On decolonising the Anthropocene

by Mark Jackson 

What follows is an overview of my paper, ‘On Decolonising the Anthropocene: disobedience via plural constitutions’ recently published in the journal Annals of the Association of American Geographers (doi: 10.1080/24694452.2020.1779645).

 A decolonial critique, the paper argues against how the Anthropocene overdetermines environmental politics. In place of increasingly assumed global environmental governance imaginaries, which mobilise under the aegis of emergency, but which also reproduce a status quo coloniality, the paper presents two pluriversal imaginaries, one from Afro-Caribbean historical geographies, another from Anishinaabe legal philosophy. Together they evidence enduring ecological reciprocities that unsettle and refuse the totalising narratives too often invoked by the Anthropocene.

[Left] Detail from ‘Emergence’ (c. 1999) by Haitian artist Frankétienne. [Centre] Earth Systems Governance research network. [Right] Detail from Children with the Tree of Life (c. 1980-1985) by Anishinaabe artist Norval Morrisseau.

On decolonising the Anthropocene

Names are more than nouns. They are also verbs. Names build and summon relationships—familial, historical, cultural, axiological. Names tell stories. They are ways of remembering and valuing. Names, then, are narratives. And narratives matter.

Few narratives have swept across academic and popular imaginations with the speed and tenacity as ‘The Anthropocene’. From its storied nomination as a gruff rejoinder during a scientific meeting in Mexico in 2000 by Paul Crutzen, to its near ubiquity two decades later, the Anthropocene has quickly amassed an enormous body of scholarship and influence. This scholarship, now legion, and upon which careers, journals, research programs, and government policies depend, attends both to what ‘the Anthropocene’ names—geologically detectable, human induced, geo-physical change on a planetary scale—and how it names modern ‘ecocide’, the systematic killing of the life giving systems that sustain life.

Disagreements about the Anthropocene have, from the off, also been legion. These disputes have not been about ‘ecocide’ per se—only the most irrational and narcissistic of denialists contest that—but about when human induced harmful environmental change started, and who or what’s to blame. Questions debated are things like: has “…every human being, past and present…contributed to the present cycle of climate change” (p. 115), as the critic and novelist Amitav Ghosh argues in his book The Great Derangement (2016)? Or, are specific historical and geographical political and economic structures culpable, structures like capitalism and its social and environmental practices, and so humans as species, sui generis, are not at fault?

Many scholars have argued convincingly that, of course, not all humans are responsible for the ecocide that marks the planetary present. To suggest otherwise actually masks human difference behind a reductionist, naturalising veil that privileges a certain image of the human—white, male, North Atlantic, propertied, ‘developed’—as representative of species being. In fact, numerous human societies today, and in the past, extol forms of environmental responsibility that not only do not destroy their environments but enable complex interdependencies of managed flourishing and reciprocity. Most, indeed, don’t privilege the human as somehow separate from nature at all.

Considered closely, the Anthropocene is deeply colonial narrative. Generalising the cause of planetary ecocide as ‘Anthropos’ is racial, and, further, it blinkers the ability to see, learn from, and enact horizons of living differently constituted by other human lifeways.

Attending to pluriversal lifeways matters because the Anthropocene narrative currently overdetermines ecological imaginaries and environmental politics. It is offered first as a scientific truth claim, and, increasingly, it is also mobilised, politically, under the auspices of emergency. ‘We don’t have time to quibble about names and concepts!’, decry some. ‘We need to do something! We need immediate action at a global scale, led by global actors: nations, corporations, inter-governmental and transnational agencies. We need global earth systems governance!’ A decade ago, Paul Crutzen and colleague Christian Schwägerl wrote that the Anthropocene demands a new ‘global ethos’ of mastery. ‘We [i.e. humans] decide’, they wrote, ‘…what nature is and what it will be. To master this huge shift, we must change the way we perceive ourselves and our role in the world.”

To me, this hubris is worrying. I’m certainly not alone. Many critics contest the coloniality of the Anthropocene. We don’t need institutionalised mastery at a global scale. That’s the last thing we need. Similar hubris has led already to the present’s ecocidal conditions.

Many will scoff and patronise such criticisms with claims of naïveté and irrelevance. Undoubtedly, modern environmental harm does require immediate attention, but one of the great dangers in any response to a declared emergency is a certain unreflexive obedience, an obedience that takes the terms of engagement—the names and narratives—as given, which assumes they are natural, which doesn’t enquire about the relationships they seek to uphold and what work they do. Much harm has been done in the name of urgency, utility, and efficiency. Witness slavery, walls, holocausts, and pandemic power grabs.

What we need instead is more humility, humility to the ecological constitutions within which we have always already been a part. And, we also need to attend closely to the relationships between oppression and knowledge production.

Alternatives to what the Anthropocene over-determinines come from numerous worlds. As the famed development scholar, Arturo Escobar, writes in his new book Pluriversal Politics, ‘another possible is possible’ (2020, ix). The paper presents two possibles as ways of thinking ecological response to what the Anthropocene conditions.

The first is the example of plots. Plots were small gardens outside the global enclosures of plantations with which enslaved peoples grew food to sustain themselves. Plots, writes the cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter, were soils where once peasants “transplanted all the structure of values that had been created by traditional societies of Africa, the land remained the Earth—and the Earth was a goddess” (1971, 100), which fed and sustained, and to whose constitution people returned in death. They were, literally, the marginal spaces that rooted time (ancestrality) and space (African homeland) through food and cultivation, and upon which the colonial architectures of oppression depended. As Wynter writes, they were affirmative ‘roots of culture’ (101).

Rootedness also articulates affirmative reciprocity within Indigenous legal constitutions, the second example suggested. Indigenous legal scholar, John Borrows, writes that the Anishinaabe word akinoomaagewin communicates an ‘earthbound’ sensibility of learning (2018: 66). From aki meaning ‘earth’ and noomaage meaning ‘to point towards and take direction from’, ‘…teaching and learning literally means the lessons we learn from looking to the earth…. The earth has a culture and we can learn from it.’ Grounding ‘earthway’ relations as the source of just living is referred to in the Anishinaabeg legal tradition as minobimaatisiwin. Minobimaatisiwin refers to the idea and virtue of living a good life. Minobimaatisiwin is an embodied relation of, as the Anishinaabe legal scholar and geographer Deborah McGregor writes, “reciprocal responsibilities and obligations that are to be met in order to ensure harmonious relations” (2018: 15). The ground of conceptual reflexivity here is a lived attention to earthbound care rather than an institutionalised governance that begins in epistemic politics which necessitate technicity or mastery. Fundamentally, care comes from the Earth and listening to it, rather than the assumed humanist (and Abrahamic) hubris that the Earth is mute and humans tend care to it. Nope. Flip it and now build your politics.

Indigenous and dispossessed peoples have been living with what the Anthropocene seeks to name for a very long time. Their struggles and survivals have depended on responding in affirmative and grounded ways to rooting relations. In most cases, they’ve listened to the Earth. Listening to how the Earth precedes and therefore anticipates the present planetary struggle might enable modern subjects to appreciate political possibilities other than globalised mastery.

Moderns don’t have to take the Anthropocene narrative for granted, as science or as politics. There are other narratives, and they also name other, life-affirming worlds of possibility.

Mark Jackson is Senior Lecturer of Postcolonial Geographies in the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol. m.jackson@bristol.ac.uk