Children in The Anthropocene: Rethinking Sustainability and Child Friendliness in Cities 1st Edition Karen Malone (Auth.)
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PALGRAVE STUDIES ON CHILDREN AND DEVELOPMENT
Children in the
Anthropocene
Rethinking Sustainability and Child
Friendliness in Cities
Karen Malone
Palgrave Studies on Children and Development
Series Editors
Michael Bourdillon
African Studies Centre Leiden
University of Zimbabwe
Harare, Zimbabwe
Jo Boyden
Department of International Development
University of Oxford
Oxford, United Kingdom
Roy Huijsmans
Institute of Social Studies
Erasmus University Rotterdam
Den Haag, The Netherlands
Nicola Ansell
Brunel University London
Uxbridge, Middlesex, United Kingdom
The series focuses on the interface between childhood studies and
international development. Children and young people often feature as
targets of development or are mobilized as representing the future in
debates on broader development problems such as climate change.
Increased attention to children in international development policy
andpractice is also fuelled by the near universally ratified United
Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and the recently
adopted Sustainable Development Goals.
Nonetheless, relatively little has been written on how the experience of
childhood and youth is shaped by development as well as how young peo-
ple as social actors negotiate, appropriate or even resist development dis-
courses and practices. Equally, the increased emphasis in research on
children and young people’s voices, lived experiences and participation has
yet to impact policy and practice in substantial ways.
This series brings together cutting-edge research presented in a vari-
ety of forms, including monographs, edited volumes and the Palgrave
Pivot format; and so furthers theoretical, conceptual and policy debates
situated on the interface of childhood and international development.
The series includes a mini-series from Young Lives, a unique 15-year
longitudinal study of child childhood poverty in developing countries.
A particular strength of the series is its inter-disciplinary approach and
its emphasis on bringing together material that links issues from devel-
oped and developing countries, as they affect children and young peo-
ple. The series will present original and valuable new knowledge for an
important and growing field of scholarship.
Children in the
Anthropocene
Rethinking Sustainability and Child
Friendliness in Cities
Karen Malone
University of Western Sydney Bankstown Campus
Milperra, New South Wales, Australia
How does one do research with children or for that matter any kind of
research in the epoch called the Anthropocene? Facing the apocalyptic
visions of ecologists and geologists about the impending disaster from
humanities’ impact on the planet, should we calibrate our research data,
check our sample size, run tests of validity and construct our interview
schedule? Is it business as usual? What does it mean to do research in
the Anthropocene when we are facing the end of the world or at least a
momentous and catastrophic series of events? Somehow the purpose and
meaning of research seem to shrink away. The significance of children’s
different learning styles, analyses of poor achievement and reports of
inequalities between groups fades against the face of an impending and
rapid world deterioration. When the existence of the species and the planet
is threatened, ‘normal research’ becomes somewhat trivial, even irrespon-
sible. ‘Hey kids, the world is going to end in terrible storms and other
extreme weather events, nuclear war, climate change … Now please turn
to page X and answer the questions!’
Karen Malone is the intrepid Australian childhood and sustainability
researcher who travels to places like Kazakhstan in a future that already
outstrips the dystopian mood of the Mad Max movies and in a strange
light begins to investigate the way life picks up again in the zone of radia-
tion where babies have been genetically malformed with faces that look
like the distorted and haunted faces of a Francis Bacon painting. In the
northern crossroads of this country of Central Asia once inhabited by
nomadic tribes, Karen has been involved with childhood and sustainability
research for five years. It is a country which has been used as the testing
v
vi FOREWORD: RESEARCHING CHILDREN’S PRECARITY IN THE POST-APOCALYPSE
secured. The Christian sees the humanity of man, the humanitas of homo, in
contradistinction to Deitas. He is the human being of the history of redemp-
tion who as a “child of God” hears and accepts the call of the Father in
Christ. The human being is not of this world, since the “world,” thought in
terms of Platonic theory, is only a temporary passage to the beyond.
(Heidegger Pathmarks, p. 244)
Michael A. Peters
viii FOREWORD: RESEARCHING CHILDREN’S PRECARITY IN THE POST-APOCALYPSE
References
Haraway, D. (2015). Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene,
Chthulucene: Making Kin. Environmental Humanities, 6, 159–165.
Heidegger, M. (1998). “Letter on Humanism,” Pathmarks (trans. William
McNeil). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
In the final chapter of the book, I write: ‘We are not all in the Anthropocene
together – the poor and the dispossessed, the children are far more in it
than others.’ It is the children who are at the centre of this book that
I would like to take a moment to acknowledge. Over the past 20 years,
I have worked in many nation states on a variety of child/environment-
focused research investigations around the globe. These projects all had in
common the desire to explore with children their everyday experiences of
growing up with and through the urban environments. During my travels,
I met amazing children who, even though their lives were challenging,
shared a smile along with their hopes and dreams for a better future for
themselves and the animals and plants they lived with. By engaging in
photography, mapping, walking, interviews and drawing, thousands of
children created data that could be documented and reported back to
other children, city councils, community members and UN officials. There
was a diversity of communities where I worked: orphaned children in
South Africa, children from rural and urban villages in the Cook Islands
and Papua New Guinea, rural and regional cities and towns in Albania,
Australia, Indonesia, Japan, Kazakhstan and Tanzania, and children in
slum communities in India, Nepal, Chile and Bolivia. I thank all these
children and their families for supporting the projects and allowing me
and my researchers to be welcome in your lives. While the children’s data
from Kazakhstan and Bolivia are most central to this book, it has been this
history of working with children across the globe that has informed my
ongoing insistence that children with the non-human others they occupy
the planet with need to have a voice in these precarious times of the
ix
x ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
3 Cities of Children 57
xiii
xiv Contents
References259
Index 275
List of Figures
xv
xvi List of Figures
Nothing epitomizes the precarious nature of the planet for me than the
view as you fly from the high mountain plateaus of the Altiplano towards
the El Alto airport and see spread out in front of you the immense sprawl-
ing valley where the city of La Paz is perilously situated. The image of a
vastness of crowded slum communities perched on the high reaches of the
escarpment and spilling down into the steep, treeless ravines and gorges of
the valley is breath-taking: a human imprint at a global scale. A fragility of
human and non-human worlds engaged in a dance of daily survival, hang-
ing on, it seems, by the sheer grit of determination, with children’s lives
being the most precarious in this shared vulnerability.
Gaia Vince reminds us:
We are an incredible force of nature. Humans have the power to heat the
planet further or to cool it right down, to eliminate species and to engineer
entirely new ones, to re-sculpt the terrestrial surface and to determine its
biology. No part of this planet is untouched by human influence – we have
transcended natural cycles, altering physical, chemical and biological pro-
cesses – (Gaia Vince, The Guardian, September 2015)
Since then, Crutzen and a host of earth sciences scholars and colleagues
‘have endeavored to establish an Anthropocene “timeline” by understand-
ing the impacts of humans on earth planetary systems up to, and during,
the epoch. They have promoted technologically based solutions for plane-
tary damage and advocated that the International Union of Geological
Sciences’ Commission on Stratigraphy officially inaugurate the term to
acknowledge the impact of humans irreversibly, changing the ecology of
the planet (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000, p. 17). Although cited many
times, it was the article in Nature in 2002 by Crutzen that laid some of the
means through which the concept of an Anthropocene epoch could be
further conceptualized beyond a scientific endeavour. In this article, he
included two further significant points to the argument. The first was to
acknowledge that the changes brought about by ‘humanity’ had largely
been caused by only 25 per cent of the human population. The second was
to consider that a bold and large-scale sustainability management project
needed to be advanced at a global level where all countries contributed to a
central goal (Davies 2016). According to Davies (2016), what both themes
did was acknowledge that humans in different parts of the world made dif-
ferent contributions to global changes and that a kind of ‘geo-engineering’
of the planet at a global scale by humans was the only way forward.
4 K. MALONE
While the term is still to be accepted, there has been much debate
about where the boundaries lie that would mark the arrival of the new
epoch of the Anthropocene. There have been a number of possibilities
proposed: the start of the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century,
or the beginning of the mid-twentieth century, known as the great accel-
eration of population, carbon emissions, biodiversity loss, plastic produc-
tion and the beginning of the nuclear age with the first atomic bombs
spreading detectable radiation to every strata of the planet (Davies 2016).
But for many scholars in the humanities these arguments are not as rele-
vant as what taking up the premise or challenge of the Anthropocene
provides. As an unsettling ontology that disrupts a persistent ‘humanist’
paradigm (Lloro-Bidart 2015), the concept of the Anthropocene allows
new conversations to happen around human-dominated global change,
human exceptionalism and the nature–culture divide. The Anthropocene,
rather than scientific facts, verifiable through stratigraphic or climatic anal-
yses, is a ‘discursive development’ that problematizes a human narrative of
progress that has essentially focused on the mastery of nature, domination
of the biosphere, and ‘placing God-like faith in technocratic solutions’
(Lloro-Bidart 2015, p. 132). In this way it can be employed as a heuristic
device for gaining a greater understanding of the role of human societies,
the part they have played, in changing the planet and the implications of
this on what it means to be human but also what it means to be in relation
with a non-human world that is impacted by the consequences of those
changes.
Davies (2016, p. 48) also notes that recent postcolonialist scholars
such as Dipesh Chakrabarty have questioned the adequacy of ‘radical
critiques of globalisation, capitalism and imperialism for confronting the
idea of a new geological epoch’. Chakrabarty, according to Davies
(2016), asks, what are the implications of the Anthropocene on our
understanding of human history? In our analysis of social and economic
injustices, whatever socioeconomic or technological choices are made or
critiqued as an extension of our celebration for freedom, rights, civility,
they will never be enough. He instead proposes a mixing together of the
entangled story of capital and species history (Davies 2016). Davies, sup-
porting Chakrabarty’s argument, raises in his book whether there is a
need for historians to trace a deeper history of humankind as a species
and over timescales of thousands and millions of years come to know
how we (as one of many species) have interacted with the rest of life on
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avait toutes les chances de ne pas ressembler à un conte des Mille
et une Nuits.
De toutes ces influences variées, sinon contraires, il résultait une
assez drôle de petite personne, dont la correspondance eût charmé,
je crois pouvoir le dire, même une autre que sa mère. Dans ce vieux
château situé au fond d’une province, elle trouvait de quoi remplir
des pages nombreuses. Rien n’était omis des moindres incidents
domestiques.
Au point où je suis arrivée, c’est-à-dire à l’époque où je
commençais à prévoir l’échec de Mina Kardaun, ma fille était
informée du changement qui se préparait dans notre existence. Elle
savait que nous allions vivre ensemble ; nos projets d’avenir
faisaient, bien entendu, le principal sujet de notre correspondance.
Où habiterions-nous ? La tante Bertha nous offrait de nous établir
chez elle. J’hésitais à accepter pour deux raisons : la première c’est
que le séjour d’Obersee, qui m’eût convenu à moi-même, fournissait
peu d’occasions de faire connaître une jeune fille dont
l’établissement serait bientôt mon principal souci. La seconde, c’est
que la bonne tante allait avoir, ce qui la désolait, un voisin peu
agréable pour des femmes destinées à vivre seules. On construisait
une forteresse à une demi-lieue du château ! Cette complication
m’avait à peu près décidée à vivre dans la capitale, au moins
jusqu’au mariage d’Élisabeth. Ma maison payée, c’est-à-dire dans
peu de semaines, j’en aurais les moyens. Déjà, sans avoir pris de
résolution définitive, je visitais des appartements.