The Anthropocene event in social theory: On ways of problematizing nonhuman materiality differently

an article by Anders Blok (University of Copenhagen, Denmark) and Casper Bruun Jensen (Osaka University, Japan) published in The Sociological Review Volume 67 Issue 6 (November 2019)

Abstract

Signalling that ‘humanity’ has radically changed the Earth’s environmental parameters, the Anthropocene currently generates debate across the socio-cultural sciences. In this context, neo-Marxist and new materialist approaches stand out for the way they oblige social theory to catch up with new material realities.

We share the conviction that the Anthropocene might constitute a genuine event for social theory and practice.

However, we argue that the search for alternative ways of problematizing and ‘dramatizing’ our eco-political predicament confronts these approaches with unresolved issues of scientism and economic totalization.

Looking for another path, we turn to Science and Technology Studies (STS), and especially Actor-Network Theory (ANT). We relay the long-standing focus on nonhuman agency characteristic of this field via Isabelle Stengers’ argument that we must ‘accept’ the reality of Gaia’s intrusion into collective historicity. The challenge posed by Stengers, we suggest, requires the development of an art of immanent attention to the politics of varied matters as they unfold across diverse ecologies of practice.

Extending further than the present preoccupations of Euro-American social theory, other areas within and across environmental history, activism and politics offer sites of resistance as well as experimentation whose conceptual possibilities and practical efficacies have yet to be explored. Slowing down theory sufficiently to learn from these multiple sites, we argue, is the starting point for an approach more adequate to the problems posed by the Anthropocene event.

---

Ecomodernist citizenship: rethinking political obligations in a climate-changed world

an article by Jonathan Symons (Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia) and Rasmus Karlsson (Umea University, Sweden) published in Citizenship Studies Volume 22 Issue 7 (2018)

Abstract

Green accounts of environmental citizenship typically seek to promote environmental sustainability and justice. However, some green theorists have argued that liberal freedoms are incompatible with preserving a planetary environment capable of meeting basic human needs and must be wound back.

More recently, ‘ecomodernists’ have proposed that liberalism might be reconciled with environmental challenges through state-directed innovation focused on the provision of global public goods. Yet, they have not articulated an account of ecomodernist citizenship.

This article seeks to advance the normative theory of ecomodernism by specifying an account of ecomodernist citizenship and subjecting the theory’s core claims to sympathetic critique.

We argue that state-directed innovation has the potential to reconcile ambitious mitigation with liberal freedoms. However, full implementation of ecomodernist ideals would require widespread embrace of ecophilic values, high-trust societies and acceptance of thick political obligations within both national and global communities.

Ecomodernism’s wider commitments to cosmopolitan egalitarianism and separation from nature thus amount to a non-liberal comprehensive public conception of the good. Furthermore, ecomodernism currently lacks an adequate account of how a society that successfully ‘separates’ from nature can nurture green values, or how vulnerable people’s substantive freedoms will be protected during an era of worsening climate harms.

---