The Limits of Anthropocene Narratives

The rapidly growing transdisciplinary enthusiasm about developing new kinds of Anthropocene stories is based on the shared assumption that the Anthropocene predicament is best made sense of by narrative means. Against this assumption, this article argues that the challenge we are facing today does not merely lie in telling either scientific, socio-political, or entangled Anthropocene narratives to come to terms with our current condition. Instead, the challenge lies in coming to grips with how the stories we can tell in the Anthropocene relate to the radical novelty of the Anthropocene condition about which no stories can be told. What we need to find are meaningful ways to reconcile an inherited commitment to narrativization and the collapse of storytelling as a vehicle of understanding the Anthropocene as our current predicament

Governing in the Anthropocene: What Future Systems Thinking in Practice?

The revealing and concealing features of the metaphor ‘earth as Anthropocene’ are explored in an inquiry that asks: In the Anthropocene what possible futures emerge for systems thinking in practice? Framing choice, so important yet so poorly realised, is the starting point of the inquiry. Three extant conceptual pathway-dependencies are unpacked: governance or governing; practice or practising and ‘system’. New data on the organisational complexity within the field of cybersystemics is presented; new ‘imaginaries’ including systemic co-inquiry and institutional recovery are proposed as novel institutions and practices to facilitate systemic transformations within an Anthropocene setting. The arguments of the paper are illustrated through a research case study based on attempts to transform water and/or river situations towards systemic water governance. It is concluded that future systems research can be understood as the search for effective ‘imaginaries’ that offer fresh possibilities within an Anthropocene framing

What is Natural about Natural Capital during the Anthropocene?

The concept of natural capital denotes a rich variety of natural processes, such as ecosystems, that produce economically valuable goods and services. The Anthropocene signals a diminished state of nature, however, with some scholars claiming that no part of the Earth’s surface remains untouched. What are ecological economists to make of natural capital during the Anthropocene? Is natural capital still a coherent concept? What is the conceptual relationship between nature and natural capital? This article wrestles with John Stuart Mill’s two concepts of nature and argues that during the Anthropocene, natural capital should be understood as denoting economically valuable processes that are not absolutely—but relatively—detached from intentional human agency

Metaphorical patterns in Anthropocene fiction

This article explores metaphorical language in the strand of contemporary fiction that Trexler discusses under the heading of ‘Anthropocene fiction’ – namely, novels that probe the convergence of human experience and geological or climatological processes in times of climate change. Why focus on metaphor? Because, as cognitive linguists working in the wake of Lakoff and Johnson have shown, metaphor plays a key role in closing the gap between everyday, embodied experience and more intangible or abstract realities – including, we suggest, the more-than-human temporal and spatial scales that come to the fore with the Anthropocene. In literary narrative, metaphorical language is typically organized in coherent clusters that amplify the effects of individual metaphors. Based on this assumption, we discuss the results of a systematic coding of metaphorical language in three Anthropocene novels by Margaret Atwood, Jeanette Winterson, and Ian McEwan. We show that the emergent metaphorical patterns enrich and complicate the novels’ staging of the Anthropocene, and that they can destabilize the strict separation between human experience and nonhuman realities

The sense of an ending? Nature in the Anthropocene

Among the normative questions posed by the supposed advent of the Anthropocene is the following: Does the Anthropocene spell the end of nature? The philosophical answer to that question may determine the political answer to the phenomenon that is described by this geological-cum-historical notion. In this paper, I will argue that, although the signs are mixed, the Anthropocene does indeed confirm that nature has ended in a particular yet important way - but that such ending does not preclude further reflection about the human relation with the environment. In fact, such recognition makes possible another understanding of the task that lie ahead: a reflective re-organization of socionatural relations and a reconceptualization of sustainability.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tec

Anthropocene Blues by John Lane

Review of John Lane\u27s Anthropocene Blue

Who speaks for the future of Earth? How critical social science can extend the conversation on the Anthropocene

This paper asks how the social sciences can engage with the idea of the Anthropocene in productive ways. In response to this question we outline an interpretative research agenda that allows critical engagement with the Anthropocene as a socially and culturally bounded object with many possible meanings and political trajectories. In order to facilitate the kind of political mobilization required to meet the complex environmental challenges of our times, we argue that the social sciences should refrain from adjusting to standardized research agendas and templates. A more urgent analytical challenge lies in exposing, challenging and extending the ontological assumptions that inform how we make sense of and respond to a rapidly changing environment. By cultivating environmental research that opens up multiple interpretations of the Anthropocene, the social sciences can help to extend the realm of the possible for environmental politics

Anthropocene Feminism by Richard Grusin

Review of Richard Grusin\u27s Anthropocene Feminism

Das Anthropozän - Die Erde in unserer Hand

The Anthropocene concept is a comprehensive conceptual "toolbox" for systemic analysis, interdisciplinary monitoring and a new understanding of the gigantic current impact of human activities on the Earth system. At the same time, it neither implies a fatalistic acceptance of an apocalypse, nor does it promote a simplistic "everything will be fine" positivism, but rather allows differentiated observations from different perspectives. Precisely because of its systemic and interdisciplinary approach, the concept does not narrow possible pathways for the development, propagation and application of future options. On the contrary, the Earth system sciences, social sciences, cultural studies and the humanities together and very clearly express that in order to achieve global development goals such as justice, food security, health, peace and other goals for sustainable development (SDGs) (UNSDGs 2015), we keep on needing "assessable" and predictable conditions of an Anthropocene Earth system (Steffen et al. 2016). In order not to completely switch from the relative stability of the Holocene to incalculable risks, but rather to transform the Anthropocene Earth System into a different, but permanently habitable Anthropocene, it is necessary not to exceed planetary boundaries (sensu Rockström et al. 2009, Steffen et al. 2015b) and to see the SDGs as a compass. For this purpose, continuous monitoring of the state of the Anthropocene Earth system is indispensable. Only then both safe shelter spaces and a creative leeway for shaping the Anthropocene remain guaranteed. Within this framework, and depending on the region, the culture, the social requirements and the sociopolitical goals, it should be possible to negotiate very freely where the future journey should go. Necessary for that is a generally more holistic, systemic view of the integration of humankind into planetary processes, which means an integration of all societal groups, i.e. politics, science, business, administration, civil society groups and individuals. Another prerequisite is the improvement of future literacy via education in schools, universities, companies etc., with the goal to develop skills for better imagining alternate futures, depicting desirable futures, and designing solution portfolios for them. (excerpt from the conclusions of the paper

Ecological Finitude as Ontological Finitude: Radical Hope in the Anthropocene

The proposal that the earth has entered a new epoch called “the Anthropocene” has touched a nerve . One unsettling part of having our ecological finitude thrust upon us with the term “Anthropocene” is that, as Nietzsche said of the death of God, we ourselves are supposed to be the collective doer responsible here, yet this is a deed which no one individual meant to do and whose implications no one fully comprehends. For the pessimists about humanity, the implications seem rather straightforward: humanity will die. Yet, as we will explore in this paper, the death that we may be facing cannot be assumed to be simply biological death or extinction. Indeed, even if we are not running headlong into a mass extinction and biological demise, we do seem to be facing an ontological death. Our ecological finitude is the harbinger of our ontological finitude. The vulnerability we confront in the Anthropocene is what Jonathan Lear, in a different context, called ontological vulnerability. Worlds die too; the ways of life they sustain can become impossible, ceasing to make sense and matter. The constitutive susceptibility of all human worlds to their eventual collapse is what we mean by ontological finitude. This is what we face as presumed denizens in a dawning Anthropocene