The End of Nature: Paradoxes and Uncertainties in the Era of the Anthropocene and Geo-Constructivism

Abstract

A disconcerting paradox haunts the present situation of Man on Earth: the moment when it is perceived that human action on the planet has become its main force of artificial constitution and opened a new geological epoch - the Anthropocene - it is also the moment when one realizes that - although our anthropocentric position in the control of the planet seems strengthened to us - is faced with a circumstance of an extreme ecological precariousness of the world. 

Not only are the conditions of sustainability of the natural environment concerned, but also a rethinking of the concept of nature, which has been predicted to an early end. On the one hand, we declare the end of nature because, as if losing its own causality, it will no longer be the background, the surrounding and autonomous environment against which we carry out our activity as humans. On the other hand, the end of nature means entering into a historical phase in which, as if the modernization process was complete, a second nature can be established, a hybrid, humanized, artificial nature. Faced with the alarm of the planet's collapse, a geo-constructivist mythology answers: the Earth as a new post-natural planet that can be reconstructed and piloted through the potentials of an absolute engineering. 

In sum, the invoked end of nature does not mean its disappearance, but the awareness that in the geological age of the Anthropocene, nature, in a sort of a vicious cycle, can no longer be seen without be in collapsing and/or be in reconstituting. 

By reducing the planetary phenomenon to an urban scale, the movement of smart cities exemplifies the ambivalent crisis. As a complex of solutions optimized for the management of natural resources or for reducing the pollution effects, the new ecological cities are proposed as the main stronghold to reverse the tendency of natural degradation of the Earth. At the same time - and especially if we take into account urban complexes built from scratch, such as Songdo (South Korea), Dongtan (China) or Masdar (Abu Dhabi) - smart cities reflect the realization of fully computerized, interconnected environments and synthetically controlled, from transit to vegetation or meteorology. Regimented by ubiquitous technical planning, smart cities are spaces of isolation and limits that de-naturalize relationships, perpetuating and intensifying the modern scientific project that, since Galileo or Descartes, proposed to rationalize, dominate and possess nature.