See, for example, T. J. Demos, “III. Against the Anthropocene,” blog.fotomusuem.ch, May 25 2015; Andreas Malm “The Anthropocene Myth,” Jacobin, May 30, 2015; and Kathryn Yusoff, “Geologic Life: Prehistory, Climate, Futures in the Anthropocene,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2013.
Donna Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin,” Environmental Humanities, 2015; Jason Moore, “The Capitalocene Part I: On the Nature & Origins of Our Ecological Crisis,” 2014; and Lesley Green, “The Changing of the Gods of Reason: Cecil John Rhodes, Karoo Fracking, and the Decolonizing of the Anthropocene,” e-flux journal 65, special issue on the theme “Supercommunity,” June 9, 2015 →.
Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin, “Defining the Anthropocene,” Nature, March 12, 2015.
Paul Ehrlich et al, “Accelerated modern human–induced species losses: Entering the sixth mass extinction,” Science Advances, June 19, 2015. The team of researchers was led by Ehrlich, the author of the controversial 1968 book The Population Bomb.
The Earth After Us is the title of a book by Jan Zalasiewicz, the head of the working group at the International Commission on Stratigraphy assessing whether the Anthropocene should be accepted as an official periodization in geologic science. See also Alan Weisman’s best-selling 2008 book The Earth Without Us, and The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future by Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, for other examples of the growing post-extinction genre in popular science.
Roy Scranton, “Learning How to Die in the Anthropocene,” New York Times, November 10, 2013.
Erle Ellis, “Stop Trying to Save the Planet,” Wired, May 6, 2009; Erle Ellis, “Forget Mother Nature: This is a World of our Making,” New Scientist, June 14, 2011.
Ellis, “Stop Trying to Save the Planet.”
Ellis, “Forget Mother Nature.”
Ellis, “Stop Trying to Save the Planet”; Ellis, “The Planet of No Return: Human Resilience on an Artificial Earth,” The Breakthrough Institute, Winter 2012; Ellis, “Forget Mother Nature.”
Ellis, “Stop Trying to Save the Planet” and “Forget Mother Nature.”
Ellis, “Forget Mother Nature.”
Ellis, “The Planet of No Return.”
The early Anthropocene hypothesis sits at some distance from dominant scientific opinion, which locates the origins of the Anthropocene in the massive intensification of carbon-heavy industrialization in the last two centuries or even just in recent decades. Although Ellis has been involved in the International Stratigraphic Commission’s working group on the Anthropocene, he is relatively marginalized, as the vast majority of its members seek to locate the origins of the Anthropocene much later in the stratigraphic records than he does. It is also important to clarify that not all advocates of the early Anthropocene get behind Ellis’s vision of a good Anthropocene. The originator of the hypothesis, the palaeoclimatologist William Ruddiman, is more circumspect about the nature of geo-social futures, remaining optimistic about human resilience in the long run but disturbed by the idea that his arguments are being used to claim that increasing fossil-fuel use does not threaten catastrophic environmental change. I focus here on Ellis because he is the most vocal and public proponent of the early Anthropocene hypothesis and is involved in attempting to alter climate policy with his public activities.
In 2004 the directors of The Breakthrough Institute, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, coauthored a controversial paper entitled “The Death of Environmentalism: Global Warming Politics in a Post-Environmental World.”
See Will Steffen et al, “The Anthropocene: From Global Change to Planetary Stewardship,” Ambio, November 2011.
Mark Lynas, “A good Anthropocene? – speech to Breakthrough Dialogue 2015” →.
For example, authors of best-selling popular environmental science books like Diane Ackerman (The Human Age: The World Shaped By Us), Emma Marris (Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World), and Mark Lynas (The God Species: Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans); journalists such as Andrew Revkin, who runs the New York Times’ “Dot Earth” environment blog; as well as think tanks like The Breakthrough Institute, Steve Brand’s Long Now Foundation, and Future Earth (a United Nations–funded research platform that has a project on “Bright spots: seeds of a good Anthropocene,” perhaps tellingly related to research in ecosystem services) are all associated with so-called new environmentalism. As for Ellis, he writes in popular magazines such as Wired and New Scientist and had a prominent role in the recent two-year Anthropocene Project at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt.
Revkin’s talk at the Association for Environmental Studies and Sciences conference in New York can be found on his blog at the New York Times →.
Clive Hamilton, “The Delusion of the Good Anthropocene,” June 17, 2014. To his credit, Revkin shared Hamilton’s response on his blog and took part in a discussion with Hamilton hosted by the environmental news site Grist.
Clive Hamilton, “The New Environmentalism Will Lead Us to Disaster,” Scientific American, June 19, 2014.
Hamilton in “Is the Anthropocene a World of Hope or a world of Hurt?,” a discussion with Andrew Revkin and Nathaneal Johnson, Grist, July 7, 2014.
The Ecomodernist Manifesto, The Breakthrough Institute, 2015.
See the collectively authored piece “A Call to Look Past An Ecomodernist Manifesto: A Degrowth Critique” (PDF) →.
Clive Hamilton, “The Technofix Is In: A Critique of the Ecomodernist Manifesto,” Earth Island Journal, April 21, 2015. Hamilton was nonetheless invited to The Breakthrough Institute’s Good Anthropocene conference, where he argued that the manifesto’s argument followed an essentially theological structure. See Clive Hamilton, “The Theodicy of the Good Anthropocene,” June 24, 2015.
Bruno Latour, “Fifty Shades of Green,” June 2015 (PDF) →.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Hamilton, 2014.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Latour, 2015.
Ibid.
For example, although Hamilton admits that “thinking about the politics of climate change is depressing” (Hamilton, 2014), he stands at some distance from the metaphysically morose Kingsnorth on the ultimate possibility, as opposed to likelihood, of the large-scale environmental and social transformation needed to secure a more socially just and ecologically sustainable geo-social future. Nonetheless, one of the most interesting aspects of the debates around potential geo-social futures is that they tend towards polemical polarization. This is hardly surprising given the stakes involved, but these polemics sometimes unearth an unexpected subterranean opposition between optimistic and pessimistic orientations, which cut across the expected Left-Right political axis and revealing strange and perhaps uncomfortable conceptual convergences.
David Brooks, “The Small, Happy Life,” New York Times, May 29, 2015. Here, as so often, the moderate conservative (Brooks) and the disenchanted radical (Kingsnorth) enter into a peculiar consensus on the salve of the private sphere when the public disappoints. See Paul Kingsnoth, “Dark Ecology,” Orion Magazine, December 21, 2012.
This retooling also applies to familiar modes of critical thought, some of which call out for an epistemological update. Some of the critiques of the Anthropocene concept have shown a reluctance to tarry with the limits of established critical maneuvers in the face of fundamental conceptual change, and have sometimes appeared to be forcing the toothpaste back in to the tube of familiar critiques. This is not to say that these critiques are wrong or somehow unnecessary—on the contrary—but rather that they have limits with regard to concepts that emerge from very different domains that need to be recognized.
See Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, “Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics,” 2013 →; Laboria Cuboniks, “Manifesto on Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation” 2015 →; Mark Fischer and Jeremy Gilbert, “Reclaim Modernity: Beyond Markets, Beyond Machines,” Compass, 2014; Alberto Toscano, “The Prejudice Against Prometheus,” STIR, Summer 2011. The impulse to reclaim the Left’s orientation to the future common to these texts is one I share, but none have adequately accounted for the fundamental shift in planetary conditions within which this future will emerge.