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invested with human constructs and ultimately therefore open to manipulation in
human politics. The deployment of invasion narratives in Australia's border security
regime (though the analysis can easily be extended to other countries) reflects this
on-going imbrication between the control of nature and control of humans,
between ecology and eugenics, between conservationism and protectionism.
It is at this level that I have concerns with the universal human conception at
the heart of the Anthropocene because it has the potential to be used to reinstall
the white liberal human subject of the Enlightenment. We can already see this in
media attempts to locate the cause of climate change in Third World countries'
pollution and deforestation practices. These countries are therefore portrayed as
the cause of 'our' (read: Western) decline in living standards not simply in the
present but importantly in the future. Such arguments echo the racism touted by
Carr-Saunders'
The Population Problem
; this time through climate change. This
cultural anxiety around the polluting presence of non-Western countries obfuscates
not simply the history of colonisation and the British Industrial Revolution that
introduced such problems to the world, but also the present massive discrepancy
of pollution per capita between OECD countries and developing countries.
Yet the legacy of imperial ecology has also given us science fiction and with it
the possibility of imagining this kind of dystopic world. An environmentally
challenged world, far from uniting humanity under a universal 'human', might be
precisely the rhetorical space needed to reinvigorate old prejudices. There is a
strong eschatological literary tradition that has helped us imagine the dangers of a
post-human world (see Johnson, 2012). This literary tradition continues in more
recent natural disaster films, which envisage a post-apocalyptic world where power
is reinscribed through and onto environmental disasters (through the control of
water, control of reproduction). It is for this reason that postcolonialism must
remain one of the limits that tempers the excesses of the enthusiasm for the
Anthropocene in the humanities.
Notes
1 A meeting on the Anthropocene was held at the Geological Society of London on 11
May 2011, which featured in
Nature
,
Science
and
The Economist
and on the BBC. The
Anthropocene was a major theme at the 2011 Nobel Laureate Symposium and the
Mineralogical Society of Poland invited a keynote talk on the Anthropocene in
September 2011. The
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society
(2011) published a
special edition devoted to the Anthropocene. Meanwhile, journal articles on the natural
sciences on the Anthropocene increased to 331 in 2011 and Jacques Grinvald, an historian
of science, is publishing a new edition of his topic
La Biosphère de l'Anthropocène
in 2012,
which details the history of the concept of the Anthropocene from the biosphere.
2 See http://quaternary.stratigraphy.org/workinggroups/anthropocene/ (accessed 11
February 2013).
3 For work on ecopoetics, see Bryson (2002) and Killingsworth (2004). Ecocriticism is now
a large body of literature but for a good introduction, see Garrard (2004). For earlier
examples of ecocriticism, see Glotfelty and Fromm (1996) and Kerridge and Sammells
(1998), and see Coupe (2000) to trace its links to earlier Romanticism. For earlier
environmental criticisms of capitalism, see Caldwell (1972) and Stretton (1976). For
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