Humility in the Anthropocene

Abstract

The last 50 years have witnessed a set of changes in the scale of humankind’s ecological imagination toward ‘thinking globally’. Developments in earth and planetary sciences have elaborated a creation story that dethroned humans from a position of claimed supremacy to a status on a par with other systemic forces that have shaped the planet. So marked is the human imprint that it has earned its own name in the annals of geology, environmental history, and geopolitics: the anthropocene. The scientific refutation of human exceptionalism has not elicited either instant humility or greater self-awareness in the uses of expert knowledge to combat global problems such as climate change. This paper looks at sites of struggle between a persistent human imperialism, expressed through the continued commodification of nature, and more humble ways of knowing and guiding humanity’s planetary future from standpoints in ethics, politics and law.