Hosted by: Ethics Unit
Abstract for Online Program Book (maximum 150 words)
In this round-table six scholars, who (broadly speaking, come from the field of religion and nature/ecology) will critically examine the concept of the Anthropocene. This concept has shaped the way we think about the planetary future in some helpful but also very problematic ways. We will look at critiques of the anthropocene from post-humanist and planetary perspectives, and from ideas emerging out of microbiology and microanimality. In addition we will discuss links between the idea of the Anthropocene and religious nationalism, "sophiology," and the construction of the idea of "religion" itself. Is the anthropocene something which we need to reject or keep? Or does it really matter for ethics in the end?
Audiovisual Requirements
LCD Projector and Screen
Critical Planetary Romanticism and the Problems of the Anthropocene
Many have pointed out the problems of the Anthropocene in terms of lumping all humans into one as “equally responsible” for things like climate change, and the way that it perpetuates the idea of human superiority and separateness from the rest of the natural world. I would argue too, that people such as Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos (Rubenstein 2022)—interested in saving (some of) humanity by exerting more technological control over the planet, and eventually getting off the planet (to Mars or a space station, respectively)— though they may understand the larger problems that place we humans in both a planetary and universal context are merely interested in projecting a certain type of understanding of the human (which looks like them) into space and into the future. They represent the Anthropos coming into its universal stage. I would argue in a similar fashion to Bruno Latour (among others) that if we lose the earth, we lose our soul. We are through and through entangled in this evolving planetary community. From a critical planetary perspective, (CPR) technology, knowledge, and value systems that help us live into the realization that we are enmeshed with and part of the entangled, evolving planetary system helps us to imagine and co-construct “better” worlds, than those that take humans out of the planetary context.