Global governance in the Anthropocenes

Abstract

This article adumbrates how we can re-envision global governance in the Anthropocene. The first section explores the plurality of Anthropocenes through an initial analysis of the Great Transformation since 1950. The second section focuses on what this means for global governance through insights from the history of international thought. The first insight comes from earlier works by the international functionalists, who emphasized process over goals. The second is found in the international political geography of Derwent Whittlesey, who outlined how we could take in ecological concerns through a four-dimensional view of the industrial world. Here I will also stress the growing importance of the concept of waste and refuse in global governance, a concern that becomes visible when we think about global politics in four dimensions. The final concluding section underscores how a messy and unprecedented crisis requires an equally messy and unprecedented approach to global governance.

The future will be messy, in more ways than one. In this article my focus is on how global governance and the study of International Relations (IR) can confront the ecological crisis. The premise of this article is the perhaps uncontroversial contention that you cannot see a problem—no matter how major—if you do not have the theoretical tools to see it. We face a global existential crisis at the moment that is focused on climate change, but we largely lack the theoretical lenses to see it. Those with influence on policy, both at the national and global levels of governance, are (to paraphrase John Maynard Keynes) slaves of long-defunct theories.

In the first book of his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams has the alien Vogon constructor fleet that will shortly demolish the Earth (to make way for a bypass) move into orbit without showing up on Earth’s vast array of radio telescopes, “which was a pity because it was exactly the sort of thing they’d been looking for all these years.” ¹ For those who study international affairs and global politics, the threat of climate change has a family resemblance to the appearance of the Vogon constructor fleet. Global existential crises that would threaten the very structures of global governance are what we have all been looking out for since the last century. Yet, for many, as the crisis built over the last half-century, the overwhelming analyses were oblivious to it. There were exceptions. In 1999, Susan Strange placed the environmental crisis as the most dangerous of three failings of what she dubbed “the Westfailure system.” ² Overall, though, the great commentaries on the past, present, and future of global governance to be found among IR scholarship and punditry just did not see the extent of the challenge posed by the gathering environmental crisis until recently. ³ The study of IR, with its long history of worrying about war, great power balances, and the direct threat of nuclear weapons, lacked the tools to appreciate the danger coming from stresses on the environment. Indeed, it was this lacuna in IR that inspired the planet politics manifesto published in the journal Millennium in 2016. ⁴ This article’s goal was to explore how we can retool our thinking about global governance in order to render the global ecological crisis we face visible. In this sense, it was a call to see the world differently, and to adjust our global governance accordingly.

Seeing the world in a different way is often a prerequisite for making an issue visible. The two scholars who helped me the most in seeing new issues, by imagining different ways of seeing, were Jane Parpart and Tim Shaw. Indeed, the direct inspiration for this article comes from a tendency in Tim Shaw’s work to pluralize concepts that most people use as singulars. Thus, Shaw’s analysis of the Commonwealth employs the concept of Commonwealths, inviting us to explore the multiple layers that make up the various aspects of Commonwealth structures and affiliated organizations. ⁵ This article employs this pluralizing to explore the concept of the Anthropocene: the idea of a proposed geological epoch rendered unstable by human actions. By talking about Anthropocenes in the plural—various recastings and renamings that focus on specific issues related to the ecological crisis—I emphasize both the different definitions of the new epoch, and how this analysis in turn can be used to rethink our views of global governance.

In the first section I explore this plurality of Anthropocenes through an initial analysis of the Great Transformation since 1950, and by looking at how the different names given to this new putative epoch act as lenses focusing in on the different aspects and characteristics of the crisis. This process lays out the extent of the challenge posed by the ecological crisis for global governance, and some of the key issues that global governance needs to address. The second section focuses on what this means for global governance, and it is here that I return to my own subfield of IR: the history of international thought. Here I explore two key insights that can help us sketch out a global governance that can confront the existential crisis we face from the Anthropocenes. The first insight comes from earlier works by the international functionalists Mary Parker Follett and David Mitrany, which can steer us towards a global governance for an unstable world that focuses on processes, rather than goals. The second insight comes from the international political geographer Derwent Whittlesey, who argued for expanding our horizons to include both the vertical third dimension and the fourth dimension of time in order to better comprehend the relationship between human society and its ecology. Here I will also stress the growing importance of the concept of waste and refuse in global governance. The final concluding section underscores how a messy and unprecedented crisis requires an equally messy and unprecedented approach to global governance.

Industrialization, the Great Acceleration and the Anthropocenes

Once you see the graphs, it is difficult to look at the world in quite the same way. There are twenty-four in total. Twelve show global socioeconomic trends, while twelve plot Earth system trends. Originally published in 2004, but fully updated in 2015, they are the product of an Earth system science project to map changes across a range of key global factors (from population and primary energy use, to surface temperature and ocean acidification) since 1750. The original researchers were looking for a possible marker for the proposed new geological epoch of the Anthropocene, and the group began from an assumption made by one of the original advocates of the Anthropocene (Paul Crutzen) that the likely start date would be at the beginning of industrialization in the late eighteenth century. Once the data had been collected into graphs, the results took the team by surprise. Indeed, this was one of those “wow” moments in science. Each of the twenty-four graphs showed rapid increases starting around 1950. ⁶ This sudden change became known in Earth system science as the Great Acceleration, ⁷ and for the authors of the study this was seen as strong evidence for a mid-twentieth century start date for the new geological epoch of the Anthropocene. ⁸

Yet, it was not just the quantitative leap that makes the Great Acceleration a game-changer, it is also the associated qualitative change. Prior to the Great Acceleration, there were few direct connections between Earth system trends and socioeconomic trends. Rises in a socioeconomic trend did not necessarily correlate to related rises in one or more Earth system trends. In other words, major changes in human activity did not translate to significant and sustained comparable trends in the Earth system (although there are claims that the agricultural revolution might have produced a warming trend, and the European conquest of the Americas a cooling trend). ⁹ What marks off the Great Acceleration from earlier times is a clear and sustained coupling between socioeconomic and Earth system trends that occurs from around 1950. ¹⁰ While correlation is not causation, the sheer scale of the coupling leads to the conclusion that humans are now influencing the Earth system in unprecedented ways, and that unless these can be decoupled there will be serious impacts on socioeconomic trends from the Earth system trends as tipping points irreversibly change the Earth’s ecology, undermining human society in turn. Humans have become a force of nature. ¹¹

While these explorations of the game-changing Great Acceleration have been useful, and a serious wake-up call for humanity, it has not given us the full story. The problem can be seen both in the scope of the original 2004 graphs and in the very choice of the Anthropocene as the name for the new epoch. The socioeconomic graphs in the original 2004 study showed only the aggregate numbers for the whole world. They were not broken down to show what share different human communities and classes were responsible for in the vast sea of aggregate data. The result is an uncritical spreading of the blame across humanity in a process that has been marked by sharp inequalities in both the causes and the effects of the crisis. ¹² In 2015 the original team behind the graphs did endeavour to address this criticism by dividing the socioeconomic trends into three classes of country (OECD, ¹³ BRICS, ¹⁴ and others), showing that past growth in these trends came predominantly from the OECD. The very name “Anthropocene” casts the origins of changes wrought on the Earth system widely, seeming to put the onus on the species as a whole. Yet deeper dives into how humans became a force of nature suggest that particular aspects of this story show that blame is unevenly spread.

In addition to this, while the focus on the Great Acceleration is important, its sudden appearance (in historical and geological terms) likely hides earlier trends that made it possible. While geology requires a clear physical change to mark the end of one epoch and the start of another—and the Great Acceleration starting around 1950 certainly offers rich pickings here—a more historically nuanced approach needs to appreciate earlier multiple causes that may have made this sudden acceleration possible. These will have predated the physical manifestation of the changes in the data. Consequently, a single Anthropocene with a clear physical marker may not suffice when we come to explore the ecological crisis from a global governance perspective. Rather, we need to be aware of multiple and often longer-term causes leading to, and shaping, the Great Acceleration and its challenges.

This is where I turn to Tim Shaw’s use of pluralization when exploring phenomena. Depending on what we are concentrating on, there have been (and continue to be) multiple Anthropocenes, each one focusing on an aspect that has its own history and its own focus on specific agents. Those unsatisfied with the term Anthropocene have often come up with their own alternative names that highlight a specific agent or cause that they see as central to the ecological crisis. While these criticisms are useful, and I agree with them, I argue that the term Anthropocene is useful in itself as an umbrella term for the totality of human impacts. Or rather, to distance ourselves from the potential placidity of spreading the blame equally, we should think in terms of many Anthropocenes. Thus, recasting these as many Anthropocenes allows for a richer definition of the ecological crisis that also highlights their interconnectedness. This is also an approach that is compatible with the functional approach that I explore in the second section. While there are many of these recastings (and certainly room to take in more as we get to grips with the crisis we face), there are four that I highlight here, each of which has implications for how we might reimagine global governance in the Anthropocenes.

Arguably, the most influential of these recastings is the concept of the Capitalocene, first suggested by Anders Malm, and further developed by Raj Patel, Jason Moore, and others. Here the key change that has led to the Great Acceleration occurs much earlier, with the development of a capitalist economy focused first on the North Atlantic, but spreading out to the rest of the world between 1450 and 1750. ¹⁵ Here, it is capitalism’s separation of humanity from nature (and also associating some subaltern populations with nature) that allowed capitalism to render nature (and those seen as closer to nature, such as women or other races) as a set of cheap objects ripe for exploitation. ¹⁶ It is the global spread of capitalism that makes possible the regimes of exploitation that eventually lead to the phenomena exposed by Will Steffen et al. as the post-1950 Great Acceleration. The very processes that we witness in the Great Acceleration are what bring about the end of cheap nature (as Moore articulates it) and force us as a species to confront the vast ecological bill that a small minority has run up over time. In sum, a small minority is responsible for running up a long-term bill that the majority of us now find ourselves forced to pay for within a short space of time. The Capitalocene challenges the tendency of the idea of the Anthropocene to create a placid environment where we are all seen as individually culpable in the creation of the ecological crisis that has been caused by the longer-term cheapening of nature for the benefit of the few. Rather, the focus of the Capitalocene is on those that benefitted the most, and on the structures that enabled them. This shift also allows us to focus on the activities of other actors, such as companies. A 2017 report found that just 100 companies globally were responsible for 70 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) since 1988, while a mere twenty-five corporate and state producers were responsible for over 50 percent of GHGs during the same period. ¹⁷ Thus, the Capitalocene reframing both exposes the inequalities at the heart of the crisis, while also warning us that we are now paying a heavy price (a built-up ecological debt) for rendering nature cheap. The post-1950 end of cheap nature, which we can see in the coupling of trends during the Great Acceleration, is the great crisis of the Capitalocene.

Related to the Capitalocene is the Plantationocene that came out of discussions during a gathering at the University of Aarhus in 2014. The Plantationocene focuses on “the devastating transformation of diverse kinds of human-tended farms, pastures, and forests into extractive and enclosed plantations, relying on slave labour and other forms of exploited alienated, and unusually spatially transported labor.” ¹⁸ The idea of the Plantationocene shares some of its argument with the idea of an “Orbis Spike”: that the start of the Anthropocene should be traced to the European conquest of the Americas, which was marked by both genocide and the “Columbian exchange,” where the mixing of plant and animal species led to the end of discreate biospheres on the world’s continents. ¹⁹ Anna Tsing has seen this process as the extinction of the last wild refugia on Earth. ²⁰ The natural world has been reconstructed (and simplified) along the lines of a great plantation. Overall, the Plantationocene sees the biosphere brought under human control. Yet, the simplification of the relationship between humans and nature into the domination of the latter by the former does not bring order. Rather, the supposed conquest of nature brings with it an unintended chaos as the Plantationocene breaks up complex ecological relations.

Donna Haraway’s response to the chaos of the Plantationocene (and the end of cheap nature in the Capitalocene) is the Chthulucene. Based on biological studies that show the interconnectedness of species, and particularly the way that seemingly discreet organisms are actually communities of different forms of life, the Chthulucene is a deliberately messy view of humanity’s place within a broader web of life. The emphasis on human activity is shifted towards making kin of other lifeforms. ²¹ An illustration of Haraway’s thinking can be found in what has been whimsically called “the wood wide web”: the discovery that trees in forests are able to communicate with each other through strands of fungi in the soil. In short, there is a hidden world of interspecies cooperation within the soil of flourishing forests that we are only beginning to understand. ²² The important distinction here is that the Plantationocene uses violence to try to control and simplify the relationship with nature, but in so doing it creates the chaos that has led to the ecological crisis. In contrast, the Chthulucene is an acceptance of the messy complexities of life that is ordered, rather than chaotic, even though it envisions a world that is outside of human control. This distinction between Plantationocene and Chthulucene has implications for how we may reimagine global governance policy processes under the Anthropocenes, which I shall return to in the next section.

Finally, I turn to the concept of the Pyrocene, first formulated by Stephen J. Pyne in 2015. Pyne argues that it is humanity’s relationship with fire that has defined its relationship to its ecology. ²³ Human adoption and adaption of fire is a mark of the species, but a fundamental shift occurred when humans started burning fossil fuels. Along a similar tack, Bill KcKibben has quipped that we need to “stop burning things” if we are to survive the climate crisis. ²⁴ Both Pyne and McKibben contrast the ordered burning of past communities and Indigenous peoples, with the uncontrolled pyromania of fossil-fuel-dependent societies. It is this changing relationship with fire that has led, in the words of Mathew Lawrence and Laurie Laybourn-Langton, to a “no-normal: a constantly evolving state of complexity and uncertainty unprecedented in human history.” ²⁵ Human pyromania has led to an out-of-control Earth system, much in the same way that uncontrolled fires have no equilibrium or stasis. A world on fire in the Pyrocene does not have a stable ecological point of reference. This problem of no-normal has implications for how we approach global governance, as I will further explore below.

What is most productive about these different recastings of the Anthropocene is how they focus on different lessons for global governance. The Capitalocene, by highlighting the central role of rendering nature cheap, helps pose the question of what should we do now when the consequences of a cheap nature make nature expensive as we pay down a growing ecological debt? In the world of the Great Acceleration, where socioeconomic trends put deep strains on Earth system processes, the assumption of cheap nature becomes a costly mistake. Indeed, cheap nature turns out to be the building up of a long-term debt via environmental damage and an uncontrolled waste regime. In short, we find ourselves facing a hefty bill that has built up over time out of our erroneous assumption that we could treat nature as a set of cheap resources. One of the bills that stands out here is associated with our attitude to waste. By allowing industries to vent their waste —whether in the form of tailings, forever chemicals, wasted landscapes or greenhouse gases—for free into the oceans, the land or the atmosphere, human society has subsidized industrial concerns. The overpowering effect of waste in the Great Acceleration is a direct result of assuming a cheap nature.

The Plantationocene focuses on a not dissimilar problem. By attempting to bring the biosphere under human control, humanity has actually created chaos. Here oversimplification has two faces. In the first, humans have created plantations out of nature that make simple monocultures out of complex ecologies. In the second, humans ignore the complex environments in which the plantation model operates. This can also include the problem of waste, which is assumed to just disappear in an oversimplified view of the natural world. Here the ominous term used to justify pollution in the oceans and atmosphere—“the solution to pollution is dilution”—comes back to haunt us. Both the Plantationocene and the Capitalocene also focus on the deep inequality associated with the environmental crisis. Haraway’s idea of the Chthulucene reverses the assumptions of the Plantationocene. Here the complexities of human embeddedness in nature are embraced, and the relationship between the socioeconomic and Earth system becomes fungible: socioeconomic and Earth system trends can affect each other in complex ways. Finally, the concept of the Pyrocene forces us to imagine humanity’s relationship with its ecology as that of a runaway pyromaniac. Our ability to control fire for our own advantage turns into an inability to control our burning of (especially) fossil fuels. The emphasis here is that we need to make policy within the context of a situation without a normal. Here “the age of fire” reflects not only a reality of a species using fire recklessly, but also serves as a metaphor for the out-of-control trajectory of human society. Fire, in this sense, has no equilibrium.

The ecological crisis of the Anthropocenes is an existential crisis that IR and the study of foreign affairs has largely sleepwalked into. There have been the occasional bolts of lightning that have lit up the potential extent of the ecological crisis (Susan Strange in 1999, and mentioned above, is an example), but these have not (with apologies to the Pyrocene idea) started any intellectual fires until recently. Yet, having said that, past iterations of IR and studies of global governance—especially those that developed as a way to understand the effects of late-nineteenth-century industrialization and globalization—do point to possible ways that global governance might adapt to the problems of the Great Acceleration. What is more, they also hook into the concerns of the Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene, and Pyrocene outlined above. Here I turn this discussion to my own research sub-field: the history of international thought. Interestingly, these also present us with new reasons for pluralizing the Anthropocenes.

Process and horizons: Lessons from the history of international thought

In their analysis of the implications of the Anthropocene for political institutions and decision-making, John Dryzek and Jonathan Pickering argue that the instabilities of the Anthropocene mean that public policy has to be more than just responsive to sudden and unexpected changes. Holocene governance could get away with being merely responsive because it existed in an ecologically stable warm period, but Anthropocene governance needs to be geared to unexpected problems as they happen. ²⁶ The implication of this is that Anthropocene governance needs to shift the focus from goals to processes. Governance in the Holocene could take a largely stable environment for granted, and with the ecology as a known quantity, it is possible then to focus on goals that can be achieved. This approach is analogous to planning a journey across solid ground. If we can take the solid ground for granted, then our planning of a journey to a particular spot is relatively straightforward. What, though, if the ground in front of us is subject to liquefaction? A solid under stress that is capable of behaving like a liquid? Our journey now is dominated by the process of walking, and the discussion of an end goal becomes moot compared to the art of surviving the act of walking. The goal of politics centres on the process, rather than on goals.

What stops this approach from ending up with an Oakeshottian view of the ship of state on a sea with no harbours, with the art of politics focused on traditional means of staying afloat, is that the shifting environment in which policy is made means that there is no comfort in tradition. Flexibility is required. Interestingly, there was an approach to global governance that already took this need to privilege process over goals in an ever-changing political environment. The functional approach to governance that we find first in Mary Parker Follett’s The New State (1918), and then subsequently in David Mitrany’s mid-twentieth century oeuvre, was itself a response to an earlier, milder form of rapid change that had its origins in the unprecedented shocks of the second industrial revolution: a revolution in global political economy that left its mark through the international instability and crises of the first half of the twentieth century. ²⁷ Both Follett and Mitrany sought to describe a new public policy more fitting to the changing world they saw around them, and they came to conclusions that are quite similar to those of Dryzek and Pickering.

The functional approach addresses both the complexities of the Chthulucene and also the idea of no-normal found in the Pyrocene. As a response to the revolutions in electrification, new metal alloys, artificial fertilizers—and the globalization of trade, industrial supply-chains, finance and labour—the starting point for the functional approach was the irreversible nature of the new interdependence and globalization of the economy, and the growing involvement of the state in the development and welfare of citizens as a necessary response to the growing complexities of society. This was the New State outline by Follett. Key to Mitrany’s approach, as someone concerned about the problem of security, was the way the state could no longer contain “the social life” of its citizens as economic interdependence made a mockery of state sovereignty. Others had diagnosed the problem too. International federalists, seeing states as no longer capable of containing the complex web of social interdependence, advocated for the growing federation of states. The functionalist criticism of federalism was that it set up a goal (global federation) without any attempt to explain how this federalism could be achieved. It put goals ahead of process. ²⁸ Rather, functionalism put off the question of what global order would look like in the long-term, concentrating instead on structures of global governance that can be put in place in the short term, and can offer solutions to the problems of interdependence.

Unlike federalist negotiations, functional organizations do not directly challenge the state, but rather provide a parallel governance that attempts to bring together the knowledge of individuals and groups working in a single function. The approach had notable but limited success in the development of UN specialized agencies, international regulatory agencies like IATA or UPU, and the growth of NGOs. While specific aspects of the functional approach found in Follett and Mitrany might not be appropriate for global governance now, the principles behind it may serve a reformed global governance as we come to deal with the multiple issues associated with the current ecological crisis. Current problems require the bringing together of a wide range of technical and scientific expertise within a complex political landscape of competing interests. One of the roles of functional organizations is as umbrella institutions that bring together epistemic communities with specific knowledge that each contain part of what we know in order to address the problem. Above all, it is the process-driven nature of functional organizations that may perhaps make them better suited to dealing with the Anthropocenes. Thus, functional organizations, like Haraway’s Chthulucene, endeavoured to bring together kin. In functionalism’s case, this was the kin created by global interdependence, although the same logic applies to Haraway’s broader idea of kin created by the ecological crisis.

Global institutions also need to see the world differently. In one form, this may require a shift in the dimensions we use to make sense of the world. In his 2018 book Vertical, Stephen Graham took the reader on a three-dimensional tour of the city, from satellites to underground bunkers. ²⁹ Graham’s argument is that, to make sense of cities in the modern world (and with half an eye on ecological problems) we need to see them as three-dimensional spaces. Interestingly, Graham’s work was partially anticipated by an earlier fellow geographer who, like Follett and Mitrany, was also trying to make sense of how the world was changing as a result of the second industrial revolution. Derwent Whittlesey called this new world the machine age, and in 1945 he laid out how the machine age had shifted our global perceptions from two to four dimensions. ³⁰

Whittlesey’s argument focused on how our vision of the world needed to catch up with how the machine age was altering our relationship with the environment. Pre-industrial space perception, he argued, was dominated by a two-dimensional view of the world, and this was the vision the twentieth century had inherited from its agrarian past. Human society was seen as taking place on a two-dimensional map, where the prominent human contribution was the boundaries between jurisdictions. The problem, as Whittlesey saw it, was that the machine age had opened up a third dimension that was invisible on a two-dimensional map. Deep mining, artesian wells, submarine cables, deep sea fishing, tunnels, airplanes, radio waves, and other related technologies had opened up the third dimension. Indeed, Whittlesey saw the Second World War as being fought in three dimensions. There was, however, another dimension that was becoming more crucial in the machine age: the fourth dimension of time. The world was speeding up, with implications both for the coordination of human action and the use of vital natural resources. Here Whittlesey worried about the threat of human activity on the stability of the Earth’s ecology. His particular concern was how both extractive industries and farming threatened to outpace the Earth’s ability to replenish its resources (hence the crucial importance of time). Towards the end of the article, Whittlesey wrote about the consequence of the machine age in this four-dimensional world:

Huge acreage of soils is depleted, in places ruined, by machine methods of tillage that modern inventions have put into the hands of every farmer. Water supplies have been pumped for irrigation at rates far in excess of replenishment, to the ultimate detriment of the users. Extraction of minerals threatens to exhaust not merely small deposits, but also major enrichments. Depredations have made serious inroads into many vital natural resources. All three dimensions of earth-space are affected. ³¹

Whittlesey’s criticism of two-dimensional thinking in a four-dimensional world echoes the concerns with the Plantationocene. The logic of the plantation is also two-dimensional, and thinking about the extractive nature of the plantation, a four-dimensional approach reveals how plantation simplifications can lead to disaster. A global governance for the Anthropocenes requires a four-dimensional vision of the world in line with Whittlesey’s thinking.

There is, though, an insight that flows from Whittlesey’s call for a four-dimensional horizon, but it is an area that Whittlesey himself did not explore. It is a problem, though, that has become acute during the Great Acceleration. The third dimension is not just the site for extraction and resource depletion; it is also where we send our waste. When we look at the world as a two-dimensional map, our waste is often invisible, save for particular and unusual wastescapes such as the site of the Chernobyl disaster, or (more prosaically) the isolated tailings ponds of old mines. Rather, to look for our waste, we have to look to the third dimension. Here we find buried refuse (stored radioactive waste, city dumps), refuse dumped at sea (chemicals, older radioactive dumps, human and farm waste, nitrogen from farm runoff, ocean microplastics), and refuse pumped into the atmosphere (chemicals, soot, carbon dioxide, methane, sulphur dioxide). Many of these classes of refuse (but not plastics, and so-called forever chemicals) do either break down over time or are eventually taken out of the environment by the Earth system. The problem, though, is when we turn to the fourth dimension we find a related problem that Whittlesey noted with the over-extraction of resources: that the ability of the environment to break down our waste is slower than the supply of these waste products. Thus, a key problem of the machine age in the era of the Great Acceleration is that waste builds up at an alarming rate in a cheapened nature. A four-dimensional approach to global governance makes the issue of refuse visible as a global problem.

In a recent article on mines and the management of mine-related wastescapes, Beckett and Keeling noted that a common quip in the mining industry is that mining is “primarily a waste management industry.” ³² While made as a tongue-in-cheek comment, it reveals an important point about much economic activity, especially in the Great Acceleration: that the production of goods and resources is only one part of what our industrial economy produces. Useful products are balanced (and often exceeded) by the even more important creation of waste. To a certain extent this has been the case throughout human history. Archaeologists have, for a long time, seen midden heaps and refuse as the best way to reconstruct an ancient civilization. Our waste tells more about us than our high-status constructions. Or, as V. Gordon Childe put it, “archaeologists eagerly collect, scrupulously measure and record and systematically classify bits of junk and holes in the ground” in order to find out what people of the past were thinking. ³³ Yet, what is new with waste is that, with the Great Acceleration, its levels and lethal nature have increased exponentially, leading to a whole new academic subfield of geography: Discard Studies. ³⁴

This brings us back to studies of the Capitalocene. Capitalism made nature cheap in order to increase profits, and part of this making nature cheap was to make the discarding of waste by industry and other human activities cheap. Industrial waste could be pumped into the atmosphere, buried under ground, poured into rivers, or discharged into the sea at very little expense. This waste has built up over time, acting much like a toxic bank soaking up bad debts to protect the rest of the system, but at some time these will still need to be dealt with. On top of this, the Great Acceleration, by also accelerating waste, has undermined the usual waste regime. Industries can no longer be subsidized by being allowed to pollute freely, and industries such as mining or fossil fuel extraction increasingly need to factor waste costs and decommissioning into the costs of production. Nature can no longer be treated as cheap, at least if we hope to be able to sustain ourselves in the longer term. What is more, with problems such as plastic pollution and greenhouse gas emissions on the rise, waste management becomes a central problem of global governance institutions, affecting biodiversity, human health, food production and even climate stability.

In addition to this, wastescapes caused by human activity have unintended consequences on the complexities of the Earth’s biosphere. Here we return to the key concern of the Chthulucene: making and recognizing non-human kin as we explore the complexities of biological systems. Waste undermines these connections faster than we can study how reliant we are on them. Failure to realize fully the complexities of ecosystems reduced to wastescapes has removed one of the comfortable fantasies associated with industrial activity (particularly of the extractive kind): that after the economic activity has been exhausted, it is possible to return the wastescape to its original form. The problem with this approach is that it is never possible to fully replace what has been lost, due to the complexity of the web of life. Rather, as Beckett and Keeling argue, the management of wastescapes is not an exercise that can be finished but becomes an exercise in permanent care where we have to learn to live with our waste. ³⁵

Of Anthropocenes, waste, and a messy conclusion for a messy future

The different ways of recasting the Anthropocene allow us to think of the Anthropocenes as a plural umbrella containing any number of possible interpretations of the new epoch. It is these recastings that provide us with the fine detail of the politics of the Anthropocenes. While Anthropocenes can be pluralized, we also see the process of pluralization in the lessons for global governance in the Great Acceleration that we can find in the works of Follett, Mitrany, and Whittlesey. The process orientation of the functional approach removed the need for a single goal. Rather, the future is left open, and thus can be pluralized as a potentially large number of Anthropocene futures. Equally, Whittlesey’s extension of our horizon for global governance from two to four dimensions is representative of another form of pluralization, this time in terms of our expanded horizons of perception.

What might this mean for global governance? In his 1994 history of the growth of international organizations as a response to industrial change, Craig Murphy analyzed the century-and-a-half-long adaptation of the new concept of international organizations as responses to problems of governance thrown up by industrialization. ³⁶ While the development of these new forms of global governance was rapid and unprecedented, they were responding to changes that, in comparison to the post-1950 Great Acceleration, were relatively leisurely. Consequently, the shifts that result from the Great Acceleration are likely to be unprecedented, often too slow for the nature of the crisis, and chaotic. Yet, we might still be able to glean what a concentration on process might mean as both governments and international organizations adjust to the realities of a no-normal with no clear policy pathways.

The first forms the central conclusion of Dryzek and Pickering’s book. Governance needs to escape the “pathological path dependencies” (found in the different recastings of the Anthropocenes) that got us here, and to focus instead on ecological reflexivity. ³⁷ This amounts to the ability to anticipate and respond to rapid changes and tipping points in a political environment where the social life (to use Mitrany’s phrase) has not only burst the bounds of the state, but is also dependent on an unstable ecology that is fundamentally Earth-wide and global. Like the permanent management of wastescapes discussed by Beckett and Keeling, this ecological reflexivity has to be about stewardship as well as resilience to challenges. Second, the plural and interlocking nature of the challenges of the Anthropocenes means that the interconnections between organizations, even if they are functionally distinct, will need to be as strong and as regularized as the internal structures of the organizations themselves. As with the functional approach, this means horizontal interconnections, rather than some top-down coordination body. Third, if they are to be more than reactive, the institutions of global governance will need to take in a wealth of information from a pluralized world suffering different yet connected crises. This might best be accomplished by some form of functional democracy, where those involved in the functions managed by structures of governance have a say in how those institutions function. Thus, a territory-based representation may need to be supplemented by function-based representation. This idea of functional democracy as a source of knowledge finds parallels in the analysis of Follett and Mitrany, where the coordination of knowledge becomes a central concern for good international public policy. This democratization might itself be extended to finding kin in the non-human world, in the way laid out by Haraway. Finally, and in line with Whittlesey’s horizons, global governance will need to see in four dimensions—in other words, also vertically and over time.

Whittlesey’s expanded horizons also allow us to see something that he did not develop in his analysis, but that is consistent with his approach: the issue of waste. In a very direct way waste is an issue that our studies of global politics need to address more. After all, waste in the form of greenhouse gases is behind the climate crisis, but it also reaches into other areas, such as global health, and an alternative set of global waste supply chains that run parallel to that of raw materials and goods: a global network of waste management and flow, whether intentional or unintentional. A global politics of the Anthropocenes will need to put waste front and centre as part of the cheapening of nature in the Capitalocene. At present, there is still the tendency to render the world of waste invisible and so low a concern that it does not even deserve to be part of a standard definition of “low” politics. When it does appear, it is often disciplined by a discourse of recycling that disengages the issue of waste from the problems of production and seems to hold out the potential of keeping this aspect of nature cheap.

Yet, there is also an indirect way that we should look to waste, not so much as a real existing thing, but as a metaphor for our attempts to understand global politics. Our global governance in the Anthropocene will be messy. One of the ways it will be messy is that it will require many different technical languages to describe it. In her classic analysis of nuclear weapons and defence intellectuals, Carol Cohn pointed out how membership of the group required the learning of a particular techno-strategic language. However, use of that language would discipline your thought, and there were certain ideas, such as peace, that could not be rendered into speech. ³⁸ On its own, a narrow technical language, which we might associate with the simplifications of the Plantationocene, could never come to grips with the existential crisis of the Anthropocenes (much in the same way that the techno-strategic language of defence intellectuals could not contain all the problems associated with the existential threat of nuclear war). Global governance in the Anthropocenes will require a meeting place for multiple languages in interdisciplinary spaces (requiring those thick horizontal linkages mentioned above), and the abandonment of the idea that there can be one master technical language. These languages, in turn, will be informed by different recastings of the Anthropocene, such as the four I have discussed in this article. To a degree, this is already being done in Earth system science and venues like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, where multiple disciplines and ways of seeing the world find the need to communicate with each other. The Anthropocenes, dominated by the growing issues associated with refuse, will also be a messy polyglot of different technical languages.

Welcome to the messy realities of the Anthropocenes.