EDUARDO VIVEIROS DE CASTRO / DÉBORAH DANOWSKI  The Earth has always ‘inscribed’ or recorded the effects of the actions of human beings, but contrary to what Modernity and its ideology of progress has claimed, the Earth has never given in to humankind’s domination. We (or rather, those civilizations that have given birth to western capitalist Modernity, and vice-versa) have lived for centuries as if the whole world — of which we are but a part — was made up of inert matter and inferior living beings, which implied that we had rights over all of them, treating them as infinite resources that we could use for free or silent slaves available for our beneficial use. But every action elicits a reaction, as everyone knows (a reaction that is also an action from the point of view of the subject upon which we act). This is not exactly something new; what is indeed new about the situation is the scale of these ‘reactions’, whose summation has led us from the Holocene to the Anthropocene. We have truly entered into an unknown world — unknown to not only our current civilization but, in some aspects, to the species Homo sapiens as a whole. What is happening is enormous. We could even say that we are confronted with a situation and a state of things that is supernatural in the true sense of the word, if we understand the word in a completely new way, without necessarily forgetting its relation with the old surnature [supernature]. So, yes, we are indeed in the midst of, or have already exceeded the limits recognized by international scientific organizations such as the maximum limit of a temperature increase of 1.5o Celsius explicitly mentioned by the Paris Accord. We have exceeded the 350 ppm CO2 emissions in the atmosphere that scientists considered as the limit point for concentration of CO2, after which we would enter into a very dangerous territory beyond our control (a few days ago we reached the level of 410 ppm). The Arctic ice sheet is doomed, and more than likely the same fate is destined for Antarctica and Greenland. We are smack dab in the middle of the sixth mass extinction event in the history of the Earth. What is to be done? We must admit that no one knows exactly. Nevertheless, we must act, always, persistently. We must slow down, or even halt our reckless rushing ahead. We must exercise our imagination and think; perhaps first of all, we must reverse the direction of the so-called arrow of ‘historical’ time, which has never been anything more than a single time for all of humanity and whose arrow never flew straight towards the kingdom of the Ends of Man. As far as ‘physical’ time is concerned, or in other words, the law of entropy, we know that until now, the phenomenon of life has succeeded in cheating by exporting entropy in such a way as to constitute itself as a negentropic, organizing force. But it seems that ‘we’ have become very efficient agents of entropy, and thereby have become anti-life forces: we now know that our ‘way of life’ is deadly. We still speak as if the world was here to attend the sovereign will and pleasure of the human subject, and paradoxically, we also speak as if there weren’t other ways of living available to us, as if exiting ‘modern’ life would hurtle us into pure chaos. However, these two presuppositions are false. First, we can’t do everything; there are all kinds of limits everywhere, we can’t simply choose what we want to preserve and what we agree to let go — which doesn’t prevent us from acting and living in multiple ways and in harmony with other living beings. If we try to imagine how (human and extra-human) life on Earth will be in fifty years, we will immediately realize that, whether we choose it or not, life will be very, very different from life as it exists today. Will there still be personal cars and roads covering a large part of the Earth’s surface? Will there still be the same large corporations dominating the market? Will the Amazonian rainforest still be a forest, or will it have transformed into a semi-arid savannah? Will the ice coverings on the Earth still be there? Will there still be fish in the oceans, and will the desert regions have largely increased in their surface area? What will the new geo-politics of the various countries of the world look like? Will there still be countries in the sense of nation-states? How many climate and political refugees will there be, and where will they reside? Is it possible that we all — each and every one of us — will be refugees? What will become of the Amerindians and the other extra-modern collectives? How will the last of the remaining resources be distributed? And what about wars? What new communities, new ‘supernatural’ assemblages will be created? Perhaps only science fiction is capable of proposing such diverse and rich worlds; but what I wanted to say in conclusion is that, yes, the Anthropocene will certainly force us to confront a number of limits, be them old or new; but also this: when some of these worlds vanish or become closed off, others will open up, and it’s within these new worlds then, that we will have to learn how to live with that, or to stay with the trouble as Donna Haraway has proposed.

EVC / DD  Yes, it is basically a contradiction in terms, except if we redefine the notion of development as a radical change in our ways of living, or better still, as the spreading of human virtualities, even as a kind of withdrawal capable of bringing the Buen vivir for all, including non-humans. Above all, the idea of a sustainable Capitalism is worse than wishful thinking: it’s a conceptual hypocrisy.

EVC / DD  First, we should clarify something: Déborah is a philosopher, Eduardo is an Anthropologist, and he is the one who has lived several years with the Amerindians. We believe that the Amerindians have taught us at least two things: 1) How to survive in a world (in this case, the Americas) ravaged by an enemy civilization who believed it was far above the whole world (the Earth) and therefore it had sovereign rights over all existing beings. In a somewhat ironic way, a civilization is in the midst of finding itself in the position of being its own enemy. 2) And how to be aware that the land (the Earth) does not belong to us, but rather it’s us who belong to it.

Amerindian civilizations — and many other civilizations who are still in a state of spiritual defiance of capitalism (even if the so-called ‘real capitalist subsumption’ becomes a ‘universal proposition’) — should not be posited as a model for anything whatsoever. They don’t provide any sort of remedy or potential outline for the future. They are rather an example, which is something very different than a model. We can view the model in the same way as a Platonic idea: a normative order that we impose on the other and which the latter can do nothing but copy- imperfectly, always imperfectly. Models are the business of the IMF and the World Bank for countries on ‘the path of development’. Conversely, the example is something that inspires us to emulate ‘in the same way but differently’, or ‘in a different way but the same’. The model is vertical and hierarchical; the example is horizontal and rhizomatic. So, what would be the example that Amerindians and other Indigenous peoples have to offer us? Very simply: how to live, how to insist on existing (we should perhaps write ‘re-existing’) in a world that has been stolen from them, ravaged and plundered, invaded by a strange, foreign and incomprehensible civilization. The paradox of the present planetary situation is that this foreign and incomprehensible civilization is our very own: the so-called global civilization — or to state it succinctly, the integrated world capitalism, as Félix Guattari would say.

EVC / DD  We can begin by asking ourselves who is this ‘we’ that you claim are not Amerindians, and who are thereby the guilty party. The Americans, the Brazilians, the Chinese, etc. — are they all the guilty ones? And if this is the case, are they as guilty as the Europeans? And what about the European ethnic minorities? Are the Finnish Sami just as guilty as the French? Is the farmer from Auvergne just as guilty as a multi-national company such as Total or Syngenta? And the millions of others in the ‘developed’ world who have been abandoned? The small independent farmers who are forced to plant OGMS and to apply toxic pesticides on their crops, are they ‘guilty’ in the same way as Monsanto or Bayer, or as guilty as their government, who gives in to the mandates set by these sinister corporations? The worker-slaves in factories in China making IPhones, who end up killing themselves, are they just as guilty as their bosses or Apple? In any case, if each social class has its traitors, as Hegel claimed, we can say that each civilization has — must have — its traitors. When all is said and done, the Amerindians and other extra-modern people (and/or those other peoples who find themselves stuck between Nation-states that want to assimilate them) are beginning to find allies within the ‘central’ countries. All one needs to do is to look at the expanse and strength of support that the Zapatista movement or the Kurds have received to see that things are changing. There appears to be quite a large number of ‘guilty parties’ that are determined to align themselves with the Amerindians and their fellow contemporaries.

EVC / DD The Amerindians, as much as the small farmers from North-eastern Brazil, or the Inuit, or the islanders of Oceania whose lands are submerging — they all know very well what is going on, even if they don’t use terms like climate change, global warming, etc. We actually reference in our chapter, ‘The End of the Indians’ World’ a quote from the Yanamami shaman Davi Kopenawa: ‘Unlike us, white people are not afraid of being crushed by the falling sky. But one day, they will fear that as much as we do!’³ So, yes, they are well aware of what’s happening, and they’re afraid. The disturbance or de-synchronization of the ecological rhythms and cycles has already become the rule, seriously disrupting the subsistence practices of all these traditional peoples: one no longer knows when to plant this or that crop, since the environment’s bio-semiotic regime has become unpredictable. To quote the thinker and activist Russel Means (Oglala Sioux) whose role at Wounded Knee in 1973 is very well known:

‘American Indians have been trying to explain this to Europeans for centuries. But, as I said earlier, Europeans have proven themselves unable to hear. The natural order will win out, and the offenders will die out, the way deer die when they offend the harmony by over-populating a given region. It’s only a matter of time until what Europeans call ‘a major catastrophe of global proportions’ will occur. It is the role of American Indian peoples, the role of all natural beings, to survive. A part of our survival is to resist. We resist not to overthrow a government or to take political power, but because it is natural to resist extermination, to survive. We don’t want power over white institutions; we want white institutions to disappear. That’s revolution.’

Much has been said recently about fear and other affects regarding climate change. There are some who simply say that those who fear the ecological crisis are exaggerating, that they are pessimists, or even ‘catastrophists’. Others, such as Naomi Klein (The Shock Doctrine), explain in a rather interesting way how fear is being transformed into a state policy, how the ‘shock and awe doctrine’ paralyses populations and allows neo-liberal governments to implement economic policies that are particularly harmful to the poorest and the middle classes. Others believe that the situation is serious but that we shouldn’t ‘scare’ people. But our own personal opinion is something closer to that of someone like Günter Anders or Hans Jonas, the philosophers who believe in the prophylactic power of fear. Because fear (like death, for that matter) must not be in the grasp of the right and its fascist policies. What is important is to re-appropriate the affects, to avoid leaving them it in the hands of those who are destroying the forest or the ecosystems.

EVC / DD  Indeed. They are very different, even completely opposite in every way. An Ecomodernist Manifesto preaches ‘a vibrant post-industrial capitalism’, with centralized technological solutions along with a heavy material and energetic investment (hydraulic fracking, nuclear power plants, large hydroelectric projects, monocrops of transgenetic vegetables, environmental geo-engineering, etc.) Whereas Laudato Si’ proposes a ‘return to simplicity’, an ‘increase in sobriety and the capacity for rejoicing with less’, in complete contrast to consumerism and the hallucination of ‘infinite and unlimited growth’, in other words, ‘the conviction that small is beautiful’. The authors of the Ecomodernist Manifesto write ‘big is beautiful’: instead of a reduction in growth, instead of slowing down, we should produce even more, go even faster, innovate, grow even more and prosper. Without second-guessing, without an ounce of shame, without any regrets. While the encyclical alerts us to the danger of considering technological development and economic growth as a ‘homogenous and unidimensional paradigm’ and, echoing the warnings of the climatologists and other scientists, insists on the importance of the precautionary principle. While the encyclical speaks of planetary limits and urges us to eradicate irresponsible ecological practices, which generate enormous profits by destroying crops and ways of life everywhere, ravaging our ecosystems and poisoning ‘our common house’, the authors of the Ecomodernist Manifesto, in complete contrast, believe that we can continue our reckless rush forward, and, as long as we ‘modernize modernization’ (as Ulrich Beck said), we have nothing to fear. The same technology that is poisoning us today will end up correcting — and one never knows how — its ‘collateral damage’, its ‘externalities’ and would even end up feeding 10 billion beings (human beings, of course, they never speak of the other billions of living beings) that will populate the Earth in the second half of the 21st century. Following this logic, they think that we will be capable of assuring ‘everyone’ (if by everyone they mean the 1%) a Good, perhaps even a Great Anthropocene, where we would be able to continue living not only as we already do today in developed countries, but also by spreading and sharing this abundance with the rest of the world’s populations. Where the encyclical takes into account the diversity of cultures and forms of life, the eco-modernists merely see one path forward for everyone. And yet, as we can note in reading Laudato Si’, not even the notion of ‘quality of life’ can be imposed on everyone as a kind of dogma, ‘for the quality of life must be understood within the world of the symbols and customs proper to each human group’. Finally, where the encyclical repeats several times that everything in Nature has an intrinsic value, and what’s more, that everything is connected, the authors of the Manifesto came up with this strange concept of ‘decoupling’, according to which technology (for them, there is only one Technology: ‘advanced technology’, i.e. the technology taking root in Big Science and within great international capital) will reach an optimal state in a few years, by practically reducing material costs and environmental impact to zero.

So, it’s not by chance that the authors of this document have accused Pope Francis of being a ‘pope against progress’, and denounced the ‘religious accents’ of the ecologists’ discourses, such as the use of the terms ‘sin’ and ‘redemption’, and their apocalyptic catastrophism in the face of climate change. We have a hard time understanding how it is that the author of an encyclical — who embraces the scientific consensus regarding the most serious challenge humanity has ever experienced as a species, the Anthropocene — can be accused of being ‘against progress’. Unless, of course, we understand by progress nothing more than the technophilic wishful thinking of the authors of the Manifesto. When everything is said and done, it seems that it’s precisely the authors of the Manifesto, who, as good Christians, believe that after the Apocalypse the Kingdom will come.

*Translated by Drew Burk