Abstract
This article elucidates the spatial order that underpins the politics of the Anthropocene – the ecological nomos of the earth – and criticizes its imperial origins and legacies. It provides a critical reading of Carl Schmitt’s spatial thought to not only illuminate the spatio-political ontology but also the violence and usurpations that characterize the Anthropocene condition. The article first shows how with the emergence of the ecological nomos seemingly ‘natural’ spaces like the biosphere and the atmosphere became politically charged. This challenges the modernist separation between natural facts and political norms. It then underlines the imperial origins of this nomos by introducing the concept of air-appropriation understood as the colonization of atmospheric space by CO2 emissions. Instead of assuming that the ecological nomos represents a transition from a colonial to an ecological and cosmopolitan world order, focusing on air-appropriation highlights forms of ecological imperialism that go along with the new nomos. Accordingly, the article calls for a just redistribution of ecospace that takes into account the imperial legacies and ongoing effects of air-appropriation.
The ‘Anthropocene’ marks a turning point in spatial history as it goes along with new ‘geohistorical categories’ (Coronil, 1996) that supplement the existing repertoire of historically and politically relevant spaces, such as national territory. Although these categories seemingly only concern natural spaces like the atmosphere and the biosphere, they must be understood as both inherently historical, because of the ways they have been altered by human interference, and political, as they call forth and underpin attempts at ‘governing the Anthropocene’ (Delanty & Mota, 2017). This article takes up the challenge of analysing these earth spaces as historical and political spaces. However, it departs from the dominant ‘ecocratic’ (Bonneuil & Fressoz, 2016) narratives of the Anthropocene by introducing the notion of air-appropriation, understood as the colonization of atmospheric space by CO2 emissions. This concept makes it possible to foreground the violence, the imperial origins and ongoing social asymmetries of the Anthropocene condition.
Many scholars have already pointed out how environmentalism went along with the emergence of a new kind of global politics that transcends the political horizon of the nation state (Beck, 2009; Jasanoff & Martello, 2004). But the debate on the Anthropocene engendered a radicalized understanding of earthly politics that is not just about the global but about a new sense of the planetary. It introduced a series of more than human spaces like the atmosphere, the ozone layer, ‘critical zones’ (Arènes et al., 2018) and ‘tipping elements’ (Lenton et al., 2008). These spaces always served as the environmental background for societies. But the advent of the Anthropocene made visible their historical and in fact political character for at least two sets of reasons. As natural scientists as well as eco-Marxists focusing on the materiality of socio-natural metabolisms (Clark & York, 2005) argue, the material makeup and ecological functioning of these earth system spaces changed considerably as a consequence of environmental degradation. As scholars in science and technology and governmentality studies argue, new ways of mapping, measuring and managing these spaces have changed their political status as they are no longer a mute background for social operations but have become problem spaces in environmental politics. In this article, I bring both perspectives together by arguing that the material disruption of these natural spaces constitutes the condition of possibility for knowing and constituting them as political spaces to be acted upon. I argue that changing and knowing the spaces of the Anthropocene are two sides of the same process of ‘appropriating’ the earth, understood in an equally material and semiotic way. The sciences of the earth system that made visible the new spaces of earthly politics rely on acts of usurpation that have provided the very conditions of possibility for the subsequent measurement of the appropriated space.
The argument is informed by a critical reading of Carl Schmitt’s (2011a) theory of the nomos of the earth. For Schmitt, a nomos is a historically specific spatio-political order that responds to the general apprehension and appropriation of space in a historical epoch. I argue that the Anthropocene, by introducing a new understanding of the earth as a complex life support system, provoked the emergence of a new nomos. In contrast to the old Eurocentric and colonial nomos of the earth, the basic units of the ecological nomos are no longer national territory and colony but ecospheres like the atmosphere that due to their degradation became political problem spaces. Yet, according to Schmitt, a new nomos does not just go along with a new spatial Weltbild, but with acts of ‘land-appropriation’ such as the colonization of the supposedly ‘new world’ by European nations during the heyday of imperialism. In this article, I will not only focus on the appropriation of land, but I will introduce the concept of air-appropriation: the colonization of the atmosphere by industrial carbon emissions. I will show how the various attempts to map the atmosphere and the global carbon cycle rely on this prior appropriation of the atmosphere, which made possible and necessary a new ecological nomos of the earth. The article will thus show that, just as the old colonial nomos of the earth emerged as a consequence of European land-appropriation, the ecological nomos is similarly implicated in a particular form of imperialism. This distinguishes my argument from Bruno Latour’s (2017, 2018) mobilization of Schmitt in his writings on Gaia that ignores the imperial origins of the ecological nomos. The article thus responds to recent calls to ‘decolonize the Anthropocene’ (Davis & Todd, 2017) and to challenge its hegemonic ‘origin stories’ (Yusoff, 2018, pp. 19–22) by elucidating the imperial trajectories that made the Anthropocene possible both as a material reality and an object of knowledge and governance in the first place.
In the next section, I sketch the new ecological nomos implicit in the debates on Earth System Sciences (ESS) and Earth System Governance (ESG). The following section problematizes and complicates this view by introducing the notion of air-appropriation. I will then further elucidate this notion with reference to Michel Serres’ alternative theory of appropriation that sees the origin of property in acts of pollution. This provides the conceptual resources to reveal why and how the ecological nomos relies on the prior appropriation of the atmosphere with carbon emissions. Finally, I critically reflect on the contemporary climate regime as the most important expression of ecological geopolitics in the Anthropocene. Currently, dominant climate politics does not take into account the imperial origins of the ecological nomos and its unequal distribution but furthers these imperial tendencies. I stress that an alternative politics of the Anthropocene that takes the imperial legacies and ongoing effects of air-appropriation seriously needs to fight for a just redistribution of ecospace and arrive at less damaging ways to re-appropriate the earth.
The ecological nomos of the earth
It is not a coincidence that Carl Schmitt’s writings on the ‘Nomos of the Earth’ became a point of reference in debates on the Anthropocene among social theorists (Latour, 2017, pp. 220–254, 2018; Pottage, 2017). Schmitt’s spatial–political thought is highly suggestive for thinking new forms of ‘geopower’ (Luisetti, 2018; Povinelli, 2016; Yusoff, 2016) that go along with the Anthropocene. What makes Schmitt’s approach especially relevant is that it shows the entanglements between spatial and political history. Schmitt assumes that every legal–political system is grounded in a spatial order. Nomos is the name for such a territorialized order. The nomos does not spontaneously grow out of an already existing territory. The emergence of a spatio-political order is a historical event that creates and territorializes the spatial ground on which it resides in the first place. In this way, one can also think about the Anthropocene as a historical event that goes along with a new spatial ground for politics, or, to use Schmitt’s terminology, a new nomos. However, the analytical potential of his thought should not obscure the fact that Schmitt was a highly problematic thinker. As a crown jurist of the National Socialists, he actively supported Nazi politics. His considerations on the state of emergency (Schmitt, 2004) promoted the Führer principle. And his geopolitical writings tried to vindicate Nazi geopolitics (Neumann, 1984, p. 191ff.).
Accordingly, Latour (2017, p. 228) characterizes Schmitt as ‘toxic and nevertheless indispensable’ for a theory of the new ecological world order. Latour’s strategy to deal with this predicament is to ‘detox’ Schmitt by mobilizing his concepts to apprehend ecological politics without buying into his geopolitics. ‘The ecological conflicts do not bear upon the nationalist Lebensraum of the past; and yet they bear, in spite of everything, on “space” and on “life”’ (Latour, 2017, p. 252). He, therefore, offers a formal conception of nomos as ‘redistribution of agency’ (Latour, 2017, p. 235) and tries to show how in the new nomos of the earth Gaia becomes a political agent. What gets lost in this ecological translation is the violence involved in the creation of a new nomos. The emergence of a nomos goes along with acts of land-appropriation that involve more than a ‘redistribution of agency’ and the scientific ‘measuring’ of space as Latour (2017, pp. 231, 250) suggests. Schmitt made clear that the modern nomos of the earth was a consequence of European colonialism that he calls European land-appropriation. Instead of greenwashing Schmitt, I will argue that harnessing such ‘toxic’ Schmittian insights the right way might provide a critical remedy for the homogenizing and universalizing tendencies of the Anthropocene narrative. I argue that the new nomos became necessary as a consequence of an act of air-appropriation understood as the colonization of the atmosphere with CO2 emissions from (mostly western) fossil industrialization. Instead of assuming that the new ecological nomos represents a transition from an imperialistic world order to a cosmopolitan and ecological one, I focus on the complex entanglements and overlaps between two imperialistic world orders. I will, however, first sketch what the ecological nomos looks like from the perspective of contemporary ESS and attempts to govern the Anthropocene through new forms of ‘planetary stewardship’ (Steffen et al., 2011). This will make clear how the air-appropriation framework I advance in this article differs from hegemonic approaches in debates on the Anthropocene.
In his 1950 the ‘Nomos of the Earth’, Schmitt (2006, p. 86) made a remarkable observation on the relation between the measurement of the earth and the political order since the fifteenth century: No sooner had the contours of the earth emerged as a real globe – not just sensed as a myth, but apprehensible as fact and measurable as space – than there arose a wholly new and hitherto unimaginable problem: the spatial ordering of the earth in terms of international law. The new global image resulting from the circumnavigation of the earth and the great discoveries of the 15th and 16th centuries, required a new spatial order. Thus began the epoch of modern international law that lasted until the 20th century.
Schmitt, as well as other political theorists (Arendt, 1973), rightly diagnosed the end of this political order in the twentieth century. The decline of the old colonial nomos did not (yet) give way to one new totalizing nomos but rather to a series of often quite precarious nomoi that are far from being consolidated. The ecological nomos is not the only relevant spatio-political regime of the present and clearly a series of elements of the old nomos still persist. However, it is particularly interesting from a Schmittian perspective because it goes along with an entirely new apprehension of the planet as a lively earth system and thus with a ‘spatial revolution’ (Schmitt, 2011b, pp. 55–57; own translation) that provokes a new nomos of the earth. The earth system or ‘Gaia’ (Lovelock & Margulis, 1974), the object of ESS, is markedly different from the earth that grounded the modern political order that Schmitt described. It is not the earth of the circumnavigators and colonizers. No telescope and no world map can render it properly visible. Rather, space travel, a planetary knowledge infrastructure and climatic models (Edwards, 2010) paved the way for this new experience of the earth. The new earth is not just a horizontal surface, but a voluminous and vertical body. It is not just an extended space but an intensive, molecular space where the chemical composition of the atmosphere or the oceans matters as much as the temperature on the earth surface. The essential spatial units are no longer national territory and colony, but a complex of planetary ecospheres: the hydro-, geo-, atmo- and biosphere.
This ‘discovery’ was not just a scientific but also a political event. The new spaces ceased to be a mute natural background for society and became objects for the environmental sciences and ecological politics that emerged as a consequence of recurring ecological crises. Already in the 1970s Hans Jonas (1984, p. 6) argued that the critical vulnerability of nature […] [was] unsuspected before it began to show itself in damage already done. This discovery, whose shock led to the concept and nascent science of ecology, alters the very concept of ourselves as a casual agency in the larger scheme of things. It brings to light […] that an object of an entirely new order – no less than the whole biosphere of the planet – has been added to what we must be responsible for because of our power over it.
According to the climate scientist John Schellnhuber (1999), the appearance of ESS marks a ‘second Copernican revolution’ because it introduces a new understanding of the earth and its place in the universe. This has far-reaching consequences since the Copernican revolution was never just about the acknowledgement that the earth is a sphere. It came with a new understanding of scientific truth and its place in the world. It introduced a new ontology that strictly differentiates between facts and norms. As Alexandre Koyré (1957, p. 2) has pointed out, the Copernican revolution brought about a previously unknown devaluation of nature that created the necessity to assume a separate sphere of value: This scientific and philosophical revolution […] can be described roughly as bringing forth the destruction of the Cosmos, that is, the disappearance, from philosophically and scientifically valid concepts, of the conception of the world as a finite, closed, and hierarchically ordered whole […] and its replacement by an indefinite and even infinite universe which is bound together by the identity of its fundamental components and laws, and in which all these components are placed on the same level of being. This, in turn, implies the discarding by scientific thought of all considerations based upon value-concepts, such as perfection, harmony, meaning and aim, and finally the utter devaloraization of being, the divorce of the world of value and the world of facts.
Air-appropriation: The imperial underpinning of the ecological nomos
The ecological nomos is not about the European conquest of the ‘new world’ but about the collective preservation of the ‘one world’. The ecological nomos seems to be the proper ground for a reflexive cosmopolitics in which nation states set aside their petty conflicts to fight united against the common threat of ecological world risks (Beck, 2009). However, the transition from the old to the new nomos is not a straightforward transition from an imperialistic to a non-imperialistic world. By introducing the notion of air-appropriation, I want to point out the imperial origins and durabilities of the ecological nomos.
Schmitt stresses that a new political world order always goes along with a new experience of space. In his essay Land und Meer he calls this a ‘spatial revolution’ (Schmitt, 2011b, pp. 55–57, author’s translation). Yet Schmitt also emphasizes that such a revolution always goes along with an act of land-appropriation (Landnahme). Schmitt’s concept of land-appropriation bears many similarities to the nomos concept. Nomos comes from the Greek word ‘neimen’ and – according to Schmitt (2011b, p. 71) – means first taking or conquering (the land) (German: ‘nehmen’ as in Landnahme), second dividing and distributing and third cultivating it. Like nomos, land-appropriation entails all of these processes. It is about measuring, dividing and distributing the land, but it is also about the violent conquering of land. Schmitt cites the conquests of Alexander the Great, the Roman Empire and the Crusades as historic events catalysing a spatial revolution (Schmitt, 2011b, pp. 58–63). Moreover, he frequently admits that modern international law became necessary because of European colonization. Even though he often trivializes colonization as ‘discovery’, he is clear that ‘European land appropriation’ (Schmitt, 2006, p. 75), and thus imperialistic conquest, is the critical historical event catalysing the new nomos. For him, land-appropriation is a pre-legal act. From the perspective of the colonizers, the only perspective Schmitt cares about, it represents the conquest of an uncharted terrain that makes necessary an order that retrospectively hedges and legalizes this act of violence. Understood in this way, the measuring of the earth did not precede its conquest but followed it.
The appropriation of land is not the only mechanism for creating a nomos. The nomos is not the natural ground that offers the foundation for law. Rather, the act of appropriating, measuring and dividing space makes up and orders these spaces in the first place. Therefore, non-terrestrial appropriation is possible and in fact happens frequently. Schmitt (2011b, pp. 86–89) argues that the British dominance of world trade was made possible by an act of ‘sea-appropriation’. He considers the global-networked space disclosed by modern technologies such as railway, electricity and radio (Schmitt, 2011b, p. 103f.) and ponders the impact of aviation on the modern experience of space and its significance for warfare (Schmitt, 2011b, p. 104f.).
Yet the notion of air-appropriation that I want to foreground in this article is not about the role of aviation for ‘vertical geopolitics’ (Elden, 2013). It instead refers to the occupation of the atmosphere by CO2 emissions as an effect of the combustion of fossil fuels. Indeed, in contrast to the debate on vertical geopolitics, this understanding of air-appropriation is not just about vertical space or volume, but about the molecular spatiality that concerns the chemical composition of the atmosphere expressed in parts per million (ppm) of CO2. The large-scale combustion of fossil fuels has colonized the atmosphere with the molecules of a geological formation: carbon minerals. That is why an atmospheric chemist, Paul Crutzen (2002), could declare a new geological epoch – the Anthropocene – that began with the invention of the steam engine. In contrast to colonial land-appropriation, air-appropriation does not involve the use of immediate physical violence, but it is responsible for the ‘slow violence’ (Nixon, 2011) of climate change. The ‘weapons’ of such an ‘air-grabbing’ are not guns and canons but steam engines, furnaces, cars and aeroplanes. The temporal lag between the cause (emissions) and its effect (global warming) renders this violence less visible, but by no means less real. Apart from the innumerable lives endangered by extreme weather, droughts and spreading disease, climate change will lead to new forms of land-expropriation through rising sea levels and desertification.
It is important to note that the history of air-appropriation is deeply entangled with colonial land-appropriation. The impact of colonial practices on the atmosphere started even before the industrial-scale combustion of fossil fuels. Lewis and Maslin (2015, p. 175) associate the temperature drop during the little ice age in the seventeenth century with the colonization of the Americas from 1610. This colonial genocide brought the fire clearing practices of the American natives to a halt. As a consequence, forests could fix more carbon and thus reduce the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. Yet with the invention of the steam engine and the subsequent industrialization of Europe, colonial land- and air-appropriation started to reinforce each other. The exploitation of resources and labour in the colonies and the opening up of new export markets increased the combustion of fossil fuels.
In Land und Meer, Schmitt cites a famous paragraph from Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, where the latter emphasizes the deterritorializing tendencies of capitalist industries by pointing out the affinity between industry and the sea: ‘Just as the earth, the firm and solid ground, is a precondition […] of family life, so is the sea the natural element for industry, whose relations with the external world it enlivens’ (Hegel, 1991, p. 268, italics in the original). It turns out that the element that ‘enlivens’ capitalist industry is not just the sea (and the colonization it engendered), but also the fire of fossil fuels and the air in which it dumps its emissions.
Writing nature: Pollution as material-semiotic appropriation
But why does the pollution of the atmosphere constitute an act of appropriation? Part of the answer lies in the way climate science and politics conceptualize, measure and divide the atmosphere. In climate politics the atmosphere figures as a dumb space with limited capacity (Whitington, 2016). The limited capacity of the atmosphere indicates the relative amount of carbon allowed to enter it without causing global warming to exceed 1,5°C or 2°C. According to official estimates, this corresponds to 450 ppm CO2 molecules. Though this implies a relational-molecular spatiality of the atmosphere’s chemical composition, the atmosphere is mostly cast in the geometrical terms of a limited dumb space. This makes it possible to treat atmospheric space as bounded and amenable to measurement and division. Climate policy becomes the management and distribution of atmospheric space or ‘atmospheric capital’ (WBGU, 2009, p. 2). It seems counter-intuitive that the atmosphere figures both as a dumb space and as capital, and so as a valuable property. Liberal theories of property, at least since John Locke (1982, pp. 17–31), assume that something becomes property by virtue of the work invested in it, not the waste dumped on it. According to liberal theories, a plot of land becomes property through the labour of cultivation – an argument that frequently served as a justification for the seizure of supposedly unpropertied land (terra nullius) by the European colonialists (Verran, 1998). In contrast, the atmosphere became a property through its pollution. But how can pollution (waste), rather than labour (work), become an act of appropriation, of making property?
Michel Serres’ (2010) theory of property provides an answer that allows us to understand the logic of air-appropriation and implicitly criticizes liberal theories of property. Serres seeks to show that the secret origin of property lies in acts of contamination. Animals mark their territory with excrement and kids lick food to claim it as their own. Serres (2010, pp. 5–7) even argues that the fertilization of soil with dung is originally a territorializing technique. In turn, every act of signification that marks a territory or, respectively, an exclusive property – from initials in briefs, to advertisements in the urban landscape – is a form of pollution. Against this backdrop, Serres (2010, pp. 65–66, 79) interprets modern environmental pollution, especially air pollution – as representing both the culmination point and the crisis of the contaminating logic of property: At least since the industrial revolution, heat effluents no longer encounter any limits and are diffused in the atmosphere […] all over the world. […] The owner of a blast furnace was able to dirty the air all the way to the ocean and the stratosphere and thereby increased his property on earth, water, and air, without limits. Whether he intended it or not, his property swelled and became global and exploded. […] Pushed to the limit […] acts of appropriation will inevitably lead to the end of property.
Serres’ theory not only challenges traditional theories of property but also theories of pollution. Waste is not ‘matter out of place’ (Douglas, 1966, p. 36), and so something that becomes a pollutant by falling out of an already established symbolic spatial order. Instead, pollution acts as a medium to carve out territories and thus to establish such an order in the first place. Polluting matter is not in or out of place, but a spatial operator that creates places. Understood as a theory of territorialization, Serres’ considerations represent a counterpoint to Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987, pp. 310–350) theory of territory in their famous chapter on the refrain in Thousand Plateaus. To them, animals carving out their territory are proto-artists and not conquerors (Folkers, 2017). However, both Serres and Deleuze/Guattari have a similar systematic idea about the appropriation – whether artful, economic, polluting or violent – of territory. Both argue that appropriation hinges on material operators that carve out a territory by becoming expressive. Deleuze and Guttarri (1987, p. 315) argue that everything – excrement, leaves, a bird’s song – can become a ‘matter of expression’. As a matter of expression things or pieces of matter undergo an ‘incorporeal transformation’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 81) and acquire a semiotic quality. For example, a leaf turned upside down by a bird is no longer just a piece of biomass but a signpost in its habitat (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 315).
Against this backdrop, it becomes possible to see CO2 emissions not only as a pollutant but also as expressive or ‘informationally enriched matter’ (Barry, 2013, p. 141). As such they serve as the condition of possibility for the legibility of the atmosphere as a valuable dumb space. Air-appropriation is not only an act of occupation but also of signification. Industrial carbon footprints are an inscription, an act of ‘earth writing’ (Yusoff, 2009, p. 1010), or rather air writing, that enables the subsequent description of the atmosphere. Science and technology studies scholars like Paul Edwards (2010) have rightly emphasized that all knowledge about atmospheric pollution and climate change depends on a ‘vast machine’ of sensors, data infrastructures and computer models. However, one should not forget the agentive role carbon molecules play in climate science by acting both as pollutant and ‘tracer – a way to see relations’ (Tsing et al., 2017, p. M-8). A series of scholars have convincingly argued (Bond, 2013; Jonas, 1984; Masco, 2010) that our knowledge of the environment hinges on environmental disruption and the materiality of pollutants that render visible the relations of ecosystems. In this sense, carbon is not just a passive material but a medium that together with scientific apparatuses takes part in the disclosure of the natural world. The ‘vast machine’ of climate science only reads what acts of air-appropriation have already ‘written’ in the sky.
That is why environmental knowledge in the Anthropocene is no longer about observing nature ‘out there’, but increasingly about the interpretation of human traces. The epistemology of the sciences in the Anthropocene is more akin to what is traditionally understood as a particular feature of the humanities: making explicit the implicit structures of the lifeworld, spelling out what has been inscribed in it. Vico’s verum factum principle according to which one can only know the truth of what one has made seems to apply here (Chakrabarty, 2009, pp. 202–203). The difference is, however, that in this case the ‘making’ is always already a destroying and disrupting, not a factum but a destructum, not a performative but a deformative act. The deformation and displacement of carbon – from geological to atmospheric strata – has increased its informational value turning it into a ‘signal of the Anthropocene’ (Zalasiewicz et al., 2014, p. 37).
The processes and materials that cause the climate crises also underpin the science that made the crisis visible and the atmosphere legible. James C. Scott (1998, pp. 11–52) has famously shown how ‘nature and space’ became legible by the state through processes of standardization and simplification. The sovereign vision rests on material practices that rendered the world visible and governable. The legibility that ‘carbon’ induces follows a similar logic. Carbon metrics are simplifying by not only measuring all greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions against the benchmark of CO2 (MacKenzie, 2009) but also by utterly reducing nature to the stocks and flows of carbon (Bonneuil & Fressoz, 2016, p. 56). After all, the measurement of the world in terms of ‘carbon’ does not just take into account CO2 emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels or the carbon footprint associated with consumer goods along their ‘life cycle’ (Freidberg, 2013). With the emergence of emissions trading (Lohmann, 2005) ecosystems that sequester CO2, such as tropical rainforests, entered the climate balance sheet as potential offsets for industrial GHG emissions. ‘Carbon’ not only makes atmospheric space measurable, but also a wide variety of ecospaces that partake in the planetary carbon cycle: from forests to oceans. Carbon is no longer just the basic chemical building block of life (sustaining)-processes on earth, but increasingly its principle of legibility and accountability. As in high-modernist state projects, the visibility that carbon brought about produces measurable, dividable and fungible spaces of nature through an epistemology that eclipses alternative ways of knowing (Moreno et al., 2015). 2
From the (re)distribution of ecospace to the re-appropriation of the earth
The ecological nomos of the earth hinges on the prior process of air-appropriation because this material-semiotic appropriation constituted the epistemological conditions of possibility to measure and divide the ecospace of the earth. This measurement, in turn, constitutes another political and economic reason why the air-appropriation provoked a new nomos. The colonization of the atmosphere poses questions over the right distribution of ecospace and the remaining atmospheric capital just as the old land-appropriation posed the question of how to distribute the supposedly ‘New World’ among the European colonizers. This is a socio-economic distributional conflict concerning the question of how to distribute the atmospheric dumb space, among whom and for what purpose. But it is also about the ‘redistribution of agency’ (Latour, 2017, p. 235) because it raises the question of who can be held accountable for the colonizing consumption of atmospheric space, or, put differently, who is the author of air writing. The question of authorship is a particularly tough one in the hermeneutics of the atmosphere. The carbon traces in the atmosphere do not come with a signature. The atmosphere remembers air writings. It has a good, in fact all too good, memory for retaining carbon traces for centuries (on the memory of the earth, see: Szerszynski, 2019), but it is a pretty messy archiver. It only retains and accumulates the writings itself and does not care about who wrote it. For the atmosphere, the author is always already dead. However, if climate knowledge is about the interaction between carbon air writing and its scientific decipherment, then there is more than one possible reading of the atmosphere and way of construing authorship. For the hegemonic Anthropocene narrative, the author of air writing is humanity per se, which systematically sidesteps considerations of distributing atmospheric space according to differentiated responsibilities for global heating. The hegemonic climate regime does not do much better. It allocates atmospheric capital through a budgeting approach. According to the Paris Agreement (UN, 2015) there should be net zero emissions, and so a balanced budget, by 2050. Until then there is only a limited amount of available carbon space left to divide. The remaining budget is then distributed among nation states (Lövbrand & Stripple, 2006). This amounts to an economistic and future-oriented reading of the carbon traces. It does not focus on who has left traces in the past, but rather on how much available carbon space this leaves for the future.
Scholars from the global south and climate justice activists have criticized this approach for decades on several grounds: the current carbon accounting regime makes no distinction between ‘subsistence emissions’ and ‘luxury emissions’ (Agarwal & Narain, 1991, p. 3), national carbon budgets do not reflect the population size of the respective countries (Agarwal & Narain, 1991, p. 9), and do not take into account the historic debt of industrialized countries that occupy a disproportionally large part of the atmospheric space (Agarwal & Narain, 1991, p. 15f.). Where the hegemonic climate regime only sees uniform emissions, climate justice advocates highlight historically and contextually thick traces of different kinds of carbon (from, say, rice farming and aeroplanes) that can be traced back to different actors/authors indicating differentiated responsibilities. This critical concern with socio-economic context among climate justice advocates also concerns the countermeasures to climate change. Climate justice activists criticise emissions trading for disenfranchising people whose lives and livelihoods depend on ecosystems that they can no longer use when they become a carbon sink (Fogel, 2004). Even though the earth system, and especially the atmosphere, figures as global commons, the world of international climate politics is less a common world but a ‘commensurable’ world that allows for trade-offs between different parts of a uniform earth system. Tropical rainforests that sequester CO2 are equivalent to emissions reductions. The atmospheric dumb space has an equivalent ecological dumb space on the earth’s surface which – in the current climate regime – is construed just like the smooth and abstract space of the atmosphere. According to this logic, if the land people inhabit is more efficient as a ‘carbon sink’ than for their subsistence, it should become a dump for CO2 emitted in other parts of the world. If in the past the terra nullius principle legitimized the expropriation of land (Verran, 1998), hence the idea that land not cultivated according to European standards ought to be appropriated, today it is the notion of ecosystem services that legitimizes the seizure of land for ecological purposes (Lohmann, 2005, p. 206), turning it, ironically, into nobody’s land. Current climate politics, as the most important and developed manifestation of geopolitics in the Anthropocene, thus continues and intensifies the unequal distribution of ecospace through new forms of ‘environmental colonialism’ (Agarwal & Narain, 1991).
The politics of the earth might thus be constituted as a politics of redistribution that struggles for a just way of ‘sharing our ecospace’ (Gupta, 2016). By taking into account the historical and still ongoing inequalities in terms of ecospace consumption, such a redistribution could also contribute to a ‘decolonization of the Anthropocene’ by accounting for the historical injustices associated with the air-appropriation. Instead of the ecocratic narrative of the Anthropocene that suggests that humans as a homogenous species is equally responsible for the ecological crisis, such a redistributive politics entails the recognition of the unequal contribution to ecological problems and the unequal occupation of the atmosphere. Carbon metrics that allow for the measurement and distribution of atmospheric space can provide the epistemological bedrock for claims to compensate those most affected by climate change by those mostly responsible for it, for repaying the ecological debt of developed countries resulting from centuries of ‘unequal ecological exchange’ (Hornborg, 2009). Such a redistributive politics would avoid many of ‘the pitfalls of Anthropocene ethics’ (Karera, 2019) that tends to lose sight of historically deep rooted, structural inequalities over its generic focus on ‘relationality’. As Alain Pottage (2019, p. 172) has remarked, the ‘schema of appropriation-distribution’ provides a valuable counterpoint to the current trend of short-circuiting an ontology of relationality with an ethics of response-ability in which the simple fact of ecological entanglement constitutes a common and therefore rather undifferentiated ethical obligation for the well-being of all life on earth (Haraway, 2016).
However, such a redistributive politics would have to rely on the imperial ontologies that caused the distributive problems that go along with air-appropriation in the first place. This creates a serious predicament. Critical scholars have criticized carbon metrics as a form of ‘ecological epistemicide’ (Moreno et al., 2015) because it eclipses alternative ways of knowing and being on the earth. Many calls for a ‘decolonization of the Anthropocene’ have therefore advanced a critique of western-modernist naturalistic (De Castro, 2014) ontologies (Davis & Todd, 2017; Spencer et al., 2019), that is, of ontologies that assume that there is only one, homogenous nature out there and that disregard alternative, non-western ontologies of natureculture. They criticize what John Law (2015, p. 127) has called the ‘one-world-world’ view, which assumes that the world is just one abstract ‘large space-time box’, without recognizing the multiple ontologies of coexisting worlds residing on and making up the earth. Indeed, even radical propositions like climate reparations for those affected by climate change like the small Island States would only be able to compensate people for the pieces of earth space they lost and not the meaningful worlds that flourished on them. A redistribution of ecospace risks continuing the process of rendering the incommensurable commensurable, which turns meaningful worlds into fungible units of ecospace. At the same time, it is hard to imagine how a compensation for past and ongoing injustices could be feasible without mobilizing the existing infrastructure of measuring earth space and thus resorting to the current ecological nomos of the earth. It seems to be inevitable to engage in some sort of ‘strategic naturalism’ that would make it possible to advance a socio-economic critique of current forms of distributing the ecological nomos without losing sight of the ontological problems of this very nomos. The challenge would thus be to ‘stay with the ontological trouble’ and forge an alternative understanding of the ecological nomos that allows for righting historical wrongs while recognizing the imperial origins and political limitations of the ontology such claims would have to strategically mobilize. The political challenge is thus to bend and fold the ecological nomos so that it can account for the ‘many worlds’ while also enabling a just distribution of a shared earth. The telos of such a politics might be to construct a ‘common world’ that is more than the commensurable world of contemporary climate politics but, according to Isabell Stengers (2005, p. 995), an ‘unknown constituted by […] multiple, divergent worlds’. 3 Constructing such a common world would not only entail a just redistribution of existing ecospace (being the product of the polluting appropriation of the earth), but makes necessary a re-appropriation and thus a reworlding of the earth in less damaging ways.
Conclusion
This article elucidated the ecological nomos of the earth understood as the spatial order supporting the geopolitics of the Anthropocene. This nomos entails new spatio-political categories like the biosphere and the atmosphere as well as a new normative order immanent to the operations of the self-regulative earth system. As such it is markedly different from the old nomos that gravitated around the spatial units of national territory and colony and imposed an external normative order on a seemingly value-neutral planet. Although this nomos is not yet a consolidated reality it currently emerges as a political blueprint in debates among earth system scientists and in proposals for planetary stewardship. Especially in the politics of climate change, elements of this new nomos – both in its spatial and normative dimension – are already part of a powerful Realpolitik. Here, the atmosphere is a crucial political space and the deviation from the planet’s mean temperature represents a critical political problem. Climate politics is the first, most powerful and paradigmatic site where the ecological nomos emerges and from where it may expand. Accordingly, this article focused on climate politics and the air-appropriation that made it necessary. It showed how, as a consequence of air-appropriation understood as carbon imperialism, the entire earth system is rendered visible in terms of stocks and flows of carbon. It is, therefore, fair to say that the CO2 molecule became the most important unit of the ecological nomos that measures and endangers planetary ecospaces which are global and molecular at the same time.
There are four reasons why the ecological nomos emerged. Firstly, a new ontology of the earth provoked the emergence of a new nomos. In ESS the earth is no longer just an extended spherical surface in an infinite universe, but a complex, self-regulating, lively and life-enabling system. According to Schmitt, such a far-reaching ‘spatial revolution’ in science must have consequences for the political ordering of space. Secondly, this spatial revolution made clear that the earth system as a whole provides the ‘safe operating space for humanity’. The ‘earthbound’ (Latour, 2017, p. 248) no longer just live in a particular place, a city or a nation. Rather, the entire earth system functions as their ‘life support system’. This transcends the scope of the nation state and thus made necessary a new nomos that goes beyond the territorial order of the old nomos. These two points, developed in the first section of the article, are more or less in line with the ‘grand geocratic narrative’ (Bonneuil & Fressoz, 2016, pp. 45–96) of the Anthropocene. The latter part of the article critically engages with this view. It introduces the concept of air-appropriation, understood as the colonization of atmospheric space by industrial carbon emissions, to draw attention to the imperial origins and legacies of this nomos. I argue, and this is the third reason for the emergence of the ecological nomos, that the air-appropriation not only historically preceded the science of the earth system but that it provides the very conditions that made these sciences possible, because air-appropriation entails both the (material) occupation and the (semiotic) signification of the atmosphere that allowed it to be ‘read’ as an engendered ecosphere. Carbon emissions made the atmosphere legible as a simultaneously natural and political space. Just as the early colonizers set food on a territory before knowing what and where exactly it was, the carbon footprints preceded the charting and measuring of the atmosphere. Finally – the fourth reason – this air-appropriation made a new nomos necessary because it posed the question over the proper distribution of the atmosphere. This is again analogous to the colonial land-appropriation that created the need for a new spatial and political order to divide a supposedly ‘New World’ among European colonizers.
To be very clear, this analogy should merely make clear that a new nomos becomes necessary as a response to distributional conflicts and is of course not intended to draw the same Eurocentric and imperialistic conclusions. The focus on air-appropriation makes it possible to criticize the imperial origins and ongoing injustices of the Anthropocene and to support a different ecological politics that does not repeat these imperial tendencies. Progressive geopolitics of the Anthropocene will have to find just solutions to the distributional problems that result from the air-appropriation. Yet the contemporary climate regime tends to repeat the mistakes of the past. It does not properly take into account the fact that the industrial countries of the global north occupy a disproportionally large part of the atmospheric space. Many of the instruments of climate change mitigation, like the creation and administration of carbon sinks, introduce new forms of ‘environmental colonialism’. That is why the emergence of the ecological nomos does not yet mark a transition from imperial to cosmopolitan geopolitics but tends instead to continue imperial patterns with ecological means. The negotiation over the ecological nomos should not remain in the hands of the geocrats of ESS and of self-appointed planetary stewards. Critical social theorists should therefore not uncritically stick to the geocratic grand narrative of ESS or accept planetary stewardship as an adequate way to govern the Anthropocene, but should instead start to critically reflect on the presuppositions of Anthropocene talk, the Realpolitik of climate change and recognize or even incite alternative ways of drawing the political map of the Anthropocene. While such a redrawing of the anthropocenic map that attempts to contribute to a just redistribution of ecospace will have to rely to a certain extent on the ontological and epistemological repertoire of the ecological nomos – like carbon metrics – it also needs to keep a critical distance from it because its origins and conditions of possibility reside in acts of air-appropriation. Excavating the origins and legacies of the ecological nomos of the earth thus not only illuminates the violence and imperialism of the Anthropocene, it also indicates the need for new ways of re-appropriating the earth. The task is thus to come up with a non-imperialistic earthly politics for and against ‘the Anthropocene’.
Footnotes
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their productive remarks on the manuscript.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
