Anthropocene as Hope? Counternarratives

In Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation Jonathan Lear explored what happens when humans lose or are losing the concepts with which to pass on sustaining cultural stories and patterns to the next generation. Lear wasn’t writing about environmental issues; he focused on why some Native American tribes survived with more intact possible futures than others. Those who dug in their heels, looking for solutions based on old warrior narratives, did not fare as well as those who struggled to reimagine their place in radically changing circumstances—which in no way minimizes the unconscionable, unjust, and terrible losses that all tribes endured and continue to endure. For one prescient chief, Plenty Coups, “reimagining” meant realizing that most of the old ways were gone and that the tribe must adapt to the onslaught of change while mourning the loss of their culture as they knew it. It is my belief that our entire species is at a similar inflection point, that we must let go of what brought us to where we are, i.e., the extreme versions of the modernist progress, capitalist, carbon narrative. That narrative is still alive in fantasies of extreme forms of geoengineering. But we risk complacency if we believe that technological solutions are the silver bullet. Yet, as Elizabeth Kolbert makes starkly clear in her latest book: Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future, we will have to resort to some of them because we have created many situations with few exits other than more attempts at technological intervention.

However, it is possible to view the many narratives that have emerged in the phenomenon of environmental philosophy and environmental thinking generally, despite fractious internal disagreements, as a bundle of counternarratives filling in the vacuum left by the mechanistic metaphysics aligned with extreme progress narratives. In the broadest sense, there is an ongoing dialogue about our place and our responsibilities during this historical period, which is all to the good. The underlying theme of the participants, whether explicitly stated or not, is to assert interconnectedness. Debates about whether to be a biocentrist, an ecocentrist, a deep ecologist, a social ecologist, or an enlightened anthropocentrist occupy this rhetorical place—one that continues to displace the progress monostory that has helped usher in many of the calamitous problems we face. This is not to deny aspirations of progress; it is to reconceive what progress means—to inhabit the imaginative space that Plenty Coups had the wisdom to aim for.