Ecocene Politics

The impacts of human activities on the Earth have become a major preoccupation across the disciplines of human and physical geography, especially since the Anthropocene concept began to attract sustained attention. This book is one more addition to the high-stakes discussion about what sort of planetary future homo sapiens might reasonably want or expect. Geographers are lively contributors to that discussion (e.g., think of Clark’s [2012] Inhuman Nature). Mihnea Tănăsescu—an ecologically minded political philosopher who works at the Free University of Brussels—draws liberally on their work, along with that of all manner of geoscience, social science, and humanities researchers. His specific focus is politics—the process of determining who gets to decide what to do about matters of shared concern. Tănăsescu presents a plenary argument in seven very readable chapters. He calls for a new politics founded on overdue recognition of humans’ real ontological situation. As such, Ecocene Politics speaks to a number of live topical concerns among human geographers, such as how to achieve effective global environmental governance, the emerging geopolitics of a post-Holocene world, and the very nature of “the political” on a more-than-human planet.

At the heart of Tănăsescu’s book is the concept of the Ecocene. It is intended as a corrective to the much debated Anthropocene idea. For Tănăsescu, the problem with the latter is that it invites hubris: “Human agency has become the provocateur par excellence, but this does not mean that human agency is in the driving seat” (p.10). By contrast, the Ecocene designates an epoch where the nonhuman world begins to exert a dynamic “force” at all points of the compass. This might sound like a version of earth system thinking. Tănăsescu, however, is inspired by the (now not so) “new ecology” rather than by engineering. For him, the Ecocene is about chance (unexpected events) and change (a lack of stability), both being operative at the level of locality (differentially across the globe) as much as transnationally. “Nobody relates to the planet as such,” Tănăsescu (p. 4) notes, though “humans metabolize the world through ideas” (p. 8), as well as physiological processes. That being so, the Ecocene idea is intended to bring people down to earth so that they can better appreciate the material reality of their lives. It is a caution against schemes for control and domination, and involves embracing ignorance, uncertainty, and the world’s ultimate refusal to be known once and forever. This embrace, for Tănăsescu, must extend to our notion of the political, because our present ways of thinking about politics for him rest on a false ontology of stability and a naive epistemology that presumes descriptions can fully characterize worldly phenomena: “If political theory can only guide people in living together under conditions that cannot exist,” he writes, “then it’s literally useless, divorced from its purpose” (p. 18).

After a scene-setting chapter 1, chapter 2 sketches an ontology that the author believes best captures our world. It is explored via the concepts of volumetric space and relational nature. The work of everyone from Alfred North Whitehead to Maurice Merleau-Ponty to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro to Doreen Massey is referenced positively, Cartesianism being the foil. In this context, the global environmental crisis is, for the author, a crisis of a particular worldview as much as a material loss of Holocene stability: “The trouble with holding on to modernist concepts while living … with the decomposition of modernity is that it leaves one unable to do much other than mourn the inevitable loss” (p. 43), or else deny it. Tănăsescu sees capitalist technomanagerial solutions and revolutionary ecosocialism as fundamentally similar in their will to know and to control. By way of contrast, in an intermezzo he concretizes his preferred worldview by explaining how grafting and pruning olive trees occurs in rural Italy. These are acts of great attentiveness that are locally situated and ever responsive to context. Chapter 3 then zooms back out into the lofty realms of grand thinking. Human exceptionalism and the false notion of individuals are taken to task. Drawing on Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock’s notion of Gaia, among others, Tănăsescu questions notions of separation and the idea that any organism can know its environment in (and as a) totality. He favors notions of multiplicity and perspectivalism over holism and omniscience, noting that experimentation and surprise can be enlivening rather than exceptions to a settled, habitual mode of living. To illustrate the point, chapter 4 offers a particular, normative reading of “rewilding” projects in the context of the “new nature conservation” and the postnatural strands of “restoration ecology.” Here he draws on geographer Jamie Lorimer’s work, among others, and his own research into European bison. The author wants to create room for nature. There is a seeming contradiction, though: “On the face of it, making room for the autonomy of the natural world may imply the kind of separation that this book, and so many practices, are trying to think beyond. On the other hand, the self-willed nature of the world surely has a place in the Ecocene, the time when it is precisely the irruption of natural processes that re-dimensions humans” (p. 99). Tănăsescu’s solution is to call for geographically promiscuous rewilding, not a spatially bounded form of (now rambunctious) nature reserves. As he notes, this will be demanding and recomplexify our rather sanitized everyday environments.

Chapters 5 and 6 try to put argumentative flesh on the bones of an “Ecocene ethics.” The former suggests that “recognition is not the only, nor the best, way of conceiving of ethical relationships with environing worlds” (p. 110), and makes the case for an ethic of reciprocity. It does so by elucidating Māori philosophy and practice. Chapter 6 then explores what responsibility might mean. It takes issue with modern notions of development and associated technologies, whose wealthy beneficiaries “have created for themselves a world so removed from ecological processes that it is impoverished nonetheless” (p. 135). For Tănăsescu, responsibility is not about being stewards or guardians, but about humans being humbly responsive to a fecund, sometimes dangerous, often surprising and changing world, both near and far. He offers a brief vote of confidence in representing nonhumans politically, taking the example of river personhood in Aotearoa New Zealand. Chapter 6 is followed by a second intermezzo, which is a paean for the uniqueness of all places—the example is once again from Aotearoa New Zealand, starting with the author’s visit to Tāne Mahuta, an old tree believed to be the largest one in the country. Chapter 7 frames an Ecocene ethics as mutualist, offering a discussion of Darwin, Peter Kropotkin, and anarchist political theory. A short afterword offers a reflection on the former communist Europe in which the author’s family lived and the supposed difference that capitalist modernity brought after the fall of 1989 and 1990. He notes that both projects are inimical to an Ecocene politics and laments the huge resistance to change that we are likely to encounter as the Holocene gives way to a new planetary regime.

I enjoyed this book, even as I found it wanting. There’s a quiet passion to the writing, occasional pearls of wisdom, and some evocative formulations. Ecocene Politics is idiosyncratic, though. It is an interesting but rather undisciplined synthesis of thinking from across multiple fields. It reads as a plenary statement of the author’s faith rather than a rigorously argued case. At the heart of the book lies the question of how existing “modern” mindsets will, in practice, give way to an Ecocene mentality—yet Tănăsescu does not provide an answer. In addition, the author’s focus on ecological thinking in the life sciences has perhaps blinded him to a key insight of earth system thinking, namely that chance and change in our environment will be global, significant, and unstoppable, albeit experienced in a local and variable way. This focus also explains Tănăsescu’s rather naive hope that local-level experimentation and environmental mutualism will take hold, rather than large-scale forms of geoengineering (and nuclear power supply) sanctioned by national governments and supranational organizations like the United Nations.

Ecocene Politics belongs to a particular genre of books about the Earth transformed. Within this genre, other works offer a more systematic, properly argued critique of modern thinking within and beyond academia. Among them are Malm’s (2018) The Progress of This Storm and Neyrat’s (2018) The Unconstructable Earth. Then there are works that address the political economic barriers to achieving a new relationship with nature, such as those by U.S. geosociologist Jason Moore and Swedish anthropologist Alf Hornborg. Within the more specific genre of writing about the Anthropocene and politics, Tănăsescu’s book also offers far too little. For instance, it refuses to engage in the sort of interesting thought experiment offered some years ago by Latour (2004) in Politics of Nature. Likewise, there is none of the systematic political futuring offered by Mann and Wainwright (2018) in their brilliant book Climate Leviathan. In fact, Tănăsescu does not even attend to basic distinctions between “the political,” politics, and policy, nor their spatial configuration at different scales in a world of social and ecological difference and connectivity. Likewise, politics and ethics are elided. For this reason, Ecocene Politics offers too little to students of international relations, environmental geopolitics, multiscalar environmental governance, or global environmental law. Whatever values one holds, the scale, scope, and magnitude of human impacts on the planet raises questions of the utmost seriousness. We need hard-headed thinking that can somehow concretize the ideals of social justice, ecological care, universal well-being, and cultural tolerance while tackling problems like neoliberal governmentality, ethno-nationalist rivalry, and dangerous viruses.