Ecocene Politics

* Book: Ecocene Politics. By Mihnea Tănăsescu. Open Book Publishers. 2022.

URL = https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0274

Description

1. From the publisher:

"Anchored in the diverse ecological practices of communities in southern Italy and Aotearoa/New Zealand, this book devises a unique and considered theoretical response to the shortcomings of global politics in the Ecocene—a new temporal epoch characterised by the increasingly frequent intrusion of ecological processes into political life.

Dismantling the use of the term ‘Anthropocene’ as a descriptor for our current ecological and political paradigm, this bold and resolutely original contribution proposes a restorative ethics of mutualism. An emancipatory theory intended to re-invigorate human agency in the face of contemporary ecological challenges, it posits an effective means to combat the environmental destruction engendered by modernity.

Using ecology alongside European moral and Māori philosophies to re-conceptualise the ecological remit of politics, this book’s granular approach questions the role played by contemporary political ontologies in the separation of humans and environments, offering an in-depth view of their renewed interrelation under mutualism."

(https://www.openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0274)

2. David Bollier:

"Mihnea Tănăsescu, a brilliant Romanian-born, Belgium-based academic, urges that we ... recognize this geological era of Earth as the Ecocene.

Locked in our anthropocentric bubble, we humans have failed to see that we are deeply entangled with nature and not separate and superior to it. If humanity is to survive, it will have to learn how to get in sync with natural systems, culturally and economically, and actively contribute to the flourishing of earthly and human systems in tandem.

Hence the title of Tănăsescu’s 2022 book, Ecocene Politics. Our epoch is “characterized by the increasingly frequent intrusion of ecological processes into political life,” as the book puts it. If you can recognize this reality, it becomes clear that our politics, economy, and culture must actively learn new post-modern ways of being and doing, and adapt appropriately. That is the task ahead. Trying to shore up or restore the collapsing edifice of modernity is a fool’s errand.

...

Tănăsescu is Research Professor of the Fund for Scientific Research at the University of Mons, Belgium, where he writes extensively about human relations with nature, drawing deeply on anthropology, sociology, politics, and law.

A key challenge that Tănăsescu tackles in Ecocene Politics is the trap of capitalist modernity – its ways of thinking and relating to the world, and how to move beyond them. His basic answer: to develop a “restorative ethics of mutualism” based on social reciprocity, responsibility, and vulnerability.

Inspired by French social philosopher Bruno Latour, Tănăsescu argues for a politics based on relationality – a theme that commoning obviously advances. The point, he argues, is to get beyond modern notions of individualism, rationality, separation from nature, and capital accumulation, and into a realm of mutualism.

How might we move in such directions? Tănăsescu proposes that we develop “renovative practices” – a term that “expresses both the necessity of radical change and the impossibility of returning to some idealized past.” To evoke the shift of perspective that humans need to develop, he tells the concrete, mundane story of pruning olive trees in Puglia, Italy.

The successful nurturing of olive trees is a complicated act of co-creation and love between humans and olive trees in very particular locations. Human culture enters into a deep relationship with what the living plant itself wants and needs. This requires attention to the larger “mosaic of landscapes and micro-climates” in the region because “every little spot is impossible to understand outside of a history of generative interaction, and outside of a familiarity with that spot.”

Because there is such a “highly complex assemblage that nurtures the health of an olive tree, the act of pruning” (the judicious, selective cutting of tree branches) is “highly ritualized," notes Tănăsescu. It's something done by trusted elders who understand pruning as a sacred art-form.

“One prunes for olives, but also for one’s children, for the beauty of the land, for the health of the soil, to heat oneself during winter, to make great food, for the longevity and beauty of the tree, out of a sense of duty for a land etched with mutual genealogies. Given pruning’s central role in human relationships with olive trees, it is impossible to explain it with instrumental reasoning; it resists, escapes, and overflows mere reasons, pointing towards the rich tapestry of reciprocity that can be articulated around it.”

A parable for modern times? In the traditional culture of olive tree pruning, Tănăsescu began to see how human-nature relationships had gone wrong in the modern era. He also saw, through traditional practices, how a relational ethic of reciprocity and respect for life could be cultivated at both individual and cultural levels.

For Tănăsescu, this book was a personal odyssey. While living precariously as an academic, he found himself living on unemployment benefits between one job and the uncertainties of his future. This proved to be creatively liberating. He was able to abandon a more impersonal, academic style of writing, and express his personal zeal and commitment to overcoming the limits of capitalist modernity.

“The book was not just about the ideas,” he explained, “but about a certain commitment to the difficulty of staying with the relationality of the world. You always have to unlearn ways of thinking.” For Tănăsescu, Ecocene Politics represents a bold attempt to transform our thinking about human existence, economics, culture, and politics in the face of dire ecological realities, especially climate change.

His concluding chapter on mutualism offers some practical, useful advice and many rich nuggets of insight and wisdom for commoners."

(https://www.bollier.org/blog/anthropocene-no-were-actually-entering-ecocene)

Discussion

Matthew David Segall:

"Mihnea Tănăsescu's “Ecocene” framing (you can read his open-source book here) fruitfully invites us beyond the stale anthropocentrisms inherited from the industrial logic of modernity—logics rooted in the Cartesian fantasy of a human subject standing above and apart from a mute, mechanistic nature. But he also warns against the opposite extreme—what could be called misanthropocentrism—a reversal in which the human remains at the center, now as a uniquely malignant disruptor of an otherwise perfect planet. This is a familiar trope in some strands of environmental discourse: “if only humans didn’t interfere, nature would remain in harmonious balance.” Yet as Tănăsescu argues, this too reinstates the human as exceptional—not as steward but as saboteur—reinscribing the very wound it seeks to heal.

Such views not only essentialize Nature as a timeless steady-state, but cast the human as somehow unnatural, a fall from ecological grace rather than a Gaian creature emergent from earth evolution. From the perspective of autopoietic biology and enactive cognition, there is no pre-given, pristine world out there awaiting our retreat or restoration. Rather, organisms—including humans—are co-creators of their worlds through dynamic structural coupling. Gaia, as Lovelock and Margulis have shown, is not a passive backdrop but a co-evolving semiotic field of reciprocal influence, an “ecopoietic” network within which the human is always already entangled.

Tănăsescu’s critique of ecotheology is instructive. He warns against the tendency to exalt humanity as either nature’s guardian or her consciousness incarnate—roles that, however sanctified, still unduly pedestalize the human. But there is an alternative to both dominion and disavowal. Process theology offers a way to affirm our unique capacities without imposing a hierarchy upon the rest of life. It invites us to think of the human not as a fixed type, but as a relational becoming whose meaning is not given in advance but co-created through our participatory knowing and doing.

There is a difference, then, between anthropomorphism—the projection of ourselves onto the nonhuman, rendering the whole cosmos our vanity mirror—and what I’ll call anthropometamorphism: a recognition of our capacity to be transformed by the more-than-human, to become with and through what is beyond us. We need not shatter the mirror but must step through it into alchemical mixture. The human, in this reframing, is not a detached prospector measuring matter by application of a universal grid, but a protean participant in the plural meshworks of Momma Mundi—a creative creature whose language and consciousness may become Gaia’s way of telling her own story."

(https://footnotes2plato.substack.com/p/the-power-of-vulnerability-in-a-wounded)

More information

• Video: Mihnea Tanasescu on Ecocene Politics