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The Politics of the Anthropocene, John S. Dryzek and Jonathan Pickering (Oxford University Press, 2019), 224 pp., $78 cloth, $26 paper, $25.99 eBook.

Foregrounding both justice and environmental integrity, The Politics of the Anthropocene offers a vision of how to manage a world in which human activities have extensive, lasting effects on the Earth and its human and nonhuman inhabitants. Setting aside the question of whether we are in the Anthropocene (spoiler: we are), authors Dryzek and Pickering instead outline its unique characteristics and the accompanying implications for global governance that upholds social and planetary justice. The book envisions new institutions for the new epoch. In doing so, the authors depart from most scholarly work on the Anthropocene and the environment more generally. Many scholars of environmental governance have dissected the designs and efficacy of our current institutions with a view toward improving them—usually arguing for more or better institutions. The Anthropocene, argue Dryzek and Pickering, requires wholly new institutions. It is characterized by instabilities and even catastrophic changes in the Earth system. The politics of the Anthropocene, argue the authors, will require similarly dramatic shifts in governance. The organizing concept of the book is “ecological reflexivity,”which the authors define as a process that brings together the Earth system, humans, and nonhumans to reflect and respond to emerging challenges. Dryzek and Pickering seek to disrupt the “pathological path dependence” of existing institutions by replacing them with ones that will prioritize such reflexivity. They outline how to better listen to the Earth system in order to unite human activities and governance with the changing environment. Such reflexivity is inherently dynamic, allowing agents to learn, adapt, and even rethink their goals, rather than remain locked into a given set of rules. The book then explores how ecological reflexivity can safeguard, and indeed improve, justice and sustainability in theAnthropocene. The changes faced in this epoch will exacerbate current justice and sustainability issues and likely create new concerns. Dryzek and Pickering present reflexivity as a bulwark against such dire trends and propose ways to think about the duties that the citizens of one country may have to the citizens of other countries, to future generations, and to nonhumans. While the book avoids a definitional debate over the term “justice,” it does tackle the concept of sustainability and its co-optation by corporations and others that attempt to “greenwash” their practices in an effort to appear sustainable as a way to advance their own brand. Reflexive sustainability as outlined in the book, with its focus on learning from the natural world and grounding discussion in ecological realities, can counter greenwashing and other attempts to appropriate the idea of sustainability. The dynamic nature of reflexive sustainability allows those who practice it to attend to ecological instability while also being inclusive, justice oriented, and farsighted. These are high bars for future institutions, involving balancing dynamism with durability. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, Dryzek and Pickering find current institutions dealing with climate change, biodiversity, and sustainable development to be, at best, partial examples of reflexive governance.