Environmental Geopolitics in the Twenty-first Century

Geological Politics

Much modern political thinking frequently depends on assumptions of self-determination and claims to sovereignty over at least relatively discrete spaces. Politics supposedly happens within states; territory has become a taken-for-granted spatial premise for politics. Mere international relations occur between these geographically demarcated entities, at least that used to be the case according to many accounts in the social sciences of the previous century. Globalization was, in the 1990s at least, supposedly a threat to all this, calling into question matters of autonomy as the premise for political thought. While critiques of methodological nationalism are easy, and inform a diverse range of contemporary political analysis, the debate about climate change in particular suggests that there is now a pressing need to go much further in these critiques of the implicit geographic premises of political thinking. It does so because, as Bruno Latour puts it in the epigraph to this essay, geology is now a matter of politics too. Geopolitics isn’t just about the spatial arrangements that provide the context for politics, it’s now unavoidably true that the material circumstances of humanity are political too, even more so than in the past, because they are increasingly artificial.

While environmentalists have long asserted that pollution recognizes no boundaries, and the iconic National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) image of “the whole earth” is still widely invoked to suggest the artificiality of political borders, contemporary earth system thinking adds greatly to the impetus to take such matters much more seriously in matters of geopolitics. This is so because the sheer scale of contemporary transformations challenges the taken-for-granted geopolitical assumptions that have structured modern social sciences and political practice. These transformations involve both the social and the environmental context of humanity in fundamental ways that have yet to be thought through in detail in light of the emergent insights in earth system science. This discussion has crystallized in recent years in the debate about how to specify the parameters of the Anthropocene, the as yet unofficial designation for a new geological epoch in the planet’s history.

The discussion of the Anthropocene calls into question the modern distinctions between people and environment, culture and nature, while simultaneously challenging the inside/outside spatial distinctions, and also the traditional assumptions about a given world as the context for the human drama. Environmental determinism, arguments that geographic contexts shape human destinies are now obviously backward given the artificial circumstances we are creating. In this sense, geological sciences really do suggest we live in a postmodern world, one in which the key distinctions of modernity no longer hold as useful categories for either analysis or action. Given that the basic insight that drives the Anthropocene discussion is that we are collectively changing the basic parameters of the earth system, we have literally taken our fate into our own hands, and are determining the circumstances in which future generations will live.

The implications of all this are profound for how we now understand geopolitics, questions of local and global, not to mention the need to think in ecological terms about what kind of world we are literally making. Politics is not now just a matter of institutions, sovereignties, governance arrangements, parties, movements, leaders, and states. It is now unavoidably a matter of cities, pipelines, technological innovations, and discussions of the future configuration of the planet. While these themes are present in much political analysis of late, the Anthropocene formulations underscore both why they are important, and how much more hard thinking is needed to update the categories of social and political analysis to take the new circumstances humanity faces seriously.

Environmental geopolitics in the twenty-first century will in part be shaped by how these shifting ontological premises are adopted, or as some retrograde political regimes now suggest, not adopted. Crucially, the entities that need at least in theory to be governed are now not those that used to make up the traditional themes of geopolitics. Extracting geopolitical analysis from the conceptual strictures of great power rivalries, assumptions of a fixed context in which the rivalries play out, and the persistent fictions of territorial sovereignties is part of the current task of those who ponder questions of authority, decision making, and rule in the new circumstances of the Anthropocene.

The new material circumstances wherein humanity has become effectively a geological force requires a much more fundamental rethinking of the geo in geopolitics than most analysts have so far contemplated. Not least as the brief discussion of carbon markets and related matters of ecological services, offsets, carbon sinks, and related matters suggests subsequently, new ecological entities are now very much part of the calculus of spaces, properties, and territories. How they are designated, calibrated, and decided upon are crucial parts of global governance and the rivalries among states, corporations, and all sorts of so-called nongovernmental organizations. As Latour puts it, science and politics are irredeemably intertwined. In Walker’s terms, the traditional Cartesian coordinates of contemporary cartography don’t work as the interpretive frame for legitimate authority however much the guns might be used to impose temporary modes of order on a rapidly changing world. Welcome to the Anthropocene!

The Anthropocene

While matters of geology are rarely an integral part of social analysis, beyond obvious immediate concerns with matters of mining and resource use, the discussion in the earth sciences about the new geological epoch the planet is now in provides an innovative lens through which to view contemporary transformations. It does so because the realization that humans are changing the largest geophysical functions of the biosphere demolishes residual modern assumptions of humanity as somehow distinct from nature, and the planet as the backdrop or setting for the human drama. At the largest scale, the new focus on earth systems challenges modern categories in ways that are loosely congruent with the focus on neurosciences, biology, and the new materialities discussion of post-humanism at the micro scale. We are not apart from nature; we are part of a nature that the affluent urbanized fossil fueled part of humanity is rapidly changing.

While it is not yet official in the scientific category system of geological ages, the Anthropocene is now a widely used term in earth sciences. The term, literally the age of humanity, has been coined to give recognition to the fact that industrial humanity has set in motion a series of changes to the planet of a similar order of magnitude to events such as those that lead to the extinction of dinosaurs. Climate change gets most of the attention, but the transformation of such things as the nitrogen content of the biosphere, and the wholesale elimination of numerous species, due to habitat disruption and pollution as well as the acidification of the ocean are important parts of the contemporary transformation. ³ They occur on a widespread enough scale to have caused geological scientists both to debate their significance and to suggest that serious consideration needs to be given to redesignating the contemporary period of the geological timescale.

Some researchers have argued that human effects in the biosphere have been noteworthy since at least the retreat of the ice sheets at the end of the most recent period of global glaciation. If that is the case, then the period of the Holocene, the relatively stable climatic period for the last ten millennia might better be called the Anthropocene, and the Holocene is then a redundant designation. ⁴ Given the elimination of many species of megafauna, only most famously the mammoths, human activities have been obvious in the geological record. The rise of agriculture and in particular the domestication of large mammals might indeed have generated enough methane to prevent the world slipping back into another ice age. The point of such discussions is precisely to make it clear that the planet’s ecosystems, and possibly its global climate too, have been in part a human artifact. The discussion of the Anthropocene involves a fascinating debate about when it might be understood to have begun and the consequences for geological thinking of how the key “golden spike” marker at the beginning of the period might be specified. ⁵ In the process, there is an implicit discussion about humanity’s place in nature, and how this has changed so that industrial humanity is now the most important geomorphological agent in the planet’s geophysical processes. This, as the later stages of this article will make clear, requires a rethinking of the implicit contextualizations for geopolitics.

Earth system thinkers have suggested a threefold periodization of the Anthropocene. ⁶ The first phase is the industrial revolution from the late eighteenth century to middle of the twentieth century. Second is the great acceleration since about 1950 when the rapid expansion of the global economy and petroleum powered communications have dramatically expanded human numbers and activity. What comes next, in the third stage of the Anthropocene, might be a period of sustainable planetary stewardship, or something altogether more unpleasant for humanity. It all depends on human actions in the next few decades. The geographical context for human affairs is not a given natural entity; however, much contemporary political reasoning practices continue to take it for granted.

The Industrial Revolution

The story of the modern world is often told as the rise of European power and the growth of industrial technological capabilities. The conventional histories tell of rising powers, rivalries, and imperial growth; of geopolitical struggles for dominance related to the rising power of industrial production; and of the struggles to secure resources to supply the growing factories, the producers of wealth and power. But less discussed is the material transformation wrought by the rise of modern powers. That other story, the environmental transformation of the material circumstances of humanity, is now becoming an essential part of the discussion of contemporary global politics. It is doing so because of the transformations now understood mostly in terms of climate change with all their profound consequences for the human condition. Putting global ecology into the heart of geopolitical discussion is now essential if analyses of world politics are to engage with the material circumstances within which decisions are now made, or as is frequently the case with formal intergovernmental negotiations of late, not made.

Plantation agriculture and cotton in particular were key to the emergence of the industrial power of England first and quickly much of the rest of Europe. But the related environmental transformation is the material backdrop to the rise of European, and subsequently American and Japanese industrial and imperial power that began in the second half of the eighteenth century. The appropriation of increasingly large amounts of rangeland, and subsequently other ecosystems and the gradual urbanization and construction of the related new artificial ecologies, has profoundly changed the global biosphere in ways that are frequently poorly understood. ⁷ While estimates of precisely which ecosystems have been transformed to human productive purposes are disputable, the overall trend of the dramatic reduction of “wild” spaces is clear, as is the expansion of cropland and the reduction of ecosystems that are predominantly driven by nonanthropogenic forces. The expansion of empires was a matter of ecological transformation quite as much as a matter of geopolitics. Much of this was powered by coal and the ubiquitous steam engine, first in mines, then factories, and crucially in the mid-nineteenth century as a mode of propulsion for trains and then shipping.

This innovation of steam power and the rapid expansion of the use of coal as an energy source began the gradual increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, and hence the beginning of the industrial revolution is frequently taken as the start of the Anthropocene, because the process of turning rocks back into air, which is what the combustion of coal does, is a clear geophysical process that can be traced in the rise of carbon dioxide levels from the preindustrial level of about 280 parts per million (ppm) to the current levels close to 400 ppm. Thus, the period of the industrial revolution, the coal-powered rise of industrial urbanization can be said to constitute the first period of the Anthropocene.

Crucial to the innovations that simultaneously accelerated the growth of European and American power, and began the accelerated transformation of ecosystems, is the use of fossil fuels, and to use the Marxist term for the change in ecological circumstances that was ushered in, the metabolic rift, whereby urban systems were ruptured from the surrounding ecological processes of energy supply and waste disposal. ⁸ Modernity as a cultural phenomenon of speed, technological prowess, and the domination of a nature now understood as external to the concerns of civilization is literally powered by fossil fuels. Steam power overtook water and wind power as both key to production and locomotion. With this rift came the gradual increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and numerous other changes to how the biosphere functions.

The Great Acceleration

The rise of petroleum-powered industry and transportation expanded rapidly in the 1940s as the war machines of the largest states innovated and built huge numbers of ships and vehicles. Since the Second World War, the sheer scale of the human enterprise has expanded even more rapidly leading the earth system scientists to suggest that this period might be termed “the great acceleration.” While the traditional “IPAT” formula suggesting that environmental impact (I) is a function of population (P) times affluence (A) times technology (T) is undoubtedly overly simplistic, it is a useful first approximation that illustrates the sheer scale of the transformation that humanity has wrought in the last century. In terms of population, the planet had approximately 1.7 billion humans in the early twentieth century, 2.5 billion by 1950 but has recently topped 7 billion. The change in affluence measured in terms of global gross domestic product (GDP) is even more impressive, with a two trillion US dollar global economy in 1900 growing to US$5.3 trillion in 1950, and then growing by an order of magnitude to US$55 trillion by 2011. Technology is obviously more difficult to measure but in so far as the number of registered patents worldwide indicates the scale of the human technological enterprise it has risen from 141,000 in 1900 to 412,000 in 1950, and 1.9 million in 2011. ⁹ Together these suggest a vast expansion of the environmental consequence of human activity in the last half-century or so, first in the post–Second World War long boom in the organization for economic cooperation and development (OECD) countries and subsequently in Asia as the Asian dragons and then China have rapidly expanded industrial production and begun building cities and infrastructure at a rate that dwarfs early urbanizations.

Looked at in terms of the transformation of ecological systems and the emergence of all sorts of new things on the surface of the planet, and only most obviously perhaps the changing composition of the atmosphere driving climate change, it is clear to most geological scientists that we have recently crossed an epoch scale boundary in geological history. While it is impossible to know what the consequences of this will be clearly the emergence of new geological formulations in terms of cities, the appearance of new radionuclides as a consequence of nuclear weapons and power production, the dramatic reduction of biodiversity, the acidification of the Oceans, and the introduction of huge new pulses of nitrogen into soils because of artificial fertilizers, we no longer live in a world that is ecologically similar to that which emerged at the end of the last ice age. The geographical arrangements of “biomes” the major geographical regions designated mostly by the vegetation that is “native” to the area, have been overtaken in numerous parts of the world by urban assemblages and agricultural species mixes that change things to the degree that ecologists are now discussing these things in terms of the new “anthromes” that now dominate at least the more obviously fertile parts of the planet. ¹⁰

The disconnection between this discussion and the conventional discourse of geopolitics is noteworthy for a number of reasons both practical and more theoretical. But as later sections in this article suggest, this separation is starting to close albeit in ways that have yet to reformulate the recontextualizations clearly. One of the obvious consequences of the transition to the new geological epoch seems to be the increase of extreme weather events that in many cases have become human disasters if not the cause of overt conflict. ¹¹ These are in many cases preventable, but the lack of preparation to deal with disasters, despite clear indications that such preparations are wise public policy, suggests that vulnerabilities to extreme events are one of the important human dimensions of the Anthropocene that need attention. Huge forest fires in Russian coupled with dramatic floods in Pakistan in 2010 suggested unusual weather patterns that have serious consequences. The summer in much of the United States in 2012 was marked by major droughts and heat waves that broke numerous records; the inundation of parts of New Jersey and New York by hurricane Sandy came a little later that year.

Classical Geopolitics

Popular commentary on geopolitics in the United States continues to offer apparently endless discussions of the rivalries of great powers and a preoccupation about which state is ranked first in a world assumed to be inherently anarchic and competitive. The much commented upon prognostications by Fareed Zakaria on what a post–American world might look like perpetuate both fears that the United States might be slipping from a position of preeminence while in the end reassuring readers that the dynamism of American culture will ensure a revival of its economic and hence its geopolitical fortunes. ¹² Similar themes run through Thomas Barnett’s ruminations on the next decades of geopolitical change, but with an ominous twist in how Barnett specifies a rather different mapping of potential future difficulties. His “Pentagon’s New Map” suggested a rationale for American military intervention in Iraq a decade ago by specifying that military action as part of a larger series of actions that were necessary to forcefully integrate the peripheral parts of the world into the global economy. Doing so was, he argued, necessary to eliminate threats that came from “the non-integrated gap” in the world polity. ¹³

More so than this scholars and pundits have looked backward to supposed verities of the past in search of guides to the future. Jakub Grygiel argued that states that confuse their strategic priorities and don’t remain focused on their primary interests inevitably decline when challenges arise for which they don’t have the necessary resources. ¹⁴ Using this as a template, he argues that the United States will succumb if it fails to focus on rivalry with China in particular. Climate change simply isn’t a primary interest. Robert Kaplan insists that Halford Mackinder and his discussion of Asian verities provides the key to the future as to the past. ¹⁵ Much of this commentary reiterates old nostrums focusing on rivalries between big states as the only issue that really matters. Even Thomas Barnett’s reformulation of many things dismisses climate change as a significant factor. He is more concerned that climate change–driven regulations will stymie the expansion of American led capitalism, his sine qua non for global peace in the long run. All this despite increasingly urgent attention to the pressing agenda climate change presents to policy makers and the potentially significant changes it will bring in coming decades.

Many of these themes come together in the discussion of the geopolitical situation related to resource wars and the motivations for continued American geopolitical involvement in the Middle East. While all this obviously is “about oil,” it is not just about oil and its relative scarcity or conflicts to control its exploitation and transport. While this concerns the historic patterns of empire and Anglo Saxon supremacy in the region, it is also about the larger pattern of resource supply that fuels the global economy. The obvious irony is the simple fact that the rivalries over petroleum are rivalries over one of the key substances causing climate change. Viewed in terms of climate change, the problem with oil is not a shortage of resources, but the abundance of the substance which humanity is burning with such abandon. Whatever climate change may be, it is not a matter of scarcity. There simply is too much easily accessible fossil fuel widely available to facilitate keeping the atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide close to the levels that generated a biosphere conducive to human civilization in the first place. Unless, that is, political decisions and economic change move rapidly in ways that they show little inclination to do so, at least so far.

Much of the climate change debate still frames matters in terms of scarcity and problems of administering supposedly resources, a specification seriously at odds with the simple fact that there is too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere already. Modernity’s master frame in terms of the domination of a stingy nature and the inherent difficulties of doing so persists. Peripheral places subject to disruptions caused by climate change continue to be a key theme in the security discussion of these matters, rather than a focus on the combustion of fuels that causes the problem in the first place. While marginal poor peoples may be displaced by extreme weather events, droughts, and attempts to adapt to climate change by the rich and the powerful, and hence be portrayed either as victims of scarcity or potentially destabilizing threats to modernity, this is a matter of mistaking symptoms for causes. ¹⁶ In so far as climate change is a problem, it is caused mostly by metropolitan consumption not by peripheral scarcities. Any sensible set of geopolitical categories has to incorporate this key point.

Or else, as many critics now fear, the conventional categories will probably be used to specify the disruptions set in motion by climate change as a security problem requiring the use of force to maintain the social status quo. How this plays out in coming decades matters greatly in terms of how the next phase of the Anthropocene is shaped. Whether it will be a gradual transition to solar-powered cities with careful thought given to how to enhance agricultural productivity while simultaneously buffering ecosystems to cope with the more extreme climates that are coming, or a dystopian violent attempt by the rich and powerful to maintain their privileges by force and draconian economic measures is the political question for our times. How the geopolitical contextualization requiring certain forms of political action is specified is a key part of this politics.

Greening the Military

Ironically, given traditional assumptions about the US military as an environmental problem, and assumptions that it would be among the last institution to take environmental matters seriously, in the United States in the last decade military thinkers and planners have been taking climate change and its implications both for their institution and the rest of the world very seriously indeed. The discussion of force restructuring and reequipment emphasizes a military preeminence but increasingly suggest that the wars that the United States might be called on to fight in future are not those of the past. Interventions in smaller marginal places, the small wars on the periphery of empire, are frequently invoked, as are arguments that the United States won’t usually fight alone. Most recently, these arguments about political stability have been reinforced by discussions of the destabilizing effects of climate change on marginal populations, and the formulation of these matters in terms of conflict multipliers. ¹⁷ While this formulation emphasizes interventions and military preparations to deal with instabilities, of late it has begun to generate more general expressions of concern about failure to anticipate what is coming among defense officials worried about the long-term consequences of accelerated climate change.

Related to these concerns are others about the terrain in which future wars might be fought. Drones and the future of these robotic weapons appear in serious scholarly publications as well as the pages of popular magazines, and ubiquitously online in discussions of the future of warfare. But against this focus on technology and the traditional geopolitical games of great power, there is another rising discussion of the difference that climate change might make in all this for water and food in particular. ¹⁸ If global disruptions caused by storms and droughts, both directly in terms of immediate damage and indirectly in terms of economic disruptions to food systems in particular, impinge on matters of international security, as all forecasts of coming disruptions suggest will be the case, then security in the twenty-first century will look substantially different from the past. Repeated alarms about rising food prices in particular are linking climate to political stability not only in discussions of the Arab Spring. While the discussion of the potential for environmental change to have security consequences is not new, three developments have changed the dynamic of the debate in recent years.

First is the growing recognition by military thinkers that climate change is real and imminent dangers loom if precautionary actions aren’t taken urgently. Thinking ahead in terms of possible disruptions that will require military operations is a key part of the military culture so strategic planning can easily be extended to add climate disruptions to the list of contingencies to be considered. Related to this is the concern about both the amounts of fuel the armed forces use and their availability in times of crisis. The navy in particular has lead the search for novel sources of fuel and generated political opposition from Republicans in particular in Washington apparently anxious to protect the prerogatives of at least some petroleum producers while denying the existence of Anthropogenic causes of climate change. The Pentagon has begun contingency planning for future conflicts related to climate change, building forces that are less dependent on petroleum and planning to redesign its facilities to make them less vulnerable to extreme weather events. ¹⁹

Second is the growing recognition recently in the American military that its dependence on petroleum fuel is making its troops vulnerable in the field because fuel tanker convoys are easy targets, and lengthy supply lines from insecure supply states add to logistical difficulties. Attempts to substitute solar-powered electrical equipment and water purification systems to increase flexibility and reduce fuel bills are changing the military appreciation of new energy sources and “greening” the military in some ways consistent with tackling climate change. While environmentalists might be horrified that a greener military is a leaner one and more combat effective as a consequence, nonetheless the transition to a less fossil fuel dependent military is at least being seriously considered in the United States.

Third is the rapidly growing appreciation among scientists that the sheer scale of human endeavors has changed not only the composition of the atmosphere, but many other systems, that cannot now any longer be considered as purely “natural.” The discussion of “planetary boundaries” and the larger appreciation that we now live in the Anthropocene suggests that earlier discussions of environmental security now need to be updated in light of the institutional adoption of concerns about climate security and the recognition that environment can no longer be considered as a backdrop to human activities, but has to be understood as the changing context for humanity. ²⁰ Given the long-standing concern within the military about geophysics and weather modification as a possible weapon of war, the scientific insights of earth systems thinking find a receptive institutional audience used to considering order and control in terms of physics at the planetary scale. ²¹

Likewise, it is richly ironic that so much contemporary security thinking is about fence building, and the portrayal of migrants as a threat to a supposedly stable geographically separate entity. In Wendy Brown’s terms, waning sovereignty is related to shoring up frontiers by building walls. ²² Although maritime boundaries are less certain, most terrestrial borders have been agreed upon now, territorial claims to other states’ land are frequent, but usually small-scale demarcation matters rather than the major sources of war that they were in the past. This precisely when both the economic system of trading now called globalization, and the ecological disruptions that are the consequence of that global trading system, flow across political jurisdictions all the time. Capital, pollution, and commodities can move across borders, but the workers who assemble the goods that make up the global economy usually can’t.

The state system provides an elegant solution to many political claims, but so far it has spectacularly failed to deal with climate change and many of the other global innovations that are dramatically changing humanity’s circumstances. Building fences to stop migration suggests both a completely inadequate policy response and one that will act mostly to make life more difficult for those most vulnerable to extreme events and climate change. But it also reflects a profound failure of political imagination in the face of novel circumstances; invoking sovereignty, territorial control, and using violence to militarily control borders may provide a short-term political solution to the problems of change, but it is at best a violent temporary response to the symptoms of a much larger transformation.

The irony that governance and hence political rivalry is understood through a series of categories specified in territorial terms precisely when what matters apparently cross those boundaries is key to understanding the current dilemmas and to suggesting modes of analysis that can more effectively grapple with what is coming. Shifting from a physics model of power, of surveillance, territorial demarcation, and enforcement to an ecological sensibility that recognizes interconnection and change rather than permanence and fixity as key to flourishing life is a fundamental ontological challenge to conventional understandings of politics and society. But on the largest scale, that of the biosphere as a whole, this is exactly what now has to be brought into political analysis.

Living in the Anthropocene

Many of the more thoughtful analyses of climate change have tried to tackle the matter beyond the conventional formulations that apply resource management or some form of state administrative apparatus to the problem. The multifaceted nature of climate change makes this, when considered in terms of immediate policy options within the contemporary political economy of liberal states, a “super-wicked” problem that is urgent but that defies a simple solution. ²³ There are many technological innovations that are less carbon intensive, but no technical fix can resolve the climate change issue in purely engineering terms; however, tempting such solutions may seem to those who would control global politics. ²⁴

Climate change is part of the larger transformation of the global biosphere and as such touches on the most basic conditions of human existence. How it is tackled, or not, goes to the heart of politics, and to the biggest questions of world order that are the key matters of geopolitics. Put most simply, humanity has changed the composition of the planet’s atmosphere and raised the level of carbon dioxide close to 400 parts per million, well above levels that the planet has known in the last million years. This will inevitably set off disruptions to how weather systems function and do so in unpredictable ways. Unpredictable precisely because there is no analogous state in the recent history of the planet to which we can refer for indications as to how things might play out.

While fears of global disruption are not new, the new earth system sciences conceptualization has added to the scale of what needs to be considered. Environmentalists understood at least some parts of these issues in the early 1970s. In particular, when the NASA astronauts took photographs of the planet and the unofficial report to the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in 1972 specified matters in terms of “Only One Earth,” discussions in terms of the “limits to growth” were easily comprehensible. The earlier focus on resource shortages, likely famines and related disasters as a consequence of “overpopulation,” poisoning related to pollution and the loss of species has now been complemented by a growing awareness, driven mostly by climate change, that human actions are effectively a geological force, not just a biological one. Discussions in terms of security risks and biopolitical strategies are no longer enough to grapple with the transformations now in motion, however much they may be invoked in a crisis to justify violent responses. ²⁵

The Anthropocene formulation emphasizes the point that it is important not to focus on climate alone. The global economy has been constructed by large-scale environmental change in terms of the extension of agriculture into much of the world’s ecosystems that can support crops. The loss of habitat for other species has led to the extinction of a sizable percentage of the life forms that the planet supported until recently. Fishing combined with pollution and now increased acidification of the oceans due to rising carbon levels, has transformed aquatic life systems too, with untold future consequences for many species apart from humanity. Human industrial systems “fix” more nitrogen for fertilizers than natural processes do. Phosphorous likewise is increasingly an artificial cycle. Most large rivers have been dammed, diverted, and modified, some to the extent that the waters in them don’t reach their estuaries. Artificial urban habitats have been built that transform regional ecosystems, as they provide the basic necessities of life for the burgeoning global population.

This is the new context for the human drama, one of our own making. It is within this new context of an increasingly artificial world that human vulnerabilities, and all sorts of insecurities, play out now. Given these new circumstances, it seems fitting to many earth system scientists to designate the current period in terms of the Anthropocene, literally the age of humanity. In the Anthropocene, artificial circumstances define our existence and infrastructure, markets and politics matter much more in terms of who lives and who dies than the immediate consequences of weather events, however severe or dramatic. This is a global urban system that stretches beyond the actual boundaries of individual cities enmeshing people everywhere in the economic and ecological linkages that are the material practices that constitute globalization.

The Next Stage of the Anthropocene

The political implications of all this are profound. No longer can death by disaster be dismissed as an act of God. Now both the weather and the immediate provision of housing, emergency shelters, and food are a matter of government. Environmental determinism is no longer a tenable argument, given the scale of the transformations already accomplished in what earth system scientists call the period of the great acceleration. We live in new circumstances where literally human actions are deciding such things as whether the planet will have two polar ice caps later in the twenty-first century. Given the rapid melting of Arctic sea ice in the first decade of this century, it appears that summers in the Arctic will be ice free in coming decades, although it is far from clear quite when this will be the case.

While pundits have speculated at length concerning the geopolitical consequences of this in terms of the traditional rivalries of polar states, few have posed the more profound questions about the implications for governance that the rapid disappearance of Arctic ice implies. Industrial humanity is effectively deciding that later in the century the earth will have only one permanent polar ice cap. There is no deliberative body that makes such decisions about the configuration of the planet’s surface or about practical issues such as the appropriate level of the ocean surface. To even pose such questions as how many polar ice caps the earth ought to have is to ask questions that are outside the ambit of what is normally considered geopolitics. But that is precisely the implication of the notion of the Anthropocene. Such questions are now implicitly part of geopolitical discussion even if political discussion has been slow to acknowledge these matters.

Regardless of state policies energy companies, automobile manufacturers and infrastructure planners are now making decisions that have major geologic consequences. Increasingly municipal governments facing extreme weather events and the dawning realization that planning decisions based on “normal” weather are increasingly unreliable and are starting to think about how to build facilities and mundane things like bridges to deal with unpredictable events. All these decisions are consequential but largely uncoordinated. Some of the Obama administration green energy initiatives, and the tightened regulations over automobile fuel efficiencies have helped, and will, if they continue in coming years, produce less carbon-intensive consumption in the absence of legislation to constrain fuel use.

In part, things are changing because attempts to deal with climate change have invoked the standard logics of neoliberalism in attempting to find modes of regulation that are simultaneously effective in reducing carbon emissions while not threatening the power structures that have caused the problems in the first place. There are numerous proposals for cap and trade schemes, and a plethora of markets and arrangements to offset carbon emissions by purchasing ecological services. ²⁶ The collapse of prices for carbon credits in the early months of 2013 in the European Union’s system is a salutary warning for advocates of market solutions to climate change. Nonetheless, these market arrangements, coupled to the financial arrangements of the UN clean development mechanism, promise solutions that will generate substantial vested interests in climate mitigation, and hence the argument goes, the chance to have effective political initiatives not only taken but also maintained over the long term.

Climate’s Territories

If carbon is to be offset, then either compensation has to be paid for forgone developments that would use carbon fuels or ecological services to “sink” the carbon must be available for purchase. Many of these carbon sinks are patches of tropical and subtropical forests or forestry plantations. Designating them as sinks requires evaluations of how much carbon they can sequester and administrative arrangements to ensure that the forests are managed in ways compatible with their “sink” functions. This has generated a whole new set of geographical arrangements where forests are now calculated in terms of their abilities to sink carbon. ²⁷ These have to be measured, calculated, certified, and monitored by a whole new industry of forest managers and technicians who can ensure that central governments, who are frequently the financial beneficiaries of clean development fund largesse, live up to their ecological services commitments.

While satellite mapping may specify forests in technical manners that code them as sinks, local inhabitants may have other understandings of the appropriate way to use forests. ²⁸ If state governments undertake to manage them according to climate rules and get the financial rewards through clean development, mechanisms or adaption funding arrangements question of whose territory it is and how it should be governed are unavoidable; these matters of local political ecology now add an important dimension to climate geopolitics, and while local activist and sympathetic academics may demand that carbon be sunk somewhere else, the climate offset industry is now part of the complexities of political ecology and will probably be so for some time to come. This is land use planning at the global scale tied ineluctably into the logics of global capital and the new calculations of carbon value.

These innovations and new modes of governing ecosystems are matters of what is now frequently understood in terms of “mitigation” of climate change, reducing the carbon dioxide buildup in the atmosphere. In parallel with these are matters of adaptation and preparations to deal with what is coming. Corporations are increasingly doing risk analyses of their possible climate change vulnerabilities and reconsidering their supply chains and likely access to resources in future. Food price hikes and concerns that climate change will disrupt agriculture in some states are leading to strategies to acquire agricultural land elsewhere. The resulting processes of accelerated purchase in the global South are part of the larger practices of “land grabbing” and the disruptions or rural political economies that have caught the attention of development researchers in recent years. In Saskia Sassen’s terms, this amounts to disassembling national territories and new assemblages of rights and authorities, as the global political economy increasingly intrudes on national spaces. ²⁹ This in turn is heightening the disparities of power and wealth, as those that manage to connect to this new political economy are distinguished from those dispossessed and displaced by its voracious appetite for resources and land.

From such considerations, it isn’t much of a stretch to extend this pattern of changing territories and authorities to considering how geoengineering projects might be marketed and administered. The terminology isn’t consistent, and many modes of offsetting carbon can already be understood as geoengineering in terms of carbon sequestration. But if proposals to cool the earth, or parts of it by “solar radiation management” come to fruition in coming decades, then questions of who controls the technologies, where they are deployed, who pays for them and their services, and how these are managed and monitored are but a further extension of the logic of climate neoliberalism.

While all this might be understood to be security in some senses, it is one that has more to do with technocratic fiat than democratic processes. Indeed, its precisely fears that technocratic attempts to use such dubious techniques as sulfate aerosol injection into the stratosphere to cool the planet, instead of rethinking unsustainable modes of contemporary political economy, will become the preferred mode of climate security, that most concerns geoengineering skeptics. ³⁰ The promise of yet further engineered solutions to ecological damage perpetuates the pattern of social dominance that was institutionalized through the period of the cold war, linking technological acumen with logics of fear in security discourse.

Anthropocene Geopolitics

Territorial modes of rule are still immensely efficacious for those who aspire to dominance, but the dramatic shift in humanity’s circumstances captured in discussion around the term “Anthropocene” makes it clear that, even more so than in previous periods of human history focusing on who rules, rather than what is ruled over, is no longer an adequate formulation for social sciences, nor an appropriate political strategy for anything more than short-term thinking. We have taken our fate into our own hands in ways that now require a reengagement with the increasingly artificial circumstances that now shape the context for human affairs.

This provides another compelling argument for rethinking geopolitics as much more than the rivalries of states, and security as much more than physical control over demarcated spaces. Modern politics if there ever was such a thing might be said to be the geopolitics of the twentieth century. The ordering principles of the state system evolved dramatically, especially as decolonization and the breakup of the European empires rapidly expanded the number of states in the system. At least notional arrangements of sovereignty became the premise for much political activity. Self-determination and claims to autonomy emerged as key legitimating strategies for political spaces designated as nation states. Homelands were apparently key to the logic of all this even if some of the most blatantly artificial constructions, such as the Bantustans of apartheid South Africa, were never accepted. Claims to autonomy and separation challenged the logics of empire and invoked a very geographical vocabulary to specify the categories of acceptable rule. In that sense, modernity was a liberal project about self-rule, autonomy, and the presumed competence of autonomous individual entities to decide their own fate. Realpolitik constrained the options, but the proliferation of states in the second half of the twentieth century gave the lie to earlier social Darwinist versions of geopolitics where states were analogized to single organisms that supposedly grew or died.

Similarly, the long discredited arguments about environmental determinism that frequently invoked natural causes in human affairs are of no help in present circumstances either. Early twentieth-century claims to environmental causation, which in part drew on a long intellectual heritage of debates about how nature conspired to direct human affairs, emerged in the context of imperial rule and the expansion of an imperial modernity that belittled non-Western cultures while simultaneously constructing them as potential threats to modernity. ³¹ The crude discussions of population and sustenance in some early political geographic writing were transformed into Nazi notions of Lebensraum. Subsequently, debates about population growth especially in the 1960s invoked overpopulation and environmental constraints as the cause of various social ills and as a root cause of warfare too. ³²

Historical reevaluations have suggested that climate has been a major cause of many human calamities, and notably Geoffrey Parker’s magnum opus recently traced the cause of at least some of the political and social upheavals of the seventeenth century to global climate variability. ³³ Such historical investigations, which are most useful at filling in the frequently lacking material context for past human events, are of much less use in terms of thinking about contemporary developments and future possible geopolitical eventualities. The period of the great acceleration, with the transformation of agriculture and the rapid expansion of global trading systems means that at least that part of humanity that is enmeshed in this global urban system is much less directly linked to the immediate consequences of agricultural disruptions. Even those who are not so directly enmeshed in the global economy are now sometimes fed by food aid and humanitarian assistance in ways that frequently were absent in the earlier centuries of imperial domination. Parker’s repeated point about the politics of food supplies as key to the survival of political regimes remains important in terms of short-term politics. But the point about the Anthropocene is that political economy is now shaping the future of the climate and much else besides. The implications of the Anthropocene formulation are that geopolitical decisions are now influencing the future climate of the planet, not the other way round. ³⁴ In Latour’s terms, science and politics are unavoidably interconnected. Modernity is now the sorcerer’s apprentice, who having conjured up formidable powers is having great difficulty controlling what has been set in motion.

In very crude terms, the challenge facing those of us who struggle to rethink geopolitics in these novel times, and to make useful contributions to the discussions of transitions to a more sustainable world, is to facilitate shifting analysis from focusing on questions of dominance on a divided world to modes of sharing a crowded planet which is actively being transformed by human action. To do so is going to require a reimagining of virtue in terms very different from those of capitalist “interests” where the ontological premise of modernity is one of a given competitive world in which success is defined in terms of the accumulation of possessions, and the power that comes from the technologies that wealth understood in those terms makes possible. Who we are is now irretrievably interlinked to what kind of a biosphere we are remaking; there is no nature out there for us to dominate. There is however a nature that we are collectively reassembling, and heating up, with no clear understanding as to how it will sustain an urbanized humanity in even the medium term.