This tension is nicely illuminated by Greyson in the following way: In her dissertation on Vital Reenchantments: Biophilia, Gaia, Cosmos and the Affectively Ecological, Lauren Greyson therefore defines the Anthropocene as “the age of the human, in which we have acquired unthinkable influence at precisely the time that we realize just how small the world is and how unpredictable the consequences of our own activities are.” What renders this background an interesting frame of reference for this essay is the tension between human cognition and action in the age of the Anthropocene. However, the idea of human domination of the Earth system is far from unproblematic, which is why the Anthropocene is also often evoked to stress that humans have left their mark on Earth to such an extent that the effects of their agency have become noticeably recursive - for instance in the form of global warming. The notion of the ‘Anthropocene’ as such is far from uncontested, but the term is usually used to designate “the present, in many ways human-dominated, geological epoch,” as the chemist Paul Crutzen proposed in a Nature article at the beginning of the new millennium. To this end, I briefly turn to a particularly topical issue that has received increased attention in ecosystem ecology in the last 15 years: the debate on the Anthropocene. One might wish to describe the dynamics that produce emergent emergencies in ecosystems a little more precisely. Emergent emergencies will therefore be understood in the following as states of severity that have arisen from insufficient understanding of how complex systems operate.
It also includes the cognitive ways in which humans make sense of - or misunderstand - the workings of ecosystems, and these attempts necessarily rely on forms of knowledge that are always culturally mediated. This not only entails the ethical aspect of how human beings act in such systems, often seeking to acquire control or mastery over them. According to Stacy Alaimo, the notion of the ‘ecosystem’ can be regarded as the central concept in ecology because it paradigmatically captures the discipline’s interest in “systems of exchange, which includ the cycles of nutrients, energy and chemicals.” But the concept also appeals to the interest of this issue in emergent emergencies as it inevitably raises the question of the human embeddedness in complex natural systems.
Because of the massively “interdependent interactions” of their elements, such systems display “a complexity of form not predictable from antecedent conditions.” While it is certainly true that “he systems of the world are numberless” and that emergent behaviors can be observed in a whole range of natural and social systems, the specific phenomenon that this essay wants to look at more closely is that of the ecosystem. It implies that states of emergency can arise out of cognitive inability to comprehend ‘emergence’ - a term used to describe the behavior of complex systems marked by “circular recursion” rather than straightforward linearity or mono-causality. The felicitous concept of ‘emergent emergencies,’ as proposed by the editors of this issue, suggests a close interrelationship between an ethical and a cognitive problem. 1_Introduction: ‘Emergent Emergencies’ as Ethical Consequences of Cognitive Failure