The term “Anthropocene” conveys the idea that humans have shifted the planet into a new geological epoch. While geoscientists debate the notion, “Anthropocene” proliferates beyond the academy. It has been featured on the front cover of The Economist, been the subject of award-winning popular-science books (by writers like Elizabeth Kolbert and Diane Ackerman), and was recently the focus of a high-profile art exhibition in Berlin. The term captures the intellectual spirit behind our contemporary environmental condition.
Jedediah Purdy’s new book, After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene, makes an accessible contribution to this emerging field. The title nicely captures the anxiety of the zeitgeist — a broad concern that, as Purdy writes, “it makes no sense now to honor and preserve a nature that is defined by being not human, that is purest in wilderness, rain forests and the ocean.” Writers like Bill McKibben and William Cronon have foretold the death of this understanding of nature for nearly 20 years, but with the spread of “Anthropocene” as a buzzword, this anxiety has gone mainstream.
Purdy, a law professor at Duke University, lucidly assesses the implications of the end of nature for environmental politics. The majority of the book is a fairly orthodox account of four ecological imaginations that Purdy argues have configured American attitudes toward nature: a frontier vision of settlement, a wilderness-seeking Romanticism, a utilitarian attitude that tries to manage nature for human benefit, and a 20th-century ecological view.
He is especially interested in the use and abuse of nature in science, economics, and politics. Purdy argues that all three fields have referred to nature as a timeless and stable source of authority to order human affairs, and makes the case that the various orientations to nature have both informed and undermined American democracy. He is particularly concerned with the “antipolitical” use of nature as a means for shortcutting democracy. Like Cronon, he explores how accounts that present the conquest of the West as a “natural process” (or “Manifest Destiny”) erase brutal practices of war and ethnic cleansing. For Purdy, the end of these traditional understandings of nature should bring science and economics into politics, creating space for a new form of environmentalism.
In After Nature, Purdy offers autobiographical color from his rural West Virginia childhood and a narrative streamlined through an absence of academic referencing. He provides a synthesis and clear explication of a body of existing scholarship. The Anthropocene offers Purdy a useful narrative device, but its radical implications go underdeveloped.
It is only in the introduction and final two chapters of the book that Purdy really looks “after nature.” He argues that the diagnosis of the Anthropocene becomes “a call to take responsibility for what we make, as well as for what we destroy. It is the starting place for a new politics of nature.” Purdy quickly establishes the functional absence of this “we” in the current configuration of global environmental politics: There is no coherent multilateral organization capable of democratic planetary management.
Purdy offers a familiar critique of the current “neoliberal Anthropocene,” which he finds “antipolitical” in its technocratic belief that environmental problems will be tackled with geoengineering, carbon markets, and better accounting, without attending to the politics of market valuation or the tendency for markets to widen inequalities. Purdy takes issue with the techno-optimist vision that calls for humans to develop more rational forms of planetary management and to achieve their Enlightenment destiny as what environmentalist Mark Lynas calls the “God Species.”
Instead, After Nature seeks to develop a vision for a democratic Anthropocene. This vision initially emerges through a diagnosis of some desirable shifts in North American politics: the American food movement, the growing concerns for animal welfare, and other Michael Pollan-esque lifestyle changes. While these causes may resonate with the anticipated readers of the book, it is hard to see these working on the planetary stage Purdy has set himself.
Finally, Purdy builds from these shifts toward a more expansive framework, arguing that we need to talk, narrate, and speculate about the future practices and institutions that will enable an Anthropocene democracy. This, he argues, will involve acts of fiction — experimental and imperfect stories that might help us imagine and summon into being more desirable worlds. But compared with the environmental speculative fiction of Donna Haraway or McKenzie Wark, the character of his future democracy seems thinly sketched.
Like these authors, Purdy demands that a democratic Anthropocene should be posthumanist, respecting the agencies of nonhuman actors. He envisages a strong role for active citizens in a future empowered through state and other forms of regulation. His ultimate and most demanding point is an appeal for a mature democracy capable of self-restraint.
There are at least three further areas in which Purdy’s engagement with the Anthropocene disappoints. First, there is the issue of “species-talk,” in which a generalized Anthropos masks inequalities in responsibility for, and vulnerability to, planetary change. On the one hand, Purdy is very much aware of this issue. In a nice turn of phrase he explains how “the global atmosphere is a great launderer of historical contributions to, and benefits from, inequality. Everything washes out in the weather.” On the other hand, there is a lack of specificity in his account as to whom his politics is for. His book offers a politics for certain parts of modern, liberal America. There is an expansionist creep in some of his more general assertions that his four ecological imaginations and his future lifestyle politics might be applicable for politics everywhere.
Second, one of the defining features of the Anthropocene epoch is a coming shift in planetary conditions, which might tip the earth system out of the fairly benign envelope of the Holocene. Earth in the Anthropocene is likely to be a much less hospitable place than it is now. Such scientific predictions intersect with an apocalyptic strand of nature thinking that has a long and dark provenance in North America. Concerns for an “eco-rapture” and a coming “world without us” have important connections to the history and current operations of American democracy. Think for example of recent writings by Cormac McCarthy and Margaret Atwood, or Hollywood’s post-WWII fondness for apocalyptic films. It is surprising that this imagination did not feature more prominently in Purdy’s account.
Finally, the book has little to say about the current and future place of science in the Anthropocene. Science has been central to the diagnosis and proclamation of the new epoch. Climatologists and geologists have been empowered by their model of the earth as a system to imagine planetary interventions in geoengineering. Some appeal for new modes of planetary management. The relationships between science and politics have been central concerns for other writers on the Anthropocene — like Bruno Latour or Clive Hamilton. It is a little unclear where science fits in Purdy’s account.
Over all, this book offers a readable history of American environmentalism bracketed with some intelligent speculations on the national implications of the end of nature. But there is little that is original here, save the accomplished narration.
