What might a politics of the Anthropocene look like? This question is distinct from asking what policy responses to climate change should be. Rather than asking what we should do moving forward, in response to environmental change, a politics of the Anthropocene imagines what a workable relationship between politics and the environment might be in an era when anthropogenic forces undermine visions of a sustainable future. The three thoughtful and well-written books reviewed in this essay do this in different ways, with very different conclusions. Two of them, one by Ethan Miller, the other by Jonathan Symons, address this question by imagining a new politics. The third, by Lisa Garforth, addresses it by surveying what other thinkers, from political theorists to writers of speculative fiction, have imagined.
The Anthropocene here is understood less as a geological era, in which human activity leaves an indelible mark on the planet, than as...