Citizenship in the Anthropocene
Not for quotation. This is a draft of a contribution to the Handbook of Environmental Political Theory in the Anthropocene (Edward Elgar), edited by Amanda Machin and Marcel Wissenburg, due for publication in 2024.
Plus Ça Change ...
For all the litres of ink, reams of paper and bytes of hard drive storage that have been expended on analysing the Anthropocene since Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer published their short article in the International Geosphere–Biosphere Programme’s (IGBP) Global Change Newsletter in May 2000 (Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000), some will argue that the concept has changed nothing in regard to the theory and practice of citizenship.
In Hannah Arendt’s classic formulation citizenship is ‘the right to have rights’ (Arendt, 1958: 296), and the Anthropocene, it will be said, has done nothing to change this. This ‘meta-right’ is conferred by being a member of a polity, usually a nation-state, and the possession of the meta-right is represented by the possession of a passport. The battle for the right to have rights, and to improve the rights to which one has a right through migration, is about 75 years old, counting back to the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights. The fact that the Mediterranean and the English Channel have become battlegrounds where people die in small boats is simply the latest instance of the decades-long battle over the (supposed) universality and indivisibility of the rights that citizenship confers, and the particular instantiations of rights that go along with particular citizenships. In the Holocene it was illegal under international law to make someone stateless - everyone must be a citizen of somewhere - and this remains the case in the Anthropocene.
All this is true, but we will argue that is not inconsistent to claim that while from one point of view the Anthropocene has changed nothing in regard to citizenship it has also changed everything. In what follows we will offer a brief survey of theories regarding citizenship and the environment to date; outline two versions of the Anthropocene - ‘good’ and ‘bad’ - and what they might mean for citizenship; suggest that the Anthropocene invites us to abandon ethics and embrace (political) ontology; sketch the changes that the Anthropocene is wreaking in human ‘being’; before concluding with what this all means for citizenship in the Anthropocene.
Citizenship and the Environment
Rights-claims and rights-claiming are one way of conceptualising what citizenship is about. The rights might be liberal rights such as freedom of speech or freedom of association, or they might be what have come to be known as social rights, such as a right to employment, housing or healthcare. Once the relationship between political concepts and environmental issues came to be examined (Dobson and Eckersley, 2006), and citizenship came under scrutiny as one of the concepts (see, for example, Dobson, 2003), liberal citizenship, with its focus on rights, seemed to be a likely candidate for linking the two via the concept of environmental rights. So, a liveable environment might be seen as a precondition for the enjoyment of the rights referred to above, or the list of human rights might be extended to include the right to a liveable and sustainable environment, or rights of the environment itself might be established. In all these respects environmental citizenship can be spoken in the liberal idiom of rights (Shelton, 1991).
A second major tradition in citizenship theory and practice is civic republicanism. In this tradition the idea of the common good bulks large, and the focus on rights in liberal citizenship is replaced by an emphasis on duty. Thus the civic republican citizen has the duty to work towards the common good of the polity to which s/he belongs, however the common good is defined and understood. It is not hard to see how this translates into the environmental context: the common good here is defined as the sustainable society and the duty of the civic republican environmental citizen is to work towards that objective, even if that means suppressing subjective senses of self-interest on occasion (see, for example, Curry, 2001; Madiraju and Brown, 2014 and Fremaux, 2019).
One problem with both these citizenship traditions from an environmental point of view is that they involve territoriality. As we saw earlier, citizenship is normally predicated on the existence of an internationally-recognised polity, usually a nation-state. One of the most widely-accepted features of environmental issues, though, is that they do not respect national boundaries, and this makes territorial notions of citizenship problematic. This has led some to canvass the virtues of non-territorial citizenship, such as cosmopolitan citizenship (Linklater, 1998) or even post-cosmopolitan citizenship (Dobson, 2003), as a way of squaring the theoretical circle on which lie citizenship and the environmental problematic.
While both of these indeed enable us to use the language of citizenship while acknowledging the ‘beyond-the-state’ nature of many environmental issues, they differ in their notion of the origins of the obligations of the ecological citizen and to whom they are owed. Cosmopolitan citizenship works with ‘some vision of a universal community of humankind’ (Linklater, 2002, 317) and obligations are owed because of an ethical universalism that generates duties, much like that which prompted the Good Samaritan to help the man in distress on the side of the road. Thus the ‘ties that bind’ cosmopolitan citizens are thin and non-material. In contrast, the obligations owed by the post-cosmopolitan citizen derive from the ‘actual interrelation and interaction of both individuals and collectives’ (Hutchings, 1997, 127), or from ‘global actualities rather than transcendent principles’ (Hutchings, 1997, 128). Another way of putting this is to to say that the ‘space’ of cosmopolitan citizenship is the whole planet, while that of the post-cosmopolitan citizen, as applied specifically to the environmental problematic, is the ‘ecological footprint’ (Dobson, 2003, 99-107).
Precisely because cosmopolitan and post-cosmoplitan citizenship are non-territorial there are those who argue they are not citizenships at all, properly understood, so attempts to ‘speak’ the environment in the language of citizenship - or indeed vice versa - are doomed to fail. In all these regards, the environmental problematic has been a challenge for citizenship, and the underlying question is what does the former mean for the latter? And if they are to be brought together, are subtle inflections enough, or is radical surgery required in order to bring the patient back to life? After this brief survey of the environmental challenge to citizenship, we now turn to a second one: the advent of the Anthropocene. It seems that citizenship can be adapted to and adopted by the environmental challenge, but strains and stresses can appear at the margins. So what happens when we bring the Anthropocene into contact with citizenship?
Two Anthropocenes
In the context of social and political theory it has become customary to distinguish between a ‘good’ and a ‘bad’ Anthropocene (see for example Eckersley, 2017 and Dryzek and Pickering, 2019). Those who take the latter view of the unparalleled agency we have come to exert on the planet argue that we are in danger of undermining the (eco)systems on which we depend. This has always been part of the green critique of late modernity of course, but ‘bad’ Anthropocentrists argue that the range and depth of human influence at this point in the evolution of the species is no longer local and limited but has reached the point where life support systems at a planetary level are in danger of breaking down. Proponents of this view often use the work of the Stockholm Resilience Centre and the idea of planetary boundaries to support this view. According to the Centre’s latest estimations (Stockholm Resilience Centre, 2023), the so-called ‘safe operating space’ of seven out of eight indicators has already been exceeded.
Advocates of the ‘good’ Anthropocene, on the other hand, celebrate the reach and range of human agency on the planet, arguing that the so-called ‘Great Acceleration’ that began in the mid-twentieth century is to be fêted rather than lamented. On this view, reining back the forces that have got us to be a terra-forming species would be a mistake. On the contrary, they say, the full potency of the energies that have brought about the Anthropocene should be unleashed in the service of control of our planetary destiny (for a critique of this ‘technocratic Anthropocene’ see Andrew Stirling in this volume).
By these lights, it is evident that if we are to ask ourselves what the Anthropocene citizen looks like, there are at least two answers. The citizen of the bad Anthropocene will do all s/he can to bring humanity’s impact back with the safe operating space of the variables discussed by the Stockholm Resilience Centre. This first order objective will entail a wide range of possible second order citizen commitments ranging from individual lifestyle change to collective political action.
The citizen of the good Anthropocene, on the other hand, will argue that the limits identified by the Stockholm Resilience Centre are not limits in any absolute sense but can be pushed back through investment in and deployment of the very practices and technologies that citizens of the bad Anthropocene believe are driving us to perdition (see the Ecomodernist Manifesto [Asafu-Adjaye et al., 2015] and Symons and Karlsson, 2018).
On the strength of this it would be valid for the rest of the chapter to follow the path suggested by this binary account: to tease out the detail of these two citizenships and assume that they exhaust the possibilities of citizenship in the Anthropocene. Certainly, the literature to date would suggest that this is sufficient. When casting around for theories of citizenship to capture the ‘good’ citizen of the ‘bad’ Anthropocene, for example, there seems to be something of a consensus that is enough to preface ‘citizenship’ with ‘ecological’ or ‘environmental’, even if quite what the prefix signifies is often underspecified. It might refer to the liberal or civic republican citizenships referred to above, with appropriate environmental/ecological content, or it might refer to more fully worked out theories such as that offered by Dobson (2003).
In most cases it seems to be assumed or accepted that the Anthropocene is, in terms of citizenship theory, just another step on a well-trodden path, and minor adjustments to said theory will be enough to deal with its challenges. This is not how geologists of the Anthropocene see things. They have been understandably cautious about a) announcing the onset of the Anthropocene and b) naming the date of its dawning, but the reason for this caution is, precisely, the magnitude of the implications of signalling the beginning of a new geological epoch. For geologists, this is a once-in-12,000-year event, with evidence of the colossal transformation this signifies laid down in the earth’s geology until the end of planetary time. The argument in this chapter is that citizenship theory should follow the geologists rather than diffident political theorists, because such theory has wildly underestimated the change in the terms of reference for citizenship (and indeed everything else) that the Anthropocene is wreaking on us. Fundamentally, the Anthropocene is a ‘moment’ (which may turn out to be thousands of years long) in the relationship between human beings and the more-than-human world. Both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Anthropocene proponents agree on that, and they also share the belief that the dispute over how to approach the Anthropocene moment is essentially an ethical one: how ought we deal with the consequences of the Great Acceleration, by decelerating or by accelerating even faster?
Ethics - an Anthropocene Dead End?
Ethics have been at the heart of environmental political theory for a very long time, animated as this politics is by the question of how we should treat the more-than-human world. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that this same trajectory has been followed by most of those grappling with the significance of the Anthropocene for human conduct - including the conduct of citizens. It is commonplace, then, to read that, ‘the Anthropocene has called into question the nature of humans’ relationship to the nonhuman other’ (Chandler and Hathout, 2023), or that, ‘In this pivotal and turbulent time, we are traveling deeper into ethics than ever before, as more and more human beings respond to the urgent call for respecting all life globally’ (Rolston, 2020: 123). It is a short step from here to the conclusion that the root of our troubles is that old favourite of environmental political theory, anthropocentrism. Thus we must, ‘find ways in every context to disrupt anthropocentricism … I am convinced that much good can come from our refusing human-centredness’ (Barnett, 2018: 24).
In themselves there is nothing objectionable in these assertions, in the sense that they have an impeccable pedigree going back over 50 years of environmental ethical commitment, a commitment born of the belief that ethics would play a significant role on pacifying humans’ relationship with the more-than-human world. Indeed, the expansion of the ethical community proposed by environmental ethicists has its parallel in some recent citizenship theory, where it is argued that non-human beings should be admitted to the community of citizens: ‘the best way to give a political view of the relations between humans and non-humans in the Anthropocene is by developing a view of non-human citizenship’ (Pellegrino, 2022: 147).
But there are two amber warning lights here that should give us pause for thought. The first is that we believe it is a mistake to argue that it is the Anthropocene that has triggered this ethical reappraisal, because the reappraisal was under way well before the Anthropocene became a focus of critical social attention. (This is not to say that the Anthropocene as a geological epoch had not begun, of course. Only that it had not prompted environmental ethical re-examination in any discursive sense; it could not have done so because social theory had not caught with geological fact).
The second problem is graver and more far-reaching. It is that the concentration on ethics has created a blind spot as far as other more suggestive lines of enquiry are concerned, lines that are more consonant with the dramatic changes the Anthropocene is bringing about. In brief, the suggestion here is that ethical enquiry should be shelved in favour of an analysis of the ontological turn in the terms of reference of the relationship between human beings and the more-than-human world. If we focus on ethics we lose sight of ontology, and ontology is where the changes in that relationship are at their most profound. This has consequences for much of our social and political thinking, including our thinking about Anthropocene citizenship.
Ontology
What does this ontological turn look like? It is important to stress that it is more than the theories of human and more-and-human ‘entanglements’ inspired by work by theorists such as Bruno Latour (2004) and Jane Bennett (2010). These theories amount to attempts to redefine the nature and origin of agency, arguing that not only humans are capable of agency but more-than-humans are, too. Thus, ‘in the Anthropocene it becomes impossible to make a clear-cut distinction between human and non-human agencies, between culture and nature’ (Carleheden and Schultz, 2022: 2), while in similar vein Robyn Eckersley writes of ‘a non-anthropocentric ontology of entangled human and non-human agencies paired with a non-anthropocentric and ‘geopolitical’ imaginary of time, space and community that repositions and decentres humanity in Earth’s geostory’ (Eckersley, 2017: 986).
This is an entirely proper corrective to the dominant thought that humans are the only animals with agency on the planet. Indeed, perhaps the only surprising thing is that it has taken so long for this rehabilitative reflection to make its mark given that it was 1881 when Charles Darwin wrote of the humble earth worm that, ‘It may be doubted if there are any other animals which have played such an important part in the history of the world as these lowly organized creatures’ (Darwin, 1881). But ‘entanglement’ theory is a theory about beings rather than a theory of being, and the ontological turn we have in mind is actually the inverse of making animals more like humans by spreading agency across the biosphere: the effect of this turn is to make clear that the vulnerability and dependency experienced by non-human animals is a fundamental feature of the human Anthropocene condition (Connolly, 2014). To this we now turn.
There are already modest signs of a turn to ontology: ‘The Anthropocene, in addition to its geological meaning, has recently gained a metaphysical meaning. This emphasizes the need for a philosophical, ontological turn in human perception of reality to prevent devastating consequences of human activities’, write the Dedeoglus, for example (2020; emphasis added). But when ontology does come into view, the overwhelming emphasis is on the way in which human beings have ‘humanised’ the non-human natural world. A locus classicus of this thought is Bill McKibben’s 1989 The End of Nature. Nature has been humanised, he writes, because that which defined it – its independence from human influence – has been fatally undermined by climate change. :
By changing the weather, we make every spot on earth man-made and artificial …. If you travel by plane and dog team and snowshoe to the farthest corner of the Arctic and it is a mild summer day, you will not know whether the temperature is what it is ‘supposed’ to be, or whether, thanks to the extra carbon dioxide, you are standing in the equivalent of a heated room …. This new summer will retain some of its relative characteristics – it will be hotter than the rest of the year, for instance, and the time of the year when crops grow – but it will not be summer, just as even the best prosthesis is not a leg. (McKibben, 1989: 59)
In McKibben’s view for the first time in human history there is not one spot on earth without the mark of the human upon it: this is the apogee of the humanisation of nature.
The reaction of mainstream environmentalists to this process is generally one of profound misgiving, even of what Glenn Albrecht has called ‘solastalgia’ (Albrecht et al, 2007) - the distress caused by environmental change, particularly when it impacts on a well-known and loved environment with which one has long-standing contact. This reaction is hardly surprising, at both the intellectual and affective level, given that most environmentalists dedicate their political lives to defending exactly that which is said to have disappeared: the non-human natural world. So, as Anne Fremaux writes: ‘if nature is all human, is there any need to protect it or to critically reflect upon what we make of it?’ (2019: 93).
Worse still from this point of view, now that there is nothing left to defend the door is wide open for continued despoliation: ‘By declaring that everything is human-constructed or that nature is ‘dead,’ post-environmentalists intend to neutralize green traditional discourses on environmental (material) limits and legitimize Earth’s further artificialization and anthropization’ (Fremaux, 2019: 71). In other words, the thesis of the end of nature via its humanisation is a gift to the ‘good’ Anthropocentrists who would accelerate human impact on the earth and use technologies to push back planetary boundaries. It is the close relationship between the humanisation of nature and the geological Anthropocene (the latter is the geological confirmation of the former) that has led ‘traditional’ (Fremaux, 2019: 71) environmentalists to be critical of the role the concept of the Anthropocene plays in contemporary environmental theory and practice. We believe this is a mistake, as we hope to show.
Human ‘Being’ in the Anthropocene
Let us take as read that a) something like the humanisation of nature is taking place, and b) the Anthropocene can be regarded as an instantiation and culmination of that process. The usual conclusion at this point is that the Anthropocene is a problem for the concerned environmental or ecological citizen and that the obligation of said citizen is to resist the process it represents and roll it back wherever possible. The argument in this chapter is that this conclusion is based on a one-sided reading of the processes at work and of the changes taking place in the human-nature relationship in the Anthropocene. Crucially, what is missing in this non-dialectical reading is the recognition that at the same time as nature is being humanised, humans are being naturalised: autonomy is being exchanged for heteronomy, and independence is giving way to dependency.
Once we recognise that the relationship between humans and non-human nature is dialectical, we see that at the same time as humans humanise nature, nature acts back on humans, ‘naturalising’ them. In his monumental exploration of the explanatory potential of dialectical reason, Jean-Paul Sartre concludes that, ‘Human history … is in fact also defined in the present by the fact that something is happening to men’ (Sartre, 1976: 122; emphasis in the original). But what, exactly, is ‘happening to men’? The answer is that as we exert increasing influence over the natural world we simultaneously and progressively come under its sway, in the guise, now, of humanised nature (or what Sartre calls the ‘practico-inert’ - ‘matter in which past praxis is embodied’; Sartre, 1976: 829). This is the difference between the dependency experienced by the pre-Anthropocene human and the Anthropocene human: for the former the resisting environment is the non-human natural world, for the latter it is Sartre’s ‘matter in which past praxis is embedded’, or McKibben’s humanised nature.
Dialectical reason shows how emancipatory praxis works back on the emancipated subject in such a way that the praxis is experienced by the subject as domination. To give an example, late-Holocene practices designed to release us from the thrall of nature have resulted in conditions (such as climate change) which we now experience as obstacles to autonomy. In a dialectical dance the very praxis aimed at increasing autonomy in the late Holocene was - and is – a praxis producing the heteronomy that characterizes the Anthropocene. In sum, and in the words of the evocative title of Alasdair MacIntyre’s exploration of the significance of human animality in social and political theory and practice, in the Anthropocene we are, and have the opportunity to become aware of ourselves as, ‘dependent rational animals’ (MacIntyre, 1999).
Anthropocene Citizenship
If, then, the Anthropocene human is a dependent rational animal, what does this mean for citizenship? For all the differences between liberal, civic republican and cosmopolitan citizenship pointed out near the beginning the chapter, they have one thing in common: they were forged in the modern era, defined here as beginning with the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century. On July14th 1789 Parisians seized the Bastille in the name of the citizenry against royal tyranny. In the same year, across the strip of water separating France from England, Edmund Cartwright patented the first wool-combing machine, just one of the events which, taken together, made up the Industrial Revolution. Crudely, we can say that while the French Revolution gave birth to modern citizenship the Industrial Revolution ushered in the Anthropocene.
As well as sharing a date of gestation these revolutions also share a political ontology: an aspirational account of the being carrying them through. The citizen and the industrial worker are both heroic figures, forging a new world unlike anything that has been before, creating and demanding rights, exercising duties, circumventing ‘natural’ limits, creating linear time. Perhaps the most worked out expression of this ontology is Kant’s account of the autonomous subject, developed in the same decade as the birth of modern citizenship and the accelerating industrial revolution (Kant, 1785/1969). Kant made the case for a realm of autonomy and – crucially – constructed it as a realm superior to that of its inferior counterpart, the realm of heteronomy, whose denizens - non-human beings - are by definition subject to external domination. Kant’s ethical theory is driven by a creative distinction between these two realms, the human realm and the realm of nature, with the latter subordinate to the former.
This ontology has been overturned in the Anthropocene, where our experience is more and more one of heteronomy and dependence than of autonomy and independence. As Mihnea Tănăsescu puts it in her contribution to this volume, ‘humans are always subject to the whims of the world, no matter their own power’. In what remains of this chapter we will sketch out the implications for citizenship of this shift, focusing particularly on what it means for the idea of the ‘good citizen’. Every notion of citizenship has its sense of what the good citizen looks like. So the good liberal citizen energetically seeks to make good her or his citizenly rights and seeks to add to the list of rights to which citizens should have access. The good republican citizen strives to fulfil the citizenly obligations which membership of their political community entails. The good cosmopolitan citizen seeks to recognise and establish relations of justice across national boundaries. The question for us, then is: what constitutes the good citizen in the Anthropocene?
The point of departure for an answer to this question has to be the ontological shift that is taking place and, with it, the transformation in political ontology which we are undergoing. The importance of the distinction between ontology and political ontology should now be becoming clear. The ontological change in the human condition is occurring irrespective of human volition. The humanised nature we have produced acts back on us in ways over which we have less and less control, and which we experience much as non-human animals experience the world around them: as resistant and uncompliant. Political ontology, on the other hand, has to do with the conception we have of our capacities as actors in the world. The political ontology born in the late eighteenth century, and which inflected the conceptions of citizenship gestated around the same time, was that of heroic individuals, pushing back boundaries and making a world in their own image.
A necessary condition for this new political ontology to take root and be acted upon was knowledge of it, self-awareness of the new powers and capacities made possible, fundamentally, by exploitation of the store of energy laid down in the form of fossil fuels in the Carboniferous period some 300 million years before. The communication and assimilation of this self-awareness was no easy task, given that for much of the previous 11,500 years - the Holocene epoch which the Anthropocene is succeeding - human powers were much more limited and modest. This sedimented sense of constraint was the target of the promoters of the Enlightenment, whose task it was to articulate a political ontology rooted in autonomy and independence as a counterpoint to the heteronomy and dependency that characterised much of our Holocene existence.
The task now is the inverse of the one facing the champions of the Enlightenment: to articulate a political ontology consistent with our condition as human beings living under the Anthropocene, a condition of heteronomy, dependence and vulnerability. This is a task at least as difficult as the one facing patrons of the Enlightenment because, even though the period of time over which the new heroic political ontology has developed has been much shorter - not much over 200 years - the changes it has helped to engender have been as profound as anything achieved over the previous 2000 years. The Anthropocene itself is surely proof of that.
The epistemological task of the good citizen in the Anthropocene, then, is to resist the binary approach to it that presently dominates discussion. The ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Anthropocene discourse outlined near the beginning of the chapter is unhelpful for two reasons. First, those who advocate for pressing harder on the Anthropocene accelerator misread the changes in human being that are being wrought in this new epoch. As a consequence, their political ontology is at odds with the nature of Anthropocene human being. So, unlike the critique of the ‘good’ Anthropocene offered by what we might call traditional environmentalists, ours is ontological rather than ethical.
The more serious problem lies with those who argue that the Anthropocene is ‘bad’, because this Manichean approach obscures the potential for positive political learning in the Anthropocene. The suggestion here is that we should view the Anthropocene much as Marx viewed capitalism - dialectically. This reveals that while the Anthropocene does indeed harbour the destructive tendencies attributed to it by its critics, it is also the process creating the very conditions for the articulation of a new political ontology rooted in heteronomy, dependency and vulnerability.
There is nothing inevitable, though, about the instantiation of this Anthropocene political ontology. The processes creating the conditions for its instantiation are ongoing, but its realisation depends on the communicative and performative actions of citizens, perhaps via the ‘reflexive rationality’ of Marcel Wissenburg’s constitutional republicanism (Wissenburg, 2021). These actions include taking every opportunity to articulate and enact the new political ontology, especially when events that are so obviously ‘produced’ by the Anthropocene occur. Our record to date on this score is not good.
Covid-19, for example, has been described as a ‘disease of the Anthropocene’ (O’Callaghan-Gordo and Antó, 2020). This is because the evidence suggests that Covid-19 is a zoonotic (species-jumping) disease triggered by the Anthropocene takeover of the planet. Logging, mining, population growth, deforestation, forest road-building and population increase are taking us into ever more remote parts of the planet and drawing ever more ‘exotic species’ into the web of human contact and commerce. If someone wanted to devise an event designed to illustrate the embodiedness, heteronomy, dependency and vulnerability of the Anthropocene human, all brought about by humanised nature acting back on us in malign fashion, they would be hard pressed to come up with anything better than the Covid-19 pandemic.
Covid-19 was, and is, the Anthropocene in action, and the worldwide lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 were hardly the response dictated by a confident, Promethean political ontology. Indeed, for a brief period in mid-2020 it looked as though a reassessment of that ontology would take place. There was talk of ‘building back better’, generally taken to mean closing down the social, economic, political and zoological vectors that gave rise to the pandemic. But this period of review was short-lived: the ‘new normal’ rapidly gave way to a desire to return to pre-pandemic habits and practices and the opportunity to ground a political ontology suited to Anthropocene human being was spurned, even by those who might have been expected to know better such as Green parties around the world.
In sum, if the task of the pre-Anthropocene environmental or ecological citizen was rooted in ethics, the focus of the Anthropocene citizen has to be on ontology, and particularly political ontology. The Anthropocene is ‘producing’ a new human being, a dependent rational animal whose characteristics are more those of King Canute than of Prometheus. The tide is coming in, and our powers lie less in turning it back than accepting our limitedness and vulnerability and designing our politics accordingly.
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Sartre, J-P (1976), Critique of Dialectical Reason (Volume 1) (London: New Left Books)
Shelton, D. (1991), ‘Human Rights, Environmental Rights, and the Right to Environment’, Stanford Journal of International Law, 28: 103-38
Stockholm Resilience Centre (2023), https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/research-news/2023-05-31-groundbreaking-study-quantifies-safe-and-just-earth-system-boundaries.html (accessed 1 June 2023)
Symons, J. and Karlsson R. (2018), ‘Ecomodernist citizenship: rethinking political obligations in a climate-changed world’, Citizenship Studies, Vol 22 No 7: 685-704
Wallenhorst, N. (2022), ‘What Does the Anthropocene Hold for Citizenship?’, Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Pädagogik, 98(4): 431-442
Wissenburg, M. (2021), ‘The Anthropocene and the republic’, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, Volume 24, No 5: 779-796
Not for quotation. This is a draft of a contribution to the Handbook of Environmental Political Theory in the Anthropocene (Edward Elgar), edited by Amanda Machin and Marcel Wissenburg, due for publication in 2024.
Plus Ça Change ...
For all the litres of ink, reams of paper and bytes of hard drive storage that have been expended on analysing the Anthropocene since Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer published their short article in the International Geosphere–Biosphere Programme’s (IGBP) Global Change Newsletter in May 2000 (Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000), some will argue that the concept has changed nothing in regard to the theory and practice of citizenship.
In Hannah Arendt’s classic formulation citizenship is ‘the right to have rights’ (Arendt, 1958: 296), and the Anthropocene, it will be said, has done nothing to change this. This ‘meta-right’ is conferred by being a member of a polity, usually a nation-state, and the possession of the meta-right is represented by the possession of a passport. The battle for the right to have rights, and to improve the rights to which one has a right through migration, is about 75 years old, counting back to the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights. The fact that the Mediterranean and the English Channel have become battlegrounds where people die in small boats is simply the latest instance of the decades-long battle over the (supposed) universality and indivisibility of the rights that citizenship confers, and the particular instantiations of rights that go along with particular citizenships. In the Holocene it was illegal under international law to make someone stateless - everyone must be a citizen of somewhere - and this remains the case in the Anthropocene.
All this is true, but we will argue that is not inconsistent to claim that while from one point of view the Anthropocene has changed nothing in regard to citizenship it has also changed everything. In what follows we will offer a brief survey of theories regarding citizenship and the environment to date; outline two versions of the Anthropocene - ‘good’ and ‘bad’ - and what they might mean for citizenship; suggest that the Anthropocene invites us to abandon ethics and embrace (political) ontology; sketch the changes that the Anthropocene is wreaking in human ‘being’; before concluding with what this all means for citizenship in the Anthropocene.
Citizenship and the Environment
Rights-claims and rights-claiming are one way of conceptualising what citizenship is about. The rights might be liberal rights such as freedom of speech or freedom of association, or they might be what have come to be known as social rights, such as a right to employment, housing or healthcare. Once the relationship between political concepts and environmental issues came to be examined (Dobson and Eckersley, 2006), and citizenship came under scrutiny as one of the concepts (see, for example, Dobson, 2003), liberal citizenship, with its focus on rights, seemed to be a likely candidate for linking the two via the concept of environmental rights. So, a liveable environment might be seen as a precondition for the enjoyment of the rights referred to above, or the list of human rights might be extended to include the right to a liveable and sustainable environment, or rights of the environment itself might be established. In all these respects environmental citizenship can be spoken in the liberal idiom of rights (Shelton, 1991).
A second major tradition in citizenship theory and practice is civic republicanism. In this tradition the idea of the common good bulks large, and the focus on rights in liberal citizenship is replaced by an emphasis on duty. Thus the civic republican citizen has the duty to work towards the common good of the polity to which s/he belongs, however the common good is defined and understood. It is not hard to see how this translates into the environmental context: the common good here is defined as the sustainable society and the duty of the civic republican environmental citizen is to work towards that objective, even if that means suppressing subjective senses of self-interest on occasion (see, for example, Curry, 2001; Madiraju and Brown, 2014 and Fremaux, 2019).
One problem with both these citizenship traditions from an environmental point of view is that they involve territoriality. As we saw earlier, citizenship is normally predicated on the existence of an internationally-recognised polity, usually a nation-state. One of the most widely-accepted features of environmental issues, though, is that they do not respect national boundaries, and this makes territorial notions of citizenship problematic. This has led some to canvass the virtues of non-territorial citizenship, such as cosmopolitan citizenship (Linklater, 1998) or even post-cosmopolitan citizenship (Dobson, 2003), as a way of squaring the theoretical circle on which lie citizenship and the environmental problematic.
While both of these indeed enable us to use the language of citizenship while acknowledging the ‘beyond-the-state’ nature of many environmental issues, they differ in their notion of the origins of the obligations of the ecological citizen and to whom they are owed. Cosmopolitan citizenship works with ‘some vision of a universal community of humankind’ (Linklater, 2002, 317) and obligations are owed because of an ethical universalism that generates duties, much like that which prompted the Good Samaritan to help the man in distress on the side of the road. Thus the ‘ties that bind’ cosmopolitan citizens are thin and non-material. In contrast, the obligations owed by the post-cosmopolitan citizen derive from the ‘actual interrelation and interaction of both individuals and collectives’ (Hutchings, 1997, 127), or from ‘global actualities rather than transcendent principles’ (Hutchings, 1997, 128). Another way of putting this is to to say that the ‘space’ of cosmopolitan citizenship is the whole planet, while that of the post-cosmopolitan citizen, as applied specifically to the environmental problematic, is the ‘ecological footprint’ (Dobson, 2003, 99-107).
Precisely because cosmopolitan and post-cosmoplitan citizenship are non-territorial there are those who argue they are not citizenships at all, properly understood, so attempts to ‘speak’ the environment in the language of citizenship - or indeed vice versa - are doomed to fail. In all these regards, the environmental problematic has been a challenge for citizenship, and the underlying question is what does the former mean for the latter? And if they are to be brought together, are subtle inflections enough, or is radical surgery required in order to bring the patient back to life? After this brief survey of the environmental challenge to citizenship, we now turn to a second one: the advent of the Anthropocene. It seems that citizenship can be adapted to and adopted by the environmental challenge, but strains and stresses can appear at the margins. So what happens when we bring the Anthropocene into contact with citizenship?
Two Anthropocenes
In the context of social and political theory it has become customary to distinguish between a ‘good’ and a ‘bad’ Anthropocene (see for example Eckersley, 2017 and Dryzek and Pickering, 2019). Those who take the latter view of the unparalleled agency we have come to exert on the planet argue that we are in danger of undermining the (eco)systems on which we depend. This has always been part of the green critique of late modernity of course, but ‘bad’ Anthropocentrists argue that the range and depth of human influence at this point in the evolution of the species is no longer local and limited but has reached the point where life support systems at a planetary level are in danger of breaking down. Proponents of this view often use the work of the Stockholm Resilience Centre and the idea of planetary boundaries to support this view. According to the Centre’s latest estimations (Stockholm Resilience Centre, 2023), the so-called ‘safe operating space’ of seven out of eight indicators has already been exceeded.
Advocates of the ‘good’ Anthropocene, on the other hand, celebrate the reach and range of human agency on the planet, arguing that the so-called ‘Great Acceleration’ that began in the mid-twentieth century is to be fêted rather than lamented. On this view, reining back the forces that have got us to be a terra-forming species would be a mistake. On the contrary, they say, the full potency of the energies that have brought about the Anthropocene should be unleashed in the service of control of our planetary destiny (for a critique of this ‘technocratic Anthropocene’ see Andrew Stirling in this volume).
By these lights, it is evident that if we are to ask ourselves what the Anthropocene citizen looks like, there are at least two answers. The citizen of the bad Anthropocene will do all s/he can to bring humanity’s impact back with the safe operating space of the variables discussed by the Stockholm Resilience Centre. This first order objective will entail a wide range of possible second order citizen commitments ranging from individual lifestyle change to collective political action.
The citizen of the good Anthropocene, on the other hand, will argue that the limits identified by the Stockholm Resilience Centre are not limits in any absolute sense but can be pushed back through investment in and deployment of the very practices and technologies that citizens of the bad Anthropocene believe are driving us to perdition (see the Ecomodernist Manifesto [Asafu-Adjaye et al., 2015] and Symons and Karlsson, 2018).
On the strength of this it would be valid for the rest of the chapter to follow the path suggested by this binary account: to tease out the detail of these two citizenships and assume that they exhaust the possibilities of citizenship in the Anthropocene. Certainly, the literature to date would suggest that this is sufficient. When casting around for theories of citizenship to capture the ‘good’ citizen of the ‘bad’ Anthropocene, for example, there seems to be something of a consensus that is enough to preface ‘citizenship’ with ‘ecological’ or ‘environmental’, even if quite what the prefix signifies is often underspecified. It might refer to the liberal or civic republican citizenships referred to above, with appropriate environmental/ecological content, or it might refer to more fully worked out theories such as that offered by Dobson (2003).
In most cases it seems to be assumed or accepted that the Anthropocene is, in terms of citizenship theory, just another step on a well-trodden path, and minor adjustments to said theory will be enough to deal with its challenges. This is not how geologists of the Anthropocene see things. They have been understandably cautious about a) announcing the onset of the Anthropocene and b) naming the date of its dawning, but the reason for this caution is, precisely, the magnitude of the implications of signalling the beginning of a new geological epoch. For geologists, this is a once-in-12,000-year event, with evidence of the colossal transformation this signifies laid down in the earth’s geology until the end of planetary time. The argument in this chapter is that citizenship theory should follow the geologists rather than diffident political theorists, because such theory has wildly underestimated the change in the terms of reference for citizenship (and indeed everything else) that the Anthropocene is wreaking on us. Fundamentally, the Anthropocene is a ‘moment’ (which may turn out to be thousands of years long) in the relationship between human beings and the more-than-human world. Both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Anthropocene proponents agree on that, and they also share the belief that the dispute over how to approach the Anthropocene moment is essentially an ethical one: how ought we deal with the consequences of the Great Acceleration, by decelerating or by accelerating even faster?
Ethics - an Anthropocene Dead End?
Ethics have been at the heart of environmental political theory for a very long time, animated as this politics is by the question of how we should treat the more-than-human world. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that this same trajectory has been followed by most of those grappling with the significance of the Anthropocene for human conduct - including the conduct of citizens. It is commonplace, then, to read that, ‘the Anthropocene has called into question the nature of humans’ relationship to the nonhuman other’ (Chandler and Hathout, 2023), or that, ‘In this pivotal and turbulent time, we are traveling deeper into ethics than ever before, as more and more human beings respond to the urgent call for respecting all life globally’ (Rolston, 2020: 123). It is a short step from here to the conclusion that the root of our troubles is that old favourite of environmental political theory, anthropocentrism. Thus we must, ‘find ways in every context to disrupt anthropocentricism … I am convinced that much good can come from our refusing human-centredness’ (Barnett, 2018: 24).
In themselves there is nothing objectionable in these assertions, in the sense that they have an impeccable pedigree going back over 50 years of environmental ethical commitment, a commitment born of the belief that ethics would play a significant role on pacifying humans’ relationship with the more-than-human world. Indeed, the expansion of the ethical community proposed by environmental ethicists has its parallel in some recent citizenship theory, where it is argued that non-human beings should be admitted to the community of citizens: ‘the best way to give a political view of the relations between humans and non-humans in the Anthropocene is by developing a view of non-human citizenship’ (Pellegrino, 2022: 147).
But there are two amber warning lights here that should give us pause for thought. The first is that we believe it is a mistake to argue that it is the Anthropocene that has triggered this ethical reappraisal, because the reappraisal was under way well before the Anthropocene became a focus of critical social attention. (This is not to say that the Anthropocene as a geological epoch had not begun, of course. Only that it had not prompted environmental ethical re-examination in any discursive sense; it could not have done so because social theory had not caught with geological fact).
The second problem is graver and more far-reaching. It is that the concentration on ethics has created a blind spot as far as other more suggestive lines of enquiry are concerned, lines that are more consonant with the dramatic changes the Anthropocene is bringing about. In brief, the suggestion here is that ethical enquiry should be shelved in favour of an analysis of the ontological turn in the terms of reference of the relationship between human beings and the more-than-human world. If we focus on ethics we lose sight of ontology, and ontology is where the changes in that relationship are at their most profound. This has consequences for much of our social and political thinking, including our thinking about Anthropocene citizenship.
Ontology
What does this ontological turn look like? It is important to stress that it is more than the theories of human and more-and-human ‘entanglements’ inspired by work by theorists such as Bruno Latour (2004) and Jane Bennett (2010). These theories amount to attempts to redefine the nature and origin of agency, arguing that not only humans are capable of agency but more-than-humans are, too. Thus, ‘in the Anthropocene it becomes impossible to make a clear-cut distinction between human and non-human agencies, between culture and nature’ (Carleheden and Schultz, 2022: 2), while in similar vein Robyn Eckersley writes of ‘a non-anthropocentric ontology of entangled human and non-human agencies paired with a non-anthropocentric and ‘geopolitical’ imaginary of time, space and community that repositions and decentres humanity in Earth’s geostory’ (Eckersley, 2017: 986).
This is an entirely proper corrective to the dominant thought that humans are the only animals with agency on the planet. Indeed, perhaps the only surprising thing is that it has taken so long for this rehabilitative reflection to make its mark given that it was 1881 when Charles Darwin wrote of the humble earth worm that, ‘It may be doubted if there are any other animals which have played such an important part in the history of the world as these lowly organized creatures’ (Darwin, 1881). But ‘entanglement’ theory is a theory about beings rather than a theory of being, and the ontological turn we have in mind is actually the inverse of making animals more like humans by spreading agency across the biosphere: the effect of this turn is to make clear that the vulnerability and dependency experienced by non-human animals is a fundamental feature of the human Anthropocene condition (Connolly, 2014). To this we now turn.
There are already modest signs of a turn to ontology: ‘The Anthropocene, in addition to its geological meaning, has recently gained a metaphysical meaning. This emphasizes the need for a philosophical, ontological turn in human perception of reality to prevent devastating consequences of human activities’, write the Dedeoglus, for example (2020; emphasis added). But when ontology does come into view, the overwhelming emphasis is on the way in which human beings have ‘humanised’ the non-human natural world. A locus classicus of this thought is Bill McKibben’s 1989 The End of Nature. Nature has been humanised, he writes, because that which defined it – its independence from human influence – has been fatally undermined by climate change. :
By changing the weather, we make every spot on earth man-made and artificial …. If you travel by plane and dog team and snowshoe to the farthest corner of the Arctic and it is a mild summer day, you will not know whether the temperature is what it is ‘supposed’ to be, or whether, thanks to the extra carbon dioxide, you are standing in the equivalent of a heated room …. This new summer will retain some of its relative characteristics – it will be hotter than the rest of the year, for instance, and the time of the year when crops grow – but it will not be summer, just as even the best prosthesis is not a leg. (McKibben, 1989: 59)
In McKibben’s view for the first time in human history there is not one spot on earth without the mark of the human upon it: this is the apogee of the humanisation of nature.
The reaction of mainstream environmentalists to this process is generally one of profound misgiving, even of what Glenn Albrecht has called ‘solastalgia’ (Albrecht et al, 2007) - the distress caused by environmental change, particularly when it impacts on a well-known and loved environment with which one has long-standing contact. This reaction is hardly surprising, at both the intellectual and affective level, given that most environmentalists dedicate their political lives to defending exactly that which is said to have disappeared: the non-human natural world. So, as Anne Fremaux writes: ‘if nature is all human, is there any need to protect it or to critically reflect upon what we make of it?’ (2019: 93).
Worse still from this point of view, now that there is nothing left to defend the door is wide open for continued despoliation: ‘By declaring that everything is human-constructed or that nature is ‘dead,’ post-environmentalists intend to neutralize green traditional discourses on environmental (material) limits and legitimize Earth’s further artificialization and anthropization’ (Fremaux, 2019: 71). In other words, the thesis of the end of nature via its humanisation is a gift to the ‘good’ Anthropocentrists who would accelerate human impact on the earth and use technologies to push back planetary boundaries. It is the close relationship between the humanisation of nature and the geological Anthropocene (the latter is the geological confirmation of the former) that has led ‘traditional’ (Fremaux, 2019: 71) environmentalists to be critical of the role the concept of the Anthropocene plays in contemporary environmental theory and practice. We believe this is a mistake, as we hope to show.
Human ‘Being’ in the Anthropocene
Let us take as read that a) something like the humanisation of nature is taking place, and b) the Anthropocene can be regarded as an instantiation and culmination of that process. The usual conclusion at this point is that the Anthropocene is a problem for the concerned environmental or ecological citizen and that the obligation of said citizen is to resist the process it represents and roll it back wherever possible. The argument in this chapter is that this conclusion is based on a one-sided reading of the processes at work and of the changes taking place in the human-nature relationship in the Anthropocene. Crucially, what is missing in this non-dialectical reading is the recognition that at the same time as nature is being humanised, humans are being naturalised: autonomy is being exchanged for heteronomy, and independence is giving way to dependency.
Once we recognise that the relationship between humans and non-human nature is dialectical, we see that at the same time as humans humanise nature, nature acts back on humans, ‘naturalising’ them. In his monumental exploration of the explanatory potential of dialectical reason, Jean-Paul Sartre concludes that, ‘Human history … is in fact also defined in the present by the fact that something is happening to men’ (Sartre, 1976: 122; emphasis in the original). But what, exactly, is ‘happening to men’? The answer is that as we exert increasing influence over the natural world we simultaneously and progressively come under its sway, in the guise, now, of humanised nature (or what Sartre calls the ‘practico-inert’ - ‘matter in which past praxis is embodied’; Sartre, 1976: 829). This is the difference between the dependency experienced by the pre-Anthropocene human and the Anthropocene human: for the former the resisting environment is the non-human natural world, for the latter it is Sartre’s ‘matter in which past praxis is embedded’, or McKibben’s humanised nature.
Dialectical reason shows how emancipatory praxis works back on the emancipated subject in such a way that the praxis is experienced by the subject as domination. To give an example, late-Holocene practices designed to release us from the thrall of nature have resulted in conditions (such as climate change) which we now experience as obstacles to autonomy. In a dialectical dance the very praxis aimed at increasing autonomy in the late Holocene was - and is – a praxis producing the heteronomy that characterizes the Anthropocene. In sum, and in the words of the evocative title of Alasdair MacIntyre’s exploration of the significance of human animality in social and political theory and practice, in the Anthropocene we are, and have the opportunity to become aware of ourselves as, ‘dependent rational animals’ (MacIntyre, 1999).
Anthropocene Citizenship
If, then, the Anthropocene human is a dependent rational animal, what does this mean for citizenship? For all the differences between liberal, civic republican and cosmopolitan citizenship pointed out near the beginning the chapter, they have one thing in common: they were forged in the modern era, defined here as beginning with the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century. On July14th 1789 Parisians seized the Bastille in the name of the citizenry against royal tyranny. In the same year, across the strip of water separating France from England, Edmund Cartwright patented the first wool-combing machine, just one of the events which, taken together, made up the Industrial Revolution. Crudely, we can say that while the French Revolution gave birth to modern citizenship the Industrial Revolution ushered in the Anthropocene.
As well as sharing a date of gestation these revolutions also share a political ontology: an aspirational account of the being carrying them through. The citizen and the industrial worker are both heroic figures, forging a new world unlike anything that has been before, creating and demanding rights, exercising duties, circumventing ‘natural’ limits, creating linear time. Perhaps the most worked out expression of this ontology is Kant’s account of the autonomous subject, developed in the same decade as the birth of modern citizenship and the accelerating industrial revolution (Kant, 1785/1969). Kant made the case for a realm of autonomy and – crucially – constructed it as a realm superior to that of its inferior counterpart, the realm of heteronomy, whose denizens - non-human beings - are by definition subject to external domination. Kant’s ethical theory is driven by a creative distinction between these two realms, the human realm and the realm of nature, with the latter subordinate to the former.
This ontology has been overturned in the Anthropocene, where our experience is more and more one of heteronomy and dependence than of autonomy and independence. As Mihnea Tănăsescu puts it in her contribution to this volume, ‘humans are always subject to the whims of the world, no matter their own power’. In what remains of this chapter we will sketch out the implications for citizenship of this shift, focusing particularly on what it means for the idea of the ‘good citizen’. Every notion of citizenship has its sense of what the good citizen looks like. So the good liberal citizen energetically seeks to make good her or his citizenly rights and seeks to add to the list of rights to which citizens should have access. The good republican citizen strives to fulfil the citizenly obligations which membership of their political community entails. The good cosmopolitan citizen seeks to recognise and establish relations of justice across national boundaries. The question for us, then is: what constitutes the good citizen in the Anthropocene?
The point of departure for an answer to this question has to be the ontological shift that is taking place and, with it, the transformation in political ontology which we are undergoing. The importance of the distinction between ontology and political ontology should now be becoming clear. The ontological change in the human condition is occurring irrespective of human volition. The humanised nature we have produced acts back on us in ways over which we have less and less control, and which we experience much as non-human animals experience the world around them: as resistant and uncompliant. Political ontology, on the other hand, has to do with the conception we have of our capacities as actors in the world. The political ontology born in the late eighteenth century, and which inflected the conceptions of citizenship gestated around the same time, was that of heroic individuals, pushing back boundaries and making a world in their own image.
A necessary condition for this new political ontology to take root and be acted upon was knowledge of it, self-awareness of the new powers and capacities made possible, fundamentally, by exploitation of the store of energy laid down in the form of fossil fuels in the Carboniferous period some 300 million years before. The communication and assimilation of this self-awareness was no easy task, given that for much of the previous 11,500 years - the Holocene epoch which the Anthropocene is succeeding - human powers were much more limited and modest. This sedimented sense of constraint was the target of the promoters of the Enlightenment, whose task it was to articulate a political ontology rooted in autonomy and independence as a counterpoint to the heteronomy and dependency that characterised much of our Holocene existence.
The task now is the inverse of the one facing the champions of the Enlightenment: to articulate a political ontology consistent with our condition as human beings living under the Anthropocene, a condition of heteronomy, dependence and vulnerability. This is a task at least as difficult as the one facing patrons of the Enlightenment because, even though the period of time over which the new heroic political ontology has developed has been much shorter - not much over 200 years - the changes it has helped to engender have been as profound as anything achieved over the previous 2000 years. The Anthropocene itself is surely proof of that.
The epistemological task of the good citizen in the Anthropocene, then, is to resist the binary approach to it that presently dominates discussion. The ‘good’ and ‘bad’ Anthropocene discourse outlined near the beginning of the chapter is unhelpful for two reasons. First, those who advocate for pressing harder on the Anthropocene accelerator misread the changes in human being that are being wrought in this new epoch. As a consequence, their political ontology is at odds with the nature of Anthropocene human being. So, unlike the critique of the ‘good’ Anthropocene offered by what we might call traditional environmentalists, ours is ontological rather than ethical.
The more serious problem lies with those who argue that the Anthropocene is ‘bad’, because this Manichean approach obscures the potential for positive political learning in the Anthropocene. The suggestion here is that we should view the Anthropocene much as Marx viewed capitalism - dialectically. This reveals that while the Anthropocene does indeed harbour the destructive tendencies attributed to it by its critics, it is also the process creating the very conditions for the articulation of a new political ontology rooted in heteronomy, dependency and vulnerability.
There is nothing inevitable, though, about the instantiation of this Anthropocene political ontology. The processes creating the conditions for its instantiation are ongoing, but its realisation depends on the communicative and performative actions of citizens, perhaps via the ‘reflexive rationality’ of Marcel Wissenburg’s constitutional republicanism (Wissenburg, 2021). These actions include taking every opportunity to articulate and enact the new political ontology, especially when events that are so obviously ‘produced’ by the Anthropocene occur. Our record to date on this score is not good.
Covid-19, for example, has been described as a ‘disease of the Anthropocene’ (O’Callaghan-Gordo and Antó, 2020). This is because the evidence suggests that Covid-19 is a zoonotic (species-jumping) disease triggered by the Anthropocene takeover of the planet. Logging, mining, population growth, deforestation, forest road-building and population increase are taking us into ever more remote parts of the planet and drawing ever more ‘exotic species’ into the web of human contact and commerce. If someone wanted to devise an event designed to illustrate the embodiedness, heteronomy, dependency and vulnerability of the Anthropocene human, all brought about by humanised nature acting back on us in malign fashion, they would be hard pressed to come up with anything better than the Covid-19 pandemic.
Covid-19 was, and is, the Anthropocene in action, and the worldwide lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 were hardly the response dictated by a confident, Promethean political ontology. Indeed, for a brief period in mid-2020 it looked as though a reassessment of that ontology would take place. There was talk of ‘building back better’, generally taken to mean closing down the social, economic, political and zoological vectors that gave rise to the pandemic. But this period of review was short-lived: the ‘new normal’ rapidly gave way to a desire to return to pre-pandemic habits and practices and the opportunity to ground a political ontology suited to Anthropocene human being was spurned, even by those who might have been expected to know better such as Green parties around the world.
In sum, if the task of the pre-Anthropocene environmental or ecological citizen was rooted in ethics, the focus of the Anthropocene citizen has to be on ontology, and particularly political ontology. The Anthropocene is ‘producing’ a new human being, a dependent rational animal whose characteristics are more those of King Canute than of Prometheus. The tide is coming in, and our powers lie less in turning it back than accepting our limitedness and vulnerability and designing our politics accordingly.
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