Today, it is increasingly argued, humans have changed the planet to such an extent that we have moved from the past 11,700 years of the Holocene to the new geological epoch of the Anthropocene. ‘Anthropos’, the human, has become such a significantly active force that it has transformed a wide range of planetary conditions; from global and local weather patterns, to the chemical constituency of the earth and the oceans. Here, islands are not only the most high-profile markers of the Anthropocene; of rising seas, global warming, the fallouts of mainland consumerism, continued colonialisms, nuclear testing and fallout, ecological degradation, and many other negative forces associated with the legacies of modernity. More proactively, work with islands, island cultures and conceptually thinking with ‘islandness’, is today broadly understood as highly generative for the development of distinct alternatives to the modern, ‘mainland’ reasoning which is widely said to have caused the Anthropocene. In particular, contemporary work with islands is seen as important for the stimulation of alternative ways of thinking about being (ontology) and knowing (epistemology) which challenge the very foundations of modern reasoning – those modern human/nature, mind/body, subject/object divides which enabled humans to rise above, command and control ‘nature’, with terrible consequences. Central to this rise in the power of island work is how, across Western academic disciplines and in popular culture, islands have long been understood as key alternative sites for thinking through the complex relational entanglements between humans and nature. From the paradigm shifting work of Charles Darwin, to the defining anthropology of Margaret Mead and Marilyn Strathern, to highly influential work on colonialism by Édouard Glissant and Epeli Hau‘ofa, islands have long been considered as central places for the development of alternatives to modern reasoning. For Darwin, islands show us, or amplify, how all life differentiates and is adaptive to its environment, as in his famous branching trees, not in the way of modern linear progress. For Mead and Strathern, many island cultures do not split the world into ‘humans’ and ‘nature’, but rather have a more relationally entangled and attuned understanding of being. For Glissant and Hau‘ofa, islands demonstrate how there is no ‘past’ or ‘away’, as in the linear telos, fixed grids of space and time, of modernity. Rather, island life and cultures powerfully register and hold the ongoing legacies of mainland modernity and colonialism. Thus, today, as ‘relational entanglement’ emerges as the key trope or problematic of the Anthropocene, it would be inevitable that certain geographical forms, like islands, would rise to the surface of consciousness for the development of alternative, ‘relational’, ways of thinking about being and knowing which both register and challenge those of modernity. The development of new modes of thinking and approaches associated with the Anthropocene does not emerge in the abstract, existing only in people’s heads, but by engaging the world, turning to particular geographies and geographical forms, such as islands, which are widely held to enable us to think problems through more effectively. This is why islands have risen to the surface in the development of contemporary Anthropocene thinking which seeks to move against the legacies of modern reasoning across mainstream policymaking, the arts, activism, sciences, social sciences and humanities. From the emergence of the highly influential ‘resilience’ paradigm which draws heavily upon a Darwinian understanding of (island) life as inherently adaptive; to island ecologies and cultures as emblematic ‘sensors’ for the rest of the world to learn from, the ‘canaries in the coal mine’ of transforming planetary conditions; to prevalent developments across critical and colonial theory, art and activism which foreground island and islander life as powerfully disrupting the neat boundaries, top-down command and control of modernity’s human/nature divide, islands are at the fore of Anthropocene thinking. In this sense, the contemporary turn to islands in Anthropocene research, policy, practice and activism was always in some way overdetermined. Today, as the problematics of relational sensitivities, relational ways of being and knowing, come to the fore in debates about the Anthropocene, so do geographical forms like islands, long held to be productive sites for thinking these problematics through. This is the generative power and lure of working with islands for Anthropocene thinking.
Jonathan Pugh
References
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