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AI Summary:

Source: "Climate science, politics, and discourse are constantly couched in the Anthropocene narrative: species-thinking, humanity-bashing, undifferentiated collective self-flagellation, appeal to the general population of consumers to mend their ways and other ideological pirouettes that only serve to conceal the driver. To portray certain social relations as the natural properties of the species is nothing new. Dehistoricizing, universalizing, eternalizing, and naturalizing a mode of production specific to a certain time and place — these are the classic strategies of ideological legitimation. They block off any prospect for change. If business-as-usual is the outcome of human nature, how can we even imagine something different?... Species-thinking on climate change only induces paralysis. If everyone is to blame, then no one is."

My take away from the article is that the universalizing rhetoric of the Anthropocene displaces blame on us as individuals to a supposedly species-wide defect, in a way that ignores the particular social, economic, and political conditions that gave rise to the crisis in the first place (i.e. the birth of capitalism following parallel developments in science, technology, industry and politics, which were in fact unique). As the article points out, unless we recognize the particular historicity of the crisis, we'll put false hope in ahistorical, utopian projects or throw up our hands in defeat. The main point is: we need to remember that the crisis is contingent on particular beliefs, lifestyles, institutions, and power structures, not a species-wide defect. I can see a certain validity in a critique of global neoliberal capitalism which attaches to it a particular responsibility for the post-1950s 'Great Acceleration,' whose resource extraction and fossil fuel emissions account for the lion's share of the crisis (it is also the latest proposed starting point for the 'Anthropocene').

Source: "Despite all its weaknesses, the anthropocene debate should force geology to confront investigators’ relationships to processes of geological change they measure, akin to the challenges posed by quantum mechanics to physics at the dawn of the nuclear age. It should reckon with the field’s colonial inheritances, which make geology, like all colonial science, an impure science that cannot be understood outside of the context of the relations of place, labor, and production that mobilize it. Geology is a spawn of the colonial capitalist assemblage that is rapidly transforming the planet, and whether or not geologists formalize ‘anthropocene,’ the discipline cannot stand objectively outside the relations that term clumsily attempts to name. Understanding this history — whether or not we accept any golden spike narrative for the anthropocene — is necessary for integrating our grand visions of climate with fragmented ones about our dispersed environmental justice struggles, which have been constant since the systemic colonial reengineering of indigenous ecosystems began in earnest some 500 years ago. Unfortunately, the current debates are doubling down on the conceptual split between humans and the planet, society and nature, in ways that foreclose a broad rethinking of the planetary processes through which energies, life forms, and processes are formed and reproduced... environmental justice activists and scholars have widely criticized the concept for its limited analysis of the ‘human.’ In one sense it is overly broad: it generalizes to all humans the effects of particular environmental practices that have only benefited some humans at the expense of others. In another sense it is overly narrow, viewing ‘the human’ as separate from ‘the environment.’ A number of critics point to the central role of fossil-fueled capitalism, suggesting that it is necessary to specify a mode of production that generates destructive wastes rather than to view climate change and other planetary processes as inherent to a species. More broadly, the term shuts down a radical reimagining of the interspecies forces that constitute our planetary webs of life. Finding a geological basis for the anthropocene in preserved rock or ice strata limits the potential of the term, confining it to geological forms in ways that reproduce the divide between human and environment that ‘anthropocene’ could theoretically undermine. This much is evident in the dismissal of the clearest stratigraphic evidence of capitalist transformation of the environment by the top experts in the field and, thus, the exclusion of this evidence from the working group’s proposal."

Source: “In ‘The Climate of History: Four Theses,’ Dipesh Chakrabarty examined the idea of the Anthropocene—the dawn of a new geological period dominated by human activities—in the context of history and philosophy, raising fundamental questions about how we think historically in an era when human and geological timescales are colliding. Developing out of a 2015 workshop, this volume of RCC Perspectives offers critiques of these ‘Four Theses’ by scholars of environmental history, political philosophy, religious studies, literary criticism, environmental planning, geography, law, biology, and geology. The essays suggest many ways in which Chakrabarty’s arguments both reflect and further catalyze an ongoing transformation in intellectual culture and research on environment and society in the Anthropocene. The volume concludes with a response to the essays from Chakrabarty himself.”

Source: “...[There is] a common critique of the Anthropocene concept: it attributes ecological collapse to an undifferentiated ‘humanity’, when in practice both responsibility and vulnerability are unevenly distributed. While the Anthropocene continually inscribes itself in all our bodies – we all have endocrine disruptors, microplastics and other toxic things chugging through our metabolisms – it manifests differently in different bodies. Those differences, along with the histories that generated them, matter a great deal... According to one recent report, the annual premature death-rate attributable to outdoor pollution in African cities rose by 36 per cent between 1990 and 2013; current estimates put it at a quarter of a million lives a year... pollution is the world’s leading environmental cause of disease. Pollution caused some 9 million premature deaths in 2015, and 16 per cent of all deaths worldwide – ‘three times more deaths than from AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria combined, and 15 times more than from all wars and other forms of violence’, the [Lancet] report added. The vast majority of these deaths took place in low- and middle-income countries, and in the poor communities of rich countries... the [World Health Organization] does not have air-quality programmes in place for sub-Saharan Africa, though it does for Europe, the Western Pacific, and the Americas... Taking advantage of relaxed (or non-existent) regulatory limits across much of Africa, commodity traders maximise their profits by creating high-sulphur blends that are outlawed in Europe and North America. The Swiss NGO Public Eye found that some amalgams in Africa contain up to 630 times more sulphur than European diesel... Traders unabashedly name these blends ‘African-quality’ fuels, as they are saleable only on the continent... Such ‘dirty diesel’ is a significant part of why Lagos air contains 13 times more particulate matter than London air... European limits on sulphur in fuel stood at 10 parts per million (ppm). North America offered polluters a bit more leeway, with 15 ppm. Across Africa, however, the average limit was 2,000 ppm; Nigeria, the continent’s largest oil producer, had a standard of 3,000 ppm. By leveraging these differences, commodity traders engaged in an utterly ordinary profit-maximisation strategy known as ‘regulatory arbitrage’: avoiding legal restrictions in rich countries by moving manufacturing and waste to poor countries... Regulatory arbitrage is a defeat device that operates on a planetary scale. The oil industry complies with tighter restrictions on some continents by offloading dirtier fuel on others... If the Anthropocene is to have real value as a category of thought and a call to action... it requires thinking from, and with, Africa. ‘They’ are ‘us’, and there is no planetary ‘we’ without them.”

Source: "In one sense, the term Anthropocene already introduces a social dimension into the geological record, simply by offering a way to think about 'humanity-as-stratum'. However, at the same time, it minimizes the meaning of the term social by thinking humans as a homogenous force, whereas 'humanity is used as a term of erasure of material and political forms of differentiation' (Yusoff 2015, 7). The Anthropocene is a geo-social formation, but in singular. So what is needed is to detect geo-social formations within it, a stratification of the social, involving for instance linking specific sediments of the Anthropocene to historically or geographically specific socialities, or further specifying them culturally or by gender... The Anthropocene concept, whether in its narrow geological framing or a broader social-historical one, has the potential of producing a theory of responsibility, a way to assign responsibility for particular changes in the Earth’s ecosystems to humans. And as such it is valuable to consider the Anthropocene in relation to Isabelle Stengers’s theorization of an ecology of practices. Responsibility is an important idea for Stengers in her theorization of decision making situations in modern society. For Stengers, different 'practices are introduced and justified, the way they define their requirements and obligations, the way they are described, the way they attract interest, the way they are accountable to others, are interdependent and belong to the same temporality' (Stengers 2010, 56-57). Furthermore, obligations are the binding material of an ecology of practices, as Stengers writes, 'it is in terms of obligations rather than requirements that the unity of here and elsewhere can be asserted, the copresence of that which, at the same time, claims to be heterogeneous' (Stengers 2010, 80, my emphasis). So reading the Anthropocene through Stengersian theory, it becomes an example of such a copresence, one that can unite the humans of 'here and elsewhere' with their different cultures, living standards and practices, while still belonging 'to the same temporality.' But while this copresence unites different practices they should not only be seen as undifferentiated unity. They 'claim to be heterogeneous' and thus hide complexities that a focus on specific requirements and obligations can disclose. Analytic attention to such specificity offers a way to elicit the characteristics of each practice and their individual connections with one another, or, in other words, to illuminate the social stratification of the Anthropocene."

Source: "As solutions to our current global problems, Žižek proposes a new workers’ movement, while Bifo has suggested inventing forms of recombinant autonomy and a new internationalist Left. Yet contemporary ecological mutations require that we ask whether or not the principle of representation at the heart of our inherited models of struggle has become obsolete. In other words, it is not only the crypto-government of transnational capital that has superseded the form of the nation-state; such states are also undermined by territorial conflicts created by irreversible ecological events. Is it absurd to seek new forms of representativity for those agents involved in climate change like 'soils,' 'the atmosphere,' 'oceans,' and 'cities'? Bruno Latour thinks so. But it is equally senseless to pursue a collective figure of exclusively human being that could function as a new agent of geohistory, like the proletariat once did. Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams have demanded that the Left make use of the latest technological developments to liberate humanity from work while simultaneously producing wealth. However, it is not clear how this new dream of a postwork society of full automation escapes the early twentieth-century fantasy of technology and knowledge as spontaneously emancipating—a dream that sits uncomfortably alongside the neoliberal deployment of technology as a tool of domination. How is this not simply another example of Herbert Marcuse’s use and abuse of 'technological rationality'?... In spite of the human and environmental cost, industrialism and technocracy as technological rationality are still perceived as emancipatory tools as well as systems geared toward maximizing the material well-being of humans. This is why, in spite of multiple UN Climate Change Conferences and efforts to make capitalism more 'green,' the stability of the environment is under ongoing threat. In reality, there can be no such thing as green capitalism because capitalism is built precisely on the logic of technological rationality, which implies the negation of the environment itself. Technological rationality, insofar as it is the rationalization of the domination of nature and society, is the foundation of our current model of accumulation by dispossession, exploitation, and extraction. This model has not only created environmental and social destruction; it has also divided the world into privileged urban areas and what Naomi Klein calls 'sacrifice zones.' These sacrifice zones are the contemporary manifestation of the colonial model; once the imposed project of development failed to modernize 'primitive' societies, their lands were transformed into zones of pure extraction. Residents of these sacrifice zones not only live with the toxic waste of our systemic need to consume fossil fuels (undergoing, as Rob Nixon calls it, a form of 'slow violence') and face the destruction of their autonomous forms of sustainability in the name of development; they also sustain the privileges of people living in developed urban areas, people who deny or justify this destruction under the logic of modernization... We must also acknowledge the colonial basis of modernity and modernism. The logic of technological progress as emancipation is inherent to colonial narratives... critique is also a tool that purports to facilitate progress while really just underscoring the givens of imperialism. Modernity relies on critique to reinvent itself and to justify colonial exploitation, creating new hybrids and paradoxes and finding new ways to look at the world and our relationship to the past. Critical theory (from Marx and the Frankfurt School to post-structuralism and postworkerism, including their more recent derivations) assumes that modernity provides the social, economic, and cognitive means of human emancipation. In this way, it perpetuates a series of oppositions: nature vs. culture; development vs. underdevelopment; degrowth vs. acceleration; indigenous struggles to protect the environment vs. extractive capitalism... the main challenge posed by the Anthropocene/Capitalocene/Chthulucene is of an epistemological nature: our forms of knowing and seeing are inseparable from capitalist excess. The intellectual basis of modernity was constituted after the fact, as a justification for the separation of humans and nonhuman agents. If it has been acknowledged that capitalist exploitation depends on the organization of scientific objectivity and reason, why do we continue to uncritically uphold the ways in which we organize knowledge? We must explore forms of knowledge that were ignored by modernity and use non-Western epistemologies to question the disciplinary boundaries imposed by modern science, along with the isolation of political struggles it has led to... The majority of aboriginal peoples have epistemologies based on embodied knowledge—similar to Haraway’s notion of 'situated knowledges,' which she developed in opposition to the disembodied nature of scientific epistemology... it is necessary to live in a way that achieves physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual balance. This implies that aboriginal intellect has no limits and that meaning emerges from context and process instead of from content... We can understand colonialism as a confrontation of epistemologies... our understanding of nature is based on the premise that nature 'is there' for us to turn it into a form of knowledge, to appropriate and exploit—the concept of 'natural resources' says it all. This is in contrast to the interrelationality and eco-dependency the indigenous peoples, who listen to natural cycles as part of human life... When we use the term 'Anthropocene,' we need to be aware that it falsely universalizes humanity’s impact on the Earth, when in fact different cultures, regions, and countries have different degrees of culpability for environmental destruction."

Source: "Where the anthropology of humanitarianism shows how the concept of compassion for 'humanity' is enacted in different spaces and times, the Anthropocene forces us to view humanity in relation to space and time itself. Just as our individual actions influence the lives of others and our local environment, our collective and historical human activity affects the life course of the planet as a whole. Humanity is a force of nature. In making this explicit, the Anthropocene has been characterized as a destruction of dualisms, a concept that renders long-standing theoretical divides—such as nature/culture, modern/non-modern, human/non-human—if not demonstrably false, then at least not fit for analytical purpose (Sanders & Hall 2015). The Anthropocene highlights the fallacy of society as an imagined world apart from nature, and the natural, geological world as a force outside social and cultural influence. It spells the end of Natural History, as culture itself is recognized as a geological force."

Source: "...the case for the Anthropocene can be seen as a resonant instance of a broader intellectual move towards nondualist ontologies which has been taking place since the 1990’s, at an increased pace in recent years. In the social sciences and humanities (SSH), for example, the so-called ‘new materialism’ (see e.g. Coole and Frost 2010) is characterized precisely by a rejection of the binaries traditional to modern thinking (nature/culture, mind/body, subject/object, matter/language, reality/knowledge, sensuous/ideal, etc.). SSH scholars, it has to be noted, find major inspiration in contemporaneous developments in the biophysical sciences and technologies, where the boundaries between life and nonlife, material and informational, bodily and mental, real and virtual, mechanical and organic, become increasingly porous. As a result, fluidity, contingency and endless variation appear to constitute the basic fabric of reality. If there is anything current SSH and natural sciences share, it is this move towards a nondualist ontological framework. From such a framework new materialist scholars generally draw ‘emancipatory’ implications. The overcoming of binaries, they stress, entails a distributed account of liveliness and agency, countering the dominative implications of dualist thinking, where one polarity always ends up claiming predominance over the other. Human agency, as a result, takes a post-humanist outlook: disempowered, defective, decentered, hence also modest, restrained, careful and responsible. Far less noticed is the fact that the same ontological claims can be conducive to opposite outcomes. If the world is inherently contingent and fluid, including the agent’s own ‘center’, then there is no limit to what such an agent, eventually identifiable only as the source point of a will to be(come), can do to the material world, including to his or her own physical constitution. This agent becomes a 'world-maker' in the fullest sense of the expression, as the psychical and corporeal ‘self’ can be molded and remolded together with its own framing conditions. The blurring of internal and external (relative to the self) is analogous to the way a big-bang universe simultaneously deploys both its material contents and the framework of time and space in which they exist. Needless to say, in this framework any notion of responsibility evaporates, replaced by a radical experimentalism where error is reframed from threat to opportunity... The lesson is that, by itself, the notion of Anthropocene tells absolutely nothing about what one ought to do. We are left, therefore, with an ideal of stewardship... it is not an ‘Anthropos’ as such that is responsible for the sour state of our planet, but specific historical configurations of human societies, in particular those implicated by capitalist industrialism and its techno-scientific underpinnings. Only by fully recognizing the political character of the case for the Anthropocene will we be able to address what a non-dominative approach to stewarding the planet may look like and require."

Source: "Does the concept of 'the'/'an' Anthropocene promote or inhibit the possibilities of a polycentric global epistemology? Pluralizing (technospheres, anthropocenes—even anthropo-scenes) is a step towards a democracy not only of language."

Source: “There are plenty of troubling things about the Anthropocene. But to my mind, one of its most troubling dimensions is the sheer number of people it fails to trouble. For many living in precarious situations, the Anthropocene is already life-altering, life-threatening, and even deadly. It comes in the form of a massive flood or a rising tide that takes their homes away. Or as an oil well that poisons the river on which they depend. But for others, especially the white and middle-class of the global North, the Anthropocene is so banal that they do not even notice it. It is the green front lawn, the strip-mall parking lot, the drainage ditch where only bullfrog tadpoles remain. Iowa lies at the heart of this banal Anthropocene. The Anthropocene, here, is wholesome. It is the cornfield and the industrial pig farm. It is the 4-H county fair and eating hot dogs on the Fourth of July. It is precisely this banality, this routinized everydayness (see Arendt 1963), that makes the Iowa Anthropocene so terrifying... Blindness proliferates: when my uncle becomes blind to the violence of his own corn, he becomes blind to others in neighboring farmhouses, in the neighboring towns, in neighboring states. He cannot see Standing Rock, and he cannot see why Black Lives Matter might matter to him. It isn’t exactly his fault that he doesn’t notice. White middle-class American subjectivities are predicated on not noticing. They are predicated on structural blindness: on a refusal to acknowledge the histories we inherit.”