The second reason has to do with some of the very worst things about the term’s Enlightenment legacy. The term appeals to a false universal of homogeneous “Man,” which was created with a white, Christian, heterosexual male person as the basis for the universal. Paying attention to that legacy can help us to figure out what’s happening on the planet. It allows us to ask, for example, why so many landscape modification projects were made without thinking at all about what their effects might be on the people who live around them as well as local ecologies. That problematic legacy can help us focus in on the uneven, unequal features of planetary environmental issues.

DH: It’s not that I disagree with anything that Anna said, and I also tend to want to work by addition and not by subtraction, multiplying terms to a point where you can foreground them and background them to do different work differently situated.

Also, I think the term Anthropocene has simply been adopted, and that it is no longer a question about whether to work within this category in productive ways and in the kinds of alliances that it encourages. I share very much with Anna the sense that my natural science colleagues understand the Anthropocene and can speak to me or to others about it while other terms—like Capitalocene, for example—kind of put them off. But this strength is also a problem.. My natural science colleagues—and for that matter myself and my colleagues in general—have a tendency to think that apparatuses and terminologies like, for example, climate change are going to be translatable somehow to all parts of the world, even if the phenomena in question are experienced differently.

For example, the astute peoples of the circumpolar north have developed Indigenous vocabularies and both analytical and experiential ways of talking about the changes in the ice, the changes in the waters, the changes in the position of stars in the sky because of the way sea ice and fog will refract differently and so on. These people, who live on the land might react to the notion of climate change as another southern importation that tends, yet once again, to make it almost impossible to propose local terms for analytical work.

I want to nurture—to somehow force, if necessary—the attachment sites and contact zones so that all of the players have to somehow learn each other’s idioms in a way that changes everybody so that no one remains the same as they were at the beginning and can perhaps find more collaborative, decolonial ways to address urgent problems. Often, Indigenous people are forced to learn southern idioms, but the reverse is much less true. That is not tolerable.

The power of a term like Anthropocene, it’s importance, has a very problematic quality. Then I’m also less generous than Anna about the potential of remembering the Enlightenment dimension of the “Anthropos” and of “Man” because I experience, in fact, among my colleagues across activist and scholarly worlds, a tendency to think that Anthropocene really does mean a species act. That the problem really is humanity, not “Man” in the Enlightenment sense, but humanity in its evolutionary social history on this planet— its increase in numbers, its increase in demands. This strengthens the illusion that turning all that is Earth into resource for humanity is inevitable, if tragic.

There’s a way in which the Anthropocene is considered a species act as opposed to an historical, situated set of conjunctures that are absolutely not a species act. Most peoples on this planet have precisely not lived and exercised the same kinds of processes that break generations, that radically simplify ecologies, that drastically force labor in a mass way that creates a kind of global transformation and global wealth that is in and of itself genocidal and extinctionist. That is not a species act; it’s a situated historical set of conjunctures, and I think to this day the term Anthropocene makes it harder, not easier, for people to understand that.

GM: You talked about proliferation of terms and the importance of that in terms of generative thinking. You yourself have really helped us with that in generating some more ‘cenes beyond the Capitalocene. In the midst of a conversation around the Anthropocene that you and Anna had at Aarhus a few years ago, you said, “Well, what about the Plantationocene?” So, what is the Plantationocene? Why did you feel the need to introduce that term? Maybe we could just begin with this question: what is a plantation? This is actually not so simple. We’ve been wrestling with that definition here in the conversations and seminars we’ve been having.

DH: We were wrestling with it, too. There is a way in which the Plantationocene forces attention to the growing of food and the plantation as a system of multispecies forced labor. The plantation system speeds up generation time. The plantation disrupts the generation times of all the players. It radically simplifies the number of players and sets up situations for the vast proliferation of some and the removal of others. It’s an epidemic friendly way of rearranging species life in the world. It is a system that depends on forced human labor of some kind because if labor can escape, it will escape the plantation.

The plantation system requires either genocide or removal or some mode of captivity and replacement of a local labor force by coerced labor from outside, either through various forms of indenture, unequal contract, or out-and-out slavery. The plantation really depends on very intense forms of labor slavery, including also machine labor slavery, a building of machines for exploitation and extraction of earthlings. I think it is also important to include the forced labor of nonhumans—plants, animals, and microbes—in our thinking.

So, when I think about the question, what is a plantation, some combination of these things seems to me to be pretty much always present across a 500-year period: radical simplification; substitution of peoples, crops, microbes, and life forms; forced labor; and, crucially, the disordering of times of generation across species, including human beings.

I’m avoiding the word reproduction because of its productionist aspect, but I want to emphasize the radical interruption of the possibility of the care of generations and, as Anna taught me, the breaking of the tie to place—that the capacity to love and care for place is radically incompatible with the plantation. Thinking from the plantation, all of those things seem to be always present in various combinations.

AT: I’ll just add briefly that the term plantation for me evokes the heritage of a particular set of histories involving what happened after the European invasion of the New World, particularly involving the capture of Africans as enslaved labor and the simplification of crops so as to allow enslaved laborers to be the agricultural workers. In many small, independent farming situations, dozens of crops are raised that need to be tended by farmers who are invested in attending to each one. In designing systems for coerced labor, ecological simplifications entered agriculture.

The plantation was precisely the conjuncture between ecological simplifications, the discipline of plants in particular, and the discipline of humans to work on those. That legacy, which I think is very much with us today, is so naturalized that many people believe that that is the meaning of the term agriculture; we forget that there are other ways to farm. The plantation takes us into that discipline-of-people/discipline-of-plants conjuncture.

Want more of their conversation? Edge Effects is excited to provide a full transcript of Gregg Mitman’s interview with Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing, in an accompanying booklet designed by Nicole Bennett with Addie Hopes and Laura Perry. Click here to read—and we hope you’ll share it, too.

Featured image: An oil palm plantation in Grand Cape Mount County, Liberia, operated by Sime Darby Plantation. Sime Darby is the world’s largest palm oil plantation company by planted area. It was granted a concession by the Liberian government in 2009 for a 63-year lease on up to 220,000 hectares to grow monoculture oil palm. Still from The Land Beneath Our Feet (2016). Photo by Sarita Siegel.

Podcast music: “Gloves” by Julian Lynch. Used with permission.

Donna Haraway is Distinguished Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Attending to the intersection of biology with culture and politics, Haraway’s work explores the string figures composed by science fact, science fiction, speculative feminism, speculative fabulation, science and technology studies, and multispecies worlding. Her recent books include Making Kin Not Population, co-edited with Adele Clarke and Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Website. Contact.

Gregg Mitman is the Vilas Research and William Coleman Professor of History, Medical History, and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His most recent work includes The Land Beneath Our Feet, a documentary co-directed and co-produced with Sarita Siegel on history, memory, and land rights in Liberia, and Future Remains: A Cabinet of Curiosities for the Anthropocene, co-edited with Marco Armiero and Robert S. Emmett. He is the founding director of the Nelson Institute’s Center for Culture, History and Environment (CHE) and co-organizer of the multi-year John E. Sawyer Seminar, Interrogating the Plantationocene, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. His previous contributions to Edge Effects include “Plantation Legacies” (January 2019) and “A History of the Anthropocene in Objects” (May 2018). Website. Twitter. Contact.

Anna Tsing is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Between 2013 and 2018, she was a Niels Bohr professor at Aarhus University where she led the Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene (AURA) group. She is the author of The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins and a co-editor of Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene (with Heather Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt). Her newest work is a digital project, in preparation, entitled Feral Atlas: The More-than-Human Anthropocene. Her previous contributions to Edge Effects include the podcast episode “The Best of End Times: A Conversation with Anna Tsing” (September 2017). Website. Contact.

EXCERPT> Soon after that shaking begins, the electrical grid will fail, likely everywhere west of the Cascades and possibly well beyond. If it happens at night, the ensuing catastrophe will unfold in darkness. In theory, those who are at home when it hits should be safest; it is easy and relatively inexpensive to seismically safeguard a private dwelling. But, lulled into nonchalance by their seemingly benign environment, most people in the Pacific Northwest have not done so. That nonchalance will shatter instantly. So will everything made of glass. Anything indoors and unsecured will lurch across the floor or come crashing down: bookshelves, lamps, computers, cannisters of flour in the pantry. Refrigerators will walk out of kitchens, unplugging themselves and toppling over. Water heaters will fall and smash interior gas lines. Houses that are not bolted to their foundations will slide off—or, rather, they will stay put, obeying inertia, while the foundations, together with the rest of the Northwest, jolt westward. Unmoored on the undulating ground, the homes will begin to collapse.

Across the region, other, larger structures will also start to fail. Until 1974, the state of Oregon had no seismic code, and few places in the Pacific Northwest had one appropriate to a magnitude-9.0 earthquake until 1994. The vast majority of buildings in the region were constructed before then. Ian Madin, who directs the Oregon Department of Geology and Mineral Industries (dogami), estimates that seventy-five per cent of all structures in the state are not designed to withstand a major Cascadia quake. fema calculates that, across the region, something on the order of a million buildings—more than three thousand of them schools—will collapse or be compromised in the earthquake. So will half of all highway bridges, fifteen of the seventeen bridges spanning Portland’s two rivers, and two-thirds of railways and airports; also, one-third of all fire stations, half of all police stations, and two-thirds of all hospitals.

Certain disasters stem from many small problems conspiring to cause one very large problem. For want of a nail, the war was lost; for fifteen independently insignificant errors, the jetliner was lost. Subduction-zone earthquakes operate on the opposite principle: one enormous problem causes many other enormous problems. The shaking from the Cascadia quake will set off landslides throughout the region—up to thirty thousand of them in Seattle alone, the city’s emergency-management office estimates. It will also induce a process called liquefaction, whereby seemingly solid ground starts behaving like a liquid, to the detriment of anything on top of it. Fifteen per cent of Seattle is built on liquefiable land, including seventeen day-care centers and the homes of some thirty-four thousand five hundred people. So is Oregon’s critical energy-infrastructure hub, a six-mile stretch of Portland through which flows ninety per cent of the state’s liquid fuel and which houses everything from electrical substations to natural-gas terminals. Together, the sloshing, sliding, and shaking will trigger fires, flooding, pipe failures, dam breaches, and hazardous-material spills. Any one of these second-order disasters could swamp the original earthquake in terms of cost, damage, or casualties—and one of them definitely will. Four to six minutes after the dogs start barking, the shaking will subside. For another few minutes, the region, upended, will continue to fall apart on its own. Then the wave will arrive, and the real destruction will begin.

Among natural disasters, tsunamis may be the closest to being completely unsurvivable. The only likely way to outlive one is not to be there when it happens: to steer clear of the vulnerable area in the first place, or get yourself to high ground as fast as possible. For the seventy-one thousand people who live in Cascadia’s inundation zone, that will mean evacuating in the narrow window after one disaster ends and before another begins. They will be notified to do so only by the earthquake itself—“a vibrate-alert system,” Kevin Cupples, the city planner for the town of Seaside, Oregon, jokes—and they are urged to leave on foot, since the earthquake will render roads impassable. Depending on location, they will have between ten and thirty minutes to get out. That time line does not allow for finding a flashlight, tending to an earthquake injury, hesitating amid the ruins of a home, searching for loved ones, or being a Good Samaritan. “When that tsunami is coming, you run,” Jay Wilson, the chair of the Oregon Seismic Safety Policy Advisory Commission (osspac), says. “You protect yourself, you don’t turn around, you don’t go back to save anybody. You run for your life.”

The debate over whether climate change will end life on Earth, explained.

Robert Watson

A colleague recently described how fish would swim into her clothing when she was a child bathing in the ocean off the coast of Vietnam, but today the fish are gone and her children find the story far-fetched.

Another recalled his experiences just last year in Cape Town – one of the world’s most attractive tourism and leisure destinations – when more than 2 million people faced the nightmare prospect of all taps, in every home and business, running dry.

These instances, on opposite sides of the world, are two faces of the same problem; the relentless pressure we are putting on biodiversity and the contributions that nature makes to our wellbeing, and the way we humans are changing the Earth’s climate.

The rich variety of nature provides us with the food we eat, the water we drink and the air we breathe, and countless moments of personal inspiration spent in forests and mountains, exploring beaches and rivers, or even listening to a simple birdsong in a quiet moment.

We have all assumed that nature would always be here for us and our children. However, our boundless consumption, shortsighted reliance on fossil fuels and our unsustainable use of nature now seriously threaten our future.

Environmentalists, scientists and indigenous peoples have been sounding the alarm for decades. Our understanding of the overexploitation of the planet has advanced with grim, sharp clarity over that time.

We have entered an era of rapidly accelerating species extinction, and are facing the irreversible loss of plant and animal species, habitats and vital crops, while coming face to face with the horrific impacts of global climate change.

In 2018 alone, there were deadly heatwaves across Europe and south-east Asia, while the US experienced floods and wildfires. Insurance companies went under, unable to bear the costs of rebuilding after extreme weather events.

There is a rising wave of collective anger and anxiety. The spectre of such environmental damage has caused grave concern, especially among global youth, about our inability to sustain our health, productivity, security and wellbeing. New realities have pulled back the curtain and exposed initiatives such as the banning of plastic straws as the drop in the ocean they truly are when it comes to protecting the future for ourselves, our children and all the species with which we share our planet.

We must now consider the animals, insects, plants and all the places in which they live.

Despite the profound threat of biodiversity loss, it is climate change that has long been considered the most pressing environmental concern. That changed this week in Paris, when representatives from 130 nations approved the most comprehensive assessment of global biodiversity ever undertaken.

The report, spearheaded by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), found that nature is being eroded at rates unprecedented in human history.

One million species are currently threatened with extinction and we are undermining the entire natural infrastructure on which our modern world depends.

Nature powers human endeavours – underpinning productivity, culture and even our beliefs and identities. But our economies, livelihoods, food security, health and quality of life worldwide are under threat. We are exploiting nature faster than it can replenish itself.

The IPBES assessment has shown the strong interrelationship between climate change, the loss of biodiversity and human wellbeing. Climate change has been identified as a primary driver of biodiversity loss, already altering every part of nature. Likewise, the loss of biodiversity contributes to climate change, for example when we destroy forests we emit carbon dioxide, the major “human-produced” greenhouse gas.

We cannot solve the threats of human-induced climate change and loss of biodiversity in isolation. We either solve both or we solve neither.

The IPBES report shows that governments and businesses are nowhere close to doing enough. The world is on track to miss the targets of the Paris agreement, the Aichi biodiversity targets and 80% of the UN sustainable development goals (food, water and energy security), because of our poor stewardship of the natural world.

However, the good news is that there are many policies and technologies that will limit global temperature rise and address the conservation and sustainable use of biodiversity. These will also offer our last, best chance to limit human-induced climate change and preserve the greatest amount of biodiversity possible. The way we produce and use energy, and farm, use our soils, protect coastal ecosystems and treat our forests will make or break our future, but it can also help us have a better quality of life.

We still have time – though very limited – to turn things around. It won’t be easy. It requires massive changes, from removing subsidies that lead to the destruction of nature and future warming of the Earth, to enacting laws that encourage the protection of nature; from reducing our growing addiction to fossil-fuel energy and natural resource consumption, to rethinking the definition of a rewarding life.

Our current agricultural system is broken. If we keep producing food using current unsustainable agricultural practices, we will undermine future food production. But we already have more than enough food to go around. Today 815 million people go to bed hungry, 38 million more than in 2015. Yet, if food waste were a country, its emissions would rank third in the world, after China and the US, producing 8% of manmade emissions.

We need to redirect government subsidies towards more sustainable and regenerative farming. This will not only contribute towards absorbing carbon and reducing the emissions of other greenhouse gases, it can also halt a frightening trajectory where farmland is so overloaded that eventually it just stops growing crops.

We simply cannot afford the cost of inaction. Change of the magnitude required will mean a different life for everyone, but the costs of doing nothing will be much higher.

The G7 environment ministers, currently meeting in France, have the opportunity to return to their capitals with the freshly approved IPBES report. The world needs them to reflect our current level of crisis at the heads of state meeting later this year.

The UK parliament has endorsed a motion to declare a formal climate and environment emergency, which is a start, but action and budgets from governments and business will need to follow.

As policymakers around the world grapple with the twin threats of climate change and biodiversity loss, it is essential that they understand the linkages between the two so that their decisions and actions address both.

The world needs to recognise that loss of biodiversity and human-induced climate change are not only environmental issues, but development, economic, social, security, equity and moral issues as well. The future of humanity depends on action now. If we do not act, our children and all future generations will never forgive us.

• Sir Robert Watson is chair of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), and former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)

#ClimateFacts #YEARSproject

Activists to rally at parliament urging government to declare environmental emergency

Mattha Busby

Mon 29 Apr 2019 15.07 BST

Momentum, the youth climate strikers and Extinction Rebellion are to unite in protest outside parliament on Wednesday as Labour calls on the Conservatives to declare an environmental emergency in a parliamentary vote.

In the first explicit collaboration between the three groups, a coalition of activists and campaigners will rally in Parliament Square to demand the government backs the plan, first put forward by Extinction Rebellion as the primary demand of the protests that engulfed London over the past fortnight.

Last month Labour declared an environment and climate emergency and the shadow environment secretary, Sue Hayman, challenged her government counterpart, Michael Gove, to follow suit. The party has now forced a Commons vote on the issue as concerns over pollution and climate change dominate the political agenda.

Momentum said climate change was caused not by ordinary people but by elites, and Labour was right to push the government to recognise the urgency and scale of the impending environmental crisis.

“It’s disgraceful that Theresa May has sat on her hands, refused to meet the climate strikers and ignored the huge public outcry about the climate crisis,” said Laura Parker, a Momentum spokesperson. “Climate change isn’t caused by ordinary people. It’s caused by elite politicians, oil executives and bankers who all profit from causing climate breakdown.”

She added: “Only Labour can challenge this climate-wrecking elite and deliver a green industrial revolution, which will mitigate climate breakdown whilst transforming our economy and society in the interests of the many, not the few.”

The protests follows school strikes in dozens of countries, mass demonstrations in London organised by Extinction Rebellion and the targeting by Momentum of banks that fund fossil fuel companies.

The leftwing grassroots movement has previously organised demonstrations outside parliament, such as in 2015 to put pressure on MPs to vote against the bombing of Syria in 2015, and to display support for the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, after a number of shadow cabinet resignations in 2016.

Extinction Rebellion representatives are to meet the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, and the shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, on Tuesday and Gove on Wednesday.

The group is also calling for the government to act immediately to halve biodiversity loss and reduce net greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2025, and to create a citizens’ assembly to spearhead reforms.