Urban Ecological Security and the ‘Anthropocene’
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Transcript of Urban Ecological Security and the ‘Anthropocene’
Urban Ecological Security and the ‘Anthropocene’
Prof. Stephen Graham Newcastle University
What is ‘Nature’ and How Do CiEes Relate to It?
Our world, our old world that we have inhabited for the last 12,000 years, has ended. This February […], the StraEgraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London was adding the newest and highest story to the geological story. To the quesEon "Are we now living in the Anthropocene?" the 21 members of the Commission unanimously answer "yes." They adduce robust evidence that the Holocene epoch -‐-‐ the interglacial span of unusually stable climate that has allowed the rapid evoluEon of agriculture and urban civilizaEon -‐-‐ has ended and that the Earth has entered "a straEgraphic
interval without close parallel in the last several million years.” In addiEon to the buildup of greenhouse gases, the straEgraphers cite human landscape
transformaEon which "now exceeds [annual] natural sediment producEon by an order of magnitude," the ominous acidificaEon of the oceans, and the relentless destrucEon of biota. This new age, they explain, is defined both by the heaEng trend […] and by
the radical instability expected of future environments. In somber prose, they warn that "the combinaEon of exEncEons, global species migraEons and the widespread replacement of natural vegetaEon with agricultural monocultures is producing a disEncEve contemporary biostraEgraphic signal. These
effects are permanent, as future evoluEon will take place from surviving (and frequently anthropogenically relocated) stocks.[…] EvoluEon itself, in other words, has
been forced into a new trajectory.” Mike Davis (2008)
Welcome to the ‘Anthropocene’: Capitalist urban-‐Industrialism as the Planet’s most important geophysical force
• Human and urban manufacture of
‘Nature’ – climates, biospheres, carbon cycles, hydrological and geomorphological systems, even organisms and ecosystems -‐-‐ has reached such an extent since the Industrial revoluEon that we no longer inhabit the post-‐glacial Holocene
• Instead we live in the Anthropocene (term coined in 2000 by the Nobel Prize-‐winning geologist, Paul Crutzen)
Paul J Crutzen
Holocene-‐Anthropocenic boundaries can now be discerned in ocean sediments, ice sheet cores, pollen cores etc.
• Incredibly rapid growth and extension of ciEes and urban-‐industrial systems absolutely central to this process
• Already, ciEes consume 75% of world energy and produce 80% greenhouse gas emissions
• Main hubs of global water, energy, food, waste, carbon flows and demands; generators of resource conflicts; foci of geneEc, hydrological, nano-‐, chemical and geological engineering (intenEonal and unintenEonal) on earth-‐shaping scales
• Use huge, geographically-‐stretched systems of infrastructure to metabolise enormous flows of food, water, energy, wastes, commodiEes, raw materials & resources from distant sites through the city and the bodies of its human (and non-‐human) inhabitants within globalised and ‘neoliberal’ worlds of trade and exchange
Brad allenby
Anthropocene Concepts Resonates With Posthumanist Ontologies Put Forward by Actor-‐Network and Cyborg
Urbanisa@on Theories
• Fixed human/machine, human/animal, physical/non-‐physical, social/technological & social/natural binaries blur away
• A subjec5fica5on of objects, and the objec5fica5on of subjects (Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour etc.)
• “Physical and biological phenomena must be reconceived as outcomes, to some degree of poliEcal-‐ economic, as well as ecological, processes. The forces of environmental colonialism and triage are simply a prelude of the management project immanent in the Anthropocene ” John Byrne, Leigh Glover and Cecilia MarEnez w002
• Urban Technonature: “Cyborgs are not creatures of prisEne Nature; they are the planned and unplanned offspring of manufactured environments, fusing into new organic compounds of naturalized maner and arEficialized anE-‐maner” Tim Luke (1997)
• “The enEre planet now is increasingly a "built environment" or "planned habitat" as
polluEon modifies atmospheric chemistry, urbanizaEon restructures weather events,
biochemistry redesigns the geneEcs of exisEng biomass, and architecture accretes new bioEc
habitats inside of sprawling megaciEes.”
• (Luke T W, 1997, "At the end of Nature: cyborgs, 'humachines', and environments in postmodernity" Environment and Planning A 29(8) 1367 – 1380 )
Manhew Gandy: Cyborg UrbanisaEon
• Cyborgian thinking suggests a way of thinking about ciEes as a whole
• Geographically and temporally-‐stretched hybrids of human, organic, technological, conEnually connecEng urban sites and processes to ‘rural’ ones
• Helps create a new vocabulary for understanding what we mean by the ‘public realm’ against the vulnerability and inter-‐dependency of urban socieEes and the complex technological networks and organic and biospehric metabolisms, stretched across different geographical scales, that make them possible.
Cyborg UrbanisaEon Revealed During Disrup5on of Infrastructures
• “Cyborgs, like us, are endlessly fascinated by machinic breakdowns, which would cause disrupEons in, or denials of access to, their megatechnical sources of being.” (above NYC blackout, 2003)
• (Luke T W, 1997, "At the end of Nature: cyborgs, 'humachines', and environments in postmodernity" Environment and Planning A 29(8) 1367 – 1380 )
•
• Also unerringly reveal the osen concealed poli5cs of cyborganised ciEes
• e.g. Katrina in 2005 not a ‘natural disaster,’ ‘technical failure’ or ‘Act of God.’ Rather, the inevitable result of:
• Climate change accentuaEng hurricane
• Hiung a city denuded of natural protecEon and
• Very poorly covered by a levee network that was systemaEcally racially biased over centuries of constructed socio-‐nature in context of
• A NeoconservaEve and racist Federal Government that had systemaEcally skewed Emergency Planning towards terrorism for poliEcal ends
Infrastructure disrup5ons reveal osen taken for granted and
normalised ‘infrastructures’ and cyborg assemblies especially
blackouts In cyborg ciEes, increasingly
threaten life, not mere inconvenience
Dominant Responses: Earth Systems and Geoengineering
and Securi@sa@on
• “The human/natural/built integrated systems of the Anthropocene cannot be understood through just one worldview, be it scienEfic, theological, or postmodern (mutually exclusive but equally valid ontologies)” Brad Allenby
• “The world as design space” ; “The human as design space” • “Earth Systems Engineering and Management is the capability to
design, engineer, and manage, through dialog and conEnual feedback, integrated built/human/natural systems that achieve the mulEvariate and someEmes mutually exclusive goals and desires of humanity, including at the least personal, social, economic, technological, and environmental dimensions, within the constraints imposed by the states and dynamics of exisEng complex adapEve systems.” Brad Allenby
We must be wary of ‘quick technical fix’ ideas of ‘Terraforming’, ‘Geoengineering’ and ‘Earth Systems Engineering’ in the
Anthropocene. These depoli5cise and commodify the problems, legiEmise an unchanged poliEcal economy, and would
inevitably bring major unintended effects
Securi@sa@on and Weaponisa@on of the Anthropocene
• Ole Wæver's Copenhagen School SecuriEzaEon Theory (1995)
• Security as a “speech act” where a securiEzing actor designates a threat to a specified reference object and declares an existenEal threat implying a right to use extraordinary means to fend it off.
• Such a process of “securiEzaEon” is successful when the construcEon of an “existenEal threat” by a policy maker is socially accepted and where “survival” against existenEal threats is crucial.
• Strong Anthropocenic turn in securiEsaEon discourse
Biopiracy and biofuels push (indigenous
groups in Indonesia, protesEng, above)
Global South ‘land grab’ by global North agribusiness
City AuthoriEes increasingly reaching out to secure their own energy, hydrological or food futures
hnp://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/6377867.stm
The Anthropocenic Global City System: A New Imperialism?
• Neoliberalised ‘global’ ciEes osen have a parasi@c relaEonship with near and distant hinterlands
• Global neoliberal urbanisaEon has led to ‘devastaEng dispariEes between the mobility of capital and labour that have produced new forms of economic serfdom in the global South’ Manhew Gandy
• Resource (food, water, energy) grabs organised and finance through the financial centres and technopoles of the North’s global finance capitals
• New highly regressive paradims of ‘urban ecological security’ (Simon Marvin and Mike Hodgson) E.g. Daewoo (South Korean corporaEon) has just leased half of all the arable land in Madagascar to feed South Korean ciEes in the future
Conclusions: The Anthropocenic City
• DrasEcally destablise concepts of ‘city’, ‘technology’, ‘nature’ and ‘scale’, along with persistent ‘urban-‐rural’, ‘natural-‐social’, ‘natural-‐technological’ and ‘global-‐local’ binaries
• Profound implicaEons for conceptualisaEons of the ‘urban’. Is the enEre Anthropocenic biosphere, in effect, ‘urban’? Tim Luke (2009) talks of the mulEple interconnecEons and new spaEal pracEces of “urbanatura” (Tim Luke, 2009);
• “The accidental normaliity of greenhouse-‐gassing global capitalism envelops humans, non-‐humans, and hybrids in technonaturalized systems and structures”
• Crucially, these processes map conEnuously onto, and through, more usual policy paradigms and discourses: “whether they examine technoscience operaEons, natural disasters, or socio-‐spaEal collapses”, new research must “scan the property boundaries of urban space as they are stabilized in ordinary policy terms such as urbanizaEon, land use, environment, river basins, industrializaEon, economic growth, sprawl, or natural resources. Once scruEnized more closely, the unstable, unconvenEonal, and undetected properEes of mulEple industrial hybridiEes do emerge out of foggy phenomena, including the ’greenhouse effect’” (Tim Luke, 2009)
• Reveals limits of both ‘sustainability’ and environmentalist debates: Sustainability discourses osen involve elements of ‘greenwash’, over-‐aestheEc concepEons, or outright bourgeois environmentalism. “Sustainability is too osen a self-‐absorbed mechanism for avoiding the complexity of the Anthropogenic world” Brad Allenby
• Environmentalist tropes of prisEne nature, meanwhile, “suggest the importance of minimizing alteraEons of many habitats; but so many habitats are now obviously "arEficial" that the invocaEon of a preservaEonist ethos is frequently inappropriate if ecology, rather than aestheEcs, is considered as the basis for policy prescripEon” Simon Dalby
• New “technonatural formaEons” required based on a “foundaEonal reimaginaEon of the innovaEons unfolding in many intersecEng terns in what are called “Nature” and “society”’ (Tim Luke, 1997)
• Need a new ethics and research paradigms for the Anthropocene to poli5cise the Anthropocenic city: Must blur debates about global neoliberalised poliEcal economy, global urbanisaEon, global environmental change and environmetal jusEce
• Planetary, anthropocenic, urban and human concepts of ‘security’ required rather than naEonal-‐militarisEc ones
• Dangers that dominant responses -‐-‐ earth systems and geoengineering and securiEsaEon -‐-‐ offer myths of technological panaceas based on further securiEsaEon, commodificaEon, colonisaEon centred on global north corporate capital and ‘global’ metropolitan regions
• Emerging militarisaEon of Anthropocene? Oil, biofuels, biopiracy, water, land-‐grabs and food security
Reading
• Luke T W, 1997, "At the end of Nature: cyborgs, 'humachines', and environments in postmodernity" Environment and Planning A
29(8) 1367 – 1380 ) •