Reconfiguring the Child in the Anthropocene

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247© The Author(s) 2018
K. Malone, Children in the Anthropocene, Palgrave Studies on Children
and Development, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-43091-5_9
CHAPTER 9
Reconguring theChild intheAnthropocene
In the Kino Mountains in central Japan is Lake Suwa. Every year the lake
freezes, and due to the changing temperature the ice expands and cracks,
pushing upwards and producing a ridge. Japanese legends say this ridge is
caused by the feet of Shinto gods as they make their way across the lake.
Japanese monks who live in a shrine on the edge of the lake have recorded the
passage of the Shinto gods since around 1443, so about 700 years. It is the
oldest continuous human recording of climate available in the world. What
these recordings reveal is an acceleration in the number of years when the lake
did not freeze. For the rst 250 years, only three winters the lake did not
freeze. Between 1955 and 2004, there were 12 non-freezing events at the
lake; between 2005 and 2014, 5freezing events, and most recently the lake
has not frozen in 2015, nor again in 2016. What does this mean Shinto gods
do not walk the lake (Nijhuis 2016). Scientists analysing data from the lake
have concluded that it reveals an intimate relationship between the timing of
the thawing and freezing with the Industrial Revolution. It is a physical; sto-
ried account of the entwined realities of ice performativity and global carbon
dioxide (CO2) increases (Sharma etal. 2016). Knotted and tied together the
global warming of the atmosphere, caused largely by human activities, is
shown to be having an irreversible impact on the climate. These ancient
records of the climate provide a direct experience of the environment encoun-
tered by the human and non-human inhabitants of the planet over a sustained
period of time. These large global climate changes are evidence in many
respects of what Tim Morton refers to as ‘hyperobjects’. In 2010, Morton

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(2013, p.1) adopted the term hyperobject to denote some of the charac-
teristics of the Anthropocene. Hyperobjects are ‘so massively distributed
in time, space and dimensionality’ that they ‘defy our perception, let alone
our comprehension’. Among the examples Morton gives of hyperobjects
are climate change, mass species extinction and radioactive plutonium. ‘In
one sense [hyperobjects] are abstractions,’ he notes, ‘in another they are
ferociously, catastrophically real’ (Morton 2013, p.1).
‘Earth’s atmosphere, oceans, rocks, plants and animals are experiencing
changes great enough to mark the ending of one epoch and the beginning
of another,’ writes Davies (2016, p.4) in the introduction to his book The
Birth of the Anthropocene:
The present environmental crisis is epochal in this particular, specialized
sense. It is hard to comprehend its magnitude, but if we regard current
environmental changes as the birth pangs of a new epoch, and if we give that
epoch its place in geological time, in the long history of the earth itself, we
might start to make sense of what we are facing.
Robert Macfarlane (2016) has also warned of the implications of the
Anthropocene and the consequences of not to seeking to reimagine what
it means to be human on a planet that has existed for around 4.5 billion
years. On my desk I have a piece of zircon crystal given to me by a
myfriendCarol; it reminds me daily of the vastness of the earth’s history
compared to human history, the concept of deep time:
The idea of the Anthropocene asks hard questions of us. Temporally, it requires
that we imagine ourselves inhabitants not just of a human lifetime or genera-
tion, but also of “deep time”– the dizzyingly profound eras of Earth history
that extend both behind and ahead of the present. Politically, it lays bare some
of the complex cross-weaves of vulnerability and culpability that exist between
us and other species, as well as between humans now and humans to come.
(Robert Macfarlane 2016, The Guardian, April 2016: par. 4)
In this book I have attempted to understand the subtleties of Morton’s
(2013) hyperobjects and to comprehend the magnitude of the epochal
crisis that is the marking of atransition to the Anthropocene and how it
impacts on the messy, mattered, entangled assemblages of children grow-
ing up in cities.
The capacities of children to be open and aware of the uidity of
‘timespacemattering’ with and through ‘other’ beings and objects who
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they are intra-acting with, and adapting alongside them in the aftermath
of disasters and disastrous situations, are unique. If the United Nations’
predictions are correct (Ensor 2008; UNUEHS 2006), that well over 50
million humans, including a large number of children, animals and other
non-human entities, whowill be displaced by disasters in cities due to the
anthropocentric conditions of the present state of the world—and given
children and animals in disaster situations are extremely vulnerable and
most likely to be traumatized—there is much to do to consider how chil-
dren can be central to new ways of reconguring the universalist of our
relations with the planet. Universalist, because the Anthropocene assumes
a generalized anthropos, whereby all humans (non-humans) are equally
implicated and all equally affected. But we are not all in the Anthropocene
together—the poor and the dispossessed, the children and non-human
animals are far more in it than others. Privileged humans have cultivated a
global landscape of inequality in which they nd their advantages multi-
plied in these highly fragile times of the Anthropocene. The writings of
Ensor (2008) on her own research with migrant children after Hurricane
Katrina, like my own stories of children in cities in these precarious times
of the Anthropocene, are compelling. It is an example of children ‘intra-
acting’ with and through material and relational bodies, of making a dif-
ference in the world ‘about taking responsibility for the fact our practices
matter’ (Barad 2007 p.88). Ensor writes:
[C]hildren play an important part in assessing their own opportunities and
responsibilities within their families and societies, even in—or perhaps espe-
cially during—times of crisis. Their role in making decisions about their life
trajectories and in negotiating difcult circumstances is often much more
independent, context-specic, and diverse than generally assumed. (Ensor
2008, p.296)
Ensor goes on to state that circumstances ‘have proven to be far from
homogenous, and should not be assumed to be universally maladaptive’
(Ensor 2008, p.295).
Marc Berkoff, in the preface of his book Rewilding Our Hearts, writes
of humans:
We humans– big-brained, big footed, overproducing, overconsuming, and
invasive mammals– have for a long time acted as if we are the only animals
that matter. We have made huge and horric global messes, impacting every
environment, every ecosystem and all species. (Bekoff 2014, p.3)
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250
In order to change this view of ourselves, as the only animal that mat-
ters, Berkoff argues we need to rewild our hearts by restoring the environ-
ment: to nd harmony in our common goals and our shared call to action.
I believe the conceptual interference brought about by naming the
Anthropocene is calling us all in different ways to act, to be and respond
as Berkoff suggests. It demands of us a response that isn’t just about
humans once again inserting themselves into the big story of restoration
as the hero in the planet’s salvation, as many sustainability discourses and
policies would have us believe. It is about reconguring those old ways
and being something different. As Taylor (2013) reminds us that to
respond to the big picture challenges of the twenty-rst century, children
will need:
relational and collective dispositions, not individualistic ones, to equip them
to live within the kind of world they have inherited ...They will need a rm
sense of shared belonging and shared responsibility … They will need to
build upon a foundational sense of connectivity to this same natureculture
collective. (Taylor 2013)
Exploring ChildrEn’s livEs inthEAnthropoCEnE
Within a rapidly urbanizing world, many governments, particularly those
in developing nations, will struggle to strike a balance between a neo-
liberal focus for sustainable urbanization and the limits to growth for the
planet, compounded by impending global phenomena such as climate
change, toxic contamination, waste, species loss and ongoing degradation
of the land. Communities of human and non-human others, in low-
income nations particularly, will face signicant barriers to the current
economically driven models of sustainable development and their capacity
to adapt. These barriers will come in the shared form of increases in pol-
lutants and pathogens in the air, water, soil and food, natural disasters, loss
of land, and the ongoing impacts for human security with insecure slum
housing, poor education and health provision. The only way forward may
be to rethink our way of being with the planet altogether rather than
continuing to tinker around with old models that haven’t worked in the
past and are unlikely to work in the future. Many of the key issues of the
Anthropocene for children were identied over a decade ago as countries
embarked on the task of addressing and monitoring their progress to reach
the targets through the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
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Butafter the 15-year time frame of the MDGs nished in 2015 and urban-
ization had continued to swell in those countries such as Bolivia, with the
least capacity to manage it, children’s quality of life is again under the
microscope.
Already it is clear that children’s rights, their wellbeing and sustainable
development are central to the newly launched global post-2015 UN
agenda for sustainable development, but will this be enough? (Malone
2015a, b). Investment in children in the past has shown to be a fundamen-
tal means to eradicate poverty, boost shared prosperity and enhance inter-
generational equity. Investment in children and families has also been
shown to be essential for strengthening children’s ability to reach their
potential as productive, engaged and capable citizens, contributing fully
to their societies. The question is how can we equally invest in children’s
needs and rights, now and in the future, while equally investing in the
intra-active potential of a shared set of child–ecological relations with the
planet that we can only imagine could be? It is within this growing urgency
for possibilities and new ways of thinking on the reconguring of child,
cities and the non-human as companion kin in a future planet that this
book has sought to expose.
UnsEttling thEChild inthEAnthropoCEnE
As an undeniably powerful, creative and destructive species, humans are
both responsible for, and mortally vulnerable to, the life threatening bio-
spheric changes that we have brought upon ourselves and countless other
species with whom our lives are entangled. At face value, the omnipotent
belief that we are an exceptional species is reconrmed by the declaration of
the Anthropocene. But on the other hand, this same belief in human excep-
tionalism is self-sabotaging. It leads us to imagine that we can endlessly
intervene to ‘improve on nature’, always nd new technoxes to repair the
messes we have created, and/or use up the earth’s resources without suffer-
ing the consequences. It also leads us to disavow our own mortal entangle-
ment in the same earth systems we so radically disturb. In other words, it is
the fatally awed belief in human exceptionalism, in the guise of omnipo-
tence and radical nature/culture separatisms that has unhinged us and
produced the imbroglio of disorderings that are now being named the
Anthropocene. (Taylor & Pacini-Ketchabaw 2015, p.510)
Taylor and Pacini-Ketchabaw clearly outline the irony we as a species,
amongst others, nd ourselves: both as the monster and the maker.
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The unsettling that the naming of the Anthropocene has adminis-
tered—and will continue to administer—is a massive jolt to our collective
imagination of ourselves.
If viewed as a potentially transformative naming event with complex affor-
dances, rather than as a scientic validation to scramble for yet another
heroic techno x, debates over the Anthropocene can open a space for con-
structive circumspection and thoughtful response. (Instone & Taylor 2015,
p.139)
Philosophically, it is a concept that works both for us and on us. In its
unsettlement of the entrenched binaries of modernity (nature and culture;
object and subject), and its provocative alienation of familiar anthropocen-
tric scales and times, it opens up a number of possibilities for exploring
concepts such as entanglements and differences in children’s lives. Barad
(2014, p.176) argues:
‘(d)ifference is not some universal concept for all places and times, but is
itself a multiplicity within/of itself. Difference itself is diffracted. Diffraction
is a matter of differences at every scale, or rather in the making and remaking
of scale, spacetimematterings. Each bit of matter, each moment of time, each
position in space is a multiplicity, a superposition/entanglement of (seem-
ingly) disparate parts’.
In working with and through diffraction as the entanglement of entities
in the Anthropocene, I have sought to highlight and ‘make evident the
entangled structure of the changing and contingent ontology of the
world, including the ontology of knowing’ (Barad 2007, p. 73).
Entanglements in this sense do not propose unity or erase difference, in
fact ‘entanglings entail differentiatings, differentiatings entail entanglings.
One move– cutting together-apart’ (Barad 2014, p.176).
Entanglements call into question the state of entities and events. Itper-
sists in unsettling us to imagine children as no longer existing separately
from one another or apart from the many others they are ‘intra-acting
within and as part of ’ (Barad 2007, p.88). The study of entanglement has
through diffraction allowed for a form of performativity—‘subjects and
objects do not pre-exist as such but emerge through intra-actions’ (2007,
p.88). This is a challenging work; it is easier to write about it than do it.
I know in places I haven’t succeeded in doing enough in my theorizing of
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the research data to full fully these expectations of Barad’s theoretical
principles. But I have in the writing attempted to do something different
when bringing posthumanism and new materialism into the commons
with children, through the concept of ecological posthumanism. I have
done this in order to expose the entangled nature of children’s lives with
the non-human world that embraces them, holds them, works through
them and for whom they have come to know, often without the need of
formal ‘researching possibilities’ such as those I created in these projects
around the world. I have in this work focused on assemblages of differen-
tiations, by exploring entangled natures, the porosity of bodies, children’s
multi-species companions, the materiality of mobilities, and the monstros-
ities of disaster. This ecological posthumanist perspective, building on a
view of ecological communities beyond deep ecology or sustainable devel-
opment, takes seriously the need to stop the anthropological machine and
contests the production of absolute dividing lines between humans and
other worldly matter. It recognizes the fragility and porosity of all matter
and objects—not to collapse categories of objects entirely into each other
but to bring to our attention the porousness of what has been viewed as
distinct boundaries and distinct entities. I have through this work consid-
ered children’s lives differently by inviting the monster into the room.
The monster in the room, or what Latour (2015) referred to as the
herd of black and white elephants that are stampeding on the stage of the
quiet American political landscape, is the Anthropocene. ‘What is totally
missing from the description of the Anthropocene,’ states Latour:
is that it modies the scale, the speed, the rhythm and, more importantly,
the distribution of active agents in any political conversation we have about
the entanglement of humans and non-humans. Even though the label and
the date are still disputed, in terms of political philosophy its effect is to
bring on stage a set of actors that reacts fairly quickly and fairly unexpectedly
to the action of the earlier protagonists, namely the historical agents of his-
tory, formerly known as “humans”. (2015, p.5)
While there is much suspicion around how human impact on the
planet might play out, it is clear that sustainability has some role to play.
Yet I believe it would be politically naïve to imagine the global commu-
nity will adopt a just and equitable response to the ecological crisis under
a banner of sustainable development or geo-ecological management.
Throughout this book I address many of the challenges (and limitations)
RECONFIGURING THECHILD INTHEANTHROPOCENE

254
of ‘sustainability’ and ‘sustainable development’ (and its by-products proj-
ects like UNICEF’s child-friendly cities), as a means for addressing the
impending monstrous crisis. Simple (or even complex) sustainability mod-
els will fall short of explaining the complexities of messy entangled worlds
of the least privileged, child-bodies-objects in cities. The story of sustain-
ability is written as ‘if humans were still alone on stage, the only being who
out of its own free will is in charge of apportioning space, land, money and
value to the old Mother Nature’ (Latour 2015, p.6). By reconguring the
way we come to be in the world. By reconceiving the notion of the
Anthropocene as a means for unifying past ways of knowing that acknowl-
edged the inequities existing in a common world of humans and non-
humans, I am considering ifa new way forward through an expandingspecies
thinking that acknowledges human and non-human relations as intra-
active, agentic and lively. Our entangled history is revealed through the
ghosts that remain on our landscape, and our future story is unravelling
before our very eyes. This work of reconguring the Anthropocene means
getting beyond a view of the political as conned to ‘humans’, instead
geophysical forces, the non-living, the human and non-human are all
actors contributing to a transition between two epochs. In this transition,
‘sustainability’ might begin to look like a ‘time-bound and contingent goal
at best, not an absolute one, so environmentalists will need to construct
some other normative standard of value’ (Davies 2016, p.200). The nam-
ing of the Anthropocene becomes the way of remaking and reconguring
connections between humans and non-humans, demoting the old mantra
of sustainability (Davies 2016) and considering an ecological collective
concerned with difference and diversity instead of sameness. This will be
the struggle for a politics and ethics of plural ecologies.
Through a lens of the Anthropocene and by drawing on a variety of
tools including Barad’s notion of diffraction and intra-action, I have
sought to reveal the complexities of an entangled messy world illuminated
by listening to children and engaging through children’s voices their
encounters in and with the world. I have also endeavoured to support
Taylor’s (2013) adaption of Latour’s ‘common worlds’ notion and
advanced an indivisible human and non-human real-world collective
through the lives of children. Being and belonging to the precarity of life
on this nite planet, I have sought to account for how practices matter in
this reading of children in the Anthropocene and most importantly that
‘(e)xistence is not an individual affair. Individuals do not pre-exist their
interactions; rather, individuals emerge through and as part of their entan-
gled intra-relating’ (Barad 2007: preface). I have brought attention to the
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way the environmental crisis accentuates rather than diminishes differ-
ences between the rich and the poor, the privileged and the not-so-
privileged. It is important not to universalize childhood through an
articial separation of the human–non-human experience. I believe that it
is in these stories of the dispossessed, those children living in the global
south, post-Soviet countries, Pacic island states where the social and eco-
logical costs of toxic waste, natural disasters, climate change have been
widely experienced, we can nd some answers to the questions of our
shared future. In these communities where spiritual beliefs and ways of
knowing have for thousands of years acknowledged the way in which
human, non- human and the non-living world co-produce one another.
These are the communities often where indigenous peoples, slum dwell-
ers, women, children and youth and some governments have risen up
against multinational corporations and have sought to nd ways to be in
‘good’ relations with others. These are where the questions of ethics
(embracing ethics as a just, fair childhood conjoined with ecological post-
humanist collectivism), epistemology and ontology become devoted
attachments, inseparably woven through our deepest concerns. In these
ethos-onto-epistemological spaces is where new ideas for being in ecologi-
cal community with others could evolve, that is, ‘the environmentalism of
the poor might appropriately become the type of environmentalism most
readily associated with the idea of the Anthropocene’ (Davies 2016,
p.203).
I nish these stories of Children in the Anthropocene by considering ‘No
species, not even our own arrogant one pretending to be good individuals
in so-called Western scripts, acts alone; assemblages of organic species,
abiotic actors make history, the evolutionary kind and the other kinds too’
(Haraway 2016, p. 99). Childhood in the Anthropocene is premised on
import of making kin, ‘situatedness’ of being child relative to, and co-
mingling with ‘other’ kin. By making evolutionary history. By being sensi-
tive to how children come to know it, sense it, touch it, and be in it, we
can acknowledge how it is to be child with a host ofothers and the poten-
tial differences, through diffraction, their ‘acting’ as an ecological collec-
tivecan have on the ecosystems of the planet:
By the mere process of living, organisms change the very conditions upon
which they depend for subsistence. Their resource supply is changed by the
effects of their own interactions. The individual effects may be small but the
compound effects are large. Eventually they change the ecosystem. (Canan
1996, p.30)
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