Archive | 2021
Tipping Points: The Anthropocene and Covid-19
Abstract
As I wrote this text in the spring of 2020, a large part of the world was under lockdown because of the outbreak of SARS-CoV-2. It was barely six months since the Fridays for Future demonstrations. So one could read quite a few articles dealing with the relationship between the coronavirus and the current ecological crisis which we have come to label the “Anthropocene.” Are shrinking wildlife habitats, species migration and dangerously close human-animal contact directly or indirectly responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic? Or does the corona crisis rather present a temporary break in the otherwise relentless increase of greenhouse gases, a breather for air pollution hotspots, a chance for an ecologically sound reconstruction following the economic collapse? Due to reduced traffic and halted industry, blue skies have suddenly returned to many cities for the first time in decades. Many see Covid-19 as an opportunity to implement a completely new and more appropriate approach to environmental policy. The virus and its spread have taught us something about the fatal global interweaving of supply chains and tourist flows which are a driving factor in climate change. Is Covid-19, some columnists asked, not in fact a symptom of the Anthropocene (Scherer 2020)? Is it a “dress rehearsal” for the Great Climate Collapse (Latour 2020)? Or, looked at from a different perspective, does it offer, albeit by force of circumstances, an experimental space in which to test out how things might be done differently – proof that it is possible after all to limit travel and transportation, to reorganize work and communication, and to reduce the consumption of fossil fuels? Could it even present an opportunity to reinvent international cooperation in the face of a global threat? These questions can hardly be answered at present. What I propose to consider here are epistemic links between the ecological crisis of the Anthropocene and the corona crisis. These are to be found, as I will argue, less in causal or metonymic relationships (the Anthropocene as the cause of Covid-19, or the pandemic as a symptom of the Anthropocene), than in temporal structures and event forms.What kind of caesura are we witnessing? What do the two crises – the ecological metacrisis of the Anthropocene and the global pandemic – have in common? In the case of the Anthropocene, this involves asking what it means to proclaim the beginning of a new geochronological epoch. How do we account for this beginning and on the basis of which historical thresholds? Which time scales come into view? A number of these questions have already been exten-