The Anthropocene and the Republic

Conceiving of climate change etc. in terms of an Anthropocene, thereby almost inevitably bringing on board Earth System and Earth Science, has major implications for green politics as ‘shaping the world’ (in the Aristotelian sense). Among these are: (1) the focus of environmental action changes from ecosystems and/or states to spheres and the global realm; (2) global strategies have global consequences: states, societies and other stakeholders in Earth System can play the ostrich but only to their own disadvantage. Using Constant’s terms, such collectives’ freedom of the Moderns, freedom from interference, is severely limited while the freedom of the Classics, political participation, becomes (a moral duty or) inevitable; avoidance is now irrational. It would seem then that the Anthropocene calls for global governance and global governance institutions – ambitions that shine through in many an environmental thinker’s work, not to mention almost every IPCC report and almost every publication by proponents of the Anthropocene concept. In my paper I intend to argue, using the republican repertoire, that global governance is actually the last thing that we need, and that global environmental institution ought to be based on (at least) a global ‘republicanism-light’ with: (1) rather than a quest for a forced consensus (as the term ‘governance’ also suggests), a Machiavellian appreciation of discord, agonism and ‘the political’, combined with a realistic assessment of the very diverse interests global stakeholders have, hence very diverse ideas about the benefits and burdens of specific global environmental strategies (pace the political naïveté of Anthropocene Advocates); (2) rather than institutions aimed at quick and decisive actions, institutions based on principles developed by Bodin, Montesquieu and the Founding Fathers (checks and balances, division of powers etc.) allowing for human and science’s fallibility on the one hand, irreducible moral and political diversity on the other.