Julien Rebotier - Risks and the Anthropocene

5 Foreword

6 Introduction

7 Begin Reading

8 Conclusion

9 List of Authors

10 Index

11 End User License Agreement

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SCIENCES

Geography and Demography , Field Director – Denise Pumain

Geography of Risk , Subject Head – Samuel Rufat

Coordinated by Julien Rebotier

First published 2021 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms and licenses issued by the CLA. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be sent to the publishers at the undermentioned address:

ISTE Ltd

27-37 St George’s Road

London SW19 4EU

UK

www.iste.co.uk

John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

111 River Street

Hoboken, NJ 07030

USA

www.wiley.com

© ISTE Ltd 2021

The rights of Julien Rebotier to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021945744

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78945-041-5

ERC code:

SH2 Institutions, Values, Environment and Space

SH2_7 Environmental and climate change, societal impact and policy

SH2_11 Human, economic and social geography

Samuel RUFAT

Institut universitaire de France, Paris, France

Since 1980, more than 1.5 billion people have died in disasters and the UN estimates that annual damages will exceed $400 billion by 2030. Global trends of increasing exposure, high inequality, rapid urban development and worsening environmental degradation raise concerns that risk levels are becoming an impediment to sustainable development. In this context, the “migration” of the notion of the Anthropocene from the earth sciences to the social sciences has led to both hopes and controversies while polarizing attention around environmental emergencies. Are we witnessing a renewal, a refoundation or a refutation of knowledge, practices and levers of action around risks and catastrophes?

With regard to “Geography of risk”, books on this theme take stock of the renewal of concepts, approaches, issues and tools at the interface between risks, societies and the environment, because risks do not always translate into disasters and the increase in risks is not inevitable. It is possible to reduce the exposure of populations, to reduce their vulnerabilities, to support their adaptation or to support the resilience of societies in the face of risks that cannot be reduced or shared. Risk prevention, disaster reduction and mitigation of their effects require interdisciplinary approaches, in a subtle balance between the social demand for coordinated action at all levels and the imperative of reflexive criticism, in order to deal with the substance of the problems rather than the most visible symptoms or the most fashionable solutions. This book shows that, like other such notions. “The Anthropocene, even if it is deconstructed and criticized by the social sciences, seems to function as a performative category (which tends to impose a conception of the world), more than as a heuristic category (which allows meanings to emerge around conceptions and relationships to the world)”.

While scientists’ calls to action on disasters and climate are ancient and necessary, the call to the social sciences themselves remains fundamental. This book examines the shift toward the “social sciences of the Anthropocene” by showing that the imperatives of the emergency and action are engulfed in a constant deficit of reflexivity. Julien Rebotier has brought together a multidisciplinary team of French-speaking specialists, researchers and teachers, to put their expertise into dialogue. The authors offer a critical analysis of the links between risks, the Anthropocene and environmental emergencies, without glossing over the controversies and the political and ethical issues. They show in a fine way how the emphasis on climate, earth or life sciences, when social sciences are not audible in environmental research, tends to orient both the questions and the answers in a way that is not neutral: “The environmental emergency and the thinking of the whole deny the less fortunate their very status as dominated and lock them into a double punishment: they are both the most vulnerable and those whose voice counts the least (or for whom we speak the most)”.