Anthropocene encounters: new directions in green political thinking, edited by Frank Biermann and Eva Lövbrand

The idea of the Anthropocene, to recall Walt Whitman, contains multitudes. The notion that human alteration of the Earth system has pushed the planet into a new geological epoch is not only vast in its geographical reach – spanning the world’s diverse human and non-human populations – but also has a temporal gaze that extends beyond the horizons of human history to the millennial timescales of geology. Conceptually, too, the idea of the Anthropocene offers fertile ground for debates about big ideas ranging from humanity and nature to agency, responsibility and beyond.

It is no mean feat, then, to produce a collection that grapples thoughtfully and originally with an idea of this complexity, but Frank Biermann and Eva Lövbrand have produced an excellent edited book. Stemming from a collaborative effort within the Earth System Governance Project research alliance, the book explores how the idea of the Anthropocene has been ‘encountered’ by scholars of environmental politics and aims to understand the contestations arising from those encounters. The editors have assembled an impressive range of authors working primarily in political theory, with further contributions from geography, International Relations, Science and Technology Studies and related fields. While the perspectives the chapters offer are diverse in many ways, contributors from the global South are under-represented, which is symptomatic of a broader tendency in Anthropocene literature to date.

The book falls neatly into three parts. Part 1 addresses how different fields of inquiry, ranging from natural science and neo-materialist political theory to literary fiction, have engaged with the Anthropocene. Part 2 critically reassesses a set of core concepts in politics through an Anthropocene lens. Part 3 explores how the practice and methods of political theory should respond to Anthropocene conditions.

Perhaps the most prominent theme across the chapters is humanity’s relationship with the nonhuman world. Noel Castree and James Meadowcroft show how nuanced and differentiated understandings of nature can clarify the muddy conceptual waters over the much-reported ‘death of nature’. What emerges is a recognition that, even if there is no such thing as a nature untouched by human influence in a climate-changed world, we should be wary of jettisoning the idea that nature persists in some form and retains distinctive moral value. Two complementary chapters argue that theories which collapse nature into ‘matter’ or fuse the human and nonhuman make it harder to ground moral reasons and responsibilities for conservation (Manuel Arias-Maldonado) or unwittingly bolster ecomodernist aspirations to find hubristic technological fixes for Anthropocene problems (Anne Fremaux and John Barry). Tony Burke and Stefanie Fishel are more sympathetic to key tenets of new materialism – including the idea of nonhuman agency – but they show how a distributed account of agency remains compatible with recognising a distinctively human responsibility to reverse ecological harm.

A paramount challenge in producing such a collection is to show why the Anthropocene deserves to be treated not merely (to use Castree’s distinction) as a buzzword but as a keyword in the crowded lexicon of political theory. There is a temptation to oversell the novelty of the Anthropocene at the expense of more established concepts such as sustainability and globalisation. However, as Meadowcroft notes, ‘while the turn towards the Anthropocene requires a refocusing of environmental scholarship and a renewal of green political thinking, there are reasons to be cautious with claims that “this changes everything” or that there is nothing to be learned from the Holocene for the politics of the future’ (p. 238).

For the most part, the book does an admirable job of showing how key ideas need to be rethought, particularly in Burke and Fishel’s re-envisioning of power relations, Ayşem Mert’s call to imagine democracy at a new planetary scale, and Victor Galaz’s diagnosis of the challenges that the deep timescales of the Anthropocene pose for the myopic timeframes of conventional decision-making.

Baskin’s chapter on global justice is highly critical of Western models of development which, he argues plausibly, have offered ideological cover for the unbridled economic growth that has driven the present ecological crisis. He observes that prominent accounts of the Anthropocene advanced by Earth system scientists fail to challenge dominant growth-oriented narratives of development. Surprisingly, however, the analysis does not mention another key Anthropocene narrative that has considerable potential to unsettle conventional notions of development: the idea of ‘planetary boundaries’ promulgated by Johan Rockström and others. Some policymakers, particularly in the global South, fear that planetary boundaries – like earlier notion of limits to growth – threaten their development aspirations, hence the concept’s failure to secure official recognition at the Rio+20 summit. This suggests that the paradoxes of Anthropocene narratives – radical in some respects and conservative in others – may run deeper than Baskin’s analysis suggests. Other work which integrates planetary boundaries with minimum standards for social justice (as in Kate Raworth’s sustainability ‘doughnut’) suggests that looking to post-development narratives is not the only option; creative reconfigurations of Anthropocene narratives may offer other promising ways forward.

Despite the complexity of the book’s subject matter, the chapters are generally written in a clear style that will be accessible to graduate students of political science, environmental studies and related disciplines, as well as being of interest to more advanced researchers. For readers relatively new to the Anthropocene literature, the editors’ introduction and Noel Castree’s chapter provide clear and insightful overviews of how debates over this proposed epoch have unfolded in Earth system science, geology and political theory.

While a sense of the gravity and urgency of the ecological crisis ebbs and flows throughout the book, its high-water mark can be found in Paul Wapner’s chapter on the ethics of research in the Anthropocene. In vivid prose, Wapner makes a compelling case that moral sensitivity to the injustices of the Anthropocene should be at the heart of political research, albeit not at the expense of empirical rigour. This call is complemented by Meadowcroft’s concluding reflections on future directions for political theory. Green political thought, he argues, has much to offer in informing societal debates about big-picture questions such as how humanity should relate to the planet. Nevertheless, he contends, it is vital that ‘green thinking also engages more explicitly with problems that connect directly with the life-experiences of communities and political actors’ … ‘To bridge this gap green thinking needs to be more directly connected to sites of practical struggle, projects for reform, transition experiments, and so on’ (p. 239). Thus the collection points towards a challenging but promising future for theorising that can rethink and help reshape politics in the Anthropocene.