Future. Contribution to the Environmental Humanities Lexicon
Futur : contribution au dictionnaire des humanités environnementales
Résumé
The future has long been viewed in terms of modernity’s human-centred categories of innovation, emancipation, progress and civilization while nature has been shoved to the realm of the ahistorical, understood as a fixed background for the development of society. These categories entail the subterfuge that the future is always “ours” to shape and build. While much needed attention has been given to the entanglements of humans and environments that are creating new connections and proximities in a global world, now is the time to address the shared futurities of nature-culture entanglements. This is not only because impending radical environmental changes orient human and non-human beings toward shared possibilities: this is also because non-humans (animals, plants, things, matter and ecological and physical forces) themselves instigate change and trigger the advent of futures often perceived as uncertain and unpredictable. “Our” future is unquestionably a more than human future.