Wartime for the Planet?

Amid the many discussions of how environmentalism and democratic politics might intersect, perhaps the greatest challenge for historians has come from the simultaneously emergent and epochal shift into the Anthropocene. This is because the Anthropocene signals a world ‘after nature’, but that means at least two things. First, that human beings have become geological agents, and that we have become conscious of our being geological agents, through an increasingly historical awareness of how our species has transformed planetary conditions of habitability. Secondly, and related to the first point, the once seemingly accepted divisions between a humanlycurated, and thus artificial, world of politics and a natural world or environment somehow separate from it, and indicative of a certain type of Western ‘modernity’, no longer seems tenable, if it ever was. However, as we shift, or rather stumble into the complex worlds of the Anthropocene, there is no clear point of origin around which to orient its political implications. In fact, its temporalities weave in and out of deep geological time, modern democratic time, the accelerated time of the post-1945 global order, and now into a sort of Anthropocene time of revision since 2000, the moment of its formal conceptual coining. Yet the pre-eminent theorist of history writing today, François Hartog, suggests that what he has elsewhere seductively termed a regime of historicity, that is, a sense of the complex connections between different sedimentary time-scapes of past, present, and future, is going to be difficult, if not impossible, to conceptualize in the Anthropocene. Why? ‘We have some experience of the world’s time’, Hartog writes, ‘but no experience of Anthropocene temporality is possible’ for human beings. Consequently, the construction of an Anthropocene ‘regime of historicity’ must be informed by ‘chronos time’ or the time of the world of globe – those temporalities that human experience can grasp – but still try to register the time of the planet (such as those temporalities of geological and thermal processes), which we cannot directly experience.