Reflections on the University in the Anthropocene

Casper Bruun Jensen

Prepared for workshop on ‘The University in the Anthropocene’
held at Aarhus University, December 18, 2019

The relationship between ‘the university’ and ‘the Anthropocene’ can of course be framed in
many different ways, which lead to many different kinds of questions. To set the scene in a
manner that deliberately intensifies the stakes, I begin with two frames which are not in
contradiction, but definitely in tension.
One: We now know that global climate change is occurring. Yet, there is much we don’t
know about what is going on and what the consequences will be. Here are new openings for
inquiry but they pose significant challenges to our institutions of higher education. There are also
new demands, since knowledge must be oriented to changing current trajectories, or we will
soon breach all planetary boundaries. If this sounds broadly familiar, it is because it is—of
course—a framing from the inside of the university; one we might associate with the worried but
also carefully skeptical mind of an academic.
Two: global climate disruptions are on, and they are accelerating. Everybody knows this:
witness the proliferation of more or less radical ideas and movements: divest, degrowth,
permaculture, circular economies, climate strikes, extinction rebellion. Witness even the
continuous emission of vacuous phrases from politicians and business leaders. For all that, far
too little consequential large-scale action is happening. Rather than decreasing, CO2 emissions
are increasing in tandem with empty promises. In all likelihood, the window of opportunity for
avoiding the massive catastrophe of a 2c rise this century has already closed, and we are not even
talking about what happens after that. It is not for nothing that Kim Stanley Robinson, the great
science fiction writer, refers to our period as the “dithering,” a time of lingering and delay, with
unfathomable consequences. As Isabelle Stengers observes, “my generation will be the most
hated in history.”
Tension, then: The first framing manages the pretense of being marginally upbeat. Even
if things are going downhill, there are still interesting intellectual opportunities; perhaps the worst
dangers might be averted. At least, let’s try to come up with some interesting concepts, ideas,
and discussions. If you’ll allow me to be a bit salty, I would say this attitude resonates with a
mixture of docility and healthy skepticism towards authority characteristic of Danish public life.
Probably we will be fine. It won’t be as bad as all that. Bad things tend to happen elsewhere.
Everyone nods, and we can return to important business, like keeping boars and immigrants out
of the country. In contrast, the second is deeply dystopic and, in all likelihood, far more realistic.
Why are academics not on the fences, protesting? Don’t you care about the livability of the
planet your kids will grow up on? Why aren’t students rebelling until serious action is taken—not
in 10 years, or in 2, but now. Why? Though it is not what gathers us today, it is truly a very good
question. This second framing does not negate the importance of rethinking the university in the
Anthropocene. But it contextualizes the stakes. And it peels off any sense of ironic complacency
with respect to the urgency of the topic.

Let us take as a given, then, that the Anthropocene calls for multi-layered action in all contexts,
including at universities. As is well known, a major part of the difficulty with coming up with
adequate responses is indeed that what must be responded to is simultaneously so encompassing
and so diffuse. This is an issue even if one moves inside the university, for one might start
practically anywhere. Evidently, material transformation is needed. Campuses need to be
greened. Where, one might ask, are the solar panels around here? Where are the carefully
developed and seriously enforced regulations on sustainable transportation or waste? Clearly,
also, if there is to be anything like an ethics for universities in the Anthropocene, it must involve
detaching from unsustainable, anti-environmental, or climate hostile money flows. Danish
agriculture anyone? Dirty industries? Investment in Amazonian fires, fracking, rare earths or
palm oil? So, where are the concrete initiatives to cut off resources from manifestly unsustainable
funders, partners, and other stakeholders? Who holds the university accountable when it
becomes, as it so often does, a more or less witting accomplice in greenwashing? These issues,
too, I simply flag and do not pursue further; because today’s topic is different.
As suggested by its name, the universe can be viewed as the institution tasked with
making knowledge and teaching about the whole world, the world in its many dimensions and
full diversity. If this is the case, how does the Anthropocene change the conditions of possibility
for adequately carrying out that task?
This question is apparently quite far from solar panel installations and divestment, but
not really. Because if you zoom out a bit, it is clear that no matter how fully sustainable your
research agendas are, or how post-colonially committed your research collaborations, they will
still be contaminated, if not undermined, as long as they are carried out within a general
institutional context of unsustainable business as usual. To be sure, nobody can do everything,
but everything has to be done.
Briefly, then, which also means bombastically, the Anthropocene calls for changes to existing
ecologies of knowledge. The university still has to deal with the whole world in its multiplicity,
but since the whole world is dramatically changing, we are faced with great difficulties imagining
precisely how. Since the Anthropocene means that domains that we used to consider separate—
nature and culture—are completely entangled, however, one thing at least is clear. The university
will need disciplinary alliances and constellations of scholarship, evidence, and theory capable of
grappling with environmental, social, technological, political and economic issues not
disjunctively, but in one sweep.
You will be excused if you think this sounds a lot like STS. But the point is not that all
Anthropocene problems evaporate if everybody reads Bruno Latour or Donna Haraway. You
might also recognize similarities to the recurring calls for inter- or transdisciplinarity over the last
three decades. Again, this is not completely wrong. But there are some crucial differences, which
can be initially clarified with an example provided by the anthropologist Heather Swanson.
In a 2015 paper published in Nature, the plant ecologist Simon Lewis and the
climatologist Mark Maslin examined a range of suggestions for dating the advent of the
Anthropocene: the industrial revolution, the invention of agriculture, the atomic bomb, and the
invasion of South America. The interesting thing, Swanson notes, is that to conduct this
examination, these natural scientists had to engage seriously with knowledge, not only from
climatology, geology and physics but from social and environmental history. For example: the
early 16th century saw a noticeable decrease in global CO2 levels. Why is that? After careful
examination of the environmental historian Alfred Crosby’s work, an explanation emerged:
Because South American indigenous populations were decimated, and their vast agricultural
civilizations collapsed after Columbus’ arrival in 1492. As you may know, many critical social
scientists are busy rejecting the Anthropocene because it does not take the destructive effects of
capitalism into account. Meanwhile, natural scientists, some anyway, are busily reading up on
colonialism and world trade.
We have here a text-book STS illustration of the hybridity of knowledge. But it is
evidently not one premised on everyone becoming an STS scholar, since neither Lewis, Maslin
nor Crosby did, and indeed none of them have probably read Latour. Again, we have here a
sophisticated conjunction of knowledge, but one infinitely far from interdisciplinary in the
common sense of combining the least controversial bits of knowledge everyone can agree on. It
is sophisticated because it took the risk of taking knowledge from very distant fields so seriously
that it had real implications for the knowledge claims to which the authors were most
committed.
Let us pause for a moment. I said before that the Anthropocene calls for new ecologies of
practice, for sophisticated conjunctions of knowledge capable of thinking a new earth. I pointed
to the future; then offered an example from the recent past. So which is it? Have such
sophisticated conjunctions already emerged? Are they emerging? Or is this speculative gesturing?
The answer is that it is all of the above, to an extent. The answer is that it is still undecideable. It
has happened, it is happening, and it isn’t.
To start with the past, it has evidently happened. Hence, Lewis and Maslin. Or, consider the
extraordinary long-term massively trans-disciplinary history that generated what the historian of
science Paul Edwards calls Anthropocene knowledge infrastructures: the innumerable
observation stations, satellites and databases that enabled tens of thousands of scientists from
dozens of disciplines to model atmospheres and geophysical processes and eventually diagnose
with near certainty the situation we are in today.
Still following Edwards, these reconfigurations are still happening, as planetary climate
projections are gradually being down-scaled to the level of regions and cities, while bottom-up
experiments combine local environmental information with social data, or couple organizational
logistics with ecological footprints. These kinds of infrastructural developments are about
material science and engineering but also about ecological niches, habits of consumption and
waste, global politics, and much else.
In other areas, however, changes are not yet happening, and it is telling where. Edwards
focused on big Anthropocene infrastructures. Lewis and Maslin combined information gained
from these infrastructures with histories of the devastating consequences of invasion for
indigenous populations. And what about those indigenous populations? Where are they now?
They appear, virtually, in an exchange between Deborah Danowski, a philosopher,
Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, an anthropologist, and Bruno Latour. In his Gifford lectures
“Facing Gaia,” Latour remarked that one should probably not put too much faith in the vaunted
ecological wisdom of indigenous people, since their ways of life cannot be scaled up sufficiently
to matter to the climate challenges, which gigantic, technological metropolises will face in the
future. In reply, Danowski and de Castro observe that Latour seems to get the problem upside
down. Mayan populations, for example, have not only continued to survive but even to thrive,
even though their ways of life have been continuously and violently “scaled down,” ever since
Columbus. Perhaps, climate change will lead to a similarly dramatic process of involuntary
scaling down of the opulent West. In which case, there might indeed be few better teachers than
the Mayan masters of surviving several ends of the world. The kind of sophisticated conjunction
that would bring urban planners, water engineers, social and environmental researchers, and
technology designers together with indigenous populations, however, is—by and large—yet to
happen.

Why are working together on innovative environmental data infrastructures so relatively easy and
serious collaboration with indigenous populations so very hard? One reason, surely, is that the
latter offer a direct, pointed challenge to the growth economies that drive the climate
acceleration today. They are outside in a double sense. Their worlds were destroyed to extract
the resources that enabled Western modernization. And their ways of life today are exterior to
the consumption networks that propel us further into climate disruption. Precisely for these
reasons, they pose a challenge that is perfect for differentiating collaborations. For aside from
requiring sophisticated conjunctions of knowledge rather than banal interdisciplinarity, the
Anthropocene creates another crucial faultline. It sharply distinguishes between collaborations
that feed from, and feed into, growth-oriented business-as-usual knowledge economy and others
oriented towards collective survival, and perhaps thriving, on a permanently damaged, changing,
earth.
Scientists, observes Isabelle Stengers, will no doubt make many proposals for limiting the
effects of climate disruption, but it is unlikely that the scope and imagination will be sufficient to
avoid a descent into what she calls barbarism. Because the university has been captured. It is tied
to the growth machine, whipped forward by the very same politicians and business elites whose
obsessions created the climate acceleration in the first place. It is not, now, simply the case that
climate or indigenous movements desperately need science to provide epistemological support
for their political work. If the sciences are not to be permanently crippled, they themselves need to
find new ways of resisting. They—we—desperately need new alliances with which to break free
from destructive networks; sophisticated conjunctions of knowledge and concerns—out of our
comfort zones—with which to address the enormous Anthropocene challenges awaiting. Here,
we are far from the Mayan end of the world masters. But we are quite close to the Inuit, whose
territories are invaded by Danes, Chinese and Americans scavenging for rare earths for your new
smart phone, as quickly as their glaciers melt. As the connection between melting ice,
colonialism, infrastructures, and everyday media consumption shows, Anthropocene issues are
by no means as far away from digital design and information studies as one might think. We are
obliged to wonder, seriously, about the implications for teaching and research.
Tony Fry’s notion of redirective design offers a relevant counter-point to design
practices that “defutures”—creates less future—by using unsustainable resources or
undermining (almost literally) other peoples’ ways of life. Design in its various forms, too, needs
sophisticated conjunctions capable of taking on board all that follows from technology, politics,
aesthetics and environments being created in the same process. This cuts two ways. If your
beautifully designed app that makes it possible to quickly find locally grown organic vegetables
runs on a phone created with materials from the deathly cobalt mines in Congo, or Greenland’s
Kvanefjeld, it is only user- and environmentally friendly in a very limited sense. At the same time,
though, there is also something particularly promising about Anthropocene interventions at the
level of materials, designs, and technological infrastructures. They hold the potential to stealthily
bypass the stale fixity of identity politics. Obdurate anti-climate thought styles can be loosened
by designs that materialize sustainability as part of peoples’ operative realities. As when right-
wing republican voters in the American heartlands plaster their front-yards with solar panels
despite hating the climate message, science in general, and the army of George Soros clones
behind it all.
We don’t know what will happen, or what we can accomplish. All we know, as we
contemplate the university in the Anthropocene, is that new risky collaborations, aiming for
sophisticated conjunctions of knowledge, decoupling from destructive networks, striving to
relearn resistance and inventing new designs for sustainability, are urgently needed. There is
enough work to go around, only too little time.