Climate without Nature

This book offers a critical reading of the Anthropocene that draws on archaeological, ecological, geological, and ethnographic evidence to argue that the concept reproduces the modernist binary between society and nature, and forecloses a more inclusive politics around climate change. The authors challenge the divisions between humans as biological and geophysical agents that constitute the ontological foundations of the period. Building on contemporary critiques of capitalism, they examine different conceptions of human–environment relationships derived from anthropology to engage with the pressing problem of global warming.

• Proposes a new and deeper reading of the Anthropocene that will appeal to all scholars who are concerned with the long-term human-environment relationship
• Challenges uncritical narratives of the Anthropocene that reproduce modernist and technocratic notions of nature and limit its abilities to generate a politics of global warming
• Reviews, engages, and critiques new materialism, posthumanist, and ontologically oriented theory in the social sciences and humanities