Anthropocentrism and the Anthropocene
There is little doubt that the questions of anthropocentrism and the Anthropocene are profoundly interrelated. Yet, posing the two questions separately seems to trigger characteristically different responses that lead to opposing effects. Ask the question of the Anthropocene in the human and social sciences, and you will immediately get swallowed in the swirl of fierce debates and disagreements over definitions, beginnings and origins, historical responsibilities, and the simultaneous demands of foregrounding social differentiations and addressing humanity holistically. Ask the question of anthropocentrism, however, and the conflicts over the Anthropocene suddenly begin to tame into a relatively consensual view that spotlights centuries of human-centered thought and action as principal drivers of today’s Anthropocene crises.
On the one hand, understandings of the Anthropocene are many. You might go with the majority of the human and social sciences and use the Anthropocene in the broadest (and vaguest) sense as a placeholder for human-environment interactions. Instead, you might as well emphasize the chronostratigraphic context, in which the Anthropocene is currently under consideration for formalization in the Geological Time Scale on the level of epoch with a mid-twentieth-century onset.See the work of the Anthropocene Working Group, tasked with investigating the formalization of the Anthropocene as a unit in the Geological Time Scale. For instance, Zalasiewicz et al., “The Working Group on the Anthropocene: Summary of Evidence and Interim Recommendations,” Anthropocene 19 (2017): 55–60; Jan Zalasiewicz et al., “The Anthropocene within the Geological Time Scale: A Response to Fundamental Questions,” Episodes: Journal of International Geoscience (2023), Online First article, available at: https://doi.org/10.18814/epiiugs/2023/023025. Or you might find it more plausible to blend these views and think that human-environmental relations reach a point where human impact on the environment becomes geological, and debate whether this starts with the domestication of animals, with European colonial expansion, or with industrial modernity and the rise of a fossil fuel economy.To provide a brief sample, for a view that sees the Anthropocene coeval with the Holocene by virtue of associating it with the human domestication of plants and animals, see Bruce D. Smith and Melinda A. Zeder, “The Onset of the Anthropocene,” Anthropocene 4 (2013): 8–13. For linking it with early European colonialism, see Heather Davis and Zoe Todd, “On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene,” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geography 16, no. 4 (2017), 761–780. For foregrounding industrial modernity, capitalism, and the fossil fuel economy, see Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History, and Us, trans. David Fernbach (London: Verso, 2016). For the Anthropocene and the Great Acceleration of the second half of the twentieth century see Will Steffen et al., “The Trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration,” Anthropocene Review 2, no. 1 (2015), 81–98.
Among several other options, one might also think, like I do, that the Anthropocene makes little sense – even in the human and social sciences – without acknowledging the context of its development in Earth System science.For an argument for taking Earth System science seriously in human and social scientific engagements with the Anthropocene, see Zoltán Boldizsár Simon and Julia Adeney Thomas, “Earth System Science, Anthropocene Historiography, and Three Forms of Human Agency,” Isis 113, no 2 (2022), 396–406. In that sense, the Anthropocene does not simply refer to broad “human impact” on the planet, on “nature,” or on the “environment.” Rather, it means a fairly recent predicament in which human activity in the differentiated social world attains a systemic character in pushing the state of the Earth – viewed as an integrated system – out of the Holocene conditions that support the human societal endeavor into conditions that might no longer be hospitable to human societies. Even though the issue of human-induced climate change dominates public discussions, the anthropogenic transformation of the climate system is only but one of the many transformations of the Earth’s systems as driven by human activity.For an overview of anthropogenic transformations of the Earth System, see the planetary boundaries framework. Johan Rockström et al. “Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” Ecology and Society 14, no. 2 (2009), art. 32; Will Steffen et al. “Planetary Boundaries: Guiding Human Development on a Changing Planet,” Science 347:6223 (2015), 1259855–8. The Anthropocene neither climate change or any singular human-induced environmental change, but anthropogenic Earth System transformation.
On the other hand, underlying all conflictual interpretations of the Anthropocene and all debates about when has the Anthropocene begun and what social forces and systems can be linked with it the most closely, there is little contestation over the question of what lurks behind any and all of these social forces and systems linked the Anthropocene: anthropocentrism. What is more, regardless of what one thinks about the question of what the Anthropocene is, there is a profound convergence on the question of what should be done next: anthropocentrism needs to be overcome. And, indeed, the imperative is the most reasonable. If what landed us in the Anthropocene predicament are human-centered modes of thinking and acting that see and treat everything and anything nonhuman as means to achieving human ends, then it appears to be both logical and sensible to suggest that the way forward consists of becoming non-anthropocentric – or, at the very least, less anthropocentric.
Yet, this seems easier said than done. For as much as there is a relative consensus about the harms of centuries of pursuing human-centered action, the shared imperative to overcome anthropocentrism (as an adequate response to the Anthropocene) nurtures a cluster of paradoxes. And, in a way, this does not come as a surprise. For the paradoxes that emerge in Anthropocene context in relation to the imperative of overcoming anthropocentrism are not the first ones. They form only a recent cluster in a larger set of paradoxes around the question of anthropocentrism – the question that came to prominence in the second half of the last century.
To understand the novelty of the cluster of paradoxes that characterize the Anthropocene predicament, let me briefly review, first, the two central paradoxes of anthropocentrism as they came to be known in late modernity. It is against this backdrop that, in the second step, it becomes possible to explore the complexities of anthropocentrism in the Anthropocene more profoundly. Finally, in place of the conclusion, the many paradoxes of the Anthropocene will demand posing the question: can anthropocentrism even be overcome?
The Paradoxes as We Know Them
The environmental thought of the second half of the last century has developed several streams of problematizing anthropocentrism, from the deep ecology movement to animal studies. True enough, anthropocentrism needed to get problematized only in societies and knowledge systems that saw the human world in separation from the natural world. Unlike many indigenous societies, epistemologies, and cosmologies, Western societies and Western epistemologies came to that separation. According to Carolyn Merchant, this happened with the Scientific Revolution, when the emergence of a new mechanistic worldview that saw nature as an object of human control replaced a more organic view of human-nature relations that characterized pre-modern Europe.Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1990).
What this means is that, in Western societies, the problematization of anthropocentrism concerns both the very functioning and the most profound assumptions of modernity. The anthropocentrism at the heart of modernity is a social and philosophical complex: human-centered views and assumptions manifest in socio-economic systems and technology-driven societal practices that have an exploitative character both socially and environmentally. Nothing testifies to the point concerning the socio-environmental character of anthropocentrism more clearly than the long histories of extractivism and the more recent structural transformation brought about neo-extravist practices.See, for instance, Alberto Acosta, “Extractivism and Neoextractivism: Two sides of the Same Curse,” in Permanent Working Group on Alternatives to Development, Beyond Development: alternative Visions from Latin America (Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, 2013), 61–86; Maristella Svampa, Neo-Extractivism in Latin America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019).
Across the globe, environmental movements confront extractivism and other human-centered practices in their immediate social contexts on a daily basis. But for those movements to succeed – not in particular cases but altogether – it became necessary to address and properly understand the complexities of anthropocentrism at the more profound level of human-centered assumptions and views that fuel such practices. In the 1970s, Arne Naess did precisely this. In developing an ecosophy for the deep ecology movement – with ecosophy being understood as “a philosophy of ecological harmony and equilibrium.”Arne Naess, “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement. A Summary,” Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 16, no 1 (1973), 99. – Naess laid out the movement’s premises by prioritizing the most profound level of presuppositions. This doesn’t mean that deep ecology would remain uninterested in linking social action with its philosophical premises. To the contrary; the movement did so in a rather organic fashion. It is only that, in an article from 1973 that is seen today as the inception of deep ecology, Naess presented the “rejection of the man-in-environment image in favour of the relational, total-field image” that sees “organisms as knots in the biospherical net or field of intrinsic relation” as the first and thus the most foundational of the seven tenets of the movement.Arne Naess, “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement,” 95.
Little wonder that the foundational paradox of anthropocentrism, detected by the environmental thought of the time, also works on the level of world apprehensions. In the words of Christopher Manes from 1990, “the paradox of anthropocentrism is that a world conceived of only with human ends in mind seems destined to become inhospitable to any human ends in the long run.”Christopher Manes, Green Rage: Radical Environmentalism and the Unmaking of Civilization (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1990), 142. Needless to say, these words attain new layers of meaning today, when the concept of the Anthropocene captures human activities on the level of the Earth System, and when, consequentially, the paradox also becomes a systemic one. More on this later. For now, what seems more important is to trace a second paradox that that was known prior to the rapid spread of the Anthropocene concept in the new millennium.
The second paradox of anthropocentrism emerges out of the acknowledgement of the first one, and it revolves around the aim to repair the harms of anthropocentrism. For, as soon as one comes to the recognition that anthropocentrism consumes the planet, it becomes essential to develop practices, ways of thinking, epistemologies, cosmologies, worldviews, and systems on knowledge free from human-centered assumptions.
In the last decades of the twentieth century, alongside deep ecology, several knowledge formations have attempted to overcome an anthropocentrism on this basis. In the human and social sciences, animal studies was among the pioneers of such new knowledge formations. Consequently, it was also among the first ones that came to debate a paradox of anthropocentrism that seemed intrinsic to the imperative of developing non-anthropocentric forms of knowledge. In scrutinizing its own premises, animal studies came to be increasingly concerned with the aporetic nature of animals becoming objects of human studies. At the turn of the millennium, Erica Fudge phrased the ethical conundrum at the heart of such exercise with exceptional clarity by saying that “instead of undercutting the domination of humanity, reading animals may actually reveal the continuing centrality of humanity: paradoxically, the various anthropocentrisms which the study of animals might be attempting to counter are reproduced in its very act of being. We read animals,” continued Fudge, “as if they were texts, just as human cultures have exploited animals as if they were objects.”Erica Fudge, “Introduction to Special Edition: Reading Animals,” Worldviews 4, no 2 (2000), 103.
The Paradoxes of Anthropocentrism in the Anthropocene
By the end of the last century, two main paradoxes of anthropocentrism crystallized in environmental thought and scholarly research. The paradoxes showcase the intricacies of human-centeredness, entrenched in the emerging modern worldview in the wake of the Scientific Revolution. On the one hand, following centuries of anthropocentric action and thinking, the conclusion became inescapable that the modern pursuit of human ends might result in effectively ending the human societal endeavor by virtue of making the planet inhospitable to human. On the other hand, the early efforts directed at overcoming anthropocentrism themselves seemed to reproduce the very human-centered assumptions and practices that they hoped to dismantle.
Enter the Anthropocene. Just about the time of the crystallization of the second paradox of anthropocentrism, the Anthropocene concept entered wider circulation. And, as discussed earlier, in the broader context of Anthropocene research across disciplines, long-term historical patterns of anthropocentric modes of acting and thinking came to be held responsible for leading up to today’s Anthropocene crises.
What happens then to the paradoxes of anthropocentrism in the Anthropocene? Do the old paradoxes of anthropocentrism (the ones intrinsic to modernity) simply get enveloped in a new Anthropocene context? Or do these older paradoxes rather vanish and came to be replaced by new ones? Well, neither and both. It seems to me that the modern paradoxes of anthropocentrism gain new dimension by being scaled up in the Anthropocene, while, at the same time, new paradoxes also arise by virtue of the emergence of new forms of anthropocentrism and anti-anthropocentrism. The result is a fairly complex picture in which human-centered action and thought is confronted on all fronts, and, at the same time, persists even in acts of its persecution.
Let me briefly survey of the paradoxes of anthropocentrism in the Anthropocene by singling out what I think are the four central ones. In the remaining pages of this essay, I will attempt to articulate these paradoxes in the shape of four theses. Two of the paradoxes of anthropocentrism concern old ones gaining new dimensions in the Anthropocene, while two further paradoxes represent novel ones, specific to the Anthropocene predicament. However, regardless of whether old or new, there is a defining characteristic of the paradoxes of anthropocentrism in the Anthropocene that the coming pages will spotlight: the systemicity of the paradoxes in the Anthropocene.
1. Anthropocentrism is a driver of the emergence of the Anthropocene
To see what the systemic character of the paradoxes of anthropocentrism in the Anthropocene means, consider, as an entry point, how the paradox that Christopher Manes attributed to late-modern environmental thought becomes now associated with the Anthropocene itself. In a way, the resulting paradox is the most straightforward one. Among the four paradoxes, it probably has the least added value by the Anthropocene context beyond its newly acquired systemicity, but this is precisely what makes it highly illustrative of how the systemic framing of the paradox makes Anthropocene paradoxes qualitatively different from environmentalist ones.
Whereas twentieth-century environmentalism has already come to the realization that the result of the pursuit of human ends is a planet that no longer supports any human pursuit, making the same argument in the Anthropocene context sees human-centered action as the driver of Earth System transformations. At stake is no longer the alteration of “nature” or the “environment,” which can easily be argued to have a history as long as the history of human life. What human-centered modes of acting acquire in the Anthropocene is a new form of agency on previously inconceivable scales: Earth System agency.On Earth System agency, see Simon and Thomas, “Earth System Science, Anthropocene Historiography, and Three Forms of Human Agency,” esp. 404–406.
2. Overcoming anthropocentrism is the paramount human end in the Anthropocene
While interrogating its own assumptions, animal studies encountered a paradox that must be of concern for most, if not all, anti-anthropocentric knowledge formations and societal practices: the reproduction of anthropocentrism by efforts aimed at overcoming it. Just like in the previous case, transferring the paradox into the Anthropocene frame means vesting it with a systemic character.
In the Anthropocene, the imperative of refraining from treating the planet and planetary life as means to human ends becomes the ultimate human end that aims to secure the maintenance of the human lifeform. Or, as I phrased it elsewhere, the inescapable anthropocentrism of contemporary forms of post, non- and anti-anthropocentrism is provided by the fact that it matters to humans that humans matter less.Zoltán Boldizsár Simon, “Two Cultures of the Posthuman Future,” History and Theory 58:2 (2019), 180. Scaling down anthropocentrism and developing non-anthropocentric modes of thinking and acting has become an indispensable self-interest of contemporary societies, a very human end that demands immediate realization. If humans now treat nonhuman lifeforms, nature, and the environment differently, it is because this is the means that serves best the reigning human ends of the day.
The paradox here is not merely the philosophical one that highlights the inescapability of the fact that dismantling human-centeredness remains to be thought by humans. The systemic paradox of overcoming anthropocentrism in the Anthropocene is about keeping on mobilizing all and any means to achieve human ends, whatever happens to suit self-interest, and about the fact that, at this point in time, the principal means has become anti-anthropocentrism itself. But if anti-anthropocentrism is the means, then there must be an end, too. And, in recent discussions on overcoming anthropocentrism, the end to which anti-anthropocentrism is the means appears to be as elemental as it gets: human survival.
Now, none of this means that seeing the human enmeshed in a web of planetary life wouldn’t be a desirable ethical, political, social, and cultural imperative, against centuries of human-centered exploitation of the planet and its lifeforms, and the organically linked exploitation the of poor by the wealthy in the socio-political domain. What the paradox shows is only that even if overcoming anthropocentrism is desirable, then it is desirable precisely because it is pictured as a means that has no alternative when it comes to working toward the towering end of securing human survival.
As a case in point for the first two paradoxes, consider the reasoning of Eileen Crist and Helen Kopnina, from 2014. Even without explicitly framing their views within the Anthropocene context,Crist, in fact, is critical to the Anthropocene concept, seeing what she calls “Anthropocene literature” and “Anthropocene-think” as discourses responsible for naturalizing human impact. See Eileen Crist, Abundant Earth: Toward an Ecological Civilization (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019), 94–102. The coming pages will return to the extent that such interpretations, despite all their merits, misunderstand the Earth System science concept of the Anthropocene. their reasoning testifies to the novel character of both the workings of anthropocentrism and the need to overcome anthropocentrism in the systemic frame of interacting anthropogenic transformations on a planetary scale:
“Yet today there is something new under the sun: A dawning recognition of the need to contain the ill side effects of human expansionism. This need has arisen because the disregard of any limits to economic growth, population increase, industrial food production, energy use, and the spread of human settlements and industrial infrastructure is backfiring against humanity itself. The nonstop advance of the human enterprise—hitherto unproblematic in only having consequences for dismissable others—is ramifying in ways that are jeopardizing people and perhaps civilization as a whole: rapid climate change, water shortages, pollution, and resource depletions to mention some high-priority issues for human welfare. A mounting sense of troubles imminent on humanity’s horizon is a signal feature of our time.”Eileen Crist and Helen Kopnina, “Unsettling Anthropocentrism,” Dialectical Anthropology 38 (2014), 391.
The endgame of the “mounting sense of troubles” Crist and Kopnina links with “jeopardizing people and perhaps civilization as a whole” is, of course, the discontinuation of the human societal endeavor at best or the discontinuation of human life on Earth at worst. The anti-anthropocentric imperative is mobilized in order to avoid such scenarios, in society and scholarship alike. As to the latter, it is perhaps Ewa Domanska who ties together human survival as the end and anti-anthropocentrism as the means the strongest. In arguing for the integration of historical studies into a larger family of post-anthropocentric human and social scientific scholarship, Domanska answers the question “what kind of humanities do we need today?” by claiming that “we need the kind of knowledge, cognition and human science that have survival value and might help in the protection and continuation of the species.”Ewa Domanska, “Beyond Anthropocentrism in Historical Studies,” Historein 10 (2010), p. 121.
3. The Anthropocene simultaneously decenters the human and invites anthropocentrism
Whereas the old paradoxes of anthropocentrism gain a systemic character in the context of the contemporary predicament, the new ones are emerging as systemic paradoxes by virtue of being intrinsic to the Anthropocene. As in the previous case, the paradox revolves around the goal of securing the continuation of the human endeavor, but this time the paradox is encoded into the fabric the Anthropocene concept.
The very conception of the Anthropocene – conception as in both conceiving and conceptualizing the Anthropocene – already entails a double movement that decenters and re-centers the human at the same time. This is nevertheless not to say that the concept of the Anthropocene is anthropocentric per se. Quite the contrary. As its foundational move, the systems-thinking of Earth System science that informs the Anthropocene concept does the very opposite of what human and social scientific criticism habitually attributes to it: it decenters the human by seeing it within a relational view of the interacting subsystems of the Earth System. Systems-thinking about Earth – as any other systems-thinking – knows no center. It is a holistic way of thinking to the extent that it sees the Earth as one integrated system, and a relational way of thinking to the extent that it sees a complex web of interactions among the subsystems.
Yet, if relational systems-thinking about the Earth decenters the human, it does so only in order to call attention to how systems-level human activity transforms the Earth System and pushes it into states of functioning that are potentially no longer hospitable for human societies. Differently put, the scientific term of the Anthropocene decenters the human only in order to facilitate human action aimed at avoiding trajectories of the Earth System that would be perilous for the human endeavor on the planet. And the mobilization of human action on a planetary scale, the mobilization of action aimed at steering clear of what seems a catastrophe for humans, invites an anthropocentric view that, again, sees the planet in terms of what suits the human endeavor.
The Earth System has no perilous states and catastrophic prospects as such; it only has perilous states and catastrophic prospects for human perceptions. Regardless of where one stands in the Anthropocene debate, there seems to be a broad agreement over seeing Anthropocene prospects potentially disastrous or even cataclysmic. This is the spirit in which Earth System science papers speak of Earth System trajectories that would be “uncontrollable and dangerous to many” and would potentially pose “severe risks for health, economies, political stability […] and ultimately, the habitability of the planet for humans.”Will Steffen et al., “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene,” PNAS 115, no 33 (2018), 8256. This is the spirit in which human and social scientific critique calls for overcoming anthropocentrism, as in the words quoted earlier about how the “nonstop advance of the human enterprise” is now “jeopardizing people and perhaps civilization as a whole.”Crist and Kopnina, “Unsettling Anthropocentrism,” 391. And this is the spirit in which conceptualizations of Anthropocene predicament across the human and social sciences – such as the “Great Planetary Contraction,”Patrice Maniglier , « Introducing Les Temps qui restent », Les Temps qui restent, Numéro 1, Printemps (avril-juin) 2024. referring to the shrinking place available for humans in the Anthropocene – keep on spotlighting the contemporary predicament as one that centers around the fate of the human endeavor on planet Earth, despite the fact that the Anthropocene concept in Earth System science is not about humans but about the Earth System.
As soon as the future appears catastrophic, the demand to act against the realization of such futures arises. And, again, regardless of the specifics of the kind of action one advocates, the sheer fact of acting on the imperative to avoid planetary-scale catastrophe requires planetary-scale human action that continues to interfere with the planet and planetary life on the basis of the demand to satisfy human needs.Zoltán Boldizsár Simon, The Epochal Event: Transformations in the Entangled Human, Technological, and Natural Worlds (Cham: Palgrave 2020). There are, evidently, crucial differences between advocating “planetary stewardship” as some Earth System science papers do in trying to keep Earth System trajectories on “Stabilized Earth;”Steffen et al., “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene;” Will Steffen et al., “The Anthropocene: From Global Change to Planetary Stewardship,” AMBIO 40 (2011), 739–761. between siding with ecomodernism in aiming to upscale technological capacities, carrying forward the modernist project of mastery over nature, and fancying the prospect of a “good Anthropocene;”John Asafu-Adjaye et al., An Ecomodernist Manifesto (2015), 6. Available at: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5515d9f9e4b04d5c3198b7bb/t/552d37bbe4b07a7dd69fcdbb/1429026747046/An+Ecomodernist+Manifesto.pdf or between calling for downscaling the human endeavor and dismantling human expansionism.Crist, Abundant Earth; Eileen Crist, “Reimagining the Human,” Science 362, Issue 6420 (2018), 1242–1244. Yet, all differences aside, in the end, all such forms of action necessarily remain planetary in character and human-centered in their aims.
4. Even the idea of the voluntary human extinction remains anthropocentric in assuming that humans know best what would be the best for the planet
So far, human-centeredness seems indestructible. If you keep the front doors closed, it returns in the back door. It seems that as long as there are humans, there will be anthropocentrism. So what if humans are no longer? What if we do not simply scale down the human footprint on the planet, but phase out human existence once and for all so that planetary life can thrive? To be clear, these are not hypothetical questions that I entertain for the sake of abstract argumentation, but questions that animate certain positions at the fringes of environmental debates and discussions of the Anthropocene.
The recent decades have witnessed the emergence of lines of thought that consider voluntary human extinction as an adequate response to the acknowledgement of the role of human activity in driving the emergence and the crises of the Anthropocene. The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (VHEMT) has commenced its advocacy of human extinction by means of non-reproduction already in 1991,For the aims and goals of the movement, see their website: VHEMT. prior to the spread of the Anthropocene concept, but already at a time where the systemic character of the contemporary predicament came increasingly be recognized. Today, three decades later, Patricia MacCormack’s The Ahuman Manifesto echoes the ideas of VHEMT about phasing out human existence, but this time more explicitly in the Anthropocene context (even if MacCormack’s understanding of the Anthropocene has little to do with the concept as it has emerged in Earth System science). Patricia MacCormack, The Ahuman Manifesto: Activism for the End of the Anthropocene (London: Bloomsbury, 2020).
What brings ahumanism and the arguments of VHMET into a shared platform is that both present the idea of pursuing the goal of human extinction in the non-violent way of non-reproduction as the ethically right action as long as one takes seriously the imperative of decentering the human and as long as one valorizes an Earth-centered or life-centered view. What is more, both the VHEMT and MacCormack present the argument for human extinction not only as a desirable ethics but also as the only genuinely non-anthropocentric one. Along these lines – and in harmony with the analysis of the previous pages – MacCormack’s ahumanism contends that the goal of securing human survival cannot but maintain human-centeredness. In fleshing out a contrast between the premises of Extinction Rebellion and ahumanism, MacCormack criticizes the former’s anthropocentrism for seeing “the threat of ecological crisis primarily through the lens of a threat to human survival,” which, unlike ahumanism, “makes no room for the grace of stepping aside and embracing human extinction so that the world may flourish.”MacCormack, The Ahuman Manifesto, 146.
While MacCormack’s analytical claims about retained patterns of anthropocentrism seem correct, it is more doubtful whether ahumanism would offer a truly non-anthropocentric perspective. I assume that letting the world flourish aim to be liberatory in one way or another, freeing the world from under human exploitation. But what exactly would it mean for the world to flourish? Who decides about what makes the planet and planetary life “flourish”? To whom exactly does the world appear as flourishing? It is, of course, human perception that considers the planet as one that flourishes – and it does so in terms of what pleases the human eye and mind. Perhaps most of us would rather automatically think that such a flourishing state of the planet or condition of the Earth System is one that does not bear human imprint. May that image of the flourishing planet be one that pre-dates the emergence of human societies or may it simply be the image of a place on Earth that is (at least, relatively) out of human reach, it is an image without humans, or, more precisely, without humans of technologized societies. At the same time, however, it is also an image that is profoundly human. It is a human image of a planet without humans, an image that associates the abundance of planetary life with “flourishing,” and an image of a vivid picture that you see on the OLED screen while watching a documentary on National Geographic channel about Amazonian flora and fauna, rather than an image of the rocky planet of the Archean Eon, before the emergence of complex life.
Assuming what is good for the planet and appearing to know what satisfies the existence of a planet without humans are, of course, very understandable sentiments, but they also are very anthropocentric. Voluntary human extinction advocates a human decision on behalf of the planet and the entirety of planetary life, appears to know what is “good” even for a planet defined by human nonexistence, and associates that “good” with an image of the planet that is aesthetically appealing to socially sanctioned ways of human perception. In the end, even if there might indeed be many reasons to see voluntary human extinction as a more consequent form of non-anthropocentrism, it seems that there are just as many reasons to see it anthropocentrism upscaled to the extremes. The unexamined premise of voluntary human extinction is that, even in the absence of humans, the world must have a human end.
Against All Odds
Paradoxes are intrinsic both to the various forms of anthropocentrism and to the various forms of anti- and non-anthropocentrism. Does the sheer existence of these paradoxes render efforts to downscale or overcome anthropocentrism pointless? Absolutely not!
The stakes of the Anthropocene for the human societal endeavor are clear. It remains an essential societal imperative of the Anthropocene predicament to develop modes of human action and thought in contemporary technologized societies that no longer see the planet and planetary life as means to achieving human ends. The paradoxes show that the imperative has limitations. But making those limitations visible does not amount to erecting obstacles to the development of less anthropocentric or more consequently non-anthropocentric ways of organizing contemporary societies. Quite the contrary. What the paradoxes reveal is that the efforts that need to be mobilized to achieve anything that would even remotely resemble to shifting away from the human-centeredness that treats the planet as a human playground without considerations of the planet itself greatly exceed the level of current efforts.
Knowing the paradoxes means knowing that much more is needed. It means being conscious about the odds, as well as being conscious about the fact that working towards overcoming anthropocentrism amounts to working against all odds. Accordingly, and most importantly, the potential gains are proportionally massive. Given the intertwinement of exploitative patters in relations to the planet and planetary life, on the one hand, and exploitative patterns in relation to other humans, downscaling the former might potentially entail downscaling the latter. True enough, this might also be an anthropocentric contention – but, again, that would be just yet another paradox of anthropocentrism to come to terms with.