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Human activities such as use of land, oceans, and fresh-water, have markedly
changed land cover, biogeochemical and hydrological cycles, and even the
climate system (Vitousek et al 1997; IPCC 2006:
van der Leeuw and Redman
2002; Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005). Human influence is now so
pervasive that it dramatically alters the evolutionary trajectories of many other
species (Palumbi 2001). Even areas explicitly buffered from human impacts,
such as protected areas (e.g., nature reserves), are the outcome of human decisions
and are influenced by global responses to human disturbances, such as climate
change. Development has generated enormous benefits for humanity and
improved human well-being (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005), but
gains through inappropriate practices (e.g., undervaluation and overexploitation of
ecosystem services) have also increased risks and impaired numerous ecosystem
services essential for human survival and development (Daily 1997; Odum 1989).
(Liu et al. 2007).
time interval in which human activities now rival global geophysical processes, suggests
that we need to fundamentally alter our relationship with the planet we inhabit (2011,
739).
My goal in this essay is to consider how welcoming the Anthropocene might
provide a path for fundamentally altering our relationship with the planet and cultivating
new responses to global issues. My position is that the Anthropocene has the potential to
usher in an onto-ethical transformation in which an appreciation of the nature and extent
of human impacts on global environmental processes can be the catalyst for a radical
transformationa shift of habits, affective dispositions, and ways of conceivingof the
magnitude required to live differently. I will bracket classification debates and leave
these to groups like the Anthropocene Working Group of the International Commission
on Stratigraphy. My aim is rather to argue for the significance of embracing the symbolic
meanings of the Anthropocene as a vehicle for transforming the imaginary.1 Here my
goal is to examine how the figure of the Anthropocene can serve to disrupt and go
beyond the limits of the inherited symbolic order that sets down a series of imposed
subject-positions and dichotomies. I will focus on the divide between the human and the
natural, the geophysical and the social. The promise of the Anthropocene is its potential
to rework and transform concepts that, as Wittgenstein would say, hold us captive
(1968, 115). This potential for a shift in ways of thinking carries with it associated
changes in what we value. These in turn can influence how we live our relationships to
one another and to the environment. I call this area of changed concepts and life-patterns
1
My conception of the imaginary is influenced by Drucilla Cornells work on the imaginary domain
(1995).
the space of the ethical. I will illustrate that the Anthropocene can be understood as
signaling and catalyzing an interrelated ontological-ethical transformation in ways of
living.
I advanced this conception of a relational ontology in my essay Viscous Porosity: Witnessing Katrina
(2008).
remember the porosity among these phenomena. Porosity serves to disrupt the
sedimented habit of making an ontological divide between the natural and the cultural. It
disrupts thinking that the distinctions signify a natural or unchanging boundary. It serves
to unsettle additive accounts that see phenomena as combinations of natural and social
factors, but in which the interactions are mechanistic rather than constitutive, additive
rather than transformative.
The viscous porosity of the socionatural invokes the complex interconnections
among things and exchanges of material agency that include but are not limited to human
agency.3 Viscosity retains an emphasis on the agential form of the socionatural, a
reminder that the interactions are not simply fluid in the sense of open possibilities, but
constrained and made possible by forms of material agency. Only certain things are in
the making. Only some choices are possible. A choice leads to some outcomes and not
others.
Consider the use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides to increase crop yields.
The exchanges here have been complex and far reaching. I can gesture only at a few.
Without these transformations world population and the well-being of many people
would be far lower.
With average crop yields remaining at the 1900 level the crop harvest in the year
2000 would have required nearly four times more land and the cultivated area
would have claimed nearly half of all ice-free continents, rather than under 15%
of the total land area that is required today (Smil 2012).
For a more in-depth illustration see my essay Viscous Porosity: Witnessing Katrina (2008).
Farming practices have shifted dramatically over the past century. Synthetic nitrogenous
fertilizers provide more than half of the nutrient received by the worlds crops. This has
created an exchange which has allowed the worlds population to grow from under two
billion at the turn of the nineteenth century to over seven billion today. Nitrogen
fertilizers account for nearly 45% of the food production. Without them, roughly three
billion people would face food insecurity (Smil 2012). This example is complicated, of
course, both by how much and what people eat. The population of some countries
consume far more per capita than others, and eating higher up on the food chain is less
efficient in terms of crops. But given that more than three billion people already have
inadequate diets, a shift either in food production or consumption would be needed to
address their well-being.
The viscous porosity of artificial nitrogen is manifest not only in the ways it
enhances crop productivity, but also how it leaches into ground water, rivers, lakes, and
coastal areas where its interactions result in phytoplankton and algal blooms and
expanding dead zones in some regions, or an overgrowth of species such as gelatinous
zooplankton (jellyfish) in others (Canfield, et al 2010). It also mixes with the atmosphere
constituting the third most important greenhouse gas, nitrous oxide.
Since the turn of the nineteenth century, nitrous oxide concentrations have risen twenty
percent.4 Some of that percentage is due to the production of artificial fertilizers, which
in turn, account for crop productivity. Nitrogen is the key nutrient in plant growth taken
up and transformed into the flesh of the plant. Nitrate taken up by the roots is either
4
Agriculture is not the sole cause of this increase. Nitrous oxide is also a byproduct of cars and trucks as
well as various industrial processes.
reduced or stored in the vacuoles or is translocated to the shoot for subsequent reduction
and vacuolar storage; it is also used for osmoregulation (Tischner and Kaiser 2007,
283).
The porosity of bodiesplant bodies and our bodiesallows the openness to the
biological interactions of nitrogen essential to life. But the viscous porosity of nitrogen
also leaches into the atmosphere and the water, as well as into bodies. Not all nitrogen
fertilizer is taken up by crops. The nitrogen applied as synthetic fertilizer or excreted in
manure and urine is biologically reactive. It is transformed by microbes and mixes in
with air, water, and soil causing negative impacts for ecosystems and the humans that are
part of them. Consuming water with high levels of nitrates may lead to significant health
issues, including methemoglobinemia (also called blue-baby syndrome), certain types of
cancer, and other chronic health issues caused by repeated ingestion of water with high
levels of nitrates (Galloway et al 2008). They enter into the flesh of food and sediment
into the water we drink. Studies of fertilizer and pesticide exposure have documented
significantly increased rates of certain types of cancer as well as higher levels of
neurological diseases.5
It is the porosity of bodies that allows for these exchanges. Understanding that
we are affected by this porosity is key to accepting our inexorable interconnection with
the world we are of and inthe promise of the imaginary of the Anthropocene. We
cannot but be open, for it is through this porosity that we thrive. But porosity is also the
site of harm. Understanding this affect is essential.
5
A poignant illustration of this point can be found in Sandra Steingrabers Having Faith: An Ecologists
Journey to Motherhood.
There is a viscous porosity of fleshmy flesh and the flesh of the world. This
porosity is a hinge through which we are of and in the world. I refer to it as
viscous, for there are membranes that affect the interactions. These membranes
are of various typesskin and flesh, prejudgments and symbolic imaginaries,
habits and embodiments. They serve as mediators of interaction (Tuana 2008,
199-200).
The imaginary of the Anthropocene is positioned to affect an ontological shift.
Carrying with it a relational ontology infused by the ontological inseparability of the
socionatural, it has the potential to provoke new affective dispositions and habits of
conceptualization. And here lies the promise of new ways of living. I welcome the
Anthropocene in the sense of acknowledging its potential for undermining a series of
irresponsible dichotomies, not just the socio/natural, but also false divides and
problematic distinctions that haunt contemporary ethical theory.
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between human flesh and the fertilizers used to grow the food needed to survive,
exchanges between the microorganisms like the microbial symbionts in the human
gut that are the foundation of life.
[The] organism is a processa life cyclerather than a thing; it may be a
community of distinct kinds of organisms rather than a monogenomic
individual; and it must be understood as conceptually and of course causally
linked to its particular environment, or niche, which both contributes to the
construction of the organism in development, and is constructed by the
organism through its behavior (Dupr 2007, 54).
Corporeal exchanges are not inherently good or bad. They are the well-spring of
what is. It is only through my openness with the world around me that I can be
nourishedincorporating into my flesh that which I need to survive. But this same
openness that is essential to life makes me, like all things, susceptible to harm. It is only
through my bodily and psychic openness and vulnerability that I can love and be loved by
others. This very openness can also be the vehicle through which violence and trauma
can be inflicted upon me. Accepting the fact of corporeal vulnerability occasions an
awareness of the material conditions of interactions, the ways in which the exchanges of
social institutions, geophysical processes, human choices, and ecosystem evolution are
co-emergent. The corporeal vulnerability of all thingshuman and nonhumanserves
as the ontological ground of a new ethos, one that circulates in the imaginary of the
Anthropocene.
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thing, each event, is what it is and is becoming through exposures to others and to
the world.
The imaginary of the Anthropocene, with its reminder of the intricate
interconnections between humans and geophysical processes carries with it an
ethos infused by viscous porosity, an ethos that can elicit affective dispositions
empathy, concern, the ability to respond to suffering. These affective dispositions
will range across the field of the socionatural and serve to disrupt the moral blind
spot of humancentricness. This heightened attention to viscous porosity emboldens
us to accept the fact that the choices societies make today will have profound
impacts on what life will be like in the future, what species will continue to exist
and where. It evokes attention to exchanges and lived appreciation to the fact that
which regions support flourishing and which will be rendered barren is intimately
tied to complex exchangesof capital, of power, of materiality.
Woven into the ethos of the Anthropocene is attention to deep uncertaintythe
interactive geophysical/socioeconomic exchanges do not permit a predict then act
approach (Lempert et al 2004). Corporeal vulnerability promotes a similar
appreciation of deep uncertainty. It does not permit an apply normative rule then
act approach. It serves not as a prescription for actionfollow this rule nowbut
a wellspring for ethical habits and a passion for the good. We learn to become
intimate with the world through mutual indwelling. Through this ethos we feel our
way back to mutual belonging and ontological intimacy with the world we are in
and of. These affective dispositions arise in the space created by the unceasing
reminder of the inevitable play of the world and the openness of bodies to that play,
15
recalling to us the myriad ways we stand in relation not only to others but to the
world. It carries an admonition to attend to our participation in that exchange, to
understand that choices made now carry forward in terms of harm and benefit, that
past interactions still circulate in the flesh of our bodies and the contours of our
psyche. Synthetic fertilizer applications coincide with institutionalized patterns of
oppression. Migrant workers in the US in the twentieth century, for example, were
those who were most likely to ingest their toxins, but the bodily exchanges from
chemical to plant, from plant to animal, are also co-constitutive of bodies living far
beyond the croplands. The viscous porosity of bodies permits the exchange of
chemicals that kills certain insects, causing food scarcity for some birds and small
animals, in turn impacting flora and fauna near and far. The institutionalized
patterns of oppression, in turn, carry an exposure to ways of living that impact us
all.
Understanding this exchange provides an occasion for transforming complacent
irresponsibility (it is not a problem for which I am responsible) to affective
engagementan ability to respond, response-ability. It serves to disrupt moral
blind spots by summoning an appreciation of the exchanges between seemingly
disparate processescolonialism and environmental degradation, poverty and
climate change, cancer and global business practices, species extinction and income
inequities. The Anthropocenean imaginary reminds us that human well-being is coconstituted in a tangle of socionatural processes. The ethical provocation of the
Anthropocene is to learn to live in ways that acknowledge this openness and
interrelationality, and to enhance well-being while appreciating that it, well-being,
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reciprocal agency and viscous porosity among people and places, social institutions and
geophysical processes.
the phenomenon of habit is just what prompts us to revise our notion of
understand and our notion of the body. To understand is to experience harmony
between what we aim at and what is given, between intention and the
performance and the body is our anchorage in the world (Merleau-Ponty1962:
144).
The promise of the imaginary of the Anthropocene is in catalyzing new ways of
being in the world, of constituting meaning, of re-visioning social habits of knowing and
doing.
Concrete habits do all the perceiving, recognizing, imagining, recalling, judging,
conceiving and reasoning that is done. .. . We may indeed be said to know how by
means of our habits (Dewey, 1988: 124).
As habits, ways of knowing and being in the world are sediments of socionatural
interactions. For Dewey these are shaped and reshaped in the to and fro of interaction,
and the appreciation of the intricate mixture of the stable and the precarious:
it is the intricate mixture of the stable and the precarious, the fixed and the
unpredictably novel, the assured and the uncertain, in existence which sets
mankind upon that love of wisdom which forms philosophy (1981, 55).
By embracing the imaginary of the Anthropocene, we will be challenged to rework these
habits and will be in turn transformed through the emergent interactions with a changing
world. Becoming affectively disposed to the interconnections between things, places,
and time periods gives rise to collective ethical habits that encourage responsible
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Conclusion
The Anthropocene is a figure of the urgency of change. It reminds us that we
must be open to being transformed in the midst of socionatural exchanges. We must
allow that we will not find a simple algorithma rule to follow to ensure well-being.
We must rather learn to be affected (Latour 2004) by the full complexity of exchanges
between human habits and geophysical interactions. We must learn to be affected by
uncertainty and develop ways of knowing and living attuned to it. We must learn to be
moved by, animated by, attuned to the threads of inextricable interconnections between
consumption practices and ice sheets, between agricultural practices and species
flourishing, between ocean currents and energy choices, between the way we live with
the earth and the earths becoming.
Val Plumwood called for new ways to live with the earth:
If our species does not survive the ecological crisis, it will probably be due to our
failure ... to work out new ways to live with the earth, to rework ourselves ...We
will go onwards in a different mode of humanity, or not at all (2007:1).
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The imaginary of the Anthropocene provides this world of possibility. Its onto-ethical
practices can enable new practices of being co-constituted. While there is no guarantee
of success, being attuned to corporeal vulnerability is grounds for hope in a deeply
uncertain world. It is a ground for being affected, a well-spring for caring for the world
we are in and of.
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*This essay was richly influenced by numerous exchanges with Charles Scott.
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