Security in the anthropocene: Environment, ecology, escape
| Date | 01 June 2017 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1354066116639738 |
| Author | Madeleine Fagan |
| Published date | 01 June 2017 |
E
JR
I
https://doi.org/10.1177/1354066116639738
European Journal of
International Relations
2017, Vol. 23(2) 292 –314
© The Author(s) 2016
Reprints and permissions:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1354066116639738
journals.sagepub.com/home/ejt
Security in the
anthropocene: Environment,
ecology, escape
Madeleine Fagan
University of Warwick, UK
Abstract
The anthropocene poses a set of conceptual challenges for the study of security in the
discipline of International Relations. By complicating the distinction between human and
nature, the concept of the anthropocene puts into question one of the key organizing
logics of upon which much security discourse is built: what would a security look like
whose subject was not modern man? This article offers a reading of environmental and
ecological approaches to security as two potential avenues for rethinking security in the
context of the anthropocene. This is done in order to demonstrate the dominance and
centrality of the nature/culture binary for conceptualizing the environment, ecology and
security. Such a common philosophical horizon problematizes and undermines the scope
for a critical reorientation of security thinking from either perspective. Drawing on R.B.J.
Walker’s concept of the politics of escape, the article suggests that in attempting to escape
the nature–culture binary, the move to ecology in fact, simultaneously reinscribes and
obscures this distinction, thereby limiting the potential of the concept of the anthropocene
to offer a critical framework with which to analyse the interplay of nature and culture in
contemporary security politics.
Keywords
Anthropocene, ecological security, environmental security, human security,
International Relations theory, security
Introduction
It is becoming increasingly accepted that humans have become a geological force, a devel-
opment significant enough that the proposal of a new geological era — the anthropocene
Corresponding author:
Madeleine Fagan, Department of Politics and International Studies, Social Sciences Building, University of
Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL, UK.
Email: m.fagan@warwick.ac.uk
639738EJT0010.1177/1354066116639738European Journal of International RelationsFagan
research-article2016
Article
Fagan 293
— is gaining currency. Coined by Crutzen and Stoermer in 2000 (Crutzen and Stoermer,
2000), the designation of the anthropocene is intended to convey the way in which human
existence since the advent of industrial modernity has left geologically significant traces.1
Crutzen defines it as ‘a new geologic epoch in which mankind has emerged as a globally
significant — and potentially intelligent — force capable of reshaping the face of the
planet’ (Clark, Crutzen and Schellnhuber, 2004: 1). The insertion of the human into the
geological means, argue Crutzen and Stoermer, that there is no ‘natural’ nature anymore;
humans have impacted on it everywhere (Rudy and White, 2013: 128). The advent of the
anthropocene, then, puts into question one of the key organizing logics of modernity on
which much security thinking is built: the separation between human and nature (Dalby,
2009; Dobson, 2006; Latour, 2004; Walker, 2006).
While geological in origin, in the humanities and social sciences, it is the broader
implications of destabilizing the human/nature dualism implied by the anthropocene that
has received most attention; the ‘anthropocene’ contains the Greek for ‘human’ and
‘new’, and the ‘anthropic’ refers to the role and place of humans. In this context, the
anthropocene might be thought of as naming ‘the context encompassing all the new
demands — cultural, ethical, aesthetic, philosophical, and political — of environmental
issues which are truly planetary in scale, notably climate change’ (Clark, 2012: v).
The anthropocene offers a construction of this new (place for the) human as simultane-
ously central and all-powerful, and as fragmented and insignificant. On the one hand, as
Tom Cohen has suggested, to think in terms of the anthropocene ‘seems the epitome of
anthropomorphism itself — irradiating with a secret pride invoking comments on our
god-like powers and ownership of the planet’ (in Clark, 2014: 23. Emphasis in original).
The corresponding ‘anthropocene environmentalism’ views the solution to climate change
not in the reduction of human interference and manipulation of the natural world, but in
its accelerated and more conscious manipulation (Barry, Mol, and Zito, 2013: 370).2
On the other hand, as Nigel Clark (2014: 27) has argued, by placing the human in a
geological timeframe — and so encouraging us to imagine worlds both before and after
it — the human begins to seem rather insignificant. Furthermore, the sheer complexity of
the conceptual challenges posed by conceiving of the problem of climate change in terms
of the anthropocene makes the imagination of a world that might be the place of this new
human a very difficult task. One reading of the anthropocene argues that it marks the end
of the world as an intelligible whole.3 As Timothy Clark (2013: 5) puts it: ‘What if such
a “world” had now to be seen as constituted in the denial of a realm of irreconcilable
conflicts, scalar disjunctions and imponderable non-human agency?’ The planetary prob-
lem of climate change poses questions of scale in terms of how we think timeframes,
individual and collective action, and responsibility. It also suggests that rather than a
symbiotic and co-evolving planetary system of humans and non-humans, a more apt
characterization might be one of conflict, indetermination or unstable relation between
the human and non-human.
In putting into question the human/nature distinction, the anthropocene poses an
important challenge to dominant ways in which the concept of security has been
approached. It destabilizes the organizing categories that animate much of the literature
produced by security studies — in both ‘traditional’ and ‘critical’ guises — in relation to
the environment and climate change: the distinction between referent objects; the logics
To continue reading
Request your trial