What does it mean for us humans to have the future of the planet in our hands? A feeling of terror, very soon combined with a sense of power? After centuries of doing geo-bioengineering without knowing it, are we now in a position to make all our interactions with Gaia conscious, voluntary and scientifically calculated, to convert ourselves to a generalized ecological engineering? Whereas it should mean a call to humility, the Anthropocene is summoned in support of a planetary hubris. ‘We’ve engineered every other environment we lived in, why not the planet?’ asks Lowell Wood, an astrophysicist and champion of geoengineering.64 We will be ‘proud of the planet that we create’, adds the geographer Erle Ellis, one of the first anthropocenologists and a member of the Breakthrough Institute, an eco-modernist think-tank that celebrates the death of nature and preaches a ‘good anthropocene’, one in which advanced technology will save the planet.65
To position humanity in this way as pilot means seeing the Earth as simply a cybernetic machine, rather than a dynamic becoming and a history. It also means, with the functional discourse of an anthropo-nature, denying nature and Gaia any alterity: even if we are part of it, and if nature must be brought within our collective politics, it is important to recognize this alterity, through a listening that is not instrumental and a respect for certain limits to human action. Fusion and omnipotence, these sentiments characteristic of early infancy, lie at the basis of such ‘post-nature’ discourse, participating in the dream of a total absorption of nature into the commercial technosphere of contemporary capitalism (Chapter 9).66
The discourse of a new geopower
The representation of the Earth and its contemporary disarray proposed by the anthropocenologists must be taken seriously, in two ways. On the one hand, it brings knowledge and warnings that are absolutely essential and indispensable, while on the other, it is a product of Western naturalism and the scientific culture of the Cold War. It cannot be the unique point of view, the unique imaginary of the Earth, or the unique way of inhabiting it collectively and in peace. There are multiple narratives about the change of existential regime under way on our Earth. In Western culture alone it is possible to distinguish at least five: the (naturalist) official narrative that prevails today in the scientific and international arenas (discussed in chapters 3 and 4), the post-nature and ‘eco-modernist’ narrative of a high-tech ‘good Anthropocene’ (as mentioned above), an eco-catastrophist narrative that envisions a collapse of industrial civilization and seeks local resilience, an eco-Marxist narrative in which the Anthropocene is better described as a ‘Capitalocene’ (see Chapter 10) and an eco-feminist one that relates male domination to the degrading of the Earth.67 But many more narratives, imaginaries, cosmologies and types of knowledge have an essential role to play in order to inhabit the Earth in a proper fashion. We need a variety of civic initiatives and popular alternatives, of transition and abstemiousness, which explore the outlines of ‘living better with less’, rather than relying upon ‘solutions’ offered by a circle of planetary eco-technocrats. It is also essential to note in the dominant narratives of the Anthropocene (the first two of the five mentioned narratives) the elements that could form part of a new geopower.
What do we mean by geopower? As historians have shown (Michel Foucault above all), the biological knowledge of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries made possible the constitution of new scientific objects: ‘population’, ‘life’ and ‘race’. Biological advances heralded a new form of power, biopower, with the particular property of taking biological life as an object and political project. This biopower, characteristic of the industrial age and the construction of the nation-state, aimed to optimize the number, quality (health, physical, intellectual, genetic, etc.), military ‘strength’ (war becoming total) and productivity of populations.68
The new knowledge and imaginaries of the global environment that have asserted themselves since the Cold War, and the dominant narratives of the Anthropocene, can be read as elements of a new knowledge-power that bears not only on the ‘bio’ but also on the ‘geo’. After life, it is the Earth as a whole (from the lithosphere to the stratosphere) that simultaneously becomes the object of knowledge (‘geo-knowledge’) and government (‘geopower’). The advent of new subjectivities of ‘citizens of the planet’, the geological turn of our – previously ecological – understanding of the ‘global environmental crisis’, its increased timescale that seems to make the ordinary time of collective and political action inoperative (if the problem is geological, what can the mere citizen do except trust experts?), the hyper-interdisciplinarity of global expertise of Earth socioecological systems as envisaged by the IPCC (or ‘Future Earth’, the recent global research platform launched by the UN), and finally the monitoring systems of the planet by satellite,69 are so many indexes of the emergence of a new geopower that establishes the Earth as a ‘system’ to know and govern as a totality, in all its components and all its functions.
It is true that an ‘imperial ecology’70 developed in the nineteenth century, but it was only well after the Second World War, with atomic weapons, new international institutions and, above all, a Cold War that conceived the whole globe as the theatre of an imminent conflict, that a new knowledge-power of the entire globe was born, from the submarine depths to the Moon.71 At the same time, ecology became systemic and global. The biosphere, a concept initially proposed by Vladimir Vernadsky in the 1920s, was thus redefined by UNESCO in 1968 as ‘an ancient, extremely complex, multiple, all-planetary, thermodynamically open, self-controlling system of living matter and dead substance which accumulates and redistributes immense resources of energy and determines the composition and dynamics of the Earth’s crust, atmosphere and hydrosphere’.72 Armed with this cybernetic conception of nature, the champions of systems ecology claimed the role of global experts in the governing of the planet’s ‘biological productivity’ – a term frequently encountered in articles of the time, with a view to reconciling short-term economic profitability with the long-term maintenance of the ecosystems that supplied resources.73
This understanding of the environment as a global system to control and optimize formed part of a Weltanschauung of the ‘closed world’ forged in each bloc by the culture of the Cold War (Chapter 3). The United States, in particular, saw itself as the guardian of the progress of the whole world and worked for the establishment of a global market. There then emerged a new planetary subjectivity, a new deterritorialized and uniform way of inhabiting the Earth. Whatever the place you found yourself, you were subject to the universal struggle of ‘freedom versus slavery’,74 prey to new fears and scenarios of planetary catastrophe,75 and the subject of a ‘state of exception’ (Giorgio Agamben) justified by the threat of death from attack by the opposing bloc (today by climate disruption or a global collapse). Caring for nature thus became ‘managing planet Earth’,76 whether to extract a maximum and sustainable yield, or to limit (and adapt to) its tempestuous disruptions. This is how the Brundtland Report depicted the human condition in the age of this new geopower:
In the middle of the twentieth century, we saw our planet from space for the first time. Historians may eventually find that this vision had a greater impact on thought than did the Copernican revolution of the sixteenth century … This new reality, from which there is no escape, must be recognized – and managed.77
Geopower is based on a common matrix and mechanisms in which knowledge, power and subjects of a new type emerge together. This geopower exhorts its subject, the anthropos, to ‘reconnect with the biosphere’ and tends to establish an ever-greater number of human problems as soluble only at a global level and only by way of technological solutions.78 The nascent geopower is a ‘space of calculation’ (Foucault) at the level of the Earth system: accounting of flows of matter and energy and of ‘natural capital’, markets in ‘ecosystemic services’, control and management of the components and processes of the Earth system, instruments of anticipation, prediction and global simulation, and making place
s commensurable in an isonomic space.
This geopower, faced with the upheavals of the Earth system under way, aspires to regulate the globe’s thermostat and, in order to do so, to control the Earth by a new engineering of humanity’s envelopes.79 The project of geoengineering is a concrete embodiment of the nascent geopower. Its aim is nothing less than ‘improvement of the environmental characteristics of the atmosphere’,80 or even the entire functioning of the planet, biosphere included. Still more here than with nuclear tests or the imaginary of ‘Spaceship Earth’, the entire Earth is now explicitly reified as object of experimentation and control.
The project of climate engineering goes back to the Cold War. For example, the technology of ‘global management of solar radiation’ by dispersal of aerosols in the upper atmosphere finds its origin in a proposal by the Soviet scientist Mikhail Budyko at a conference held in Leningrad in 1961 on ‘problems of climate control’, warning that human activities could in due course shift the Earth’s radiative balance. His colleague M. Ye Shvets then proposed injecting 36 million tonnes of aerosols into the stratosphere in order to reduce solar radiation by 10 per cent.81 An analogous project can be found in the writings of James Lovelock, who, after working for NASA on a programme for the colonization of Mars, published in 1984 a fiction that imagined the use of intercontinental missiles spreading hundreds of tonnes of chloro-fluorocarbons around the red planet in order to create a greenhouse effect that would make it habitable.82 Born in the post-war United States, then appearing in the Soviet Union and China, multiple projects of cloud seeding with the aid of balloons, planes or projectiles of all kinds attest to a ‘real war waged on the atmosphere’, in a culture of manipulation of the Earth system favoured by the context of the Cold War.83
After the fall of the Soviet bloc, the project of geoengineering was recycled in 1992 as a means of combating climate change, in a report of the US Academy of Sciences.84 Similarly, if in the first decade of the new century Paul Crutzen finally rallied to geoengineering, this was also because of his background in this culture of the Cold War that made the entire Earth (and even Mars!) a theatre of large-scale intervention: he had worked in the 1980s on the first scenario of ‘nuclear winter’ resulting from a nuclear war.85
In February 2014, John Kerry presented climate change, along with other threats such as epidemics and terrorism, as ‘perhaps the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction’.86 In the age of ‘global environmental governance’, the logic of warfare, of total control of the planet in the name of a state of exception, seems indeed to have made its return in the face of the possibly violent consequences of global ecological disturbance, fuelling new geopolitical cleavages. Though seemingly very different, projects such as geoengineering, UN-REDD (the official acronym for the programme of Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) mechanisms that insert forests into a global carbon market, dreams of terraforming, etc., proceed from the same logic of emergency (‘climate emergency’), if not that of a ‘state of exception’:87 they manufacture a global nature-system that is no longer a commons regulated by collective debate, practices and rights, but one ‘whose exclusive access is strictly regulated as a function of the rights, subject to emergency circumstances, to alter, pilot and optimize the whole of the planet and its atmosphere’.88
It is difficult to predict the future of geopower. Will it be multilateral and UN-based? Regional or even private? (There have already been certain corporate experiments with the seeding of oceans.) Combined with logics of sovereignty and a national security imperative, this could very well be exercised unilaterally; combined with contemporary neoliberal doctrine and the extension of the domain of private property, it conceives the market as the best calculator to save the planet by giving a price to ‘natural capital’ and ‘ecosystemic services’, and would make financial flows the controllers of biogeochemical ones (at the risk of a crash of the Earth system?).89
The dominant narrative of the anthropocenologists already involves an embryonic redefinition of what it is to be human on the Earth. The subject of the Anthropocene and of geopower is caught in a ‘geodestiny’, of ‘humanity as geological force’ that is both heroic and unsustainable, arousing both admiration and terror while reinforcing a certain number of socio-environmental injustices under the consensual banner of the species. The subject of the Anthropocene, moreover, appears as an eco-citizen optimizing her carbon credits, managing her individual footprint (and governed by way of her environmental reflexivity). This is a being plugged into the flows of ‘ecosystemic services’ that the different compartments of the Earth system supply her with.90 And finally, the subject of the Anthropocene is constructed as a passive public that leaves solutions to geocratic experts.
Right from the 1970s, political ecologists signalled the dangers of such a geopower. André Gorz called it ‘eco-fascism’, while Ivan Illich, in his book Tools for Conviviality, saw ‘a well-organized elite, vocally promulgating an antigrowth orthodoxy’ as ‘highly undesirable. By pushing people to accept limits to industrial output without questioning the basic industrial structure of modern society, it would inevitably provide more power to the growth-optimizing bureaucrats and become their pawn.’91 As for Félix Guattari, he spoke of the knowledge and powers of ‘scientific’ management of the environment as a ‘mechanical ecology’, insufficient or even dangerous if it was not complemented and controlled by a ‘social ecology’ as well as by a ‘mental ecology’ or ‘ecosophy’.92
And what if ‘Earth seen from nowhere’ and the narrative of ‘interactions between human species and Earth system’ were not the most interesting perspectives for relating what has happened to us in the last two and a half centuries, not to mention predicting the future? Perhaps we should accept the Anthropocene concept without succumbing to its dominant narrative. Without handing full powers to the experts and losing the specific resources that every community has, which in their diversity and local attachments are essential motors for a just ecological transition. In 1949, the poet René Char posed a similar problem in his poem ‘Les Inventeurs’:93
They have come, the foresters from the other side, unknown to us and rebels to our customs.
They have come in large numbers.
Their troop appeared on the dividing line of the cedars …
We have come, they said, to warn you that the hurricane will soon arrive,
your implacable enemy.
What is this ‘hurricane’? Char wrote his poem at a time rich in scientific warnings about the state of the planet: the erosion linked to the retreat of forest cover in the mountains of his native Provence, the threat of a nuclear winter, the scarcity of resources discussed at a Food and Agriculture Organization conference in 1949, the destruction of nature denounced by the naturalists who founded the International Union for the Conservation of Nature at Fontainebleau in 1948. But these whistle-blowers, who in Char’s poem are represented by the ‘foresters’ (a leading profession in the conservationist movement of that time), are ‘inventors’, a term Char had used pejoratively in previous poems, seeing them as mechanical demiurges harmful to social and inner life. The poem continues:
We thanked them and bade them farewell …
Men of trees and axes, able to withstand any terror
but unsuited to conduct water, to align houses and daub them in pleasant colours,
they knew nothing of winter gardening and the economy of joy …
Yes, the hurricane soon will come;
But was it worth speaking of it and disturbing the future?
Here where we are, there is no urgent fear.
Let us pursue the parallel. The ‘inventors’ of the Anthropocene, the scientists of the Earth system who warn of planetary unbalances, are very useful in coming to alert us of danger. But, says the poet, they are ‘from the other side’, unsuited for a warm presence in the world, for the ‘economy of joy’ and ‘pleasant colours’. If the danger is indeed real (‘yes, the hurricane soon
will come’), Char proclaims the resistance of a society that refuses to abdicate its autonomy and its culture to bow to the heteronomy of an eco-technocratic government. Are the scientists of the Earth system (whose champions propose a general engineering of ecosystems and climate) not the equivalent of Char’s inventors? Are they not bearers of a relationship to the world that has precisely produced the danger that they warn us of and offer to save us from? As opposed to the satellites that orbit the Earth and the experts who travel at great speed from conference to conference, another poet, Henri Michaux, proposes that we should slow down:
By slowing down, you feel the pulse of things; you snore, you have all the time in the world; calmly, all of life … We have all the time. We savour … We no longer believe that we know. We have no more need to count … We feel the curve of the Earth … We no longer betray the soil, no longer betray the minnow, we are sisters by water and leaf.94
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1Will Steffen et al., ‘The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?’, Ambio, 36:8, 2007: 614–21, 614.
2Carl Folke and Lance Gunderson, ‘Reconnecting to the Biosphere: A Social-Ecological Renaissance’, Ecology and Society, 17:4, 2012: 55.
3Will Steffen et al., ‘The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, 369:1938, 2011: 842–67, 843.
4Ibid.
5We have taken this joke from Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg, ‘The Geology of Mankind? A Critique of the Anthropocene Narrative’, Anthropocene Review, published online 7 January 2014, anr.sagepub.com.
6This is the contention of Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Postcolonial Studies and the Challenge of Climate Change’, New Literary History, 43:1, 2012: 1–18.
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