ABSTRACT
The Anthropocene highlights the need to see nature and culture in a more dynamic interrelation than at least Enlightenment reasoning and ethics had allowed. Indeed, it is commonplace in environmental thinking to criticize the facile binaries between subject and object and between human and nonhuman for having facilitated an anthropocentric and indifferent view of our treatment of the physical world. What these criticisms fail to recognize, however, is the challenge this confusion of boundaries between the human and the natural poses to the very idea of human agency. Enlightenment reasoning allowed us to conceive of ourselves as autonomous individuals who could trace our own accountability, but climate change has introduced the problem of a human agency that is so profoundly collective that accountability for the changes wrought on the climate is no easy matter to trace. In other words, our agency as emitters of carbon has resulted in climate change, and while traceable as a force, the collective nature of our agency has made it far too easy for individuals and nations to deny or hide their own accountability. For Dipesh Chakrabarty this means that we need to reconceive ethics: “in becoming a geo-physical force on the planet, we have also developed a form of collective existence that has no ontological dimension. Our thinking about ourselves now stretches our capacity for interpretive understanding. We need nonontological ways of thinking the human.” He reasons that “however anthropogenic the current global warming may be in its origins, there is no corresponding ‘humanity’ that in its oneness can act as a political agent” (2012, 13–14).
