Living in the Middle of Extinction: Climate Change, Philosophy, and the Anthropocene
Keywords:
Extinction, Anthropocene, Apocalypse, Climate Change, Environmental PhilosophyAbstract
We are living in the middle of extinction. Several species have already disappeared, numerous others are endangered, and Indigenous communities have experienced ecological and cultural destruction for centuries. Yet the term Anthropocene places the responsibility for planetary transformation on humanity as a whole. This article questions the human implied in the Anthropocene and examines the political importance of naming and dating the current geological epoch. It considers the Eurocene as a way of drawing attention to European colonialism, and the global expansion of a human centered economic hegemony. The article also examines extinction as a gradual process that is already part of the present. I draw on Indigenous accounts of ongoing apocalypse to argue that human survival depends on relations that capitalism and ongoing colonialism continues to damage. The article concludes by calling for a dialogue between the sciences and humanities and for a renewed understanding of philosophy’s responsibility toward the present and future.
Downloads
References
Badiou, Alain. (2015). What is philosophy? A lecture by Alain Badiou 2010 (S. Cvjeticanin, Ed.). Atropos Press.
Baichwal, J., de Pencier, N., & Burtynsky, E. (Directors). (2018). Anthropocene: The human epoch [Film]. Mercury Films.
Ceballos, G., Ehrlich, P. R., Barnosky, A. D., García, A., Pringle, R. M., & Palmer, T. M. (2015). Accelerated modern human-induced species losses: Entering the sixth mass extinction. Science Advances, 1(5), e1400253. doi:10.1126/sciadv.1400253
Chakrabarty, D. (2009). The climate of history: Four theses. Critical Inquiry, 35(2), 197–222.
Colebrook, C. (2017). We have always been post Anthropocene. In R. Grusin (Ed.), Anthropocene feminism (pp. 1–20). University of Minnesota Press.
Crutzen, P. J., & Stoermer, E. F. (2000). The Anthropocene. Global Change Newsletter, 41, 17–18.
Davis, H., & Todd, Z. (2017). On the importance of a date, or, decolonizing the Anthropocene. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 16(4), 761–780.
Davis, J., Moulton, A. A., Van Sant, L., & Williams, B. (2019). Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene? A manifesto for ecological justice in an age of global crises. Geography Compass, 13(5), e12438.
Dawson, A. (2018). Bio capitalism and de extinction. In R. Grusin (Ed.), After extinction (pp. 173–200). University of Minnesota Press.
Gergan, M., Smith, S., & Vasudevan, P. (2020). Earth beyond repair: Race and apocalypse in collective imagination. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 38(1), 91–110.
Grove, J. (2016, January 11). The new nature. Boston Review.
Grove, J. V. (2019). Savage ecology: War and geopolitics at the end of the world. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Haraway, D. J. (2016). Staying with the trouble: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene. In J. W. Moore (Ed.), Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, history, and the crisis of capitalism (pp. 34–76). PM Press.
Kirksey, E. (2015). Emergent ecologies. Duke University Press.
Lewis, S. L., & Maslin, M. A. (2015). Defining the Anthropocene. Nature, 519(7542), 171–180.
Masco, J. (2018). The six extinctions: Visualizing planetary ecological collapse today. In R. Grusin (Ed.), After extinction (pp. 71–106). University of Minnesota Press.
McBrien, J. (2016). Accumulating extinction: Planetary catastrophism in the Necrocene. In J. W. Moore (Ed.), Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, history, and the crisis of capitalism (pp. 116–137). PM Press.
Mirzoeff, N. (2018). It’s not the Anthropocene, it’s the White Supremacy Scene, or, the geological color line. In R. Grusin (Ed.), After extinction (pp. 123–149). University of Minnesota Press.
Oreskes, N., & Conway, E. M. (2013). The collapse of Western civilization: A view from the future. Daedalus, 142(1), 40–58.
Rose, D. B. (2012). Multispecies knots of ethical time. Environmental Philosophy, 9(1), 127–140.
Saldanha, A. (2020). A date with destiny: Racial capitalism and the beginnings of the Anthropocene. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 38(1), 12–34.
Schneiderman, J. S. (2015). Naming the Anthropocene. philoSOPHIA, 5(2), 179–201.
Watts, V. (2013). Indigenous place thought and agency amongst humans and nonhumans. Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 2(1), 20–34.
Whyte, K. P. (2017). Our ancestors’ dystopia now: Indigenous conservation and the Anthropocene. In U. K. Heise, J. Christensen, & M. Niemann (Eds.), The Routledge companion to the environmental humanities (pp. 206–215). New York, NY: Routledge.
Whyte, K. P. (2018). Indigenous science fiction for the Anthropocene: Ancestral dystopias and fantasies of climate change crises. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space, 1(1–2), 224–242.
Downloads
Published
License
Copyright (c) 2024 Shahram Sarwar (Author)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
