Ecocene
Discussion
David Bollier:
"the instability of the planet’s climate and severity of other ecological crises confirm what Mihnea Tănăsescu writes in Ecocene Politics: “[M]odernity tends towards the annulment of the striations and textures of the world” (Tănăsescu, 2022a, 13–14). It is this fundamental ontological reality of modern life – “all that is solid melts into air” – that must be reversed. The coming epoch is not so much the Anthropocene, in which humankind will hold sway, but the Ecocene, in which more-than-human natural systems will profoundly intrude upon and reshape civilization.
Tănăsescu argues that the Ecocene,
- "by foregrounding the central role of ecology in the new era….implies that we have to make political sense of our times via concepts that are synchronous with ecological science. And if we accept that chance, change, and locality are what ecology injects into political thought, then the Ecocene becomes that era when human social and political arrangements start from the necessity of living with uncertainty…. Our imbrication with the world is not something to be escaped so as to find human meaning and purpose; it is itself the condition for meaningfulness" (Tănăsescu, 2022a, 13–14).
Much more deserves to be said on this topic, but for the purposes of this essay, it is enough to say that any path forward must deal with “the irruption of ecological processes within the polis” – a theme that Bruno Latour also addressed in his later books (Latour 2017; Latour 2021; Schultz & Latour, 2023). Climate change is destroying the global capitalist fantasy of infinite possibilities and material extraction without consequences. It is also shattering the idea that the Local, as a counterpoint to the Global, is a haven of sequestered safety, morality and order. Neither the Global nor Local is truly connected to the biophysical realities of the Earth, Latour points out. Both are modernist constructions and projections. It is this worldview that the Ecocene is disrupting, forcing humans to radically reshape the polis of modern civilization.
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If uncertainty is a keynote of the coming Ecocene era, as Tanasescu suggests, then we will need to be open to improvisation, dynamic change, and a radical re-scaling of functions that are now mostly centralized, regimented, and corporatized. Hierarchies of control are becoming more problematic, or at least more expensive and complicated to administer, as disrupted ecosystem processes assert their own living logics over and against the anthropocentric demands of modern civilization. This suggests the need for new organizational forms that can embrace exploratory and participatory processes, in the manner of open source innovation. Crisp blueprints and rigid, linear systems of command-and-control won’t be effective. Far better to nurture relationships of trust and solidarity among people, and with natural systems, as facilitated by “infrastructures of reciprocity” that support mutualism (Tănăsescu, 2022a).
This is obviously a massive challenge conceptually and administratively, but there are already numerous gambits underway to explore how governance can be decentralized, infrastructures can be designed to serve bioregional integrity, and state power re-imagined to facilitate and support subsidiarity of control."