ANTHROPOCENE AND GEOPOLITICS

For it is because we are kept in the dark about the nature of human society - as opposed to nature in general - that we are now faced by the complete destructibility of this planet that has barely been made fit to live in. (Bertolt Brecht)

This quote reflects on how human ignorance regarding social, political, and economic systems - rather than a lack of understanding of physical nature - drives ecological crisis. It argues that society's hidden power structures blind us to the self-destructive path of modern civilization

Resonating in the field of science and technology studies, the indeterminacy and complexity of many novel risks, and their refusal to stay within neatly drawn geopolitical lines must be taken into account.

It is timely, however, to ask what exactly the geo in geopolitical is doing in this scenario, and what claims about the coming of an Anthropocene epoch might mean for such an understanding of “geopolitical lines”.

Since Paul Crutzen made his now famous statement in 2000 that we are no longer living in the Holocene, but rather in a geological period better termed the Anthropocene, the debate about the term has grown and spread into many genres. Concerned that the scale of human activities was such that a new designation for present times was necessary, in no small part because of the dangers that contemporary transformations present to the future prospects for much of humanity, Crutzen’s contention has been worked over thoroughly in the pages of academic journals and not only.

Background

As alarming headlines in recent years suggest, violent rivalries are, once again, the order of the day in global politics. Discussions of migrations and boundary walls and fences, military interventions, and the use of nationalist tropes, especially by the Trump administration, have raised the rhetorical temperature in international politics, not least in the much-discussed China - US rivalry.

But well before Donald Trump’s election, commentators and politicians were focused on rivalries, nationalist priorities, and concerns about migration, in particular in Europe and North America.

The Anthropocene, viewed as a new geological epoch displacing the Holocene epoch of the last 10,000 to 12,000 years, represents what has been called an “anthropogenic rift” in the history of the planet. Formally introduced into the contemporary scientific and environmental discussion by climatologist Paul Crutzen in 2000, it stands for the notion that human beings have become the primary emergent geological force affecting the future of the Earth system. Anthropocene is best seen as arising in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Recent scientific evidence suggests that the period from around 1950 on exhibits a major spike, marking a Great Acceleration in human impacts on the environment (floods, hurricanes, storms, heatwaves and droughts) with the most dramatic stratigraphic trace of the anthropogenic rift to be found in fallout radionuclides from nuclear weapons testing.

What comes next is a matter for humanity to decide: a planetary stewardship would seem to be the desirable next phase of the Anthropocene, but if the Earth System is to be sustained in something roughly approximating Holocene conditions, many things will have to change, not least the understandings of environment and humanity’s place in it. In terms of international relations, what should be secured to facilitate a sustainable Earth is rather different from what has been seen as essential until very recently; geopolitics can no longer operate as before.

Current situation

The geopolitical order of modernity is apparently one of states, of a fixed territorial arrangement, and supposedly stable arrangements where state sovereignty is tied to an agreed set of fixed boundaries. All else follows from this mode of governance; this system of states is sovereign, the overarching principle that orders humanity’s affairs. It’s an especially elegant resolution to the political difficulties of reconciling universal aspiration and political particularity. We can all be modern and exercise our human rights within the boundaries of our state: citizenship is understood in geographical terms as related to distinct, exclusive territorial states.

But, given the extraordinary scale of human changes wrought in the biosphere and related parts of the Earth, in particular in the last three quarters of a century, Earth System scientists tell us we now live in the great acceleration period of the Anthropocene. This involves the rapid expansion of the global economy fuelled by massive fossil fuel consumption and the rise of international trade. The abilities to transform much of the world by using these sources of energy are key to both the current functioning of the global economy and the ecological transformations of the present.

Climate change has gradually become a major factor in international politics and, as the urgency of the situation and the serious consequences of failing to deal with it become obvious, a matter of discussion in terms of security.

To a growing degree, human insecurity is now a matter relating the global economy, its economic entitlements, and the technological systems in which those are enmeshed. In the modern cities of the Global North, economic activities and the mundane practicalities of everyday life are directly related to the supply of electricity to homes and workplaces. What is now clear is that disasters and human vulnerability are increasingly artificial matters.

Geopolitics and Anthropocene

The most important point about contemporary governance and the geopolitical challenges of the present is so obvious that it frequently goes unsaid: the organization of the world into 193 supposedly sovereign territorial states, a matter that appears stable and fixed. The United Nations system is premised on this geographical division of the Earth’s terrestrial, and by extension, parts of its oceanic surface. This arrangement was, to a substantial extent, an effort to solve one of the key problems of European geopolitics: the longstanding pattern of using military force for territorial aggrandizement.

Despite its formal rejection as a new geological epoch in 2024, the Anthropocene continues to circulate widely in scientific, policy, and public circles as a maturing neologism signifying the complex ecological and social problems humanity faces at a global scale.

Anthropocene is a key concept for rethinking many things and, in particular, the assumptions underpinning much of the discussion of sustainability.

The epistemological difficulties following from the collapse of nature and culture - where the world is increasingly artificial, the consequences of a growing technosphere - needs attention if sustainability is to be reworked as a useful way of dealing with rapid and frequently disruptive change.

Implied, but rarely spelled out in the discussion of sustainable is the assumption that the planetary conditions inherited from the Holocene are essential for future generations to meet needs. This discussion of physical sustainability is based on the condition that the planet is one given by Holocene parameters that facilitated the emergence of human civilization.

Geopolitics

Geopolitics (from Ancient Greek land and politics) is the study of the effects of Earth's geography on politics and International Relations. Geopolitics usually refers to countries and relations between them.

The Austro-Hungarian historian Emil Reich (1854–1910) is considered to be the first to have coined the term in English in 1902.

The term itself was abandoned in the United States after the Second World War due to its identification with Nazi ideology, but some of the key premises in Mackinder and Spykman’s thinking about struggles for world power in what they termed the Heartland and the Rimlands of Eurasia, were part of American security policy in the cold war.

The revival of the term in the 1970s was in part due to Henry Kissinger’s use of the term to refer to the balance of power between great powers.

The struggles for space and power, as geopolitics was understood in the early twentieth century, were also about gaining access to colonies and, crucially, to resources needed to supply industrial production in imperial states; seapower is crucial to ensuring this long-distance trade.

Specific resources and land availability, once the geopolitical confrontation of the Cold War ended, became new sources of security threats, due to the fear that their scarcity could erupt into conflict. Whether it was water wars or access to agricultural land, or fears of populations displaced by environmental change, the assumption was that environmental change caused conflict.

Geopolitics revisited

Convincing governments and investors that their future security is dependent on a flourishing biosphere, rather than the continued combustion of fossil fuels, is now the key task for Anthropocene geopolitics.

Most traditional geopolitical reasoning has focused on state rivalries, access to resources and the control of spaces to ensure this and protect the supply lines to feed metropolitan economies.

Mostly ignored were the impacts of the expansion of imperial economies, the disruptions these caused in the colonies and elsewhere in global trading patterns, and the environmental dislocations caused by plantations, mines, fishing and forestry.

Geo-politics is about the often-violent imposition of particular modes of life and economy on territories, and his term “Eurocene” is used to describe the impact of the expansion of European and subsequently American modes of life in the last half millennium.

The deforestation and dispossession of rural populations, to make way for dams, highways and numerous modes of “development” is now being dramatically aggravated by disruptions to weather systems caused by climate change. Floods, storms, heatwaves and droughts are both directly impacting populations and indirectly disrupting them due to damage and dislocation of agriculture.

The old geopolitics of rival states and suppositions of relatively separate entities on a relatively stable planet urgently needs to be replaced by conceptualizations of interconnectedness that pay attention to key ecological processes and operate to keep the earth system in a state roughly consistent with what has been the human historical experience.

Anthropocene

Human activities have become so pervasive and profound that they rival the great forces of nature and are pushing the earth into planetary terra incognita: a new epoch called Anthropocene. An overwhelming volume of evidence shows that a new stage in Earth system history has begun, one characterized by major changes to many aspects of the natural world, heading toward conditions that humans may not survive. Scientists have shown that many of the largest changes are irreversible on any human timescale.  They have also shown that physical records of the change can be seen in geological strata.

Within International Relations (IR) researchers have begun to explore approaches to security that account for the changing climate. The Anthropocene has been described as a watershed moment for IR and it is argued that security and the environment can no longer be acted upon in conventional ways. Although the engagement with the Anthropocene in the IR discipline was marginal, the interest in this concept has increased and has even been discussed by high-level politicians in international settings. Perhaps the most recognized example of this is when Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany spoke about the implications of the Anthropocene for global security at the 2019 Munich Security Conference.

In March 2024, twelve of the twenty-two members of the international sub-commission on quaternary stratigraphy chose to reject the applicability of the term ‘Anthropocene’ to signal a new geological epoch. If that place and time was rejected as marking a new geological epoch, what difference does it make to the Anthropocene more broadly, which has already long moved beyond the bounds of the geological? Innumerable histories have shown, whether written by climate scientists or not, that human beings have been geological and planetary agents for aeons.

Characteristics of Anthropocene

The highest temperatures in human history, species extinctions on an unprecedented scale, a global glut of plastics and synthetic chemicals that nature cannot absorb, multiple pandemics of previously unknown diseases, and many more crises confirm that massive disruption of Earth’s life support systems is underway, in a new and deadlier stage of planetary history.

The Anthropocene may not be official, but it is real. Humans have become a driving force of geological change and are likely to remain so for millennia to come. Over the course of a few generations - a brief moment in the planetary history - humans have drained fossil fuels that were formed over millions of years, transformed at least 30-50% of the planet's land surface and caused a dangerous air pollution. The speed and scale of this global environmental change has set a new trajectory for the planet, one that humans are part of as much as any natural process with a geological footprint. The future of the Earth and humanity are now closely interrelated.

The Anthropocene is a term of geological periodization that seeks to elucidate the fact that humankind has become a telluric agent. This means that humankind’s interference with earthly, geologic, processes has acquired such a status as to be a geologic force. Thus, the Anthropocene as a term captures the impact humankind’s activities have had on the geo-physical environment.

The Anthropocene is an event and a breaking point in modernity’s consistent technological, scientific, and capitalist progress. The Industrial Revolution and the Great Acceleration have taught the moderns that happiness is found in abundance. But, burdened by the Anthropocene and large-scale ecological destruction, the moderns are increasingly aware that abundance and happiness seem to be recipes for catastrophe since the search for them is never-ending, which is to say unlimited.

Earth System Science is now asking: where are the safe limits to human activity, beyond which the earth system will be tipped into new and dangerous configurations?

Involvement of universities in actions, research and policy

Universities can undertake several actions to transform themselves toward planet-positive impacts. They should seek to answer the fundamental question if we are doing the right things to meet the challenges of the Anthropocene.

A second useful action is integrating the results of examinations and assessments into institutional strategic planning processes. Strategic planning can bring legitimacy and wide participation and shape the culture of the institutions, facilitating changes and implementation of new directions.

Another important direction for universities to move in is opening up to meaningful stakeholder engagement, especially earth systems and socioeconomic changes within communities. They can develop standards and assessment criteria for ensuring the code-sign of research problems, co-production of knowledge with stakeholders, impact on real-world problems and contributions to the overall sustainability of communities, regions and nations. Universities have enormous intellectual power and considerable moral capital that make them able to play their role as the guardians of humanity.

Considerations

Humans occupy a tiny part of Earth's long geological history, yet they have dominated and transformed the planet, shaping the landscape, influencing the climate, and altering ecosystems.  Anthropocene, compared to previous geological eras, which lasted hundreds of millions of years, is a phenomenon of just a century. Some geologists believe it is premature to label such a short era, as our traces may not be found later.

But, at this point in history, humanity deserves - even if in this case the reason is not particularly positive - to be ushered in a new era. A new era must begin when its protagonist has influenced the Earth to such an extent as to be capable of significantly altering its equilibrium. The clear proof of this is climate change.

The evidence of our impact is overwhelming: from the extinction of various animal and plant species to the exponential growth of greenhouse gas emissions, from large-scale deforestation to plastic pollution in the seas. These changes have left and will leave an indelible mark on the ocean floor, glaciers, and sedimentary rocks around the world. Scientists themselves tell us that if we don't make a decisive change of course, we will cause our own extinction and that of much of the existing biodiversity, thus creating a significant transformation of planet Earth.

The delay in formally recognizing the Anthropocene is primarily due to political pressure, aimed at reducing alarmism, but such a communication choice merely refuses to acknowledge the significant impact of humanity on our planet. On the contrary, its recognition should serve as an urgent call to action.

Conclusion

The political language of rivalry and the insistence on dominance in many places has yet to grapple with the new context and the existential threats resulting from massive fossil fuel use and all the other ecological disruptions of contemporary industrialization.

We badly need geopolitical cultures that understand humans as earthlings, enmeshed in a complex interconnected biosphere, rather than inhabitants of relatively discrete but rival spaces.

While discussions of climate change continue under the Paris Agreement process, they have failed, at least so far, to dramatically curtail the use of fossil fuels; neither the urgency nor seriousness of the situation have effectively penetrated far into the halls of power.

But we, the people, have not lost the ability to change the world. The time for political action cannot be prolonged any longer. If our leaders are unwilling or unable to grasp the current critical situation, it is up to the people (naturally through peaceful means) to make them understand that either they commit to leading the change or they must leave.