The Anthropocene: Action and agency for preventing collapse
The Anthropocene is suggested as a new geological epoch (Crutzen, 2002) where human impacts have crossed six of nine planetary boundaries, the biosphere integrity, climate change, novel anthropogenic entities, biochemical flows, freshwater and land system (Richardson et al., 2023). While transgressing these boundaries does not mean that we will rapidly go to drastic collapse, altogether they mark a critical threshold for increasing risks to people, species, cultures and the social-ecological systems of Planet Earth (Rees, 2014).
Studies on the Anthropocene propose that since the 18th century—with the rise of capitalism—Western economic and political systems have gradually become dominant over multiple and diverse cultures on our planet. This has led to over-exploiting natural resources, over-producing waste and eliminating the state of the biological and sociological diversity. While humans as a species have created ecological destruction, not all cultures have equally contributed to the problem. To acknowledge this, Anthropocene studies should be complemented with a more culturally sensitive examination and inclusiveness of diverse approaches of the society and environment at issue (Farhana, 2023; Heikkurinen, 2017; Hornborg, 2024). While the Anthropocene remains a concept, it offers an opportunity for transdisciplinary discussion on action and agency for cultural critique and alternative forms of social organizing (Albareda and Branzei, 2023; Heikkurinen et al., 2016; 2021), in particular to find ways to support action and agency of the marginalized voices of the global society (Farhana, 2023a). Furthermore, agency of the powerful is needed, as until governments, CEOs and company owners act, little happens.
Action is commonly understood as individual action, but it can also be—for instance—collective (Ostrom, 1990), communicative (Habermas, 1984) and organizational (King et al., 2010), as well as something non-humans do (Latour, 2005; Barad, 2003). It is a core concept in environmental social sciences concerned with action as a form of praxis. Agency, again, commonly refers to actors’ capacity to act. It is another key concept in environmental social sciences and is often discussed together with the notion of structure. Dating back to Hume and Aristotle, agency is that which allows agents to overcome structural constraints and thereby shape social organization. Emirbayer and Mishe (1998), for instance, disaggregate agency into different components to demonstrate different ways agency interpenetrates structure and the implications for empirical research.
In the context of the Anthropocene, the notions of action and agency invite us to rethink the traditional subject-object distinction and discuss the role of both human and non-human viewpoints and doings (Dürbeck et al., 2015). If agencies are extended to mountains, rivers, landscapes, animals, and the natural environment, then what does that mean for preventing collapse? Latour (2014a) notes: ‘the great philosophical contribution of the Anthropocene is that narrativity, what I call geostory, is not a layer added to the brutal “physical reality” but what the world itself is made of.’ The debate on agency has resurfaced and reformulated to understanding the pressing problems of the Anthropocene—opening new ways of theorizing relational, collective or human/non-human agency among others (see e.g., Heikkurinen et al., 2021; Hirvensalo et al., 2021; Teerikangas et al., 2021; Jokinen et al., 2021).
References
Albareda, L. & Branzei, O (2023). Without nature we have nothing: Biocentric work on the Anthropocene. Academy of Management Proceedings. vol. 2023, 1. https://doi.org/10.5465/AMPROC.2023.10834abstract
Barad, K. (2003) Posthumanist performativity: Toward an understanding of how matter comes to matter. Gender and Science: New Issues. 28 (3), 801-831.
Crutzen, P. (2002). Geology of mankind. Nature 415, 23. https://doi.org/10.1038/415023a
Dürbeck, G., Schaumann, C., & Sullivan, H. (2015). Human and non-human agencies in the Anthropocene. Ecozon@, 6(1), 118-136.
Emirbayer, M. and Mische, A (1998). What is Agency? American Journal of Sociology, 103 (3), 962-1023.
Farhana, S. (2023). Whose growth in whose planetary boundaries? Decolonising planetary justice in the Anthropocene. Geo: Geography and Environment, 10, e00128. https://doi.org/10.1002/geo2.128
Farhana, S. (2023a). Progress Report in Political Ecology III: Praxis - doing, undoing, and being in radical political ecology research Progress in Human Geography. https://doi.org/10.1177/03091325231157360
Foucault, Michel (1998 [1984]) Foucault. In James D. Faubion (Ed.), Essential works of Michel Foucault, Vol. 2: Aesthetics, method, epistemology (pp.459-463). New York: The New Press.
Habermas, J. (1984). The theory of communicative action. Boston: Beacon Press.
Heikkurinen, P., Rinkinen, J., Järvensivu, T., Wilén, K., & Ruuska, T. (2016). Organising in the Anthropocene: An ontological outline for ecocentric theorising. Journal of Cleaner Production, 113, 705-714.
Heikkurinen, P. (Ed.). (2017). Sustainability and peaceful coexistence for the Anthropocene. Routledge: Oxon.
Heikkurinen, P., Ruuska, T., Wilén, K., & Ulvila, M. (2019). The Anthropocene exit: Reconciling discursive tensions on the new geological epoch. Ecological Economics, 164, 106369.
Heikkurinen, P., Clegg, S., Pinnington, A. H., Nicolopoulou, K., & Alcaraz, J. M. (2021). Managing the Anthropocene: Relational agency and power to respect planetary boundaries. Organization & Environment, 34(2), 267-286.
Hirvensalo, A., Teerikangas, S., Reynolds, N., Kalliomäki, H., Mäntysalo, R., Mattila, H., & Granqvist, K. (2021). Agency in Circular Ecosystems – A Rationalities Perspective. Sustainability, 13.
Hornborg, A. (2024). Beyond Prometheanism: Modern technologies as strategies for redistributing time and space. Human Ecology,33 (1), 28-41. https://doi.org/10.1177/09632719231209744
Jokinen, A., Uusikartano, J., Jokinen, P., & Kokko, M. (2021). The interagency cycle in sustainability transitions. In S. Teerikangas, T. Onkila, K. Koistinen, & M. Mäkelä (Eds.), Research handbook of sustainability agency. Edward Elgar. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781789906035.00027
King, B. G., Felin, T., & Whetten, D. A. (2010). Perspective—Finding the organization in organizational theory: A meta-theory of the organization as a social actor. Organization Science, 21(1), 290–305. doi:10.1287/orsc.1090.0443
Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Latour, B. (2014). Agency at the time of the Anthropocene. New Literary History, 45 (1), 1-18.
Latour, B. (2014a). Anthropology ant the time of the Anthropocene – A personal view of what is to be studied. Distinguished lecture American Association of Anthropologists. Washington, December 2014.
Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rees, W. E. (2014). Avoiding collapse: Agenda for sustainable degrowth and relocalizing the economy. DesLibris.
Richardson, K. et al. (2023). Earth beyond six of nine planetary boundaries. Science Advances, 9 (37), eadh2458. doi:10.1126/sciadv.adh2458
Teerikangas, S., Onkila, T., Koistinen, K., & Mäkelä, M. (2021). Research Handbook of Sustainability Agency. London: Edward Elgar.