Dr Anne Fremaux- Queen’s University Belfast - School of Politics, International Studies, and Philosophy

This Article follows an ECPR joint sessions workshop:

https://ecpr.eu/Events/PanelDetails.aspx?PanelID=3778&EventID=101
It will be published in Arias Maldonado, M. & Trachtenberg, Z.(Ed.) (2018) Reframing
environmentalism? Environmental Political Theory in the Anthropocene. New York: Routledge.

The Return of Nature in the CAPITALOCENE

A Critique of the ecomodernist1 version of the ‘good Anthropocene’

Introduction: the end of nature?

There are countless examples of writings today that bemoan, celebrate, or just
try to adjust to the new regime of truth according to which nature is ‘dead.’ The recent
proposal to rename our geological epoch ‘The Anthropocene,’ or ‘Age of Humans’, is, for
some theorists, another attempt to claim the ‘end of nature.’ ‘Nature is gone,’ says Erle Ellis
in an article eloquently entitled ‘Stop trying to save the Planet’ …: ‘[w]e now live in the
Anthropocene’ (2009: n.p.). In the ecomodernist narrative, the Anthropocene or new
ecological era is not an event to be lamented and feared but rather ‘an opportunity for
humans to finally come into their own’ (Hamilton, 2015: p.233). When Bill McKibben spoke
about ‘the end of nature’ in his eponymous 1989 book, he had a few concrete developments
in mind (which he lamented): for instance, global warming and ozone layer depletion that
rendered extinct the idea of nature as something absolute and separate from us (1989:
p.54). The ‘end of nature’, as he saw it, was the end of nature as we used to know it. That
was the end of representation—of an independent, autonomous nature, free from human
influence and impact2.
In the same vein, when Carolyn Merchant (1980) famously evoked ‘the death
of nature,’ she meant the change of paradigm from nature understood in a vitalistic and
organicist way to a basic mechanic and reductionist view. Probably neither McKibben, nor
Merchant would have ever thought that the metaphoric ‘abolition of nature’ would become
an ontological signifier in the era of the Anthropocene and that it would even have, for some,

1 Ecomodernism is a recent movement associated with prominent environmental figures such as Ted

Nordhaus, Michael Shellenberger, Steward Brand (2009), the physicist David Keith (2013), Nobel Laureate
Joyashree Roy and filmmaker Robert Stone who co-authored The Ecomodernist Manifesto (2015). It also
designates the neo-conservationist movement associated with Peter Kareiva, Michelle Marvier, Emma Marris, and
Robert Lalasz. Institutional allies and supporters of Neo-Greens are The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, The
Breakthrough Institute, The Long Now Foundation, The Nature Conservancy. For a detailed account of their
claims, see Wuerthner (2015) and Soulé (2013).
2 However, Vogel (2015: 241, n.33) and White (1995: p.183) are right to argue that McKibben un-

reflexively travels back and forth between epistemological and ontological insights regarding nature.
positive implications. Indeed, what is at stake, now, is not ‘the supposed end of nature as
an idea or symbol…[but] nature’s reality’ (Arias-Maldonado, 2014: p.4).
What does ‘the end of nature’ in the Anthropocene mean? In a soft version, it
says that ‘(i) natural processes can no longer be defined as independent from human
influence, and [that] (ii) natural forms and processes have been influenced by humans to a
very high degree’ (ibid: p.5). The close intertwinement between nature and culture and the
fact that human actions influence, even on a large scale, natural processes is nothing that
traditional environmentalists would deny. But the idea that nature is ‘dead’ goes further. First
of all, it ignores the fact that rather than being neutrally ‘dead,’ nature is rather being
‘destroyed’ and ‘devastated’ by identifiable social processes such as class relations,
technologies, growth logics, etc. (Moore, 2015). But more philosophically, ecomodernists
such as Ellis deny nature’s own agency in the new techno-postmodern hybridist socio-
ecological compound offered by postmodern thinkers3. Humans’ cultural and technological
mediations are the grand winners of the ‘good Anthropocene.’ 4 As Pellizzoni playfully says
(in this volume): ‘[a]s happens in George Orwell’s Animal Farm; some agents seem to be
more agential than others.’5 However, the ‘ecological crisis’ itself and all its material
components (the disappearance of the Arctic ice cap, rising temperatures and sea levels, the
concentration of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere, species extinction,
pollution, etc.), show that nature is not entirely subsumed within the human power. As
Adorno says, ‘objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder’ (1973: p.5).
This mysterious ‘leftover’ is maybe what some postmoderns call ‘Gaia’ (Stengers, 2015;
Latour 2014). Gaia, says Hamilton, juts through into our world as ‘an intruder, a trespasser,
a gate crasher’ who ‘is crashing the party [of progress]’ (2014: n.p.).
The ecomodernist view seems to be flawed, even from the postmodern perspective it
sometimes wants to embrace. Indeed, in socio-constructivism, nature is seen as a relativist
concept and, therefore, should be open to social discussion (social consensus). However,
ecomodernists do not replace the old single concept of (pristine) nature by the ‘Contested
Natures’ dear to postmoderns (Macnaghten and Urry, 1998). They do not argue for increased
democratic debates on environmental issues and the entering of the Anthropocene in the
agonistic political realm (for instance on the issue of global and environmental justice). On
the contrary, the new ecomodernist and constructivist socio-ecological regimes are rather

3 In order to overcome the nature-society dualism constitutive of modernity, theorists such as Haraway

(1991) or Latour (1993) who can be considered as the paradigmatic thinkers of the deconstructive posthumanist
field have refashioned nature as a ‘techno-nature’ (‘socio-technical assemblages’); that is as a flexible entangled
hybrid reality. Even if Haraway’s position is subtler on this concern, both show little attention to the idiosyncrasies
and significant otherness of the nonhuman world and privilege the human agency and technological side of the
equation. In our opinion, both authors remain caught in the very human exceptionalism they try to denounce,
preventing their theories from being authentically ‘postmodern.’
4 For a further analysis of the ecomodernist ‘good Anthropocene,’ see Hamilton (2015).
5 The absence of thick characterization of what ‘nature’ and ‘society’ are, facilitates the absorption of

nature in plastic capitalistic flux (see Pellizzoni in this volume).

‘anti-democratic’ and ‘technocratic’ (mandating scientists to decide which arrangements are
to be elected), ‘conservative’ (privileging the current capitalistic management of nature), and
‘Universalist.’ Indeed, the Anthropocene, as Arias-Maldonado (2016) says, is heading
inevitably towards ‘the convergence of different societies around the Western, capitalistic-
driven model of socionatural relations’ considered by the author as a ‘universal impulse’
(p.7).
The teleological conception of history which considers (neo)liberalism as ‘the
end of history’ (Fukuyama,1992) does not take into account the peoples on Earth who suffer
from eco-social destructions induced by capitalist modes of production and consumption, as
well as environmental and social movements that resist the capitalistic appropriation of the
world (grassroots movements, Indigenous struggles, anti-extractivist Buen Vivir movement,
Navdanya movement for peace and democracy in India, etc.). The ecomodernist version of
a ‘good Anthropocene’ driven by an undifferentiated global subject (‘the Anthropos’) and
heading toward the European or American unsustainable norms of production and
consumption6 is a typical modernist and Western-centric interpretation of history that forgets
the billions of people who still live in severe poverty lacking elementary goods such as food,
clean water, basic medical care, or shelter to survive7. Moreover, it assumes that all humans
are equally implicated and equally affected by the situation. Bonneuil (2015), for instance,
criticises the dominant narrative and ‘view from nowhere’ that put forward an
undifferentiated biological entity and geological agent (‘humanity’), uniformly concerned or
even implicitly guilty for the mechanisms that gave rise to the advent of the Anthropocene.
Some, like the historian and sociologist Jason W. More (2015, 2016) argue that the
Anthropocene is not the geology of a species but rather the geology of a system of power,
profit and re/production, namely capitalism, and as such, should be renamed ‘Capitalocene.’
For Malm and Hornborg (2014), the Anthropocene is not a scientific story but the index of
capital accumulation, of privileged resource consumption, differentiated and unevenly
distributed environmental impacts. According to these views, this is the same system
(capitalism) that has produced the devastating ecological effects that typify the
Anthropocene and social inequalities which characterize our contemporary world. As Newell
and Paterson put it:‘[w]hat makes [the anthropogenic climate change] a particularly tricky
issue to address is that it is the people that will suffer most that currently contribute less to
the problem, i.e., the poor in the developing world’ (2010:p.7).This program does not only
deny natural limits and the capacity of the environments to absorb the by-products (waste,

According to the blogger and journalist Tim De Chant, if the world’s population lived like the U.S., we
6

would need 4.1 planets (Elert, 2012: n.p.).

7 Nearly 1/2 of the world's population — more than 3 billion people — live on less than $2.50 a day (Shah,

2013: n.p.).
GHGs, etc.) of advanced societies; it also denies the burden of responsibility carried by the
Western world in the ecological plight.
Contrary to the need for accountability, eco-constructivists8, also called ‘eco-
pragmatists’ or ‘neo-environmentalists, ‘urge us to produce the technological innovations
necessary to adapt to the new situation, without changing the usual way of doing (what can
be called the ‘business as usual’ scenario).They advocate the decoupling from nature in order
to ‘save’ it; celebrate the ‘end of nature’ as well as ‘the death of (romantic)
environmentalism.’ They recommend more technology, and especially a ‘neoliberal
conservation’ guided by economic rationality and human-centered managerialism’ (Asafu-
Adjaye, et al., 2015).This program is opposed to the challenge of postmodernity 9, which as
Michel Serres frames it, demands conceiving of nature in intersubjective terms: not as an
enemy to be conquered but as a partner worthy of respect and recognition; in effect, a
declaration of peace between the human species and the natural world (Stierstorfer, 2003:
p.180).
The novelty and ‘originality’ of eco-modernism, compared to the former tenets of
ecological modernization, stem from the alliance eco-modernism promotes between green
capitalism and postmodern discourses on the ‘end of nature.’ Ecomodernists have indeed
seized the opportunity of the new post-natural hybridist narrative, and of the anthropocentric
world picture offered by the ‘Anthropocene,’ to foster traditional techno-socio-capitalistic
arrangements, presented as the roadmap for the future. This is a typical techno-optimist
position, according to which ‘technological innovation incentivized by capitalism and the free
market (coupled with a willingness to leave the planet), means that we can continue with
our energy-intensive, consumer-intensive, globalized ways of life and socio-economic orders
indefinitely’ (Barry, 2016: p.109). This school of thinking includes authors such as Ted
Nordhaus and Michael Schellnhuber, Bjorn Lomborg and Rasmus Karlsson. ‘One way of
describing this form of thinking is “Cornucopian,” understood to mean the confident belief
that technological advances and scientific knowledge and its application will continue to
deliver high levels of material goods and services, material abundance now and in the future’
(Barry, ibid.).
By fostering such a techno-optimistic agenda, these thinkers ignore 1) the non-
reductionist conception of Earth brought about by Earth Science System (ESS) and post-
normal science (Ravetz, 2006), both of which show the unpredictability of Earth trajectory
in the Anthropocene; 2) the postmodern warnings about the ‘intrusion of Gaia’ (Stengers,

8
Ecomodernists or eco-constructivists perpetuate ‘the social siege of nature’ (Soulé and Lease,1995),
started by constructivists/deconstructivists but in new sophisticated forms (geoengineering, hybridist and
postnature narratives, hypermodern dreams of control and reproduction of nature, etc.). They promise a ‘good
Anthropocene,’ thanks to unbridled technological and capitalistic developments.
9 A challenge which is taken up by real postmodernists such as Smith (2001, 2011), Alaimo (1994),

Mathews (1996, 2003), Gibson et al. (2015) who seek to develop ontologies/ethics that decentre the figure of
the autonomous and self-sufficient human in favour of a humbler positioning in the world.
Latour); 3) the deconstructive critiques of human exceptionalism in the post-nature
connectionist and relational narrative, or ‘the blurring of boundaries’ between humans and
nonhumans (Latour, Haraway, Braidotti, etc.).
While uncritically appropriating insights of the hypermodern narrative of
control10 and of the postmodern narrative of hybridity (‘nature is us’), the eco-modernist
narrative and the unapologetic picture of a ‘good Anthropocene’ it offers, remain entirely
situated in the prejudices of modernity. These prejudices include, among other ideas, a blind
faith in technology 11, a ‘domination of nature’ narrative, and a dualism by which nature is
seen as pristine or as not existing at all. Ecomodernists could, therefore, be renamed
‘mostmoderns,’12 a provocative appellation aiming at denouncing the postmodern claims of
ecomodernism while they remain highly (un-reflexively in my opinion) modern.
This chapter argues that to acknowledge the increasing entanglement of nature and
culture around us—and inside us—does not require us to abandon the analytic distinction
between aspects deriving from human societies (the construction of nature by human labor
and technologies) and those arising from nature’s ‘non-identity’ (otherness). The affirmative
‘identity thinking’ characteristic of both hypermodernity and constructivist postmodernism
(‘nature is dead’) is an attempt to reduce the other to the self, the object to its
representation, the making to the knowing and, in the capitalistic framework, the
particularities of nature to abstract forms of monetary exchange. It represents, therefore, a
source of dominating hubris (Adorno, 1973; Horkheimer and Adorno, 2002), a philosophical
anthropocentric fallacy and a justification for destructive practices. As White et al. say,
summarizing eco-Marxism: ‘Humans viewed from the perspective of geohistory over time
are indeed more one force bobbing on the sea than a producer of socionatures’ (2016:
p.139). Against the further capitalist exploitation that the ecomodernist version of the ‘good
Anthropocene’ promotes, I argue that the repeated failures of ecological modernization,
ecomodernism, and environmental managerialism should be an opportunity to re-think our
place on the planet. Particularly, it should urge us to accept the fragility and vulnerability of
the human species in the face of complex and unpredictable natural phenomena. The great
challenge that lies ahead us is not the further humanization of the planet nor its mastery but
rather the further humanization of humanity and the mastery of our mastery. The current
‘Capitalocene’ (Moore, 2015, 2016), where the global ecological crisis is not so much the

10 The hyper modern conception of the Anthropocene is mostly un-reflexive and flatly techno-optimist:

little space is devoted to doubt, uncertainties, precaution, etc. It is an arrogant and hubristic orientation of
anthropocentrism that presents humanity, the ‘top’ species in the rank of agency, as able to control and rearrange
the natural world. It also rehearses the very modern conceptions of progress and freedom as an escape from
nature’s determinations and limits.
11 Concerning the warning against the possible destructive effects of technology, it is a view reduced to

a cliché by Arias-Maldonado (2012: p.93), a threat attributed to romantic environmentalists that should be swept
aside in the face of the inexorable advancement of science and modernity.
12 An appellation I borrow from Spretnak (1997).
humanization but rather the capitalization of the earth (Barry, 2007) leads us to unforeseen
and unpredictable catastrophes, spelled out here as ‘the return of nature.’

1. ESS, Ecomodernism, and geoengineering: the (hyper)modern narrative of

mastery and control

From the perspective of the ESS, our planet is going through a huge change,
leaving behind the thousands of years of exceptional stability of climate temperatures and
sea levels that characterized the Holocene, to enter a new epoch of uncertainty and
significant transformations. The ESS approach puts forward processes such as global
warming, biodiversity loss or the prevalence of artificial organic molecules throughout the
world that push the Earth System towards tipping points at which more or less stable systems
will shift to a different state, or be disrupted altogether. Although the very idea of ‘tipping
point’ comes out of the analytical model of systems theory, this approach considers feedback
mechanisms inherent in forces that escape our analytical models, and sudden collapse
thresholds of ecosystems as carrying unpredictable consequences that will change the
conditions of life on Earth. The ‘Anthropocene’ is, therefore, bringing about fears that the
planetary system is leaving the stable trajectory that characterized the Holocene (Folke et
al., 2010). From the ESS perspective, traditional answers such as Promethean science or
‘business as usual’ modes of thinking and doing (e.g. carboniferous capitalism) are ‘now
dangerously obsolete… [They are] an invitation to impending catastrophe’ (Sardar, 2010:
p.441). Modernity’s key concepts can no longer apply. Science and technology no longer
open a path of linear and unidirectional progress, where uncertainties can be managed and
mitigated by technology and science. Humans are not able anymore to predict the future
ramifications and consequences of their actions. The non-mastery of their technological
mastery leads to the introduction of indeterminacy at the very core of nature, not only
because of what is involved in any human action (Smith, 2011: p.139) but also because of
a technological power that surpasses humans’ perceptive abilities. In modern capitalist
societies humans are not able to control their control of nature, nor can they control their
own lack of control. Therefore, from the ESS outlook, the Anthropocene is an event to be
lamented and feared rather than to be celebrated (Hamilton, 2015). Considered as an
ecological predicament, the Anthropocene shows the structural limitation of our knowledge:
it is better seen as ‘nonknowledge,’ or rational ignorance linked to uncertainties and
ontological indeterminacy. But further, it also displays the helplessness of already
accumulated scientific knowledge to trigger necessary changes 13. We have entered a world
of limits: a material world of ecological limits but also a symbolic world of scientific limits
(what post-normal sciences call the ‘unknown unknowns’ Ravetz 2006).
However, and in spite of the warnings contained in the very notion of
Anthropocene, key proponents of the concept – or ‘Anthropocenologists’ as Bonneuil and
Fressoz (2016: pp.48-49) label them – assume that governing ecological limits under a
condition of emergency will require more technology (possibly including large-scale
technologies)14, better management of the Earth, and the guidance of scientists and
engineers to mitigate the situation. This narrative is what Bonneuil calls the ‘tale of scientific
shepherds and green geo-technologies’ (2015: p.23). Anthropocenologists, more or less
enthusiastically, welcome the Anthropocene as being ‘the beginning of a new geological era
ripe with human-directed opportunity’ (Ellis 2012). We can find here Ellis (2009, 2011,
2012), Crutzen (2002), Crutzen and Steffen (2003), Steffen, Crutzen, and McNeill (2007),
Crutzen and Schwägerl (2011). All of them offer a ‘science-driven vision of Earth stewardship’
(Lövbrand et al. 2009) where humans are sometimes crudely presented as Masters or
demiurges of the planet. For instance, in a famous piece co-authored by Crutzen and the
German environmental journalist Christian Schwägerl, we can read: ‘[t]he long-held barriers
between nature and culture are breaking down. It’s no longer us against ‘Nature.’ Instead,
it’s we who decide what nature is and what it will be’ (2011, n.p.; my emphasis).
Astrophysicist Lowell Wood, likewise, embraces the prospect of geoengineering: ‘we’ve
engineered every other environment we live in – why not the planet?’ (quoted in Hamilton
et al., 2015: p.9). For Marc Lynas, author of The God Species, ‘[n]ature no longer runs the
Earth. We do. It’s our choice what happens here’ (2011: p.8). Ellis proclaims that ‘we will be
proud of the planet we create in the Anthropocene’ (2011: n.p.; my emphasis). Stewart
Brand’s statement is probably the acme of this Promethean vision: ‘[w]e are as gods, and
we have to get good at it’ (1968: n.p.). It seems obvious that those eminent scientists and
ecomodernists, some of them being members of the Breakthrough Institute 15, make a
confusion between ‘human-induced planetary change’ and ‘human planetary control,’
thinking that the extent to which we alter the planet gives us control of it. In their defence,
those statements could also mean that our largely unconscious global environmental

13 Actually, the issue is not anymore to get a clearer picture of the situation by accumulating scientific

data but to understand ‘how we entered the Anthropocene despite very consistent warnings, knowledge and
opposition’ (Bonneuil and Fressoz, 2015: p.79; original emphasis). As Barry notes, ‘the scientific evidence for
anthropogenic climate change has accumulated to the extent that we could be the first species to accurately
document our own demise’ (2012: 1; emphasis added).
14
It is salutary to note that Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer, who first announced the arrival of the
Anthropocene, support geoengineering in the name of ‘climate emergency.’ Despairing over governmental
capacity and ability, they suggest that only the global scientific research and engineering community might be
able to guide mankind to sustainability, thanks to large-scale geoengineering projects (2000: p.18). Their support
to the ‘Anthropocene’ is therefore not of the same nature than the blind enthusiasm we can find in ecomodernism.
15 Mark Lynas and Steward Brand are two of the co-authors of the Ecomodernist manifesto (2015).

Steward Brand and Erle Ellis are senior fellows of the Breakthrough Institute. Steward Brand is also the cofounder
and president of The Long Now Foundation. See https://thebreakthrough.org/about/people
destruction needs now that we, consciously this time (under the stewardship of global
managers and experts), ‘manage’ the planet. Contrary to those views that praise the control
or ‘management’ of the planet, reflexive ESS and postnormal sciences (Ravetz, 2006) show
that the consequences of scientific and industrial developments are a set of uncontrollable
and unforeseen large-scale risks and hazards (‘manufactured risks’). As Beck, says, ‘we are
living in the age of side effects’ (Beck et al., 1994: p.175; original emphasis.). Ignoring this
gloomy outlook or welcoming it in the same way as Latour encourages us to ‘love [our]
monsters’ (2012), ecomodernists greet the new ecological era as ‘an optimistic view toward
human capacities and the future’ (Asafu-Adjaye et al., 2015: n.p.). Hamilton (2015)
compares the ecomodernist narrative of the ‘Good Anthropocene’ to a theodicy intended to
make us believe, like in Voltaire’s caustic tale on Enlightenment’s optimism, that ‘everything
is for the best in the best of all possible worlds’ (Candide, ou l’optimisme, 1759)16. Especially,
the ‘good Anthropocene’ argument aims to convince us that further technological innovation,
further undifferentiated economic growth, further urbanization, further population growth 17,
etc. will save us from the predicament these processes have created. This view is similar to
a blissful invitation to continue the ‘business-as-usual’ scenario and the modernization
process which lie at the roots of the ecological predicament. Especially, ecomodernists’
statements about the ‘good/great Anthropocene’ reflect a misreading of the warning signals
reflexive ESS is sending concerning the alteration of the planet self-regulation dynamic that
has been occurring over the last two to three centuries. The concept of earth systems’
resilience, dear to ecomodernists and neo-conservationists18, fails to acknowledge that it is
not nature’s resilience which is into question insofar as the earth (which does not need to be
a ‘home for humans’) will continue on its route, but the very survival of human and non-
human life on the planet, or in other terms, the resilience of life mechanisms. If resilience
means for ecomodernists that the natural world will always offer humans a welcoming home,
this is a tragic mistake. As Hamilton puts it, ‘[t]hroughout its geo-history the planet has
never ‘bounced back’ from one epoch to the previous one. The Earth has now crossed a point
of no return; its great cycles have changed, the chemical compositions of air and ocean have
been altered in ways that cannot be undone. By the end of the century it will very likely be
hotter than it has been for 15 million years’ (2015: p.237).
Denying the adverse consequences of the Anthropocene, ecomodernists have
‘instate[d] an ‘anthropodicy’ in which human-directed progress takes the place of God’

16
This blissful view is particularly expressed in the Ecomodernist Manifesto (2015) where ecomodernism
spokesmen express the view that thanks to human creativity and inventiveness, we will create a world – maybe
a ‘rambunctious garden’ as Marris (2011) proposes – where ‘nearly all of us will be prosperous enough to live
healthy, free, and creative lives’ (2015: n.p.).
17 For Ellis, ‘humans appear fully capable of continuing to support a burgeoning population by engineering

and transforming the planet’ (2012: n.p.).

18‘Nature is so resilient that it can recover rapidly from even the most powerful human disturbances’

(Kareiva et al., 2011: n.p.).

(Hamilton, 2015: p.234). Western technologically-fitted humans, like gods, are capable of
transcending natural limits: it is not nature that rules over man but the man who rules over
nature. If Crutzen and Schwägerl deny that the Anthropocene, understood as a name which
‘highlight the immense power of our intellect and our creativity, and the opportunities they
offer for shaping the future’ is ‘another sign of human hubris,’ (Schwägerland Crutzen, 2011:
n.p.), for Arias-Maldonado ‘a bit of prometheanismus seems hard to avoid’ (2012: p.70).
Those discourses reflect the old dream of mastery typical of pre-reflexive modernity. Indeed,
by closely associating the progress of humanity to the developments in science and
technology, they are still ‘largely trapped inside the enlightenment tale of progress as human
control over a passive and “dead” nature that justifies both colonial conquests and
commodity economies’ (Plumwood, 2007: p.1). But because of the technological level now
achieved, the modernist logic is pushed to its upper limits and becomes a hypermodern
narrative where humans do not aim at becoming ‘like masters and possessors of nature’ but
rather real demiurgic (geological) forces unable, however, to anticipate the implications of
their actions. As Hamilton quips: ‘[t]he Moderns are convinced it’s a party with no end. The
eco-Moderns go further. “Yes, yes,” they agree, “we have entered the Anthropocene, but
that is just another phase of the party, which can only get better.” They have a name for the
next phase of the party, uniting two words we thought would never be put together, the
“good Anthropocene”’(Hamilton, 2014: n.p.).
For ecomodernists, the so-called ‘natural world’ has been progressively so shaped by
human activities, through technoscientific progress, that the otherness and exteriority of
nature have almost disappeared: we have entered a ‘post-nature’ era (which needs, in turn,
‘post-environmentalist’ thinkers). The concept of ‘post-nature’ means here that the planet
has been literally - not metaphorically-socially constructed. This hypermodern narrative still
conceives nature as an ontological exterior (pristine?) reality that humans have managed
progressively to conquer until its quasi-final disappearance. The epistemological
separateness of nature from humans, as per the nature-culture distinction, leads to its
empirical destruction. The ‘end of nature,’ here, is an ongoing process and not a philosophical
a priori (as it is the case in postmodern discourses which consider that nature isolated from
humans has never existed). For ecomodernists, and despite their attempt to adopt a
postmodern hybridist narrative, nature is still an amenable external matter waiting for its
anthropization. As Ellis says, our task is to ‘shoulder the mantle of planetary stewardship’
(2012: n.p.). The conquest of the earth can go on: the geopower will now regulate the globe’s
thermostat and reconfigure the living beings on the planet 19.
Hyper-ecomodernists find in the postnatural narrative a precious ally to prepare the
public for more technological fixes and capitalistic innovations: as Arias-Maldonado warns

19 Some techno-ideologues even think of creating a human species able to adapt to climate change. On

human genetic engineering, see Liao et al. (2012).

us: ‘[r]eality will be much more mixed and hybrid than its current representations’ (2012:
p.82). The post-environmentalist theory works like a self-fulfilling prophecy: the more nature
is destroyed by techno-capitalistic apparatuses, the more will humans be dependent on
technology and capitalist-driven investments to survive. The concept of the Anthropocene
provides eco-constructivists with an opportunity to achieve a form of philosophical and
scientific reductionism. Indeed, eco-modernists, as well as some unreflexive Promethean
scientists who use the pretext of planetary ecological emergency to promote techno-fixes
such as geoengineering and who support, by doing so, technocratic scientific-based modes
of decision-making and governance that bypass democratic institutions,20 ask us to redouble
our faith in modernist rationalism. However, as Hamilton asks: ‘how can we think our way
out of a problem when the problem is the way we think?’ (2013: p.182). According to the
geoengineering conception, the world is still conceived as an aggregation of material objects,
meaningless in themselves and devoid of agency, that can be rearranged and reorganized
according to human’s will (scientific reductionism).
Promethean hyper-modernists seem to have lost sight of the fact that
Anthropocene scientific perceptions are not only concerned with dreams of mastery but also
with nonlinearity, the existence of critical thresholds, bifurcations and stochasticity, that is
with doubt, uncertainty, irreversibility, and unpredictability. The Anthropocene will be an era
of considerable instability for the Earth system, which might turn out to be threatening to
human life. As Hamilton recalls, warning us and geoengineers, the planet is a ‘complex and
uncooperative beast’ that might not react as planned to the manipulations of the atmosphere
(2013: p.37). Nature, indeed, is also natura naturans, a self-causing reality, an active
process, and a self-productive power that ceaselessly generates new forms . In spite of its
entangled relationships with culture, ‘nature retains its exteriority, otherness, and agency’
(Baskin, 2014: p.10). The consequences of the denial of a natural agency – which has
reappeared in techno-postmodernism in the mysterious form of ‘Gaia’ – are enormous for
ecology. If everything is produced and reproduced, if natural products are nothing more than
an internal differentiation of society and production processes (‘commodities in the
making’)21, then no normative limits to the social and capitalistic appropriation (and therefore
spoliation) of the natural world can be set up. As Cafaro says, preserving nature ‘involves
setting limits to human demand on nature, not endlessly accommodating them. It involves
setting limits to the degree of human influence that is acceptable … This in turn, limits the
degree to which real conservationists can accept the dominant trends of the Anthropocene’

20
The notion of “Anthropocene boosters” also covers the scientists, such as Paul Crutzen or Will Steffen
who optimistically–or not– praise geoengineering and large-scale technologies as a new efficient way to “manage”
the earth. All these discourses have in common to be driven by an unreflexive Hubris. In another work (Barry &
Fremaux, 2018 forthcoming) we have characterised them as part of unreflexive ESS in contrast with reflexive
ESS.
21 Smith shows very well how capitalism does not aim only at plundering nature but also at increasingly

producing a ‘social nature’ as ‘the basis of new sectors of production and accumulation’ (2006: p.33).
(2014: p. 138). To forsake ‘the bounds of the ecologically possible,’ an expression which
defines sustainability (Brundtland Commission 1987: n.p.), means nothing less than to lose
any normative means of resistance against the destruction of the living world entailed by
globalized neoliberal capitalism. By identifying de facto ‘nature’with ‘techno-nature,’ that is
by naturalizing the process of destruction of the natural world (which becomes in post-
environmental terminology mere ‘transformation’22), advocates of the post-nature narrative
offer a typical example of an ‘affirmative thinking’ (Adorno) which turns out to be on the side
of nature’s neoliberalization.

2. Ecomodernism (again) and postmodern constructivist narrative: another

version of the ‘end of nature’ in the Capitalocene

On the other hand, and complementary to the hypermodern conception, a new

attack on nature has come from another front, that is the ‘post-nature grand narrative’ of
the Anthropocene (Bonneuil, 2015: p.24) which declares that ecology must be ‘without
nature.’ Nature and societies have always been commonly produced, and reality has always
been made of complex hybrids and mixed socio-material assemblages. Not only does this
narrative acknowledge ‘a la McKibben’, that ‘nature had ended as an independent force’
(1989: p. ix), but it extrapolates, from nature’s history of humanization that nature as an
ontological reality was always somehow ‘dead.’ For postmodern post-nature theorists, the
opposition between nature and culture; that is the fundamental antagonism central to
modernity is flawed. Modernity has compromised itself into false dualisms that postmodern
theory has dissolved. We live into the ‘mesh’ (Morton). Old tactics of preservation and
protection of nature are therefore obsolete. Future-oriented environmentalism must develop
an ‘ecology without nature’ (Purdy, 2015; Vogel, 2015; Morton, 2007). New post-
environmentalism is no longer about protecting nature but about offering a better capitalistic
and technological management of hybrids (Arias-Maldonado, 2016).
To overcome the false dichotomies of modernity, postmodern and posthumanist
thinkers such as Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, Isabelle Stengers or Peter Sloterdijk (among
others) have tried to show how much nature and culture are entangled and how much our
world is made up of imbroglios, assemblages and hybrid entities. According to this
conception, everything is interconnected; everything is linked and attached: ‘the nonhuman
world,’ says Haraway, ‘is dialogic… a co-productive participant in human social relationships’
(quoted in Soulé and Lease 1995: p.3). The world is made up of ‘naturecultures’: Haraway
likes to cite the OncoMouse™ as an apotheosis of this mixed reality. Post-nature techno-
thinkers have refashioned nature as a flexible hybrid, a relational reality without solid

22 See Crist (2013).

content, which can be easily deconstructed and re-constructed by market forces23. In effect,
the refusal of the nature/culture divide does not work in favor of nature but rather benefits
technology and artificial arrangements. According to this view (which concurs with a global
capitalist outlook), the reality is made of ever-changing networks where everything can be
remolded or re-composed at any time. Our world is a techno-natural continuum made of
hybrids, mixed entities, and cyborgs. Postmodern eco-constructivism is a cultural monism,
namely the exact opposite of the natural monism developed by deep ecology. It also opposes
the relational ontology of genuine postmodern worldviews, Mick Smith’s for instance, which
‘counter the modern ideological flight from body, nature, and place’ (Spretnak, 1997: p.223).
The techno post-nature narrative departs from the old ‘domination of nature’
thesis. The latter describes an ongoing process by which nature comes progressively and
increasingly under modernity’s rationalizing. In the hyper-modern view, nature is still seen
as an external force standing in the way of the industrial civilizational process. As Arias-
Maldonado says, the basis for civilization lies in ‘the transfer of wealth from nonnature
environments into human ones’ (2016: p.2). The postmodern post-nature narrative no longer
conceives nature as a separate entity but as a fluid techno-reality that was always already
mixed with the products (and waste) of technology. Pollution, nuclear waste, modified crops,
climate change, etc. are all ‘naturecultures’ that we need to accept as part of our
‘postmodern’ reality… As Latour says, we must love our ‘monsters’ like our own children
(2012: n.p.). The aim is not any longer to destroy the otherness of nature but to contend
that there is no otherness. This kind of reasoning is trapped into affirmative thinking (only
socio-cultural arrangements exist) and strawmen (nature is pristine or is not).
The modern mastery of separate nature and the ‘postmodern’ conception of
eco-social assemblages under the hegemony of culture are two anthropocentric theoretical
frameworks which contest nature and lead to the same antinaturalist consequences. They
typify two forms of techno-capitalocentric hubris that fail to recognize the value of nature’s
agency. By praising technology and evacuating ontological natural limits, they both open the
door to further human-caused degradation of the world for the sake of economic
development and scientific innovation. The complacency of this ideology about the current
capitalistic organization of the world makes its views very attractive to the advocates of the
status quo, those who want to go on maintaining the same patterns of development and
(unsustainable) ways of living. However, as next section shows, nature is never merely a
social product, neither a pure raw material that awaits the human inventiveness and
ingenuity passively. It is a complex system that can wake up at any time: this is what we
call ‘the return of nature’ in the Capitalocene era. As Callicott says, ‘nature is dead. Long live
nature!’ (1992).

23 There is, actually nothing more ‘constructivist’ than the market, an entity that aims at transforming

everything into saleable commodities circulating in fluid networks.

 3. The return of nature: nature as ‘non-identity’

The Anthropocene means nothing less than that the phenomenon of

anthropization has become so extended that policies of environmental conservation are now
out-moded. Our impact on the world, it is argued, is so pervasive that the traditional
environmental goals of protecting, restoring, and valuing natural environments are just
romantic pipe-dreams, like the human virtues of humility, prudence, and restraint which
accompany green radical political projects like degrowth or post-growth political economies.
If nature does not exist and has, maybe, never existed, why bother protecting it? 24. An article
in The New York Times written by environmental professionals (including the chief scientist
for Nature Conservancy), and entitled ‘Hope in the Age of Man’ illustrates this worrisome
moral and metaphysical perspective. It argues that viewing our time as ‘the age of man’ is
‘well-deserved, given humanity’s enormous alteration of earth’ and concludes that because
‘this is the Earth we have created,’ we should, therefore, ‘manage it with love and intelligence
… We can design ecosystems…to new glories’ (!) (Marris et al., 2011: n.p.; emphasis added)
The condemnation of archaic and outdated positions, the optimistic utterances
about the ‘good Anthropocene’ as well as the denial of planetary boundaries gives to
Anthropocenologists a surprising air of déjà-vu. Indeed, we witness here a reappearance of
the glorious years of the 17th century, except for the fact that the new Prometheus knows
that ‘our powers may yet exceed our ability to manage them’ (Ellis, 2012: n.p.). In other
words, we know that we will produce monsters (which are redefined as ‘hybrids’ for more
convenience). Ecological catastrophes are indeed the material signs of nature-as-other’s
resistance, of the non-identity of nature, or what Adorno calls the ‘non-mediated,’ because
it is not reducible to concepts. As O’Connor explains, there is ‘an irreducible, nonidentical
moment’ in our experience of reality (quoted in Cook, 2011: p.37). There is actually a
‘surplus’ in nature that can never be summarised in a final synthesis. 25 This surplus is
displayed in our experience in the form of ecological tragedies and uncontrollable risks.
The lesson to be learned is that nature can never be totally subsumed under
social practices and that its own logics and meaning must be respected in order to avoid
tragic feedbacks loops or negative consequences. What is needed is, therefore, a reflexive
form of ‘societal relationships with nature’ that would respect its ‘non-identity.’ This concept,
borrowed from Adorno (1973) defines what, in nature, is ungraspable and unknowable by

24 As Hamilton shows, those views are factually contested by the Wildlife Conservation Society who

estimates that 26% of the Earth’s land may be classed as ‘last of the wild’ (Hamilton, 2013: p.188).
25 This position could be named ‘critical realism’ (Baskhar, 1989) or ‘subtle realism’ (Hammersley, 1992),

that is a position which assumes that there are real world objects apart from the human knower (objective
reality), that our ability to know this reality is imperfect, and that our claims about these objects must be,
therefore, subject to wide scientific critical examination and caution.
concepts and therefore what escapes the process of domination. Adorno, as Hailwood
explains, criticises the fact that instrumental reason has attempted [and still attempts] to
override non-identity, that is to ‘reduce everything to the graspable’ (2015: p.132).
Hypermodernity is unable to respect nature’s non-identity while postmodern constructivist
thinkers mostly deny its existence. To ignore nature’s non-identity or, in other words, to
pursue the domination and appropriation project, entails the ‘return of nature’ on the scene
of human history in the form of biological dysfunctionalities and environmental catastrophes.
On the one hand, nature is a social construction: nature is constructed
discursively through language and, empirically, through human practices. But on the other
hand, through the dialectic interdependence of nature and society, nature produces a society
and also remains a principle of production on its own, displaying processes that societies
cannot control. The dialectical perspective criticises the subsumption of nature under the
purposes of society, that is to say, the technical and symbolic project of natural capital
substitution insofar as: 1) it dismisses the natural rootedness of societies, exposing societies
to the risks entailed by the ‘omission’ of the natural processes that also inform them (the
‘return of nature’ under the form of risks and catastrophes); 2) it locks up societies in the
logics of ‘identity thinking’ according to which things exist only to the extent they fit into
humans’ concepts. For that reason, societies ignore the non-conceptual content of nature –
its Otherness – and are unable to accept and respect nature’s agency.
The concept of the Anthropocene, which embodies those two pitfalls is, in this
regards, ‘tautological:’ it substitutes unity to diversity (for instance the Anthropos as a
homogeneous actor; cultural artefacts for natural diversity), simplicity for complexity (the
complexity of feedback loops and Earth’s singularity being sacrificed on behalf of reductive
causal laws), identity for difference (nature being declared identical to society while it is also
non-identical). An adequate concept of society would acknowledge the extent to which we
are part of, and not only apart from nature, and would cease to oppose humanity
‘destructively and self-destructively to [nature]’ (Cook, 2011: p.160). The failure to
acknowledge the autonomous, complex and rich agency of nature might otherwise lead to
more tragic ‘ecological hazards.’ As Brand et al. say, ‘certainly, the process of modernity is
based on an increasing control of nature, but this domination does not lead to an increasing
control over nature’ (2008: p.12; emphasis added). Rather, the relentless project of
commodification and objectification of the world rebounds in the destruction of natural
processes on which we depend for our own living (the social processes being always
materially embedded) and in more uncontrollable reactions from nature that translate in
forms of destructive ecological risks like global warming, acidification of oceans, viral
microorganisms, radioactivity, atmospheric pollution, etc.
At the very time when nature is declared ‘dead,’ natural processes are making
their comeback in the form of uncontrolled phenomena. Societies are more and more
confronted with the unintended consequences of the Western attempts to dominate nature.
The uncontrolled hybrids (or ‘monsters’) we create and the risks for living beings they entail
show that we are less and less able to control the impacts of our actions. This experience
proves that a reality foreign to human constructions blows up in our faces. Shall we call it
‘non-identity,’ ‘Otherness’ or ‘Gaia’? Environmental hazards are, indeed, a consequence of
the remaining natural agency in the socio-ecological compound. As Görg says, ‘[t]he more
nature is seen as something influenced and produced by human action, the more our
experience is that we are far away from having real control over nature’ (2011: p.43). The
power on nature which defined modernity’s progress could paradoxically become an obstacle
to the furtherance of human civilisations… and human progress. There is, indeed, a widening
gap between our capacity to influence nature and our inability to control the consequences
of our deeds. It is very likely that the Promethean attempts to resolve this contradiction
offered by Anthropocenologists (that is geoengineering and more growth-based economic
management) will only dramatically expand the gap.
We thought that the growing reflexivity and awareness concerning the
ecological crisis would have favored other types of relationships with nature than the
capitalistic forms of dominance, appraisal, and appropriation of nature. ‘Traditional’
ecologists have tried to put at the forefront some forms of knowledge and practices that
cultivate an entirely different, more respectful, treatment of nature, for example, post-
anthropocentric approaches, the ecofeminist ethics of care or ecological humanism (weak
anthropocentrism). However, they did not count on the infinite capacity of capitalism to
invent new ways of bouncing back to pursue the planned and deliberate destruction of the
Earth for the sake of short-term economic profits and a small elite’s interests. The
‘Anthropocene/Capitalocene’ is the new name given to the further instrumental and
capitalistic domination of the Earth at the expense of its most vulnerable inhabitants. A
humbler and more cautious view is desperately needed to replace the misleading arrogant
Western-centrism inherent in this so-called ‘age of humans.’ One of the central paradoxes
related to the concept of Anthropocene is probably that just as the impact of humans on
ecosystems has become so significant that it prompts some to celebrate the ‘age of humans’,
the survival of humanity has never been so much challenged and under global threat. The
Anthropocene concept should, therefore, be seen as a warning sign rather than an appeal to
‘new glories.’ Otherwise, the perspective stretching in front of us (and future generations) is
the one of a humankind left without a world to inhabit or, supreme irony, an anthropized
planet without the Anthropos.
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