Choosing Metaphors for the Anthropocene: Cultural and Political Ecologies

Abstract

The Anthropocene is a metaphor, a clever use of language to invert our perspective about human life and environmental order. The Anthropocene conveys both a cultural and political ecology. This chapter briefly reviews several of the dominant metaphors in geography, including determinism, functionalism, and adaptation, that have sought to encapsulate the relationship between humans and the non-human world, showing how each opens interesting views on the problem while closing down others. These metaphors are of prime importance in the research field of cultural ecology and political ecology. The former field works to explain human adaption to physical environments and vice versa, while the latter field seeks to merge the “concerns of ecology and a broadly defined political economy”.

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