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The ‘Return of Nature’ in the Capitalocene: Against the Ecomodernist Version of the ‘Good Anthropocene’

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Book cover After the Anthropocene

Part of the book series: Environmental Politics and Theory ((EPT))

Abstract

This chapter examines the current assault on nature as coming from two different fronts: On the one hand, it comes from the hypermodern camp, that is, from those who celebrate the Anthropocene as the apex of human mastery and domination over nature (‘good Anthropocene’ scenario), the ‘techno-optimists’ who are willing to (re)engineer/recreate the earth, and the neo-greens who wish to see the growth-based economy and the technological colonization of the planet continue, even if the cost is the disappearance of life-sustaining ecosystems. On the other hand, the assault on nature stems from postmodern techno-theorists, renamed for our purpose ‘most-moderns,’ who, relying on the concept of ‘technonatures,’ contend a hybridist ontology which eventually justifies the de/reconstruction (read: destruction) of the planet under the rule of technoscience and capitalism. The latter narrative does not only acknowledge that nature has ended as an independent force because of human’s growing techno-scientific power on Earth: It extrapolates, from the history of humanization, that nature as an ontological reality was somehow always already ‘dead,’ and that the idea of a ‘nature out there’ is, therefore, intrinsically flawed. This chapter contends that both hypermodernists and techno-postmodernists are trapped in modernity’s failures, i.e., in the dream of a technological appropriation of nature, as well as in the binary modes of thinking they denounce (cf. separation nature/culture) that have contributed to creating the ecological predicament itself. Against those views, it shows that the natural world is not an inert matter amenable to all sorts of transformations but rather an ‘uncooperative beast’ which rebels against human manipulations and expresses its ‘revolt’ to human attempts of control in the form of eco-catastrophes—what has been designated in this chapter as ‘the return of nature’ in the Anthropocene.

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  1. School of Politics, International Studies and Philosophy, Queen’s University, Belfast, UK

    Anne Fremaux

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Fremaux, A. (2019). The ‘Return of Nature’ in the Capitalocene: Against the Ecomodernist Version of the ‘Good Anthropocene’. In: After the Anthropocene. Environmental Politics and Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11120-5_3

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