The recently much-discussed term Anthropocene is the abbreviation for the realization that humans are profoundly changing the planet's life system on a global scale. Industrialization, transport, consumption and human waste are changing the overall structure of the planet with the same force as global geological forces in the Earth's history, such as cyanobacteria, meteorite impacts or volcanic eruptions. Geologists have therefore suggested that the present geological period should no longer be called the Holocene, but the Anthropocene. This ecological upheaval is multifaceted and global in scope: it ranges from global warming and changes in oceanic and atmospheric current systems to the disruption of water cycles, the consumption of non-renewable and overuse of renewable resources, and the rapid loss of biodiversity, changes in weather patterns and landscapes, to the accumulation of non-degradable waste and overpopulation.
Why not just stick with the good old concept of sustainability?
For two reasons: Sustainability implies that you can "go on like this forever". Sustainable management means constantly regenerating resources so that they will still be available in two or three generations' time. But simply continuing in the long term, according to the Anthropocene's diagnosis, is no longer an option today. Moreover, traditional environmental policy in the service of sustainability has often been limited to local measures. Today's ecological problems, however, are not local but global in nature. In times of climate change, there is no longer such a thing as 'untouched nature'. However, talk of the Anthropocene is not so much aimed at the abandonment of traditional environmental agendas, but at their radicalization. In the knowledge that existential ecological thresholds have been crossed here and now, radical change rather than permanence is the order of the day.
What could this change consist of and what would be its foundations?
The term Anthropocene is about nothing less than a different way of being in the world. It means conceiving of humans in a new way, namely as beings who have to live together with other non-human life forms without reifying or damaging them. It means understanding the social as something that is not limited exclusively to humans (but also to animals, plants, landscapes, the atmosphere, etc.). But it also means other forms of human coexistence. Some early critics of the term took offense at the fact that a single humanity as a whole would become the eponym. However, the lively and very productive debate about the Anthropocene has long since shown that the term does not mean that the differences between rich and poor, between high-tech and low-tech ways of life, between large and small ecological footprints will disappear. On the contrary, the Anthropocene asks precisely about the global ecological costs of the wealth of industrialized countries and the conditions for global environmental justice.
Living in the Anthropocene also means searching for forms of life and society that represent an alternative to the prevailing neoliberal market. These could be subsistent forms of life in agriculture, but also new forms of communal economic activity and non-monetizable cooperation such as neighbourhood networks and citizens' initiatives.
With the awareness that we are living in the Anthropocene, there is a call to rethink the foundations of human life on this planet. What kind of relationship to nature do we need, one that no longer views nature merely as a "resource" or "commodity"?
What ethics do we need if not only people, but also other living beings and natural things should have rights? What would be the rules of fairness between rich and poor societies? What would it mean to protect global commons such as the air, oceans, landscapes and coasts on a global level?
The fact that humans have become a globally effective geological force is not a call to despair. Rather, it is an imperative to take on unprecedented responsibility, collectively and individually.
About the author
Eva Horn has been Professor of Modern German Literature at the University of Vienna since 2009. She has researched and taught at universities in Germany, Switzerland, the USA and France, most recently as Distinguished Max Kade Visiting Professor at Columbia University, New York. Her study "Future as Catastrophe" on modernist fantasies of catastrophe and prevention was published by Fischer Verlag in 2014. Her research areas are disaster fictions since the 18th century and the relationship between literature, political theory and knowledge. She is currently working on an introduction to the concept of the Anthropocene and a cultural history of the climate.
