Temporalities in security: Long-term sustainability, the everyday and the emergent in the Anthropocene

Recent years have witnessed extensive debates about the environmental risks of global warming and human-induced climate change prompted by excessive accumulation in the atmosphere of greenhouse gases mainly as a result of the burning of fossil fuel and the industrialised practices of animal farming. The Anthropocene – identified by Crutzen and Stoermer (2000: 17) as ‘the recent age of man’ – represents a new and distinct epoch characterised by the fact that ‘the human imprint on the global environment has now become so large and active that it rivals some of the great forces of nature in its impact on the functioning of the Earth system’ (Steffen et al., 2011: 842). Its defining features are both the trend towards global warming and the radical instability expected of future environments. It represents a new geological epoch in which human existence has become a geological force, signalling a fundamental shift in the capacity of humans to exert influence over and reshape the Earth’s atmospheric patterns and, hence, determine the direction of the climate for millennia to come. In the process, human beings have become a geological agent disturbing the parametic (i.e., boundary) conditions needed for our own existence.