Thinking the Earth: New Alliances in the Anthropocene

In recent years, the anthropocene has been subject to considerably controversy

both within the natural sciences and the humanities. Travelling from its origins

in geology and into social science, environmental humanities and popular

culture, the anthropocene has set in motion a wide-ranging set of debates. In this

paper, I explore what these varied discussions might mean for reconfiguring the

ecology of knowledge practices. Specifically, I argue that the implications of the

anthropocene can only be adequately grasped on the basis of new alliances

between divergent forms of knowledge.

Regardless of the problems posed by the term, the importance of the

climatological and environmental evens it aims to characterize is indisputable. It

seems clear that global warming is bound to dramatically transform ecologies

across the world. In the summer of 2016, the arctic melting process was reported

as literally “off the charts.”1 Currently circulating maps show that major cities

will be ‘hit’ by climate change within the next few decades.2 And researchers

argue that the earth has crossed several thresholds thought to maintain global

ecological stability: if this process does not stop soon, earth systems may spin

into positive feedback loops with unpredictable and likely catastrophic

outcomes. There is little doubt that the changes currently happening are hugely

important, and that their impacts, though differential, will be felt almost

everywhere.

While these changes unfold in the physical world, they are also

reconfiguring academic worlds. As the anthropocene entered social science and

the humanities it was immediately subjected to critique focusing on its

universalism and inability to grapple with capitalist legacies and colonial

histories. Anthropologists further noted that the term assumes a distinction

between nature and culture that has no purchase in many parts of the world.

1 See http://gizmodo.com/the-arctic-heat-wave-is-literally-off-the-charts-right-1778868261.2 See https://weather.com/science/environment/news/20-cities-most-lose-rising-sea-levels-20130822?pageno=2#/1, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2013/10/09/map-these-are-the-cities-that-climate-change-will-hit-first/.

At the same time, however, the catastrophic potentials of the

anthropocene seems to have acted as a catalyst for creative thinking in a range of

humanities and social science fields, including literary theory (e.g. Cohen 2016),

environmental and anthropocene arts (e.g. Davis and Turpin 2015), and the

conglomerate environmental humanities described by Rosea et al (2012) as

drawing together literature, history, anthropology and the arts.

Yet due to recurrent suspicions about the universalism of the

anthropocene and its exclusion of politics and history, the boundary of these new

conjunctions of knowledge practices is generally drawn at the border of natural

science. What is thereby overlooked is an unfolding reverse movement in which

social scientific knowledges, pertaining for example to colonial and

environmental history, the inequalities of global trade, and the socio-technical

transformations of capitalism are already being drawn in to geological

discussions about the implications of the anthropocene.

These developments send a clear signal that creative and effective

responses to problems classified under the anthropocene cannot be based in, or

on, single, compartmentalized disciplines. What is required is a more general

transformation of disciplinary ecologies (Serres 1995, Zylinska 2014). Thinking

the new earth, I argue, calls for the creation and nurture of new alliances (cf.

Prigogine and Stengers 1984) and the making of sophisticated conjunctions

between and across the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences.

Geologies and Environments of ‘Mankind’

In 2000, the chemist Paul Crutzen and the ecologist Eugene Stormer coined the

term the anthropocene to describe a situation in which various conditions that

are assumed to have held the earth’s ecologies relatively steady for the last

several millennia have been breached. This breach, they argued, was due to

human activity. Since then, the word has spread like wildfire. Noting that the

anthropocene may become a ‘keyword’ in the sense of Raymond Williams

(1981), the geographer Noel Castree (2014: 437) argues that the contagious

effect of the term is due to its depiction of “human impacts on the Earth’s surface

of such magnitude, scope and scale as to present an existential threat.” And

indeed, the anthropocene is often connected with evidence that we are presently

in the midst of the sixth planetary mass extinction of species; this one set in

motion by human activity.

Crutzen (2002) popularized the concept of the anthropocene through the

publication in Nature of “Geology of Mankind.” This intervention were followed

by a flurry of studies, including Steffen et al’s important 2007 paper “The

Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature,”

published in Ambio. A few years later, the geologist Jan Zalasiewics and co-

authors noted that the evidence shows “global change consistent with the

suggestion that an epoch-scale boundary has been crossed within the last two

centuries” (2011: 835).

By speaking of the crossing of an epoch-scale boundary, these scientists

were suggesting that the Holocene had come to an end. The Holocene itself

draws a whole picture of mankind’s history. Around 11.500 years ago,

agriculture intensified in the Middle Eastern ‘fertile crescent’ and extended

gradually to Europe. This “change from hunting to cultivation” (Zalasiewics

2011: 836) is readable from the fossil record. Forest clearing may have led to

rising CO2 levels much earlier than the industrial revolution. Due to agriculture,

people could live in villages or larger towns. Urbanization proceeded, and very

large cities were established in the late medieval period. The industrial

revolution gave rise to massive population growth, from 1 billion people in 1800

to 6.5 billion in 2000 and a projection of 9 billion by 2050 (Zalasiewics 2011:

836). Today, many cities are inhabited by upwards of 20 million people, and they

keep growing.

In turn, these huge urban conglomerates required massive interventions

that created unprecedented changes in erosion and sedimentation patterns.

Radical interventions in the landscape -- sometimes referred to as ‘terraforming’

(originally a science fiction term) -- was needed to support megacities, and are

characteristic of the entry into the Anthropocene. Even so, Zalasiewicz et al

argued that these massive physical structures are likely to be more impermanent

than the “biological and chemical signals left by humans” (2011: 836). For

example, they refer to increased ocean acidity due the dissolution of atmospheric

CO. The pH value of oceans is constantly dropping, leading to coral bleach and a

decline in marine plankton, which is at the bottom of the ocean food chains. The

consequence will be biodiversity decline, which will itself “produce a distinctive

event in the future fossil record” (836).

In short, as Zalasiewicz et al argue, and as Castree (2014: 439)

summarizes:

Earth has endured changes sufficient to leave a global stratigraphic

signature distinct from that of the Holocene … encompassing novel biotic,

sedimentary and geochemical change. These changes, though likely only

in their initial phases, are sufficiently distinct and robustly established for

suggestions of a Holocene–Anthropocene boundary in the recent

historical past to be geologically reasonable

Debates about the formal adoption of the Anthropocene revolve on technical

issues, revolving around which kind of stratigraphic markers would be

sufficiently robust to be acceptable for geologists in the far future.3 Suggested

markers have indicated lake sediments, greenhouse gas concentrations, and

artificial isotopes produced by nuclear detonation (Castree 2014: 439).

Centrally, however, “the driving force” of the anthropocene is seen to be

“firmly centred in human behaviour, particularly in social, political and economic

spheres” (Zalasiewics 2011: 838). Evidently, as the anthropologist Marilyn

Strathern (1995: 424) wrote (in a different context), the time when “a creative

future was projected against a stable natural environment” seems “irretrievably

locked in the past”.

Accordingly, the anthropocene diagnosis is far from an exclusively

geological affair. Instead, it relates to the concerns of a great many disciplines,

scientists and environmental organizations and activists, who may not be

particularly interested in the formal definitions of geology, but who are very

interested indeed in what the emergent and changeable relations between

human and natural history might mean in terms of biodiversity and species

survivability, including that of humans.

3 Steffen et al (2007), for example, argue for a three-stage transformation from ‘the industrial revolution’ (1800-1945) to the ‘great acceleration’ after WW2), and a hoped for period of “Earth Systems Stewardship” starting – now. Others argue for earlier ‘take-off’ periods in the middle age (Ruddiman et al 2011) or relating to the colonization of South America (Lewis and Maslin 2015).

For some scientists, this question is engaged through an effort to identify

a set of crucial parameters that keep earth systems in relative equilibrium. These

parameters are referred to as ‘planetary boundaries.’ For Rockström et al.

(2009), for example, the main distinction between the Holocene and the

Anthropocene, is that we know that the former was relatively stable. They locate

the source of stability in parameters that include ocean acidity, aerosols,

biodiversity, land use types, nitrogen and phosphorous cycles, and ozone

density. Crossing these boundaries may move the earth into unknown ecological

territory – precisely the territory of the Anthropocene (Castree 2014: 441).

Accordingly, these planetary boundaries define what the authors, echoing

Buckminster Fuller’s (1963) Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth call “a safe

operating space for humanity” (Rockström et al. 2009: 472). As Castree observes,

these arguments, while also scientific, are “less politically neutral and more

overtly normative” (2014: 441). No surprise, therefore, that they have led the

anthropocene to travel outside the bounds of natural science.

Anthropocene Travels

As the anthropocene travelled into the environmental and ecological sciences, it

gained a complementary set of political and social meanings, relating to present

unsustainable modes of inhabiting the planet. As it entered popular culture, the

term “helped normalise the idea that certain human actions can significantly

transform environmental processes at a global scale and with enduring effects”

(Castree 2014: 443). As described by Castree, this ‘normalization’ occurred in

part through a series of high-profile features including in The Economist (May

2011), National Geographic (March 2011), The New York Times (December

2011), Time Magazine (2012) and a four part television series by the English

BBC. Around the same time, Mark Lynas (2011) published the best-selling The

God Species. More generally, environmental arts focusing on anthropocene

problems.

Within the social sciences, too, the anthropocene has exploded as a topic.

The term is vigorously discussed in geography, anthropology, history,

philosophy, cultural theory, and among artists (e.g. Davis and Turpin 2015,

Haraway et al 2016, Lorimer 2015, Malm and Hornborg 2014, Swanson, Bubandt

and Tsing 2015, Wark 2015). proliferate, and climate fiction (cli-fi) is blooming

(Trexler 2015). Crucially, however, this is a not a simple movement from science

to culture. Instead, as I discuss below, the anthropocene is testimony to a

complicated and heterogeneous set of relations and movements between

different kinds of natural science, social science, humanities and popular culture,

including reverse flows from social and cultural fields of knowledge into natural

science.

Noel Castree (2014) points to two central reasons for these anthropocene

transformations. First, the anthropocene posits a world where multiple, disjoint

actions have emergent effects at many different scales up to the whole earth. For

this reason, the term evokes the need for enhanced forms of inter- or trans-

disciplinarity, and this is equally felt within the natural sciences and within the

social sciences and humanities. Exemplifying these movements in quite different

registers, we are witness, on the one hand, to the emergence of Earth Systems

Science, a generalized natural-social science that aims to integrate knowledge

about the earth’s interlocked systems in a coherent whole and, on the other, to

the emergence of environmental humanities which is no less daring in its call for

rethinking disciplinary relations.

Secondly, the anthropocene attracts attention because it heightens and

intensifies the stakes of the already well-known fact that “man” has transformed

the “natural” world. At this point, the anthropocene tells us, “man” is actually

well on the way to breaching the boundaries that keep the planet stable for

human inhabitation. This poses urgent questions about how to respond, and this

is why the anthropocene creates a sense of urgency and a “powerfully forward-

facing” discourse (Castree 2014: 244). From the point of view of social science,

the anthropocene is further worthy of interest because of its profoundly political

nature. It raises the question of what kind of world is being produced for future

generations, and how alternatives might be pursued.

The anthropocene, we might say, is a gigantic, yet diffuse, future-

generating device. Because we are all part of “it” and because it is prognosticated

to affect people “in all dimensions”, it invites not only descriptive and theoretical

engagement but also ethical, political and aesthetic responses. Indeed, the

anthropocene can be seen as a ‘science fiction’ concept in a double sense

(Swanson, Bubandt and Tsing 2015). On the one hand, the concept is fictional,

since it remains undetermined and controversial whether it actually has an

acceptable scientific meaning. On the other hand, it is fictional since it points to

the inherent unknowability of the future, and thus to processes of imagining

what it will bring. In combination, the scientific and fictional components of the

anthropocene is going to shape the world we – or anyone else – will be able to

know and experience, even in the relatively near future.

In the following, I sketch some of the main controversies to which the

anthropocene has given rise within social science. Some of these arguments, I

suggest, hold potential for the making of a new ecology of knowledge. Yet, this

ecology can thrive only by nurturing cross-disciplinary alliances and forms of

scholarly practice that include the natural sciences. Vigilant critique, that is, must

be complemented by the careful construction of sophisticated conjunctions

between and across the natural and social sciences, and the humanities.

Anthropocene or Capitalocene?

The anthropocene has entered a range of discussions in social science and

humanities. Unsurprisingly, however, it has not proven convincing or appealing

to everyone. The key disagreements revolve around whether or not the

anthropocene is a useful notion, and the reasons why it is, or isn’t.

Much of the social scientific controversy around the anthropocene centers

on its claim to universality. After all, the anthropocene trades in various forms of

oneness. There is one globe, and its current transformation is mainly due to one

species; namely the human. This runs against much social scientific and

humanities thinking, which tends to emphasize diversity and variability.

The article “Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change”,

written by the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty (2012), offers a clear outline of the

issues. Here, Chakrabarty deploys a contrast with the notion of globalization,

which, has held so much social scientific attention. Chakrabarty observes that

globalization was initially described as a homogeneous and homogenizing

process. Yet, anthropologists and others quickly saw it as a way of illuminating

cultural and political differences and translations.

The problem is that it’s difficult to transform the anthropocene in a

similar way because of its ‘oneness.’ After all, again, there is only one globe.

Moreover, the scientific discussions take a species-level perspective. The human

species is thus also seen as ‘one’; that is, as “a collectivity whose commitment to

fossil-fuel based, energy-consuming civilization is now a threat to that

civilization itself” (2012: 2).

Accordingly, the anthropocene is met with two kinds of quite different, in

some ways even opposed, forms of social scientific critique. The predominant

objection is that the responsibility for climate change cannot be located at the

level of the species. This homogenization overlooks all historical, cultural and

political evidence. Anders Malm and Alf Hornborg (2014), for example, forcefully

object to the idea that it is humanity in general that has generated climate

change. Far from the whole of humanity, only a particular sub-set of people is

responsible. Specifically, massive changes in production and consumption

originated with Western Colonialism and the Industrial Revolution, and

accelerated with the neo-liberal world order, which depends on a constantly

growing, fuel-based economy. It is therefore both historically wrong and

politically unfair to assign blame for climate change to ‘humanity.’ By mistaking

the whole for only a part, the anthropocene makes it impossible to assign blame

where it is really due; namely to Europeans and Americans. Rather than living in

the anthropocene, Malm and Hornborg (2014) conclude that we live in the

capitalocene.

It might appear that the capitalocene critique solves the problem. If the

problem is indeed the ‘exceptionalism’ of the “industrial ways of life”,

Chakrabarty asks, “why could not the narrative of capitalism – and hence its

critique – be sufficient for interrogating the history of climate change and

understanding its consequences?” (Chakrabarty 2012: 217).

Chakrabarty, however, rejects this solution, arguing that it is short

circuited by the fact of uncontrollable climate change itself. The industrial way of

life, he suggests, “has acted much like the rabbit hole in Alice’s story; we have

slid into a state of things that forces on us a recognition of some of the

parametric (that is, boundary) conditions for the existence of institutions central

to our idea of modernity” (217), or, indeed, to human existence as such.

As we see, then, Chakrabarty is unsatisfied with the capitalocene

diagnosis not because it is historically wrong, but because it is limited, or even

inconsequential, in terms of the present and future. No matter that the present

situation is not the historical fault of either ‘the poor of the world,’ or Japan, or

China (216). No matter, even, that China or India may be seen as ‘prospectively

guilty,’ given their accelerating emissions of carbon dioxide. The key point,

rather, is that the anthropocene “has brought into view certain other conditions

for the existence of life in the human form that have no intrinsic connection to

the logics of capitalist, nationalist, or socialist identities” (217).

In this context, critically diagnosing who is historically at fault is less

important than the prospective, future-oriented task of figuring out how to

handle the mess in which we are now all, in one way or other, finding ourselves,

or going to find ourselves. But such prospective engagement cannot be carried

out on the back of an updated critique of capitalism (author). This is not only

because the mess has extended everywhere, including into non-capitalist, or

para-capitalist spaces, but also because we are now in a situation that nobody,

capitalist or otherwise, can either foresee or control. This leads us to the second

social scientific critique of the anthropocene.

Anthropocentric or Non-Anthropocentric?

Environmentalists typically emphasize the destructive powers of human agency in

order to better curtail them. The capitalocene has a similar emphasis; only it

assigns these destructive powers more or less exclusively to Western capitalism.

Others, however, make the very different argument that while it is true

that the destruction is due to human powers, the only remedy is to use these

powers even more forcefully to reverse the situation. Under the heading ‘the

good anthropocene’, some even suggest that given our technological and

scientific capacities we can engage in global climate- or geo-engineering to

improve the climate.4

While climate- and geo-engineering is dear to the heart of those who

support the ‘good anthropocene,’ social scientists view it as an intensified

4 See e.g. http://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/dialogue/can-we-have-a-good-anthropocene.

version of the same hubris that created the anthropocene in the first place.

However, it often goes unnoticed that the possibility of climate engineering was

made not in the name of the infinite powers of humanity, but rather as a sign of

despair. As Clive Hamilton (2013: 34 of ebook) notes

In the 1990s proposals for geoengineering were regarded by the

mainstream as fanciful and a distraction from the real task of reducing

emissions… almost all climate scientists took the view that the availability

of an alternative to cutting emissions, even if manifestly inferior, would

prove so alluring to political leaders that it would further undermine the

will to do what must be done. To canvass climate engineering, let alone

advocate it, would be unethical

Believing that climate engineering would likely be just as dangerous for the

climate as the problems it was meant to respond to – if not worse -- climate

scientists long refrained from even mentioning this possibility. It was only due to

continuous political inaction in the face of constantly worsening predictions that

Paul Crutzen’s “Albedo Enhancement by Stratospheric Sulfur Injections: A

Contribution to Resolve a Policy Dilemma?” published in the journal Climatic

Change in 2006 broke the taboo.

Far from positioning himself as a hubristic ‘earth master’, Crutzen

brought climate engineering to the table only because hope for a future

sustainable future for the planet seemed to be quickly vanishing. Since then

various more or less far-fetched proposals for engineering the climate have been

made. Some focus on removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and

depositing it elsewhere, like in underground quarries, or in oceans, soil or

vegetation. Others center on cooling the planet by solar radiation management,

which entails finding a way of reflecting solar radiation back into space. The

common assumption is that scientists indeed have the capacity to modify global

environmental processes in a manner both safe and controllable, not to mention

likely to be extremely profitable to their advocates. As Clive Hamilton (2013)

argues, there are good reasons to be worried about these schemes.

In spite of their many differences however, environmentalists,

proponents of the capitalocene, and advocates of climate engineering, have one

thing in common. Differences aside, everyone sees anthropocene causes as well

as solutions as centered on human agency and capacity, which can be used to

either destroy or save the planet.

In contrast to this view, the second line of critique of the anthropocene

centers specifically on problematizing reigning understandings of the

anthropocene for this anthropocentrism. This line of critique offers a non-

anthropocentric interpretation in order to bypass the dualism between humanity

and earth, and between nature and culture, which is located at the heart of the

anthropocene. The consequence of this dualism is that far too much power and

agency is ascribed to humanity – as when all the problems are ascribed to

capitalists, or all solutions are put in the hands of climate engineers.

Once again, we can turn to Chakrabarty’s argument. He readily admits

that the anthropocene up to this point has been largely the consequence of

human agency. But the take away point is that we are now in a situation where

anthropocene effects are out of our hands. Paradoxically, the balance of agency

has shifted: we have produced a world in which our powers are henceforth far

more uncertain, and probably diminishing. What this means is that the

anthropocene requires a much deeper understanding of the powers and agencies

of nonhumans.

This is indeed the key lesson social scientists like Kathryn Yusoff (2015)

and Nigel Clark (2011), and literary scholars like Timothy Morton (2013) take

from the anthropocene. Connecting with the philosophical current variously

called speculative realism and object-oriented ontology (e.g. Bryant et al 2011),

they argue that the anthropocene requires a rethinking of the anthropocentrism

of social science and humanities scholarship. In light of climate change, even the

social sciences are obliged to find new ways of paying attention to, and making

sense of, the power of things like storms, electromagnetic waves, melting glaciers

and sub-atomic particles.

Thinking the New Earth

In the mid-nineties, Marilyn Strathern (1995: 433) noted that for the (European)

anthropologist, “the concept of culture is already problematized.” Contrary to

conservative culture warriors, she insisted that the ambiguity of what is natural

and what is cultural was not primarily a consequence of postmodern theories

but rather of the fact that “we now live in a world that makes explicit to itself the

ability to breach the difference.” Strathern was discussing new reproductive

technologies but the anthropocene only underscores her observation more

forcefully, since the very name signals that culture is now situated at the very

core of what we thought was nature.

As critics emphasize, the anthropocene reconfiguration of nature-culture

relations is far from unproblematic. Even scholars, who accepts the

anthropocene as a working concept for social science, like Kathryn Yusoff (2015:

4), are concerned that it at once “naturalizes ‘humanity’ (culture is made into

nature) and reintroduces the nature/culture split” (4). Yet, rather than using this

as a cause for rejection, Yusoff and others ask how the concept can be enhanced

as a mode of thinking the future earth. Thus, with reference to the mad scientist

Dr. Strangelove, the literary theorist Timothy Morton (2014) explains how he

“learned to stop worrying and love the term anthropocene.” For Morton, the

anthropocene is centrally a sign for the sixth mass extinction in the 4.5 billion

year history of the earth. No reference to social construction or Foucault’s

discourses of man removes the fact that this extinction is unfolding, caused by

people, but now out of their control.

Morton summarily dismisses the standard critiques of the anthropocene.

Even if the anthropocene was originally the child of Western expansion

colonialism, its consequences are not exclusively colonial, since people all over

the world presently want air-conditioning. Even if the anthropocene mutation

has been caused by people this does not mean that humans are located above all

other species, but rather indicates their present vulnerability alongside other

species. Pointing to the profound vulnerability rather than the immense powers

of people, for Morton, the anthropocene is precisely not hubristic. Indeed, he

concludes that the anthropocene “is the first truly anti-anthropocentric concept.”

Agreeing with this diagnosis, Kathryn Yusoff (2015: 5) proposes to view the

anthropocene as a “new password.” But what is it a password to? Which

pathways does it open and which does it close?

To answer this question, Yusoff (2015: 6) outlines two broad possibilities.

One is the path of the aforementioned earth systems science, which centers on

the understanding of planetary thresholds and the specification of various forms

of climate intervention and engineering. Another can be seen as a vision for

environmental humanities that would come to terms with the Anthropocene by

recognizing it as the outcome of “geopolitical formations that are deeply

enmeshed in the mobilization of earth forces.” Yet, echoing Morton, she insists

that a merely “semantic” critique of the anthropocene and its scientific

vocabulary makes impossible the urgent task of “thinking a new earth”.

In Excess of Nature and Culture

Even within the Western discourses of modernity and science, the anthropocene

evidently gives rise to radically divergent interpretations of the relative

importance of people in relation to each other, and in relation to their

environments, up to the scale of the whole planet. If we move outside the West,

these interpretations vary even more significantly. Accordingly, the question of

what is required to take into account in order to adequately “think the new

earth” also expands.

The anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena (2015), for example, has argued,

that the reception of the anthropocene is complicated because the term assumes

a dualism between nature and culture that holds no purchase in many parts of

the world (see also Danowski and Viveiros de Castro 2017). Atsuro Morita

(2015) argues that this problem extends to Japan, where the anthropocene has

garnered relatively little attention, and only recently received a somewhat

awkward translation.

Identification of such cosmological differences is very important. But,

again, its significance is not in offering ammunition for the critique of the

anthropocene in the name of cultural variability. Far more is at stake than

linguistic differences or terminological quibbles. After all, even if cultural

categories and interpretive schemes vary the overwhelming evidence still

indicates that climate change is accelerating across the globe with all kinds of

dire consequences.

Yet even if cultural variability does not make the anthropocene go away it

poses other problems. Prominently, it makes clear that the anthropocene tends

to make invisible a whole range of ‘environmental’ processes that do not fit

neatly within its dual scheme of nature and culture. Moreover, the nature-culture

dichotomy makes it difficult to map back onto, and activate within, the

anthropocene discourse, the many analyses, arguments and practical responses

that originate from traditions -- intellectual, indigenous, or both -- that do not

make sense of the world in terms of this dualism. Obviously complicating the

question of what an adequate formulation of the anthropocene would look like, it

also raises the question of how to create openings for the active engagement of

the many social scientists and humanities scholars, and concerned people all

over the world, who are not interpellated by the nature-culture dichotomy in the

first place.5

An important dimension of this challenge is articulated by de la Cadena’s

(2015) notion of the anthropo-not-seen, which refers to the “the world-making

process through which heterogeneous worlds that do not make themselves

through the division between humans and nonhumans” unfold. De la Cadena

illustrates the anthropo-not-seen with the warnings made by the leaders of the

Awajun-Wampi who speak of the destruction of the world by invoking their

siblingship with the Amazon: “The river is our brother, we do not kill our brother

by polluting and throwing waste on it.”

On the one hand, this warning is a response to modern pollution, enabled

by separating nature from culture. Yet, on the other hand, it works by refusing

this separation and changing the modern storyline, redefining rivers, plants and

animals as kin rather than resources. As de la Cadena says, anthropo-not-seen

responses are called forth by the nature-culture distinction but they also exceed

it. It is because of the excess of the nature-culture scheme that such responses

can challenge what she follows John Law (2015) in calling the ‘one-world world’

of modernity. In certain parts of South America, at least, these kinds of response

currently do offer such challenge with an “unprecedented degree of publicity.”

5 See for example the comments by Noburo Ishikawa in Haraway et al (2015).

The possibilities thus opened, she argues, “must be cared for”, and it is part of the

job of social science and humanities to engage in such forms of care.

De la Cadena’s argument opens an exciting path for the environmental

humanities. Doing so, it travels down one of Yusoff’s paths towards the new

earth. Yet, Yusoff’s vision of two divergent pathways – one for the humanities

and one for earth sciences – is problematic. As I discuss below, not only is it

empirically incorrect, in that it ignores already existing conjunctions of social

and natural science knowledge, but it is also far too limiting in imaginative terms.

Rather than revivifying C. P. Snow’s (1993) discredited thesis of the “two

cultures,” we might see disciplines as internally complex and mutually

interacting, forming drifting archipelagos, where ideas and forms of

collaborative engagement travel in many directions, informing and transforming

one another.

New Alliances

Rather than parallel developments in the humanities and science, and certainly

rather than a hierarchy in which firm scientific facts underpin more fanciful

humanistic interpretations, the archipelagic picture defines the anthropocene

landscape as one of many possible conjunctions. Thus, as the philosopher of

science Isabelle Stengers writes, it is

because of models running on more and more powerful computers and

observational data … [that] the many diverse disruptions already

witnessed, by Inuits, Amazonians or fishermen of Capetown are now to be

recognized as having nothing transitory about them, as referring to the

same ongoing process, bound to affect all and every people on this earth,

human and nonhuman6

In this picture, there is no opposition between data sciences and indigenous

narratives. Rather, scientific modeling holds potential for supporting the many

observations and analyses that anthropologists, geographers and environmental

6 Available at https://osmilnomesdegaia.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/isabelle-stengers.pdf .

historians and indigenous people have already been making by other means.

Moreover, as Heather Swanson (2016) notes, natural scientists debating the

meaning and implication of the anthropocene are, in fact, increasingly required to

turn to humanities and social scientific research.

In a careful analysis of Lewis and Maslin’s (2015) Nature article “Defining

the Anthropocene,” Swanson observes that the authors draw on a range of

historic and geographic evidence in the attempt to make a sound scientific

determination of the starting point of the anthropocene. Some locate the

anthropocene starting point as the Industrial Revolution and the beginning of

fossil fuel use, while others draw on archaeology to claim a beginning 10,000

years earlier, around the Neolithic revolution. Considering these possible

starting dates, Lewis and Maslin (2015) further examine what they call the

“Great Acceleration” after WW2. But they are particularly interested in what

following the environmental historian Alfred Crosby (1972), they call the

“Columbian exchange”.

Crosby used this term to designate the “mass movement of animals,

plants, and pathogens among continents that began with the wave of exploration

and exploitation that followed Columbus’ initial voyage” (Swanson 2016: 160), a

wave that led to “a swift, ongoing, radical reorganization of life on Earth without

geologic precedent” (Lewis and Maslin 2015: 174). As Lewis and Maslin explain

one can detect lowered global CO2 levels as a result of mass death in the

Americas, because the slaughter led to a decline in farming, expansion of forest

and an uptake of atmospheric carbon (Swanson 2016: 160, paraphrasing Lewis

and Maslin 2015: 175).

Rather than being concerned with the correctness of this analysis,

Swanson makes several incisive observations about the form of the argument.

For one thing, she observes the anomaly (from the point of view of the two

cultures logic) that controversies about the scientific definition of the

anthropocene involve a large amount of social scientific scholarship, pertaining

to histories of colonialism, archaeology, anthropology and geography. Even

further, she highlights the explicit normative and political impulse guides these

discussions. Whereas some scientists argue that pushing the anthropocene

starting date back to the Neolithic could be problematic, as it might normalize

the idea of global environmental change, while locating the anthropocene onset

of the Industrial revolution would enable assignment of “historical

responsibility…to particular countries or regions” (Lewis and Maslin 2015: 171),

others worry that such a late starting date may suggest that everything until the

Industrial revolution was “natural,” thereby “wrongly stereotyping pre-industrial

peoples as primitives who were in harmony with nature” (Swanson 2016: 159).

Criticizing the anthropocene as a depoliticizing concept (Malm and

Hornborg 2014), social scientists appear oblivious to the reverse movement

whereby the political issues they urge us to address are already being

internalized in scientific discussions about the very meaning that might be given

to the concept. Meanwhile, Lewis and Maslin are drawing extensively on social

science, to make the argument – in Nature – that the anthropocene is not only a

stratigraphic but also a political matter, relating to colonialism, global trade and

power relations.

Swanson concludes that the anthropocene might itself be seen as

generative of a new political ecology. This would be an ecology in which new

cross-disciplinary alliances hold potential not only for “new forms of scholarly

practice” (Swanson 2016: 162) but also for leading to a new politics of

knowledge. Though resonant with Yusoff’s call for thinking the earth, at stake is

not the opening of parallel pathways, but rather a recognition of existing cross-

disciplinary entwinements and a willingness to seek out travel companions with

which to nurture new forms of knowledge and practice.

In this paper, I have indicated that the anthropocene holds rich potential

for the creation of such new alliances not only within the social sciences and

humanities, as exemplified by the emergence of environmental humanities, but

also across the natural and social sciences, as evinced by the mutual traffic

between geology, ecology, anthropology and history. In place of traditional

epistemological hierarchies (with natural science on top) or more superficial

interdisciplinary collaborations, in which different forms of knowledge are not

really allowed to trouble one another, the anthropocene calls for increasingly

sophisticated conjunctions between divergent fields of knowledge.

The stakes are high. What is needed are disciplinary formations capable

of drawing on diverse forms of scholarship, evidence and theory, in order to

deliver informed and imaginative analyses of anthropocene developments and

consequences: for society, politics, infrastructure, science and technology and for

philosophy. Ultimately, the anthropocene question is about nothing less than

figuring an emerging ethics for the inhabitable future earth.

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