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Abstract

This paper proposes the concept of Anthropocene ordinary to direct attention to the ways in which the polysemic idea of the Anthropocene coalesces with/in affective experiences, emergent practices and ways of relating within ordinary life. It reviews research on lived experiences, affective resonances and encounters shaped by the Anthropocene idea as well as arguments that the Anthropocene idea perniciously limits what might emerge from the worlds it describes. The paper then explores how scenes of Anthropocene ordinariness open multiple possibilities for emergence with a range of normative valences and scales, attending particularly to the relationship between emergence and the ordinary.

Keywords

Anthropocene ordinary emergence encounter crisis

I Introduction

The Anthropocene, having escaped the narrow stratigraphic discussions from which it was first proposed (Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000) – and lately rejected¹ – has, as Noel Castree writes, ‘rapidly become a descriptive, explanatory, normative, and affective flashpoint’ for thinking about human influences on the planet across disciplines and beyond academia (2022: 49). Unlike the designations of climate change or climate crisis, the Anthropocene usefully captures the multiplicity and anthropogenicity of globally interlinked and cascading environmental changes: climate change and precipitous declines in biodiversity, and global accumulations of toxic and plastic wastes, and exhaustion of soils, and draining of aquifers, and so on and on. In geography, the Anthropocene holds an additional promise, that of bridging the disciplinary divide between the human and the physical (Castree, 2014), though from the first human geographers have, to paraphrase Latour, 2017a, suspected this promise is a poisoned one, full of definitional shortfalls and conceptual traps. Indeed, rather than a neutral signifier for this time of planetary socio-environmental crisis, for many human geographers and cognate scholars the Anthropocene is, as Melanie Benson Taylor (2021: 10) describes it, yet another ‘inaccurate, injurious product of normative, hierarchical ideologies’, discursively obscuring differential responsibility for and vulnerabilities to planetary crisis, overwriting many worlds with Euro-Modern universals and centring undifferentiated human agency in replication of Modernity’s hubris (see also, e.g., Curley and Smith, 2024; Yusoff, 2019). The force of social science and humanities critiques of the Anthropocene is persuasive. And yet, the term persists in the world (e.g. Ellis, 2024), providing a magnetic shorthand for the many, differentiated yet interlinked, human impacts on the Earth that are shifting socio-ecological relations around the world in increasingly catastrophic ways. This persistence, the lure of the Anthropocene, provokes a new question for human geographers: not whether the Anthropocene is an accurate or just description for the planetary present but rather, what emerges in ordinary encounters with/in the Anthropocene, understood as a polysemic theory and imaginary of planetary socio-environmental change (Castree, 2022; Tsing et al., 2019)?

In this paper, I propose answering this question with the concept of Anthropocene ordinary. A play on Lauren Berlant’s (2007, 2011) ‘crisis ordinary’, Anthropocene ordinary directs attention to the ways in which the idea of contemporary environmental crises as both anthropogenic and planetary is shifting affective experiences, emergent practices and ways of relating within ordinary life. Anthropocene ordinary shares Berlant’s focus on the ordinary as a site of change, where seemingly small encounters, attachments and affective intensities occur, shifting and accumulating in ways that can change what emerges from the flow of individual and collective experiences without registering as rupture (see also, Berlant and Stewart, 2019; Stewart, 2007).² In distinction from recent ecocritical uses of ‘climate crisis ordinary’ (Carlill, 2025; Luciano, 2023), however, my conceptualisation of Anthropocene ordinary is not simply an extension of Berlant’s ‘crisis ordinary’ into the specifically environmental realm of crisis. Berlant’s (2011: 10) crisis ordinary is concerned with how accumulating structures of crisis mediate the affective intensities and encounters of ordinary life, how crisis ‘unfolds in stories about navigating what’s overwhelming’, how it builds up in the background of things (see also Anderson et al., 2023; Berlant and Stewart, 2019; Povinelli, 2011). In replacing ‘crisis’ with ‘Anthropocene’, Anthropocene ordinary directs attention to the ways in which not a structure but an idea – the Anthropocene – mediates ordinary experiences and ways of relating; and while the idea of the Anthropocene can carry an imaginary of catastrophic endings and, indeed, crisis writ large, it is not, or not only, an environmentally inflected version of crisis. The task is to explore, empirically, what worlds emerge with/in multiple iterations of the Anthropocene idea, without overwriting them with a predetermined sense of what is ‘really real’ (Savransky, 2021: 26).

The idea that worlds emerge through the coming together of things is, of course, a familiar one in human geography (see, esp., Massey, 2005) and geographers have drawn from a wide set of theoretical lineages in seeing the world as emergent in and through these comings together (e.g. Anderson et al., 2012; Bawaka Country et al., 2016; Braun, 2006; Bridge, 2021). What is distinct about emergence in Berlant’s and related iterations of affect theory (e.g. Ahmed, 2004; Stewart, 2007) is their attention to the affectively charged intensities, encounters and relations within ordinary life, as well as an insistence on the non-linearity and open-endedness of emergence (the latter building from Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). While existing formulations such as the everyday Anthropocene (LeMenager, 2017; Westgate, 2022) and ordinary Anthropocene (Fredriksen, 2021) share this affective orientation to ordinary modes of inhabiting worlds with/in the Anthropocene, they tend to leave the Anthropocene itself slippery. In particular, they often use it loosely, as shorthand for the multiple environmental crises unfolding in the planetary present. They thereby resonate with the growing body of human geography research focused on experiences of living through accumulating conditions of socio-ecological precarity (Petrova, 2024). This includes work that extends Berlant’s crisis ordinary to think about socio-ecological crisis (e.g., Anderson et al., 2020; Linz, 2021) as well as corresponding theorisations of the various non-eventful, yet harmful, accretions of environmental changes in everyday life such as Rob Nixon’s (2011) theorisation of ‘slow violence’ and Deloughrey’s (2015, 2019) figuration of ‘non-spectacular ecological violence’. These approaches usefully draw attention to the everyday, experiential scenes of slowly unfolding and/or accumulating socio-environmental violence arising from ecological degradation, toxicity, changing weather and seasons and/or other forms of planetary environmental change accumulating in place (see, e.g., Davies, 2018, 2022; Liboiron, 2021; Murphy, 2017; Russo, 2023). In so doing, they establish a ground for understanding experiences of planetary socio-ecological crises as unavoidably situated, as unfolding within the context of everyday practices and ordinary life. They leave open, however, the question of how and with what effects the Anthropocene idea entangles itself with/in such zones of the ordinary, how it mediates the worlds it describes. This is the gap I propose Anthropocene ordinary to address.

For the task of thinking about the role of ideas within the ordinary, I draw additional insights from recent theoretical engagements with Alfred North Whitehead (1929; see, e.g., Debaise, 2017, 2020; Roberts, 2024; Stengers, 2014) and William James (1912, see, e.g. Debaise and Stengers, 2022; Savransky, 2021). While a detailed account of the metaphysical propositions of this work is beyond the scope of this paper (see Debaise, 2020; Stengers, 2014 for such a discussion), its focus on the continuity and immediacy of experience and the call to understand reality as multiple and emergent through relations resonates with the affective orientation of this paper (see also, McCormack, 2014, 2018), while adding a particular consideration for the way that abstractions, themselves coalescing from emergence, participate in shaping what emerges from the flows of the ordinary. As Martin Savransky (2021: 13), writing within this tradition, argues in regard to the abstraction of modernity, it is a ‘name for a host of different stories we tell. Which is not to say that these are “just stories.” Stories do things, they inflect our lives and practices, they weave and tear worlds, they shape how they might come to be inhabited’ (see also Haraway, 2016; Lorimer, 2003 on the significance of stories for making worlds). With this in mind, Anthropocene ordinary foregrounds the question of how multivalent ideas/stories/abstractions of the Anthropocene coalesce with/in the ordinary worlds they describe, shifting what emerges therein.

The paper is organised around three sections. In the proceeding, I gather insights on the affective resonances of the Anthropocene idea within zones of the ordinary from scholarship that explores the Anthropocene as something that comes together within everyday, emplaced practices and encounters. Following this, I consider the challenge presented to the Anthropocene idea by the diverse set of critical literatures that figure it as a metanarrative through which various forms of harmful or regressive socio-environmental relations and (bio)political modes of governance are enacted. I consider how such critiques also engage with the Anthropocene as an abstraction that shapes worlds, but question the tendency to reify the meanings of the Anthropocene in advance of empirical study. The final substantive section then builds from these insights and oversights to consider how different scenes of Anthropocene ordinariness open multiple possibilities for emergent worlds with a range of normative valences and scales, paying particular attention to the relationship between emergence and the ordinary. A concluding section recounts key aspects of the argument and calls for expanding attention to scenes of Anthropocene ordinariness within future human geographic research.

II Encountering Anthropo-scenes

The Anthropocene presents itself as a global condition, a provocation to think about anthropogenic environmental changes at a global scale. Yet, as Ana Tsing (2016: 3) writes, ‘None of us live in a global system; we live in places’ and we can only experience and think from those places. This is a familiar insight in human geography, where the global has long been understood as articulated through the local (e.g. Amin, 2002; Massey, 2005; Swyngedouw, 2004), and so it is no surprise that a substantial body of work within human geography and related fields has located the planetary dynamics of the Anthropocene within ordinary encounters and everyday practices in place. In this section, I gather intellectual resources for thinking about Anthropocene ordinariness from literature that locates the Anthropocene or related ideas such as global climate change within ordinary and everyday practices and encounters.

1 Affective senses of the Anthropocene

Writing over a decade ago on the Anthropocene vis-à-vis the everyday, Donna Houston (2014: 448) argued for seeing ordinary life as a key site for studying planetary environmental change because the latter ‘impacts on the most fundamental elements of everyday life—how we sustain our bodies, families, communities, livelihoods and places in relation to the living/dying earth’. In this vein, a growing body of work on what Ginn and colleagues (2018) label the ‘affective Anthropocene’, turns attention to the varied ways that planetary anthropogenic socio-environmental crisis is sensed through everyday practices and encounters. In a key articulation of this approach, Alex Arnall (2023: 9) writes that the Anthropocene can take shape ‘as an everyday, multisensory unfolding consisting of visual, aural and tactile components’. In other words, the Anthropocene becomes legible through particular, sensory and emplaced encounters between people and the tangled more-than-human worlds in which they find themselves (Fredriksen, 2021; HF Wilson, 2016). Extending from Stewart’s Ordinary Affects (2007), this understanding of an ‘ordinary Anthropocene’ attends to ‘the ongoing, everyday … and less-than-planetary assemblages through which the Anthropocene is sensed and lived’ (Fredriksen, 2021: 532). By centring the affective resonances and everyday practices of planetary crisis, this work figures the Anthropocene as coalescing within the flows of ordinary life. It does little, however, to interrogate how the Anthropocene as an idea comes together and works within these ordinary worlds. In contrast, there is a growing body of research on everyday practices and encounters which does consider the ways in which imaginaries of the Anthropocene, and not just the material conditions ascribed to it, are shifting everyday practice and ways of knowing.

As Elizabeth Deloughrey (2019: 135) writes, although local weather is not commensurate with global climate systems, the imaginary of global climate change unsettles local experiences and ways of knowing the weather, drawing in anxieties about the significance of extreme weather and shifting expectations for what constitutes ‘normal’ weather (Clifford and Travis, 2020). In California, where extreme weather is becoming more frequent, Michael Vine (2018: 406) shows how the idea of the Anthropocene is reshaping experiences and expectations of events like wildfires, floods and heatwaves in a way that reconfigures the ‘form and content of the ordinary’, leading people experiment with new everyday ‘ways of feeling at home in the Anthropocene’. Similarly, Uma Kothari and Alex Arnall (2019: 130) show how both the effects and the imaginaries of global climate change are (re)shaping ‘people’s regular, routine, and quotidian activities’ (see also Bee et al., 2015; Kothari and Arnall, 2020; Sou et al., 2022). In these cases, we can see how the idea of the Anthropocene, understood as a new era of extreme and unpredictable weather across the globe, is shifting how people relate to environmental happenings. Rather than expecting a ‘return to normal’ following extreme weather events, an understanding of these events as signals of a new normal within the Anthropocene shifts everyday practices and ordinary experiences.

Along with weather, work in more-than-human geographies has also shown how the idea of the Anthropocene is unsettling ordinary ways of relating to and interpreting encounters with wildlife. While the loss of wildlife in local places has long been taken to signal wider ecological losses (Heise, 2017), the idea of the Anthropocene changes the scope and scale of imagined losses. Andrew Whitehouse’s (2015) work on listening to birdsong in the Anthropocene, for example, highlights the multiple ‘anxious semiotics’ that the idea of the Anthropocene as a planetary extinction crisis attaches to encounters with birdsong. Compared to the imaginaries inaugurated by Rachel Carson’s iconic Silent Spring (1962), wherein local declines in birdsong were linked to the proliferation of pesticide use at municipal and state scales, the idea of the Anthropocene expands these losses to signal nothing less than the limits of planetary liveability. Moreover, along with an expanded sense of what the quietening of birdsong signals – from short-sited municipal or state policy to anthropogenic planetary crisis – Whitehouse (2015: 69) finds that the idea of the Anthropocene reverses the relation of assigning meaning after experiencing changes in the soundscape to one where people are actively and anxiously ‘listening for discordance, disruption and absence’ in avian soundscapes, even when no such changes are evident (see also, Newman, 2024; HF Wilson, 2024a). Beyond losses, animal geographers have also shown how the idea of the Anthropocene can attune people and communities to perceiving novel ecological relations as signals of both planetary loss and, alternately, hopeful signs of resilience (e.g. Barua, 2022, 2023a; Stoetzer, 2022). More ambiguously, Lorimer’s (2024) case study of beavers in Britain shows how these animals bring Anthropocene ‘worldings and weirdings’ into view through their ordinary entanglements with the socio-ecologies of place (see also Oliver, 2025; Turnbull et al., 2022). Careful attention to the mundane work involved in responding to ecological reshufflings in place, meanwhile, shows how imaginaries of the Anthropocene can be enrolled in reorienting everyday practices and relations of caring for wildlife (e.g. Gibbs, 2021; Houston, 2021; HF Wilson, 2022; HF Wilson, 2024b).

This section has offered examples of how affectively oriented geographies have laid the groundwork for thinking the Anthropocene as something that might be sensed in places and encounters, moving from the Anthropocene as a loosely defined planetary condition to the Anthropocene as an imaginary or abstraction through which the present is made sense of, and with/in which new practices and ways of relating are emerging. This work offers various windows into Anthropocene ordinariness, views of zones of the ordinary coalescing through or with the abstraction of the Anthropocene. An additional question arises, however, as to where the idea of the Anthropocene itself comes from. Ideas and abstractions may present themselves as ‘views from nowhere’, arriving from an outside to shape or weigh on ordinary life, but, as the empiricist tradition of emergence insists, they also coalesce through relations and practices as they come together in the present, a matter to which I now turn.

2 Bringing the Anthropocene ‘down to Earth’

Bruno Latour’s later works (e.g. Latour, 2017b, 2018, 2023) engage the Anthropocene as an idea that breaks the spell of Modern imaginaries of nature as external to the social, forcing an ‘ecologisation’ of the social and political (see, e.g., Usher, 2024 for a wider discussion of Latour’s ecological politics). The Anthropocene, Latour argues, intrudes on modern imaginaries, making it impossible to ignore interconnectedness and dependency with and within the vital systems of the Earth’s critical zone (see also Stengers, 2017). As to the Anthropocene itself, as an idea, Latour (2023: 74) argues that although it presents itself as a totalising view of the Earth, as if viewed ‘from Sirius’ – Latour’s playful spin on previous critiques of the impossible ‘view from nowhere’ (e.g. Haraway, 1997) – it too coalesces within the Terrestrial grounds of geology, ‘connected step by step’ through scientific work of sampling, data modelling and other ordinary ‘data labours’ (Nadim, 2016).

In her work on the materiality of big data, for example, Shannon Mattern, 2017, 2017b attends empirically to the ways in which the geologic imaginary of the Anthropocene emerges from data that is itself generated from earthly matter, specifically samples of ice, soil, sediments and rock. Such samples, particularly cores – long cylindrical samples taken vertically – are read by environmental scientists as archives of past Earthly conditions (see also Ogden, 2021 on ‘the archival earth’). Simultaneously, through the cataloguing and collating of these samples into the big datasets that inform computer models of past, present and future climates, they also figure a planetary present through which humans diagnose and read Earthly futures (Mattern, 2017b). In a related consideration of the movement to digitise and database natural history collections around the world, Tahani Nadim (2016, 2021) shows how material samples – here the remains of animals, plants and other museum specimens – are recontextualised by their transfiguration into big data, thereby re-narrating histories, presents and futures of planetary ecological change. Importantly, in this movement of de- and recontextualising museum collections, Nadim (2021: 72) observes that ‘the domaining and magnifying that occur through scaling resist any easy equation of local/diverse/concrete and global/homogenous/abstract’. In the newly ‘big’ data of geology and natural histories, the idea of the Anthropocene emerges through the collation of earthly samples – of ice, rock and mud as well as the preserved remains of organic bodies – not as a matter of simplifying and universalising, but of redistributing complexity.

The scientific data and modelling dependent on material samples and ordinary workflows are one important site wherein the idea of the Anthropocene is constructed and mobilised. At the same time, once circulating in the world, the Anthropocene escapes these scientific confines, changing in places and encounters. On this matter, cultural geographies of landscape, having previously argued for the potential of landscapes to unsettle linear perceptions of time and scale (e.g. Matless, 2017; Wylie, 2007), have been particularly instructive. In an important contribution, David Matless (2017, 2018) formulated the concept of the ‘Anthroposcenic’ to name the experience of landscapes as intersecting scenes of planetary deep time, human history and environmental change.³ Matless proposed that the idea of the Anthropocene expands what can be seen or otherwise sensed in ordinary landscapes (see also Garlick, 2023). Using the example of the English coast, he traces how the entanglement of geologic sedimentation, historical memory, cultural interpretations and contemporary environmental change evokes a sweep of human impacts on the planet as encounterable through the Anthropocene imaginary. Along with coasts, human geographers have looked to a variety of landscapes for understanding how the imaginary of the Anthropocene allows for a sense of planetary systems and the deep time of geologic change to ‘telescope into and out of everyday moments’ (Ginn et al., 2018: 217), including, for example, peatlands (Woolley, 2018); glaciers (Bennett, 2020; Morehouse and Cigliano, 2020); permafrost (Wrigley, 2023); and, perhaps especially, islands.

Islands, as Chandler and Pugh (2021) argue, are particularly generative places for (re)thinking the Anthropocene. In Deloughrey’s (2019) formulation, islands at the emplaced conjunctures of ruinous colonial and modern developmental legacies with environmental ravishes of planetary environmental crises serve as allegories for the Anthropocene writ large. Speaking particularly to the Caribbean, Mimi Sheller (2020) observes that there is a tendency to figure this region as a ‘canary in the coal mine’, alternately a foreshadowing of wider Anthropocene catastrophes and a laboratory for Anthropocene adaptations. Against such topdown views of the Caribbean understood through the Anthropocene idea, Sheller (2020: 7) argues that ‘the “Anthropocene islands” offer active sites of cultural creativity and complex evolving socioecologies for the revision and remaking of present social relations’. Within islands (and island imaginaries), then, the idea of the Anthropocene can be seen to intrude both from above, in modes of developmental governance and racial capital that figure the Anthropocene as an everyday emergency and from the ground, where Caribbean histories of colonisation and slavery, racial capitalism and humanitarian biopolitics are not lived as marks of vulnerability, but as evidence of ongoing, everyday psychic resistance realised in the cultural identities, practices and ways of being in the world that persist despite ongoing colonisation, thereby modelling new ways of living through the Anthropocene imagined as the end of liberal modernity (Brathwaite, 2021; Sheller, 2020).

Notably, the normative valences of the Anthropocene idea’s disruption of modernity’s liberal horizon (Povinelli, 2021) are not always so inspiring, as demonstrated by recent human geographical engagements with populist-authoritarian and far-right ecologies (e.g. McCarthy, 2019; Menga, 2022; Varco, 2024). As research in this area has shown, the idea of the Anthropocene can evoke a variety of ‘authoritarian desires and anxieties’ (Daggett, 2018: 29) in which ecological crisis becomes imbricated with a variety of extreme right imaginaries and emergent reactionary practices. Matt Varco’s (2024) work on the far-right völkisch movement in Germany is particularly instructive here, showing how the idea of the Anthropocene – especially as articulated through planetary limits and ecological catastrophe – has re-enlivened ethno-nationalist thinking vis-à-vis land and belonging, providing new ecological grounds for back to the land movements charged with the affective fears and hatreds of racially exclusive imaginaries of ‘blood and soil’. Varco’s work shows how new far-right publications and online discourses are adopting conventional style and design aesthetics, replicating scientific citation practices and glossy production values in the presentation of arguments that launder white supremacist ecological discourses like Lebenstraum via affectively charged mobilisations of the Anthropocene idea.

The coalescence of the Anthropocene with/in places occurs both scientifically through ordinary gathering and collating materials and in the literal ground of places where the idea of the Anthropocene draws different histories, presents and futures into affectively charged encounters. Before moving to explore the relations of emergence within such scenes of Anthropocene ordinariness, the following section engages an important rejoinder to this more open exploration of Anthropocene affects and effects: the substantial body of critical literature arguing that the idea of the Anthropocene forecloses the political potential of what might emerge within the worlds it describes.

III The Anthropocene as a limiting abstraction

Like climate change – one of its constituent parts – the ‘truth’ of the Anthropocene is often referred through the evidence produced by Earth Systems Science (ESS). In a hopeful interpretation of what emerges from the big data modelling of Earth systems, ecophilosopher Timothy Morton (2013) suggests that, by allowing humans to glimpse ‘hyperobjects’ like global climate change, ESS opens the possibility of drawing people into planetary awareness and action. Where Morton sees generative potential for the big data through which the Anthropocene idea is figured to draw people into action, however, historian Dipesh Chakrabarty (2022) sees something more limiting emerging from these data worlds. In figuring the planet as one interconnected system, he argues ESS presents a global one-ness that is outside the possibility of humans’ experiencing it as such. As a result, Chakrabarty (2022: 230) writes there is no planetary ‘we’ capable of cor/responding to the Anthropocene’s ‘one world’ as described by Earth Systems Sciences. As a result, ESS figures a set of ‘facts’ that are removed from the possibility of political action. The Anthropocene, in this sense, is figured by Chakrabarty as an abstraction that constrains what can emerge from the worlds it describes. In this section, I engage the substantial body of literature in human geography and related fields that critiques the Anthropocene as an idea that shuts down possibilities, limits potentials and inflicts violence on worlds. For these authors, the Anthropocene is, at best, what Derek McCormack (2023: 65) describes as ‘a s/cene-stealing abstraction’ and, more often, a hegemonic metanarrative through which socio-environmental crisis is universalised and depoliticised (Gandy, 2022; Jackson, 2021; Taylor, 2021).

A common theme within critiques of the Anthropocene is that the ‘Anthropos’ in Anthropocene, like the concept of ‘Man’, discursively universalises human experience, obscuring radical differences in responsibility for, and vulnerability to, global environmental changes across different human groups and systems (Fagan, 2019; Head, 2016; Johnson et al., 2014; Wynter, 2003). In response, critical scholars have proposed an array of alternative designations to more accurately name the drivers of planetary environmental change, prominently including Capitalocene (e.g. Altvater et al., 2016; Moore, 2016) and Plantationocene (e.g. Barua, 2023b; Haraway, 2015; Wolford, 2021), amongst others. Such alternatives seek to overcome the Anthropocene’s discursively problematic universalisation of human experience and culpability, naming particular socio-ecological systems rather than humans in general as the source of current planetary destabilisation. Simultaneously, however, a smaller set of critics have noted that the ‘-cene’ part of the word Anthropocene – and indeed of alternative designations like Capitalocene and Plantationocene – problematically implies the linear, sequential and global temporality of stratigraphy (Clark and Yusoff, 2017) and European universalism (Curley and Smith, 2024; Rickards, 2015). The conclusion of much of this critical work is to renounce the Anthropocene idea in order to open ‘the terrain for a proper politicization of the environment’ (Swyngedouw, 2024: n.p.). Sticking with the task of this paper, however, I read these critiques as pointing to another mode in which the Anthropocene idea might coalesce with/in the ordinary: namely as what Debaise and Stengers (2022) call, following James, a ‘thinning abstraction’. Thinning abstractions are ideas that participate in the worlds they explain through ‘the subtraction of the qualities of concrete things’ (Debaise and Stengers, 2022: 405); in other words, they are reductionist ideas, through which irreducible differences and multiplicity in the world are made illegible and/or insensible. In what follows, I read attestations of this dynamic first through work that argues that the Anthropocene idea is depoliticizing and, second, through work that links the Anthropocene with Euro-modernity and the legacies of colonialism.

1 The Anthropocene as engine of immuno-bio-politics

In many colloquial uses, the Anthropocene is taken to convey an ‘anticipatory semantics’ of impending, universal catastrophe on a global scale (Castree, 2021a; DeLoughrey, 2019; Wakefield, 2020). As such, one useful starting point for thinking about the Anthropocene as a de- or anti-political abstraction is the substantial body of work in geography and cognate fields that engages with the ways in which ordinary modes of governance are increasingly oriented in relation to the potentiality of future emergencies (Adey and Anderson, 2012; Collier and Lakoff, 2021; Deville et al., 2014; Grove, 2014; O’Grady, 2018; Tironi Rodó et al., 2014). Here, the spectre of emergency – whether as natural disaster, terrorism or other – is enrolled in justifying pre-emptive modes of governing in the everyday present (Anderson, 2010; Massumi, 2021). As the effects of climate change, toxic pollution, extinction and other socio-environmental crises increasingly intrude on the everyday, the Anthropocene coalesces as an emergency imaginary extraordinaire, driving modes of governance that are not so much pre-emptive – the scale and inevitability implied by the Anthropocene idea precludes pre-empting disaster – but rather attenuative. And, as with other forms of emergency management, such governance invites a variety of techno-managerial approaches oriented around, for example, adaptation, resilience and mitigation (see, e.g., Chandler et al., 2020; Grove, 2018). The problem, critics argues, is that by carrying an appearance of political neutrality, techno-managerial approaches remove problems from the realm of public, political debate (Blakey, 2021), while simultaneously justifying and obscuring the various forms of bio- and necropolitics they involve (Neyrat, 2019).

Returning to the example of the Caribbean, Gahman and Thongs (2020) argue that the techno-managerial focus on risk and resilience associated with global environmental change has dominated international governance and aid to the region, obscuring the colonial, white supremacist legacies that have drained the region of resources and increased its vulnerability to extreme weather and sea level rise (see also, Anderson et al., 2020; Grove, 2014; Sheller, 2020). In this argument, the promotion of local resilience as a response to global eco-crises – despite its progressive potential (Grove, 2018; O’Grady, 2025; Sou, 2022; Tozzi, 2021) – can be mobilised in a depoliticizing way, shifting the onus of adaptation away from the structures and politics of global inequalities and towards the behaviours of local people (e.g. Bonds, 2018; Bonilla, 2020; Erickson, 2020; Walker and Cooper, 2011). In this line of argument, imaginaries of the Anthropocene as a looming global catastrophe are seen to drive modes of adaptation that, as Matthew Gandy (2022: 208) argues, represent ‘a radical elaboration of existing discourses within the sustainability literature’, seeking to maintain rather than break with existing socio-ecological power dynamics. In other words, rather than forcing a break with modern imaginaries of stability and endless growth, these arguments justify the extension of existing apparatuses – like technology, markets, individual behaviours – to meet the challenges presented by the Anthropocene, ignoring or glossing over the question of irreversibilities (Gandy, 2022) as well as political and ethical questions of how places should respond to planetary socio-environmental changes (Castree, 2021b).

Making a strong argument for the depoliticising effects of the Anthropocene idea, Swyngedouw and Ernstson (2018) propose the provocative term ‘Anthropo(Obs)cene’ to name and indict the ways in which the Anthropocene idea performs planetary environmental crisis as a universal technical problem, off-staging political possibilities and directing public and private attention towards techno-managerial solutions for a so-called ‘good-Anthropocene’. Swyngedouw (2019: 255) further explains how the ‘construction of eco-bubbles and ‘sustainable’ enclaves for the privileged’, driven by imaginaries of the Anthropocene as a problem of sustainability, ‘produces simultaneously the unprotected exiles and deepening socio-ecological destruction elsewhere’ (see also Esposito, 2011; Neyrat, 2019). Illustrating this point empirically, Meredith DeBoom (2021) shows how the Anthropocene discourse of impending global eco-catastrophe drives states and individual consumers in the global North to enact policies and shift everyday consumption patterns towards ‘green’ technologies like solar panels and electric vehicles. In turn, this increasing demand for ‘green’ technologies drives an escalation of socio-ecologically violent forms of extraction in the global South in order to supply the raw materials and labour on which these technologies depend (see also Lunstrum and Bose, 2022; Lykke, 2019; Sullivan, 2013). Focusing on what is left outside of the immuno-biopolitical bubble of so-called ‘green’ politics of the Anthropocene, De Boom exposes what she names the ‘climate necropolitics’ that populations elsewhere are exposed to in the deathscapes created by mining for the rare-Earth minerals required for the production of adaptational devices like solar panels and batteries for electric vehicles.

2 The Anthropocene as an extension of Euro-modern imaginaries

Alongside the literature on the immuno-bio- and necropolitics effected through discourses of the Anthropocene, a growing set of scholarship looks beyond the relations of global capitalism to the longer racialised histories of ecocide and extraction associated with European colonisation (e.g. Erickson, 2020; Jackson, 2021; Simpson, 2020; Whyte, 2017a, 2017b; Yusoff, 2019). Through the global and sequential imaginary of stratigraphic epochs, the Anthropocene presents itself as a rupture with the preceding stability of the Holocene. This linear imaginary can, as discussed in the preceding subsection, contribute to a depoliticised techno-managerialism. It can also, as the literature engaged with here argues, obscure the past and ongoing socio-ecological violence of colonisation and shore up Eurocentric understandings of planetary change.

Advancing this position, Davis and Todd (2017) argue that the etymological universalisation of the designation ‘Anthropocene’ accurately names itself by signifying the Enlightenment logics of ‘Man’ that underlaid European colonisation, enforcing ontological unity, assuming a ‘one world world’ (Law, 2015) that can be known through Western science and managed through rational planning (de la Cadena and Blaser, 2018). As Davis and Todd elaborate,

Universalist ideas and ideals are embedded in the colonial project as it was enacted through a brutal system of imposing ‘the right’ way of living. In actively shaping the territories where colonizers invaded, they refused to see what was in front of them; instead forcing a landscape, climate, flora, and fauna into an idealized version of the world modelled on sameness and replication of the homeland. (2017: 769)

Through this process, as Burgos-Martinez (2021: 439) puts it, ‘the Anthropocene becomes a macro-story overshadowing and neglecting the pluriverses of human existence’.

In their recent critique of ‘the cene scene’, Curley and Smith (2024: 180) argue that even in various critical formulations that replace the problematically undifferentiated ‘Anthropos’ with more specific causal prefixes, ‘-cenes center our attention on breaking points in time determined by white European expansion’, thereby continuing to centre whiteness. Here, the epochal periodisation implied by the ‘-cene’ of Anthropocene becomes equally suspect to the ‘Anthropos’, assuming a global rupture of uni-linear – or ‘Eurocentric’ (Mitchell, 2024) – time, interlinked with imperial modernity’s sense of Progress (Curley and Smith, 2024; Ogden, 2021). Notably, this figuration of time and change performatively obscures the world-ending experiences of people and wider ecologies already devastated by colonialism (Neves Marques, 2015; Whyte, 2017b). In a related rejoinder to the Anthropocene imaginary as one of the future in ruins, Deloughrey (2015: 353) proposes that, vis-à-vis the experience of many indigenous peoples around the world, the Anthropocene’s spectacular promise of socio-ecological ruin to come is in fact ‘a profoundly ordinary future’. In other words, if the Anthropocene is experienced and discursively positioned as new, it is only because the wave of ecocidal violence inflicted on indigenous worlds through colonisation is only ‘now hitting those nations, legal systems, and structures that brought about the rending and disruption of lifeways and life-worlds in the first place’ (Davis and Todd, 2017: 774; see also Curley and Smith, 2024; LeMenager, 2021; Povinelli, 2021; Whyte, 2017b). Moreover, as Khyle Powys Whyte (2017b: 207) argues, the stable Holocene environments imagined as ruptured by the Anthropocene were in fact already ‘ancestral dystopias’ to indigenous communities living within the aftermath of colonial campaigns that ‘depleted, degraded, or irreversibly damaged the ecosystems, plants, and animals that our ancestors had local living relationships with for hundreds of years’.

Whether by depoliticising socio-ecological crises or overwriting pluriversal worlds, the critical literature discussed in this section can be read as showing how the Anthropocene is an abstraction that thins out the worlds it describes, an idea that obscures other ways of knowing and sensing planetary change that thereby limits the possibilities for what might emerge therein. In much of this critical literature, however, there is a tendency to reify the Anthropocene idea, freezing and fixating on its formal geologic definition and etymological meanings, rather that attending, empirically, to how it mutates along the way, to what it does differently in different places (Cox, 2024; Ginn, 2015). Though it seems clear that many variations of the Anthropocene abstraction do off-stage politics and/or performatively obscure difference, empirical attention to the ordinary also suggests something less totalising, resembling, for example, the worlds of the ‘Anthropo-not-seen’ described by Marisol de la Cadena, 2015, 2015b: n.p.), in which diverse indigenous Andean worlds are ‘both obliged into’ and yet continue to ‘exceed’ the abstraction of the Anthropocene. In the next section, I return to the question of emergent worlds with/in Anthropocene ordinariness.

IV Emergence with/in scenes of Anthropocene ordinariness

In the Peruvian Amazon city of Iquitos, Japhy Wilson (2024: 76) describes a zone of the ordinary wherein the indefinitely deferred infrastructural promises of Modernity intersect with the mounting degradations effected by planetary socio-environmental crisis to engender a ‘lived experience of space-out-of-joint’. The Anthropocene, he suggests, does not refer to an external, objective planetary condition, but instead emerges within this lived conjuncture as ‘increasingly surreal and absurd: a slapdash concoction of state-engendered fantasies projected onto a slow-motion breakdown of the socioecological order that its protagonists are seemingly powerless to avert’ (J Wilson, 2024: 76). The empirical case Wilson presents aligns in many ways with the category of ‘slow emergencies’, proposed by Ben Anderson et al. (2020: 632) to describe ‘situations where the intersection of stalled time and disastrous time foreclose capacities to become otherwise’. The absurdity that Wilson encounters in Iquitos might be understood as arising from the impasse of the slow emergency effected by persistent attachments to Progress within a context where its realisation is no longer imaginable. At the same time, Wilson’s centring of the absurd, surreal qualities of this particular scene of Anthropocene ordinariness offer an opening – albeit an uncertain one – to move beyond the impasse of the situation by refusing the researcher’s impulse to explain away the nonsensical worlds they encounter by importing theories from outside to explain what is ‘really’ going on (Savransky, 2021). By instead confronting the nonsensical experience of ordinary life in places where the idea of the Anthropocene renders continued attachments to the Modern horizon of progress absurd, the Anthropocene idea might open up spaces to live and relate differently (J Wilson, 2024).

Wilson’s exploration of ‘space-out-of-joint’ gives us just one example of the way the Anthropocene idea can coalesce with/in places, shaped by and shaping encounters and affective resonances therein, transversing longstanding and increasingly tenuous attachments to Progress, and shifting and stretching the edges of the ordinary in an emergent sense of absurdity and surrealness. In section II, above, I traced several scenes where Anthropocene ordinariness could be glimpsed – within shifting practices and imaginaries attached to everyday environmental encounters, in ongoing, ordinary forms of resistance and reaction that gain new visibility and viability in the wake of failing modernity, and in new Anthropocene ‘data labours’ (Nadim, 2016) through which the idea itself takes shape, amongst others. What I turn to explore now is how scenes of the Anthropocene ordinary might reveal something about the ordinary present of socio-ecological crisis as a site of change as well as, or within, impasse, returning to the matter of emergence, as raised in the introduction.

Berlant (2011: 4) describes impasse as a ‘a time of dithering from which someone or some situation cannot move forward’. In scenes of crisis ordinary, people find ways of living on, enduring through the impasse of the ordinary without moving forward or out of the structures of crisis. As Wilson’s example of Iquitos shows, Anthropocene ordinariness can also coalesce as impasse, a ‘space-out-of-joint’ that people struggle to exit despite the growing absurdity of the situation. But impasse is not a site where nothing happens. The stretched-out present of the ordinary is both the site where things persist through repetition – of routines, attachments, encounters and so forth – and also where things occur, where change emerges through small shifts and the slow congealing of things. These small occurrences can thereby open up a difference in relation to the persistence of things with which they coexist (see Debaise, 2020 for a discussion of occurrence and persistence in Whitehead). It is through such an emergent relation of difference that changes emerge with/in ordinary existence. This understanding of how change occurs and worlds emerge within the Anthropocene ordinary does not preclude that some changes and worlds also emerge from extraordinary shocks, from accidents that are not foreseen and through which the repetitions and affective resonances of the ordinary are ruptured. But the extraordinary never lasts long, it inevitably reverts to a new ordinary following the moment of rupture (see, Das, 2006; Linz, 2021). Anthropocene ordinariness offers a lens onto both persistently and newly normal worlds.

In the examples of Anthropocene ordinariness I have offered in the previous sections, a range of normative valences and scales of change are apparent. In both the hopeful spaces of Caribbean survivance (e.g. Sheller, 2020) and the decidedly bleak resurgence of far-right ecological imaginaries (e.g. Varco, 2024), the Anthropocene idea shifts things in the background of the ordinary, unsettling existing ways of living and relating as they (re)emerge with new groundings. The overwhelming sense of hopelessness within wildlife conservation spaces operating within an Anthropocenic figuring of the scale of ecological crisis, meanwhile, effects an impasse of futility within which the ordinary work of counting and caring for species, of raising awareness and cataloguing loss nonetheless endures with/in shifting grounds of hope and witness (Braverman, 2016; HF Wilson, 2024a). The recent rejection of the formal proposal to date the start of the Anthropocene at the start of ‘the great acceleration’ using a sedimentary core from Canada’s Lake Crawford (McCarthy et al., 2023), meanwhile, acts as something of an external shock to the work of the Anthropocene Working Group, but has not stopped the ongoing, ordinary data labours of collecting, analysing and databasing material samples through which the Anthropocene idea takes shape. The everyday work of expanding datasets of earthly materials and museum collections continues apace, resuming the shape of normalcy even while the stories they appear to tell metamorphose, losing previous shapes, only to coalesce around new and competing narratives. These examples show a variety of possibilities for zones of Anthropocene ordinariness to stretch out a present lived with/in polysemic ideas of anthropogenic, planetary socio-ecological change, engendering new realities through shifting grounds of relation.

In addition to (and overlapping with) these shifting grounds of relation, Anthropocene ordinariness might also be taken as a space in which new worlds emerge through modes of active experimentation. In a move to multiply understandings of how the Anthropocene is lived, Stephanie Wakefield (2020: 22) writes that in the face of accelerating planetary crises, old ways of being and relating, of moving forward through life (the ‘frontloop’), are losing their stability, but through this disintegrative movement, things also open up, inviting ‘experimentation, reorganization and transformation’ within what she calls the Anthropocene backloop. Wakefield (2020) highlights a number of ‘backloop experiments’, ranging from accounts of the techniques of governing resilience and ruin to stories of preppers and crossfitters finding agency in the face of the uncertainties introduced by the Anthropocene. While these experiments are not coterminous with scenes of Anthropocene ordinariness (they include scenes of the ordinary, but are not centred on them as such), they speak to a similar multiplicity of possibilities both substantively and normatively for what might emerge through active engagement with the Anthropocene idea.

Experiments with/in Anthropocene ordinariness can be modest, like the ‘Greeting cards for the Anthropocene’ project led by Craig Campbell (2024), which prints greeting cards for new Anthropocenic categories of card-mediated communications like ‘Sorry I missed your extinction’, ‘Love like plastic outlives all of us’ and ‘I don’t want your hope, I want you to panic like the house is on fire’ amongst others. The goal of this experiment is to offer prompts for writers and receivers of cards to ‘encounter their climate thoughts within the constraints of the card and the moment. The lie of interiority is exposed as public feelings caught along the way of becoming positions, articulations, or just stories’ (Campbell 2024: 112). In a more ambitious register, the CLIMAVORE project (CLIMAVORE, 2024) experiments with (re)worlding food systems through reimagining seasonal eating for the Anthropocene. Initiated through the artistic practice of Alon Schwabe and Daniel Fernández Pascual, known collectively as Cooking Sections (e.g. Cooking Sections, 2021; Fernández Pascual and Schwabe, 2024), CLIMAVORE provocatively engages seasonal eating as a matter not of attuning to spring, summer, autumn and winter or to rainy versus dry, but instead to a variety of Anthropocenically defined seasons: seasons of polluted seas, of fertiliser runoff, of soil exhaustion and so forth. Through collaborative research and practice with local communities and traditional food producers at ‘stations’ in the Hebrides, southern Italy and the wetlands outside of Istanbul, CLIMAVORE engages and experiments with food systems emerging within these seasons of the Anthropocene in pursuit of new and reclaimed modes of valuing and relating to food for more liveable futures.

The emergent worlds described here offer just a small window onto the possibilities coalescing with/in zones of Anthropocene ordinariness. I have tried to show in these few examples the emergence of things big and small, hopeful and bleak as well as various ambiguous in-betweens in order to emphasise the inherent ambivalence of Anthropocene ordinariness as a lens onto the present. The goal is not to rehabilitate the Anthropocene idea, but to multiply ways of seeing how it works within ordinary worlds. Like Wakefield’s (2020) experiments at the Anthropocene backloop, scenes of Anthropocene ordinariness shift the starting point of engaging the Anthropocene from one that takes its meanings as given to one that is open to the creative possibilities of repetition and difference emerging with/in its worlds. In the concluding section, I summarise the path traced by this paper and offer a view on how Anthropocene ordinariness might be taken forward as a conceptual lens in research within human geography and related fields.

V Conclusion: Geographies of Anthropocene ordinariness

In this paper, I have argued for engaging with the Anthropocene not as a neutral or objective signifier of the epochal present, but as a polysemic abstraction that coalesces within worlds, (re)shaping how things emerge with/in different zones of the ordinary. I have proposed the concept of Anthropocene ordinary to designate these ordinary worlds emergent with/in the Anthropocene as a multivalent abstraction/idea/story. To expand the contours of Anthropocene ordinariness, I have drawn resources from existing literature in human geography and related fields in which the Anthropocene is figured as co-emerging with, entangling, and/or intervening in the various worlds it describes. In particular, section II reviewed developments within human geography and related fields that move towards affective and emplaced encounters with the Anthropocene idea. This work lays the ground for thinking about the Anthropocene as an idea that coalesces with/in ordinary worlds by drawing attention to the everyday practices and ways of knowing and relating that it engenders with/in ordinary places and more-than-human environments. Section III then confronted the critical arguments on what the Anthropocene idea limits, obscures and forecloses, the spaces where its imbrication with/in the ordinary thins out what is legible or sensible within worlds. This literature brings crucial resources for political action, but can tend to reify the meanings and workings of the Anthropocene idea rather than attending to it as a shifting empirical question. Sections IV then considered what might emerge from with/in scenes of Anthropocene ordinariness, offering various examples that illustrate (albeit partially) a range of possibilities.

After almost two decades of exploration, and the disciplinary drama of its formal proposal to and rejection by the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy, it is clear that the Anthropocene idea exceeds its original stratigraphic definitional terms. Whether its circulation in the world will start to wane following its formal stratigraphic rejection is uncertain, but as Lesley Head (2023: 309) writes, even ‘[i]f the Anthropocene’s moment has passed, the reasons why still bear scrutiny and discussion’. And indeed, it continues to provoke thought within human geography, not least in the many critiques that our field has generated, but also in the many works that continue to grapple with the Anthropocene’s core propositions: that socio-ecological crisis is anthropogenic and planetary. Anthropocene ordinary, as a concept, directs attention to what emerges with/in ordinary worlds as they are differently, unevenly shaped by the anthropogenic planetary environmental changes named by the Anthropocene and variously made sensible through its imaginaries. It takes a radically empirical stance toward the Anthropocene idea, asking what worlds are inhabited with/in the Anthropocene abstraction, whether in the stuckness engendered by the conjuncture of Modernity’s hubris with an unruly planet, or in expanses opened up by ongoing relations of resistance drawing planetary entanglements and Earthly limits into view. Human geographers are well placed to expand on Anthropocene ordinariness, as an open empirical question of what emerges with/in ideas of the Anthropocene in the places we study.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Kevin Grove for his generous editorial guidance throughout the process and to the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback on earlier versions of this paper. Both have been invaluable in shaping and sharpening this final version.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Aurora Fredriksen

Notes

Author biography

Aurora Fredriksen is a Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in the Department of Geography, University of Manchester, UK. Her research explores the spaces where the ordinary and crisis coexist, with a particular focus on emplaced encounters with ecological change.

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Anthropocene ordinary: Emergent worlds with/in imaginaries of anthropogenic planetary crisis

Abstract

Keywords

I Introduction

II Encountering Anthropo-scenes

1 Affective senses of the Anthropocene

2 Bringing the Anthropocene ‘down to Earth’

III The Anthropocene as a limiting abstraction

1 The Anthropocene as engine of immuno-bio-politics

2 The Anthropocene as an extension of Euro-modern imaginaries

IV Emergence with/in scenes of Anthropocene ordinariness

V Conclusion: Geographies of Anthropocene ordinariness

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

ORCID iD

Notes

Author biography

References