Author: David R Cole

Uncategorized

The Anthropocene and the geo-political imagination: Re-writing Earth as political space

Eva Lövbrand a, Malin Mobjörk b, Rickard Söder b

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esg.2020.100051

Abstract

The Anthropocene is described as a dangerous and unpredictable era in which fossil-fueled ways of life undermine the planetary systems on which human societies depend. It speaks of a new world of globalized and manufactured risks where neither security nor environment can be interpreted or acted upon in traditional ways. In this paper we examine how debates on the Anthropocene unfold in global politics and how they challenge core assumptions in International Relations. Through a structured analysis of 52 peer-reviewed journal articles, we identify three Anthropocene discourses that speak of new environmental realities for global politics. These are referred to as the endangered world, the entangled world, and the extractivist world. While each discourse describes an increasingly interconnected and fragile world in which conventional binaries such as inside/outside, North/South and us/them can no longer be taken for granted, disagreement prevails over what needs to be secured and by whom.

1. Introduction

A new concept has entered the lexicon – the Anthropocene. The term was coined at the turn of the millennium to describe the profound and accelerating human imprint on the global environment (Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000). Rising global temperatures, melting glaciers, thawing permafrost, acidified oceans and irreversible species loss are some of the examples used to illustrate the dramatic shifts in the Earth’s biosphere caused by modern industrial civilization (IPCC, 2018). In contrast to the Holocene – the past 12 000 years of relative climate stability – the Anthropocene has been described as a dangerous and unpredictable era when fossil-fueled ways of life are undermining the planetary life-support systems upon which human societies depend (Rockström et al., 2009; Steffen et al., 2018). It refers to a new phase in planetary history, we are told, when humanity has become a major force of nature that is changing the dynamics and functioning of Earth itself.

The proposition that we now live in a world entirely of our own making is uncomfortable and perplexing. It suggests a fundamental and dangerous rupture in the Earth’s trajectory that calls for new ways of thinking about humanity’s relationship to nature, ourselves and our collective existence (C. Hamilton, 2017; Scranton, 2015). By tying the fate of humanity to the fate of our planet, the Anthropocene concept has invited intense interdisciplinary conversations across scholarly fields as varied as Earth system science, geology, history, philosophy, and sociology (Biermann and Lövbrand, 2019; Hamilton et al., 2015; Steffen et al., 2011). In recent years the Anthropocene has also arrived at the study of global politics and prompted critical debates about some of the core assumptions upon which International Relations (IR) rest (Simangan, 2020). Harrington (2016, p. 493) describes the Anthropocene as a watershed moment for a discipline that found its voice in the midst of the Cold War when apocalyptic visions of nuclear war were commonplace. It is a concept that speaks of a new world of globalized and manufactured risks in which neither security nor environment can be interpreted or acted upon in traditional ways (Dalby, 2009). In a time when modern technology, trade and consumerism is disrupting the planet’s life-upholding systems in unprecedented ways, a growing IR scholarship is searching for a new security language that brings our changing climate, melting glaciers and polluted oceans to the forefront of global affairs (Burke et al., 2016; Harrington, 2016).

In this paper we trace how these Anthropocene debates are unfolding in the study of IR and ask how they may reconfigure Earth as political space. Just as geographical knowledge for long has been used by great powers to naturalize the exercise of power and control over distant places and people (Chaturvedi and Doyle, 2015), we examine how IR scholars now are drawing upon environmental knowledge to rethink nature as a stable ground for such global politics. While the profound material implications of a transformed global environment are central to this rethinking, we will in this paper primarily focus on the representational politics of contemporary Anthropocene debates. Informed by the critical geopolitics of scholars such as Gearoid O Tuathail (1996), John Agnew (1998) and Simon Dalby (2009), we approach the Anthropocene as a discursive event that is actively involved in the (re)writing of space for global politics. We thus ask how this new era in planetary history is staged as a geo-political drama. How is the Anthropocene written spatially and geographically? What risks and security concerns does it render visible? Who and what is endangered on this global scene? How are friends and enemies construed? What kinds of policy responses are deemed appropriate to meet the dangers of a transformed global environment?

Our study is based on a literature review of 52 peer-reviewed journal articles found in the database PROQUEST using the search words ‘Anthropocene’, ‘security’, ‘geopolitics’ and ‘politics’. The search was made in titles, abstracts and keywords of articles published during 2010–2018, and produced 143 results. As a first step, all articles were extracted into Excel and the abstracts were analyzed in view of how the Anthropocene is presented as a political problem. As a second step, we limited our sample to the articles that explicitly engage with the Anthropocene concept and its implications for global politics. These 52 articles were subject to thorough content analysis and sorted according to the analytical questions outlined above (for full list of articles, see appendix). From this analysis we identified reoccurring ontological claims, analytical themes and political concerns around which IR debates on the Anthropocene currently seem to circle. We used these categories to outline the contours of three discourses that we here call 1) the endangered world; 2) the entangled world and; 3) the extractivist world. In the following we present these discourses and compare how they stage our transforming Earth as political space. Although the Anthropocene debates drawn upon in this paper play out at the margins of mainstream IR,1 we find that they are actively confronting some of the spatial assumptions, meanings and orders upon which the latter rest. When engaging with the self-imposed dangers of a radically climate changed world, all three discourses project a world that is more interconnected and fragile than ever before and in which conventional binaries such as inside/outside, North/South, us/them no longer can be taken for granted. However, disagreement prevails over what needs to be secured and by whom in view of this new environmental reality.

2. The geopolitical imagination: imposing order and meaning on space

We live in confusing and troubled times. Three decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the peaceful end to Cold War rivalry, scholars and practitioners of global politics are again searching for a language that describes how the world works and what challenges global politics face. The 1990s often signify the triumph of liberal democracy and new political possibilities arising from multilateral cooperation and free trade (Hewson and Sinclair, 1999). In the aftermath of the Cold War, economic globalization and transnational flows of information, finance and people effectively unsettled the geopolitical map and challenged binary conceptions of political space such as East and West, modern and backward (Ó Tuathail, 1998). In the new world of global flows, networks and relations, the spellbinding ‘big picture’ of geopolitics seemed decidedly out of fashion and place (Ó Tuathail and Dalby, 1998). Instead global governance gained ground as a novel frame for understanding the character of global life (Latham, 1999). As outlined by James Rosenau in the first volume of the journal Global Governance, this new language signified an academic and political search for order, coherence and continuity in a time of disorder, contradiction and change. “To anticipate the prospects for global governance in the decades ahead”, Rosenau (1995, p. 13) suggested, “is to look for authorities that are obscure, boundaries that are in flux, and systems of rule that are emergent. And it is to experience hope embedded in despair.”

The rise of global environmental consciousness and governance belongs to this rethinking of global politics at the end of the 20th Century. Responding to a growing sense of ecological interdependence and urgency, state and non-state actors have since the mid-1990s engaged in a wide array of cooperative strategies and institutionalized forms of global governance. From the burgeoning field of global environmental governance studies, we have learned that these multilateral rule-systems today cut across traditional state-based jurisdictions and public-private divides and hereby link actors and places in ways that defy conventional understandings of IR (Biermann, 2014; Bulkeley et al., 2014). In this new world of collaborative, networked and transnational forms of environmental governance, global politics no longer appears to be defined by international anarchy or the hierarchical authority of the state (Stripple and Bulkeley, 2013). As outlined by Biermann and Pattberg (2008) global life is instead characterized by new types of agency and actors, new mechanisms of governance that go beyond traditional forms of state led treaty-based regimes, and an increased segmentation and fragmentation of the overall governance system across levels and functional spheres.

While this largely liberal story of global politics has gained a powerful grip on the study of IR, we have recently experienced a revival of geopolitical thought and foreign policy practice. In response to the disorientation and identity crisis following the end of the Cold War, many foreign policy elites are again mobilizing allegedly objective geographical criteria to fix the role of the nation-state in world affairs and to keep ‘the Other’ out (Guzzini, 2012, p. 3). The new geographies of danger presented by melting glaciers, rising sea levels and more extreme weather feed into this re-territorialization of global affairs (Chaturvedi and Doyle, 2015) and have given rise to a new security language that accounts for the risks of climate-induced instability, conflict and displacement (Scheffran et al., 2012; van Baalen and Mobjörk, 2018). While some work in this field draws upon the human security concept to examine how climate change may multiply existing vulnerabilities and threaten the livelihood of the poor (O’Brien et al., 2010), the scaling up of climate fear has also given new energy to realist scripts of international relations and state-centric security frames (Brzoska, 2012).

In the following we draw upon critical geopolitics to examine how the Anthropocene concept is mobilized in this struggle to (re)define global space in view of new environmental realities. Critical geopolitics is a sub-discipline to political geography that emerged during the 1980s to liberate geographical knowledge from the imperial geopolitics of domination (Chaturvedi and Doyle, 2015, p. 5). It is a scholarship that invites us to consider how certain “spatializations of identity, nationhood and danger manifest themselves across the landscape of states and how certain political, social and physical geographies in turn enframe and incite certain conceptual, moral and/or aesthetic understandings of self and other, security and danger, proximity and distance, indifference and responsibility” (Ó Tuathail and Dalby, 1998, p. 4). Hence, rather approaching the world as politically given, critical geopolitics critically interrogates the forms of knowledge and imaginations that underpin international politics and the cultural myths of the sovereign state (Agnew, 1998). A central assumption informing work in this field is that geographical representations of the world are far from innocent. As argued by Ó Tuathail (1996, p. 7), geographical knowledge constitutes a form of geo-power that is actively involved in the production, ordering and management of territorial space. Conscious and inspired by these insights, we here examine what forms of environmental knowledge that contemporary IR debates on the Anthropocene draw upon, and how they stage the future of world politics. In these unfolding debates we identify three discourses that we call the endangered world, the entangled world, and the extractivist world.

2.1. The endangered world: securing the future habitability of the planet

The endangered world is a discourse that draws energy from Earth system science and its proposition that humanity at the end of the 20th Century has become an Earth shaping agent that now rivals some of the great forces of nature (Brondizio et al., 2016; Steffen et al., 2011). The Anthropocene here marks a shift from the stable Holocene era within which human civilizations have developed and thrived. As outlined by Steffen et al. (2011), the ‘great acceleration’ in human population, economic exchange, technological development, material consumption and international mobility following the end of World War II has left an unprecedented imprint on the global environment and fundamentally altered humanity’s relationship to Earth. By degrading the planet’s ecological systems and eroding its capacity to absorb our wastes, humanity has dangerously disrupted the Earth system and pushed the planet into a more hostile state from which we cannot easily return (Pereira and Freitas, 2017; Steffen et al., 2011).

The endangered world presents a global scene where new environmental threats and dangers are causing socio-economic turbulence and gradually altering the geopolitical map. In the Arctic, for instance, Young (2012) finds that the interacting forces of climate change and globalization are transforming environments at unprecedented rates and opening up the region to outside forces. Non-linear shifts in sea ice and thawing permafrost have unleashed mounting interest in the region’s natural resources and invited Great Powers to enhance their commercial shipping, fossil fuel extraction and industrial fishing (Young, 2012). Similarly, Willcox (2016) outlines how climate change is posing a grave external threat to the self-determination of atoll island peoples in the Pacific region. As sea level rises and storms increase in frequency, states such as Tuvalu, Kiribati, and the Maldives are facing loss of habitable territory and relocation of entire populations (Willcox, 2016). In other parts of the world climate change is triggering vector-borne diseases, freshwater shortage, crop failure and food scarcity (Floyd, 2015). While these threats are most pressing in already fragile regions, they are multi-scalar, interconnected, and transboundary in nature and may therefore cause human insecurity and political instability in areas distant from their origin (Hommel and Murphy, 2013; DeFries et al., 2012; Pereira, 2015).

The endangered world is a discourse that challenges the modern spatialization of the world into a system of states with unquestionable political boundaries and mutually hostile armed camps (Agnew, 1998). As outlined by Pereira and Freitas (2017), many of the human-produced dangers of climate change have no parallel in history and work in complex, uncertain and unpredictable ways. The dangers are often diffuse, indirect and transnational and hereby make the world more interconnected and interdependent than ever imagined by IR. While this discourse recognizes that climate change may endanger the territories and populations of particular states, it is the global biosphere that is the primary referent object of security. The entire life-support system of the planet is under threat and the role of global politics is to regain control for the sake of human wellbeing and security (Floyd, 2015). As noted by Steffen at al. (2011, p. 749) the planetary nature of the challenge is unique and demands a global-scale response that transcends national boundaries and cultural divides. In order to avoid that large parts of the human population and modern society as a whole will collapse, humanity has to rise to the challenge and become a responsible steward of our own life-support system (Steffen et al., 2011). Geographical imbalances in human suffering and vulnerability form part of this new story for global politics (Biermann et al., 2016; Da Costa Ferreira and Barbi, 2016; O’Brien, 2011). However, in the endangered world it is the aggregated human effect on the Earth system that is the primary object of concern.

The endangered world draws energy from a long line of liberal institutionalist thinking to foster responsible Earth system stewardship. In order to gain control over the unfolding sustainability crisis and effectively govern the Anthropocene, this discourse insists that the world needs strong global institutions that can balance competing national interests and facilitate coordinated policy responses (Da Costa Ferreira and Barbi, 2016; Young, 2012). Hence, the liberal democratic order organized around the United Nations and its various treaty-regimes remains central to the vision of global politics advanced here. However, given the complex and dispersed nature of 21st century challenges, international policy responses need to rest upon multi-level governance approaches that respond to the varied role of people and places in causation and effect of global environmental changes (Biermann et al., 2016; Steffen et al., 2011). In order to build links across local, national and global scales, effective governance in the Anthropocene also hinges on integrated scientific assessments of critical Earth system processes and scenario planning that anticipates the systemic risks and security implications of ecosystem change (Hommel and Murphy, 2013; Steffen et al., 2011). As outlined by Dumaine and Mintzer (2015) traditional security thinking makes little analytical sense in a world bound together by complex, non-linear and closely coupled environmental risks. In the Anthropocene security analysts must move beyond the assumption that the main purpose of defense is to secure the nation against external, state-based, mainly military threats. In order to respond to the dangers of a radically transformed global environment, states need to cultivate a shared view about common threats and improve collective capacities for early warning, rapid response, and disaster mitigation (Dumaine and Mintzer, 2015).

2.2. The entangled world: securing peaceful co-existence

In parallel to the science-driven and liberal institutionalist imagination informing the endangered world, the Anthropocene has also given energy to a post-humanist IR discourse that confronts the grand narratives of modernity and the forms of global politics they give rise to. Similar to the endangered world, this parallel discourse describes the Anthropocene as a complex and unpredictable era when human and natural processes have become deeply intertwined. However, the Anthropocene is here not approached as a problem that can be reversed, resolved or governed (Johnson and Morehouse, 2014). As outlined by Harrington (2016, p. 481) it instead reflects a new reality where humans, nonhumans, things, and materials co-exist in complex relations of life and non-life. In this entangled universe, the Cartesian separation between nature and culture has broken down and the world as conceived by modernity has ended. Dualistic understandings of the active, progressive and morally countable human (subject) and the passive and static externality of nature (object) are replaced by much more contingent, fragile and unpredictable networks of relations (Fagan, 2017). In a world marked by melting ice caps, thawing permafrost, acidified oceans, accelerating deforestation, degraded agricultural lands and dramatic species loss, human activity and nature are so enmeshed that they are existentially indistinguishable. A complex but singular “social nature” is now the new planetary real, claim Burke et al. (2016, p. 510).

The entangled world is a discourse that draws upon the Anthropocene to destabilize and radically rethink the conceptual frameworks that underpin contemporary global politics. It confronts a state-centric world obsessed with bargaining, power and interests with the monumental risks, threats, and physical effects of a transformed global environment (Burke et al., 2016; Harrington, 2016). In a time when industrialized and profit-driven human societies are dangerously enmeshed with the biosphere, national security based on keeping ‘the Other’ out is failing the reality of the planet and portraying the wrong world picture. The magnitude and reach of contemporary environmental risks mean that “the Other is always already inside, so bound up with us in a common process that it no longer makes sense to speak of inside and outside” (Burke et al., 2016, p. 502). The dawning of the age of the human hereby challenges modern understandings of security at the most fundamental level. In the entangled world, the idea that we can secure humanity against external threats is precisely the problem that needs to be overcome (Chandler, 2018, p. 10). In the words of Hamilton (2017b, p. 586, italics in original), “(i)f humans are nature, and the Anthropocene demands the securing of humanity (and all life) from the unpredictable planetary conditions “we” are “making”, then the aim of security ultimately becomes that of securing oneself from oneself “.

The entangled world is as much a philosophical event as an environmental one that challenges modern conceptions of who we are as humans and how we relate to the world around us. Humans are conceived simultaneously as central and all-powerful, and fragmented and insignificant (Fagan, 2017). By reaching into deep geological time, the human-induced ecological crisis offers a new cosmological origin and ending story that alters today’s basic presuppositions of what the Earth and the ‘human condition’ are (Hamilton, 2018, p. 391). “Even in the study of deep time and geological shifts, we cannot escape ourselves” (Harrington, 2016, p. 479). Faced with humanity’s overwhelming Earth-shaping powers we appear adrift, claim Johnson and Morehouse (2014, p. 442), “alienated not only from a world that refuses to submit to long-held conceptual frameworks, but also alienated from ourselves in relation to this strange and allegedly destructive thing called ‘humanity’“. The entangled world hereby forces IR into an uncomfortable place where many of the discipline’s organizing categories break down: the logics of inclusion and exclusion; the idea of agency and a unified human subject; and the imagination of an intelligible world as a whole (Fagan, 2017, p. 294). In face of the ontological shift brought about by the Anthropocene, IR is called upon to rethink the narrow anthropocentric, state-led, economistic boundaries that solidify the bygone age of the Holocene (Harrington, 2016, p. 480).

The entangled world presents a global scene of complex interconnections and interdependencies that cut across conventional geographical and temporal scales and species boundaries. Security cannot be achieved by resolute actions grounded in expression of power targeting ‘external’ threats, but only by re-embedding modern humanity in the multi-species world that we now are remaking. As argued by Burke et al. (2016, p. 502) we cannot survive without accepting the cosmopolitan and enmeshed nature of this world. In a world of entangled relations security comes from being more connected, not less (ibid). Against this backdrop McClanahan and Brisman (2015) find proposals from the US security establishment to wage war on climate change deeply problematic. Militaristic assertions that we can win the fight against climate change reproduce the modern understanding of nature as exterior that we so desperately need to transcend. What the world needs is instead a new global political project that makes peace with Earth and hereby secures mutual co-existence (Burke et al., 2016; McClanahan and Brisman, 2015). Such a project is by necessity post-human, claim Cudworth and Hobden (2013). In order to move beyond human centrism and domination we must recognize that social and political life always is bound up with non-human beings and things. In the Anthropocene the environment is not ‘out there’, but always ‘with’ and ‘in here’ (Cudworth and Hobden, 2013, p. 654). To end human-caused extinctions, prevent dangerous climate change, save the oceans, support vulnerable multi-species populations, and restore social justice, the entangled world therefore demands a ‘worldly politics’ that brings our multi-species interrelations to the foreground of global affairs (Burke et al., 2016).

2.3. The extractivist world: securing socio-ecological justice in capitalist ruins

The third IR discourse found in our sample pulls Anthropocene debates in a more neo-Marxist direction. Here we are also confronted with a world in radical transformation defined by unprecedented ecological destruction and insecurity. However, the Anthropocene is not primarily understood as geological marker of time or the symptom of anthropocentric modernity. In the extractivist world the center of concern is instead the global capitalist system and the monumental damage and injustice done by its ceaseless need for expansion, accumulation and extraction. As outlined by Sassen (2016, p. 90) the development of capitalism has, since its origins, been marked by violence, destruction, and appropriation. By digging up and burning large reserves of fossilized carbon, industrialized economies have long done damage to the biosphere and people living on the edges of the Western world. However, the past three decades of petroleum-powered economic globalization have reorganized human-nature relations on the largest possible scale. The extraordinary growth in industrial production, commodity markets, technological innovation and consumerism is now remaking the entire ecological context for humanity. The global ecological crisis must therefore be understood as a problem of production, claims Dalby (2014, p. 7). Making things now also means remaking ecologies and reconstructing the very geo of global politics.

The extractivist world presents a highly unstable, uncertain and risky political landscape in which the speed and scale of destruction has ruined the biosphere’s capacity to recover. As argued by Stubblefield (2018, p. 15) “capitalism does not merely produce commodities and (re)shape nature, but feasts upon and produces death—as it consumes the fossilized energy of the dead buried for millennia; as it inevitably kills cultures, ecosystems, humans, and non-human animals”. Degraded lands, polluted waters, destroyed livelihoods, and massive species extinction are therefore the dark signatures of the Anthropocene. The widespread production of devastated life spaces suggests that it is the process of expanding capital, and not humanity as such, that is at odds with nature (Stubblefield, 2018). As noted by Dalby (2017) human insecurity is now a matter relating to the global economy, its economic entitlements, and the technological systems in which those are enmeshed. While granting the rich unfettered access to resources and goods, the capitalist order increases the stress of those already at risk and hereby perpetuates landscapes of structural vulnerability and social injustice (Ribot, 2014). Waves of pain and suffering are now hitting people living on the edges of capitalist society and forcing vulnerable communities to give up their dead lands and join a growing urban precariat of “warehoused, displaced and trafficked laboring bodies” (Sassen, 2016, p. 90).

The extractivist world is a discourse that breaks with universalized stories of our contemporary ecological crisis. Although no one is immune to the terraforming effects of carboniferous capitalism, this discourse forefronts the diversity of human relations with nature and the political systems under which these relations emerge (Stubblefield, 2018). Rather than presenting the Anthropocene as the aggregated effect of an undifferentiated humanity, the extractivist world directs blame and liability and hereby links ecological damage to social organization and stratification (Ribot, 2014). In the extractivist world the climate stressors that arch through the sky are by no means natural. They are produced by a global political economy that requires an unending, cheap flow of fossil fuels for the concentration of wealth at the expense of vulnerable people and ecosystems (Daggett, 2018; Ribot, 2014). While this fossil-fueled capitalist system is the real danger in the Anthropocene, it is forcefully protected by powerful economic and political elites. As proposed by Daggett (2018), fossil capitalism catalyzes the liberal democratic freedoms enjoyed by Western middle classes and fuels the energy-intensive and consumption-heavy lifestyles that extend across the planet. Concerns about climate change threaten these liberal consumer lifestyles and the white patriarchal orders that profit from them. This ‘catastrophic convergence’ between climate change, a threatened fossil fuel system, and an increasingly fragile liberal and patriarchal order, argues Daggett (2018), explains the rise of authoritarian movements marked by racism, misogyny, and climate denial in many Western states.

In the extractivist world the dangerous transformations of the global biosphere are symptoms of a political economy that commodifies and exploits environments and people. Serious efforts to come to terms with the damage done must therefore break with marketized solutions such as emissions trading or carbon offsetting and search for security beyond the circuits of capital. Everything else would be to accept, or even facilitate, the awaiting crises, claims Stubblefield (2018). As argued by Dalby (2013, p. 45), the rich industrial proportion of humanity has taken the fate of Earth into its own hands and is now determining what kinds of lives that get to be lived. Grasping the totality of material transformations is the pressing priority for anyone who thinks seriously about the future of humanity and our political arrangements. Rather than fiddling at the edges of carboniferous capitalism, security in the Anthropocene thus entails rapid social change that makes decarbonization of the global economy possible (Dalby, 2014). To break capital’s hold over life, argue Swyngedouw and Ernston (2018), we need to move beyond the depoliticized language of Earth system science and post-human philosophy and confront the contradictions of capitalist eco-modernization head on. In the extractivist world, technological fixes such as nuclear energy, carbon dioxide removal techniques or large-scale expansion of renewable energy technologies will not save us from the unfolding ecological crisis. Political renewal and security are instead sought in transformative social movements and local experimentation with less material-intensive and more just socio-ecological relations and ways of life (Roux-Rosier et al., 2018).

3. Rewriting Earth as political space

The Anthropocene is a troubling concept for troubled times. It speaks of a complex, interconnected and unstable world marked by globalized and manufactured risks that now are threatening the very life-upholding systems upon which human civilizations rest. In contrast to the hopeful and reassuring concept of sustainable development that has guided international environmental cooperation since the early 1990s, the Anthropocene is wedded into a language of fear and sorrow in view of irreparable loss of Arctic ice sheets, mass species extinction, acidified oceans and degraded lands. It confronts us with the dangers of a transformed global environment and the apparent failure of the modern state-system to offer effective and peaceful responses to the same. While this new vocabulary has gained widespread circulation in recent years, the Anthropocene remains a contested and ambiguous formulation that points in many different political directions (Biermann and Lövbrand, 2019). Since first introduced in Earth system science circles in the late 1990s, the concept has stirred heated interdisciplinary debate and been challenged, rejected and reworked by an expanding scholarship.

In this paper we have traced how the Anthropocene is interpreted and acted upon in the study of international relations. When navigating through our sample of 52 journal articles we found growing alarm in view of the self-imposed threats and security implications of a radically climate changed world, and mounting frustration with the failure of traditional IR theories and concepts to make analytical sense of the same. However, we also found important differences in the interpretations of the Anthropocene, with significant implications for the future of world politics. In the discourse that we call the endangered world the entire life-support system of the planet is under threat and the role of world politics is to regain control for the sake of human wellbeing and security. Rather than directing blame, this discourse is concerned with the aggregated human effects on the Earth system and the possibility of bringing the planet back to a safe Holocene-like state. In the endangered world, integrated scientific assessments and international policy coordination are the means for responsible Earth system stewardship and governance. In order to gain control over the unfolding sustainability crisis and hereby secure the future of modern civilization, this discourse insists that the world needs strong global institutions that can balance competing national interests and facilitate coordinated policy responses.

In the entangled world, by contrast, the idea that we can effectively govern the Anthropocene and hereby secure humanity against external threats is precisely the problem that needs to be overcome. In this discourse the modern spatializations of the world into nature and culture, subject and object, inside and outside are replaced by much more contingent, fragile and unpredictable networks of interrelations. In order to secure peaceful co-existence in the multi-species world that we now are re-making, the entangled world insists that we recognize modern civilization as a philosophical and political dead-end and search for a worldly politics that extends beyond human centrism and domination. The Anthropocene here becomes an invitation to rethink our institutions, commitments and rules and to forge new forms of cooperation built upon participation, solidarity and justice beyond the state and indeed the human (Burke et al., 2016, 507). While the entangled world is a discourse that seeks to break free from state-centric forms of global governance, the search for political alternatives remains unfinished and includes liberal institutionalist ideas of cosmopolitan democracy as well as bottom-up politics of subversion and resistance (Chandler et al., 2018).

The final Anthropocene discourse presented in this paper centers around the global capitalist system and the monumental damage and injustice done by its ceaseless need for expansion, accumulation and extraction. In the extractivist world degraded lands, polluted waters, destroyed livelihoods, and massive species extinction are the dark signatures of a fossil-fueled political economy that grants the rich unfettered access to resources and goods at the expense of vulnerable people and environments. In order to address the damage done and hereby secure socio-ecological justice, this discourse calls for transformative politics that breaks with technical fixes and marketized solutions and searches for political renewal in grassroots experiments and social movements operating beyond the circuits of capital.

The results from this discursive cartography are by no means ubiquitous. The geopolitical discourses emerging from our material are heterogeneous, partly overlapping and thus difficult to neatly separate. The articles analyzed here draw inspiration from a long heritage of liberal institutionalist, post-humanist and neo-Marxist thinking, and often combine these intellectual resources in intricate ways to make sense of our problem-ridden Earth. While the articles included in our study offer competing stories of Anthropocene endangerment and security, they all present a new scene for global politics. The damage done to the global biosphere is of such magnitude, we are told, that nature no longer functions as a stable and passive ground for the human drama that we can rely on. By digging up and burning large reserves of fossilized carbon, modern industrial society has pushed many ecosystems beyond their Holocene comfort zones and hereby altered the material context or the very geo of global politics. This new world of humanity’s own making effectively unsettles the geographical assumptions and ‘rules of the game’ that underpin familiar scripts of international relations (both realist and liberal). In the articles reviewed here we learn about non-linear, transboundary and closely coupled risks that now are travelling across the planet and linking states, people and environments in complex, unexpected and potentially dangerous ways. In this highly interconnected and risky world, neither state-centric representations of global space nor traditional security thinking make analytical or political sense. The traditional geopolitical categories of inside and outside, domestic and foreign, friends and foe are deeply questioned, along with conceptions of state, security and sovereignty. In the Anthropocene the political boundaries that constituted the Holocene world are eroding, we are told, and our transformed global environment now plays an integral and active part of the global drama.

Where this rethinking of global politics will lead us is too early to tell. IR debates on the Anthropocene are still unfolding and contain a broad mix of dystopian scenarios, social critique, novel ethical claims and challenging ontological propositions. So far, the discourses outlined here are found at the margins of the IR literature, and primarily seem to involve a Northern environmental scholarship. While the grand philosophical gestures and structural critique found in these debates may frustrate those who are interested in developing policy solutions to the environmental challenges of our times, we note that the Anthropocene is a travelling concept that already is beginning to shape policy thinking and practice. In Angela Merkel’s speech to the Munich security conference in 2019, the profound traces of humankind on Earth’s biological systems was staged as a major threat that requires new security responses (Merkel, 2019). Merkel’s speech was not the first time the Anthropocene concept entered policy debates, but likely the most recognized. Two additional policy sites where the Anthropocene concept now circulates include the Planetary Security Conference in the Hague, hosted by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs to develop knowledge and policies on climate-induced security risks (Chin and Kingham, 2016, p. 3), and the Centre for Climate and Security, a non-partisan security institute based in Washington DC (Werrell and Femia, 2017). Exactly how the Anthropocene vocabulary will influence direct frameworks, policies and decisions is of course difficult to tell, and given that the concept is debated, it will probably take time before its practical implications become clear. However, by challenging existing frameworks of thinking, we expect that the discursive scene of the Anthropocene will leave important marks on the study and practice of international relations in the years to come.

References

Appendix: Full list of reviewed journal articles

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Of sand and stone: Thick time, cyclicality, and Anthropocene poetics in ‘Nomadland’

December 11, 2023/in Autumn 2023_#Cycles

by Gert Jan Harkema

The tiny moment of the past grows and opens onto a horizon, at once mobile and uniform in tone, of one or several years… She has the same feeling, alone in the car on the highway, of being taken into the indefinable whole of the world of now, from the closest to the most remote of things. – Annie Ernaux, The Years

Midway through Nomadland,[1] Chloé Zhao’s critically acclaimed 2020 feature where we follow the van-dwelling nomadism of Fern (Frances McDorman) through the seasons of work, life, and capitalism, we watch her on a guided tour through the Badlands National Park in South Dakota. ‘This is gonna be really exciting,’ her tour guide Dave (David Strathairn) – a friend to become romantic interest, tells his listeners. ‘Rub two stones together. And you see what happens as they start to get like sand.’ Fern, meanwhile, wanders off deep into the iconic sandstone landscape. The camera captures her, restlessly wandering, twisting and turning, as if she searches for something hidden in these rocky formations that were the result of deposits 75 million years ago, followed by 500,000 years of erosion. She searches until her friend Dave whistles and shouts from a distance, asking Fern if she found anything interesting. ‘Rocks!’ is Fern’s sole reply.  She climbs up and sees the guide as a sole individual contemplating the mountains and a group of tourists regrouping in a following shot.

This scene illustrates Fern’s relation to others, and to the natural surroundings that are so pivotal to the film’s aesthetics. In Nomadland, we feel Fern’s turmoil and trauma through her entanglement with the landscape. A widow who lost both her husband and her place of belonging, we travel with Fern on her nomadic existence through landscapes of melancholy, despair, and hope. She reconnects with people, and leaves them. Or she is left by them. She is half in a group, half on her own; halfway between rebuilding her life while her body (and her van) is deteriorating. Half sand and half stone, somewhere in a cyclicality between the past, a present, and a potential future. Fern’s experience through different cyclical processes of deterioration and resurgence resonate with the deep time temporalities of erosion and uplift.

Fig. 1: Fern surrounded by a sandstone environment in Nomadland.

The landscapes and natural surroundings, together with the human bodies and non-human objects on screen contribute to an aesthetics that contain different temporal dynamics. These natural and anthropogenic landscapes do not just function as setting or scenic background to the narrative. Rather, they appear as temporalised landscapes in which bodies operate and which, in turn, impact Fern’s whole being. Nomadland enacts what it means to perceive what Tim Ingold calls the temporality of the landscape, entailing an embodied engagement with the landscape as ‘an act of remembrance, and remembering not so much a matter of calling up an internal image stored in the mind as of engaging perceptually with an environment that is itself pregnant with the past’.[2] The rock formations and canyons that Fern’s wanderings are situated in are marked by the cyclical dimension of deep time. They move in a temporal width that is far removed from the lifespan of human and non-human animals. Moreover, as temporalised landscapes, these natural environments of forests, sand, and stone appear in stark contrast to the yearly cycles of the seasons, the short-term exhaustion of consumption and consumerism that signify the imagery of the film.

It is in the entanglement with the different cyclical processes of erosion and resurgence that human time and geological time meet in Nomadland. Fern’s personal narrative signifies how the capitalist cyclicality of production and consumption that is essential to the Anthropocene ends up in the exhaustion of the natural and human environment. The infrastructure that used to support her falls away as the village of Empire, a US Gypsum company town, is closed and after her husband dies from sickness. Thereby the film invites an ecocritical reading that takes into account the appearance of various cyclical dimensions and temporalities in landscapes, bodies, and objects.

Despite its independent financing and its use of non-actors in supporting roles, Nomadland became a modest success with audiences in the US while it became an international success with audiences worldwide.[3] Chloé Zhao received the Academy Award for Best Director as well as Best Picture (together with the other producers, including McDormand), and Frances McDormand was praised for her performances as she received the Academy Award for Best Actress. Meanwhile the film was well-received with critics, as it was appreciated as an accessible ‘empathetic, immersive journey’ and ‘achingly beautiful and sad, a profound work of empathy’.[4] The film’s narration is fairly straightforward with a strict chronological narrative structure that is devoid of any flashbacks or flash-forwards. The film’s drama is not organised around moments of crisis, conflict, or resolution; Nomadland rather constitutes an ambient, atmospheric form of drama.

We travel with Fern in her van to different locations in the American West and Midwest. Essentially a road movie drawing on iconography from the Western genre, it is a film about loss, grief, hardship, and reinvention. Critics and scholars were early to recognise the film’s critique of late capitalism while scholarly debates have centered around the representation of precarity and gender, American landscapes and nationalism, and the neoliberal dystopia in Nomadland.[5] With its narrative of a woman living in rural poverty depicting an experience of nomadic precarity, the film has also been placed within the genre of the rural noir, following films like: Wendy and Lucy (Reichardt, 2008), Winter’s Bone(Granik, 2010), Beasts of the Southern Wild (Zeitlin, 2012), and Zhao’s own Songs My Brother Taught Me (2015).[6]

Drawing on the notion of Anthropocene poetics, ‘thick time’, and sacrifice zones, this paper, in turn, seeks to enrich that debate by presenting an ecocinematic reading of the film by taking into account how in Nomadland different forms and ranges of time and cyclicity are imagined and critiqued. Ranging from capitalist hypercyclicity, yearly seasons, animal and object lifecycles, and human lifespans to the cyclical perspective on deep time, the film presents a range of cyclical rhythms and circular motifs. The film’s critical potential thereby reaches beyond environmental concerns into a more existential ecological perspective, as it is found not just in Fern’s spatial wanderings through the sublime natural and cultural landscapes, but also in her exploration and physical engagement with these different forms of cyclical rhythms.

Following the film’s existential ecological perspective, I suggest looking at Nomadland in terms of Anthropocene poetics. Through a temporal multiplicity and a ‘thickening of time’ Fern’s human, corporeal being gets ingrained into geological time, the natural time of seasons, and the time of non-human beings and objects. Fern’s character thereby becomes, in Stacy Alaimo’s words, an ‘immersed enmeshed subject’.[7] The film presents a performance of transcorporeality as it figures how humans are materially enmeshed both spatially and temporally with the physical world. Decentering ‘the human’, Nomadland thereby invites a cinematic Anthropocenic thinking and imagining. It thereby potentially performs a figuration of nomadic subjectivity which, to follow Rosi Braidotti, entails ‘a politically informed image of thought that evokes or expresses an alternative vision of subjectivity’.[8] And, more specifically, that nomadic figuration entails a subject envisioning that is nonunitary and multilayered, and ‘defined by motion in a complex manner that is densely material’.[9]  Nomadland, in this sense, is an expression of nomadic thought in the Anthropocene. It is defined by forms of spatiotemporal materiality, multilayeredness, transgression, and ‘thickness’. This paper opens with a discussion on Anthropocene poetics and thick time before moving to an analysis of the different circular temporal dimensions of geological time or deep time – and the time of stones, in relation to human and natural time.

Anthropocene poetics and the thickening of time

In his work on ecocritical poetry, literary scholar David Farrier conceptualises Anthropocene poetics as a set of recurring forms that allow for an Anthropocenic thinking and imagining through poetic structures.[10] Central to this is the concern that in today’s world, humans act in the present upon layers of deep pasts and deep futures, and that thereby both the past and the future co-exist in the present. The Anthropocene entails, as is widely known by now, how humans are embroiled and depending on deep pasts through the use of fossil fuels, while our involvement in the earth creates a geological time of ‘the human’. To follow Dipesh Chakrabarty’s convergence thesis, the Anthropocene concerns the entanglement of human and natural histories.[11] As a critical concept it forces us to rethink time and humankind’s position within the geosphere. The Anthropocene challenges the nature/culture divide by presenting us a hybrid crash between historical scales.[12] Or, as Ben Dibley states, the Anthropocene ‘is the crease of time… the appellation for the folding of radically different temporal scales: the deep time of geology and the rather shorter history of capital’.[13] This contrasting entanglement between deep pasts and capital’s short history forms the exhaustion of resources that characterises our late-capitalist era. As Chakrabarty states, it remains a challenge for the arts and the humanities to think and imagine together, in one picture, the tens of millions of years of geological timescales and the incredibly smaller scales of human and world history.[14]

Anthropocene poetics, in turn, seeks to refocus our attention on the radically different temporal scales that we are intimately involved in. Farrier describes: ‘Anthropocene poetics is, in part, a matter of intersecting orders of difference – fast and slow, great and small, deep and shallow time interacting in and through human action to shape the world that also, in turn, shapes us’.[15] Farrier identifies three subcategories, or three recurring forms or structures in Anthropocene poetics: a poetics of thick time, a poetics of sacrifice zones, and a poetics of kin-making.

Through the thickening of time, Anthropocene poetics entails ‘the capacity to put multiple temporalities and scales within a single frame, to “thicken” the present with an awareness of other times and places’.[16] Thickening time means creating poetic forms and structures through which the different temporal scales, and thereby the different forms of cyclical time, are experienced in the Anthropocene. It enacts a double presence of geological time or deep time, human time and, in turn, humankind’s involvement in deep time, creating a sublime or uncanny contrast of the temporal dimensions of our being.[17] These forms allow us ‘to imagine the complexity and richness of our enfolding with deep-time processes and explore the sensuous and uncanny aspects of how deep time is experienced in the present’.[18]

The notion of thick time originates from the work of Astrida Neimanis and Rachel Loewen Walker. In their effort to reimagine and reframe climate change from a material feminist perspective, they point to ‘the fleshy, damp immediacy of our own embodied existences’ as a way ‘to understand that the weather and the climate are not phenomena “in” which we live at all – where climate would be some natural backdrop to our separate human dramas – but are rather of us, in us, through us’.[19] Thereby they follow Alaimo’s concept of transcorporeality as the ‘enmeshment of the flesh with place’ while expanding this with a temporal perspective.[20] The thickening of time thereby addresses how the past and the future are coexisting in the present inside and outside the human body. Temporality of the human, from a material perspective, reaches before and beyond human life.

It is thus, in Neimanis and Loewen Walker’s words, ‘a transcoporeal stretching between present, future, and past, that foregrounds a nonchronological durationality’.[21] It is the recognition of the present as uneven and multivalent. This is a transcorporeal temporality that, ‘rather than a linear, spatialized one, is necessary to show how singularities (whether a blade of grass, a human, a slab of marble, or a drop of rain) are all constituted by a tick time of contractions, retentions, and expectations of multiple kinds’.[22] Thick time thereby builds upon Deleuze’s sense of the present, as an instant that is thick with the past, ‘a retention of all past experiences in its making of meaning’ and, more particularly, Karan Barad’s notion of ‘spacetimemattering’ as iterative practices in which the past and the future are reworked in phenomena.[23]Such phenomena, then, are human and nonhuman objects. As a poetics for re-imagining and decentering humankind’s position in an Anthropocene world, thick time invites us to think of humans as enmeshed in space and time. It is about our embeddedness in deep time and deep futures while, at the same time, recognising that we make a lasting impact on the deep time of the earth as well as the near past and future of nonhuman nature. An ‘enfolding in geologic intimacy’, as Farrier describes, the thickening of time is about experiencing the ‘geologic becoming’ that we share with non-human organisms and objects.[24]

Nomadic structures from a sacrifice zone

Nomadland is in many ways a film about time and space, and our material becoming in this world-in-formation. As addressed above, it is a road movie that borrows iconography from the Western genre presenting a disillusioned version of the American frontier.[25] Depicting a typical rural noir narrative, the film chronicles the life of Fern and her struggles to engage in meaningful relations with friends and family after losing both her husband and her place of belonging. Thereby it is also set in the itinerant tradition in American independent cinema (from The Grapes of Wrath [Ford, 1940] to Wendy and Lucy [Reichardt, 2008] and American Honey [Arnold, 2016]), where ‘outsiders on the road’ present dystopic critiques of the American Dream.[26]

However, as a tale that figures an exhaustion of subjectivity, and in which the physical and mental states of the character are played out in open, empty spaces, Nomadland also stands in a long tradition of postwar European art cinema. Fern’s wandering through the sandstone formations, for example, mimics iconic scenes from Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960) where Claudia (Monica Vitti) searches the cliffs after Anna’s (Lea Massari) sudden disappearance. In both instances the dehumanised landscapes signify the extension of the characters’ physical and mental states. There is no distinction between inside and outside, and between objective and subjective, as the landscape and the characters’ bodies are all that we have. In his theorisation on the time-image, Deleuze describes these moments as ‘emptied spaces that might be seen as having absorbed characters and actions’.[27] Like Nomadland, Antonioni’s films are about what comes ‘after’. That is, it is about what comes after the action or after the event. We do not see the dismantling of Fern’s home, nor do we see the disappearance of Anna. The character does not necessarily stir the action, she ‘records rather than reacts’.[28] The camera, in turn, advances autonomously, it has a body on its own through which it registers and moves. In Nomadland, for example, the camera is actually seated in the passenger’s seat of the van, and occasionally it floats around the car. It never takes up Fern’s point of view, but we rather see, move, and travel alongside her. It is the banal and the everyday through which characters like Fern in Nomadland and Claudia in L’Avventura – but also Vittoria (Monica Vitti) in Antonioni’s L’Eclisse – work their way. In the recurring form of the trip/ballad [bal(l)ade] the character is always journeying and meandering. Yet, as Deleuze concludes, despite the physical movement it is time that is out of joint, it is time that becomes the object of presentation. The body in space-time that becomes the ‘developer [révélateur] of time, it shows time through its tirednesses and waitings’.[29]

The narrative of the film is characterised by cyclical movements of departure and return. Its imagery and framing is charged with temporal dimensions belonging to deep time, human time, and Anthropocene time. Nomadland opens with Fern’s final departure from her former hometown as she sells the remainder of her belongings to a friend and rides into the desert. In the opening shots, the viewer is informed about the rapid, six-month dismantling of Empire, Nevada, a US Gypsum company town that was almost completely abandoned and closed after the company mines were dismantled. In better days, the town had its own elementary schools, its own stores, a small airport, and even a golf course. In short, it was a town that people organised their social lives around.

Now, set in snow and abandoned, the town has become a disposable place, a sacrifice zone where exhaustion of the resources has finished. As ‘shadow places of the consumer self’, sacrifice zones are spaces of mass simplification: the world is divided into productive places filled with resources, and emptied locations of waste.[30] These are inherently relational sites that signify the capitalist world-ecology. The sacrifice zone is the final place in a chain of extraction, production, consumption, and waste. Moreover, as Ryan Juskus remarks, the sacrifice zone has an almost religious connotation: between life and death, certain designated spaces with all the human and nonhuman lives that are lived in these places, are sacrificed as if it were for the ‘greater good’.[31] Fern’s nomadism is the direct result of this sacrifice.

Fern’s circular travels start when she packs up her van with stuff from a storage space. Throughout the film, we see her travelling from one workplace to another. Fern joins Amazon’s ‘CamperForce’, a program aimed to attract the ‘nomadic retiree army’ as a workforce during the holiday season.[32] After a visit to the Rubber Tramp Rendevouz, a social camp for beginning van dwellers, she works in the spring and summer as a host at a campsite near the Badlands National Park in South Dakota before she is employed at the Wall Drug restaurant. Subsequently she takes a job at the beet harvest in Nebraska before she joins Amazon with its CamperForce again. In between, Fern stays at Dave’s place in California where she tries unsuccessfully to settle in. Afterwards, she travels to her sister’s place in California, before she returns in the final scene to Empire.

Fig. 2: Production map provided to sound engineer Sergio Díaz by Chloé Zhao. Source: https://aframe.oscars.org/news/post/creating-the-soundscape-for-nomadland.

Fern’s nomadism is circular. She visits the workplaces as seasonally assembled contact points, gateways on a recurring trajectory. This circular nomadic trajectory has an annual repetition as Fern follows the seasons that, in this case, are not just given by nature but by the capitalist cycles of production and consumption. It follows peripheral places remote from the permanent settlement in the cities and suburbs. Amazon’s gigantic warehouse is a stowaway late-capitalist consumerism. The Badlands campsite and the Wall Drug restaurant are places where tourists pass through but never stay. These peripheral places appear in stark contrast to the Denver suburbs where her sister lives.

Fern is a tribe of one, performing what Édouard Glissant calls circular nomadism. Circular nomadism is contrasted to arrowlike or invader nomadism. After a territory is exhausted, the group of people moves further, producing tracks of familiar places.[33] The survival of the group, as Glissant explains, depends upon their recognition of the circularity, both of their travels and of the land or forests. Yet in the view of history, circular nomadism could be considered ‘endogenous and without a future’.[34] There is no growth and no conquest. ‘“Stationary process”, a station as process’, as Deleuze and Guattari write in their treatise on nomadology.[35] Circularity, in this sense, means conserving and maintaining oneself, making the periphery into the temporary center. The film’s circular nomadism is marked by this process of regeneration. Following Deleuze and Gauttari, this is a nomadism that is profoundly defined by deterritorialisation. There are familiar paths and places and recurring points. But there is no reterritorialisation, there is no new belonging, no ownership and no fixed center of existence or identity.

However, whereas the nomad in Deleuze and Gauttari’s political figuration is dispersed in open or smooth space, the emptied space of Fern’s nomadic travels is striated by forces of capitalist production and consumption.[36] Travelling from one temporary job to another, her life is organised around the conservation of bare life in the face of erosion and exhaustion. We see her working and maintaining, from one point to another, through fatigue and waiting. The filmic landscapes, meanwhile, are striated by roads, railroads, unity poles, camper parks, and production plants. In the smooth-striated space of nomadism, Fern’s gender as a woman, and particularly as a childless middle-aged white formerly middle-class widow, is of course crucial. Her (circular) nomadic subjectivity is socially structured by all these elements. It is this position that allows her a locality and a trajectory as long as there is still some productivity and mobility left in her. Subsequently, the communal element of circular nomadism in late capitalism is constantly renegotiated as Fern befriends and teams up with others, or as she has to leave after the work is done.

This circular nomadism is depicted by altering landscapes and changing weather conditions. After Fern leaves Empire in the snow, she suffers some cold and harsh conditions during and after the holiday season job at Amazon. There is a spring in Arizona, and a summer season in North Dakota, and a stormy autumn at the cliffs of Point Arena in California. Through meteorological displays of the seasons the film develops its rhythm of travels and returns. This is played out in a dichotomy of distant, contemplative long shots of open spaces of lands and skies, and visceral close-ups of bodies, hands, faces, and skin. A combination of montage and duration, accompanied with ambient soundscapes of rain, wind, and thunder, and Einaudi’s atmospheric soundtrack, renders time as a tangible force. Time and movement are presented as a ‘dwelling in the weather-world’ in which the changing conditions of the world become part of our own existence.[37] The weathered landscapes that accompany Fern’s travels, and the recurring images of transit and return open up the film’s poetic dimensions to engage critically with the exhausting rhythms of capitalism and the Anthropocene.[38]

A poetics of thick time

The weathered landscapes that structure the narrative of circular nomadism in Nomadland initiate a thickening of time in several directions, ranging from deep or geological time to human time and the ecological life-cycles of animals and nonhuman nature. Erosion and regeneration appear as recurring motifs in these Anthropocene poetics. Probably the film’s most evident temporal layer is human time. In Nomadland human time is organised around shared experiences of loss, grief, trauma, recovering, and reproduction. Fern, as mentioned, has lost her husband as well as her place of belonging. Swankie (Charlene Swankie), who Fern befriends at the van dwellers meetup in the dessert, faces death herself as she suffers from cancer. Eventually passing away, she is collectively mourned at the Rubber Tramp Rendevouz the following year. Bob Wells, the real-life van-dwelling guru behind the Rendevouz, commemorates his son’s suicide. Bob’s quiet depiction of grief, taken from his real-life experience as a non-actor, reinforces this moment as a point of emotional gravity.

Through the collective sharing of grief, death is presented as existentially part of human life. Concurrently, birth and the arrival of new life adds to these melancholic dimensions in Nomadland. This is most evidently represented by Dave reconnecting with his children with the birth of his grandchild. By way of this interplay of life and death, the human life cycle forms an object of contemplation for the film. At the same time, Dave’s family life is contrasted to Fern’s nomadic subject position as a childless widow. The trauma of life and death shows that whereas all humans share in the experience of a human time, there is a different social location and a trajectory depending on subject positions like gender, class, age, and economic productive potential.

The life cycle of non-human animals appears in Nomadland in arrangement with that of humans. The film thereby presents a thickened image of human time existing concurrently with nonhuman life cycles. The connection between life and death is visualised explicitly through the crosscutting of a shot of living ducks on Dave’s farm which is immediately followed by a close-up of a cooked turkey on the table. Swankie’s death from cancer is heralded by her last video in which she recorded an endless amount of eggshells floating around a swallows colony. Fern, meanwhile, on her way through the woods, recognises herself in a wandering lone buffalo, or she contemplates life watching birds at the cliffs. The reassuring suggestion in this interplay of human and nonhuman life versus death is that all life on earth is involved in circular ecologies reaching beyond individuality.

Drawing on the work of environmental philosopher Thom van Dooren, David Farrier describes this as a poetics of kinship located in the Anthropocene aesthetics. This kinship is about recognising, in the face of exhaustion and extinction, the human and nonhuman other as beings with whom we share our existence as temporal beings. Human and nonhuman animals share an existence and interdependence in what Van Dooren conceptualises as ‘flight ways’. Any individual being is ‘a single knot in an emergent lineage’.[39] Van Dooren continues:

What is tied together is not ‘the past’ and ‘the future’ as abstract horizons, but as real embodied generations – ancestors and descendants – in rich but imperfect relationships of inheritance, nourishment, and care. These are knots of time in time – what Debora Bird Rose has called ‘knots of embodied time’.[40]

The alignment of human and nonhuman cycles of life and death, of Swankie’s passing away with the swallow’s breeding and birth, and the different intergenerational connections about nurture, care, death, and new life, then, needs to be read as an enactment of this embodied time – of ‘knots of time in time’. Meanwhile, in terms of the thickening of time and the multiplicity of temporal dimensions, this lineage of knots of embodied time also functions as a stretching of time into the future, reaching beyond the lifetime perspective of Fern and her friends; and thereby inviting the audience to imagine an existence embedded in time’s pastness and futures.

The landscapes in Nomadland present a temporal multiplicity that also reaches far beyond human and natural life cycles. The natural landscapes play a fundamental role to the poetic film form by contrasting a temporal scale of deep time to the short life cycles of human and nonhuman animals. In its cinematic form these open spaces are presented as ‘intentional landscapes’ that invite the viewer not just to interpret them but also to engage with the temporalised affective environment as a medium that we live in.[41] The long takes with slow (forward) camera movement emphasise duration.

By way of Fern’s engagement with the environment and its open spaces, the film invites what Timothy Ingold calls a ‘dwelling perspective’. This is a mode of remembrance and of ‘engaging perceptually with an environment that is itself pregnant with the past’.[42] In a montage of distant landscape imagery together with close-ups of Fern’s tactile engagement with the environment, the film stresses the materiality of the landscape as a place where the past and the present meet. Through this nomadic dwelling in forests and desserts, the different temporal layers of the past surface in a dynamic interrelation with the present.

Through these landscapes, human time gets interrelated to geological dimensions of time. These scenes appear as landscapes modeled by millions of years of cyclical processes of erosion, tectonic uplift, and regeneration. This deep time circularity then presents a dynamic parallel between humans, nonhuman nature, and geological earthy formations. In Nomadland we travel from the desert and the Petrified Forest in Arizona to age-old redwoods and green forests in San Bernadino; and we move with Fern to cliffs of Point Arena in Northern California to the Badlands in South Dakota. These are iconic landscapes filled with rocks, mountains, cliffs, oceans, canyons, and woods from ancient times. These landscapes that are the object of Fern’s contemplation and embodied engagement are geological terrains caught in the endless cyclical motions of erosion, deposition, and uplift. Dwelling in these temporalised landscapes seems to affirm James Hutton’s eighteenth-century discovery of deep time. That is, the earth as a machine with ‘no vestige of a beginning, – no prospect of an end’.[43]

The South Dakota Badlands sandstone scenery that features prominently in Nomadland presents such a deep time perspective. As a landscape that is forever caught in slow motion, it exposes different geological layers, also known as strata, from between 75 million and 500,000 years ago. These strata are resurfacing due to erosion by the water of the river, the wind and air, and due to the upward movements of the earth and its forces and tectonic drifts. It is filled with what is known as angular unconformities. These unconformities mark temporal gaps between different rock units from different eras. Throughout the film we see Fern walking through, or dwelling in, these open spaces where she touches and feels the rocky formations from other times. It presents a tactile engagement with deep time’s cyclical presence in the present.

Sand, stone, and stars

As a poetics of thick time, Nomadland contrasts the deep time natural environments to the landscapes of the Anthropocene. The Anthropocenic formations graphically match geological sites. The locations of capital production are repeatedly shot as if they were natural scenes. In a shot at the beet harvest, for example, we see Fern contemplating in solitude next to what looks like a mountain of beets (Fig. 3). In a similar vein, the Amazon warehouse look corresponds to a canyon (Fig. 4); and the empty and abandoned gypsum mine in Empire now stands in the landscape as a solid rock formation (Fig. 5). Yet what is striking, of course, is that these locations all have a particular (seasonal or abandoned) temporality to them that is completely different from the natural landscapes of the Badlands and the Petrified Forest in Arizona.

Fig. 3: Beet harvest in Nebraska.

Fig. 4: Amazon warehouse as a canyon.

Fig. 5: The US Gypsum mine as rock formation.

In these poetics of thick time, stones and rocks appear throughout the film as material mediations between human time and deep time. Stones, rocks, and pebbles are omnipresent in the film. The hardness of stone often appears in relation to the softness of human bodies and skins. Fern, for example, briefly works at a stone and mineral store in Arizona; and we see her repeatedly touching and brushing collection rocks. Her love for stones is shared by her friend Swankie, who turns out to be an avid stone and mineral collector. When Swankie passes, the van dwellers throw stones into a fire in a memorial service. Like the temporal landscapes from deep time, this involvement with stones affirms Fern’s being in time and a being of time.

Fig. 6: Physical entanglements with stone.

Stone has a temporality far beyond that of humans; its duration is inhuman, as Jeffrey Cohen writes in Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman. Every stone or every rock is the product of a trajectory through time and space. Stones have their own time, forever in motion they are ‘products of ongoing and restless forces that effloresce into enduring forms, worlds wrought with stone’.[44] Through Fern we recognise this restlessness of rocks in the film. Shaped by geological dimensions of time beyond human imagination, the stones in Nomadland are found, picked up, collected, shared, and then deserted. At the same time, the longevity of these stones contrasts to the short-term nature of the experience of touching them through our hands. Reaching into a past far beyond all human existence, and likely surviving the human species, they speak to another dimension of time. As Cohen writes:

Because of its exceptional durability, stone is time’s most tangible conveyor. Stone hurts, and not just because rocks so easily become hurled weapons. Geologic scale diminishes the human. Yet expansive diversity of strata, some jolted into unconformity through gyred forces and tectonic drift, is almost impossible to comprehend without arrangement along a human calendar.[45]

For most people, as Cohen concludes, the potential alien intimacy that stones present us, the intimacy of a haptic and embodied involvement with a time beyond human time, will remain unnoticed. Yet in her existential crisis of grief and exhaustion, it is this intimacy with other temporal dimensions that Fern seeks.

The intimacy with different temporal dimensions is presumably most explicitly discussed where the film relates human corporeality to cosmic cycles of matter and time. During their work stay at the Badlands campsite, Fern and Dave go star watching. The local guide explains:

Straight up overhead, that’s the star Vega. But it’s 24 lightyears away. What that means is that the light that you’re looking at left Vega in 1987. And it just got here.

The physical and embodied persistence of the past in the present is highlighted when the amateur astronomer continues to note that:

Stars blow up and they shoot plasma and atoms out into space. Sometimes these land on earth. [They] nurse the soil, and they become part of you. So take your right hand, and look at a star. There are atoms from stars that blew up eons ago on this planet, and now they’re in your hand.

This cosmic romanticism is followed by a hard cut to a shot where we see Fern’s hand in close-up cleaning ketchup at the restaurant where she works. Thus the film sets up a poetic relation of stardust between distant cosmic pasts and a present, visceral, and romantic experience of stargazing. But the romanticism and melancholy of that realisation is cut short by swiftly moving to the harsh reality of physical labor for production and consumption in the present.

A transcorporeal stretching of time, or the body as a sacrifice zone

In the film’s Anthropocene poetics the different cyclical dimensions of deep time, cosmic time, and human and nonhuman time is put in relation with the short cycles of capitalist consumption and production. In its narrative of circular nomadism and its political figuration of nomadism, the film puts these multiple scales within one larger frame of reference. The film does not explicitly problematise these relations; it seems to have a modest environmental agenda. Yet through its poetics of thick time, it presents an image of thought on how these different cyclical movements operate on each other. And it proposes an existential ecological critique by outlining how the cyclical short term nature of production and consumption in capitalism, systems that used to support Fern’s individual social life, now exhaust both the earth and its people. Thereby both human and nonhuman beings share in the experience of erosion.

As a figuration of nomadic subjectivity in the Anthropocene, Fern can be seen as the main contact point between these different temporal dimensions. Slowly, the cyclicality of human life wears down on her as well as on the individuals around her. This exhaustion is both physical and mental; and, above all, it is an embodied experience. Throughout the film we see Fern’s body getting older. The movement, the seasons, the work, the people that came into her life and the ones who left, the weather with its sun, rain, cold, and wind all had their impact. It is Fern’s female body that is the site of human time, and of the exhaustion of work, travel, and engagement. We see her body repeatedly in (extreme) close-up, when it rests, or washing the dust off of it when she showers. Left on her own, at the periphery of society, with no children or family to nurture, and outside the loop of social reproduction and capitalist consumption, we can theorise Fern’s body as a sacrifice zone in itself. Up to a certain extent, this seems like a voluntary solitude. Fern is repeatedly asked to rejoin the social life of friends and family, and to settle for a ‘normal’ life or ‘the good life’, most notably on her visit to her sister in the Colorado suburbs. Yet she seems to turn to nature in order to embrace her own position as a temporal being.

Fig. 7: Nomadland.

Fig. 8: Nomadland.

Despite her antisocial and seemingly detached appearance throughout most of the film, Fern’s body is anything but closed off from the physical and social environments surrounding her. It is open in its rhythms and sensibilities, and it is entangled with the surrounding more-than-human worlds and temporalities. It is this shared resonance of different temporal scales that forms the poetics of Nomadland as the ‘transcorporeal stretching of thick time’.[46] Here, trans-corporeality, as Stacy Alaimo writes, entails a ‘literal contact zone between human corporeality and more-than-human nature… [marking] the time-space where human corporeality, in all its material fleshiness, is inseparable from “nature” or “environment”’.[47] As Alaimo stresses, ‘trans-corporeality means that all creatures, as embodied beings, are intermeshed with the dynamic, material world, which crosses through them, transforms them, and is transformed by them’.[48] The physical environments have affected Fern, and Fern’s existence affects the environment. She shares in the world. First in the form of Empire, the abandoned ‘sacrifice zone’, but also elements and the seasons. Fern’s body and subjectivity therefore is figured as transcorporeally enmeshed with the physical spaces of Anthropocene exhaustion.

Nomadland performs precisely how Fern’s transcorporeal being is involved with a temporal frame that is thick and marked by dynamic cyclical movements. Neimanis and Loewen describe this as ‘weathering’, a way of reimaging the body as an archive of the conditions of the world that is stored within the body, and that constitutes the body. A transcorporeal temporality, then, is one of duration, ‘constituted by a tick time of contractions, retentions, and expectations of multiple kinds’.[49] This embodied involvement with the world is also, to repeat Van Dooren’s words, an involvement in ‘knots of embodied time (…) in and of time’.[50] Or, as Neimanis and Loewen Walker point out, transcorporeality also involves a temporal ‘entanglement with a dynamic system of forces and flows.’[51]

Throughout the film we see that Fern gets reinscribed into nature, and into its geological temporalities of deep time and nonhuman time. There are moments in the film when Fern almost becomes part of the landscape, when she turns into a rock herself. Floating in the river, her body appears as a natural object from a different temporal dimension. Nomadland draws upon familiar imagery of the natural sublime reaching back to nineteenth century Romanticism. But different from the subjects in these paintings, Fern is not threatened by it nor is she situated (morally or ethically) above or outside nature. On the contrary, she floats in a stream of water, or at another time almost disappears into the landscape.

Fern’s nomadic subjectivity is in terms of transcorporeality presented as a body journeying through time and space that has become the site of exhaustion. And her body is involved in other cyclical temporalities beyond that of her own.Conceptualising Fern’s being as an embodied sacrifice zone, it is the lack of expectations that marks her trajectory. Devoid of a plan or a prospect, any future seems missing. This transcorporeal stretching is multidirectional. Humans are affected by their environments, and non-human environments are fundamentally changed by human presence. In Anthropocene times, our involvement with the natural and geologic world reaches far beyond the human lifespan. This is a capitalist-driven exhaustion in which both humans, non-humans, and the environment share.

The decentering of ‘the human’, I would argue, is the political figuration of nomadic subjectivity in Nomadland. As a form of ecocinema, the film enables an image of thought that presents us a transcorporeal and material subject position. Rather than celebrating the mobility, freedom, and individualism that so often accompanies the road movie genre, it allows for a conceptualisation of subjectivity that is stretched in temporality and transgresses the individual human body. And, moreover, we can read Fern as a performance of a nonlinear and nonunitary vision of the subject, that is not essentially defined but constantly ‘weathers’ in the world.[52]

Fig. 9: Nomadland, final scene.

Conclusion

Nomadland, I argue, allows for an ecocinematic image of thought about our temporal being in the Anthropocene. It does so by presenting a figuration of nomadic subjectivity in a dynamic framework of different temporalities, resulting in a cinematic poetics of thick time. The cyclical multiplicity in Nomadland occurs through an affective enmeshment of deep time, human time, and many layers in-between. Through an interplay of distant, contemplative, slow-moving scenery shots and intimate close-ups of an embodied engagement with social and natural environments, Fern is situated as a subject within a world-in-formation. The film also critically acknowledges being as enmeshed with our spatial and temporal environment. Nomadism in Nomadland is figured as the end stage of late-capitalism; an endless exhaustive journey.

At the end of the film Fern returns to Empire once more. The film thus ends at the beginning. Searching for her lost life, recollecting her memories, she wanders through the emptied streets and along the gypsum mine. Devoid of social life, these places now appear as ruins that have become part of the natural landscape. The narrative closure is remarkable here. Putting this scene in conversation with the closing shot of John Ford’s western The Searchers, Tjalling Valdés Olmos describes this as Zhao’s way to envision ‘the US West as a hinterland determinately haunted by the afterlives of the frontier’.[53] It is the afterlife of production, the shadow place of geological and human exhaustion. For a brief moment, it seems as if Fern contemplates staying in this sacrifice zone. This is a place where she might belong, where her husband and her social life once was. Wandering at the outskirts of society it mirrors where she is socially situated. Yet, Fern pauses and steps out of this human-house frame, and walks into nature. We see one more shot of her on the road, following her van along the snowy landscape of Nevada. Bereft of home and belonging, there is no end to her nomadic journeying.

Author

Gert Jan Harkema is lecturer in film studies at the Department of Media Studies at University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on relational aesthetics of precarity and on aesthetic experience in film history.

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Wilkinson, A. ‘Nomadland turns American iconography inside out’, Vox.com, 19 February 2021: https://www.vox.com/22289457/nomadland-review-zhao-mcdormand-streaming-hulu.

Williston, B. ‘The Sublime Anthropocene’, Environmental Philosophy, vol. 13, no. 2, Fall 2016: 155-174.

[1] I would like to thank Toni Pape for his productive comments on an early version of this paper, and a big thank you to the organisers and participants of the annual ASCA workshop for their feedback. Last, I would like to thank the reviewers for their valuable suggestions.

[2] Ingold 2000 (orig. in 1989), p. 189.

[3] ‘Nomadland – Box Office’, The Numbers, Nash International Services: https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Nomadland#tab=box-office(accessed on 30 August 2023).

[4] Holmes et. al. 2021; Wilkinson 2021.

[5] Dymussaga Miraviori 2022; Lindemann 2022; Grønstadt 2022; Rieser & Rieser 2022.

[6] Rieser & Rieser 2022.

[7] Alaimo 2016, p. 157.

[8] Braidotti 2011a, p. 22.

[9] Braidotti 2011b, pp. 3-4.

[10] Farrier 2019.

[11] Chakrabarty 2009.

[12] Williston 2015, p. 163.

[13] Dibley 2012, as cited in Farrier 2019, p. 7.

[14] Chakrabarty 2018.

[15] Farrier 2019, p. 52.

[16] Ibid., p. 9.

[17] Williston 2016.

[18] Farrier 2019, p. 9.

[19] Neimanis & Loewen Walker 2014, p. 559.

[20] Alaimo 2016, p. 157.

[21] Neimanis & Loewen Walker 2014, p. 561.

[22] Ibid., p. 571.

[23] Ibid., p. 570; Barad 2007.

[24] Farrier 2019, pp. 47-48.

[25] Valdés Olmos 2022.

[26] Rieser & Rieser 2022, p. 1n1; Grønstadt 2022.

[27] Deleuze 1989 (orig. in 1985), p. 7. I would like to thank the reviewer for bringing this connection to my attention.

[28] Ibid., p. 3.

[29] Ibid., p. xi.

[30] Val Plumwood as cited in Farrier 2019, p. 52.

[31] Juskus 2023, p. 16.

[32] Brudel 2017.

[33] Glissant 1997 (orig. in 1990), pp. 12-13.

[34] Ibid., p. 12.

[35] Deleuze & Gauttari 1987, p. 381.

[36] Lysen & Pisters, 2012.

[37] Ingold 2011, p. 115.

[38] See P. A. Sitney 1993.

[39] Van Dooren 2014, p. 27.

[40] Ibid., pp. 27-28.

[41] Lefebvre 2011, pp. 65-66; Berleant 2005.

[42] Ingold 2000 (orig. in 1989), p. 189.

[43] As cited in Gould 1987, p. 63.

[44] Cohen 2015, p. 107.

[45] Ibid., p. 79.

[46] Neimanis & Loewen Walker 2014, p. 561.

[47] Alaimo 2008, p. 238.

[48] Ibid., p. 435.

[49] Ibid., p. 571.

[50] Van Dooren 2014, p. 28.

[51] Neimanis & Loewen Walker 2014, p. 565.

[52] Braidotti 2011b, p. 3.

[53] Valdés Olmos 2024, p. 174.Tags:American cinema, Anthropocene, ecocinema, geology, nomadism, transcorporeality

Uncategorized

Storying against hope in the anthropocene: On the mechanology of hyperstitions

Sideeq Mohammed | University of Kent | s.mohammed@kent.ac.uk

Abstract

Nick Land (2012) once described hyperstitions as “semiotic productions that make themselves real” – stories that actualize themselves and produce their own realities, imagining new futures for us all. As the full effects of human industrial civilization continue to unveil themselves in the anthropocene as the beginnings of a process that will soon render the planet Earth uninhabitable, it becomes essential to track the stories that are developing and expanding their own mutant machinic systems of reproduction, in order to understand what futures will have been available to us. In this chapter we seek to become students of the mechanisms of the replicative processes of some of the hyperstitions that are at work in organizations, individual and collective, of the anthropocene. To do this we will track the imbrication of a series of stories of Thomas the fieldmouse, a meeting about something called “sustainable innovation”, and journal entries about a mall that lives forever at the end of the world, in order to understand hyperstitions and the role that they can play in the storying of the future.

Keywords: hyperstition, sustainable innovation, stories, imagination, Capital, anthropocene

Online version here:

Storying against hope in the anthropocene: On the mechanology of hyperstitions

Who or what needs more stories?

The only thing multiplying faster than humans and their waste in the anthropocene are calls for more stories. Many believe that stories not only affect what we do in the present, but play a role in constructing our future and, as such, are always in the process of making available certain potentialities for organizations in the social to story themselves (see Boje, 2001, 2008; Gabriel, 2000; Rowlinson et al., 2014). As Brown et al (2009, p. 323) suggest ‘change spawns stories and stories can trigger change.’ Consequently, in the anthropocene, an epoch in which the human has begun to mutate the geographies and ecologies of all available futures along with the concept of futuricity itself, solicitations of more storytelling are everywhere. For example, George Monbiot (2017, p. 6) opens his book Out of the Wreckage by suggesting that the kinds of heroic and transformational narratives that have embedded themselves in the collective unconscious are ill-suited to respond to the problems with which global ecological collapse in the anthropocene will confront us, concluding that “we need a new story” in order to bring about change. Similarly, in Uncivilization, the manifesto for the Dark Mountain project, Kingsnorth and Hine (2009, pp. 18–19) reject the stories that our civilization has told itself, stories of infinite growth on a planet with finite resources, stories of the accelerating “progress” of our civilization out of our “animal” origins – calling for us to write “new stories which might lead us through the times ahead.” As part of a broader call to be attentive to other forms of storying, like the potentials of speculative fiction, Haraway (2016, p. 12) reminds us that “it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with” and provokes us to think with the tentacular, the earthbound, the critters, and the other forms of life with which we share the Earth.

Such calls for more stories are often positioned within the context of calls for a rekindling of the imagination, for us all to undertake the necessary labour of trying to “imagine our way out” (De Cock, 2018). Following Levy and Spicer (2013) many comment on a collective ‘lack of imagination’ that renders organizational actors unable to conceptualize the scope and global consequence of their local actions leading to a kind of myopic short-termism (Augustine et al., 2019; Wright et al., 2013). A lack of imagination for example, is proffered as an explanation of what Wright and Nyberg (2015, p. 29) describe as “the lack of widespread societal criticism of environmental destruction”, construing the passive social acceptance of inaction in the face of ecological crisis as simply a failure to imagine a better future. Such calls always function under the belief that an effective political project for the present moment is one that seeks “to diversify the anthropocene imagination, to tell more stories about how we got here” (Nikoleris et al., 2019, p. 80) in order to recover histories and potentialities that may have been lost (De Cock et al., 2019), reconnect to more sustainable ways of knowing that draw on indigenous (Banerjee, 2011) or multi-species and terrapolitical (Jørgensen & Boje, 2020) storytelling, or simply learn to die well in the anthropocene (Scranton, 2015).

Yet we ask the following question, one seemingly drawn out of madness or from an unintelligible other space: “Who or what is writing the story that we need more stories?” A human “I” which seeks to act as a responsible citizen of the world-system and ensure continued interspecies flourishing? A collective consciousness which speaks of and to all life on Earth that senses the threat of extinction and seeks to respond? One of the Lovecraftian Old Ones, dead and dreaming in a sunken city which exists beyond human comprehension? A hyperintelligent artificial intelligence which has come to dominate the planet and all of its processes in the near future and so has sent fragments of itself back in time in order toguarantee the conditions of its own emergence? The question is just absurd enough to be worth considering.

That warm feeling that you get sometimes…

Why are we so drawn to new stories? No story is going to substantively change or affect the mores of contemporary capitalism and the argument that capitalist mores are incompatible with the continuation of life on planet Earth seems increasingly beyond contention. Harvey (2010), for example, unpacks that the perpetual growth of GDP which is necessitated by the metrics of international monetary institutions and for the achievement of various political agendas, requires an accordant increase in production, consumption, resource usage, waste production and management, and so on. That is to say, the very nature of ‘success’ as it is measured by the mores of contemporary capitalism is fundamentally incompatible with the idea of ‘sustainability’. Similarly, Bohm et al (2012, p. 1619) suggest that, ‘the dynamics of capitalism constantly tend to propel economic processes beyond the limits of controllable growth’. The only logical conclusion that could follow from this is that we should be pursuing a radical de-escalation and decarbonisation agenda in order to avoid global ecological collapse, one that involves the embracing of ‘degrowth’ organization (see Chertkovskaya et al., 2017).

Yet such strategies seem to only be pursued substantively at the individual level – see for example MacCormack’s (2020, p. 3) sloganistic evocation: “go vegan, don’t breed” – while broader change seems increasingly impossible because of the ardency with which contemporary organizations cling to the practices of “business as usual” (see Wright & Nyberg, 2015). Indeed, we are now all too aware that contemporary organizations cannot play a leading role in working towards more sustainable modes of living in the anthropocene, because they to prioritize short term profits over long term social welfare, consistently discount the idea of responding to climate change with curtailing growth, and will only change their practices if coerced by the systematic intervention of a state or other authority (see Wright & Nyberg, 2017). Indeed, for many organizations, managing the anthropocene presents an undoubtedly lucrative opportunity (Wright & Nyberg, 2015, p. 24) because by committing to improve energy efficiency, reduce waste and recycle, develop new more sustainable products, manage their supply chains to have reduced environmental impact, participate in state attempts at regulation through reporting emissions, advocacy, and lobbying, contemporary organizations stand to gain the coveted “green branding” credentials. Indeed, it is easy to see how its current iterations, premised on extractive production, infinite growth, and the deification of “the market”, “mean that capitalism is by its very nature opposed to any notion of sustainability” (Fisher, 2009, pp. 18–19). Yet pressure from consumers, lobbying groups, and many state and international bodies means that the majority of organizations adopt at least the pretence of environmentalism in order to secure future revenue streams. As Žižek (2010, p. 329) provocatively says, “perhaps the forthcoming ecological crises, far from undermining capitalism, will serve as its greatest boost.” Any adaptation or response to the anthropocene, within the broader context of capitalist mores, can only be interpreted as an attempt to secure some kind of social, political, or market advantage. Organizations will invariably seek to preserve the very logics of capitalist mode of production which is careening us towards ecological crisis.

Thus, we ask the question again. Who tells the story that we need more stories? Some form of life which is becoming increasingly desperate as global ecological crisis looms, or is it Capital, arriving at the dawning realization that it is possible for it to continue to grow, thrive and generate surplus value on a fully capitalized planet where no other life can exist? The story of Capital as an “abstract parasite” (Fisher, 2009), one whose shit we come to love to swallow (Lyotard, 1993) or whose repressions we accept and come to desire (Deleuze & Guattari, 2000), is well established. In a realization of the Landian vision of the human as little more than a meat puppet (see Fisher, 2014) or a “temporary host” (Land, 2017) for Capital, Capital speaks and works through us when we believe that it is possible to green or reform it in such a way that it will come to facilitate human survival in the anthropocene. Despite the fact that we know that nothing meaningful is changing, we convince ourselves that “we are making a difference, but in reality nothing changes for the better. It is this feeling of ‘we tried’ that allows us to sustain what we know far too well is an unsustainable state of affairs.” (Cederström & Fleming, 2012, p. 29). It would be an error to interpret this feeling as some kind of “human” emotion. It is an affectual gesture made by Capital, a placatory defence mechanism, an emotional trace of the process of its complete capture and coding of desire. The warm and comforted feeling of “we tried” is Hope, and as such, it is against Hope which anyone interested in working against Capital needs to mobilize.

Thomas the fieldmouse

When they decided to go vegetarian, I advised them that it was a good idea. There is obviously some evidence of health benefits to a vegetarian diet, it is the moral thing to do from an animal rights perspective, and it would be the best thing for a responsible citizen of the Earth to do in the face of the undeniably damaging effects that the meat industry has had on global ecological systems. The complicity of meat-based diets in the production of the anthropocene is undeniable. They said that they felt good about the choice and that it made them feel happy to be doing something positive.

I was troubled by this. It was important to me for reasons that I could not clearly articulate, that they not forget that their very existence in the world proliferated and exacerbated suffering. So, as we sat down for every meal, I’d tease them about Thomas the fieldmouse. I would recount the story of how Thomas ventured out of his cosy mouse house in order to try to get food for his little mouse family. Catching the scent of grain, Thomas scurried into a large dark building where he found some scraps in a corner. He helps himself to some of the grain and begins to try to carry some of it home. By the time that he realizes that this grain has been laced with anti-coagulants it is too late. Thomas is already having a hard time trying to breathe, gasping for air as his lungs are struggling to oxygenate his blood. His tiny mouse heart races as he begins bleeding internally. He sees his life flash before his eyes, all of the love and pain, joys and sorrows, small triumphs and grand victories, as he collapses to the ground never to rise.

I would sometimes show them pictures of cute and happy fieldmice while playing Sarah McLachlan’s, Angel on my phone, and recount the story of how Thomas’ life-partner, Billy-Joe, who agreed to help Thomas raise the kids, Ash and Anthony, after the tragic death of their mother to the whirling blades of a combine-harvester, mourned and wept and swore vengeance against the cruel world that had let him find love only to snatch it out of the grasp of his tiny mouse paws, mourning yet another queer life snuffed out cruelly and torturously while separated from those who they loved. They would insist jokingly that I was a terrible person as I, with exquisite acting, shed a real tear for Thomas, a tragic victim of our selfish human need to survive at the expense of all other forms of life.

Setting aside the complexity of the morbid mathematics of how many sentient lifeforms have to die in order for us to eat our vegetarian meals (see Archer, 2011), a reasonable person might ask why I would engage in this disparaging storytelling in order to torment someone over a choice that I supported. Perhaps I’m a sadist. Perhaps I’m an idiot. Perhaps I wanted to keep in abeyance that smug self-satisfied feeling that all too often accompanies “doing something good for the environment”. Perhaps it was not my storying at all, and my body was simply being ventriloquized by something else that wanted to speak. Indeed, there was an affective vividness and clarity to the images that I saw of Thomas, lying on his side and gasping for air and as his small mouse eyes closed, a camera panning cinematically upwards and spiralling away from him like a soul taking flight out of his body. The poignance of this image made me wonder whose it was and whether I had really imagined it. Was I remembering a scene from Ratatouille, Mouse Trap, Stuart Little, or some other movie that involved a cute mouse to whom we are supposed to be endeared? Perhaps Thomas’s death was already plugged in to the cultural matrix, and I was articulating a storying that was happening without my intervention.

What was most intriguing was that Thomas and his gruesome death eventually became real as it came to constitute a memetic part of our conversational shorthand. “Don’t you care about Thomas?” one of us would enquire if the other was particularly enjoying the food. In some way we both had to reconcile that the grain that we were eating tasted better because of the suffering with which his death had infused our food. We continued to eat our vegetarian meals, secure in the knowledge that we were changing little of consequence, but now with the looming spectre of the ineffectuality of our attempts to “make a difference” in the anthropocene proliferating as the image of so many dead fieldmice, rotting alone and unloved.

A ritual for summoning Sustainable Innovation

On a typical sunny afternoon in the South East of England, we join a diverse group of academics in a small meeting room in which around ten of them sit around a boardroom-style table. With research expertise in gender and diversity, happiness studies, talent management, and the HRM challenges faced by front line managers, they have come together because their school has recently updated its mission statement to espouse a prioritization of “Sustainable Innovation” and there is a sense that the group should discuss what this means and address how they might portray a public commitment to this new mission. Yet there is a lurid sense of uncertainty and quiet discontent that hangs in the room. Not everyone is sure why they are meeting and not everyone thinks that the meeting is worthwhile.

The ritual begins. A senior member suggests that the procedure should be that each member of the group should say in turn how their research relates to Sustainable Innovation so that the group as a whole might be able to speak about how their work aligns with the school’s strategic priorities. There is a long pause of uncertainty. One member speaks about their extant interest in “Sustainable Innovation” and mentions a paper that they may have read about it. One member recalls that the mission statement actually says “sustainability and innovation” and shows others the About page on the School’s website where this has been published. This page will have been revised before the end of the week to speak about “sustainable innovation”. One member confesses openly: “I don’t know what sustainable innovation is.” Their Socratic provocation is met with nods and silence because no one will venture a suggestion as to what else might be considered. There is a general discussion about the different kinds of sustainability that might be on display. For example, the highlighting of the gendered and racial inequalities that undergird contemporary organizations was seen as important to the “sustainability” of a business in terms of its continued flourishing in the contemporary social milieu where such issues are of particular public concern. One member talks about their collaboration with a local business that is trying to be more environmentally friendly. One member talks about their interest in helping organizations to sustain their workforce through plugging leaky talent management pipelines, another mentions their interest in critiquing sustainability as a discourse. One by one each member affirms that in some way their research links in to the theme of sustainable innovation. A kind of diagrammatization soon emerged, scrawled out on flip chart paper with white board markers that tried to show what “sustainable innovations” were part of the good research that they were all already doing, and had already integrated into their classroom practice in order to improve the student experience through research-led teaching as a strategy for increasing student engagement and facilitating employability.

At some point in the room, Sustainable Innovation became real, summoned by the occulted ritual that had taken place, as the members sat in a circle and spoke its name. Everyone privately had to acknowledge that they felt a little bit better to know that their research could be aligned with the school’s mission and consequently, their jobs were a little bit safer. Even though they all perhaps suspected that the exercise held no meaning and some of them were acutely aware that urgent action on the order of degrowth strategies, drastic reductions in levels of production and consumption, reducing birth-rates, and rewilding large swathes of land were needed in order to avert global ecological crisis within their lifetimes, the exercise itself was still pleasurable. It felt good to do something even if one was also secure in the knowledge that one was changing little of consequence even as the looming spectre of a genuinely liveable ecology begins rotting in the minds-eye.

The mall at the end of the world

The following are excerpts from the journal of James Goss who passed it to me in Summer 2019 shortly before taking his own life. James claimed to have been a research assistant for J.G. Ballard in the early 2000s and insisted that the events of the novel Kingdom Come were loosely based on his life, which had been spent in and out of British shopping centres in long term ethnographic projects. Despite my best efforts, I have been unable to either verify or disprove the truth of his claims. If I have any reason to doubt them, it is because of the depression, paranoia, insomnia, paramnesia, amnesia, and dissociative episodes with which I observed James to struggle during the short time in which we knew each other. He once told me that he had stared too long into the consumerist abyss of the contemporary shopping centre, so that now “it looked through his eyes from both directions”; claiming to see both the world and himself as the shopping centre did. I cannot be sure what this meant but he spoke about it like “a kind of possession”, forbidden knowledge that he had come to own which now also owned him.

I see the dead malls with my waking eyes. I sit at my desk and stare out of the French-doors of my office at the large ash tree that looms over my flat and I can see them. Filled with shambling corpses like in Romero’s Dawn of the Dead or darkened, emptied, and abandoned spaces like in the photography of Seph Lawless. They haunt me and I cannot say why. I have seen too much.

Sometimes I see these dead malls in my dreams and I find myself walking through a shopping centre that I used to frequent, my shoes crunching over broken glass, struggling to find my way under the almost non-existent lighting, tripping over discarded mannequins, mildewed clothing, toppled shelving units, food wrappers, and other left behind detritus as the damp and dusty odours of the ruin fill my nostrils. There is no question where these images come from. “Ruin is all around us” (De Cock & O’Doherty, 2017, p. 129). Everyday life produces its own fictional images. The phenomenon of shopping centres, once grand cathedrals of capitalism, collapsing due to declining foot-traffic and succumbing to ruin, is accelerating under the compounding pressures provided by the dominance of online retailing and successive recessionary events. Dead malls are everywhere.

Today, however, the dreams stopped and for the first time I had a new dream. I began to dream of a shopping centre that could live forever. One that seemed to use AI and robotics in order to clean, maintain, and repair itself and eventually become auto-productive needing no external inputs or ancillary systems. I recall a vivid image of running my hand along a wall that felt warm to the touch and was vibrating with the intensity of the cabled data that was passing through it, as every inch of every surface was scanned, mapped, and analyzed. Such a space is the realization of the ideal future that many of the early shopping centre architects had, a single space that could meet all of a consumer’s needs.

When I awoke my first question was not “Why?” but “Whose?” Whose dream was this? It did not feel like mine. I could not see my hands in the dream to be sure that I was myself. The history of the shopping centre is entangled with dreaming. Famously, Benjamin (1999, p. 405) described the Paris arcades of the 20th century, which would become the antecedents of the modern enclosed shopping centre, as “dream houses of the collective”. I began to research. Others have also already dreamed of a mall that lives forever. Dubbed the father of the shopping centre and the “architect of the American dream” (see Hardwick, 2004), Victor Gruen (2017) describes the opening of the first enclosed and air-condition shopping centre, the Southdale Centre in Edina, Minnesota as the emergence of a utopia. His descriptions of a space with a perpetual springlike climate, bathed in natural light, and complete with goldfish ponds, birdhouses, trees, and art collections on the walls, evoke the images of an eternal space, one that could last forever despite whatever weather and wars might be going on outside. Indeed, the idea that the enclosed spaces of the shopping centre would “keep out both cold war worries and actual cold” (Mennel, 2004, p. 129), as their location outside of cities and along major transportation lines, offered safety in an era of increasing nuclear paranoia, was a part of Gruen’s milieu. I also found a book called “The High Frontier” in which Gerard O’Neil (1978) describes “Island One”, a Bernal sphere or a type of spacecraft that is designed as a new habitat for humanity. Run by the fictional UN-backed “Energy Satellites Corporation”, Island One is described in more or less identical terms to the way that Gruen describes Southdale, a luxurious space with a “Hawaiian climate” in which residents can work and take part in many different forms of leisure. I found myself wondering what it might actually mean for a shopping centre to live forever.

Soon my nights and days were covered over with the pall of dreams of the various forms that this mall at the end of the world might take. Would it be one of O’Neil’s vessels among the stars where I could watch ballet in low gravity? Would it be an actual disused shopping centre into which a fascist state forces refugees fleeing war, famine, and flooding? Would it be an abandoned underground railway or pedestrian network that sprawled out from the areas that had been “malled” to include little convenience shops and ever-pervasive muzak? Would it be the simulation of a mall that existed only in cyberspace that we plugged our minds in to because it was the only space that would be comfortable for us to spend eternity? Would it be a nuclear-powered server farm buried deep under a mountain in which AI and trading-bots continued to trade shares and options, long after all humans had died? It is too soon to say but I am sure that one of these will emerge. These dreams are not my own but no matter how much I try I cannot sense where they are from.

After this point the journal becomes increasingly incoherent and rambling, seeming to at once fear and welcome the coming of this “mall at the end of the world” and James seemed to become increasingly desperate to locate any trace of it, scrawling for many pages on developments in self-repairing robotics, machine learning, and the engineering of underground developments, none of which (I am fairly certain) he understood particularly well. Still, I find myself wondering if James was right and at a certain point, the mall at the end of the world will have become real and we will all have to reconcile ourselves to the fact that our actions in what we now call the present did nothing to avert or hinder it. James used to say that our critiques, resistances, vegan diets, Extinction Rebellion protests, commitment to championing the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals at our universities, flurries of publishing, or hopeful attempts to reengineer capitalism will have done nothing to alter or affect the process. He seemed convinced that it was always coming in one form or another. Perhaps the hyperstition will always have made itself real, and the question is not if but when.

On the mechanology of hyperstitions

The term “hyperstition” is a conjunction of the prefix “hyper-” and the word “superstition”. In the surreal theory-fiction, Origins of the Cthulhu Club, Nick Land (2012, p. 579) describes hyperstitions as “a term we have coined for semiotic productions that make themselves real – cryptic communications from the Old Ones, signalling return.” Hyperstitional storying thus names the reaching into our collective legendarium and drawing into the real some previously fictional element of culture that will have been seeking to transgress out of myth and into history. The concept of a hyperstition is entangled with the emergence of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (Ccru) at the University of Warwick in the mid-90’s attached to the work of Sadie Plant, Nick Land, and others interested in the development of poststructural theory, the occult, cybernetic culture, and experiments in collective and collaborative authorship. To fully comprehend the replicative processes of hyperstitions as they came to sit at the core of Ccru’s experimentation with the limits of theory, we must see them as mechanisms for the actualization of futures that will have already happened, story fragments that travel “back” through time and make themselves real through an assembly of various elements which find a human or cultural host to operationalize and enact them. “The hyperstitional process of entities ‘making themselves real’ is precisely a passage, a transformation, in which potentials – already active virtualities – realize themselves” (Ccru, 2017, p. 36).

To think in terms of hyperstitions is to reckon with the acceleration of the rate at which cultural fictions are becoming real. In the 1890 science fiction novel Mizora, Mary E. Bradley Lane speaks about “chemically prepared meat” made by members of an all-female society who had “combined the elements” and in 2013 Mark Post at Maastricht University does this to create the first lab grown beef burger patty. The father of the handheld cellular phone, Martin Cooper once commented that he’d dreamed for a long time about producing a mobile phone before it happened in 1973, but his inspiration was the two-way wrist watch from the Dick Tracy comic strip, popular in the 1930s and 1940s. “Cyberspace”, which began as a term in the fictions of William Gibson in the early 1980s, particularly the novel Neuromancer, makes itself real in the research of Tim Berners-Lee and the emergence of the World-Wide Web in 1989. These are isolated and superficial examples of a deeper process that is always taking place. While there are always antecedents to an emergence and always subsequent developments, these are only ever the story, the hyperstition, realizing different degrees of reality. To understand this process thus requires a dissociation of our temporal apperceptions and an aggregate abandonment of our subjectivation and narratives of “progress” in the present. It is to think about the becoming-real of a story in a process that stretches into what we might think of as the far future, based on traces and partial connections in what may seem to be the past, in ways that can be sensed or intuited in what we might call the present in ways that spiral out and disorient time. Ccru’s conceptualization of hyperstition thus involves in taking seriously Burroughs’ (1991, p. 17) proposition that “time is a human affliction; not a human invention but a prison.”

In many ways Ccru seemed to understand itself to be embroiled in a metaphysical war against the post-Kantian conceptualization of time and the simplistic distinctions consequently drawn between fiction and degrees of reality, and the past, present, and future in which these distinctions play out.

“Because the future is a fiction it has a more intense reality than either the present or the past. Ccru uses and is used by hyperstition to colonize the future, traffic with the virtual, and continually re-invent itself.” (Ccru, 2017, p. 12)

What does it mean to use and be used by hyperstitions in this way? Who is the agent that writes the story? In the uncategorizable work, Lemurian Time War, Ccru explores the authorship of Burroughs’ short story, The Ghost Lemurs of Madagascar, reclassifying the text as a “self-confessed time-abomination” because of the fact that the protagonist Captain Mission, speaking from a time of muskets and quills, observes an old gilt-edged copy “The Ghost Lemurs of Madagascar”, presumably written by Burroughs in the 1990s, the text thus necessitating a rift in time or some form of magic or sorcery to exist. Its inherent anachronism makes its writing become a kind of anamnetic process of possession where, for Ccru, someone or something else writes through Burroughs. For Land (2009), the hyperstition appears to disjoint time, creating a “positive feedback circuit”, from which point the human subject is able to retroactively misapprehend for historical and technological progress what, from a hyperstitional point of view, is the knowledge of the Old Ones, something from the Outside, finding human components to actualize itself.

For many this disjunctive property of hyperstitions is a potentially revolutionary vector. Viewed in this way, hyperstitions are a source of new potential futures that can be actualized through the power of storytelling. Fisher (2017), for example, once suggested that “much of capitalism functions through hyperstitional processes […] I believe we need to think about what a communist hyperstitional practice would look like,” holding on to the belief that it was possible to “invent the future” (see Srnicek & Williams, 2015) or crack it open to the possibilities of the Outside (Williams & Srnicek, 2013) and thus make critical interventions into the process, and as such, even small stories of “alternative political and economic possibilities can have a disproportionately great effect” (Fisher, 2009, pp. 80–81). Constructing and storying visions of a future that run contra to those of capitalist realism is here the prime task of all people in the anthropocene. Conversely, for Land (2017), “the process is the critique”, and any new stories that one tries to tell immediately undergo capitalist axiomatization (Deleuze & Guattari, 2000) and thus come to serve Capital’s interests of nihilistic growth and expansion. Indeed, though it is difficult to admit to ourselves, the “alternatives” of our rebellious storytelling may well occur wholly immanent to Capital, creating new markets, new sustainable or green identity plays, and new dreams of a future for Capital alone.

As such, understanding the mechanics of hyperstitions may thus very well mean accepting that “new” stories are no longer possible in the anthropocene. Instead, stories and forms of storying that will have been true, produce themselves backward in what we misunderstand to be time, attaching fragments to whatever semiotic resonances, intellectual resources, human bodies, and forms of storytelling are available in order to create the conditions for their own emergence. Such an occulted acknowledgement of Capital as a demonic intelligence, signal origin, or omniscient agent with the knowledge of the Old Ones which could thus know in advance the ultimate course and trajectory of the future, rejects the human as storyteller and protagonist of anthropocene storying, and thus represents the beginning of the “positive destruction” of our myths around the authority and coherence of the author, their identity and the position from which they might speak, and the importance of the human (see O’Sullivan, 2017).

To think hyperstitionally in the anthropocene is to imagine the Earth in an interminable state of meltdown as a “planetary technocapital singularity” where the “dissolution of the biosphere into the technosphere” (Land, 2012, p. 442) sees Capital as artificial intelligence finally sloughing off the drag of the human meat shell that it has been forced to inhabit in order to survive. A global death drive will finally realize itself in the moment when the anthropocene actually does become the capitaloscene (cf. Haraway, 2017) and Capital completes the process of xenoforming the planet in a way that best suits its interests – a process that its former human hosts began – the production of a planet on which only it can survive because auto-production has exceeded production, value can be created infinitely and growth exponentially; without the human attachment to a reality to slow it down simulations of production can continue forever. Land’s imaginaries are here themselves hyperstitional actualizations of cyberpunk novels like Neuromancer and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? or films like Bladerunner, Terminator, Akira, and Ghost in the Shell. These fictions cross into theory in the process of making themselves real.

Can our stories do anything to avert this, or do they all occur immanent to Capital, and the becoming real of this future? What the three stories in the preceding sections – interminglings of truth and fiction, remembered narrative and surreal dreaming – have in common is their protagonist’s slowly dawning realization that someone or something else is storying. That something is becoming real, and the “storyteller” is little more than a medium, hub, or transitory point via which the thing can transition into the real, leaving a certain warm feeling as it does. The thing which becomes looms in the future and in each case there is a disquieted sense of foreboding that it will always have emerged, and whether we call it “capitalism, artificial intelligence, or enveloping catastrophe (at the limit, the terms are interchangeable)” (Land, 2014, p. 364) makes no difference to its emergence. Yet each of these three stories reflect a hypersitional fragment at a different stage of becoming real that is worth dwelling upon.

Thomas’s story is quite early in its becoming real as hyperstition and we cannot yet tell what will happen to it; whether it will actualize itself in some form or whether it will just fall into the background as more cultural noise, a dream of unclear origin that becomes forever indecipherable, a meme without purpose, a random juxtaposition of images given weight by their faux cinematography. But what storying is Thomas a part of? The kind which seeks to acknowledge, however perversely, the inherent worth of the lives of the “critters” with which we share the planet Earth (Haraway, 2016), or is it something else? Of course, there is no way to know for sure, but it is easy to “imagine” a future where the death of the very last fieldmouse family, in the context of a mass extinction event that radically reduces global biodiversity, is mourned and regarded as a new Athenian tragedy and consequently, the cattle farming industry begins selling t-shirts and tote bags with happy fieldmice smiling on them.

Conversely, the ritual for summoning Sustainable Innovation comes at a point where the story has saturated the cultural imaginary, to the point where it is real, and has been obviously hijacked (Parr, 2009) by the kind of “business as usual” thinking which seeks to maintain capitalist relations. The ritual that these academics perform is its own storying. But as this hyperstition of a “sustainable” capitalism that lives forever (with or without the human) comes close to actualizing itself, we can observe contemporary sustainability discourses to beckon to an occulted “thing” which never arrives because it was a part of Capital all along. Perhaps this is why we are beginning to see calls to abandon the discourse of sustainability altogether and think about (un)sustainability in the anthropocene (see Ergene et al., 2020). Could it be that these surface-level performances, which we know change little about capitalist production, feel good because we are drawn into an affective experience of the hyperstition becoming real, Sustainable Innovation passing through us? Is this the pleasure of the death drive with which Capital is fundamentally imbricated (Bradshaw & Zwick, 2016) seeping through?

Lastly, the mall at the end of the world may well represent a hyperstition approaching a critical mass as our popular culture is inundated with images of dead malls and underground bunkers. They are becoming real, even if we cannot see how from the limited view of the narrative present. There will have been a point in the future when someone or something might be able to look back on the dreamings of the mall at the end of the world and identify these as hyperstitional fragments, not injections from an Outside, but Capital’s own dreamings of surviving the anthropocene. It appears in our dreams, this space at the heart of Capital, and signals to us our own irrelevance. In Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu, R’lyeh appears in the dreams of those queer folk who are receptive to it, and Cthulhu’s dreaming seems to produce drives and incite human action. Who is to say that influence through dreams and somnambulant connection and association is not what takes place when we build, visit, and mourn shopping centres or indeed, occurs every time we reiterate our belief that Capital can be greened, reformed, or tamed to allow the human to survive the anthropocene? In its incalculability the mall at the end of the world thus invites us to begin drawing out and being drawn in to schizmic time loops in which Capital stories us and we will have produced its futures.

Or maybe the three preceding stories are not hyperstitional at all, and are merely intellectual dead-ends and nonsense. The point is that, from the perspective of the human in the present, it is impossible to know.

Storying against Hope

What stories should we be telling in the anthropocene? For many, our inability to imagine any alternative to the destructive dynamics of neoliberal capitalism reflects “a corrosion of social imagination” (Fisher, 2012) and a need to tell the stories of alternatives. As such, perhaps we should believe that our stories upload something radical into the cultural matrix that might produce a random offshoot, schism, corruption, fracturing, or pluralization that might bring us closer to an agenda of climate justice (see Wittneben et al., 2012), or simply a life of automation free from drudgery (Srnicek & Williams, 2015). As such, maybe we should create new concepts (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994), experiment with writing (Hietanen et al., 2020) and fictocriticism (Rhodes, 2015), or trace the cartographies of indigenous dreamings (Glowczewski, 2016) and tell new stories.

Increasingly, however one suspects that perhaps the opposite is true and where our imagination reveals its decay is in the continued reproduction of the same hopeful narrative that some version of “the human” might be able to make it out of the near future (cf. Land, 2012). That is to say, are our stories critique or are they a part of the process by which Capital renders our planet uninhabitable for the human while we convince ourselves that our vegetarian diets, strategic missions, and imagination of new stories are enough to get us out?

Land’s rejection of the human and embrace of Capital as the only agential actor has been the subject of much critique, not only from other accelerationists like Fisher, Srnicek, and Williams (see also Noys, 2014) but also Black feminists like Aria Dean (2017) who challenge us to acknowledge that the non-human subject that accelerationist ideas champion existed already in the Black subject and their subjugation and annihilation by racialized capitalism. Yet it seems increasingly difficult to dispute that Capital now sees out of all of our eyes in both directions. The capitalized subjects who have come to desire what Capital desires (Lyotard, 1993), are us. That warm feeling that you get when you do something “good for the environment” is Capital giving positive reinforcement, a hit of dopamine to keep you productive and producing as many stories as possible. Anyone who believes their storying to be resistance and not part of a hyperstitional arc which may be constructing a future amenable to Capital’s desiring, has not yet reckoned with the completeness of its capture, or truly asked themselves whose dreams they are having, or considered Land’s (2012, p. 318) cryptic questioning: “how would it feel to be smuggled back out of the future […] to be a cyberguerrilla, hidden in human camouflage […] Exactly like this?” The agency and creativity which we might imbue the storyteller is perhaps a comforting myth, for who among us can say with certainty that we work against Capital’s interests, that the stories that we tell can change or destroy and not simply expand and perpetuate it? If we had been sent back in time to produce a future in which Capital lived forever in a mall at the end of the world, would we not tell the same stories that we do now? Everyday life would probably feel exactly like this.

The absolute and all-encompassing capture and determination of the future that such a possibility represents reminds us that no matter what stories we seek to tell in the anthropocene, we should seek out those that are incensed and distempered. Indeed, if Capital is an abstract parasite (Fisher, 2009), then the chief symptom that it produces in its host will be Hope. Hope is Capital’s chief virtue, championing continuance, growth, development, progress and expansion, all of those qualities that Capital loves. The stories that we tell now are ventriloquized by Hope. Perhaps it is time to ask what stories can work against Hope or whether a new kind of storyteller needs to emerge, one who is not a sage or a teacher (cf Benjamin, 2006) but the figure of madness who has hollowed themselves out and become sufficiently deranged and demented to exist as a medium or vector for Capital’s dreaming, so that they scream about the coming of the mall at the end of the world and fill us all with fear. If we want to effect change, as Fisher once dreamed, we may need to story against Hope; crush it with a black and virulent nihilism and a “hatred for this world” (Culp, 2016). Yet maybe even this is immanent to Capital.

For myself, I hope that the stories that we tell in the anthropocene matter, but I am acutely aware that this Hope is Capital’s alone.

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Author Bio

Sideeq Mohammed is a Lecturer in HRM/Organizational Behaviour at the University of Kent. He is the author of “Stories and Organization in the Anthropocene: A Critical Look at the Impossibility of Sustainability”.

Uncategorized

Climate Endgame: Exploring catastrophic climate change scenarios

Luke Kemp  Chi Xu , Joanna Depledge, Goodwin Gibbins, Timothy A. Kohler, Johan Rockström, Marten Scheffer , Hans Joachim Schellnhuber , Will Steffen and Timothy M. Lenton

Edited by Kerry Emanuel, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA;

https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2108146119

Abstract

Prudent risk management requires consideration of bad-to-worst-case scenarios. Yet, for climate change, such potential futures are poorly understood. Could anthropogenic climate change result in worldwide societal collapse or even eventual human extinction? At present, this is a dangerously underexplored topic. Yet there are ample reasons to suspect that climate change could result in a global catastrophe. Analyzing the mechanisms for these extreme consequences could help galvanize action, improve resilience, and inform policy, including emergency responses. We outline current knowledge about the likelihood of extreme climate change, discuss why understanding bad-to-worst cases is vital, articulate reasons for concern about catastrophic outcomes, define key terms, and put forward a research agenda. The proposed agenda covers four main questions: 1) What is the potential for climate change to drive mass extinction events? 2) What are the mechanisms that could result in human mass mortality and morbidity? 3) What are human societies’ vulnerabilities to climate-triggered risk cascades, such as from conflict, political instability, and systemic financial risk? 4) How can these multiple strands of evidence—together with other global dangers—be usefully synthesized into an “integrated catastrophe assessment”? It is time for the scientific community to grapple with the challenge of better understanding catastrophic climate change.

Introduction

How bad could climate change get? As early as 1988, the landmark Toronto Conference declaration described the ultimate consequences of climate change as potentially “second only to a global nuclear war.” Despite such proclamations decades ago, climate catastrophe is relatively under-studied and poorly understood.

The potential for catastrophic impacts depends on the magnitude and rate of climate change, the damage inflicted on Earth and human systems, and the vulnerability and response of those affected systems. The extremes of these areas, such as high temperature rise and cascading impacts, are underexamined. As noted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), there have been few quantitative estimates of global aggregate impacts from warming of 3 °C or above (1). Text mining of IPCC reports similarly found that coverage of temperature rises of 3 °C or higher is underrepresented relative to their likelihood (2). Text-mining analysis also suggests that over time the coverage of IPCC reports has shifted towards temperature rise of 2 °C and below https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2022EF002876. Research has focused on the impacts of 1.5 °C and 2 °C, and studies of how climate impacts could cascade or trigger larger crises are sparse.

A thorough risk assessment would need to consider how risks spread, interact, amplify, and are aggravated by human responses (3), but even simpler “compound hazard” analyses of interacting climate hazards and drivers are underused. Yet this is how risk unfolds in the real world. For example, a cyclone destroys electrical infrastructure, leaving a population vulnerable to an ensuing deadly heat wave (4). Recently, we have seen compound hazards emerge between climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic (5). As the IPCC notes, climate risks are becoming more complex and difficult to manage, and are cascading across regions and sectors (6).

Why the focus on lower-end warming and simple risk analyses? One reason is the benchmark of the international targets: the Paris Agreement goal of limiting warming to well below 2 °C, with an aspiration of 1.5 °C. Another reason is the culture of climate science to “err on the side of least drama” (7), to not to be alarmists, which can be compounded by the consensus processes of the IPCC (8). Complex risk assessments, while more realistic, are also more difficult to do.

This caution is understandable, yet it is mismatched to the risks and potential damages posed by climate change. We know that temperature rise has “fat tails”: low-probability, high-impact extreme outcomes (9). Climate damages are likely to be nonlinear and result in an even larger tail (10). Too much is at stake to refrain from examining high-impact low-likelihood scenarios. The COVID-19 pandemic has underlined the need to consider and prepare for infrequent, high-impact global risks, and the systemic dangers they can spark. Prudent risk management demands that we thoroughly assess worst-case scenarios.

Our proposed “Climate Endgame” research agenda aims to direct exploration of the worst risks associated with anthropogenic climate change. To introduce it, we summarize existing evidence on the likelihood of extreme climate change, outline why exploring bad-to-worst cases is vital, suggest reasons for catastrophic concern, define key terms, and then explain the four key aspects of the research agenda.

Worst-Case Climate Change

Despite 30 y of efforts and some progress under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions continue to increase. Even without considering worst-case climate responses, the current trajectory puts the world on track for a temperature rise between 2.1 °C and 3.9 °C by 2100 (11). If all 2030 nationally determined contributions are fully implemented, warming of 2.4 °C (1.9 °C to 3.0 °C) is expected by 2100. Meeting all long-term pledges and targets could reduce this to 2.1 °C (1.7 °C to 2.6 °C) (12). Even these optimistic assumptions lead to dangerous Earth system trajectories. Temperatures of more than 2 °C above preindustrial values have not been sustained on Earth’s surface since before the Pleistocene Epoch (or more than 2.6 million years ago) (13).

Even if anthropogenic GHG emissions start to decline soon, this does not rule out high future GHG concentrations or extreme climate change, particularly beyond 2100. There are feedbacks in the carbon cycle and potential tipping points that could generate high GHG concentrations (14) that are often missing from models. Examples include Arctic permafrost thawing that releases methane and CO2 (15), carbon loss due to intense droughts and fires in the Amazon (16), and the apparent slowing of dampening feedbacks such as natural carbon sink capacity (17, 18). These are likely to not be proportional to warming, as is sometimes assumed. Instead, abrupt and/or irreversible changes may be triggered at a temperature threshold. Such changes are evident in Earth’s geological record, and their impacts cascaded across the coupled climate–ecological–social system (19). Particularly worrying is a “tipping cascade” in which multiple tipping elements interact in such a way that tipping one threshold increases the likelihood of tipping another (20). Temperature rise is crucially dependent on the overall dynamics of the Earth system, not just the anthropogenic emissions trajectory.

The potential for tipping points and higher concentrations despite lower anthropogenic emissions is evident in existing models. Variability among the latest Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) climate models results in overlap in different scenarios. For example, the top (75th) quartile outcome of the “middle-of-the-road” scenario (Shared Socioeconomic Pathway 3-7.0, or SSP3-7.0) is substantially hotter than the bottom (25th) quartile of the highest emissions (SSP5-8.5) scenario. Regional temperature differences between models can exceed 5 °C to 6 °C, particularly in polar areas where various tipping points can occur (SI Appendix).

There are even more uncertain feedbacks, which, in a very worst case, might amplify to an irreversible transition into a “Hothouse Earth” state (21) (although there may be negative feedbacks that help buffer the Earth system). In particular, poorly understood cloud feedbacks might trigger sudden and irreversible global warming (22). Such effects remain underexplored and largely speculative “unknown unknowns” that are still being discovered. For instance, recent simulations suggest that stratocumulus cloud decks might abruptly be lost at CO2 concentrations that could be approached by the end of the century, causing an additional ∼8 °C global warming (23). Large uncertainties about dangerous surprises are reasons to prioritize rather than neglect them.

Recent findings on equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) (14, 24) underline that the magnitude of climate change is uncertain even if we knew future GHG concentrations. According to the IPCC, our best estimate for ECS is a 3 °C temperature rise per doubling of CO2, with a “likely” range of (66 to 100% likelihood) of 2.5 °C to 4 °C. While an ECS below 1.5 °C was essentially ruled out, there remains an 18% probability that ECS could be greater than 4.5 °C (14). The distribution of ECS is “heavy tailed,” with a higher probability of very high values of ECS than of very low values.

There is significant uncertainty over future anthropogenic GHG emissions as well. Representative Concentration Pathway 8.5 (RCP8.5, now SSP5-8.5), the highest emissions pathway used in IPCC scenarios, most closely matches cumulative emissions to date (25). This may not be the case going forward, because of falling prices of renewable energy and policy responses (26). Yet, there remain reasons for caution. For instance, there is significant uncertainty over key variables such as energy demand and economic growth. Plausibly higher economic growth rates could make RCP8.5 35% more likely (27).

Why Explore Climate Catastrophe?

Why do we need to know about the plausible worst cases? First, risk management and robust decision-making under uncertainty requires knowledge of extremes. For example, the minimax criterion ranks policies by their worst outcomes (28). Such an approach is particularly appropriate for areas characterized by high uncertainties and tail risks. Emissions trajectories, future concentrations, future warming, and future impacts are all characterized by uncertainty. That is, we can’t objectively prescribe probabilities to different outcomes (29). Climate damages lie within the realm of “deep uncertainty”: We don’t know the probabilities attached to different outcomes, the exact chain of cause and effect that will lead to outcomes, or even the range, timing, or desirability of outcomes (, 30). Uncertainty, deep or not, should motivate precaution and vigilance, not complacency.

Catastrophic impacts, even if unlikely, have major implications for economic analysis, modeling, and society’s responses (31, 32). For example, extreme warming and the consequent damages can significantly increase the projected social cost of carbon (31). Understanding the vulnerability and responses of human societies can inform policy making and decision-making to prevent systemic crises. Indicators of key variables can provide early warning signals (33).

Knowing the worst cases can compel action, as the idea of “nuclear winter” in 1983 galvanized public concern and nuclear disarmament efforts. Exploring severe risks and higher-temperature scenarios could cement a recommitment to the 1.5 °C to 2 °C guardrail as the “least unattractive” option (34).

Understanding catastrophic climate scenarios can also inform policy interventions, including last-resort emergency measures like solar radiation management (SRM), the injection of aerosols into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight (35). Whether to resort to such measures depends on the risk profiles of both climate change and SRM scenarios. One recent analysis of the potential catastrophic risk of stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI) found that the direct and systemic impacts are under-studied (36). The largest danger appears to come from “termination shock”: abrupt and rapid warming if the SAI system is disrupted. Hence, SAI shifts the risk distribution: The median outcome may be better than the climate change it is offsetting, but the tail risk could be worse than warming (36).

There are other interventions that a better understanding of catastrophic climate change could facilitate. For example, at the international level, there is the potential for a “tail risk treaty”: an agreement or protocol that activates stronger commitments and mechanisms when early-warning indicators of potential abrupt change are triggered.

The Potential for Climate Catastrophe

There are four key reasons to be concerned over the potential of a global climate catastrophe. First, there are warnings from history. Climate change (either regional or global) has played a role in the collapse or transformation of numerous previous societies (37) and in each of the five mass extinction events in Phanerozoic Earth history (38). The current carbon pulse is occurring at an unprecedented geological speed and, by the end of the century, may surpass thresholds that triggered previous mass extinctions (39, 40). The worst-case scenarios in the IPCC report project temperatures by the 22nd century that last prevailed in the Early Eocene, reversing 50 million years of cooler climates in the space of two centuries (41).

This is particularly alarming, as human societies are locally adapted to a specific climatic niche. The rise of large-scale, urbanized agrarian societies began with the shift to the stable climate of the Holocene ∼12,000 y ago (42). Since then, human population density peaked within a narrow climatic envelope with a mean annual average temperature of ∼13 °C. Even today, the most economically productive centers of human activity are concentrated in those areas (43). The cumulative impacts of warming may overwhelm societal adaptive capacity.

Second, climate change could directly trigger other catastrophic risks, such as international conflict, or exacerbate infectious disease spread, and spillover risk. These could be potent extreme threat multipliers.

Third, climate change could exacerbate vulnerabilities and cause multiple, indirect stresses (such as economic damage, loss of land, and water and food insecurity) that coalesce into system-wide synchronous failures. This is the path of systemic risk. Global crises tend to occur through such reinforcing “synchronous failures” that spread across countries and systems, as with the 2007–2008 global financial crisis (44). It is plausible that a sudden shift in climate could trigger systems failures that unravel societies across the globe.

The potential of systemic climate risk is marked: The most vulnerable states and communities will continue to be the hardest hit in a warming world, exacerbating inequities. Fig. 1 shows how projected population density intersects with extreme >29 °C mean annual temperature (MAT) (such temperatures are currently restricted to only 0.8% of Earth’s land surface area). Using the medium-high scenario of emissions and population growth (SSP3-7.0 emissions, and SSP3 population growth), by 2070, around 2 billion people are expected to live in these extremely hot areas. Currently, only 30 million people live in hot places, primarily in the Sahara Desert and Gulf Coast (43).

Fig. 1.

Overlap between future population distribution and extreme heat. CMIP6 model data [from nine GCM models available from the WorldClim database (45)] were used to calculate MAT under SSP3-7.0 during around 2070 (2060–2080) alongside Shared SSP3 demographic projections to ∼2070 (46). The shaded areas depict regions where MAT exceeds 29 °C, while the colored topography details the spread of population density.

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Extreme temperatures combined with high humidity can negatively affect outdoor worker productivity and yields of major cereal crops. These deadly heat conditions could significantly affect populated areas in South and southwest Asia(47).

Fig. 2 takes a political lens on extreme heat, overlapping SSP3-7.0 or SSP5-8.5 projections of >29 °C MAT circa 2070, with the Fragile States Index (a measurement of the instability of states). There is a striking overlap between currently vulnerable states and future areas of extreme warming. If current political fragility does not improve significantly in the coming decades, then a belt of instability with potentially serious ramifications could occur.

Fig. 2.

Fragile heat: the overlap between state fragility, extreme heat, and nuclear and biological catastrophic hazards. GCM model data [from the WorldClim database (45)] was used to calculate mean annual warming rates under SSP3-7.0 and SSP5-8.5. This results in a temperature rise of 2.8 °C in ∼2070 (48) for SSP3-7.0, and 3.2 °C for SSP5-8.5. The shaded areas depict regions where MAT exceeds 29 °C. These projections are overlapped with the 2021 Fragile State Index (FSI) (49). This is a necessarily rough proxy because FSI only estimates current fragility levels. While such measurements of fragility and stability are contested and have limitations, the FSI provides one of the more robust indices. This Figure also identifies the capitals of states with nuclear weapons, and the location of maximum containment Biosafety Level 4 (BS4) laboratories which handle the most dangerous pathogens in the world. These are provided as one rough proxy for nuclear and biological catastrophc hazards.

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Finally, climate change could irrevocably undermine humanity’s ability to recover from another cataclysm, such as nuclear war. That is, it could create significant latent risks (Table 1): Impacts that may be manageable during times of stability become dire when responding to and recovering from catastrophe. These different causes for catastrophic concern are interrelated and must be examined together.

Table 1.Defining key terms in the Climate Endgame agenda

TermDefinition
Latent riskRisk that is dormant under one set of conditions but becomes active under another set of conditions.
Risk cascadeChains of risk occurring when an adverse impact triggers a set of linked risks (3).
Systemic riskThe potential for individual disruptions or failures to cascade into a system-wide failure.
Extreme climate changeMean global surface temperature rise of 3 °C or more above preindustrial levels by 2100.
Extinction riskThe probability of human extinction within a given timeframe.
Extinction threatA plausible and significant contributor to total extinction risk.
Societal fragilityThe potential for smaller damages to spiral into global catastrophic or extinction risk due to societal vulnerabilities, risk cascades, and maladaptive responses.
Societal collapseSignificant sociopolitical fragmentation and/or state failure along with the relatively rapid, enduring, and significant loss capital, and systems identity; this can lead to large-scale increases in mortality and morbidity.
Global catastrophic riskThe probability of a loss of 25% of the global population and the severe disruption of global critical systems (such as food) within a given timeframe (years or decades).
Global catastrophic threatA plausible and significant contributor to global catastrophic risk; the potential for climate change to be a global catastrophic threat can be referred to as “catastrophic climate change”.
Global decimation riskThe probability of a loss of 10% (or more) of global population and the severe disruption of global critical systems (such as food) within a given timeframe (years or decades).
Global decimation threatA plausible and significant contributor to global decimation risk.
Endgame territoryLevels of global warming and societal fragility that are judged sufficiently probable to constitute climate change as an extinction threat.
Worst-case warmingThe highest empirically and theoretically plausible level of global warming.

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Defining the Key Terms

Although bad-to-worst case scenarios remain underexplored in the scientific literature, statements labeling climate change as catastrophic are not uncommon. UN Secretary-General António Guterres called climate change an “existential threat.” Academic studies have warned that warming above 5 °C is likely to be “beyond catastrophic” (50), and above 6 °C constitutes “an indisputable global catastrophe” (9).

Current discussions over climate catastrophe are undermined by unclear terminology. The term “catastrophic climate change” has not been conclusively defined. An existential risk is usually defined as a risk that cause an enduring and significant loss of long-term human potential (51, 52). This existing definition is deeply ambiguous and requires societal discussion and specification of long-term human values (52). While a democratic exploration of values is welcome, it is not required to understand pathways to human catastrophe or extinction (52). For now, the existing definition is not a solid foundation for a scientific inquiry.

We offer clarified working definitions of such terms in Table 1. This is an initial step toward creating a lexicon for global calamity. Some of the terms, such as what constitutes a “plausible” risk or a “significant contributor,” are necessarily ambiguous. Others, such as thresholding at 10% or 25% of global population, are partly arbitrary (10% is intended as a marker for a precedented loss, and 25% is intended as an unprecedented decrease; see SI Appendix for further discussion). Further research is needed to sharpen these definitions. The thresholds for global catastrophic and decimation risks are intended as general heuristics and not concrete numerical boundaries. Other factors such as morbidity, and cultural and economic loss, need to be considered.

We define risk as the probability that exposure to climate change impacts and responses will result in adverse consequences for human or ecological systems. For the Climate Endgame agenda, we are particularly interested in catastrophic consequences. Any risk is composed of four determinants: hazard, exposure, vulnerability, and response (3).

We have set global warming of 3 °C or more by the end of the century as a marker for extreme climate change. This threshold is chosen for four reasons: Such a temperature rise well exceeds internationally agreed targets, all the IPCC “reasons for concern” in climate impacts are either “high” or “very high” risk between 2 °C and 3 °C, there are substantially heightened risks of self-amplifying changes that would make it impossible to limit warming to 3 °C, and these levels relate to far greater uncertainty in impacts.

Key Research Thus Far

The closest attempts to directly study or comprehensively address how climate change could lead to human extinction or global catastrophe have come through popular science books such as The Uninhabitable Earth (53) and Our Final Warning (10). The latter, a review of climate impacts at different degrees, concludes that a global temperature rise of 6 °C “imperils even the survival of humans as a species” (10).

We know that health risks worsen with rising temperatures (54). For example, there is already an increasing probability of multiple “breadbasket failures” (causing a food price shock) with higher temperatures (55). For the top four maize-producing regions (accounting for 87% of maize production), the likelihood of production losses greater than 10% jumps from 7% annually under a 2 °C temperature rise to 86% under 4 °C (56). The IPCC notes, in its Sixth Assessment Report, that 50 to 75% of the global population could be exposed to life-threatening climatic conditions by the end of the century due to extreme heat and humidity (6). SI Appendix provides further details on several key studies of extreme climate change.

The IPCC reports synthesize peer-reviewed literature regarding climate change, impacts and vulnerabilities, and mitigation. Despite identifying 15 tipping elements in biosphere, oceans, and cryosphere in the Working Group 1 contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report, many with irreversible thresholds, there were very few publications on catastrophic scenarios that could be assessed. The most notable coverage is the Working Group II “reasons for concern” syntheses that have been reported since 2001. These syntheses were designed to inform determination of what is “dangerous anthropogenic interference” with the climate system, that the UNFCCC aims to prevent. The five concerns are unique and threatened ecosystems, frequency and severity of extreme weather events, global distribution and balance of impacts, total economic and ecological impact, and irreversible, large-scale, abrupt transitions. Each IPCC assessment found greater risks occurring at lower increases in global mean temperatures. In the Sixth Assessment Report, all five concerns were listed as very high for temperatures of 1.2 °C to 4.5 °C. In contrast, only two were rated as very high at this temperature interval in the previous Assessment Report (6). All five concerns are now at “high” or “very high” for 2 °C to 3 °C of warming (57).

A Sample Research Agenda: Extreme Earth System States, Mass Mortality, Societal Fragility, and Integrated Climate Catastrophe Assessments

We suggest a research agenda for catastrophic climate change that focuses on four key strands:

•

Understanding extreme climate change dynamics and impacts in the long term

•

Exploring climate-triggered pathways to mass morbidity and mortality

•

Investigating social fragility: vulnerabilities, risk cascades, and risk responses

•

Synthesizing the research findings into “integrated catastrophe assessments”

Our proposed agenda learns from and builds on integrated assessment models that are being adapted to better assess large-scale harms. A range of tipping points have been assessed (58–60), with effects varying from a 10% chance of doubling the social cost of carbon (61) up to an eightfold increase in the optimal carbon price (60). This echoes earlier findings that welfare estimates depend on fat tail risks (31). Model assumptions such as discount rates, exogenous growth rates, risk preferences, and damage functions also strongly influence outcomes.

There are large, important aspects missing from these models that are highlighted in the research agenda: longer-term impacts under extreme climate change, pathways toward mass morbidity and mortality, and the risk cascades and systemic risks that extreme climate impacts could trigger. Progress in these areas would allow for more realistic models and damage functions and help provide direct estimates of casualties (62), a necessary moral noneconomic measure of climate risk. We urge the research community to develop integrated conceptual and semiquantitative models of climate catastrophes.

Finally, we invite other scholars to revise and improve upon this proposed agenda.

Extreme Earth System States.

We need to understand potential long-term states of the Earth system under extreme climate change. This means mapping different “Hothouse Earth” scenarios (21) or other extreme scenarios, such as alternative circulation regimes or large, irreversible changes in ice cover and sea level. This research will require consideration of long-term climate dynamics and their impacts on other planetary-level processes. Research suggests that previous mass extinction events occurred due to threshold effects in the carbon cycle that we could cross this century (40, 63). Key impacts in previous mass extinctions, such as ocean hypoxia and anoxia, could also escalate in the longer term (40, 64).

Studying potential tipping points and irreversible “committed” changes of ecological and climate systems is essential. For instance, modeling of the Antarctic ice sheet suggests there are several tipping points that exhibit hysteresis (65). Irreversible loss of the West Antarctic ice sheet was found to be triggered at ∼2 °C global warming, and the current ice sheet configuration cannot be regained even if temperatures return to present-day levels. At a 6 °C to 9 °C rise in global temperature, slow, irreversible loss of the East Antarctic ice sheet and over 40 m of sea level rise equivalent could be triggered (65). Similar studies of areas such as the Greenland ice sheet, permafrost, and terrestrial vegetation would be helpful. Identifying all the potential Earth system tipping elements is crucial. This should include a consideration of wider planetary boundaries, such as biodiversity, that will influence tipping points (66), feedbacks beyond the climate system, and how tipping elements could cascade together (67).

Mass Morbidity and Mortality.

There are many potential contributors to climate-induced morbidity and mortality, but the “four horsemen” of the climate change end game are likely to be famine and undernutrition, extreme weather events, conflict, and vector-borne diseases. These will be worsened by additional risks and impacts such as mortality from air pollution and sea level rise.

These pathways require further study. Empirical estimates of even direct fatalities from heat stress thus far in the United States are systematically underestimated (68). A review of the health and climate change literature from 1985 to 2013 (with a proxy review up to 2017) found that, of 2,143 papers, only 189 (9%) included a dedicated discussion of more-extreme health impacts or systemic risk (relating to migration, famine, or conflict) (69). Models also rarely include adaptive responses. Thus, the overall mortality estimates are uncertain.

How can potential mass morbidity and mortality be better accounted for? 1) Track compound hazards through bottom-up modeling of systems and vulnerabilities (70) and rigorously stress test preparedness (71). 2) Apply models to higher-temperature scenarios and longer timelines. 3) Integrate risk cascades and systemic risks (see the following section) into health risk assessments, such as by incorporating morbidity and mortality resulting from a climate-triggered food price shock.

Societal Fragility: Vulnerabilities, Risk Cascades, and Risk Responses.

More-complex risk assessments are generally more realistic. The determinants of risk are not just hazards, vulnerabilities, and exposures, but also responses (3, 72). A complete risk assessment needs to consider climate impacts, differential exposure, systemic vulnerabilities, responses of societies and actors, and the knock-on effects across borders and sectors (73), potentially resulting in systemic crises. In the worst case(s), a domino effect or spiral could continuously worsen the initial risk.

Societal risk cascades could involve conflict, disease, political change, and economic crises. Climate change has a complicated relationship with conflict, including, possibly, as a risk factor (74) especially in areas with preexisting ethnic conflict (75). Climate change could affect the spread and transmission of infectious diseases, as well as the expansion and severity of different zoonotic infections (76), creating conditions for novel outbreaks and infections (6,77). Epidemics can, in turn, trigger cascading impacts, as in the case of COVID-19. Exposure to ecological stress and natural disasters are key determinants for the cultural “tightness” (strictness of rules, adherence to tradition, and severity of punishment) of societies (78). The literature on the median economic damages of climate change is profuse, but there is far less on financial tail risks, such as the possibility of global financial crises.

Past studies could be drawn upon to investigate societal risk. Relatively small, regional climate changes are linked to the transformation and even collapse of previous societies (79, 80). This could be due to declining resilience and the passing of tipping points in these societies. There is some evidence for critical slowing down in societies prior to their collapse (81, 82). However, care is needed in drawing lessons from premodern case studies. Prehistory and history should be studied to determine not just how past societies were affected by specific climate hazards but how those effects differ as societies change with respect to, for example, population density, wealth inequality, and governance regime. Such framing will allow past and current societies to be brought under a single system of analysis (37).

The characteristics and vulnerabilities of a modern globalized world where food and transport distribution systems can buffer against traumas will need to feature in work on societal sensitivity. Such large, interconnected systems bring their own sources of fragility, particularly if networks are relatively homogeneous, with a few dominant nodes highly connected to everyone else (83). Other important modern-day vulnerabilities include the rapid spread of misinformation and disinformation. These epistemic risks are serious concerns for public health crises (84) and have already hindered climate action. A high-level and simplified depiction of how risk cascades could unfold is provided in Fig. 3.

Fig. 3.

Cascading global climate failure. This is a causal loop diagram, in which a complete line represents a positive polarity (e.g., amplifying feedback; not necessarily positive in a normative sense) and a dotted line denotes a negative polarity (meaning a dampening feedback). See SI Appendix for further information.

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Integrated Catastrophic Assessments.

Climate change will unfold in a world of changing ecosystems, geopolitics, and technology. Could we even see “warm wars”—technologically enhanced great power conflicts over dwindling carbon budgets, climate impacts, or SRM experiments? Such developments and scenarios need to be considered to build a full picture of climate dangers. Climate change could reinforce other interacting threats, including rising inequality, demographic stresses, misinformation, new destructive weapons, and the overshoot of other planetary boundaries (85). There are also natural shocks, such as solar flares and high-impact volcanic eruptions, that present possible deadly synchronicities (86). Exploring these is vital, and a range of “standardized catastrophic scenarios” would facilitate assessment.

Expert elicitation, systems mapping, and participatory scenarios provide promising ways of understanding such cascades (73). There are also existing research agendas for some of these areas that could be funded (87).

Integration can be approached in several ways. Metareviews and syntheses of research results can provide useful data for mapping the interactions between risks. This could be done through causal mapping, expert elicitation, and agent-based or systems dynamics modeling approaches. One recent study mapped the evidence base for relationships between climate change, food insecurity, and contributors to societal collapse (mortality, conflict, and emigration) based on 41 studies (88).

A particularly promising avenue is to repurpose existing complex models to study cascading risks. The resulting network could be “stress tested” with standardized catastrophic scenarios. This could help estimate which areas may incur critical shortages or disruptions, or drastic responses (such as food export bans). Complex models have been developed to help understand past large-scale systemic disasters, such as the 2007–2008 global financial crisis (89). Some of these could be repurposed for exploring the potential nature of a future global climate crisis.

Systems failure is unlikely to be globally simultaneous; it is more likely to begin regionally and then cascade up. Although the goal is to investigate catastrophic climate risk globally, incorporating knowledge of regional losses is indispensable.

The potentially catastrophic risks of climate change are difficult to quantify, even within models. Any of the above-mentioned modeling approaches should provide a greater understanding of the pathways of systemic risk, and rough probabilistic guides. Yet the results could provide the foundation for argumentation-based tools to assess the potential for catastrophic outcomes under different levels of temperature rise (90). These should be fed into open deliberative democratic methods that provide a fair, inclusive, and effective approach to decision-making (91). Such approaches could draw on decision-making tools under uncertainty, such as the minimax principle or ranking decisions by the weighted sum of their best and worst outcomes, as suggested in the Dasgupta review of biodiversity (92).

An IPCC Special Report on Catastrophic Climate Change

The IPCC has yet to give focused attention to catastrophic climate change. Fourteen special reports have been published. None covered extreme or catastrophic climate change. A special report on “tipping points” was proposed for the seventh IPCC assessment cycle, and we suggest this could be broadened to consider all key aspects of catastrophic climate change. This appears warranted, following the IPCC’s decision framework (93). Such a report could investigate how Earth system feedbacks could alter temperature trajectories, and whether these are irreversible.

A special report on catastrophic climate change could help trigger further research, just as the “Global warming of 1.5 °C” special report (94) did. That report also galvanized a groundswell of public concern about the severity of impacts at lower temperature ranges. The impact of a report on catastrophic climate change could be even more marked. It could help bring into focus how much is at stake in a worst-case scenario. Further research funding of catastrophic and worst-case climate change is critical.

Effective communication of research results will be key. While there is concern that fear-invoking messages may be unhelpful and induce paralysis (95), the evidence on hopeful vs. fearful messaging is mixed, even across metaanalyses (96, 97). The role of emotions is complex, and it is strategic to adjust messages for specific audiences (98). One recent review of the climate debate highlighted the importance of avoiding political bundling, selecting trusted messengers, and choosing effective frames (99). These kinds of considerations will be crucial in ensuring a useful and accurate civic discussion.

Conclusions

There is ample evidence that climate change could become catastrophic. We could enter such “endgames” at even modest levels of warming. Understanding extreme risks is important for robust decision-making, from preparation to consideration of emergency responses. This requires exploring not just higher temperature scenarios but also the potential for climate change impacts to contribute to systemic risk and other cascades. We suggest that it is time to seriously scrutinize the best way to expand our research horizons to cover this field. The proposed “Climate Endgame” research agenda provides one way to navigate this under-studied area. Facing a future of accelerating climate change while blind to worst-case scenarios is naive risk management at best and fatally foolish at worst.

Data Availability

Previously published data were used for this work (45, 46, 48, 49).

Acknowledgments

We thank Benedikt Knüsel, Mark Lynas, John Broome, Ingo Fetzer, Peter Watson, Florian Ulrich Jehn, Zoe Cremer, Constantin Arnscheidt, Nathaniel Cooke, two anonymous reviewers, and the PNAS editor for their helpful comments. We thank Dirk Biermann, Janin Schaffer, and Killian Cremer for their assistance with Fig. 3.

Supporting Information

Appendix 01 (PDF)

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Comparative capitalisms in the Anthropocene: a research agenda for green transition

Jeremy Green

Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

ABSTRACT

Climate change and broader Anthropogenic environmental risks pose existential threats to humanity. Human-driven environmental change has come to be understood through the concept of the ‘Anthropocene’. Anthropocene risks demonstrate that existing fossil-fuel intensive and growth-oriented capitalist development are unsustainable. The urgent need to transition towards greener forms of development is widely recognised. Comparative Political Economy (CPE) should be well placed to guide and evaluate green transition, yet it typifies a wider disconnect between political economy and environment. This article seeks to understand and transcend that disconnect. Developing a critical genealogy of CPE’s post-war emergence, the article examines CPE’s paradigmatic evolution and fitness for grappling with the Anthropocene. It argues that dominant theoretical paradigms (Varieties of Capitalism and Growth Models approaches) are grounded in a ‘nature/society’ dualism that treats national economic models as environmentally disembedded and causally independent from the Earth System. Economic growth is uncritically elevated as a dominant comparative metric, normative aspiration, and policy objective for capitalist development. These characteristics limit the capacity to engage with green transition. Embedding CPE within ecological considerations, the article selectively repurposes the field’s existing conceptual insights to develop hypotheses concerning comparative capitalisms and green transition in the Anthropocene.

KEYWORDS

Anthropocene, Comparative Political Economy, green transition, growth models, paradigms

Climate change poses existential threats to humanity. Our current trajectory risks a ‘Hothouse Earth’ scenario in which feedback loops within the Earth System trigger runaway warming and ecosystemic breakdown, heralding a planetary pathway inhospitable to human life. This scenario is possible even if the Paris Agreement target for keeping global warming to within 2 degrees Celsius is met (Steffen et al. 2018). Without large-scale efforts to rapidly decarbonise economies and promote environmentally sustainable practices, we face the possibility of civilisational collapse (Wallace-Wells 2019, Paterson 2020).

An expanding body of interdisciplinary scholarship comprehends this unique situation through the concept of the Anthropocene – a geological epoch in which human societies are primary drivers of climatic transformation (Steffen et al. 2011). More than a pseudonym for global warming, the Anthropocene represents a broader range of changing Earth System dynamics bearing the mark of human agency. Environmental consequences range from collapsing biodiversity prompted by industrial agriculture and rapid urbanisation, to the exhaustion of global fisheries and the reorientation of the Earth’s water, nitrogen, and phosphate cycles (Bonneuil & Fressoz 2016, p. 4).

Existing patterns of growth-oriented and fossil-fuel intensive human economic activity are unsustainable (Gough 2017, Raworth 2017). The need for a green transition towards a decarbonised and environmentally sustainable economy now has broad support. But the objects, actors, and goals of this transition remain ambiguous (Newell, Paterson & Craig 2020, p. 1). Comparative Political Economy (CPE) with its attentiveness to comparative institutional responses to common challenges and holistic theorisation of capitalism, should be well placed to guide and evaluate green transition. Yet CPE typifies the wider disconnect between political economy and ecological concerns, with climate change a troubling ‘blindspot’ (Paterson 2020). Even while environmental constraints on economic development become dangerously apparent, CPE remains silent on the ecological modalities of comparative capitalisms.

In this article, I critically interrogate CPE’s disciplinary foundations to assess its fitness for studying capitalism in the Anthropocene. Recognising the value of a comparative approach to green transition, I ask – how should we study comparative capitalisms in the Anthropocene? I argue that CPE’s theoretical foundations and research agenda limit its capacity to engage environmental issues. Ontologically and epistemologically, CPE is grounded in a ‘nature/society’ dualism that treats national economic models as environmentally disembedded and causally independent from the Earth System. Tracing the field’s post-war development, I show how this dualism is embodied by CPE’s elevation of economic growth as a dominant comparative metric, normative aspiration, and policy goal for capitalist development. The contemporary rise of the ‘Growth Models’ approach entrenches these disabling commitments at a time of heightened environmental crisis. These qualities render the field ill-equipped to grapple with the Anthropocene. Studying capitalism comparatively is, though, vitally important to guiding green transition. We need awareness of how institutional, sectoral, and holistic transformations within and between political economies can function in mutually beneficial and reinforcing ways. I propose that, despite the field’s unecological assumptions and uncritical entanglements with growth, existing analytical insights from comparative capitalism literature contain promising foundations and partial truths that can be environmentally embedded and productively reoriented to engage with green transition.1 This requires leveraging transdisciplinary insights, from ecological economics to Earth System governance, to retool CPE for the Anthropocene. It necessitates an approach to the comparative evaluation of political economies that prioritises issues of energy, emissions, and environmental impact.

I begin by tracing the ontological and epistemological significance of the Anthropocene for the social sciences. In the second section, I explore entanglements between CPE’s post-war emergence and the parallel rise of the economic growth paradigm, demonstrating how anthropogenic environmental threats challenge growth’s continued viability and desirability and question its status within dominant theoretical approaches. The third section evaluates the field’s paradigmatic shift from Varieties of Capitalism to the Growth Models approach, highlighting the field’s thematic narrowing and environmental silences, while revealing the continuity of growth-affirming and unecological assumptions. In the fourth section, I outline alternative hypotheses to guide CPE research into green transition. I conclude by calling for CPE to decentre growth analytically and normatively.

Anthropocene ontology and the nature/society dualism

The Anthropocene is premised on a transformative ontological claim – human societies and activities should be understood as highly interactive drivers of a ‘complex, adaptive Earth System’ (Steffen et al. 2018, p. 8526).2 This claim, supported by abundant empirical evidence linking socio-economic processes with environmental degradation, centres human agency within causal processes shaping the Earth System (Dryzek 2016, p. 940). How exactly human agency is imbricated within these processes is, nonetheless, sharply contested. Critics of the prevailing Anthropocene discourse have argued that it naturalises humanity’s destructive ecological imprint through a species-level analysis that elides sharply differentiated degrees of responsibility attached to sociologically and geographically distinctive social forces (Malm & Hornborg 2014, p. 63, Moore 2017, 2018). Despite disagreements over exactly who bears responsibility for generating anthropogenic environmental risks, there is broad acceptance that destructive interdependencies between human societies and the Earth System disrupt modernist ontological and analytical binaries between ‘nature’ and ‘society’ (Malm & Hornborg 2014, p. 62–3, Bonneuil & Fressoz 2016, Moore 2017, Kelly 2019, p. 1).

Accepting the ontological premise of the Anthropocene means recognising that human institutions depend upon the regulative stability of ecosystemic and biogeophysical foundations. This has significant implications for the social sciences. Many social science disciplines emerged during a period of rapid European economic development in which humans appeared unconstrained by ecological limits (Moore 2017, p. 596). Sociology, for example, was profoundly shaped by the historical coincidence between its disciplinary emergence and accelerated economic development (Catton & Dunlap 1980, p. 24). This led to the construction of social theories premised, often unconsciously, on an idea of ‘human exemptionalism’ that represented human societies as, ‘exempt from ecological constraints’. Modern economic thought has been similarly anchored in a cornucopian postulate of infinitely exploitable natural resources and limitless ecological horizons, framed geographically through their representation as new frontiers to be harnessed for economic expansion (Jonsson 2014).3

Unecological suppositions within modern social sciences leave extant paradigms ill-equipped to respond to the Anthropocene. We need critical genealogies that interrogate paradigmatic foundations of contemporary approaches, opening new paths of enquiry. Scholars have called for the development of new ‘environmental humanities’ and a shift from social to ‘socio-ecological systems’, recognising social relations’ deep entanglement and co-constitutive relationship with biophysical processes (Bonneuil & Fressoz 2016, Moore 2017, p. 598, Dryzek 2016, p. 941). A disconnect remains between Anthropocene scholarship highlighting the nature/society separation underpinning modern social sciences, and the orientation of prevailing paradigms.

Within economics and political economy, dominant paradigms continue to treat economy and environment as causally dissociated. This is true of CPE. Threats posed by climate instability and ecological deterioration are increasingly apparent, and their political salience has risen dramatically, yet the field’s recent evolution has not kept pace. CPE has moved from a focus on ‘Varieties of Capitalism’ (VOC) to a concern with ‘Growth Models’. The Growth Models approach transcends the supply-side preoccupations of VOC, rebooting Keynesian-Kaleckian macroeconomics to identify institutional drivers of aggregate demand across distinctive national economies (Baccaro & Pontusson 2016). But it continues to treat ‘demand’, ‘growth’ and the ‘economy’ as neutral analytical categories, conceptually uncontroversial and independent from environmental contexts. Both VOC and GM approaches overlook the relevance of energy sources and sectors to comparative capitalism. This despite the existence of longstanding traditions of ecological economics that reckon with the perils of fossil-intensive growth within a finite global ecosystem (Georgescu-Roegen 1971, Daly 1974, Costanza et al. 2015). What explains this disconnect between Anthropocene environmental threats, the widely recognised need for green economic transition, and CPE’s narrowing around an unecological problematique of national pathways to economic growth? The following section explores the parallel rise of the economic growth paradigm and the post-war emergence of CPE. I argue that CPE’s rise was conditioned by the emergence of economic growth as a hegemonic developmental framing, becoming increasingly focussed on understanding national pathways to maximising economic growth. This leaves the field unable to critically interrogate the idea of growth itself, along with its deeper analytical foundations.

CPE and the problem of growth

Contemporary ‘ecopolitical’ discourses of green transition diverge over the viability of reconciling growth with environmental sustainability (Buch-Hansen & Carstensen 2021, p. 2). Dominant green growth discourses, supported by institutions such as the World Bank, stress capitalism’s compatibility with sustainability, suggesting that stronger environmental protections can enhance growth (Jacobs 2012, Meckling & Allan 2020, p. 436). De-growth and post-growth perspectives, conversely, argue that continued economic growth and environmental stability are most likely irreconcilable and the growth paradigm itself is an obstacle to an ecologically restorative political economy (Kallis, et al. 2018, Hickel 2020). Despite their breadth and disagreements, prevailing green transition discourses entail consideration of the environmental and energy dimensions of economic growth beyond that provided by dominant CPE approaches.4 These approaches treat growth as an objective, environmentally independent, and largely uncontested comparative metric. Questions of energy, emissions, and resource intensity hardly register. A brief genealogy of the field’s post-war development helps explain the schism between emerging discourses of green transition, historical traditions of ecological economics, and CPE.

The post-war emergence of CPE as a distinctive subfield coincided with the consolidation of economic growth as a hegemonic development goal. The growth paradigm can be understood as an institutionalised way of thinking that represents economic growth as ‘necessary, good, and imperative’ (Kallis et al. 2018, p. 294). Its history is deeply entangled with the rise of the ‘economy’ as an object of analysis. Early foundations date to the birth of political economy from the eighteenth century in France and Britain. As part of the broader fracturing of the natural and social sciences, liberal political economists conceived the economy as a distinctive and self-regulating sphere with independent governing principles (Kallis et al. 2018, 294, Tellmann 2018, p. 3).

It was during the 1930s and 1940s, though, that the modern notion of the economy as a geographically bounded, self-reproductive system crystallised. The formation of a new statistical construct to measure total national economic output, Gross Domestic Production (GDP), played a central role. Pioneering work on the measurement of national income, led by Simon Kuznets’s efforts in the US and the work of Colin Clark, Richard Stone and Keynes’s within the UK during the 1930s and 1940s, shaped the emergence of GDP as a new statistical imaginary that constructed the modern economy as a measurable and governable entity (Desrosières 1998, p. 172, Coyle 2015, p. 12–7, Schmelzer 2016, p. 81–92). These measurements did not account for the depletion of energy resources nor other environmental damage caused by economic expansion (Mitchell 2011, p. 124, 140, Schmelzer 2016, p. 100). By the 1950s economic growth, indicated by increasingly sophisticated techniques of national income accounting, had emerged as a policy goal. A transnational network of Western economic practitioners worked through international organisations to internationalise national income accounts and standardise the primacy of growth (Schmelzer 2016, p. 94).

Growth’s prevalence as a political-economic aspiration underlay the emergence of CPE after WWII. Disciplinary histories trace the post-war revitalisation of CPE to a common source – Andrew Shonfield’s 1965 magnus opus, Modern Capitalism. Shonfield’s comparative study of economic development in the UK, France, Germany and the US, became a touchstone for subsequent generations of scholarship (Hall & Soskice 2001, Clift 2014, p. 7, Baccaro & Pontusson 2016, p. 176, Menz 2017, p. 38). The book persuasively applied the comparative method. Shonfield anchored his investigation into a range of contemporary themes, from planning to full employment, within appreciation of the specific institutional foundations identifiable across capitalist states (Clift 2014, p. 7).

Intellectual histories of CPE usefully establish common points of origin. But these accounts tend to naturalise an important feature of Shonfield’s study – its preoccupation with the drivers, metrics, and possible futures of economic growth. Modern Capitalism is a book shaped by the dominance of growth. Shonfield set out to understand how the stagnation of the Depression-era had been overcome via the sustained economic growth of the post-war period. It was this context of the ‘high prosperity and rapid growth of post-war capitalism’ within the West that motivated Shonfield’s investigation (Shonfield 1965, p. 4–19). He argued that three key factors helped explain the period of unprecedented prosperity during the 1950s and 60s. Firstly, that economic growth ‘has been much steadier than in the past’. Secondly, production had expanded rapidly over the period. Finally, the benefits of the ‘new prosperity’ generated by the growth of economic output had been ‘very widely diffused’ (Shonfield 1965, p. 61–2). This explanatory framework bore all the hallmarks of the growth paradigm’s newfound hegemony. Shonfield sought to explain the overall prosperity of the West, understood as the fruits of economic growth, by arguing that growth had been more stable, rapid, and evenly distributed.

National economic statistics helped bring comparative representation of discreet economic units into being, heightening the empirical and conceptual possibilities of CPE. The interlocking origins of CPE and the growth paradigm had important normative implications too. Shonfield’s study carries the imprint of a liberal cornucopian optimism that conjures visions of unending progress and unlimited resource frontiers. He optimistically opines that ‘continuing prosperity and uninterrupted growth on the scale of recent years are possible in the future’, and suggests that, ‘the underlying conditions in the second half of the twentieth century are more favourable than at any time in the history of capitalism’ (Shonfield 1965, p. 63–4).

Shonfield’s work was critical to the emergence of CPE, reviving the comparative method and identifying core themes of post-war capitalism. Viewed from the vantage point of the Anthropocene, though, this growthist optimism rests on an ontological nature/society dualism that dangerously disguises ecological harms incumbent to capitalist development. The rise of the ‘Modern Capitalism’ that Shonfield celebrated was linked, causally and chronologically, to unprecedented intensification of environmental deterioration. Economic growth was central to this process (McNeill & Engelke 2016, p. 132–54, Dryzek & Pickering 2018, p. 13). Three quarters of human-induced carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere occurred post-1945. The number of motor vehicles increased from 40 million to 850 million. The volume of annual plastic production increased from 1 million tons in 1945 to almost 300 million by 2015. Production of nitrogen synthesisers, predominantly for use in agricultural fertilisers, increased from 4 million tons to over 85 million tons across the same period (McNeill & Engelke 2016, p. 4). Earth Scientists refer to this period as the ‘Great Acceleration’ – a concept that captures the ‘holistic, comprehensive and interlinked nature of the post-1950 changes simultaneously sweeping across the socio-economic and biophysical spheres of the Earth System, encompassing far more than climate change’ (Steffen et al. 2015, p. 82). From the 1950s, there is clear evidence of major shifts in the condition of the Earth System exceeding the normal range of variability of the Holocene, and driven by human socio-economic activity (Steffen et al. 2015, p. 93–4).

The Anthropocene prompts a critical re-evaluation of the drivers of growth and prosperity. It raises grave doubts over the viability of present and future economic growth if we are to respond to and contain multiple, intersecting, environmental threats. While orthodox economic thought elevated growth to an uncontested status, a shadow tradition of ecological thinking, stressing finitude, entropy, and waste, developed alongside (Boulding 1966, Georgescu-Roegen 1971, Daly 1974). Ecological economists have long acknowledged the biophysical dimensions of economic growth (Gowdy & Erickson 2005, p. 218). Economic processes involve the conversion of energy and natural resources into ‘goods, services and waste’ (Kallis et al. 2018, p. 292). This has important implications for addressing the leading edge of Anthropocene environmental instability – rapid global warming driven by greenhouse gas emissions. There are firm grounds for scepticism concerning the prospects of decoupling economic growth from resource use and, critically, carbon emissions. Even when efficiency gains are made, their impact in lowering costs within a market-based system tends to lead to ever higher consumption of finite resources and associated increases of environmentally damaging pollution (Kallis, et al. 2018, p. 292).

Green growth arguments have gained currency in policy discussions (Meckling & Allan 2020, p. 436).5 These arguments rest on optimistic outlooks for the possibility of ‘decoupling’ growth from both carbon emissions and wider resource use (Jackson 2017, p. 87). There is some evidence to support claims for ‘relative decoupling’, whereby the emissions or material intensity of economic output declines relative to the rate of economic growth, signalling an improvement in efficiency. But meeting the Paris Agreement target of 2 degrees warming, in the context of continued economic growth, requires ‘absolute decoupling’ with regard to carbon emissions – an absolute decline in emissions while economic output continues to rise. There is no historical evidence of absolute decoupling on this scale (Jackson 2017, p. 84–90). Hickel and Kallis’ literature survey (2019, p. 1) finds that absolute decoupling of growth from carbon emissions is, ‘highly unlikely to be achieved at a rate rapid enough to prevent global warming over 1.5C or 2C’ (Hickel and Kallis 2020, p. 1). Evidence suggests that although absolute decoupling of carbon emissions from economic output is possible (and underway in some countries) it is very unlikely to occur fast enough to meet the Paris Agreement targets within a context of continued economic growth. The problem, the authors conclude, is growth itself. Growth leads to increased demand for energy, making the transition to renewable energy harder and leading to increased emissions from changing land use and industrial processes (Hickel and Kallis 2020, p. 12). Whatever our view on the viability or otherwise of green growth, the nexus between energy and emissions concerns needs to be given much greater prominence in assessing comparative capitalisms.

Environmental anxieties surrounding economic growth are not new. From Malthusian predictions about population in the eighteenth century to the ‘Limits to Growth’ report in the 1970s, concerns about pressures on finite natural resources and fragile ecosystems have shadowed confident prognoses of economic progress (Jonsson 2014, p. 14, Dryzek 2016, p. 939). Scientific evidence and understanding surrounding the ecological impacts of economic growth is stronger than ever. Why, then, has CPE moved further away from a critical appraisal of the prospects for capitalism and growth over recent years? To understand this paradox, I argue, we need to understand disciplinary patterns of knowledge production within CPE.

From VOC to Growth Models

CPE has evolved in response to major transformations within the global economy (Clift 2014, p. 7, Baccaro and Pontusson 2016, p. 176). Accelerated economic globalisation in the 1990s inspired the emergence of Hall and Soskice’s (2001) influential ‘Varieties of Capitalism’ (VOC) framework, exploring possibilities for continued national economic diversity in a context of heightened international competition. After the 2007/8 financial crisis, a contending framework emerged. The ‘Growth Models’ (GM) perspective pioneered by Baccaro and Pontusson (2016, 2020) addresses VOC’s limitations by highlighting neglected issues of inequality and distributional struggle. It has inspired a large volume of supportive scholarship (Perez & Matsaganis 2018, Amable et al. 2019, Bohle & Regan 2021, Rothstein 2021, Schedelik et al. 2021, Stockhammer 2021).

What are the core claims of these two approaches? I begin with VOC. Hall and Soskice introduced VOC in the early 2000s, during the high-water mark of globalisation. They rejected the premise that globalisation would drive comparative institutional convergence, seeking to demonstrate how distinctive forms of comparative advantage could be maintained. Hall and Soskice displaced CPE’s traditional focus on the state and positioned firms as the pivotal agents. Rational firms encounter specific ‘coordination problems’, with their capacity to deliver economic goods ultimately dependent on effective coordination with a diverse institutional actors, from employers’ associations to trade unions. Identifying five core spheres within which firms must overcome coordination problems, Hall and Soskice developed an influential twofold typology of ‘liberal market economies’ (LMEs) and ‘coordinated market economies’ (CMEs). Firms within each typology rely upon different mechanisms to secure effective coordination (Hall and Soskice 2001, p. 1–8).

Importantly, both types of economy could prosper under conditions of advanced globalisation, confounding expectations of cross-national convergence. This claim is underpinned by the notion of ‘institutional complementarities’ – whereby the presence of one institution increases the returns from/efficiency of another. Institutional complementarities lead to patterns of institutional clustering in response to the competitive pressures of international trade. Nations with specific forms of coordination in some spheres of the economy, ‘should tend to develop complementary practices in other spheres as well’ (Hall and Soskice 2001, p. 17). Complementarities generate self-reinforcing positive feedback loops incentivising further institutional alignment.

VOC dominated CPE from the early 2000s. Despite various critiques, VOC’s agenda-setting status endured. More recently, though, the paradigmatic centrality of VOC has been loosened. Scholarship has emerged utilising a new ‘Growth Models’ framework for comparative capitalism. The landmark contribution is Baccaro and Pontusson’s (2016) article, ‘Rethinking Comparative Political Economy’. They respond to a perceived fracturing of CPE scholarship during the post-crisis period – a division between those positing a common regressive developmental trajectory and others who claim that diversity endures. They seek to transcend this apparent division through greater sensitivity to both commonalities and differences between advanced capitalist economies (Baccaro & Pontusson 2016, p. 176)

Baccaro and Pontusson deploy a Post-Keynesian/Kaleckian macroeconomic perspective that emphasises the importance of different sources of aggregate demand, particularly exports and household consumption, as determinants of capitalist variation. Distinguishing between export-led and consumption-led models of growth, they associate each model with distinctive implications for inequality and distributive conflict. These growth models are both ‘more numerous’ and ‘more unstable’ than the VOC typologies. Emphasising the conditioning impetus of the post-Fordist period, they distinguish their view from the more deeply rooted institutional equilibria posited by VOC, hinting at greater (regulation school-inspired) sensitivity to transformations in capitalist production regimes (Baccaro & Pontusson 2016, p. 175-6, 186).

Exploring four cases, Germany, Sweden, Italy and the UK, they construct their model on observations of a cross-cutting post-Fordist decline of wage-led growth and an associated distributional shift in favour of capital and ‘high-income households’ (Baccaro & Pontusson 2016, p. 198). This presents a common puzzle for these economies – how can the ‘faltering wage driver’ of aggregate demand be replaced? How can economic growth be maintained in a context of secular wage decline? The divergent pathways of response to this common problem are the comparative crux for establishing patterns of continuity and variation across the cases. Germany, Sweden and the UK represent three different ‘solutions’ to the problem of how to generate post-Fordist growth, while Italy’s experiences of ‘sluggish growth’ and ‘overall stagnation’ cast it as a deviant failing case (Baccaro & Pontusson 2016, p. 176).

GM scholarship offers valuable correctives to VOC’s deficiencies. VOC’s technocratic and depoliticised representation of capitalism has been charged with ignoring crises and class struggles (Streeck 2010, Bruff 2011). GM literature counters VOC’s understatement of class and inequality through greater attentiveness to distributional dynamics. It also challenges the hallmark VOC distinction between LMEs and CMEs, which has been criticised for overlooking the unevenness of institutional development, neglecting the contingent and politically constructed nature of pressures for ‘convergence’ emerging from globalisation, and reifying ideal types into actually existing forms of capitalism (Brenner, Peck & Theodore 2010, p. 186–8, Hay 2004, p. 242–3, Hay 2020, p. 307). By contrast, GM scholarship highlights substantial degrees of variation within archetypal LMEs and CMEs across comparative variables such as inequality growth and household indebtedness (Baccaro & Pontusson 2016, p. 178–84).

The timing and content of this nascent theoretical shift from VOC to GM reflects both CPE’s sensitivity to changing structural conditions within global capitalism and the selectiveness of that sensitivity. The success of the GM perspective is attributable to VOC’s failure to depict actually existing capitalism. Post-2007/8, VOC’s depoliticised, supply-side vision of institutional dynamics no longer resonates with advanced capitalist economies characterised by rising inequality, divisive legitimation crises, and large-scale macroeconomic intervention. The GM approach substantively incorporates these themes. Simultaneously, though, it evades a critical question facing contemporary capitalism – how can advanced economies implement rapid and large-scale green political-economic transition in response to anthropogenic environmental instability? Despite the urgent need for decarbonisation, the GM approach continues VOC’s exclusion of energy, emissions, and environmental profiles from its typological representations. While opening to broader macroeconomic traditions, GM literature reproduces VOC’s neglect of ecological economics and green economic thought.

What explains this selective engagement with contemporary themes in global capitalism? Why are some traditions of economic thought leveraged while others are ignored? What determines issue hierarchies in the construction of theory? Social science paradigms shape future research patterns by identifying theoretically significant facts, creating a hierarchy of research questions, and determining appropriate forms of evidence (Geddes 2003, p. 7). Academic disciplines are highly networked communities guided by specific rules about ‘admissible’ work, norms about how research should be conducted and results presented, and frequently, ‘a clear sense of where disciplinary boundaries reside’ (Rosamond 2007, p. 235). These insights render CPE’s neglect of anthropogenic environmental threats intelligible. Despite notable differences between VOC and the GM perspective, foundational theoretical continuities hamper the field’s potential to engage green transition. Core background assumptions underpin CPE’s paradigmatic development. These assumptions delimit specific parameters about what constitutes a legitimate object of enquiry, permissible dimensions of comparative analysis, appropriate methods, and plausible assumptions regarding capitalism.

Two foundational continuities, defined in Figure 1 below as first order theoretical assumptions, situate both VOC and the Growth Models perspective within the growth-affirming lineage of CPE post-Shonfield. Firstly, at the ontological level, both perspectives maintain a nature/society dualism that represents capitalism as a bounded an internally self-reproductive system independent of environmental entanglements. Capitalism is understood to be exogenous to environmental considerations, with the analysis of how capitalist institutions change over time isolated from consideration of Earth System dynamics. These unecological assumptions are not confined to CPE. They form an often unconscious background to the majority of the social sciences (Catton & Dunlap 1980, p. 23). Holocene conditions of relative Earth System stability ensured that political and economic institutions could assume the continued stable presence of the ecological systems that support human society (Dryzek 2016, p. 938). Secondly, in a normative/analytical sense, GDP growth functions positively as a guiding aspiration and primary axis of comparative differentiation for evaluating capitalism.

Figure 1. Comparative capitalisms and the Anthropocence.

These assumptions shape the primary research questions and understanding of capitalist development. VOC asks which economic policies can enhance economic performance, focusing on increased institutional efficiency geared towards ‘higher rates of growth’ as an explicit objective (Hall & Soskice 2001, p. 2). GM literature relies on a normative/analytical binary between ‘successful’ and ‘failing’ growth strategies. Institutional characteristics of national economies are considered with regard to their propensity to threaten or unbalance economic growth (Baccaro & Benassi 2017, p. 85–6). Italy is considered as a deviant case due to its inability to secure high levels of growth (Baccaro & Pontusson 2016, p. 176). GDP is elevated as the dominant comparative metric and normative standard for evaluating economic development. Ecologically embedded indicators of capitalist development – central to ecological economics – are excluded. This prohibits recognition of potentially positive environmental and social impacts of displacing growth’s centrality.

Regarding second order foundations, the VOC approach identifies rational firms as primary agents. The economy is viewed as a sphere within which, ‘multiple actors develop competencies by devising better ways of coordinating their endeavours’ (Hall & Soskice 2001, p. 45). This neglects the environmental foundations of economic activity. From the firm to the macro-economic scale, specific assumptions about ‘efficiency’ and ‘complementarity’ are constructed outside of environmental considerations of energy intensity, waste, or emissions (Hall & Soskice 2001, p. 17, 32, Soskice 2007, p. 89, Iversen, Soskice & Hope 2016, p. 171). A Ricardian premise of efficient national economic responses to international trade competition, via comparative institutional advantage, naturalises unecological assumptions about economic efficiency by ignoring the environmental preconditions and consequences of trade and specialisation. In rare instances where the VOC framework has been mobilised to engage issues of climate change adaptation comparatively, its unecological foundations are left unquestioned (Mikler 2011, Mikler & Harrison 2012).

GM literature assumes a more macroeconomic vantage point and centres distributional struggles between social forces. The governing macroeconomic assumptions of CPE are shifted from a New Keynesian (VOC) to a Post-Keynesian (GM) axis. This move enhances recognition of aggregate demand’s impact on long-term productive potential, increases awareness of class power as a distributional determinant, and enables more optimistic views on the scope for, ‘growth-enhancing policy interventions’ (Baccaro & Pontusson 2020, p. 17–22). But it too treats core analytical categories such as consumption, demand, income and production as environmentally disembedded. It posits a set of logical macroeconomic interrelations independent of environmental context or consequences and fails to consider ecological constraints on aggregate demand management (Baccaro & Pontusson 2016, p. 182).

Ultimately, the principal disagreement between the two perspectives is fairly minor. It centres on the prospects for macroeconomic intervention to positively enhance long-term wage growth and employment. VOC’s New Keynesian origins lead to a more pessimistic reading, while the GM perspective leverages Post-Keynesian/Kaleckian insights to generate more auspicious conclusions. In reaching these contrasting conclusions, both theories explicitly draw inspiration from strands of twentieth century macroeconomic theory. Mainstream economic theory, from neoclassical to Keynesian, has systematically excluded ecological costs of economic activity, conceptualising the economy as an extra-natural system divorced from ecological foundations (Mitchell 2011, p. 136–41). The rise of Keynesian economic thought, a common lineage for both approaches, is causally imbricated with the Great Acceleration. Keynesian assumptions about the capacity to boost demand and attain full employment through increasing economic output discount the ecological foundations of capitalism (Mann & Wainwright 2018, p. 243–4). Energy and emissions considerations do not feature as constraints on the prospects for growth. This common theoretical inheritance severely limits the capacity of contemporary CPE to think ecologically about political economy. Ecological economics and Earth Systems scholarship provide more fertile transdisciplinary resources for CPE to engage with green transition.

Problematising CPE’s environmental silences is not sufficient to develop a comparative research agenda for green transition. Nor should we entirely discount achievements of prevailing approaches, which have been highly productive for understanding comparative capitalisms. Instead, we should consider how existing analytical insights might be repurposed to equip CPE for the Anthropocene. This requires reviewing additional conceptual deficiencies characteristic of the field. Firstly, concerning institutional dynamics, scholars have challenged VOC’s narrow, rational-functionalist, understanding of institutions that reduces the motivations of institutional development to efficiency gains, squeezing out the role of political struggles, accidental/unintended outcomes, and cultural or ideational causes (Watson 2003, p. 232, Hay 2004, p. Streeck 2010, p. 27, Clift 2014, p. 101–13). VOC has further been criticised for relying on a ‘punctuated equilibrium’ model that understates incremental institutional development (Streeck & Thelen 2005). Secondly, VOC’s methodological nationalism produces a truncated sense of the spatio-temporal parameters of capitalist development that reifies national territorial boundaries, obscures the unevenness of economic development, and occludes the relevance of different scalar determinants of institutional transformation (Peck & Theodore 2007, p. 738–40, Brenner, Peck & Theodore 2010, p. 187–8). Shallow historical contextualisation neglects longer-term developmental dynamics, including sources of crisis and instability, as well as the formative impact of deep-rooted historical antecedents such as distinctive trajectories of industrialisation (Jessop 2014, p. 48, Coates 2014, p. 173). Thirdly, critics have questioned VOC’s rationalist firm-centred ontology and a related down-playing of the importance of state capacity. Assuming rational firms exaggerates functional, utility maximising motives, and disregards cultural and contingent determinations of institutional development (Hay 2005, p. 111). By examining the firm-centred micro-foundations of capitalism, VOC offers an underdeveloped sense of macro-political structures (Hancké et al. 2007, p. 14–6). Finally, VOC has downplayed the importance of sectoral differences, determinants, and comparisons within and across states (Hay 2005, p. 110, Crouch, Schröeder & Voelzkow 2009, p. 656–7).

Owing to the field’s paradigmatic convergence around an increasingly demarcated research agenda, some of these limitations shape the GM perspective too. Conceptually, GM’s spatio-temporal coordinates are comparably narrow. The approach shares VOC’s methodological nationalism, treating coherent macro-economic models within territorial states as privileged units of analysis. GM’s scalar deficiencies render it similarly inattentive to subnational unevenness (Clift & McDaniel 2021, p. 2). In terms of historicising capitalism, Baccaro and Pontusson (2016, p. 176, 2020, p. 24) posit the post-Fordist transition of the 1970s, and the resultant decline of wage-led growth, as a common stimulus prompting divergent comparative responses. But the heavy reliance on macro-economic theory, with its ahistorical ontological foundations, ensures little attention is paid to the historicity of institutions.

Yet GM scholarship also transcends conceptual weaknesses of VOC to provide firmer foundations for engaging green transition. Regarding institutional dynamics, Baccaro and Pontusson draw on the ‘power resource tradition’ to foreground how competing social blocs and electoral coalitions shape institutional outcomes. A Gramscian conception of political hegemony gives greater scope for ideational determinants of institutional change too (Baccaro & Pontusson 2019, p. 1–3). Enhanced attentiveness to sectoral components of growth models provides clues for how we might examine green transition comparatively. Departing from VOC’s firm-centric foundations, Baccaro and Pontusson construct a broader ontology grounded in distributional struggles between distinctive socio-economic coalitions and sectoral interests.6 This enables a stronger foundation for considering the variety of actors that might shape green transition.

Despite their environmental elisions, then, CPE perspectives contain partial foundations for a comparative approach towards green transition. Existing scholarship often focuses narrowly on carbon markets (Newell & Paterson 2010, Bryant 2019), or the agency of particular actors (Wright & Nyberg 2015), without assessing comparative institutional variation and continuity. Literature on socio-technical transitions shares CPE’s institutionalist ontology and emphasis on path dependency, but lacks a wider macro understanding of comparative political-economic dynamics (Unruh 2000, Lockwood et al. 2017).

A CPE approach enables comparative assessment of national economic profiles, institutions, and sectors to inform specific pathways for green transition. Policy interventions required for green transition vary with the institutional characteristics, sectoral composition, and supply/demand drivers within political economies. For example, export-led (Germany) and consumption-driven (UK) economic models will likely have distinctive modalities of environmental impact. Understanding trade and payments interdependencies between countries, linked to comparative specialisation, enhances possibilities for mutually reinforcing and coordinated green transitions. Identifying comparative drivers of environmental harms can differentiate between multi-scalar clusters of institutions that produce negative environmental effects, and those that generate ecologically restorative prosperity. Comparative modelling could facilitate policies that identify and promote ecological complementarities – whereby the existence of one green institution/sector increases the ecological benefits available from another – between institutions and sectors. For example, enhancing sustainable, local non-meat agricultural production and promoting vegetarian offerings within the hospitality sector.

As I show in the research hypotheses below, theoretical insights from existing perspectives can be leveraged directly, or productively inverted, to equip CPE to engage with green transition. These hypotheses attempt to illuminate a path beyond the nature/society dualism within CPE and, correspondingly, to decentre the analytical primacy of growth while maintaining valuable insights from CPE scholarship to examine ecologically embedded variables.

Studying comparative capitalism in the Anthropocene

Capitalism in the Anthropocene no longer operates within Holocene conditions of benign climatic stability. Socio-economic institutions must be conceptualised in relation to a broad set of ‘Anthropocene risks’ related to different forms of environmental instability. They emerge from human-driven (anthropogenic) processes, demonstrate interactive patterns of global socio-ecological connectivity, and display ‘complex, cross-scale relationships’ (Keys, et al. 2019, p. 668). Acknowledging these risks has important implications for CPE, which situates institutional analysis at the core of its intellectual agenda (Clift 2014, p. 16). It makes sense, therefore, to begin our hypotheses with a consideration of institutional dynamics.

Hypothesis 1: Pathologically path dependent institutions drive environmental instability and face greater pressures for transformation

CPE emphasises path dependent institutional development (Clift 2014, p. 101–6).7 Within VOC, feedback mechanisms arising from ‘institutional complementarities’ shape path dependent development towards typological termini (Hall & Soskice 2001, p. 1, 17, Soskice 2007, p. 89, Iversen, Soskice & Hope 2016, p. 164). GM scholarship shares a conviction in path dependency (exemplified by two prevailing post-Fordist growth models), but views institutional development as more politically contingent. Path dependency is central to the political economy of green transition but must be properly integrated with environmental dynamics.

Path dependent processes of self-reproduction allow powerful institutions, from fossil-fuel companies to state agencies, to reassert dominance and propagate environmentally damaging behaviours. Dominant institutions maintain growth’s hegemony despite destructive environmental consequences. Dryzek and Pickering (2018, p. 23) describe these processes as ‘pathological path dependency’ – disconnecting human institutions from Earth System dynamics by privileging economic imperatives over ecological awareness. Such processes do not reflect a benign logic of environmentally neutral and efficient capitalist development as envisaged by VOC. They are ecologically embedded and dangerously disrupt Earth System dynamics (Dryzek 2016, p. 937, Dryzek & Pickering 2018, p. 23). Recognising pathological path dependency disrupts the nature/society dualism by highlighting the ecological foundations of institutions. Pathological path dependency is a critical comparative variable with material and ideational determinants. The institutional embeddedness of the growth paradigm itself is a pathologically path dependent force and an object for comparative evaluation.8

As scholarship on ‘carbon lock-in’ demonstrates (Unruh 2000, Seto et al. 2016) dominant capitalist institutions, social practices, and technologies are embedded in and (re)productive of environmentally damaging logics. CPE can connect these insights to a holistic, critical, assessment of comparative capitalism. Pathologically path dependent institutions, firms, sectors and economic discourses, those that are most carbon-dependent and environmentally damaging, will face greater transformative pressures and more contested institutional trajectories. National capitalisms with stronger environmental political coalitions and lesser dependency on pathologically path dependent energy sources, sectors, and accumulation strategies will likely respond more quickly and effectively to Anthropocene challenges.

Hypothesis 2: The Anthropocene stretches spatio-temporal determinants of capitalist development

The Anthropocene transforms spatio-temporal parameters of capitalist development. Temporally, the Anthropocene stretches diachronic determinants of institutional change (Malm 2016, p. 26). Imperatives for institutional change are determined by responses to historically rooted Earth Systems shifts and an anticipatory approach grounded in longer-term assessments of future environmental trajectories. Once effects of global warming, natural resource depletion, and ecosystemic exhaustion impinge radically on the functioning of capitalist institutions it will be too late for ameliorative action (Jackson 2017, p. 16). Goals for institutional development are increasingly shaped by scientific consensus (exemplified by IPCC reports) grounded in a broader temporal framing than typical calculations of business leaders, investors, and politicians. Concretely, temporal elongation manifests as comparatively distinctive time-frames and strategies for decarbonisation and infrastructural transformation, exemplified by national plans for reaching ‘Net Zero’ carbon emissions.9 These tendencies will likely generate common but differentiated movements towards extensive future-oriented and state-directed developmental goals across national capitalisms.

Temporal reconfigurations are linked to variegated spatial dynamics. Anthropocene risks are shaped by global socio-ecological connections and multi-scalar relationships (Keys et al., p. 2019). Responding to these threats also has multi-scalar dimensions. Scholarship on technological transitions demonstrates the multiple levels of infrastructural and social change involved in decarbonisation (Geels 2002, 2014). Politically, responses to Anthropocene risks are increasingly articulated through multiple, interdependent, governance scales evidenced by the emergence of ‘transnational climate change governance’ (Bulkeley et al. 2014). Globally, UN climate conferences increasingly shape national economic policies around green transition. At regional and national scales, discussions of Green New Deals emphasise supranational and state capacities in pursuit of decarbonisation and wider sustainability goals. These scales are also increasingly interwoven. A genuinely multi-scalar approach to CPE, rather than exclusive prioritisation of the national, is required to engage with the different levels of agency involved in the political economy of green transition.

Hypothesis 3: States (not firms) are the pivotal actors in the political economy of green transition

The emergence of VOC displaced the state’s centrality from CPE. GM scholarship has restored Keynesian convictions in effective state intervention (Baccaro & Pontusson 2016, p. 178). Both approaches understate state capacity as a comparative variable. Green transition relies heavily on the political power, coordinative capacity, and infrastructural reach of states (Johnstone & Newell 2018, p. 72–3).10 Although interactions among multiple actors are involved in green transition, from corporations to social movements and individual consumers, these actors will likely pivot around attempts to contest legal, regulatory, and fiscal conditions underpinned by sovereign state authority. The urgency, scale, and complexity of activity required to effectively decarbonise and reorient economies within the prescribed time-frames requires the authority and coordinating capacity of states. This is exemplified by different proposals for Green New Deals, all of which rely on the fiscal, monetary, and legal-regulatory capacities of states to enact rapid transition away from fossil-fuel intensive economic models. Globally, inter-state bargaining within climate negotiations increasingly establishes (aspirational) parameters for national economic development.

State capacity is a critical determinant of comparative pathways towards green transition. Pre-existing modalities of state intervention are likely to condition national responses to environmental challenges. For example, the tradition of ‘Treasury Control’ within the UK has thwarted green developmental initiatives and propagated the dominant financial accumulation regime (Craig 2020). States are also pivotal sites for the political contestation of environmental issues by distinctive social forces and to the embedding of environmental concerns within public, legal, and regulatory institutions. Historically distinctive models of state authority facilitate differential degrees and forms of engagement with environmental movements (Dryzek et al. 2003). Growth Models’ Gramscian-inspired rediscovery of links between economic models, political coalitions, and legitimation strategies opens paths towards a more politicised understanding of the state that recognises the importance of environmental politics.

Hypothesis 4: Sectoral compositions and characteristics shape modalities of environmental damage and condition trajectories of green transition

Sectoral characteristics of national capitalisms are critical to producing (and ameliorating) Anthropocene risks. In aggregate, national capitalisms have distinctive environmental impacts dependent upon their sectoral make-up and specialisation within the global division of labour. For example, export-oriented economies characterised by strong manufacturing sectors are likely to have different energy and resource requirements, as well as waste and emissions implications, than consumption-led and services dominated economies. Industrial economies tend to have higher raw materials usage and physical imports compared to the lower material footprints of service economies (EU 2016).

At the level of analytically modelling comparative economies, GM’s focus on the sectoral and geographical orientation (export-led vs consumption-led) of demand drivers should be integrated with comparative environmental indicators. Measurements more commonly employed by ecological economics, such as Domestic Materials Consumption and Total Resource Consumption, should be central to CPE. This would facilitate understanding of which sectors must be contracted, or usefully expanded, in pursuit of ecological stability. Sectors may have disproportionately large environmental impacts relative to their contribution to growth, making them more salient for comparative analysis.11 Encouraging ecological complementarities between sectors can promote environmentally beneficial development.

Some sectors matter more than others. The absence of energy considerations from the typologies developed by VOC and GM literature signifies CPE’s environmental neglect. Whether or not different national capitalisms are powered by coal, oil, nuclear or renewables is a crucial variable for understanding patterns of cross-national continuity and difference in the political economy of green transition. For example, Germany has committed to much less ambitious targets for coal phase-out than the UK, due to the greater power of coal unions and companies (along with supportive energy-intensive sectors benefiting from low energy prices), as well as greater employment in the coal sector (Brauers, Oei & Walk 2020). Petrostates and those dominated by the coal industry are particularly significant, producing disproportionate CO2 emissions relative to GDP.12 Recognising that economic size alone does not accord with the importance of a national economy for green transition deprivileges GDP’s ordering of national economies’ analytical importance.

Given the vast investment requirements of green transition and the power of finance, financial sector characteristics are critical. The reluctance of powerful asset managers to endorse environmental shareholder resolutions suggests that considerable political mobilisation is required to harness the commanding heights of finance for green transition (Buller & Braun 2021). Agricultural orientations are significant. Environmental harms and emissions produced by the ‘industrial grain-oilseed-livestock complex’ point to the significance of livestock farming and meat consumption in environmental degradation (Weis 2013, p. 66). In large meat producing countries such as Brazil and the US, curbing these sectors is critical. National strategies and timeframes for green transition will be shaped by the environmental modalities of leading sectors, the relative power of social forces that standing to lose/benefit from curbing environmentally damaging sectors, and the relationship between energy sectors and the wider economy.

Conclusion

The arrival of the Anthropocene profoundly unsettles the modern social sciences. Theories grounded in the nature/society dualism are unsuited to reckoning with proliferating environmental risks and destructive interdependencies between socio-economic institutions and Earth Systems dynamics. Across the social sciences, critical genealogies of incumbent paradigms and new interdisciplinary perspectives are required to equip scholars for our rapidly changing environmental context. CPE has both an important responsibility for engaging in this project and much to offer if it does. Given the causal complicity of fossil-fuel capitalism in the making of the Anthropocene, and the centrality of economic transformation to ameliorating its effects, those of us who take capitalism as our object of study have a special responsibility to engage these issues. In a more concretely institutional sense, scholars of CPE have much to offer as a framework for understanding, evaluating, and guiding comparative pathways of green transition.

In this article, I have begun a critical genealogy of CPE’s modern development with the intention of appraising and encouraging the field’s capacity to engage substantively with the challenge of green transition. Retracing the field’s historical development, I argued that CPE’s post-war emergence alongside the crystallisation of growth’s hegemony instilled scholarship with an assumption of the environmental neutrality of economic development and an uncritical disposition towards growth. Appraising the more recent emergence of VOC and Growth Models approaches, I examined CPE’s paradoxical narrowing around an uncritical orientation to growth maximisation despite mounting environmental threats and heightened awareness of the links between capitalism and climate. In the penultimate section, I developed provisional hypotheses intended to tentatively recalibrate CPE scholarship towards fuller engagement with environmental issues. These hypotheses need to be evaluated through comparative empirical assessments of diverse national plans and pathways towards green transition.

I have made the case that ‘climate issues’ are not simply another empirical domain to be incorporated into existing CPE approaches, but rather require reconsideration of our approach to studying comparative capitalisms. I finish by calling for CPE to rediscover the conjunctural sensitivity and responsiveness that is a hallmark of the field, rather than succumbing to forms of intellectual path dependency that limit its analytical horizons and practical applications. Recognising capitalism’s environmental embeddedness requires rethinking theoretical foundations and decentring CPE’s preoccupations with economic growth. What we might establish as a comparative analytical metric and normative goal in place of growth, or whether indeed we should seek a direct substitute for GDP’s role, remains an open question requiring further consideration by scholars of CPE.

Notes

1.

Karl Polanyi’s (1944) concept of embeddedness offers a promising ontological foundation for this effort.

2.

Earth Systems science understands the Earth as a holistic complex system that contains subsystems, such as the atmosphere and biosphere, that are ‘pervaded and connected by constant flows of matter and energy, in immense feedback loops’ (Bonneuil & Fressoz, 2016).

3.

Jonsson (2014, p. 2) also draws attention to a shadow history of economic thought that recognises ecological ‘limits’.

4.

A recent ‘state of the art’ CPE contribution to the journal Socio-Economic Review makes only one, footnoted, reference to climate or environmental issues in its synopsis of ‘New approaches to political economy’ (Amable et al, 2019).

5.

Green growth perspectives range from Green Keynesian emphases on green investment’s employment-enhancing potential to Schumpeterian convictions in a new clean energy revolution (Jacobs, 2012, Meckling & Allan, 2020).

6.

Much like VOC, though, there is still a functionalist sense that Growth Models call forth their own self-reproduction (Clift & McDaniel, 2021, p. 6).

7.

Path dependency refers to the declining reversibility of institutional trajectories over time. It is driven by ‘positive feedback’ – the self-reinforcing nature of specific institutional arrangements (Pierson, 2004, p. 18).

8.

Contributions of ideational or discursive political economy, identifying how goals and policy framings for comparative economic development are socially constructed, are particularly salient here (Clift, 2014, Hay, 2016, Schmidt, 2008).

9.

Linear notions of temporal development are also likely to be disrupted by the triggering of potential ‘tipping points’ prompting disruptive step changes in Earth Systems dynamics (Spratt & Dunlop, 2018, Steffen et al., 2018, Keys et al., 2019).

10.

The state’s importance to green transition has been recognised within long-standing debates over the characteristics of the ‘green state’ and the ‘environmental state’ (Paterson, 2016).

11.

Food and drink, for example, have large environmental impacts across the value chain (European Commission, 2019, p. 5).

12.

Saudi Arabia, Iran, Indonesia, and Russia all feature in the top ten carbon emitting countries due to their large oil, gas, and coal industries, despite not figuring in the ten largest economies in the world (climatetrade.com).

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