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Against the Anthropocene: visual culture and environment today, by T.J.

Demos

Article  in  Environmental Politics · November 2019

DOI: 10.1080/09644016.2019.1657646

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 Environmental Politics

ISSN: 0964-4016 (Print) 1743-8934 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fenp20

Against the Anthropocene: visual culture and

environment today, by T.J. Demos

jan jagodzinski

To cite this article: jan jagodzinski (2019) Against the Anthropocene: visual culture
and environment today, by T.J. Demos, Environmental Politics, 28:7, 1309-1311, DOI:
10.1080/09644016.2019.1657646

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 ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS 1309

development narratives is not the only option; creative reconfigurations of

Anthropocene narratives may offer other promising ways forward.
Despite the complexity of the book’s subject matter, the chapters are generally
written in a clear style that will be accessible to graduate students of political
science, environmental studies and related disciplines, as well as being of interest
to more advanced researchers. For readers relatively new to the Anthropocene
literature, the editors’ introduction and Noel Castree’s chapter provide clear and
insightful overviews of how debates over this proposed epoch have unfolded in
Earth system science, geology and political theory.
While a sense of the gravity and urgency of the ecological crisis ebbs and flows
throughout the book, its high-water mark can be found in Paul Wapner’s chapter
on the ethics of research in the Anthropocene. In vivid prose, Wapner makes
a compelling case that moral sensitivity to the injustices of the Anthropocene
should be at the heart of political research, albeit not at the expense of empirical
rigour. This call is complemented by Meadowcroft’s concluding reflections on
future directions for political theory. Green political thought, he argues, has much
to offer in informing societal debates about big-picture questions such as how
humanity should relate to the planet. Nevertheless, he contends, it is vital that
‘green thinking also engages more explicitly with problems that connect directly
with the life-experiences of communities and political actors’ . . . ‘To bridge this gap
green thinking needs to be more directly connected to sites of practical struggle,
projects for reform, transition experiments, and so on’ (p. 239). Thus the collection
points towards a challenging but promising future for theorising that can rethink
and help reshape politics in the Anthropocene.

Jonathan Pickering
Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance,
University of Canberra, Australia
jonathan.pickering@canberra.edu.au
© 2019 Jonathan Pickering
https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2019.1657647

Against the Anthropocene: visual culture and environment today,

by T.J. Demos, Berlin, Germany, Sternberg Press, 2017, 112 pp., index;
€18, ISBN 978-3-95679-210-6

The anthropogenic transformation of the earth by our species, unofficially desig-

nated the Anthropocene and ubiquitously referred to as ‘climate change’, has
become perhaps ‘the’ defining problematic of the 21st century. T.J. Demos asks
how this epoch is politically represented through various visual media, in the way
visual culture both abets and contradicts this evolving ecological crisis. Demos asks
how artistic-activist practices both confirm and rhetorically present alternatives to
the dominant view. Grounded in environmental arts and humanities, Demos
1310 BOOK REVIEWS

provides compelling reasons why the Anthropocene’s legitimation as an ideological

term must be strongly opposed, and to search for alternatives.
To develop such a political stance, Demos begins by presenting what the domi-
nant hegemonic grand narrative of terraforming the earth via technological means:
the so-called techno-fix of geoengineering that has now set its sights on space – the
terraforming of the moon and Mars once life on Earth is no longer sustainable under
the current socio-political forms of global capitalism, as supported by various forms
of democracies, communisms, dictatorships, oligarchies, and kingdoms. The grand
design is to control nature; nature in effect ‘disappears’. Demos points out the
inherent contradictions of this project, showing the split between ‘ecomodernists’
who promote green technologies, biogenetic engineering, transhumanism, de-
extinction and the like. Environmentalism (preservation of wildlife) for them is
a foregone conclusion. The ‘good’ Anthropocene provides the next phase of capi-
talist expansion, a revolution in technology that is already well on its way through
nanotechnolgies, biosensing, bioengineering and genomic manipulation. For
Demos, visual images of terraforming and geoengineering from the vantage point
of space provides such a god’s-gaze view of control.
Against such an ecomodernism are attempts to at least offer new visions.
The alternative cultural forms Demos develops belong to the transnational
alliances of environmentalists, NGO representatives and Indigenous activists
who stage alternative media distributions, political theatre, alternative signage,
blockades, civil disobedience and call on Indigenous ritual to stage difference
and dissent, a ‘biopolitical assemblage’ (Deleuze). Against a petrocapitalist
economy or the Anthropocene, Demos provides resistance to Alberta’s ‘Tar
Sands’ and the building of the Keystone XL oil pipeline to transport this dirty
crude oil (diluted bitumen) to Houston refineries. This pipeline will cover vast
tracts of farmland and waterways. Built over Indigenous lands, it will inevitably
be subject to pipeline leaks that will affect minority and low-income commu-
nities. The necessity to ‘indigenize’ the Anthropocene becomes obvious.
Demos, following Jason Moore, supports the term Capitalocene, which he
believes to be more accurate in denoting what is happening to the vulnerable,
Indigenous peoples, women, migrants and peoples of color. Demos brings out
the paradox of what might be called the sublime beauty of powerful technologies
in their destructive power; the paradigm example being the atom bomb. He
accuses several photographers of industrial eco-devastation, namely, Edward
Burtynsky and Louis Helbig, whose photographs of oil fields and Alberta Tar
sands provide viewers with a paradoxical ambiguity of death and annihilation in
relation to their aestheticized beauty of industrial terraformations, witnessing the
capacity to ‘move’ the Earth. In contrast, Demos offers the example of Richard
Misrach’s Petrochemical America, a photo exhibition (and book project with
landscape architect Kate Orff) of the150-mile Mississippi River corridor between
Baton Rouge and New Orleans. Misrach’s images document the devastation to
the political economy of this area. His images are ‘up close and personal’
documentations of this ‘Cancer Alley,’ the environmental and human costs of
Southern oil development, what Demos terms ‘petrocapitalism’s necropolitics of
ecocide’ (p. 71, after Achille Mbembe).
 ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS 1311

Thus, the book brings into the spotlight the role of resistance activism in
visual art, performance and Indigenous-led activism. Demos calls on Haraway’s
Chthulucene, and various artists who push back petrocapitalism (Ursula
Biemann, Terike Haapoja) and many forms of North and South American
Indigenous activism (Amazon Watch). Finally, Demos enthusiastically embraces
Climate Games, a climate-justice action-adventure game and its team, which has
been successful in organizing global climate governance, creating international
coalitions, working with global blockadia movements.
Demos’ short (110-page) book provides the reader with an overview of
some of the major tensions that a contested view of the Anthropocene
presents. He stays focused on visual culture to keep open a certain clarity
and accessibility. His extensive footnotes provide the reader ample citations to
further explore more nuances and explanations. If there are any clarifying
points to be made regarding Demos’s overall thesis, it is to query his
dominant use of Jason Moore’s Capitalocene at the expense of the
Anthropocene itself. It is not a question of either-or, as Moore’s book title
suggests: Anthropocene or Capitalocene? nor is it a complete conflation of the
two. The entanglement of the Anthropocene with the Capitalocene should be
thought on two levels. The first is to recognize that we have indeed entered
into a new geological epoch; the science here is indisputable. As such, the
Anthropocene far outdates capitalism. It studies fundamental shifts in the
Earth System, far beyond the Holocene and the human impact on this system
by various measurable indicators, such as CO2 levels, artificial nitrogen,
species extinctions, ocean acidification, sea level, holes in the ozone layer
and population growth, each of which has a critical limit in relation to the
sustainability of our species on this planet. The second level is to recognize,
and concur with Moore (2016), that ‘t]he Capitalocene signifies capitalism as
a way of organizing nature – as a multispecies, situated, capitalist world-
ecology’ (p. 6). How the economy of capitalism hinders or intensifies the state
of the Earth system is an overriding question in relation to the triggers that
are generated that affect and effect the socio-political order. The
Anthropocene remains an intensely problematic term.

Reference
Moore, J., ed., 2016. Anthropocene or capitalocene ?: Nature, history, and the crisis of
capitalism. Oakland, CA: PM Press.

jan jagodzinski
University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
jan.jagodzinski@ualberta.ca
© 2019 Jan Jagodzinski
https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2019.1657646

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