The Politics of Earth Stewardship in the Uneven Anthropocene - Earth Stewardship: Linking Ecology and Ethics in Theory and Practice - page 138

we offer two conceptual frameworks that contribute to an ethics of Earth
stewardship.
First, we argue that the Anthropocene, as a lens for understanding global envi-
ronmental change, makes certain processes of change visible, while blinding us to
others. We examine how insights from political ecology help us to see the
Anthropocene as an uneven process of global change. A political ecological
approach suggests that particular agents (social groups, corporations, nations) have
caused the global environmental change we face today, instead of blaming a gener-
alized species, Homo sapiens . Unsustainable practices that are detrimental to life (in
all its human and non-human complexities) need to be sanctioned and/or remedied.
Complementarily, more sustainable worldviews, forms of knowledge, values, eco-
nomic and ecological practices should be respected and eventually adapted as we
develop new models of Earth stewardship (Rozzi 2013 , p. 10).
Second, we introduce the concept of the “global assemblage,” a framework
adopted widely in the social sciences (Collier and Ong 2005 ; Sassen 2006 ). Many
scholars in the social sciences and humanities draw upon “assemblage theory,” a
theoretical approach indebted to the relational philosophy of Donna Haraway
( 2008 ), Bruno Latour ( 1993 , 2004 ), and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari ( 1987 ;
DeLanda 2006 ). While distinct, this scholarship shares an understanding of world
making, or life, as a dynamic process of becoming beings in the world through
changing constellations of humans, other species, technologies, and institutions.
Like many of our colleagues in ecology, we, as anthropologists, geographers,
and philosophers, share research approaches that focus on a range of different kinds
of socio-ecological relationships that are embedded at different spatial and geopo-
litical scales within communities, ecosystems, biomes, and the biosphere (cfr. Wu
2013 ). While these methodological and conceptual lenses provide a rich analytical
framework for understanding the complexities of social and environmental change,
we suggest that Earth stewardship requires more deliberate inclusion of conceptual
approaches that help us to understand how the “local” articulates with and is trans-
formed by economic and cultural globalization and global climate change.
When Arthur Tansley ( 1935 ) developed his ideas about ecosystems, he sug-
gested that they were not simply comprised of “natural” dynamics, but also human
made dynamics. In so doing, he laid the foundations for understanding the
Anthropocene, forcefully arguing for a new conceptual apparatus for ecology:
We cannot confi ne ourselves to the so-called “natural” entities and ignore the processes and
expressions of vegetation now so abundantly provided by man [sic]. Such a course is not
scientifi cally sound, … The “natural” entities and the anthropogenic derivates alike must be
analyzed in terms of the most appropriate concepts we can fi nd (1935: 304).
Following Tansley and others, political ecologists have developed approaches
that analyze the complex ways “natural” entities are transformed and contested
through changing social contexts. However insightful, Tansley and early political
ecologists were writing at a time before globalization and global institutions began
to transform ecological processes and functions to the extent we all recognize today.
In this chapter, we suggest the Anthropocene is an epoch constituted by processes
of socio-ecological change that are no longer localized, as they were for most of