O
n 9 May 2013 the iconic ‘Keeling Curve’ measured an average of over 400 ppm CO2 through the day. A symbolic threshold was crossed, that might not matter precisely in ecological terms, but which matters greatly in terms of contemporary global politics. It matters not only in terms of climate change but as a symbolic marker of the larger transformations underway, processes that now frequently invoke discussions in terms of the putative new geological epoch of the Anthropocene.
In the fifty-five years that the measurement devices, whose results are synthesized into the Keeling Curve, have tracked carbon dioxide levels, their concentration has risen from close to 310ppm, and as numerous commentators have recently emphasized, the rate is accelerating. This is despite two decades of discussions about how to act to prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system, to use the terms from the UN framework convention on climate change.
Add in concerns about biodiversity loss, ocean acidification and numerous other “environmental” concerns and the interference with other natural systems make it clear that while climate change is indeed serious, it is playing out in a system that is being transformed in other ways simultaneously. The rapid change in the atmosphere, with current levels of greenhouse gases unprecedented in human history, brings the human predicament into very clear focus; the symbolic 400 ppm marker highlighting the point.
Humanity is remaking the biosphere; producing the new natures in which the human future will play out. Hence the now widespread use of the term Anthropocene for the period of planetary history in which the dominant ecological force is humanity, or more precisely, fossil fueled industrial capitalist humanity.
Focusing on this new contextualization, of life in the Anthropocene, is now key for the geography discipline as it is for scholars in other parts of the academy. To get the key scholarly and related political questions into the new appropriate context requires among other many things a recognition of the inadequacy of many modern categories for dealing with current dilemmas.
While readers of the pages of this journal will remember the attempts to formulate such things as socio-spatial relations to transcend some of the pernicious dichotomies that bedeviled geography a generation ago, similar such considerations now matter greatly in terms of how the planetary system functions and our “place” within it.
The formulation of “natural systems” as used above here is itself no longer an adequate phrasing where numerous new “forcing mechanisms” of anthropogenic origin are in play. Natural environments are no longer in any meaningful sense the given context for human existence; they are being remade by land use changes, urbanization and by both technologies and species moved and recombined in numerous artificial assemblages. Atlases with their designations of planetary biomes frequently need replacement with a dynamic cartography charting the changing “anthromes” that are the new terrestrial ecological patterns that matter.
The presuppositions of nationalism and of territorial states, the political and methodological devices that designate societies as in particular spaces, are also profoundly challenged both by the flows and interconnections of globalization, and by the necessity for governance mechanisms to ensure the novel configurations we build don’t compromise ecological integrities for the future.
Globalization now has to be understood as a process of material transformation quite as much as a matter of trade, culture and politics crossing frontiers. The processes whereby business decisions are made to produce particular products by using certain technologies is key to understanding the future of the planet; economic geography has become essential to geomorphology.
The geopolitics of this are especially important; interconnections and cooperative ventures are key to governing the earth system. The Westphalian political imaginary of separate competing territorial states is a spatial arrangement singularly unsuited to the collective tasks ahead, but it is the institutional context within which we have to act. Reimagining ourselves as part of a biosphere we are actively remaking, rather than as either a separate species “on” a planet, or as separate nations competing for “space” has become a pressing pedagogic priority.
The 400ppm symbolic threshold marks but one milestone in the progress of the Anthropocene, but it emphasizes the most important point; humanity has made these circumstances, and it now has the task of thinking very carefully about what kind of future needs to be made and how to collectively do it if any notion of justice matters.
Four hundred parts per million is too high for the planetary climate system to remain more or less as it has been for human history; how social arrangements are to be configured to produce the next stage of human society and its spaces is the question for the current generation of social scientists, a matter most appropriately simply called “Anthropocene Geopolitics”.
