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Taking the human (sciences) seriously: Realizing the critical potential of the

Anthropocene

Authors: Lövbrand, Eva1/ Beck, Silke2 / Chilvers, Jason3 / Forsyth, Tim4 / Hedrén, Johan5 /

Hulme, Mike6 / Lidskog, Rolf7 / and Vasileiadou, Eleftheria8

Draft paper to be presented at the ECPR General Conference, Glasgow 6 September 2014.

Panel ‘Politics of the Anthropocene’. Please do not cite without permission.

Introduction

In recent years leading environmental scientists have told us that we live in an unprecedented

time called ‘the Anthropocene’. The Anthropocene concept was coined by the chemist and

Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen and biologist Eugene Stoermer at the turn of the new

millennium to describe a new geological era fully dominated by human activity (Crutzen and

Stoermer 2000). Since then it has taken root in scientific and popular discourse and offered a

powerful narrative of human resource exploitation, planetary thresholds and environmental

urgency. Central to the Anthropocene proposition is the claim that we have left the benign era

of the Holocene – when human civilizations have developed and thrived – and entered a much

more unpredictable and dangerous time when humanity is undermining the planetary life-

support systems upon which it depends (Rockström et al. 2009). In the Anthropocene, we are

told, the Cartesian dualism between nature and society is broken down resulting in a deep

intertwining of the fates of nature and humankind (Zalasiewic et al. 2010: 2231).

In this paper we discuss how the social sciences and humanities (hereafter referred to as the

human sciences) may engage with this powerful environmental narrative. In a time when

international science initiatives such as Future Earth are ‘calling to arms’ and asking the

human sciences to participate in an integrated analysis of the Anthropocene (Palsson et al.

1 Department of Thematic Studies: Environmental Change, Linköping University, 58183 Linköping,

Sweden. Email:eva.lovbrand@liu.se 2 Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research, Leipzig 3 University of East Anglia 4 London School of Economics 5 Linköping University 6 Kings College London 7 Örebro University 8 Eindhoven University of Technology

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2013), this is a pressing question that has triggered a discussion on the role of social and

cultural theory in the study of global environmental change. In a number of recent

publications, environmental scholars across the human sciences have begun to question the

primacy of the natural sciences and to recast the Anthropocene as an inherently social

problem with different, and often unequal, consequences for people around the world

(O’Brien and Barnett 2013, Hornborg and Malm 2014). In this paper we take this important

discussion one step further by outlining a research agenda that draws attention to the social

and cultural politics of the Anthropocene. Rather than approaching ‘the age of man’ as a

natural consequence of human-driven changes to the global environment, this paper seeks to

open up an interpretative horizon that allows for a critical engagement with the Anthropocene

as a powerful imaginary space that constitutes particular ways of seeing, knowing and acting

upon nature’s and society’s entanglement.

Our paper is organized around three paradoxes that illustrate why we think the Anthropocene

calls for increased critical engagement from the social sciences and humanities (hereafter

referred to as the human sciences). We call these paradoxes 1) the post-natural fallacy of the

Anthropocene, 2) the post-social fallacy of the Anthropocene, and 3) the post-politics of

environmental urgency. We begin by outlining what we think characterizes each paradox and

continue by discussing how the human sciences may help to identify ways out of these. We

contend that critical social and cultural engagement with the Anthropocene does not promise

any immediate solutions to the problems posed by the recent ‘age of man’. The research

agenda advocated in this paper is more likely to unsettle the dominant Anthropocene narrative

and to pave the way for competing understandings of the interlocking of human and non-

human worlds. Rather than leading astray, however, we argue that critical engagement with

the social and cultural politics of the Anthropocene offers a necessary alternative to the

contemporary quest for integrated research and univocal decision support. In order to

constructively confront the Anthropocene, we do not primarily need more coordinated

knowledge on the dangers of environmental change. A more urgent challenge for the human

sciences lies in exploring, contrasting and unsettling eco-political visions for societal change.

Only when opening up the conceptual and political terrain of the Anthropocene to critical

social and cultural scrutiny is it possible, we argue, to push the boundaries of contemporary

environmental thought and hereby foster new ways of seeing, knowing and being with nature.

The Anthropocene – a paradoxical environmental narrative

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The Anthropocene, now outlined in numerous scientific articles and popular science texts

(Rockström et al. 2009, Zalasiewic et al. 2010, Griggs et al. 2013), has an interesting

genealogy that dates back to a complex series of ideas and knowledge practices developed

within and beyond the environmental and Earth sciences over the past two centuries. Steffen

at al. (2011) offer a useful overview of the historical precedents of the Anthropocene concept

that extends well beyond the rise of global environmentalism in the 1970s. The ideational

heritage of the Anthropocene is here traced back to seminal volumes such as George Perkins

Marsh’s The Earth as Modified by Human Action from 1874, Eduard Seuss’ The Face of the

Earth published at the turn of the 19th century, and Vladimir Vernadsky’s work on the

Biosphere and Noosphere in the 1920s (Steffen et al. 2011). The proposition of the

Anthropocene should also be understood as a practical achievement closely linked to the

international research coordination initiated through the International Geophysical Physical

Year (1957-58), and further developed by international science programmes such as the

International-Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP), the World Climate Research

Programme (WCRP), International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental

Change (IHDP) and DIVERSITAS during the latter part of the 21st Century. Numerous

studies have traced how the notion of a human-dominated planet was born out of the

integrated Earth System research fostered by these global change programmes (Robin and

Steffen 2007, Ignacuik et al. 2012, Uhrqvist and Lövbrand 2014).

In the following we discuss three assumptions that underpin the proposed advent of the

Anthropocene. While these assumptions rest upon particular ways of seeing and knowing the

interplay between nature and society, we claim that they harbor interesting tensions or

paradoxes that invite critical scrutiny and debate.

The post-natural fallacy

The deep intertwining of natural and human systems is at the heart of the Anthropocene

narrative (Oldfield et al. 2013). As clarified by Zalasiewic et al. (2010:2228) the

Anthropocene concept was coined in a time of ‘dawning realization that human activity was

indeed changing the Earth on a scale comparable with some of the major events of the ancient

past.’ In Stoermer’s and Crutzen’s pioneering paper from year 2000, climate change emerges

as the primary signal of the Anthropocene. The rising atmospheric concentrations of

greenhouse gases resulting from human land use change and fossil fuel burning here

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symbolize the ability of ‘civilized man’ to alter natural systems to the extent that they cannot

be considered ‘natural’ anymore. In other studies the strong human ‘footprint on the planet’

(Vitousek et al. 1997) is attributed to land transformations through forestry and agriculture,

biodiversity loss through land clearing and the introduction of alien species, the damming of

rivers, the terraforming effects of the world’s megacities or the introduction of information

and geoengineering technologies (Steffen et al. 2004, Zalasiewic et al. 2010, Galaz 2014).

Taken together these Anthropocene analyses suggest that humankind has become a global

scale force with the ability to fundamentally reshape the planet. The dominant influence of

humanity has pushed the Earth into new geological era ‘when natural forces and human forces

are so intertwined that the fate of one determines the fate of the other’ (Zalasiewic et al.

2010:2231).

Barry et al. (2013) refer to this fusing together of human and non-human histories as the post-

natural ontology of the Anthropocene. The ‘humanization’ of the natural environment implied

by the advent of the Anthropocene suggests a breeching of the human-nature divide inherited

from the Enlightenment era. In the Anthropocene, nature is domesticated, technologized and

capitalized to the extent that it can no longer be considered natural. While this conquest of the

natural world can be interpreted as the epitome of human rationality and progress, the

Anthropocene is not automatically ‘a hyperbolic narrative of totalized humanity’ (Wakefield

2014: 12). For critical environmental scholars across the human sciences ‘the Anthropocene is

as much about the decentering of humankind as it is about our rising geological significance’

(Clark 2014: 25 italics in original). It is a concept that emphasizes humanity’s material

dependence, embodiedment and fragility, and hereby invites us to rethink long-held

assumptions about the autonomous, self-sufficient human subject that begins and ends with

itself (Wakefield 2014). Interestingly, and paradoxically, however, the dominant

Anthropocene narrative has to date failed to take on board the profound transformative

implications of its post-natural ontology. The language of the Anthropocene remains the

language of the Enlightenment (Chakrabarty 2008) and modernity (Dibley 2012) which

stipulates that the knowing human subject, through knowledge and reason, can tame nature.

As a result the substantive division between the human and the non-human world remains

unchanged.

In order to move beyond this ‘post-natural fallacy’ we here call for more radical

interpretations of Anthropocene that help us to critically interrogate how sedimented

representations of nature and humanity are constituted or co-produced as hybrid nature-

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cultures. This is a research agenda that for long has engaged scholars across fields such as

political ecology (e.g. Castree 2013), science and technology studies (STS) (Latour 2004,

Jasanoff 2004), and post-humanist gender studies (Alaimo 2010, Yusoff 2010). A central

ontological assumption running across this diverse humanist and social science scholarship is

that natures do not come ready made. As suggested by Latour (1993) nature will always be a

‘quasi-object’ that is real in a material sense and yet discursive, narrated, historical and

passionate. From this interpretative horizon there is no pristine or absolute nature against

which the advent of the Anthropocene can be analyzed. Nature is no longer a neutral object to

be studied from afar, but understood as a socio-political space, or as a technological artifact,

that is brought into being and gains meaning through representational practices and

technologies (Baldwin 2003).The question to ask about nature is thus not what it is, but how it

is taken into account in social and cultural life and with what material and political effects.

Three epistemological implications flow from this radical post-natural position that we think

may help to push the Anthropocene scholarship in new directions. First, work in this field sees

all ways of knowing as situated, embodied and contingent on pre-commitments and

imaginaries of the future (Haraway 1988). The needs, claims and actions of the human

observer are always inseparable from the material world in which s/he is embedded. This

means that transcendent and omniscient representations of nature are impossible. In its place

we find a reflexive and situated epistemology that invites us to constantly to revisit what we

mean by nature, to denaturalize what is given to us as natural, and to relocate inquiry ‘down

on the ground’ where knowledge is made, negotiated and circulated (Alaimo 2010:17).

Second, subject/object distinctions break down. The repositioning of the knowing subject as a

self-conscious part of nature invites a constant reflection on the ethical assumptions that shape

our knowledge/value-commitments and those of others (e.g. Stirling 2006, Chilvers 2013). It

is through such reflexivity that an attitude of humility can be fostered and room is made for

the exercise of wisdom, a long-treasured human virtue which brings together knowledge and

action in relational settings (Hulme 2014).

Finally, a radical post-natural position is attentive to the material effects of particular nature

representations. In the field of STS, for instance, the ‘co-production’ concept has been

advanced to critically interrogate how ways of seeing and knowing nature, often originating

from the domains of science and technology, shape how the environment is construed and

acted upon in social and political life (Jasanoff 2004). By asking whose nature is being

represented and what the material effects of such representations are, this is a literature that

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has sought to de-naturalize the global gaze of science and hereby open up for more locally

embedded ways of knowing and doing nature (Jasanoff and Martello 2004, Litfin 1997). To

interpret and interrogate the possibilities of the Anthropocene from this more radical post-

natural perspective opens up to a plurality of non-scientific nature framings, knowledges and

cosmologies, with an emphasis placed on mapping and accounting for these diversities as

opposed to producing single and definitive truths of nature and society (e.g. Brown 2009,

Hulme 2009, Whatmore 2009, Stirling 2012, Marres 2012, Salmond 2014).

The post-social fallacy

The Anthropocene puts humans at the centre of global environmental change. It is a story of

‘the Anthropos’ that has conquered the planet and now is humanizing the natural environment

in dangerous and unforeseeable ways. The conception of humanity as a geological force that

is shaping the internal dynamics of the Earth itself is reproduced in the Earth System sciences

through people-centred concepts such as ‘human activities’, ‘human drivers’ and ‘human

stressors’ (Steffen et al. 2004). Given this emphasis on the human dimensions of

environmental change it is remarkable, and highly paradoxical, that the dominant

Anthropocene narrative to date has been so devoid of people. In the Anthropocene humankind

emerges as a single interconnected subsystem to the larger Earth System, and as such, as a

universal and disembodied entity that acts as a collective causal force. The human signal in

the Earth System is primarily accounted for through its aggregated impacts on natural systems

or its ability to transgress planetary boundaries (Rockström et al. 2009b). In some Earth

System representations human consciousness and agency is also accounted for in a singular

metric. Schellnhuber (1999), for instance, speaks of humanity as ‘a global subject’ capable of

making collective rational choices on the Earth System level.

This elevation and simplification of human agency has not passed unnoticed, but is today

increasingly criticized by environmental scholars across the social and human sciences. Ever

since early 1990s when Agarwal and Narain (1991) highlighted the unequal consequences of

global greenhouse gas accountancy, social scientists have sought to connect the global gaze of

environmental research to the every-day life of people and places (Litfin 1997, Jasanoff and

Martello 2004, Liverman 2009, Hulme 2010). Despite these efforts to link the risks and

vulnerabilities of the Anthropocene to the environments in which people live, critics maintain

that the Earth System sciences give little room for research on the social contexts and unequal

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consequences of environmental change for different places and groups (O’Brien and Barnett

2013). Whereas ‘the biophysical processes associated with environmental change are

increasingly well understood, the social drivers and human consequences are often

overgeneralized (for example, in sweeping claims about impacts on women and the poor) or

deterministic (as in accounts of climate change forcing mass migration and warfare)’

(O’Brien and Barnett 2013: 381). Also Malm and Hornborg (2014) question the lack of social

analysis in the Earth System scholarship. The Anthropocene is from their horizon not an

innocent story of a generalized humanity, but an index of capital accumulation, privileged

resource consumption and the displacement of work and environmental loads.

According to Luke (2009) this homogenization of human agency and responsibility is largely

due to the quantitative metric of the Earth System sciences. In order to map, monitor and

ultimately manage the planet as a whole, the diverse and dynamic possibilities for different

societies and economies are by necessity narrowed and simplified. This contracting of social

diversity and complexity into a single path for humanity has, however, resulted in a de-

politicized Anthropocene vocabulary with little social content. There are no actors, interests

or social categories acknowledged within this humanity, neither any evidence of social

injustice or asymmetry. We contend that a more transformative Anthropocene narrative

begins in the social. Human beings are always and everywhere embedded; human activities

emerge because they are meaningful for actors in their specific context. Individuals, groups

and organisations are embedded in a world of biophysical properties and material artefacts,

but also in a socio-cultural world of meanings and motivations (Jasanoff 2010). People and

social groups do not develop their own goals, values and preferences apart from those that

already exist in society, but in close relation to these. To fully understand the dynamics and

trajectory of the Anthropocene, we thus need to understand the socio-cultural meaning

attached to ‘human activities’ such as land-use change or fossil fuel use and which social

functions they provide for particular groups, agents and subjects at particular times.

A more radical Anthropocene scholarship also acknowledges social differentiation. In order to

mobilize new forms of eco-politics and human agency we need to take seriously the social

inequalities, cultural differentiation and power relations that grant individuals and groups

different abilities to challenge and break with entrenched socio-political arrangements. The

challenges of the Anthropocene are not universal, but emerge from different socio-cultural

settings, have different context-specific implications and will therefore most likely generate

different social responses (Liverman 2009, O’Brien and Barnett 2013). Only when

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acknowledging how social categories such as gender, class and race play out in the every-day

life of people and shape the environments in which they live, will the Anthropocene begin to

offer a compelling story of social change.

The post-politics of environmental urgency

The Anthropocene is a not a hopeful narrative of human development and progress. The

mainstream story is rather one of urgency and crisis. Steffen and Crutzen (2007) stage the

Anthropocene as a state of exception when human resource exploitation and degradation has

become so pervasive and profound that it rivals some of the great forces of nature. It is a

dangerous and unpredictable age, we are told, when human activities have pushed ‘the Earth

System outside the stable environmental state of the Holocene, with consequences that are

detrimental or even catastrophic for large parts of the world’ (Rockström et al. 2009: 472).

When Crutzen and Stoermer launched the Anthropocene concept in year 2000, they linked

this new era to the industrial revolution in 18th Century Europe when the discovery and

exploitation of fossil fuels shattered the energy bottleneck and hereby paved the way for new

forms of social organization. In more recent publications, the Anthropocene primarily denotes

the post-World War II era when ‘the human enterprise switched gears’ resulting in a sharp

increase in the human imprint on the natural environment (Steffen et al. 2011). During this

period the human population has grown faster than at any previous time in history;

industrialization has gained irresistible momentum; the world economy has expanded in

unexpected ways; transport and IT-technology has rapidly transformed mobility and human

connectivity (Steffen and Crutzen 2007: 618). An unintended side-effect of this ‘great

acceleration’ in social and economic development, so it is argued, is dramatic environmental

change which now threatens the planetary life-support system upon which human civilization

depends (Steffen et al. 2004).

In order to counter an immanent humanitarian catastrophe, the current Anthropocene

scholarship sets out to define safe planetary boundaries outside which the Earth System

cannot continue to function in a stable, Holocene-like state (Rockström et al. 2009:474,

Griggs et al. 2013). Interestingly, this invocation of biophysical limits for social and economic

development is seldom coupled with potent suggestions for social and political

transformation. The fundamental challenges to societal organization posed by the

Anthropocene are, paradoxically, to be countered by many of the same institutions that have

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allowed the recent human conquest of the natural world. Among the reoccurring suggestions

for Earth System stewardship and governance we find environmental treaty-making, carbon

pricing mechanisms, public private partnerships and geoengineering technologies (Chapin et

al. 2011, Biermann 2012, Steffen et al. 2004). This paradoxical relationship between

environmental apocalyptic thought on the one hand, and institutional status quo on the other,

speaks to the post-political condition of our times. Swyngedouw (2013) defines post-politics

as a particular socio-political order in which ideological contestation and struggles are

replaced by techno-managerial planning. It is a condition where the articulation of divergent,

conflicting and alternative trajectories of future socio-environmental possibilities are

evacuated from the political arena and replaced by a normative consensus around common

humanity-wide action, and mutual cooperation in face of pending environmental catastrophe.

When disagreement is allowed, suggests Swyngedouw (2013), it is primarily with respect to

the choice of technologies, the detail of the managerial adjustments, and the urgency of their

timing and implementation.

This post-politics of environmental urgency, we argue, stems from a lack of analytical

attention to the socio-political dynamics that engine ‘the great acceleration’. By engaging with

the plurality of interests, the many conflicts, the warped distribution of wealth and unequal

power relations that have paved the way for the recent ‘geology of mankind’, we will find that

the Anthropocene denotes a particular form of social organization closely tied to the political

economy of neoliberal capitalism. A more critical Anthropocene research agenda turns

attention to the power geometries of this socio-political arrangement and investigates how it

shapes the environments in which we live and those that we imagine for the future. It does not

accept the inevitability of the contemporary socio-political order, nor does it approach the

Anthropocene as ‘the apocalyptical end to all things’ (Dalby 2013:191). Instead it insists on

exposing the many conflicts and political struggles that the Anthropocene rests upon in order

to foster a genuine space for political debate and re-orientation. The human sciences offer

several entry points to such constructive eco-critique. Across fields such as political ecology,

feminist studies, post-colonial studies and green political thought we find many examples of

green critical theorizing that seeks to cultivate new forms of eco-politics and human

subjectivity (Bradley and Hedrén 2014). While these literatures remain diverse and

incomplete, they share a number of analytical traits that may help to re-politicize the

Anthropocene.

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Firstly, much of the green critical literature is committed to the exploration of alternative

socio-environmental orders as they are articulated in specific empirical contexts. By

grounding eco-critique in real situations (e.g. the urban farming movement, environmental

justice networks or civic movements) work in this field has offered heuristic devices for

experimenting with politics of the possible beyond the capitalist and technocratic incarnations

of the Anthropocene (Lehman and Nelson 2014, Alaimo 2010, Dryzek and Stevenson 2014).

Secondly, green critical theorizing fosters reflexivity by introducing “alien” principles that

allow contemporary socio-ecological orders to be approached from afar. It is a literature that

offers positions “from which to investigate the ideals, undertakings, and institutions of

contemporary society, encourage a critical perspective on them, inspire a thoughtful

evaluation of present and alternative individual and social ideals and activities, and consider if

and where change is feasible and desirable” (Stillman 2001, p. 11). Thirdly, by exposing the

post-political character of contemporary environmental policy-making and governance, work

in this field also stimulates the power of imagination and the will to change. Instead of

accepting the current formulation of Anthropocene as the end of history, green critical

theorizing can help to rethink our times as the beginning of a new phase in human and

planetary history. Efforts to name other socio-ecological futures do, of course, not guarantee

transgression of current orders and structures. They do, however, enable mind to “break free

of mental constraints” (Sargisson 2000: 3) and can hereby push the boundaries of

conventional political thought and practice.

Towards a critical Anthropocene research agenda

The proposition that we have left the Holocene and entered into a new geological époque fully

dominated by human activity is a challenging one that has paved the way for new forms of

research coordination and funding. In the Anthropocene, we are told, conventional ways of

doing science are no longer adequate. The challenges of a rapidly changing Earth demand

new strategies to generate scientific knowledge and to support societal action (Steffen et al.

2004: 32). Scientific integration and coordination are central rationales for this new

generation of environmental research. In order to account for the dynamics of the planetary

life support system as a whole, environmental scholars across the natural and human sciences

are today asked to find new ways of collaboration that make it possible to put the various

pieces of the Earth System together in innovative and incisive ways (Steffen et al. 2004:32).

The basic premise of this bridging of research traditions and epistemologies, explains

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Ignacuik et al. (2012), is that no single discipline can respond effectively to the increasing

human transformations of the Earth System. In order to fully understand why and how the

Earth’s environment is changing, and hereby foster adequate policy responses, holistic

appraisals of the Anthropocene are required.

A step in this direction was taken when the Earth System Science Partnership (ESSP) was

established in 2001. Responding to mounting calls for coordinated Earth System research, the

partnership reached out to the global change research networks organized around the WCRP,

IGBP, IHDP and DIVERSITAS. In the years that followed, the partnership fostered new

forms of collaboration across the environmental sciences through joint research projects and

agendas. Although there was strong support for the integrative ambitions of the ESSP among

the participating research networks, Ignacuik et al. (2012) note that the partnership failed to

foster any fundamental transformation of established research practices. In time for the UN

Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio de Janeiro (Rio +20) in summer 2012, the

ESSP therefore transitioned into a more institutionalized programme for integrated Earth

System research called Future Earth. Scientific integration and coordination remains the lead

motif of this new research programme, but policy relevance and usability have also surfaced

as important mandates. In order to effectively address the urgent challenges of the

Anthropocene, Future Earth is expected to reach out to a new set of societal partners and

stakeholders and hereby begin the transition to global sustainability (Future Earth 2013: 10).

In this quest for coordinated and solutions-oriented global environmental research, many have

called for a deeper involvement of the human sciences. Scholars across the social sciences and

humanities are today asked to align with global change research agendas and hereby

participate more fully in the strong and immediate commitment ‘to actions that reduce the

known risks to Earth’s life support system’ (Stafford-Smith et al. 2012: 5, Palsson et al.

2013). In the following we discuss why the human sciences should hesitate to accept this

invitation and instead insist on the cultivation of interpretative horizons that enable critical

engagement with dominant, as well as alternative, ways of seeing, knowing and acting upon

nature. In contrast to the imperative of scientific integration and coordination, the critical

research agenda advocated here will neither strive for a unified or full account of the

Anthropocene, nor univocal decision support. A more important role for the human sciences,

we argue, is the promotion of multiple, divergent and conflicting epistemic frameworks and

eco-political possibilities. Following the paradoxes outlined above, we here propose three

inroads to this alternative engagement with the Anthropocene.

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Radicalizing the post-natural through an epistemology of location

Firstly we contend that a critical Anthropocene research agenda invites a serious engagement

with the epistemological implications of a post-natural ontology. The advent of a truly

entangled socio-physical nature emerges as a reason to radically challenge and rethink the

possibility and desirability of aggregated representations of the Earth System in terms of

quantitative budgets and balance sheets, and to experiment with more humble, embodied and

located ways of knowing and doing nature. We note that the proposed research agenda of

Future Earth takes steps in this direction through its focus on co-design. By aligning

environmental research agendas with the knowledge needs of societal user groups, Future

Earth is a research initiative that aims to redirect the Earth System sciences towards more

transparent, salient and solutions-oriented knowledge (Future Earth 2013: 21) that will build

resilience in our global responses to ‘the great acceleration’ (Stafford-Smith et al. 2012:5).

While this effort to establish a new social contract for science may foster new and unexpected

research questions, it does not pose any radical challenge to modern habits of scientific

thought and practice. The Anthropocene scholar remains a transcendent and omniscient

observer of environmental risks from which s/he is separated. The detached, and ultimately

modern, epistemological foundation of most Earth System research renders invisible the full

philosophical implications of the proclaimed ‘end of nature’ and hereby works to reproduce

the anthropocentric projection of the human rational subject as separated from its material

conditions of existence.

A more radical interpretation of the post-natural ontology, by contrast, repositions the human

as a bounded and highly embodied subject that finds itself ‘inextricably part of the flux and

flow of the world that others would presume to master’ (Alaimo 2010:17). This blurring of

social and physical boundaries challenges ‘homo scientificus’ as a rational agent set apart

from, or above, nature (Litfin 1997: 39) and makes explicit the local and situated character of

all nature representations. We believe that this ‘epistemology of location’ (Haraway 1988)

may help us to address what Jasanoff (2003:227) calls ‘the ragged fringes of human

understanding – the unknown, the uncertain, the ambiguous, and the uncontrollable’ – and

hereby foster a feeling of humility and kinship with the object of study. Acknowledging the

impossibility of detached ways of knowing Anthropocene also offers important entry points

for the experimentation with multiple analytical perspectives and knowledge-ways. By

decentering the knowing human subject, a radical post-natural research agenda can open

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environmental debates to alternative ways of seeing and experiencing nature, embedded in

local cultural practices and knowledge-making traditions (Hulme 2010, Long-Martello 2004).

Such experimentation with multiple knowledge-ways does not promise better or more

complete understandings of nature’s and society’s entanglement. Haraway (1988) reminds us

that the vision of the less powerful by no means is innocent. To foster an epistemology of

location may, however, help to uncover some of the cultural presumptions that we as

environmental scholars bring to our knowledge and hereby open up conversations about the

global environment to unheard voices (Turnhout et al. 2012).

Unsettling the globalizing instinct of standardized research frameworks

Secondly, a critical Anthropocene research agenda challenges the assumption that complex

and cross-cutting environmental problems, such as climate change or food security, require

integrated research and interconnected solutions (Future Earth 2013). To account for social

diversity and difference it is important, we argue, to move away from the globalizing instinct

of standardized research templates and integrated research questions. While efforts to provide

the full picture of Earth System dynamics are driven by a genuine concern for the planetary

life support system, they are rooted in a paradigm of rationality and control that so easily

erases difference and collapses meaning (Hulme 2010). Attempts to account for the human

signal in the Earth System through aggregated social-economic drivers and data foster an

empty view of humanity that tells us little about the lived experiences, fears, vulnerabilities,

ideas and motivations of real people, in real places. Critical scholars across the social and

human sciences have for long illustrated how ‘the global view’ of environmental research

renders human beings invisible, both as agents and victims of environmental destruction. By

erasing difference, the integrated Earth System scholarship lends itself to a totalizing vision

amenable to grand managerial schemes (Litfin 1997: 38, Hulme 2010).

To question the homogenizing effects of scientific integration and coordination, we argue, is

an important step in the reengagement with the Anthropocene as a social and cultural category

with different and often unequal consequences for particular places and social groups. In

order to avoid the post-social fallacy outlined above, a critical Anthropocene scholarship

should work to unsettle the aggregated view of Earth System science that is ‘remote or

detached from the diverse geographies of personal or collective history and culture’ (Hulme

2010: 5). The advent of the Anthropocene may indeed be a common concern of humankind,

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but can never be addressed at the species level (Dalby 2013). In order to render the concept

meaningful, scholars across the human sciences should insist on examining how nature’s and

society’s entanglements are interpreted and lived across socio-political contexts, categories

and geographies. This is an important analytical task if we are to understand the many, and

often conflicting, social divers, impacts, risks of and responses to global environmental

change. To recognize that people’s experiences of nature are different may help us to

reposition ‘the human’ as a heterogeneous social and political subject and hereby re-connect

the Anthropocene narrative to ‘the realm of immediacy where meaningful action is possible

and most likely to be effective’ (Litfin 1997: 38).

Exploring new eco-political possibilities

Finally, the critical Anthropocene research agenda advocated here approaches the recent

‘geology of mankind’ as an opportunity to rethink the political and hereby challenge the

managerial impulse of the integrated Earth System scholarship. Instead of accepting the

dominant staging of the Anthropocene as a planetary emergency and shared humanitarian

cause beyond political dispute, a critical Anthropocene research agenda urges scholars to

approach engagements with natures (in the plural) as political acts that shape and order the

social and material conditions of life for individual and groups. We agree with Swyngedouw

that the apocalyptic vocabulary of the dominant Anthropocene narrative calls for a profound

re-scripting of nature in political terms. ‘The question is not any longer about bringing

environmental issues into the domain of politics as has been the case of now but rather about

how to bring the political into the environment’ (Swyngedouw 2013:2).

To re-politicize the Anthropocene, we argue, means fostering a vibrant public space where the

manifold, divergent and often unpredictable socio-ecological relations and futures can be

exposed and debated. In order to enable such constructive politics of the environment, critical

scholars across the human sciences need to demonstrate that the Anthropocene is not the end

of politics but a social-natural arrangement – a hybrid nature/culture – subject to political

contestation and normative choice. As proclaimed by Dalby (2013: 191) ‘(t)he Anthropocene

isn’t the terminal phase, it’s the next phase!’ A critical Anthropocene research agenda will

insist on the exploration of politics of the possible beyond the dominant post-political

articulations of the Anthropocene. By examining and contrasting different ways of seeing,

knowing and being with nature, work in this field may help to experiment with alternative

15

socio-ecological trajectories and hereby contribute to the forging of new eco-political futures.

As such the research agenda advocated here will depart from the logic of scientific integration

and coordination. In order to foster ‘imaginative breakthroughs’ and ‘effective solutions’ that

match the urgency of our times (Steffen-Smith 2012), we defend a critical-pluralist

perspective that replaces epistemic homogeneity with heterogeneity, global knowledge-

making with local meaning-making, and scientific agreement with constructive disagreement.

In order to offer imaginative responses to the manifold and urgent challenges facing society,

from environmental stress and resource scarcity, to poverty and social inequality, we believe

that global environmental research needs to unsettle integrated, singular perspectives and

instead experiment with multiple ways of knowing and being in the world.

Conclusions

In this paper we have approached the Anthropocene as a rich, potent but also highly

paradoxical environmental narrative that invites serious engagement from the human sciences.

It is a narrative that radically challenges the Cartesian distinction between natural and human

worlds, and yet calls upon modern science to reinstall this distinction as the natural order of

things. Rather than using the proclaimed ‘end of nature’ as an opportunity to revisit what we

mean by nature and to rethink the rational human observer as detached from the material

world in which s/he is embedded, the dominant Anthropocene narrative remains deeply rooted

in a modern science paradigm that reproduces nature as an object to be studied from afar.

Paradoxically, it offers an equally detached view of humankind. Although ‘the human’ is at

the center of the Anthropocene, the dominant story has to date had little to say about the vital

geographical and socio-cultural differences in how nature is understood and experienced by

real people, in real places. By imagining ‘the Anthropos’ as a singular geological force – a

unitary subsystem to the larger Earth System – the Anthropocene has become an apolitical

narrative of environmental rather that social change that invites techno-managerial planning

and expert administration at the expense of democratic debate and contestation.

We believe that the critical research agenda outlined in this paper can help develop analytical

spaces where the paradoxes of the Anthropocene can be further interrogated, challenged and

debated. Interpretation, contestation and re-politicization represent central traits of this next

generation of Anthropocene scholarship, in which a plurality of actors are welcomed to

deconstruct established frames of the planet and its species and to experiment with new ones..

16

We recognize that important steps in this direction already have been taken by scholars active

within established environmental research networks such as Future Earth (O’Brien and

Barnett 2013, Biermann 2013, Palsson et al. 2013). While we celebrate these efforts to

complicate the dominant Anthropocene narrative, we have in this paper cautioned against the

constitutive effects of the integrated research and interconnected solutions promoted by global

change research networks. The primary role for the human sciences, we argue, is not to adjust

to the staging of the Anthropocene offered by international science initiatives such as Future

Earth. More important is the cultivation of interpretative horizons that may help to

problematize and unsettle the conceptual and political terrain in which the current

Anthropocene scholarship currently operates. By exposing the ways of seeing, knowing and

being the Anthropocene rests upon and gives rise to, we hope that the human sciences may

help to foster a genuine space for political debate and re-orientation. Only then, we argue, can

the Anthropocene turn into a critical event and a powerful story of social change that may

bring about more imaginative politics of the environment.

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