Fingerprint, bellwether, model event: Climate change as speculative anthropology

Abstract

The climate change fingerprint, bellwether and model event are three epistemic figures through which it may be possible to know the future through attention to specific material relations. They offer an emergent grammar to help make sense of the rapid transformations in planetary ecology over the past decade due to climate change. What was before experienced as modeled scenarios about future change is now increasingly confirmed. But the experience is characterized equally by uncertainties about the precise implications of these global changes. These terms demonstrate explicit reflection on uncertainty through material practices of thinking, what I identify as a kind of speculative materialism. What becomes apparent is that anthropology itself is at stake to the extent that anthropogenic climate change problematizes the ecological dimensions of Earth at home. I propose the term viability to explore thresholds of ecological value that are not uniquely tied to human observers and which call for imaginative and evaluative judgment about the subtle yet pervasive changes at work in planetary ecology.