Humility in the Anthropocene

ABSTRACT

The last 50 years have witnessed a set of changes in the scale of humankind’s ecological imagination toward ‘thinking globally’. Developments in earth and planetary sciences have elaborated a creation story that dethroned humans from a position of claimed supremacy to a status on a par with other systemic forces that have shaped the planet. So marked is the human imprint that it has earned its own name in the annals of geology, environmental history, and geopolitics: the anthropocene. The scientific refutation of human exceptionalism has not elicited either instant humility or greater self-awareness in the uses of expert knowledge to combat global problems such as climate change. This paper looks at sites of struggle between a persistent human imperialism, expressed through the continued commodification of nature, and more humble ways of knowing and guiding humanity’s planetary future from standpoints in ethics, politics and law.

KEYWORDS:

• Anthropocene
• co-production
• globalization
• sociotechnical imaginaries

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 https://mashable.com/video/nasa-climate-change-video/ (accessed May 2020).

2 Modern markets thrive on allowing people to act on their understandings and preferences of the moment, and neoclassical economics has developed a set of instruments, most notably the discount rate, to reduce the value of futures that are deemed too uncertain or speculative. There is a large literature on discount rates and their meaning within economics, and a detailed review is beyond the scope of this article. See Portney and Weyant (1999).

3 In the conclusion of his review of The Stern Review, Martin Weitzman (2007, p. 724) wrote,

in my opinion, Stern deserves a measure of discredit for giving readers an authoritative-looking impression that seemingly objective best-available-practice professional economic analysis robustly supports its conclusions, instead of more openly disclosing the full extent to which the Review’s radical policy recommendations depend upon controversial extreme assumptions and unconventional discount rates that most mainstream economists would consider much too low.

STS scholars will recognize here a common form of boundary-drawing that has placed Stern and his review on the side of politics, persuasion, and subjectivity, rather than on the side of objective economic consensus (see, for example, Jasanoff, 1987).

4 Reconstructing Sloane, https://reconstructingsloane.org/blog/2018/06/05/the-enlightenment-gallery-a-brief-introduction/ (accessed May 2020).

5 Sloane’s volumes on the natural history of Jamaica bore a quotation from the Book of Daniel: ‘Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.’ https://reconstructingsloane.org/blog/2018/06/05/the-enlightenment-gallery-a-brief-introduction/ (accessed May 2020).

6 IPCC Home Page, https://www.ipcc.ch/ (accessed May 2020).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation [grant number 1856215].

Notes on contributors

Sheila Jasanoff

Sheila Jasanoff is Pforzheimer Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. Her research centres on the production and use of science in legal and political decision making. Her books include The fifth branch, Designs on nature, and Can science make sense of life?