Sara’s Reviews > The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us > Status Update

Fusion and omnipotence, these sentiments characteristic of early infancy, lie at the basis of such ‘post-nature’ discourse, participating in the dream of a total absorption of nature into the commercial technosphere of contemporary capitalism

This fable, claiming to break with the world-view of the moderns that it incriminates, in the end actually reproduces it. It proceeds from the same regime of historicity that dominated the nineteenth century and a part of the twentieth, in which the past is assessed only as a backdrop, for the lessons it yields for the future, and in a representation of time as a one-directional acceleration.

Deriving from these ‘closed world’ views came the metaphor of ‘Spaceship Earth’ that seen from the Moon suggests its finite and fragile character … not without giving a new sense of geo-technocratic power, the pleasure of imagining oneself piloting the whole system.

Indeed, quantifying nature is today big business, just as quantifying the economy had been after the Second World War.

A narrative that makes the management of the Earth system a new object of knowledge and government.

Instead of a concentric view in which the economy is within the social, itself framed by a thousand feedback loops within the biosphere and the Earth system, the environment became a new column in the bookkeeping of big corporations, which gave themselves new sustainable development divisions. The project of the ‘green economy’, born within international institutions in recent years, accentuates this development.

In place of ‘environment’, there is now the Earth system. While triumphant industrial modernity had promised to prise us away from nature, its cycles and its limits, placing us in a world of boundless progress, the Earth and its limits are today making a comeback. We are facing ‘the intrusion of Gaia’, in the words of Isabelle Stengers.

This story of awakening is a fable. The opposition between a blind past and a clear-sighted present, besides being historically false, depoliticizes the long history of the Anthropocene.