The term Anthropocene rose to prominence around 2000 in the works of the ecologist Eugene Stoermer and the chemist Paul Crutzen, to describe our current geological era. The term denotes the period during which humans have had a dominant impact on the planet, and its climate and ecologies. Architecture is implicated with Anthropocenic changes to the climate because the built environment is a construction with social, spatial, material, and ecological consequences. As the architectural theorist Hélène Frichot explains, the Anthropocene describes a long period of entanglement between “ecologies, economies and technologies in an all-pervasive capitalist economic logic.”
Exactly when the Anthropocene era began has been the subject of debate. Some theorists have located its emergence in the development of agriculture, while others have pinpointed the growth of colonial plantation systems from the 15th century as a pivotal shift (and so suggested the terms Capitalocene and Plantationocene to emphasise the fact that not all humans are responsible for climate breakdown, but only those driving capitalist projects for extractive and exploitative profit). Others have suggested 19th century industrialism, or an even later mid-20th century moment of great acceleration in fossil fuel use, petrochemical production, and plastic pollution. Whatever the date of its inception, the Anthropocene implicates human activities in climatic changes, particularly, human activities that depend on separating a determined category of ‘human’ from the rest of nature.
The Anthropocene’s narratives of causes and effects, and of dates of origin, suggest a particular relationship to time that is based on linear models of past, present, and future. Much current thinking around climate and the built environment is based on such linear thinking, with the future simply seen as a progressive step up from the present in a manner that ignores the violations of the past. Terms such as climate emergency and crisis, while important in emphasising urgency, can obscure the long, slow, and unfinished history of climate devastations wrought by colonial and capitalist extractivism and exploitation. Emergency terms also remain wedded to a conception of time that drives a linear path towards progress or into apocalyptic decline. Linearity, however, is not the only way to think about time. The concept of revolution illustrates this through the word’s different uses. Agricultural, industrial, or political revolutions are commonly associated with an idea of a rupture that breaks from the past in pursuit of the new. The word revolution, however, also signifies turning, as in the revolution of a wheel. Revolution thus carries the suggestion of return, repetition, or circularity, and belongs to a conception of time based on a relation of integration with pasts that are not past. The concept also suggests a movement that does not occur as a gigantic bang, but as gradual change.
This non-linear and longer-term conception of time occurs in many cultures, knowledges, and traditions. Black critiques of empire and capitalism, for example, bridge histories of New World slavery to contemporary racial capitalism, exploring alternative practices of time and history as forms of resistance and world-making rooted in inheritance and intergenerational relations. Andean traditions of pachakuti, meanwhile, understand time as a recurrent act of balancing that involves human and other beings, and the climate itself. Pachakuti derives from the Quechua ‘pacha’ (meaning time and space, or the world), and ‘kuti’ (meaning revolution), and understands the necessity to re-balance the world through a turn of events that has the potential for renewal. Pachakuti characterises the Latin American practice of buen vivir, with its investment in maintaining forms of ancestral knowledge, including expertise on medicine and low-impact agriculture. Engaging the past in an ongoing and future-oriented practice of situated, localised knowledges ensures that technologies and methods tested over thousands of years remain used and useful. This contrasts with the dominance of technocratic thinking in current architecture, in which climate breakdown is seen as a problem to be ‘solved’ through technical fixes.
Learning from the past in such a way, and transmitting its lessons for the future, invites a wider consideration of epistemology—that is, how knowledges are produced, shared, and put to work. Learning from a deep past can refuse hierarchies of knowledges in which modern science and technology marginalise anything deemed traditional or dated. Working with contingency can also play a part here, allowing different routes to emerge from a situated context rather than imposing universal, linear, rules.
Without such reflection, the production of knowledges, spaces, and societies risks repeating past inequities in a rush to innovate through new discoveries, buildings, and technologies. Better to stay with the trouble, as the philosopher and environmentalist Donna Haraway puts it; to make unexpected alliances in the ruins of capitalism, in the words of the anthropologist Anna Tsing. Or, as the geographer Stephanie Wakefield writes, to find alternative modes of living in the back-loop that opens when time is freed from linearity, and the past comes to productively bear on the present. From entangled spaces and deep, back-looping time, we might repair estranged planetary social groups (human and otherwise). The term climate breakdown is an invitation to break open calcified ways of knowing and doing. Emergency is now seen not as something needing an urgent fix, but as a setting containing possibilities for emergence.
Annotated bibliography
Karen Barad. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
In this book by the theoretical physicist and feminist theorist Karen Barad, the idea of entanglement creates an account of the world as one whole, rather than as composed of separate natural and social realms. Drawing on research in quantum physics, Barad reworks understandings of space, time, matter, and causality, to emphasise the constitutive agency of intra-activity between different elements.
Bruno Latour. We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
According to the social scientist Bruno Latour, modernity’s hallowed distinctions between nature and society, and between human and thing, would have struck our ancestors as nonsensical. Moreover, modernity itself fails to achieve such distinctions. In this book, Latour maps connections between nature and culture to emphasise humanity’s continued entanglement with more than itself, creating a compelling argument for us to rethink modernity. If we understand the reality of our interconnected existence, Latour argues, then epistemologies of other cultures, past and present, including those of our so-called primitive, premodern ancestors, suddenly yield new insight on living an integrated social and planetary life.
Jason W. Moore. Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2016).
This edited volume gathers different scholars’ approaches to questioning the idea that we are living in the Anthropocene, literally the “Age of Man,” by arguing that the term Capitalocene better describes the causality of contemporary climate change, by placing it in the age of capital. Challenging conventional practices of dividing nature and society, the book offers a connective view within the biosphere, or in the words of Jason Moore, “the web of life”.
Kyle Whyte. “Is It Colonial Déjà Vu? Indigenous Peoples and Climate Injustice”. In Humanities for the Environment: Integrating Knowledge, Forging New Constellations of Practice, edited by Joni Adamson and Michael Davis (Oxford: Earthscan, 2016), 88-104.
In this essay, the Potawatomi Nation philosopher and environmental activist Kyle Whyte calls for a longer historical account of climate change that accounts for colonial violence inflicted against Indigenous peoples over the past centuries. His argument makes an important intervention into climate breakdown discourses rooted in the contemporary and vocabularies of emergency, as well as Anthropocene debates about the origins of climate change. In continued contexts of resource extraction, Whyte writes, “climate injustice, for Indigenous peoples, is less about the spectre of a new future and more like the experience of déjà vu”.