Environmental historians have written mountains of books describing how capitalism, settler colonialism, racism, and a host of other “-isms” are bad for birds, bees, water, soil, animals, humans—pretty much everything. We know the guilty parties, many of whom are corporations long bankrupt or people long dead. Yet, amid the volumes describing the disaster, we are still left with questions related not to responsibility but rather to accountability for the Anthropocene. Buried in the word “accountability” flutters the recognition that enumeration—that is, fairness as measured in numbers—is critical. Accounting is as much a verb as a noun, procedure as much as verdict. As such, the focus of this pathway is of accountability as a process, as a corrective. What would an accounting of the Anthropocene look like? Who is counting what? Who controls the instruments of tabulation? What scale might accountability take—national, international, communal, or personal? On a planet where every place is affected by the Anthropocene, which forms could justice take? 

Thinking about accountability as a process, Nabil Ahmed, Adrian Lahoud, Godofredo Pereira, and Eyal Weizman of the research group Forensic Architecture—in an Anthropocene Curriculum seminar on geo-politics5.2.1—argued for a shift in the understanding of action from timeline to map. Rather than being occupied with who did what when, they advocate investigations of relations on a spatial plane, mapping out “simultaneous sites, actions, and causes” to see impacts interacting universally.

Spatial arrangements often reveal racial hierarchies. Our era of rampant identity politics is shot through with claims-making, affirmations, and denials of accountability. Reform politics, protest movements, and plans for Green New Deals are saturated with desires for restitution and reparation. Many now understand that a minority of people got a hold of natural resources and had their way with them. And we sit here now enjoying the souring fruits of past violence. As Sarah Lewison writes in “Measuring Loss,”5.2.2 our identities matter “as white people from settler or immigrant ancestries who enjoy advantageous property relations through no efforts of our own.” Lewison is concerned with how the historical production of property has disproportionately negated the existence of some people, placing them in the way of railroads, polluting factories, chain gangs, guns, toxins, and bulldozers. The loss to be measured goes back centuries. How do we account for the sheer volume of loss?

Firtz Habekuss, in “A River Indicts,”5.2.3 has a solution to justice along the Mississippi River. He advocates “saving the world in court.” Around the globe, he argues, there are environmental laws that regulate only the permitted level of destruction, yet no one can speak up for the rights of the Amazon rainforest, he points out. Habekuss calls for a set of “international laws” to protect the environment. Just as states passed laws on crimes against humanity in the postwar period, he proposes a contract between humans and all other life on the planet. 

Contracts, however, are the same vehicles of property and domination that caused the problem in the first place. How could courts, which have been designed to protect property, shift so radically as to redistribute it? 

Michael Marder and Matthew Hall have debated legally and ethically recognized personhood for plants on philosophical grounds for over a decade. Hall, in “In Defence of Plant Personhood,”5.2.4 argues along lines of animist intellectuals that plant personhood cannot be granted as an abstract “right” but rather must be grounded in situational relationships of care that enable plants and all “nonhuman persons” to flourish. In practical terms, Hall seconds E. O. Wilson’s proposal to set aside half the globe for other-than-human purposes.5.2.5

Unfortunately, conservation also has a long and storied history, at times enacting old patterns of domination in new ways. Liv Østmo and John Law in “On Land and Lakes: Colonizing the North”5.2.6 describe how Norwegian laws ban traditional Sámi practices in the Sápmi Lakeland. The same families fishing for hundreds of years have passed on fishing practices that sustain the population of powan fish they desire, but this relationship is not purely extractive. As Sámi cast their nets, they care for the lakes. The weights on the nets churn up the bottom so that a type of sedge plant that clogs waterways cannot take root. If the spring melt does not scour the lake bottom, they clear debris to keep the water flowing, so the powan can thrive. Sámi are thus doing the work of the spring melt, which has weakened with the thawing of the permafrost. They leave fish bones and oil as an offering. Sámi teachings hold that there is no taking without giving.

Kim TallBear argues likewise that in the relationship between science and Indigenous studies, reciprocity is elemental. She notes the superficiality of diversity efforts in North American postsecondary institutions, alongside the seduction and fashion of big science. It is difficult, TallBear writes in “Close Encounters of the Colonial Kind,”5.2.7 to find technoscience allies who are willing to trust the map of Indigenous knowledge and to be rerouted through an alternative geography of relations.⁠

During the Anthropocene River Campus, as part of the seminar “Claims/Property,”5.2.8 New Orleans activist Shana M. griffin led a tour through the city. griffin had previously followed her own trail of accountability, shifting from work on women’s health and incarceration to establishing a community land trust: a new form of land ownership to repair centuries of stolen labor and property among New Orleans’ Black community and the Pointe-au-Chien Indian Tribe of southern Louisiana. For griffin, property is a fraught category, a vehicle of expropriation and enslavement. She looks to the collective land arrangements of the Point-au-Chien community as a model for communal ownership in New Orleans to restore land and community for Black residents.

 Orit Halpern, Johannes Bruder, and Karolina Sobecka in “The Mont Pelerin Rewrite”5.2.9 also look for solutions in collective forms. They argue that capitalism is a “system that liberates fictions to rule over the social.” Rather than being turned into “resilient” citizens who are supposed to figure out how to manage climate change and pollution on their own, they ask for a different kind of accounting: “How can we begin to think of climate risk measurement practices that are utilized for critiquing authority” and expose how “‘individual’ failures are in fact systemic in origin?”

Subsumed in capitalist imaginaries, accountability becomes more than a personal choice. As Paul Edwards puts it in “Taking on the Technosphere”5.2.10: “Being born into infrastructures means being pre-enrolled, from the very beginning of your life, in supporting, maintaining, and possibly extending infrastructures.” Gabrielle Hecht, debating with Edwards, disagrees. Seeing a vast, controlling, subsuming “technosphere” (as Peter Haff does) removes human agency, justifies inequality in access to the technosphere, and portrays the status quo as a given. Haff, Hecht complains, does not “offer a world in which humans can do anything to make living on this planet more just, more tolerable, less damaging to each other and to other beings.”

Natasha Myers concurs that an exclusive focus on humans is part of the problem. In “How to Grow Liveable Worlds,”5.2.11 she rejects the singular attention on the Anthropos in the framing of the Anthropocene. Recognizing that “we are of the plants,” Myers resolves that we must learn to conspire with plants in what she calls a Planthropocene, an aspirational episteme that seeks to seed new plant-people relations in the here and now. Beronda Montgomery, in her book Lessons from Plants,5.2.12 applies a similar plant-forward perspective. In studying how plants interact with others, Montgomery sees the importance of establishing an ecosystem of support, collegiality, and community. Plants offer, for Montgomery, a salient demonstration of the power of diverse communities to overcome environmental injustice.

 For some scholars, issues of accountability lie in one’s personal past. Lucas Bessire returns to his ancestral farm on a dry Kansas plain in his book Running Out.5.2.13 He explores his farming grandfather’s singular responsibility for the loss of an entire river through reckless irrigation practices. When his grandmother obsessed over the lost river, her husband had her institutionalized for insanity. The pain extracted from landscapes reflect in bitter family relations generation after generation. Pain also translates into powerlessness—a failure among local farmers today to do anything but race to drain the aquifer before others do.

The artist Ravi Agarwal5.2.14 arrives at a place where small, rusty locks and chains block his passage, though it is a place to which he belongs: his mother’s ancestral home, where he spent his childhood summers in the searing hot desert of Basawa in northwestern India. For modernizing reformers, the region was considered barren with no economic interest, despite the facts that it held unique biodiversity and that, for thousands of years, humans built and maintained small-scale infrastructures to collect and use gravity to channel rainwater for pastoral-agricultural purposes. “Barren,” Agarwal and his collaborator, the cartographer Paulina Lopez, show, is in the eye of the beholder. In the late 1940s, reformers got busy transforming wasteland into a productive economy. They built a 650-kilometer canal, channeling water from the Himalayas. They dug mines and built India’s nuclear-testing facilities. In Agarwal’s lifetime, his mother’s homeland became an anthropogenic epicenter. Maps, Lopez says, shape perception of realities in a particular space. In the case of Basawa, maps helped remake the desert into a labyrinth of toxicity, erosion, and sandstorms shot through with miles of silted canals. In response, the artist and cartographer joined forces to draw maps that show the interdependent features of the landscape—how landscapes, humans, and more-than-humans interact. Agarwal and Lopez demonstrate how forgotten family, community histories, and technologies offer solutions, like ghosts from the past, to sustainable futures.

Of course, the most basic form of accountability is simply the act of counting. Since 2009, geologists of the Anthropocene Working Group have been scanning the sedimentary record as they try to figure out if the Anthropocene is a new epoch, defined by markers that appear across the globe in the same geological time bands. One of the most persistent and easily detectable markers is radioactive caesium-137, liberated during nuclear weapons tests and nuclear power plant accidents. Once in the atmosphere, the radioactive isotopes took to the trade winds circling the globe. In my key contribution, originally published in Anthropogenic Markers, I describe how “slow scientists” have been accounting for what happened after billions of curies of radioactive energy were released in nuclear bomb tests, saturating landscapes and percolating into the food chain, including human bodies. Unfortunately, that accounting will be ongoing into the future.