Anthropocene Psychology

Being Human in a More-than-Human World

Matthew Adams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781138570245
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351336390
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Social Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This ground-breaking book critically extends the psychological project, seeking to investigate the relations between human and more-than-human worlds against the backdrop of the Anthropocene by emphasising the significance of encounter, interaction and relationships.

Interdisciplinary environmental theorist Matthew Adams draws inspiration from a wealth of ideas emerging in human–animal studies, anthrozoology, multi-species ethnography and posthumanism, offering a framing of collective anthropogenic ecological crises to provocatively argue that the Anthropocene is also an invitation – to become conscious of the ways in which human and nonhuman are inextricably connected. Through a series of strange encounters between human and nonhuman worlds, Adams argues for the importance of cultivating attentiveness to the specific and situated ways in which the fates of multiple species are bound together in the Anthropocene. Throughout the book this argument is put into practice, incorporating everything from Pavlov's dogs, broiler chickens, urban trees, grazing sheep and beached whales, to argue that the Anthropocene can be good to think with, conducive to a seeing ourselves and our place in the world with a renewed sense of connection, responsibility and love.

Building on developments in feminist and social theory, anthropology, ecopsychology, environmental psychology, (post)humanities, psychoanalysis and phenomenology, this is fascinating reading for academics and students in the field of critical psychology, environmental psychology, and human–animal studies.

1

Welcome to the Anthropocene

A parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity

Human nature is an interspecies relationship.

Anna Tsing

Introduction

The title of this book brings together two words rarely considered together – Anthropocene and psychology, so to begin, perhaps some explanation of that title is in order. For a number of years, I have been interested in how we respond to knowing about human-induced climate change and related environmental problems and how that knowledge gets translated into action – what we do, or do not do, individually and collectively, about ‘environmental issues’, depending on where and who we are. Fairly recently, the Anthropocene has come to the fore as a powerful way of framing our current era as one 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). Although originally proposed by atmospheric scientists and then geologists advancing the idea that future proof of our planet-dominating existence will be evident in rock strata and biosphere, it has rapidly become shorthand for the ‘overwhelming global evidence that atmospheric, geologic, hydrologic, biospheric and other earth system processes are now altered by humans’ (Ellis, 2013). As discussed below, the idea of the Anthropocene has rapidly become influential in shaping discussion of ecological crisis across academic disciplines and in wider public debate. It offers a great deal of material in making sense of our predicament, whilst even as it emerges and takes shape, is subject to criticism on many fronts. The Anthropocene has been effectively utilised as a point of coalescence for mounting evidence of anthropogenic ecological degradation. This book is not an attempt to add to that body of work. Introduced below, and explored in detail in the chapters to follow, the intention in this book is to take up the Anthropocene as an invitation.

Why psychology? Chakrabarty makes the point that as an idea, the Anthropocene represents ‘the makers of geology inscribing themselves into their own rock record’ (2009, p. 207). In this sense, the Anthropocene is also something intimately disconcerting, a reflexive turn, troubling in a ‘deeply existential way… the environment is in us, and we humans are in the environment’ (Åsberg, 2018, p. 186); the contemplation of human activity as now the single most decisive force shaping the planet ‘a profound realisation’ (Garavan, 2015). Descriptions such as this challenge or invite us to recognise the deep material, emotional and existential resonance of the Anthropocene. Whilst it might seem to consolidate the notion of human influence on ecological systems, the Anthropocene also amplifies the interrelationship that defines the co-constitution of human with other forms of life; and ‘the multiple, interdependent relations within nature, within different forms of materiality, within technologies and within social systems’ (Lidskog and Waterton, 2018, p. 39). Psychology, especially social psychology, has always been interested in the part encounters, interactions and relationships play in shaping our personal and social realities, though for the most part, this has been exclusively in human terms. The Anthropocene imaginary invites a radical extension of meaningful relationality, understanding and attending to human–animal and multispecies encounters as worthy of theoretical, methodological, ethical and political attention.

Accordingly, this book is about critically extending the psychological project to being human in a more-than-human world. The term ‘human and more-than-human worlds’ was coined by US philosopher David Abram to refer to all forms of earthly life – animals, plants, landforms – and to make salient the fact that the world exceeds the human in ways we are nonetheless a part of, the human and more-than-human world (Abram, 1997). So the book is titled Anthropocene Psychology and subtitled Being Human in a More-Than-Human World, to make explicit that the book is an attempt, however modest, to contextualise the human in the life forces and liveliness of what is other than human. It does so largely by attending to specific and situated places. Before summarising the chapters that follow, however, some reflections on time offer a further contextualisation of the way in which the Anthropocene is approached in this book.

Deep time

Deep time is the concept of geological time used ‘to describe the timing and relationships between events that have occurred throughout Earth’s history’ (Warmold, 2017, p. 3) – an approximate 4.54 billion year history. We struggle to grasp the huge scale of a sense of time that is so, well, deep, especially in comparison to the shallow time of our everyday experience, our lifespan, the history of our nation, culture, even of human history in general.1 Geologists work with stories of deep time, ‘the immense arc of non-human history that shaped the world as we perceive it’ (Farrier, 2016; emphasis added). Theirs is a story which takes in unimaginable stretches of life on Earth and its transformation, told through cycles of sedimentation and erosion. Geology divides deep time into segments, which makes it easier for us to digest, but these are also meaningful divisions, distinctions in rock strata that reflect shifts in global climate and biology. Earth’s time is divided into large segments called eons, within which are eras, periods and epochs. We live in the Phanerozoic Eon, a 451-million-year history which marked the beginning of abundant plant and animal life on Earth. It incorporates numerous eras, the current being the Cenozoic, a mere 66 million years old. The Cenozoic is notable for the rise of mammals as dominant life forms, making the most of a sudden ‘mass-extinction event’ that wiped out almost all larger life forms. The Cenozoic is subdivided into shorter epochs, the six previous averaging 10 m years each. We are now into the seventh – the Holocene, which follows the end of a glacial period and at 11,700 years old is barely into its stride. Although in existence for perhaps as long as 300,000 years (Hublin et al., 2017), the Holocene marks the global spread of homo sapiens as the ice retreated and the climate warmed. So we have raced through deep time to the almost-present. However, something else of significance has been happening in the blink of an eye, and it concerns the impact of a single species, for, as far as we know, the first time in Earth’s history – homo sapiens. Remarkably, 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’ (2016).2 Welcome to the Anthropocene.

The cumulative effects of human activity are well known in relation to climate change – derived primarily from extracting and then burning or boiling fossil fuels such as coal and crude oil. Fossil fuels are essential to the manufacture of many materials such as plastic and many practises that require power – transportation, electricity and heat, manufacturing and construction and agriculture; whilst other activities like deforestation and waste systems also contribute. The impacts of such activities are also now familiar to many – air, water and land pollution; loss of biodiversity; desertification; mass extinctions; acidified oceans; extreme weather; drought; eroding coastlines. As a conceptual framework, the Anthropocene broadens this impact beyond climate. The proposed markers of the Anthropocene include carbon spheres emitted by power stations; radioactive elements from nuclear bomb tests; plastic pollution; nitrogen and phosphate in soils (from fertilisers) and domestic chicken bones; the growth of global cattle populations; species extinction rates; various types of habitat loss; the rise of industrial fisheries and, of course, greenhouse gas emissions (Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000; Steffen, Crutzen and McNeill, 2007). Human practises are embedded in these processes on a scale staggering in its variety and banality. The briefest browse of accounts of human practises considered responsible in one form or another for ecological degradation includes colonialism, the plantation system, the steam engine, radioactive isotopes, the mining of tar sands, the redistribution of fresh water, the cruise ship industry, data cloud storage, avocado production and drinking coffee. Clearly, the world’s economy is far from dematerialising, and the Anthropocene is as much about stratification, inequality, injustice, power and politics as it is about extraction, production, distribution and consumption practises. But it is also about time.

Deep time is profoundly uncanny – it is disorientating to consider a human life span, or even the life span of humanity, against a non-human history stretching back over eons, the immediate reality of being as an embodied and temporal experience within a timescale of imponderable proportions. The Anthropocene is a kind of double-uncanny – human beings entering into deep time’s register by disrupting it. The deep time of an ancient Earth and an indifferent universe is uncanny in its own right, that we humans might be disturbing this unknowable teleology, and how, more so. In other words, told straight, the Anthropocene is an outlandish tale of science fiction, but one that is really happening. The shock of the Anthropocene, then, is ‘to reveal humans as planetary agents on a deep spatial and temporal scale. The corollary to that shock was of course to place humanity within long-running Earth processes’ (Ginn et al., 2018, p. 214).

A parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity

It is remarkable how quickly the Anthropocene moniker has become culturally ubiquitous – the subject not just of academic texts and conferences but art, magazines, travelogues, poetry, even an opera. It has rapidly become what the anthropologist Elizabeth Reddy calls a ‘sort of charismatic mega-category’, establishing itself as the lens through which to make sense of our current predicament. There is already plenty of criticism of the idea of the Anthropocene. We have recently seen attempts to double down on the specifics of human history and aggregate activity responsible for environmental crises, rather than lumping all humans, and their responsibility, together as Anthropos – offering alternatives terms like Capitalocene and Plantationocene (Haraway, 2015; Moore, 2017). Whether rapid devastation or slow degradation, those who are the least responsible are already positioned to experience the brunt of ecological crises for now, and the least equipped to successfully mitigate against. Ignoring such enormous variation and positing a simplistic ‘species-thinking’ is a form of ‘bourgeois mystification’ (Malm and Hornborg, 2014: 67). It clouds a sense of specifics – of what is driving our predicament, of the power asymmetries involved, of where (in)action matters, who has access to the lifeboats and who is left to sink with the ship. In this book, I largely follow Haraway’s lead, in accepting the usefulness of the Anthropocene ambivalently as a motif, as a story that matters, whilst committing to addressing its shortcomings and inconsistencies as we go along, in the working through of particulars (Haraway, 2016).

Other critics argue that the Anthropocene framing is inherently hubristic or triumphalist (e.g. Clarke, 2014; LeCain, 2015). Whilst particular framings can lend themselves to this kind of rhetor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Frontispiece
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Welcome to the Anthropocene: A parenthesis of infinitesimal brevity
• 2. Why Pavlov’s dogs still matter: Animals, experimental psychology and the Anthropocene invitation
• 3. Eating animals in the Anthropocene: The broiler chicken, speciesism and vegatopia
• 4. Crafting new human–animal attachments: Do Anthropoceneans dream of eclectic sheep?
• 5. Heartbreaking losses in real places: Losing and finding solace in the Anthropocene
• 6. Between the whale and the kāuri tree: Multi-species encounters, indigenous knowledge and ethical relationality in the Anthropocene
• 7. Afterword
• Index