John Asafu-Adjaye et al., “An Ecomodernist Manifesto,” 2015, →, 6.
See →.
T. J. Demos, Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today (Sternberg Press, 2017).
See: Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Duke University Press, 2016); Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt, eds., Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet (University of Minnesota Press, 2017); John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (Monthly Review Press, 2000); and Jason Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life (Verso, 2015).
Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer, “The ‘Anthropocene’,” Global Change Newsletter 41 (2000), 17–18.
See Paul J. Crutzen, “Geology of Mankind,” Nature 415, no. 23 (January 3, 2002): 23; and Paul Crutzen, “Albedo Enhancement by Stratospheric Sulfur Injections: A Contribution to Resolve a Policy Dilemma? An Editorial Essay,” Climatic Change (2006) 77: 211–219. For Crutzen, the Cold War provided the opportunity to first consider the atmosphere as theater of large-scale military intervention transformed by a hypothetical “nuclear winter,” an experience that fed into his consideration of technology in the 1990s as a means of tackling climate change. Also see his co-authored book The Atmosphere After a Nuclear War: Twilight at Noon (1982).
Heather Davis and Zoe Todd, “On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene,” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2017, 16 (4), 761–80.
Asafu-Adjaye et al., “Ecomodernist Manifesto,” 6.
Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, “The Death of Environmentalism: Global Warming Politics in a Post-Environmental World,” June 16, 2010. The Institute’s philosophy advances ecological modernization theory, which contends, as Richard York and Eugene Rosa explain, that “industrialization, technological development, economic growth, and capitalism are not only potentially compatible with ecological sustainability but also may be key drivers of environmental reform.” Richard York and Eugene A. Rosa, “Key Challenges to Ecological Modernization Theory,” Organization & Environment 16, no. 3 (September 2003).
Asafu-Adjaye et al., “Ecomodernist Manifesto,” 29.
For a thorough critique of the manifesto, see Jeremy Caradonna et al., “A Degrowth Response to an Ecomodernist Manifesto,” Resilience.org, May 6, 2015, →.
Van Jones, “Vanity Fair: The Unbearable Whiteness Of Green,” Huffpost, May 17, 2007, →.
Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 21. Similarly drawing ecology together with racial politics, Alessandra Raengo asks “What is the ontology of black lives, when they are so thoroughly wrapped in an atmospheric anti-blackness?” in “Black Ontology and The Love of Blackness: Introduction,” Liquid Blackness, vol. 3, no. 6 (December 2016), →. Meanwhile, the recent 848-page catalog with essays by Fred Moten, Tina M. Campt, Ernest Hardy, John Akomfrah, and Hans Ulrich Obrist & Yana Peel—Amira Gad and Joseph Constable, eds,. Arthur Jafa: A Series of Utterly Improbable, Yet Extraordinary Renditions (König and Serpentine, 2018)—doesn’t mention ecology, climate, atmosphere at all.
For a discussion of the Black Anthropocene, where racialization is premised on exclusion as well as creative survival, and which stresses the formative influence of Octavia Butler’s dystopian sci-fi and Earthseed series, see Stephanie LeMenager, “To Get Ready for Climate Change, Read Octavia Butler,” Electrastreet, November, 2017. See →.
For further discussion of art and climate justice, see my specially edited issue of Third Text on “Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology” (January 2013); T. J. Demos, Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology (Sternberg Press, 2016); and Yates McKee, “On Flooded Streets and Breathing-in-Common: Climate Justice, Black Lives Matter, and the Arts of Decolonization,” Strike Art: Contemporary Art and the Post-Occupy Condition (Verso, 2016), 181–236.
Robinson Meyer, “Donald Trump Is the First Demagogue of the Anthropocene,” The Atlantic, Oct 19, 2016, →; and Christopher Schaberg, “Trump in the Anthropocene,” Sierra, Feb 1 2017, →: “we have to acknowledge Trump as endemic to, and symptomatic of, the current state of our world. His bullying tweets and destructive executive orders; his prioritizing dirty fossil fuels over clean renewable energy; his ‘us versus them’ and ‘America first’ ethic all expose the very same pathologies that got us an ‘Anthropocene’ in the first place.”
Rebecca Solnit, “Climate Change Is Violence,” Truthout, February 5, 2015, →.
Naomi Klein, “Why #BlackLivesMatter Should Transform the Climate Debate,” The Nation (December 12, 2014), →.
See →.
Two recent contributions supporting movement in this direction are adrienne mare brown, Emergent Strategies: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (Chico: AK Press, 2017); and Shelley Streeby, Imagining the Future of Climate Change: World-Making through Science Fiction and Activism (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018).
Lindsey Dillon and Julie Sze, “Police Power and Particulate Matters: Environmental Justice and the Spatialities of In/securities in U.S. Cities,” English Language Notes (Fall–Winter 2016).
Bruno Latour, “Love Your Monsters: Why We Must Care for Our Technologies as We Do Our Children,” Breakthrough 2 (Winter 2012), →.
Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate (New York: Allen Lane, 2014), 279. That said, there are also progressive engineering models that are not techno-fixes, such as forest management practices, mangrove protection, and permaculture farming, all of which accelerate carbon sequestration through natural processes. See Troy Vettese, “To Freeze the Thames: Natural Geo-Engineering and Biodiversity,” New Left Review, 111 (May–June 2018), →.
For critical overviews of geoengineering, see www.geoengineeringmonitor.org, a joint project of Biofuelwatch and ETC Group, with support from Heinrich Boell Foundation; Linda Schneider, “Geoengineering and Environmental Capitalism: Extractive Industries in the Era of Climate Change,” Science for the People (Summer 2018), →; and John Bellamy Foster, “Making War on the Planet: Geoengineering and Capitalism’s Creative Destruction of the Earth,” Science for the People (Summer 2018), →. For current proposals for developing a governance system based on functional, strategic, and normative demand rationales, see Sikina Jinnah, “Why Govern Climate Engineering? A Preliminary Framework for Demand-Based Governance,” International Studies Review 20 (2018), 272–82.
See Dominic Roser and Christian Seidel, Climate Justice: An Introduction (Routledge, 2016); I discuss some of these formations further in “The Great Transition: The Arts and Radical System Change,” e-flux architecture, April 12, 2017 →
As sci-fi writer Kim Stanley Robinson puts it: “Justice is a climate-change technology of great power, so there is no need to set up false dichotomies as to which good cause we support. The good causes reinforce each other and we need them all at once. This is why capitalism has to give way to an ecologically-based post-capitalism, which, in some features, will be aspects of socialism chosen democratically. We have to figure out a way to pay ourselves to do the work of survival.” Javier Sethness, “Toward an Ecologically Based Post-Capitalism: Interview With Novelist Kim Stanley Robinson,” Truthout, March 17, 2018, →.
Jedediah Purdy, After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene (Harvard University Press, 2015): the risk of a “neoliberal Anthropocene” occurs when nature is consigned to “natural capital” in economic mechanisms, where techno-optimism forces our collective fate into the hands of markets and technology.
See Jackie Wang, Carceral Capitalism (MIT Press, 2018).
Cited in John Elkington, “Saving the Planet from Ecological Disaster Is a $12 Trillion Opportunity,” Harvard Business Review, May 4, 2017, →.
See →.
See Rory Rowan, “Beyond Colonial Futurism: Portugal’s Atlantic Spaceport and the Neoliberalization of Outer Space,” April 18, 2018, →.
See David Keith’s book The Case for Geoengineering (MIT Press, 2013). Gates and Tar Sands tycoon Murray Edwards are among the key funders of Carbon Engineering. See the interactive geoengineering map designed by ETC Group and the Heinrich Boell Foundation, which shows the global state of climate engineering research and experimentation, including nearly 1000 current projects: →.
More info on the project can be found here: →.
See →.
Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason, trans. Laurent Dubois (Duke University Press, 2017), 6.
Yuval Noah Harari’s Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (Harvill Secker, 2016). Gates featured the book on his blog in 2017, https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Homo-Deus; and in Bill Gates, “What Are the Biggest Problems Facing Us in the 21st Century?,” New York Times, September 4, 2018, →. Also see Joanna Zalinska, The End of Man: A Feminist Counterapocalypse (University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming), where she writes: “there is a very clear sense in many of the science papers on the Anthropocene and their popularized media versions that the salvation from the Anthropocene’s alleged finalism will come from a secularized yet godlike elsewhere: an escape to heavens (i.e., a planetary relocation), or an actual upgrade of humans to the status of Homo Deus. In both of these narratives Man arrives in the post-Anthropocene New Jerusalem fully redeemed—and redesigned.” (manuscript, 10). Homo Deus resonates with Breakthrough Institute affiliate and EcoModernist Mark Lynas’s The God Species: The God Species: Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans (Fourth Estate, 2011), itself an update of Stuart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog motto from the late 1960s: “We are as gods and have to get good at it.”
Cited in Matthias Schrader, “Why Climate Change Skeptics Are Backing Geoengineering,” Wired, March 28, 2018. “The future is bright for geoengineering,” claimed Republican Representative Randy Weber of Texas, chairman of the Energy Subcommittee of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, and noted climate skeptic.
See Parker, Andy, Joshua Horton, and David Keith, “Stopping Solar Geoengineering Through Technical Means: A Preliminary Assessment of Counter-Geoengineering,” Earth’s Future (May 2018).
Arthur Jafa, with reference to Fred Moten, in conversation with Greg Tate, at the Hammer Museum, 2017: →.
Greg Tate, “The Changeling Mise-en-Scène—Arthur Jafa’s Meta Love and the New Black Reportage,” in Love Is the Message, The Message Is Death (Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, 2016), n.p.
Syms video can be found here →.
Martine Syms, “Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto,” →. Syms builds off the “Mundane Sci-Fi Manifesto” conceptualized by Geoff Ryman in 2007 (→), although she notably injects social justice and progressive political imperatives into her version. See also: Reynaldo Anderson and Charles E. Jones, eds., Afrofuturism 2.0: The Rise of Astro-Blackness (Lexington Books, 2015), x, which defines Afrofuturism 2.0 as “The early twenty-first century technogenesis of Black identity reflecting counter histories, hacking and or appropriating the influence of network software, database logic, cultural analytics, deep remixability, neurosciences, enhancement and augmentation, gender fluidity, posthuman possibility, the speculative sphere with transdisciplinary applications and has grown into an important Diasporic techno-cultural Pan African movement.”
Aria Dean, “Notes on Blacceleration,” e-flux journal 87 (December 2017), →.
Nicholas Mirzoeff, “It’s Not the Anthropocene, It’s the White Supremacy Scene, or, the Geological Color Line,” in After Extinction, ed. Richard Grusin (University of Minnesota Press, 2018). On “white environmentalism,” see Danielle Purifoy, “On the Stubborn Whiteness of Environmentalism,” Inside Higher Ed, June 22, 2018, →.
As Kyle Powys Whyte observes, Native Americans—like other groups that have suffered slavery, dispossession, and genocide—“are already living in what our ancestors would have understood as dystopian or post-apocalyptic times,” in “White Allies, Let’s Be Honest About Decolonization,” Yes Magazine, Apr 03, 2018, →.
Fred Moten in conversation with Robin D. G. Kelley, University of Toronto, April 3, 2017, →. Moten also appears in Jafa’s 2012 video Dreams Are Colder than Death.
All images unless otherwise noted are from Arthur Jafa, Love Is The Message, The Message Is Death, 2016. Video (color, sound) 7' 25'' Courtesy of the artist and Gavin Brown Enterprise.