentrating matter from other layers, times and places. Perhaps the rapid urbanization that the world is experiencing now is another “sudden mineralization” in the history of life, about which Manuel De Landa wrote [21] (pp. 26–27). In this case, cities are nothing less than a human (exo)skeleton, a life-support system, as Matthew Gandy puts it [22]. If this is the case, then, just like the dinosaurs, man will also leave behind his great skeleton as remnants. It is not surprising that—as Jeremy Davies claims [23] (p. 102)—the post-war exponential growth of megacities was considered to be the “golden spike” for the Anthropocene. Hence, maybe it should be the Urbanocene, rather than the Anthropocene?
1.2. What Age, Which Man? The State of the Discussion and Problems Associated with the Urban Age and the Anthropos
As was already pointed out, according to many estimates, over 50% of people already live in cities [15]. But what does this really mean—if anything? Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid call this statement and its conceptual basis the Urban Age Thesis [24] (UAT, or “thesis” hereinafter). As those authors indicate, it is a long-standing and still dominant view when it comes to urbanization, population distribution and coverage of the surface of planet Earth. They compare it to the concept of modernity or modernization in the 1960s and globalization in the 1980s, just as Jason W. Moore compares the status of the Anthropocene today to globalization in the 1990s [25] (p. 80).
As with the case of the Anthropocene-concept, sufficient attention has already been given to the “thesis” in its various forms. At the heart of it is quite a big and extensive issue of what to understand as urban/city and how it changed, especially as figured in Modernist and Postmodernist discourses. However, I would like to focus on analogies between the Anthropocene-concept and the “thesis”—especially those regarding their problems and the need for rethinking them. As Brenner and Schmid show, sources of “thesis” should be sought in the Cold War attempts to more accurately measure the world urban population. The authors argue that although today, researchers use current data, at the same time the conceptual orientation, geographical imagination and representational strategies (“graphonology”) have not changed a great deal since the 1950s.
Authors distinguish between statistical and theoretical problems with the “thesis”. As for the former, there is a problem with operationalization of this “urban”—with determining and counting what is and what is not a city (and, by analogy, a city resident). On the other hand, there are two main theoretical problems inherent in the “thesis”. The first is methodological territorialism—the perception of social processes as closed and limited, occurring in strictly defined, non-overlapping spheres. Secondly, urbanization is treated here simply as a concentration of population in a given territory. A city is a homogeneous, coherent, discreet, unchanging, timeless container, detached from global processes. Borders are assumed rather than obtained as a result of research. This has three effects: the fetishization of settlement types, pitting the countryside and city against each other, and a “fluid” model of change—changes in space occur through transfer of population from rural areas to urban ones. Meanwhile, the countryside under this approach remains a black box. Here the problem lies in excessive territorialization, whereas in the case of the Anthropocene-concept it is the lack of such—in the sense of paying attention to space. At the same time, urbanization understood in this way is ahistorical and apolitical.
The effects of such reifying and depoliticized thinking are solutions from which politics is cut out and replaced by technoscience. Just as Bonneuil and Fressoz mention sustainable development as an old and standard response to environmental crises, and today to the Anthropocene [14] (loc 422–443 and 3845–3940), so it has a spatial counterpart (with its own set of violence) described by Swynegouw [26]. This is the majority of cities that are sustainable, smart, green, eco, zero-carbon, intelligent or resilient (or are labeled as such). Usually those enterprises solve problems only locally and for few—and can increase them on the global scale. Behind every intelligent building there can be a bloody coltan from Congo [27], e-waste villages in Asia [28] or CO2 emissions associated with electronics and cement production (Congocene, Molysmocene, Anthrobscene…). What is more, these solutions are difficult to negotiate. One can either accept them and give most of the power to specialists and infrastructures or reject them. There is not much place here for the visions of a given community, its ideas, views and preferences, nor space for negotiations.
Similar veins of criticism apply to the Anthropocene-concept. This “we”, this anthropos in the Anthropocene proposal, is one of the main problems that Bonneuil and Fressoz bring to the fore in their book [14]. They thoroughly examine the Anthropocene-concept and also propose and describe a number of alternative conceptualizations. It is due to the latter that their work is being used here as a main source of criticism for the Anthropocene-concept, although there is a lot of critique developing (for example, [29]). Additionally, because it is an excellent example of a critical approach to contemporary knowledge structures [30], I would say that it is an exploration of this “we” with respect to the natural sciences, but from the perspective and initiative of social sciences and humanities.
I will refer here only to selected threads of the critique of the Anthropocene-concept made by Bonneuil and Fressoz. As the authors point out, similarly as with UAT, the basic problem is operationalization. Because who is this anthropos? And what does his global responsibility look like? The authors point out that the average American from the US uses 32 times more raw materials and energy than the average Kenyan. A child born in a rich family will have a carbon footprint 1000 times larger than a child born in a poor one [14] (loc 1182–1244). And, after Alf Hornborg and Andreas Malm, they repeat the joke that an explanation indicating generally homo sapiens may be sufficient only for orangutans or polar bears asking who violates their habitats [29] (p. 6). Even if the numbers cited above are not accurate (which is difficult to confirm, for many reasons), they adequately represent ratios and relations. These inequalities are well summarized in the Oxfam report [31] and there are abundant data that legitimize similar conclusions [32].
Similarly problematic in the Anthropocene proposal is the explanation of where this situation came from. The approach to history is geological here, as if events were evenly distributed over sufficiently long periods of time, like accumulating rock layers. Hence, “exaggerating a little, we could say that history for anthropocenologists comes down in the end to a set of exponential charts” [14] (loc 1235) starting in 1945. This leads to formulating the Anthropocene in a similar way as UAT: ahistorically and apolitically. Meanwhile, the Anthropocene is a diverse socio-political-historical problem, not a geological, quantitative and demographic monolith.
This averaging, reducing and monolithic approach is an extrapolation and reversal of the slogan “We only have one Earth”, which guided the UN ecological conference in Stockholm in 1972 [14] (loc 1062–1071). The effect of this reversal is a message that can be conveyed as follows: “there is only one cause and it is all of us”. Of course, there is no doubt about the anthropogenic source of the climate catastrophe and most of the changes occurring. The problem, however, lies in the details and meaning of the term “anthropogenic”.
This problematic symmetry between diagnosis and phenomenon goes deeper. The Anthropocene-concept seems to derive from the same source from which the Anthropocene-phenomenon came. This means the nature–culture divide, the “man vs. world” vision, and seeing nature as something separate and under man’s influence [14] (loc 486–574), [25] (p. 80). It is a similar construction to that of UAT: urban vs. rural. Moore notes that this concept cannot answer the question “how did it happen?”, because it is being hostage to the same cognitive structures that are responsible for today’s situation [25] (p. 84). This also affects the proposed solutions that are subject to the same symmetry.
Just as the AWG identifies the Great Acceleration as the beginning of the Anthropocene, so Bonneuil and Fressoz see the sources of the above dualistic approach in the Cold War “optics”. On the one hand, it is a vision and heritage of cybernetics and systems theory, quite universalizing, which also attempted to create a scientific perspective without disciplinary divisions. One can add the tools and effects of this optics: infrastructures that allow the diagnosis of the Anthropocene and climate change (radars, climatology and meteorology) can also be associated with this period and with the (cold) war context. The same applies to sources of the Anthropocene-phenomenon, as one can see in alternative propositions concerning the military and political sources of technology and energy infrastructures (e.g., Thermocene, Thanatocene, Necrocene, Technocene, etc.). On the other hand, it is the cultivation of a “glance from nowhere”, initiated by the famous “Earthrise” or “Blue Marble” photos—gazing from space onto the planet and seeing it as a fragile Spaceship Earth. A ship that apparently needs the strong hand of a geo-scientist-pilot, who will guide her through this crisis. In the meanwhile, in line with this and the common approach, this crisis is automatically recognized as an opportunity [14] (loc 976–1021 and 1488).
This is how the defenders of everlasting growth and the proponents of a “good” Anthropocene [33] see it—as a transformation of the Earth and nature into a human garden, adapting those two to the economy, and not other way around. This is the way for William Nordhaus, the laureate of the so-called [34] Nobel Prize in economics. As he calculated in the 1990s, and still believes this is the case, economically-optimal global warming is 3.5 degrees Celcius [35]. The IPCC 2018 report sets the limit at 1.5 degrees, while 2 degrees is already a big ecological problem, to put it mildly [2]. However, according to Nordhaus, a bigger disaster (financial and detrimental to economic growth) would be to struggle to maintain the thresholds recommended by the IPCC. Nordhaus’s and other good anthropocenologists’ positions are a testimony to the cracks and crevices in the scientific community. As there is a consensus in disciplines dealing with the climate catastrophe on various scales (climatology and ecology), climate economists and geologists—especially those related to the oil industry—have doubts with which they “trade” [36]. These are the same geologists within whose discipline the Anthropocene-concept is being formulated and the Anthropocene-phenomenon is going to be named.
To describe this conceptualization and subsequent solutions, Bonneuil and Fressoz took inspiration from works of Michel Foucault. They propose the notion of geo-power and geo-knowledge (a succession to the bio- prefix), the subject of which is the whole Earth. In this framework, scientists are enlightened guides of the entirety of undifferentiated humanity and, similarly to the Cold War era, difficult to accept [37], potentially violent [38] climate engineering projects are proposed as solutions [14] (loc 1552).
Violence and coercion are indispensable elements of power, state and organization. However, their distribution remains a key issue. It is very likely that in order to save what we have understood as the Earth so far, we need some geo-power and geo-knowledge. Not only to make and sign a new contract with nature, but also to enforce it. The question is what values will stand behind this “legislation”. The Anthropocene turns out to be a construct torn apart by conflict of interests. As long as the discussion consists of different voices and its shape is not a foregone conclusion, indeed there are the potentials that Bińczyk wrote about. However, one must be careful about the moment of crystallization and reduction. For if we fail to take into account these critiques and this multiplicity, we will end up with a dysfunctional concept. A concept that will provoke pseudo-solutions, like the “green” discourse about saving the planet through consumer choices, not systemic changes. That is why it is so important to look closely into other propositions, alternative names based on alternative diagnoses, and to further develop those that are underdeveloped (such as the Urbanocene)—to be able to see the problem in its full complexity. Only then can we also have solutions multidimensional and complex enough to handle the situation.
2. Materials and Methods
As in philosophy and cultural studies, the materials that are on the table here are practices, ideas and their embodiments. I focus on propositions for an alternative name of the geological epoch (Capitalocene, Chthulucene, Urbanocene…—the “-cenes”) that were somehow justified by authors. They are proposed as a part of the constructive and creative critique of the Anthropocene-concept, but they share the recognition of the Anthropocene-phenomenon and try to name it (or some aspects of it). I am not interested in the dismantling critiques of the Anthropocene (concept or phenomenon)—in those names that mock the idea of proposing alternatives or in propositions without any idea or recognition behind them.
For a list of all the propositions found as a part of my query, with the sources, see Appendix A, Table A1. Such attempts have already been made, but seem unsatisfactory. Either they were made some time ago and are not exhaustive [8], or they were conducted in a spirit of trivia and not exhaustively enough [39], or only listed names without providing sources [40]. Mine probably also misses many propositions, but it is still twice as extensive as others and no effort of this kind can be complete or closed. Every “-cene” used in this text can be found in the table, with a proper reference. I will not be citing them here, in the standard, bracketed way, as that would only make the citation system obscure.
As for the general approach of working with those concepts, I adopt a transdisciplinary way of practicing cultural studies [41], additionally inspirited by Science, Technology and Society studies (STS). On the one hand, it is putting oneself in the position of a “trickster” [42] or “Hermes” mediating between various disciplines and meanings [43]. On the other hand, it is taking tricksters, parasites [44] or boundary objects [45] as the main objects of interest (and also as methods, like travelling concepts [41]). This requires mobilizing a specific ability to capture and view subjects and their relations—the ontological imagination, as Andrzej W. Nowak calls it [46,47]. He retrofits C. W. Mills’ famous concept and critically merges the STS approach with action-network theory.
This pluralism, metaphorics of exchange, wandering and circulation, as well as the subject of research, direct me towards a more specific perspective and justification for my research approach. One that is also a source for the aforementioned engaged pluralism [48]. To a large extent, what I do here can be considered a study of “trading zones” [49] and the co-production of such. This is a concept Peter Galison coined to explain how physics researchers were able to collaborate on specific projects and devices. These are spaces in which researchers locally coordinated and agreed upon their actions when, in a broader perspective, the meanings behind their actions or objects were conflicting or contradictory. The differences did not disappear in those zones; however, it can be said that a discrepancy report had been draw up and the attempt to put something together was continued. By exchanging theoretical, epistemological or technological objects, the sides agreed on the rules of exchange, although completely different meanings could been assigned by them to the objects exchanged. Those were not just simple exchanges—new procedures and qualities were being developed. I show how this applies to the “-cenes” in the Results.
There are two methods used here to recognize how the “-cenes” complement each other and to answer the question of whether there are any empty spaces. The first method was inspired by negative theology (discussed in philosophy by, e.g., Derrida [50] or Putnam [51]). The second inspiration was the post-secular current of contemporary humanities and also the literally “supernatural” status of the subject being studied, the Anthropocene-phenomenon. Bińczyk emphasizes the eschatological dimension of the Anthropocene debate [7]. Bonneuil and Fressoz draw attention to the similarity of the structure of the Anthropocene narrative to the history of redemption [14]. Clive Hamilton writes about theodicy—in the case of this eco-modern, “good” Anthropocene [52]. Mark Sagoff, in a journal that can be regarded as representing the “good” Anthropocene approach, writes about “the theology of eco-modernism” [53]. Donna Haraway formulates her Chthulucene by referring to chthonic deities, underworld and rebirth, the beliefs of indigenous peoples, and proliferating and intertwining tentacles [54]. Mark Lynas describes the scale of influence of a collectively treated man as “divine” [55], and after Tomasz Majewski one can look for a way out of the marasmus of the Anthropocene in “secular holiness” [56]. By following these clues, proliferating and intertwining alternative names for the Anthropocene-phenomenon can be interpreted in this spirit. Then Capitalocene, Chthulucene, Urbanocene etc., are different names denoting various aspects or avatars of a given supernatural driving force. In speaking of a supernatural driving force, I do not mean a thing out of some spiritual order, but from a social one—spiritual and ghostly only insofar as it is the subject of Geisteswissenschaften. In this context, listing further propositions of names for the Anthropocene-phenomenon here, and indicating that they do not fully capture it, can be compared to and named as a (secular) negative theology.
I will show it here by means of an example, as it is a less established and described method and approach than other ones I refer to here (trade zones, engaged pluralism, ontological imagination). The question is: what epoch are we living in? Let us focus on the subquestion about responsible subjects—who is responsible? Then, is it the Anthropocene, the age of anthropos? No, because it is difficult to recognize all Homo sapiens as equally responsible. Maybe just one half, so an Androcene? No, it needs to be historically and geographically more contingent. Is it the Eurocene, because it was European culture and policies that led to colonization, the industrial revolution and the current situation? It is hard to hold Central and Eastern Europe responsible for that. Maybe the Sinocene, as the Chinese civilization is one of the longest lasting civilizations on Earth? However, they did not start a global industrial revolution or emit so much greenhouse gas (although they are catching up, even if producing for the West). Is it the Occidentalocene or the Anglocene, because most of the emissions were produced by the UK and USA and the West (or for them)? No, because it is hard to blame the poor from those countries for this condition. So maybe the Oligarchocene or the Corporatocene? Not really, it started and was caused by changes in mostly democratic countries, and not only corporations, but states were also responsible—and there were many oligarchies in history that did not end up causing changes on a geological scale. Maybe then we should use single figures as symbols, like the Trumpocene (to denote disregard of science and denialism), the Jolyoncene (as a statement about political elites) or the Alanthropocene (to acknowledge the participation of all “middle-class northerners”)? Those are too specific. So maybe we should try to name it through a negation—is it the Polemocene, the epoch of the resistance against the environment degradation? But that only tells us about organized resistance in Europe or India, inside the centers, but what about the peripheries? Maybe then the Anthropo-not-seen, the epoch of forcibly adjusting and turning some cultures into the dominant ones (based on human–nonhuman division) and ignoring those other cultures, their possibilities and peoples? Etc. As one can see, this method does not allow us to name the epoch. However, it gives us some knowledge about it (of course when done more precisely than here, this is just an example).
The second method, the positive one, is “engaged pluralism”, created by the philosopher-pragmatist Richard Bernstein and adapted by the economic geographers Trevor J. Barnes and Eric Sheppard [48]. This pluralism enables not only a dialogue between some approaches but also some progress. It differs from other pluralisms in that it “above all means stubbornly pursuing potential common ground” [57] (p. 297). It is a “navigation between the Scylla of multiple solitudes and the Charybdis of monism” allowing for “practices of hope” [48] (p. 194). As a result, the meeting of conflicting approaches should not end as these often end: with the division of the parties and return to playing their “chmess” [58]. In response to criticism of his and Christian Schmid’s Planetary Urbanization proposition, Brenner tries to apply it himself and encourages this way of discussion [59]. He also notes that it is an apt method for application in urban studies, where—as other authors note—“the main challenge is to not become paralyzed by notions of theoretical or empirical ‘incommensurability’” [57] (p. 297).
3. Results
3.1. The Anthropo-Scene of the Neologismcene
The key feature of a trading zone is the development of a common contingent language. For Galison, referring to anthropology, those are kinds of pidgin languages (with proper conditions met—creole). “Anthropocene” and subsequent “-cenes” (“Capitalocene”, “Chthulucene”, “Urbanocene”…), “planetary boundaries”, etc. seem to be the notions and words of just such a scientific pidgin. One that is emerging at the junction of different disciplines dealing more or less with the Anthropocene.
When describing such a scientific pidgin, Galison firstly notes that it is a local language—specific to the applications it serves and the languages it combines. It only embraces what it needs and cuts off the wider context. Similarly, none of the participants in the Anthropocene debate knows all the knowledge necessary to fully understand this phenomenon. Its purpose is to name a new era, understand how we got here and counteract its dangers or, as Bińczyk calls it, the risk of losing the future. As dangers are multidimensional, so combating them must be interdisciplinary and coordinated.
Secondly, such a pidgin is time-dependent and embedded in a given moment. It is born from a need, develops and dies. For some time, research and debate about the Anthropcene-phenomenon has been growing, as well as discussion about the concept and alternatives.
Thirdly, it is a contextual language—one cannot try to understand it without taking into account the wider social and historical circumstances. In this case, Galison speaks of war (WWII, Korea, Vietnam), as it “throws people of different languages together” [49] (p. 50). The Anthropocene and the climate catastrophe are also being considered a war situation with a need for mobilization that reflects this—either by philosophical inquiry (as in the case of Serres) or due to the scale and seriousness of the phenomenon. At the same time, some alternative names for the Anthropocene-phenomenon (the Thanatocene, the Necrocene…) point to its wartime specificity and sources.
Galison states that war is not the only socio-historical factor that shapes language. The other factor is power relations, where the stronger one usually provides the vocabulary and the weaker one the syntax. Here one can see why the debate around the Anthropocene-concept between the natural sciences or ESS, on the one hand, and the social sciences and humanities, on the other, is focused on one word, the name—and why debate within the natural sciences or ESS is not. To a large extent in the social sciences and humanities, working on the Anthropocene-concept involves either a different arranging of the “words”, or arguments, of the ESS and the natural sciences, or trying to get our “vocabulary” included: in order to name some meanings and aspects that were not included and are important—to make the phenomenon more comprehensible.
Let us then take a look at the vocabulary of the Anthropocene trading hub. The propositions listed in Appendix A, Table A1, can be divided into three groups:
The Meta-propositions are focused on the process of naming the new epoch and how this concept is being worked on and mobilized. Steve Mentz notes that although the name “Anthropocene” will stay with us, environmental humanists are doing everything in their power to make it plural. As he states, in the history of environmental humanities there may not have been a moment more abundant in the proliferation of neologisms—hence his (first) proposal, the Neologismcene. Jamie Lorimer also commends this multiplication by stating, “let a hundred -cenes bloom!”, and describes it as the Anthropo-scene. Swyngedouw and Ernstson note some problems with the Anthropocene and the Anthropo-scene (depoliticization among both the natural sciences and new ontologies in humanities and social sciences) and try to counteract them, also naming it the Anthropo-obScene. Kate Raworth draws attention to the question of who has the opportunity to name the epoch. To reflect the answer, she proposes two terms: Northropocene and Manthropocene, as the AWG consists mainly of men from the “global north” (Europe and the USA). Raj Patel, in turn, warns against the Misanthropocene. There are other propositions, but I will not focus on this category here.
The Postulative Propositions focus on the current moment as a beginning of a new era whose shape is not yet determined. Therefore, they suggest what this new era should be like. They do not diagnose how we got here nor what will happen based on current trajectories—but are rather concerned with what should happen and how to get there. There are two main types here. The first ones, mainly originating from the natural and technical sciences, sustain or even further anthropocentrism. They advocate an escape forward and a leap into the future through technology and further change of the environment, etc. (e.g., Sustainocene, Good Anthropocene). The second ones, mainly originating from the social sciences, humanities and the art world, call for reorientation and rethinking of place and role of the anthropos in the world, the creation of new relations on a new basis, etc. (e.g., Chthulucene, Cosmopolocene, Symbiocene). I will not focus on this category here.
The Diagnostic Propositions category is most numerous one. Here are all the propositions that name and describe the current situation, how it came to be and what lies ahead according to prospects and trajectories. There are many ways one can order this set. For clarity, I categorize them using the five W’s and How heuristic—simple and basic, but a useful method in the field of collecting and organizing information. Those five W’s are the following questions: Who? What? Where? When? Why? How? Of course propositions do not distribute evenly. There are not many that answer the “when” question (Paleoanthropocene, Early Anthropocene)—or, more accurately, they all answer this question but focus on aspects other than time. As an example I listed most of those answering the “who” question in the Materials and Methodssection.
Most diagnostic propositions answer the questions “what” and “how”, simultaneously. Thematically, they can be divided into three additional categories (at least two of which have already been discussed in one way or another in the context of the Anthropocene (e.g., [14])):
The first ones are concentrated on the hyperagency of the anthropos and his dealings with anything deemed external (to society, to order, etc.). One can distinguish here a group of propositions focused on the loss of biodiversity and war on nature—let me use it as an example. Here is the Homogenocene (referring to the effects of Columbian Exchange), the Thatanocene (the story of achieving mastery in killing and later applying it towards the environment), the Pyrocene (concentrating on the importance and shaping role of fire control in the development of humanity) and the effect—the Eremocene (becoming a lone species on a once lush planet) and the Necrocene (linking death, war and killing with the Capitalocene).
The second ones focus on the interior management, helplessness, futility, lack of power and agency and their production. Those propositions are about policing the order inside the local or global anthropos communities. Here the Econocene can be found (pointing out how the economy became the main episteme of the postwar period as well as the most important thing) and the Growthocene (focusing on growth as becoming the only possibility, compulsion even), the Phagocene (where consumerism serves as a means of pacification, but also as a motivator increasing the agency), the Agnotocene (concentrating on the deliberate production of the ignorance), the Trumpocene (pointing out the newest developments and figures of the Agnotocene) and the already-mentioned Anthropo-not-seen. In all of the phenomena described by such propositions, any “outside” (to society, to the accepted order of things, etc.) is being forgotten, hidden, covered or overlooked—as long as it serves and fulfills its role.
The third ones are about the infrastructures of hyperagency and helplessness—for movement, transportation and translation between scales. Here the Anthrobscene is found, which tells us about the functioning of the media and reminds us about their materiality and weight: how “clouds” need space and energy; how smartphones need coltan, are made by slave labor and end as e-waste. Those media also need a precise and secure environment to function [60] and are tools of the Agnotocene, as they allow filter bubbles [61], and as they are weapons of “math” destruction [62]. Those were more infrastructures of helplessness, but what about the ones for hyperagency? Those are being described under, e.g., the Thermocene proposition. This shows how the energy technologies progressed—not necessarily being better, but being more culturally and socially appropriate and better fitting into existing power relations. Adreas Malm points to something similar when subscribing to the Capitalocene proposition [63]. There are also propositions regarding the cognitive apparatus and way of seeing the world needed for creation, maintenance and governance. The Anthroposeen refers to a linear perspective, the Euclideocene to geometry, and the Simulocene to simulations and modeling in real time with causative feedback loops. Finally, there is the Technocene, where technology is characterized as magic (in an anthropological sense). It is a kind of social persuasion, mediated by human perception, but represented as independent from it. It results in an ability to move the work and liabilities onto someone and somewhere else in time and space. It also leans toward the Capitalocene.
Many propositions invoke the Capitalocene as an overarching proposition, so is seems to be the one answering the “why” question. This is not the time or the place to show why the Capitalocene proposition, although important and overarching, is still not sufficient on its own. The same applies to relating the Urbanocene to the Capitalocene. Urbanization appears in Moore’s texts and books, but not as a significant actor. For example, as a synonym for proletarianization [64] (p. 250) or as an “earth-moving: urbanization, agricultural expansion, mining, and so forth” [64] (p. 87) process in opposition to the more important and underlying environment-making forces of capitalism. Moore points out that the industrial revolution took place in the countryside, not in the cities [64] (p. 150). Generally, in his argument he puts more emphasis on production spaces. Meanwhile, they do not exist without spaces of circulation, exchange and consumption—cities, in other words. Only in his later texts, inter alia after the works of Brenner and Schmid, does Moore recognize the role of the city as, e.g., a new frontier [65] (p. 22, footnote 12). It suffices to say that capitalism as we know it would not have developed without cites, as e.g., Fernand Braudel shows [66–68].
One should agree with Mentz and Bińczyk that “Anthropocene” is rather the only realistic candidate for the name—no other proposal has received such attention. As Bińczyk notes, one should appreciate the rhetorical power of this etiquette, uniting geologists, climatologists and others, and catalyzing the discussion around the topic. However, the reservations made in the second part of the Introduction—as to the actual state of this unity and as to the content of this label—remain valid. Bińczyk is aware of them, but due to her goals—focusing on the future—she believes that these problems would be difficult to eliminate [69] (p. 115).
Indeed, if we are to have a future, this cannot be the Capitalocene and all the subsidiary -cenes that got us here. It is already running out of margin and it must end. In turn, other proposals fail not in naming and defining the future, but the past—the Chthulucene is still only postulative. Here I see the possibility and need for the Urbanocene proposal. Constituting the city and urbanization as the major vehicles and sources of anthropos (hyper)agency, its restraints, and also the hubs of infrastructures managing is not only justified, but it may also have other benefits. It may allow not only to diagnose where the current climate crisis came from (concrete, localized practices and structures) and why it is so difficult to fight it, but also how to deal with it—on a proper scale: not individual, not global or state, but between and linking them, as cities do. However, before one can start to formulate such a theory, one must recognize the already existing accounts.
3.2. The Space “-cenes” and towards the Urban Frontier—The Astycene
Let us take a closer look at the propositions that consider space. The spatial dimension is not particularly intensively explored within the discussed Anthropo-scene. The first two spatial proposals, the Plantationocene and the Euclideocene, were formulated as a part of the “Anthropologists talk” event with Donny Haraway, Anna Tsing and others [70]. They focus directly on the issue of space and spatial categories, but not satisfactorily enough. They show how space in the Anthropocene and the way it is perceived have been changing, and how these aspects are interrelated. However, they do not place the main causative factors in the dimension of space or the way it is organized.
The Plantationocene proposition refers to agriculture-slavery: of people, but also of animals, plants and microbes. The key issue here is the displacement of genomes, abstracting organisms or entire environments, the productive forces from their environments, and their implementation elsewhere—relocation for extraction. In that, it is similar to the Homogenocene, but when it comes to the broader framework, the authors refer to the Capitalocene. The other one, the Euclidocene, discusses the necessary conditions for the Plantationocene or the Capitalocene. To create ownership it is necessary to impose a grid on the world, to enclose space in frames and categories. The ability to separate and abstract from the world and its networks of relationships is also important. However, both of these propositions are rudimentary. The first one gained some attention lately (e.g., [71,72]). The second one was slightly developed, focusing on the linear perspective, but independently from the original, by someone else and under a different name—the Anthroposeen [73].
Other space-propositions are about the seas and oceans. The first is the Thalassocene, coined by Mentz in his book [74]. It is an attempt to write “the human history through and on the World Ocean, whose currents and storms shape exchanges of cultures, products, creatures and stories” [39]. The second is the AnthropOcean [75], focusing on venturing into the largest habitat on Earth and the issues concerning it. However, again: in both cases it is more a space where something happens or a space that is an environment of some processes, facilitating them or hindering, merely reactive, rather than a space that works, acts and even changes on its own, and has some agency.
Finally, we can focus on the propositions that indicate the way of spatial organization as an essential factor enabling human hyperagency on a geological scale and, as a consequence, the coming and naming of a new epoch. What is more, all such propositions diagnose cities and urbanization processes as key factors.
The Astycenewas proposed in 2010 by Karen C. Seto, Roberto Sanchez-Rodriguez and Michail Fragkias [76]. The authors focus on the scale, pace, geographical coverage, form and function of modern urbanization and changes in land use. They note that although urbanization is a diverse process, the one that nowadays dominates and spreads is the sprawling, “American” model. It is also in urbanization, but in a different style, that they see the best answer to the challenges of global warming. This proposition links together a lot of research and knowledge about urbanization in the context of climate change and the Anthropocene, and through that it provides a whole battery of empirical and statistical arguments in favor of the reorientation from anthropos to a “townsman” as a main cause of the Anthropocene-phenomenon. However, it is just one article and does not offer an explanation or a mechanism of why cities and urban folk are the source of all of that agency. In fact, at a key moment the authors turn to “(a) increasing returns from innovation and productivity; and (b) economies of scale in energy use, carbon emissions, and infrastructure provision” [76] (p. 187), which are being tackled in detail by Santa Fe Institute researchers (here in 3.4.). However, the authors also note the need to take into account other factors (such as institutions, management and planning methods), not only spatial distribution and population growth physics.
3.3. The Metropocene—The Relations between Cities and Their Environments
The Metropocenewas proposed by Mark Whitehead in 2014, in his book about the “where” of the Anthropocene-phenomenon [77]. This proposition is very close to what the theory of the Urbanocene should look like. The author’s goal is to show the need to not only look into the depths and to include not only the geological dimension, “the future past”, as an extrapolation of what is. He would like the present and the “width” to be taken into account—geography, environments, peoples, their psychology and cultures, and also possible changes and futures.
In the chapter dedicated to urban issues, Whitehead speculates that it may be helpful to consider our current geological period as the Metropocene—a period defined by the dynamics and needs of urbanization. He supports this with some statistics and by reaching back to the history of urbanization, to the conclusions of Lewis Mumford from “The City in History” [78]. Firstly, it is the special role of the city and the surplus of food that enable specialization, which in turn leads to the development of technology, which in general enables the emergence of the Anthropocene-phenomenon. Secondly, it is the creation of a new, “artificial” environment by the city that allows a distancing from the “natural” environment and managing it from a distance while using the obtained technological tools.
This is a good starting point, especially when Mumford’s works about the connection between culture and cities are added to this [79]. However, Mumford’s works on technology, from the early ones [80] to the late ones, synthesizing his approach [81,82], are getting broader and broader in scope, reaching a general frame, that amounts to his own philosophy of technology, based on the myth of the machine and the megamachine. Although it is useful as a frame, I am not so sure that it can be useful for the theory of the Urbanocene, because here one should trace how situated technologies work on a smaller scale—or rather, between different scales, traversing them. This is a question about the mundane components, crews and screws of Mumford’s omnipotent and all-encompassing megamachines. On the other hand, what is missing in Mumford’s frame is a certain psychological dimension or a nuanced representation of human entanglement in technology and space.
Like the previous authors, but after Mumford, Whitehead points out that there are many types of urbanization. Among them, he indicates the American type of spreading (sub)urbanization as fundamental for the Anthropocene-phenomenon. This diversity of urbanization also serves as his justification for why, when going on to theorize the city, he does not use the Chicago school, which focused on urbanization as a consequence of the internal properties of a closed urban system. He goes straight to David Harvey and to the processual approach to the city—a bundle of political, social, economic and relationship interests with capitalism. This dualism in approach and offered explanations—either internal factors, the (existing) city in itself and some of its properties, are the cause, or external ones are: urbanization determined and created by its contexts (usually capitalism)—is a recurrent theme among the attempts to link the planetary changes (the Anthropocene-phenomenon) with urbanization.
Finally, moving on to the relationship of urbanization with the environment, Whitehead proposes a possible model for these relations: the ecological Kuznet’s curve. This is a bell-like or inverted U-curve. In this case, it represents the relationship between environmental degradation (vertical y axis) and the economic growth of the city (horizontal x axis). When a city grows (especially in the industrial age), it pollutes its surroundings—until it reaches a point where this trend reverts and the city begins to take care of its environment, and pollution decreases (especially in the post-industrial era). This change may be related to the strengthening of local governments and regulations, to the enrichment of residents and their disagreement with living conditions, or to the technological progress. In this version, the curve is practically no different from the classic Kuznet’s curve. Both the original and the ecological ones were thoroughly discussed and assessed quite negatively, especially in the ecological context, as the Astycene proponents note [76] (p. 169).
However, here this curve is signed as “local/metropolitan scale”. There is another curve in which there is no turning point. Even more: after crossing the tipping point of the former, the latter grows more. It is a pollution curve on a global, “external” scale. And here comes another, possible explanation of the shape of the first curve. At some point, it becomes more profitable to export pollution sources (heavy industry, etc.) outside to other, often cheaper locations, and to invest in and free space and workforce for office and management work. At that time, the city is still responsible for these emissions, because it is for its needs that they are emitted. Only they are emitted somewhere else.
Treating those two curves as a starting point, Whitehead also recognizes two possible directions for the urban in the Anthropocene. The optimistic one, which sees cities as a solution (Peter Hall, smart and new urbanism) and a pessimistic one, especially in the context of the global domination of capitalism. In addition, after Hodson and Marvin [83], he notes that there is one more answer to the challenges of climate change, and it is the possibility of reinforcing and securing the cities. In the context of this and the climate disaster, it is worth recalling the question that Mike Davies asks in his classic text: “who will build the ark?” [84]. However, I am more interested in two other questions here, concentrated around those curves. The first one is: what if (or more like when) the “exterior” ends—either as a result of exhausting its limits, crossing Planetary Boundaries, saturating the environment, or as a result of planetary urbanization, or the internalization of the whole world? Secondly, what constitutes and sustains these curves—or the processes behind them? Those are the key questions of the Urbanocene, but one cannot find answers to them in the Metropocene proposition.
3.4. The (Santa Fe Institute’s) Urbanocene—The Urban Event Horizon
Urbanoceneis a name proposition mentioned by Geoffrey West in his 2017 book on scales [85]. Again, the proposition is not really fleshed out. That is why I will use other works by West and his colleagues—mostly Luis M. A. Bettencourt’s [86,87]—to reconstruct what I call Santa Fe Institute’s Urbanocene and present it here. Brenner and Schmid include this approach as a subtype of the UAT, technoscientific urbanism [88]. However, it partly exceeds the traps of the “thesis”. Still, this is an approach with a very wide reach and considerable ambition. These researchers draw their conclusions on the basis of data obtained from many metropolitan centers of China, Japan, Europe and the USA. Bettencourt declares: “I show how all cities may evolve according to a small set of basic principles that operate locally” [87] (p. 1438). In other studies, they diagnose similar properties for pre-modern cities based on archaeological records [89]. Although this may be too big a generalization, on the other hand the modern urban network is quite strongly connected, internally, and its main nodes are similar. In addition, it can be simply treated as a different level of idealization than the one usually found in the social sciences (and what else to expect from physicists than grandiose generalization). That is why it does not include important internal differences within the city (class, race, gender…). Bettencourt seems to be aware of the latter issue, as he points out: “It should be emphasized that the theory does not predict […] socioeconomic differences inside the city, but the scaling for the properties of the city as a whole” [87] (p. 1441). However, it is possible to supplement and correct this approach, and its problems resulting from excessive simplification, with sociological and anthropological approaches; ones with higher resolution.
The city in this proposal is a container in which scaling effects occur and which provides a favorable environment for frequent and various social interactions to occur in it. There are two components to this effect: economies of scale and increasing returns for scale (referred to by the authors of the Astycene). These scaling effects mean that the values of many different measurable properties of the city (the production of patents, income per person or the total length of electric cables) are subject to a power law function. This function consists of the size of the population with scaling exponents, marked as β. These can be classified into certain classes, e.g., more or less than one.
The modeling done by those authors shows that for quantities reflecting the production of goods and services (GDP, salaries, crime rates, the spread of infectious diseases or even the speed of pedestrians’ walking), i.e., the effects of social activity, this parameter β assumes values that are approximately 1.2 (more than 1, which means increasing the rate of return). For quantities related to material infrastructure, raw materials, etc., this parameter β takes values that are approximately 0.8 (less than 1, which means economies of scale). Simply put, when doubling the population, there is a slight increase in the social effects than would result from a simple doubling, and the consumption of raw materials and infrastructure increases a little less than it should. This translates to the dynamics of growth that somewhat accelerate with size instead of slowing down.
It is particularly interesting that one of the highest values—from 1.15 to 1.34—is reached by β for categories such as employment in Research and Development (R&D), the number of new patents, inventors, employment in the “super-creative” sector, and the number of R&D institutions. The special relationship between the city and technology (if to treat those as its proxies) shows up here again.
Bettencourt concludes his article by stating that cities can resemble various other objects with properties derived from the article:
“The most familiar are stars [..]. Thus, although the form of cities may resemble the vasculature of river networks or biological organisms, their primary function is as open-ended social reactors. This view of cities as multiple interconnected networks that become denser with increasing scale” [87] (p. 1441).
However, this approach has two disadvantages. Cities are considered here in a vacuum, without relations with other cities and with their environment. At the same time, they are “flat” and black boxed. First, this happens on the ontological level, due to the assumptions and perceiving the city as homogenous. Cities are really like stars here, consisting of just a few layers and mainly being aggregates of hydrogen and helium. Of course, it should not be surprising that physicists dealing with social issues come up with such a star-model of the city. Secondly, it happens on the methodological level, by being interested only in the data on the entry and on the exit of the studied entity. This perspective focuses on and describes the interior, but treated as a whole and in a zone of contact with the outside—not deviating even a millimeter in or out. It is as if a black hole was being described, behind the event horizon of which nothing can be seen—or a black hole being treated as a two-dimensional being, and therefore its surface is examined and it testifies to what is happening inside.
Santa Fe Institute’s Urbanocene shows that cities create pressure and where the specificity of cities lies. However, it does not show what the relations with the immediate and wider surroundings are, nor what is happening inside—or how the transition between different scales occurs and how the strengthening or weakening of the processes being relayed happens. Using the author’s metaphors, but slightly changing the course, what is really interesting is to look at the city as a reactor. This one definitely has no homogeneous structure, but is a complex techno-scientific entity with many different subsystems, mental and material, human and non-human. From this perspective, the Santa Fe Institute researchers’ approach focuses on the physics of the fusion itself and symbols on the blackboard. What should be taken into account is the casing of such a reactor, its closer and further socio-technical environment, crews, rods and fuel sources, its political frame, complicated pipe systems connecting different layers and the folds of insulation separating subsequent levels.
3.5. The Urbicene and Why not the Planetary Urbanization?
The Urbicene is a proposition put forward by Swyngedouw in one of his brief essays [90]. It is the second closest one to the themes and approach of the needed Urbanocene proposition—one that is being hinted at throughout this text and especially in the Discussion. However, the Urbicene is not really a name for why and how the Anthropocene-phenomenon occurred through cities and urbanization (the diagnostic category), and so it does not serve the purpose I am committed to here.
It is more a reflection on the Anthropocene-concept (the meta category): how much of the “scene” depoliticizes the issue and allows the status quoto be sustained and furthered. The author points out that even those critical new ontologies serve as a fuel for the accelerationist manifestos of hyper-modernization. The Urbicene is also a consideration upon the desirable and undesirable futures and ways of portraying them (the postulative category). The undesirable ones being the immunization frame, “smart”, “sustainable” and “resilient” cities under techno-managerialism, with a focus on geo-social interventions as a means of continuing “business as usual”. It is worth noting here that to fight for our planet we might need geo-social interventions; hyper-modernity with positive biopolitics [91]—maybe just driven by different axionormativity and under societal, political and democratic supervision, rather than market supervision.
Swyngedouw’s analysis employs the apparatus of psychoanalysis and metaphors of immunology. Although such tools serve well at the meta level, it seems that they would not be so useful on the diagnostic level. I do not see the need to, or benefit from, bringing yet another epistemic universe, one of biology and psychoanalysis, into this issue. Similarly to those new ontologies, these ones can also be easily twisted on the diagnostic level. Finally, urbanization in the Urbicene is capitalist, and it seems that all of its problems stem out from this fact. However, it is important to also look into urbanization itself, as cities preceded capitalism. They also allowed urbanization to flourish and had a great environmental impact before capitalism.
As for the proposition itself, Swyngedouw states:
“Planetary urbanization is of course the geographical expression of this anthropocenic process. Therefore, Urbicene might be a more appropriate term to capture the sociomaterial form that the Anthropocene takes” [90] (p. 19).
Planetary Urbanization could be a good basis for this. However, from the perspective sketched in this paper, it is still somewhat lacking. Brenner formulates nine theses [92], which he later reformulates with Schmid to seven [88] and then explains in response to criticism [59]. For these authors, the key today is not the city, but the urbanization process—and therefore not the container, but what it is created by: relations and their dense networks. They repeat urbanism as a way of life, but now it is on a global scale. Urbanization is an uneven, dynamic, changeable, diverse and differentiating process. It was usually seen through the prism of agglomeration—the concentration of people, infrastructure and investment in some place against the background of a larger space. Now the emphasis is placed on different scales and distant areas, hinterlands and relations that put them into such “rural”, “urban” and “dependent” categories.
According to Brenner, first of all, the urban is a theoretical construct, arising through theoretical abstraction. It is not an empirical, pre-existing object, place or space. I agree with the advised methodological caution resulting from this. Brenner emphasizes the importance of being aware of the theoretical background and its impact on the operationalization and research results. However, this declared nominalist approach and the resulting radical cut-off from reality is problematic. Other authors raised similar reservations [93], indicating that this concentration or even limitation to epistemology is not enough. Planetary Urbanization approach does not see the “ontological struggle”—that is, struggles with everyday life and around it, the production of knowledge at this basic level. Those are factors capable of emerging on the surface of events and initiating global changes. This ontological aspect is crucial. However, it is not easily discernible—it requires special imagination, as I already mentioned [46,47].
Too often, according to Brenner, the concepts related to or derived from everyday practices are turned into analytical categories without enough reflection. However, Brenner’s postulate for separating “categories of practice” and “categories of analysis” does not seem feasible and desired. As one can see in the case of the Anthropocene, scientific concepts can and often are ideological, and end up becoming everyday notions. A large part of the struggle in trade zones and responsibility of science and scientists concerns the construction, saturation and introduction of those terms in such a way that they land in society in the most responsible manner. Such a struggle for discourse in science and beyond it is particularly important when—secondly, according to Brenner—the place and subject of science, here urban studies, are constantly being questioned, and when—thirdly—the main currents of science, here urban studies, fail to cope with the demarcation of their places and subjects and with the formulation of terminology and assumptions that would be sufficiently aware. No wonder then that they are strongly, though not necessarily intentionally, intertwined with other terminological circuits. However, this is not necessarily a bad thing, and it can even be useful. Again, as in the case of the Anthropocene and the attempt and need to generate a collective political and operational entity, that “we”—words and the circulation of meaning is a part of that.
In the fifth thesis [92], Brenner advocates giving up focusing on the typology of settlements and looking for what distinguishes the city from the rest (“nominal essences”). He proposes paying attention to the socio-spatial processes (“constitutive essences”), which are producing the various urban and other landscapes of modern capitalism. The sixth point is that, however, it requires a new lexicon, because today it is no longer possible to talk about the urban–rural divide. As a consequence, and this is the seventh thesis, nowadays urban effects appear and continue in very diverse socio-spatial landscapes, not just urban ones.
At this point, Brenner also touches the topics of mentality and culture. The typologization he is so opposed to requires the mental actions of separation and sustaining divisions. Thanks to them, the uniqueness and essence of the given spatial and social form is being constructed, demonstrated and sustained. However, this is not just a scientific process; it is also a socio-cultural one. Not only because science is part of culture, but also because (more or less) the concepts and ideas from science pervade society and culture and go into wider circulation (and back). That is why Brenner also urges us to analyze the widespread urban ideologies through which we perceive something like the city and as a city—a separate and limited urban unit, the fruit and engine of progress—in opposition to the countryside or nature recognized as a self-regulating, closed, virgin and cyclical system.
However, recognizing a thing as such reproduces and creates it, making these divisions and objects as real as possible. Here I see another convergence with the Anthropocene and its alternatives. The processes described here by the Anthroobscence—the Agnotocene on the one hand, and the Euclidoecene and the Anthroposeen propositions on the other—are necessary for the Capitalocene- and the Anthropocene-phenomenon. The same applies to the Planetary Urbanization—it is also accompanied by a cover-up of its realities and basic conditions, on the one hand, and special ways of seeing the world on the other. Those are the roles of urban ideologies. They are not only symbolic, ephemeral, non-material. Brenner does not seem to fully take into account those performative, causative and creative powers. They are real, solid, material and causative, and they created cities as we know them. Again, one needs the ontological imagination here [46,47]. Were it not for the cultural sphere and objects present in it—this image of the city and its opposition to the world—the relations and flows described here in this form would be unsustainable. Similarly, maintaining these ideas and ideologies would not have been possible without the effort and appropriate scene: the props, the entire materializations of the urban iconography—walls, gardens, fountains, panoramas, and, e.g., collective portraits of the militia company from the 17th century Amsterdam.
Critics claim that Planetary Urbanization could very well be called “planetary capitalism” or the “global space-economy” [94]. The same could be said about the Anthropocene-concept, the Urbanocene or other propositions in the context of the Capitalocene. Yes, but only on condition that the urban aspect is not perceived as important and separate from capitalism—and therefore contrary to the authors. For they write:
“We would insist, however, on distinguishing urbanization from the more general processes of capitalist industrialization […]. As understood here, urbanization is indeed linked to these processes, but its specificity lies precisely in materializing the latter within places, territories and landscapes […]. Capitalist industrial development does not engender urban growth and restructuring on an untouched terrestrial surface; rather, it constantly collides with, and reorganizes, inherited sociospatial configurations […]. Urbanization is precisely the medium and expression of this collision/transformation, and every configuration of urban life is powerfully shaped by the diverse social, political and institutional forces that mediate it” [88] (p. 172).
The problem I see here is the way of looking at the medium. Especially in connection with this “expression”, it seems to be perceived here as pure and transparent, merely a carrier. I fully agree with such an approach to urbanization, but more in line with Friedrich Kittler’s “city as a medium” [95]. In this case, after his successor, Marshall McLuhan, it is worth noting that “the medium is the message” [96]. The city is not only an expression, because it is not blank—not just capitalist even when it is capitalist. Being a medium, it can be an amplifier, but also a resistor, dimmer or some other component. It has its own properties and agendas that it weaves into.
This medium problem connects with another issue. Brenner and Schmid are accused of completely giving up on the city—as a category and as an object. This is a partly understandable and substantiated charge, although excessive (the city exists here in the form of the effects of “concentrating urbanization”). It seems that they simply wanted to pay more attention to urbanization outside the traditional limits of the city. However, one can get such an impression when one reads that: “Apparently stabilized urban sites are in fact merely temporary materializations of ongoing sociospatial transformations” [88] (p. 165). The question that arises here is about the time scales of this appearance and temporality. Even at a non-geological scale, such an approach seems to be inadequate. Cities are not only seemingly stabilized and this temporariness, like a stopgap, can also be extremely persistent. The question is what does change. Even with high variability, after all, the structure, as in Theseus’s ship, may remain.
This stability, a city as a secured stabilization environment, is strongly neglected in this approach. Again, using the electronics example—what matters is not just the speeds of radio waves and optical fibers, or the ephemerality of the “cloud”. One should also remember about the cables on the ocean floors and physical locations of servers—e.g., in former silos for ballistic intercontinental missiles [60]. Those technologies need a stable microenvironment and security. A similar need is demonstrated by complex material–symbolic, human–inhuman, mental-bodily–out-of-body cultural infrastructures. I would not give up so easily on the “container” or “casing” perspective.
4. Discussion
So what could the Urbanocene proposition look like? A (very) simple, idealized model with an example can be constructed using and combining the research by Matthew Gandy and Lewis Mumford (about which, and the Urbanocene, I partially and briefly already wrote [97,98]). This is mainly a historical case, focusing on providing well-documented instances for the sketch of a critical model. Its main purpose is to show that the urban environment was already a key driver of past geophysical and ecological transformations and can still be today. But to show how exactly these observations translate into the modern, globalized urban environment (with its accompanying political-economic rhetorics and imperatives) as a key driver of present transformations would require a more detailed example and refined model, which are yet to come.
I will start with Mumford and his work on the history of natural urbanization [99]. The author tries to conceptualize urbanization, the city’s relationship with the environment and its changes. Mumford distinguishes two perspectives (internal and external) and points out that the village and the city—usually pitted one against other—are actually the same. The former only lacks the size and complexity of the latter. What changes as one grows and what ultimately distinguishes the two entities—in the external perspective—are the relations of the settlement with the environment. In turn, the internal perspective focuses on the presence of an organized social core, the creation of a new environment (and subsequent ones), the relocation of the dwellers into it, and a loosening of the bonds connecting them with the previous environment. Now groups and individuals are being shaped according to the new environment and adapt to it.
In Mumford’s view, as the city changes and grows, it becomes more and more independent from its surroundings and detaches from it. Put another way, it expands its surroundings to the point where the closest one is no longer so important and necessary. Until the local growth limits (obviously co-determined by the logic of growth) are exceeded, cities develop mainly through extensification, enlarging the surroundings. After exceeding these limits, development takes place, on the one hand through intensification, while on the other through penetrating into the extra-local space or into other cities, e.g., by subordinating them. Mumford illustrates this with an example of ancient deforestation around Rome or the impoverishment of the lands surrounding it because of connecting toilets through the sewers to the Tiber, which began a cycle of increasing imbalance. Important in this transition is the growing network of influence and its coverage—thanks to, e.g., roads and channel networks. The city, from the container for the area (granary and wall), becomes a sluice controlling streams flowing from near and far and directing them towards itself, forming a catchment. Finally, it turns into a dam, concentrating and capturing flows, and the surroundings turn into a bayou.
Mumford mainly uses the example of the city’s relationship with arable land. He shows how for a long time it is land around cities that is cultivated, the city consumes its fruits and fertilizes the land with the effects of the metabolism taking place in the city. Hence the best areas for intense cultivation were, e.g., in China, just under the walls, near the city—up until recently. Braudel also writes about this [66]. Gandy, in turn, describes the entire institution of the so-called “night soil collectors”—people who had the dangerous task of emptying latrines and cesspits (usually at night) and taking waste products to the surrounding fields.
For a long time, the fertility of the land was a condition of urban development and urbanization. Braudel cites calculations according to which since the eleventh century the urban center with 3000 inhabitants had to have around a dozen villages, i.e., an area of about 85 km2 under its control [66]. However, meeting this condition and settling in fertile places led to a paradox. As the city grew, it covered that fertile land and its food needs increased. According to Mumford, in the United Kingdom in the 1950s cities occupied only 2.2% of the area, but this was more than half of the “first-class” agricultural land and one-tenth of the “good” land. In this situation, if the cities were to be only dependent on their surroundings, they would have had to stop growing or experience overgrowth, and fall.
However, hardy and durable cereal grains, pottery, and other tools, technologies and infrastructures enabled the city to draw food from afar. Fischer-Kowalski and co-authors model the dependence of the urban development of this period on means of transport and food availability [100]. These measures allowed cities to grow further and occupy arable land all around, and gave them excess time and energy to manage. When combined with other factors this resulted in the possibility of the emancipation of the city from its immediate surroundings.
The ultimate effect is the “ghost acres” that Bonneuil and Fressoz write about when discussing the Capitalocene [14] (loc 4206, 4256, 4505). These are areas that were directly or indirectly occupied—which was necessary for the European powers after exhausting their own territory (or its efficiency). Thanks to them, those powers can sustain themselves. What is more, not only the fruits of these acres are being imported, but also the fuel for the native acres. Bonneuil and Fressoz describe the dependence on guano mines in Peru, Bolivia and Chile, and phosphorites in Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria [14] (loc 4250), and Brett Clark and J. B. Foster present a similar analysis [101]. However, as can be seen above, this mechanism of dependence can be reconstructed at the urban level—lower than the state level, although still with global reach. It is also worth remembering the key role that cities played in the foundation of states and empires [66].
In turn, these surpluses and released resources were crucial for the development of technology, for which cities play a central role. This is indicated by Mumfrod or by the discussed Santa Fe Institute studies. At the same time, the fruits of this development further enabled the obtainment of these surpluses, releasements and changes. They allowed, for example, intensification, instead of complementing the extensification. In agriculture this is the case of “natural” and “artificial” fertilizers.
There is a contemporary version of this expansion, invasion of the non-local space, extensification or obtainment of the “ghost acres”. One can consider as such the global land grab progressing after 2007, following the financial, fuel and food crises. These are mass expropriations and buyouts of land on a global scale for the cultivation of food, biofuels, fiber crops etc. (palm oil, soybean, wheat, rice etc.) [102]. The main buyers are China, one of the most urbanizing nations, and highly urbanized countries (Japan, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, South Korea), all trying to secure their position. The purpose of these purchases is to control resources (land, water) and the benefits stemming from them—to subordinate and draw them into the orbit of global, large-scale circulation. This is to “link extractive frontiers to metropolitan areas” [103] (p. 4).
On the other hand, there is intensification. As discussion revolves around the topic of land, soil, agriculture and water, in this case it will be only natural to talk about natural and artificial fertilizers. Especially since this is one of the four significantly crossed Planetary Boundaries [5]. This is a fairly classic thread, referred to as metabolic rift in the literature (especially from a Marxist perspective [104], but also more broadly [105]). Moore [106] and Bonneuil and Fressoz [14] (loc 3297–3373) also explored this topic. Discussing and combining changes in nitrogen and phosphorus circulation with the replacement of excrement as fertilizer with artificial ones, Bonneuil and Fressoz write about urbanization as an important but rather secondary process. In addition, they write about it in the simplifying spirit of UAT: “urbanization, i. e. the concentration of the population and their faeces …” [14] (loc 3297). This view of the city as “only” the concentration of humans and their feces, the effects of their metabolism, does not take into account the networks on which all of it depends, or the emergent processes which may result from the distribution of actors in space and this concentration.
Parallel to Mumford, it is now worth recalling Gandy’s research and model (similar in some aspects). He is studying urban public health policies, born of the need to keep bodies healthy and extinguish outbreaks of disease [107]. Gandy analyzes changes in those models, sets of standards, practices and their infrastructures.
First, he distinguishes a pre-industrial organic model, based on cycles and a compact city (similar to the one in early phases that Mumford described). “Nature” is just behind the walls; it runs an exchange with its surroundings and is aware of it. At one point, however—when and where a number of conditions are met and are favorable—it turns into a differentiating and spreading “bacteriological” model. In its creation and existence, an important role is played by the “technical rationalization of space”—the perception of urban space (and not only) as homogeneous and coherent [108]. However, it is not only this—the bacteriological city was created due to many factors, such as specific mental and material infrastructures:
“Advances in the science of epidemiology and later microbiology which gradually dispelled miasmic conceptions of disease; the emergence of new forms of technical and managerial expertise in urban governance; the innovative use of financial instruments such as municipal bonds to enable the completion of ambitious engineering projects; the establishment of new policy instruments such as the power of eminent domain and other planning mechanisms which enabled the imposition of a strategic urban vision in the face of multifarious private interests; and the political marginalization of agrarian and landed elites so that an industrial bourgeoisie, public health advocates and other voices could exert greater influence on urban affairs” [109] (p. 365).
The biopolitical nature of the modern city is associated with the dissemination of hybrid relationships of the body, nature and urban space, physiology and infrastructure [22]. Gandy focuses on the example of water circulation as the main one, showing the degree of incorporation of man into the city and his regimes. At the same time, this rationalization did not mean a transformation of only the physical structure of the city and areas far beyond it, but also mental and cultural ones. Those are, for example, the public and private space divisions, hygiene and washing regimes and their evolution—e.g., the change of attitude towards public washing places with the appearance of the bathroom and new standards [107]. At that time, human excrement changed its meaning and perception. From the “night soil”, something important for agriculture and ordinary in the organic city, it turned into faeces—something disgusting that needed to be hidden.
Finally, a technological and strictly urban thread needs to be included here; one completely omitted by Moore and almost entirely by Bonneuil and Fressoz [14] (loc 3135, 3745). One that is crucial from the point of view of Mumford, Gandy and the Urbanocene proposition. It is the invention and implementation of a technical infrastructure, namely the sewage system, and with its help the reconstruction of urban naturocultures, overcoming some limits and creating others. Its creation was a direct result of the expansion of cities and the need to overcome related problems. As the city grows, the amount of water falling on it during rainfall increases. At the same time, the possibilities of absorption (built-up area) and drainage are decreasing (although the city grows, the streets do not get significantly wider). In the event of heavy rainfall, the streets of a large city without a sewage system turned into rushing rivers. Sewerage was originally created primarily for the drainage of storm water, not faeces. What is more, this idea was opposed. Using the example of Paris, Gandy shows two positions from which the option of connecting and flushing the effects of human metabolism were opposed [110]. Baron Hausmann could not imagine letting feces into his mains, the miracle of the Second French Empire considered an achievement equal to Rome. On the other hand, ecological and economic concerns were flourishing: the dilution and loss of nitrogen, so important for agriculture and the army, was considered a real threat. Similarly, those fears are mentioned by Bonneuil and Fressoz [14] (loc 3339). On the other hand, due to the expansion of the city, the output of night soil collectors was drastically falling. It became difficult to take all the waste matter from the city to the more and more distant fields before dawn. Meanwhile, as a result of the development of science, technology, commerce and imperial policy, alternative sources of food or fertilizer were sought and provided.
However, as Gandy notes, the appearance of these opposing voices testifies to the continued existence of cyclical, premodern thinking in the (supposedly) modern, rationalist order. It was sewerage and artificial fertilizers that were ultimately to change this—along with a number of other physical manifestations of the reconstruction of urban space into a more “rational” one, which were conducive to management and control. This created a new, metropolitan attitude to “nature”: from a direct partner in the waste–fertilizer–product cycle, a material necessity, the environment, it changes into a landscape, a remote source of pleasure and rest. On the other hand, it still remains a material base, but a hidden one—and is exploited even more. Agriculture disappears from the eyes of downtowners into the provinces or colonies—just as chamber pot contents disappear in the hole and underground.
Due to the rapid expansion of the hinterlands on a global scale and beyond the boundaries of imagination, they seemed potentially infinite. In other words, these are (already described here by Mumford) changes in the settlement’s relationship with the environment through the creation of a new one, and a loosening of the bonds connecting dwellers with their previous environment. It is plumbing, hygiene and the new circulation of waste and fertilizers that trigger an increase in imbalance, which progresses, expands and self-propels a decrease in mortality, an increase in population and in food needs, a decrease in the availability of natural fertilizers, an increase in the acquisition and production of artificial ones, and their deposition in the environment.
The effect of this cultural mental–material change is the possibility of (seemingly) unlimited growth of cities—assuming the maintenance of logistics lines and the opening of new hinterlands. They can be in space, in the form of new lands for cultivation or in time, through technology. Such a role can be played by new technologies, acreages or ways of using energy or matter accumulated over time, as in the case of fossil fuels or fertilizers. These are guano mines on the Pacific Islands, superphosphates created by treating bones with sulfuric acid or phosphate rock mines, with limited and decreasing deposits. For nitrogen, unlike phosphorus, one can determine the end point and also the triumph of this logic, the discovery of the “infinite” source—the Haber–Bosch method: obtaining nitrogen from the air. Nitrogen and phosphorus are no longer circulating between the city and its fields. One is dug up and the other is pulled literally out of thin air. Then, in excessive quantities, they are used in global fields to feed the metropolises. Finally, they flow into oceans that are unable to process this rapid accumulation. This may lead to excessive eutrophication, flowering, and to significant deterioration of ecosystem parameters. This is a new limit created by the new circumstances.
The basic problem now is the limited size of the globe. The local urban–rural cycle has scaled into a global dimension. However, although it seemed otherwise, it did not lose its cyclical character. This is now a problem, when the disposed disorder is not able to decompose and recycle in the environment and it begins to return and break down the order. The outside, from whence the disorder came and to whence it returned, is starting to disappear—it is no longer possible to treat even the geological layers, the atmosphere or oceans as the exterior. The inability to remove disorder causes it to grow inside. Especially since the whole planet has been internalized (urbanized). How to resolve a situation like this, where the exterior is no longer the source of disorder and a place to dispose it?
One of the possibilities—amplified by the Capitalocene—is the creation of spheres of disorder in the interior. Such spheres of disorder can be created in the form of, for example, zones of indistinction, about which Gandy [107] writes (being critically inspired by Giorgio Agamben’s philosophy). In this context and in relation to models of urban public health policies, apart from the two models already mentioned here—organic and bacteriological—Gandy distinguishes the third one, which is dominant today: antibiotic [109]. It is an individualized health regime—instead of building collective resistance, biopolitical “care” for bodies and entire organisms, these are individual (antibiotic) therapies. He discusses this more deeply with the example of water—e.g., a common retreat from “taps” towards bottled water. One can think of another illustration here: instead of the walls around the city and services in it—gated communities, all of those smart, resilient or sustainable enclaves.
Translating this into the example discussed here so far, urban agriculture comes to mind as an illustration. The need for the internal sourcing of food ceases to be just a memory of wars and occupation [111] or the local post-apocalypse, as in the case of Detroit [112]. It becomes a vision of the future: balcony gardening [113], green roofs and roof gardens, urban greenhouses and vertical crops [114]. Perhaps in the future New York will indeed be able to (or have to) feed itself [115] and clean itself [116]. All those technologies, bundled into bigger infrastructures, now labeled as smart, resilient and sustainable by some, could become as transformative and powerful as sewers were. The problem is, firstly, what new limits will they create by overcoming the existing ones? Secondly, who will get to be plugged into this new network, and who will be forcefully separated?
At any rate, it has happened in history that the outside of the city disappeared for some time—e.g., during sieges. It is significant and very interesting that when considering the city’s situation in the Anthropocene, an interdisciplinary team of researchers—having similar issues in mind—took interest in Constantinople [117]. They argue that this city has survived 2000 years and many plagues, crises and sieges (including the longest one lasting eight years) thanks to the organization, management and sustainment of the possibilities of such internalization. For example, a large space on the inside of the walls was dedicated to possible crops. Moreover, according to the authors, in its glory days in the early Middle Ages, Constantinople resembled modern cities in many respects. It was the earlier collapse of global logistics that meant that it had to find itself in a new situation. Therefore, the authors suggest that Constantinople may be a source of inspiration, knowledge and experience for the future.
5. Conclusions
In this way, by combining the macroscale effects of collective, urban anthropos with the microscale of urbanism as a way of life, the livelihood of individual urban dwellers and their groups, it is possible to take into account (although here briefly and superficially) different dimensions: the city as one big perpetrator; its internal complexity, relations and transformations; and infrastructures and mechanisms, by means of which the impact and changes are taking place (and feedback is coming back or is forcefully stopped). Further research and formulation of the Urbanocene proposition should focus on the three dimensions distinguished here in the Results 3.1., and on an expanded expression of how the Urbanocene is manifested across contemporary urbanalities. The first triad showing that new proposition should not only be diagnostic, but also postulative and self-aware (especially in a political context). The second triad shows what dimensions it should cover—the external, the internal and how they are being constituted and linked or severed; what kinds of settlements or cities—infrastructures bundles—produce what kind of divisions into the interior and exterior, into heavenly city arcades supported by the backstage hell of modernity, to put it in Walter Benjamin terms [118]. What is their order, what is their needed and unwanted disorder? All while remembering to balance between the external (e.g., capitalism) and the internal explanations (e.g., panuniversal properties of cities). All of this extends between the macroscale of planetary urbanization and the Anthropocene-phenomenon and the microscale of urban dwellers’ environments, their actions, cognition and praxis—with many scales in between. What links different scales are infrastructures, and that has to be studied—there are already some good starting points [119–122] and more are being pointed out and emerge [123–127].
For one final remark: as one can see, it is not necessary to use capitalism and its processes here to connect at least part of the socio-culturo-economic causes with global, ecological effects and to show how this frame is produced at all. That is why Mumford may carry out a similar analysis for ancient Rome—of course on a slightly different, more local scale. This is also why one can explore the cities of former and current socialist and communist countries using this frame. Although using Moore’s frame is not necessary, it is very useful as a complementary one. The same can be said for the other 91 frames—some more, some less. For, I repeat, none of these propositions alone is sufficient to name or explain the Anthropocene-phenomenon.
Funding: The APC was funded by Adam Mickiewicz University (AMU) in Poznań, Poland—Faculty of Anthropology and Cultural Studies and Institute of Cultural Studies—and from the grant funds. This text is the result of research conducted under the auspices of a grant from the Polish Ministry of Higher Education, entitled: Mediated Environments. New practices in humanities and transdisciplinary research (no: 0014/NPRH4/H2b/83/2016), PI: Agnieszka Jelewska.
Acknowledgments: I would like to thank the Head of the Institute of Cultural Studies AMU, Marianna Michałowska and the Dean of the Anthropology and Cultural Studies Faculty AMU, Jacek Sójka for funding the APC. I would like to also thank Angieszka Jelewska and Michał Krawczak for additional funding for the APC. I also thank Stephen Dersley for English proofreading and Joachim Horzela for support and translations from French. In the end I would also like to thank Reviewers for their assessments, comments, suggestions and work.
Conflicts of Interest: The author declares no conflict of interest.
Appendix A
As this is research material, a dataset for this paper, I do not find it suitable to cite those positions in the same fashion as other references in this text. For the sake of clarity, for positions in this table I give full bibliographical address inside the table and not in the References section. Along with the proposed alternative names I provide a references: to the first formulation of the name (or to a couple of them—when they were formulated independently), to the most elaborated take on the proposition, to some mix of those or to the only one source I could find.
If you are reading this and know about some other “-cenes” not listed here—and any source or reference for it—please be so kind and send it to me: f.chwalczyk@gmail.com
Swyngedouw, E.; Ernstson, H. Interrupting the anthropo-obScene: Immuno-biopolitics and depoliticizing ontologies in the anthropocene. Theory, Culture & Society2018, 35(6), 3–30.
11
Anthropo-scene
Lorimer, J. The Anthropo-scene: A guide for the perplexed. Social studies of science2017, 47(1), 117–142.
12
AnthropOcean
Brugidou, J.; Fabien, C. ‘AnthropOcean’: Oceanic perspectives and cephalopodic imaginaries moving beyond land-centric ecologies. Social Science Information2018, 57(3), 359–385. https://doi.org/10.1177/0539018418795603
Lepenies, P. The Anthroposeen: The Invention of Linear Perspective as a Decisive Moment in the Emergence of a Geological Age of Mankind. European Review 2018, 26(4), 583–599. https://doi.org/10.1017/S106279871800042X
Seto, K. C.; Sánchez-Rodríguez, R.; Fragkias, M. The new geography of contemporary urbanization and the environment. Annual review of environment and resources2010, 35, 167–194. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-environ-100809-125336
Moore, J. W. Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital; Verso Books, 2015. Malm, A. Fossil capital: The rise of steam power and the roots of global warming; Verso Books, 2016.
21
Chimpocene
Langlitz, N. Primatology of Science: On the Birth of Actor-Network Theory from Baboon Field Observations. Theory, Culture & Society2019, 36(1), 83–105.
22
Christocene
Northcott, M. S. A political theology of climate change; Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2013.
23
Chthulucene
Haraway, D. Staying with the trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene; Duke University Press, 2016
24
Congocene
De Groof, M. Congocene: The Anthropocene through Congolese Cinema. In Opposing Colonialism, Antisemitism, and Turbo-Nationalism. Rethinking the Past for New Conviviality; Gržinić, M.; Pristovšek, J.; Uitz, S., Eds.; Cambridge Scholars Publishing: 2020; pp. 88–111.
25
Corporatocene
Schneiderman, J. S. Naming the Anthropocene. philoSOPHIA2015, 5(2), 179–201.Colebrook, C. What is the Anthropo-political. In Twilight of the Anthropocene Idols; Cohen, T.; Colebrook, C.; Hillis Miller J., Eds.; Open Humanities Press: London, 2016; pp. 81–125.
26
Cosmopolocene
Delanty, G.; Mota, A. Governing the Anthropocene: Agency, governance, knowledge. European Journal of Social Theory2017, 20(1), 9–38.
27
Cyanocene
Sagan, D. Coda: Beautiful Monsters: Terra in the Cyanocene. In Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene, Tsing, A. L.; Bubandt, N.; Gan, E.; Swanson, H. A., Eds.; University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 2017; pp. 169–174.
Stiegler, B.; Escaping the Anthropocene. In The Crisis Conundrum: How To Reconcile Economy And Society, Magatti, M., Ed.; Palgrave Macmillan: Milano, 2017, pp. 149–164. Robbins, J. H. The entropocene. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the ISSS-2017 Vienna, Austria (Vol. 2017, No. 1).
32
Eremocene
Wilson, E. O. The meaning of human existence; Liveright: New York, London, 2015.
33
Euclideocene
Haraway, D.; Ishikawa, N.; Gilbert, S. F.; Olwig, K.; Tsing, A. L.; Bubandt, N. Anthropologists are talking–about the Anthropocene. Ethnos2016, 81(3), 535–564. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2015.1105838
34
Eurocene
Sloterdijk, P. The Anthropocene: A Process-State at the Edge of Geohistory? In Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters among aesthetics, politics, environments and epistemologies; Davis, H.; Turpin, E., Eds.; Open Humanities Press, 2015; pp. 327–340.
35
Foggy Anthropocene
Chaberski, M. Resensing the Anthropocene. Ambividual Experiences in Contemporary Performative Arts. In Emerging Affinities—Possible Futures of Performative Arts; Borowski, M.; Chaberski, M.; Sugiera, M., Eds.; transript: Verlag, Bielefeld, 2019; pp. 149–172.
36
good and bad Anthropocene
Kunnas, J. Storytelling: From the early Anthropocene to the good or the bad Anthropocene. The Anthropocene Review2017, 4(2), 136–150.
37
Good Anthropocene
Asafu-Adjaye, J.; Blomquist, L.; Brand, S.; Brook, B. W.; DeFries, R.; Ellis, E.; … & Nordhaus, T. An ecomodernist manifesto. http://www.ecomodernism.org/ 2015. Bennett, E. M.; Solan, M.; Biggs, R.; McPhearson, T.; Norström, A. V.; Olsson, P.; … & Carpenter, S. R. (2016). Bright spots: seeds of a good Anthropocene. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment2016, 14(8), 441–448.
38
Goracene
Herald. Naqvi, N. (2017) Global Apartheid: On the historical superiority of the West. Available online: https://herald.dawn.com/news/1153700 (accessed on 10.04.2020).
Mann, Ch. C. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created; Alfred A. Knopf: New York, 2011. Samways, M. Translocating fauna to foreign lands: here comes the Homogenocene. Journal of Insect Conservation1999, 3(2), 65–66.
Le Partage. Sallantin, T. (2018) Ni anthropocène, ni capitalocène: le problème, c’est le mégalocène. Available online: https://www.partage-le.com/2018/04/30/9279/ (accessed on 10.04.2020)
49
Metropocene
Whitehead, M. Environmental transformations: A geography of the Anthropocene; Routledge, 2014.
50
Misanthropocene
Earth Island Journal. Patel, R. (2013) Misanthropocene? Available online: http://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/eij/article/misanthropocene/ (accessed on 10.04.2020). Clover, J.; Spahr, J. #MISANTHROPOCENE: 24 Theses. In Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters among aesthetics, politics, environments and epistemologies; Davis, H.; Turpin, E., Eds.; Open Humanities Press, 2015; pp. 327–340.
Pauly, D. 5 Easy Pieces: The Impact of Fisheries on Marine Ecosystems; Island Press: Washington, Covelo, London, 2010.
53
Narcisscene
Sagoff, M. Welcome to the Narcisscene. The Breakthrough Journal2018, 9.
54
Naufragocene
Mentz, S. Shipwreck modernity: Ecologies of globalization, 1550–1719; University of Minnesota Press, 2015.
55
Necrocene
McBrien, J. Accumulating Extinction: Planetary Catastrophism in the Necrocene; w: Jason W. Moore (red.), In Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism; Moore, J. W.; PM Press: San Francisco, CA, 2016; pp. 116–137.
56
Neganthropocene
Stiegler, B.; Escaping the Anthropocene. In The Crisis Conundrum: How To Reconcile Economy And Society, Magatti, M., Ed.; Palgrave Macmillan: Milano, 2017, pp. 149–164. Stiegler, B. The neganthropocene. Open Humanities Press: 2018.
Zwart, H. From the nadir of negativity towards the cusp of reconciliation: A dialectical (Hegelian-Teilhardian) assessment of the anthropocenic challenge. Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology2017, 21(2/3), 175–198.
Biello, D. The Unnatural World: The Race to Remake Civilization in Earth’s Newest Age, Scribner: New York City, 2016.
62
Paleoanthropocene
Foley, S. F.; Gronenborn, D.; Andreae, M. O.; Kadereit, J. W.; Esper, J.; Scholz, D.; … & Vött, A.; 2013, The Palaeoanthropocene—The beginnings of anthropogenic environmental change. Anthropocene2013, 3, 83-88.
63
Papiocene
Langlitz, N. Primatology of Science: On the Birth of Actor-Network Theory from Baboon Field Observations. Theory, Culture & Society2019, 36(1), 83–105.
64
Phagocene
Bonneuil, C.; Fressoz, J. B. The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth. History and Us; Verso: London, 2016;
65
Phronocene
Bonneuil, C.; Fressoz, J. B. The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth. History and Us; Verso: London, 2016;
66
Plantationocene
Haraway, D.; Ishikawa, N.; Gilbert, S. F.; Olwig, K.; Tsing, A. L.; Bubandt, N. Anthropologists are talking–about the Anthropocene. Ethnos2016, 81(3), 535–564. https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2015.1105838
67
Planthroposcene
Myers, N. From the anthropocene to the planthroposcene: designing gardens for plant/people involution. History and Anthropology2017, 28(3), 297–301.
Preston, Ch. J. The Synthetic Age Outdesigning Evolution, Resurrecting Species, and Reengineering Our World; The MIT Press: 2019.
70
Plutocene
Glikson, A. Y. The Plutocene: Blueprints for a Post-Anthropocene Greenhouse Earth; Springer, 2017.
71
Polocene
Barcz, A. Witajcie w Polocenie. Polskie konteksty walki z katastrofą na przykładzie literatury okołopowodziowej po roku 1945. Prace Kulturoznawcze2019, 22(1), 129–142.
72
Polemocene
Bonneuil, C.; Fressoz, J. B. The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth. History and Us; Verso: London, 2016;
Pop, D. Replicant theologies of the Early Robocene or the covenant of procreating replicants, cybernetic fertility and divine androids. Caietele Echinox2018, (34), 132–142.
76
Romanthropocene
Ford, T. H. The Romanthropocene. Literature Compass2018, 15(5), e12464.
Cohen, T. Trolling “Anthropos”–Or, Requiem for a Failed Prosopopeia. In Twilight of the Anthropocene Idols; Cohen, T.; Colebrook, C.; Hillis Miller J., Eds.; Open Humanities Press: London, 2016; pp. 20–80.
79
Sociocene
Connell, R. Foreword: Masculinities in the Sociocene. In Men and Nature: Hegemonic Masculinities and Environmental Change; MacGregor, S.; Seymour, N., Eds.; RCC Perspectives: Transformations in Environment and Society 2017, no. 4., pp. 5–8. doi.org/10.5282/rcc/7977
80
Solar-cene
Saraceno, T.; Engelmann, S.; Szerszynski, B. Becoming Aerosolar: From Solar Sculptures to Cloud Cities. In Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters among aesthetics, politics, environments and epistemologies; Davis, H.; Turpin, E., Eds.; Open Humanities Press, 2015; pp. 57–62.
81
Soterocene
Semal, L. Anthropocene, Catastrophism and Green Political Theory. In The Anthropocene and the global environmental crisis: Rethinking modernity in a new epoch; Hamilton, C.; Gemenne, F.; Bonneuil, C., Eds.; Earthscan/Routledge: London, 2015, pp. 87–99.
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Sustainocene
Faunce, T. Towards a global solar fuels project-Artificial photosynthesis and the transition from anthropocene to sustainocene. Procedia Engineering2012, 49, 348–356. YouTube TEDx Talks. Nocera, D. (2013) The Sustainocene: era of personalized energy. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u92O8LSkezY (accessed on 10.04.2020). Manahan, S. Sustainocene: Managing the Anthrosphere for Sustainability in the Anthropocene Epoch; ChemChar: 2014.
83
Symbiocene
Albrecht, G. Exiting The Anthropocene and Entering The Symbiocene. Minding Nature2016, 2 (9), pp. 12–15.
84
Technocene
Hornborg, A. The political ecology of the Technocene: Uncovering ecologically unequal exchange in the world-system. In The Anthropocene and the global environmental crisis: Rethinking modernity in a new epoch; Hamilton, C.; Gemenne, F.; Bonneuil, C., Eds.; Earthscan/Routledge: London, 2015, pp. 57–69. Hornborg, A. Global Magic. Technologies of Appropriation from Ancient Rome to Wall Street; Palgrave Macmillan: New York, 2016. Cera, A. The technocene or technology as (Neo)environment. Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology2017, 21(2/3), 243–281.
85
Thalassocene
Mentz, S. Shipwreck modernity: Ecologies of globalization, 1550–1719; University of Minnesota Press, 2015.
86
Thanatocene
Bonneuil, C.; Fressoz, J. B. The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth. History and Us; Verso: London, 2016;
87
Thermocene
Bonneuil, C.; Fressoz, J. B. The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth. History and Us; Verso: London, 2016;
West, G. B. Scale: the universal laws of growth, innovation, sustainability, and the pace of life in organisms, cities, economies, and companies; Penguin, 2017. Chwałczyk, F. Wnętrze—zewnętrze. Relacja miasta i środowiska w warunkach globalnej urbanizacji. MA. Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland, 27.06.2017.
90
Urbicene
Swyngedouw, E. More-Than-Human Constellations as Immuno-Biopolitical Fantasy in the Urbicene. In New Geographies 09: ‘Posthuman’; Gomez-Luque, M.; Jafari, G.; Eds.; Harvard Graduate School of Design, Actar Publishers, 2017, pp. 18–23.
91
White supremacy-scene
Mirzoeff, N. It’s Not The Anthropocene, It’s The White Supremacy Scene; or, The Geological Color Line. In After Extinction; Grusin, R., Ed.; University of Minnesota Press: Minneapolis, 2016; pp. 123–149.
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Napoletano, B.M.; Foster, J.B.; Clark, B.; Urquijo, P.S.; McCall, M.K.; Paneque-Gálvez, J. Making Space in Critical Environmental Geography for the Metabolic Rift. Ann. Am. Assoc. Geog.2019, 109, 1811–1828, doi:10.1080/24694452.2019.1598841.
Moore, J.W. Metabolic rift or metabolic shift? dialectics, nature, and the world-historical method. Theory Soc.2017, 46, 285–318, doi:10.1007/s11186-017-9290-6.
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Gandy, M. Landscapes of disaster: Water, modernity, and urban fragmentation in Mumbai. Environ. Plan. A2008, 40, 108–130, doi:10.1068/a3994.
Gandy, M. Rethinking urban metabolism: Water, space and the modern city. City 2004, 8, 363–379, doi:10.1080/1360481042000313509.
Gandy, M. The Paris sewers and the rationalization of urban space. Trans. Inst. Br. Geogr.1999, 24, 23–44, doi:10.1080/1360481042000313509.
Maas, W.; Pasquinelli, M. The City Devouring Itself: Urbanibalism in Times of World Wars, Insurgent Communes and Biopolitical Sieges. Open2009, 18, 132–147.
Mogk, J.E.; Wiatkowski, S.; Weindorf, M.J. Promoting urban agriculture as an alternative land use for vacant properties in the city of Detroit: Benefits, problems and proposals for a regulatory framework for successful land use integration. Wayne Law Rev. 2010, 56, 1521.
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Because a lightning strike does not come down from the clouds in a continuous motion, but is instead emergent, and intra-active – formed in communication with the earth, Vicki Kirby describes it as a kind of “stuttering chatter between ground and sky” (10). As if gold scribbles through the crow black night – sharp and erratic, stop and start – like the tongue of one wracked with anxiety, to stall at the cliff-face of words, in the space between sound and silence.
And if the world is, as Kirby argues, a cacophonous conversation, perhaps the black ants that swirl around my feet like dots of ink nipping at my toes can be heard to sing “rain, rain, rain.” Because I learned when I was a little kid that ants and water rhyme, because lines of ants across the pinewood of our kitchen bench were, almost always, followed by a chorus of rain and thunder. And much later in my life, Dharawal Elder, Aunty Frances Bodkin advised me that ants respond to weather conditions months in advance: “Their nests go down to the groundwater’ she said ‘and groundwater is connected to air pressure, it rises and falls as the air pressure changes” (Bodkin qtd. in K. Wright 162).
So it is that the moving architecture of an ant mount in response to weather – a multiplicity made of the microscopic bodies of the living and the dead coalescing with mineral rock and mobilised by an insect colony – can tell you which direction the rain is coming from. The world communicates itself as it creates itself (Murphie, 29) and this language of life is what environmental philosopher Deborah Bird Rose refers to as “creature languages” (103).
The sight and smell of flowers, the pain of the march fly bite and the sensation of blood running down the leg, the sight of swifts in the sky or flower petals drifting in the river, fireflies winking and the interminable racket of cicadas: these are multifaceted creature languages, and smart creatures take notice. Humans enhance their intelligence not by stepping out of the system and trying to control it, but by enmeshing themselves ever more knowledgeably into the creature-languages of Country (Rose 104).
It is said that we have entered the ‘Age of Man’, where the collective agency of the human species has become geological – what Michel Serres has called “the dense tectonic plates of humanity” (16). With such emphasis on the newfound mineralogical coordinates of the human “event” it can sometimes go unremarked upon that the burning of fossil fuels is a mobilisation of creaturely powers – that the uncanny return of the dead bodies of our Carboniferous multispecies kin to feed our fossil economy is part of a collective material agency, as the human, ant-like, burrows into and releases the subterranean forces of the Earth. Hacking into the narcissistic edifice of the Anthropocene, as if chiselling into the granite to which a memory of our species is to be forever consigned, is a reminder that humans are always becoming-with nonhuman kin.
As a conceptual frame and an embodied political tactic, ‘weathering’ is a mode of attunement that attends to this relational becoming. In this immanent, affective, viscous approach to the living world, the more-than-human kin that surround us are part of a semiotic ecology – their own affective and responsive bodies reverberating with difference as they communicate shifts in time and place. Nonhuman bodies are both signals and agents because everything in the world “is a kind of immanent process of mediation or… communication,” and an active participant in the world’s becoming (Murphie, 19).
Yolngu Elder LakLak Burrarwanga describes multispecies weathering in a communicative more-than-human matrix through the coming of a storm:
This lightning and thunder is sending out messages to other countries and other homelands telling everyone – Yolngu, animals, plants, everyone – that arra’mirri mayaltha [a particular season] is coming. Are you listening? Are you looking, smelling, feeling, tasting it? Quick Baru [crocodile] there’s a message here for you, don’t miss it. It’s very hot and humid during the day now and we’re starting to sweat during the night. The night sweating is a message, telling us fruit, like larani [apple] is getting ripe (qtd in S. Wright et al., 55).
It is a condition of existence that we cannot attend to all difference in our environments. As Uexküll observed through his concept of Umwelt – our sensory bubbles are always tuning out part of the rich ecologies we inhabit.[1] Attending to more-than-human semiotic ecologies – creature languages – is a way of picking up on important environmental change that we would never be able to perceive with our own, all too human, sensory apparatus.
While the bodies of our more-than-human kin are a crucial part of our epistemology, I think it is important that these bodies are not approached with an extractivist mindset, to be dissected and mined for information. Scholars involved in Indigenous language revitalisation talk about the dangers of extracting Indigenous languages from community and place, and inadvertently (or intentionally) inserting colonial or capitalist concepts (Fraser). Creature languages are minoritarian and counter-colonial. They are part of the ongoing differentiation of life. If, as Hugo Reinert observes, extractive resource capitalism is a sort of “ontological machine—an engine that continuously remakes the world… in ways that facilitate surplus value extraction” (Reinert 96) – creature languages help us to work against this destructive worlding, and ask us to think otherwise. In this sense, creature languages can be understood as part of an intersectional more-than-human counter-colonial struggle. This decolonisation of creaturely linguistics must attend to creature languages not as a lingua nullius – but as a semiotic field that is an integral part of First Nation cultures and knowledge systems, requiring genuine collaborative engagement with Indigenous thinkers.
Callum Clayton-Dixon, an Ambēyaŋ scholar and co-founder of the Anaiwan language revival program, argues that:
For Aboriginal people, language is not merely a tool for communicating and relating with other humans. Language is also core to maintaining healthy relationships with country. The devastation inflicted upon Aboriginal languages by colonial violence, parallel to and interconnected with the colonisation of Aboriginal lands, lives and liberties, has caused extreme disruption to the fundamental relationships between people and country. It is therefore necessary, in principle and in practice, to ensure language revitalisation efforts aim to repatriate language to country. Like Indigenous peoples have been displaced from country, forced onto reserves and missions, Aboriginal languages have likewise been displaced from country, forced onto the pages of anthropologists’ and linguists’ notebooks, gathering dust in university and library archives.
Language revitalisation has a crucial role to play in contemporary assertions of Indigeneity, in what Cherokee academic Jeff Corntassel describes as the reclamation and regeneration of our ‘relational place-based existence’(88).
The Anaiwan Language Revival Program, an Aboriginal language revitalisation initiative in the so-called New England Tableland region of New South Wales, has begun the task of repatriating language to land by undertaking cultural site trips, reclaiming place names, and reconnecting lexical items with the elements of country to which they belong (e.g. plant and animal species). Language revitalisation ultimately offers a means of reclaiming and reviving the ancient reciprocal relationships we as Aboriginal people held within the natural world since the first sunrise.
Akarre Elder Margaret Kemarre Turner stated that “Language is a gift from that Land for the people who join into that Land… We come from the Land, and the language comes from the Land… language is born out of the living flesh of that Land” (Turner, 194). In other words, human language is not a property that separates humans from the nonhuman world, but an extension of the eloquence of life – and a gift.
Clayton-Dixon, Callum. Personal Communication, Armidale, 9 December, 2017.
Corntassel, Jeff. ‘Re-envisioning Resurgence: Indigenous Pathways to Decolonization and Sustainable Self-Determination,’ Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 86 – 101
Simon Fraser University, Decolonizing Language Revitalization. Retrieved from summit.sfu.ca/item/14186 (2014).
Kirby, Vicki. Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011): 10
Murphie, Andrew. ‘The World as Medium: Whitehead’s Media Philosophy, Immediations, eds. Erin Manning, Anne Munster and Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen (Open Humanities Press, Forthcoming)
Reinert, Hugo. ‘About a Stone: Some Notes on Geologic Conviviality’ Environmental Humanities 8, no. 1 (2016): 95 – 117
Rose, Deborah Bird. ‘Val Plumwood’s Philosophical Animism: Attentive Interactions in the Sentient World,’ Environmental Humanities 3 (2013).
Serres, Michel. The Natural Contract., trans: Elizabeth MacArthur and William Paulson (University of Michigan Press): 16
Turner, Margaret Kemarre. Iwenhe Tyerrtye: What it Means to be an Aboriginal Person. As told byBarry McDonald Perrurle. Translated by Veronica Perrurle Dobson (Alice Springs: IAD Press, 2010)
von Uexküll, Jacob (1957) “A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men: A Picture Book of Invisible Worlds,” Instinctive Behavior: The Development of a Modern Concept, ed. and trans. Claire H. Schiller, New York: International Universities Press, pp. 5–80.
Wright, Sarah., Kate Lloyd, Sandie Suchet-Pearson, Laklak Burrarwanga and Matalena Tofa, ‘Telling Stories In, Through and With Country: Engaging with Indigenous and More-than-Human Methodologies at Bawaka NE Australia’ Journal of Cultural Geography 29, no. 1 (2012).
[1] Nineteenth-century biologist Jakob von Uexküll used the term Umwelt to describe the way organism and environment form a whole system. Each organism has its own Umwelt, which is its meaningful environment. (5–80)
Dipesh Chakrabarty proposes that anthropogenic climate change presents scholars with a novel and daunting set of imperatives. It requires, among other adjustments, that we think and work across incommensurable timescales and disciplinary regimes. We must learn to “mix together immiscible chronologies,” Chakrabarty urges, as well as “rise above [our] disciplinary prejudices.”[1] Our situation is not utterly without precedent, for the idea that humans might act as geological agents of some sort “is not a new thought as such.”[2] Moreover, explaining such watershed events as the agricultural revolution of ten thousand years ago similarly required a convergence of diverse timescales and disciplines of “geology, archaeology, and history.”[3] Still, the idea of humans as a geophysical force akin to a dinosaur-decimating asteroid is something new under the sun. And as disciplinary mergers go, it is one thing to put historians in touch with geology but quite another, perhaps, to expect a scholar of postcolonial or subaltern studies to engage in meaningful and mutually respectful dialogue with an evolutionary biologist–particularly (let us say) a sociobiologist in the thrall of Enlightenment positivism and the quest for universal “laws” of human nature.[4]
In what follows, I focus on Chakrabarty’s invitation to blend immiscible timeframes and disciplines, primarily with reference to movements afoot in my own discipline of religious studies and adjacent fields. My aim is not so much to register disagreement with Chakrabarty’s portrait of the Anthropocene and what it signifies, as to present some sobering examples of how this invitation is being received and enacted and why no single discipline can define for us what it means to be human in the Age of the Human.
Thinking Like a Species
Anthropogenic climate change, and the attendant onset of humans’ geological agency, entails a new understanding of humans as a collective entity, a species.[5] Species-level thinking–a concept Chakrabarty attributes to E.O. Wilson, among others–works hand-in-glove with a turn to deep history. As Chakrabarty notes, Wilson believes that deep history perspectives, which move across large spans of time, and species thinking are both necessary if humans are to survive into the future. I want to pick up this strand of Chakrabarty’s engagement with Wilson and consider its implications for developing a genuinely interdisciplinary dialogue around the Anthropocene and what it means to conceive of ourselves as a species.
Thinking big is currently in vogue, but deep-historical and species-level thinking–even an incipient Anthropocene concept–have been knocking around my discipline for decades. For example, in 1992 in a book immodestly titled The Universe Story, Thomas Berry, a cultural historian and religion scholar who referred to himself as a “geologian,” and his protégé, a mathematical cosmologist named Brian Swimme, predicted that “in the future the Earth will function differently than it has functioned in the past.” In this emerging era, the “entire complex of life systems of the planet will be influenced by the human in a comprehensive manner.”[6] They envision a fourth geological era to follow the Paleozoic, the Mesozoic, and the Cenozoic, and optimistically christen it the “Ecozoic,” [7] a period marked by “mutually enhancing human-Earth relations” and by recognition that our species now occupies the geological driver’s seat.[8]
Clive Hamilton and Jaques Grinevald argue convincingly that there are no genuine precursors to the Anthropocene, which they define as a sudden (not incremental) and dangerous shift, a radical rupture in Earth history as well as in the very idea of evolutionary “advance to a higher stage.”[9] However, while I do not have space to make the argument here, I think there are precursors to the good Anthropocene. Indeed, some Anthropocene lookalikes rejected by Hamilton and Grinevald bear the earmarks of the good Anthropocene; the Ecozoic is one candidate precursor. Proponents of the good Anthropocene typically also regard the planetary crisis as a grand adventure, an exciting challenge that can be met by human ingenuity and smart technology, and—controversially—by jettisoning traditional approaches to wilderness conservation while welcoming engineering strategies for the planet and its lifeforms.[10]
Swimme and Berry’s sanguine appraisal of the coming Ecozoic is nurtured by a belief that the universe purposefully gropes its way towards consciousness. Theirs is an anthropic universe: the emergence of a self-reflective species such as our own was implicit in the unfolding of the universe from its inception. A pivotal moment for the cosmos is when humans emerge as the supreme consciousness of the universe, and–even more specifically–when we begin to reflect on ourselves as a species. Humans have often conceived of themselves as cultures, ethnic groups, or international organizations, Swimme and Berry note, but “what we seldom think about is the human as species.”[11] We must “reinvent the human at the species level,” fully and reflectively embracing the reality that we are an interdependent species.[12]
These ideas have percolated up from the musings of French paleontologist and Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), a key mentor to Swimme and Berry and, incidentally, a personal hero to Anthropocene booster Andrew Revkin.[13] Teilhard understood our planet to unfold in a series of developmental layers or envelopes: lithosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere, and finally and most significantly, the noösphere. The noösphere is an additional, thinking layer beyond the biosphere, an evolutionary stage driven by the human phenomenon. At a key moment in the universe, the noösphere begins to transform the biosphere. Acting as a kind of planetary or communal mind, our species begins to direct the course of evolutionary unfolding. While Swimme and Berry remain on guard against the extreme techno-optimism that characterizes Teilhard’s thought, an unmistakable sense of celebration attends the Ecozoic moment when humans take hold of the evolutionary reins. In short, there are many resonances between the noösphere and the Ecozoic, and between both concepts and the good Anthropocene.
A Common Story
The Universe Story is one of a handful of projects that narrate, in quasi-mythic form, the entire cosmic history, from the Big Bang to the dawn of our global environmental crisis. A variety of grandiose names are appended to these narratives–The Epic of Evolution, The Great Story, or Big History.[14] These projects blend human and cosmic history (as well as science and religion) into a comprehensive common story that properly emplaces humans in the cosmos. One recent iteration is a multimedia phenomenon called “Journey of the Universe,” launched by the above-mentioned Swimme together with religion scholar Mary Evelyn Tucker. As with Swimme and Berry’s narrative, a central claim is that humans represent the universe becoming conscious of itself.[15] Interestingly, it is E.O. Wilson who coined the phrase “Epic of Evolution,” and many a cosmic storyteller regards him as an architect of a new cosmology that will unify the human species and bind it more intimately to the Earth.[16] The binding agent is science itself–or, rather, science in mythic form. Some celebrants of the Epic have created musical and ritual accompaniments to the story, seeking to infuse it with an experiential dimension.
What I am suggesting then, in outlining these projects, their genealogy, and their affinities with Anthropocene discourse, is that these efforts embody and respond to key elements of Chakrabarty’s portrait of our Anthropocene moment. They collapse conventional boundaries between human and natural history,[17] foster self-recognition of humans as a species, and implicate human agency across geological timescales. In their utilization of multiple genres–myth, ritual, film, art, and song–they might even be seen to foster something Chakrabarty considers impossible, namely, a “phenomenology of us as a species,” an emotional or experiential identification with the species concept.[18] Moreover, they claim to combine insights from across the disciplinary spectrum, and even to breathe new life into the humanities.[19] So: we do not have to imagine what it would look like if scholars were to take up the challenges Chakrabarty puts before us. From where I’m standing–in religious studies–it seems these projects are well underway. Preliminary results are in. In my view, the results are dispiriting.
A Perilous Journey
While he finds Wilson’s ideas alluring, Chakrabarty is attuned to the perils of inviting a vision of humans as a species, or a “natural condition,” to dominate scholarship across the disciplines. He believes our current situation confronts us with questions of human collectivity, but he resists a homogenizing vision of “global identity,” and sees “obvious value” in retaining “postcolonial suspicion of the universal.”[20] He does not abandon one scale of history for another, but asks that we attend to these registers simultaneously (even if doing so radically challenges historical understanding). The specter of “essentialism” is real to him, as are the dangers of “the political uses of biology.”[21] Still, I am not convinced that Chakrabarty fully appreciates the way in which scaling-up our imagination of the human has engendered–and perhaps is bound to engender–essentialist, reductionist, or homogenizing portraits of the human, not to mention inadequate forms of interdisciplinarity. Wilson’s species concept, in and of itself, carries a lot of troubling baggage.[22]
Citing Daniel Lord Smail’s work on deep history, for example, Chakrabarty suggests that the aforementioned perils are not so grave. Species, after all, are not fixed or homogenous entities, and the quest to identify human nature has proven largely futile and is, therefore, not something to fret about. Furthermore, Chakrabarty ventures that all disciplines engage in reductionism or abstraction: the category of personhood is “no less a reduction of or an abstraction from the embodied and whole human being, than, say, the human skeleton discussed in anatomy class.”[23] Well, perhaps. But we should note that Wilson’s brand of species-thinking, unlike Smail’s (or Darwin’s) does entail that “humans possess a species specific nature and morality.”[24] These bold assertions are uncritically received by Epic of Evolution devotees. They, like Wilson, are not especially sensitive to the limits of biological explanation. They will not entertain conversations about human nature not “firmly grounded in the sciences” and believe that “one world calls for one story.”[25]As they gaze out into the cosmos, or deep into our evolutionary past, the new self-appointed narrators of the Anthropocene do not contemplate a differentiated humanity polarized into rich and poor–as Chakrabarty at least occasionally does–but humanity in a universalizing spirit. Our destiny is to become “universe people … a form of human being that is natural to the universe.”[26]
What is worse, Wilson and his admirers castigate humanities scholars for failing to place these settled accounts of human nature at the center of their research, as if humanists’ reluctance to do so stemmed from a failure of courage rather than an appreciation of the diverse conceptual tools available to us from across the disciplines. Wilson’s attachment to the relative fixity and universality of human nature is inseparable from his investment in a form of faux interdisciplinarity he calls consilience.[27] Consilience, the unity of all knowledge, is predicated upon a clear disciplinary hierarchy. Disciplines oriented to the study of human culture will eventually fall out into science, Wilson predicts, as science progressively colonizes and explains material that was once their purview. Hence, the lasting value of the arts and humanities lies in their capacity to express in poetic, visual, or narrative form–and thereby disseminate and celebrate–the discoveries of science. Variations on this problematic division of labor characterize the narrative projects that are presently encroaching upon my discipline.[28]
As scholars pursue convergences among disparate disciplines and timescales, they will find some collaborators more egalitarian than others. Among the inegalitarian partners, as John M. Meyer rightly notes, are enthusiasts of consilience who seek to reconcile disciplinary differences by uniting all under the banner of biology. [29] Scientists who exhort humanists to embrace their portrait of the human may fail to recognize that the sciences themselves reveal multiple registers and scales, and thus multiple images of the human. Even within biological science alone–say paleobiology, microbiology, and biochemistry–we find visions of the human that are incommensurable with one another, as Julia Adeney Thomas argues.[30] The species-level view of humans as a collective agent and discrete entity might be recognizable to paleobiologists, but a microbiologist would reject this image in favor of one that regards each of us as a conglomerate of multiple species, akin to a coral reef. Where paleobiology may seem to underwrite species solidarity–the ethic at the heart of universalizing narratives like the Epic of Evolution or Universe Story–the microbiologist’s perspective makes it difficult to talk about a human “we” at all. “While 99.9 percent of our human DNA is shared,” Thomas notes, “our microbial cells may have as little as 50 percent of their genetic profile in common.” For those who look to science to inspire or justify a narrative of species oneness “this finding is disturbing.”[31]
Again, no single discipline can define for us what it means to be human in the Age of the Human. Instead of turning away from the messiness and inexactitude of these immiscible scales and their possible meanings—or forcing a reconciliation that does violence to their autonomy and richness–we might look instead “with wonder at the incommensurable yet accurate ways in which ‘the human’ emerges in various disciplines, especially in the Anthropocene.”[32] Ambitious disciplinary mergers such as those being forged in and around my own field of study will be productive and equitable only when scholars take seriously that no single framework can adequately interrogate the Anthropocene. We must say this again and again, and we must mean what we say, and say what we mean.
Reference List
Thomas Berry, The Christian Future and the Fate of the Earth, eds. Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2009).
Dipesh Chakrabarty, ” The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 197–222.
Clive Hamilton and Jacques Grinevald, “Was the Anthropocene Anticipated?” The Anthropocene Review 2, no. 1 (2015): 59–72.
John M. Meyer, “Less is More,” in Minding the Gap: Working Across Disciplines in Environmental Studies, eds. Robert Emmett and Frank Zelco, RCC Perspectives, 2014, no. 2: 15–8.
Andrew C. Revkin, “Exploring Academia’s Role in Charting Paths to a ‘Good’ Anthropocene,” New York Times, June 16, 2014.
Loyal Rue and Ursula Goodenough, “A Consilient Curriculum,” in The Evolutionary Epic: Science’s Story and Humanity’s Response, eds. Cheryl Genet et al., (Santa Margarita, Calif.: Collins Foundation Press, 2009), 175–82.
Lisa Sideris, “Science as Sacred Myth?: Ecospirituality in the Anthropocene Age,” in Linking Ecology and Ethics for a Changing World, eds. Ricardo Rozzi et al. (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer, 2013): 147–62.
Lisa Sideris, Consecrating Science: Wonder, Knowledge, and the Natural World (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2017).
Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry, The Universe Story (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1992).
Brian Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker, Journey of the Universe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011).
Julia Adeney Thomas, “History and Biology in the Anthropocene: Problems of Scale, Problems of Value,” American Historical Review 119, no. 5 (2014): 1587–1607.
Edward O. Wilson, On Human Nature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978).
Edward O. Wilson, In Search of Nature (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1996).
Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998).
[1] Dipesh Chakrabarty, ” The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35, no. 2 (2009): 220, 215.
[4] Here I refer to E.O. Wilson, whose ideas Chakrabarty invokes. Some may object to my invocation of sociobiology, given Wilson’s move embrace group selection theory, but Wilson has never broken with the basic dogma that such complex behaviors as morality, religion, and artistic expression are fundamentally biological in nature.
[15] Tucker and Swimme also invoke the language of the Anthropocene. Humans have “crossed over into an Earth whose very atmosphere and biosphere are being shaped by human decisions. . .With our machines and our numbers we have become a geological force.” Brian Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker, Journey of the Universe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011): 101, 102.
[16] Wilson first alluded to an epic of evolution in his On Human Nature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978). For a fuller examination of these movements and their relationship to science, see Lisa Sideris, “Science as Sacred Myth?: Ecospirituality in the Anthropocene Age,” in Linking Ecology and Ethics for a Changing World, eds. Ricardo Rozzi et al. (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer, 2013): 147–62.
[17] It might be said that they collapse cosmic history into human history, counterintuitive as that sounds, insofar as humans are seen as implicitly present since the Big Bang.
[22] Wilson’s work routinely pursues grand and controversial themes: human nature and sociobiology; free will and determinism; the unity of science. His bold pronouncements on these themes, moreover, tend to be interconnected, as parts of an overarching metaphysics.
[27] Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998).
[28] See Loyal Rue and Ursula Goodenough, “A Consilient Curriculum,” in The Evolutionary Epic: Science’s Story and Humanity’s Response, eds. Cheryl Genet et al., (Santa Margarita, Calif.: Collins Foundation Press, 2009), 175–82.
[29] John M. Meyer, “Less is More,” in Minding the Gap: Working Across Disciplines in Environmental Studies, eds. Robert Emmett and Frank Zelco, RCC Perspectives 2014, no. 2: 15–8.
[30] Julia Adeney Thomas, ” History and Biology in the Anthropocene: Problems of Scale, Problems of Value,” American Historical Review 119, no. 5 (2014): 1587–1607.
‘The Anthropocene’ is a term that is increasingly used to define a new planetary era: one in which humans have become the dominant force shaping Earth’s bio-geophysical composition and processes. Initially emerging in the Earth Sciences as the name for a proposed new geological epoch[1] (Crutzen & Stoermer 2000), the Anthropocene has been widely adopted across academia as a catch-all description of the overwhelming impact of human activity on the planet. Its key markers include climate change and its consequences (e.g. sea level rise), the effects of plastic pollution on marine and terrestrial processes, unprecedented rates of biodiversity loss and extinction, and the changing chemical composition of soils, oceans, and the atmosphere.
Academic interest in the Anthropocene has been paralleled by a growing awareness of its existence in the public sphere. For example, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) dedicated an entire journal issue to the Anthropocene (UNESCO 2018), while many of the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) Sustainable Development Goals (2016-present) are built around key Anthropocenic concerns, such as global emissions, ecosystem damage, and overreliance on fossil fuels. At the same time, productions such as Edward Burtynsky’s film Anthropocene: the human epoch (2018) are drawing public attention to both the term and the challenges that it poses in the contemporary world. The Anthropocene has thus become a ‘charismatic mega-concept’ (Turpin & Davis 2015: 6) that bridges the natural and the social sciences, and academia and the public realm, igniting heated debates across all of them.
This entry provides a short and necessarily partial account of anthropological engagements with the Anthropocene—an immense, burgeoning, and still-embryonic field of study (Gibson & Venkateswar 2015; Swanson, Bubandt, & Tsing 2015). After briefly considering what the Anthropocene is, we shall examine four key anthropological approaches to it: those that a) put ethnography to work in spaces most directly affected by Anthropocenic phenomena; b) critically interrogate the idea of the Anthropocene: its discourses, truth-claims, politics, and ethical injunctions; c) take the Anthropocene as an opportunity for speculation, creativity, and hopeful regeneration; and d) treat the Anthropocene as a political and socio-economic problem and symptom of global inequalities and injustices.
These approaches are characterized by distinct methods, analytical frameworks, conceptual vocabularies, and ethico-political agendas. However, they also share certain key traits. First, they point to how the Anthropocene destabilizes dichotomies between ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ and ‘human’ and ‘non-human’, as well as the academic disciplines built around them. At a time when microplastics have infiltrated marine food chains and ‘natural disasters’ like floods and coastal erosion are precipitated by human-induced climate change, such dichotomies have become increasingly hard to maintain. Many anthropologists have responded to this problem by transcending their own disciplinary boundaries, and engaging with methods and frameworks from other disciplines, such as biology and art.
Secondly, none of these approaches can be said to be agnostic about their subject matter. Rather, they exemplify what has become an increasingly pervasive tendency in this field: the imbrication of the analytical with the political and the ethical. More than analyzing the Anthropocene, anthropologists are increasingly asking what can and should be done in response to the threats and opportunities that it poses. Their agendas and interventions, however, vary significantly—as do the demands that they make on themselves. The upshot of all this, thirdly, is that anthropologists are increasingly pushed to ask what exactly their discipline can bring to the evolving ‘Anthropo-scene’, i.e. the intellectual field that has emerged around the concept (Lorimer 2017), and vice-versa. This entry suggests that classic anthropological methods, such as small-scale participant-observation and the critical juxtaposition of ‘strange’ and ‘familiar’ insights, are well suited to adding empirical depth and nuance to this multidisciplinary field. Yet the same time, it is also becoming clear that engagements with the Anthropocene are reshaping anthropological practices and imaginaries, with profound ethical and political implications.
What is the Anthropocene?
Since the early-2000s, the Anthropocene has received increasing scientific attention as a proposed new geological epoch: one dominated by the impact of human activity on planetary systems. These impacts include anthropogenic climate change, biodiversity loss leading to mass extinction, and the ubiquity of microplastics in terrestrial and marine ecosystems. Proposed bio-geophysical evidence for these and other features of the Anthropocene includes increasing global average temperatures and carbon dioxide concentrations, rising sea levels and ocean acidification (Zalasiewicz et al. 2008; Lewis & Maslin 2015). On the basis of such evidence, in 2016 the Anthropocene Working Group of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (f. 2009) provisionally recommended that the Anthropocene be formally recognized as a distinct unit of geological time (Zalasiewicz et al. 2017). However, debates continue regarding its starting point.
Events as early as the extinction of mammoths through human predation 13,800 years ago (Doughty et al. 2010) and forest clearances and rice cultivation 5,000-8,000 years ago (Ruddiman 2003) have been proposed as boundary points that mark the start of the Anthropocene. While Paul Crutzen and other members of the working group previously endorsed the Industrial Revolution and the development of the steam engine as the Anthropocene’s origin (Crutzen 2002; Zalasiewicz et al. 2008), the working group’s members now largely favour the ‘Great Acceleration’ (Zalasiewicz et al. 2015)—the period of extensive technological, demographic, economic, and resource use expansion from 1945 onward—as the origin point. Members of the working group contend that the Great Acceleration represents a global synchronous phenomenon (a key criterion for selecting a stratigraphic marker), compared to earlier suggestions, which they argue were merely regional or did not occur simultaneously across the world.
Alternatively, Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin (2015) have proposed 1610 as a starting date, due to the profound alterations to ecosystems produced by the Colombian Exchange[2] as well as the dip in CO2 concentrations most likely caused by reforestation in the Americas, due to the enormous loss of Indigenous life. As well as identifying an event they deem stratigraphically significant, Lewis and Maslin therefore foreground colonial violence as a foundation of the Anthropocene. This position is endorsed by feminist scholars Heather Davis and Zoe Todd (2017), who contend that selecting this starting date would create space for Indigenous thought within the Anthropocene debate.
Decisions regarding the formal boundaries of the Anthropocene have political and socio-economic repercussions. Depending on the starting date that is chosen, particular processes will come to be held responsible for our current planetary predicament. This will suggest certain avenues for action, and foreclose others. For instance, selecting the Industrial Revolution as a start-date suggests that capitalism as a socio-economic system is primarily culpable for the Anthropocene, whereas 1610 foregrounds colonialism and the historic and ongoing exploitation of the majority world[3], suggesting that former imperial nations have a particular responsibility to mitigate Anthropocenic problems. These debates reflect how the Anthropocene is not simply a natural scientific phenomenon, but a methodological, conceptual, and ethico-political challenge for scholars across a range of disciplines. The following sections examine how anthropologists have both approached and intervened in these debates.
The Anthropocene as context
While the Anthropocene encompasses many different processes, anthropogenic climate change is often treated as its main ‘yardstick’ due to the scale and ubiquity of its impacts (Rudiak-Gould 2015: 48). Ethnographic research into the effects of, responses to, and understandings of climate change constitute some of the earliest anthropological engagements with the Anthropocene. These approaches draw upon anthropology’s traditional strengths of rich qualitative research in small scale societies, focusing particularly on regions mostly critically threatened by climate change impacts, such as low-lying small island states. Such ethnographic research provides insights into how Anthropocenic phenomena are apprehended, experienced, and conceptualized in specific settings. In this way, they point to the heterogeneous nature of the Anthropocene, and the need to examine its social and cultural dimensions, rather than approaching it as a purely natural scientific concern.
Anthropologists have commonly tried to understand how climate change is experienced in particular local settings (Crate & Nuttall 2009). In these studies, the Anthropocene is treated as a backdrop to social life or a key factor shaping social relations, rather than as a purely geophysical phenomenon. For example, Heather Lazrus (2009) documents how, in Nanumea, Tuvalu, the tips of islands, which are associated with particular family lineages and corresponding levels of community prestige, are shifting due to coastal erosion, potentially causing changes in familial status and social hierarchies. Susan Crate and Mark Nuttall argue that climate change is ‘ultimately about culture’ (2009: 12) as it has emerged from a culture of mass consumerism, requires cultural change to mitigate it, and threatens Indigenous cultural practices by disrupting cosmologically significant human-environment relations. This emphasis on culture chimes with the work of geographer Mike Hulme (2008), who contends that climate change discourse is dominated by natural scientific frameworks, and consequently has been stripped of cultural context (see also Malm & Hornborg 2014). Instead, he argues both that the climate must be understood culturally, and that climate change must be locally situated and rendered culturally and ethically meaningful for those that it impacts. Thus, culture can be understood as both a cause of climate change, integral to understanding it, and a means of influencing responses to it. This latter process has been explored in relation to Christian responses to climate change, with ethnographies analyzing the use of Biblical stories in challenging the hegemony of predictions of sea level rise in Kiribati (Kempf 2017) and advocating for greater preparedness in the face of intensifying cyclones in Vanuatu (Fair, forthcoming).
Many researchers advocate bringing Indigenous knowledge of climate change into dialogue with scientific knowledge, for example by drawing on Athapaskan and Tlingit oral histories of glacial travel in the Gulf of Alaska (Cruikshank 2001), or organizing community knowledge exchanges that bring together ethnographic accounts and scientific data regarding changes to the permafrost in northeastern Siberia (Crate & Fedorov 2013). This approach, however, raises more fundamental questions about the distinction between local and scientific knowledge. There have been calls to recognize how scientific knowledge of climate change is shaped by specific local and cultural conditions, rather than accepting it as a ‘view from nowhere’ (Hulme 2008), as well as recognizing that local knowledge itself is not isolated, static, or sealed off from scientific discourse. In this vein, anthropologists have explored how scientific knowledge is received, interpreted, and incorporated within specific local cultural settings. For example, Jerry Jacka (2009) shows how the impacts of El Niño in the Porgera Valley in Papua New Guinea have been accommodated within Christian narratives of punishment and apocalypse and understood as revenge for the destruction of significant ritual sites through road building. These local understandings can render problematic the anthropogenic dimension of climate change. While they concur regarding the human responsibility for global warming, they do not agree which specific human actions have caused it.
Peter Rudiak-Gould’s (2012) work in the Marshall Islands also highlights how scientific understandings are combined with local understandings and used to bolster existing moral frameworks, a process he describes as ‘promiscuous corroboration’. He identifies a prevalent Marshallese understanding of climate change as symptomatic of wider, pre-existing cultural decline, due to increasing American influences and the loss of traditional knowledges, lifestyles, and practices. Similar understandings have been identified in the Pacific Island nation of Vanuatu (Fair 2018) where climate change impacts, including the intensification of cyclones, have been attributed to deviations from both Christian morality and kastom (traditional knowledge, beliefs, and practices). Climate change as rendered intelligible through these existing ethical frameworks therefore also lead Islanders to hold themselves morally culpable for Anthropocenic impacts, in distinction to their nation’s minimal contributions to carbon dioxide emissions.
Rudiak-Gould’s work reveals some of the tensions that can emerge between research and political advocacy. He argues that while most anthropologists subscribe to a narrative of climate change blame focused upon the responsibilities of industrialized nations, researchers should be open and alert to alternative narratives, even those that challenge their own politico-ethical standpoints. While the Marshallese narrative of Islander responsibility is at odds with conventional framings of small island states as victims of climate injustice, it is also empowering on a local level, as ‘innocence implies impotence’ (Rudiak-Gould 2015: 58).
This raises a broader question: what political and ethical demands does the Anthropocene make of social scientists? Crate and Nuttall (2009) argue that anthropologists have a privileged point of engagement: many are already working with communities who are experiencing the severest impacts of climate change while being some of the least responsible for those impacts. Consequently, some researchers have focused their energies not just on analysis but advocacy, engaging with legislation and policy (Fiske 2009), setting up university sustainability initiatives (Bartlett & Stewart 2009), and participating in climate justice movements (Chatterton et al. 2012). Their efforts exemplify a form of engaged research that seeks to alleviate, or at least highlight, the deleterious effects of the Anthropocene.
Studying ‘the Anthropocene’ as a concept
Much of the work cited above is situated in the Anthropocene, which serves as an encompassing, real-life backdrop to ethnographic inquiry. However, there is also a growing body of scholarship that advocates a critical understanding of the Anthropocene as an idea (Moore 2015a: 28). Drawing partly on critical traditions such as science studies and post-structuralism, these writings examine how Anthropocenic knowledge practices and truth-claims are constructed, circulated, contested, and strategically deployed—as well as how these can bring new realities and relations into being.
This approach is marked by a commitment to rendering the familiar strange by showing how apparently clear-cut Anthropocenic ‘facts’, such as ‘climate change’, ‘carbon emissions’, and ‘biodiversity loss’, are inherently partial and dynamic constructs. Rather than assuming their veracity, anthropologists ask: how are such concepts defined, made visible or knowable, and formalized, and to what effect? In recent years, for example, scholars have examined how the Anthropocene is made ‘imaginable and comprehensible’ (Marzec 2014: 249) through specific technologies, including narratives, photography (Kember 2017), infographics (Houser 2014), and environmental visualizations (Carruth & Marzec 2014). Another fecund area of inquiry is that of climate science, with anthropologists examining the scalar, spatial, temporal, and speculative dimensions of climate modelling (Hastrup & Skrydstrup 2013), the universalization of carbon as a metric through which to quantify (and thus compare) a vast array of human activity (Günel 2016), and the impact of ideals of accountability (Hall & Sanders 2015) and expertise (Vaughn 2017) on climate science research. Their insights into the all-too-human production of scientific knowledge are exemplified by Jessica O’Reilly’s discussion of Antarctic research (2016), which reveals how scientific data about the shifting Antarctic landscape is indelibly shaped by scientists’ intimate, sensory engagements with the ice, national research logistics and nationalism, guesswork, and, often, pure chance.
By treating scientific practices and categories as objects of ethnographic scrutiny, such scholars highlight the vital point that [k]nowledges do not float free from their contexts of production, and cannot arrive any old way. They travel well-worn paths, and are preconditioned by other academic knowledges, knowledge-producing apparatuses, and institutional arrangements (Hall & Sanders 2015: 454).
These approaches thus reveal how seemingly ‘factual’ Anthropocenic discourses, categories, and epistemologies are in fact malleable, fragile, and socio-historically specific (see, e.g., Last 2015). Moreover, the truth-claims that they generate are often tied up with profoundly moral ideas that evoke specific ways of thinking and feeling. Some of these, such as paintings of scenes from the Industrial Revolution, romanticize and naturalize the very conditions of human dominance over nature that fuelled the Anthropocene (Mirzoeff 2016). Others, notably public discourses about climate change, are apocalyptic (Swyngedouw 2010), depicting the Anthropocene as a threat to humankind’s very survival.
More than making the Anthropocene knowable, such ideas and imaginaries can have powerful social, political, and material effects in multiple settings. Narratives of low-lying island states being imminently engulfed by rising sea levels, for example, can disempower affected communities and inhibit effective mitigative action by representing Islanders as helpless victims and their homelands as inevitably lost (Farbotko 2010). Rather than reflecting an inherent vulnerability to climate change, these discourses can actually encourage people in affected areas to produce and perform their vulnerability in order to receive development funding (Webber 2013), and in doing so divert resources from other areas. Other studies show how discourses of climate change vulnerability have been mobilized in order to reinforce existing stereotypes of certain places and groups of people as vulnerable, hazardous, and disadvantaged (Yamane 2009).
It is here that anthropologists are well-placed to intervene in ongoing conversations by producing detailed ethnographic accounts of the events by the Anthropocene idea, from emergent political alliances and spatializations to modes of subjectivity and citizenship, from forms of scientific objectification and naturalization to shifting research methods and narratives, from green markets, products, and flows of capital to the materialization and embodiment of these ideas in spaces, places, bodies, and earthly relations (Moore 2015: 40).
Through such accounts, Amelia Moore suggests, anthropologists can begin to treat ‘the Anthropocene idea as a problem space’ (2015: 41; italics in original) that needs to be explored rather than taken for granted.
Moore’s work on the growth of sustainability, conservation, and eco-tourist initiatives in the Bahamas (e.g. Moore 2015) exemplifies the value of such an approach. Taking the Bahamas as one particular ‘Anthropocene space’ (2015: 31), she traces how rising sea levels, notions of sustainability, and concerns about biodiversity loss have collectively reframed and literally reworked the islands’ ecological, spatial, and socio-economic makeup—for example, through the promotion of sustainable fisheries, the establishment of new marine protected areas, and the growth of ecotourism initiatives. In her work, the Anthropocene is not simply a backdrop to ethnographic inquiry, but a material and imaginative space that constantly generates new relations and effects.
Similar approaches can be found in Jason Cons’ (2018) ethnography of the pre-emptive restructuring of Bangladeshi borderlands in the name of climate security; Cymene Howes’ discussion of multiple claims to ‘anthropocentric ecoauthority’ in the context of wind power development in Mexico (2014); and Nayanika Mathur’s description of the political work performed by Anthropocenic categories like ‘climate change’ in the context of human-wildlife conflicts in the Indian Himalayas (2015). Rather than asking how anthropology can illuminate small-scale responses to the Anthropocene, these writings push us to interrogate the very idea of the Anthropocene, the truth-claims and the ethical demands that it makes, and the effects of such claims and demands in multiple settings. By adopting this critical perspective, they imply, anthropologists can not only challenge the deleterious effects of oversimplified concepts such as ‘anthropogenic’ or ‘climate change’, but can also begin to explore ‘alternative visions’ (Cons 2018: 286) and possibilities for life in the Anthropocene. On this point, their work converges with that of another form of scholarship, to which speculation and creativity are central.
Remaking the Anthropocene: speculation, creativity, and experimentation
Rather than critically unpack the ‘Anthropocene’ idea, other scholars have opted to play with the speculative and regenerative possibilities that it presents. While not uncritical of its horrors and injustices, their writings approach the Anthropocene as an opportunity: as a still-emergent entity to be appropriated, recast, and even redone (Buck 2015: 372).
This diverse body of work is often animated by a shared concern with unsettling, reworking, and transcending dominant scholarly categories such as ‘nature’, ‘culture’, ‘human’, and ‘nonhuman’. Although social scientists have long questioned these categories’ universality, the Anthropocene has thrown their contingency into starker relief: if ‘human agency has become the main geological force shaping the face of the earth’ (Latour 2014), how, then, can we tell what is ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’, ‘human’ and ‘nonhuman’? By thrusting this vital question into the public spotlight, the Anthropocene has, as Bruno Latour puts it, been a gift to contemporary scholarship—an invitation to ‘renegotiate the shape, boundary, limit and extent’ of anthropology’s core concern, ‘humanity’ (2014), and much more besides.
A common response to this invitation is to embrace rather than abhor the Anthropocene’s human-nonhuman hybrid ‘monsters’ (Latour 2011; Swanson et al. 2017: M4), from bacteria that have evolved to resist human-synthesized drugs to ‘blasted landscapes’, such as sites of oil spills, that are simultaneously ‘natural’ and ‘social’ (Kirksey, Shapiro, & Brodine 2014). Many scholars point out that the Anthropocene has simply made visible the complex webs of relations in which humans and nonhumans have always been enmeshed, while also generating new, inescapable hybrids and relations in the present. Apprehending these old and new hybrids and relations means finding ways to transcend anthropology’s traditional focus on humans, and asking: on what other terms can the Anthropocene be approached? To this end, many anthropologists draw on methods and analytics developed in ‘multispecies ethnography’ (Kirksey & Helmreich 2010), a field of scholarship that foregrounds how all humans and nonhumans on the planet are ‘entangled’—tied together and interdependent in various ways (e.g. Haraway 2008; Mitchell 2016; Reinert 2016; Rose 2011; Tsing 2015; van Dooren 2014). Rather than shunning such entanglements, they posit, why not use them to engender new possibilities for thinking about and living in the Anthropocene?
Such calls are often underpinned by a distinct ethical injunction: to elevate nonhuman entities into subjects worthy of scholarly attention, and also care and solidarity. Musing on the presence of penguins and flying foxes in urban spaces, for example, Thom van Dooren and Deborah Bird Rose refute the assumption that such animals are ‘out of place’ (2012: 2), advocating instead an ‘ethic of conviviality for a genuinely inclusive multispecies city…that provides a space for the flourishing of as many different forms of life as possible’ (2012: 17). Similarly, Anna Tsing (2011, 2015) propounds a form of ‘multispecies love’—‘passionate immersion in the lives of…nonhumans’ (2011: 19)—as an antidote to the destructive excesses of global capitalism. For her, multispecies entanglements offer a glimpse of how life, like mushrooms in abandoned anthropogenic landscapes, can emerge from ruined places (2015b: 6). Indeed, ‘in a global state of precarity’, she argues, ‘we don’t have choices other than looking for life in this ruin’ (2015: 6).
For many of the scholars mentioned in this section, then, the interdependence of humans and nonhumans is not simply an ontological fact, but it may be a potent conceptual and ethical way of moving forward on a ‘damaged planet’ (Tsing et al. 2017). As Swanson et al. put it:
Our continued survival demands that we learn something about how best to live and die within the entanglements we have. We need both senses of monstrosity: entanglement as life and as danger (2017: M4).
In such work, the Anthropocene is thus an opportunity to: 1) right old wrongs, particularly the anthropocentric hubris that caused such planetary ruination; and 2) create and experiment with new modes of understanding, living with/in, and transforming the Anthropocene, so as to make it plural, livable, even charming (Buck 2015). Here, hope and possibility (Kirskey, Shapiro, & Brodine 2014) are key motifs; correctives to what Donna Haraway calls the ‘game over’ attitude (2016: 2) that characterizes more cynical, hopeless responses to the Anthropocene.
Such hopeful interventions are often accompanied by an impulse to play and experiment with existing scholarly methods and frameworks. Rather than writing straightforward ethnographies, anthropologists are increasingly turning to cross- and trans-disciplinary engagements—with art and artists (Davis & Turpin 2015; Kirksey, Schuetze, & Helmreich 2014), natural sciences and scientists (Tsing 2015), and stories and storytelling (Haraway 2016; van Dooren & Rose 2012)—to overcome the limits of disciplinary knowledges, practices, and barriers. These experimental, collaborative projects are generally characterized by two attributes.
First, many are ‘transgressive’ (Kirksey, Schuetze, & Helmreich 2014: 17) and ‘speculative’ (Davis & Turpin 2015: 17; Haraway 2016). Defying, rather than conforming to, academic conventions and expectations, they experiment with different methods, forms of knowledge, and aesthetics to ‘imagine alternative [Anthropocenic] futures’ (Lorimer 2017: 131). For example, Terike Haapoja and Laura Gustafsson (2015), creators of the art installation, The Museum of the History of Cattle (2013), use the narrative of an imaginary cow in a way that urges the reader to reimagine the world’s history, animal sociality, and the Anthropocene in bovine terms. In the process, they invite us to consider how we relate to nonhuman others in the Anthropocene, and what a non-anthropocentric Anthropocenic future might look like.
Second, as we saw above, these interventions are commonly framed as ethico-political manifestos that implicate their audiences in the urgent project of finding new ways to live and survive in the Anthropocene (see esp. Gibson, Rose, & Fincher 2015; Kirksey, Shapiro, & Brodine 2014; Tsing et al. 2017). Treating the ethical, the political, and the scholarly as of a piece, such speculative discussions impel anthropologists to embrace their connections with other entities and to formulate ‘alternative political visions, modes of relation and opportunities for ethical responsiveness’ (Mitchell 2016: 39). In contrast to the critical, deconstructionist agendas of the works cited in the previous section, these interventions are self-consciously experimental and collaborative—and always ethically and politically loaded. Yet, as the next section shows, they have their own limitations.
Re-politicizing the Anthropocene
While enthusiastically adopted in some quarters, creative approaches to the Anthropocene have also been criticized for failing to rigorously interrogate the relationships between capitalism, power, inequality, and the Anthropocene. Such critiques typify a fourth main response to the Anthropocene in our discipline: one that emphasizes historical contingency, political contestation, and socio-economic inequality. Contributors to this field have reproached both speculative and dominant scientific approaches for depoliticizing their subject matter at a time when political engagement is most needed.
Three major concerns have been expressed regarding the dominant narrative generated by the Anthropocene Working Group. The first concerns its portrayal of the Anthropocene as a moment of rupture. In The shock of the Anthropocene, historians Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz (2016) contend that the dominant narrative perpetuates a historically inaccurate myth: that humans have suddenly awoken to the negative consequences of their actions upon the environment (see, e.g., Steffen et al. 2011). This awakening narrative, they argue, presumes that environmental inaction emerges from ignorance, as opposed to an ideological battle over how humans engage with the non-human world. It conceals longstanding environmental consciousness and previous grassroots political struggles against ecological degradation in the Global North and Global South, thereby depoliticizing the contested history of the Anthropocene (Swyngedouw & Ernstson 2018). Bonneuil and Fressoz further argue that such narratives glorify the position of scientists, placing them above society and suggesting that science can provide straightforward solutions to the Anthropocene while concealing a need for political choices. This narrative frames the Anthropocene in terms of human accomplishments, rather than taking it as an opportunity for humility and recognizing the distinction between human influence and human control (Nixon 2017). The notion that the Anthropocene represents a sudden new era of ecological dystopia has also been critiqued by Indigenous scholars. Potawatomi scholar Kyle Whyte (2018), for example, argues that this fails to recognize that, from one Indigenous perspective, the Anthropocene is a perpetuation of environmental destruction, displacement, and extinction due to the violence of colonialism: for some Indigenous communities, he argues, the apocalypse already arrived long ago.
Secondly, scholars have argued that the dominant Anthropocene narrative treats humanity — the Anthropos — as a ‘unitary species actor’ (Nixon 2017: 24), or a singular universal subject. In this capacity, the imaginary of ‘the anthropogenic’ covers over the global and historical inequalities between humans that caused the Anthropocene, and that continue to structure global politics today (Sayre 2012). It thus fails to recognize the inequity of responsibility for anthropogenic climate change, as well as the unequal distribution of exposure to its impacts, thereby depoliticizing analysis. Moreover, far from being universal, this vision of the Anthropos has been criticized for making wealthy European perspectives stand in for the experiences of all of humanity, thereby replicating the homogenizing violence of colonialism (Davis & Todd 2017). Métis scholar Zoe Todd argues that the Eurocentrism of the dominant Anthropocene narrative is a consequence of its emergence from white Eurocentric institutions, and instead advocates a decolonization of the Anthropocene through bringing in Indigenous knowledges that emphasize the ‘reciprocal, ongoing, and dynamic relationships’ (2015: 251) between humans and nonhumans.
Thirdly, dominant Anthropocene narratives may also naturalize the development of the Anthropocene, depicting it as inevitable rather than identifying it as a consequence of contingent historical developments and particular political choices. Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg (2014) note how, in some accounts, a linear trajectory is drawn from the discovery of fire to the development of the steam engine. This presentation of the Anthropocene as a natural, inevitable, teleological development depoliticizes its origins, and limits political responses to it. Instead, they argue that the Anthropocene should be understood as a ‘sociogenic’ phenomenon, emerging from particular social relations and an uneven distribution of power between different nations, social groups, and species. Naturalizing the Anthropocene can lead to an understanding of human domination of the planet and of nonhuman life as inevitable, with the epoch’s very name maintaining an anthropocentric perspective to the exclusion of all others (Crist 2016). This failure to recognize the Anthropocene’s historically contingent conditions can be attributed to a ‘consequentialist bias’ (Moore 2016) of dominant scientific approaches, reflecting their greater emphasis upon evidence of biophysical changes as opposed to systemic causes.
Responses to this singular Anthropocene grand narrative vary. Bonneuil and Fressoz advocate producing multiple histories of the Anthropocene, which recognize the different political choices that have been and can be made (2016). Bringing analyses of power into the Anthropocene and rejecting the homogenized figure of the Anthropos, Malm and Jason Moore present contrasting accounts of a ‘Capitalocene’, an epoch defined by the impacts of Capitalism upon planetary systems, as opposed to those of all of humanity. While Malm (2016) focuses on the Industrial Revolution and the role of fossil fuels in capital accumulation, Jason Moore (2016; but c.f. Hornborg 2017) identifies 1450 and the mercantile capitalist era as the starting point of the Capitalocene. He argues that this period witnessed the production of ‘Nature’ as an abstracted object of power, and that it was the violent exclusion of ‘Nature’ from ‘Society’ that enabled the development of capitalism. Meanwhile, Hann (2017) urges an even more long-term perspective on the development of capitalism, one that overcomes what he perceives as the Eurocentrism of existing analyses. He focuses on Jack Goody’s work and urban revolutions of the Bronze Age, arguing that the emergence of commodity as opposed to gift economies can be seen as part of the social, political, and cosmological preconditions of the Anthropocene.
Like the speculative scholarship discussed earlier, such writings undermine the Euro-American modernist division between ‘nature’ and ‘society’. However, their interventions take a markedly different form. Rather than treating the Anthropocene as an opportunity for hopeful, creative speculation, they view it as a spur to unmasking and contesting long-standing political and socio-economic inequalities in the present. But does this entail entirely dissolving the differences between ‘nature’ and ‘society’? Hornborg (2017), for one, rejects Moore’s view of nature and society as entirely entangled. He contends that without a clear analytical separation of nature and society, capitalism cannot be critiqued, thereby diminishing the possibility for political action. Similarly, Erik Swyngedouw and Henrik Ernstson (2018) challenge what they label as a post-humanist rejection of nature/society distinctions. For them, an understanding of nature as entirely part of society and capitalism creates a view of nature that can be too easily managed and co-opted by neoliberalism. This depoliticizes the Anthropocene, as it perpetuates the fantasy that life and capitalism can continue as they are, ignoring the need for decisive, radical socio-economic transformation.
Such neo-Marxist concerns about depoliticizing the Anthropocene extend to their critiques of the speculative and creative approaches discussed above. Hornborg (2017), for example, accuses scholars like Tsing (2015) and Haraway (2016) of ‘dithering’ in the face of ecological crisis: producing poetic yet inaccessible, theoretically imprecise interventions that preoccupy the attention of critical scholars rather than critiquing inequality or encouraging political action. While blunter than most, Hornborg’s critique typifies a specific kind of ethico-political position on the Anthropocene. Underpinned by the insights of political economy and political ecology, such scholarship treats anthropological critique as an intervention in the world: as a means of highlighting ongoing inequalities and historical contingencies and continuities, as well as the basis of a direct, engaged form of political action.
Conclusion
Jason Moore describes the Anthropocene as having ‘two lives’: one as a scientific concept and object of geological debate; and another as an idea that has moved beyond its natural science origins, permeating the social sciences and public discourse, and raising questions about the relationship between humans and the non-human world (2016: 80). This entry has offered a glimpse of the Anthropocene’s second life as it is playing out in various anthropological quarters.
As we have seen, the Anthropocene is apprehended in multiple ways within anthropology: as an encompassing, threatening backdrop to ethnographic inquiry; as an idea and ‘problem space’ to be interrogated; as an opportunity for creativity, speculation, and experimentation; and as the outcome of historical inequalities and injustices. These varied figurations of the Anthropocene give rise to equally varied ethico-political positions and interventions. As the approaches above reveal, there are different, and differently scaled, ways of responding to the Anthropocene: to take it apart and focus on its small-scale, localized challenges; to critique its truth-claims and politics on various levels; or to capitalize on the Anthropocene as an opportunity to formulate new, hopeful, experimental possibilities for the future.
Embedded in, but also evolving through, these propositions are thus different visions of what anthropology is, could be, and can do. But such competing visions—and they are likely to be joined by many more—are not simply about the future of anthropology. As lenses onto the world, they raise much bigger questions about how the very categories of ‘human’ and ‘non-human’ and ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ are being reproduced, transformed, or even dissolved in the present moment. And as Anthropocenic phenomena impact ever more of the planet, and Anthropocenic discourses gain greater social, political, and moral traction, these are questions that will animate academic debates and affect the lives of millions of people for years to come.
Note on contributors
Liana Chua is Reader in Anthropology at Brunel University London. She has studied conversion to Christianity, ethnic politics, indigeneity, resettlement and development in Malaysian Borneo since 2003. She is currently leading a large multi-sited project that explores the global nexus of orangutan conservation in the Anthropocene. http://www.brunel.ac.uk/people/liana-chua.
Hannah Fair’s doctoral research concerned Pan-Pacific climate justice movements and religious understandings of climate change in Vanuatu. She holds a PhD in Human Geography from University College London, and is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Anthropology at Brunel University London, investigating interspecies compassion, extinction, and orangutan conservation in the Anthropocene.
Anthropology, Department of Social and Political Sciences, Brunel University London, Uxbridge, Middlesex, UB8 3PH, United Kingdom.
Bartlett, P.F. & B. Stewart 2009. Shifting the university: faculty engagement and curriculum change. In Anthropology and climate change: from encounters to actions (eds) S.A. Crate & M. Nuttall, 356-69. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press.
Bonneuil, C. & J.-B. Fressoz 2016. The shock of the Anthropocene: the earth, history and us. London: Verso.
Buck, H.J. 2015. On the possibilities of a charming Anthropocene. Annals of the Association of American Geographers105(2), 369-77.
Carruth, A. & R.P. Marzec. Environmental visualization in the Anthropocene: technologies, aesthetics, ethics. Public Culture26(2), 205-11.
Chatterton, P., D. Featherstone, & P. Routledge 2012. Articulating climate justice in Copenhagen: antagonism, the commons, and solidarity. Antipode 45(3), 602-20.
Cons, J. 2018. Staging climate security: resilience and heterodystopia in the Bangladesh borderlands. Cultural Anthropology33(2), 266-94.
Crate, S.A. & A.N. Fedorov 2013. A methodological model for exchanging local and scientific climate change knowledge in Northeastern Siberia. Arctic 66(3), 338-50.
——— & M. Nuttall (eds) 2009. Anthropology and climate change: from encounters to actions. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press.
Crist, E. 2016. On the poverty of our nomenclature. In Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, history and the crisis of capitalism (ed.) J. Moore, 14-33. Oakland: PM Press.
Cruikshank, J. 2001. Glaciers and climate change: perspectives from oral tradition. Arctic 54(4), 377-93.
Crutzen, P. 2002. Geology of mankind. Nature 415, 23.
——— & E.F. Stoermer 2000. The ‘Anthropocene’. Global Change Newsletter41, 17-18.
Davis, H. & Z. Todd 2017. On the importance of a date, or decolonizing the Anthropocene. ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 16(4), 761-80.
——— & E. Turpin 2015. Art in the Anthropocene: encounters among aesthetics, politics, environments and epistemologies. London: Open Humanities Press.
Doughty, C.E., A. Wolf & C.B. Field 2010. Biophysical feedbacks between the Pleistocene megafauna extinction and climate: the first human-induced global warming? Geophysical Research Letters37: L15703.
Fair, H. 2018. Three stories of Noah: navigating religious climate change narratives in the Pacific Island region. Geo: Geography and Environment 5(2), e00068. Available on-line: https://doi.org/10.1002/geo2.68
Farbotko, C. 2010. Wishful sinking: disappearing islands, climate refugees and cosmopolitan experimentation. Asia Pacific Viewpoint51(1), 47–60.
Fiske, S.J. 2009. Global change policymaking from inside the beltway: engaging anthropology. In Anthropology and climate change: from encounters to actions (eds) S.A. Crate & M. Nuttall, 277-91. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press.
Gibson, H. & S. Venkateswar 2015. Anthropological engagement with the Anthropocene: a critical review. Environment and Society: Advances in Research 6, 5-27.
Gibson, K., D.B. Rose, & Ruth Fincher (eds) 2015. Manifesto for living in the Anthropocene. New York: Punctum Books.
Günel, G. 2016. What is carbon dioxide? When is carbon dioxide? PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review39(1), 33-45.
Haapoja, T. & L. Gustafsson 2015. A history according to cattle. In Art in the Anthropocene: encounters among aesthetics, politics, environments and epistemologies (eds) H. Davis & E. Turpin, 293-8. London: Open Humanities Press.
Hall, E.F. & T. Sanders 2015. Accountability and the academy: producing knowledge about the human dimensions of climate change. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute21(2), 438-61.
Hann, C. 2017. The Anthropocene and anthropology: micro and macro perspectives. European Journal of Social Theory 20(1), 183-96.
Haraway, D.J. 2008. When species meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
——— 2016. Staying with the trouble: making kin in the Chthulucene. Durham: Duke University Press.
Hastrup, K. & M. Skrydstrup (eds) 2013. The social life of climate change models: anticipating nature. New York: Routledge
Hornborg, A. 2017. Dithering while the planet burns: anthropologists’ approaches to the Anthropocene. Reviews in Anthropology 46(2-3), 61-77. Houser, H. 2014. The aesthetics of environmental visualizations: more than information ecstasy? Public Culture26(2), 319-37.
Howe, C. 2014. Anthropocenic ecoauthority: the winds of Oaxaca. Anthropological Quarterly87(2), 381-404.
Hulme, M. 2008. Geographical work at the boundaries of climate change. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers33(1), 5–11.
Jacka, J. 2009. Global averages, local extremes: the subtleties and complexities of climate change in Papua New Guinea. In Anthropology and climate change: from encounters to actions (eds) S.A. Crate & M. Nuttall, 197-208. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press.
Kempf, W. 2017. Climate change, Christian religion and songs: revisiting the Noah story in the Central Pacific. In Environmental transformations and cultural responses (eds) E. Dürr & A. Pascht, 19-48. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Kirksey, E. & S. Helmreich 2010. The emergence of multispecies ethnography. Cultural Anthropology 25, 545-76.
——— C. Schuetze, & S. Helmreich 2014. Introduction: tactics of multispecies ethnography. In The multispecies salon (ed.) E. Kirksey, 1-24. Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 1-24.
——— N. Shapiro, & M. Brodine 2014. Hope in blasted landscapes. In The multispecies salon (ed.) E. Kirksey, 29-63. Durham: Duke University Press.
Last, A. 2015. We are the world? Anthropocene cultural production between geopoetics and geopolitics. Theory, Culture and Society34(2–3), 147–68.
Latour, B. 2011. Love your monsters: why we must care for our technologies as we do our children. Breakthrough Journal (Fall 2011), 21-8.
——— 2014. Anthropology at the time of the Anthropocene: a personal view of what is to be studied. Distinguished lecture, 113th American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Washington, D.C.
Lazrus, H. 2009. The governance of vulnerability: climate change and agency in Tuvalu, South Pacific. In Anthropology and climate change: from encounters to actions (eds) S.A. Crate & M. Nuttall, 240-9. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press.
Lewis, S.L. & M.A. Maslin 2015. Defining the Anthropocene. Nature519, 171-80.
Lorimer, J. 2017. The Anthropo-scene: a guide for the perplexed. Social Studies of Science47(1), 117-42.
Malm, A. 2016. Fossil capital: the rise of steam power and the roots of global warming. London: Verso.
——— & A. Hornborg 2014. The geology of mankind? A critique of the Anthropocene narrative. The Anthropocene Review 1(1), 62-9.
Mathur, N. 2015. ‘It’s a conspiracy theory and climate change’: of beastly encounters and cervine disappearances in Himalayan India. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory5(1), 87-111.
Marzec, R.P. 2014. Militarized ecologies: visualizations of environmental struggle in the Brazilian Amazon. Public Culture26(2), 233-55.
Mirzoeff, N. 2014. Visualizing the Anthropocene. Public Culture26(2), 213-32.
Mitchell, A. 2016. Beyond biodiversity and species: problematizing extinction. Theory, Culture & Society33(5), 23-42.
Moore, A. 2015. Anthropocene anthropology: reconceptualizing global contemporary change. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute22(1), 27-46.
Moore, J. (ed.) 2016. Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, history and the crisis of capitalism. Oakland: PM Press.
Nixon, R. The Anthropocene and environmental justice. In Curating the future: museums, communities and climate change (eds) J. Newell, L. Robin, & K. Wehner, 23-31.Abingdon: Routledge.
O’Reilly, J. 2016. Sensing the ice: field science, models, and expert intimacy with knowledge. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute22, S27-45.
Reinert, H. 2016. About a stone: some notes on geologic conviviality. Environmental Humanities8(1), 95-117.
Rose, D.B. 2011. Wild dog dreaming: love and extinction. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
Ruddiman, W.F. 2003. The anthropogenic greenhouse era began thousands of years ago. Climatic Change 61, 261-93.
Rudiak-Gould, P. 2012. Promiscuous corroboration and climate change translation: a case study from the Marshall Islands. Global Environmental Change22, 46-54.
——— 2015. The social life of blame in the Anthropocene. Environment & Society6, 48-65.
Sayre, N. 2012. The politics of the anthropogenic. Annual Review of Anthropology41, 57-70.
Steffen, W., J. Grinevald, P. Crutzen, & J. McNeill 2011. The Anthropocene: conceptual and historical perspectives. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 369(1938), 842-67.
Swanson, H.A., N. Bubandt, & A. Tsing 2015. Less than one but more than many: Anthropocene as science fiction and scholarship-in-the-making. Environment and Society: Advances in Research6, 149-66.
———, A. Tsing, N. Bubandt, & E. Gan 2017. Introduction: bodies tumbled into bodies. In Arts of living on a damaged planet: monsters of the Anthropocene (eds) A. Tsing, H. Swanson, E. Gan, & N. Bubandt, pp. M1-M12. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Swyngedouw, Erik. 2010. Apocalypse forever? Post-political populism and the spectre of climate change. Theory, Culture and Society27(2-3), 213-32.
——— & H. Ernstson 2018. Interrupting the Anthropo-obScene: immuno-biopolitics and depoliticizing ontologies in the Anthropocene. Theory, Culture & Society5(6), 3-30. Available on-line: https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276418757314
Todd, Z. 2015. Indigenizing the Anthropocene. In Art in the Anthropocene: encounters among aesthetics, politics, environments and epistemologies (eds) H. Davis & E. Turpin, 241-54. London: Open Humanities Press.
Tsing, A. 2011. Arts of inclusion, or, how to love a mushroom. Australian Humanities Review50, 191-203.
——— 2015. The mushroom at the end of the world: on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. Princeton: University Press.
——— H. Swanson, E. Gan, & N. Bubandt (eds) 2017. Arts of living on a damaged planet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Van Dooren, T. 2014. Flight ways: life and loss at the edge of extinction. New York: Columbia University Press.
——— & D.B. Rose 2012. Storied-places in a multispecies city. Humanimalia3(2), 1-27.
Vaughn, S.E. 2017. Disappearing mangroves: the epistemic politics of climate adaptation in Guyana. Cultural Anthropology32(2), 242–68.
Webber, S. 2013. Performative vulnerability: climate change adaptation policies and financing in Kiribati. Environment and Planning A45(11), 2717–33.
Whyte, K.P. 2018. Indigenous science (fiction) for the Anthropocene: ancestral dystopias and fantasies of climate change crises. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space1(1-2), 224-42.
Yamane, A. 2009. Climate change and hazardscape of Sri Lanka. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space41(10): 2396-416.
Zalasiewicz, J., M. Williams, A. Smith, T.L. Barry, A.L. Coe, P.R. Bown, P.Brenchley, et al. 2008. Are we now living in the Anthropocene? GSA Today18(2), 4-8.
——— C.N. Waters, M. Williams, A.D. Barnosky, A. Cearreta, P. Crutzen, E. Ellis, et al. 2015. When did the Anthropocene begin? A mid-twentieth century boundary level is stratigraphically optimal. Quaternary International 383, 196-203.
——— C.N. Waters, C.P. Summerhayes, A.P. Wolfe, A.D. Barnosky, A.Cearreta, P. Crutzen, E. Ellis, et al. 2017. The working group on the Anthropocene: summary of evidence and interim recommendations. Anthropocene19, 55-60.
[1] At the time of writing (late 2018), ‘the Anthropocene’ has yet to be formally recognized by the International Union of Geological Sciences or the International Commission on Stratigraphy as a distinct geological epoch.
[2] A term that refers broadly to the movement of plants and animals such as potatoes, tomatoes, cattle, and sugarcane between the Americas and Europe, Africa, and Asia in the 15th and 16th centuries.
[3] The term ‘majority world’ collectively refers to the countries of Asia, Africa, Latin America and Oceania – who make up the majority of the world’s population – without defining them negatively in comparison with Europe and North America (unlike the categories ‘third world’ or ‘developing world’).
Institute for Interdisciplinary Research into the Anthropocene 