Being Affected by Climate Change

The Anthropocene and the Body of Ethics

Nancy Tuana
Penn State University
It is basically a truism to say that humans have always interacted with the
biophysical environment. Only relatively recently, however, arguably at the beginning of
the 21st Century, do we find a focused effort to develop systematic scientific methods to
address the complex interactions between human systems such as agriculture, industry,
and business, and natural systems such as the atmospheric, the biologic, and the
hydrologic. One example is the National Science Foundation (NSF) Biocomplexity in
the Environment Program launched in 1999 that evolved to include the Dynamics of
Coupled Natural and Human Systems program. According to its 2001 Program
Announcement, the NSF defined biocomplexity as the dynamic web of often surprising
interrelationships that arise when components of the global ecosystem--biological,
physical, chemical, and the human dimension--interact (NSF 2001).
With the Industrial Revolution and the complex economic shifts leading to the
contemporary global economic system, interactions between human and natural systems
have had an increasing potential for impacts in both scope and intensity. Scientific
research into understanding of feedbacks, surprises, nonlinearities, thresholds, time lags,
legacy effects, path dependence, and emergence (unique properties not belonging to the
human or natural systems separately) have revealed significant transformations of
biogeological systems. This combined with a growing awareness of the exponential
increase in human impacts on natural systems has led many to argue that we have entered
into a new era, the Anthropocene, in which humans have become the key drivers of
environmental change:

Human activities such as use of land, oceans, and fresh-water, have markedly
changed land cover, biogeochemical and hydrological cycles, and even the
climate system (Vitousek et al 1997; IPCC 2006: van der Leeuw and Redman
2002; Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005). Human influence is now so
pervasive that it dramatically alters the evolutionary trajectories of many other
species (Palumbi 2001). Even areas explicitly buffered from human impacts,
such as protected areas (e.g., nature reserves), are the outcome of human decisions
and are influenced by global responses to human disturbances, such as climate
change. Development has generated enormous benefits for humanity and
improved human well-being (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, 2005), but
gains through inappropriate practices (e.g., undervaluation and overexploitation of
ecosystem services) have also increased risks and impaired numerous ecosystem
services essential for human survival and development (Daily 1997; Odum 1989).
(Liu et al. 2007).

Welcome to the Anthropocene

Will Steffen, Paul J. Crutzen, and John R. McNeill define the Anthropocene as
the current epoch in which humans and our societies have become a global geophysical
force (2007, 614). Many writing about the impact of the Anthropocene argue for a
radical transformation in worldview in which humans come to be seen as geological
agents, changing the most basic physical processes of the earth (Oreskes 2007, 73).
This change, in turn, leads to the challenge of cultivating new responses to global issues.
In a recent article, Steffen, Crutzen et al. argue that the advent of the Anthropocene, the

time interval in which human activities now rival global geophysical processes, suggests
that we need to fundamentally alter our relationship with the planet we inhabit (2011,
739).
My goal in this essay is to consider how welcoming the Anthropocene might
provide a path for fundamentally altering our relationship with the planet and cultivating
new responses to global issues. My position is that the Anthropocene has the potential to
usher in an onto-ethical transformation in which an appreciation of the nature and extent
of human impacts on global environmental processes can be the catalyst for a radical
transformationa shift of habits, affective dispositions, and ways of conceivingof the
magnitude required to live differently. I will bracket classification debates and leave
these to groups like the Anthropocene Working Group of the International Commission
on Stratigraphy. My aim is rather to argue for the significance of embracing the symbolic
meanings of the Anthropocene as a vehicle for transforming the imaginary.1 Here my
goal is to examine how the figure of the Anthropocene can serve to disrupt and go
beyond the limits of the inherited symbolic order that sets down a series of imposed
subject-positions and dichotomies. I will focus on the divide between the human and the
natural, the geophysical and the social. The promise of the Anthropocene is its potential
to rework and transform concepts that, as Wittgenstein would say, hold us captive
(1968, 115). This potential for a shift in ways of thinking carries with it associated
changes in what we value. These in turn can influence how we live our relationships to
one another and to the environment. I call this area of changed concepts and life-patterns

1

My conception of the imaginary is influenced by Drucilla Cornells work on the imaginary domain

(1995).

the space of the ethical. I will illustrate that the Anthropocene can be understood as
signaling and catalyzing an interrelated ontological-ethical transformation in ways of
living.

The Ontology of the Anthropocene: Changing the Subject

The Anthropocene calls for a new ontological appreciation of the interrelations of
humans, environments, and societies. Like Deweys organism/environment/culture
interactions (1981), the Anthropocene leads us to an appreciation of the inherent
relationality among people and between people and places. In sum, embracing the
imaginary of the Anthropocene requires a shift in worldviews, a shift away from more
traditional conceptions to a relational ontology.2
I deploy the term ontology to refer to the way different beings happen. The
position that I will advance in this paper is that the imaginary of the Anthropocene can
serve as a catalyst to disrupt the inherited substance ontology of Western thought as
inadequate to epistemically and ethically responsible ways of knowing and living. It
encourages an event or processional ontology as we come to understand how beings and
differences happen. Our current imaginary is oriented by divisions between types of
substances and an absence of interconnectivity. The Anthropocene has the potential to
change this imaginary and when the imaginary shifts, it shifts not only how we conceive
but also how we are affected. In other words, being subjected to the Anthropocene

I advanced this conception of a relational ontology in my essay Viscous Porosity: Witnessing Katrina

(2008).

provokes a transformation in our ontological commitments. We become affected by

climate change.
Being subjects of the Anthropocene encourages an appreciation of the inherent
interconnectivity among things, including the complexity of interactions between humans
and environments. It removes the sharp boundaries (humans/environment,
natural/cultural) and encourages attention to the porosity of inter-relationality, the rich
interactions through which subjects and environments are co-constituted. The
phenomenon of climate change illustrates this inter-relationality through the complex and
interlocked material and social phenomena that generates it and which it, in turn, alters.
Sifting out which elements of our current climate or of an extreme weather event are
natural and which are caused by humans is to fall back into an ontology without
interconnectivity. The ontology that arises from the imaginary of the Anthropocene
renders the old ontology unintelligible. The climate is not something that naturally
exists, untouched by human activities. Organisms affect the climate (as well as other
elements of their environments). Embracing the Anthropocene serves as a reminder of
that fact that organisms and environments are co-constituted. Humans cannot but alter
and be altered by the world they are of and in. Appreciation of this inevitable exchange
can have a capillary action on other domains, including the ethical and the epistemic.
This new ontological appreciation of the depth and salience of interconnectivity
requires a radical transformation of traditional Western ontological divisions including
those between humans and the environment, the social and the biological. It requires as
well a shift from a substance object ontology to a process ontology. As William James
explained, what exists is not things made, but things in the making (1958, 263). The

promise of the imaginary of the Anthropocene is its potential to usher in an appreciation

of a relational ontology that precludes the either/or of the social/natural.
Encountering the Anthropocene is a call to learn how to think and act anew, to
break out of habits of thought and of action sedimented by a substance ontology. Here I
recommend two hybrid concepts that can assist with this shift in understanding. These
are concepts that help us appreciate the co-constitution of the biological and the cultural.
One is Eric Swyngedouws term socionature; the second is my conception of viscous
porosity. As Swyngedouw explains,
natural or ecological conditions and processes do not operate separately from
social processes, and that the actually existing socionatural conditions are always
the result of intricate transformations of preexisting configurations that are
themselves inherently natural and social. (1999: 445)
A full appreciation of Swyngedouws merging of the social and the natural requires the
refusal of a substance ontology and of the affective dispositions, habits of thought, and
ways of living that are its legacy. The ontological challenge is to understand and
responsibly live socionaturally and thus inter-relationally.
To move to a sense of things in the making, I wed Swyngedouws socionatural
with my conception of viscous porosity with its attention to the open exchange between
phenomena and its emphasis on the inherent interconnections and emergent coconstitution of what is. Porosity calls attention to the epigenetic interactions between
people and placessea level rise and greenhouse gases, changing temperatures and wellbeing, dams and shifts in wetlandssignaling that while we might find reason to make
pragmatic distinctions between what is natural and what is social, it behooves us to

remember the porosity among these phenomena. Porosity serves to disrupt the
sedimented habit of making an ontological divide between the natural and the cultural. It
disrupts thinking that the distinctions signify a natural or unchanging boundary. It serves
to unsettle additive accounts that see phenomena as combinations of natural and social
factors, but in which the interactions are mechanistic rather than constitutive, additive
rather than transformative.
The viscous porosity of the socionatural invokes the complex interconnections
among things and exchanges of material agency that include but are not limited to human
agency.3 Viscosity retains an emphasis on the agential form of the socionatural, a
reminder that the interactions are not simply fluid in the sense of open possibilities, but
constrained and made possible by forms of material agency. Only certain things are in
the making. Only some choices are possible. A choice leads to some outcomes and not
others.
Consider the use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides to increase crop yields.
The exchanges here have been complex and far reaching. I can gesture only at a few.
Without these transformations world population and the well-being of many people
would be far lower.
With average crop yields remaining at the 1900 level the crop harvest in the year
2000 would have required nearly four times more land and the cultivated area
would have claimed nearly half of all ice-free continents, rather than under 15%
of the total land area that is required today (Smil 2012).

For a more in-depth illustration see my essay Viscous Porosity: Witnessing Katrina (2008).

Farming practices have shifted dramatically over the past century. Synthetic nitrogenous
fertilizers provide more than half of the nutrient received by the worlds crops. This has
created an exchange which has allowed the worlds population to grow from under two
billion at the turn of the nineteenth century to over seven billion today. Nitrogen
fertilizers account for nearly 45% of the food production. Without them, roughly three
billion people would face food insecurity (Smil 2012). This example is complicated, of
course, both by how much and what people eat. The population of some countries
consume far more per capita than others, and eating higher up on the food chain is less
efficient in terms of crops. But given that more than three billion people already have
inadequate diets, a shift either in food production or consumption would be needed to
address their well-being.
The viscous porosity of artificial nitrogen is manifest not only in the ways it
enhances crop productivity, but also how it leaches into ground water, rivers, lakes, and
coastal areas where its interactions result in phytoplankton and algal blooms and
expanding dead zones in some regions, or an overgrowth of species such as gelatinous
zooplankton (jellyfish) in others (Canfield, et al 2010). It also mixes with the atmosphere
constituting the third most important greenhouse gas, nitrous oxide.
Since the turn of the nineteenth century, nitrous oxide concentrations have risen twenty
percent.4 Some of that percentage is due to the production of artificial fertilizers, which
in turn, account for crop productivity. Nitrogen is the key nutrient in plant growth taken
up and transformed into the flesh of the plant. Nitrate taken up by the roots is either

4 Agriculture is not the sole cause of this increase. Nitrous oxide is also a byproduct of cars and trucks as
well as various industrial processes.

reduced or stored in the vacuoles or is translocated to the shoot for subsequent reduction
and vacuolar storage; it is also used for osmoregulation (Tischner and Kaiser 2007,
283).
The porosity of bodiesplant bodies and our bodiesallows the openness to the
biological interactions of nitrogen essential to life. But the viscous porosity of nitrogen
also leaches into the atmosphere and the water, as well as into bodies. Not all nitrogen
fertilizer is taken up by crops. The nitrogen applied as synthetic fertilizer or excreted in
manure and urine is biologically reactive. It is transformed by microbes and mixes in
with air, water, and soil causing negative impacts for ecosystems and the humans that are
part of them. Consuming water with high levels of nitrates may lead to significant health
issues, including methemoglobinemia (also called blue-baby syndrome), certain types of
cancer, and other chronic health issues caused by repeated ingestion of water with high
levels of nitrates (Galloway et al 2008). They enter into the flesh of food and sediment
into the water we drink. Studies of fertilizer and pesticide exposure have documented
significantly increased rates of certain types of cancer as well as higher levels of
neurological diseases.5
It is the porosity of bodies that allows for these exchanges. Understanding that
we are affected by this porosity is key to accepting our inexorable interconnection with
the world we are of and inthe promise of the imaginary of the Anthropocene. We
cannot but be open, for it is through this porosity that we thrive. But porosity is also the
site of harm. Understanding this affect is essential.

5

A poignant illustration of this point can be found in Sandra Steingrabers Having Faith: An Ecologists

Journey to Motherhood.

There is a viscous porosity of fleshmy flesh and the flesh of the world. This
porosity is a hinge through which we are of and in the world. I refer to it as
viscous, for there are membranes that affect the interactions. These membranes
are of various typesskin and flesh, prejudgments and symbolic imaginaries,
habits and embodiments. They serve as mediators of interaction (Tuana 2008,
199-200).
The imaginary of the Anthropocene is positioned to affect an ontological shift.
Carrying with it a relational ontology infused by the ontological inseparability of the
socionatural, it has the potential to provoke new affective dispositions and habits of
conceptualization. And here lies the promise of new ways of living. I welcome the
Anthropocene in the sense of acknowledging its potential for undermining a series of
irresponsible dichotomies, not just the socio/natural, but also false divides and
problematic distinctions that haunt contemporary ethical theory.

The Ethic of the Anthropocene: Corporeal Vulnerability

Viscous porosity, the exchanges between things in the making, signals the need
for a new ethos for the Anthropocene. I use the term ethos to inform my account of the
ethic of the Anthropocene in order to return to the historical meaning of the term ethic,
namely, the ways we live together. Here my concern is with the ways we live together
socionaturally. The ethos of the Anthropocene is not the disciplined study of values and
principles. It rather calls for an appreciation of and ability to respond to the deep
interconnectivity between near and distant others, between the now and the future,
between the local and the global, and between humans and the world they are of and in.

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A relational ontology effects an affective shift to embracing the corporeal vulnerability

of things in the making and the concomitant accountability that comes with this shift.
I build on the conception of corporeal vulnerability advanced by Judith Butler
(2005, 2009). Butler reframes typical conceptions of vulnerability, shifting its
signification from weakness or susceptibility, to an openness to the other, an ability to
affect and be affected. She illustrates that it is corporal vulnerability through which each
things uniqueness emerges. Corporeal vulnerability is a conceptual shift from the notion
of vulnerability as harm to an appreciation of the reciprocal vulnerability of things in the
making. Each entity, each event, occurs as it does because of complex interactions
among entities and between entities and events, both near and far, past and present. Each
thing is the way it is because of its corporeal vulnerability, its ability to be affected. This
conception does not see vulnerability as a feature only of certain peoples or things
(vulnerable populations or vulnerable ecosystems). Rather it sees the ontological nature
of things in the making. Corporeal vulnerability is the precondition of interrelationality
that signals the openness essential to becoming, along with the mutual dependence and
interdependence of peoples and things.
Butlers account, however, falls short in replicating a long standing habit of
looking only at the exchanges between humans and forgetting that our corporeal
vulnerability is not only to other humans, but to the world around us, including
nonhuman others. It is certainly true that selves are formed through exchanges with
other humans and the institutions that have been sedimentedfrom prisons to
economic exchanges, unfree labor practices to disciplining of sexualities. But it is
equally true that selves are formed through the vicious porosity among bodies

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between human flesh and the fertilizers used to grow the food needed to survive,
exchanges between the microorganisms like the microbial symbionts in the human
gut that are the foundation of life.
[The] organism is a processa life cyclerather than a thing; it may be a
community of distinct kinds of organisms rather than a monogenomic
individual; and it must be understood as conceptually and of course causally
linked to its particular environment, or niche, which both contributes to the
construction of the organism in development, and is constructed by the
organism through its behavior (Dupr 2007, 54).
Corporeal exchanges are not inherently good or bad. They are the well-spring of
what is. It is only through my openness with the world around me that I can be
nourishedincorporating into my flesh that which I need to survive. But this same
openness that is essential to life makes me, like all things, susceptible to harm. It is only
through my bodily and psychic openness and vulnerability that I can love and be loved by
others. This very openness can also be the vehicle through which violence and trauma
can be inflicted upon me. Accepting the fact of corporeal vulnerability occasions an
awareness of the material conditions of interactions, the ways in which the exchanges of
social institutions, geophysical processes, human choices, and ecosystem evolution are
co-emergent. The corporeal vulnerability of all thingshuman and nonhumanserves
as the ontological ground of a new ethos, one that circulates in the imaginary of the
Anthropocene.

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An Anthropocenean attention to corporeal vulnerability undertakes a transformation

of the ethical by transforming the ability to be affected, to respond. As Judith Butler
explains, in the case of the political domain:
Mindfulness of this vulnerability can become the basis of claims for nonmilitaristic political solutions, just as denial of this vulnerability through a
fantasy of masterycan fuel instruments of war. We cannot, however, will
away this vulnerability. We must attend to it, even abide by it, as we begin to
think about what politics might be implied by staying with the thought of
corporal vulnerability itself (2004: 29).
Attending to corporeal vulnerability occasions a call to the ethical, a striving for
relations among people and between people and places such that there is a fair balance
between who and what is harmed and who and what benefits from their relational
vulnerability. It elicits an ethical practice of attention and of affect: The vulnerable
human body isthe provocation for an ethics insofar as it elicits a response (Murphy
2011, 577). The aim then is not to eliminate vulnerability, but to understand which
exchanges, which interactions, are ethically desirable.6 According to Butler, this means
that the recognition of shared precariousness introduces strong normative commitments
of equality and invites a more robust universalizing of rights (2009, 29). While essential
that her account be extended to include non-human vulnerability, it foregrounds the
inherently ethical fabric of a relational ontology.

6 Petra Tschakert and I (2013) argued against the dichotomy between vulnerability and resilience, positing
instead the notion of situated resilience that acknowledges that corporeal vulnerability is an ontological
state rather than a site of weakness.

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Embracing corporeal vulnerability, the imaginary swirling in the material

exchanges of the Anthropocene, affords the impulse for living ethically. I see in it a
way to undermine what Jean Drze and Amartya Sen call complacent
irresponsibility.
The fact that so many people go on perishing from persistent deprivation
on a regular basis, is a calamity to which the world has, somewhat
incredibly, got coolly accustomed. It does not seem to engender the kind of
shock and disquiet that might be reasonable to expect given the enormity of
the tragedy. Indeed, the subject often generates either cynicism (not a lot
can be done about it) or complacent irresponsibility (dont blame me it is
not a problem for which I am answerable) (Drze and Sen 1989).
We are what we are through our interactions, through our exposures to others.
Attention to this exchange encourages a mindfulness toward and practice of
response-abilitythe ability to be affected by and to respond to the interrelations
that constitute us, all of us. Such attentiveness can serve to promote a dedication to
interrelations that promote flourishing and an awareness of and ability to respond to
the harms that emerge from certain ways of living. In the recognition of our mutual
porosity, of our constitution through exposures to others and to the world we are of
and in, we come to appreciate our dependency on others, including past and distant
others, and the intricate and irrevocable interconnections among beings and
socionatural environments. We come to understand the dependency of future others
on the lives we live today. Viscous porosity is a continual reminder that we, each

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thing, each event, is what it is and is becoming through exposures to others and to
the world.
The imaginary of the Anthropocene, with its reminder of the intricate
interconnections between humans and geophysical processes carries with it an
ethos infused by viscous porosity, an ethos that can elicit affective dispositions
empathy, concern, the ability to respond to suffering. These affective dispositions
will range across the field of the socionatural and serve to disrupt the moral blind
spot of humancentricness. This heightened attention to viscous porosity emboldens
us to accept the fact that the choices societies make today will have profound
impacts on what life will be like in the future, what species will continue to exist
and where. It evokes attention to exchanges and lived appreciation to the fact that
which regions support flourishing and which will be rendered barren is intimately
tied to complex exchangesof capital, of power, of materiality.
Woven into the ethos of the Anthropocene is attention to deep uncertaintythe
interactive geophysical/socioeconomic exchanges do not permit a predict then act
approach (Lempert et al 2004). Corporeal vulnerability promotes a similar
appreciation of deep uncertainty. It does not permit an apply normative rule then
act approach. It serves not as a prescription for actionfollow this rule nowbut
a wellspring for ethical habits and a passion for the good. We learn to become
intimate with the world through mutual indwelling. Through this ethos we feel our
way back to mutual belonging and ontological intimacy with the world we are in
and of. These affective dispositions arise in the space created by the unceasing
reminder of the inevitable play of the world and the openness of bodies to that play,

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recalling to us the myriad ways we stand in relation not only to others but to the
world. It carries an admonition to attend to our participation in that exchange, to
understand that choices made now carry forward in terms of harm and benefit, that
past interactions still circulate in the flesh of our bodies and the contours of our
psyche. Synthetic fertilizer applications coincide with institutionalized patterns of
oppression. Migrant workers in the US in the twentieth century, for example, were
those who were most likely to ingest their toxins, but the bodily exchanges from
chemical to plant, from plant to animal, are also co-constitutive of bodies living far
beyond the croplands. The viscous porosity of bodies permits the exchange of
chemicals that kills certain insects, causing food scarcity for some birds and small
animals, in turn impacting flora and fauna near and far. The institutionalized
patterns of oppression, in turn, carry an exposure to ways of living that impact us
all.
Understanding this exchange provides an occasion for transforming complacent
irresponsibility (it is not a problem for which I am responsible) to affective
engagementan ability to respond, response-ability. It serves to disrupt moral
blind spots by summoning an appreciation of the exchanges between seemingly
disparate processescolonialism and environmental degradation, poverty and
climate change, cancer and global business practices, species extinction and income
inequities. The Anthropocenean imaginary reminds us that human well-being is coconstituted in a tangle of socionatural processes. The ethical provocation of the
Anthropocene is to learn to live in ways that acknowledge this openness and
interrelationality, and to enhance well-being while appreciating that it, well-being,

16

is an always emerging state of being, informed by historical contexts, biological

interconnections, social institutions, ecological dynamics, interests, and aims.
Recognition of the openness of peoples and places to both benefits and harms, to
what Des Gasper (2010: 25) calls shared fragility, can motivate ethical place
making and attention to relationships of care and flourishing connection across
space and time.

Epistemic Habits of the Anthropocene

The onto-ethical shifts of the Anthropocene carry an epistemic challenge as well,
one that encourages a modified approach to responsible knowing. Embracing
socionatural exchanges has an epistemic component as you can see from the deep
uncertainty I mentioned previously. The ethical and the epistemic are coupled.
Alfred North Whitehead argued against any knowledge practice based on an
ontological divide between nature and culture:
[One] way of phrasing this theory which I am arguing against is to bifurcate
nature into two divisions, namely into the nature apprehended in awareness and
the nature which is the cause of awareness. The nature which is in fact
apprehended in awareness holds within it the greenness of the trees, the song of
the birds, the warmth of the sun, the hardness of the chairs, and the feel of the
velvet. The nature which is the cause of awareness is the conjectured system of
molecules and electrons which so affects the mind as to produce the awareness of
apparent nature (1909: 16).

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According to Whitehead, this ontology has resulted in an academic divide between

scientific research, on the one hand, and social scientific and humanities research on the
other. Through this divide science is seen as focused on the material world of nature,
while leaving to the humanities and social sciences the domain of the beliefs and
experiences of the worlds subjects, typically assumed to be limited to humans. The
dichotomy is a sharp one: the natural world posited as existing apart from the experiences
of thinking subjects, devoid of both agency and affectivity. On such an account, science
becomes a domain of objective knowledge, placing it apart from the subjective realm of
human meanings and experiences which, in turn, becomes the domain of the social
sciences and humanities.
The relational ontology embedded in the imaginary of the Anthropocene
precludes not only a sharp divide between the cultural and the natural world but also
between the human and the natural sciences, requiring a rehabituation of ways of
knowing, acting, and dealing with the world. Embracing the imaginary of the
Anthropocene encourages new socionatural affects that in turn infuse know-how and
inform practices. We, collectively, come to see relationality in its emergent complexity,
which has a capillary action through which we see, to take one example, the complexity
of economic, institutional, and natural exchanges that circulate in the phenomenon of sea
level rise. This, in turn, leads to structures of behavior that couple knowing and wellbeing, and recognize the dynamic and ongoing relationality between our efforts to
respond to climate change, the world we come to inhabit, and the socialites allowed by
such exchanges. Through an Anthropocenian rehabituation we learn to be attentive to the

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reciprocal agency and viscous porosity among people and places, social institutions and
geophysical processes.
the phenomenon of habit is just what prompts us to revise our notion of
understand and our notion of the body. To understand is to experience harmony
between what we aim at and what is given, between intention and the
performance and the body is our anchorage in the world (Merleau-Ponty1962:
144).
The promise of the imaginary of the Anthropocene is in catalyzing new ways of
being in the world, of constituting meaning, of re-visioning social habits of knowing and
doing.
Concrete habits do all the perceiving, recognizing, imagining, recalling, judging,
conceiving and reasoning that is done. .. . We may indeed be said to know how by
means of our habits (Dewey, 1988: 124).
As habits, ways of knowing and being in the world are sediments of socionatural
interactions. For Dewey these are shaped and reshaped in the to and fro of interaction,
and the appreciation of the intricate mixture of the stable and the precarious:
it is the intricate mixture of the stable and the precarious, the fixed and the
unpredictably novel, the assured and the uncertain, in existence which sets
mankind upon that love of wisdom which forms philosophy (1981, 55).
By embracing the imaginary of the Anthropocene, we will be challenged to rework these
habits and will be in turn transformed through the emergent interactions with a changing
world. Becoming affectively disposed to the interconnections between things, places,
and time periods gives rise to collective ethical habits that encourage responsible

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reproduction of sociality. A human society is always starting afresh. It is always in

process of renewing, and it endures only because of renewal (Dewey 1988: 69).
Through our attachments and our losses, our desires and our needs, the imaginary of the
Anthropocene can affect a new project of being and knowing, of acting and attending. It
disrupts desires for fixity and certainty, serving as a reminder of our world of constant
change. It encourages encounters without sharp boundaries, by acknowledging that
openness to forms of engagement is the stuff of life.
Habit marks our modes of engagement with and transformation by the real; and
this is quite precisely a measure of the extent to which the real is itself
transformed by living beings. We are not the only creatures of habit; all living
things, from plants through the worlds of animals to the vast array of human
forms of sociality and politics and perhaps even matter itself form habits as
their vastly different modes of self-organization, which enable them to
accommodate real forces and effects through the minimization of the energy and
conscious awareness that concerted action involves (Grosz 2013, 218).
The imaginary of the Anthropocene encourages a shift in epistemic habits and
dispositions to action. It closes the gapboth epistemic and ethicalbetween near and
distant others, both spatially and temporally. It encourages us to reorient our ways of
knowing. This reorientation encourages us to couple ethical and epistemic issues and to
recognize the inextricability of the socionatural so that we stop dividing knowledge
practices into the natural science, the social sciences, and the humanities. Such a
reorientation serves as a constant reminder that economic exchanges percolate into the
materiality of the world, affecting socionatural exchanges. It sensitizes us to openness

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and uncertainty, to modesty in the face of the depths of complexities, attended by a

renewed commitment to acting responsibly. The epistemic habits of the imaginary of the
Anthropocene cultivate an openness and receptivity to the world that serves as a constant
reminder of the desire to know well to live well. It challenges us to reexamine social
values, knowledge practices, institutions, and ontologies that pose a barrier to needed
epigenetic transformation. It provokes learning to think with the weight of the world;
learning to be affected.

Conclusion
The Anthropocene is a figure of the urgency of change. It reminds us that we
must be open to being transformed in the midst of socionatural exchanges. We must
allow that we will not find a simple algorithma rule to follow to ensure well-being.
We must rather learn to be affected (Latour 2004) by the full complexity of exchanges
between human habits and geophysical interactions. We must learn to be affected by
uncertainty and develop ways of knowing and living attuned to it. We must learn to be
moved by, animated by, attuned to the threads of inextricable interconnections between
consumption practices and ice sheets, between agricultural practices and species
flourishing, between ocean currents and energy choices, between the way we live with
the earth and the earths becoming.
Val Plumwood called for new ways to live with the earth:
If our species does not survive the ecological crisis, it will probably be due to our
failure ... to work out new ways to live with the earth, to rework ourselves ...We
will go onwards in a different mode of humanity, or not at all (2007:1).

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The imaginary of the Anthropocene provides this world of possibility. Its onto-ethical
practices can enable new practices of being co-constituted. While there is no guarantee
of success, being attuned to corporeal vulnerability is grounds for hope in a deeply
uncertain world. It is a ground for being affected, a well-spring for caring for the world
we are in and of.

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*This essay was richly influenced by numerous exchanges with Charles Scott.
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