Difference between revisions of "Anthropocene (controversies)"

Revision as of 21:20, 29 August 2020

Geological Debate

As of 2020, there is still ongoing debate about when to date the Anthropocene. Following guidance form the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy and the International Commission on Stratigraphy, the Anthropocene Working Group has been tasked with the job of determining a start date for the Anthropocene.

There are three suggestions for how the Anthropocene should be integrated into the Geological Time Scale. Option 1 has the Anthropocene following Holocene, so retaining what would be a normal interglacial as an anomalous very short Holocene Epoch. Option 2 has the Anthropocene directly following the Pleistocene. Under the second option, it would be called the Holocenian, since all formally defined Ages have an -ian suffix^[1] Option 3 removed the Quaternary Period, allowing the Neogene ('new life') Period to run to the present day and removes the anomalously short Holocene Epoch.^[2]

Fire

Farming

The Columbian Exchange

Industrial Revolution

Great Acceleration

In Humanities and Social Sciences

Philosophy

Through the modern age, conventional rationalist and humanist theories conceived of a Cartesian duality between human and environment, such that humans were the Subject observing and acting upon the environment or nature as the Object.^[3] This conceptualization was challenged as the term Anthropocene affirms the human species as a geological force,^[4] but only as one of many such forces within the Earth System. Perspectives of Postmodern theory further complicated the modernist or rationalist perspective by positioning of the subject-object duality and asserting there is no single grand narrative. This position has de-centered the human as subject and added the non-human or extra-human as an active agent. This understanding shifted contemporary framing, across disciplines, to abandon the previous conceptualization of human-earth relational positioning to a more complex, interdependent theory together in the same story, rather than parallel and sometimes separate entities.^[5]

However, the revelations of Anthropogenic change have encouraged a new sense of human exceptionalism, or anthropocentrism, which is a reiteration of rationalist, modernist, humanist and technologist perspectives that reasserts human-centeredness and humanity's imperative to modify earth system toward to meet its needs. Anthropocentrism acknowledges human species as an unparalleled force and thus reasserts the position as a primary agent, or Subject. Further, anthropocentic positions reassert the imperative to develop or change or subdue changes in the Earth System by human will and ingenuity. This rehetorical position has been met with much criticism.

As scholars become more aware of the effects of human behavior on the earth, further concepts of time have been called into question. Humans must look beyond historical narrative to a geological time frame, while also concerned with impending threats of the collapse of systems as climate changeshas accelerated. The new awareness has caused a flourish of activity in scholarly fields to deconstruct historical narratives as grounded in the larger history of the earth^[4]in an effort to understand better causes for human behavioral impacts on the Earth and how to move forward in the new climate.

This ongoing effort to reconcile observed changes in earth systems with human history from a multitude of perspectives with has shifted dialogue in social, political and economic realms.^[4] However, humanities scholars experience some difference in the conceptual framework as it is being formulated in the same instance as the rapid changes in climate crisis unfold. The ongoing question of locating when human behavior began to change the earth systems has implications in other fields of study.

These shifts in perspective among scholars of every discipline has been referred to as the beginning of a new ontological turn. While others posit that this shift has already occurred.^[6]

Postcolonial studies

Race and ethnicity studies

The concept of the Anthropocene has been approached by race and ethnicity studies. In the scholarly world, it has been the subject of increasing attention through special journal issues^[7][8], and books^[9]. The Anthropocene prompts questions about racial and ethnic exclusion in dialogues concerning the concept.  

Some race and ethnicity scholars suggest that imperialism and capitalism have already led to the extinction of masses populations during the Anthropocene and these populations have not been taken into account by geologists debating the dating^[9]. Examples are the Colombian Exchange, the trans-Atlantic slave trade and colonization. Axelle Karera states how the Anthropocene does not account for these past and current imperial injustices^[7]. To this end, they argue how the Anthropocene is configured in a future tense rather than in recognition of the extinction already undergone by black and indigenous peoples^[9].

Scholars argue suggest this is problematic because the Anthropocene then omits non-white narratives and blames the entire human race for a crisis caused by imperialist powers (scientific America^[10]. A contemporary example given includes the last survivor of an uncontacted hunter-gatherer tribe in the Brazilian Amazon compared to Rex Tillerson, who was CEO of ExxonMobil^[10]. In 2017, Rex Tillerson’s company is the fifth-largest carbon emitter in the world^[11] while the last tribe member’s carbon emission is essentially zero.

Proposed solutions are centered on including non-white narratives of origin stories^[9] and when discussing the Anthropocene to “systematically grapple with the problem of black suffering”^[7]. Nancy Tuana says that racism needs to be removed from various institutions and social practices that are relevant to the current climate regime^[8].

Feminist Theory

Current feminist critical commentary is characterized by a rapidly shifting transdisciplinary discussion, based on intentional inclusionary principles of modern feminism.

A contemporary foundational notion is the insistence on the poststructuralistshift from a humanist perspective, calibrating notions of anthropocentrism by critically de-centering human using techniques of postcolonial theory, asserting the nonhuman is the ruling concept.^[12]

The discussion on troubling the binaries of earlier theories is heavily influence by Karen Barad who also focuses on intersection between ecological destruction and human systems that include racist, colonialist, nationalist and misogynistic ideologies.^[13]

“There is no question that contemporary feminist theory is productively post-human, as evidenced by the work of Karen Barad, who coined the terms posthumanist performativity and agential realism to signify this enlarged and, in my terms, postanthropocentric vision of subjectivity”^[12] (Braidotti, pp 33).

Feminist scholar Donna Haraway has been influential in this field, emphasizing a change in perspective toward a cultivation of responsibility with the human and nonhuman – what she calls creating “kin” or a building of community, and a multispecies ecojustice. Haraway builds upon issues of reproductive rights and drawing attention to population issues in the wake of Anthropocene changes.^[14][15]

Literature

Politics/non-human agency

Popular culture

In the 2010s the Anthropocene has become more mainstream in its use in popular culture. It is more widely included in documentaries, music, magazines, poetry and podcasts.

The concept gained attention of the public via documentary films such as The Antarctica Challenge: A Global Warning, The Polar Explorer, L'homme a mangé la Terre, Anthropocene: The Human Epoch and Anthropocene.

In 2019, the English musician Nick Mulvey released a music video on YouTube named "In The Anthropocene".^[16] In cooperation with Sharp's Brewery, the song was recorded on 105 vinyl records made of washed-up plastic from the Cornish coast.^[17]

The poet Alice Major wrote Welcome to the Anthropocen. Her work, art that reckons with science, is part of a long tradition.^[18] 

"The Anthropocene Reviewed" is a podcast by author John Green, where he "reviews different facets of the human-centered planet on a five-star scale".^[19]

Multidisciplinary impact

Alternative framings

Capitalocene

Plantationocene

Chthulucene

References

1. ↑ Lewis, Simon, and Mark Maslin. 2015. “Defining the Anthropocene.” Nature 519: 171-180
2. ↑ Lewis, Simon, and Mark Maslin. 2018. The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene. Yale University Press.
3. ↑ Moore, Jason. (2017) The Capitalocene Part I: on the nature and origins of our ecological crisis, The Journal of Peasant Studies, 44:3, 594-630, https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2016.1235036
4. ↑ ^{4.0 4.1 4.2} Chakrabarty, Dipesh. (2009) The Climate of History: Four Theses. Critical Inquiry, 35(2), 197 – 222. Retrieved August 27, 2020 from https://www-journals-uchicago-edu.ezproxy.uio.no/toc/ci/2009/35/2
5. ↑ Latour, B. (2014). Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene. New Literary History, 45(1), 1-18. Retrieved August 27, 2020, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/24542578
6. ↑ Maslin, Mark A, & Lewis, Simon L. (2015). Anthropocene: Earth System, geological, philosophical and political paradigm shifts. The Anthropocene Review, 2(2), 108-116. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053019615588791
7. ↑ ^{7.0 7.1 7.2} Karera, Axelle. 2019. “Blackness and the Pitfalls of Anthropocene Ethics.” Critical Philosophy of Race. 7(1): 32-56.
8. ↑ ^{8.0 8.1} Tuana, Nancy. 2019. “Climate Apartheid: The forgetting of Race in the Anthropocene”. Critical philosophy of race 7(1): 1-31.
9. ↑ ^{9.0 9.1 9.2 9.3} Yusoff, Kathryn. 2019. A Billion Black Anthropocenes of None. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
10. ↑ ^{10.0 10.1} https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-term-anthropocene-is-popular-and-problematic/
11. ↑ Carbon Majors Report https://climateaccountability.org/carbonmajors.html
12. ↑ ^{12.0 12.1} BRAIDOTTI, R. (2017). Four Theses on Posthuman Feminism. In Grusin R. (Ed.), Anthropocene Feminism (pp. 21-48). Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press. Retrieved August 29, 2020, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctt1m3p3bx.5
13. ↑ Barad, K. (2018). Troubling time/s and ecologies of nothingness: re-turning, re-membering, and facing the incalculable. new formations: a journal of culture/theory/politics 92, 56-86. https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/689858.
14. ↑ Haraway, Donna. (2015) Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin. Environmental Humanities; 6 (1): 159–165. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3615934
15. ↑ Haraway, Donna J. (2016). Staying with the Trouble : Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press Books.
16. ↑ "In the Anthropocene" song from Nick Mulve. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYnaQIvBRAE
17. ↑ CMU: Nick Mulvey releases vinyl made from recylced plastic washed up on Cornish beaches.
18. ↑ https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/02/frank-kermode-revisited-apocalypse-pop-culture/581803/
19. ↑ "The Anthropocene Reviewed - WNYC Studios and Complexly. Spotify. Retrieved 28 April, 2020.