139,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
- Sprache: Englisch
The Anthropocene refers to all societies’ current era of environmental challenges. For the social sciences, the Anthropocene represents a historical “moment” with huge potential: it offers people new ways of considering the human condition, as well as how they interact with the rest of the living world and with the planet on all levels. At the turn of the 21st century, the idea of the Anthropocene burst onto the older, diverse and varied scene of risk studies.
This “new geological era”, which is entirely created by humanity, went on to revive our understanding of environmental issues, as well as the analysis of the social and political problems that constitute risk situations.
Drawing together contributions from specialists in social sciences concerning risks and the environment, Risks and the Anthropocene explores the advantages that the idea of the Anthropocene can offer in understanding risks and their management, as well as the limitations it presents.
Sie lesen das E-Book in den Legimi-Apps auf:
Seitenzahl: 457
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022
Ähnliche
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Foreword
Introduction
PART 1: Toward Unprecedented Risks?
1 Coastal Risks: Coastlines Always Under Pressure
1.1. Introduction: environmental risks/natural risks
1.2. Desire for shores and climate change: the increase in coastal risks in the world in the 20th century
1.3. Systemic approach to the vulnerability of coastal territories
1.4. Interests and limits of the Anthropocene moment for thinking about coastal risks
1.5. References
2 Forest Fires in the Anthropocene: Issues of Scale
2.1. Introduction
2.2. The Anthropocene or the resurgence of questions about fire and firefighting
2.3. Fire management in France: a renewed interest
2.4. Fires, climate change and territory: a mobilizing subject?
2.5. Conclusion
2.6. References
3 Urban Climate: Agenda and Perspectives of a Climate Risk
3.1. An internationalized and interdisciplinary research topic
3.2. Making urban climatology knowledge operational: a challenge for action
3.3. Feedback of knowledge from the local to the global
3.4. References
PART 2: Recompositions for the Study and Management of Risks?
4 Permanence and Specificities of Risks and Their Management in the Anthropocene Era
4.1. The Anthropocene, paradox of a new era?
4.2. Restoration of mountain terrain: recompositions of policies centered on the correction of hazards
4.3. Knowing, telling and managing risks: levers and attributes of metropolitan power
4.4. The Anthropocene, an ideological amplifier of responsibility transfers?
4.5. Back to the future: the Anthropocene as a new avatar of “creative destruction”?
4.6. References
5 The International World of Disasters: Beyond Reflexivity, Surpassing Naturalism?
5.1. Introduction
5.2. Localized disasters dealt with internationally
5.3. Disaster science: a naturalistic framework
5.4. Understanding nature in disasters
5.5. Denaturalizing disasters or the arrival of reflexivity
5.6. What framing at the international level?
5.7. Friction between climate and disaster risk reduction framing
5.8. Conclusion
5.9. References
6 The Difficult Birth of the Risk Society and the Relegation of Social Sciences
6.1. Introduction
6.2.
The Risk Society
, an ambiguous grand narrative
6.3. Contrasting contributions of the social sciences
6.4. Social sciences caught in a world of constraints
6.5. Conclusion
6.6. References
PART 3 What Consequences for a Changing Modernity?
7 Understanding the Political Fabric and Effects of Ensemble Flood Forecasts in Europe
7.1. Introduction
7.2. Modernity and the anticipation of risk
7.3. Numerical weather predictions and the emergence of forecasting the future
7.4. Flood forecasting, ensemble predictions and probabilistic risk management
7.5. The promises and pitfalls of risk-based flood risk management
7.6. Flood risk management in the Anthropocene moment
7.7. References
8 Toward a New Security Deal? Reflexive Modernity, a Complex Turn and Shift to Uncertainty
8.1. Introduction
8.2. From the globalization of threats to the resurgence of uncertainty
8.3. From risk to threat: when complexity produces uncertainty
8.4. The Anthropocene or the twilight of the modern project?
8.5. Adaptation and resilience: transformative promise or conservative revolution?
8.6. Conclusion: an unprecedented collective challenge
8.7. References
9 The Imperative of Practical Wisdom in the Face of Anthropocene Emergencies: The Case of Climate Change
9.1. Introduction
9.2. The main characteristics of practical wisdom
9.3. Industrial modernity and denial of the prudential imperative
9.4. Practical wisdom in the 21st century
9.5. The imperatives of practical wisdom
9.6. Conclusion
9.7. References
Conclusion
List of Authors
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1
Figure 1.1. Map of the world population in 2000 and the estimated population in ...
Figure 1.2. Blankenberge beach, Belgium (source: C. Meur-Ferec, September 2005)....
Figure 1.3. Diagram of the emergence and multiplication of coastal risks in the ...
Figure 1.4. Systemic vulnerability diagram (source: from Meur-Ferec et al. 2008)...
Figure 1.5. Map of the national coastal erosion indicator in France (source: Cer...
Figure 1.6. Remains of the pebble crushing plant of Tréguennec, Audierne Bay, Fr...
Figure 1.7. Lowering of the beach at the foot of a structure, Wissant, France (s...
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1. Analysis map for the urban heat island in Toulouse (source: BD-Mapuc...
Figure 3.2. Application of climate maps in urban planning (from Hidalgo et al. 2...
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1. RMT policy display in front of the town hall of Scionzier (Haute-Sav...
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1. Boat perched on the roof of a house in Banda Aceh, Indonesia, after ...
Figure 5.2. Flyer presenting the UN-SPIDER organization in Spanish
Chapter 7
Figure 7.1. Deterministic and probabilistic forecasts from the European Flood Aw...
Figure 7.2. Simultaneous ECMWF forecasts. For a color version of this figure, se...
Figure 7.3. Schematic view of the EFAS system
Figure 7.4. Example of flood risk mapping taken from the river Eden in the UK. F...
List of Tables
Chapter 1
Table 3.1. Example of policy levers to address the risk of extreme temperatures ...
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Foreword
Introduction
Begin Reading
Conclusion
List of Authors
Index
End User License Agreement
Pages
v
iii
iv
xi
xii
xiii
xiv
xv
xvi
xvii
xviii
xix
xx
xxi
xxii
xxiii
xxiv
xxv
xxvi
xxvii
xxviii
xxix
xxx
xxxi
xxxii
xxxiii
xxxiv
xxxv
xxxvi
xxxvii
xxxviii
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
SCIENCES
Geography and Demography, Field Director – Denise Pumain
Geography of Risk, Subject Head – Samuel Rufat
Risks and the Anthropocene
Alternative Views on the Environmental Emergency
Coordinated byJulien Rebotier
First published 2021 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms and licenses issued by the CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be sent to the publishers at the undermentioned address:
ISTE Ltd27-37 St George’s RoadLondon SW19 4EUUKwww.iste.co.uk
John Wiley & Sons, Inc.111 River StreetHoboken, NJ 07030USAwww.wiley.com
© ISTE Ltd 2021
The rights of Julien Rebotier to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021945744
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-78945-041-5
ERC code:
SH2 Institutions, Values, Environment and Space
SH2_7 Environmental and climate change, societal impact and policy
SH2_11 Human, economic and social geography
Foreword
Risks and the Anthropocene: A Look at the Environmental Emergency
Samuel RUFAT
Institut universitaire de France, Paris, France
Since 1980, more than 1.5 billion people have died in disasters and the UN estimates that annual damages will exceed $400 billion by 2030. Global trends of increasing exposure, high inequality, rapid urban development and worsening environmental degradation raise concerns that risk levels are becoming an impediment to sustainable development. In this context, the “migration” of the notion of the Anthropocene from the earth sciences to the social sciences has led to both hopes and controversies while polarizing attention around environmental emergencies. Are we witnessing a renewal, a refoundation or a refutation of knowledge, practices and levers of action around risks and catastrophes?
With regard to “Geography of risk”, books on this theme take stock of the renewal of concepts, approaches, issues and tools at the interface between risks, societies and the environment, because risks do not always translate into disasters and the increase in risks is not inevitable. It is possible to reduce the exposure of populations, to reduce their vulnerabilities, to support their adaptation or to support the resilience of societies in the face of risks that cannot be reduced or shared. Risk prevention, disaster reduction and mitigation of their effects require interdisciplinary approaches, in a subtle balance between the social demand for coordinated action at all levels and the imperative of reflexive criticism, in order to deal with the substance of the problems rather than the most visible symptoms or the most fashionable solutions. This book shows that, like other such notions. “The Anthropocene, even if it is deconstructed and criticized by the social sciences, seems to function as a performative category (which tends to impose a conception of the world), more than as a heuristic category (which allows meanings to emerge around conceptions and relationships to the world)”.
While scientists’ calls to action on disasters and climate are ancient and necessary, the call to the social sciences themselves remains fundamental. This book examines the shift toward the “social sciences of the Anthropocene” by showing that the imperatives of the emergency and action are engulfed in a constant deficit of reflexivity. Julien Rebotier has brought together a multidisciplinary team of French-speaking specialists, researchers and teachers, to put their expertise into dialogue. The authors offer a critical analysis of the links between risks, the Anthropocene and environmental emergencies, without glossing over the controversies and the political and ethical issues. They show in a fine way how the emphasis on climate, earth or life sciences, when social sciences are not audible in environmental research, tends to orient both the questions and the answers in a way that is not neutral: “The environmental emergency and the thinking of the whole deny the less fortunate their very status as dominated and lock them into a double punishment: they are both the most vulnerable and those whose voice counts the least (or for whom we speak the most)”.
In a concern for rigor and pedagogy, the authors first unravel the issues and approaches of the Anthropocene to propose a critical analysis in three parts: by presenting emerging risks and emergencies, then by discussing what the Anthropocene does to the concepts, themes and approaches of risk studies, and finally by questioning the possibilities of prediction, action and reflexivity in a world of uncertainty. Each chapter can be read independently. They are organized around common issues and converge to show that “the notion of the Anthropocene intervenes mostly in parallel rather than as a complement to decades of accumulated knowledge from research and action programs on risk.... First of all, reinforcement of the naturalization implied by the Anthropocene is mentioned in many places. Our gaze is focused on the threats and diverted from the issues as well as from the genesis of environmental problems”. Their analyses are illustrated by a wide variety of examples and welcome clarifications at different scales, placing the issues in relation to the concepts dealt with in other books on this theme (adaptation, management, resilience, vulnerability, etc.), without succumbing to the effects of popularity or urgency.
With this book, Julien Rebotier and his team draw up a critical prospective assessment of studies on risks and disasters and propose to provide the social sciences with a more autonomous research agenda in the Anthropocene era. They stimulate an essential reflection for a better accompaniment of societies in the face of global change, environmental degradation and the highlighting emergencies, in the perspective of a sustainable and liveable future for all.
Introduction
Risks and the Anthropocene Moment: Social Science Issues1
Julien REBOTIER
TREE, CNRS – E2S UPPA, Bayonne, France
Nous dont la lampe le matin [We whose lamp in the morning],
Au clairon du coq se rallume [At the rooster’s bugle is lit again],
Nous tous qu’un salaire incertain [All of us whose uncertain wages]
Ramène avant l’aube à l’enclume [Bring us back before dawn to the anvil]
Nous qui des bras, des pieds, des mains [We who with arms, feet, hands],
De tout le corps luttons sans cesse [With our whole body struggle ceaselessly],
Sans abriter nos lendemains [Without sheltering our tomorrows]
Contre le froid de la vieillesse [Against the cold of old age]
Pierre Dupont, Le chant des ouvriers, 1846
Collectively, we choose what we are sensitive to and what we need to react to quickly
Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia, 2015, p. 396
I.1. Risks renewed by the Anthropocene?
I.1.1. Social science research and risk
Social science research on risks and disasters multiplied after the Second World War. The range of approaches, concepts and methods used is extremely wide. Different currents feed a plethora of academic literature and quantities are regularly produced offering varied outlooks. Whether it is about collective or individual behaviors (Burton et al. 1978; Rodríguez et al. 2007), root causes (Blaikie et al. 1994; Wisner et al. 2012), the social construction of risks (Oliver-Smith et al. 2017), issues of maldevelopment or justice (Maskrey 1993), or readings of societies and their relationships to environments (Douglas and Wildavsky 1983; Theys and Fabiani 1987; Beck 1992), the intelligibility of risks and their management from the social world defines a vast and diverse knowledge domain.
Note the considerable deployment of initiatives of all kinds (research, studies, policies) on the risks of disasters, on the mechanisms that lead to them, on the ways to identify them and even to manage them (Pigeon and Rebotier 2016). So many efforts question the scope of research in the world that it takes as its object and of which it is part (Ribot 2019). The history and sociology of science show this (Bourdieu 1975; Bonneuil and Pestre 2015), and research on risk bears witness to it: there is no causal link between knowledge and action. Research is one way to produce knowledge (Mercer 2012). It coexists with other interests that are foreign to it and that weigh on it as well as on the arbitrations of action. Research is shaped by the world in which it takes place.
I.1.2. The Anthropocene: a new moment for thinking about risks?
Today, the notion of the Anthropocene is the focus of attention for environmental concerns. However, its content and temporal boundaries are still under discussion and controversy. Consequently, similarly to the French version of the book, the Anthropocene will not be capitalized throughout the book2. This editorial choice has not been imposed on the authors, but each of them has been careful to specify the preferred meaning when using the term. Whether it is a question of the more restricted geological meaning, of the craze that the notion arouses, of its effects in the political and scientific spheres, or of the reflection of a broader context for thinking, living and making the world, the effort to clarify the meanings of a term that remains polysemous is recalled by the use of Anthropocene3, or even Anthropocenes.
Engaged in this work of elucidation, the social sciences provide information on risk situations and their meanings (material, symbolic, political, economic) in their contexts. In this way, they shed light on the social world and the contexts in question, and on the moments to which the risk situations and their analysis correspond. Reducing the consequences of disasters is a legitimate objective for research. But the social sciences also have the mandate to produce intelligibility, in this case through the undertaking of risk situations. In this sense, risks can be reconsidered in the light of an Anthropocene “moment”, in the same way as other phenomena or issues such as globalization, justice or resilience (Chandler et al. 2020). The Anthropocene would introduce a “remarkable sequence” for renewing the understanding of life on Earth due to new articulations between living beings and the biogeochemical mechanisms of the planet. It remains a moment to be defined.
It is difficult to account for the diversity (and even contradictions) and the finesse of knowledge on risks. It is also difficult to introduce the notion of Anthropocene without arbitrating between its meanings, and between the terms used. Sequence or geological epoch? Living beings rather than human beings, whereas the human race often locks the discussion into the opposition: humanity versus the rest of the world. Choosing to use the category of humanity is a shortcut of thought that is rarely used in a measured way. It carries laudable ideals as well as obliterating abysmal inequalities. Finally, is the Earth correct to refer to a system and conditions that allow the living being to be accommodated? The planet Earth, then, unifies yet certainly oversimplifies the complexity of biogeochemical processes that we are now sure have a global history since their unprecedented trajectory is incomprehensible without human influences.
The Anthropocene is a 21st-century notion, marked by the seal of the physical and earth sciences. Like many other concepts, it has been taken up by the social sciences and is the subject of controversial, sometimes contradictory and virulent debates. Once the “Anthropocene event” (Fressoz and Bonneuil 2015) has passed through the stupefaction of its possible implications and the vagueness of its definition, which goes hand in hand with a certain anxiety (can we really measure it?), it is appropriate to return to the way this event forms a turning point to the ordinary and significant course of social relations and events; in the modes of production, of living, of circulating; in the complexity of the interactions that are established between humans and non-humans. To give an account of an intellectual, institutional, scientific and political conjuncture at work in the opinion as much as in more academic or programmatic registers sends us back to the complexity of a moment. In this sense, the Anthropocene moment corresponds to a historical period that is characterized by ways of thinking, arguing and acting, both collectively and individually, particularly with regard to the attention given to the environmental issue in our societies. The Anthropocene as a moment refers as much to the possible objectifications of an unprecedented sequence of relations between societies and environments as to the need to reconsider certain reference points and major structuring narratives of a modernity that is emerging from the 20th century bled dry: the great divide (between nature and culture), the status of science, the trajectory of progress, the mastery of uncertainty, security, etc.
The Anthropocene will be discussed in this introduction as a singular moment that seems to be taking shape, but it is indeed risk research, in its diversity and from the social sciences, that is at the heart of this book. In many respects, the Anthropocene moment remobilizes old questions about risk: relations between societies and environments, solidarity and inequalities, the hegemony of the naturalistic approach, the political nature of environmental issues, etc. Interrogating the knowledge produced by the social sciences on the notion of the Anthropocene thus makes it possible to point out fundamental debates, often hidden behind simple reformulations.
I.2. Defining the Anthropocene: ways of seeing, ways of thinking
I.2.1. A global framing by the Earth sciences
In the early 2000s, geochemist Paul Crutzen helped popularize the notion of the Anthropocene (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000). The rapid introduction of the notion into the global science arena was partly orchestrated from the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme – an international initiative led by the International Council for Science (ICSU) – where Crutzen served as vice-president. The IGBP aims to coordinate research at global and regional scales on the earth system, on the biogeochemical interactions that constitute it, and on the interactions maintained with societies. The IGBP is part of the trend toward the globalization of environmental issues, toward the consolidation of a planetary, atmospheric and climatic framework, then more broadly biogeochemical, and toward the train of major scientific initiatives driven by international governance – through the United Nations system. Thus, the creation of the IGBP in 1987 followed that of the World Climate Research Programme in 1979. Concerns about climate extend to global change in general in order to measure human impacts on the environment, from what would become the Earth sciences, which are well suited to address changes in the earth system. In 1988, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was formed, laying the foundations for a type of governance of climate and environmental issues already analyzed by the social sciences (Dahan and Aykut 2015).
The Anthropocene postulates that humanity’s influence on the geosphere and biosphere is such that it can define a specific geological epoch that would bear its name (Crutzen 2002). The recognition of human influence on the Earth is not new (Marsh 1865; Crutzen 2007) and, through a form of human ecology, it even constitutes one of the foundations of geographical questioning (Robic 2006, pp. 28–29). But the recent success of the notion can be understood in two ways. It is due to the intensity and unprecedented nature of interactions between societies and environments (Gemenne et al. 2019), as well as to the conditions in which scientific knowledge is produced, to the structuring of a globalized intellectual climate that weighs heavily on the practice of research (Castree et al. 2014), and to the place of the environmental question within globalized societies (Smith 2010). These two bundles of elements, namely the physical reality of unprecedented consequences of human–environment interactions, on the one hand, and the social configurations that accompany them, on the other hand, constitute the Anthropocene moment. The latter is of interest to the reflections gathered in this work on risk assessment and risk management.
I.2.2. From controversies on the boundary…
I.2.2.1. The steam engine, the Industrial Revolution and the Great Acceleration
Proposing the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch requires compliance with the rules of the International Commission on Stratigraphy, the body within the International Union of Geological Sciences that oversees the standardization of a geological time scale. Designating the boundaries of a geological epoch requires two conditions. It is necessary to be able to locate the traces of a global event left in stratigraphic materials (rocks, ice, sediments) and to associate them with other stratigraphic markers indicating changes in the whole earth system. Duly localized traces constitute a “golden spike”4.
For Crutzen and Stroemer (2000), it is the increase in the amount of CO2 found in the atmosphere (visible in ice cores) that marks the beginning of the Anthropocene at the end of the 18th century. This period corresponds to the beginnings of the industrial revolution. The authors link it to the introduction of the steam engine patented by James Watts in 1784. Thanks to the multiplication of the data collected, a period of “great acceleration” after the Second World War has been identified more precisely (Steffen et al. 2007). The malady was diagnosed, tracing the horizon of a techno-scientific and moral research agenda supposed to respond to the major dysfunctions that this evolution has partly caused:
A daunting task lies ahead for scientists and engineers to guide society towards environmentally sustainable management during the era of the Anthropocene. This will require appropriate human behaviour at all scales, and may well involve internationally accepted, large-scale geo-engineering projects, for instance to “optimize” climate. (Crutzen 2002, p. 23)
Despite the confidence displayed, evidence is lacking to close the stratigraphic debate on the Anthropocene. Above all, underlying ways of seeing the world clash across such categorization, underscoring the interest of axiological controversies in addition to metrological ones:
Care is needed to ensure that the dominant culture of today’s scientists does not subconsciously influence the assessment of stratigraphic evidence. (Lewis and Maslin 2015, p. 173)
I.2.2.2. A range of possible hypotheses
Geological time is marked by changes in the state of the Earth. Between the end of the Pleistocene (11,700 years ago) and the 1960s, several events are strong candidates as anthropogenic signatures of geologic epoch change. Lewis and Maslin (2015) explore several hypotheses and select two.
The great fires associated with the Pleistocene mass extinctions are discarded, their traces not being explicitly global enough. The stratigraphic evidence of the beginnings of agriculture and the upheavals of the Neolithic are not considered sufficiently synchronous. The process of industrialization and then the industrial revolution bequeath diverse and temporally dispersed markers. On the other hand, 1610 and 1964 are favored by authors as potential starting points of the Anthropocene.
For 1610, the consequences of the discovery of the Americas by the Europeans at the very end of the 15th century led to the global dissemination of pollens of many species and to the massive sequestration of carbon. In a few decades, the genocidal impact of the bacteriological shock on the Amerindian populations led to the death of 90% of the indigenous population and the rewilding of 50 million hectares of forest, wooded savannahs and grasslands, for lack of manpower to work them. Considerable amounts of CO2 were captured, removed from the atmosphere, as indicated by the ice cores that report the date of 1610 (Lewis and Maslin 2015, p. 175). For 1964, in the context of the “Great Acceleration,” it is a spike in the concentration of 14C (a radioactive isotope of carbon) in ice and trees that wins favor with Steffen et al. (2015). The 14C spike evidenced in the stratigraphic material was linked to a frequency of nuclear explosions on the Earth’s surface unmatched by any other time period.
Each hypothesis reflects an image of societies and their relationship to the environment. The date of 1610 emphasizes the domination and exploitation of resources. The 1964 date points to the concord of an international governance capable of banishing – or at least reducing significantly – the use of nuclear weapons. The fact remains that there is no consensus on the stratigraphic evidence and, above all, that it is only a matter of conforming to the requirements of geology. As such, the axiological controversies surrounding the Anthropocene carry more meaning – and are of greater interest – to the social sciences than the debates on the stratigraphic classification that presides over its identification from the Earth sciences.
I.2.3. … to the strengthening of meta-narratives
As a result of the disciplinary divisions, the truth of geology is not the same as that of the social sciences. Framing effects are at work here. Under cover of the authority of the discourses produced by legitimate sciences, we can convey ways of seeing the world. It is the role of the social sciences to identify the meanings produced, to identify the sources of the arguments on which they are based, as well as the interests, the expectations or the benefits linked to social positions. Numerous works contribute to exploring the social scope of the controversies surrounding the Anthropocene (Lorimer 2017), to making explicit the images of the world conveyed (Bonneuil 2015), and even to considering the agenda of autonomous research on the subject (Lövbrand et al. 2015; Davis and Todd 2017).
In this respect, the identification of major narratives conveyed by the Anthropocene is instructive of the possible contributions of social sciences (Bonneuil 2015):
– Earth sciences introduce a naturalistic narrative, which separates man and nature, by giving science and technology the means to sound the alarm and to find solutions. The advent of a global and homogeneous environmental conscience justifies that problems and solutions draw from the same source (Crutzen and Stroemer 2000);
– the postnature narrative does not recognize the modern separation between nature and culture. It comes into play to the extent that it recognizes that the outcome of actions is beyond the control of the will alone. We humans “become geology” (Latour 2015) and the emerging reflexive subject must acknowledge this (Beck 1992). The great divide between nature and culture blurs to define a common hybrid, of humans and non-humans, able to identify the environmental question as superior and ultimate;
– the ecocatastrophic narrative has been a recent bestseller (Servigne and Stevens 2015), while at the same time reviving the apocalyptic reflections of the post-Second World War era (Anders 1995) or those dealing with the autonomy of technology (Mumford 1950). From the limits of the planet to the prospect of collapse, it is impossible for societies to think of themselves as being alone in the maneuver. The capacity for action is shifted toward a kind of ecomodernism that would allow us to act in a more relational way on/with the environment (of which societies are part);
– the ecomarxist narrative applies the grid of reading historical materialist antagonisms (Keucheyan 2014; Moore 2017a), opposing classes and interests. The Anthropocene moment is the contemporary theater of the contradictions of capitalism, especially those that confront it with the depletion of resources in a finite world. The environmental crisis is the manifestation of an asymmetrical globalization of the economic world, reactivating the themes of inequality, exploitation and domination;
– the feminist political ecology narrative links the mechanisms of economic exploitation that transpire during the Anthropocene to other strands of domination. Issues of gender, community, racialization, sexual orientation, or faith, from an intersectional perspective (Gandy 2015; Yusoff 2018), weave the differentiated fabric of environmental crisis.
The work of contextualizing and explicating the grand narratives that accompany possible Anthropocenes also concerns the discourses held by the social sciences themselves (Lövbrand et al. 2015). Social science knowledge is always produced in the plural, under social conditions that need to be identified, both within the scientific field and in the social world (Bourdieu 2001).
I.2.4. Thinking about Anthropocenes from the social sciences
During the last decade, the growing production of work by the social sciences on the Anthropocene has been “foundational”. Collective articles seek to “reconceptualize” the Anthropocene – so as not to leave it to the Earth sciences? To defend competing interpretations of the social world? (Palsson et al. 2013; Lövbrand et al. 2015; Brondizio et al. 2016). Some elements of reflection are recurrent. This is the case of Anthropocene thought as an opportunity to break with the modern division between nature and culture. But very distinct positions clearly identify very different currents, sometimes in obvious opposition:
– the stream most compatible with the framing of the Anthropocene by the Earth sciences claims a joint research agenda (Brondizio
et al.
2016). We find co-publishing authors who share a form of universalization of processes (Steffen
et al.
2007) and agree on the identification of thresholds (
tipping points
), the place of numbers in a generalized equivalence and the evaluation of limit values with a global scope (
planet boundaries),
or an approach based on scenarios. However, the potential coupling of “social sciences and physical sciences” (Castree
et al.
2014) is only a fraction of what the social sciences can contribute. Integration is not questioned when it suggests that the sum of knowledge necessarily leads to better knowledge... which is not self-evident, however;
– another current claims a more interpretative perspective that explores the possible meanings of the Anthropocene for the social world through a new form of weaving on (and with) the Earth (Tsing 2017). Humans are becoming aware of a common, interdependent humanity through the multiple, complex, random and not entirely predictable interactions with living things and the rest of the geochemical dynamics. The Gaia hypothesis is taken up by Lovelock and Margulis (1974) through the Anthropocene and this new era that forces Earthlings to cohabit with others, human and non-human, “under the authority of a power without political institution yet assured” (Latour 2017, p. 115). The reflexive human subject is no longer the pivot of an anthropocentric existence. It is the “assemblages of organic species and a biotic actors that make history” (Haraway 2016, p. 76) and create new familiarities, extended kinships, toward another form of shared world (as exemplified by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020). Proponents of this current assess the complex “web of life”, which is “unruly, rebellious, and has a way of continually upsetting the best laid plans of states, of capitalists, of scientists and engineers” (Moore 2017c, p. 177);
– a third current breaks more clearly with the Earth sciences (Lövbrand
et al.
2015) as with the proponents of a “posthuman” thought (which moves from the human condition to that of Earthlings, human and non-human). Vectoring a form of pagan spirituality, the fable of the “We-common-earthling” (or humanity) is not convincing (Hornborg 2017). For this latter, yet very composite, current, blindly universalizing thought disarms the critique of capitalism, the springs of injustice and forms of domination (Malm and Hornborg 2014). In order to shed light on the matrix genesis of the Anthropocene, authors have introduced new terms such as “capitalocene” (Moore 2017a, 2018), pointing to globalized capitalist exploitation, or “plantacionocene” (Ferdinand 2019), denouncing the colonial fact. In both cases, the idea is not to reduce the Anthropocene to a material consequence of capitalism or colonialism but to extend it to a relationship to the world, to ways of relating to all elements of the “web of life,” to an imaginary penetrated by multifaceted and invasive fronts of appropriation that place all things in equivalence (Moore 2003). The perspective of a “world-ecology” reveals the divergence of elements and their complex, reciprocal relationships that connect – and make – the world without obliterating the inequalities, asymmetries, contradictions and antagonisms of a more materialist analysis (Peet and Watts 1996; Castree
et al.
2014; Davis and Todd 2017).
Several lessons can be drawn from social sciences readings of the Anthropocene. These echo the persistent and structuring variety found in risk studies. Bringing together debates on the Anthropocene and reflections on risk allows us to confirm, complete and even deepen certain recurring obstacles and challenges in the understanding and management of disaster risks, as well as of the environmental question more broadly.
I.3. Risks and social sciences: well-identified obstacles and challenges that continue to be debated
I.3.1. The blind spot of development
Ben Wisner defines “disaster studies” as:
A broad interdisciplinary attempt to understand the causes and consequences of events that cause sufficient harm and loss that assistance is required from people and/or institutions unaffected, whatever size of the group and area affected. (Wisner 2019, p. 48)
This very open definition of a composite field leaves unresolved the questions that concern “the causes and effects of events that lead to damage”. Since the second half of the 20th century, a growing part of research has been devoted to the denaturalization of so-called natural hazards (O’Keefe et al. 1976). But the social processes put forward are based on different, sometimes antagonistic, visions of the social world and relationships with the environment. It is sometimes a question of being attentive to the behavior of individuals, sometimes to the response capacities of communities, sometimes to the effects of framing social structures, among many other approaches. Alongside this polyphony of social sciences around disaster risks, the understanding and treatment of hazards continue to be a major focus of attention, effort (and resources) of research and social demand:
Four decades of academic literature on disasters (e.g. Baird et al. 1975; Maskrey, 1989; Oliver-Smith, 1994), backed up by a profusion of practitioners’ reports from the field (e.g. Anderson and Woodrow 1989; Heijmans and Victoria 2001), have shown that disasters deeply reflect failed or skewed development. Considering vulnerability to natural hazards through the sole lens of potential damage created by rare and extreme natural phenomena is a remnant of a paradigm that has been completely up-ended. (Wisner et al. 2012, p. 11)
In a literature that purports to be intermediate between academia and action, despite an observation that is now half a century old, the challenge remains:
If disaster risk is an endogenous indicator of a flawed development model, then progress toward the policy goal of disaster risk reduction will depend on a transformation of that model. If the world is to survive beyond the middle of the 21st century... it will be necessary to make conclusive progress on the path that has been least followed under the Hyogo Framework for Action and to develop a new approach to disaster risk management. (GAR 2015, p. 39)
However, the GAR (Global Assessment Report on Disaster Risk Reduction) does not engage in the programmatic field. Yet the Sendai Framework for Action (2015–2030), which postdates the Hyogo Framework, does not meet the need to turn the correction of misguided development into the key driver of risk management either (Wisner 2016, p. 32). In theory, the relevance of social science input is no longer in dispute. In practice, misunderstandings and confusions persist about their place, scope and impact in research and management (Ribot 2019). This discrepancy should be seen in the light of the apparent contrast between the many efforts made to understand risks, on the one hand, and the observation of a simultaneous increase in damage, on the other hand (White et al. 2001).
I.3.2. Risks and the Anthropocene: updating or evacuating social science questions?
I.3.2.1. Old themes that are still relevant
Given both the importance of the Earth sciences in framing the Anthropocene and the discrete consequences of critical social science work in the field, one might ask whether the Anthropocene is advancing a meaningful research agenda on risk, or whether, on the contrary, it is helping to make certain social science productions incidental. The themes found around the Anthropocene are illustrated by these five examples:
– Knowledge: there is not a single piece of knowledge, but varying forms of knowledge, which may or may not be scientific, may not always be compatible and may sometimes be in competition to aid understanding of the “causes and consequences” of harmful events (Mercer 2012). The social sciences are equipped to decipher the meanings encapsulated in the different acceptations of the notions mobilized (Demeritt 2001; O’Brien
et al.
2007; Hulme 2009; Bonneuil 2015). Knowledge never evolves alone, independently of the social world in which it is produced and conveyed.
– Technocracy and dogmatism: the decision founded in science remains a political arbitration. On the one hand, the practice of science and the legitimacy it enjoys – not to mention the heterogeneity of the scientific field – are a matter of social relations and therefore of politics (Bourdieu 1975). On the other hand, recourse to science to decide is always selective. It depends on the moment, on the context or on the underlying conceptualizations that presume a reading of the world. If they are not made explicit, they are ideology. Pretending to avoid arbitrations on the grounds that geology or atmospheric sciences would know neither morality nor subjectivity is an act of faith.
– Scientific polyphony: for risks as for the Anthropocene, the diversity of social science productions is considerable. This introduction has mentioned work on both risks and the Anthropocene. In both cases, there is no consensus on the analysis of the social dimensions of environmental issues, and there is a wide range between utilitarian reflections, in line with Earth science approaches, on the one hand, and the analysis of the environmental dimensions of the social, on the other hand. This diversity, characteristic of the epistemology of the social sciences (Passeron 1995), enriches interpretation but can feed confusion and so be detrimental to such environmental research.
– Interdisciplinarity and integration: it is now commonplace to denounce the fragmentation of research into silos, particularly in the case of subjects such as risk. We distinguish two forms of integration called for in response. One concerns the conditions of research; the other concerns the decompartmentalization of disciplines around the society–environment relationships that are the hallmark of geography and constitute one of its historical markers.
– The power of capture of one legitimate research sector over another is known (Castree
et al.
2014). Some promote the broad field of “sustainability sciences” (Lorimer 2017) or embrace the unifying dynamics of “environmental sciences” with the Anthropocene (Brondizio
et al.
2016). Others denounce it, see the opportunity to think differently (Palsson
et al.
2013) and resist falling into line with a poorly controlled framing of research. In particular, the debate stumbles over modeling or indicators, in fact over reluctance to put an irreducibly diverse social world into functional equivalence (numerical or not) (Wisner 2016). Extracting the figure from its context also cuts the data from its meaning (Rebotier
et al.
2019) and contributes to dehistoricizing the analysis (Moore 2003).
– Historically, risk studies have endorsed the separation between nature and culture (between hazard and vulnerability). This is particularly visible in the use of conceptual models that struggle to articulate physical processes and social mechanisms in a complex and explicit way (Pigeon and Rebotier 2016; García Acosta and Musset 2018). The Anthropocene moment may offer an opportunity to think about the post-great divide between nature and culture. But integrated ways of considering the reciprocal and non-deterministic relationships between societies and environments were already among the founding debates of geography at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries (Berdoulay 2008). The trajectory of the notion of adaptation is an illustration of this (Rebotier 2020), and calls for more integrated research on the environment, at least in Francophone geography, and predates the Anthropocene moment (Mathieu and Jollivet 1989).
– Transformations of the social: the theme of social change as a practice has sensibly receded in the research agenda (Castel and Martin 2012). Regardless of what it is called, (transformative development (Lavell and Maskrey 2014); adaptive transformation (Pelling 2010)), social change is either reduced to the inoffensive perimeter of small reformist steps (Pahl-Wostl 2009) whose modest consequences are continually promised to become significant; or it falls outside the scientific field, on the grounds that it would cover an ideological bias unacceptable in the majority representation of science (Metzger and Robert 2015). Research copes differently with this normative tension. Critical analyses identify asymmetrical development or structuring inequalities as obstacles to effective, sustainable and just improvements in risk conditions (Lavell and Maskrey 2014). The same criticisms are, nevertheless, blunted in official documents to preserve the consensus required by international institutionalization (GAR 2015). Critical thinking seems neutralized between its inclination to say things and a form of inability to change the world. In spite of the impasse, some people take up the issue of social responsibility in two ways. On the one hand, they assume that changing the world (not just making it work or describing it) is part of the mandate of research (Robbins 2004); on the other hand, they engage with other knowledge producers and with social sectors (other than those composed of scientists) that are more action-oriented (Mercer 2012; Shaw 2013). On the subject of the Anthropocene, should we dismiss the critique of capitalism on the grounds that its postponement is unrealistic (Latour 2017)? Along the narrow path that combines critique of capitalism and social transformation, some explore a movementist, collective option (Wisner 2019), which relies on critical initiatives and claims interdependencies as pledges of liberation (Moore 2017b).
Already known themes are reformulated and take on the appearance of a new terminology without any impression of significant progress. The apparent stagnation legitimately raises questions about a form of neutralization of social science questions and reflection. Clearly, the weak consequences of social science knowledge on risks and the environment would make it non-discriminating, without effect; in short, non-significant and almost useless in the wider debates (which go beyond corporations and disciplinary arenas), despite a great deal of valuable work, innovative proposals and ambitious approaches. A brief review of the difficulties in considering the issues of power around environmental problems, particularly in French geography, is enlightening in this respect.
I.3.2.2. A still difficult introduction of the environment in society
From the ranks of French geography to the arenas of globalized research, the status of the environmental question has been strongly conditioned. The Anthropocene moment seems to consolidate and even deepen the framings more than it offers real opportunities to reduce, circumvent, transform or overcome them. And this is certainly less a problem of the quality of the work than of the social conditions in which social science knowledge on risks and the environment is elaborated, produced, relayed, legitimized and appropriated (Metzger 2017).
In France, the 1990s and 2000s marked a resistance to thinking about the environment as a social issue within a geography understood as a social science (Kull and Batterbury 2017). Environmental concerns were pushed to the margins of the discipline (Pelletier 1993; Rossi 2001; Brunel and Pitte 2010), whether they blurred the more classical software of social struggles of industrial societies or compromised the scientificity of the study of natural environments that were more or less open to interactions with societies. This reluctance of some geographers to give a full place to social and political issues in environmental problems is at once symptomatic, blinding and declining:
– It is symptomatic of a modern world cornered at the threshold of upheavals it helped cause, and unable to think of itself simultaneously as an element taken in these upheavals. Tetanized by their power and its consequences which put them under obligation, modern actors evade their responsibility (Latour 1991) and try to disqualify their denigrators, who support the entry into political debate of an eminently social environmental question. The rise of the ecological question in politics, which has been growing in France since Jacques Ellul (1912–1994), Bernard Charbonneau (1910–1996) and Serge Moscovici (1925–2014), is referred to as the excesses of obscurantism – the Amish model and the oil lamp – or to the fascist threat – ayatollahs and other green Khmers (Ferry 1992; Brunel and Pitte 2010).
– It is blinding, because it masks the efforts, already mentioned, of fine integration of the natural and the social. Thinkers of the milieu
5
, such as Reclus or Kropotkin (regularly mobilized today in literature on the Anthropocene), put forward an idea that is not exteriority to the social world, but rather the embodiment of reciprocal relations between societies and a natural environment (in the sense of what surrounds), whether living or not. The notion did not resist neither the regional approach, nor later the spatial turn of quantitative geography, while abandoning nuances and complexity of the idea of milieu (Robic 1992). During the 1970s, the notion of environment became institutionalized as the systemic study of a complex of interdependent societies and natural environments in the form of a geosystem structured in geography (Bertrand 1968). At the same time, national interdisciplinary scientific programs sought to combine social and physical approaches to an environmental issue that was emerging as a social issue (Tissier 1992). In spite of the resistance to make room for social questions, these two precedents (and there are many others, in a wide range from Jean Tricart to Augustin Berque) show how much what will be called environmental geography only gradually, laboriously, painfully integrates the social question.
– Finally, this resistance promises to be on the decline insofar as the stigma of a major split in the discipline (between physical geography and human geography) is pushing younger generations to defend a programmatic horizon for a radically integrated “environmental geography” (Chartier and Rodary 2016). Another informal group formed in 2016, called Cynorhodon, is, for example, behind the
Critical Dictionary of the Anthropocene
(Cynorhodon 2020). The spirit of the times is one of permeability between disciplines, but also between questionings, from the plural register of environmental humanities (Choné
et al
. 2016) to the anchoring in critical geography of a physical practice of the discipline (Di Mauro 2015; Dufour 2015; Dufour and Lespez 2019). In the wake of this new breath of environmentalism on renewed practices and issues of geography, we find the emergence in France of the scientific current of political ecology (Gautier and Benjaminsen 2012). The specificities of the corporation, the institutional structuring of the community, the proximity between geography and public policy or the development of related problematic fields (such as environmental justice) certainly contribute to explaining the late introduction in France of a current formulated in the 1970s and well established in English-language, but also Spanish-language, environmental geographies (Kull and Batterbury 2017).
Thus, the evolution of French geography with respect to the environmental question is not induced by an Anthropocene moment. Rather, it is part of the long history of a disciplinary trajectory, its structuring narratives and competing paradigms and approaches. The Anthropocene moment and its environmental emergency today (like the awareness of these issues in the 1970s) sharpen the tensions within a discipline that is constantly working, recomposing and repositioning itself. The “missed appointment” (Chartier and Rodary 2016) of an integrating environment for geography at the beginning of the 20th century could today present a new face.
This is the meaning of the status of the social in the environment. Natural, ecological, physical conditions or planetary limits are not, for the social sciences, the cardinal terms of the environmental problem. Rather, through the classic but robustly updated idea of the co-production of nature (Braun and Castree 1998; Ekers and Loftus 2012), it is social and political conditions that are central to ways of regulating a shared, safer and more sustainable world. The environmental problem does not surround the social world. It is a product of it, the result of social relations and interactions between societies and their environments (Ribot 2014).
Seen from the South, what difference does it make to interrogate risks in the Anthropocene? What new things does the Anthropocene introduce for those whose world has already collapsed or whose inequalities are already difficult to bear (Bouisset et al. 2018)? It has been known (read and written about) for decades that development (a form of social relations and relationships with the environment) constitutes the matrix of the greatest social challenges – with multiple environmental variations. What remains is to put relational intelligence at the service of one of the fundamental mandates of risk studies: to practically and sustainably reduce the risks of disaster by pointing out and acting on the multiple causes and on the differentiated consequences of harmful events.
I.4. Insights on risks in the Anthropocene era
Based on the Anthropocene moment, nine chapters have been proposed for the study and management of risks by providing elements of response in three parts, posed as three questions. The first part, “Toward new risks?”, discusses types of risk (coastal risks, fires, urban climate) that have emerged or been renewed by the Anthropocene context. The second part, “Recompositions for the study and management of risks?”, evaluates what the Anthropocene moment is doing to the classic themes of risk studies: the risk society, the management of disasters or prevention policies that are always the mark of attributes of power. The third part, “What consequences for a changing modernity?”, takes a step back from the Anthropocene moment and draws the (at least potential) contours of future worlds. It includes an ethnography of flood prediction systems in Europe, an analysis of the shift to a world of uncertainty and a practical philosophical examination of an old challenge for action: the necessary action in a radically uncertain world.
Each contribution is positioned in its own way around common problematic orientations, recalled by this general introduction. It is possible to navigate between the autonomous chapters because of explicit cross-references throughout the text and to the general index of the book.
These reflections all feed questioning in the social sciences. They bring together authors who, for the most part, are involved in risk studies. At the heart of the book, highlighted by reflections on the Anthropocene, we find risks as research objects, as supports and markers of the social and as modalities and manifestations of interactions between societies and environments. The general perspective assumes a form of déjà vu by being part of several decades of social science research on risks. The notion of the Anthropocene, despite its success, should neither be used to neglect the critical knowledge already produced on risks, their study and their management, nor to elude the obstacles already identified. The introduction of the notion of the Anthropocene into the debate on risk thus serves as a revelation of certain salient points, or as a moment of reference for drawing up forward-looking assessments.
I.5. References
Anders, G. (1995). De la bombe et de notre aveuglement face à l’apocalypse. Titanic, Paris.
Beck, U. (1992). Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. Sage Publishing, London and New York.
Berdoulay, V. (2008). La formation de l’école française de géographie (1870–1914). Éditions du CTHS, Paris.
Bertrand, G. (1968). Paysages et géographie physique globale. RGPSO, 39(3), 249–272.
Blaikie, P., Cannon, T., Davis, I., Wisner, B. (1994). At Risk: Natural Hazards, People’sVulnerability and Disasters. Routledge, London.
Bonneuil, C. (2015). The geological turn. Narratives of the Anthropocene. In TheAnthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis: Rethinking Modernity in a New Epoch, Hamilton, C., Gemenne, F., Bonneuil, C. (eds). Routledge, London.
Bonneuil, C. and Pestre, D. (2015). Histoire des sciences et des savoirs. Le siècle des technosciences, Volume 3. Le Seuil, Paris.
Bouisset, C., Clarimont, S., Rebotier, J. (2018). Résilience et prévention des désastres (dossier). Vertigo, Special edition 30 [Online]. Available at: https://doi.org/10.4000/vertigo.19331
