Telling Friends from Foes at the Time of the Anthropocene

In spite of its pitfalls, the concept of Anthropocene offers a powerful way, if used wisely, to avoid the danger of naturalization while ensuring that the former domain of the social, or that of the “human”, is reconfigured as being the land of the Earthlings or of the Earthbound. Like Aesop’s tongue, it might deliver the worst – or worse still, much of the same; that is, the back and forth movement between, on the one hand, the “social construction of nature” and, on the other, the reductionist view of humans made of carbon and water, geological forces among other geological forces, or rather mud and dust above mud and dust. But it might also direct our attention toward the end of what Whitehead called “the Bifurcation of nature,” or the final rejection of the separation between Nature and Human that has paralyzed science and politics since the dawn of modernism. The lecture is dedicated to Clive Hamilton.