Geopolitan Democracy in the Anthropocene

Published date01 December 2017
DOI10.1177/0032321717695293
Date01 December 2017
AuthorRobyn Eckersley
Subject MatterArticles
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321717695293
Political Studies
2017, Vol. 65(4) 983 –999
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0032321717695293
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Geopolitan Democracy
in the Anthropocene
Robyn Eckersley
Abstract
The proposed new epoch of the Anthropocene, whereby humans have become the dominant
geological force shaping Earth systems, has attracted considerable interest in the social sciences
and humanities but only scant attention from democratic theorists. This inquiry draws out the
democratic problems associated with the two opposing narratives on governing the Anthropocene
– Earth systems governance and ecomodernism – and juxtaposes them with a more critical
narrative that draws out the democratic potential of the Anthropocene as a new source of critique
of liberal democracy and a new resource for democratic renewal. While Ulrich Beck welcomed
reflexive cosmopolitan democracy (understood as a civil culture of responsibility across borders)
as the appropriate response to the world risk society, this narrative develops an account of hyper-
reflexive ‘geopolitan democracy’ based on a more radical extension of democratic horizons of
space, time, community and agency as the appropriate response to navigating the Anthropocene.
Keywords
Anthropocene, ecomodernisation, geopolitan democracy, reflexive modernisation
Accepted: 2 December 2016
Should democrats be nervous about the Anthropocene? Coined at the turn of the
Millennium by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer (2000), the Anthropocene refers to a
proposed new geological epoch marked by the fact that humans have become the domi-
nant ‘geological force’ shaping the Earth’s systems. Epochs, like other geological time
periods, often mark upheavals in Earth’s history (Zalasiewicz et al., 2010: 2229), and the
Anthropocene is no exception. While the Holocene provided a relatively stable climate
which has been remarkably conducive to the development of human civilisation over the
past 11,500 years, the Anthropocene is set to be characterised by unpredictable and pos-
sibly abrupt Earth systems changes and tipping points.
School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia
Corresponding author:
Robyn Eckersley, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC 3010,
Australia.
Email: r.eckersley@unimelb.edu.au
695293PSX0010.1177/0032321717695293Political StudiesEckersley
research-article2017
Article
984 Political Studies 65 (4)
In 2009, a team of Earth systems scientists led by Johan Rockström et al. (2009) devel-
oped the complementary idea of ‘planetary boundaries’ and identified nine boundaries
within which human societies must operate to avoid abrupt, irreversible and potentially
catastrophic environmental change. Their 2015 update found that humans have already
transgressed the ‘safe operating space’ of four boundaries: climate change, biodiversity
loss and species extinction, land-system change and altered biogeochemical cycles
(Steffen et al., 2015). They also singled out the first two as ‘core boundaries’ because the
more we collectively transgress them, the greater the likelihood that we will drive the
Earth’s systems into a new and unpredictable state.
The Anthropocene has not yet received official recognition by the International
Commission on Stratigraphy and the International Union of Geological Sciences, despite
a recommendation by their Anthropocene working group that the middle of the twentieth
century should serve as the point of onset (Waters et al. 2016). But irrespective of whether
the stratigraphic community can agree on where to place a golden spike in the geological
time record, Earth systems scientists warn that humans are busy producing an Earth
which is likely to become increasingly inhospitable to human civilisation unless we stay
within the ‘safe operating space’ of planetary boundaries.
Hitherto, geology and Earth systems processes have been of little interest to students
of democracy. But the Anthropocene and the idea of planetary boundaries raise new and
daunting challenges for both democratic theorists and actually existing democracies. The
first interpretative challenge is to grasp what it means for humans to be a ‘geological
agent’. As Dipesh Chakrabarty (2009: 221) has put it, ‘The wall between human and
nonhuman history has been breached. We may not experience ourselves as a geological
agent, but we appear to have become one at the level of the species’. While the idea of a
fundamental divide between society and the environment, and between nature and cul-
ture, has been eroding for some time in the ecological humanities and social sciences, the
idea that humanity now exercises geological agency is novel: it represents a much more
totalising form of agency than local or regional environmental change, and it has already
produced irreversible and systemic changes on a planetary scale.
Rockström’s team of scientists developed the planetary boundary framework to sup-
port the global governance of Earth systems processes. But the democratic implications
of managing a concerted transition of this scale and magnitude remain unclear. If we are
now ‘in the planetary driver’s seat’, as Rockström (2015) suggests, does this mean that
humans have eclipsed other planetary drivers and have the foresight, knowledge and
political capacity to exercise geological agency by steering Earth processes within a safe
operating space? And who is the ‘we’ who should do the driving? If humans have become
an Earth-shaping force largely by accident rather than by design, then what are the pros-
pects of an intentional, democratic enactment of this ‘geological agency’ by humanity as
a collective and what form should it take?
I approach these three questions by first critically teasing out the democratic implications
of two prominent and opposing narratives of how to govern the Anthropocene. The first is
a story of rupture (the apocalyptic or ‘bad’ Anthropocene) and rational correction/recovery
through Earth systems governance to constrain human activity within safe planetary bound-
aries. The second is a story of continuity and further opportunity (the ecomodernist or
‘good’ Anthropocene) realised through further technological progress which pushes back or
otherwise manipulates planetary boundaries to safeguard human well-being. Despite their
stark differences, I show how both narratives share three common problems. First, they are
democratically troubling because they legitimise (albeit in different ways) the increasing

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