Thread by @RewildingS

1/ in today’s #rewildingscience thread we’re looking at the popular use of the term ‘Anthropocene’. Like many terms this paper found that term has many divergent points of use across Terrestrial, Marine and Atmospheric discourse and warns that against a totalising use of the term

2/ The papers goal was to investigate the transformation of recent environmental thinking and environmental ethics and in particular the language of “the Anthropocene” which is prominent in driving it.

3/ The author explains how contemporary American land management philosophy suggest that management goals in a “new conservation science” need to focus “beyond naturalness.” Naturalness, this new approach suggests, has simply lost its value as a management guide

4/ The result of this is a series of calls for “living through the end of nature,” embracing “post-naturalism,”. The onus here is stakeholders to be realistic about the reality of the situation and, make informed decisions about what sort of planet we want in the future

5/ The author then talks about a similar proactive management philosophy in atmospheric discussion and that In order to avoid the worst costs of climate change, the IPCC has started to consider the pros and cons managing the climate through technological means

6/ It then highlights how both terrestrial and atmospheric management discussions are linked together. Firstly because global climate change is heavily implicated in both. They also both completely reject environmental ideas such as “pristine” or “untouched” nature.

7/ Finally, these two discussions are linked is that they both embrace and perhaps, to some extent, rejoice in the banner of “the Anthropocene.”

8/ Next the author moves onto the background of the term 'Anthropocene', highlighting that the person who first popularized the term Anthropocene is also the person who first brought the possibility of climate engineering to wide public attention. Paul Crutzen.

9/ The paper suggests that use of intelligently designed technical strategies is a reason for optimism which could address environmentalism’s failures to replace pessimistic, and largely ineffectual environmental rhetoric with a positive vision of future hopes and possibilities,

10/ This optimism is pushed farther by Earle Ellis who stated that new vision of the future demands “ We must not see the Anthropocene as a crisis, but as the beginning of a new geological epoch ripe with human-directed opportunity”

11/ We then look at some of the ways that the atmospheric and terrestrial Anthropocenes differ. Firstly, management strategies in the atmospheric Anthropocene are often global in a way that those in the terrestrial Anthropocene could never be

12/ Secondly, the amount of control that can be exerted over the management action. While few management regimes for natural systems allow for complete control of outcomes, the degree of control typically decreases as the spatial extent over which the action takes place increases

13/ Finally, differences reside in finding appropriate decision-making and governance structures for each version of the Anthropocene. It has been recognized from the start that one of the biggest challenges facing geoengineering is the problem of legitimate political process.

14/ The authors states that every resident of the planet is a stakeholder in both climate change and climate engineering and that due to their different economic, geographical, and ecological starting points, nations have different and diverging interests in play

15/ One of the main arguments given for the need to go “beyond naturalness” in terrestrial discussion is that, even without climate change, impacts such as extinction, habitat fragmentation, and landscape-scale anthropogenic manipulations have resulted in irreversible changes

16/ The author states that despite physical & chemical linkages, the goals, challenges, scales, and risks in the atmospheric &terrestrial Anthropocenes vary enough that caution needs to be taken before using them under the same label and the same descriptive and normative content

17/ The fracture is greater when including what a marine Anthropocene might look like. While factory trawling has effectively “clear-cut” whole swathes of the ocean floor, there are other parts of the ocean that have never been seen or impacted by humans.

18/ The Total Anthropocene, the author suggests, appears to be a simplification. In their grand statements about what the Anthropocene means for humanity, people like Ellis and Crutzen carelessly equivocate between a number of thoroughly different phenomena

19/ Evidence suggests determining a new status for nature as “no longer pristine” may be empirically, and perhaps even metaphysically, interesting but it may not have the implications for public policy some seem to think

20/ Paul Keeling has suggested the pervasiveness of the human fingerprint on “pure nature” is a red herring caused by a philosophical obsession with precision about the meaning of words rather than precision about their use.

21/ The authors proposes that even if nature is, in some sense now largely influenced by the effects of human activities, terms such as nature and artifact still do significant work, being constitutively related to each other in the language game of environmental ideas and policy

22/ The authors then talk about how the British have no difficulty at all talking about nature in relation to culture; nor thinking of nature, outside of culture, as something that warrants some important consideration.

23/ Bringing in research from, Corner et al. we then learn that caution against “messing with nature” plays “an anchoring, organising and bridging role.” Even though ideas can shift over time certain key notions remain linguistically central and play an important public role

24/ We then hear that as well as Nature there is enduring significance of both wild places and the concept of them. The movement towards rewilding currently evident across Europe suggests that the term wild plays a similar organizing role there in policy discourse.

25/ The paper concludes that the idea of wildness isn't extinct in Europe. Wildness is still a viable idea. In Europe, the idea of the wild is moving people to donate, volunteer, and dream of alternative futures in which nature strikes a more visible and more public pose.

26/ The paper then talks about the confusion and risks spawned by overly enthusiastic use of the term Anthropocene. With suggestions that Earth is now post-natural or post-wild shift taking people & policy away from how they try to understand their place in the order of things.

27/ The ideas of nature and the wild clearly still play a significant organizing role even in the era of climate change. The ideas of post-natural and post-wild that are claimed to be part of the Total Anthropocene, cut environmental discourse adrift from public perception

28/ In a Total Anthropocene, it isn't clear what the source and origin of restraint and moral regard will be other than the interests of the surrounding people. The banishment of nature and wild, make it hard to see what humility can really mean in an environmental context.

29/ We then get some important lessons. Firstly, the idea of the Anthropocene is clearly provocative & important and at time optimistic & progressive. But the regressive and dissociating elements and shortcoming of employing the term in a totalizing fashion should not be missed

30/ The Anthropocene offers a significant disruption of past environmental discourse. Separating the atmospheric from the terrestrial Anthropocene disrupts discourse on the grounds that an increasingly impacted global environment is not a cause to reject concepts of importance

31/ Finally, In an era in which anthropogenic influence has increased, terms such as nature and wild may have more significance than ever.

32/ If the #Anthropocene idea endures the layers need to be transparent to enable those who engage with the discussion to distinguish the management challenges it actually presents from the licenses a few of its advocates wish it offered.

33/ I really enjoyed this paper. The importance of language is clear here and its impacts wide reaching. Keeping and utlising 'nature' and 'wild' and other terms that resonate will be important in providing a positive environmental vision in this human-dominated world #rewilding

34/34 The full paper can be found here:
cas.umt.edu/mdb/FILES_Facu…