| Popis: |
The Anthropocene challenges contemporary democratic imaginaries. It marks the scale of contemporary ecological crises as planetary, while there is no political system at the corresponding scale of governance to address them. In the absence of a global democratic imaginary, the severity of environmental problems triggers technocratic and eco-fascistic tendencies. Furthermore, contemporary governance structures have emerged in the steady conditions of the Holocene, where decision-making could take longer. It is not certain whether democratic practices and institutions will be a part of the Anthropocene governance, and if so, which ones. This chapter argues for “a literacy of scales” that would allow for us to rethink nation-state level imaginaries before we assume they can be scaled up. Starting with early conceptions of size and scale in biology, we investigate democratic scale in the context of the Anthropocene: If we can imagine a democracy in the Anthropocene that is divorced from these preconceived notions, what would it look like? What kind of citizens and agents would emerge and interact with the governance architecture, and at what scale? In other words: If the Anthropocene indicates a new scale, what kind of a democratic imaginary is possible or could address its tensions? The debates over a new geological epoch marked by the human influence on the planet have challenged contemporary imaginaries of democracy. The Anthropocene represents a mismatch: the scale of ecological crises today is increasingly recognized as planetary whereas there is no stable political system in place to address these challenges at the corresponding scale of governance. Neither is there consensus regarding the desirability of a planetary-scale governance architecture. This mismatch, the severity of environmental problems and the lack of political arrangements to address them, trigger technocratic and eco-fascistic tendencies, particularly in the absence of a democratic imaginary to address socio-political necessities in the face of impending catastrophes. In this chapter, we problematize these tendencies. Underlying these arguments are issues of size and speed, both of which can be reconsidered for a new era. |
