The environmental crisis is the most prominent challenge humanity has ever had to battle with, and humanity is currently failing. The Anthropocene—or so called ‘age of humans’—is indeed a period when the survival of humanity has never been so much at risk. This book locates itself in the field of critical green political theory. Fremaux's analysis of the current environmental crisis calls for us to embrace radical shifts in our modes of being; or, in other words, socially progressive innovations (...) that will be described within the unique framework of "Green Republicanism." In offering a constructive and emancipatory delineation of what could be considered an ecological civilization that is respectful of its natural environment and social differences, this book describes how to shift from an ‘arrogant speciesism’ and materialistic lifestyle to a post-anthropocentric ecological humanism focusing on the ‘good life’ within ecological limits. This new political regime calls for a radical reinvention of our societies, a decentering of the humans within our metaphysical worldview, and a withdrawal of the capitalist technosphere at the benefit of the biosphere. It will require a new economic paradigm that replaces the unsustainable capitalist logic of growth by sustainable degrowth and steady economics. Rooted in ethical thinking and political philosophy, this book seeks to offer a concrete roadmap of how sustainable societies can be fostered. (shrink)

The Anthropocene, in which humankind has become a geological force, is a major scientific proposal; but it also means that the conceptions of the natural and social worlds on which sociology, political science, history, law, economics and philosophy rest are called into question. The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis captures some of the radical new thinking prompted by the arrival of the Anthropocene and opens up the social sciences and humanities to the profound meaning of the (...) new geological epoch, the 'Age of Humans'. Drawing on the expertise of world-recognised scholars and thought-provoking intellectuals, the book explores the challenges and difficult questions posed by the convergence of geological and human history to the foundational ideas of modern social science. If in the Anthropocene humans have become a force of nature, changing the functioning of the Earth system as volcanism and glacial cycles do, then it means the end of the idea of nature as no more than the inert backdrop to the drama of human affairs. It means the end of the 'social-only' understanding of human history and agency. These pillars of modernity are now destabilised. The scale and pace of the shifts occurring on Earth are beyond human experience and expose the anachronisms of 'Holocene thinking'. The book explores what kinds of narratives are emerging around the scientific idea of the new geological epoch, and what it means for the 'politics of unsustainability'. (shrink)

In the humanities and social sciences, the concept of the Anthropocene has become the starting point for theoretical analyses of the immediate relationship between the environmental preconditions for the existence of civilization and the human actions whose consequences threaten these preconditions. From the philosophical-anthropological point of view, reflections on the concepts of the Anthropocene focus not only on a critical analysis of the claims about human that originate in the natural sciences but also on an understanding of the (...) overall role of humanity in the new geological-climatic regime of the Earth. The primary purpose of this paper is to highlight two-pronged problem areas, which include both the problem of anthropological constants as specific ways of makingstatements about humans and the problem of using them to reflect on the conceptual system of the Anthropocene. In particular, this paper emphasizes hypotheses and claims from the Anthropocene concept of Earth System Science that point to humans becoming a geobiophysical force in the Anthropocene. Three areas in which anthropological constants could be subsequently subjected to a deeper analysis are proposed. -------------------------- Received: 01/12/2022. Reviewed: 08/02/2023. Accepted: 30/03/2023. (shrink)

The ambition of this article is to propose a way of visualizing the Anthropocene dialectically. As suggested by the Dutch atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and the professor of biology Eugene F. Stoermer, the term Anthropocene refers to a historical period in which humankind has turned into a geological force that transforms the natural environment in such a way that it is hard to distinguish between the human and the natural world. Crutzen and Stoermer explain that the Anthropocene (...) has begun after the Holocene, the geological epoch that followed the last ice age and lasted until the industrial revolution. Drawing on a number of figures such as the “tenfold” increase in urbanisation, the extreme transformation of land surface by human action, the use of more than 50% of all accessible fresh water by humans, and the massive increase in greenhouse emissions, Crutzen and Stoermer conclude that the term Anthropocene describes aptly mankind's influence on ecological and geological cycles (Crutzen & Stoermer, 20... (shrink)

The growing body of literature on the idea of the Anthropocene has opened up serious questions that go to the heart of the social and human sciences. There has been as yet no satisfactory theoretical framework for the analysis of the Anthropocene debate in the social and human sciences. The notion of the Anthropocene is not only a condition in which humans have become geologic agents, thus signalling a temporal shift in Earth history: it can be seen (...) as a new object of knowledge and an order of governance. A promising direction for theorizing in the social and human science is to approach the notion of the Anthropocene as exemplified in new knowledge practices that have implications for governance. It invokes new conceptions of time, agency, knowledge and governance. The Anthropocene has become a way in which the human world is re-imagined culturally and politically in terms of its relation with the Earth. It entails a cultural model, that is an interpretative category by which contemporary societies make sense of the world as embedded in the Earth, and articulate a new kind of historical self-understanding, by which an alternative order of governance is projected. This points in the direction of cosmopolitics – and thus of a ‘Cosmopolocene’ – rather than a geologization of the social or in the post-humanist philosophy, the end of the human condition as one marked by agency. (shrink)

Recent attempts to rename the geological epoch in which we live, now called the “Holocene,” have produced a number of impressive suggestions. Among these the leading contender at present is the “Anthropocene.” Despite its possible advantages, there are a number of reasons why this term is ultimately misleading and unhelpful in both philosophical and policy deliberations. Especially off-putting is the word’s tendency to identify the human species as a whole as the culprit in controversial changes in Earth’s biosphere whose (...) proximate sources can be more accurately identified. The new candidate term echoes discussions of “Man and...” in countless twentieth-century publications, an outmoded conceit rightly overcome in more recent writings on science, technology and society. (shrink)

Geologically speaking, the Anthropocene marks the end of the Holocene period, a time of great planetary stability. Conceptually speaking, the Anthropocene marks the end of the Modernist period, a time of great epistemic stability. As scientific framings of sustainability strain under anthro­pocenic realities, reconceptualizing sustainability may be necessary. By positioning human/nature relations beyond Modernist dichotomies under­pinning scientific discourse, the implications of the Anthropocene shift from methodological to ontological, dislodging sustainability from its traditional scientific foundations. To this, we (...) propose new stability through four interlinked approaches to sustainability’s complex challenges, offering a framework for thought and action beyond Modernist framings of sustainability and opening essential roles to often-marginalized interpretive social sciences and humanities. (shrink)

We are now entering the Anthropocene Epoch—so runs a recent enthusiastic claim. Humans can and ought go beyond the natural and powerfully engineer a better planet, managing for climate change and building new ecosystems for a more prosperous future. Perhaps the Anthropocene is inevitable. But: Rejoice? Accommodate? Accept it, alas? Perhaps the wiser, more ethical course is not so much going “beyond” the natural as “keeping the natural in symbiosis” with humans, maintaining a tapestry of cultural and natural (...) values, not a trajectory even further into the Anthropocene. Keep the urban, rural, and wild. Enter the Semi-Anthropocene! Basically Natural! Carefully! (shrink)

This paper aims to discuss human experience in the Anthropocene geological era based on contemporary social theorists as Žižek and Badiou. I propose that, in face of the environmental crisis, techno-ecological corporative style sustainability is a perverse response; and this circuit can only be broken by a radical version of environmentalism that antagonizes the hegemonic discourse of our production-and-consumption system – emphasizing politics. The paper is divided into four parts where: a) the term Anthropocene, created by Paul Crutzen (...) among others, is described as the configuration of an era when biosphere disappears as an externality and becomes subordinated to the ensemble of knowledge and powers of liberal-capitalism; b) based on Alain Badiou, I describe the subject as resulting from an event’s truth progressing as fidelity; and the fact that not even the vision of environmental death have had the power to create new environmentalist subjects in place of consumer subjects; c) I analyze the perverse structure of denial that shows the reverse of the hole made positive - namely the appearing of techno-ecological products inviting us to enjoy a qualified consumption as the positived reverse of the environmental crisis; d) finally, after a brief comment about the currents which fight for hegemony in the discursive field of environmentalism, I discuss how the radical ecologism proposes to break the perverse circuit of techno-efficient sustainability by means of the political antagonism. (shrink)

The Anthropocene is a term described by Earth Systems Science to capture the recent rupture in the history of the Earth where human action has acquired the power to alter the Earth System as a whole. While normative conclusions cannot be logically derived from this descriptive fact, this paper argues that law and philosophy ought to develop responses that are ordered around human beings. Rather than arguing for legal rights or extending rights to nature, this paper focuses on obligations. (...) Drawing on Hans Jonas, it argues that obligations are a more appropriate tool for cultivating human plurality, restraining human action and protecting future generations. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Tracing the Anthropocene and Entangled Trauma in Yashar Kemal's NovelsMore-Than-Human Lives in the Post-Ottoman WorldDeniz Gündoǧan Ibrişim (bio)Yashar Kemal (1923–2015), one of Turkey's most prominent Kurdish-Turkish novelists and human rights activists, largely engages with the southern Turkish countryside, which the author himself had known well in his early life.1 Kemal is commonly recognized as the writer of Çukurova or the Clician Plain (Cilicia Pedias in antiquity), a large (...) fertile plain in southern Turkey. The plain covers the easternmost areas of Mersin Province, southern and central Adana Province, Western Osmaniye, and Northwestern Hatay, and it has been a major place of anthropogenic change and industrialization since the 1930s, in the aftermath of transition from the Ottoman Empire to the modern Republic. Kemal presents the severe impact of the destruction of the forests and the draining of the swamps on the nature of the local people, whose way of life was transformed by this anthropogenic uprooting during the modernization and industrialization brought about by successive political and environmental administrations in post-Ottoman Turkey:The earth was covered with woods from Misis to the Mediterranean Sea in the olden days. There is a tree called Kars. Due to the fact that the Kars tree grows there the place was called Kars for a long time.... Now there is nothing; not one single tree until the Mediterranean. Historians write that the land was a great forest even in the 19th century. This was stated in a letter of Cevdet Pasha written in 1865.... Hundreds, even thousands of [End Page 32] tractors entered the Çukurova, everything happened overnight, so to say. Farm workers digging the earth to a depth of 75 centimeters were left with nothing to eat and nowhere to dwell, left with no forest, no Kars, no tree, no cane thickets, no bushes, and no swamps. I witnessed unbelievable destruction. The Çukurova turned into a desert of agriculture. This is the reality of our century, the actual conditions of our times.(qtd. in Andaç 61–62; my translation)I suggest that Kemal's lamentation here introduces non-Western stories, placing post-Ottoman vulnerability and resilience into the Anthropocene, our current geological era in which humans as a collective are said to have become a geophysical force on a planetary scale.2 The above excerpt encourages the reader to embark on an alternative reading in which the anthropogenic changes have deep and environmentally damaging roots in the Middle Eastern region, including Turkey (see Inal and Turhan 1–9). Despite the global and universal staging of the Anthropocene within North America and Western Europe, it is crucial here to underscore how the Anthropocene renders both a global process of anthropogenic climate change and a local laying down of industrial change in other landscapes and cities beyond its Eurocentric roots and routes.Within this context, this article argues that Kemal's literary works speak well to the concerns of the Anthropocene epoch, characterized by rapid and fundamental human-driven alterations of Earth, revealing longue duree linkages between weather, war, industrialization, empire, agriculture, urbanization, and deforestation that have created extraordinary changes on local and global scales. In the above passage, where we read the loss of the woods from Misis to the Mediterranean, Kemal manifests an acute awareness that the tree already disappears amid a vanishing ecosystem. Elsewhere, Kemal recounts the destruction of the forests and swamps that grants the Çukurova region its richness and vitality. At the same time, he shows how the particular process of deforestation dramatically changes ordinary lives of both human and nonhuman communities in the area during the modernizing and westernizing processes in the aftermath of the Ottoman Empire. This dramatic change is illustrated in Hüyükteki Nar Ağacı (The Pomegranate Tree on the Knoll). Andaç quotes Kemal as follows: [End Page 33]Çukurova was a whole forest of pomegranate trees from here to the sea at one time. In spring and summer time, these trees would be covered with red blossoms, so that the whole area from here to Ayas would be all red and would wave like the sea. Black snakes used to mate... (shrink)

The Natural Contract (1990) marks the emergence of the environmental question in Serres’s work that became central in his later publications. Over the twenty years when the Anthropocene emerged as a distinct narrative entangling geological time with the history of human technology, Serres developed a rather similar “Grand Récit” embracing deep geological time, biological evolution, the process of hominization, and the future of humankind, although he did not enter into conversation with the leading figures of the interdisciplinary field of (...) Anthropocene studies. This paper seeks to characterize Serres’s position in the field of environmental philosophy as it has been reconfigured by the introduction of the concept of the Anthropocene. It first briefly surveys the personal pathway that led Serres to his diagnosis of a global climate crisis. It then compares the concepts that guided his analysis with the concepts debated in Anthropocene studies. Finally, I will suggest that the ethical measures proposed by Serres to face the crisis did not help to bring him into dialogue with the Anthropocene scholars. (shrink)

This essay interprets Schelling's positive philosophy as an effort to conceive nature as a gift. Schelling ruminated throughout his career on the paradoxical relation between humanity and nature that is expressed in the contemporary term “Anthropocene,” but this essay argues that Schelling's most productive response to this paradox can be found in his reflections on how to receive the gift of nature. After laying out the project of positive philosophy, the essay first explores Schelling's effort to conceive nature as (...) a gift in On the World-Soul, and then considers how this project founders in the First Projection of a System of Nature Philosophy. After the resources of the natural sciences showed themselves to be inadequate to the task of conceiving nature as a gift, Schelling returned to mythology in his late philosophy, and the concluding section of this essay traces how an often overlooked Epicurean strain in Schelling's late philosophy can help us see what is entailed in conceiving nature as a gift. (shrink)

In the Parthenon frieze, the time of mortals and the time of gods seem to merge. Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued that with the advent of the Anthropocene the times of human history and of the Earth are similarly coming together. Are humans entering the ‘monumental time’ of the Earth, to stand alongside the Olympian gods of the other geological forces? This article first looks at the cultural shifts leading to the modern idea of separate human and Earth histories. It (...) examines the changing use of monuments to mediate between human and other temporalities. It explores the use of ‘stratigraphic sections’ as natural monuments to mark transitions between the major time units of Earth history, and the erection of intentional monuments nearby. It suggests that the Anthropocene, as a geological epoch-in-the-making, may challenge the whole system of monumental semiotics used to stabilize our way of thinking about deep time. (shrink)

The paper discusses some difficulties that life in Anthropocene poses to our ethical thinking. It describes the sort of ethical task that individuals find themselves confronting when dealing with the planetary environmental quandaries that characterise the new epoch. It then asks what, given the situation, would count as environmentally virtuous ways of looking at and going about our lives, and how relevant virtues can be developed. It is argued that the practice of gardening is distinctively conducive to that objective. (...) Finally, some garden virtues that will be of special importance in the Anthropocene, but have so far been largely neglected by environmental ethicists, are listed and described. (shrink)

This article explores the specific role of courage in the context of the Anthropocene’s moment; it first examines Aristotle’s conception of virtues, focusing on courage, before comparing it to Confucian thought and analyzing the historical dialogue between Western and Chinese traditions on ethics through the works of François Noël (1651–1729). Aristotle views moral cultivation as a social process wherein habits shape inner dispositions; in his view, courage is linked to other virtues, such as temperance and justice. For Aristotle, courage (...) implies the appropriate balance between extremes and must be directed toward a worthy end, such as promoting positive change within a community. This Aristotelian perspective was later incorporated into a biblical framework by Aquinas and Suarez, emphasizing dichotomies between body and soul, as well as between humans and other living beings. These dichotomies must be challenged in the face of the Anthropocene’s emergencies. The second part of this contribution proceeds to a detour examining Confucian ethics, which rests on a different anthropology, emphasizing continuities rather than discontinuities. Like Aristotelian thought, Confucian thought also underscores moral education within a community; it prioritizes humanity, embodied through empathy and loyalty. In the Analects, courage is balanced by a sense of rituals and righteousness. Mencius further distinguishes several types of courage, stressing self-cultivation and the ruler’s responsibility to make empathetic, appropriate decisions for the community’s sake. From this perspective, courage is understood as the continuous perseverance in self-cultivation, coupled with a firm intention oriented toward the good of the community. Zhu Xi’s comments on Zilu’s courage in the Analects extend this Confucian tradition. Finally, this article highlights how a dialogue between Aristotelian and Confucian ethics began four centuries ago, particularly through Noël’s Philosophia Sinica, which combined these traditions. This inter-religious approach to ethics, enriched by figures such as Aquinas, Suarez, Zhu Xi, and neo-Confucian thinkers, requires re-evaluation because the understanding of personal ethics and nature has evolved. The modern naturalistic approach, with its emphasis on dichotomies, has contributed to a mechanistic view of nature, fostering its exploitation, and a devaluation of the body. This contrast highlights the urgent need for renewed dialogue between Western and Chinese ethical traditions to address contemporary challenges, with François Noël serving as a historical witness of these exchanges. (shrink)

We live in the anthropocene, the era of global warming. How are Americans responding to this predicament? To answer the question we need a philosophical concept of a collective mood and then empirical support to make it concrete. The result is a collective ground state. It has gone through the stages of confident prosperity, the dissolution of that confidence, the present state of anxious disorientation, and the hopeful prospect of grounded responsibility.

The Anthropocene crisis is frequently described as the rarefaction of resources or resources per capita. However, both energy and minerals correspond to fundamentally conserved quantities from the perspective of physics. A specific concept is required to understand the rarefaction of available resources. This concept, entropy, pertains to energy and matter configurations and not just to their sheer amount. However, the physics concept of entropy is insufficient to understand biological and social organizations. Biological phenomena display both historicity and systemic properties. (...) A biological organization, the ability of a specific living being to last over time, results from history, expresses itself by systemic properties, and may require generating novelties The concept of anti-entropy stems from the combination of these features. We propose that Anthropocene changes disrupt biological organizations by randomizing them, that is, decreasing anti-entropy. Moreover, second-order disruptions correspond to the decline of the ability to produce functional novelties, that is, to produce anti-entropy. (shrink)

This volume weaves together a variety of perspectives aimed at confronting a spectrum of ethico-political global challenges arising in the Anthropocene which affect the future of life on planet earth. In this book, the authors offer a multi-faceted approach to address the consequences of its imaginary and projective directions. The chapters span the disciplines of political economy, cybernetics, environmentalism, bio-science, psychoanalysis, bioacoustics, documentary film, installation art, geoperformativity, and glitch aesthetics. The first section attempts to flesh out new aspects of (...) current debates. Questions over the Capitaloscene are explored via conflations of class and climate, revisiting the eco-Marxist analysis of capitalism, and the financial system that thrives on debt. The second section explores the imaginary narratives that raise questions regarding non-human involvement. The third section addresses ’geoartisty,’ the counter artistic responses to the speculariztion of climate disasters, questioning eco-documentaries, and what a post-anthropocentric art might look like. The last section addresses the pedagogical response to the Anthropocene. (shrink)

The dominant current in the contemporary environmental movement fails to make the connection between the preservation of the environment and the survival of humans. The fashionable concept of the “Anthropocene” is not fully adequate to get to grips with the full gravity of the situation. Contemporary human society, based on a neo-liberal market economy, is “locked in” to a productivist mode of existence, so that it will be extremely difficult to abandon the goal of “growth” and to achieve a (...) sustainable relationship with the eco-system on which human existence depends. The “TAC” thesis, that “Technology is Anthropologically Constitutive,” has a dark side: technology may be anthropologically destructive. (shrink)

Abstract:Enlightenment era optimism that technological and educational developments offer a progressive path to plenty and liberation supports a hope that human toil may be progressively reduced. The Development Thesis defended by G. A. Cohen is a piece of that Enlightenment optimism. The Development Thesis holds that productive forces tend to develop throughout history. The tendency for such an increase in productive forces to occur is, according to Cohen’s argument, due to persistent facts about human nature. If Cohen is correct, there (...) is a tendency toward progress of an important sort, and this progress is due in significant part to human nature. But the development of productive forces also destroys nonhuman natural value. In the era of the Anthropocene this is occurring on a planetary scale. The simultaneous development and destruction entails that claims of progress must rely on an all-things-considered judgment. But due to the plurality of the relevant values, which cannot be compared according to a common metric, rational disagreement about the existence of progress and our progressive nature can be expected to persist. (shrink)

The recent proposal by the Independent Expert Panel of the Stop Ecocide initiative to include the crime of ecocide in the International Criminal Court's Rome Statute has raised expectations for preventing and remedying severe environmental harm through international prosecution. As alluring as this image is, we argue that ecocide prosecutions may be the most difficult, perhaps even impossible, in precisely the cases that the ICC would need to be concerned with; namely, the gravest global incidents of environmental harm, including those (...) associated with planetary climate change. We explore a series of questions about the panel's formulation of ecocide that resonate with longer debates around criminalizing environmental harm but take on new dimensions amid the Anthropocene and after twenty years of ICC trials. Ecocide must contend with the hard lessons learned concerning the ICC's limitations in realizing justice in a fraught international political context and also with fundamental challenges to knowledge and legitimacy arising from the uncertainty and dynamic socioenvironmental context of the Anthropocene. The proposed amendment, if adopted, risks ineffective prosecutions or even perverse outcomes for the environment itself. This risk, however, may characterize any effort to prosecute ecocide internationally in the Anthropocene unless the terms of international criminal law are fundamentally rethought. (shrink)

Humans are remaking the planet, with the planetary human imprint so profound that all planetary systems are being changed: the atmosphere, the hydrosphere and cryosphere (water and ice), the lithosphere (Earth's crust), and the biosphere (the community of life). The changes are so deep and far reaching that a new geological epoch, the first effected by humans, has set in, the Anthropocene. It succeeds the only geological epoch human civilizations have known, the late Holocene. The tattoo of the Holocene, (...) climate stability, is replaced by climate volatility, mass eco-social uncertainty, and extinction. Because the Anthropocene is itself the outcome of cumulative human choices, everything in response also turns on ethics. In this case, that entails rethinking and reforming human responsibility. This essay pursues that, after making the case for climate and the Anthropocene as a new prism for Religious Ethics, one that changes the work of Religious Ethics itself. (shrink)

This article examines Dipesh Chakrabarty’s ecological theory to explore inherent tensions, ambiguities, and contradictions concerning human agency in Anthropocene discourse. Contra most commentators, I argue that Chakrabarty’s account of the Anthropocene remains neither modernistic nor posthumanistic per se because his view of the human turns out to be consistently inconsistent. Chakrabarty apparently advances an anti-anthropocentric and posthumanist explanation of the climate crisis by shifting his focus from the ‘species’ to the ‘planet’. However, his account of the planet remains (...) within the modernistic paradigm that privileges progress, rationality, and human agency because he tacitly embraces the narrative of enlightenment, or transition from ignorance to knowledge, when describing a passage from the global to the planetary. Chakrabarty’s narrative of enlightenment thus epitomizes the remains of anthropocentrism in Anthropocene discourse, registering the extent to which it retains beliefs in human agency, rationality, and singularity. (shrink)

The nomenclature of the Anthropocene for this geological epoch marks in a novel way the global impact of human activity on the world. Consequently, it creatively raises the alarm bell of global environmental devastation. However, the narrative implicit in the Anthropocene presents challenges to use it as a departure point for developing an ethics of responsibility, as it contains morally relevant but ambiguous etiologies, phenomenological challenges to discrete human agency, and the potential erasure of both causes and victims (...) of global environmental degradation. This challenge compounds the challenges to traditional models of responsibility-as-imputation by global forms of environmental degradation signaled in the Anthropocene. Our new epoch demands new models of responsibility. This article draws upon neglected work by Paul Ricoeur to reconstruct a twofold model of responsibility: (1) responsibility-as-imputation and (2) responsibility for the fragile other and the domains that amplify fragility. It shows that a twofold model can more completely respond to harms elicited by anthropogenic environmental degradation by maintaining the benefits of traditional models of responsibility-as-accountability while dramatically expanding the subject and objects of responsibility through attention to the fragile and thus better serving us as we navigate responsibility in the Anthropocene. (shrink)

In this text I investigate the increasing usage of the Rights of Nature to approach the task of Stewardship for the Earth. The Ecuadorian constitution of 2008 introduces the indigenous concept of Pachamama and interpretes nature as a subject of rights. Reflecting the two 2017 cases of the Whanganui River and the Gangotri and Yamunotri Glaciers, my main argument is that, although the language of individual rights relies on modern subjectivity as well as the constitutionalism of the secular nation state, (...) it is obviously seen as a trans-cultural tool to justify Human Stewardship over the Earth in the Age of Anthropocene. I argue that the new Rights of Nature debate “provides” a straightforward justification of the Stewardship for the Earth and it includes two moments aimed to transcend European Modernity. The Rights Approach justifies obligations towards nature beyond human interests and it appeals to indigenous knowledge as an alternative sphere of argumentation. The relation of this endevor to the Anthropocene is twofold: The indigenous worldviews can now be translated into Rights of Nature because of the two core items of the Anthropocene that are gaining more and more acceptance: the idea of the Earth as a system and of history as a non-linear process. The scientific description of the Earth system offered by the Anthropocene supports holistic narratives of the Rights of Nature and facilitates the recognition of non-Western worldviews. At the same time the Rights of Nature help to clarify the normative claims implicit in the Anthropocene because the integrity of natural items and processes is presented as the explicit reason for a responsible human stewardship towards the Earth. (shrink)

On 29 August 2016 the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG), headed by geologist Jan Zalasiewicz from the University of Leicester, officially presented its recommendation concerning the declaration of a...

The concept of the Anthropocene draws attention to human activity's impact on the planet at the geological scale. It is tempting to reason that like evolution, a heliocentric solar system or quantum mechanics, climate science compels us to accept as real a radical new ontology, the ‘anthroposphere’, with far-reaching social and political consequences. I wish to argue that this temptation should be resisted. The Anthropocene cannot be understood entirely as a natural scientific phenomenon, although it can be treated (...) as such for certain purposes. It is also an irreducibly social phenomenon. This is not to say that it is a socially constructed concept like nationhood, but that it is constituted by natural causal processes that are irreducibly entangled with social causal processes. Adopting the Anthropocene as a working concept therefore requires that we understand the causal processes involved in bringing it about as social causal processes, while also viewing these processes as objectual, open to public scrutiny and capable of compelling public assent. Social causes are not, however, easily subjected to such a naturalistic treatment. I conclude that the Anthropocene is not currently a suitable candidate for inclusion in a naturalist ontology. (shrink)

The idea of the Anthropocene postulates that, epistemically and ontologically, we must consider the climatic, geological, and biological systems of the Earth as essentially bound up with the technological systems that have been developed by human beings. This idea has been aesthetically configured through images of ‘Spaceship Earth’ and in the orbital pictures of light patterns emitted by human settlements across the globe. I will argue that this shift towards the idea of the Anthropocene is complicit with a (...) certain kind of technological messianism, which assumes that the most serious problems of global warming and environmental despoliation will be solved by future technologies. Furthermore the impact of this futural orientation, which includes the idea of transhumanist adaptations to the consequences of climate change, has been to intensify the nexus between technological innovation, neoliberal economics, and entrepreneurial heroism that has come to shape the collective imagination of the future. This, I will argue, has profound consequences for the way human beings orientate themselves to their ethical and political responsibilities in respect of climate change, human suffering, and cosmopolitan democracy. (shrink)

The diagnosis of a new geological epoch, The ‘Anthropocene’, has implications far beyond geological science. If human activity has disrupted the planet, then this diagnosis potentially disrupts socio-political conventions. This article assesses the implications the Anthropocene has for democratic politics, by delineating three challenges: challenges of knowledge, time and boundary. In contrast to the claim that democratic institutions are unable to adequately respond to these challenges, I suggest that they might be strengthened through an engagement with them. Following (...) an ‘agonistic’ understanding of politics, I argue that the contestation instigated by the challenges of the Anthropocene is key to democratic renewal. Just as democracy in the Anthropocene can be enhanced through an agonistic approach, agonistic theory can be enriched through an engagement with the Anthropocene. (shrink)

Abstract:This assessment of the field explores a confluence of feminist thinking about the 20th-century Great Acceleration in the United States: post-World-War II projects of modernization made the security of white nuclear families global models of well-being, while banishing the work of their securitization to non-white sacrifice zones—which eventually came to encompass most of the earth. “Anthropocene” is thus a project of making race and gender as much as making capital. The essay continues into feminist arguments for limiting the (...) class='Hi'>Anthropocene to maintain spaces of more-than-human livability. We end with work of emerging scholars. (shrink)

Noting a lack of consensus in the recent literature on the Anthropocene, this article considers how social anthropologists might contribute to its theorizing and dating. Empirically it draws on the author’s long-term fieldwork in Hungary. It is argued that ethnographic methods are essential for grasping subjectivities, including temporal orientations and perceptions of epochal transformation. When it comes to historical periodization, however, ethnography is obviously insufficient and proposals privileging the last half-century, or just the last quarter of a century, seem (...) inadequate. Influential theories, which define ‘modernity’ in terms of developments emanating from the countries of the North Atlantic in the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries (Gellner, Polanyi, Wolf), remain partial and Eurocentric. To comprehend the social preconditions of the Anthropocene in a holistic fashion (the crucial contribution of comparative anthropology), it is necessary to follow Jack Goody and trace how the urban revolutions of the Bronze Age united Eurasia through the diffusion of new forms of economy, polity and cosmology. (shrink)

The Anthropocene, understood from the perspective of the creators of Earth System Science and IPCC, calls for global governance, which tends to be understood as an epistocratic, technocratic affair leaving little room for reflective rationality and politics in the agonistic sense. Using the republican repertoire, I argue that global governance thus understood is actually the last thing we need. I suggest that global environmental institutions ought to be based on ‘constitutional republicanism’. Key elements of this approach are a Machiavellian (...) appreciation of discord, agonism and ‘the political’, combined with a realistic assessment of the very diverse interests at stake in global climate politics, hence very diverse ideas about the benefits and burdens of specific global environmental strategies; and institutions based on ideas uniquely developed by republicans from Machiavelli to Mouffe allowing for human and science’s fallibility on the one hand, irreducible moral and political diversity on the other. (shrink)

In this article, I address and argue against the tendency to understand the anthropocene as inaugurating the end of nature. I conduct two key moves. First, by way of an engagement with the concept of anthropocene technology I explain how understanding the anthropocene as the end of nature prevents us from recognizing what the anthropocene is all about: interventionism. Secondly, I illustrate how a nondualist understanding of the human-nature relation allows us to recognize interventionism as the (...) hallmark of the anthropocene without falling back into the hierarchical human-nature conceptions that underlie interventionism. A nondualist framework that conserves the human-nature distinction helps us in our ability to relate critically to contemporary science and technology in the anthropocene. I illustrate the conceptual narrative of the article through the specific case of gene drive technology development. (shrink)

"This book is about the way shifting conceptions of ecology, biology and technology significantly alter what it means to write poetry about nature in a time of environmental crisis. It offers a radical re-reading of three major British poets, Ted Hughes, Derek Mahon and JH Prynne, and their aesthetic strategies for negotiating the complex feedbacks between organisms and their environments in a technological world. Their poetry not only provides ways of thinking and communicating about ecology and biology, but shows how (...) the unpredictable processes of thought and communication impact on organic life in the Anthropocene, providing a substantial challenge to aesthetics, ethics and politics" --. (shrink)

Industrialisation, urbanisation and economic development have produced unprecedented improvements in human health. They have also produced unprecedented exploitation of Earth’s life support systems, moving the planet into a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene—one defined by human influence on natural systems. The health sector has been complicit in this influence. Bioethics, too, must acknowledge its role—the environmental threats that will shape human health in this century represent a ‘perfect moral storm’ challenging the ethical theories of the last. The US conservationist (...) Aldo Leopold saw this gathering storm more clearly than many, and in his Land Ethic describes the beginnings of a route to safe passage. Its starting point is a reinterpretation of the ethical relationship between humanity and the ‘land community’, the ecosystems we live within and depend upon; moving us from ‘conqueror’ to ‘plain member and citizen’ of that community. The justice of the Land Ethic questions many presuppositions implicit to discussions of the topic in biomedical ethics. By valuing the community in itself—in a way irreducible to the welfare of its members—it steps away from the individualism axiomatic in contemporary bioethics. Viewing ourselves as citizens of the land community also extends the moral horizons of healthcare from a solely human focus. Taking into account the ‘stability’ of the community requires intergenerational justice. The resulting vision of justice in healthcare—one that takes climate and environmental justice seriously—could offer health workers an ethic fit for the future. (shrink)

“No one can take the other’s dying away from him,” as Martin Heidegger famously claimed, but what he was significantly silent about was that beings, both human and non-human, can mutually contribute to each other’s death. By focusing on the interrelatedness of deaths, this paper presents a reversal of the Heideggerian perspective on the relation between Dasein’s mineness and “being-toward-death.” Drawing upon the structural meaning of death, which consists in the fact that no one can replace me in that I (...) will die, I show that the phenomenon of contributing-toward-the-death-of-others individuates Dasein as well. This will allow us to reread the threat of the They in the context of the Anthro- pocene, elucidating the non-transferable character of my share in others’ death. Finally, the paper aims to deepen our understanding of the change in the character of death which has been brought about by technology in the Anthropocene. (shrink)

Panpsychism, the view that the material elements of the universe have mental properties, has until quite recently remained in the periphery of the philosophical mainstream due to its blatant contradiction of normative Cartesian dualities, which divided the world into mental properties and material properties, that are devoid of value and sentience. The recent geological shift to the Anthropocene Age, in which human culture can be found in pesticide resistant mosquitoes and the ozone heavens, has undermined the foundations of Cartesian (...) dualism, making panpsychism a credible alternative. Yet some panpsychists go too far by conflating all distinctions between living and nonliving, human and nonhuman, evolved and made entities. Using Whitehead's process philosophy, this article will defend panpsychism and develop the philosophical criteria of causation, relationality, unity and intentionality to differentiate between natural living forms, natural nonliving forms, and human artifacts. (shrink)

The question of the moral demands that humans, posthumans, and nonhumans in the Anthropocene put up on persons now living generally takes the form of supererogatory demands—that is, moral obligations with a perfectionist structure leading to obligations “above and beyond the call of duty” and extreme individual and collective sacrifice. David Roden construes this by deontology; Toby Ord, following Derek Parfit, by consequentualism. Such obligations are akin to the martyrdom of saints: but must our expectations of the Anthropocene (...) necessarily lead to this kind of moral obligation? Can it be mitigated and how? Meta-ethically, it is a highly externalist form of motivation with no concurrent rewards. In this respect, the inquiry is to be pursued through understanding how to align horizons of experience and of expectation. Normatively, it very much concerns how we define and regard persons—present and future, human and non-human, organic or artificial, conscious or not, intelligent or otherwise—since personhood and moral obligation are deeply connected concepts. In my conference paper I want to open and provoke discussion of the current and possible views of the supererogatory moral obligations in and toward the Anthropocene. (shrink)

This book puts forward a radical, unorthodox thesis with respect to the Anthropocene, the philosophy of Deleuze/Guattari and education. This book analyses the Anthropocene for its unconscious drives and develops a parallel mode of education and social change.

The natural sciences and religion are two of the primary modern social practices that, for better and worse, shape our relationship to nature. Ralph Waldo Emerson helps us to think about their relation to one another and the virtues needed for the perfection of each. His insights about virtue and the “religious sentiment” shed light on how we moderns might make a home of a world indelibly marked by science, technology, and anthropogenic change. In addition to the quintessentially Emersonian virtue (...) of self‐trust, the virtues of faith, hope, and love are vital for this home‐making endeavor. Emerson, thus, prefigures what prominent environmental ethicists have described as a “turn to virtue in climate ethics,” as well as what some see as a return to religious communities, values, and ideals, as the way forward. By guiding readers through Emerson's early work Nature and his late essay “Worship,” this article provides an account of these three traditionally theological Emersonian virtues of the Anthropocene. (shrink)

The Anthropocene prompts renewed critical reflection on some of the central tenets of modern thought including narratives of ‘progress’, the privileging of the nation state, and the universalist rendering of the human. In this context it is striking that ‘rights’, a quintessentially modern mode of articulating normativity, are often presumed to have an enduring relevance in the contemporary moment, exemplified in renewed recourse to rights in their attribution to parts of the nonhuman world. Our intervention contemplates ways in which (...) the apparent disorientations of the Anthropocene might allow for a generative reorientation of some of these presuppositions. We critically consider the institutional and discursive limitations of rights and the ambivalence of rights language, and argue that the monism that rights so often implies limits the capacity to foster generative encounters between Indigenous and non-Indigenous legal traditions. We develop a critical discourse of obligation, understood here to both precede and exceed the rights-duty correlate so central to modern law. An attentiveness to the priority of obligation, we argue, might allow us to foreground an ethics of encounter between traditions, to examine the limits of modernity’s legal and political imaginary, and to pursue a ‘radical re-storying’ of laws for the Anthropocene. (shrink)

The archive produces a linear time that reaches towards ‘what could be’ by asserting ‘what has been’, providing us reassurance of our existence through the assertion of a reliably past past. But the Anthropocene is an era of uncontained material ramifications, where the past juts into the future and temporality warps as change accelerates unexpectedly. As an ecological and geologic epoch, documentation of the Anthropocene inherently has a relationship to natural history museums and archives. These institutions, however, troublingly (...) rest on what Elaine Graham calls ‘ontological hygiene’ – the separateness of the human subject from ‘nature’. The Anthropocene however, challenges the western post-Enlightenment binary of man vs. nature, as it (supposedly) naturalizes humans into an earth systems force. As such, documentation of this epoch might resist ontological sanitation. This article outlines an artistic research practice to create artefacts of the Anthropocene – one that invites material idiosyncrasies, objects-in-becoming, ephemerality, and decay. I suggest that artistic ‘anarchices’ prioritize process over objects, and resist linear and static representation in lieu of material, embodied and sensory artefacts. These include relational encounters with waste materials, reworked forms of ‘geology’, edible artefacts and multimedia works at landfills and feral sites. The anarchives are interpolated by a rejection of hegemonic logic, positivism and ‘objective’ truths about environmental phenomena; Situated, ambiguous and material knowledges are inwrought into the so-called Anthropocene (and any alternatives to this term). By focusing on waste as an analytical category, I explore some of the ontological breakdowns present in the Anthropocene and question how to unorder systems and disturb materiality. (shrink)

A growing number of geologists, geophysicists, and other Earth scientists now claim that human caused changes in the chemistry of the atmosphere, oceans, and land are so pervasive as to constitute a new geological epoch characterized by humanity’s impact on the planet. They argue that these changes are so profound that future geologists will easily recognize a discernible boundary in the stratigraphy of rock separating this new epoch from the previous geological epoch, i.e., the Holocene. They propose to name this (...) new geological epoch the “Anthropocene,” a term meaning the age of man. Common to this view is the claim that humans are now the ecologically dominant force on Earth. This paper compares the understanding of human self-identity developed by the defenders of the Anthropocene discourse with the understanding of human self-identity developed by radical ecologists. It concludes by arguing that only an ecologically and dialogically informed conception of human self-identity can provide an adequate point of departure for an ecologically benign form of human dwelling on this planet. (shrink)

The article has two aims. First, it provides a view of why the standard liberal-democratic political theory is unfit for the Anthropocene. Then, it defends two claims: that the fittest politics for the Anthropocene is to be fully non-anthropocentric and that the best model of a non-anthropocentric political theory is to be grounded in the notion of ‘ecological citizenship’, which can be easily extended to non-human living beings and even to non-living objects, such as ecosystems. The latter claim (...) is defended by endorsing and enlarging Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka’s views of animal citizenship rights and by putting forward a view of the Anthropocene as an age of massive domestication of non-human nature. (shrink)

The idea that we are living in the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch defined by human activity, has gained substantial currency across the academy and with the broader public. Within the earth sciences, however, the question of the Anthropocene is hotly debated, recognized as a question that gets at both the foundations of geological science and issues of broad philosophical importance. For example, official recognition of the Anthropocene requires us to find a way to use the methods (...) of historical science to make predictions. It also involves determining the role that political motivations should play in establishing scientific kinds. I bring the perspective of philosophy of science to bear on these questions, ultimately arguing that formal recognition of the Anthropocene should be indefinitely deferred. 1A New Epoch 1.1Criteria for designating a new epoch2The Future Geologist’s Perspective 2.1Climate change2.2The fossil record, excluding humans2.3The human fossil record2.4Direct anthropogenic deposits2.5Chemical markers2.6Hydrology2.7Summing up3The Synchronic Perspective4The Anthropocene Is Not yet Set in Stone. (shrink)

More than a decade ago, Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen first suggested that we were now living in the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch in which human dominance of biological, chemical and geological processes on Earth was already an undeniable reality. Crutzen's ideas inspired Christian Schwagerl to do further documentation and to write this stimulating book. Well-equipped to take on such a task, Schwagerl has been a political, science and environmental journalist for more than 20 years. He first (...) studied biology at the University of Berlin, completing his Master of Science degree at the University of Reading (UK). He is a past winner of the Georg von Holtzbrinck Prize for Science Journalism, the IUCN-Reuters Media Awards for excellence in Environmental Reporting (Category Europe, together with Philip Bethge and Rafaela von Bredow) and the Econsense Journalism Award for sustainability. (shrink)

This study reassesses the concept of the Anthropocene as a new geological age as it is influencing contemporary debates in social theory. As a unit of geological time whose changes are allegedly caused, directly and indirectly, by human beings, this scientific concept challenges the existing constructions of theoretical binaries, such as nature/culture, environment/society, objectivity/subjectivity or happenstance/design, in social theory. The analysis suggests many understandings of the Anthropocene in social theory are politicized over-interpretations of natural events, and these moves (...) appear to be developing moral rhetorics of, and operational plans for, managing the Anthropocene to create specific outcomes for those who are the managers as well as the managed. The fact that human beings do not, in fact, have this measure of technical control is ignored by advocates of Anthropocenarian politics to advance their policy agendas. (shrink)