Placing the Anthropocene: a day in the life of an enviro‐organism

Abstract

A turning point in human–environment relations has been signalled by the term Anthropocene. Academic responses to the Anthropocene must acknowledge the unprecedented role of humankind on the planet while avoiding models that dismiss or minimise the agency of non‐human actors. They must pay attention to hybridity, materiality, actor‐networks and nonrepresentational geographies, and at the same time, they must appreciate posthumanist blurring of ontological divides between the social and the natural, and an ethics of mutual inclusion. One way to meet these varied objectives is by understanding place as an organic whole orchestrated by human and non‐human communications, an entity I call an ‘enviro‐organism’. An account of the enviro‐organism proceeds through three phases of the day on a generic, though far from universal, beach. It integrates four goals: to renew understanding of communication as a geographical process, to emphasise scalar ambiguity, to reveal various ways in which communications are embodied and to promote holistic ways of acting and thinking with the world rather than against it. Theoretical foundations in Peircean semiotics, biosemiotics and Jacob von Uexküll's idea of Umwelt permit this sustained focus on communication as a generalised phenomenon linking humans and non‐humans in a place.

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