Time, Climate Change, Global Racial Capitalism and Decolonial Planetary Ecologies

Anna M. Agathangelou, Kyle D. Killian, Anna M. Agathangelou, Kyle D. Killian

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000606768
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique

This book probes the interconnections of time and ecology in order to spark our imagination and inspire us to re-think the planetary, ecology, and otherwise. It presents debates that interrogate and elucidate the anxieties of the known and the unknown of this world and the planetary beyond, sifting through temporal accounts of the Anthropocene, human beings, and climate change.

The chapters in this edited volume spur conversations with different thought systems and their underlying assumptions about the composition of structures of time and contingent temporalities. The authors engage rising temperatures in the oceans and air, the consequences, intended and unintended, of investments in various forms of "development", and the potential catastrophe unfolding in real time. Recent temporal strategies such as mitigation and adaptation to the "climate crisis" are challenged as they further compound and commodify the inquiry, the understanding and responses to environmental degradations, extractions, and displacements. Anti-colonial and decolonial debates about the structures of time, the planetary, and ecology are crucial contributions of this volume. Further, privileging the vantage points of the colonized and enslaved, the authors of this volume challenge dominant universal, cyclical, and retrospective structures of time and the planetary. Through research, poetry, art, and popular cultural analyses, the authors attend to the ways that the struggles of the "submerged, " indigenous and black communities for climate justice become coded as a global warming crisis.

This volume grapples with how racial climate struggles and unrest become mobilized both as a source of paralysis and as an opportunity for further expropriation and expansion of data accumulation markets for settler planetary projects all in the name of global warming. Ultimately, the authors in this volume argue that conventional attempts at exploiting the planetary all depend upon ideas of conquest and the mastery and control of ecologies, global governance, and individual behaviors. In this sense, fears about the unknown future of our planet miss what is at stake in the structures of time, the question of creation and invention.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal, Globalizations.

Part I The question of radical existence

Humility in the Anthropocene

Sheila Jasanoff

ABSTRACT

The last 50 years have witnessed a set of changes in the scale of humankind’s ecological imagination toward ‘thinking globally’. Developments in earth and planetary sciences have elaborated a creation story that dethroned humans from a position of claimed supremacy to a status on a par with other systemic forces that have shaped the planet. So marked is the human imprint that it has earned its own name in the annals of geology, environmental history, and geopolitics: the anthropocene. The scientific refutation of human exceptionalism has not elicited either instant humility or greater self-awareness in the uses of expert knowledge to combat global problems such as climate change. This paper looks at sites of struggle between a persistent human imperialism, expressed through the continued commodification of nature, and more humble ways of knowing and guiding humanity’s planetary future from standpoints in ethics, politics and law.

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness:

and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air,

and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing

that creepeth upon the earth.

(Genesis 1:26)

No motion has she now, no force;

She neither hears nor sees;

Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course,

With rocks, and stones, and trees.

(William Wordsworth, 1798)

The Judeo-Christian tradition placed human beings at the pinnacle of creation, moulded in the very form of God and given dominion over all other forms of life, indeed over Earth itself. In time, through colonization and the successes of industrial globalization, that culturally singular creation story, with its anthropocentric vision and its wide allowance for all forms of human exploitation, even of other humans, became the narrative underpinning humanity’s uses of planetary resources. Capitalism, an economic system that celebrates and feeds on resource extraction, joined hands with colonialism as dominant social logics by which an evolutionarily rampant species – homo sapiens – powered its spread across the planet (Bonneuil & Fressoz, 2016). Economic theories and practices prized growth and posited a world of never-ending resources: supply, the neo-classical economists argued, would evolve to meet demand (Simon, 1981), defeating any unduly pessimistic natural ‘limits to growth’ (Meadows et al., 1972). For a long time, nature seemed to comply with inexhaustible abundance. Until the last few decades of the twentieth century, the pattern of human production and consumption nicely fitted itself to a theory of perpetual growth and endless accumulation (Wallerstein, 2014) – until the same march of technology that gave rise to humanity’s expansionist dreams also brought it face to face with Earth’s bounded finitude. Made aware of limits, humanity sought new ways of knowing its place. But how successfully?

From the vantage point of the first and second industrial revolutions, those far-reaching transformations enabled by machines, electricity, and mass production, the environmental and life sciences of the past few decades can be seen as painful exercises in deep un-learning. What we have witnessed in the last fifty years is a series of changes in the scale of humankind’s ecological imagination, toward ‘thinking globally’ to be sure, but with strands of humility woven in. Beginning with geological explorations of Earth’s long history (Rudwick, 2016), continuing with evolutionary biology and the unravelling of the genetic code, and culminating in today’s satellite and computer-dependent climatology, the natural sciences have slowly elaborated an alternate creation story: one in which humans are recent, accidental, unnaturally fecund, and exceptionally disruptive arrivals that now stand poised to remake the future on a planetary scale (Masco, 2015). So epochal is the human imprint that it has inscribed its own name into the annals of geology, environmental history, and even geopolitics: the anthropocene (Crutzen & Stoermer, 2000; Davies, 2016). From triumphalism to tragedy, this is a refutation of human exceptionalism in the starkest terms, in favour of an account that makes us part of a process of integrated evolution, the human with the nonhuman, the living with the nonliving, the conscious, strategic and interventionist with the inert, inanimate and acted upon. As in Wordsworth’s ‘Lucy’ poem quoted above, this is the subsuming of the human body back into the body of nature. And this retelling of creation sounds a supremely ironic note, because it emphasizes humanity’s growing capacity not only to question its metaphysical supremacy but to produce the conditions for its own demise. Unless, of course, ways are found to speedily reverse the unsustainable ‘great acceleration’ of the last few centuries (Steffen et al., 2004) in favour of more modest and mindful ways of steering humanity’s sojourn upon the Earth.

What role has science played in the celebration and now partial recantation of human mastery, and how best can future knowledge-making serve our species in this period of growing doubt about humanity’s place in the planetary order? Not surprisingly, this is an unanswered, possibly unanswerable, question, but one can make some tentative forays into the heart of uncertainty. It is worth taking stock of the emancipatory promise of the Enlightenment, that knowledge will set us free, in a historical moment when a lowly virus – the novel coronavirus that spread in 2020 from China across the globe – jeopardized the world’s physical and economic health and well-being, freezing capitalism in its tracks. In this moment, nations were called upon to review not only the so-called achievements of globalization but also their sustainability, the robustness of civilization’s infrastructures along with their precarity. Around the world, airlines stopped flying, highways emptied, factories closed, and foodlines lengthened, while death came to hundreds of thousands, especially the poor and the elderly. The virus invites us to reflect on the ways in which science, with its handmaiden technology, entered into the manufacture of globalization, making interconnectedness seem inevitable, while rendering invisible those forms of life that did not cohere with science’s modes of self-understanding or were inimical to technoscientific notions of progress and development.

Forced encounters with Earth’s limits did not, as we will see, automatically elicit either humility or greater self-awareness in the deployment of expert knowledge against global problems such as climate change. Emblematic here is the Cold War’s production not only of a bipolar view of geopolitics, but of a panoptic vision that treated Earth as a closed system, allowing itself to be seen, studied, and above all managed from viewpoints situated outside and above the structures of national law and politics (Anker, 2007; Ashley, 1983; Jasanoff, 2001). Only gradually, as the apocalyptic implications of climate change penetrated more deeply into humanity’s collective consciousness, did the sciences, both natural and social, begin to waver in their managerial imperative, though incompletely and not without resistance from those very disciplines. The resulting struggle for more humble ways of knowing and understanding humanity’s planetary future, from standpoints grounded in ethics, politics and law, rather than science and engineering, is the subject of this essay.

As in much of my work, my theoretical moorings are firmly located in the framework of co-production (Jasanoff, 2004): the observation that how we acquire and organize our knowledge of the world is always entangled with ideas of how we should govern it. Science in the co-productionist idiom tells stories that are not merely descriptive but also profoundly normative. These stories blend the is and the ought into integrated acts of world-making that seek to tell us both how things are and how we should behave. It is not surprising, then, that along with the new biologies and ecologies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have emerged changes in the focus and methods of the human and social sciences – economics, politics, and sociology, as well as new fields of hybrid knowledge, often labelled interdisciplinary, such as environmental studies, science and technology studies (STS), and studies of societal futures still in-the-making.

This article explores the complexities and contradictions of this explosion of knowledge-making under four headings, each of which engages with the intertwined relations between is and ought in delineating humanity’s future. These are temporality, territory, exchange, and rule. Under each heading, we will see how four important compass points with which we define the coordinates of our earthly existence – time, space, capital, and law – have been configured and reconfigured to accommodate changing conceptions of human-nature relations. Far from being a linear, progressive and friction-free account of growing climate awareness, this is a narrative of diverse epistemic traditions meeting and clashing around competing ideas of how to know and govern this looming threat to humanity’s future. It is a story of alternative moral imaginations of how our species should accommodate itself to global challenges, and of imperfect attempts to institutionalize those imaginations by embedding them in technical and political discourses that are never fully adequate to contain them. More particularly, it is an account of the tight grip of capital and consumption in foreclosing radical reimaginings of human relations with nature.

Time and money

Making time calculable and turning it into currency was one of modernity’s signature achievements. Humans embarked on the project of classifying time many ages ago, at least since the birth of agricultural civilization. The ancient world marked time largely through its relationship to universal human ends, whether secular or religious. In the familiar lines from Ecclesiastes, ‘To every thing there is a season, a time to every purpose under the heaven’: a time to be born and to die, to plant and to harvest, to mourn and to dance, to love and to hate, to make war and seek peace. Premodern agricultural societies, in particular, tethered time to seasons, measuring its passage in relation to climate and crop cycles. Time was not money. As the anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard famously recounted in his study of the Nuer of the South Sudan, Nuer time danced to a different metaphysical rhythm from Western time: not spoken of as ‘something actual, which passes, can be wasted, can be saved, and so forth’ (Evans-Pritchard, 1939, p. 208). The religions of the world also divided up time – days, years, and seasons – through rituals of prayer or fasting or feasting. In these perfectly well-calendared worlds, human labour had its place, whether in the tilling of fields, the building of cities, or the nurturing of children. But the value of work came from its subservience to a natural ordering, in keeping with a divine providence. Indeed, without that correspondence, the writer of Ecclesiastes wondered, ‘What profit hath he that worketh in that wherein he laboureth?’

It took centuries of inventions in time-keeping, both social and material, to attach a different, more secular meaning to that word profit. The historian E.P. Thompson began his magisterial essay on time and the rise of industrial capitalism with the observation, ‘It is commonplace that the years between 1300 and 1650 saw within the intellectual culture of Western Europe important changes in the apprehension of time’ (Thompson, 1967, p. 56). The mechanical clock is key to Thompson’s story, because it allowed for the forms of standardization and accountability that disciplined the working classes of the industrial revolution. It was not the technological instrument alone that made for change, however. Thompson (1967, p. 87) also describes the sometimes violent processes by which time-keeping became inscribed into labouring subjects ‘as those moralists who had accepted this new discipline for themselves enjoined it upon working people’. This birth of a normative ‘protestant ethic’, in Max Weber’s famous term, was marked by resistance from disciplined subjects that capital mostly overcame. So deeply ingrained is that story in our culture now that the novelist Jeanette Winterson put the conflict between lived time and mechanical time at the heart of one of her short stories. Stephen, a mediaeval clockmaker, is brutally murdered by his townspeople. The killers saw as well as the capitalists did what was in store as the relentless clock took over time-keeping functions from the more forgiving cycles of sun and sundial: ‘And the rich men and merchants understood that if time could be counted, time could be sold’ (Winterson, 2015). Digital capitalism in the twenty-first century only squeezed more productivity from an increasingly time-subservient workforce (Wajcman, 2014).

If work time got parcelled out into smaller, but ever more insistent, increments of productivity, Earth’s narrative history took the opposite turn. Here, time exploded out of the clock-maker’s narrow reckoning of hours and minutes, potentially unbundling the tight coupling between time and profit, counting and capital. Computerized models allowed climate scientists to monitor how the Earth had changed over centuries ...