Rethinking the Environment for the Anthropocene

Political Theory and Socionatural Relations in the New Geological Epoch

Manuel Arias-Maldonado, Zev Trachtenberg, Manuel Arias-Maldonado, Zev Trachtenberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351400589
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política medioambiental y energética

This book brings together the most current thinking about the Anthropocene in the field of Environmental Political Theory ('EPT'). It displays the distinctive contribution EPT makes to the task of thinking through what 'the environment' means in this time of pervasive human influence over natural systems.

Across its chapters the book helps develop the idea of 'socionatural relations'—an idea that frames the environment in the Anthropocene in terms of the interconnected relationship between human beings and their surroundings. Coming from both well-established and newer voices in the field, the chapters in the book show the diversity of points of view theorists take toward the Anthropocene idea, and socionatural relations more generally. However, all the chapters exemplify a characteristic of work in EPT: the self-conscious effort to provide normative interpretations that are responsive to scientific accounts. The Introduction explains the complicated interaction between science and EPT, showing how it positions EPT to consider the Anthropocene. And the Afterword, by a pioneer in the field, relates all the chapters to a perspective that has been deeply influential in EPT.

This book will be of interest to scholars already engaged in EPT. But it will also serve as an introduction to the field for students of Political Theory, Philosophy, Environmental Studies, and related disciplines, who will learn about the EPT approach from the Introduction, and then see it applied to the pressing question of the Anthropocene in the ensuing chapters. The book will also help readers interested in the Anthropocene from any disciplinary perspective develop a critical understanding of its political meanings.

PART I

Understanding nature in the Anthropocene

1

THE RETURN OF NATURE IN THE CAPITALOCENE

A critique of the ecomodernist version of the ‘good Anthropocene’¹

Anne Fremaux

There are countless examples of writings today that bemoan, celebrate, or just try to adjust to the new regime of truth according to which nature is ‘dead.’ The recent proposal to rename our geological epoch ‘The Anthropocene,’ or ‘Age of Humans’, is, for some theorists, another attempt to claim the ‘end of nature.’ ‘Nature is gone,’ says Erle Ellis in an article eloquently entitled ‘Stop trying to save the Planet’ …: ‘[w]e now live in the Anthropocene’ (2009). In the ecomodernist narrative, the Anthropocene or new ecological era is not an event to be lamented and feared but rather ‘an opportunity for humans to finally come into their own’ (Hamilton 2015: 233).² When Bill McKibben spoke about ‘the end of nature’ in his eponymous 1989 book, he had a few concrete developments in mind (which he lamented): for instance, global warming and ozone layer depletion that rendered extinct the idea of nature as something absolute and separate from us (1989: 54). The ‘end of nature’, as he saw it, was the end of nature as we used to know it. That was the end of representation—of an independent, autonomous nature, free from human influence and impact.³

In the same vein, when Carolyn Merchant (1980) famously evoked ‘the death of nature,’ she meant the change of paradigm from nature understood in a vitalistic and organicist way to a basic mechanic and reductionist view. Probably neither McKibben, nor Merchant would have ever thought that the metaphoric ‘abolition of nature’ would become an ontological signifier in the era of the Anthropocene and that it would even have, for some, positive implications. Indeed, what is at stake, now, is not ‘the supposed end of nature as an idea or symbol…[but] nature’s reality’ (Arias-Maldonado 2014: 4).

What does ‘the end of nature’ in the Anthropocene mean? In a soft version, it says that ‘(i) natural processes can no longer be defined as independent from human influence, and [that] (ii) natural forms and processes have been influenced by humans to a very high degree’ (ibid: 5). The close intertwinement between nature and culture and the fact that human actions influence, even on a large scale, natural processes is nothing that traditional environmentalists would deny. But the idea that nature is ‘dead’ goes further. First of all, it ignores the fact that rather than being neutrally ‘dead,’ nature is rather being ‘destroyed’ and ‘devastated’ by identifiable social processes such as class relations, technologies, growth logics, etc. (Moore 2015). But more philosophically, ecomodernists such as Ellis deny nature’s own agency in the new techno-postmodern hybridist socio-ecological compound offered by postmodern thinkers.⁴ Humans’ cultural and technological mediations are the grand winners of the ‘good Anthropocene.’⁵ As Pellizzoni playfully says (in this volume): ‘[a]s happens in George Orwell’s Animal Farm; some agents seem to be more agential than others.’⁶ However, the ‘ecological crisis’ itself and all its material components (the disappearance of the Arctic ice cap, rising temperatures and sea levels, the concentration of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere, species extinction, pollution, etc.), show that nature is not entirely subsumed within the human power. As Adorno says, ‘objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder’ (1973: 5). This mysterious ‘leftover’ is maybe what some postmoderns call ‘Gaia’ (Stengers 2015; Latour 2014). Gaia, says Hamilton, juts through into our world as ‘an intruder, a trespasser, a gate crasher’ who ‘is crashing the party [of progress]’ (2014).

The ecomodernist view seems to be flawed, even from the postmodern perspective it sometimes wants to embrace. Indeed, in socio-constructivism, nature is seen as a relativist concept and, therefore, should be open to social discussion (social consensus). However, ecomodernists do not replace the old single concept of (pristine) nature by the ‘Contested Natures’ dear to postmoderns (Macnaghten and Urry 1998). They do not argue for increased democratic debates on environmental issues and the entering of the Anthropocene in the agonistic political realm (for instance on the issue of global and environmental justice). On the contrary, the new ecomodernist and constructivist socio-ecological regimes are rather ‘anti-democratic’ and ‘technocratic’ (mandating scientists to decide which arrangements are to be elected), ‘conservative’ (privileging the current capitalistic management of nature), and ‘Universalist.’ Indeed, the Anthropocene, as Arias-Maldonado (2016) says, is heading inevitably towards ‘the convergence of different societies around the Western, capitalistic-driven model of socionatural relations’ considered by the author as a ‘universal impulse’ (7).

The teleological conception of history which considers (neo)liberalism as ‘the end of history’ (Fukuyama 1992) does not take into account the peoples on Earth who suffer from eco-social destructions induced by capitalist modes of production and consumption, or environmental and social movements that resist the capitalistic appropriation of the world (grassroots movements, Indigenous struggles, anti-extractivist Buen Vivir movement, Navdanya movement for peace and democracy in India, etc.). The ecomodernist version of a ‘good Anthropocene’ driven by an undifferentiated global subject (‘the Anthropos’) and heading toward the European or American unsustainable norms of production and consumption⁷ is a typical modernist and Western-centric interpretation of history that forgets the billions of people who still live in severe poverty lacking elementary goods such as food, clean water, basic medical care, or shelter to survive.⁸ Moreover, it assumes that all humans are equally implicated and equally affected by the situation. Bonneuil (2015), for instance, criticises the dominant narrative and ‘view from nowhere’ that put forward an undifferentiated biological entity and geological agent (‘humanity’), uniformly concerned or even implicitly guilty for the mechanisms that gave rise to the advent of the Anthropocene. Some, like the historian and sociologist Jason W. Moore (2015, 2016) argue that the Anthropocene is not the geology of a species but rather the geology of a system of power, profit and re/production, namely capitalism, and as such, should be renamed ‘Capitalocene.’ For Malm and Hornborg (2014), the Anthropocene is not a scientific story but the index of capital accumulation, of privileged resource consumption, of differentiated and unevenly distributed environmental impacts. According to these views, this is the same system (capitalism) that has produced the devastating ecological effects that typify the Anthropocene and social inequalities that characterize our contemporary world. As Newell and Paterson put it: ‘[w]hat makes [anthropogenic climate change] a particularly tricky issue to address is that it is the people that will suffer most that currently contribute less to the problem, i.e., the poor in the developing world’ (2010: 7). The ecomodernist program does not only deny natural limits and the capacity of the environment to absorb the by-products (waste, green house gases, etc.) of advanced societies; it also denies the burden of responsibility carried by the Western world for the ecological plight.

Contrary to the need for accountability, eco-constructivists,⁹ also called ‘eco-pragmatists’ or ‘neo-environmentalists’, urge us to produce the technological innovations necessary to adapt to the new situation without changing the usual way of doing (what can be called the ‘business as usual’ scenario). They advocate the decoupling from nature in order to ‘save’ it; celebrate the ‘end of nature’ as well as ‘the death of (romantic) environmentalism.’ They recommend more technology, and especially a ‘neoliberal conservation’ guided by economic rationality and human-centered managerialism’ (Asafu-Adjaye et al. 2015). This agenda is opposed to the challenge of postmodernity,¹⁰ which as Michel Serres frames it, demands conceiving of nature in intersubjective terms: not as an enemy to be conquered but as a partner worthy of respect and recognition; in effect, a declaration of peace between the human species and the natural world (Stierstorfer 2003: 180).

The novelty and ‘originality’ of ecomodernism, compared to the former tenets of ecological modernization, stem from the alliance it promotes between green capitalism and postmodern discourses on the ‘end of nature.’ Ecomodernists have indeed seized the opportunity of the new post-natural hybridist narrative and the anthropocentric world picture offered by the ‘Anthropocene,’ to foster traditional techno-socio-capitalistic arrangements, presented as the roadmap for the future. This is a typical techno-optimist position, according to which ‘technological innovation incentivized by capitalism and the free market (coupled with a willingness to leave the planet), means that we can continue with our energy-intensive, consumer-intensive, globalized ways of life and socio-economic orders indefinitely’ (Barry 2016: 109). This school of thinking includes authors such as Ted Nordhaus and Michael Schellenberger, Bjørn Lomborg and Rasmus Karlsson. ‘One way of describing this form of thinking is ‘Cornucopian,’ understood to mean the confident belief that technological advances and scientific knowledge and its application will continue to deliver high levels of material goods and services, material abundance now and in the future’ (Barry 2016: ibid.).

By fostering such a techno-optimistic agenda, these thinkers ignore 1) the non-reductionist conception of Earth brought about by Earth Science System (ESS) and post-normal science (Ravetz 2006), both of which show the unpredictability of Earth’s trajectory in the Anthropocene; 2) the postmodern warnings about the ‘intrusion of Gaia’ (Stengers, Latour); 3) the deconstructive critiques of human exceptionalism in the post-nature connectionist and relational narrative, or ‘the blurring of boundaries’ between humans and nonhumans (Latour, Haraway, Braidotti, etc.).

While uncritically appropriating insights of the hypermodern narrative of control¹¹ and of the postmodern narrative of hybridity (‘nature is us’), the ecomodernist narrative and the unapologetic picture of a ‘good Anthropocene’ it offers, remain entirely situated in the prejudices of modernity. These prejudices include, among other ideas, a blind faith in technology,¹² a ‘domination of nature’ narrative, and a dualism by which nature is seen as pristine or as not existing at all. Ecomodernists could, therefore, be renamed ‘mostmoderns,’¹³ a provocative appellation aiming at denouncing the postmodern claims of ecomodernism while they remain highly (un-reflexively in my opinion) modern.

This chapter argues that to acknowledge the increasing entanglement of nature and culture around us—and inside us—does not require us to abandon the analytic distinction between aspects deriving from human societies (the construction of nature by human labor and technologies) and those arising from nature’s ‘non-identity’ (otherness). The affirmative ‘identity thinking’ characteristic of both hypermodernity and constructivist postmodernism (‘nature is dead’) is an attempt to reduce the other to the self, the object to its representation, the making to the knowing and, in the capitalistic framework, the particularities of nature to abstract forms of monetary exchange. It represents, therefore, a source of dominating hubris (Adorno 1973; Horkheimer and Adorno 2002), a philosophical anthropocentric fallacy and a justification for destructive practices. As White et al. say, summarizing the position of eco-Marxism on this issue: ‘Humans viewed from the perspective of geohistory over time are indeed more one force bobbing on the sea than a producer of socionatures’ (2016: 139). Against the further capitalist exploitation that the ecomodernist version of the ‘good Anthropocene’ promotes, I argue that the repeated failures of ecological modernization, ecomodernism, and environmental managerialism should be an opportunity to re-think our place on the planet. Particularly, it should urge us to accept the fragility and vulnerability of the human species in the face of complex and unpredictable natural phenomena. The great challenge that lies ahead us is not the further humanization of the planet nor its mastery but rather the further humanization of humanity and the mastery of our mastery. The current ‘Capitalocene’ (Moore 2015, 2016), where the global ecological crisis is not so much the humanization but rather the capitalization of the earth (Barry 2007) leads us to unforeseen and unpredictable catastrophes, spelled out here as ‘the return of nature.’

ESS, ecomodernism, and geoengineering: the (hyper)modern narrative of mastery and control

From the perspective of ESS, our planet is going through a huge change, leaving behind the thousands of years of exceptional stability of climate and sea levels that characterized the Holocene, to enter a new epoch of uncertainty and significant transformations. The ESS approach puts forward processes such as global warming, biodiversity loss or the prevalence of artificial organic molecules throughout the world that push the Earth System towards tipping points at which more or less stable systems will shift to a different state, or be disrupted altogether. Although the very idea of ‘tipping point’ comes from the analytical model of systems theory, this approach considers feedback mechanisms inherent in forces that esc...