Читать книгу Risks and the Anthropocene - Julien Rebotier - Страница 14

In the early 2000s, geochemist Paul Crutzen helped popularize the notion of the Anthropocene (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000). The rapid introduction of the notion into the global science arena was partly orchestrated from the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme – an international initiative led by the International Council for Science (ICSU) – where Crutzen served as vice-president. The IGBP aims to coordinate research at global and regional scales on the earth system, on the biogeochemical interactions that constitute it, and on the interactions maintained with societies. The IGBP is part of the trend toward the globalization of environmental issues, toward the consolidation of a planetary, atmospheric and climatic framework, then more broadly biogeochemical, and toward the train of major scientific initiatives driven by international governance – through the United Nations system. Thus, the creation of the IGBP in 1987 followed that of the World Climate Research Programme in 1979. Concerns about climate extend to global change in general in order to measure human impacts on the environment, from what would become the Earth sciences, which are well suited to address changes in the earth system. In 1988, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was formed, laying the foundations for a type of governance of climate and environmental issues already analyzed by the social sciences (Dahan and Aykut 2015).

The Anthropocene postulates that humanity’s influence on the geosphere and biosphere is such that it can define a specific geological epoch that would bear its name (Crutzen 2002). The recognition of human influence on the Earth is not new (Marsh 1865; Crutzen 2007) and, through a form of human ecology, it even constitutes one of the foundations of geographical questioning (Robic 2006, pp. 28–29). But the recent success of the notion can be understood in two ways. It is due to the intensity and unprecedented nature of interactions between societies and environments (Gemenne et al. 2019), as well as to the conditions in which scientific knowledge is produced, to the structuring of a globalized intellectual climate that weighs heavily on the practice of research (Castree et al. 2014), and to the place of the environmental question within globalized societies (Smith 2010). These two bundles of elements, namely the physical reality of unprecedented consequences of human–environment interactions, on the one hand, and the social configurations that accompany them, on the other hand, constitute the Anthropocene moment. The latter is of interest to the reflections gathered in this work on risk assessment and risk management.