The politics of the Anthropocene, by John Dryzek and Jonathan Pickering

The Anthropocene is an awkward and troubling concept that should leave few scholars of environmental politics indifferent. In contrast to the hopeful and reassuring language of sustainable development, the Anthropocene confronts us with the apparent inadequacy and failures of institutionalized responses to global environmental problems. It speaks of a radically transformed world marked by accelerating climate change, melting glaciers, acidified oceans, declining freshwater resources, shrinking rainforests and mass species extinction. In this era of rapid environmental change, humanity is no longer a spectator of a natural drama to which we have to adapt. The fundamental and irreversible human imprint on the biosphere has turned us into earth-shaping agents and inhabitants of a world increasingly of our own making (Hamilton 2017).

The proposition that modern civilization has pushed the planet into a new geological epoch is uncomfortable and perplexing. Since the Anthropocene concept was first introduced by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer (2000), it has stirred heated interdisciplinary debate and been challenged, rejected and reworked by an expanding scholarship. The Politics of the Anthropocene is a book that joins the mounting critique of human arrogance and pretentions of mastery and control that underwrite techno-optimistic stories of the Anthropocene. Dryzek and Pickering contend that a radically climate-changed world is not a problem that can be reversed, resolved or mastered, but an inescapable condition that calls for a thorough rethinking of Holocene institutions, practices, structures and worldviews. Grounded in sober recognition of the risks and dangers of a transformed and destabilized global environment, Dryzek and Pickering embark on an ambitious project to formulate a politics that listens and responds to the signals of the earth system.

Reflexivity is the recipe advanced to move beyond the outdated ‘modes of thought, and menus of options, developed under Holocene conditions’ (p. v). To cope with the earth system instability caused by pathological path dependencies such as capitalist markets, excessive consumerism and fossil-fueled transport sectors, Dryzek and Pickering suggest that we need institutions that can anticipate ecological state-shifts, learn from past failures and reinvent themselves in view of these findings. This institutional self-scrutiny will not come without struggle, and environmental crisis will not be enough as a trigger. In a world where environmental risk and suffering often are disconnected and displaced from the centers of power and wealth in which they originate, critical self-correction requires ‘discourse entrepreneurs’ (e.g. scientists, political leaders, environmental activists) who can speak for vulnerable and marginalized environments that dominant institutions are so bad at listening to. Informed by a deliberative ideal of democracy, The Politics of the Anthropocene embraces participatory public reason as the avenue towards ecological reflexivity. Institutional procedures that allow ‘discourse entrepreneurs’ to engage in meaningful, inclusive and ecologically grounded deliberations about what just and sustainable responses to earth system instability means, are key to the reflexive project advanced here.

The Politics of the Anthropocene is a hopeful tale of institutional self-confrontation and reform. Although informed by an inescapable sense of crisis, it holds the promise that the Anthropocene can initiate a process of reflexive social reorganization that sustainable development did not manage to produce. Unlike many critical treatments of our current epoch, this applied political theorizing does not break with the modern belief in human reason and scientific inquiry as the driver of social development and progress. Rather, it is through informed argument that dominant institutions will understand the damage done to the planet and begin to change course. By elevating the deliberating human subject as the agent of ecological reflexivity, Dryzek and Pickering sideline much of the post-human and new-materialist theorizing that currently infuses Anthropocene debates. The authors do not share pessimistic renderings of modernity as a failed world-making project, neither do they seek to flatten modern ontology and deprive humans of their unique position in the world. The political project is rather to reinvent modern institutions in view of humanity’s immense and dangerous earth-shaping powers.

By insisting that democratic deliberation can foster new ecological sensibilities and responsibilities, Dryzek and Pickering steer away from the darker visions of people and planet found in contemporary Anthropocene debates. As such, however, they also miss the opportunity to fully engage with the political trouble stirred up by them. In the unhappy and uncomfortable language of the Anthropocene, a growing critical scholarship is now finding radical energy to confront the failures and injustices of fossil-fueled capitalism, techno-industrialism and excessive consumerism. Rather than telling us where to go next, this broad mix of post-modern, post-colonial, post-Marxist theorizing insists that we ‘stay with the trouble’ (Haraway 2016) and seek political renewal in the frictions, disruptions and anxieties of our current epoch. While the authors’ firm belief in democratic communication is promising and reassuring, it runs the risk of downplaying the magnitude of confrontation, disagreement and struggle required to change political course. After all, it is in the trouble that the real reflexive potential of the Anthropocene lies.