Apprehending the Anthropocene
The Indian Anthropocene
What age do we live in? Some might say: the Information Age. Others might say: the Third Industrial Age. And let's add the 'Age of Globalization' for good measure. All right answers, but arguably, the most appropriate answer to the question is: we live in the Anthropocene.
When did the Anthropocene begin?
You'll find many answers. Some go as far back as the invention of agriculture and settled cultivation. In which case we have always lived in the Anthropocene ('we' being settler humanity, which is everyone reading this newsletter). Others start with Columbus' voyage to what's now called the Americas and the subsequent era of European colonization. Closer to our times, there's a good case to start the Anthropocene in 1945, the end of WWII, the beginning of decolonization and US hegemony. Or even closer, to 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of state socialism as an alternative to capitalism. Indians can start even later, in 1991, when liberalization happened. Lots of choices…. Whichever one we make, we can build on top of last week's Messenger using one of those demonstrations you'll find in Logic 101 classes:
1. If the task of Philosophy is to Apprehend its Age in Thought, and
2. Our Age is the Anthropocene, then:
3. The task of Philosophy is to Apprehend the Anthropocene in Thought.
"Apprehending the Anthropocene" - nice! It’s a good slogan for Socratus. Add some Marxian frosting (remember when we quoted the great man saying 'the point, however is to change it') to this layer cake and we have the makings of a Birthday party.
Four years and counting. No longer a toddler.
We started our journey with the intent of apprehending the Indian Anthropocene and being able to do something about it. India poses unique challenges in the era of climate change: unlike the so-called developed world, we are mostly young and mostly poor. We are also aspirational and want to live a much better life than what we have been living so far. But most imaginations of the ‘good life’ are imaginations of carbon prosperity:
What’s the alternative?
We don’t know the answer to that question, but we want to evoke the answer through our work with individuals and communities throughout India. A couple of glimpses of what we have done over the past four years to apprehend the Indian Anthropocene:
Greenup
When we first started thinking about Socratus at the beginning of 2019, we had two inspirations. One was the Buddhist and Socratic insistence on wisdom as a necessary ingredient in any attempt to address wicked problems. We had experimented with this hypothesis in the past, once in the early 2010s and once again in 2017 as a way of bringing philosophy, cognitive science and systems thinking into the social sector. The new ingredient in 2019 was the identification of collective wisdom as the important next step in the evolution of wisdom traditions. We felt that design principles and new technologies could make collective wisdom an achievable goal if midwifed by a self-avowedly Socratic community.
The other inspiration was the Green New Deal, which was red hot in the US at that time, with GND candidates such as Alexandria O’Cortez elected on a progressive ticket. We thought about how something like it might work in India, a country without a New Deal to make Green. It was clear even then that a young aspirational country with very low per-capita energy consumption won’t rally around a ‘drawdown’ or ‘degrowth’ narrative. The GND felt like a genuine alternative, a jobs and economic opportunity programme that also addressed climate change. But even the GND was inadequate, for it focuses on decarbonizing an already prosperous country, while we asked ourselves how India would flourish (perhaps for the first time in the modern era) while addressing climate change. That’s what we called Greenup. These two inspirations continue to motivate us even as there have been dramatic transformations in how we execute them.
The first phase of our work was ‘bespoke,’ as in our theory of change was predicated on transformative pathways emerging from a sequence of intense four-day affairs with some handholding in the middle for each one of our fields - food systems, urban systems, and greenup. We would have likely doubled down on the bespoke method if it weren’t for COVID which made the physical world inaccessible for much of 18 months. We were able to host two wicked sprints between March 2020 and August 2021 and learned a lot from those two events, but our model of intense, several-day affairs was severely compromised by the pandemic - India was in lockdown often, and even when in-person meetings were permitted, the demographic distribution of ‘influential people’ skews 50+, and older people were much more watchful about meeting in person. And it goes without saying there’s no way to get people to spend four full days in front of a screen!
India Story, Climate Grammar
The pandemic changed our mission in unexpected ways. India went into lockdown in March 2020 with millions of Indians out on the streets, forced to walk back from Bengaluru or Mumbai to Odisha and Bihar. It was immediately clear that many of the systemic failures of that period were failures of citizenship. One migrant in Hyderabad told us ‘hum pachaas percent ke nagrik hain.’ The dangers of moral hazard, the inversion of the usual power hierarchies and designing around the needs of citizens became important values for us - and have stayed that way.
The first Janta ka Faisla in Raipur was an intense five day affair with enormous effort going into creating a database of migrant labourers, finding a location, narrowing down a panel of jurors and a panel of experts and then choreographing the event in Raipur. That jury taught us that designing for marginalised citizens is a different challenge than designing for influential people. For example: we felt responsible for the future wellbeing of the jurors who trusted us and took part in our deliberations, while we wouldn’t have to think about the livelihood needs of any prominent person who attends a wicked sprint. And therefore, ongoing engagement with the needs of a community (in this case migrants from Chattisgarh) has a moral force as well as practical necessity.
The need for continuous engagement also became apparent in our work in Bengaluru. We had started work on ward level climate action in collaboration with the ICA (Initiative for Climate Action) between the first and the second waves of the pandemic, but the chaos of the second wave got us thinking about citizenship in conjunction with climate. We asked ourselves whether the newly constituted ward DETER committees could be improved and subsequently, whether the ward committees could themselves become opportunities for participatory citizenship. That work is what led to the Flourishing Bengaluru Collective which has begun work on topics such as health and livelihoods that intersect with climate. For us, the ward has become a location we can grasp in depth, where the moral complexity (citizenship) interacts directly with the material complexity (wicked problems) of creating a flourishing ward.
We now believe that citizen centric design - such as that of a jury - should become a part of civil society interventions in every sphere. We found ourselves designing for citizenship with domestic workers, farmers, youth and other communities. This work leads us to believe that citizenship is a verb, not a noun. It should become a routine component of social sector interventions, like how self help groups (SHGs) are.
We had not forgotten our commitment to climate change - not in the least - but our understanding of the situation had to be reframed when the Green New Deal died in the US by mid-2020. Its champions were sidelined during the presidential campaign and after the change of administration, its successor - Build Back Better - also failed. It’s been revived (third time’s the charm) as the IRA, the Inflation Reduction Act, but in the absence of new legislation, the biggest contribution to climate action came via executive order in the enormous stimulus package the US enacted in response to the pandemic. It wasn’t the Green New Deal, but nevertheless combined economy and climate in an interesting way. In some ways, the green stimulus was a win for climate, for climate action was absorbed into the everyday life of governance.
Our work on citizenship helped us frame the Indian Anthropocene in a new way, one that we call ‘India Story, Climate Grammar.’ Instead of foregrounding climate change as ‘the thing,’ the problem to be solved, we now think Flourishing India is the thing and climate change has to be baked into all the ways in which India will develop. ‘India Story, Climate Grammar’ is a developmental paradigm as much as a climate action framework. That developmental approach is also reflected in our work on bringing economy and ecology together in Odisha, which we will talk about next week.