From climate migration to anthropocene mobilities: shifting the debate

• Published in: Mobilities 2019-05, Vol.14 (3), p.289-297
• Main Authors: Baldwin, Andrew, Fröhlich, Christiane, Rothe, Delf
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: 19th century; Anthropocene; Biological evolution; Climate change; Colonialism; Earth; Embedding; Fluidity; Fossil fuels; Fossile Brennstoffe; Fuels; Geologie; Geology; Geomorphology; Holocene; Humanism; Humanities; Klimaflüchtling; Migration; mobilities; Mobility; Modernization; Ontology; Social sciences; Social stratification; Ökologie; Ökologie und Umwelt
• ISSN: 1745-0101; 1745-011X; 1745-011X
• DOI: 10.1080/17450101.2019.1620510

‘The Anthropocene epoch,’ as Claire Colebrook describes it, ‘appears to mark as radical a shift in species awareness as Darwinian evolution effected for the nineteenth century’ (Colebrook 2017). The recent outpouring of ontological speculation on the Anthropocene across the humanities and social sciences certainly testifies to such a radical shift. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s insights about the Anthropocene are emblematic (Chakrabarty 2009). The Anthropocene, he argues, marks not only the moment in which the human, Anthropos, becomes fully expressed in the Earth System, but also, paradoxically, the moment in which we lose our ability to grasp what it means to be human. Such a perspective captures well a sense in which the Anthropocene marks our passage into a geohistorical interregnum. As we depart from the geologic stability of the Holocene, so we leave behind the conceptual certainties of modernism, not least the fraught separation of Nature and Culture that has underpinned Euro-Western humanism from at least the fifteenth century onwards. Entering now an epoch in which the entanglements of social and geologic life are more and more ratified by the geosciences, it is no wonder that the social sciences and humanities have responded to the Anthropocene thesis by turning to ontological speculation. The Anthropocene is a scary business. Yet while the Anthropocene carries such far-reaching ontological consequences, those writing about it have had surprisingly little to say about the ontological primacy of mobility and movement, the ever-presence of movement in social life, and the insight that mobility is political and thus a fundamental mechanism of social stratification (although notable exceptions include Clark and Yusoff 2017; Colebrook 2017). This is unexpected given that the Anthropocene concept, by re-embedding human ontological awareness in deep time, draws us into ever closer proximity to Earth’s geomorphology, its dynamism, its fluidity, the inherent mobility of the Earth system, or what Bronislaw Szerszynski calls ‘planetary mobility’ (Szerszynski 2016). One of the aims of this special issue of Mobilities on ‘Anthropocene Mobilities’ is to add to this speculative moment by positioning ‘mobility’ as a key term of reference for thinking with, through and against, the Anthropocene as either a philosophical problem, a political concept, a material condition, or an epoch of deep time.