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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
The Anthropocene has emerged as perhaps the scientific concept of the new millennium. Going further than earlier conceptions of the human-environment relationship, Anthropocene science proposes that human activity is tipping the whole Earth system into a new state, with unpredictable consequences. Social life has become a central ingredient in the dynamics of the planet itself. How should the social sciences respond to the opportunities and challenges posed by this development? In this innovative book, Clark and Szerszynski argue that social thinkers need to revise their own presuppositions about the social: to understand it as the product of a dynamic planet, self-organizing over deep time. They outline 'planetary social thought': a transdisciplinary way of thinking social life with and through the Earth. Using a range of case studies, they show how familiar social processes can be radically recast when looked at through a planetary lens, revealing how the world-transforming powers of human social life have always depended on the forging of relations with the inhuman potentialities of our home planet. Presenting a social theory of the planetary, this book will be essential reading for students and scholars interested in humanity's relation to the changing Earth.
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Seitenzahl: 496
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
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Contents
Title page
Copyright page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Introduction: What Planet Are You On?
1 Earth at the Threshold
2 Who Speaks
through
the Earth?
3 Planetary Social Life in the Making
4 What is Planetary Social Thought?
5 Inhuman Modernity, Earthly Violence
6 Terra Mobilis
7 Grounding Colonialism, Decolonizing Earth
8 Earthly Multitudes and Planetary Futures: Ten Questions
Bibliography
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Contents
1 Earth at the Threshold
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Planetary Social Thought
The Anthropocene Challenge to the Social Sciences
Nigel Clark and Bronislaw Szerszynski
polity
Copyright page
Copyright © Nigel Clark and Bronislaw Szerszynski 2021
The right of Nigel Clark and Bronislaw Szerszynski to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2021 by Polity Press
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
101 Station Landing
Suite 300
Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2634-5
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2635-2 (pb)
Cover image:
Akiyama Yō, Japanese, born in 1953
Untitled MV-1019 from the Metavoid series
Japanese, Heisei era, 2010
Stoneware
Ceramics: 20.3 x 32.1 cm (8 x 12 5/8 in.)
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Stanley and Mary Ann Snider Collection
2012.632
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Typeset in 10 on 12pt Sabon
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Limited
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:
politybooks.com
Dedication
To our mothers, Elaine Clark (1931–2019) and Sylvia May Szerszynski (1929–2020), who both passed during the writing of this book.
Acknowledgements
We find ourselves trying to finish off Planetary Social Thought in the midst of a global crisis that is raising deep, perturbing questions about the very point of thinking and writing, while also offering profound reminders of our total dependence on the labour and the gifts of other people – most of whom will remain anonymous and distant. In its own little way, the book is intended as a kind of tribute to the vast and largely irrecoverable chain of bodies, knowledges and practices that have got us this far – through all the previous upheavals of the Earth – ultimately gifting us with the luxury of thinking and writing time. So too do we take inspiration from those younger generations who are currently doing their utmost to keep our planet in a liveable state.
Many, many encounters, prompts and borrowings contributed to Planetary Social Thought, and we thank all those who helped us along the way, while taking responsibility for whatever twists and distortions we folded into the mix. One or other or both of us gave talks based on parts of this book at the conference ‘Narratives of Scale in the Anthropocene: Imagining Human Responsibility in an Age of Scalar Complexity’, University of Vechta, held at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin, 11–13 September 2019; to the Vienna Anthropocene Network, University of Vienna, 4 October 2019; to the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies, Potsdam, 5 November 2019; at the seminar ‘After Progress: Plural Potentialities’, Goldsmiths University of London, 29 November 2019; at the ‘New Earth Histories Conference’, University of New South Wales, Sydney, 4–6 December 2019; and to the UNSW Arts and Social Sciences Faculty, New Earth Histories Research Program, 11 December 2019. Thanks to the organizers of these events for the opportunity to share our ideas-in-the-making, and to the participants for some very helpful comments.
We held an online seminar on a draft of the book on Academia.edu, and received very useful feedback from Miguel Alexiades, Ahmed Mousa Badawi, Fionn Bennett, Daniel Duhart, Peter Haff, Serpil Oppermann, Hazel Medd and Robert Chris. Thanks are due to Lesley Green for helping us with some important references for chapter 6, and to Yasmin Gunaratnam and Kathryn Yusoff for conversations and collaborations that fed into chapter 5 – along with Stephanie Wakefield and Nora K. Jemisin for the conversation at The New School, New York, 20 April 2018, that was also an inspiration for this chapter.
Many thanks are also due to the timely and insightful advice of our anonymous referees; to Jonathan Skerrett, Senior Commissioning Editor at Polity, for helping us steer the book as it became ‘other to itself’ through various transformations; to Karina Jákupsdóttir, Assistant Editor at Polity, for keeping us on track throughout the project and for helping us with the cover design; and to Fiona Sewell for her speedy mid-COVID copy-editing of our manuscript.
Etymological derivations are generally from https://www.etymonline.com/.
Finally, we would like to thank ceramic artist Akiyama Yō for permission to use the work Untitled MV-1019 (2010) from the Metavoid series on the cover.
Introduction: What Planet Are You On?
The Day before Tomorrow
A lot has happened since we started writing this book: massive outbreaks of wildfire, widespread drought, locust plagues, a pandemic, global economic crisis and a rush of what we might call de-globalization. What has also been happening – and what continues to happen despite temporary restrictions on gathering in public spaces due to COVID-19 – is that a new generation of activists across the world have been demanding that political and economic leaders put climate change at the top of their agendas. Even before they are old enough to vote, school-age campaigners have helped recruit sympathetic politicians, taken their governments to court, and called for radical changes in their own educational curricula.
Although earlier generations have confronted planet-scaled threats, this is arguably the first global cohort to come to a clear understanding that, no matter what, the world they are inheriting will be significantly less hospitable to human and nonhuman life than that of their parents. For young protesters, informed by the connections that the physical sciences have established between the combustion of fossil hydrocarbons and climatic destabilization, what is at stake is not simply the direction the future will take but whether there will be a future at all. As one student’s banner in a recent protest in South Africa put it ‘You’ll die of old age. I’ll die of climate change.’ Or, as another asked, ‘Why the actual f*** are we studying for a future we won’t have!’ (Shoba et al. 2019).
In the light of current climate science, these are hardly exaggerations. Even in the unlikely scenario that internationally agreed-upon targets for emissions reductions are met, we are still heading towards a global mean temperature increase this century of an estimated 2.7–3.0 °C (Anderson 2015). This is well above the 2 °C limit that has often been considered a planetary ‘guardrail’ that should not be overstepped. But as climatologists Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows sum up the state of their field:
There is now little to no chance of maintaining the rise in global mean surface temperature at below 2°C, despite repeated high-level statements to the contrary. Moreover, the impacts associated with 2°C have been revised upwards sufficiently so that 2°C now more appropriately represents the threshold between dangerous and extremely dangerous climate change. (2011: 41)
What defines ‘extremely dangerous’ climate change – and even merely ‘dangerous’ climate change – is a high risk of passing over thresholds or ‘tipping points’ in the global system that would result in runaway, self-reinforcing shifts such as the break-up of the West Antarctic ice sheet, loss of tropical coral reefs, melting of permafrost, or die-back of the Amazon rainforest (New et al. 2011; Lenton et al. 2008). Overflowing the pages of scientific reports, such projections are now the stuff of mass-media documentaries, daily newsfeeds and social media memes. And this means that there is now a cohort of young people – those who are putting themselves on the front line of climate activism – who have no memory of a world that was not already heading towards a significant systemic threshold beyond which living conditions are effectively unknowable.
Like others who are unfairly and disproportionately exposed to changing climate – an uncompletable list that includes inhabitants of arid zones, atolls and deltas, polar regions and urban heat islands – these young activists raise charges that demand a response: an urgent response. After decades of ‘sluggish, litigious, uneven, and generally unimpressive’ efforts to contain the climate problem (Roberts and Parks 2007: 225), there is now widespread agreement that zero-carbon targets must be reached within the lifetime of the majority of the global population. For the first time in twenty years of UN international climate change conferences, delegates to the Paris 2015 gatherings agreed that the vast majority of proven fossil fuel reserves must never be extracted and combusted. Pressing home this decision, making sure that subterranean hydrocarbons actually stay in the ground is one of the foremost tasks that today’s climate campaigners have taken upon themselves.
But just as our planet sways to many beats, pulses and cycles, so too does collective human action move to a range of rhythms and temporalities. Matters of great urgency such as getting greenhouse gas emissions under control play a vital role in bringing people together, rewriting political agendas, expanding the frame of what feels thinkable and doable. However, every situation troubling enough to spark controversy, every problem that cries for a decisive response, also opens up questions with other temporal horizons: tempos that are slower, deeper, longer-range, iterative or resurgent. And these other considerations rarely sit it out on the sideline while more immediate issues are dealt with; sooner or later they surface, intrude, irrupt – revealing their unavoidable embroilment in the landscape of pressing concerns.
While climate action rightly makes headlines, the idea of the Anthropocene has emerged as a key vehicle for opening up broader matters of concern about human relationships with the Earth. A proposed geological epoch defined by human impact on Earth systems and on the rocky strata that make up the planet’s crust, the Anthropocene extends and multiplies the notion that the global climate might be pushed over a tipping point into a new operating state. In this regard, it has become closely associated with efforts to bring into visibility a whole range of possible limits or thresholds in the Earth system, each of which would have drastic implications for the capacity of the Earth to sustain the kind of human life and nonhuman worlds that we are familiar with.
More than just putting new causes for alarm on the agenda, we argue in this book, the Anthropocene offers incitements for thinking about our planet across a range of timescales, fields of vision and trajectories. Such provocations, we propose, can and ought to prompt us to ask some far-reaching questions. What kind of planet is this on which we find ourselves? What has our planet done in the past and what might it be capable of doing in the future? And closely associated with these ‘planetary’ themes, we also need to ask: what kind of creature or being are we? How have ‘we’ inhabited and made use of this planet in the past, and what might we find ourselves doing with the Earth and all its shifting, changeable processes in the future? This is what we refer to as planetary social thought.
To give a sense of what we mean, let’s return to the vital issue of ensuring that fossilized hydrocarbons never leave their subsurface reservoirs – this time with a slightly different spin. Very quickly, any insistence upon ‘carbon descent’ raises questions about how staying comfortable, producing the things we want or moving from place to place might otherwise be powered. Many of us will be familiar with associated debates about renewable energy, infrastructural transition, changing patterns of demand and so on. But the increasingly incontrovertible evidence that combusting matter-energy from beneath the surface of our planet is transforming the very operation of Earth systems raises another set of questions. How did so much carbon get to be sequestered deep in the Earth in the first place, and what are the implications of this deep storage for the way the Earth works? And, further, how did we, as a being or species, come to be capable of setting things on fire? How did we, or at least some of us, become so proficient at traversing the Earth’s geological strata in search of utilizable energy and materials?
Having considered these issues, we might ask yet another set of questions. If we were to desist from digging deep in search of hydrocarbons to combust, then what else might we do with fire? And what else might we do with the subterranean Earth, and all the capabilities we have developed for exploring, understanding and negotiating ‘the very thickness of the planet’? (Virilio 1994: 39).
The aim of Planetary Social Thought is not so much to resolve these issues, or to identify clear pathways out of the current predicament, as it is to broaden the terms of engagement of the social sciences and humanities with knowledge about how our planet works. For us, as it is for educational theorist Jasmine Brooke Ulmer (2019), ‘the Anthropocene is a question, not a strategic plan’. The lived experience of people on the front line of climate crisis or Earth system change is a vital point of departure for such questioning. But to really do justice to their suffering, their indignation, their demands for action, we argue, the questions need to keep on coming. We need to pursue these issues beyond the conventional terrain of the social, through the contact zone of human and nonhuman processes, and deep into the times and spaces of the Earth itself. If the fundamental question of the political is how we could live our lives otherwise, we argue in this book, so too is it timely to ask how a planet becomes other than it is. If we are interested in or excited by questions of how to collectively do things differently, so too should we be concerned and curious about how the Earth, over time, has discovered how to do things differently. As we propose in Planetary Social Thought, these are questions that can no longer be kept separate. Or rather, they never should have come apart.
The Coming of the Anthropocene
For growing numbers of people, everyday experience and longer-term cultural memory confirm that something is amiss with the global climate. But for many of us, it is science that is providing the grammar to frame and speak of such experiences. While scientific terminology is often uninviting to nonspecialist audiences, the notion of the Anthropocene has played a pivotal role in expressing the idea that our home planet is undergoing fundamental and irreversible change. First dropped into a conference discussion rather spontaneously by atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen in 2000, the Anthropocene has emerged as one of the scientific concepts – if not the scientific concept – of the new millennium.
‘Anthropocene’ is a fusion of the Greek anthropos, meaning ‘human’ and kainos, meaning ‘new’. Crutzen stumbled on the term as a way of saying that the Earth may no longer be in the Holocene, the relatively stable 11,700-year-old epoch that follows the end of the last Pleistocene glacial episode. The Holocene is considered by geologists, in most regards, to be a fairly unremarkable interglacial phase, one of dozens of brief warmer spells that punctuate the generally much colder two and a half million years of so of the Pleistocene epoch. What makes it special is really only that the Holocene is the geological interval in which some members of our own species, with accelerating speed, have done a lot of new things: settled into more sedentary lifestyles, domesticated significant numbers of plant and animal species, agglomerated into ever larger assemblies with more extensive built infrastructures, turned continents, seas and eventually the entire globe into an interconnected sphere of operations. But the Anthropocene idea goes a step further. Rather than just suggesting that our species has left marks or traces on the Earth’s surface, it proposes that we have become geologic or geophysical agents: that we have impacted upon the working of the Earth as a whole.
Crutzen’s use of the Anthropocene to signify the end of the Holocene attracted attention for the way in which it provided a shorthand term for a raft of transformations that human activities are effecting in the outer layers of our planet. Climate, insist Earth and life scientists, is an issue of immense importance. In vital ways, the rhythms and pulses of the global climate bring together many of the other things that are happening on or near the surface of the Earth. But climate change is far from the only problem we face. The loss of biological diversity, the acidification of oceans caused by rising carbon dioxide concentration, the thinning of the stratospheric ozone layer, changes to the global cycles of key elements such as nitrogen and phosphorus, high levels of particulate or ‘aerosol’ pollution of the atmosphere, the extensive transformation of the landform and ecologies of the terrestrial Earth, and irreversible changes to the way fresh water pools and flows across the planet’s surface are amongst the other extremely serious global environmental challenges that scientists have assembled into the Anthropocene concept (see Steffen et al. 2004; 2015a; Rockström et al. 2009).
Writing lists – whether they are shopping lists or global challenge inventories – has a way of helping us feel that we are getting on top of things. But in the case of global environmental changes, we most emphatically are not. We’ve already touched upon the immense risks that are associated with adding carbon dioxide to the Earth’s atmosphere. Current estimates of sea-level rise suggest that some 275 million people worldwide are now living on land that with 3 °C of warming will eventually be inundated (Holder et al. 2017). With regard to threats to biological diversity, which has long been considered a localized or regional problem, some ecologists now believe that ‘the plausibility of a future planetary state shift seems high’ (Barnosky et al. 2012: 55). If such a global transition were to occur, they suggest, it would be comparable to the ‘Big Five’ mass extinction events that have occurred in the Earth’s history – currently identified at 443, 359, 251, 200, and 65 million years ago (Barnosky et al. 2012: 53). With regard to the Earth’s global nitrogen cycle, at risk largely from agrochemical fertilizer use, researchers suggest we would need to go back 2.5 billion years to find changes of comparable magnitude (Lewis and Maslin 2015: 172).
By bringing all these transformations together into the single figure of a planet exiting a familiar geological epoch and entering a new one, the Anthropocene offers a way to get our heads around changes that might otherwise seem separate, detached or just too abstract. But it’s not simply the bundling together of a whole range of changes that gives the Anthropocene its clout. It’s the way that it offers us a language or grammar for thinking about the Earth as a system that – in its entirety – is capable of going through a transition, and doing this rapidly.
Already in the 1980s, there was mounting evidence that in the past climate change has happened abruptly rather than gradually (Broecker 1987). The idea that Earth’s entire climate system might pass suddenly and irreversibly over a threshold – like a capsizing canoe or bursting balloon – prompted a search for other Earth processes with ‘tipping points’. By the time that Crutzen made his 2000 ‘Anthropocene’ interjection, there was already a gathering sense amongst Earth scientists that there were numerous potential tipping points or thresholds in the Earth system – and a rumbling fear that passing over one threshold might trigger abrupt changes elsewhere in the system.
Along these lines, as the Anthropocene thesis took shape, it came to encapsulate the possibility that the Earth system as a whole – by virtue of the way that it functions as a single integrated system – might be capable of rapid transition from one operating state to another. As palaeontologist and Anthropocene Working Group chair Jan Zalasiewicz puts it: ‘the Earth seems to be less one planet, rather a number of different Earths that have succeeded each other in time, each with very different chemical, physical and biological states’ (cited in Hamilton 2015: 6).
As its scientific exponents clearly intend, the Anthropocene concept works at once as a diagnosis of the current state of the planet and as a warning cry, a planetary alarm, a call for action. As a scientific hypothesis, the Anthropocene is still under review. At the time of writing, evidence for the novel geological epoch is being evaluated by the disciplinary bodies who preside over the official geological timescale. Whatever decision is made, however, the Anthropocene idea has gained considerable traction beyond the world of the natural sciences and seems unlikely to go away in the foreseeable future. An Earth with the potential to turn into a planet that is new and strange to its inhabitants is a storyline – it would appear – that none of us can afford to ignore. But it is not as straightforward as this, as social scientists and humanities scholars have been quick to point out.
The Challenge for Social Thought
For many of us social thinkers, the Anthropocene is at once a compelling and an unsettling idea. It grasps us because it feels important to understand what is happening to the only planet upon which human social life – and life as we know it – exists. It is troubling because the Anthropocene gives a prominent place to the activities of human actors – and the question of what humans do, collectively, what they are and what they might be capable of is our speciality, not that of the natural sciences. Who speaks – which is almost always a question of speaking on behalf of others – is important to social thinkers. It matters a great deal to us who has the opportunity, the wherewithal, the power to talk on behalf of society, to speak for all humanity, and to be the voice of Earth processes.
In diagnosing human activities as a force of geological or planetary significance, natural scientists have stretched and expanded the conventional terrains of scientific research. In assuming responsibility for voicing the current climatic or planetary predicament, many scientists have taken a step further. All this means that questions of what defines natural science, what it is good for, what it ought to do next, are under negotiation.
But if we are to conceive of ourselves as we once envisaged glaciation, meteor impacts or tectonic plate movement, this is a problem for social thought – because these are precisely the kinds of forces we formerly believed to be outside of society, indifferent to the striving of social actors and, as such, not in need of our consideration. This is why, as science studies scholar Bruno Latour puts it, in reflecting on the meaning of the Anthropocene for social thinkers, ‘[w]hat the New Climatic Regime calls into question is not the central place of the human; it is its composition, its presence, its figuration’ (2018: 85). We simply do not have to hand stories, theories or concepts fit for the task of explaining what it means for human agents to find themselves behaving like Earth or cosmic forces. It’s worth recalling that at an earlier moment literary theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak called upon fellow social thinkers to ‘imagine ourselves as planetary subjects rather than global agents, planetary creatures rather than global entities’ (2003: 73). But so too should we note how long it has taken most of us to really begin answering this call.
Our sense is that the encounter with geological forces – whether human or inhuman – is as much an opportunity for social thought as it is a threat. Our concern in this book is with what social scientists and humanities scholars could make of both the Anthropocene idea and the broader developments in Earth and life science from which the Anthropocene hypothesis emerged. Rather than analysing the event of ‘the Anthropocene’, or figuring how social thinkers might reclaim from natural scientists their privilege of asking and answering questions about social being, we want to confront ourselves as social scientists with some difficult questions.
What might it mean for those of us schooled in the social sciences and humanities to view the Anthropocene as an incitement, a provocation to think social life through the Earth: to ask, curiously and insistently, what planet we are on, and what kind of ‘planetary creatures’ we are? In particular we want to think through the idea that ours is a planet with a propensity for reorganizing its own component parts, for lurching or leaping from one operating state to another. The term we give to this understanding of a planet that is capable both of self-transformation and of being nudged into change by outside forces is planetary multiplicity. This is our way of conceiving of an Earth that has the capacity – at every scale, from the microscopic to the entire Earth system – to become other to itself, to self-differentiate.
So we seem to be at a planetary juncture, at which confronting what the Earth is capable of doing, and developing theoretical and methodological tools to investigate how this enables and conditions social life, feels like a matter of urgency. However, we are also at a historical juncture, one at which the global predominance of Western knowledge claims, whether in the human or the natural sciences, is being strongly contested. In a globalized world in which many Indigenous or traditional ways of knowing have been suppressed, marginalized and overwritten by knowledge practices that more or less emerged from a single region, the authority of Western science is under contestation.
This raises pressing questions of how the multiplicity of the planet relates to the multiplicity that is so much a part of human beings as planetary creatures. The challenge of thinking through the Earth in ways that are open to ‘modern’ science but also to a world of other knowledge practices and ways of life is one that will accompany us, animate us, unsettle us, throughout this book. How does the Earth’s own capacity to be other than it is – its planetary multiplicity – relate to the otherness, the difference, the alterity that is so constitutive of human life? These questions do not just orbit around our idea of planetary social thought – they are at its molten core.
It is not possible to ask what planet we are on without also asking about the different ways this planet is engaged with, experienced, known and imagined. The term we give to the way that different human groups or collectives respond to the multiplicity that inheres in our planet is earthly multitudes. As we will explain in more detail, for us an earthly multitude is a shared way of responding to the challenges raised by the changeability of the Earth and the opportunities opened up by planetary self-ordering and variation.
Our planetary social thought, then, is more than an immediate response to the predicament signalled by the Anthropocene. Our twinned concepts of planetary multiplicity and earthly multitudes are intended to offer a more generalized way of understanding the connections between human self-making, plurality and diversity and the inherent changeability of the Earth at every scale. Through linking planetary multiplicity with earthly multitudes, we seek to show how human difference and social ‘otherness’ are bound up with the capacity of the Earth to self-differentiate or become other to itself. And in this way we have found that one of the most important consequences of the Anthropocene problematic is to feel ourselves drawn into engagement with earlier geological intervals, earlier moments in human and Earth history.
Planetary Thought in the Making
Whether we conceive of it as Western civilization, industrial modernity or global capitalism, there is a growing doubt as to whether a world order reliant on the combustion of fossil fuels has any long-term future. Insisting that coal, oil and gas stay in the ground is an effective way of putting this system under pressure and revealing where its fault-lines lie. And identifying and defying vested interests that are intent on perpetuating carbon- and mineral-intensive production in the face of all the evidence pointing to its perils is another necessary step towards any new order. But for all their political probity, neither saying no to fossil fuels nor staging tribunals for the most suspect parties in the current environmental crisis takes us far in the direction of remaking dominant Earth–society relations.
To begin opening up alternative possibilities we need to consider how ‘we’ arrived at the current conjuncture, to ask how different social formations came to acquire their force and impact. This is an obvious question for those constituencies or groupings whose actions weigh most heavily upon the Earth, but it is just as important wherever the planet has been peopled. ‘Fossil capital’ and ‘petro-states’ may have left their mark on the Earth system (see Malm 2016; Huber 2013: 5–6), but Amazonian and West African communities have generated their own soil strata (Fraser et al. 2014), while skilled use of fire in the Australian context ‘allowed the Aborigine to move a continent’ (Pyne 1997b: 31).
As we will be arguing, this is never simply a matter of inscribing a social or cultural power on a waiting landscape, but always an active conjoining of powers from across the different parts of the Earth: human, more-than-human, fully inhuman. It is about the making of ourselves as we make over land and life. ‘The question concerns the forces that make up man’, writes philosopher Giles Deleuze: ‘with what other forces do they combine, and what is the compound that emerges?’ (1988b: 88). And as we will see in chapter 3, in no uncertain way, this question also concerns the forces with which women have combined. As geographer Kathryn Yusoff makes clear, what is at stake in the context of the Anthropocene is more than the problematic of ‘social relations with fossil fuels’ or any other elemental form or force. It is no less than ‘the contemplation of the social as composed through the geologic’ (2013: 780); or as we would put it in our terms, the thinking of earthly multitudes as composed with and through planetary multiplicity.
To inquire how, when, to what degree different kinds of social beings have joined forces with different geological formations or geophysical fluxes, we are suggesting, is to cast a glimmer of light on the question of what other powers of the Earth we might yet turn towards or turn back to. What kinds of earthly multitudes might we yet become? The more we can find out about sociocultural processes of composing or compounding with the geologic, the more we can excavate or recuperate or just simply notice, the more options we have for engaging otherwise with our planet. Writing in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, but also speaking to analogous complex and cascading events, epidemiologist David Waltner-Toews and his colleagues insisted that ‘[u]nder post-normal conditions, the knowledge base should be pluralised and diversified to include the widest possible range of high-quality potentially usable knowledges and sources of relevant wisdom’ (2020). This resonates closely with our own intent to look deeply and widely for companionable, insightful modes of planetary social thought.
Viewed both as a species and as a heterogeneous ensemble of lineages and collectives, humankind has a vast amount of experience of living with and through the dynamism of the Earth. Our notion of earthly multitudes is intended to convey something of the great diversity of ways in which humans engage with and elaborate upon planetary self-differentiation, and what is at stake in acquiring this experience and knowledge. As we will see, learning how to live on a fickle and sometimes fast-moving planet takes time, and the task is never finished. And even time-honoured wisdom needs to start somewhere. For all that humans are arguably ‘overwhelming the other great forces of nature’ (Steffen et al. 2007), this does not mean we can simply impose our will on these forces. For as science writer John McPhee (1989) has pointed out, to manipulate other dynamic geological forces – rivers, lava flows, mud slides – necessarily involves learning to ‘think’ like them, and forming more-than-human alliances.
Planetary thought and practice is a messy, inexact art. Trial and error implies coping with experiments that fall short, go awry or succeed too well. And this means that what is in the making is likely to be more than just new arts and technics of mediating the Earth’s inconstancy. What must also be thought up, improvised, relearned are ways of dealing with failure and loss – our own and others’. For a planet that has the capacity to become other to itself is also one on which humans and our fellow creatures are likely to become unsettled or estranged. Such challenges are incessant. And this is why we think of planetary social thought as a work in progress, a collaborative task, an open-ended and interminable journey.
Structure of the Book
In the opening chapter, ‘Earth at the Threshold’, we seek to understand what is at stake in the scientific concept of the Anthropocene by contextualizing it in various developments in the Earth and life sciences that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. We look at how these new paradigms destabilized the gradualist consensus about geohistory and reintroduced the idea that the Earth can itself generate sudden and drastic change – and in this way opened up what we see as the challenge of thinking with and through a dynamic, self-organizing planet.
Chapter 2, ‘Who Speaks through the Earth?’, addresses the reaction of social scientists and humanities scholars to the dominant scientific narrative of the Anthropocene. Many critical social thinkers argue that we need to socialize the Anthropocene, introducing questions about power, knowledge and social difference. But we make the case for an equally necessary counter-move of geologizing the social. The ‘human’ acquisition of geological agency, we contend, needs to be viewed not only as a manifestation of social power, but as an expression of those powers and properties of the Earth with which we have joined forces.
In chapter 3, ‘Planetary Social Life in the Making’, we use a case study of the domestic chore of ironing clothes to begin to show what it means to reimagine the social through the lens of a dynamic planet. By tracking both the use of high heat and the weaving of fabric from their contemporary conjunction on the ironing board back to their deepest historical roots, we show how a mundane practice, pushed far enough, opens out into the dynamics and structures of the Earth itself. And in the process, we catch sight of how a conventional social category like gender can also be seen to have significant geologic or planetary dimensions.
Chapter 4, ‘What is Planetary Social Thought?’, takes stock of the journey so far and explains our own approach in more detail. Coming back to the question of what planets are and what they can do, we track key moments at which our own planet has undergone reorganization and learned to do things it couldn’t do before. This leads into a discussion of what we mean by ‘planetary multiplicity’ and the kinds of methods we think are needed to make sense of a far-from-equilibrium, self-organizing planet. We then tease out the twin concept of ‘earthly multitudes’ – our way of understanding how different social practices relate to the dynamism and self-differentiation of the Earth itself.
In chapter 5, ‘Inhuman Modernity, Earthly Violence’, we use the concepts of planetary multiplicity and earthy multitudes to revisit the classic social science question of how to make sense of the modern world. Here, we contend that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European encounters with a catastrophic deep time played a significant role in the racialized reimagining of a world of non-European ‘others’ as remaining mired in nature. Drawing together ideas from decolonizing thought, Black studies and science fiction, we go on to suggest that white colonialism involved the positioning of a ‘stratum’ of black and brown bodies to absorb the shocks of a volatile Earth. But so too, we argue, can such enforced exposure to unfamiliar geological and ecological conditions spark the emergence of new ‘subterranean’ earthly multitudes.
Chapter 6, ‘Terra Mobilis’, offers an extended case study of the increasing mobility of resources, artefacts and human beings. We set out from the example of the Yamnaya, central Asian nomadic herders who around 3,000 BCE fashioned a new pattern of life that involved moving in new ways, on horseback and using ox-drawn wagons. This was a socio-technical assemblage that was to spread and slowly transform the human world – but would also establish one of the preconditions for the later Anthropocene explosion of powered transport. We situate this story within the larger story of the ‘mobility revolutions’ of the Earth, through which the planet learned to move solid objects in new ways – and end with an exploration of how this mode of analysis might expand our ideas about the future of human mobility.
Chapter 7, ‘Grounding Colonialism, Decolonizing the Earth’, picks up on the issue of decontextualizing and moving matter from the previous chapter and works it through in the context of mineral phosphate extraction and the growing problem of impacting the global phosphorus cycle. We follow critics from Pacific extractive colonies who have denounced phosphate-enriched pastoral farming in Aotearoa New Zealand, Australia and elsewhere for scattering the ancestral spirit of their peoples. This opens up the more general question of how to negotiate between the secularized visions of Western science and the more ‘enspirited’ knowledge practices of Indigenous or traditional peoples, which we approach through the boundary-traversing figure of the aerial topdressing plane.
Chapter 8, ‘Earthly Multitudes and Planetary Futures: Ten Questions’, closes the book by signalling further opportunities for thought, research and practice. The questions that we pose point to possible contributions of planetary social thought to present and near-future challenges, ranging from the fate of the current global social order, through the relationship between human earthly multitudes and other living things, to the resonance between planetary multiplicity and a cosmos replete with other, diverse astronomical bodies.
1Earth at the Threshold
Introduction: Points of No Return
Edges, Borders, Boundaries, Brinks and Limits have appeared like a team of trolls on their separate horizons. Short creatures with long shadows, patrolling the Blurry End. (Roy 1997: 3)
So writes Arundhati Roy at the outset of The God of Small Things, a novel about demarcations and thresholds, and about the lasting consequences of passing through or over them. It is also a story in which the small things of the title turn out to have big repercussions, where the echo of seemingly modest events resounds through time and space.
In both spoken and unspoken ways, borders and the issue of who will be permitted to cross them loom large in the imagining of ecological catastrophe. Global environmental change joins a long list of other problems, challenges and lures that propel some people into mobility while prompting others to erect and police boundaries. Whenever there is talk of a major transition in the global climate or the Earth system, the question of some great acceleration of movement across the Earth’s surface is never far away. But whatever the trigger for trans-boundary mobility, the point of transition – the portal or passage from one world to another – tends to be loaded with meaning for those concerned. ‘Thresholds’, observes geographer Clive Barnett (2005: 16), ‘are … scenes for the drama of responsiveness, hospitality and responsibility.’
The drama of the threshold goes back a long way. So far, in fact, that we have lost track of when it was first performed or scripted. With its reference to threshing – the work of separating valuable grain from the dispensable husk or chaff – the term ‘threshold’ takes us back to a deep agrarian past. At a certain point, now unrecoverable, the meaning of ‘threshold’ shifted from the floor where cereals were threshed and began to denote the entrance to the room – with its raised doorstep to keep in the precious grains (Liberman 2015). From there it burgeoned into the point of admission to any important site or state of being.
But future genealogists of the threshold may well find themselves with another semantic leap to decipher. In recent decades we have witnessed an irruption of new uses of the threshold metaphor: a jump that takes us from sociocultural contexts to ecological cases, and from there – rapidly – to the entirety of the Earth. The identification of ‘thresholds’ in the Earth system – and the proposal to set up and patrol boundaries around these potential transition points – is perhaps the most important practical application of the Anthropocene concept to date. As sustainability scientist Johan Rockström and his interdisciplinary team put it in a paper promoting the idea of protective boundaries at the planetary scale, ‘[t]ransgressing one or more planetary boundaries may be deleterious or even catastrophic due to the risk of crossing thresholds that will trigger non-linear, abrupt environmental change within continental-to planetary-scale systems’ (Rockström et al. 2009: 1).
Like other thresholds, limits in the Earth system appear in the discourse of the Anthropocene as points of no return. ‘We have passed the exit gate of the Holocene’, announce historians Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz. ‘We have reached a threshold’ (Bonneuil and Fressoz 2016: xiii). In the planetary boundaries literature, once a threshold in the Earth system or subsystems has been breached, change is expected to be rapid, cascading and – for the foreseeable future – irreversible. Earth system scientist Will Steffen and his multidisciplinary co-authors have recently cautioned that our species may be on ‘a one-way trip to an uncertain future in a new, but very different, state of the Earth System’ (Steffen et al. 2011b: 756). For this reason, collectively identifying and patrolling no-go zones at the threshold of the Earth’s ‘safe operating space’ is fast emerging as one the most pressing political issues of our time.
We should not underestimate the magnitude of the change entailed not just when the reach of the political extends to the Earth in its entirety but when the object of governance shifts from movements of people and things across the surface of the planet to the dynamics of Planet Earth itself. That we ourselves are situated at this brink makes it too soon to be sure what the Anthropocene might come to mean, too early to fully diagnose its significance and consequences. What we are emphasizing is that the ‘event’ of the Anthropocene thus far – its primary provocation to thought and action – hinges on a novel understanding of an Earth with the capacity to pass over thresholds and to become something other than it is. That we humans are the hypothetical trigger of this threshold transition is crucial; but to understand ourselves as capable of pushing the Earth system past a point of no return requires us to appreciate how a planet can be capable of becoming otherwise, and how it can make its transitions with speed and finality.
In this chapter, we look at the science of the Anthropocene and the broader set of developments in the Earth and life sciences that have made it possible to think of a planet with a propensity for astronomically scaled self-differentiation. We explore the scientific origins of ‘planetary multiplicity’ and open up the question of what it means to inhabit a planet that not only responds to novel human pressures but also has its own history of working out how to do entirely new things.
Identifying a New Geological Epoch
Naming is important to social scientists and humanities scholars. Names, we believe, convey sociocultural values, they express power relations, they encapsulate how some of us get to define and depict the world at the expense of others. Which is why social thinkers have proposed a slew of alternatives to the term ‘Anthropocene’ – Anthrobscene, Chthulucene, Gynocene, Capitalocene – counter-terms that have clamoured and jostled over the last decade without coming close to toppling the title Paul Crutzen apparently conjured up in a couple of seconds during his celebrated conference interjection.
Earth scientists are meticulous when it comes to identifying the divisions between geological time periods that concern them. As Jan Zalasiewicz and his colleagues remind us, ‘[t]he Geological Time Scale is held dear by geologists and it is not amended lightly’ (Zalasiewicz et al. 2010: 2228). Geoscientists too take naming seriously. Their choice of titles for geological time may indicate sites at which signals of change are particularly conspicuous, commemorate life forms prominent in an epoch, or foreground characteristics that distinguish the interval from those around it. The name for the Pleistocene is ancient Greek for ‘mostly new’ while that for the Holocene means ‘wholly new’; the Ordivician period is named after an obscure Welsh tribe, and the name of the Hadean eon – the seething, lifeless first 600 million years of Earth history – is Greek for ‘hellish’. What geologists are not especially interested in, however, is attributing culpability for epochal shifts (see Davies 2016: 69–70); the prospect of the ‘Anthropocene’ being interpreted by social critics as a monolithic judgement on every member of our species seems not to have been a big concern of the scientists who rallied around the ‘epoch of humans’ designation.
Geoscientists have been generous in acknowledging predecessors in the identification of a novel human-inflected time unit. When informed that ecologist Eugene Stoermer had previously deployed the term ‘Anthropocene’, Crutzen invited him to co-author an introductory piece on the proposed epoch (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000). Further precedents came to light: American science writer Andrew Revkin’s ‘Anthrocene’ age introduced in the early 1990s, Russian geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky’s 1930s championing of a reason-dominated ‘noösphere’, Italian geologist Antonio Stoppani’s positing of an ‘Anthropozoic era’ in the 1870s, and, as far back as the 1780s, French naturalist Comte de Buffon’s musings on a human imprint across the face of the Earth (Zalasiewicz et al. 2011; Davies 2016: 43; Bonneuil and Fressoz 2016: 4).
Mounting evidence that the idea of humankind transforming the Earth was not particularly novel encouraged efforts to distinguish what was original about its most recent incarnation. Philosopher Clive Hamilton and science historian Jacques Grinevald (2015) are among those who claim that it is only with the coming of age of the interdisciplinary field of Earth system science that the mechanisms of changing Earth processes can be understood well enough to properly gauge a systemic human influence – as opposed to simply registering incremental changes. Through its definitive concern with globally integrated biogeochemical cycles, Earth system science demonstrates how it is possible for the planet to generate its own transformations at every scale – from the localized ecosystem right up to the planetary level. A formative influence on Earth system science was the idea that life itself has played a key role in planetary dynamics for billions of years, as proposed in the Gaia hypothesis (Steffen et al. 2004: 3). But it is important to keep in mind that the field came of age focusing on ‘contemporary global change’ – which is to say, transformations triggered primarily by our own species (Zalasiewicz et al. 2017: 85).
However, as the Anthropocene intuition graduated into a testable hypothesis, Earth system science came to rely upon other modes of geoscientific inquiry to substantiate its point about anthropogenic impacts. In 2008, a dedicated Working Group was convened by the Subcommission of Quaternary Stratigraphy to assess the available data and present a case to the ‘higher’ geological authorities about the proposed epochal shift. In order to satisfy the stringent requirements of the International Commission on Stratigraphy and its parent body, the International Union of Geological Sciences, it is necessary to link any proposed amendment to the Geological Time Scale to forensic evidence from the Earth’s rocky strata (see Davies 2016: 64). Consequently, much of the responsibility for making the case for the Anthropocene passed from Earth system science to the older, more ‘mainstream’ discipline of geology: to stratigraphers and palaeontologists whose definitive concern is ‘with ancient, pre-human rock and time’ (Zalasiewicz et al. 2017: 85).
It is notable, however, that the composition of the Anthropocene Working Group included Earth system scientists, the first time they had joined any panel dealing with the definition of a geological time unit. As the Working Group itself contends, one of the signal achievements of Anthropocene science thus far has been the way that it has brought these two formerly distinct geoscience fields together – in particular to collaborate over the question of what traces human-triggered transformations in the present Earth system will be likely to leave in the lithic strata of the distant future (Zalasiewicz et al. 2017; Steffen et al. 2016).
To attain formal recognition for the Anthropocene, ‘the “geological signal” currently being produced in strata now forming must be sufficiently large, clear and distinctive’ (Anthropocene Working Group 2019). Not only must this ‘footprint’ be an effectively permanent addition to the lithic composition of the Earth’s crust, it also needs to be geosynchronous – that is, distributed across the planet’s surface at approximately the same time. To make this case, human influence on the Earth system and its associated imprint in the strata were to be treated as having no fundamental difference from any other biological or geological agency: a kind of ontologically democratic approach many scientists are quite familiar with from researching the global climate and many other forms of environmental change.
The status and timing of numerous geological intervals have been and still are hotly contested. Even amidst this fractious discursive field, it soon became clear that the Anthropocene offered exceptional grounds for controversy. Even supporters of the idea of an epochal shift acknowledge the ‘somewhat arbitrary’ nature of attempts ‘to assign a specific date to the onset of the “Anthropocene”’ (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000: 17), not least because working on timescales of centuries or decades poses methodological problems for a geological toolkit geared to thousands or millions of years (Edgeworth et al. 2019). Moreover, because the formative processes of the proposed epoch are current and ongoing, researchers cannot simply work from existing rocks, fossils and other ‘solid’ evidence. They must orient themselves towards the lithographic signals that may or may not be discernible to a hypothetical observer far in the future, bringing a strongly speculative element into the debate. Stratigraphers find themselves in the novel predicament of attending to contemporary or recent activities in order to predict which will be the best candidates for long-term fossilization (Clark 2016; Szerszynski 2012: 169).
For many geoscientists, what added to the Anthropocene’s already considerable list of contentious features was the threat posed by its obvious ‘interestedness’ to conventional standards of objectivity. The Anthropocene, Working Group members readily professed, ‘has the capacity to become the most politicized unit, by far, of the Geological Time Scale – and therefore to take formal geological classification into uncharted waters’ (Zalasiewicz et al. 2010: 2231). This has indeed turned out to be the case, though as we will see in the next chapter, the degree and direction of the proposed epoch’s politicization have failed to satisfy many critical social thinkers.
Even amongst adherents to the Anthropocene hypothesis, there are major disagreements about the historical moment at which a geosynchronous signal was or will be laid down in the rocks. While most researchers initially favoured fossil-fuelled industrialization from the late eighteenth century, an ‘early Anthropocene’ minority focused on the Pleistocene extinction of megafauna by human hunters or the Neolithic spread of agriculture, while others proposed the cataclysmic post-1492 encounter between Europeans and the Indigenous peoples of the Americas as the turning point (Crutzen 2002; Ruddiman 2003; Lewis and Maslin 2015). The juncture that was (non-unanimously) chosen by the Anthropocene Working Group for its submission to the International Commission on Stratigraphy in 2016 was a set of changes associated with economic and technological globalization and population growth in the post-World War II decades. By this reasoning, it was only with the so-called ‘Great Acceleration’ of the 1950s and 1960s – and the atom-bomb tests of those decades – that the stratigraphic trace of human activities is likely to be fully global rather than regional (Steffen et al. 2007; Zalasiewicz et al. 2015). At the time of writing, the evidence is still under consideration by the Commission.
Provocations of the Anthropocene
To meet the exacting demands of the International Commission on Stratigraphy, the case made for a new geological epoch by the unfunded Anthropocene Working Group involved the sifting and collating of mountainous geochronological evidence. But neither ‘the forensic examination of rock strata’ by stratigraphers (Zalasiewicz 2008: 19) nor the immensely complex global data sets assembled by Earth system scientists are obvious crowd-pleasers – raising questions about why exactly the Anthropocene concept is proving such an effective way of expressing and publicizing the current planetary predicament. What exactly is it about the proposed passage out of one geological epoch and into another, we need to ask, that has made the Anthropocene arguably the most influential scientific idea of the new millennium? And how is it that the departure from the Holocene has come to be so significant, when so many nonspecialist audiences would previously have struggled to date, characterize or even name the current geological interval?
For several decades now, various approaches to the social study of science have been unsettling any assumption that scientific ideas gain acceptance purely on merit or weight of evidence, alerting us instead to the complicated and often unpredictable processes by which some truth claims rather than others become widely adopted. When it comes to the case for the end of the Holocene, many commentators, especially those whose disciplinary backgrounds lie in understanding social life, have focused on interrogating the details of the pre-eminent role of (some) humans in bringing forth the new epoch. As Bonneuil and Fressoz pose the question: ‘[w]hat does it mean for us to have the future of the planet in our hands?’ (2016: xiii). Or as human ecologists Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg argue, to make sense of the Anthropocene ‘we should dare to probe the depths of social history’ (2014: 66).
Others, from across a range of disciplines, see in the Anthropocene idea a new or renewed emphasis on the need to position humans within the much more ancient history of the Earth. For historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, the Anthropocene issue contextualizes social and historical processes within geological timescales and spaces that radically exceed any measure of the human. Climate change and the broader Anthropocene predicament, writes Chakrabarty, call ‘for thinking on very large and small scales at once, including scales that defy the usual measures of time that inform human affairs’ (2014: 3). Along similar lines, and resonating with our figure of the threshold, literary theorist Jeremy Davies (2016: 11) cites poet Don McKay’s claim that the Anthropocene for us provides ‘an entry point into deep time’. In a related sense, but in advance of the Anthropocene concept, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak alludes to ‘a planetarity … inaccessible to human time’ (2003: 88).
