The death of hope? Affirmation in the Anthropocene

This article engages with the imaginary that the great age of hope as critique is finally at an end. For hope's detractors, the Anthropocene is imagined to be a gain in ethical and political possibilities at the price of the eclipse of both the modernist imaginary (with its optimistic telos of universal knowledge and progress) and its romantic critical counterpart of re-enchantment and hope. Hope can have no place in the Anthropocene if re-enchantment is no longer possible and we no longer maintain the belief that the world was ever there, in some way, ‘for us’. It is argued here that, for hope to survive, it is necessary that the world be imagined as one in which it is possible for humans to find a sense of purpose or meaning.     

Nature and the international: towards a materialist understanding of societal multiplicity

ABSTRACT

The global environmental crisis requires a grasp of how human society interacts with nature, but also, simultaneously, how the world is divided into multiple societies. International Relations has a weak grasp of nature treating it as external to the international – an ‘environment’ to be managed – while environmentalism has a planetary epistemology that occludes the significance of the international. How to break this impasse? While neither Geopolitics nor ‘new materialism’ capture the complex conjuncture of socio-natural and inter-societal dynamics, I argue that Justin Rosenberg’s theorization of the international as ‘the consequences of societal multiplicity’ provides a theoretical opening. If a materialist notion of societal is adopted, ‘societal multiplicity’ allows human-natural and international dynamics to be grasped together. Thus, climate change is not a problem arising exogenously to the international, but something emerging through international dynamics, reciprocally affecting the units, structure and processes of the international system itself.     

Indigenous (im)mobilities in the Anthropocene

ABSTRACT

This paper explores Indigenous (im)mobilities in the Anthropocene, and their relationship to Pacific Islands climate activism. In a context where Indigenous peoples and perspectives are poorly represented in global climate politics, it is important to understand how Pacific people represent their own interests and imagine their own futures as pressures to move due to climate change take hold. We examine political action outside of formal governance spaces and processes, in order to understand how Indigenous people are challenging state-centric approaches to climate change adaptation. We do so by studying the works of Pacific activists and artists who engage with climate change. We find that *banua – an expansive concept, inclusive of people and their place, attentive to both mobility and immobility, and distributed across the Pacific Islands region – is essential for the existential security of Pacific people and central to contemporary climate activism. We find that Pacific activists/artists are challenging the status quo by invoking *banua. In doing so, they are politicising (im)mobility. These mobilisations are coalescing into an Oceanic cosmopolitanism that confronts two mutually reinforcing features of contemporary global climate politics: the subordination of Indigenous peoples, perspectives and worldviews; and the marginalisation of (im)mobility concerns within the global climate agenda.     

Sleepwalking through the Anthropocene

This article reviews seven recent books on the Anthropocene, from which three major narratives are extracted. First, while posing problems, the Anthropocene is seen as a ‘great opportunity’ for business, science and technology; second, it is recognised that the planet and humanity itself are in danger, but if we are clever enough we can save ourselves and the planet with technological fixes; third, we are in great danger, humanity cannot go on living and consuming as we do now, we must change our ways of life radically – by ending capitalism and creating new types of societies.     

“人类世”时代的长江：生命衰减的社会动力

以多个明星物种和大量鱼类的灭绝或濒临灭绝为标志，长江的生物完整性在最近的十多年间下降到“无鱼”等级，长江生态系统高度碎片化。在人类世的视野里，长江的物种灭绝和生态危机实为20世纪中期开始的全球变化“大加速”的重要组成部分，是诸多人类活动综合作用的结果，体现了“文明的累积效应”——繁忙的黄金水道，密集的梯级电站、工业-城市走廊和岸线占用，以及严重的酷渔滥捕等等，共同挤压了水中生灵的生存空间，造成其种群数量锐减。由于已完成的大开发及其叠加效应足够强大，尽管“共抓大保护，不搞大开发”已成共识、禁渔令也有助于保护少数物种，但对长江生态网络的修复异常艰巨，警惕“长江经济带建设”演变为“边保护、边破坏”至为重要。     

Forum 2: the migrant climate: resilience,adaptation and the ontopolitics of mobility in the Anthropocene

ABSTRACT

While modernist or ‘top-down’, ‘command-and-control’ approaches to climate and migration worked at the surface or ontic level of the redistribution of entities in time and space, resilience approaches call for a different approach to mobility. These discourses construct mobilities that are more transformative; in fact, ones that question traditional liberal modernist notions of time and space and of entities with fixed essences. These mobilities do not concern moving entities in space but rethinking mobility in relation to space. Mobility then becomes more a matter of changing the understandings and practices relating to spaces and entities than of moving things from one place to another. Becoming ‘mobile’ thus would apply to the development of capabilities or ‘response-abilities’ to sense, adapt, recompose, repurpose and reimagine problems and possibilities; taking responses to crises beyond the static and binary conceptions of mobility and space.     

Forum 1: Migrant climate in the Kinocene

ABSTRACT

In this intervention, I put forward five short theses on the topic of ‘Anthropocene mobilities.’ My aim is not to unpack every concept contained herein but rather to provide a provocative introductory synthesis of five big ideas about Anthropocene mobility for further discussion. 1) We are living in the Kinocene, 2) The ontology of our time is an ontology of motion, 3) We need a new movement-oriented political theory to grapple better with the mobile events of our time. We need a kinopolitics, 4) Climate change is a weapon of primitive accumulation. 5) The Kinocene presents us with the danger of new forms of domination (a new colonialism, a new climate capitalism, new states, and new borders) but also with the opportunity for a new revolutionary sequence.     

Global Development in the Anthropocene

Abstract

In this brief essay I will address a few key concepts, and make an argument concerning how I think they relate to one another, and how their combination will affect the future of our understanding and practices of Development. The principal concepts I will discuss are Global History and Global Crises, Global Development, Sustainable Development, and The Anthropocene.     

国际环境史研究的新动向——第一届世界环境史大会俯瞰

世纪之交,麦克尼尔教授和《环境史》和《环境与历史》等杂志组织的学者先后对环境史研究在新世纪的发展进行了展望。2009年8月,第一次世界环境史大会在丹麦召开了。从本次会议上发表的成果来看,他们当年提出的一些需要研究的领域,如海洋环境史、军事环境史、俄罗斯和前苏联环境史都有了喜人的进展;他们当时尚未给予足够重视的领域,如极地环境史、奥斯曼帝国环境史、世界体系环境史也有了新探索。所有这些学术推进都建立在新史料的发掘和新概念、新方法的应用上。     

N2: reading,writing, walking the South African highway

This piece is drawn from a larger project that asks what it might mean to write a cultural history or “biography” of the longest highway in South Africa, the N2. Influenced by literature on the everyday, on infrastructures and the “infra-ordinary,” my approach pays attention to the highway as a material artefact. Who builds, maintains and manages it; who makes their life along it; what subcultures, lexicons and social behaviours can be read off it? Exploring the possibilities of creative non-fiction within the environmental humanities, the piece here unfolds as an exercise in psychogeography, or a deconstructed travelogue. While much travel writing about modern Cape Town describes a (motorised) journey from airport to city, here I reverse the gaze and proceed on foot from town to the airport along the hard shoulder of the N2. In doing so I try to understand the vexed relations between drivers and pedestrians in a divided city, and to conduct an “anthropology of the near” on the road reserve: perhaps the most visible but least contemplated part of the modern urban landscape.