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Crutzen and Stoermer’s (2000) naming of the ‘Anthropocene’ has provoked lively debate across the physical and social sciences, but, while the term is gradually gaining acceptance as the signifier of the current geological epoch, it remains little more than a roughly defined place-holder for an era characterized by environmental and social uncertainty. The term invites deeper considerations of its meaning, significance, and consequences for thought and politics. For this Forum, we invited five scholars to reflect on how the Anthropocene poses challenges to the structures and habits of geography, politics, and their guiding concepts. The resulting essays piece together an agenda for geographic thought – and political engagement – in this emerging epoch. Collectively, they suggest that geography, as a discipline, is particularly well suited to address the conceptual challenges presented by the Anthropocene.
The International Geosphere Biosphere Program has recently suggested that we now live in a new era ofnatural history, the Anthropocene, one marked by the emergence of a new series of geological, biological
and climatological forcing mechanisms in the biosphere. These new forcing agents are changing the
composition of trace gases in the atmosphere, moving large amounts of material all over the planet,
drastically curtailing, and in many cases, eliminating habitats and their species. The ethical challenge now
for global environmental politics, and especially for international relations specialists thinking about these
themes, is to work within such a frame of reference. In this sense at least "environment" has been
superceded. The most pressing ethical matters in the shadow of the Kyoto protocol, and recent events in
the so called 'Middle East' relate the political questions of who "we" now are, and how we might usefully
know how "we" might change our identities, and our actions, in light of the sheer scale of recent
anthropogenically induced changes within the biosphere.
The discussion of the Anthropocene focuses attention on the changing geological context for the future of humanity, change wrought by practices that secure particular forms of human life. These are frequently discussed in geography in terms of biopolitics. In particular liberal societies powered by carboniferous capitalism and using their practices of war secure ‘biohumanity’. Climate change is one of the key dimensions of the future that biopolitical strategies of managing risk and contingency have so far failed to address effectively. The debate about the relationship climate and security emphasises that the geological circumstances of the Anthropocene require a different biopolitics, one that understands that securing the biohuman is now the danger, and as an exigesis of the E3G analysis of “Degrees of Risk” shows, one that conventional understandings of risk management cannot adequately encompass. The Anthropocene provides a political recontextualisation for possible new forms of biopolitics after the biohuman.
Robyn Eckersley's elegant and eloquent argument concerning the limits of "ecological intervention" is constrained by the scope of what is included in her definition of environmental emergency, by what might be in need of protection, and also by what is conventionally understood by notions of intervention related to states and sovereign territory.
Biopolitics has engaged emergence, and the contemporary concerns with disease and newforms of life as potential threats requiring numerous processes of security. This
discussion has not yet substantially engaged with the “emergence” of urbanity as a
“threat” to the Holocene climate system. Now that earth sciences are clear that we are in
the Anthropocene, a geological era marked by the industrial production of novel forcing
mechanisms in the biosphere, the climate security discussion has to engage biopolitics if
the theoretical basis of both is to be informed by the other. None of this suggests either
conceptual clarity, nor an obvious set of policy implications, but interrogating climate
security as a policy desideratum within the conceptualisations of biopolitics offers some
insights into the limits of both. It also raises questions of how Anthropocene futures are
imagined and incorporated into political discourse, and how these might change if
emergence and life, rather than cartographies of permanence, distance and protection are
the lenses through which that future is projected. If stability and safe spaces are
exceptions rather than the norm, much needs to be thought differently; not least the
geopolitical categories brought to bear on the discussion of climate change.