Navigating the Anthropocene: environmental politics and complexity in an era of limits

The Anthropocene marks a new era of environmental politics defined by limits. The chapter identifies the overarching question facing global society as to whether there is any room for manoeuvre between the maximum scale of economy compatible with long-term ecological integrity of the biosphere, and the minimum scale required to sustain a liberal, cosmopolitan, science-based, global society. Insights from complexity science are used to question the credibility of a ‘steady state’ economy. Exploring the thermodynamic problem of economic growth as a defining foil, environmental discourses are defined variously by denial, obfuscation or acceptance of limits. Hegemonic normative and political commitments to typically modern forms of economy and society obscure the energetic and material basis of social complexity, and the biophysical limits to modernization. Such limits may be mitigated by developments in open-source, micro-production systems. Lower-overhead manufacture has the potential to reduce the ‘transformity’ (low entropy cost) of societal complexity. The potential of this ‘reMaker society’ will not be realized without a paradigm shift in values and ontological meaning systems. Environmental politics has failed to gain traction on behaviour and politics because of underlying commitments to individualism and rationalism. A non-linear environmental politics involving cascading, cross-scale cultural transformation is unthinkable in the absence of non-rational drivers of behaviour and motivation. Ritual, Earth-based spirituality and the psychoanalytical notion of radical green hero/immortality projects, offer starting points for a genuinely disruptive environmental politics.