Risking attachment in the Anthropocene

The notion of risk is now commonplace. For Ulrich Beck (1992) who introduced the term “risk society” in the early 1990s, contemporary ecological crises are not questions about the destruction of nature, but rather ones of how modern society deals with self-generated uncertainties that are no longer limited by time or space. These are dangers that escape and elide risk, calculation and insurability. In the face of permanent material threats, Beck argues that modern industrial society normalizes risk, and we become blind to side effects and consequences. Most of the time those of us in developed countries carry on our daily lives as if everything is insurable, as if we’re neither causing environmental damage nor being affected by it, a sort of amnesia to the wider implications of ordinary action. For example, where I live, the mining and export of coal is a commonplace and everyday activity. Despite the challenges of climate change, coal trains deposit their loads, in ever increasing quantities, to the port of Newcastle (Australia) to be exported to power stations in China and elsewhere. The ethics of “deplete, destroy, depart” (Grinde and Johansen 1995 in Weir 2009, 119) go on in a way that becomes ordinary, everyday and unremarkable, and the dangers of dust, environmental degradation and climate change, are in Beck’s terms, normalized.