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Anthropocene anthropology: reconceptualizing contemporary global change

Amelia Moore

https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9655.12332

Abstract

The Anthropocene is the scientific label given by earth scientists to the current epoch of unprecedented anthropogenic planetary change. The Anthropocene is also a political label designed to call attention to this change and evolving notions of agency and responsibility in contemporary life. This article critically explores what I call ‘the Anthropocene idea’ and the condition of ‘Anthropocene spaces’ through selected anthropological writing about recent planetary change and through analysis of current events in a specific ‘vulnerable’ location. By considering recent events in The Bahamas, I arrive at an orientation that I call simply Anthropocene anthropology. Rather than advocating for the creation of a new subfield of research, this mode of engagement offers an open-ended conceptual framework for the critical examination of the Anthropocene idea as it influences the symbolic and material realities of contemporary Anthropocene spaces.

This article is a critical exploration of a concept that is poised to breach the walls of academia and become an international buzzword: the Anthropocene. The term has been proposed as a designation for a new planetary epoch, encompassing the present and recent past, in which human processes drive all major earth systems. The Anthropocene idea has spread from the domain of the earth sciences into the realm of the social sciences, sparking conversations about the stakes and form of humanistic research. This article can be read as one possible approach to the anthropological engagement of the Anthropocene idea. I call this approach Anthropocene anthropology.

My goal in presenting this article is to orientate analysis around the Anthropocene as a concept that reflects the recent creation of a contemporary problem space.1 Ideas about global environmental change influence thought and action in a number of arenas, and I hope to see anthropologists tackle the breadth of this planetary imagination animating emergent cosmologies of anthropos, bios, and geo. New frameworks are needed to keep pace with authoritative arguments about collectivity and responsibility in the face of a changing world. These arguments attempt to define the present (and therefore the future and the past) for ever-increasing numbers of people (and nonhuman beings). Such definitions enable new possibilities and processes while foreclosing others. By engaging the discourses and processes enabled by the Anthropocene idea as they help to transform practices of life and work, knowledge produced about place and space, infrastructural aesthetics, and the evolving language available for subjectivation, we also engage the Anthropocene on material and symbolic levels (Beirsack 2006).

The greater argument underpinning this article is that even in an era of rapid change, we still need critical analysis of the characterization of that change and responses to it. I conceptualize my own work as an anthropological awareness ‘of’ the Anthropocene (understanding the idea as a historically contingent manifestation of social, political, and material processes), as opposed to work that is un-reflexively ‘in’ the Anthropocene (taking the framing of the problem and responses to it for granted). We need anthropological analysis that can examine the characterizations of life and change that are being made within authoritative fields of power and that can follow these ideas as they affect institutional policies with real consequences for the everyday lives of the people we work with around the world. We need concepts that can both speak to and evolve with emergent trends. At the risk of being chastised for not acknowledging the stakes of anthropogenic change, I want to make sure that we continue to maintain a space for the untimely questioning of the present (Rabinow 2008) in a time when ‘the obvious’ is solidifying rapidly around us (Raffles 2002). This orientation is a necessary complement to all the work we anthropologists do as partners in the fight against unjust and deadly global change. The work I advocate here is a part of that fight.

This article is divided into five further sections. First, I provide a brief ethnographic introduction to one location with renewed relevance in light of the Anthropocene idea: the islands of The Bahamas. Second, I explain the Anthropocene in more depth, introducing the significance of the idea for both the sciences and humanities. Third, I explore different anthropological engagements with global environmental change, providing a brief discussion of select existing work. Fourth, I introduce a platform for an Anthropocene anthropology that might be applicable in ‘Anthropocene spaces’ like The Bahamas. I conclude with an appeal for continued open-ended analysis of contemporary life in any locale said to be marked by anthropogenic planetary change.2

While this piece is not an in-depth ethnographic exploration of The Bahamas, I have written about contemporary life in these islands elsewhere (Moore 2010a; 2010b; 2012; 2015). In the following section, I use brief examples of current events in that location to introduce some of the ways in which experiences of and ideas about global change have come to influence the narratives, relations, and spatializations of human and nonhuman life. These Bahamian examples ground the following sections on current anthropological engagements with global change and the Anthropocene.

The Bahamas and global change

The Bahamas consists of over 700 islands and cays – an archipelago – in the western Atlantic stretching between eastern Cuba and southern Florida. The nation is a designated small island state under the Barbados Program of Action with a small, majority Afro-Caribbean population of approximately 320,000 and an economic dependency on the international tourism industry and foreign investment. The Bahamas is also increasingly described as home to the third largest reef system in the world, a large marine carbon sink, a number of endemic species, and several distinct island ecologies (The Islands of The Bahamas 2013a; 2013b; Westphal, Riegl & Eberli 2010). The nation has been internationally defined by its marine relations, from sponge trading and boat building in British colonial times to coastal development and beach vacationing today. Once known as the ‘isles of June’, the archipelago is now often characterized as the ‘ephemeral islands’ in an era of planetary crisis (Bell 1934; Campbell 1978).

I have travelled to The Bahamas for over a decade, exploring what it means to visit, study, and live in the ephemeral islands. The tourist industry of The Bahamas has been extremely successful in selling a brand of ‘tropicalized’ island ecology, from lush vegetation and palm-fringed beaches to azure waters and vibrant marinescapes (Thompson 2006), but the actual experience of these island ecologies is something else entirely. Spindly pine forests in the northern islands give way to dense coppice woodlands in the central islands and then to arid bush, bent by the winds, in the southern islands. The bedrock of the Bahama Banks is composed of porous limestone, an accretion of calcareous sediment deposited over millennia, and rain water (the only ‘natural’ source of fresh water) collects in fragile aquifers beneath the ground. Beaches range from white, powdery sand that swallows footprints to sand that takes on a delicate pink blush resulting from the build-up of tiny invertebrate shells. Other shores are rough and craggy, cutting like knives into bare feet.

I have learned from fishermen and ecologists that in the dense mangrove marls one is likely to come upon well-used middens (mounds of conch shells discarded by nearby fishers that are generations old at the bottom and freshly killed at the top) while navigating channels in a small boat. I have observed the way that buildings weather on the islands, responding to the sea air, heavy rains, and smoldering sun, revealing layers of pastel paint or the texture of brain coral mixed into the stuff of the building stones. I have stopped being surprised when stairways leading down sand dunes to the beach abruptly end in mid-air as the sands recede into the ocean after seasons of wave action and rising tides. And in Nassau, I fall asleep too often to the acrid smell of the perpetually burning city landfill mingled with the scent of local thyme left over from dinner.

What strikes me is that the islands are intensely alive, animated by anthropogenic and biogeochemical processes both in and out of the water, and this life is a central part of the social worlds of The Bahamas. The examples are never-ending: human waste and run-off lead to algal blooms offshore that affect the course of coral growth, inspiring novel restoration plans; hot pink shards of conch shell adorn roundabouts that direct traffic around the latest mega-resort; underwater, whip-like crawfish antennae wave from under artificial habitats laid by fishers; clouds of flying termites migrate through window screens during heavy downpours; tiny anole lizards hunt for insects in the dark corners of the house.

Bahamian ecologies shape and are shaped by those who live and work in The Bahamas and by multiple forms of anthropogenic change. These shifting ecologies are a large part of the materiality of Bahamian living, participating in the postcolonial contingencies of everyday life. I have experienced how the question of anthropogenic change affects the lives of Bahamians as well as the activities of regional environmental management communities along with national conversations around tourism and development. Multiple problems linked to the Anthropocene idea in The Bahamas include physical vulnerability to climate change, marine biodiversity loss, coastal erosion, fossil fuel dependency, and coral reef disappearance. These ‘Anthropocene problems’ are viscerally experienced by Bahamian island residents and increasingly called upon by the natural sciences and other industries to justify the speculative reorientation of local and regional geopolitics, interspecies relations, land- and marinescapes, field research, and travel markets.

In terms of geopolitical positioning, postcolonial arguments about regional distinction (in which The Bahamas is positioned by members of its government as unique in the Caribbean in terms of per capita wealth and sophistication in the tourism industry [Cleare 2007]) now sit side by side with arguments about impending anthropogenic disaster. The Bahamas, as a low-lying archipelagic nation, is imbricated in multi-scaled global change predictions that influence the creation of alliances centred on the small island (such as the Alliance of Small Island States [AOSIS] at the United Nations, of which The Bahamas is a member), and the small island is now institutionally defined by social, economic, and environmental fragility in the face of anthropogenic planetary change.3 Sea-level rise as a result of global warming is predicted to be a grave national threat within the very near future (Hamilton 2003; London 2004), sparking one Bahamian speaker at a recent conference at the national college to state, with a strong sense of irony, that ‘many of us will be environmental refugees’ who have to ‘head to the hills of Haiti’, and to ask: ‘Forty years after independence, will we have another forty years going forward?’4 These predictions are also debated privately after storms remove sections of coastline, flooding homes and roadways (a palpable inconvenience in terms of connectivity and cost), leading to conversational speculation over pub beers in Nassau about the sensibility of investing in coastal property or infrastructure.

Simultaneously, justifications for the country’s fisheries sector, following themes in international marine conservation, have switched from exhortations for growth and expansion to precautionary tales of declining numbers of commercial species and poor reef health as just some of the detrimental impacts of overfishing in recent decades (Buchan 2000; Chaplin 2006; Chiappone, Sluka & Sullivan-Sealey 2000; Clark, Danylchuk & Freeman 2005; Moore 2012). One of the ways this framing has manifested in The Bahamas has been through government partnership with local and international environmental NGOs to obtain Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) certification for the harvest of Spiny Lobster, the country’s main fisheries export. Fishers are worried that without product greening via international MSC certification, important lobster markets in the European Union and United States will soon be closed to Bahamian exports as consumers demand a sustainable stamp for their imported seafood (Smith 2011; World Wildlife Fund 2013). One Bahamian woman with a family history of fishing in the island of Eleuthera explained to me that lobster used to be so abundant that their bodies were used as pineapple fertilizer, but the value of these species drastically changed over time as the Bahamian pineapple market dried up and lobster became a global luxury food item, making lobster a million-dollar fishery. MSC certification was now necessary she said, ‘so we can continue to sell to Walmart’, registering the irony that the promotion of sustainable fisheries is increasingly central to international commodity chains linking large-scale commercial fishing and the mass consumption of marine products.

Similarly, the recognition of anthropogenic biodiversity loss has led to re-imaginations of space in the archipelago. The number of existing and proposed marine protected areas (MPAs) in The Bahamas dramatically increased in the last decade owing to the country’s commitment to international conservation plans. For example, The Bahamas has committed to the Nature Conservancy’s Caribbean Challenge Initiative (CCI) to enclose 20 per cent of its marine and coastal space within protected areas by 2020. The CCI justifies its regional plans with the argument that ‘the Caribbean contains some of the world’s richest marine biodiversity … 10% of the world’s coral reefs, 1,400 species of fish and marine mammals and mile after mile of mangrove forests … Alarmingly, the Caribbean is increasingly threatened by development, pollution, overfishing and climate change’ (The Nature Conservancy 2013). However, these NGO arguments are complicated by some Bahamian fishers, in the Berry Islands, for example, who fear that there will soon be more restricted space than open space for local fishing, ‘more red dots on the map’, and that MPA restrictions exacerbate ongoing transitions of land and reef from the generational use of islanders descended from colonial slave populations to real estate leased to foreign development companies (Stoffle 2013).

Finally, it is important to realize that engagement with global change in The Bahamas includes actions within industries and markets outside of conservation. In a 2013 speech given in observation of The Bahamas’ fortieth anniversary of independence, the Prime Minister reminded citizens that ‘tourism is the lifeline to The Bahamas’. Marketing The Bahamas has always been an effort in place-making, and the islands of the country are considered by its Ministry of Tourism to be ‘tourist products’ in competition for global travellers (Cleare 2007; Jefferson & Lickorish 1991; Moore 2015). I have witnessed the rise of the ‘sustainable tourism destination’ as an emergent product appearing alongside the mainstay postcolonial paradise model of tourism (Strachan 2002). In addition to calls for regional ‘carbon neutral destinations’ (Moore 2010b), some developers in The Bahamas are designing, building, and marketing self-sufficient travel destinations using island-based principles to keep resource use to a minimum (Schooner Bay Ventures Limited 2008). The tourist product has long influenced the basic life-ways of the islands in terms of building codes, community social relations, racialized spatialities, and household aesthetics, so it is no surprise that plans for sustainable tourism spill over into local thoughts about daily life. Yet for some younger Bahamians working in the island of Abaco and thinking about starting families, sustainability also means trying to maintain a ‘Bahamian style of community’ – living next to your neighbour in dense settlements and looking out for one another – as opposed to the prevailing model of private, segregated enclave development. For many Bahamians, knowledge about sustainable living in the face of global environmental change will always be linked to travel markets, experienced as debates over life-style and the quotidian details of community life.

These examples represent some of the ways in which the physical spaces and socioecological relations of the country continue to be transnationally framed as fragile, vulnerable, and in need of redesign within the networks of knowledge and governance concerning global change. These are simultaneously some of the ways the experience of global change and its rhetorics come to affect the everyday lives of those who reside in the islands. Bureaucratic discourse is framed around events in the archipelago as exemplary of global concerns, but the results are felt close to home. These examples are neither exhaustive nor unique to The Bahamas. However, they represent the kinds of complex emergent conjunctures that have coalesced around the Anthropocene idea and the experience of The Bahamas as an Anthropocene space.

These examples also raise a number of interrelated questions that require further anthropological engagement as ethnographic problems: How do we characterize this process of political creation that leads to geopolitical alliance, rearticulated subjectivities for island residents, and transformations of the value of landscape and infrastructure? What forms of reason hold projects like MSC and the CCI together, and how is this Anthropocene logic materialized in social relations, relations with other life-forms, and experiences of space and place? How do we understand human life in the context of lively anthropogenic ecologies informed by an awareness of global change? What kinds of stories do experts and laypeople tell in order to locate themselves in global change narratives and enroll others in planning for change? Who designs the mental and material models that inform the experience of life in an Anthropocene space?

In order to begin to approach these questions – perhaps better characterized as an anthropological puzzle for the Anthropocene – I have compiled a select collection of recent work and useful concepts that I think move us closer to an Anthropocene anthropology. However, before I delve into those compilations, I must further explain the Anthropocene idea.

The Anthropocene idea

Despite the fact that there have been a number of international conferences and even a journal dedicated to the subject, the term ‘Anthropocene’ is of very recent origin. The idea was formally introduced to the scientific community in 2000 by the atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and the biologist Eugene Stoermer in the back pages of the International Global Change Newsletter (Crutzen & Stoermer 2000), published by the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program (IGBP). Since then it has been popularized by Crutzen and others, who have campaigned for the term to label a new geological epoch encompassing the earth’s present, recent past, and indefinite future, signifying the influence of the human population on the stratigraphy of the planet as well as on earth’s primary biogeophysical systems (Crutzen 2002; Crutzen & Schwagerl 2011; Crutzen & Steffen 2003).

The campaigning has paid off – though not without controversy. The International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS), appointed by the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS), has a designated Anthropocene Working Group who must determine:

  1. if the Anthropocene, as a geological time unit, makes stratigraphic sense (can we actually see a record of human influence in the sedimentary layers of the planet now, and will we still see it many, many years from now?);
  2. if it is a useful category for earth scientists as well as other disciplines, and if this conceptual utility should also be considered in its designation (could the term’s rhetorical use be as important as its scientific use?);
  3. when its beginning should be placed in the historical record (at the evolution of Homo sapiens, the advent of agriculture, the Industrial Revolution, post-Second World War, or at some point in the future?);5
  4. how it should be formally designated (as a ‘golden spike’ or by numerical date?);
  5. if it is best considered an age, epoch, period, era, or aeon (adapted from Waters & Zalasiewicz 2013).6

Prior to the advent of the Anthropocene idea, geologists generally agreed that the planet had been residing in the post-glacial Holocene epoch for approximately 11,000 years. Formal adoption of the Anthropocene would replace the Holocene as the category defining the earth’s present geological condition. The International Geological Congress has delayed ruling on the formal adoption of the Anthropocene until at least 2016 while scientists conduct further analyses (Waters & Zalasiewicz 2013).7

To heighten the anthropogenic aspect, scientific proponents of the Anthropocene idea claim that as a result of population growth and resource use, humans are now a geological force in and of themselves, driving planetary change at an unprecedented rate. Beyond climate change and biodiversity loss (leading to what some have called the Sixth Great Extinction [Kolbert 2014]), scientists point out that domesticated animals are now the majority of living vertebrates, and measured by global weight, only 5 per cent of all vertebrates are ‘wild’. Some stress that human activities have even changed the shape of the tectonic plates. Supporters of the idea therefore believe that the overarching context for all life on earth is now the Anthropocene. In other words, the controversial event is this: humans have been so influential as to necessitate a change of epochal categorization in the life history of the planet. For many earth scientists, this categorization matters because at stake is the morality of contemporary environmentalism and the hope for real political recognition of planetary change and uncertainty (Osborne, Traer & Chang 2013).

The Anthropocene idea has further significance for the social sciences and humanities, inspiring arguments across several fields about the shifting meaning of multiple forms of life and earth processes. For the postcolonial historian Dipesh Chakrabarty (2009, 2012, 2013), the Anthropocene idea itself (specifically climate change) represents a challenge to the primacy of the human in that the consequences of human activity can no longer be explained in terms of social theories of difference or political economy alone. He now sees the human as irrefutably bound up in the natural world through the collective effects of the species as a geological force. The human is therefore a tense figure within the narratives of the Anthropocene, doubly human and natural, and Chakrabarty argues that postcolonial historians and other humanists can no longer focus on the merely human aspects of human lives, and must instead accept that humanity is not ‘free’ from the vital realities of planetary existence.

In a distinct but sympathetic argument, the science studies scholar Bruno Latour makes the ironies of the Anthropocene idea explicit. He writes, ‘[W]hat makes the Anthropocene a clearly detectable golden spike way beyond the boundary of stratigraphy is that it is the most decisive philosophical, religious, anthropological and, as we shall see, political concept yet produced as an alternative to the very notions of “Modern” and “modernity”’ (Latour 2013: 77). He sees the Anthropocene as a confession of sorts of the fallacy that various forms of humanity and earth’s biogeochemical processes can each be examined in vacuums that do not contain the other.

The geographer Jamie Lorimer (2012) also speculates that the idea of the Anthropocene represents the nail in the coffin for the modern dichotomy between nature and culture that has been so central to Western environmentalism (but see also Crist 2013). He contends that the idea of ‘pure Nature’ has not gone quietly from the sciences; instead it has left a trail of confusion in its wake, what Robbins and Moore (2013) have labelled ‘ecological anxiety disorder’. Lorimer contends that there are a multiplicity of natures at play that stem from the variety of political-ecological scenarios in the world, and that these scenarios involve integrations of the human and nonhuman that cannot be uniformly described in an a priori fashion and that require radically new research approaches (see, e.g., Holm et al. 2013).

When it comes to taking up the provocations of the Anthropocene idea in scholarly depictions of the world, Irvine and Gorji note that the turn towards ‘Writing Culture in the Anthropocene’ is part of a broader move in the academy (2013; following Kirksey & Helmreich 2010). The environmental historian William Cronon is one well-known early exemplar of this Anthropocene turn in the humanities. His work, exemplified in publications like Nature’s metropolis (1992), explores historical socioecological relationships shaped by market institutions in the American Midwest using a methodological blend of ecological and economic history. He has argued that it would have been problematic to reinforce the boundary between human and nonhuman in his investigation of the growth of Chicago because neither city nor country can be understood as solely natural or unnatural.

In a more politically explicit vein, the geographer Nahan F. Sayre argues that ‘the key points to draw from the Anthropocene have less to do with when it began than how it affects the underlying assumptions that scientists make about understanding the world’ (2012: 63) and how these assumptions affect policy. He cautions that declaring the age of anthropogenesis should not lead to an assumption of a transhistorical ‘anthropos’ with no attention to the uneven distribution of Anthropocene responsibilities and impacts. Therefore, the Anthropocene necessitates questions of ‘socioenvironmental justice’ (2012: 67). Sayre’s work and my own are aligned in that he recognizes that the Anthropocene cannot be reduced to climate change alone and that the idea presents a number of opportunities for anthropological participation. He states, ‘[T]he challenge is to rebuild our conceptual scaffolding to reflect these novel realities’ (2012: 63).

The last few years have seen solidifications of scholarship around climate change, the proliferation of political ecology, and the rise of social studies of nature. The social sciences and humanities have begun to discuss the Anthropocene, engaging with the idea and its challenges and invitations for scholarship. But what about specifically anthropological engagements with the Anthropocene? What orientations are needed to explore anthropological puzzles like those I have begun to follow in The Bahamas? My hope is that we can craft new frameworks that will open doors for such an engagement, expanding the scope of the political ecology of global change.8

Anthropology and global change

In this section, I show some of the diverse ways that anthropologists already approach the discursive and material realities of global anthropogenic change. Of course, anthropologists have long been interested in various phenomena of global environmental degradation (Bodley 2002), and, of course, environmental change depends on ‘how we see evidence of change and the stakes at play in the perceptions of environments as natural or cultural’ (Cameron 2013: 105). Many scholars accept the planetary scaling of late twentieth-century environmental science, asking how local communities are involved with degradation as a locally enacted global phenomenon.

Since the Rio Convention on Biological Diversity in 1992, a broad-reaching topic in the anthropological investigation of global change has been biodiversity loss, and studies centred on biodiversity are still an important example of anthropology in the Anthropocene. Anthropologists have documented the knowledge and practices of rural and indigenous peoples that affect crop diversity and the existence of rare species. They have also shown how local people relate to biodiversity protection in ways that differ from mainstream international conservation efforts (Haenn, Schmook, Reyes & Calmé 2014; Orlove & Brush 1996; West 2006). Importantly, anthropologists have also had a great deal to say about the social production and material manifestations of biodiversity (Hayden 2003; Lowe 2006; Nazarea 2006; West 2006). This work delineates biodiversity as one of the most influential political forms of the 1990s, reshaping idioms of value, exchange, development paradigms, material realities, and rights in ways that have transformed North-South relations to this day. Further, anthropologists have shown that the scientific designation of biodiverse nature has salience for the circulation of multiple forms of capital. This work suggests that the way anthropogenic change is imagined, defined, and experienced has crucial implications for transnational flows of capital, knowledge, and social recognition.

Anthropogenic climate change has possibly surpassed biodiversity loss as the most widely recognized form of global transformation. The anthropology of climate change, as envisioned by Crate and Nuttall (2009), stresses protecting and respecting local cultures in the face of this phenomenon when it comes to adaptations, unpreventable impacts, and disasters. These scholars exemplify an action-orientated stance towards change, calling for anthropological engagement that can make local challenges visible aspects of international policy. Within this mode of research, also known as ‘climate ethnography’, anthropologists have a responsibility to explicate the local effects of global transformation in order to fill in gaps in Western scientific knowledge about anthropogenic change (Crate 2008; 2011).

In a related vein, scholars like Lazrus and Rudiak-Gould have helped carve out a niche for an anthropological engagement with small island communities in the context of anthropogenic climate change. Lazrus (2012) argues persuasively that climate change has altered conditions for life in small islands, affecting islanders through a number of key environmental shifts, but also through the enactment of adaptive policies that circumscribe the sovereignty of affected peoples. For Lazrus, anthropological responsibility lies in reconfiguring international institutional understandings of island vulnerability so that islanders are not assumed to be inherently vulnerable. For Rudiak-Gould (2010; 2013), climate change in small island states is both an issue of translation between international scientists and island citizens and a question of seeing the material consequences of change in islander environments. He argues that scientists can learn from island people when they examine how the information they present has been reinterpreted in local idioms. Scientists are then forced to see the ‘humanistic dimensions of this geophysical phenomenon’ (2010: 53) and to respond to material realities of change that may not be readily visible from their data sets or regional climate models (2013). For both scholars, the anthropologist’s task is to help find meaning in forms of change that combat scientific hegemony and colonial legacies.

Continuing the discussion, many scholars have advocated for more of a second-order perspective for the study of climate change (Lahsen 2005; Moore 2010b; Tsing 2005; Whitington 2012). For example, Lahsen (2008) is adamant that anthropologists should study those who populate the centres of power and generate knowledge and policy about the phenomenon itself. She argues that scientists, administrators, journalists, and officials do as much to shape climate change as an idea, discourse, and powerful frame for thought and action as do the marginalized peoples of the world. Along these lines, Barnes et al. (2013) have argued that engagements at this level allow for an understanding of the cultural dimensions and micro-dynamics of decision-making about climate processes and policies, and therefore for anthropological influence to be felt amongst people in positions of power.

Other topics for the anthropology of global change have included work on the scientific rationales and social realities of invasive species eradication strategies (Fortwangler 2009; Moore 2012); the critical analysis of spatial productions in the name of environmental change such as protected areas (West, Igoe & Brockington 2006); criticism of the crisis rhetoric of global change as an excuse to appropriate land and resources in carbon trading strategies (Fairhead, Leach, & Scoones 2012), and arguments about the nexus between ecological knowledge production and market-based extractive practices (Davidov 2012). Although this is by no means an exhaustive collection, these examples show the scope of recent anthropological work that takes on the idea of anthropogenic change in an era of planetary framing. But what about anthropological work (including sympathetic disciplines) that explicitly engages the Anthropocene idea as a social fact and material reality?

Anthropological writing that explicitly tackles the idea of the Anthropocene itself is relatively few and far between (though rapidly growing), but Carrithers, Bracken, and Emery (2011) use the term to label a ‘master narrative’ of endangerment, extinction, and crisis that helps dictate the social placement of species in the world of species protection and valuation. Sympathetically, Ogden et al. (2013) argue that it is crucial to study geopolitical outcomes tied to the transnational institutionalization of discourse and practice in the name of the Anthropocene, what they call global socioecological assemblages (following Ong & Collier 2005). They use the concept of global assemblages to describe market-driven, transnational environmental governance emerging as a means of managing life processes. Also emphasizing governance, Lovbrand, Stripple, and Wiman view the Anthropocene as a ‘central system of thought mediated by Earth System Science’ (2009: 10) new forms of research such as coupled natural and human systems. These projects then become ‘new political space(s) for government intervention’ (2009: 11). Going further, Howe (2014) describes (in the context of industrial alternative energy farms) how both experts and local people assert authoritative and ethical claims in the context of Anthropocene futures. ‘Anthropocenic ecoauthority’ therefore consists of ‘experiential, scientific and managerial truth claims’ about environmental knowledge (2014: 383).

As this work on various aspects of global transformation shows, anthropologists are situated to observe how the Anthropocene idea amalgamates multiple forms of anthropogenic change into an argument about the distinction of the contemporary world. Anthropology also shows that we must remain conscious of the multiple materialities entangled in this emergent cosmological ordering of reality. For example, Larkin (2013) points us towards the infrastructures that materially mediate much of the human relation to the nonhuman world. According to him, infrastructures are more than technical objects – they are poetic, semiotic, and aesthetic, constituting subjects and citizens while embodying the ‘collective fantasy of society’ (2013: 329). An anthropology for the Anthropocene would be attuned to the ‘politics and poetics’ of the material interventions made in the name of global change along with the political ecologies, discursive productions, modes of governance, justice, authority, and expertise that combine to constitute our planetary present.

Anthropocene anthropology

I see the Anthropocene as the most recent iteration of the positive feedback cycle producing ideas about planetary change: the more researchers and policy-makers promote anthropogenesis as a global issue with political stakes and the more transnational action takes place in its name, the more we will see shifts in understandings of global transformation, sociality, ecology, and landscape (or marinescape) formations on multiple levels. These will in turn inspire new alliances and materializations. We require frameworks that allow us to recognize the components and effects of this Anthropocene feedback cycle while they help reproduce locations like the Bahama Islands.

Returning to my anthropological puzzle in The Bahamas, I would like to propose concepts for the exploration of ‘Anthropocene spaces’ – the complex conjunctures that I hope will become the subject of an Anthropocene-aware anthropology. The puzzle of The Bahamas requires analytical categories and concepts – a framework – that can reframe global change and the Anthropocene idea as an anthropological object. For starters, global change predictions, driven by the work of scientists from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and others, have had far-reaching influence in the creation of political alliances for the Anthropocene. As I mentioned above, The Bahamas is a member of AOSIS at the United Nations. The forty-four AOSIS member nations come from all the ocean regions of the world, and the group now describes itself as ‘a coalition of small island and coastal countries that share similar development challenges and concerns about the environment, especially their vulnerability to the adverse effects of global climate change’ (Alliance of Small Island States 2013). The milieu in question within AOSIS is the small island, now thought of as an object about which it is possible to make a number of truth claims about its social, economic, and environmental fragility in the face of anthropogenic planetary change. Anthropocene political objects are scalable in the Bahamian context from particular islands, to the island nation, to the Caribbean island region, to the planet itself as a fragile ‘earth island’. Further, the forms of subjectivation available for island residents in The Bahamas now include the climate change refugee, facing the future possibility of ‘heading for the hills of Haiti’9 as the everyday experience of coastal erosion and sand replenishment is publicly linked to global change. AOSIS is one example of an alliance that hopes to promote small island subjectivity while facilitating transnational island adaptation measures.

To approach these political moves, the anthropological engagement of the Anthropocene requires a scope beyond the molecularization of recent work on bioscience (Rose 2006) and the sovereign anthropocentrism of concepts like biopower and biopolitics (Povinelli 2014; Rabinow & Rose 2006). These concepts must be remediated to speak to the Anthropocene as a social category that positions the nonhuman and biogeochemical processes as integral to the political understanding of life. To do this I borrow from Olson (2010), who coined ‘ecobiopolitics’, a concept acknowledging techniques of knowledge production and governance that focus on the milieu between environmental and human processes for the optimization of the milieu itself. Ecobiopolitics focuses attention on scientific and political strategies towards anthropogenic change that manage the idea of planetary ‘habitable space’ across scales and methodologically elide human and ecological research. Anthropogenic planetary change then becomes a form of global environmental imaginary within which it is possible for Olson’s understanding of ecobiopolitics to function through ‘truth claims based on knowledge of milieu processes, power relations that take milieus as their object, and the modes of subjecthood and subjectification that designate subjects as milieu elements’ (2010: 181, modifying Rabinow & Rose 2006). The Bahamas’ self-positioning as an AOSIS member signifies the positioning of its islands within an ecobiopolitical mode of knowledge and governance, subjectivation and development.

In light of the country’s commitments to Anthropocene alliances and projects designed to combat its fragility, The Bahamas is increasingly considered a ‘rich source of research’, in the words of a visiting marine scientist at a recent public meeting of the Bahamas National Trust. This means that emergent forms of reason can now be tested there through field research projects enacted by visiting researchers who are commonly conducting integrated ecological and socioeconomic studies about environmental change. One such project I participated in was the Bahamas Biocomplexity Project (BBP), an interdisciplinary amalgamation of researchers studying the archipelago’s marine biodiversity and species connectivity, the distribution of marine habitats, and the socioeconomics of fishing communities to ‘improve the design of networks of marine protected areas’ (American Museum of Natural History 2013). This kind of policy-focused, interdisciplinary work is indicative of the research paradigms attached to the Anthropocene idea in which methodologies are consciously designed to speak to ‘big picture’ issues of anthropogenic global change within ‘linked human and natural systems’ as opposed to studies of molecular or genetic processes in isolation (Colwell 1998). My time with the BBP was spent administering surveys to members of Bahamian fishing communities, catching answers as-catch-can on boats, dock benches, car rides, and at kitchen tables. As a member of the social science arm of the project, I had no field interactions with the biological teams collecting oceanographic, biological, and spatial data elsewhere in the archipelago. I came to realize that, methodologically, such teamwork often follows different patterns in space and time depending on the target of research: human or nonhuman, living or nonliving physical processes.

How should we characterize the forms of reason that anchor such ‘big picture’ research methodologies? I argue that within projects such as the BBP or the CCI (mentioned above), socioecological forms of institutional reason – what I label ‘socioecologics’ – frame human/environmental/nonhuman relations as coupled systems united in explanations of earth system dynamics and resource management planning. Some examples of socioecologics include complex adaptive systems theory (Holling 2001) and socioecological systems theory (Anderies, Janssen & Ostrom 2004; Berkes 2003). Popular socioecologics reframe research scope and method, creating novel interdisciplinary projects, but the form of socioecological projects can amplify or ameliorate disciplinary disparities and divides between researchers and the human and nonhuman others who inhabit the field. In other words, investigations of the Anthropocene idea must be aware of the form of socioecological reason that delineates thought and action around specific Anthropocene projects within a particular ecobiopolitical milieu.

In terms of other modes of human/nonhuman relation such as the process of reproducing a Bahamian export product through MSC certification, we must remember that commodity certification transforms the relationships of production between groups of people and between people and the things they produce (Bestor 2001; West 2010). These processes alter human and nonhuman beings in ways that make them amenable to recent Anthropocene markets. Sea creatures with a mottled carapace that are known as ‘crawfish’ in The Bahamas and sold as generic (but luxurious) white-fleshed ‘lobster’ in the United States and Europe are being moulded into ‘Spiny Lobster’, becoming scientifically measured and assessed as ‘stock’ that can be studied and rebranded at national and global levels.10 Fishers, too, are moulded into ‘stakeholders’ within the MSC system, continuing a process of fishery reorganization under the sign of global conservation begun in the 1980s and 1990s. The president of the Bahamas Marine Exporters Association has said that ‘with major supermarket chains in the US and Europe committed to buying only from countries that can prove their fisheries are sustainable, we realized MSC certification would be required to maintain market access for the Bahamian Spiny Lobster. This led to the rapid and wholehearted transition of the fishery’ (cited in Isaacs 2011).

An analytic beyond the human is useful here for understanding more than the co-constitution of biogeochemical processes and research project design. Anthropological attention to the emergent objects of knowledge, governance, and forms of reason adapted to the Anthropocene idea must also acknowledge the embodied relations that produce fisheries and creatures like Spiny Lobster and fishers. Tsing argues that the idea of human exceptionalism blinds us to the interspecies connections that make up our own lives within our bodies and in our surroundings (Tsing 2012; in homage to Haraway 2003; 2008; and Kirksey & Helmreich 2010). Human species-being (the sense of human nature that concerns Chakrabarty [2009] in the Anthropocene) is not autonomous but is instead comprised of relations with other organisms moving within geochemical processes held together by diverse forms of dependency and love. Anthropocene ecobiopolitical and socioecological configurations (such as alliances based on geography, global science, resource management, etc.) manage humanity, geology, and biology in multiply produced landscapes that affect notions of value and relations of production and reproduction stretching from global markets to the state to the locality. Tsing refers to these networks as interspecies relations, but I call them ‘earthly relations’, as a reminder that there are ‘non-living’ components to consider when thinking about life (e.g. planetary geophysical processes, the ‘resonance’ of stones, and the movement of water [Ingold 2011; Kohn 2014; Raffles 2012]).

Within the assemblages and markets animated by the Anthropocene idea, there are myriad circulating stories that deserve anthropological attention. Examples of Anthropocene stories include the IPCC global change narratives that bind AOSIS members or the narratives of overfishing that link all fisheries in a global saga of anthropogenic decline. And, arguably, the task of the Anthropocene Working Group (see above) is to construct a plausible story about planetary change. Authoritative stories frame protagonists, perpetrators, and victims (human and nonhuman), and they help lay the groundwork that makes economic ventures like MSC certification or sustainable tourism viable in places like The Bahamas. While an attention to narrative may appear to abandon a commitment to material processes, I argue that such stories help constitute ecologies and socialities by bringing them into new kinds of socioecological and ecobiopolitical (earthly) relation.

The narrative power of what Latour (2013) has called ‘geostories’ is a useful analytic with which to tackle these circulating tales. Geostories reflect socioecological arguments about global change in narratives that stem from the teleologies of the earth sciences. They are meant to be accessible tales about the stakes and exceptionalism of the Anthropocene. Geostories simultaneously perpetuate ecobiopolitical discourses around global change – discourses that attempt to ‘reframe Anthropos’ (Palsson et al. 2013: 4) by narrating the Anthropocene as an effect of human species-being. Often these kinds of geostories can, in the words of Malm and Hornborg, obscure attention to the owners of the means of production who came to power out of a ‘constellation of a largely depopulated New World, Afro-American slavery, the exploitation of British labor in factories and mines, and the global demand for inexpensive cotton cloth’, which led to the rise of the steam engine and from there to our fossil-fuel-based economies (2014: 63). Even Chakrabarty (2013) contends that speaking about the collective ‘we’ of humanity should not imply that ‘we’ are politically one. As Latour (2013) points out, geostories are not harmonious tales but are instead tumultuous and crisis-ridden, steeped in the unknown.

Finally, I have observed that building models for living (and for tourist visitation) in locales such as The Bahamas involves struggle and negotiation between authorities and between authorities and marginalized groups. For example, the spread of marine reserve networks and the rebranding of Bahamian islands in speculative sustainable development markets align the country with global trends: transforming landscapes, infrastructures, and built environments to conform more obviously with prevailing concerns over greening and global change. Such Anthropocene worlding experiments (Roy 2011) can deepen social inequalities by appropriating space from coastal communities, and design models can also be misappropriated. An attention to designers and their plans for development, to resource management, scientific research, exploration projects, to the technologies that enable us to ‘see’ global change, and to various green markets and products will help open Anthropocene assemblages to scrutiny and intervention when necessary.

Therefore, I think an attention to design should be a major component of analysis as the thread that unites the interrelated themes of this framework and points us towards action. If, as proponents of the Anthropocene idea argue, the recognition of anthropogenic planetary change calls for the refashioning of human and nonhuman life on earth, then extreme care must go into redesigning ecobiopolitical configurations, socioecological forms of reason, and viable earthly relations on multiple levels (Latour 2008). The Anthropocene commitments of scientists, governments, and developers are already leading to emergent geostories and brand platforms that designers must draw together in their (co-)creations.

The interrelated concepts that I have chosen to help me explore my Bahamian anthropological puzzle – ecobiopolitics, socioecologics, earthly relations, geostories, and design – represent an amalgamation of environmental anthropology, critical science studies, and political ecology applicable to the evolving twenty-first-century concern with global change known as the Anthropocene. Such analytic reorientations help anthropologists explore events animated by the Anthropocene idea, from emergent political alliances and spatializations to modes of subjectivity and citizenship, from forms of scientific objectification and naturalization to shifting research methods and narratives, from green markets, products, and flows of capital to the materialization and embodiment of these ideas in spaces, places, bodies, and earthly relations. I contend that such recognition helps us identify how emergent ideas contribute to asymmetries and pervasive inequities, allowing anthropologists to intervene in arenas that were previously unavailable for thought. Further, recognizing the ways these conceptual arenas interrelate allows us to grasp the creativity and generativity of contemporary global change assemblages.

Conclusion

The International Geological Congress still has some time to deliberate before it rules on the ‘official’ designation of the Anthropocene. Official agreement on the existence of the Anthropocene as a geological category will not instantly change the way most of us think about planetary anthropogenesis. However, I believe it will spark further debate over the parameters of contemporary global change, inspiring more institutional initiatives and scientific engagement with policy. In other words, the Anthropocene feedback cycle could grow even more acute.

As these events unfold, anthropologists will certainly continue to respond to the social and material realities of global change, and, critically, to the Anthropocene idea itself as an important contemporary object and problem. I have argued that The Bahamas is one example of an emergent ethnographic area within the problematic of an ‘Anthropocene space’. Despite the fact that this seems to fly in the face of the Anthropocene as a planetary and temporal imaginary, it is now clear that global imaginaries and categories have powerful material and symbolic implications, contributing to the reproduction of particular locations, places, and scales. As Tsing has stated, ‘[W]e can investigate globalist projects and dreams without assuming that they remake the world just as they want’ (2000: 330). Anthropocene spaces like small islands are but one position from which anthropologists can begin to think the Anthropocene. And these spaces need not only be geographical locations, but they can also be locations of novel conservation interventions and laboratory situations, such as experiments in geoengineering, re-wilding, or de-extinction. I believe my conceptual bundle could handily be applied in these situations, with a great deal of room for modification and addition.

The work of an Anthropocene anthropology is needed in order to counter and complement the sciences of the earth system and global change research. Following Lovbrand et al., I think it is anthropology’s responsibility to ‘investigate the new forms of power, authority, and subjectivity formed within everyday practices of its own scholarship’ (2009: 12) as anthropologists are integrated further into interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary global change studies. Towards that end, frameworks like the one presented here can ground ethnographic engagement and collaboration and inform the task of reflexively ‘Writing Earthly Relations’ in the Anthropocene.

My research is slanted towards the products of travelling scientists, elite authorities, and green designers who mediate, circulate, and sell the Anthropocene idea in The Bahamas, and indeed these have been my primary informants over the years. However, I think this framework could be attuned towards less overtly ‘authoritative’ events and instantiations of Anthropocene ideas. Further, I hope I have shown that it is not only anthropogenic change that has material effects, as has been so thoroughly demonstrated by the sciences, but that the politics, forms of reason, relations, and narratives that the Anthropocene idea inspires are also materialized in ways that must be acknowledged and explored.

As I stipulated in the introduction, the background argument of this article has been that anthropology must retain its critical stance when confronted by institutional framings of global change. Again, along with Sayre, I call for a continued attention to science-based policy prescriptions that seek to limit the conceptualization of and possible responses to global environmental change. In other words, we must not participate in the erasure of real opportunities for justice and ethical awareness.

In closing, I ask, how ephemeral are the ideas that constitute today’s ‘ephemeral islands’? Despite the fact that there are anthropologists who consider the Anthropocene to be a trend-of-the-moment buzzword, I think that the Anthropocene idea as a problem space that configures locations around evolving notions of global change and human/nonhuman relations will stay with us for some time to come. There is too much political urgency and institutional attention attached to the idea for it to go quietly. I hope an Anthropocene anthropology will be there to help explore the multiplying puzzles of the epoch.

NOTES

1 Following Rabinow (2003) and Rabinow & Marcus (2008) on problematization and the contemporary.2 The Anthropocene idea is of recent origin, but the arguments leading up to its coining and conceptual coalescence have deep roots in transnational events of the last forty years and beyond with the creation of ‘the environment’ as a political category and its subsequent globalization. Parsing this history is not the goal of this article (but see Fortun 2001; Worster 2008).3 The Bahamas is also a British Commonwealth country and member of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM).4 The irony comes from the fact that Bahamians publicly debate the ‘Haitian problem’ of the illegal immigration of Haitians to The Bahamas.5 For more on the ‘start date’ controversy, which is beyond the scope of this article, see Ruddiman (2013).6 In general geochronology, an age is defined as an interval of several million years, an epoch is tens of millions of years, a period is somewhere between an epoch and an era, an era is several hundred million years, and an aeon is at least an interval of a half a billion years.7 The International Geological Congress (IGC) has been meeting since 1878 in three- to five-year intervals (IUGS 2009). The next meeting is in South Africa, in 2016, where the latest evidence for the existence of the Anthropocene will be marshalled by the Anthropocene Working Group to be voted on by the International Commission of Stratigraphy (ICS), the keepers of the geological timeline. The Anthropocene Working Group of the International Union of Geological Sciences and ICS is made up of approximately twenty-nine member scientists from fourteen countries (the United States, Spain, Germany, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Brazil, Kenya, France, South Africa, Australia, Norway, Austria, Canada, and China). The disciplinary background of members includes archaeology, chemistry, geology, earth systems, and the earth sciences.8 Anthropologists have long concerned themselves with the impacts of humans on their environments as a historical and evolutionary question, and this is far too expansive a conversation to describe here. In this article, I am focusing on the Anthropocene idea as it is used by scientists today and as it is becoming popularized in the social sciences. This is a culturally specific idea of recent origins, and I am interested in investigating its current uses, implications, and materializations.9 For a discussion of climate refugees, see Collectif Argos (2010), McAdam (2009), and McKee (2011).10 The Bahamian lobster industry is many decades old, but MSC certification is a new iteration. MSC certification also comes with increased licensing requirements and the ability to trace catch back to specific fishing boats, allowing for greater ‘transparency’ in the market.

Biography
  • Dr Amelia Moore is a sociocultural anthropologist with interests in environmental anthropology, Caribbean anthropology, science and technology studies, and the anthropology of tourism.  She currently works in The Bahamas, with a focus on the socioecological worlds of small island life in an era of global anthropogenic change.
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Artificial Stupidity and Artificial Intelligence in the Anthropocene


Bernard Stiegler

23 November 2018, Institute of Ereignis, Shanghai

For anyone wanting a precise analysis of what we refer to today as artificial intelligence, which seems now to have become the horizon of everyday life (and I will return to this question), it is necessary to begin from the following postulate: all noetic intelligence is artificial. This implies that there is such a thing as non-noetic intelligence. And it also implies that, generally speaking, noetic life is intelligent in a specific way, which is that of artifice.

I claim that there is non-noetic intelligence in the sense implied when Marcel Détienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant talk about metis, but also in the sense invoked by Kevin Kelly when he wrote an article that presented forms of life, of whatever kind, as forms of intelligence, where each of these forms has evolved in a different way over the last three billion years or more. Speaking in this way is for Kelly a matter of opposing what he calls the myth of super-intelligence, but it is also to speak against Descartes: it is to posit that life is never just machinic – and here we should also mention Georges Canguilhem’s ‘Machine and Organism’.1

Intelligence, here, whether in its ‘natural’ or ‘artificial’ forms, but I prefer to say in its organic or organological forms (I will clarify this a bit later on), is the accomplishment of a goal or an aim. There is no necessity at all for this goal to be a conscious representation, as Francisco Varela shows in a drawing in which he ridicules this kind of ‘representational’ hypothesis. What is involved with noetic intelligence, however, is, in principle, access to consciousness, insofar as it has the capacity to access what Heidegger called the as such – Heidegger being himself someone who deconstructs the metaphysics of representation. Intelligence, whether noetic or otherwise, is in a general way what orients behaviour: it constitutes an animation, as Aristotle will say in On the Soul, in which vegetative, sensible and noetic souls draw intelligence from what he calls the ‘first unmoving mover’, and where the intelligence that is the soul is above all movement, which is also to say, phusis.

In order to precisely distinguish (without opposing) the organic (vegetative and sensible) forms of intelligence from the organological (noetic) forms, we must firstly recall what Aristotle remained unaware of, namely that, some three million or so years ago, there arose the conditions for what would later, some forty thousand years ago, become noetic intelligence, in which Georges Bataille would recognize himself, and in relation to which he said: here it is we who begin, those who painted these animals are our ancestors, our father, this is evidently so, it is obviously so, and recognizing this evidence is a key feature of noesis itself. Here is exactly what he writes in Lascaux, or The Birth of Art:

It is ‘Lascaux man’ about whom we can surely say, and for the first time that, making works of art, he evidently resembled us, he was one of us, our fellow man.2

Bataille will go on to say that the kind of intelligence involved in the work of art is the intelligence of play – I will not develop this point now, but it is fundamental in order to understand what it means for the question of noetic imagination (and I will discuss this next year in Hangzhou). Having said this, we can begin to understand why what we today refer to as artificial intelligence is a continuation of the process of the exosomatization of noesis itself, such as it begins firstly with fabricating exosomatization, making things by hand, and continues with hypomnesic exosomatization, as that which makes it possible to access lived experiences of memory and imagination, which have accumulated since the origin  of the play of works, as Bataille considers them, and which engender, in passing through writing, instruments of observation, calculating machines whose principles were established by Leibniz, and analogue technologies, which form the basis of the culture industries – and here the question of their role in the ‘post-truth era’ arises as never before. All of this then, writing, telescopes, calculating machines and the analogue recording technologies of the culture industries, all of this has generated a perpetual and techno-logical evolution of what Kant called the faculties – whether they are lower, that is, functions of noesis, or whether they are higher, and thereby constitute faculties in the sense we refer to them in universities, and which regularly enter into conflict.

Why do such conflicts arise? Because there are exosomatic evolutions of the hypomnesic supports of noesis, and this generates tensions – which can be social as well as noetic.

Two years ago in Nanjing, I tried to show (and I will come back to this next year) that what Kant called the lower faculties – intuition, understanding, imagination and reason, which are put to work by the higher faculties that are those of knowing, desiring and judging – are functions that are produced through the process of their exteriorization, which Hegel was already able to see, but without truly seeing it. It is Marx who will be the first to understand this, and it will then be reformulated by Lotka, who will do so from a biological standpoint and by coining a new term: exosomatization, or exosomatic evolution and exosomatic organs. Here, the intelligence of the body is produced in being supplemented, inasmuch as it makes possible an exteriorization of experience, and the constitution of what I call (using Husserlian terminology) collective secondary retentions: the latter are retained in individual memories, but they are retained there collectively, forming what we also refer to as knowledge, which can be transmitted from generation to generation, and which metastabilizes the conditions of life – these conditions of life being negentropic, that is, struggling against the entropic effects of human behaviour, which is something we discover in the Anthropocene, through the analysis of what the IPCC calls anthropogenic forcings, which fundamentally threaten life, and in particular noetic life – life that is worthy of being lived by a noetic soul. All of this is what leads to a life that is unworthy of noesis – and ultimately becomes incompatible with life as a whole, as the 15364 signatories of a recent scientific text declare.

It is in this context, at the end of the Anthropocene – and these scientists indeed tell us that it is reaching its end, which must then also be ours – that we see the advent of artificial intelligence as an ordinary reality of everyday life. What then should be the function of what is today called ‘artificial intelligence’, where this refers to a technology of reticular, ubiquitous super-computing that automates the majority of processes by which behavioural flows are managed, where this has fundamental effects on both modes of production and modes of exchange in all their forms, and where, in its current stage, these have been transformed into functions of consumption?

What we today call artificial intelligence is not what was on the horizon of the Macy conferences, the project of which was formulated in Dartmouth by Marvin Minsky with Claude Shannon, Allen Newell, Herbert Simon, and so on. It is a reticular AI, based on what Clarisse Herrenschmidt has called reticular writing, which is linked to the networking together of three and a half billion individuals – via an apparatus that becomes exosopherical, constantly evolving, and now based on the ‘platform capitalism’ described by Benjamin Bratton – and that makes possible the production and exploitation of what I call ‘digital pheromones’.

The possibility of such digital pheromones was in a way already raised by Norbert Wiener in 1948, when he worried about the possibility that cybernetics could give rise to what he called a ‘fascist ant-state’.3 That the human could regress to the stage of the ant is a possibility contained in the fact that this human abandons his knowledge – his knowledge being the path by which he must struggle against entropy. That such a possibility exists, that is, that cybernetic exosomatization can generate an industrial artificial stupidity, is the question that must guide us here. As soon as intelligence becomes artificial, that is, as soon as it is made possible by artefacts and makes these artefacts possible – due to that astonishing faculty of dreaming which, according to the palaeo-anthropologist Marc Azéma, characterizes the human being: he posits that man dreams, as do animals, but that he also does so by producing, drawing and writing, by day-dreaming, such an ex-pression being the beginning of a process of exo-somatization by which man realizes his dreams. The faculty of dreaming is, then, here the faculty of the realization of dreams, and such is noetic intelligence according to Paul Valéry.

But as soon as it becomes artificial, such intelligence can also generate an artificial stupidity: the pharmakon that is the artifice thereby engendered can lead to regression and to self-destruction. Such artificial stupidity is what Alvesson and Spicer describe as ‘functional stupidity’, in a well-known article that has since become a book – and it also generates what Tijman Shep describes as ‘social cooling’, which John Pfaltz describes as an increase in the rate of entropy in social networks. This artificial stupidity, therefore, is also a technique for the production of lures and traps to in some way deceive humans, but here, beyond stupidity, we must also refer to the necessity of putting faults or accidents into music, as was the case with software created by IRCAM, which produced only absolutely ‘right’ notes – for example for the Queen of the Night aria in Mozart’s The Magic Flute – but the ‘music’ this produced was unbearable.

And this is an issue we also see with trading software – which raises the question of vertus and of the necessity of imperfection, that is, the necessity of negentropic locality – which we must interpret via John Stuart Mill and the necessity of diversity. Artificial stupidity also means cognitive overflow syndrome, that is, the functional destruction of attention, or, again, it is what worries Adam Smith in 1776 in The Wealth of Nations.

The possibility of artificial stupidity is what characterizes artificial intelligence, which, as we have already said with Kevin Kelly, can be distinguished from natural intelligence. Natural intelligence cannot commit acts of stupidity: it can only fail, which means, ultimately, to die. Taking up a thesis of Nick Bostrom – but we could also refer here to Bergson, who thinks intelligence in terms of a relation to action – Kelly himself argues that life in general amounts to a series of conquests of intelligence. He argues this while criticizing the perspective of those he calls ‘singularitans’, who maintain five assumptions which, when examined closely, are not based on any evidence.4

The first of these ‘misconceptions’, and the most common, begins with the common misconception about natural intelligence. This misconception is that intelligence is a single dimension. Most technical people tend to graph intelligence the way Nick Bostrom does in his book, Superintelligence – as a literal, single-dimension, linear graph of increasing amplitude. At one end is the low intelligence of, say, a small animal; at the other end is the high intelligence, of say, a genius – almost as if intelligence were a sound level in decibels […] with fish evolving into reptiles, then up a step into mammals, up into primates, into humans, each one a little more evolved (and of course smarter) than the one before it.

So the ladder of intelligence parallels the ladder of existence. But both of these models supply a thoroughly unscientific view. […] A more accurate chart of the natural evolution of species is a disk radiating outward, like this one first devised by David Hillis at the University of Texas and based on DNA. […] Every one of these species has undergone an unbroken chain of three billion years of successful reproduction, which means that bacteria and cockroaches are as highly evolved as humans.

Into this ‘mandala’, however, we must also introduce the perspective of Alfred J. Lotka, for whom ‘natural’ intelligence becomes ‘artificial’, which is also to say, discovers the possibility of its own stupidity, as highlighted by Arnold Toynbee – when the morphogenesis that is endosomatic organogenesis continues outside wet tissue, and does so as exorganogenesis. The latter generates exosomatic organs that modify the trajectory of motor acts, such as occurs with the flint tool, some of which are arrows capable of travelling at 350 kilometres per hour, and today’s rockets, which launch themselves to escape velocity – twenty-eight thousand kilometres per hour – are the continuation of this capacity in a direction that opens up exospherical spaces. But in addition, these exosomatic organs also engender accumulations of psychic retentions, which thereby become collective and constitute what Roger Bartra calls an ‘exocerebrum’ and what Karl Popper calls World Three and objective knowledge.

This third world, however, is the world of what I call hypomnesic tertiary retentions, a world composed not just of exosomatic organs but of retentional accumulations, and where Lotka shows that these are orthogenetic, that is, bearers of non- Darwinian selection processes, making possible the establishment of scalar relations between different orders of magnitude, something completely different from, for example, relations between cells, organs, bodies, milieus and so on. Here we should really turn to Durkheim and to his book, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, in which he studies totemism, but I no longer have time to do so now. But we should also note that échelle as ladder, which is also the ladder dreamed of by Jacob, who has a primordial role in Judaeo-Christian monotheism, then becomes échelle as scale, and technologies of scalability are at the heart of those ‘economies of scale’ characteristic of the industrial and capitalist stage of exosomatization. Furthermore, platforms that utilize and develop reticulated artificial intelligence are based on specific technologies of scalability, managing multi-scale data ranging from infra-organic medical ‘nanomachines’ to exospherical infrastructures capable of handling medical data at the scale of the technosphere.

It is worth noting that it is on the basis of totemic classification that Durkheim posits that the Aristotelian and Kantian theory of the categories should be completely rethought. Now, the biosphere may be one scale located within the cosmos. But to this we must add the fact that, from the moment such changes of scale and arrangements of orders of magnitude arise, which is something that occurs with the exosomatic organs that are technical objects in all their forms (including language), from this moment, this biosphere becomes a technosphere. Within this technosphere, moreover, entropy, negentropy and anti-entropy, whose local equilibriums had metastabilized over the course of three or four billion years, find themselves totally overthrown by those exosomatic organs that are pharmaka, that is, organs that can as easily increase entropy as contain it, defer it and transform it through the ‘art of living’, as Alfred Whitehead put it. And the function of artificial intelligence is to in this way minimize entropy and increase negentropy and anti-entropy.

Artificial stupidity, then, is what persists in accelerating entropy instead of deferring it, and does so by destroying knowledge, which, alone, is capable of generating positive bifurcations. It would be entirely possible to take advantage of the analytical possibilities of algorithms in order to defer entropy. But in order to do so, it would be necessary to modify data structures, to press algorithms into the service of the constitution of deliberative scales reconstituting neganthropic knowledge, that is, dialogically transindividuated knowledge, and to make automation serve disautomatization within the framework of a new macro-economy in which value would be defined according to the increase of negentropy. In the current model, however, the criteria of value are entropic.

Behind this question, there are those of the relationships between calculability, locality, incalculability and deliberation – which is equally to say, those of the relationships between understanding, imagination and reason. In Automatic Society, I have argued that algorithms constitute a hypertrophy of the understanding – and that the latter is always artificial, and based on tertiary retentions inasmuch as they configure the schematism and the categories. These questions of epistemology and technology, of the industrial future and new macro-economic models, must all be brought together. It is precisely in order to do so that a program is currently under development in the Plaine commune territory, in the northern suburbs of Paris. And in terms of the question of macro-economics – which is also a question of the function of knowledge and therefore of the episteme in Foucault’s sense and of epistemology in Bachelard’s sense – it is an attempt, in the epoch of algorithmic and articulated artificial intelligence, to draw conclusions from Marx’s statements about fixed capital and the general intellect in the Grundrisse.

I argued earlier that with Kelly’s model, inspired by Hillis, it is necessary to specify the conditions of the passage from natural intelligence to artificial intelligence. I would like to conclude by adding some further remarks on this point.

  1. We must think this passage both with Whitehead and with Canguilhem, with respect to biology for example, and more generally with respect to the role of knowledge in the technical form of life, and as a vital function that can be thought only starting from biology, but precisely as what requires that which is no longer only biological, and which leads Georges Canguilhem to make statements that are quite close to being post- Darwinian and very close to those of Lotka concerning orthogenesis.
  2.  We must specify the question of metis and distinguish it from noesis: cognition, in the sense that this word has in the so-called ‘cognitive sciences’, is not knowledge in Popper’s sense. The passage from cognition to knowledge requires an exosomatic exteriorization and the constitution of what Leroi-Gourhan calls a third kind of memory, very close to what Popper calls World Three, and what I myself call the epiphylogenesis that forms with the accumulation of tertiary retentions. It is this question of exosomatization that Kelly completely ignores when he writes that:

We contain multiple species of cognition that do many types of thinking: deduction, induction, symbolic reasoning, emotional intelligence, spacial logic, short-term memory, and long-term memory. The entire nervous system in our gut is also a type of brain with its own mode of cognition. We don’t really think with just our brain; rather, we think with our whole bodies. These suites of cognition vary between individuals and between species. A squirrel can remember the exact location of several thousand acorns for years, a feat that blows human minds away. So in that one type of cognition, squirrels exceed humans. And yet:

Your calculator is a genius in math; Google’s memory is already beyond our own in a certain dimension. We are engineering AIs to excel in specific modes.

But these specific modes are only functions. It is not just a question of functions, but of faculties – if we take it as given that we must rethink the concept of faculty from the exosomatic perspective.

… the faculties are social, and not just psychic, and that is the whole issue involved in the conflict of the faculties.

Here we should read Ignace Meyerson’s Les fonctions psychologiques et les oeuvres, along with Vernant. Now, when Kelly writes that:

In the future, we will invent whole new modes of cognition that don’t exist in us and don’t exist anywhere in biology. When we invented artificial flying we were inspired by biological modes of flying, primarily flapping wings. But the flying we invented – propellers bolted to a wide fixed wing – was a new mode of flying unknown in our biological world.

When Kelly writes this, what he describes is precisely exosomatization, but he does not see it as such, and he does not see in what way it stems from the works produced during the Upper Palaeolithic, upon whose appearance Bataille meditates. ‘To build machines capable of beating humans’: this is the very goal of exosomatization. Why would we bother to make an automobile – or a bow and arrow – if these exosomatic organs were not quicker than humans? Here, however, the question is of noetic functionality. What indeed is noesis? It is what struggles against the perverse effects generated by exosomatization, but always by generating other processes of exosomatization. This is what Freud describes in Civilization and Its Discontents.

But in that case, it is not just a matter of the exosomatization of the exosomatic organisms that we have been ever since the dawn of hominization: it is also a matter of social organizations. And the latter amount to complex exorganisms, composed of the simple exorganisms that we are, which together form social groups of longer duration than the individuals who form them, as is the case for all civilizations. Such complex exorganisms are, however, prone to becoming massively anthropic, and they can therefore collapse, and today, more than ever, the role of politics consists in struggling against this pharmacological tendency.

Kelly eventually points out that the ‘Turing machine’ and ‘the Church-Turing hypothesis’ are misleading:

no computer has infinite memory or time. When you are operating in the real world, real time makes a huge difference, often a life-or-death difference. Yes, all thinking is equivalent if you ignore time.

But this indicates that what matters here are scales of time – as well as scales of space, and hence of speed.

The only way to have equivalent modes of thinking is to run them on equivalent substrates. [The] only way to get a very human-like thought process is to run the computation on very human-like wet tissue.

What is at stake in the organic tissues of humans, that is, what is at stake in their bodies, is, however, their relationship to death, where the locus of this relationship does not just reside within this body, but, precisely, within what I call the noetic necromass, that is, within what Popper called World Three, which means for example the Trinity College library in Dublin, which is being shifted onto new substrates that require a total reconsideration of the conditions of a new era of exosomatic noesis, themselves fundamentally composed of organizations – without which it will be impossible to avoid collapse.

No thought that in fact thinks thinks like any others, and this is what points to the real challenge: anti-anthropic bifurcation is what exceeds all calculation – and the question is the function of calculation and its limit in a neganthropic field, that is, a localized field, whereas the generalization of calculation, and the totalizations to which this generalization gives rise in this or that locality, destroys this locality5 – and this locality is the biosphere itself, in its relation to the cosmos, a question that was opened in these terms by Vernadsky in 1926.

The biosphere is the condition of biodiversity. Today, the question is how to make the technosphere the possibility of a new noodiversity.

Translated by Daniel Ross.

1 Georges Canguilhem, Knowledge of Life, trans. Stefanos Geroulanos and Daniela Ginsburg (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), ch. 4.

2 Georges Bataille, Prehistoric Painting: Lascaux, or The Birth of Art, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (Geneva: Skira, 1955), p. 11, translation modified.

3 Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society (London: Free Association Books, 1989), p. 52.

4 Kevin Kelly, ‘The Myth of a Superhuman AI’, Wired (25 April 2017), available at: <https://www.wired.com/2017/04/the-myth-of-a-superhuman-ai/&gt;.

5 The question is: where is the limit of intelligence? Is it not clear that this is a matter of entropy – and of entropy within a finite locality? The limit is not quantitative, according to Kevin Kelly: for example, it is ‘not on a Moore’s law rise. AIs are not getting twice as smart every 3 years, or even every 10 years’. And to shift these limits, Kelly posits that ‘we should engineer friendly AIs and figure out how to instill self-replicating values that match ours’. But the question is here the categorization that is accomplished along with the algorithmic => a new ‘transcendental deduction’ of algorithmically generated categories.

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The deep Anthropocene

A revolution in archaeology has exposed the extraordinary extent of human influence over our planet’s past and its future

Lucas Stephens

is a senior research analyst at the Environmental Law and Policy Center in Chicago. He was a specialist researcher at the ArchaeoGLOBE project.

Erle Ellis

is a professor of geography and environmental systems at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He is a member of the Anthropocene Working Group, a fellow of the Global Land Programme, a senior fellow of the Breakthrough Institute, and an advisor to the Nature Needs Half movement. He is the author of Anthropocene: A Very Short Introduction (2018).

Dorian Fuller

is professor of archaeobotany at University College London.

Edited by Sally Davies

Humanity’s transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture is one of the most important developments in human and Earth history. Human societies, plant and animal populations, the makeup of the atmosphere, even the Earth’s surface – all were irreversibly transformed.

When asked about this transition, some people might be able to name the Neolithic Revolution or point to the Fertile Crescent on a map. This widespread understanding is the product of years of toil by archaeologists, who diligently unearthed the sickles, grinding stones and storage vessels that spoke to the birth of new technologies for growing crops and domesticating animals. The story they constructed went something like this: beginning in the Near East some 11,000 years ago, humans discovered how to control the reproduction of wheat and barley, which precipitated a rapid switch to farming. Within 500 to 1,000 years, a scattering of small farming villages sprang up, each with several hundred inhabitants eating bread, chickpeas and lentils, soon also herding sheep and goats in the hills, some keeping cattle.

This sedentary lifestyle spread, as farmers migrated from the Fertile Crescent through Turkey and, from there, over the Bosporus and across the Mediterranean into Europe. They moved east from Iran into South Asia and the Indian subcontinent, and south from the Levant into eastern Africa. As farmers and herders populated new areas, they cleared forests to make fields and brought their animals with them, forever changing local environments. Over time, agricultural advances allowed ever larger and denser settlements to flourish, eventually giving rise to cities and civilisations, such as those in Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus and later others throughout the Mediterranean and elsewhere.

For many decades, the study of early agriculture centred on only a few other regions apart from the Fertile Crescent. In China, millet, rice and pigs gave rise to the first Chinese cities and dynasties. In southern Mexico, it was maize, squash and beans that were first cultivated and supported later civilisations such as the Olmecs or the Puebloans of the American Southwest. In Peru, native potato, quinoa and llamas were among species domesticated by 5,000 years ago that made later civilisations in the Andes possible. In each of these regions, the transition to agriculture set off trends of rising human populations and growing settlements that required increasing amounts of wood, clay and other raw materials from the surrounding environments.

Yet for all its sweep and influence, this picture of the spread of agriculture is incomplete. New technologies have changed how archaeology is practised, from the way we examine ancient food scraps at a molecular level, to the use of satellite photography to trace patterns of irrigation across entire landscapes. Recent discoveries are expanding our awareness of just how early, extensive and transformative humans’ use of land has been. The rise of agriculture was not a ‘point in time’ revolution that occurred only in a few regions, but rather a pervasive, socioecological shifting back and forth across fuzzy thresholds in many locations.

Bringing together the collective knowledge of more than 250 archaeologists, the ArchaeoGLOBE project in which we participated is the first global, crowdsourced database of archaeological expertise on land use over the past 10,000 years. It tells a completely different story of Earth’s transformation than is commonly acknowledged in the natural sciences. ArchaeoGLOBE reveals that human societies modified most of Earth’s biosphere much earlier and more profoundly than we thought – an insight that has serious implications for how we understand humanity’s relationship to nature and the planet as a whole.

Just as recent archaeological research has challenged old definitions of agriculture and blurred the lines between farmers and hunter-gatherers, it’s also leading us to rethink what nature means and where it is. The deep roots of how humanity transformed the globe pose a challenge to the emerging Anthropocene paradigm, in which human-caused environmental change is typically seen as a 20th-century or industrial-era phenomenon. Instead, it’s clearer than ever before that most places we think of as ‘pristine’ or ‘untouched’ have long relied on human societies to fill crucial ecological roles. As a consequence, trying to disentangle ‘natural’ ecosystems from those that people have managed for millennia is becoming less and less realistic, let alone desirable.

Our understanding of early agriculture derives mostly from the material remains of food – seeds, other plant remains and animal bones. Archaeologists traditionally document these finds from excavated sites and use them to track the dates and distribution of different people and practices. Over the past several decades, though, practitioners have become more skilled at spotting the earliest signatures of domestication, relying on cutting-edge advances in chemistry, biology, imaging and computer science.

Archaeologists have greatly improved their capacity to trace the evolution of crops, thanks to advances in our capacity to recover minute plant remains – from silica microfossils to attachment scars of cereals, where the seeds attach to the rest of the plant. Along with early crops, agricultural weeds and storage pests such as mice and weevils also appeared. Increasingly, we can identify a broader biotic community that emerged around the first villages and spread with agriculture. For example, weeds that originated in the Fertile Crescent alongside early wheat and barley crops also show up in the earliest agricultural communities in places such as Germany and Pakistan.

Collections of animal bones provide evidence of how herded creatures changed physically through the process of domestication. Butchering marks on bones can help reconstruct culling strategies. From the ages and sizes of animals, archaeologists can deduce the populations of herds in terms of age and sex ratios, all of which reveals how herding differed from hunting. Herding systems themselves also vary, with some focused only on producing meat, and others on milk and wool too.

The British Isles were transformed by imported crops, weeds and livestock from millennia earlier

Measurements of bones and seeds have made great strides with technologies such as geometric morphometrics – complex mathematical shape analysis that allows for a more nuanced understanding of how varieties evolved and moved between regions. Biomolecular methods have also multiplied. The recovery of amino acid profiles from fragmented animal bones, for example, has allowed us to discern which animals they came from, even when they’re too degraded for visual identification. The increasingly sophisticated use and analysis of ancient DNA now allows researchers to track the development and distribution of domesticated animals and crops in great detail.

Archaeologists have also used mass spectrometry, a technique involving gas ions, to pinpoint which species were cooked together based on the presence of biomolecules such as lipids. Stable isotopes of carbon and nitrogen from animal bones and seeds give insight into where and how plants and animals were managed – allowing us to more fully sketch out ancient foodwebs from soil conditions to human consumption. Strontium isotopes in human and animal bones, meanwhile, allow us to identify migrations across a single organism’s lifetime, revealing more and earlier long-distance interconnections than previously imagined. Radiocarbon dating was already possible in the 1950s – but recent improvements that have reduced sample sizes and error margins allow us to build fine-grained chronologies and directly date individual crops.

With all these fresh data, it’s now possible to tell a much richer, more diverse story about the gradual evolutions and dispersals of early agriculture. By 6,000 years ago, the British Isles were being transformed by an imported collection of crops, weeds and livestock that had originated millennia earlier in the Near East. Similarly, millet, rice and pigs from central China had been spread as far as Thailand by 4,000 years ago, and began transforming much of the region’s tropical woodland to agricultural fields. New stories are constantly emerging too – including that sorghum, a grain crop, was domesticated in the savannahs of eastern Sudan more than 5,000 years ago, before the arrival of domesticated sheep or goats in that area. Once combined with Near Eastern sheep, goats and cattle, agropastoralism spread rapidly throughout most of sub-Saharan Africa by 2,000 years ago.

Advances in the study of plant silica micro-fossils (phytoliths) have helped trace banana cultivation from the Island of New Guinea more than 7,000 years ago – from where it spread through Island Southeast Asia, and eventually across the Indian Ocean to Africa, more than a millennium before Vasco da Gama navigated from Africa to India. These techniques have also revealed unforeseen agricultural origins – such as the forgotten cereal, browntop millet. It was the first staple crop of South India, before it was largely replaced by crops such as sorghum that were translocated from Africa. Many people might be surprised to learn that the early farming tradition in the Mississippi basin relied on pitseed goosefoot, erect knotweed and marsh elder some 3,000-4,000 years ago, long before maize agriculture arrived in the American Midwest.

Archaeologists don’t just study materials painstakingly uncovered in excavations. They also examine landscapes, patterns of settlement, and the built infrastructure of past societies to get a sense of the accumulated changes that humans have made to our environments. They have developed a repertoire of techniques that allow them to study the traces of ancient people on scales much larger than an individual site: from simply walking and documenting the density of broken pottery on the ground, to examining satellite imagery, using lidar (light and laser) and drones to build 3D models, even searching for subsurface magnetic anomalies to plot out the walls of buried cities.

There was usually a long continuum of exploitation, translocation and management of ecosystems

As a result, new revelations about our deep past are constantly emerging. Recent discoveries in southwestern Amazonia showed that people were cultivating squash and manioc more than 10,000 years ago, and maize only a few thousand years later. They did so living in an engineered landscape consisting of thousands of artificial forested islands, within a seasonally flooded savannah.

Some of the most stunning discoveries have come from the application of lidar around Maya cities, buried underneath the tropical canopy in Central America. Lasers can penetrate this canopy to define the shapes of mounds, plazas, ceremonial platforms and long causeways that were previously indistinguishable from the topography of the jungle. A recent example in Mexico pushed back the time period for monumental construction to what we used to consider the very beginning of Maya civilisation – 3,000 years ago – and suggests the monuments were more widespread than previously believed.

These transitions were not linear or absolute. It’s now clear that there was usually a long continuum of exploitation, translocation and management of plants, animals, landforms and ecosystems well before (and often after) domestication occurred. This makes it harder to draw solid lines between hunter-gatherer and farmer societies, or between societies who practised different subsistence strategies. Over archaeological timescales spanning hundreds to thousands of years, land use can be thought of instead as a tapestry of ever-evolving anthroecosystems with higher or lower degrees of transformation – more or less human-shaped, or ‘domesticated’ environments.

In 2003, the climatologist William Ruddiman introduced the ‘early anthropogenic hypothesis’: the idea that agricultural land use began warming Earth’s climate thousands of years ago. While some aspects of this early global climate change remain unsettled among scientists, there’s strong consensus that land-use change was the greatest driver of global climate change until the 1950s, and remains a major driver of climate change today. As a result, global maps of historical changes in land use, and their effects on vegetation cover, soils and greenhouse gas emissions, are a critical component of all contemporary models for forecasting Earth’s future climate.

Deforestation, tilling the land and other agricultural practices alter regional and global climate because they release greenhouse gases from vegetation and soils, as well as altering the exchange of heat and moisture across Earth. These effects reverse when land is abandoned and vegetation recovers or is restored. Early changes in agricultural land use therefore have major implications in understanding climate changes of the past, present and future.

The main global map of historical land use deployed in climate models is HYDE (the History Database of the Global Environment), combining contemporary and historical patterns of land use and population across the planet over the past 12,000 years. Despite this huge span of space and time, with notable exceptions, HYDE is based largely on historical census data that go back to 1960, mostly from Europe.

HYDE’s creator, a collaborator in ArchaeoGLOBE, has long requested help from historians, scientists and archaeologists to build a stronger empirical basis for HYDE’s global maps – especially for the deep past, where data are especially lacking. The data needed to improve the HYDE database exist, but reside in a format that’s difficult to access – the expert knowledge of archaeologists working in sites and regions around the world. The problem is that no single archaeologist has the breadth or time-depth of knowledge required.

Archaeologists typically study individual regions and time periods, and have only background knowledge on wider areas. Research methods and terminology also aren’t standardised worldwide, making syntheses difficult, rare and subjective. To construct a comprehensive global database of past land use, you need to gather information from hundreds of regional specialists and collate it, allowing this mosaic of individual studies to emerge as a single picture. This was exactly what we did for ArchaeoGLOBE.

Earth’s terrestrial ecology was already largely transformed by hunter-gatherers, farmers and pastoralists

In 2018, we surveyed more than 1,300 archaeologists around the world, and synthesised their responses into ArchaeoGLOBE. The format of our questionnaire was based on 10 time-slices from history (from 10,000 years ago, roughly the beginning of agriculture, to 1850 CE, the industrial era in Europe); 146 geographic regions; four levels of land-use prevalence; and five land-use categories (foraging/hunting/gathering/fishing; pastoralism; extensive agriculture; intensive agriculture; urbanism).

We ended up receiving 711 regional assessments from 255 individual archaeologists – resulting in a globally complete, if uneven, map of archaeological knowledge. After synthesis and careful analysis, our results (along with 117 other co-authors) were published in 2019 in Science. We also made all our data and analysis available online, at every stage of the research process – even before we had finished collecting it – in an effort to stimulate the culture of open knowledge-sharing in archaeology as a discipline.

The resulting data-trove allows researchers to compare land-use systems over time and in different regions, as well as to aggregate their cumulative, global impacts at different points over the past 10,000 years. When we compared ArchaeoGLOBE results with HYDE, we found that archaeological assessments showed much earlier and more widespread agricultural land use than HYDE suggested – and, therefore, more intensive land use than had been factored into climate change assessments. Indeed, the beginnings of intensive agriculture in ArchaeoGLOBE were earlier than HYDE’s across more than half of Earth’s current agricultural regions, often by 1,000 years or more.

By 3,000 years ago, Earth’s terrestrial ecology was already largely transformed by hunter-gatherers, farmers and pastoralists – with more than half of regions assessed engaged in significant levels of agriculture or pastoralism. For example, the Kopaic Basin in the Greek region of Boeotia was drained and converted from wetland to agricultural land in the 13th century BCE. This plain – roughly 1,500 hectares (15 sq km) in size – surrounded by steep limestone hills, had been a large, shallow lake since the end of the last Ice Age. Late Bronze Age residents of the area, members of what we call the Mycenaean culture, constructed a hydraulic infrastructural system on a massive scale to drain the wetland and claim it for agriculture. They channelised rivers, dug drainage canals, built long dikes and expanded natural sinkholes to direct the water off what would have been nutrient-rich soil. Eventually, when the Mycenaean civilisation collapsed at the end of the Bronze Age, the basin flooded again and returned to its previous wetland state. Legend has it that Heracles filled in the sinkholes as revenge against a local king. The area was not successfully drained again until the 20th century.

These examples highlight a general trend we found that agriculture and pastoralism gradually replaced foraging-hunting-gathering around the world. But the data also show that there were reversals and different subsistence economies, from foraging to farming, operating in parallel in some places. Moreover, agriculture and pastoralism are not the only practices that transform environments. Hunter-gatherer land use was already widespread across the globe (82 per cent of regions) by 10,000 years ago. Through the selective harvest and translocation of favoured species, hunting (sometimes to extinction) and the use of fire to dramatically alter landscapes, most of the terrestrial biosphere was already significantly influenced by human activities, even before the domestication of plants and animals.

ArchaeoGLOBE is both a cause and a consequence of a dramatic change in perspective about how early land use produced long-term global environmental change. Archaeological knowledge is increasingly becoming a crucial instrument for understanding humanity’s cumulative effect on ecology and the Earth system, including global changes in climate and biodiversity. As a discipline, the mindset of archaeology stands in contrast to earlier perspectives grounded in the natural sciences, which have long emphasised a dichotomy between humans and nature.

In the ‘pristine myth’ paradigm from the natural sciences, as the geographer William Denevan called it, human societies are recent destroyers, or at the very least disturbers, of a mostly pristine natural world. Denevan was reacting against the portrayal of pre-1492 America as an untouched paradise, and he used the substantial evidence of indigenous landscape modification to argue that the human presence was perhaps more visible in 1492 than 1750. Recent popular conceptions of the Anthropocene risk making a similar mistake, drawing a thin bright line at 1950 and describing what comes after as a new, modern form of ecological disaster. Human changes to the environment are cumulative and were substantial at different scales throughout our history. The deep trajectory of land use revealed by ArchaeoGLOBE runs counter to the idea of pinpointing a single catalytic moment that fundamentally changed the relationship between humanity and the Earth system.

The pristine myth also accounts for why places without contemporary intensive land use are often dubbed ‘wilderness’ – such as areas of the Americas depopulated by the great post-Columbian die-off. Such interpretations, perpetuated by scientists, have long supported colonial narratives in which indigenous hunter-gatherer and even agricultural lands are portrayed as unused and ripe for productive use by colonial settlers.

The notion of a pristine Earth also pervaded the thinking of early conservationists in the United States such as John Muir. They were intent on preserving what they saw as the nobility of nature from a mob of lesser natural life, and also those eager to manage wilderness areas to maintain the trophy animals they enjoyed hunting. For example, the governor of California violently forced Indigenous peoples out of Yosemite Valley in the 19th century, making way for wilderness conservation. These ideas went hand-in-hand with a white supremacist view of humanity that cast immigrants and the poor as a type of invasive species. It was not a great leap of theorising to move from a notion of pristine nature to seeing much of humanity as the opposite – a contaminated, marring mass. In both realms, the human and the natural, the object was to exclude undesirable people to preserve bastions of the unspoilt world. These extreme expressions of a dichotomous view of nature and society are possible only by ignoring the growing evidence of long-term human changes to Earth’s ecology – humans were, and are still, essential components of most ‘natural’ ecosystems.

A clear-eyed appreciation for the deep entanglement of the human and natural worlds is vital

Humans have continually altered biodiversity on many scales. We have changed the local mix of species, their ranges, habitats and niches for thousands of years. Long before agriculture, selective human predation of many non-domesticated species shaped their evolutionary course. Even the relatively small hunter-gatherer populations of the late Pleistocene were capable of negatively affecting animal populations – driving many megafauna and island species extinct or to the point of extinction. But there have also been widespread social and ecological adaptations to these changes: human management can even increase biodiversity of landscapes and can sustain these increases for thousands of years. For example, pastoralism might have helped defer climate-driven aridification of the Sahara, maintaining mixed forests and grassland ecosystems in the region for centuries.

This recognition should cause us to rethink what ‘nature’ and ‘wilderness’ really are. If by ‘nature’ we mean something divorced from or untouched by humans, there’s almost nowhere on Earth where such conditions exist, or have existed for thousands of years. The same can be said of Earth’s climate. If early agricultural land use began warming our climate thousands of years ago, as the early anthropogenic hypothesis suggests, it implies that no ‘natural’ climate has existed for millennia.

A clear-eyed appreciation for the deep entanglement of the human and natural worlds is vital if we are to grapple with the unprecedented ecological challenges of our times. Naively romanticising a pristine Earth, on the other hand, will hold us back. Grasping that nature is inextricably linked with human societies is fundamental to the worldview of many Indigenous cultures – but it remains a novel and often controversial perspective within the natural sciences. Thankfully, it’s now gaining prominence within conservation circles, where it’s shifting attitudes about how to enable sustainable and resilient stewardship of land and ecosystems.

Viewing humans and nature as entwined doesn’t mean that we should shrug our shoulders at current climatic trends, unchecked deforestation, accelerating extinction rates or widespread industrial waste. Indeed, archaeology supplies numerous examples of societal and ecosystem collapse: a warning of what happens if we ignore the consequences of human-caused environmental change.

But ecological crises are not inevitable. Humans have long maintained sustainable environments by adapting and transforming their societies. As our work demonstrates, humans have shaped the ecology of this planet for thousands of years, and continue to shape it.

We live at a unique time in history, in which our awareness of our role in changing the planet is increasing at the precise moment when we’re causing it to change at an alarming rate. It’s ironic that technological advances are simultaneously accelerating both global environmental change and our ability to understand humans’ role in shaping life on Earth. Ultimately, though, a deeper appreciation of how the Earth’s environments are connected to human cultural values helps us make better decisions – and also places the responsibility for the planet’s future squarely on our shoulders.

Original essay here

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The arrival of the Anthropocene in social theory: From modernism and Marxism towards a new materialism

Mads Ejsing mae@ifs.ku.dk

Volume 71, Issue 1

https://doi.org/10.1177/00380261221106905

Abstract

Since its origin in the natural sciences in the early 2000s, the concept of the Anthropocene has spread far and wide. Following the concept’s journey away from the natural sciences, where it was invented to designate the advent of a new geological epoch, and into the social and human sciences, its meaning has opened up to many different interpretations. This article examines three competing theoretical narratives about the Anthropocene, which have gained particular traction within social and political theory in recent years: The ‘good’ Anthropocene promoted by ecomodernists. The ‘bad’ Anthropocene, or so-called Capitalocene, critiqued by eco-Marxists. And, lastly, the ‘uncanny’ Anthropocene envisioned by new materialists. These three stories differ not only in their interpretation of the Anthropocene, they also engender notably different political responses. Echoing the insights of new materialists such as Jane Bennett, Bruno Latour and Donna Haraway, the article argues that we cannot rely on a single grand narrative of the Anthropocene today. What is needed, instead, is the proliferation of a multiplicity of different Anthropocene stories: situated, troubling and more-than-human stories that seek to displace idiosyncratic notions of the autonomous human subject so that we might begin to see what else is there.

Introduction

The arrival of the Anthropocene – this new geological epoch in which ‘humanity’ has become a planetary force of its own – entails a captivating story. But what kind of story is it? A tale of increased human powers? A tragedy of human fallibility? Or something else entirely? In this article I introduce three different stories of the Anthropocene that have gained increasing interest within social and political theory in recent years: The ‘good’ Anthropocene promoted by the so-called ecomodernists, the ‘bad’ Anthropocene critiqued by the eco-Marxists, and, finally, the ‘uncanny’ Anthropocene envisioned by new materialists. I retrace each of these stories as they unfold in the works of some of the most influential proponents within each tradition, and pay specific attention to the way in which each story answers questions such as: What are the origins of the Anthropocene and who are its main actors? What kinds of problems does the Anthropocene pose, and what political responses are required to solve those problems?

While all three stories entail valuable lessons for living in the Anthropocene, I argue that the new materialist story of the Anthropocene is preferable to its two alternatives. There are several reasons for this, including the need to pay renewed attention to the more-than-human entanglements of the climatic and ecological crises of the Anthropocene, as well as the recognition that these crises cannot be reduced to either a crisis of technology or politics, but go deeper, all the way to the cultural, even spiritual. In this article, however, I emphasize another argument in favor of the new materialist story: its ability to account and hold space open for what one might call ‘ontological multiplicity’, rather than insisting on the universality of a single grand story of the Anthropocene. As the anthropologist Anna Tsing and others have suggested, the Anthropocene is not a new, universally shared global condition, but more like a ‘patchwork’ of multiple, different, and differing localities that do not scale neatly into a unified global whole (Tsing, 2015; Tsing et al., 2019). The argument is not that all grand narratives of the Anthropocene are entirely false, but that they are at best partly true, that they pertain only or mostly to certain localities, and that they must therefore be supplemented with – and decentered by – a rush of smaller, more situated, and open-ended stories of multispecies survival on a damaged planet.

In what follows, I begin by briefly tracking the origin of the concept of the Anthropocene from its initial inception in the geological sciences and its first entry into parts of the social sciences, such as anthropology and social geography, all the way to its current arrival at the forefront of debates about climate change and ecology within social and political theory. In the three sections that follow, I develop each of the three narratives about the Anthropocene – the modernist, the Marxist, and the new materialist – on their own account, pointing out both their theoretical origins and their sociological reproduction in the landscape of climate politics today, before offering a critical commentary. Lastly, in the final section, I develop my argument for embracing the new materialist story, by insisting that it is best viewed as a sort of meta-narrative calling for multiple, situated, and open-ended stories that seek to uproot dominant discourses of the Anthropocene today.

An origin story: From geology to the human and social sciences

Coined as part of a discussion about geological periodization within the natural sciences in the early 2000s, the concept of the Anthropocene has since proliferated across the social and human sciences, and even outside the walls of academia into art, music, and dance.1 The scholar often credited with bringing the concept into social science is the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty. In his now seminal article ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses’ from 2009, Chakrabarty argued that the advent of the Anthropocene rearranges the age-old distinction between ‘human’ and ‘natural’ history, and that because humanity has become a geological force of its own, the histories of society and nature have become inextricably meshed (Chakrabarty, 2009).

In the last decade, the Anthropocene concept’s journey into the social sciences and humanities have helped open up new theoretical avenues for thinking about the new epochal condition, with numerous books, anthologies, and research articles now centering around the concept (Altvater et al., 2016; Davies, 2016; Hamilton et al., 2015; Purdy, 2015; Schlosberg, 2014; Scranton, 2015; Tsing et al., 2017). Despite the concept’s prolificacy, however, it remains highly contested within the social sciences, particular in the disciplines of anthropology and social geography, where it has been criticized for being both too male, too Western, and too white (see Grusin, 2017; Todd, 2015; Whyte, 2018; Yusoff, 2018). These issues continue to divide the ongoing academic debates about the Anthropocene, and a number of alternative concepts have been introduced, including neologisms such as the Capitalocene, the Chthulucene, the Planthropocene and many more. Nevertheless, the concept of the Anthropocene, and its alternatives, has come to anchor many of the theoretical debates about the present and future of climate change and the ongoing ecological crises.

In this journal, too, discussions around the Anthropocene have been connected to issues ranging from how failed ‘techno-fixes’ and colonial histories become entangled with the spread of new pathogens and other hard-to-live-with lifeforms (Giraud et al., 2019); the rise of a new type of geopolitics that shifts its focus to the management of the Earth system as a whole (Clark, 2014); to a critical engagement with appeals to ‘sustainable consumption’ as a way of addressing the challenges associated with the Anthropocene (Evans, 2019). Closest to the aims of this article is the contribution by Blok and Jensen from 2019, where they argue that the Anthropocene ‘event’ requires a new kind of social theory, one that draws on a tradition of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and entails slowing down and paying ‘immanent attention to the politics of varied matters as they unfold across the whole ecology of practices’ (Blok & Jensen, 2019, p. 1208).2

While sympathetic to Blok and Jensen’s philosophical project, this article seeks to build on and expand their arguments by turning ‘slow’ and ‘immanent’ attention to how competing conceptions of the Anthropocene prefigure different visions for climate politics today. More specifically, the article addresses three competing narratives of the Anthropocene that have gained particular attention in the last decade: The ‘good’ Anthropocene proposed by the ecomodernists, the ‘bad’ Anthropocene critiqued by the eco-Marxists, and the ‘uncanny’ Anthropocene envisioned by the new materialists. Each of these visions entails different interpretations of the current moment, proposes different future trajectories, and depends on different underlying onto-epistomological worldviews. By attending more carefully to each of these world-making projects, we learn something not only about the Anthropocene concept, but also about how the different interpretations of the current moment come to inform and shape politics.

Modernism and the ‘good’ Anthropocene

The most widespread approach to climate politics among political leaders in Western democracies today is undoubtedly the one informed by a modernist view of the Anthropocene. In many ways, this modernist view stands on the shoulders of the scientific understandings of the Anthropocene that came out of the natural sciences in the early 2000s. Here is the Anthropocene, as it was first described by atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and fresh water biologist Eugene Stoermer in their scientific newsletter from 2000, who are often credited with coining the concept:

Considering . . . major and still growing impacts of human activities on earth and atmosphere, and at all, including global, scales, it seems to us more than appropriate to emphasize the central role of mankind in geology and ecology by proposing to use the term ‘anthropocene’ for the current geological epoch. (Crutzen & Stoermer, 2000, p. 17)

On this view, the concept of the Anthropocene has become relevant today because of an increase in human powers: the unprecedented ability of humanity to reshape the contours of this planet has reached a level that now requires the introduction of a new geological epoch. Crutzen and other leading earth scientists have later suggested that because of this new Anthropocene condition, and the ecological crises it entails, it is time for humankind to own up to its new role as a geological force and become ‘stewards’ of the planet (Steffen et al., 2011).

This scientific understanding of the Anthropocene, and the responsibility it puts on humankind, was brought into a more explicitly social and political register in an Ecomodernist Manifesto from 2015.3 Here, a group of 18 scientists, journalists, and environmentalists affiliated with the American think tank The Breakthrough Institute developed their political blueprint for how to achieve a ‘good, or even great’ Anthropocene (The Breakthrough Institute, 2015, p. 6).4 Interestingly, the manifesto is highly optimistic about the current outlook. The backdrop to this optimism is a selective history of continued economic growth and human flourishing that have taken place over the past two centuries: Global living standards have gone up and life expectancy has more than doubled, while individual economic and political liberties have spread across the world and are, as the manifesto puts it, ‘today largely accepted as universal values’ (The Breakthrough Institute, 2015, p. 8).

According to the ecomodernists, the achievement of a ‘good, or even great’ Anthropocene hinges on human efforts to ‘liberate the environment from the economy’, or what the ecomodernists call decoupling (The Breakthrough Institute, 2015, p. 18). A successful example of decoupling is the increase in agricultural productivity from the mid-17th century to the 19th century, which reduced the amount of land needed to grow crops and food for an average person by half. There are several other emergent processes of such decoupling taking place today, including stagnating population growth, increasing urbanization, and decreasing resource intensity. Each of these developments are likely to reduce the total human impact on the environment; but they will have to be assisted and accelerated by technological innovations. Rising to the climatic and ecological challenges of the Anthropocene is ultimately a question of increased technological progress. As the authors of the manifesto write: ‘Absent profound technological change there is no credible path to meaningful climate mitigation’ (The Breakthrough Institute, 2015, p. 21).

Here lies a central element of the ecomodernist story: averting the dangers of climate change hinges not only on a decoupling of human from nature, but also on an increased technological control over nature. The creation of a ‘good’ Anthropocene, it turns out, depends on our ability to effectively intervene in and control natural ecosystems. Mark Lynas, who is an environmental journalist and co-author of the manifesto, describes it the following way in his book from 2011: ‘playing God (in the sense of being intelligent designers) at a planetary level is essential if creation is not to be irreparably damaged or even destroyed’ (Lynas, 2011). It is the increased powers and influence of human beings that have brought the planet into the current mess, and it is now up to humanity to use its powers to bring it back on track again.

This story of near-divine human powers is deeply entangled with contemporary attempts to address climate change through so-called geoengineering, which refers to ‘intentional large-scale manipulation of the environment, particularly manipulation that is intended to reduce undesired anthropogenic climate change’ (Keith, 2000, p. 245). Another of the manifesto’s 18 authors, Harvard professor in applied physics David V. Keith, is the founder and executive chairman of the Canadian company Carbon Engineering, which works to develop and commercialize Carbon Capture and Storage technologies that can remove CO2 from the atmosphere in order to reduce global warming. These technologies, while still not fully developed, remain only a subset of a much larger set of geoengineering ‘solutions’ that vary significantly in terms of technological complexity, scope and impact.

At one end of the continuum are relatively low-tech and simple technologies, such as reforestation and regreening of dry lands. The mitigating effects of such technologies are not insignificant, but they remain at best supporting measures in a more holistic approach (Boysen et al., 2017). At the other end of the continuum, however, are much more drastic, far-reaching, and risky technologies that have the potential to bring about radical changes to earthly ecosystems. One of the most popular types of high-risk, high-impact geoengineering technologies is Solar Radiation Management (SRM), which entails manipulating the amount of sunlight that enters the atmosphere in an attempt to reduce global warming. Scientific debates about SRM first gained traction in 2006 when atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen published an article on the potentials of Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI). SAI involves spraying sulfate aerosols into the upper atmosphere in an attempt to block out sunlight and thereby reduce global temperatures, similarly to what happens in the event of large volcano eruptions (Crutzen, 2006b).

In his book, A Case for Climate Engineering from 2013, Keith makes a distinctly ecomodernist case for SAI: injecting sulfuric acid particles into the upper atmosphere is not only possible but also ‘cheap and technically easy’, he writes, making it an ideal geoengineering solution for ecomodernists who insist on the inseparability of economic growth and climate mitigation. It is a technology that could be up and running in ‘a few years for the price of a Hollywood blockbuster’ (Keith & Chasman, 2013, p. ix). But the questions remains: Should it? Keith ends up conveying a firm ‘yes’ to this question when measured against the dangers of maintaining the status quo. There is ‘no reasonable doubt’, he writes, that it could be used as an efficient geoengineering measure to significantly slow down global warming and reduce its most severe impacts over the coming decades (Keith & Chasman, 2013, pp. 8–10).

While the jury is still out on these technologies – both in terms of their desirability and long-term effects5 – geoengineering proposals remain a site of hope for many ecomodernists. This hope is sustained, in part, by an underlying understanding of the Anthropocene as a story of increased human powers. As the opening lines of the manifesto goes: ‘To say that the Earth is a human planet becomes truer every day’ (The Breakthrough Institute, 2015, p. 6). In the ecomodernist Anthropocene, it is humanity, as a species, that has created the current mess, and it is now up to humanity – with its world-altering powers – to ensure a good, or even great, Anthropocene, even if it requires becoming miniature Gods.

There are several reasons to be skeptical of this ecomodernist story, which include its emphasis on sustained economic growth as a precondition for ‘good’ Anthropocene, as well as its naïve optimism in technological interventions. But in order to see just how deep the problems with the ecomodernist worldview go, we might as well turn to the next story of the Anthropocene, the one promoted by the eco-Marxists.

Eco-Marxism and the ‘bad’ Anthropocene

On the surface, the ecomodernist and eco-Marxist stories of the Anthropocene could hardly be more at odds. Where the ecomodernists see climate change and global warming as challenges to be solved within existing political and economic systems, through decoupling and technological innovation, the eco-Marxists argue that any feasible solution to these crises require a fundamental break with those same systems. The eco-Marxist tradition has a long intellectual history, but in recent decades it is in particular thinkers like John Bellamy Foster, and his theories of a ‘metabolic rift’, that have helped bring eco-Marxist thinking back onto the forefront of social and political theory (Foster, 1999, 2000). To see how this eco-Marxist tradition has tried to come to terms with the concept of the Anthropocene, more specifically, we are going to turn to another prominent figure within contemporary eco-Marxists circles, namely the professor of human ecology Andreas Malm.

In his book Fossil Capital from 2016, Malm lays out a straightforward eco-Marxist account of the Anthropocene.6 In contrast to the ecomodernists, the main ecological problem today is not the unintended aggregated consequences of humanity at large, but the systematic effects of what he calls the ‘fossil economy’: a socio-ecological structure ‘of self-sustaining growth predicated on the growing consumptions of fossil fuels’ (Malm, 2016, p. 4). Malm locates the historical origins of this fossil economy in the British Industrial Revolution and the invention of the steam engine in the late 18th century. While the steam engine itself did not itself cause global warming, the introduction and dissemination of the steam engine, and the fossil economy more generally, helped consolidate new social and economic relations of power that made a small capitalist elite increasingly powerful at the expense of all the rest of humanity. The first step in addressing the challenges associated with the Anthropocene, therefore, is tracing the human origins of these power relations so that we might identify ‘at least a hypothetical possibility of changing course’ (Malm, 2016, p. 19).

Malm’s historical account of the fossil economy goes like this: Up until the invention of the steam engine, the British economy had relied primarily on water power, but the arrival of the steam engine, and the shift from water power to coal, created several advantages for owners of private capital. First, coal could be commodified, stocked, and circulated in the marketplace in ways that the flow of a river could not. It did not require the same laborsome management schemes like shared access to a communal river, and unlike the river, it was spatially and temporally mobile, allowing employers to move freely to areas with the most readily accessible and profitable labor pool. Moreover, the introduction of the steam engine provided an important benefit to capital owners: it could impel a machine, making employers less dependent on labor and insulating them from the resistance of their workers. As Malm writes: ‘The struggle against labour called for machinery, which called for steam power, which called for coal’ (Malm, 2016, p. 222). The combination of these factors drove capital owners in late 18th century Britain to adopt the steam engine, thereby putting the world on the path towards fossil fuel combustion, greenhouse gasses, and global warming we are still on today.

With this historical account in place, we can begin to understand Malm’s broader claims about the Anthropocene, and his objections to the Anthropocene narrative promoted by the ecomodernists. It is not, after all, ‘humanity’ that initiated the fossil economy, and it is not all of humanity that bears the responsibility for global warming. In fact, it was a ‘tiny minority’, a small ‘all-male, all-white’ class of British capitalists in the late 18th century, who installed the steam engine and ushered in the fossil economy (Malm, 2016, p. 267). Even today, it remains a tiny subset of humanity that emits the majority of the world’s greenhouse gasses: at the start of the 21st century, ‘the poorest 45 percent of humanity generated 7 percent of current CO2 emissions, while the richest 7 percent produced 50 percent’, and a single US citizen ‘emitted as much as upwards of 500 citizens of Ethiopia, Chad, Afghanistan, Mali, Cambodia, Burundi’ (Malm, 2016, p. 268). One of the core issues with the narrative promoted by ecomodernists, therefore, is that it denies the differentiated responsibilities within humanity (Malm & Hornborg, 2014) .

What is the eco-Marxist alternative? This question is addressed head on by Malm in his book The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World from 2018. Here, Malm leaves behind the more historical approach of Fossil Capital and engages in an explicitly philosophical and normative project. The book is, in his own words, an attempt to lay out a ‘conceptual map’ that can help guide revolutionary climate action and resistance (Malm, 2018, pp. 16–18). In order to do this, he develops what he calls a historical materialist approach to climate change that forefronts unequal social and economic powers among humans beings (Malm, 2018, pp. 161–163). The purpose of such an approach is to highlight the fundamental antagonism that exists today between the ultra-rich capitalist elites and everyone else. In a world where ‘the richest 1 percent have a carbon footprint some 175 times that of the poorest 10 percent’, we simply ‘cannot afford not to draw lines of separation’ (Malm, 2018, p. 189).

A social theory suited for the Anthropocene, then, must work to attenuate the division that exists between the capitalist elites and everyone else, and push that antagonism towards a radical polarization. Only then can there remain any hope of promoting radical political action and contribute to a revolutionary ecological politics that seeks to liberate both nature and humans from the destructions of fossil capitalism. There might still be a slim chance to avoid worst-case scenarios, but even that window is rapidly closing. Current trajectories of climate change are undeniably apocalyptic – why one must ‘dare to feel the panic’ and then use that panic as a catalyst for radical action (Malm, 2018, p. 226). In the end, the arrival of the Anthropocene and its ecological crises leave us with a straightforward choice, according to Malm: ‘commit to the most militant unwavering opposition to this system, or sit watching as it all goes down the drain’ (Malm, 2018, p. 226).

An alternative version of this eco-Marxist story of the Anthropocene can be found in Jason W. Moore’s book Capitalism in the Web of Life from 2015. While the primary target of critique here remains fossil capitalism, Moore insists (contra Malm) that capitalism is best understood as ‘a way of organizing nature’ rather than merely a social or economic system (Moore, 2015, p. 2). The ecological history of capitalism is, Moore argues, a history of ongoing appropriation and transformation of natural environments into capital value. Global capitalism has survived and thrived only by materially transforming its environments, and ceaselessly producing what Moore calls ‘cheap natures’: cheap labor-power, cheap food, cheap energy, and cheap raw materials. Capitalism owes its success to the material and extra-economical appropriation and primitive accumulation of those cheap natures, which have taken place, recurrently, since the colonial expansions of the long 16th century. The problem confronting capitalist societies today, and the reason behind the current crises, is that it is becoming ‘increasingly difficult to get nature – of any kind – to work harder’ (Moore, 2015, p. 13). Faced with the intertwined challenges of agricultural stagnation, antibiotic resistance, productivity slowdown, biodiversity collapse, rising commodity prices, and – above all – global warming, fossil capitalism is coming up against its own biophysical limits. In fact, Moore finds the internal contradictions of capitalism today so profound that he considers the continued survival of the system impossible and predicts that ‘capitalism will give way to another model . . . over the next century’ (Moore, 2015, p. 294).

Moore’s world-ecological approach remains highly contentious within contemporary Marxist circles, both because of its dissolution of any clear-cut distinctions between society and nature and because of its optimism about the inevitable breakdown of fossil capitalism. Andreas Malm has called Moore’s work ‘unbridled hybridism in Marxist garb’ (Malm, 2018, p. 181), and John Bellamy Foster said in an interview that Moore’s work has ‘moved to the other side, and now stands opposed to the ecosocialist movement and socialism (even radicalism) as a whole’ (Angus & Foster, 2016). This makes Moore’s story all the more interesting here, because it reveals the existence of ongoing intellectual struggles over what is the ‘right’ eco-Marxist story of the Anthropocene, and reminds us that there might not be one single narrative.

Nevertheless, the story told by Malm remains the dominant eco-Marxist view of the Anthropocene. As we have seen, it is a story that works directly against the modernist one: where the ecomodernists argue for technological fixes and seek to defend existing political systems including its liberal worldview, eco-Marxists like Malm aim to overturn the system and subvert capitalist systems through revolutionary political action. Despite their overt differences, however, the two stories share an underlying similarity: the eco-Marxist story of the Anthropocene is, too, a story of increased human powers, even if the increase in powers is ascribed not to humanity as a whole, but to a subset of humanity, the capitalist elites who have power over everyone (and everything) else. In contrast to the ecomodernist story, there is nothing good or hopeful about this new epochal condition. In fact, the Anthropocene and its ecological crises represent the inevitable and inherently bad outcome of a fundamentally destructive capitalist system. Still, the eco-Marxist story of the Anthropocene remains a distinctly human-centered story, populated solely by human protagonists and antagonists: a small group of capitalist elites, not humanity as such, have brought us into this mess, and now it is up to the rest of us, the 99%, to rise up against the rule of the few, overthrow fossil capitalism, and thereby avert the imminent dangers of an impending climate catastrophe.

Like with the ecomodernist story, there are several reasons to be skeptical of the eco-Marxist story of the Anthropocene. Among these reasons are its preoccupation with capitalism as the single all-encompassing ill of the current moment, as well as its attribution of the origin of the Anthropocene to the early-industrial Great Britain, which not only reflects an underlying Eurocentrism, but also misrecognizes that the way in which many of the social and economic dynamics of the current crises goes much further back, and have their roots, at least in the long 16th century and the ongoing histories of settler colonialism. But the problems with the eco-Marxist vision of the Anthropocene cuts even deeper than that, and in order to see this, we now turn to the new materialist vision of the Anthropocene.

New materialism and the ‘uncanny’ Anthropocene

The third story of the Anthropocene, the one told by the new materialists, begins where the eco-Marxists put down their brakes: by upsetting the distinction between society and nature, between humans and the rest of the world. 7 We can get a better sense of this by turning to one of the central texts within the new materialist tradition, namely Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things from 2010, where she lays out the kind of horizontal ontology that underpins the new materialist story of the Anthropocene. Bennett and other contemporary new materialists are not the first, nor the only, to make the claim that the human and the more-than-human world are deeply intertwined, and that forms of agency are distributed across the artificial division between society and nature. As several authors have noted, such insights draw on and have come out of a long tradition of indigenous and non-Western thinking that goes back centuries, even millennia, as well as more recent developments within deep ecology and feminist thought during the second half of the 20th century.8 The ‘new’ in new materialism does not suggest unprecedented, it suggests merely a different kind of materialism, one that can be contrasted with earlier forms of materialism such as ‘historical’ materialism, and one that takes seriously the active and agentive capacities of matter (Coole & Frost, 2010).

The starting point for the new materialist story is that the current ecological crises do not simply constitute a technological problem (as suggested by the ecomodernists) or even a political problem (as suggested by the eco-Marxists) but reflect a deeper cultural and existential problem. In Vibrant Matter, Bennett argues that the dominant Western worldview, which envisions matter as inert and passive, provides philosophical fuel for human ‘fantasies of conquest and consumption’ that see the natural world as a resource to be extracted and thereby contribute to the current destruction of the conditions of life on the planet (Bennett, 2010, p. ix). What is needed today, therefore, is not just a new kind of politics, but also a philosophical and sensorial reorientation that challenges the ontological separation that divides the world into passive matter and active human beings – the hope being that such a reorientation can help cultivate new desires and sensibilities that will enable wiser and more ethical relations between humans and the more-than-human world (Bennett, 2010, p. 4).

Bennett embarks on this project through a series of theoretical reflections that she refers to as speculative ‘onto-story’ rather ontology, thereby emphasizing the conditions of contestation and unknowability inherent to ontological argumentation (Bennett, 2010, p. 4). Drawing on thinkers such as Spinoza and Deleuze, Bennett’s onto-story is one where deep down everything in the world is made of ‘the same quirky stuff, the same building blocks’ that ‘we might call . . . atoms, quarks, particles streams or matter-energy’ (Bennett, 2010, p. xi). These building blocks exist on a ‘turbulent, immanent field in which various and variable materialities collide, congeal, morph, evolve and disintegrate’ making up what we, humans, perceive to be the world. Everything in the world – not only human beings, but worms, rocks, and metallic substances too – exhibit an intrinsic drive to persist and exert different degrees of thing-power that can ‘affect other bodies, enhancing or weakening their power’ – they entail what Bennett calls a vitality intrinsic to matter itself (Bennett, 2010, pp. 2–3).

This intrinsic vitality of all things can be difficult to discern in our daily lives, where most material things appear fixed and lifeless, but only because their rate of movement and change ‘proceeds at a speed or a level below the threshold of human discernment’ (Bennett, 2010, p. 58). When viewed from the perspective of other temporalities, such as biological evolution or deep geological time, seemingly stable things like minerals and mountains quickly begin to move, transform, and become active shapers of the world, while the seemingly active powers of ‘human beings, with their much-lauded capacity for self-directed action’ begin to look less significant and much more passive (Bennett, 2010, p. 11). Paying attention to these and other temporalities, therefore, can help challenge the conventional belief that human beings are the only, or even the most important, agents operating in an otherwise passive material world.

From an ecological perspective, human beings are but ‘a particularly rich and complex collection of materials’ that exist ontologically, materially, and practically within a world that is always-already inhabited by a myriad of other human and non-human forces (Bennett, 2010, p. 11). The powers of human beings work with and against a multiplicity of other kinds of non-human agencies that co-shape and often outstrip our human capacities to change the world, even if they do so at different scales and temporalities. By understanding human beings in this way, as operating on the same ontological plane as the rest of the world, the new materialist story displaces human-centric worldviews that insist on distinguishing humanity from nature, by placing humans ‘at the ontological center or hierarchical apex’ (Bennett, 2010, p. 11). This displacement of humans is not meant to not deny the importance of the ‘often awesome, awful powers’ of human beings (Bennett, 2010, p. 10). It does, however, entail an explicit and active attempt to ‘distribute value more generously’ by inspiring ‘a greater sense of the extent to which all bodies are kin, in the sense of inextricably enmeshed in dense networks of relations’ (Bennett, 2010, p. 13).

This emphasis on relationality and ontological entanglement is particularly important to the new materialist story. As Bennett writes with echoes from Spinoza, it is a material and ontological condition of any existing body that it ‘depends on the collaboration, cooperation, or interactive interference of many bodies and forces’ and therefore ‘never really acts alone’ (Bennett, 2010, p. 21). Everything in this world exists and becomes what it is only through its intricate and overlapping relations and interconnections with numerous other things and beings. To capture this ontological entanglement, Bennett borrows the concept of an ‘assemblage’ from Deleuze and Guattari: assemblages are lively and diverse constellations of ‘vibrant materials of all sorts’ that are ‘not governed by any central head’ (Bennett, 2010, p. 24). A human body, for example, is a complex assemblage of cells, microbes, flesh, water molecules, desires, thoughts, and so on, all of which play a role in determining its capacities. At the same time, human bodies are part of numerous other complex assemblages, say as a workplace or political community, which are in turn comprised of numerous other human and non-human entities. Even the Earth itself, as suggested by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis in the early 1970s with their ‘Gaia hypothesis’, can be understood as a particularly complex kind of assemblage, made up of a multiplicity of other complex assemblages that constantly encroach upon and develop in relation to other assemblages (Lovelock & Margulis, 1974).

In a series of lectures called Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climate Regime from 2017, the French philosopher Bruno Latour invokes this assemblatic concept of Gaia to tell his version of a new materialist story of the Anthropocene. When moving from the Holocene to the Anthropocene – from an image of a stable globe to the lively assemblages of Gaia – a post-Enlightenment cosmology that posits a bifurcation between humans and nature on the grounds that humans have escaped from or can be distinguished from nature, no longer rings true. For Latour therefore, as for Bennett, rising to the challenges of the Anthropocene requires not only a new politics, but also a whole new cosmology, or what he calls a ‘counter-Copernican revolution’ (Latour, 2017, p. 61).

As the crisis of the Anthropocene suggest, Gaia has starting to ‘treat us as enemies’ (Latour, 2017, p. 281). Throughout most of the Holocene, natural environments remained largely indifferent to the miniscule effects of dispersed human activities, but today they are ‘no longer indifferent to our actions’ (p. 281). Therefore, in order to avoid waging an outright war against the planet, human beings of the Anthropocene must learn how to respond to Gaia with care, and how to free themselves of the illusions of infinite growth or infinite progress that brought about this mess in the first place. Only by accepting the finitude of human existence and coming back down to earth, by becoming ‘earthbound’ as Latour writes, can humans begin to find and learn new ways of living within the boundaries on this planet (Latour, 2017, p. 244).

Ultimately, for Latour, the ecological crises of the Anthropocene have brought humans into a new condition of Schmittean war between friend and enemy; a war between those still ‘living in the epoch of the Holocene’, who have not yet realized that the Earth is moving beneath their feet, and those living as ‘Earthbound in the Anthropocene’, who have realized that in order to survive, they will have to come down to Earth and learn how to sense and respond to nature, to Gaia (Latour, 2017, p. 261). While the simplicity of Latour’s story of a war between good and evil might seem appealing, his story of the Anthropocene is challenged by the eco-feminist philosopher Donna Haraway in her book Staying with the Trouble from 2016. Instead of stories of war and conflict, which draw up new lines of friend and enemy, Haraway invites us to pursue what she calls ‘tentacular’ thinking: ‘a method of tracing, of following a thread in the dark, in a dangerous true tale of adventure, where who lives and who dies and how might become clearer for the cultivating of multispecies justice’ (Haraway, 2016, p. 3).

With a playful curiosity, Haraway follows such tentacular threads into many places, finding valuable lessons in everything from art-activism projects in Southern California that cultivate interspecies trust between humans and pigeons, to the chthonic (under)worlds of Gorgons in Greek myths, the frontiers of biological research on symbiogenesis, and the science-art worldings of a computer game informed by experiences of native Inupat people in Alaska. If this sounds a little troubling and a bit speculative, it is because it is. While invoking new concepts and modes of storytelling that rely on speculation, fabulation, and science fiction, Haraway intentionally pushes against the limits of existing scientific epistemologies. For Haraway, this speculative work is required, because the Anthropocene has left us in the dark without bearings, and with no stories or concepts to rely on other than those of the outdated dualisms nature/culture, organism/environment, subject/object, which we can no longer think with (Haraway, 2016, p. 30).

But think we must! So, we must learn to think differently, and when doing so it becomes immensely important who and what we think with. This is part of the reason why Haraway takes issue with the story of friends and enemies told by Latour, even if they otherwise share many sympathies. By enlisting Carl Schmitt as his thinking companion, Latour gets too caught up in a story of war that relies on masculine tropes of heroes, victory and defeat, with all of its antagonistic dualisms and apocalyptic futures (Haraway, 2016, pp. 42–43). Today what is needed instead, Haraway insists, is a different kind of stories: more situated, patient, and tentacular stories that extend their webs in many directions and include both Gorgons and spiders, corals and octopuses, to name just a few of Haraway’s protagonists. Stories that seek to world other worlds, new worlds that can help envision and prefigure a coming-into-being of multispecies justice.

As the title of her book suggests, Haraway urges us to stay with the trouble. She wants us to remain in the troubled, muddled waters of the present instead of returning to simplified grand narratives or leaping into uncertain futures. Staying with the trouble means acknowledging the complex, entangled, often destructive histories that have brought about and still exist within the present moment – such as the histories of settler colonialism that still have their creepy tentacles all over the place today – without thereby succumbing to the belief that it is either impossible or already ‘too late’ to think and act differently (Haraway, 2016, p. 56). It means recognizing, and here she agrees with Latour, that there is still time for new and different stories, but these stories cannot rely on grand narratives of either apocalypse or salvation; neither can they rely on illusions of a return to a stable past, which never existed to begin with, as has become popular in ethno-nationalist movements today. We must, Haraway argues, give up hope in airy promises of solutions that project us into the future or wish for a return to the past, and instead begin to look for muddled hope in the troubled present. Then, and only then, might we begin learning to live with others on this damaged planet.

In the end, the new materialist stories of the Anthropocene told by Bennett, Latour, and Haraway leave us with a decidedly different view of the world than the one conveyed in the human-centered stories of ecomodernism and eco-Marxism. It is one in which the main actors are no longer human beings alone, but a much wider range of actors that include oceans, rivers, metals, corals, spiders, mythical creatures, and Gaia. It is a story in which the identification of the current crises shifts away from a sole focus on CO2 emissions or fossil capitalism to a much broader philosophical and cultural problem that is deeply connected to the ways in which we, as humans beings, think about and act in relation to the more-than-human inhabitants of this world.

For new materialists, the Anthropocene condition entails an uncanny double movement.9 On the one hand, the Anthropocene signals an increase in the world-making powers of (some) human beings over others, including many natural environments. On the other hand, the ecological crises and subsequent lack of human responses simultaneously demonstrate the limits of human powers and reminds us that the Earth is inhabited by many entities whose powers outstrip humans many times over. To new materialists, the crisis of the Anthropocene is an invitation to challenge the way we currently think about and perform the relationship between society and nature, between the human and the non-human, and to start paying more attention to the dependencies, entanglements, and resonances that cut across and interrupt those distinctions. Reformulating the problem in this way both changes and expands the range of politics that must be engaged in. Politics-as-usual, technological solutions, or even taking down capitalism is no longer going to cut it. What is needed is a whole new way of understanding of ourselves in the world, a whole new cosmology.

Telling other stories: Less than one, more than many

Both the ecomodernist and the eco-Marxist story rely on a dualist ontology that partitions the world into two realms with active and agential human beings on one side and passive law-abiding natural environments on the other. They remain couched within explicitly human and sociocentric perspectives that overestimate the world-making capacities of human beings and downplay our dependence on, as well as the active powers of, the myriad of non-human forces that upset our bids for control. These post-Enlightenment stories render the world of non-human matter passive and inert, in turn making us less attentive and responsive to its active and agential (thing-)powers. By telling stories of the Anthropocene that feature almost exclusively human beings and a natural environment that exists ‘out there’, as something that must be protected by and for the sake of human beings, all the other myriad of beings and things that inhabit and shape our world remains out of sight, out of sense.

The new materialist story explicitly challenges the human-centrism of these other stories. Not because human beings have ceased to matter in the Anthropocene. In fact, human activities matter more than ever, not only from a human perspective, but from an ecological perspective too. As Haraway writes,

. . . the doings of situated, actual human beings matter. It matters with which ways of living and dying we cast our lot rather than others. It matters not just to human beings, but also to those many critters across Taxa which and whom we have subjected to exterminations, extinction, genocides, and prospects of futurelessness. (Haraway, 2016, p. 55)

But even from a purely self-interested human perspective, the only way to survive in this world is to survive in collaboration with other things and beings, whether it is the microbes in our guts, the pollinators in vital ecosystems, or the oxygen in the troposphere. Of course, we can never completely escape our distinctly human perspectives; we meet and experience the world through our embodiment as human beings with a specific temporality and spatiality. Neither are there any reasons to resist our own humanity, nor to reject the special ethical commitments we have towards human others because of our perspectival position (Bennett, 2010, p. 104).

However, we can begin to cultivate a new and more ecological human sensibility towards a more-than-human world, and one way to do so is by telling other stories. Stories that exercise our blunted capacities for caring for and responding to multispecies others (Haraway, 2016, p. 29). If storytelling is a practice of thinking that exercises capacities for caring, the stories we tell both represent and reconfigure what we find worth caring for and are capable of attending to. Thus, in order to start recognizing more-than-human others, and to become attentive and capable of responding to them, we will have to become better at telling less human-centered stories (Haraway 2016; Tsing, 2015; Van Dooren, 2014). Stories that seeks to displace, or at least decenter, the idiosyncratic Western understanding of the human individual, so that we might begin to see what else is there, what else could be there.

The new materialist insistence on paying attention to more-than-human assemblages and their agentive capacities offers an important counter-narrative to the anthropocentrism of the ecomodernist and eco-Marxist stories. But – and this is important – if the new materialist story of the Anthropocene becomes just another grand narrative, which positions itself as the only story relevant for understanding the current condition, we have not come very far. As Haraway suggests in Staying with the Trouble, the stories we tell about the climate and ecological crises are constantly on the verge of becoming ‘too large’, making us unable to see and sense outside its limits. This goes for the new materialist story too. If the increasing popularity of theories of new materialism within universities in recent years means that it gets to position itself as a new hegemonic position, and (against its initial promises) renders us inattentive to, for example, the potential benefits of new technology, the destructive dynamics of capitalist patterns of economic production and consumption, or the situated struggles of marginalized communities, it must certainly be subjected to critique.

Making room for other stories about the Anthropocene requires affirming multiplicity and creative experimentation, rather than insisting on a single overarching narrative. But this is exactly part of the reason why the new materialist story is preferable to the ecomodernist and eco-Marxist alternatives: it recognizes that there is no single story to be told today, and seeks to keep space open for a complex and interlinked world of social and ecological multiplicity. In this sense, it is perhaps better thought of as a sort of meta-narrative – a carrier bag to use a metaphor by writer Ursula Le Guin (1996) – that makes room for other stories, rather than aspiring to become the full story. As a result, the new materialist story of the Anthropocene is not a complete narrative, but one that can be supplemented with, populated by, situated stories about the many dispersed and ongoing efforts to promote ecological sustainability and multispecies justice, unfolding in communities around the world today.

In a playful reversal of anthropologist Marilyn Strathern’s original saying, we might say with Anna Tsing and her co-authors that the Anthropocene is ‘Less Than One, More than Many’ (Swanson et al., 2015). It is less than one, because it does not signify a new unified global condition; and it is more than many because its patchwork of different, situated, and increasingly fragile Anthropocene realities, human as well as non-human, constantly exceeds our capacities for describing them in generalized terms (Tsing, 2015; Tsing et al., 2019). Therefore, if the concept of the Anthropocene is to continue to foster insightful theoretical insights about the ongoing ecological and climatic crises, new studies of the Anthropocene will have to move beyond the abstract analyses of the new epoch, and towards more concrete analyses of specific lived Anthropocene realities, which can help to challenge and pluralize the grand narratives that posit the Anthropocene as a shared global epochal condition (Ejsing, 2021; Ejsing 2020).

To put it differently, not everyone is living in the same Anthropocene. That might sound like an admission of political defeat: How can we begin to push back against climate change and global warming, if we do not even agree upon the premises, if we do not even agree what world we are living in? But that question reverses the real political challenge: it assumes that if only all agreed that we were, for example, living in the Anthropocene envisioned by the eco-Marxists, then we could finally begin to do politics from the same conceptual vantage point. But politics have never started with that kind of common ground. Politics are about creating, or to use Latour’s term ‘composing’ common ground where it does not already exist. It will not do to presuppose a new shared global condition where it does not already exist, whether that condition is described in terms of a single ‘humanity’ or a single enemy ‘capitalism’. Instead, there is an urgent need to act despite ontological uncertainty and with a recognition of situated difference. Doing politics in the Anthropocene, therefore, will have to begin ‘in the middle of things’, in the complex and muddled realities from which politics arise. Only from here can we begin to compose new and more ethical multispecies relations for the Anthropocene.

Footnotes

1.

To read more about how the concept was first introduced and popularized in the natural sciences, see for example Crutzen, 2002, 2006a; Crutzen & Stoermer, 2000; Zalasiewicz et al., 2008.GO TO FOOTNOTE

2.

Blok and Jensen distinguish their own STS-inspired approach from that of the ‘new materialism’ of thinkers like Nigel Clark and others. I suspect, however, that they would find themselves in sympathy with much, if not most, of the more encompassing vision of a new materialist Anthropocene that I lay out in this article.GO TO FOOTNOTE

3.

While the 2015 Ecomodernist Manifesto has gained a lot of attention since its publication, for other contributions to an ecomodernist worldview see also Brand, 2010; Lynas, 2011; Nordhaus & Shellenberger, 2007; Pielke, 2010.GO TO FOOTNOTE

4.

Among the 18 co-authors of the manifesto are prominent figures from environmentalist circles, such as Steward Brand, the controversial author of Whole Earth Catalog, and Ted Nordhaus, who is recurrently cited for his proposition that postponing action of global warming is a cost-effective strategy.GO TO FOOTNOTE

5.

A critical engagement with these kinds of high-risk geoengineering projects can be found in Hamilton, 2014.GO TO FOOTNOTE

6.

It should be noted here that many eco-Marxists oppose the concept of the Anthropocene itself. Andreas Malm and others have suggested, instead, the name ‘Capitalocene’, which emphasizes the decisive and detrimental role played by capitalism in bringing about this new geological epoch and its ecological crises. However, I stick to the more general usage of Anthropocene here. For a more thorough discussion on these matters see the volume Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism edited by Jason W. Moore.GO TO FOOTNOTE

7.

I use ‘new’ materialism here in a rather capacious sense that encompasses both Bennett’s materialism, which draws on a vitalist tradition, and Latour’s materialism, which comes out of Science and Technology Studies and Actor-Network-Theory. While there are notable differences between the two traditions, what connects them here is both their difference to earlier forms of ‘historical’ and ‘economic’ materialism, as well as their insistence on extending agentive capacities across human–non-human distinctions. See also ‘Can We Get Our Materialism Back, Please?’ (Latour, 2007).GO TO FOOTNOTE

8.

Theories of new materialism are sometimes critiqued for silencing, or at least neglecting, the importance of earlier theoretical contributions, in particular by indigenous and non-Western thought, or even extending colonial imaginaries. See for example Sherilyn MacGregor’s recent article ‘Making Matter Great Again’ in Environmental Politics, where she writes that ‘we did not need Bennett to write Vibrant Matter to help us see the non-binary enmeshment of materiality and values’ when several traditions of thought were already making similar arguments (MacGregor, 2021, p. 50). Critiques like these are important, and suggest a real need for new materialists to acknowledge the connections to prior work and thinking, both in terms of academic recognition and citation practices, while fostering new alliances across lines of difference that do not exacerbate existing inequalities and hierarchies of privilege (see also Todd, 2015).GO TO FOOTNOTE

9.

I am using the word ‘uncanny’ here in the sense suggested by Nils Bubandt, to capture the feeling that something which previously seemed safe and familiar, such as life on this Earth, suddenly takes on a new and unhomely character (Bubandt, 2018).GO TO FOOTNOTE

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Uncategorized

Net zero requires massive tracts of land. Habitat conservation lies in the details

Crunching the numbers, researchers found that turning the western U.S. into an electrified net zero hub is technically feasible, affordable—and perhaps even environmentally sustainable.

By Warren Cornwall

Original article here

The push to power more of the modern world with electricity—and to get those electrons without burning fossil fuels—isn’t entirely green.

Vows to steer down a path to “net zero” carbon emissions around the middle of this century have become a centerpiece of climate policies for companies, states and entire countries. Such moves are considered critical if the world is going to keep temperature increases well below 2°C, a threshold commonly cited as a point when the effects of global warming become severe.

But kicking the fossil fuel addiction comes with an environmental price of its own, especially if we want to hang onto the cell phones, plane trips, car commutes and 24/7 easy electricity that are hallmarks of modern life in the developed world. Copper, aluminum, lithium and rare earth metals, to name a few, need to be mined. And then there’s the question of where to put all those solar panels, wind turbines and switchgrass fields.

Now, a group of scientists working in the western U.S. have crafted a road map for getting the region to net zero while minimizing the environmental footprint. The upshot: It’s going to take a lot of land blanketed with solar panels and wind turbines. But careful planning could shrink the footprint on sensitive habitats and valuable farmland by half.

Grace Wu, a University of California, Santa Barbara environmental scientist who helped lead the research, summed up her view of the likelihood of western states reaching net zero this way: “It’s going to be hard, but it’s not impossible.”

Reconfiguring an entire energy system is no easy task. The North American electrical grid alone has been described as the world’s largest machine. Add in all the ways energy today is produced (wind, solar, geothermal, nuclear, gas, coal, oil, etc.) and used (transportation, manufacturing, server farms, watching Netflix, writing this story, etc.). The number of variables is staggering.

Wu was part of a team of scientists with expertise in all things energy who joined forces to try to come up with detailed, realistic scenarios for how the 11 states in the western U.S., which are joined together by electrical transmission lines, could shift their energy systems to net zero carbon emissions by 2050. They also wanted to see what the footprint would be on land and in the ocean. Members included people from a handful of California universities, consulting firms, energy companies and the environmental group The Nature Conservancy.

To find answers, the group embarked on a binge of data-crunching and computer modeling. They used environmental and land-use data to map where power generators such as wind farms could be built. They modeled routes and costs for power lines to get electricity from where it’s made to where it’s used. They plugged all of this into a program called RIO, designed to create different scenarios that would meet future energy needs. They then calculated how these results overlaid on the region’s farmland, important wildlife habitat and relatively undamaged landscapes.

The magnitude of the impact is boggling. By 2050, turning the western U.S. into a highly electrified net zero mecca run largely on renewable energy would take as much as 4.5 times more total electricity than a system built without worrying about carbon emissions. That’s largely because of the shift from fossil-fuel burning devices (cars, stoves, furnaces) to ones running on electricity. Demand for transmission systems to move that electricity would be as much as 65% greater. And the amount of land and ocean space dedicated to energy could be as much as 11 times greater than if carbon weren’t a concern. All told, the region’s energy footprint would be between 70,000 and 143,000 square kilometers bigger with the net zero push, the scientists reported this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The larger number represents enough solar panels, power lines, wind turbines and bioenergy crops to cover nearly half the state of New Mexico.

“The scale, pace, and land use requirements of the energy infrastructure build-out required to achieve net-zero economy-wide emissions are unprecedented,” the researchers wrote. “Yet, if this transition is adequately planned, it is technically feasible, affordable, and environmentally sustainable.”

The final footprint, however, depends on the details. Shifting more quickly to electricity would reduce the amount of land used, because it would mean less reliance on producing liquid biofuel from crops, the most land-intensive part of this energy equation. Likewise, adopting measures to steer power production away from more ecologically or agriculturally valuable land would shift power production to less land-intensive uses, the scientists found. For example, more conservation-minded policies would translate into a 25% increase in solar farms, while wind farms would shrink by 26%.

Emphasizing land conservation does add a 3% cost to overall energy production, which amounts to $7.8 billion in annual costs in 2050, the study showed.

While these scenarios help clarify the tradeoffs of choosing different paths forward, they illustrate how daunting it will be to make good on the net zero promises. It also raises questions about whether society and governments are ready for it. Between now and 2050, construction of low-carbon energy infrastructure would need to advance at two to three times current rates.

The biggest roadblocks could come with some of the least glamorous hardware: transmission lines. It can take a decade to build high-voltage transmission lines to ferry electricity across multiple states – for example from Wyoming windfarms to California, said Wu. That’s in part due to the challenges of getting permits for such projects. The study found that even with more strict land conservation policies, getting to net zero would take more than 10,000 kilometers of new high-voltage lines. “I worry more about actually permitting transmission than I do about permitting wind and solar farms,” she said

Wu, et. al. “Minimizing habitat conflicts in meeting net-zero energy targets in the western United States.” Jan. 19, 2023. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Image: ©Andy Tucker via Flickr