The Anthropocene is the concept used by members of the scientific community to describe the social, environmental, and infrastructural impacts of climate change. The term, however, comes with etymological and interpretational issues that result in useless scientific outputs.
In this article, I take a look at today's approaches to climate change in the era of the Anthropocene and try to explain why, despite having enough literature to compel politics –and public opinion– to engage in environmental and social movements, there’s still a reticence toward tackling the real problem.
Tapajós River is the long and mighty amazon river in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, and one of the main flows of the Amazon River. This area comprehends a vast tropical savannah rich in endemic breeds where native species and twenty-three Munduruku Indigenous Communities cohabit. However, deforestation and pollution caused by the systemic constructions of the Brazilian Federal Government and international corporations in the Amazonia rainforests are not a novelty. Since the arrival of economical expansion and international capitalism to the area in the mid-XIX century, it became the epicenter of illegal activities related to gold extraction –known as the Cycle of the Caucho–, hydroelectric projects, and planning for new waterways. Now, a highway is to be constructed in the basin of the Tapajós River, which threatens thousands of native species, and the lives of both the river ecosystem and Indigenous Peoples. As big soy plantations advance in the north of Mato Grosso, the agroindustry hopes to see some benefit from the fast transportation new infrastructure, that will include a speedy and cheap northern highway, a new train named the Ferrogrão railway, and the construction of Teles Pires-Tapajós, an industrial waterway to the Atlantic for the export of extracted materials and goods.
Environmental problems used to be distinguished from social issues and under that premise studied apart. But more and more, global climate change is destabilizing this divergence. The exploitation of the Amazon has a direct impact on Indigenous People’s lives and increases global overheating simultaneously; which calls for action in both natural and social sciences. Since 1978, approximately one million square kilometers of Amazon rainforest have been destroyed across Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Bolivia, Venezuela, Suriname, Guyana, and French Guiana. Several Indigenous Peoples and Traditional Communities from the Tapajós River, as well as Non-Profit environmentalists and social activists, are fragrantly opposed to those mega-infrastructure plans. As they argue, local and global climate change effects will be accelerated, endemic species will die, and Indigenous Communities' culture will be fragmented as sequelaes of the massive deforestation required for the construction. These are the frontlines of the Anthropocene, in which indigenous people not only block carbon-intensive infrastructures but also challenge social theory, remaking histories of progress, colonialism, and carbon. (Todd 2015; TallBear 2015).
What is the Anthropocene?
Climate change has been studied since the early XIX century and so far, its fallout is already making ecosystems, societies, and human-made infrastructures face myriad challenges; such as massive specie extinction, natural ‘disasters’, overheating, rising sea levels, acidification of the oceans, technological failures, and social uncertainty about the future. A future that, differently than in modern times, today only promises to get more extreme, turbulent, and chaotic. Inputs about the climate change burden are collected not only in scientific labs but also in social experiments. While natural scientists –like biologists, chemists, or physics– study the impact of pollution under an empirical-analytical method, social scientists –like sociologists, anthropologists, or historians– study how humanity deals with it. Two different ways to collect dissimilar data; quantitative and qualitative, respectively. Yet the two disciplines encounter the same issue: the Anthropocene.
The Anthropocene as a concept is useful for the scientific community in order to study its effects and mitigate its impact. The term refers to a new geological era, above the known Holocene, where the brunt of humanity modified Earth’s entire composition. The concept describes an epoch where human activity gained the power to change the planet’s climate and ecosystems. To understand the concept, it is imperative to conceive humanity as a geological force. As an approach to climate change, it is useful in order to identify the bugaboo, study it, and interpellate all fields it compromises. Yet it also comes with etymological and interpretational issues resulting in various useless scientific outputs.
Firstly, the ‘climate emergency’ nature calls for immediate action. Neither the environment nor human-made infrastructure or life entities are prepared to survive the impact of overheating. Yet they already suffer its consequences. And in order to cope with them, multiple fields from scientific and non-scientific disciplines are called upon, which radically changes the way the two, natural and social sciences, have been fashioned so far. Finally, the Anthropocene as a word is human-centered, which holds capitalistic and colonial ideas because it sets out humans as the only cause and casualty of climate change, even when the reality already makes it intricate to think about the future from a posthumanist perspective.
Despite having enough literature to compel politics –and public opinion– to engage in environmental and social movements, there’s still a reticence toward tackling the real problem. Perhaps because the term crises imply a ‘collective stress situation’, where many members of a social system fail to receive expected conditions of life from the system. As a result, the notion of consensus fades between groups, creating a very dull and fatigue feeling toward the crisis topic. Covid-19 is an example of this reaction: the more iftoxication –especially online– societies received about vaccination or the disease, the more different groups adopted sharply contrasting views on it. Within the climate change crisis, these social crises effervesce too: violence against environmental and social rights activists became brutal, according to the Vatican News. In Amazonia, 1 Indigenous Rights Defender is killed every 2 days. As solutions from both natural and social sciences became outdated in front of an event of such dimensions, the definition of ‘system’ –natural ecosystems, social and institutional organizations, and material infrastructures– changed, and in order to think about the future needs to be re-defined and it’s new meaning, undiversified.
Environment, Life, and Infrastructure in the Anthropocene
Since the Anthropocene as a theory assembles too many tangled concepts together, in Infrastructure, Environment, and Life in the Anthropocene, Kregg Hetherington suggests three keywords to break the notion down: environment, infrastructure, and life. As he explains, “That which humans confront as the environment (...) is the result of infrastructural history as natural history”. And that’s exactly his point in this book: the factors that define the Anthropocene make the relationship between the environment and human-constructed infrastructures harder to describe. Geoff Bowker (1994) describes infrastructure as something that happens when humans give it a specific purpose. Highways, railways, buildings, or industrial areas fit on that list. But the environment has traditionally been the infrastructure of infrastructure. In modernity, the environment dimmed into the background but in the era of the Anthropocene, where the global footprint exhausts Earth’s ecological capacity by about 175% –meaning that humanity lives more than twice beyond the ecological capacity of planet earth–, and where geologists and sociologists speak of the carbon era: carbon is the infrastructure of carbon.
Material infrastructure promised progress, novelty, and advance. The Ferrogrão railway in Amazonia also promises the future, even if that promise is already broken. When the first European Train rode in 1835 between Brussels and Mechelen, societies saw for the first time a way to travel faster, cheaper, and easier. By the early 19th century Europe was covered in railways and rapidly, they became part of the vital infrastructure of the continent. Not only for passengers to travel, but it also unified countries, created great fortunes, enabled the growth of new industries, and revolutionized life in every place trains ran. As Stephanie Wakefield and Bruce Braun state in Infrastructure, Profanation, and the Sacred Figure of the Humans “infrastructure is not just something that fades into the background to enable other things to occur; it also creates the conditions for another order, or at least, promises a new order to come”. After all, the purposes or uses humanity gave to trains surpassed the material infrastructure of railways itself: they became political. As railways became more popular, they determined local and state governments’ agendas, eventually prompting Congress and new laws to regulate the industry.
Anthropology has started to wonder how life structures a specific relationship between biology, matter, and culture, beyond humanity. But, without humans to manipulate it with a specific purpose, to which extent does life has an agency? Wakefield and Braun explore the Oystertecture: the use of animals (oysters, in this case) as sustainable and natural infrastructure that aims to “grow climate-change infrastructure biologically, rather than relying on capital-intensive big construction projects” (Orff 2011: 98). This case analyses the use of oysters to lessen the impact of waves in New York’s cost because of their natural properties that allow them to absorb and diffract energy. Even if the use of animals as infrastructure is not a novelty, the use of life as infrastructure redefines the concept of the infrastructure itself. That is because, at the same time, life can build and be the infrastructure. I personally wonder if this kind of infrastructure is reliable with other species, such as mycelium, for instance. Funghi has an immense capability to absorb CO2 and pollution and delay the effects of global warming whilst protecting the ecosystems. But beyond the focus of which species can be used as infrastructure –antispecists would oppose the exploitation of animal life even when used to tackle climate change–, it is important to note that in this process, infrastructure’s and environment’s ontological meaning change drastically.
In social sciences, infrastructure is not only studied as a material but its implications and uses –in anthropology, their “context”–are reviewed likewise. In the era of the Anthropocene, life, the environment, and infrastructure gained agency too. That results in all sorts of analysis regarding class, race and gender relations, cultural and social phenomena on the surfaces, its historical background, and large etcetera of qualitative data. Feminism, antiracism, and cultural sociology, for instance, invite us to grab certain skepticism towards politics and power in relation to the infrastructures and the environment and to question inequality and justice systems. But furthermore, they motivated the analysis of the relationships between life with both human and non-human entities. Along this line, new fields are emerging from the mixture of both humanities and ‘hard’ sciences: Design Anthropology, Sustainable Engineering, Biopolitics, and Environmental Cultural Sociology are some examples. The core question –not just to these new fields, but also to conventional scientists– is whether the Anthropocene should be considered an infrastructure –and then, studied as such–.
In a sense, social inquiries regarding infrastructure turn around what Biran Larkin (2008) calls the ‘colonial sublime’: when infrastructure serves power and dominance roles as a motor in modern capitalist societies, with the aim to ‘advance’ and ‘progress’. Although modern ideas of development are no longer valid, due to the shifting temporality of the Anthropocene – as Dipesh Chakrabarty points out in The Climate of History: Four Thesis. In modern times, Karl Marx (1818-1883) defined infrastructure as the capitalistic system, while the superstructure was everything else surrounding it: consumerism, labor, culture, thoughts, worldviews… Almost a century later, Anthony Guiddens (1938) defines words, social groups, organizations, institutions, nation-states, social constructions, and their relationships as part of a particular kind of social organization called macrostructures. And even in Wakefield’s and Braun’s article they revise Giorgio’s Agamben concept of dispositif and describe humans as living beings who are considered part of “social” infrastructure. This postmodern view involves humans and non-humans merging into one, and then becoming social actors because of their agency to shape life, infrastructure, and the environment.
The margins between the social and the natural need to be highlighted in the Anthropocene, according to Anna Tsing (2015), because they dim into old meanings. Globalization and postmodernization made orthodox positivist sciences and determinisms fade. The authority of scientific institutions, as well as of politicians and news media is now questioned. Similar to what happened to religion in modernity, when it was replaced by science and ‘progress’ after secularization; today some sociologists have started to talk about science being under siege. Anyhow, and scientifically or not, the meaning of life is a hunt for multiple disciplines, and has always been. Connotations given to life used to come from an epistemic point of view, it had a human-centered definition. But today there’s a swift to a more ontological one. ‘Sacred’ biological concepts are being re-defined according to social needs. Most visible in politics or psychology, for instance, with the regularization of reproductive rights and the des-pathologization of homosexuality as a mental health disease. But perhaps the Anthropocene came in a time where scientists and social justice activists have taken the postmodernist position, where skepticism towards big narratives of modernism is being rooted –for instance, questioning science as the main authority, but also questioning the economical system with anti-capitalist movements, feminism or antiracism—, and where culture and meaning became heterogeneous, far from the orthodox traditions. The Anthropocene is the era where no ideology is considered the seed for social change anymore.
Is there a future in the Anthropocene?
In the age of global climate change, it seems easier to construct infrastructure to mitigate its impact much sooner than to actively respond to it. As ‘emergent’ infrastructure, oysters are not meant to change the world, they are tasked with adapting to a changing world”. ‘Living’ infrastructure can’t replace modern material infrastructures, rather they are in need of them. This phenomenon, the construction of infrastructure to prevent the impacts of climate change rather than actively respond to it, corresponds to what Carl Schmitt called the katechon: the permanent management of the present to hold back the forces of chaos. Otherwise, knowing the impacts of the new railway on the Tapajós River in the Amazonia, why would big corporations insist on its construction? Oddly or not, during the past decade numerous Technological Startups are more and more, claiming to have ‘re-invented’ the traditional business and productive model, and lots of social and environmental projects are run by private companies and international agencies, who in the end, possess more “capacity to multiply future possibilities”. But these organizations are still working in the Holocene framework. As Wakefield and Braun state: Today there is no promise of future redemption. Instead, there is only the endless and continuous management of crisis here on earth, in which the chaos held at bay is generated nu the same order that the management of crisis seeks to preserve (204).
Anthropocene is a word that creates tense reactions since it indicates emergency and crisis, which creates a generalized state of anxiety –even the term ‘eco-anxiety’ is cooking up. But that means the use of its narratives can be used for certain’s group’s interests, which in order to prevent, requires global democratization of its understanding. Discourses about culture and nature have been with humanity since humans use reason. For instance, the Greeks questioned it too. For them, nature was equivalent to law and force. This is a conceivable way of life, both in public and private spaces. If somebody or something possesses the strength, the money, the influence, the ability to do something, the language, the knowledge… for the greeks, they intrinsically endure the right to do something. Law was equivalent to power, and power is the source of law. In this dynamics, chaos is not an accident, it is the substance because it is everywhere. The conflict was natural for the Greeks, and as a result, they believed, this ataxia needed to be understood and clarified.
Today, with the rise of eco-journalism along with social awareness of environmental issues, there’s also a pledge on how to mediate this chaos. As Hetherington puts it, “we are still in search of an adequate language for the ways that nature acts on its own”. The search for appropriate narratives about the Anthropocene creates a disjunctive in public opinion and within, the behavior toward it. The Anthropocene is merely the keyword to describe the “epochal discussions in the social sciences with those in the natural sciences and environmental movements”. A term that, after all, simplifies the understanding of global climate change while complexifying the attitudes towards it. It seems to me that the Anthropocene refers to an eternal cycle, where human, environmental and infrastructural action is co-related, which leads to climate change and social and infrastructural instability. But at the same time, this malaise will require human, environmental, and infrastructural action to alleviate. And the quest for the future, meanwhile, will reside in the in-between.
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