Sébastien Dutreuil & Pierre Charbonnier, “Philosophy of the Anthropocene”, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Environmental Science, 2023

Nous vous signalons la parution d’une entrée d’encyclopédie rédigée par Sébastien Dutreuil et Pierre Charbonnier intitulée “Philosophy of the Anthropocene” dans l’Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Environmental Science paru aux éditions Oxford University Press en 2023.

Résumé

The Anthropocene was proposed in 2000 as the name of a new geological epoch, succeeding to the Holocene, and marked by the influence of humanity as a biological species on its geological environment. It has resonated differently in three major epistemological domains, where the configurations of the debate has varied. For Earth system science, within which the term emerged, the Anthropocene was a keyword encompassing and stimulating large research programs which stimulated original and new scientific investigations and synthesis. The term had a more specific and evidential meaning for the geological community, which seized it after 2008. Documenting empirically the Anthropocene meant different things for these two scientific communities: tracking down every single impact humanity has on the environment on which humanity depends upon to survive for the former; analyzing how this influence can be documented in Earth’s strata for the latter. These two different epistemological regimes are intertwined with two different normative registers. Earth system science assumed from the very start a normative position: international experts elaborate normative concepts and produce scientific synthesis meant to define the conceptual space, quantitatively delimited, within which political decisions related to global environmental issues ought to be taken. By contrast, geologists were more cautious, and for some, reluctant, to engage in normative issues; but political issues unavoidably emerged when the starting date was discussed. This politicization of the debate was accompanied by human and social sciences, seizing up the debate at the same time as geologists and lay public did, toward the end of the 2000s.