The future is set in stone: on utopian thinking in the Anthropocene

The Anthropocene concept has been criticized for displaying a depoliticizing vision of politics, as it evaluates the present from a position millions of years from now, making the future appear (literally) set in stone. Politics in general, and democracy in particular, requires temporal contingency, i.e. that things don’t need to be tomorrow what they are today. In this paper, I investigate the prospect of introducing contingency into the narrative of the Anthropocene by the employment of utopian thinking. By reviewing the functions of utopian thought in green thinking, I examine what characteristics are needed in order for Utopian thinking to function as a fertile ground for politicization. I argue that its politicizing potential lies in the possibility to infuse hope, make a radical break with the present and to offer the possibility of estrangement. Furthermore, I zoom in on the formulations of utopia in three widespread narratives of the relationship between society and nature in the Anthropocene (the ecomodernist good Anthropocene, the eco-Marxist bad Anthropocene and the new materialist entangled Anthropocene) to look for the emergence of politics. I argue that although none of the narratives manage to completely politicize the Anthropocene concept, all three display utopian feature which in different ways can be helpful to counteract the presence of post-politics in environmental discourse.