Abstract
A broad consensus prevails today among science communities that we have entered an era known as ‘the Anthropocene’. For the first time, the outer limit or tipping point in Nature’s capacities to adapt to the destruction of its essential resources is in sight (e.g., grave depletion of the Earth’s biodiversity and loss of a ‘safe’ nitrogen cycle) (see Rockström et al., 2009). Over the past two centuries in particular, humanity has dramatically altered the Earth’s atmosphere and natural landscape, becoming in the process a formidable geological force of change in its own right. The fact that humankind today is the most significant source of change in planetary terms requires a reflective moment. We are now in the rather daunting position of determining how this tectonic shift will shape the future of this planet and its populations. This position raises serious moral questions as to how ideas of justice should be redefined in response to rapidly changing ecological circumstances (e.g., grave loss of land and other essential resources on the part of many communities) as well as what kind of ‘Anthropocene futures’ (Berkhout, 2014: 1) we are shaping for generations to come. As Strydom notes in his article ‘Cognitive fluidity and climate change’, humanity is not only tasked with the challenge of mastering an objectivist knowledge of nature’s outer limits but also of complementing scientific understanding of the biological, chemical and physical substance of life with a more reflexive hermeneutic reconstruction of how humanity has arrived at this point of destruction in its historical development. If this moment of crisis is to be transformative, then such reflection must also be critical and disclosing of those underlining aspects of modern social life that contribute detrimentally to human ecological destruction.
Just as the cognitive capacities of the human mind steadily acquired greater ‘fluidity’ during prehistoric times, allowing the substitution of largely mobile hunting–gathering for more sedentary farming forms of human existence and the large-scale acquisition of private lands, the problems that confront us today call for an equivalent degree of socio-cognitive transformation to move beyond an over-reliance upon dangerously intensive extractivist models of social development and cultivate instead a series of sustainable alternatives. The campaign for greater generational justice is already gaining real momentum internationally. Governments are under pressure to demonstrate a real commitment to future humanity as a legitimate and rightful subject of justice, one unjustly served by current humanity’s reckless borrowing of its environmental capital (see World Future Council, 2011; the Cousteau Society’s (2010) Bill of Rights for Future Generations). In their article ‘Mediating climate politics: the surprising case of Brazil’, Dayrell and Urry observe a clear reflexive turn in popular media framings of climate change issues in Brazil away from the earlier position of skepticism and towards a more critical framing of climate change as a priority issue for Brazilian society and beyond. Dayrell and Urry consider which factors have helped trigger this transformation in media framing. Their analysis points to the importance of number of key developments, including a series of presidential campaigns since the mid-2000s when candidates such as Marina Silva strategically forced the issue of deforestation and sustainable agriculture on to the issue agenda. A second factor noted by the authors is the devastation caused by weather-related catastrophes such as Hurricane Katrina (2005) or the severe drought in the Amazon (2005), while a third factor noted is the increasing media presence of actors promoting greater public awareness of the ontological reality of climate risks, including The Amazon Forum, as well as several high-profile Brazilian scientific experts on climate change issues.
Together, these factors have helped reshape media representations of climate change issues, dislodging an earlier position of skepticism and replacing it with a more sober perspective advocating real policy change (e.g., ‘zero deforestation’). While these changes in public discourse suggest a movement of real change is under way in Brazil, the authors add a note of caution, pointing to the fact that Brazil’s carbon intensity has risen steadily since 1994, due mainly to its increased consumption of fossil fuels, oil refining, as well as greater levels of agricultural production and deforestation. The authors suggest that this disjuncture between social practices and rhetorical frames may be due to the socially embedded nature of everyday routine behavior and institutional know-how, a view further supported by the research of Shove, Pantzar and Watson (2012).
Wishing to extend social theory’s comprehension of the
The authors point to the ‘privileged status’ of planning departments in steering and encouraging greater car usage and further road development. The cumulative small adjustments planning departments make to infrastructural design may be implemented locally yet their effects are more far-reaching. The authors call on social theory to assign grater attention to the enabling role of planning in stimulating further energy demand and related pollution problems. Impact assessments make clear in advance what the likely ecological, social and economic costs of new planning initiatives will be. Planners press ahead with designs that are known to increase congestion and concurrent with that, pollution levels, in spite of opposition. The question then is, how are decisions whose outcomes clearly run contrary to the goal of establishing ‘intelligent urban designs for future global sustainability’ (Future Cities laboratory, 2015) rendered ‘rational’ and publicly justifiable? Why are other options conducive to the establishment of less harmful, polycentric infrastructural designs not explored more actively? As potential ‘enablers’ of more sustainable models of modern living, planners are centrally positioned to initiate a transition to a more ecologically viable Anthropocene future.
Greater critical attention needs to be given to those social forces that steer cultural ideals and social practices towards carbon-intensive models of desirable social living and simultaneously away from less ecologically destructive alternatives. An ‘implicatory denial’ (Cohen, 2001: 7) of the consequences arising from such planning decisions is not able to dismiss the wider reality of climate change but does suppress any serious consideration of the implications of planners’ decisions to endorse carbon-intensive transport designs. Such a denial holds much of the contemporary climate change discourse captive to a metaphysics of presence where the only truly relevant subject of justice is a proximate one in both geographical and temporal terms.
In ‘Climate justice without freedom’, Skillington considers how Europe has responded to growing numbers of migrants fleeing the effects of deteriorating climate conditions worldwide. With an estimated 25 percent of all current international migration movements triggered by hydro-meteorological weather conditions linked directly to climate change (see The German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU), 2007), various international human rights agencies have pointed to the necessity of a new and more effective legal response to emerging realities. At present, the legal status of the climate migrant remains largely unspecified and their entitlement to settle in safer territories is unclear. Failure to secure a sufficiently civil environment of protection for those subject to the worst humanitarian effects of deepening climate problems amounts to a form of legal violence, according to Skillington. The long-term survival of climate-vulnerable communities is threatened not only by rising sea levels, severe drought or an imminent threat of flooding, for instance, but also by the active denial of the benefits that supposedly derive from being a member of the politically and legally constituted community of humanity (i.e., the United Nations and the UN Human Rights Convention). In this way, the law remains compliant with an institutional order that knowingly creates great inequalities between the freedoms of those endowed with the capacity to survive the devastating effects of prolonged drought, crop failure, desertification or flooding (in terms of their occupation of less threatened territories – for now, that is) and those denied such opportunities. Restricting the opportunity of many to migrate across borders and survive the dire economic, social and ecological effects of deteriorating climate conditions represents additional forms of violence endured by those at the cold face of climate change’s worst effects.
The Anthropocene period in human history is proving, without doubt, to be the most belligerent age of humanity. What makes this era particularly violent is the level of commitment to unprecedented degrees of irreversible ecological damage, in spite of increasing knowledge of the devastation caused thereby. Violence against Nature continues to intensify and is reaching unimaginable proportions as large-scale extractive ventures (e.g., the pursuit of further, more penetrative deep sea drilling for minerals, gas and oil) are enthusiastically pursued and widely defended against the criticisms of their opponents. The infrastructural and ideological might of this overwhelmingly global commercial venture is such that the ecological and human costs incurred now seem unavoidable. Denial of the consequences of a deeply destructive transition strategy is not unbreakable. The work of theorists such as Beck (2006), Barry and Woods (2013), and Urry (2011) offers a critical diagnostic exploration of how such denial has been maintained over time. Other theorists, including O’Mahony in his article ‘Climate change: responsibility, democracy and communication’, consider the efforts of new transnational climate justice coalitions to undermine the illusory basis of carbon-intensive models of development and introduce an additional layer of moral understanding of the importance of a ‘macro ethic’ of collective responsibility for the planet’s survival. This perspective explores the social reality of climate change twice. First, with reference to how humanity comprehends its role in the creation of the types of catastrophic realities associated with the Anthropocene Age, and, second, how shared understandings of justice come to be reflexively redefined under such a regime. As the ‘largest collective action problem’ facing humanity today, climate change is said to demand an equally collective action solution guided by certain minimum understandings of justice for all those subjected to its adversities, including future generations. The sheer scale of the damage already inflicted increases the moral gravity of decisions being made today regarding the long-term availability of food, water and energy security. Such matters require a radical reconsideration of our temporal position and strategic role in shaping ecological legacies for generations to come. We find ourselves confronted with a choice. We can either continue to deny and do largely nothing to avert impending climate disaster, or we can begin to shape ‘the future we want’ (United Nations, 2012) by reconstructing this moment of crisis as a perceptible opening for the actualization of significant social and political transformation. ‘Now time’ (Benjamin, 2003) offers humanity the opportunity to reflect on experiences to date and re-assess the changing circumstances of justice. ‘The disposition and capacity of the human race to be the cause of its own advance toward the better’ (Kant [1798] 1957: 37) remain as strong as the cause of its own advance towards self-destruction. Ultimately, the realization of a more equitable and ecologically sustainable world cannot be defined in the future but rather must be located in the energies, the experiences, and critical reflexive capacities of the ‘now time’ of the present. Opportunities to make real an alternative Anthropocene future require an equally alternative conception of the historical intelligibility of our civilizational development, a movement away from the current dichotomization of a relatively stable, even if fragile, ecological present confronting a distant and endangered future, to an understanding of how the decisions and practices of today intricately shape the ‘not yet’ moment of collective futurity.
The starting point of this new phase in our thinking has to be the realization that we are all trapped in a ‘global space of threat without exit’ (Beck, 2009: 56). Occupying the ecological present in a sort of ‘empty time’ of destruction and denial cannot will these problems away. Neither can responding to climate risks with a national defense of difference. The trans-border nature of shared ecological concerns means that, as a subject of collective willing, climate solutions cannot be limited de facto to members of any one particular sovereign community, but rather must be the concern of a more indefinite commons, in both territorial and generational terms. As the most relevant enclosure of this commons, ‘our endangered planet’ is what draws us back to cosmopolitan notions of our ‘shared humanity’ (United Nations, 2012), where the connectivity of different peoples is both trans-territorially and trans-temporally defined.
In her article ‘Cosmopolitan risk community and China’s climate governance’, Zhang explores how the alliances that formed recently around the highly successful ‘I monitor the air’ for my country/city/region campaigns (2011–2012) managed to persuade the Chinese government to impose more stringent measures of pollution control after years of concealing data on air quality. For the ‘imagined communities of respiration’ inspired by this broad alliance of environmentalists, concerned citizens, and US Embassy officials, monitoring air pollution proved an important act of political advocacy and civic solidarity with all those whose quality of life is affected by pollution problems. In monitoring an essential resource of the commons, the understanding was that campaign participants were not only adopting a stewardship role on behalf of their fellow patriots but also contributing to a broader project of cosmopolitan belonging. One important aspect of the campaign efforts of these and similar alliances is their ability to highlight the limitations of a state framework of action to combat the spillover effects of air pollution problems that transcend borders and compel a greater degree of cooperation among multiple communities on matters of common concern. Working with ‘meta-cultural principles’ of responsibility and rights (e.g., the right to a safe and clean environment), climate justice campaigners point to widening disparities between normative ideals of justice, on the one hand, and the practical reality of injustice (dangerously high levels of emissions), on the other. Their key concern is with how such differences may be addressed if a less polluted and more sustainable Anthropocene future is ever to materialize. For the generations of the Anthropocene who will continue to encounter ever more severe drought, water deficiency and poor crop yields, the realization is that climate change has already changed the world. The main concern now has to be with addressing the consequences that arise from such changes and minimizing the possibility of conflict and large-scale humanitarian disaster. Several UN agencies (e.g., the United Nations Environment Programme, 2007; the United Nations Human Rights Council, 2008) have repeatedly articulated their concerns in this regard. Global climate risks prompt a cosmopolitanization of the Anthropocene within the boundaries of institutionalized politics and beyond. The challenge now is to push critical reflexive thinking towards creative new ways of imagining and realizing a more sustainable Anthropocene future for all.