Depoliticized Environments: The End of Nature, Climate Change and the Post-Political Condition ERIK SWYNGEDOUW “[t]he rise of the ‘the rights of Nature’ is a contemporary form of the opium for the people. It is an only slightly camouflaged reli- gion …. It is a gigantic operation in the depoliticization of subjects.” 1 “… [w]hat if at some time in the next few years we realise, as we did in 1939, that democracy had temporarily to be suspended and we had to accept a disciplined regime that saw the UK as a legit- imate but limited safe haven for civilisation. Orderly survival requires an unusual degree of human understanding and leader- ship and may require, as in war, the suspension of democratic government for the duration of the survival emergency.” 2 1. Welcome to the Anthropocene: celebrating the End of Nature Nobel-price winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen introduced in 2000 the concept of the Anthropocene as the name for the successor geological period to the Holocene. 3 The Holocene started about 12,000 years ago and is characterized by the relatively stable and tem- perate climatic and environmental conditions that were conducive to the development of human societies. Until recently, human develop- ment had relatively little impact on the dynamics of geological time. Although disagreement exists over the exact birth date of the Anthropocene, it is indisputable that the impact of human activity 1 A. Badiou, ‘Live Badiou – Interview with Alain Badiou, Paris, December 2007’, Alain Badiou – Live Theory, O. Feltham (ed.), (London: Continuum, 2008), 139. 2 J. Lovelock, ‘The Fight to Get Aboard Lifeboat UK’, The Sunday Times, 8 November 2009 http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/ environment/article5682887.ece – accessed 3 August 2010. 3 P. J. Crutzen and E. F. Stoermer, ‘The ‘Anthropocene’, Global Change Newsletter, 41 (2000), 17–18. 253 doi:10.1017/S1358246111000300 © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2011 Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 69 2011