Athropogenic Discourse - Academic Insights on Scale & Scope

In this article I will continue with my examination of the Anthropocene as an emerging concept and analyze what various prominent scholars and academics view as defining elements and contestable factors. This continues in my series of past articles looking at the works and recorded debates between professors Yuki, Langston, Lekan and others.

In their continuing debate, both Masami Yuki and Nancy Langston argue that the global and the local are connected, and indeed, we do live in a time when it’s hard to draw the line between them. Langston exemplifies this with the near ubiquity of locally produced chemicals, Yuki with the locally fixed oyster farmers’ dependence on non-local nature. Like Yuki suggests, maybe the opposition between the two scales is quite new – maybe they can be (and have been) seen as complementary and connected.

Lekan (2014) suggests such an understanding, by using the metaphor of fractals, which “help us to stretch our historical imagination and cultural criticism into multi-scaled and multi-agentic realms that lie beyond the Apollonian visions of spacewalkers” (p. 178). In this sense, every scale shows us a unique representation of what is portrayed. The concept of the Anthropocene risks perpetuating the false universalism of a God’s eye perspective by turning a blind eye to local perspectives, but like Lekan argues, it doesn’t need to. Even though the definition – man as a geophysical force – makes it hard not to view the Anthropocene as spatial-temporally monolithic concept, it could be something else, like a concept encompassing various scopes and scales.

But what if the big picture has a certain advantage over the others? Like Oreskes and Conway put it: “just because the details of a picture are messy does not mean that the overall picture is not clear. It is a truism of art appreciation that by standing back the larger image often becomes clearer – or at any rate that different perspectives may reveal different things.” (Hamblin, 2011:30) Much like Lekan they think that different scales are important, but they also stress that bigger pictures sometimes need precedence.

Even though it’s problematic, a monolithic concept might be what we need in order for environmental policy to be effective – a belief I think is what drives many advocates of the Anthropocene concept. Rockström et al. (2009) exemplifies this well when introducing the idea of boundaries on a planetary level, because even though they talk about localities their main argument is that our problems are critical on a global scale.

Clearly, just because different scales are important doesn’t mean that they are just as relevant when it comes to solve specific problems. Nevertheless, problems come in different kinds and it’s not always obvious which scales are needed to understand and solve it. This is explained well in Powell et al. (2014) who sees resilience within the Anthropocene as a wicked problem, resistant to singular solutions. What makes their framework helpful is that even though they criticize the analytical foundation of the Planetary boundaries concept for being blunt, they don’t discard it. Instead they incorporate it within a multifaceted strategy; they don’t only want to provide the Anthropocene discourse with a perspectivistic understanding, they also want to keep the less nuanced understandings. In this way, they provide us with an arsenal of tools of different precision, making strategic decisions possible when trying to solve wicked problems.

The Anthropocene as concept provides numerous difficult questions regarding scope and scale of time and space, and thus, a diverse perspective is required. Only that way can we understand how the global and the local are connected, and what truly is at stake.

References:

Hamblin, J. D. (Ed.). (2011). H-Environment Roundtable Review of Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt. H-Environment, 1(2), 1–32. https://networks.h-net.org/system/files/contributed-files/env-roundtable-1-2.pdf

Lekan, T. (2014). Fractal Eaarth: Visualizing the Global Environment in the Anthropocene. Environmental Humanities, (5), 171–201. http://environmentalhumanities.org/arch/vol5/5.10.pdf

Powell, N. S., Larsen, R. K., & van Bommel, S. (2014). Meeting the “Anthropocene” in the context of intractability and complexity: infusing resilience narratives with intersubjectivity. Resilience, 2(3), 135–150. https://doi.org/10.1080/21693293.2014.948324

Image Credit: hiveminer.com: bathing in Laos