1.
It is not mainly a scientific or empirical
event, even though it has, ironically, landed in the stratigraphers’
bailiwick. Instead, announcing to
Anthropocene is a political and ethical call to take responsibility for the
world we participate in making.
2.
It is neither optional nor reversible. (E.O. Wilson is writing a book on getting out
of, or reversing, the Anthropocene.) Part
of the reason is in the fact of our impact on the world (the Anthropocene
condition), but just as important is awareness that we are making the world in
ways that involve it inextricably in human practices and human meanings (the
Anthropocene insight). This bell cannot
be unrung.
3.
The Anthropocene will intensify existing
inequalities, from vulnerability to rising seas and expanding diseases
(Bangladesh) to having your traditional lands leased out from under you to feed
China (much of Africa). Because these
inequalities will be inscribed on the landscape itself, it will be perennially
tempting to think of them as natural, inevitable, or what people deserve/had
coming. A constant political challenge
in the Anthropocene will be to remember that what “nature does to us” is better
regarded as something people do to one another.
4.
As an overarching political and ethical problem,
it will be contested along familiar lines.
Not surprisingly, there is a neoliberal Anthropocene in the
economize-everything-and-forget-wilderness movement (spurring division in the
Nature Conservancy and driving attention-getters like the Breakthrough Institute)
and there is a new socialist Anthropocene in Naomi Klein’s interpretation of climate
change (This Changes Everything).
5.
Anthropocene politics will remain a distinctly
human practice (contrary to some proposals for post-humanist and new-animist
approaches to political life), but it need not be human-centered in the sense
of restricting its concern to human beings.
One of its most important elements will be constantly revisiting our
relation to and engagement of the non-human world
6.
Pre-Anthropocene treatments of the non-human
world have been either empiricist (what is it) or idealist (what does it
mean)? An Anthropocene approach will
have to overcome this opposition, because the ways we participate in making the
world what it is will both reflect and shape what we take it to mean. Fact and meaning are a single circuit in the
human-nature continuum.
7.
The Anthropocene will not be apocalyptic: it
will be a time of perennial slow crisis.
At least for the next century (and how much further can we pretend to
see?), most people will be less vulnerable to nature than most people have been
for most of history; but systems will falter and fail, the ground will shift,
and everything will be harder. However
strange it becomes, it will seem basically normal, and not adapting too readily
to that normality will be part of the political and ethical work.
8.
Anthropocene economics will have to accept that
there is no longer such a thing as an “externality” – the basic concept in
today’s environmental economics – because there is no “outside” of either
ecology or economics. The two are
increasingly a single system. While the
neoliberal lesson from this is that all the world must be economized, the
alternative is that political and ethical judgments are necessary about the
value of life itself.
9.
Previous political thought has been Holocene: it
has been able to assume the stability of nature, the definiteness of its
meaning, and the distinction between the human and the natural. Anthropocene political thought can assume
none of these, and must take them all on as questions and projects.
10. Literary,
political, and philosophical history will not become irrelevant, but we will
read it differently, finding the ways in which we have always been
Anthropocene, without realizing it. Our
past will appear in a different light, with more resources than we had realized
for the future.
11. Environmentalism
does not end with the Anthropocene, but it changes form. Instead of a set of topical areas, it becomes
a way of asking questions about everything, from the energy economy to the
transport system to the aesthetics of the global atmosphere. It will ask of each of these: What kind of
way is this of inhabiting the earth, and how does that habitation shape both
the world and the consciousness of the inhabitants?
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