Narrow Results

The arrival of the Anthropocene entails an evolutionary tipping point that challenges basic precepts of political theory and modern science. Within this paper, emerging scholarship in political science, science and technology studies, and sustainability science are brought together to sketch out an approach for crafting more just and sustainable pathways in response to the crossing of critical thresholds in the Earth system. Accomplishing this task requires responding to the emerging reality of possibility, irreversibility, entanglement, and novelty that the Anthropocene and tipping points entail. I argue that grounding political projects in recognition of the unfolding and unpredictable terrain tipping points present allows for the opening of novel pathways toward a still possible just and sustainable planet.

In the wake of the 2017 hurricane season, discussions across the Caribbean have turned to the need to develop more resilient energy systems, particularly through the deployment of renewable energy sources. In this paper, we examine the post-Hurricane Maria rebuilding of Dominica’s electricity system in light of recent scholarship around the Anthropocene and the Caribbean, work that has heightened awareness of the entanglements between the earth’s geophysical forces and its socio-economic and geo-political relations. Drawing on archival research and key informants in Dominica, we describe the history of Dominica’s energy system, and then provide an overview of some of the energy rebuilding efforts in the country’s ongoing recovery from Hurricane Maria, particularly around the question of resilience. While we acknowledge critiques of resilience as a framework for disaster management, we also argue that resilience initiatives foster the potential for an Anthropocene reimagining of geosocial formations within the Caribbean. In the conclusion, we argue that the domain of energy, and in particular electricity, opens up important questions at the interface of social-ecological relations and the organization of collective life.

The contemporary climate change crisis is fundamentally different from what is classically understood as natural disasters, which refer to events whose impacts are restricted in both time and space. In the Anthropocene epoch, climate change disasters are being interpreted in a new language of crisis and unknown risks; it is riddled with divergent interpretations of climate responsibilities and binary framings of utopian and dystopian future. This chapter argues that the tragedy of the commons on a planetary scale will be hard to avoid unless the ideological and political roots of present-day understanding of disasters are explored and rendered visible. The language of boundaries and limits which dominate the Anthropocene discourse tends to collide with the narratives of development and global distributive justice, which remain dominant in the Global South. This chapter argues that an ahistorical framing of the Anthropocene presents an analytical challenge to multiple disciplines and especially for the study of International Relations, where the collision of world history with planetary history will be the first to become most visible. The chapter contends that the politics of climate change that seems so far driven by dystopian/utopian futures tends to obfuscate the questions of moral culpability, accountability, and asymmetry of state power and climate justice, which must be the dominant concerns in the present.

Nick Land once described hyperstitions as “semiotic productions that make themselves real” — stories that actualize themselves and produce their own realities, imagining new futures for us all. As the full effects of human industrial civilization continue to unveil themselves in the Anthropocene as the beginnings of a process that will soon render the planet Earth uninhabitable, it becomes essential to track the stories that are developing and expanding their own mutant machinic systems of reproduction in order to understand what futures will have been available to us. In this chapter, we seek to become students of the mechanisms of replicative processes of some of the hyperstitions that are at work in organizations, individual and collective, of the Anthropocene. To do this, we track the imbrication of a series of stories of Thomas the fieldmouse, a meeting about something called “sustainable innovation,” and journal entries about a mall that lives forever at the end of the world in order to understand hyperstitions and the role that they can play in the storying of the future.