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Contribution short abstract:

Can we redeem ourselves? I believe we can only if we recognise, in our social, cultural, and economic practices, our entangled complicity with the elite networks of eco-capital that perpetuate the Anthropocene. Decolonising alternatives exist and require the nomadic ethics of welcoming strangers.

Contribution long abstract:

Ethical treatments of the Anthropocene tend to be clinical or even analytical, frequently cataloguing tables of responsibilities among different agents and institutions from capital to political parties, thereby permitting my own habitus to slip through the cracks of accountability. Levinasian ethics cuts through the fog and calls on me to face my obligation to the other directly, in this case, children, asylum seekers, and nonhuman life and nonlife. In this paper, I show that I must indeed take on this onus head on by paying attention to my ways of living and their entanglements with interlocking elite networks and their systemic violence.

This paper is a philosophical confession to children of the Anthropocene. My generation's culpability has deep roots that must be acknowledged fully if we are to have a chance of redeeming climate justice. Those roots are the links that we (the privileged 5 percent in academia, think tanks, and other elite establishments, even when we bemoan our misfortune or financial deprivation) maintain with those deep in the inner circle of power. Our social roles in prolonging capitalism run well beyond our vegan, organic consuming selves; in fact they perpetuate them to our puzzlement. With an anarchic and non-identity based ethics of the other, we might just discern our complete responsibility as rentiers, patrons and allied base capacities of everyday deception.