Antropoceno O Bom o Ruim e o Feio Analise e Geopolitica

The Anthropocene Review 2016 Vol 31 33 51 The Authors 2015 Reprints and permissions sagepubcoukjournalsPermissionsnav DOI 1011772053019615618681 anrsagepubcom Review Framing the Anthropocene The good the bad and the ugly Simon Dalby Abstract The Anthropocene has become a key theme in contemporary speculations about the meaning of the present and the possibilities for the future While ecomodernists argue that current circumstances present opportunities and possibilities for a thriving future for humanity a good Anthropocene critics suggest that the future will be bad for at least most of humanity as we accelerate the sixth extinction event on the planet The geopolitics of all this which may be very ugly in coming decades requires much further elucidation of the common Anthropocene tropes currently in circulation As with the classic Western movie in the search for the gold neither the good nor the bad have the whole story the ugly will probably turn out to be decisive in determining how things play out How the Anthropocene is interpreted and who gets to invoke which framing of the new human age matters greatly both for the planet and for particular parts of humanity All of which is now a key theme in the discussions of political ecology that requires careful evaluation of both how geology has recently become so important in global politics and in discussions of humanitys future and how scholars from various disciplines might now usefully contribute to the discussion Keywords Anthropocene Earth System ecomodernism ecopragmatism environmentalism geopolitics political ecology possibilism The theme of the Anthropocene raises fundamental questions for how world politics is now to be understood Geopolitics can now no longer take the context of the human drama for granted trans formations are afoot driven by contemporary production processes Nature is increasingly being produced at the largest of scales and political thinking has to come to terms with this new condi tion quickly if there is any hope of maintaining the planetary system in something approximating what humanity has known in the current interglacial period Globalization is a profoundly physical Wilfrid Laurier University Canada Corresponding author Simon Dalby Balsillie School of International Affairs Wilfrid Laurier University 67 Erb St West Waterloo Ontario N2L 6C2 Canada Email sdalbygmailcom 618681 ANR001011772053019615618681The Anthropocene ReviewDalby researcharticle2015 34 The Anthropocene Review 31 process the global economy is the new geomorphic force at work in the biosphere How cultures are beginning to come to terms with this dawning realization is now a key theme for the humanities as well as the sciences A category of pristine natural places as the premise for environmental thinking is no longer a sensible way to discuss these matters Humanity is reorganizing reassem bling bits and pieces of nature and making profound political choices about which species will survive and which will not Nature is ever more a matter of politics McAfee 2015 Human engi neering is it turns out now operating at a geological scale shaping the future of the planet and its inhabitants human and otherwise quite profoundly Political economy is now too a matter of political ecology or at the planetary scale perhaps now a matter better understood in terms of political geoecology Brauch et al 2011 The future con figuration of the Earth System is now the key matter of geopolitics of how the world is known reorganized and rebuilt in the struggles for economic and political mastery in rapidly changing circumstances Dalby 2013a These circumstances are being shaped by decisions about produc tion systems and investment priorities intermeshed with political maneuverings in an increasingly artificial crowded and changing biosphere the condition of living in the Anthropocene Rockström and Klum 2015 The terms of discussion are also challenging traditional environmental formula tions in light of the dramatic transformations of the present catalogued and monitored by Earth System scientists both social scientists and environmentalist activists now have to engage with conditions of living after nature Wapner 2010 2014 in the new circumstances increasingly discussed in terms of the Anthropocene our new geological epoch Whether all this will turn out well a good Anthropocene as initially suggested by Erle Ellis 2011a or disastrously for humanity a bad Anthropocene as so many invocations of imminent catastrophe suggest has been a matter of considerable and sometimes acrimonious discussion recently and is the theme of this paper The Anthropocene is now more than a proposed new geological epoch that marks the transformation of the Earth System wrought by humanity it has become a conten tious term and a lightening rod for political and philosophical arguments about what needs to be done the future of humanity the potential of technology and the prospects for civilization It is so in part because the future is not determined and while the Anthropocene has already turned out to be bad for many species that have been made extinct as a result of human action whether it will turn out to be bad for humanity in the future depends in part on what is decided by the rich and powerful parts of our species in coming decades Various futures are possible for humanity but given the geologicalscale transformations that have triggered the Earth System sciences in the first place not all options are available Only some are possible but which ones depend on current political choices The politics of the Anthropocene might indeed get ugly not least because the premises that vari ous protagonists bring to the discussion are varied and in part because they are interpreting the significance of the Anthropocene in different ways not all of which seem to grapple with the pro found transformations already in motion The title of this paper borrows cheekily from the classic Western movie of the 1960s The Good The Bad And The Ugly In the movie the seekers after buried treasure each have some of the clues to its location but none of them have the whole story The plot is about the consequences of each trying to get the gold while denying the others a share of the loot But they need each others knowledge to find the precise location of the gold My appropriation of the theme emphasizes the point that the Anthropocene is neither good nor bad but that the politics of shaping its future are probably going to be both ugly and unavoidable Neither the good Anthropocene nor the assumptions of a bad Anthropocene can be divorced from consid erations of how decisions about what to create in the near future are taken the political economy of making habitats environments and inevitably new strata Clark 2013 is key to the new geo logical politics of our times Dalby 2014a Dalby 35 Many of the themes of the Anthropocene discussion are formulated in terms of optimism or pessimism about the future The paper looks first to the discussion of the good versus bad Anthropocene conducted by Andy Revkin Clive Hamilton and Joe Romm online in 2014 It then contrasts Elizabeth Kolberts The Sixth Extinction a very pessimistic tale of a bad future with Diane Ackermans The Human Age that is wildly optimistic about a good future for at least the affluent part of humanity that has access to numerous new technological wonders Both books published in 2014 contain sections called Welcome to the Anthropocene and discuss the themes in the Revkin et al exchange at length The latter sections of the paper look to debates about the geopolitics of the present to contextualize these themes in terms of governance and debates about ecopragmatism and technoutopianism While it might be objected that this selection of primary sources mostly by New England intel lectuals and one irate Australian are highly selective and unrepresentative of larger discussions the paper is concerned with the political implications of the Anthropocene term and the texts that this paper engages in detail are highprofile popular discussions that highlight the contrasting ways the Anthropocene has been framed in popular discourse In particular it emphasizes the importance of thinking about current global politics in terms of geology and geophysics not just environment an important distinction that only some of the discussion of Anthropocene geopolitics so far takes seriously enough In doing so the paper takes seriously the argument from the Earth System science literature and the safe operating space formulation which suggests that humanity has thrived in Holocene conditions Rockström and Klum 2015 Steffen et al 2011 but there is little indication that this will continue to be the case should major instabilities in the climate system something that was common prior to the Holocene once again become the normal operating conditions of planet Earth Whether the planet returns to something analogous to the Holocene or continues on its cur rent trajectory further into a noanalogue state is a matter of politics because which direction we collectively push the planet in is shaped by human actions and decisions made mostly by the rich and powerful of our species This is about much more than is usually encompassed by discussions of environment It is about what kind of future is being made for humans and whatever other species will share the planet with our descendants Framing matters Clearly humanitys geological role in the planetary system has been much more profound than was recognized until recently and this key theme highlighted by climate change and biodiversity reduction is reanimating the longstanding discussion about the global human predicament Rockström et al 2009 Steffen et al 2015 The Anthropocene provides a key conceptualization that in the scientific literature bluntly reframes the discussion in terms of humanity as a geological force not just an environmental actor This synthetic quality to the term in part explains how it has become a major theme in contemporary discussions of the changing planet even if many of the popular commentaries that use the term do not at least so far clearly engage the profound implica tions of the formulation of humanity as a geologicalscale actor Framing matters in political and academic discussion it organizes thought facilitates certain forms of identity and conduct Goffman 1974 Popular discussions of climate change and related matters are now discussed in these terms as activists and writers struggle with how to tackle con temporary changes Matthews and Matthews 2014 Romm 2012 How issues are bounded how academic questions specify the appropriate context for research is unavoidable in intellectual inquiry too and this has become a matter for scholarly analysis of climate change too OLear and Dalby 2016 Frames often need names and the Anthropocene has recently emerged as a key term 36 The Anthropocene Review 31 that reframes many things Or as this paper will argue it has the potential to do so in ways that might be very useful indeed both to political activists and academic practitioners if careful thought is given to how this new signifier is invoked and how it is given content Whether it is good or bad remains to be seen but the claims made about its potential reveal much about the larger political assumptions made by those who contest its political and analytical utility Or as is sometimes the case the profound silence about politics that optimistic commentators often rely on for their prognostications The Anthropocene term has been in circulation for some time used by Russian scientists to refer to the Quaternary and by Eugene Stoermer well before before Crutzens interventions Crutzen 2002 Crutzen and Stoermer 2000 which have been key in formulating the current discussion popularized the term It has some similar predecessors including Andy Revkins for mulation of the Anthroscene in 1992 but the key ontological novelty comes from the new under standing of Earth systems that the term encapsulates Hamilton and Grinevald 2015 The Anthropocene has entered both popular and academic discussion and as the debate about when it might most reasonably be judged to have started makes clear it is posing key questions for a number of disciplines What its utility might be in particular disciplines is a matter still undeter mined but so far at least the argument over its dating the most significant themes that might be used to designated its appearance and the political usage of the term have generated considerable attention These matter both in the academy and in larger political discussions that frequently formulate matters of climate change sustainability globalization and the possibilities of the human future very poorly Galaz 2014 The Anthropocene thus the rest of this paper argues provides a formulation for rethinking many of these things not least transcending the humannature dichotomy that bedevils intelligent political discussion of the options in decades ahead and is as such a profoundly useful category for both political and academic thinking across the divide between sciences and humanities Johnson et al 2014 But if it is to live up to its political and pedagogic potential care has to be taken that existing conceptual frameworks invoking postmodernity globalization the dangers of technology or the nuclear age or as this paper emphasizes optimism or pessimism about the future do not simply coopt the language of the Anthropocene without thinking through the transformative potential inherent in the term If it is simply assumed to be a neologism for environmental degrada tion a trendy word for wellunderstood declensionist phenomena a euphemism for imminent civi lizational demise or an apology for maintaining the profoundly unjust political economy of the present then an intellectual and political opportunity will be missed There are good reasons to be suspicious of the term not least by how it is sometimes used to evacuate key matters of politics Purdy 2015 but engaging it is now unavoidable As the debate about climate change in particular has made clear simply invoking such terms as climate change or in the discussion here the Anthropocene does not bring with them a consensus of their signifi cance nor who should act or how in light of the scientific insights they convey Hulme 2009 The media that convey scientific insights into the larger arena of popular discussion political debate and policy making further confound any simple assumptions of straightforward translation of sci entific insight into popular knowledge Boykoff 2011 Culture does indeed shape the climate debate Hoffman 2015 and likewise the discussion of the Anthropocene This is especially dif ficult in the case of the Anthropocene because of the frequent mutual ignorance of Earth System scientists of social sciences of each others methods assumptions and knowledge and the fact that the popular discussion of the issue has mushroomed in various metaphorical registers Rickarts 2015 despite the fact that the technical discussion of how to specify the Anthropocene in geologi cal terms is as yet as of late 2015 unresolved Dalby 37 Good versus bad Anthropocene Revkin Hamilton and Romm While the notion of a good Anthropocene is frequently traced to Erle Elliss 2011a paper in the Breakthrough Journal the discussion became high profile in 2014 when Andy Revkin posted some comments on the theme on his New York Times dotearth blog This blog has repeatedly posted items about the Anthropocene over the last few years indeed it has at times become a clearing house for discussions on the theme On 16 June 2014 he posted an entry on Exploring Academias Role in Charting Paths to a Good Anthropocene where he discussed a couple of academic meet ings in previous weeks and included a link to a video of his own June 2014 lecture about a Paths to a Good Anthropocene which was delivered to the annual meeting of the Association of Environmental Studies and Sciences Revkin 2014b The title to his lecture came with quotation marks around the adjective good to stress that values determine choices Revkin 2014a The lecture triggered a response from Clive Hamilton Australian public intellectual and blogger posted the following day Hamilton 2014a took issue with Revkin on a number of points Revkin 2014c in turn replied briefly to these challenges The lecture and Hamiltons reply generated an especially forceful intervention from Joe Romm 2014 that bluntly contrasts framings of the Anthropocene in terms of good or bad Revkins talk is a rambling affair It is part afterdinner speech part pep talk for the rowdy stu dents in the audience who enjoy the frequent jokes a personal biography of his journey through decades of environmental journalism partly agendasetting performance for the conference at Pace University that follows on from the theme of the talk The talk is also partly about Revkins insist ence that social sciences matter and climate cannot be left to hard scientists But perhaps mostly it is a performance in the genre of motivational speeches and an explicit rejection of pessimism in the face of dramatic environmental change The talk is only loosely scripted and draws heavily on personal experience and amusing anecdotes including ones from Revkins own youthful environ mental activism The YouTube video is low quality and while the sound track is clear the illustra tions that Revkin used in the lecture are only partly and inconsistently shown in the video An early part of the talk points squarely at the difficulties of communicating science of climate scientists as Moses bringing the tablets down from the ivory tower to an uninterested people busy with their lives and with priorities very different from the concerns of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change IPCC authors The social sciences have a role to play here in terms of commu nication and how messages are received Revkin is clear that yet more climate science will not necessarily change minds How understanding works is a key theme in the talk and environmen talist themes of Woe is me shame on you figure prominently in his argument that this meme is not enough to effectively engage in the politics to deal with climate change Variegation a multiplicity of approaches is necessary in the environmental movement Revkin asserts There is no one size fits all commonly agreed solution to climate difficulties The numbers used for climate projections are part of the problem according to Revkin because of their failure to communicate to numerous audiences in ways that relate to lived experience and hence the possibili ties of effective engagement see Kahan 2012 What traits are important in dealing with climate He suggests a list of matters that include flexibility learning and teaching Revkin bemoans the lack of sustained support for basic science and renewable energy research something that he argues is clearly needed to move climate responses ahead Twitter and hashtags as a communication tool that facilitate innovation and education get enthusiastic endorsements The ability to monitor and track environmental change matters too but key is the ability to live well in changing times This is about personal growth and given the applause that greeted these parts of the talk the students in the audi ence appreciated it There is little here specifically about the designation of the current era as the 38 The Anthropocene Review 31 Anthropocene and not much about it as either good or bad but clearly it is something social scien tists should address The commentaries on it by Hamilton and Romm are more about the premise of the good Anthropocene rather than the specific content of Revkins talk Clive Hamiltons 2014a argument is premised on the climate science that suggests that humanity is probably already locked into an increase in global temperature beyond 2C and heading towards 4C According to those best placed to make projections a world 4C warmer would be a very different kind of planet one unsympathetic to most forms of life including human life Apart from climatic change other manifestations of human impact in the Anthropocene from interference in the nitrogen cycle to plastics in the oceans only add to the grim outlook Hamilton goes on to emphasize that Revkin who he aligns with the ecopragmatist school of thinking epitomized by the Breakthrough Institute does not deny the science Rather he chooses to reframe it and in doing so conjures a notion of a good Anthropocene Hamilton notes that Revkin declares disarmingly in his talk You can look at it and go Oh my God or you can look at it and go Wow what an amazing time to be alive I kind of choose the latter overall Hamilton goes on to say that Revkin is of course entitled to put on any kind of glasses you choose including rosecoloured ones but that does not change what you are looking at In short unlike the climate deniers Hamilton argues that Revkin is accepting the science but framing it as an opportunity not a disaster Hamilton reads the science to indicate that disaster is precisely what is in store for the future of humanity While lumping Revkin in with the larger school of ecopragmatism or ecomodernism the terms are often used interchangeably see Nordhaus and Schellenberger 2014 epitomized by the Breakthrough Institute may be a bit of a stretch Hamilton nonetheless focuses in on how Revkin equates affluent technologically savvy Americans with humanity in general suggesting that this conflation hides an ideological agenda and in doing so disregards the current condition and likely fate of the majority of humanity in coming decades Following the theme raised by an Indian stu dent in the final question after the lecture but not answered specially by Revkin Hamilton sug gests that Revkin believes that with work we can have a successful journey this century We are going to do OK Personally when I think about those toiling vulnerable masses who are going to suffer the worst consequences of a warming world I find it offensive to hear a comfortable white American say We are going to do OK Im sorry if this seems harsh but unless the IPCC has it completely wrong much of the worlds population is not included in your we For the bulk of the worlds population then Hamilton sees the Anthropocene as being anything but good Thus the moral case against Revkin here is in terms of a geopolitical myopia that facili tates wishful thinking that has very obvious political consequences because it leads away from a priority on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and hence slowing the speed of transformation of the planet Hamilton draws a direct link between Revkins rosecoloured thinking and the political con servatives and physists who are uninterested in reducing the use of fossil fuels who frequently deny climate sciences veracity but are happy to consider geoengineering ideas as a way of main taining the political order that caused the problems in the first place see Lahsen 2008 Effectively the notion of a good Anthropocene deflects attention from the need to deal with numerous prob lems facing the majority of humanity In the end grasping at delusions like the good Anthropocene Dalby 39 is a failure of courage courage to face the facts The power of positive thinking cant turn malig nant tumours into benign growths and it cant turn planetary overreach into endless lifestyle improvements Hamilton 2014a He concludes his critique rather pithily by suggesting that less bad is still worth struggling for and that is the best that is possible in coming decades Things are bad and if we carry on as we are things will be very bad It is the possibility of preventing bad turning into very bad that motivates many of us to work harder than ever But pretending that bad can be turned into good with a large dose of positive thinking is even more so than denying things are bad a surefire way of ending up in a situation that is very bad indeed All of which bluntly frames the essential point of the discussion in terms of the trajectories of the planet and the question of for whom the Anthropocene might possibly be good and what to do about those for whom it is obviously well bad Revkins 2014c brief response which generously included a reprint of Hamiltons critique came on 18 June on his blog where he suggested that Hamiltons critique doesnt deal with the core argument of my talk the need for a shift in goals from numerical outcomes to societal quali ties and instead focuses on my use of the word good in relation to an era he clearly sees as awful On the substantive issues especially the need to address the needs of poorer peoples Revkin suggests that they were actually in broad agreement or rather they were if the wider corpus of Revkins thinking beyond the lecture was considered He suggested that the inference that he supported geoengineering was mistaken and suggested that he was not under any illu sions that technofixes were going to solve the problem of climate change He concluded by adding links to Hamiltons 2014b contemporaneous commentary in Scientific American on how The New Environmentalism will Lead us to Disaster which includes a criticism of Ellis 2011a formulations of a good Anthropocene and to a Joe Romm 2014 blog where the notion of a Good Anthropocene is discussed explicitly in terms of language and the politics of communication Joe Romm is a Fellow at American Progress and is the Founding Editor of Climate Progress a highprofile blog that tracks climate news and politics assiduously in the USA While much of Romms 2014 blog entry reprises themes in his earlier book on Language Intelligence Romm 2012 the first argument is that plain speaking is the key to effective communication and a term such as Anthropocene is anything but Adding good to it is only making matters worse Romm interprets the dominant theme in Revkins lecture as focusing on personal growth and optimism about the future but not on practical policy measures to reduce carbon emissions drastically in coming decades Romm insists that practical matters to avert catastrophe are what are needed and hence that a good Anthropocene is Orwellian obfuscation or selfdelusion or perhaps both For popular communication and political mobilization Romm argues that the Anthropocene is a very bad idea Whether it might have scientific or conceptual value is not discussed But Romm does not explicitly engage with Revkins discussion of communication which given Romms line of criti cism is a strange omission The implicit premise in Romms text and the explicit point that he quotes both Hamilton and Elizabeth Kolbert on is that the Anthropocene is about the destruction of the natural world that humanity has set in motion in the last few decades While watching Revkins lecture Romm says Elizabeth Kolbert emailed him stating that I dont see the value in the good Anthropocene as a rhetorical construct even if its wellintentioned What we are doing to the planet which is of course the reason geologists are considering renaming the epoch in which we live is in no way good A few years ago Paul Crutzen told me that he hoped the word 40 The Anthropocene Review 31 Anthropocene would serve as a warning to the world I think part of the power of the term is that it resists modification Romm also quotes the conclusion from Kolberts 2006 earlier book Fieldnotes from a Catastrophe to the effect that It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose in essence to destroy itself but that is what we are now in the process of doing This is what Kolbert interprets Crutzen to be implying with his formulation of the term as a warning One could then argue that a warning would be pretty useless unless it is effective as a device to facilitate a change of course and the kind of practical policy actions that Romm sees as essential to respond to climate change in particular and hence implicitly take seriously the central insight of the Anthropocene that humanity is acting in ways that shape the future of the planetary system But Romm at least seems to think the term Anthropocene is too esoteric to work effectively as such a practical political device Human age and the sixth extinction Kolbert and Ackerman Nonetheless while Romm may have his doubts about the political utility of framing current climate politics in particular in terms of the Anthropocene the term has proliferated in popular discussions making the cover of National Geographic and the Economist in the first few months of 2011 Elizabeth Kolbert wrote the cover story for the National Geographic on the Anthropocene and then the lengthy account of biodiversity loss in The Sixth Extinction The prose in The Sixth Extinction is compelling the narrative gripping a popular writer who knows her trade very well indeed Her global travelogue of key field sites in the geological sciences is a fascinating introduction to geology but it makes the point that extinction is a matter of geology The author simultaneously takes the reader on a journey to places where animals are now going extinct mostly because of habitat loss and ecological disrup tion see De Vos et al 2014 The destruction of nonhuman forms of life by the expansion of Homo sapiens is relentlessly documented in these pages The title of the volume suggests unambiguously that humanity is causing the loss of species on a scale that matches previous catastrophic events in the geological past Life has survived but in each case in dramatically altered assemblages the same is undoubtedly true now Hence given the geological scale of current biological changes the formula tion of the present as a geological transition the Anthropocene This is very much more than is usu ally encompassed by traditional environmental concerns The first few chapters take the reader on a journey to Panama where frogs are dying en masse to introduce the idea of extinction a notion that is in fact fairly new to human thought George Cuviers 18thcentury work on paleontology marks the beginning of the idea a tragic vision of Earth history that as Kolbert 2014 25 suggests has come to seem prophetic Discussions of catastrophism and uniformitarianism and Charles Lyells geological writings follow of impor tance because Lyells work so influenced Charles Darwin on his Beagle voyage Uniformitarianism postulated very slow incremental changes over very long time spans This is the duration needed for evolution by natural selection to occur Extinction is the other side of the coin species appear and disappear in the geological record Kolbert notes that Darwin passes over humancaused extinctions without reflecting that these are such oddities in geological terms What is clear is that extinction is part of the geological record we are now according to her title in the sixth major episode in the planets history But it is a unique one caused by the actions of one species a geo logical innovation of profound importance Only much later in the 20th century did catastrophic events as causes of extinction become a com monplace understanding of the gaps in the fossil record that the geological record had enumerated A meteor impact and its aftermath eliminated the dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous leaving a Dalby 41 very different combination of species alive in the Tertiary a point now familiar to most school chil dren Fitness and virtue have nothing to do with surviving such an event luck has much more to do with survival in radically changed circumstances The reason this book is being written by a hairy biped rather than a scaly one has more to do with dinosaurian misfortune than with any particular mammalian virtue Kolbert 2014 91 Hairy bipeds have now taken over Chapter five is titled Welcome to the Anthropocene A visit to Dobs Linn in Scotland and its graptolite beds guided by Jan Zalasiewicz and other geologists raises the question of the current episode of extinction and how it stacks up against earlier events in geological history Will rats be the dominant animals when humanity is through Zalasiewicz wonders This leads Kolbert 2014 108 to a discussion with Paul Crutzen where he recounted to her the now famous episode in a meeting where he grew exasperated with the designation of the present in terms of the Holocene and blurted out We are no longer in the Holocene we are in the Anthropocene The argument subsequently appeared in Crutzens 2002 paper in Nature Zalasiewicz Kolbert explains was intrigued by the idea and as head of the stratigraphy committee of the Geological Society in London set in motion the geologists discussion as to whether we are now living in the Anthropocene see Zalasiewicz et al 2015 Subsequent chapters deal in detail with ocean acidification coral reefs how forests are chang ing as a result of climate island effects of fragmented habitat and the extraordinary pace at which globalization as remixed the fauna and flora of the planet and changed the geographical distribu tion of species that Darwin among others wrote about This in Kolberts terms is the new Pangaea where forms of life separated for a very long time by continental drift are now effectively once again part of a single continental assemblage of species One of the striking characteristics of the Anthropocene is the hash its made of the principles of geographic distribution If highways clearcuts and soybean plantations create islands where none before existed global trade and global travel do the reverse they deny even the remotest islands their remoteness The process of remixing the worlds flora and fauna which began slowly along the routes of early human migration has in recent decades accelerated to the point where in come parts of the world nonnative plants now outnumber native ones Kolbert 2014 198 This whole process is unique to our times no other geological episode has so mixed up flora and fauna as Kolbert notes the new mixtures have inspired Erle Ellis 2011b and others to remap the world in terms of anthromes rather than the earlier notions of geographical distribution of natural species collections Trying to keep Sumatran rhinos alive and breeding emphasizes the efforts zoologists are making to try to prevent extinctions keeping biodiversity options open for the future where reintroductions to suitable anthromes may be possible there is no such thing as a wild anymore into which many species can be reintroduced Lorimer 2015 Extinction events of large mammals caused by human predation suggest to Kolbert that we should date the advent of the Anthropocene much earlier Heroic efforts to keep species alive have become part of numerous scientific efforts Kolbert 2014 268269 ends her volume with the following crucial reflection Right now in the amazing moment that to us counts as the present we are deciding without quite meaning to which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed No other creature has ever managed this and it will unfortunately be our most enduring legacy Whether this is good or bad is not the final concern but clearly the extraordinary circumstances of the present warrant the designation of the present in geological rather than just ecological terms This is about much more than traditional notions of a stable nature as the human context 42 The Anthropocene Review 31 While Diane Ackerman accepts the significance of the geological designation of current times also in a popular book in a similar genre her prognosis is dramatically at odds with Kolberts pessimism Ackerman 2014 starts her account of the Human Age by juxtaposing the famous 1972 NASA photo of the Blue Marble with their 2012 composite Black Marble image of the Earth at night illuminated by city lights This is an indication of how far humanity has come given that it is now capable of lighting up substantial parts of its planet at night as the urban hivelike settlements spread across all the continents except at least so far Antarctica Ackerman 2014 19 Landscapes have been radically altered now Japanese tourists sign up for nighttime cruises through giant chemical plants Such novel scapes lead Diane Ackerman inevi tably to Edward Burtynskys photographic studio in Toronto and meditations of the wastelands created by industrial production quarries as inverted skyscrapers It leads her also to Toronto Zoo where Orangutans are experimenting with iPads and in the process challenging humans to rethink their notions of nature As the title of the first part of her book has it in the now familiar slogan Welcome to the Anthropocene Ackerman is not reluctant to tackle the issues of climate change her own garden is witness to dramatic changes Humanity due to our tinkering has given the world a low grade fever which we need to quickly calm before it climbs Ackerman 2014 42 Hurricane Sandys destruction is itemized in some detail as are other floods and droughts that have inflicted harm on people in numerous corners of the planet of late Residents of Alaskan coastal communities too have to face the remaking of coastlines and their migration to higher ground that humanity is messing with Gaia is clear But how to act in such circumstances is not clear beyond the obvious need to inno vate not least by thinking about coastal ocean farming among other novel ways to harvest food a tricky matter with potential despite the ominous problems of rising acidification and the rapid growth of jelly fish populations in warming and depleted seas Urbanization gets considerable attention with innovative aquariums posited as a starting point in the search for new reefs biodiversity experiments and urban forms Novel arrangements with plants hydroponics architecture inspired by termite mounds and passive heating and recy cling systems are surveyed in Ackermans breathless prose Incinerators as heat sources in Sweden solar panels in Germany the list of possible new ways of making cities work is lengthy in these pages Urban species that populate Anthropocene cities suggest that nature is not natural anymore but new artificial ecosystems are emerging swallows with long wings are much less plentiful than those with short wings in some urban spaces The quicker and more maneuverable birds can deal with vehicle hazards much better and have outbred their longwinged cousins Urban wildlife is now standard in many cities Suburban life has opened up new ecological niches that are being colonized by numerous animals adapting to new metropolitan jungles Ackerman 2014 122 Some of these invasive species pythons in Florida in particular are a serious problem for their human neighbours Much of this is related to the changed migration patterns of birds trying to cope with both climate change and the fragmented landscapes that agricultural activities have created Ackerman recounts the record of prior planetary extinction events briefly and then echoing Kolbert confronts the sixth extinction event head on suggesting that perhaps half the worlds plants and animals will disappear by 2100 But for a change we know the exact causes of the extinction having created them ourselves climate change habitat loss pollution invasive species big agriculture acidifying the oceans urbanization a growing population demanding more natural resources and were in a position to stop them if we set our collective mind to it Ackerman 2014 154 Dalby 43 On how this might be done Ackerman the poet laureate of the optimist camp in Allens 2014 terms says not a word After many chapters working through how we are no longer the biological beings we had long thought we were Ackerman returns to the theme of us as geological beings ones that have dra matically changed things through our bad habits Without really meaning to we have nearly emp tied the worlds pantry left all the taps running torn the furniture strewn our old toys where they are becoming a menace polluted and spilled and generally messed up our planetary home Ackerman 2014 307 While the metaphor obviously works for her North American middleclass audience the following paragraph is as close as she comes to a strategy for coping with the messed up planetary home I doubt any one fix will do We need systemic policy changes that begin at the government level renewable energy replacing fossil fuels widespread green building practices grassroots community and nationwide projects and individuals doing whatever they can from composting and recycling to walking to work instead of driving Ackerman 2014 307 Crucially if this young species is to grow into a responsible one we need to look at ourselves once again from various angles Instead of ignoring or plundering nature we need to refine our natural place in it Ackerman 2014 308 While the book may help in the task of rethinking our place it does precious little to think through how the refining might be accomplished As with Romm and Hamiltons critiques of Revkin there is an ominous silence in how these new circumstances might be shaped collectively and how political strategies might be forthcoming as a result of the analysis of the Anthropocene Clearly Ackerman suggests that the future has all sorts of techno logical possibilities but she does not provide any guide as to how those opportunities might either facilitate dealing with contemporary difficulties for those in harms way nor how longterm notions of sustainability might be facilitated by taking the notion of the human age as point of departure for new social political or economic arrangements In terms of the movie script from the subtitle to this paper Ackerman follows it quite closely good disposes of bad and the ugly is simply irrelevant And the ugly The politics of the Anthropocene At the end of the question and answer period following Revkins talk an Indian student tried to engage Revkin on his assumptions of a single human we Suggesting that over the last few hun dred years humanity has not operated as a we she went on to ask How does the concept of the Anthropocene acknowledge the differentials in how humans have interacted with one another Instead of tackling the political question implied in the students question Revkin replied by refer ring to Darwin and then to Verdnadsky and deChardin and their notions of the noosphere The invocation of a single humanity evades the important questions of the politics of the present and which we is being invoked something that Revkin partly acknowledges in his response but does not address explicitly Hamiltons reprise of the students question in his blog response to Revkin puts the matter very directly in terms of who it is that is likely to be OK in coming decades Hamilton 2014a is unconvinced that many millions of people in dangerous places will be Revkins we does not seem to encompass them at all Neither does Ackermanns formulation of the Anthropocene and like Revkins talk which shared her exuberance about technological innova tion she falls very short of any form of serious social analysis If the Anthropocene is to be good 44 The Anthropocene Review 31 then it appears from her text like at least some of the ecopragmatists it will somehow happen well naturally However what this focus on what might be good about the Anthropocene does offer very clearly is the key point that whatever form of politics might engage with the larger questions it simply has to recognize that in the Anthropocene numerous new technological possibilities are opening up and how the next stage of the Anthropocene is shaped will be in part about how these new tech nologies are adopted and used by whom to what ends This is crucial to Johan Rockströms Rockström and Klum 2015 formulation of a big world in a small planet the possibilities of innovative agricultural techniques renewable energy sources and much more attention to matters of biodiversity loss still he argues offer the possibilities of shaping the future so all of humanity not just the rich white urbanites who study Earth systems can thrive in the new urban circum stances that are being produced The point is that the bad Anthropocene is not inevitable if the poli ticians and corporate executives understand that intact ecosystems are essential for their success in coming decades a shift in focus that Rockström like Nordhaus and Schellenberger thinks is much further along than does Hamilton While critics Hamilton 2013 in particular fear the focus on technological fixes leads inexo rably to a discussion of geoengineering see Keith 2013 given many of the technologies that Ackermann surveys not including climate modification devices this is not the whole story The implicit assumption that technological innovation alone will be enough to ensure a promising future for humanity strikes Hamilton in particular as at best naïve precisely because of its failure to engage politics and how decisions about what is to be made and who is to thrive in the next phase of the Anthropocene But the future will be played out in circumstances of rapid technologi cal innovation some of which will be relatively geologically benign some of which obviously will not Naomi Kleins 2014 insistence that political elites will have to be pushed to change their ways and that innovative municipal arrangements in cities and strategies of rural regeneration are necessary to fulfil the promise of new architecture and energy systems seems a very necessary supplement to Revkin and Ackermans optimism about technology Hamiltons engagement with the ecopragmatism school of thought which given their fascina tion with novel technological possibilities Revkins lecture if not many of his other texts and Ackermans book clearly are loosely aligned with challenges them not just on the failure to con sider humanity at large rather than a narrow portion of affluent Americans but also crucially on how they have in his terms misappropriated the Earth System science literature and the notion of the Anthropocene in particular But the idea of a good Anthropocene is based on a fundamental misreading of science It arises from a failure to make the cognitive leap from ecological thinking the science of the relationship between organisms and their local environments to Earth system thinking the science of the whole Earth as a complex system beyond the sum of its parts Hamilton 2014b Failing to do this and it is important to note that the label is ecopragmatism not geopragmatism allows Hamilton to suggest that at least Ted Nordhaus and Michael Schellenberger in their 2004 essay on the Death of Environmentalism Reprised and extended in their subsequent book Breakthrough From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility 2007 and some of Erle Elliss 2011a writings too ignore the full scale of the transformation of the planet cur rently underway In doing so the technoutopian vision of the future simply ignores the calamitous trajectory humanity is on and as such is dangerously misleading Crutzens Anthropocene is a warning in Kolberts terms Dalby 45 Taking this line of argument further Hamilton complains that Ruddimans 2005 Ruddiman et al 2014 early Anthropocene formulation allows ecopragmatism to suggest that humanity has already changed the planet fundamentally we have been in the Anthropocene for many millennia hence there is no undue cause for alarm Thinking in these terms Hamilton suggests avoids dealing with the qualitatively different impact of humanity since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and specifically in the period of the Great Acceleration since the end of the Second World War that has changed so much Hamiltons 2014b criticism predates Lewis and Maslins 2015 suggestion the orbis hypothesis that the Anthropocene might be dated to the mass death of aboriginal peoples in the Americas as a result of diseases brought by Europeans Rapid reforestation resulted in the early part of the 17th century and the subsequent reduction of carbon levels in the atmosphere is a noteworthy geological change This argument in turn links to Geoffrey Parkers 2013 historical reconstruction of the climate disruptions of the 17th century events that were so crucial in the emer gence of the contemporary global order see Mitchell 2015 The scale of the changes in the period of the Great Acceleration requires thinking in geological rather than ecological terms and if that were done by Shellenberger Nordhaus and others of simi lar intellectual ilk Hamilton suggests the true scale of current events what Kolbert explicitly frames in terms of an extinction event would become clear in a way that the technoutopians sim ply have not grasped Their failure to shift from ecological thinking to a geological register means that their appropriation of the Anthropocene evacuates its epochal significance and allows them to suggest that technology promises all sorts of things that Hamilton suggests are implausible in the face of rapidly rising carbon dioxide levels His forcefully stated case is that simply assuming technology is the answer without thinking through the geological transformation implied by pro jections of carbon dioxide levels as high as 700 ppm if current trends continue is politically delu sional This is about much more than has traditionally been encompassed by environmental politics In terms of the movie script theme of this paper Hamiltons argument obviously diverges from the screen outcome There the good disposes of the bad tricks the ugly and in the end allows ugly to live Now clearly we need politics ugly to dispose of the bad Anthropocene if the good is to pros per The good cannot do it all alone What the ecomodernism and ecopragmatism tropes do offer is a vision of a drastically changed future in which the human condition will be different from that of the present The key argument made by ecomodernisms advocates summarized in their April 2015 Ecomodernist Manifesto wwwecomodernismorg is that technological innovation will allow for reductions in the human imprint on the natural world effectively reducing the carbon footprint of contemporary consump tion lifestyles Ecomodernism in this incarnation is all about rethinking technological and environ mental things The Breakthrough Institute offers optimism in the face of the pessimism and emergency framings that the declensionist and catastrophist narratives frequently offer none of which provide an appropriate political focus for effective innovation While the temptation to dis miss ecomodernism as wishful thinking is obvious once a serious political economy analysis is engaged to do so is to abandon some useful political resources that imagine a future that might be much less disastrous than the present trajectory suggests Johan Rockströms Rockström and Klum 2015 insistence that a prosperous future is possible within a safe operating space for humanity demands numerous political interventions to be achievable but his point is that rapid innovation and tackling the problems of biodiversity climate nutrient amplification and ocean acidification is still feasible even if time is short But this is not going to happen without politicians being pressured to do the right things something that Ackerman and the ecopragmatists mostly simply ignore 46 The Anthropocene Review 31 Markets and technological innovations are not going to be enough to build sustainable futures for most of humanity never mind other species but how to engage them in a politics that looks forward and builds new funding and technological arrangements is now the question the future will be partly good and partly bad and the politics may indeed be ugly but it is now clearly una voidable if the Anthropocene formulation is taken seriously in political discussion All of which require an explicit working out of how new technologies and social arrangements can be engaged in political mobilizations that offer politicians and social movement activists useful practical things to work towards Naomi Kleins 2014 focus on community regeneration is but one useful attempt to look to the positive possibilities of new technological assemblages connected to a political agenda that is concerned with the broad welfare of humanity rather than maintaining the privileges of the rich and powerful In his lecture Revkin was concerned that social sciences were in danger of being marginalized in the discussion of the Anthropocene and this argument finds support in Malm and Hornborgs 2014 paper They are very concerned that the Anthropocene discussion is being led by natural scientists and in the process the inequities in human societies are occluded and politics replaced by an invocation of a universal singular humanity that has emerged from history by some natural process see also Luke 2015 Reading some of the prominent discussions of the Anthropocene Steffen et al 2011 the lack of engagement with power and political decisionmaking is notewor thy Malm and Hornborg 2014 argue that none of this discussion should remove the importance of social sciences investigating power and culture Further Malm and Hornborg 2014 6263 suggest that the physical mixing of nature and society does not warrant the abandonment of their analytical distinction Rather precisely this increasing recognition of the potency of social relations of power to transform the very conditions of human existence should justify a more profound engagement with social and cultural theory While the engagement by Revkin Ackermann and the Breakthrough Institutes ecopragmatists might allay Malm and Hornborgs fears a little on engagement by nonscientists ecopragmatists frequently do not deal with the more important point that social relations of power are key to how the Anthropocene is being shaped And as such they leave out the potential of the Anthropocene as a way of simultaneously bridging the humanities and the sciences by recontextualizing the human condition beyond the humannature dualism and a refocusing on the future as a matter of decisions about production rather than environmental protection Dalby 2014b Beyond good bad and ugly The Anthropocene focuses attention on the need to think well beyond the modern categories of human and nature In particular it requires shifting discussion out of modes of environmental dis course to think in geological terms and in the process focus on production the making of future worlds and the politics of deciding what is made This is to reprise and update Neil Smiths 20081984 influential formulations of the simultaneous production of space and nature as key to capitalism Likewise it is to take seriously his insistence on challenging the ideological strictures in much environmental discourse with its preservationist ethos and its claims to universality that have despite so many of its adherents hopes often stifled its progressive potential The claims of sustainable development advocates have not done much better Luke 2015 The Anthropocene also suggests that current transformations require political actions in numerous places not just Dalby 47 where it has long been assumed political power lies governing climate is not a matter solely of state politics but of social change much more widely Bulkeley et al 2014 Formulating matters in terms of geological politics Clark 2013 shifts the focus to matters of production while simultaneously emphasizing the point that the future is open to political inter ventions not a matter of foregone conclusions Dalby 2014a More than this it suggests that the context for international politics itself is being remade by human actions geopolitics no longer operates in a given context Hommel and Murphy 2013 That said the technocratic attempts at both mitigation and adaptation to climate change that have so far been attempted have often caused more conflict and security problems than the ostensible cause of these things in the changing cli mate Dalby 2013b Dunlap and Fairhead 2014 Determinism has been finally demolished by the Earth System discussions of the Anthropocene insights from the Earth System framing of current options Anderson and Bows 2011 Steffen et al 2015 now need much more attention from scholars in the humanities Perhaps a reworked notion of possibilism of constrained but not determined futures Febvre 19961924 one shaped by the much more comprehensive understandings of both Earth System science on one hand Whitehead 2014 and political ecology with its focus on lived environments on the other Taylor 2015 offers a better encompassing interpretive frame for present circum stances It does so because it demands political action to shape the future recognizing that we live in a world that in William Connollys 2013 terms is about fragile things and selforganizing processes that now urgently require democratic activism in the face of persistent neoliberal fanta sies that markets and individuals are all that is needed Naomi Kleins 2014 arguments for linking various forms of political activism in a coalition of fossil fuel divestment protest against mines and pipelines and a reconstruction or rural economies using renewable energy offers a broad outline of what is needed These are political decisions geological futures will result from decisions about whether to use coal or wind power petroleum or solar panels Climate change adds urgency to activism in a world where opposition to fossil fuel production and to its profligate use is obvi ously necessary if the majority of those fossil fuels are to stay in the ground and the planet not push past 2C heating McGlade and Ekins 2015 All this inevitably involves engaging social and political theory much more explicitly social scientists and not just political scientists Keohane 2015 have much thinking to do about how to facilitate rapid social change away from a global economy powered by fossil fuels premised on high modernist assumptions that nature is external to human affairs The question is not how to continue present ways of life but the deeper challenge of crafting new ways to respond with honor and dignity to unruly earth forces Ginn 2015 7 More than this the additional question is how to tackle the simple fact that those forces are being made more unruly by the actions of the affluent part of humanity and to do so in ways that understand the diverse human cultures that are trying to respond in multiple ways to circumstances not of their own making Cameron et al 2015 But while social scientists struggle with these questions the overarching questions of how to think about politics in the Anthropocene need to be confronted we do not have the intellectual tools to do this effectively One of the striking paradoxes of the Anthropocene is that as we appear to have taken control over nature and have become one of the principal forces of transformation we also appear ill equipped and perhaps unable to govern a world under the influence of these changes Hamilton et al 2015 10 Asking what until recently might have seemed to be impossible questions such as how human ity should decide what the correct temperature of the Earth should be are now on the agenda Caseldine 2015 The key point is to ensure that political elites that have blindly operated on modernist premises and in the process created the conditions of the Great Acceleration are not 48 The Anthropocene Review 31 those that appropriate the right to decide the answer Swyngedouw 2010 These are not matters that can be left to geophysists to decide and technological innovation alone will not do the trick Rowan 2015 Previously marginalized voices and aboriginal ones in particular have to be heard because they are simultaneously least responsible for present circumstances and those most likely to be most drastically affected by imminent transformations Ridgeway and Jacques 2013 The Anthropocene is neither good nor bad but is going to be shaped by a politics that is neces sary and probably will be rather ugly given the resistance of the fossil fuel industry in particular to attempts to keep rocks in the ground Climate change matters of biodiversity ocean acidification and nutrient amplification too then become a matter of what is being made for the future a politi cal choice rather than a matter of technological inevitability or imminent unavoidable doom Integrating that crucial point into the larger Earth System science literature a point Revkin hints at will greatly help clarify the significance of the Anthropocene to current generations of humanity both within and outside the scientific debates Funding This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public commercial or notforprofit sectors References Ackerman D 2014 The Human Age The World Shaped by Us Toronto Harper Collins Allen K 2014 A good Anthropocene Diane 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