The Paradox of Anthropocene Inaction: Knowledge Production, Mobilization, and the Securitization of Social Relations

Abstract

This article argues that the Anthropocene produces a paradox when thinking about political mobilization. I show how the knowledge production practices that render the Anthropocene visible and actionable, including planetary boundaries, Earth System Science modeling of earth systems, and geological strata, also circulate a security rationality. This rationality is one that attempts to manage, co-opt, or productively direct processes of becoming, which limits possibilities for mobilization. A lens that assumes political mobilization is a function of increased knowledge, understanding, and evidence contributes to this problem. By starting instead with an understanding of possibilities for mobilization as emerging from social relations, the article highlights the way in which the security rationality circulated by Anthropocene knowledge production risks transforming those social relations into security relations. Netting the planet and the human together through the practices of calculation and representation that make the Anthropocene visible produces a decontextualized, disaggregated, and dispersed subject and so limits possibilities for collective political mobilization.

Beyond “Geological Nature,” Fatalistic Determinism and Pop‐Anthropocene: Social, Cultural, and Political Aspects of the Anthropocene

“…Thus, the current state power elites continue to maintain a monopoly over “corrective actions” and use the discourse of security or “emergency situation” to avoid real social changes. Such tactics once again make it difficult to politicize the Anthropocene: “In the place of social relations, knowledge production practices around the Anthropocene produce instead security relations” (Fagan, 2023, p. 17).…”

Students' historicisation of the environmental crisis: A narrative of industrialisation, ignorance and greed

“…More critically, there are divides regarding the message of the Anthropocene story that feeds into the decadesold debate regarding system-immanent solutions -i.e., ecological modernisation -versus system change. For example, it can be interpreted both as a lesson of humility and vulnerability and about human exceptionalism and power (Bonneuil, 2015;Fagan, 2023;Fressoz, 2015;Gattey, 2021;Hamilton, 2017;Lövbrand et al, 2015;Simon, 2020).…”

Untitled

“…More critically, there are divides regarding the message of the Anthropocene story that feeds into the decadesold debate regarding system-immanent solutions -i.e., ecological modernisation -versus system change. For example, it can be interpreted both as a lesson of humility and vulnerability and about human exceptionalism and power (Bonneuil, 2015;Fagan, 2023;Fressoz, 2015;Gattey, 2021;Hamilton, 2017;Lövbrand et al, 2015;Simon, 2020).…”