The Handbook of Environmental Political Theory in the Anthropocene

By Prof. Amanda Machin and Prof. Dr. Marcel Wissenburg

For a long time, western political philosophy was largely oblivious to environmental concerns; ‘nature’ was understood as a fixed background to social activity or a helpful resource for political actors. This changed when, in the second half of the twentieth century, the scarcity of resources, the dangers of nuclear power and the hazards of pollution became the objects and obstacles for policymaking. Alongside the emergence of movements and parties demanding protection of ‘the environment’ was an expanding body of academic scholarship questioning some of the basic assumptions, discourses, categories and applications of political science and theory. And so Environmental Political Theory became its own established sub-discipline, with its own, distinctively political, agenda.

Over the last decades, that agenda has changed considerably. It is becoming increasingly obvious that ‘the environment’ cannot be simplistically conceived as a category of ‘nature’ as the other of ‘human’ or ‘society’ but is rather a term that signals the interconnection of social, material and ideological aspects to the surroundings of political thought and practice. It is precisely this interconnection that is highlighted by the (controversial and contested) diagnosis of the Anthropocene, the ‘age of the human’, that labels the human species as a geological force in its own right. In the event of the Anthropocene, ‘the environment’ no longer constitutes the stable background to politics but becomes both its dynamic condition and its exigent content.

The Anthropocene signals the collapse of various boundaries: between society and nature, between human and nature, between geological time and political time and between the scientific disciplines. It constitutes both a sober description that insists it is a rational and correct way to represent scientific facts about our world (in the shape of an interdisciplinary Earth System Science), and at the same time a kind of ethical and political battle cry (under the banner of Earth System Governance). The Anthropocene has been widely and enthusiastically taken up within environmental political theory because of its incorporation of the complexity and urgency of ecological crisis and its recognition of the compelling role of different types of science. The Anthropocene makes limits and thresholds visible but it also ‘offers incitements for thinking’ and provokes ‘countless controversies’.

But if the Anthropocene is ‘a call to take responsibility for a changing planet’ then to whom is this call addressed? For the Anthropocene has also been widely resisted as a term that hides the uneven distribution of the causes and effects under the collective responsibility of ‘the Anthropos’ – hence the development of alternative concepts like capitalocene, plantationocene and chthulucene. Its origins in and use by the natural and biosciences (or the integrative ‘Earth Science’) also link the Anthropocene to a widely criticized technocratic attitude towards environmental politics and policy. Other analyses of the tragedies covered by the term Anthropocene link them to various further non-environmental causes, inspiring alternatives like androcene, imperiocene, misAnthropocene, oligarchocene, technocene – and many, many more, all of which make an appearance in this volume. There are those, finally, who question the wisdom of trying to draw attention to environmental issues with yet another doomsday announcement.

And yet we contend, perhaps provocatively, that if it is taken seriously and critically, the Anthropocene leads to a renewed engagement with ontological, epistemological and ethical categories and the grappling with various descriptive and normative questions for environmental political theory: Who and what are the subjects and objects of politics, and must their political agency be rethought? How can the institutions, practices, actors and values of liberal representative democracy cope under new ‘timescapes’? Is there a ‘sustainability transformation’ and how does it unfold at different levels of governance and analysis? To what extent is the Anthropocene rooted in colonising practices and discourses and what would it mean to ‘decolonise’ them? And how should environmental political theory as a sub-discipline engage with other forms of knowledge? It is time to evaluate the impact and meaning of the Anthropocene, to critically assess its contribution to environmental political theory and the contribution environmental political theory can make to the further refinement – or replacement? – of the Anthropocene concept. Hence the need for the Handbook of Environmental Political Theory in the Anthropocene.

As the sub-discipline of environmental political theory evolves, as it relishes, re-evaluates and rebuffs the discourses, imaginaries and presuppositions of the Anthropocene, it also becomes increasingly pertinent to a world that seems to be spinning unpredictability and violently enough to wreak havoc on prevailing assumptions. Environmental political theory is flourishing, and although this may be small comfort on a planet that is not, it does provide us with a tiny glimmer of hope. As our esteemed colleague John Barry says, nature will find a way to survive. This does not let environmental political theorists off the hook: it bids us to better interrogate the stakes, terms and terrain of that survival.

Edited by Amanda Machin, Professor of Political Sociology, Department of Sociology and Social Work, University of Agder, Norway and Marcel Wissenburg, Professor of Political Theory, Department of Political Science, Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands