The Politics of Earth Stewardship in the Uneven Anthropocene - Earth Stewardship: Linking Ecology and Ethics in Theory and Practice - page 139

human history. We suggest that “global assemblages,” as a conceptual framework,
provides a sophisticated multi-scalar approach for analyzing these changes. In this
chapter, we demonstrate how diverse forms of global assemblages drive these
changes—with some forms facilitating and other forms hindering socio-ecological
resiliency. Our argument is that we only will be in a position to fully understand and
respond to the Anthropocene's challenges by acknowledging:

1. the diversity of human societies and cultures that are part of increasingly con-
nected world, and
2. the unbalanced power of contemporary global socio-ecological relations.

10.2 The “Uneven” Anthropocene

Though there have been important debates about the “start” of the Anthropocene,
most scholars locate its origins with European industrialization (Zalasiewicz et al.
2010 ). Not only did the Industrial Age herald practices of production that have led
to widespread degradation of the Earth's ecological systems, it also created pro-
found transformations in social, economic, and political relations. For most of
human history, our subsistence strategies (such as foraging, hunting, small-scale
agriculture) were predicated on local cultural expectations regarding the use and
meaning of the material world (plants, animals, land, water) and, importantly, by
social obligations regarding the distribution of resources among members of a com-
munity, as well as, for many peoples, social obligations to the material world (see
chapters by Kingsland and Mamani-Bernabé in this volume [Chaps. 2 and 6 ] ). Key
to the Anthropocene's shift has been a decoupling of societal obligations to other
fellow humans and nature, or Earth stewardship, from practices and ideologies of
societal reproduction. This decoupling has generated inequalities not only among
different societies and cultures, but stratifi cation within societies and cultures (pro-
ducing racial, gender, economic, and generational divisions), and inequalities
among human and non-human life.
These shifts in social-ecological relations are historically constituted and
unevenly deployed. In other words, there is a politics to the Anthropocene that is
often unrecognized in our discussions of “global environmental change.” American
anthropologist James Ferguson ( 1990 ) famously called the international develop-
ment industry an “anti-politics machine.” He argued that development efforts treat
social and environmental inequalities (such as food and water scarcity, loss of
ancestral lands, environmental degradation) as “problems” best resolved through
the application of modern technical solutions (such as techniques for intensifi ed
agricultural production to alleviate food insecurity). Ferguson's point is that this
apolitical framing masks the legacies of colonialism and ongoing global economic
exploitation. As Ferguson makes clear, development projects fail, in part, because
apolitical, technical approaches often reinforce the economic and structural inequal-
ities that have created the problems in the fi rst place (Ferguson 1990 ; see also
Escobar 1995 ).