Politics and the Anthropocene

Duncan Kelly

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781509534203, 9781509534197
• eBook ISBN: 9781509534210
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

The Anthropocene has become central to understanding the intimate connections between human life and the natural environment, but it has fractured our sense of time and possibility. What implications does that fracturing have for how we should think about politics in these new times? In this cutting-edge intervention, Duncan Kelly considers how this new geological era could shape our future by engaging with the recent past of our political thinking. If politics remains a short-term affair governed by electoral cycles, could an Anthropocenic sense of time, value and prosperity be built into it, altering long-established views about abundance, energy and growth? Is the Anthropocene so disruptive that it is no more than a harbinger of ecological doom, or can modern politics adapt by rethinking older debates about states, territories, and populations? Kelly rejects both pessimistic fatalism about humanity's demise, and an optimistic fatalism that makes the Anthropocene into a problem too big for politics, best left to the market or technology to solve. His skilful defence of the potential for democratic politics to negotiate this challenge is an indispensable guide to the ideas that matter most to understanding this epochal transformation.

1
Timings

Modern techniques and practices of government have been concerned with the effects of global warming, environmental transformation and sustainability for hundreds of years. In fact, modern representative politics and modern thinking about the environment and the space or territory where politics takes place, and the broader environment or climate surrounding it, emerged hand in glove. That we have been thinking about both for so long, though, often means that the temporal boundaries of how we think about their interconnections now tend to intersect and overlap with a great many other issues in our shared political imaginaries. So much so that it is hard to untangle the threads and traces. They form something like a dream world of complex representations in our minds, and they require something analogous to that which Sigmund Freud called a form of ‘dream work’, or engaged interpretation, in order to get straight what we’re thinking about. This is even more necessary when we start to conider conceptual innovations like the Anthropocene, which threaten to destabilize our ways of thinking, often in uncanny ways.

Simplifying somewhat, it would not be wrong, though, to argue that the shared concern of modern forms of representative politics with environmental discourse emerged in earnest with the birth of political economy as a subject of inquiry. This intellectual field first began to offer systematic reflections upon the relationship between global trade and commerce, and international war and peace. Would commercial interconnection and intercourse lead to peace, or was economic competition a form of war by other means, requiring new sorts of reasons of state underpinned by what David Hume called ‘jealousy of trade’? Behind such visions lay claims about how best to maximize natural resources, husbanding them in ways designed to maximize comparative advantage, and how to really understand the centrality of climate to constitutionalism.¹

This developed, particularly after the French Revolution, into a sort of environmental utopianism with the first so-called ‘utopian socialists’. They considered novel types of administrative, cultural, spiritual and political forms of reorganization after the terror of revolutionary politics, and they presumed that part of their remit had to do with controlling the weather.² Forms of techno-utopianism and what we often call geo-engineering have been a standard feature of modern environmental and eco-socialist discourse ever since. Today, geo-engineering has many definitions, but the prosaic formula of the Royal Society captures the thrust of the issue, which is ‘the deliberate large-scale manipulation of the planetary environment to counteract anthropogenic climate change’.³ While technology makes new forms of manipulation possible, the principle of manipulation is, historically speaking, hardly news. If you’re interested in managing or governing society, then managing the weather or your environment (given its importance to those resources you need in order to survive) is obviously a major issue in terms of thinking about your own political sustainability.⁴

Yet, in a different setting and several generations later, Russian scientists and French philosophers in the first half of the twentieth century began to consider the relationship between atmospheric systems and environmental collapse. They did so by considering both the ways in which the use of natural resources by humankind had profound atmospheric consequences, and how human consciousness evolved in collaboration with these wider features of life on earth. The pioneering work by Russian geologist and natural scientist Vladimir Vernadsky focused on what he called the biosphere (the sphere of biological life) and a related control system grounded in human cognitive capacities (what he termed the noosphere). His book on the subject was published in 1926. And together with Teilhard de Chardin and Eduard Le Roy, these figures of the 1920s and 1930s were foundational for the later developments in policy-related sciences concerned with human control of the environment.⁵ At this point, human–nature relations were coming to be connected through the concepts of ecology, cosmology and consciousness. They would be up-scaled and redeployed in the post-war period in the form of systems theory, complexity theory, cybernetics and rational choice models of strategy, as ideas about environmental catastrophe, crisis and ‘fallout’ renewed their force upon human and political imaginations under the threat of potentially lethal nuclear annihilation.

If for Vernadsky, the noosphere was simply a stage in the development of living matter, it was one that rendered human action in the wider biosphere capable of changing, and therefore possibly even controlling, it. This was an important precursor intellectually to the concept of the Anthropocene today, as Crutzen well knew. The biosphere began to resurface in wider scientific discourse about policy in 1968.⁶ But these connections had first been mediated by other Russian figures, particularly the mathematician Nikita Moiseev. It was Moiseev who adapted computer modelling and simulations of nuclear winter and environmental fallout in ways that were first shaped by this idea of a global biosphere that might, at least in theory, be regulated and controlled. And though these broader historical connections were hardly lost on Crutzen and Stoermer in the development of a concept that showed human transformation of the planetary atmosphere and environment, it was the possibility of changing the direction of travel by human control and regulation of these climate systems that they were increasingly keen to consider.⁷ In fact, although the Anthropocene has become a counsel of despair for some pessimistic fatalists who fear that human beings can do nothing to offset existentially threatening climate change, for optimistic fatalists like Crutzen and others, things can always be changed if you can learn to manage the systems.⁸ The optimism of this science might very well overestimate its action-guiding force for global politics, but it certainly does stand in some tension with the often-pessimistic fatalism of much environmental political theorizing. However, both the optimistic and the pessimistic fatalistic registers leave little room for the anti-fatalistic sensibility that is at heart required for any plausibly democratic politics to retain its dynamism and avoid complacency. If an appropriately ‘Anthropocened’ politics is to avoid fatalism, it might have to consider the connections between Anthropocene time and political time a little more closely.

*

Unsurprisingly, the challenge of the Anthropocene for geologists and natural scientists has always been one of timing, but in their thinking about the emergence of a new time for the Anthropocene, they veer straightforwardly into politics. For example, in their provocative early formulation, Crutzen and Stoermer suggested that the real birth of the Anthropocene could be dated to around 1784, with the patenting of a ‘parallel motion’ mechanism in James Watt’s steam engine.⁹ The wider thought, of course, was that the advent of radical new technologies associated with the industrial revolution signalled a moment in which the imbrication between human agency and the natural environment took a new and more fateful direction. Industry and politics ran together. The problem, though, for a stratigraphic designation is that there must be a durable trace of this in the sedimentary layers of the earth, a version of the proverbial ‘golden spike’ that renders such a change visible.¹⁰

Although the industrial revolution was a revolution in the use and production of energy, the broader transition from a largely organic economy towards more mechanized and industrial production took quite some time.¹¹ Moreover, what stratigraphic trace in the sedimentary layers of the planet could the steam engine leave? In part, the answer to this lies with what steam power prompted in terms of a step-change in coal and fossil fuel extraction. This marked another level in planetary energy use, albeit unevenly distributed, and began the sort of transformation between human agency and environmental change that could signal the emergence of something akin to the Anthropocene.

In part, what flows from this looks like a version of the argument presented in the schematic thesis of Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson in Why Nations Fail.¹² For these authors, political and economic success builds on the positive feedback loops provided by ‘inclusive’ representative institutions for economic profit and advance, and leads to early-adopter advantage, evidenced in the rise of the Dutch and English empires. There are particular ironies for the Anthropocene, however, when seen through this prism, for the ‘inclusive’ institutions that bolstered rapidly developing empires and nations in the eighte...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue: The New Political Times of the Anthropocene
• 1 Timings
• 2 Ecological Inequalities
• 3 Limiting Growth?
• 4 Ecological Debts
• 5 Population Futures
• 6 Value
• Epilogue: Historical Possibilities for an Anthropocened Politics
• Index
• End User License Agreement