The unforeseen coincidence between a general confinement and the period of Lent is still quite welcome for those who have been asked, out of solidarity, to do nothing and to remain at a distance from the battle front. This obligatory fast, this secular and republican Ramadan can be a good opportunity for them to reflect on what is important and what is derisory. . . . It is as though the intervention of the virus could serve as a dress rehearsal for the next crisis, the one in which the reorientation of living conditions is going to be posed as a challenge to all of us, as will all the details of daily existence that we will have to learn to sort out carefully. I am advancing the hypothesis, as have many others, that the health crisis prepares, induces, incites us to prepare for climate change. This hypothesis still needs to be tested.
What allows the two crises to occur in succession is the sudden and painful realization that the classical definition of society – humans among themselves – makes no sense. The state of society depends at every moment on the associations between many actors, most of whom do not have human forms. This is true of microbes – as we have known since Pasteur – but also of the internet, the law, the organization of hospitals, the logistics of the state, as well as the climate. And of course, in spite of the noise surrounding a “state of war” against the virus, it is only one link in a chain where the management of stocks of masks or tests, the regulation of property rights, civic habits, gestures of solidarity, count exactly as much in defining the degree of virulence of the infectious agent. Once the entire network of which it is only one link is taken into account, the same virus does not act in the same way in Taiwan, Singapore, New York, or Paris. The pandemic is no more a “natural” phenomenon than the famines of the past or the current climate crisis. Society has long since moved beyond the narrow confines of the social sphere.
Having said that, it is not clear to me that the parallel goes much further. After all, health crises are not new, and rapid and radical state intervention does not seem to be very innovative so far. One need only look at President Macron’s enthusiasm to take on the figure of head of state that he has so pathetically lacked until now. Much better than terrorist attacks – which are, after all, only police business – pandemics awaken in leaders and those in power a kind of self-evident sense of “protection” – “we have to protect you” “you have to protect us” – that recharges the authority of the state and allows it to demand what would otherwise be met with riots.
But this state is not the state of the twenty-first century and ecological change; it is the state of the nineteenth century and so-called biopower. In the words of the late Alain Desrosières, it is the state of what is rightly called statistics: population management on a territorial grid seen from above and led by the power of experts.[1] This is exactly what we see resurrected today – with the only difference that it is replicated from one nation to the next, to the point of having become world-wide. The originality of the present situation, it seems to me, is that by remaining trapped at home while outside there is only the extension of police powers and the din of ambulances, we are collectively playing a caricatured form of the figure of biopolitics that seems to have come straight out of a Michel Foucault lecture. Including the obliteration of the very many invisible workers forced to work anyway so that others can continue to hole up in their homes – not to mention the migrants who, by definition, cannot be secluded in any home of their own. But this caricature is precisely the caricature of a time that is no longer ours.
There is a huge gulf between the state that is able to say “I protect you from life and death,” that is to say from infection by a virus whose trace is known only to scientists and whose effects can only be understood by collecting statistics, and the state that would dare to say “I protect you from life and death, because I maintain the conditions of habitability of all the living people on whom you depend.”
Think about it. Imagine that President Macron came to announce, in a Churchillian tone, a package of measures to leave gas and oil reserves in the ground, to stop the marketing of pesticides, to abolish deep ploughing, and, with supreme audacity, to ban outdoor heaters on bar terraces. If the gas tax triggered the yellow-vests revolt, then imagine the riots that would follow such an announcement, setting the country ablaze. And yet, the demand to protect the French people for their own good and from death is infinitely more justified in the case of the ecological crisis than in the case of the health crisis, because it affects literally everyone, not a few thousand people – and not for a time but forever.
It is clear that such a state does not exist — and maybe fortunately so. What is more worrying is that we do not see how that state would prepare the move from the one crisis to the next. In the health crisis, the administration has the very classic educational role and its authority coincides perfectly with the old national borders – the archaism of the sudden return to European borders is painful proof of this. In the case of ecological change, the relationship is reversed: it is the administration that must learn from a multiform people, on multiple scales, what will be the territories upon which people are trying to survive in many new ways as they seek to escape from globalized production. The present state would be completely incapable of dictating measures from above. If in the health crisis, it is the brave people who must relearn to wash their hands and cough into their elbows as they did in primary school, in the case of the ecological mutation, it is the state that finds itself in a learning situation.
But there is another reason why the figure of the “war against the virus” is so unjustified: in the health crisis, it may be true that humans as a whole are “fighting” against viruses – even if they have no interest in us and go their way from throat to throat killing us without meaning to. The situation is tragically reversed in ecological change: this time, the pathogen whose terrible virulence has changed the living conditions of all the inhabitants of the planet is not the virus at all, it is humanity! But this does not apply to all humans, just those who make war on us without declaring war on us. For this war, the national state is as ill-prepared, as badly calibrated, as badly designed as possible because the battle fronts are multiple and cross each one of us. It is in this sense that the “general mobilization” against the virus does not prove in any way that we will be ready for the next one. It is not only the military that is always one war behind.
But finally, you never know; a time of Lent, whether secular or republican, can lead to spectacular conversions. For the first time in years, a billion people, stuck at home, find this forgotten luxury: time to reflect and thereby discern that which usually and unnecessarily agitates them in all directions. Let’s respect this long, painful, and unexpected fast.
[[Chapter 5, in Ino Rossi, ed. (2020) Challenges of Globalization and Prospects for an Inter-civilizational World Order (Springer Nature Switzerland)]]
Leslie Sklair
This piece argues that if globalization was one of the leading ideas in the social sciences from the 1990s to the first decade of the new millennium, the Anthropocene can now be considered as a leading idea in the social sciences, the humanities and also in some of the creative arts. The Anthropocene, strictly speaking, is a geological concept, coined in recognition of increasingly de-stabilizing human impacts on the planet. The controversies around the origins of the Anthropocene mirror those around the chronologies of globalization – are they ancient or modern phenomena? The label Anthropocene was intended to replace the Holocene epoch (roughly the last 10-12,000 years) in the geological nomenclature (see Steffen et al. 2011) and to establish the discipline of Earth System Science (ESS, see Hamilton 2015, Angus 2016).
The idea of the Anthropo-scene appeared around 2015, and was first systematically set out in an article in the journal Social Studies in Science to highlight the ‘rich, inchoate and multi-disciplinary diversity of this Anthropo-scene… [proposing] five ways in which the concept of the Anthropocene has been mobilized: scientific question, intellectual zeitgeist, ideological provocation, new ontologies and science fiction’ (Lorimer 2017: 117). Adding the intervention of creative artists, this is a useful way of organising a vast literature.
GLOBALIZATION AS SOCIAL SCIENCE, ANTHROPOCENE AS GEOLOGICAL SCIENCE, ANTHROPO-SCENE AS TOTALIZING NARRATIVE
The initial popularity of globalization as a motif for the social sciences and humanities was little short of astonishing. Introduced in the print media around 1960, the term first started to be used systematically by scholars and journalists in the 1980s, and by the turn of the millennium it was to be found everywhere, applied to almost everything (Ritzer 2012). In the words of TheEconomist in 2009, ‘The concept globalization was popularised by an American journalist, Thomas Friedman, in his book “The World is Flat”. Published in 2005, it reached the top of several bestseller lists with its headline message that the world is now just one big integrated market’ (<http://www.economist. com/node/14031230>). The idea of the Anthropocene was ‘officially’ announced to the wider scientific community in a short communication in the journal Nature[1] (probably the most influential science publication in the world) entitled ‘Geology of mankind’ (Crutzen 2002) – in retrospect, an unfortunate title. An article in the Guardian (London) highlighted the male bias in science in general and in the group leading the Anthropocene campaign in particular – this attracted hundreds of comments (Raworth 2014).
Critics of the ideas of globalization and of the Anthropocene share many characteristics. For example, the literature on globalization is suffused with a good deal of fatalism, popularly known as TINA (there is no alternative). Even some progressive academics, popular writers and political and cultural leaders seem to accept that there is no alternative to capitalist globalization and that all we can do is to try to work for a better world around it (Giddens 2000). And this is where the challenge of the Anthropocene to existing conceptions of globalization starts to bite. In 2009, the historian of fossil capitalism Andreas Malm, declared: ‘Forget the Anthropocene, we should call it the Capitalocene’ (quoted in Moore’s edited book of 2016: xi). While sympathising with the sentiment, I think that there are many reasons to claim that the Anthropocene is an apt label for the human impact on the planet. It is inclusive of the human enterprise, and though different levels of responsibility can be apportioned, most people on Earth (rich and poor) are understandably complicit through what I have labelled the culture-ideology of consumerism (Sklair 2001, 2002). Rebranding Anthropocene as Capitalocene conveniently lets anti-capitalists off the hook to fly around the world critiquing capitalism and making our own ecologically destructive consumer choices. Just as we are all living in a globalised world that world is also the Anthropocene. And it is taking place within and being intensified through the system of capitalist globalization fortified by hierarchic states.
What, then, does the idea of the Anthropocene have to offer that the immense body of globalization research does not already offer? The first and most obvious answer to this question must focus on the efforts of Earth System scientists to establish connections between the economic, social, and cultural spheres and the Earth System itself. Lorimer makes the distinction between the scientific agenda of the Anthropocene for Earth System science, and its rapid absorption into the intellectual zeitgeist. I would suggest, however, that the evidence permits another reading of the situation, namely that many ESS researchers (including some of the most influential) framed their concept of the Anthropocene in a way that directly invited diverse publics into the fold, creating popular and transdisciplinary appeal. This, I would argue, can be clearly seen from what may be labelled the ‘official canon’ of the Anthropocene as a scientific reality. In their collective introduction to the topic in the authoritative Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society,Steffen, Grinevald, Crutzen, and McNeill (2011) conclude that the Anthropocene might be compared to the Darwinian revolution. Even more boldly (and alarmingly) these three leading Earth scientists and one of the most influential world historians of our time, state: ‘Darwin’s insights into our origins provoked outrage, anger and disbelief but did not threaten the material existence of society of the time. The ultimate drivers of the Anthropocene, on the other hand, if they continue unabated through this century, may well threaten the viability of contemporary civilization and perhaps even the future existence of Homo sapiens’ (ibid: 862). Unusually for an article announcing a new field of scientific inquiry in a most prestigious natural science publication, this suggests that the Anthropocene is of direct relevance to planetary survival.
Further evidence of the enthusiasm of the promoters of the Anthropocene concept to welcome the social sciences, humanities, and the arts into the broad tent of ‘Anthropocene studies’ comes from the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG). This was established in 2009 to prepare the scientific community and the general public for the theoretical and practical challenges that lay ahead. The chairman was Jan Zalasiewicz (Professor of Paleobiology at the University of Leicester) who, through his writings, media outreach, and promotional skills, has done as much as anyone to disseminate the idea of the Anthropocene in scientific and public spheres. In December 2009 in correspondence with Davor Vidas (an international law of the sea scholar) Zalasiewicz wrote: ‘I would be glad to discuss the wider implications [of the Anthropocene] to your field of study, because while we are aware of the general societal implications of this term, the possible practical implications for international law [of the sea] would be of considerable interest in our examination of this term.’[2]
The Royal Society of Great Britain accepted a proposal for a thematic set of papers on the Anthropocene, to appear in their Proceedings journal. The first theme was ‘Historical perspectives and concept of the Anthropocene’, followed by eight geological and ecological topics. The last, ‘societal responses to the Anthropocene’, is of particular significance for my argument – like the article by Steffen et al., wide enough to encourage participation from practically anyone. In his annual AWG report for 2014, Zalasiewicz wrote: ‘This has been another eventful year in the rapidly growing field of what one might term “Anthropocene studies”.’ Also highlighted were the major Anthropocene project at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), the equally significant Deutsches Museum/Rachel Carson Center Anthropocene exhibition in Munich, the incorporation of the Anthropocene as a major theme in the Smithsonian Institution’s ‘Deep Time’ exhibition, three new Anthropocene journals and general books and films on the topic in the pipeline – all examples of prestigious outreach and what research funding bodies term ‘impact’.[3]
The inaugural meeting of the AWG was hosted and financially supported by HKW in Berlin in October 2014. This meeting included discussion of various technical questions concerning the measurement of the Holocene-Anthropocene boundary, whether the Anthropocene should be considered as ‘a unit of Earth history or human history’, and the issue of the ‘Anthropocene as a time unit and a material unit to be visualized by geoscientists and other interested communities.’ A session on ‘Human Impacts and Their Consequences’ ranged far and wide over critical assessment of science-political solution pathways, and a ‘research agenda beyond sustainability, linking scientific practice with societal relevance and local to global strategies of knowledge production’. Zalasiewicz summed up these ‘exchanges’ as follows: ‘a set of dialogues between members of the Anthropocene Working Group and social scientists, thinkers, and artists, a serial thread of conversations that draws from a vast range of expertise, disciplines, and practices. … engaging with research methods in the lab or field, at the desk or in the studio.’ This was followed in June 2015 by ‘The Anthropocene Project’ at the Tate Modern, an exhibition at the Barbican in London, and similar events in many other cities around the world. This suggests that in the case of the Anthropocene the dire warnings of C.P. Snow’s ‘two cultures’ thesis (chronicling the dangers of the separation of the sciences from the humanities and arts) were finally being taken to heart by all sides.[4] My view is that globalization as a sociological concept has always been too frail to sustain the theoretical and substantive burdens loaded on to it. The ‘global’ has always seemed too big and often lacking the specificity necessary for any sort of scientific rigour and no doubt some think the same about the Anthropocene.
GENERIC, CAPITALIST, AND ALTERNATIVE ANTHROPOCENES
In order to address political and methodological problems I originally distinguished three modes of globalization in theory and practice, what we may term the ‘silent qualifiers’ of globalization – namely generic, capitalist, and alternative globalizations (Sklair 2009). Now, after studying the Anthropocene (and -scene), it appears to me that the same ‘silent qualifiers’ can also be applied – generic, capitalist, and alternative Anthropocenes (same names, different contents).[5]
By generic Anthropocene I mean the simple ideas that living creatures have always had a multitude of impacts on the Earth System which itself is constantly changing in various ways, and that the evolution of humankind represented a quantitative transformation of these impacts (particularly with respect to city building, agriculture, and infrastructure). By capitalist Anthropocene I mean that the industrialization made possible by fossil fuels, exploited via capitalist relations of production, set in motion qualitative transformations of these impacts on the Earth System (Malm 2015). The difference between the generic and the capitalist Anthropocenes and, by implication, between the quantitative and the qualitative impacts on the planet, is caught by the distinction that geologists have made between the Holocene and the Anthropocene. The Holocene represents the previous 12,000 years of relative planetary stability, notably moderate temperature fluctuations and other functions favourable to life on the planet; the capitalist Anthropocene represents an end of relative planetary stability and a far less predictable, possibly catastrophic future. In the opinion of many Earth scientists and Anthropocene popularisers one possible outcome is the end of life as we know it on the planet. However, like capitalist globalization, in the capitalist Anthropocene such alarming messages are rapidly dealt with by diluting them through a variety of what we might label ‘reassurance narratives’. For example, the Steffen et al. (2011) paper cited above concludes on an optimistic note reassuring us that human intelligence and ingenuity is prepared for the challenge of the Anthropocene. The most influential statement of this view comes from the prestigious Stockholm Resilience Centre research on planetary boundaries (PB). An authoritative report on the status of these boundaries, while highlighting the dangers (several boundaries already breached, others on the edge) concludes: ‘Nevertheless, by identifying a safe operating space for humanity on Earth, the PB framework can make a valuable contribution to decision-makers in charting desirable courses for societal development’ (Steffen, Richardson, Rockström, et al. 2015: 475). The ideas of ‘safe operating space’ and the frequently quoted ‘Welcome to the Anthropocene’ are only the most common of the Anthropocene reassurance narratives which have come to be associated with the label ‘good Anthropocene’. The parallels with globalization as theory and practice are striking. Equivalent reassurance narratives for the downsides of capitalist globalization are ‘the rising tide lifts all boats’ blurring the evidence of global and local class polarization, and ‘ecological modernization’ (also propagated by good Anthropocene enthusiasts) blurring the evidence of global and local ecological unsustainability (see Leichenko & O’Brien 2008, Sklair 2002: 48-58) – the capitalist Anthropocene avant la lettre! In the media these reassurance narratives successfully morph from challenges to opportunities, successfully trumping (no pun intended) pessimism with optimism, pushing existential threats into the shadows.[6] Engaging creatively with the science-politics of the Anthropocene, Stengers (2015) shows that as scientists went public on the Anthropocene before all the geological results were established (waiting for more definitive markers could be catastrophic), the anthropogenic climate-change deniers could keep the debate going, opening up the unenviable choice between merchants of fear or merchants of doubt.[7] Latour keeps this conversation going. Science and politics are both frail human endeavours, he argues. Anthropocene politics ‘is not a rational debate … [it is] incredibly easy to make two sides emerge even when there is only one’ (Latour 2015:147).
There is a large literature on climate change denial (Boykoff & Olson 2013), much less on Anthropocene denial (but see the exemplary case study by Casagrande et al. 2017, where this is conceptualised as ‘ecomyopia’). Unsurprisingly, comparisons have been made between climate change denial and Holocaust denial: ‘Climate change and the Holocaust are not equivalent, but that does not mean there is no climate denial’ (Jacques 2012: 10). While it would be quite wrong to identify the slogan ‘Welcome to the Anthropocene’ with climate change or Anthropocene denial, I would argue that even when used ironically it does create an atmosphere of scepticism about the severity of the situation, which can implicitly lead to denial. The slogan adorned a front-page story in the Economist magazine in May 2011, the title of a 3-minute film introducing the UN Rio+20 summit in June 2012, and in 2014 a major exhibition ‘Welcome to the Anthropocene: The Earth in Our Hands’ opened in the Deutsches Museum, Munich. A review of this exhibition concludes with a sharp critique of what I mean by the capitalist Anthropocene reassurance narrative: ‘the Anthropocene idea has prompted many scholars and activists to point out the radical environmental injustice of the epoch and to critique the capitalism that has led to it. We see neither in this exhibit. Instead, it offers a relatively benign vision of a changing planet. The change is not pictured as threatening, in spite of being rapid. The exhibit says Welcome to the Anthropocene, not Goodbye to the World You Knew’ (Jørgensen & Jørgensen 2016: 237).[8] Several books, articles and mass media references to ‘Welcome to the Anthropocene’ suggest that there is a middle way between the generic Anthropocene and extreme capitalist Anthropocene denial, and that the idea of the ‘good, welcoming Anthropocene’ provides it. We may, after all, be having to think about planetary survival sooner rather than later.[9]
The debates around Anthropo-scene ideologies take different forms from those around globalization (see Sklair 2017). Capitalist ideologues generally adopted neoliberal forms of globalization, though by no means all (in and out of the transnational corporations and think tanks) took this position. My fourfold model of the transnational capitalist class (TCC) attempted to demonstrate alliances between corporate, political, professional and consumerist fractions, but was sensitive to intra-TCC differences and sometimes open warfare between the fractions, though usually resolved in the interests of Big Business and the Big State (Sklair 2001). In the case of capitalist globalization it was always obvious that there were powerful globalizing forces at work – the consequences of the digital revolution in all spheres of life and social organization made this difficult to deny. The political problem was and is: can capitalist globalization work for everyone or does it have an inbuilt tendency towards class polarization, inequality, and ecological disaster? Chinese President Xi at Davos in 2017 lectured the world with an impassioned defence of globalization and President Trump in the White House in 2018 promised to make America great again by resisting globalization. The politics of the Anthropocene do not rest on such obvious foundations. And, more to the point, I would argue that while globalization and especially climate change regularly appear in the mass media, albeit frequently in misleading and sensationalist terms (Boykoff 2011), the Anthropocene is still relatively unknown outside some bubbles in the worlds of science, academe, culture critique, and creative arts.[10]
Adding to Lorimer’s remarks on science/climate fiction and the Anthropocene (2017: 128-31), I can offer some comments on how the sciences are catching up with science fiction in a desperate attempt to prepare for the worst-case Anthropocene scenario – namely, what do we do when planet Earth becomes no longer able to support human life? [11] Two issues appear to be paramount, first the practical possibility of physical escape from a doomed planet, and second, the identification of planets that hold out prospects of supporting human life. Both are now being investigated by leading scientists and entrepreneurs with the financial backing of private benefactors and public money. Planning for physical escape from a doomed planet, does not receive much publicity, but it is clearly underway. In 2017 BBC2 screened a documentary, ‘The 21st century race for space’. Hosted by the genial Professor Brian Cox, a leading science populariser in the UK, it took viewers on a tour of cutting-edge research locations all around the world. Cox explained: ‘surprisingly, some of the boldest efforts at putting humans into space are now those of private companies started by a handful of maverick billionaire businessmen’.[12] These include Richard Branson (Virgin Galactic), Jeff Bezos (founder of Amazon and Blue Origin) and Elon Musk (Spaceport America and SpaceX) and their initiatives in privately financed space flight, space tourism, asteroid mining, and dreams of colonies on Mars. But, says Cox, ‘their true ambition is to ensure the survival of the human race by crossing our solar system and colonizing Mars in the next decade.’ Building space ships is one problem, the next is ensuring the voyagers survive the journey, and then to find somewhere eventually for them to land and make a home. This is the search for a new planet Earth. The late Stephen Hawking, had for some years been arguing that the human species will have to relocate to a new planet within 100 years. This documentary gave him one more platform to disseminate his views.
The search for another planet Earth or a planet that can be terraformed to serve as a new home for humans is also underway.[13] Professor Hawking and several other distinguished scientists worked with Breakthrough Initiatives, a programme of scientific and technological exploration, probing the big questions of life in the Universe. The website (<https://breakthroughinitiatives.org>) explains: ‘Are we alone? Are there habitable worlds in our galactic neighborhood? Can we make the great leap to the stars? And can we think and act together – as one world in the cosmos? … Breakthrough Listen is a $100 million program of astronomical observations in search of evidence of intelligent life beyond Earth. … A complete survey of the 1,000,000 nearest stars, the plane and center of our galaxy, and the 100 nearest galaxies. All data will be open to the public.’ This is serious money supporting serious efforts by serious scientists in what has been labelled exoplanet studies, namely the study of planets outside our solar system that orbit a star. A recent publication on exoplanet astrobiology states: ‘The discovery of seven new exoplanets orbiting the relatively close star TRAPPIST-1 forces us to rethink life on Earth. It opens the possibility to broaden our understanding of coupled system dynamics and lay the foundations to explore a path to long-term sustainability by entering into a cooperative ecological-evolutionary dynamic with the coupled planetary systems’ (in Kelley 2017).[14] Behind all this effort is the fear of the worst-case Anthropocene scenario, a fear that seems to put all forms of globalization into a new, rather parochial, perspective. However, this would be a premature judgement.
CONCLUSION
I have argued that the emerging discipline of Anthropocene (and -scene) studies is poised to absorb globalization as the new meme for 21st century thinking about our world as a whole and possible futures. The Anthropocene has the unique capacity to pose questions about planetary survival, and globalization has the unique capacity to explain local-global dynamics. The critical point will arrive if and when sufficient numbers of ordinary people all over the world begin to realize that geoengineering, new technologies, and Artificial Intelligence machines will not save us from the ravages of the Anthropocene. Stephen Hawking, for example, campaigned vigorously against AI, warning that robots could destroy humanity – another sphere in which capitalist globalization confronts the Anthropocene.[15] If it is not too late to secure planetary survival, alternative Anthropocenes (i.e. intelligent reworkings of human impacts on the Earth System and its constituent eco-systems) may start to replace the current dysfunctional capitalist and state systems that exacerbate existing problems. A necessary aspect of these reworkings would be innovative reformations of global-local relations. Such initiatives are already under way in thousands of small communities all round the world, seeking routes to zero-carbon living, producing their own food, and detaching themselves from the growth obsession of capitalism and its variants. It is important to acknowledge that diluted versions of these strategies are also to be found in the rhetoric of the capitalist ‘good Anthropocene’, propounded by corporate interests, national governments, and international organizations in terms of getting to grips with climate change. Climate change summits over the last 50 years have made some progress at local, national, and global levels, but the optimism of the negotiators and most of the mass media often seems pathetically naïve in comparison with the evidence-based pessimism of many Earth System scientists.
The key, in my view, is the issue of degrowth, now a rapidly expanding transnational intellectual and social movement (D’Alisa et al. 2014). With the mantra of endless growth integral to the survival of both global capitalism and the state system, it seems obvious that capitalism and the centralised hierarchical state are incompatible with planetary survival in the long-term (perhaps even in the shorter-term, if we are to take Stephen Hawking and others like him seriously). However, the proponents of degrowth like everyone else, are yet to deal convincingly with the formidable problems of existing global inequalities and their root causes. Studying more carefully small-scale self-reliant communities and their strategies of disengagement with the capitalist market and the state may offer one way of starting to deal with these problems and creating alternative Anthropocenes within which alternative globalizations may thrive. Fortunately, the Anthropocene is also a digital era, which raises the possibility for opportunities to create local democratically organized communities, networking on many different geographic and socio-political scales. This, in my view, is the best prospect for alternative globalizations and alternative Anthropocenes. So, if the worst comes to the worst, even this remote possibility of long-term planetary survival might become a little less remote and the future for our descendants a little less desperate.[16]
REFERENCES
Anderson, K. (2015). Ethics, Ecology, and the Future: Art and Design Face the Anthropocene. Leonardo, 48 (4), 338-347.
Angus, I. (2016). Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil capitalism and the crisis of the earth system. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Casagrande, D., Jones, E., Wyndham, F., Stepp, J. & Zarger, F. (2017). Ecomyopia in the Anthropocene. Anthropology Today, 33(1), 23-25.
Cook, J. et al. (2015). Consensus on consensus: a synthesis of consensus estimates on human-caused global warming. Environmental Research Letters, 11, 1-6.
Crutzen, P. & Stoermer, E. (2000). The ‘Anthropocene’. IGBP Newsletter, 41, 17-18.
D’Alisa, G., Demaria, F. and Kallis. G. (Eds) (2014). Degrowth: A Vocabulary for a New Era. London: Routledge.
Dalby, S. (2016). Framing the Anthropocene: the good, the bad and the ugly. The Anthropocene Review, 2(2), 102-106.
Ellis, E. (2018) Anthropocene: A very short introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Giddens, A. (2000). The Third Way and its Critics. Cambridge: Polity.
Hamilton, C. (2015). Getting the Anthropocene so Wrong. The Anthropocene Review, 3(1), 33-51.
Hamilton, C., Bonneuil, C., & Gemenne, F. Eds. (2015). The Anthropocene and Global Environmental Crisis: Rethinking modernity in a new epoch. London & New York: Routledge.
Jacques, P. (2012). A General Theory of Climate Denial. Global Environmental Politics, 12 (2), 9-17.
Jørgensen, F. & Jørgensen, D. (2016). The Anthropocene as a History of Technology: ‘Welcome to the Anthropocene’. Technology and Culture, 57 (1), 231-237.
Knoespel, K. (2012). Reading and Revolution on the Horizon of Myth and History: Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy. Configurations, 20 (1-2), 109-136.
Latour, B. (2015). Telling friends from foes in the time of the Anthropocene. In C. Hamilton et al., Eds. op cit., 145-55.
Lorimer, J. (2017). The Anthropo-scene: A guide for the perplexed. Social Studies of Science, 47(1), 117–142.
Malm, A. (2016). Fossil Capitalism: The rise of steam power and the roots of global warming. London: Verso.
Moore, J. (Ed.) (2016). Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism. Oakland CA: PM Press.
Oreskes, N. & Conway, E. (2012) Merchants of Doubt – How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. London: Bloomsbury.
Sklair, L. (2001). The Transnational Capitalist Class, Oxford: Blackwell.
Sklair, L. (2002). Globalization: Capitalism and its Alternatives, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sklair, L. (2009). The emancipatory potential of generic globalization. Globalizations, 6 (4), 523-37.
Sklair, L. (2016). Half-Baked. Philosophica Critica, 2 (2), 103-16.
Sklair, L. (2017). Review Article: Sleepwalking through the Anthropocene. British Journal of Sociology, 68 (4), 775–784.
Sklair, L. ed. (2021). The Anthropocene in Global Media: Neutralizing the Risk. London: Routledge.
Steffen, W., Grinevald, J., Crutzen, P. and McNeill, J. (2011). The Anthropocene: conceptual and historical perspectives. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A, 369, 842-867.
Stengers, I. (2015). Accepting the reality of Gaia: a fundamental shift. In Hamilton et al., op cit. (Eds), 134-44.
Swanson, H.A., Bubandt, N. and Tsing, A. (2015). Less than one but more than many: Anthropocene as science fiction and scholarship-in-the-making. Environment & Society, 6, 149–166.
Wark, M. (2015). Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene. London: Verso.
[1] Crutzen and Stoermer (2000) was a more technical article on the Anthropocene in the newsletter of the International Geosphere–Biosphere Programme. Stoermer is also credited with introducing the term (see Angus 2016: 33ff., Ellis 2018: Chap.1).
[2] In 2009 Vidas organised a major international conference on ‘The World Ocean in Globalization,’ perhaps the first scholarly conference to link globalization and the Anthropocene. Unattributed quotes below can be accessed from the AWG website newsletters dated from 2009 to 2014, <https://quaternary.stratigraphy.org/workinggroups/anthropocene/>.
[3] On these and other scholarly and creative arts events, see Robin & Muir (2015), Anderson (2015) and Swanson et al. (2015).
[5] I deal with generic and capitalist Anthropocenes in this section, for alternative Anthropocenes see my conclusion.
[6] The institutional support for these views could be labelled the ‘Philanthropocene’(philanthropic institutions and foundations propagating ‘good’ Anthropocene narratives).
[7] See Oreskes and Conway (2012). Relevant here is the literature on consensus in science – the multidisciplinary survey of Cook et al. (2015) has had more than 300,000 downloads.
[8] For a thorough discussion of debates around the ‘good Anthropocene’, see Dalby (2016).
[9] Compare: ‘Welcome to the Anthropocene’ with ‘Welcome to the Holocaust’; or the prizewinning book ‘Adventures in the Anthropocene’ with ‘Adventures in the Holocaust’; or the art exhibition and conference entitled ‘Postcards from the Anthropocene’ with ‘Postcards from the Holocaust’; or ‘Romancing the Anthropocene’ with ‘Romancing the Holocaust’. These comparisons might seem ridiculous (even offensive) now, but if the worst comes to the worst …
[10] For an edited collection based on a research project to establish how the Anthropocene is represented in the mass media in local languages all over the world, see Sklair ed. (2021).
[11] Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel Mars Trilogy, tells the story of the colonization of Mars. The richness and remarkable prescience of Robinson’s writing are ample rewards for the effort required to read all three volumes. See Wark (2015: ch.4), and Knoespel (2012), who provides a useful glossary of the main themes.
[13] Usually, terraforming is defined as making other planets more like Earth. However, I consider it more fruitful to expand the definition to include Earth and bring terraforming into debates about nature, infrastructure, technology, bio- and geoengineering.
[14] Kelley summarises the paper – originally published in the journal Anthropocene. I do not cite it because I do not entirely understand it, however the conclusion in Kelley, quoting one of the authors, seems to imply something like the relationship between Earth and Mars in Robinson’s trilogy.
[15] In the long Harvard Business Review (July 2017) cover story on AI, notable for their absence are the words citizen, democracy, ethics, morality, responsibility, values.
“This time, then once more I think, then perhaps a last time, then I think it’ll be over, with that world too. Premonition of the last but one but one. All grows dim. […] I’ll manage this time, then perhaps once more, then perhaps a last time, then nothing more.”[1]
With these words from Molloy, Samuel Beckett evokes a curious sense of temporality. The end has already come, yet never seems to arrive; the world appears in its final dying form, but it is only the first of an endless precession of death masks. The end of time doubles back on itself, replaying its last moments like the skipping of a record player.
What appears in Beckett’s novel as a narrative at the limits of the sensible is perhaps no longer so rare an experience. Today there is no shortage of proclamations on the end of days, either in the mode of imminent catastrophe or in the grim acknowledgement that it is already too late to change our fate. It is said that our actions on this planet have inaugurated a new geological epoch—the Anthropocene, the era of humanity—and that this epoch also marks our doom, as an era of inevitable catastrophe and extinction. The concept of the Anthropocene carries within it a temporal ambiguity, as it signifies both “that there will not be complete annihilation but a gradual witnessing of a slow end, and that we are already at that moment of witness, living on after the end.”[2] To call this situation apocalyptic or even post-apocalyptic would be a misnomer, because the catastrophe is one without a moment of revelation, much less a redemptive relation to the history that preceded it. The end is embedded in the earth itself, and made into something always already present, as a simple fact of the human era.
It is the argument of this paper that this vision of an end to human history that is at once finished and unfulfilled is not an innate fact of our ecological predicament but is rather symptomatic of our present historical juncture of late capitalism—which is itself interminably caught on the verge of global climate catastrophe but seemingly without alternatives. To attribute the ecological disasters of a historically novel economic system to the geological epoch of humanity itself risks reifying that system into something ahistorically innate to human nature, and therefore without changeability or recourse. The narrative of the Anthropocene is thus characterised by a mournful order of time—which shrinks from historical consciousness and envisages humanity as fossils in the making.
To make sense of this melancholic disposition, I will turn to the works of Walter Benjamin to give a typology of the forms of time available to us. Specifically, I will examine Benjamin’s early writings on Baroque drama, which stages a model of history in which all human action sinks into the mute eternity of the natural world. This form of time will also be compared with Benjamin’s more famous formulations of industrial capitalism’s homogeneous, empty time and the Messianic time which marks the moment of historical fulfilment. Having examined the temporalities of natural history, mechanical time, and Messianic fulfilment as they are drawn by Benjamin, the final part of this essay returns to the present predicament of the Anthropocene and the possibility of reading this new epoch according to Benjamin’s typology of temporalities. If, as per Benjamin, the funereal vision of nature’s eternity is a mark of historical failure, we are today confronted with a failure of world-historic proportions that threatens to sweep up even the most critical minds in its tide.
I: The Triumph of Vegetation is Total
The subject of Benjamin’s 1925 habilitatian thesis is the trauerspiel, which may be best defined as an obscure genre of Baroque drama originating from sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Germany. The trauerspiel has its counterparts elsewhere in Europe, although the most famous of these—Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Calderón’s La vida es sueño—are marked by their transcendence of the trauerspiel form, which in Germany remained an esoteric, even stagnant, genre without a claim to greatness. The term trauerspiel is variably translated into English as ‘Baroque tragedy’ or ‘German tragic drama,’ although both of these translations risk assimilating the trauerspiel to tragedy proper. Unlike tragedy in its classical sense, the trauerspiel lacks a historical dimension, in which its heroes attain the immortality of a fulfilled fate. As Benjamin writes:
“In tragedy the hero dies because no one can live in fulfilled time. He dies of immortality. Death is an ironic immortality; that is the origin of tragic irony. […] Death in the trauerspiel is not based on the extreme determinacy that individual time confers on the action. It is not conclusion; without the certitude of a higher life and without irony […] the time of the trauerspiel is not fulfilled, yet it is finite. It is nonindividual, but without historical generality.”[3]
The plot of the tragedy sustains itself on the interplay between fate and character, and the eventual fulfilment of both in the hero’s fulfilment of his destiny. His death is his gateway to greatness, and therefore a paradoxical kind of immortality as the heroic forefather of a city, a culture, or a faith. As we shall see, the trauerspiel lacks access to an immortal or historic register because it admits neither a permanence to worldly affairs nor a transcendence from the world of creation.
Yet in its lack of historical consciousness, the trauerspiel is in every respect a reflection of its historical context. Emerging from a Europe ravaged by the wars of religion, culminating in the prolonged bloodshed of the Thirty Years War, the trauerspiel was a narrative form which expressed the hideous violence of the age. For the heroes of the trauerspiel there is no immortality following great deeds, much less any redemption conferred from on high for the victors of the bloody squabbles that take centre stage.
Translated literally, the trauerspiel is a ‘mourning play’ or even a ‘funeral pageant’—terms which better express the melancholic disposition of the genre. It is the prevalence of mourning which informs the trauerspiel’s unique relation to time and history, which it conceives under the symbol of the ruin: a marker of humanity’s passing, where historical triumph is recognised in decay, and nature reasserts itself over the greatest of human achievements. As a measure of decay, the time of the trauerspiel is marked by its transience and the sinking of historical time into the timelessness of non-human nature. “With decay, and with it alone, historical occurrence shrinks and withdraws into the setting.”[4] Its narrative, and the prevailing symbol of the ruin, provide a model for a conception of history that is inevitably fated for decline. The ruin figures the failure of history to achieve any ends beyond inescapable death.
If the trauerspiel occupies a curious position in relation to historical time, this relation is only complicated by its conception of nature and the natural world. As Benjamin writes, “what has the last word in the flight from the world that is characteristic of the Baroque is not the antithesis of history and nature but total secularization of the historical in the state of creation.”[5] This is not an opposition between history and nature, but the total submergence of the former within the latter, silencing historical consciousness in favour of a melancholic rumination upon the cruel whims of nature. Human history is caught within the much wider movement of nature itself, and inevitably cycles downwards from glory to desolation. It is this turn from history to nature which marks the barrier between classical tragedy and the trauerspiel; as Fredric Jameson suggests, “tragedy brings history into being by emerging from legend, by overcoming myth; Trauerspiel is condemned to a history without transcendence, which it can only think my means of natural categories, cycles, organisms, the seasons, the eternal return.”[6] This nature appears “not in the bud and blossom but in the overripeness and decay of its creations. Nature looms before them as eternal transience.”[7] Nature in this sense is not merely the non-human world or the earthly basis for human affairs, but a force external to history which constantly intervenes to dash the dreams of historical permanence.
Although preoccupied with death, the trauerspiel is not an apocalyptic vision of the end of history, because there is no end to speak of. Eternal transience destroys all sense of permanence, but it also precludes any fundamental change to the state of the world. It is in this interminability of natural history that the time of the trauerspiel shows in diabolical face. The eternity of nature’s dominion is experienced as the endless torment of perdition. In the trauerspiel’s bloody dramas the most boastful of nature’s creations are the most overripe, and the most accomplished are the ones most ready for decay. Something abyssal is recognised at the heart of humanity, god’s fallen children who cannot be anything but the imperfect mirrors of a creation lacking all transcendence. The subsumption of history within nature begets a theory of human nature: a bloody turmoil, a lust for power, and a war of all against all. History does not end, because it can come to no lasting conclusion; it eddies in the vastness of nature but does not entirely subside. “History finds expression not as [a] process of an eternal life but as [a] process of incessant decline.”[8] The narrative of the trauerspiel realises a melancholy negation of historical consciousness, which retains the historical interest in disputes of power while simultaneously undercutting the lasting achievements of those historic struggles.
II: Eternity on the Clock
The time of the trauerspiel stands in contrast, but not necessarily in opposition, to the time of industrial capitalism, which possesses its own interminable cycles and myths of inevitability. In his famous “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Benjamin calls the latter of these temporalities “homogeneous, empty time,” because its units are purely formal, interchangeable, and emptied of specific historical content.[9] This is the temporality of the clock, by which time is regimented according to the strictures of the factory and the office, divided into abstract units of time, and measured according to their pace and intensity in purely quantitative terms.[10] Within this form of time, we are caught in a “sequence of events” which pass rhythmically “like the beads of a rosary.”[11] Like a rosary this form of time is not only broken into uniform and discreet units, but at a larger scale assumes a cyclical organisation. At the scale of society as a whole, mechanical time describes the capitalist processes of production, circulation, and accumulation—great circuits of capital which everyone from the most destitute worker to the wealthiest capitalist. The motion of the clock whirs ever onwards, and in its cycles it amasses heaped moments of abstract time.[12]
This organisation of time brings with it a corresponding vision of history as the sum of all homogeneous, empty moments. Benjamin calls this “universal history,” the method of which is additive; “it musters a mass of data to fill the homogeneous, empty time.”[13] The result of this quantitative accumulation of time is the vision of ‘progress’ as something inevitable, as the simple amassment of cultural and social wealth. With each circuit of the clockface, as the story of progress goes, the moments pile up, and history advances one step forward in a world necessarily enriched by each moment elapsed. But this narrative of progress is also an empty one, because it cannot attain historical fulfilment in its endless task; the curve of history bends upwards, but infinitely, and without content to give meaning to its quantitative acceleration. If the concept of progress once played a critical role as a demand, or as a declaration of the right of all people to partake in the growing wealth of society, “in the course of the nineteenth century, as the bourgeoisie consolidated its positions of power, the concept of progress would increasingly have forfeited the critical functions it originally possessed.” No longer the fruit of political struggle, progress became naturalised as an innate feature of history itself: an automatic and unthinking movement in which are all unknowingly swept along.[14]
As the naturalisation of decline, the trauerspiel’s symbol of the ruin functions as an inverted image of progress (which naturalises the gradual rise of prosperity). In the former, humanity is fated by nature to toil and struggle for no lasting gain, while in the latter the bounty of future generations is assured by the natural shape of history itself. That these two forms of time carry contradictory visions of history does not mean that they cannot be made complementary to one another. Although the fortunes of history may rise or fall, the upward curve of mechanical time may be fitted neatly into the eternal recourse of the time of the trauerspiel—as one segment of the great circle which encompasses times of prosperity and destitution alike. Likewise, the circular motion of time in the trauerspiel has its counterpart in the circulating components of mechanical time, which pass through many repetitions on their way upward. It is little wonder then that Benjamin describes progress and the eternal return as complementary, if indissoluble, opposites which mirror back to one another their most hidden traits:
“The belief in progress—in an infinite perfectibility understood as an infinite ethical task—and the representation of eternal return are complementary. They are the indissoluble antinomies in the face of which the dialectical conception of historical time must be developed. In this conception, the idea of eternal return appears precisely as that ‘shallow rationalism’ which the belief in progress is accused of being, while faith in progress seems no less to belong to the mythic mode of thought than does the idea of eternal return.”[15]
In the theses of 1940, it was mechanical time and its myth of progress which predominated the European intellectual and political scenes. Conversely, the melancholy and boredom which Benjamin discovers in the culture of the nineteenth century appear as oases of eternity amidst the tumult of a ‘progressive’ century. Regardless of which predominates, both progress and the eternal return function as partial views of history, which cannot sustain a historical consciousness unencumbered by myth. For Benjamin, the dialectical conception of history emerges out of the antinomy of these two forms, rejecting the panacea of universal history and the resignation of the eternal return, and discovering a natural history which undoes both mythic modes of thought.[16] The trauerspiel and its universal narrative of decay may for this reason be regarded as an abortive theory of history, springing from an ahistorical formation of time. Whereas the myth of progress sooths the complaints of capitalist society’s periodic crises with the promise of future prosperity, the trauerspiel carries the concept of crisis to the heart of nature and justifies all that follows as the preterition of a doomed world.
III: Redemption and Death
While the time of the trauerspiel possesses a hidden complicity with mechanical time and an ambiguous relation to historical time, its structure could not be more opposed to the most famous and perplexing of Benjamin’s temporal forms: Messianic time. In the theses of 1940, Benjamin delineates the relation of Messianic time to homogeneous, empty time, to which it is not so much opposed as it is situated within and against. The structure of Messianic time, for Benjamin, is not indefinitely extended into the past and future like mechanical time or historical time but is condensed into a single moment or event. As early as 1916, Benjamin would write of Messianic time a collective mode of “fulfilled historical time” that instantiates the idea of history in a moment of truth.[17] Fulfilment in this sense, and the attendant concept of redemption, is a relation between events already past and those which bring their promise to fruition. As Fredric Jameson suggests, events in the past “demand completion by events in the future; their redemption is not a personal one, not a bodily resurrection, but a reenactment that brings them to realization and fulfillment.”[18]
By 1940 this idea would only become more urgent and politically charged, when Benjamin uses it to chart out the goals a renewed of historical materialism, which must search for those seeds of Messianic fulfilment in the homogeneous grains of mechanical time:
“He [the historical materialist] takes cognizance of it in order to blast a specific era out of the homogeneous course of history—blasting a specific life out of the era or a specific work out of the lifework. As a result of this method the lifework is preserved in this work and at the same time canceled [aufheben]; in the lifework, the era; and in the era, the entire course of history. The nourishing fruit of the historically understood contains time as a precious but tasteless seed.”[19]
This is all to say that Messianic time occupies a position both within and without the mechanical sequence of events. The seed of the Messianic event lies hidden within the course of homogeneous, empty time, but when its time comes it is blasted out of that continuum, so that it may bring to fruition its own temporality. If mechanical time is formally alike to the beads of a rosary, which are homogeneous in appearance, Messianic time is what seizes a hold of a singular bead and suffuses it with the mystery of divinity. Messianic content fills the empty form of time.
For Benjamin, this Messianic time is also the time of the revolutionary event, the year zero, when the old regime is overthrown and the new order composed: “The awareness that they are about to make the continuum of history explode is characteristic of the revolutionary classes at the moment of their action.”[20] Each revolutionary movement brings to fulfilment those that preceded it: the French revolutionaries reenacted the Roman Republic; the Communist movement fulfilled the promise of the peasant revolts; Spartacus marched through the streets of Berlin—history is not so much repeated as it is seized from its grave and given new life. The revolutionary, the historical materialist, and the Messianic movement act “to interrupt the course of the world.”[21] The inevitable motion of universal history is put on hold, caught by surprise by the irruption of a revolutionary event unassimilable to the linear course of homogenous, empty time.
In contrast to the fulfilled time of the Messianic, the time of the trauerspiel is left absolutely unfulfilled. Its moments are not alike to the beads of a rosary, which, although homogeneous in form, are the vessels of revelation. Rather, the law which governs the time of the trauerspiel is not homogeneity or fulfilment but repetition, which summons up each moment in time as a mere reflection of another, which in turn is only the mirror image of another yet further removed. Eternity makes itself visible in every moment of time by way of the mise-en-abîme of repetition:
“The law of a higher life prevails in the restricted space of earthly existence, and all things play until death puts an end to the game, so as to continue, in another world, the greater repetition of the same game. It is this repetition on which the law of the trauerspiel is founded. Its events are allegorical schemata, symbolic mirror images of a different game. We are transported into that game by death.”[22]
This ‘higher life’ which governs the world of the trauerspiel appears not in transcendence but in immanence, as the law which governs nature from within its eternally returning cycles of fruition and decay. Whereas Messianic time sees each moment as the potential gateway of redemption, the trauerspiel’s “profane exposition of history” envisages it “as the Passion of the world—meaningful only in the stations of its decline.”[23]
Although preoccupied with the death of all things, the trauerspiel is not only unfulfilled but also lacking in eschatological potency. It does not mark the end of history in redemption, but the failure of that redemption to take place. This refusal to contemplate the end of time is partially attributed by Benjamin to the theological situation of the Counter-Reformation, in which “the hierarchical tendency of the Middle Ages resumes its authority in a world that was denied immediate access to the beyond.”[24] This closing up of theological horizons was expressed positively in the pomp and ideology of the Baroque’s golden age, but by necessity also enclosed a negative force to ward off all challenges to this glorified order:
“And one of these necessities, consequent upon the collapse of all eschatology, is the attempt to find consolation in the renunciation of a state of grace in reversion to the bare creaturely condition. […] The German trauerspiel wholly buries itself in the desolation of the earthly estate. Such redemption as it knows will lie more in the depths of these vicissitudes themselves than in the fulfillment of a divine plan of salvation.”[25]
Order reigns on earth! An order which is guaranteed in aeternum by the sword and cross. Worldly transience has this as its political lesson: nothing can change—nothing can be allowed to change—and all things must bend to this eternal kingdom of tyrants and slaves or else be condemned to the grave. Salvation is precluded by the revocation of grace, once more placing the trauerspiel in contradistinction with the Messianic, which is motivated by the unpredictability of the event and the promise of the resurrection of the dead.
Just as the time of the trauerspiel and mechanical time differ in their relation to the future (the former foreseeing a cyclical regression and the latter projecting a linear increase), the forms of time found in the trauerspiel and in the Messianic event are incompatible because they posit fundamentally different relations to the past. Messianic time is the redemption of the dead, whereas the trauerspiel is the final forgetting of the lost. The Messianic is a reenactment or a revitalisation of the unfulfilled past, which blooms like an ancient seed finally placed in fertile soil. We may recall Benjamin’s famous proclamation: “Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious.”[26] In contrast, the trauerspiel seeks to bury the past ever deeper, to make each event only a spectral repetition in an eternal return of the same. The fruition of Messianic time means crossing the river Styx to retrieve what would be lost forever, while the trauerspiel bathes in the waters of Lethe, hoping to return to the paradisical timelessness of pre-history.
But this is not to condemn the trauerspiel out of hand as a misjudged or even false vision of the world, because for all its regressive tendencies it remains a genuine expression of historical failure. Ultimately, Benjamin’s Messianism hinges precisely on its unpredictability, its seizure of a moment which flashes up in a moment of danger, which for this reason cannot be accounted for or even counted on in advance.[27] As Peter Osborne writes, Benjamin’s Messianism is:
“consistent with materialism insofar as it depends upon the impossibility, not the imminence, of a willed redemption. Only if the Messianic remains exterior to history can it provide the perspective of a completed whole (without the predetermination of teleological end), from which the present may appear in its essential transience, as radically incomplete.”[28]
The Messianic fulfilment of history is not assured, and its formulation risks affirming its opposite: that history will remain forever trapped in its incomplete state of transience. The time of the trauerspiel is in this respect the infernal double of Messianic time because it affirms the impossible exteriority of all salvation. Its world is Gnostic, presided over by an evil god who prevents access to the fullness of another world.[29] The subservience of historical time to nature’s eternity precludes all escape from the former. The ouroboros tightens its grip, keeping history pinned to the earth and foreclosing any possibility of the “tiger’s leap” into the Messianic event.[30] Seen through the eyes of eternity, to quote Osborne once more, “the anticipation of historical death, the death of the species, is the material meaning of Messianic exteriority.”[31]
IV: An Epoch of Ruins
In summary, we may envisage in Benjamin’s work a system of plural temporalities which stretches beyond the temporal dyad described in his 1940 theses. Homogeneous, empty time (or mechanical time; clock time) presents one kind of closure to historical time by shackling it to a mythic notion of progress. This mechanical form of time remains unfulfilled because it is a purely formal organisation of time, but it nonetheless sequesters within it the explosive charge of genuine historical consciousness. This historical consciousness finds its fulfilment in the moment of revolution, when a unit of homogeneous, empty time is blasted from the continuum and resurrected by the hands and minds of the living. This is the intrusion of Messianic time into the dreary motions of a ‘universal’ history without end, and the establishment of a truly universal history as the history of salvation. Alongside historical, mechanical, and Messianic time stands the time of the trauerspiel, which encloses all within the desolate expanse of nature’s eternal return. As a ruin in the making, history is put in retrograde motion, falling from grace into perdition. Without the storehouse of historical memory to seize a hold of, Messianic time is defused; its salvation deferred until an end of days which will take an eternity to arrive.
But where does this damned, earthly time of the mourning play find its expression today? If this melancholy resignation to the vicissitudes of nature came to the fore of German drama during the social crises of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, I argue that similar attitudes toward history and formulations of time are also near at hand for many who today see climate change as the augur of a new, posthuman age. As we have seen, the time of the trauerspiel has four key traits:
(1) It is, first and foremost, a time which is historically unfulfilled: a litany of lost causes; (2) it is a spectral time in which history is understood under the symbol of the ruin; (3) it naturalises eternal transience as the order of the world at large; (4) its drama is one of earthly creation without hope of messianic redemption.[32]
Now it remains to be shown that the grand narrative of the Anthropocene possesses parallel traits to those of the trauerspiel narrative, allowing it to be understand as both an anti-historical narrative of naturalised decline and as a symptom of the world-shattering catastrophe which it purports to describe.
As in the narrative of the trauerspiel, the concept of the Anthropocene carries with it a sense of time which twists back on itself, carrying the catastrophe which it marks far into the unimaginably distant future and into the primordial past. As Deborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro write, although the Anthropocene is an epoch “in the geological sense of the word,” it also “points toward the end of epochality as such, insofar as our species is concerned.”
“For it is certain that, although it began with us, it will end without us: the Anthropocene will only give way to a new geological epoch long after we have disappeared from the face of the Earth. [It is] a present ‘without a view,’ a passive present, the inert bearer of a geophysical karma which it is entirely beyond our reach to cancel.”[33]
The Anthropocene, from this perspective, is not only a description of a new era, but an injunction to think of the present time in a resigned fashion. Danowski and Viveiros de Castro’s invocation of ‘karma’ is no anomaly. Among the proclamations upon the changed circumstances of history there is no shortage of statements on the moral meaning of those changes. The discovery that we have entered not only a new era of history but a new geological epoch has brought with it a chiliastic fervour, spoken in, for example, Roy Scranton’s manifesto for “learning to die in the Anthropocene” and Patricia MacCormack’s argument that “the only solution for climate change is letting the human race become extinct.”[34]
It is little wonder that the trauerspiel has not gone unnoticed by some theorists of the Anthropocene. As the editors of the Haus der Kulturen der Welt’s Anthropocene Project write, “the Trauerspiel plays on in the Anthropocene, for ‘the catastrophe here is in the form of the age itself, meaning our entire civilization, and its requisite way of life, is already a ruin.’”[35] The Anthropocene is rendered as a trauerspiel drama for the entire globe:
“A return to the earthly conditions of man, the name of a fated history, the passing away of Renaissance humanism, humans above all, for a general ideology of the creaturely, an immanent intermingling between rocks, trees, angels, and tyrants.”[36]
A rosy picture, but one we will not be fated to see with our own eyes. What at first sounds like an eschatological vision of paradise returned to earth belies the infernal heart of the trauerspiel. In its shock at the unrepresentable catastrophe which lies before it, the trauerspiel finds solace in a catastrophic conception of nature itself. In the eternal stretch of natural time, we are already dead; a fate we must contemplate in melancholic resignation. In Anthropocene theory, too, there is a recognition of shock, a desperate need to make sense of a world which no longer conforms to the myth of progress—and the answer these theorists provide is a new, earthly myth. At precisely the moment that the planetary reign of Anthropos is declared it is disavowed, and the eternal transience of nature’s dominion is reaffirmed.
If the Anthropocene contradicts the narrative of historical progress by naturalising decline in the place of ascent, this is not to say that it has no relation to the mechanical time from which the momentum of progress springs. In fact, the time of the Anthropocene depends just as much upon a homogeneous, empty construction of time as does the myth of progress. But whereas the universal history of progress sees a timeline stretching indefinitely upward into the heavens, the Anthropocene envisages a timeline which infinitely curves back upon itself across millennia. As Claire Colebrook writes, conceptualising the Anthropocene means envisaging a world without us which is already present, virtually, at this moment:
“The positing of an anthropocene era (or the idea that the human species will have marked the planet to such a degree that we will be discernible as a geological strata) deploys the idea of human imaging—the way we have already read an inhuman past in the earth’s layers—but does this by imagining a world in which humans will be extinct.”[37]
This construction of time is no less uniform than its progressive counterpart, but whereas the latter takes the clock as its model the Anthropocene measures itself on a cosmic scale. In the place of the seconds, minutes, and hours of the clockface, the Anthropocene’s homogeneous, empty units are geological layers—trace remnants which we imagine ourselves as in advance. Chronological time is distended across an inhuman expanse of time, projecting forward a future in which we must necessarily meet our demise—a future which is then brought back to the present as the lesson that our fates are already sealed: sic transit gloria mundi. Just as mechanical time and its universal history of progress work to negate true historical consciousness by turning our gaze from the sacrificed dead to an imagined future paradise, so too does this vision beget an ahistorical image of eternity: which seals up the past and future alike in forgotten aeons.
In its retreat from historical time, the concept of the Anthropocene is opened to a mythic sensibility, which discovers in the inhuman void of extinction a hard-faced divinity staring back. Isabelle Stengers has made much of James Lovelock’s ‘Gaia hypothesis,’ taking seriously the theory’s personification of an impersonal planetary system. For Stengers, Gaia is a strange kind of god, who announces the end of days but does not preside over the casting of judgment or distribution of redemption:
“Gaia is the name of an unprecedented or forgotten form of transcendence: a transcendence deprived of the noble qualities that would allow it to be invoked as an arbiter, guarantor, or resource; a ticklish assemblage of forces that are indifferent to our reasons and our projects.”[38]
Mirroring the demiurgic divinity of the trauerspiel, this is a ‘transcendence’ which does not, in fact, transcend, but remains mired within the world it governs without recourse to a world beyond. This curiously non-transcendent divinity also finds its spokesperson in Bruno Latour, in his lectures on natural theology, who proclaims the coming rule of Gaia over a terrestrial world of “immanence freed from immanentization.”[39] Whereas for Stengers the inauguration of a new mythology for the era of climate change stops short of a definite political project, for Latour the intrusion of Gaia means a return to the bellum omnium contra omnes of Hobbes, the ‘earthly’ politics of Schmitt, and the repudiation of the modern world proclaimed by Voegelin.[40] For this mystified faction of Gaia, the world as we know it is damned, and all that remains to be done is to make a choice of future barbarisms. An apocalypse is proclaimed, but redemption is postponed, as myth reasserts itself over a humanity with neither a history nor a future.
Even apart from these more explicit attempts to formulate a mythology for the era of ecocide, the Anthropocene has been subjected to a great deal of scrutiny for its ahistorical qualities. One cogent expression of this critique has been given by Andreas Malm, who writes that the main paradox of the Anthropocene narrative is that, within it:
“Climate change is denaturalised in one moment—relocated from the sphere of natural causes to that of human activities—only to be renaturalised in the next, when derived from an innate human trait. Not nature, but human nature—this is the Anthropocene displacement.”[41]
For Malm the core problematic of the Anthropocene is a sleight of hand, which displaces the culpability of industrial capitalist society onto a wider complicity of ‘human nature,’ presumably including the masses of humans today and in the past who did little to fuel the climate crisis. Seen through the lens of the trauerspiel and Benjamin’s typology of temporal forms, we can see how this act of legerdemain extends into the heart of the Anthropocene concept. As the proclamation of the first human epoch, the Anthropocene naturalises the present state of humanity and its crises as symptoms of human nature specifically and nature itself in general.
Against this naturalisation of history it is necessary to historicise nature; to understand the recursive, or dare we say dialectical, feedback loop between history and nature, and the way in which both are composed in a mutually dependent natural history. The merely natural processes of the world—from weather, to digestion and respiration, to the architecture and fashion we take for granted as part of our living environment—are, Benjamin insists, only those things of which we remain unconscious, allowing them to slip into the subterranean zones of dream and myth. To the dreaming collective, these phenomena “stand in the cycle of the eternally selfsame, until the collective seizes upon them in politics and history emerges.”[42] This is the meaning of historicised nature: the emergence of unconscious forces into the light of day, transforming their motions from the vicissitudes of chance or fate into the known causes of a totality in which nature and history are inextricably linked. The failure to recognise the historical component of this system is to lose this foothold, and to conceive nature as an unconscious and seemingly inalterable force that slowly engulfs history in its myths.
As in the trauerspiel narrative, we find in Anthropocene theory a recognition of historical crisis which precludes a consciousness of history itself. Rather, crisis is naturalised and made the founding myth for a melancholic model of history. According to this narrative, we are the doomed creatures of a monstrous world, residing in the ruins of a geological epoch which will stretch far beyond the life of our species. But even though extinction is at hand, the end is nowhere in sight as we drift further into an anti-apocalypse; an event which mutes revelation and casts its transient shroud across our collective horizons. That is, until we can grasp the historical as well as the natural genesis of the present conjuncture—to understand that the present epoch is not the consequence of an eternal order but the work of human hands; hands which, if conscious of the work they do, can just as well halt what they set in motion.
References:
[1] Samuel Beckett, Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable (New York: Everyman Library, 1997), 4.
[2] Claire Colebrook, The Death of the PostHuman (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2014), 40.
[3] Walter Benjamin, Origin of the German Trauerspiel, trans. Howard Eiland (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019), 262; 264.
[4] Benjamin, Origin of the German Trauerspiel, 190.
[5] Benjamin, Origin of the German Trauerspiel, 81.
[6] Fredric Jameson, The Benjamin Files (London: Verso, 2020), 68.
[7] Benjamin, Origin of the German Trauerspiel, 190.
[8] Benjamin, Origin of the German Trauerspiel, 188.
[9] Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 261.
[10] Jonathan Martineau, Time, Capitalism, and Alienation (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016), 38.
[12] “The pages of Marx’s Capital are filled with terrifying examples of the tyranny of the clock over workers’ lives. In pre-capitalist societies, time bore qualitative significance, but, with the advance of the process of industrialization, this gradually gave way to the dominance of clock time alone.” Michael Löwy, Fire Alarm, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso 2016) 91.
[14] Within the bourgeois ideology of the nineteenth century, the discoveries of the natural sciences played a significant part in justifying the inevitability of progress: “In this process, the doctrine of natural selection had a decisive role to play: it popularized the notion that progress was automatic. The extension of the concept of progress to the whole of human activity was furthered as a result.” Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1999), N11a,1.
[16] This is the conception of natural history which Adorno would find so compelling in Benjamin’s work. As Susan Buck-Morss writes of this Benjaminian inflection to Adorno’s thought: “Whenever theory posited ‘nature’ or ‘history’ as an ontological first principle, [the] double character of the concepts was lost, and with it the potential for critical negativity: either social conditions were affirmed as ‘natural’ without regard for their historical becoming, or the actual historical process was affirmed as essential.” Susan Buck-Morss, The Origins of Negative Dialectics (New York: The Free Press, 1977), 54.
[17] Benjamin, Origin of the German Trauerspiel, 262. This formulation is constructed alongside the concept of “tragic time,” which is the individual mode of fulfilled time.
[19] Benjamin, Illuminations, 263. See also, Agamben, who uses the Greek kairos and chronos in the place of Messianic and mechanical time, respectively: “What do we have when we have Kairos? […] Kairos (which would be translated banally as ‘occasion’) does not have another time at its disposal; in other words, what we take hold of when we seize kairos is not another time, but a contracted and abridged chronos […] kairos is nothing more than seized chronos. The pearl embedded in the ring of chance is only a small portion of chronos, a time remaining [restante].” Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 68-9.
[21] Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Volume IV, 1938-1940, eds. Marcus Bullock, Howard Eiland, Gary Smith (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003), 170.
[22] Benjamin, Origin of the German Trauerspiel, 264.
[23] Benjamin, Origin of the German Trauerspiel, 174.
[24] Benjamin, Origin of the German Trauerspiel, 66.
[25] Benjamin, Origin of the German Trauerspiel, 67-8.
[27] “Great prophecy seems to have been omitted, and Benjamin never formulates the idea of strong messianism as such.” Jameson, Benjamin Files, 240.
[28] Peter Osborne, The Politics of Time (London: Verso, 1995), 147.
[29] See also Benjamin, Origin of the German Trauerspiel, 248 on the “Gnostic-Manichean doctrine” which presides over the material world of the trauerspiel.
[32] Corresponding to these traits of the trauerspiel are the following elements of the concept of the Anthropocene, which is: (1) a mournful time of historical failure; (2) an imagining of human ruin and extinction; (3) a naturalisation of this decline in a geological epoch; (4) and by these means a retreat from any possibility of redemption for human history.
[33] Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, The Ends of the World, trans. Rodrigo Nunes (Cambridge: Polity, 2017), 5.
[34] See: Roy Scranton, Learning to Die in the Anthropocene (San Francisco: City Light Books, 2015) and Patricia MacCormack, The Ahuman Manifesto (London: Bloomsbury, 2020). The exact formulation does not appear in MacCormack’s book, but an advertisement for the book released online.
[35] Katrin Klingan, Christoph Rosol, Bernd M. Schererm, and Ashkan Sepahvand, eds., Textures of the Anthropocene: Manual (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015), 34.
[36] Klingan, Rosol, Schererm, and Sepahvand, Textures of the Anthropocene, 29-30.
[40] Latour, Facing Gaia, 149-50; 242-5. That the liberals of the Anthropocene academy consider Latour’s arch-conservativism a welcome addition to their canon of ‘re-enchanting the world’ stands without comment as evidence for their lack of political seriousness.
[41] Andreas Malm, Fossil Capital (London: Verso, 2016), 270.
THE TASOS MARKOU AND his fiancé, Maria, were on their sofa avoiding Greece’s summer heat when a video of a man carting a toddler in a green wheelie bin turned up in their social media feeds. The place looked familiar: a Mediterranean coastal village, a street sign in Greek.
‘Lesvos!’ said Maria.
The clip showed the man climbing a steep road in the midday sun. The child was alive. More people were walking the roads, or slumped against buildings, or laying spread out on verges and shading themselves with jackets or thin cotton sheets.
Refugees had been making the sea crossing from Turkey since the 2003 invasion of Iraq, but this was something bigger. In the summer of 2015, tourists on Greek islands began sharing videos of people landing on beaches or wandering into town from the mountain roads. An internet news channel compiled the mobile-phone footage.
Tasos put his laptop down and turned to Maria. ‘I need to go there,’ he said.
In 2015, more than eight hundred thousand refugees crossed the Aegean Sea to Greece, up from forty thousand the previous year. News media showed images of discarded fluoro-orange lifejackets and PVC boats bulldozed into massive piles on the island of Lesvos. Greek freelancer Tasos Markou was one of the first photographers to share those dramatic images with the world. His photos were published in major British papers and across Europe.
LIFEJACKETS SAY SOMETHING about how it feels to live in these times. You can buy a factory-direct child’s lifejacket online for US $4.14 apiece. Shipping is free to most destinations. Some Turkish apparel shops have switched to selling lifejackets exclusively. Even kebab vendors saw an opportunity, and started hanging them above their counters. The orange colour is a signal for help; it communicates the courage and desperation of people on the move, hopes dashed at the borders while the rest of us watch on feeling powerless.
Lifejackets also allow us to think through global political and material circumstances. The strategic desire for control of fossil fuels in the Middle East gave rise to colonial interference, to new borders and conflicts; the burning of those fuels has increased the volatility of the climate, which influenced the severity of the drought preceding the uprising against Assad in Syria. The industrial use of petrochemicals and the globalised workforce made plastic lifejackets cheap enough to be used in sea crossings by hundreds of thousands of people fleeing war in Syria and Iraq.
Populist fear and anger are fuelled by more than economic and cultural insecurities. For more than a decade, experts have issued warnings about resource scarcity and the disruptive consequences of climate change. I want to try to consider our anxieties and fears, displacement and migration, with the social and the environmental combined.
A concept in the natural sciences offers a way to bring these strands together: the Anthropocene. Some scientists argue that humankind’s activities – deforestation, soil erosion, chemical pollution, species extinctions and greenhouse gas emissions – have altered Earth’s systems so much that we have entered a new geological epoch. The concept pushes our imaginations to think in vast timescales and expands debate beyond climate change to include the many other environmental pressures we face. However, the Anthropocene narrative makes political claims that flatten historical difference, casting all people as responsible for problems the privileged created. If we can return contingency to the Anthropocene it will be a richer concept for thinking about our current circumstances.
I want to think about a place, its people and the situation – about lifejackets, nationalism, economic globalisation and resource exploitation – and consider these histories as part of one context.
MAKING A LIVING as a news photographer was tough for Tasos in austerity-ravaged Greece. He’d worked for the major international press agencies covering riots, the war in the Ukraine and the ongoing consequences of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. The refugee crisis on the Greek island of Lesvos presented him with an opportunity to freelance on a matter he cared about in his own country. I first emailed Tasos last year when I sought permission to reproduce one of his photos. We began corresponding, and when I learnt he was continuing to document the plight of refugees in Greece I asked to interview him. We spoke regularly on Skype over several months.
In June 2015, Tasos flew from Thessaloniki to Lesvos with five-hundred euros in his pocket. He and Maria had been saving the money for a holiday. It was more than Maria earned in a month as a home-care nurse, but she urged him take his camera and go. Tasos hired the cheapest car available, a 1000 CC Dimitriadis, and headed north to the closest point to Turkey.
It took Tasos two hours to drive the winding and mountainous roads to Skala Sikamineas, a fishing settlement at the coast. By then night had fallen.
‘It was a ghost village,’ he recalled.
Across the sea, mountains rose from the horizon, dark against the sky. The twinkling lights at the foothills belonged to Turkey. The wind blew hard and Tasos thought he could hear voices on the sea. It was only the waves. He was about to head for a guesthouse when he looked down and saw traces of arrivals on the beach and rocks. Shoes, passports, backpacks, T-shirts, plastic water bottles and lifejackets. Hundreds of lifejackets.
‘I realised this was not just rubbish,’ said Tasos. ‘Each jacket meant a human life, a story of a crossing.’
The next morning, Tasos drove the rough roads along the northern coast and into the mountains. He saw people emerge from parks, fields and roadsides. Refugees and migrants had to walk sixty kilometres south to the port of Mytilene, where they could be assessed and issued with papers before boarding a ferry to mainland Greece and, from there, into northern Europe. Some journalists and Lesvos locals were offering rides to the walkers. Tasos asked if he could help. Drivers were supposed to call the police and register their name, car make, licence plate, car-hire company, pick-up point and destination – a procedure designed to prevent smugglers exploiting refugees.
‘My car was filled with people, against the roof, out the windows,’ said Tasos.
The little Dimitriadis crawled up the hills. By the time he made it to Mytilene it was 36 degrees. There were queues of men in their underwear at the public shower. Families sat under trees or statues or beside walls. Some tourists wound down their car windows, took a snap and drove on. Others handed food and water to exhausted people. Tasos followed the example. He spent the next three days buying water, interviewing and taking photos across Lesvos. Most of the refugees were from Syria; many were from Iraq and Afghanistan.
After three days Tasos’s money was gone. This was something you couldn’t understand in a single news article, thought Tasos. He was determined to follow the story.
THE FIFTEEN-YEAR DROUGHT in the Levant that preceded the Syrian civil war was likely the worst in nine hundred years, according to NASA. Since the beginning of the conflict, some scientists and media have overstated the link. ‘Drought helped cause Syria’s war,’ declared a 2013 Washington Post headline. This has led to misguided conclusions about people, climate and migration.
In March 2017, ABC’s Four Corners aired an American documentary titled The Age of Consequences, which was billed as The Hurt Locker meets An Inconvenient Truth. It posed climate change and migration as risks to United States national security. The film warned of more terrorism and hordes of climate change refugees overwhelming countries and causing the collapse of states. It interviewed military generals who treated population displacement as a security threat that requires militarised solutions.
Refugees and migrants have often been represented as dangerous for wealthy nations and as ‘agents of chaos in the Middle East’, wrote Alex Randall of the UK Climate Change and Migration Coalition. The standard narrative for Syria is that the drought forced farmers off the land, food prices rose and competition for resources among rival groups led to violence. Some campaigners on climate change have used populist fears over refugees as a tactic to try to build support for action on emissions.
Randall pointed out that drought and social grievances in Syria didn’t cause people to turn on each other – it united them. Different groups began mingling in urban centres in a way that Assad’s regime had tried to prevent. This led to protests and co-operation, which Assad’s authoritarian government responded to with violence.
To avoid ‘reducing our future to climate’, in the words of Mike Hulme, professor of climate and culture at King’s College London, the concept of the Anthropocene could serve as a shorthand way for introducing broader ecological changes and historical timescales. The idea has been reported enthusiastically in TheEconomist, The New York Times and TheGuardian. Scholars say the collapse of the Enlightenment distinction between human and nature, and the convergence of geological and biological time, forces us to reconsider our place on the planet and the very foundation of what ‘human’ means.
The problem with the Anthropocene narrative is that it strips the social causes from ecological disruption. Not everyone is responsible for the Anthropocene and not everyone will experience it equally. Paul Crutzen, the Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist who popularised the term, suggested the invention of the steam engine during the Industrial Revolution should be considered the start of the new epoch: the switch to fossil fuels ‘shattered’ an energy bottleneck. Humanities scholars approach this from a different angle: human ecologists Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg asked what the motivations were for investment in steam. Only the very wealthy could afford steam engines, and they ‘pointed steam power as a weapon’ at colonies in Africa and the New World, extracting material resources and labour in plantations, mines and factories, completely reorganising ecological and social relationships. The Anthropocene was founded on global inequity. Some have suggested ‘Capitalocene’ as a more accurate moniker.
ON 20 AUGUST 2015, Tasos drove to Idomeni, a Greek town near the border with the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and a gateway to the ‘Balkans route’. It’s from here that refugees and migrants followed train tracks into Macedonia, northwards across the Balkan countries, and finally into Germany. Tasos saw hundreds of people gathered on the rail lines. The Macedonian government had called a state of emergency and rolled barbed wire across the border. It wanted to slow the flow of people. Military and anti-terror troops stood at the border next to armoured vehicles. Tasos said they aimed guns and yelled, ‘Go back to Greece.’
One woman told an Amnesty International worker: ‘This reminds me of Syria. I never expected to find that in Europe. Before the war, life in Syria was paradise…then both sides started taking our children to fight and bombs started falling on our heads.’
People jumped with every new explosion and burst of gunfire. It began pouring rain and some sheltered under cardboard while families climbed under thin summer tents and tarps. Tasos was afraid. He hadn’t seen the crowds angry and confused before. He was covered in mud and his lens was destroyed. Stun grenades cracked in the distance.
A young man from Kashmir took Tasos’s arm and offered him shelter under a concrete railway culvert. The men gave him biscuits, water and cigarettes.
‘The guys gave me everything they had,’ said Tasos.
The photos that agencies and newspapers wanted were of human drama in extreme moments: people falling from boats, pulling children from the sea, landing on the beach with tears of fear and joy. Tasos began to wonder if these images helped. He wondered how he could convey moments such as the hospitality under the culvert.
In October Tasos returned to Lesvos. The small island was now receiving two hundred thousand people per month. The cemetery in Mytilene was running out of space. Camps were over capacity.
‘People slept in boxes, old fridges, whatever they could find,’ said Tasos.
Remarkably, international and Greek volunteers, authorities, locals and refugees collaborated to hold it all together. Fishermen in the northern village of Skala Sikamineas spent every night in their boats, guiding refugees to the shore, diving into the water and rescuing people. Women handed out sandwiches and fruit. They washed clothes and looked after children. They hugged and kissed those who made the crossing.
Tasos drove volunteers from Skala Sikamineas to a cape at the northernmost point of the island. There, beneath the Korakas Lighthouse, the beach gave way to sharp rocks and cliffs. It was the most dangerous place to land on Lesvos from the sea. Many died in the attempt. Tasos worked with two American volunteers who wore wetsuits and dragged lifejackets from the ocean and shoreline. The older one, Jeff, had holidayed on Lesvos with his parents in the 1980s. When he saw reports about the crisis he came over to help. The other American, Max, was trekking in Nepal in 2015 when the earthquake struck. He helped in the aftermath and it changed his life.
‘We spent the days collecting lifejackets, and the nights helping people arriving on the beaches,’ said Tasos. He saw a man collapse with hypothermia. He saw a hand rise from the ocean, waving for help.
Jeff and Max told Tasos to stop feeding the daily news and follow his own path. Tasos began to question whether he could continue as a photojournalist. Previously, some papers had used his photos out of context. News stories appeared one day and were gone the next. He wanted to be able to provide more depth.
‘I decided it wasn’t enough to just be a good person. You have to act. Lesvos changed me. It would change anyone who comes here.’
Thinking about the different reception these refugees and migrants would have received in Australia or the UK, I asked Tasos why Greece, suffering as it is from austerity measures, was so generous. He said, ‘In Greece, we all have a story.’
Tasos’ great-grandfather was injured fighting the Germans in World War II. When a Nazi officer was killed, the Germans began massacring whole villages in the north. They burned the hospital where Tasos’ great-grandfather was being treated. Tasos’s grandfather was left an orphan; a family took him in, and when he was older he worked in Germany illegally, saving enough to build a house back in Greece – the house in which Tasos’ father was raised.
‘We know about displacement,’ said Tasos.
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, populist nationalism tore Europe apart. National identities were imagined into being through the literature, arts and revolutionaries of loosely connected ethnic groups. Religious and aristocratic allegiances were in decline and the idea of the nation-state bounded to territory emerged. German states began to federate, Polish people sought independence and, in the south, Serbians, Greeks, Montenegrins, Bulgarians and others revolted against the Ottoman Empire.
Violence broke out as nationalists tried to overthrow the ruling elites, and as new nations sought to define who did and didn’t belong. This caused some of the largest mass migrations in history. European Muslims in the Caucasus, Crimea, the Balkans and the Mediterranean were massacred and millions were forced to flee to Anatolia. The Ottoman regime violently suppressed nationalist uprisings in the Balkans. At the start of World War I, the Ottoman Empire had lost most of its European territories. Turkish nationalists saw Armenians in Anatolia as a threat to their vision for an independent and homogenous Turkish nation. The Turkish armies began massacring Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians, and forcing the Armenians on death marches into the Syrian desert – actions we now call genocide.
In 1919, Greece launched an attack on the Turks to gain territory in Anatolia. The Turkish nationalists defeated the Greek army in 1922. Most of the Anatolian Greeks had fled to Greece and Russia. Those who remained were forced to migrate in a compulsory population exchange under the 1923 Lausanne Convention. Experts thought enforcing ethnic groupings into bounded territories would ensure peace. Around 1.2 million Christian refugees were sent across the Aegean to Greece, while four hundred and fifty thousand Greek Muslims were sent to the new nation of Turkey. No one who was expelled could return. British foreign secretary Lord Curzon described this period as the ‘unmixing of peoples’.
Many Greeks, including the villagers on Lesvos, say, ‘We are all refugees.’
IN MARCH 2016 the European Union, alarmed by rising popularism and right-wing nationalism, signed a controversial deal with Turkey to prevent further refugee and migrant crossings to Greece. Anyone who arrived after that date would be sent back to Turkey. In exchange, Turkey would receive more assistance for the nearly three million refugees it was hosting. The Balkan route was closed permanently.
Tasos was in Idomeni volunteering. ‘When we told the guys that the border was closed they didn’t believe it. They refused to leave.’
More people arrived at the bottleneck, swelling the makeshift camp to twelve thousand. Portable toilets overflowed. The Greek military delivered firewood but couldn’t meet demand. Refugees burned whatever was at hand to keep warm. They searched fields for food. Children shivered in the wet. A UN spokesperson described the situation as ‘misery beyond imagination’. Fences went up in Macedonia, Serbia, Slovenia, Hungary and Germany. Journalists dubbed it the ‘rise of the mesh curtain’.
‘We weren’t the European Union anymore,’ said Tasos.
Volunteers and NGOs set up a network of storage facilities in the area, paying cheap rent for empty farm buildings. Tasos packed boxes, distributed food and translated from Greek to English. Greek authorities began transferring people to better-equipped camps in the cities. Around fifty thousand displaced people were stranded in Greece after the EU–Turkey deal.
On Lesvos, people continued to take selfies to let loved ones know they’d made it to Europe.
‘They didn’t realise they hadn’t made it to Europe,’ said Tasos. ‘They made it to Greece.’ No one knew how long they would be stuck there.
The series of photos that Tasos did sell – the aerial shots of half a million lifejackets piled up on Lesvos – provided enough money for him to continue volunteering. He thought a photography workshop might help occupy people during the wait. French photographer Lois Simac had a similar idea, so they partnered to run a twelve-week course in Thessaloniki. The camp there was set up in an abandoned paper factory from which it derived its name, Softex. Petroleum fumes drifted from the nearby oil refinery.
Only Syrians could pitch their tents inside the Softex building while Moroccans, Algerians, Eritreans and others slept in nearby disused train carriages without power, water or heating. Just over a thousand people stayed at the site.
Twelve participants signed up to the photography workshop. They named it Crossroads and decided to develop an exhibition. One of the keenest students was twenty-year-old Mohammad from Syria. Tasos said that after each lesson Mohammad would be the first to email his assignments and results of experiments with the new techniques he’d learnt. Previously he’d spent a lot of time keeping to himself and drawing allegorical pictures about war. Now he was interacting. Tasos was impressed with his photographic work.
‘I draw it first in my heart, and then I take the photo,’ Mohammad told Tasos.
Mohammad was from a city in northern Syria that had expanded in the 1920s as a French military post. It was home to many Kurds, as well as Armenians who had fled the genocide, and Assyrians who fled Iraqi nationalists in the 1930s. Since the Syrian conflict began, the city had been the site of four major battles and control changed between Kurdish, ISIS and Assad-government fighters.
Tasos couldn’t help thinking about the people in Europe saying, ‘Why don’t they stay and fight?’
‘Fight for what?’ asked Tasos. ‘And for whom? There is no point dying for someone else’s war.’
THE DYNAMICS OF the Anthropocene can be traced in the context of the Syrian conflict. The Anthropocene was made possible by dispossession, extreme inequality and the extraordinarily rapid expansion of technological and political control over natural resources and labour. The Anthropocene can’t explain causes, but it is useful for establishing connections across multiple histories.
Before the end of World War I, when it was clear the Ottoman Empire would be defeated, the British and French Empires agreed to carve up most of the Ottoman’s territories between them. This became known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement, named after the two lead negotiators. The French promised what would become Syria to the British after oil was discovered in Mosul, east of the Syrian provinces. After the war, with the Ottomans gone, Damascus declared itself an independent kingdom. The French feared this would threaten its deal with Britain, so it invaded Syria and made it a French mandate.
The ancient cities of Syria were home to people of diverse ethnicities, languages and religions. The French thought it would be easier to control these populations if they divided them, and when that didn’t work, it brought them together under two main administrative centres based around Damascus and Aleppo. The decades of French rule were violent. Former diplomat and historian William R Polk wrote in The Atlantic, ‘The French bombarded Damascus, which they had regime-changed in 1920, in 1925, 1926, and 1945, and they pacified the city with martial law during most of the “peaceful” intervals.’ The Syrians didn’t achieve independence until the British invaded the Middle East in World War II to secure oil supplies.
Animosity towards the French gave rise to Syrian nationalism, but the movement was left searching for a strong basis for a Syrian identity. The Syrians hadn’t carried out ethnic homogenisation like the Europeans. Polk described Syria as a ‘sanctuary’ for leftover peoples who were cast out of other territories. For years Syria struggled to recover from the legacy of colonialism. Political parties were militaristic and leaders overthrown in coups. In 1970, the Ba’ath Party’s Hafez al-Assad, a strongman and former air-force commander, took over as prime minister and then president, until he died in 2000.
Assad’s secular, socialist government tried to ensure authority and support by providing social services such as education and healthcare (but not democratic autonomy). Agriculture had been the largest sector of the economy in the mid-twentieth century, but by the time Assad came to power it was in decline. In the 1980s, with assistance from the Soviets, the government made massive investments in agriculture to intensify production. The result was overgrazing, soil erosion, groundwater depletion and vast irrigation projects that failed to fulfil expectations. Farmers flocked to the cities. Bashar al-Assad continued the agricultural intensification after he took over the presidency in 2000. His aim for agriculture was to feed a rapidly growing population. The number of groundwater wells jumped from around fifty thousand in the late 1980s to two hundred and thirty thousand in 2010. The water table plummeted. Syria had also built a hundred and sixty dams with a total storage capacity of fourteen million megalitres. Further stressing the region’s river systems, Turkey and Iraq pursued their own dam-building projects on the Euphrates, with tensions almost sending Syria to war with both at different times.
Drought exacerbated existing problems before the civil war began in 2011. The UN estimated that up to three million rural people were reduced to extreme poverty. Extra pressure was placed on farmers when Assad carried out neoliberal reforms to open the economy, which included cuts to diesel fuel subsidies. Irrigators depended on diesel to power their groundwater pumps. The reforms might have slowed water extraction, but they devastated livelihoods. The cities had already absorbed millions of migrants from rural areas and refugees from the war in Iraq. When protests broke out, Assad directed his security forces to crush dissent. In April 2011, the world saw a video depicting the mutilated body of thirteen-year-old Hamza Ali Al-Khateeb. Foreign fighters joined the conflict. Some based their philosophies on an ultraconservative reform movement that its detractors call Wahhabism. Its teachings emerged in the aftermath of European and Ottoman imperialism, and grew substantially with billions of dollars of Saudi oil money. ISIS was anti-colonial, anti-nationalist and anti-pluralist (including in its list of enemies, traditional schools and branches of Islam). In 2014, ISIS released a video titled ‘The End of Sykes-Picot’, which showed the destruction of the border between Syria and Iraq.
THE WINTER IN Thessaloniki in 2016–17 was the most severe in thirty years. The pipes at Tasos’s apartment froze and burst. The city had to provide carted water. At the Softex camp, people warmed their hands around the building’s exterior vents. In the months since the closure of the Balkan route most of the Syrians at Softex had been relocated within Europe. Authorities allowed the Algerians and Moroccans to move from the abandoned trains into the Softex building.
I’d asked Tasos to question his workshop participants about Australia.
‘First, I must ask you something,’ he said to me, his face grave. ‘They say you turn boats around in the sea. Is this true?’
Tasos couldn’t believe it. Maybe it was because Greece is a seafaring country of many islands that this came as a shattering moral violation.
‘They say Australia is a no-go zone,’ said Tasos. ‘That it’s worse than Trump’s America.’ Our political parties would be pleased this message made it to Syria.
Tasos said the refugees he spoke with have no intention of travelling to Australia. They want to stay closer to family in Europe. Most hope to return to Syria if the country still exists.
A month later Tasos said he had bad news. ‘Mohammad was beaten. He’s been in hospital for days.’
The uncertainty was weighing on the migrants and refugees. Money had run out and there was no way of making more in Greece. It was unlikely that anyone who was not Syrian would be granted permission to stay in Europe. Some in the camps preyed on the vulnerable. There were reports women had been sexually assaulted at the Softex camp and elsewhere in Greece. Mohammad was bashed with an iron bar.
‘He’s such a sensitive guy,’ said Tasos. ‘He would never fight back.’
There were tensions within the workshop group over the future of the Crossroads project. They didn’t have enough money to hire a translator so had to rely on volunteers and friends. Tasos and Lois were spending their time writing exhibition proposals and seeking legal advice. They argued more.
On Lesvos, members aligned with the Greek neo-Nazi party Golden Dawn threw a Molotov cocktail at a café helping refugees. Unlike many parts of Europe, the Greek people hadn’t turned against the refugees and migrants yet, but they had started to ask how the government could manage. At a bar one night, a man told Tasos to ‘stick your camera up your arse’ because he was helping refugees. Golden Dawn was capitalising on these anxieties.
IN 2016, WRITER James Bradley gave a moving lecture, subsequently published in the Sydney Review of Books, on the role of the arts in an age of global ecological transformation. He said he is uncomfortable with the term Anthropocene because ‘its assertion of human primacy reiterates the blindness that got us here’. Whatever we call it, said Bradley, we must recognise that something is different and the world we are creating presents challenges to every aspect of our societies.
In recent years, when many around me were jaded, I kept my faith in politics. I kept handing out how-to-vote cards, I believed in public debate and that you could just talk things through. Now I worry like everyone else. I bond with colleagues at lunch critiquing the cynicism and destructiveness of neoliberalism, but then I return to my desk and I’m too anxious about keeping an income to do anything about it. I’ll be on my third contract this year for the same casual job and I’m grateful for the work.
In the news I see drone strikes and beheadings and refugees stopped at the gates. I see people blaming the most vulnerable for the state of the world. We feel like there’s nothing we can do because institutions have been eroded and the usual avenues of civic participation appear ineffective. Global forces kick on regardless. I read of our government’s plans for blackshirts demanding ID on the streets of Melbourne, stripping political enemies of citizenship, criminalising environmental protest and retaining and sharing our phone and internet data. I hear that our civil Department of Immigration and Border Protection spent hundreds of thousands on handguns and machine guns. They’ve used misery as an opportunity. Now, more than two hundred thousand Australians follow hate sites online. A friend said recently, if truth doesn’t matter, what’s the point? I think I’m slipping into the learnt helplessness that suits the status quo. I reckon there’s a heap of us who feel this ache in our chests.
I’m desperate for a label for our times around which people could recognise connections to a wider context and longer history than neoliberalism or climate change. I don’t know if we have a politics for this yet. Rather than fragmenting into tribalism, internet bubbles, polarisation and xenophobic nationalism, it might be possible to think about our grievances as part of the same set of problems and work towards a mutually beneficial future. Most of us are on the same side. We could seek solidarity with migrants and refugees instead of establishing elaborate exclusion zones for them.
I admire Tasos and his project. He hasn’t just supplied water and food and something to do. He has worked to humanise refugees in the eyes of others. He has brought companionship as a fellow person. He has provided some dignity.
By April this year, about half of the Crossroads participants had been relocated within Europe. Some of them met up with former Softex camp volunteers in France, Finland and the Netherlands. People have asked Tasos why he is helping twelve refugees when there are thousands stranded in Greece.
‘Ask those twelve people if their lives have changed,’ said Tasos. ‘If everyone helped one person we’d all be happy.’
In May 2017, the Crossroads exhibition began to tour major cities, including Barcelona, Copenhagen, Izmir and Dubai. The first showing outside of Greece was in Vienna. Mohammad and the other refugees weren’t permitted to travel for the opening night so they used Skype to participate in a forum with the gallery audience. I asked Tasos if the group was excited.
‘The guys had mixed feelings,’ said Tasos. ‘They saw their photos travelling to places they can’t.’ Their photos, they noted, moved faster than refugees.
BRIGHT-ORANGE LIFEJACKETS PROBABLY say more about our times than any other object of the twenty-first century. People making a few dollars an hour produce cheap knock-off safety vests and inflatable boats that are shipped around the world and resold at a mark-up to desperate refugees fleeing conflict, poverty and ecological disorder for the security of Europe, the US and Australia. The refugees come from places that the wealthy countries are bombing in wars that are, in part, a legacy of Europe’s late-imperialist carve-up of territory, of forced migrations, Cold War geopolitics, exploitation of fossil fuels and the rise of the privatised corporate war economy under the auspices of the ‘War on Terror.’
In the introduction to their book Environmental History of Modern Migrations (Routledge, 2017), Marco Armiero and Richard Tucker argue we are operating with ‘lifeboat’ ethics. In the affluent countries we pretend it’s possible to escape the social and environmental disruption of the Anthropocene in our lifeboats while the displaced clamour to get on board in their cheap lifejackets. Our nation states look like tools for controlling the movement of capital, commodities and labour for the advantage of a few. They appear incapable of solving cross-border challenges such as climate change, overfishing, over-extraction of water, wars, inequality and migration. Yet in response to these international problems, nationalist movements have increased in popularity.
Jane McAdam, professor of international human rights law at UNSW, reported that most displaced people remain within or close to their homeland borders. However, environmental and social pressures will continue forcing large numbers of people to move as a last resort. The Pacific nation of Kiribati has bought land in Fiji as backup for when the sea inundates its islands. The hundred thousand inhabitants don’t want to be environmental refugees, relegated to stateless people with inferior rights; they want to control the process of migration. If we saw the larger forces at play, it might be possible to treat migration as an adaptation to the challenges of the Anthropocene rather than as a security risk. Perhaps we are witnessing the beginning of the remixing of peoples.
POSTSCRIPT: THE DAY before I submitted this essay Tasos emailed with an update. Mohammad’s application had been decided, and he will be relocated to Norway.
I am an academic psychologist interested in individual and collective forms of distress in relation to experiences of nature, the climate crisis and environmentalism. My intention here is to talk through what I see as some of the connections between critical approaches to psychology/psychiatry, experiences of emotional distress and the Anthropocene – a new(ish) name for the complex combination of climate and ecological crises we are living through.
The term was originally proposed by atmospheric scientist Paul Crutzen at the turn of this century and then taken up by geologists, advancing the idea that in the far future, proof of our planet-dominating existence will be noticeable in rock strata, to anyone or anything willing and able to pay attention. This is because, it is claimed, evidence of our existence will be condensed into a distinct layer, about a quarter-inch thick, made up of an anthropogenic cocktail including nitrogen and phosphates, carbon spheres, radioactive elements, chicken skeletons and plastic detritus.
The Anthropocene has quickly gained prominence more generally as a way of framing the current era in which, for the first time in its history, the Earth is being deeply transformed by one species – the human (Anthropos is Greek for human; the –cene suffix refers to a substantial geological time period within the current 65-million-year-old Cenozoic era). It has become shorthand for what anthropocene.info describe as the ‘overwhelming global evidence that atmospheric, geologic, hydrologic, biospheric and other earth system processes are now altered by humans’. What this signifies may already seem unsurprising, but it is absolutely remarkable that we are now talking about the impact of human activity as it has accumulated over the last 300 years, perhaps even the last 70, radically unsettling the Earth’s biodiversity, carbon cycles, climate, ocean chemistry and so on, on a scale equivalent to deep-time processes – millions of years of slow evolution in the making.
What has the Anthropocene got to do with experiences of emotional distress? Back in 2007, the environmental philosopher David Kidner asserted that ‘psychological distress is likely to arise within an ecological context that is becoming increasingly degraded’. At its simplest the Anthropocene is a way of deepening our understanding of this degradation and human responsibility for it. Many more have followed Kidner in highlighting the manifestations of distress that emerge in response, including the Climate Psychology Alliance (which I am a member of), drawing on psychoanalysis amongst other perspectives. Fallout from ecological degradation, extinction and climate crisis can of course be direct and immediate – hunger, thirst, fear; experiencing precarious water supplies in a drought; fleeing for safety at a rapidly encroaching forest fire; the loss of home, familiar landscape; migration from places made incrementally or instantaneously uninhabitable by a changed climate, rising seas, pollution.
The individual and collective body can be marked in many more ways by the shock of the Anthropocene. On a personal and social level, the Anthropocene threatens our taken for granted certainty in the ongoingness of our world, a point captured elegiacally by eco-philosopher Joanna Macy in her memoir Widening Circles:
“[U]ntil the late twentieth century, every generation throughout history lived with the tacit certainty that there would be generations to follow. Each assumed, without questioning, that its children and children’s children would walk the same Earth, under the same sky… that certainty is now lost to us… that loss, unmeasured and immeasurable, is the pivotal psychological reality of our time”
We are threatened with the loss of species, habitats, landscapes, but also a deeply engrained way of life, and the idea of an open-ended future, even if we rarely stopped to think about it. A note of caution should be offered about the use of ‘we’ here. Loss on this kind of scale is not novel for many communities. As Heather Davis and Zoe Todd point out, for Indigenous peoples, ‘the Anthropocene is not a new event, but only the continuation of practices of dispossession and genocide, coupled with a literal transformation of the environment, which have been under operation for the last five hundred years’. The Anthropocene raises lots of questions about responsibility for the kinds of environmental impacts it refers to, and the ability to withstand them. These include the ongoing legacies of colonialism and imperialism. Colonial power was and is about dispossession – a forced separation of people and place, the ‘environmental’ effects of which still reverberate deeply.
Yet even for those of us who have historically benefited from these practices, the Anthropocene arguably marks something profoundly unsettling. With the distress of loss comes a mixture of complex emotional responses – grief, mourning, denial, feelings of displacement and powerlessness. The fact that historical and ongoing human activity – our (some of our) actions – are responsible for these losses laces these experiences for many with guilt, anxiety and all the defensive reactions that tends to accompany them, conscious or otherwise. There are of course readily available models to frame these experiences, and related remedies which may provide some solace, a sense of control or certainty. These include psychiatric diagnoses and medication, but also consumerism, conspiracies, polarising worldviews, and the idealisation of ‘strong’ leaders. To say there is a mismatch between problem and solution here is something of an understatement – the root causes of these losses are still obscured by individualist and apolitical framings of ‘mental health’ that dominate the social, political and cultural landscape.
Related experiences of distress are being recognised in terms like eco-anxiety, environmental melancholia and ecological grief. The latter is defined by Ashlee Cunsolo and Neville Ellis as ‘The grief felt in relation to experienced or anticipated ecological losses, including the loss of species, ecosystems, and meaningful landscapes due to acute or chronic environmental change’. Any shift towards a vocabulary in which these experiences of loss, grief and mourning are recognised is no doubt positive. However, there is a danger here of an error familiar to critics of psychology and psychiatry. This is the tendency to reframe understandable collective responses as medical and individualised “mental health” problems; and with it an extension of the absurd logic of the best response to a ‘mental illness epidemic’ being the rolling out more pharmaceutical or cognitive-behavioural oriented support. This is already happening in and around applications of health psychology, whereby life in the Anthropocene is said to result in a ‘higher frequency of mental disorders’. The priority then becomes adaptation strategies, such as better access to healthcare systems, and better training for professionals. In other words, adapting the individual to the emotional impacts of the Anthropocene by extending the established infrastructure and language of a medicalised and individualised understanding of distress.
Things are changing. Recognition of the climate crisis as an existential as well as a material threat is increasingly public; and social justice asserted as a vitally important dimension of a meaningful collective response. An emerging wider movement emphasises the vital importance of establishing shared means of recognising loss, expressing grief and acceptance. Acknowledging loss collectively and publicly is an important step in facing up to the reality of the Anthropocene and the impossibility of carrying on ‘as normal’.
Articulating loss, grief and fear as shared is also a starting point for developing forms of mutual support, as the psychotherapist Rosemary Randall eloquently argued some time ago. It is also a potentially powerful foundation for the collective demand for change. This is what political philosopher Judith Butler refers to as ‘the militant potential of mourning’. In the context of the Anthropocene we see evidence of the power of recognising loss not just in exclusively human terms; but in public memorial ceremonies and remembrance days dedicated to lost species and landscapes; and in broader demands to ‘tell the truth’ about ecological and degradation. A starting point for meaningful action, but also for recognising the shared experiences of distress.
The Anthropocene encourages us to think about a bigger picture too, in terms of who or what counts as worthy of attentiveness, care and compassion. In my understanding, there is no doubt that the Anthropocene characterises a time of great worry and fear, but it is also an invitation to reflect and think differently about the relationship between humans and ‘nature’. Whilst the idea of the Anthropocene might seem to consolidate the notion of human influence on the natural environment, it also encourages us to consider the countless interrelationships and interdependencies that shape the co-constitution of the human with other forms of life. These vital interactions stretch from the microbiome – the vast microcosmos of bacteria, fungi, protozoa and viruses interacting on and inside the human body – to the wider biosphere – ocean trenches, subterranean root systems, lush rain forests, arctic glaciers and sprawling cities – wherever life is reciprocally formed.
Many approaches in psychology have always been profoundly interested in the part encounters, interactions and relationships play in shaping our personal and social realities, and their role in the origins and alleviation of suffering and distress. For the most part, it has been an almost exclusively human emphasis. I am interested in what happens if we extend an emphasis on the fundamental importance of the state or condition of being in relationship, taking in cross-species conversations and human relations with more-than-human worlds. Developments in psychology often depend on looking outside the discipline for invigoration and new ideas – drawing, for example, on feminism and postcolonialism. In recent years I have been drawn to a fascinating body of work emerging in human–animal studies, anthrozoology, transspecies psychology, multi-species ethnography and posthumanism – reflected in my book Anthropocene Psychology. This work invites us to pay attention to how other animals, species and natural entities are entangled in human societies, focussing on issues such as rights, responsibilities and justice. At the same time, it unsettles anthropocentrism, the ideology that human beings are the most important species, are in control, and that all problems can be solved by human technology and ingenuity.
At present, this might all appear indulgent or irrelevant in the context of the coronavirus, not least in terms of experiences of distress. Perhaps, but as I understand it, COVID-19 is a feature of the Anthropocene, with the virus seeming to have emerged at the heart of that precarious interconnectedness and interdependence with nonhuman life forms – from a nexus of cross-species relations. Numerous calls to revolutionise the ethical foundations of human-animal relations have followed, not just in halting the ‘wet markets’ of China, but in demands for the ‘end of meat’ – the radical reform and even abolition of the use of the factories and abattoirs of industrialised animal agriculture. Others begin to reimagine changes to underlying social systems and structures to reverse the ecological degradation so closely aligned with multiple forms of distress – working conditions, travel, pollution, access to wilder and more biodiverse places.
At the same time, COVID-19 reminds us that we, as a species, are not an exception, able to stand outside or above the ebb and flow of life on earth. This is of course unsettling, but there might yet be healing power in recognising our shared vulnerability and interdependence, that our future is one where we learn to recognise how profound our interdependence and interconnectedness with each other, other species, nature, really is. In this vein, philosopher of science Cecilia Åsberg argues that the Anthropocene can highlight the many ways in which ‘humanity is intimately bound up with non-human co-travellers on our shared planet; and that ‘our survival may depend on understanding the company we keep, within our bodies, attached to our bodies and around the world’.
In her wonderful essay responding to attempts to pathologise distress in the face of COVID-19, Lucy Johnstone argues that now more than ever ‘we need a new narrative of shared distress to replace the failed one of individual disorders’. I wholeheartedly agree. The shared nature of that distress extends to what it means to live in, and comprehend living in, the Anthropocene – giving rise to experiences of fear, loss, grief and mourning. In inviting us to recognise both human and more-than-human losses, the Anthropocene deepens the need for such a narrative whilst reaching out across the species barrier. In doing so there is hope, that we are finally coming back down to Earth
Dr Matthew Adams is a Principal Lecturer in psychology at the University of Brighton. In both teaching and research, he is an advocate of psychological, cultural and social approaches to experiences of distress that challenge medical and individualist models and offer alternatives to psychiatric diagnosis. He has undertaken research and written extensively on human-nature relations in an era of unprecedented ecological crisis. His most recent book is Anthropocene Psychology: Being Human in a More-Than-Human World, published by Routledge in 2020. The book investigates the relations between human and more-than-human worlds against the backdrop of the Anthropocene by emphasising the significance of encounter, interaction and relationships.
Institute for Interdisciplinary Research into the Anthropocene 
