Nothing epitomizes the precarious nature of the planet for me than the view as you fly from the high mountain plateaus of the Altiplano towards the El Alto airport and see spread out in front of you the immense sprawling valley where the city of La Paz is perilously situated. The image of a vastness of crowded slum communities perched on the high reaches of the escarpment and spilling down into the steep, treeless ravines and gorges of the valley is breath-taking: a human imprint at a global scale. A fragility of human and non-human worlds engaged in a dance of daily survival, hanging on, it seems, by the sheer grit of determination, with childrenâs lives being the most precarious in this shared vulnerability.
Gaia Vince reminds us:
We are an incredible force of nature. Humans have the power to heat the planet further or to cool it right down, to eliminate species and to engineer entirely new ones, to re-sculpt the terrestrial surface and to determine its biology. No part of this planet is untouched by human influence â we have transcended natural cycles, altering physical, chemical and biological processes â (Gaia Vince, The Guardian, September 2015)
City children are often perceived as the most disadvantaged human group in the Anthropocene. Cities throughout human history have been difficult and risky places for children, with urban childhoods in the twenty-first century continuing to be played out in crowded, polluted environments, with limited opportunities to engage with nature, animals or other non-human elements. Living on the urban fringes of major cities in minority countries, many children and their families live in poverty , exposed daily to a host of challenges. These challenges often contribute to a childâs inability to move freely and safely when accessing resources for play or work, or services such as schools and health providers. But these are not just contemporary issues. Even though when asked to reflect on their own childhood, many adults reminisce about having far more freedom in their urban places than children have today (Malone 2016), the argument accorded to this ânewâ childâcityânature disconnect often relies on an assumption that past generations of children had a closer and more intimate relation with the planet, de-emphasizing what has been âa long history of urban environmental degradation and childhood disconnectedness (Malone 2001; Chawla 2002; Chawla and Malone 2003; Dickinson 2013) where the experience of being a child in the environmentâ may not have been a positive one (Malone 2007). The Anthropocene and its impact on childrenâs lives are not new. Children working or living near factories; children being exposed to pollutants in the soil, air and water; children losing homes to rising sea levels and suffering from the impact of natural disasters ; children losing opportunities to be in nature , encountering animals; children dying from radiationâall signs of the impending ecological crisis, the advancing consequences of human degradation of the landscape at a planetary level. Cities are âmicrocosms of the planet fashioned for our [human] species and no otherâ (Vince 2015, p. 338), and endeavouring to exist in this âentirely synthetic human creationsâ are the children whose stories appear in this book. They are part of the great global movement of urban migration in the Anthropocene. From a slow urban drift in past generations what we see now is a massive tidal wave of humanity headed to live in the contested, ambiguous spaces of the worldâs largest cities.
The story of the Anthropocene as expressed through the everyday, entangled lives of children growing and being with many others in cities is the focus of this book. Children are living in a world where, for the first time in global history, more humans reside in city environments than those in the countryside. Education, health services, employment, shelter, food and water are alluring possibilities that large urban environments bequeath the poor. Politically, cities have become the solution to the ecological crisis and the problems of the age of humans. Cities have been proclaimed as the means for providing shelter and resources for the steadily increasing populations. Under the auspices of global and national policies on sustainable development and sustainable cities, the people have been encouraged to move away from their land and find greater potential for themselves and their children in the cities. Despite the hardships encountered in cities, the draw is great; the urban revolution of the Anthropocene has always promised children a better life, a future. But the lure of the city and the call of the Anthropocene havenât always delivered their promises. This book reveals the complexities of childrenâs lives entangled with each other, their families, the communities of humans and the collective of humanânon-human that are tied together, knotted in an intricate ecological collective .
Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and biologist Eugene F. Stoermer first used the term Anthropocene in a 2000 publication when they wrote:
Considering ⊠growing impacts of human activities on earth and atmosphere ⊠it seems to us more than appropriate to emphasize the central role of mankind in geology and ecology by proposing the term âAnthropoceneâ for the current geological epoch. (2000, p. 17)
Since then, Crutzen and a host of earth sciences scholars and colleagues âhave endeavored to establish an Anthropocene âtimelineâ by understanding the impacts of humans on earth planetary systems up to, and during, the epoch. They have promoted technologically based solutions for planetary damage and advocated that the International Union of Geological Sciencesâ Commission on Stratigraphy officially inaugurate the term to acknowledge the impact of humans irreversibly, changing the ecology of the planet (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000, p. 17). Although cited many times, it was the article in Nature in 2002 by Crutzen that laid some of the means through which the concept of an Anthropocene epoch could be further conceptualized beyond a scientific endeavour. In this article, he included two further significant points to the argument. The first was to acknowledge that the changes brought about by âhumanityâ had largely been caused by only 25 per cent of the human population. The second was to consider that a bold and large-scale sustainability management project needed to be advanced at a global level where all countries contributed to a central goal (Davies 2016). According to Davies (2016), what both themes did was acknowledge that humans in different parts of the world made different contributions to global changes and that a kind of âgeo-engineeringâ of the planet at a global scale by humans was the only way forward.
While the term is still to be accepted, there has been much debate about where the boundaries lie that would mark the arrival of the new epoch of the Anthropocene. There have been a number of possibilities proposed: the start of the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century, or the beginning of the mid-twentieth century, known as the great acceleration of population, carbon emissions, biodiversity loss, plastic production and the beginning of the nuclear age with the first atomic bombs spreading detectable radiation to every strata of the planet (Davies 2016). But for many scholars in the humanities these arguments are not as relevant as what taking up the premise or challenge of the Anthropocene provides. As an unsettling ontology that disrupts a persistent âhumanistâ paradigm (Lloro-Bidart 2015), the concept of the Anthropocene allows new conversations to happen around human-dominated global change, human exceptionalism and the natureâculture divide. The Anthropocene, rather than scientific facts, verifiable through stratigraphic or climatic analyses, is a âdiscursive developmentâ that problematizes a human narrative of progress that has essentially focused on the mastery of nature, domination of the biosphere, and âplacing God-like faith in technocratic solutionsâ (Lloro-Bidart 2015, p. 132). In this way it can be employed as a heuristic device for gaining a greater understanding of the role of human societies, the part they have played, in changing the planet and the implications of this on what it means to be human but also what it means to be in relation with a non-human world that is impacted by the consequences of those changes.
Davies (2016, p. 48) also notes that recent postcolonialist scholars such as Dipesh Chakrabarty have questioned the adequacy of âradical critiques of globalisation, capitalism and imperialism for confronting the idea of a new geological epochâ. Chakrabarty, according to Davies (2016), asks, what are the implications of the Anthropocene on our understanding of human history? In our analysis of social and economic injustices, whatever socioeconomic or technological choices are made or critiqued as an extension of our celebration for freedom, rights, civility, they will never be enough. He instead proposes a mixing together of the entangled story of capital and species history (Davies 2016). Davies, supporting Chakrabartyâs argument, raises in his book whether there is a need for historians to trace a deeper history of humankind as a species and over timescales of thousands and millions of years come to know how we (as one of many species) have interacted with the rest of life on the planet. âHistorians need to tell the story of capital, the contingent history of our falling into the Anthropoceneâ (2016, p. 49), a shared catastrophe of capitalist globalization and the history of humans as one of many species.
There has also been a strong critique from many in the academy in regard to the naming of the Anthropocene. The main arguments are based on the concept as being universalist and technocratic. The first in particular is important to my research work. Universalism produces an assumption that we (humans) are all in this together and implicated universally. This universalizing of the human predicament neglects to acknowledge the extent of diversity in the human experience and the ways in which âwealth, nationality, ethnicity, gender, class and so on mediate the relationships between those groupsâ (Davies 2016, p. 52). By simplifying the view of the human species, humanity becomes a collective damaging group, a resource-exploiting, over-consuming, capitalist homogeneous collective called âhumansâ. It then attaches the âblameâ of a collective ecological crisis squarely on the shoulders of the masses. A preoccupation on limits to growth, overpopulation becomes the means for âblaming the poor for a crisis to which they have in fact contributed very littleâ (Davies 2016, p. 53). For the opponents of the Anthropocene concept, the militarization of disaster and the economic financialization of catastrophe through risk management are evidence that the naming of the Anthropocene has the potential to privilege the rich and disadvantage the poor. This advancing of capitalist dominations is evidence that a prerequisite for addressing the Anthro...