Spinning Anthropocenarios: Climate Change Narratives as Geopolitics in the Late Holocene

This essay reconsiders research programs in environmental studies as they confront the Anthropocene.While scientific investigations are conducted with a commitment to clarifying the scientific record for geological sciences, the interpretation of their goals, methods, and results have also become more fluid cultural, political, and social narratives with complicated and conflicted implications in today’s economy and society.Anthropocene studies, which have assembled multi-scale projects of multidisciplinary teams, now aspire to steer geoscience analysis, in part, toward planet-wide management of today's rapid climate change events as they propound new objects of study and control.This study poses some questions about these trends.Is the turn to the Anthropocene, which can easily serve be another mystified narrative for the “rise of the West” since the fifteenth century, an attempt to sustain technocratic projects for centers of power and knowledge based in the West?As with all politics, what decisive struggles are at stake between "who, whom" in these shifting geopolitical debates that now are cloaked in the advanced study of physical and social sciences?