If there is a trading standards authority for concepts and what they promise, then the Anthropocene should be reported to them. The Anthropocene was so named to highlight that human action has impacted the planet to the extent that we are now so entangled with the natural environment that humanity is part of the problem as much as the solution. The Anthropocene was touted as being the closure of modernist illusions of progress, the end of a liberal telos of history, the problematisation of Anthropos (the human) as the centre of the world – a world that was no longer available to be instrumentalised as a resource or reserve. The world was no longer seen as being there ‘for us’, to provide the backdrop to human dreams of infinite growth and progress. Bruno Latour, amongst others, argued that the Anthropocene could achieve what critical theory could not, in providing a conceptual alternative to modernity.

The Anthropocene was to put the final nail in the coffin of disciplines such as International Relations, with their statist and anthropocentric biases. What happened? It seems that the more attentive governments and international authorities have been to the disastrousness of industrial modernity, the more enabled they are. Bringing the world back into governmental calculation works in ways that are counterintuitively opening rather than closing.

Take a typical Anthropocene story, a recent piece in The Guardian. The headline reads: ‘Bycatch has “shocking” toll on British marine life, first-ever analysis reveals’. A UK report revealed for the first time that sea floor dredging results in catastrophic levels of destruction to a wide range of sea-life and ocean ecologies – seabirds, including puffins, gannets and razorbills, porpoises, dolphins, seals, humpback whales, minke whales, salmon, sharks etc etc – are caught up in the shocking destruction of the industrialised fishing industry. This is very much in line with the Anthropocene sensitivities to the unintended consequences of ‘progress’, of entangled outcomes which are nonlinear products of complex........

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