The Politics of Earth Stewardship in the Uneven Anthropocene - Earth Stewardship: Linking Ecology and Ethics in Theory and Practice - page 152

egalitarian forms of knowledge. The Anthropocene casts a bright light of the politics
of knowledge production. The CLP's approach is working to create broader
approaches within “big science” to better connect ecology through broader ideas of
what Earth stewardship can be.

10.5 Implications for an Earth Stewardship Initiative

Here we propose that the Anthropocene is not only an era of anthropogenic change.
Instead we suggest that the Anthropocene's changes arise out of new processes
linked to a diversity of global assemblages. This reframing allows us to develop new
approaches for more holistically engaging with a broader and necessarily more
complicated articulation of Earth stewardship. Here we suggest that analyzing
global assemblages, as a new form of socio-ecological governance, allows us to bet-
ter articulate and understand how processes of uneven development often dispropor-
tionately impact vulnerable communities and environments, making them less
resilient to global environmental change. At the same time, we see how grassroots
social movements facilitate socio-ecological resilience even in contexts of “double
exposure,” as Leichenko and O'Brien describe.
From this new approach, Earth stewardship requires a willingness to recognize
the politics inherent to the Anthropocene. In other words, it requires us to grapple
with the complex ways our global connections create and maintain social and envi-
ronmental inequalities. Taking these politics seriously, necessitates asking who pro-
duces what kind of socio-ecological confi gurations and for whom? Or in other
words, this more holistic ethic is about formulating socio-ecological perspectives
that are radically democratic in terms of organizing the interconnected processes
through which ecologies we inhabit (humans and non-humans) come to be and
evolve into the future.
This more robust version of an anthropocenic logic, if applied to ecological
research and thinking, would be transformative and would necessitate the inclusion
of a whole range of alternative approaches to the status quo . It would situate as a
central pillar the view that processes of metabolic change are never socially or eco-
logically neutral; that socio-ecological conditions under which particular trajecto-
ries global environmental change occur sometimes destabilizes the coherence of
some people living in some places, while the “sustainability” of some people living
in some other places might be improved by those same conditions. In sum, a broader
political-ecological perspective on Earth stewardship in the Anthropocene exposes
the fundamentally uneven development of the global environmental system and
amplifi es the sorts of socio-ecological alternatives necessary for science and prac-
tice to do better at ameliorating environmental injustices the world over and sustain-
ability for some and ecological calamity for others.