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• Use of fire enables surface dwelling humans to access the Earth's subsurface. • Early human fire use linked to evolution in tectonically active landscapes. • Mineral extraction and chambered fire underpin political power in ancient city-states. • Gunpowder and explosive weapons crucial to expansion of early modern empires. • Climate change calls for new ways of using fire to negotiate the subsurface. The geopolitical - or more specifically pyropolitical – crisis triggered by combusting fossilized hydrocarbons can be viewed in the context of a much longer human history of utilising fire as a means of traversing and utilising the Earth's subsurface. The paper develops a conceptual framework to show how the developing fire-subsurface nexus advances through a succession of different human enfoldings or 'involutions' of fire that serve to intensify its force. This is explored at three critical junctures: the earliest hominin uses of fire in the geologically active landscape of the Great Rift Valley, the chambering of fire by ancient artisans and the material and political significance of its products in emergent city-states, and the role of explosive weapons in gunpowder empires. Finally, the paper circles back on the question of how revisiting the longue durée of human fire-subsurface entanglements might help us conceive of alternative pyropolitical realities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the growing interface between climate-induced mobilities and participation in ‘global care chains’ under conditions in which climate change is already impacting on lives and livelihoods – especially in the Global South. The authors reconsider discourses on ‘climate migration’ in the light of everyday caring practices and adaptive responses to climate stress, evaluating how climate policy interferes with ‘grassroots’ flows of care. Early engagements tended towards alarmist predictions of mass climate-induced displacement, triggering proposals to ‘secure’ potential host nations against anticipated influxes. Recently, apparently more sober approaches have emerged, promoting labour migration as contributing positively to climate ‘resilience’. These new approaches encourage more able and resourceful people from under-resourced, climate-vulnerable regions to join trans-local or transnational labour markets – which often equates with predominantly female care workers entering global care chains. Effectively, this means that those best equipped to provide care in places where it is most urgently needed end up providing care in relatively privileged, less climate-vulnerable places. Questioning the climate justice implications of this mobilization against the gradient of vulnerability, the authors offer suggestions about how climate policy could actually support caring practices in the places where ordinary people struggle at the sharp edge of climate change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In its explicit engagement with the possibility of human extinction, the Anthropocene thesis might be seen as signalling a ‘crisis of natality’. Engaging with two works of fiction – Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces – the article explores the embodied, affective and intimate dimensions of the struggle to sustain life under catastrophic conditions. Though centred on male protagonists, both novels offer insights into a ‘stratigraphic time’ associated primarily with maternal responsibility – involving a temporal give-and-take that passes between generations and across thresholds in the Earth itself. If this is a construction of inter-corporeality in which each life and every breath has utmost value, it is also a vision that exceeds the biopolitical prioritization of the organismic body – as evidenced in both McCarthy’s and Michaels’ gesturing beyond the bounds of the living to a forceful, sensate and enigmatic cosmos. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For at least two centuries most social thought has taken the earth to be the stable platform upon which dynamic social processes play out. Both climate change and the Anthropocene thesis – with their enfolding of dramatic geologic change into the space-time of social life – are now provoking social thinkers into closer engagement with earth science. After revisiting the decisive influence of the late 18th-century notion of geological formations on the idea of social formations, this introductory article turns to more recent and more explicit attempts to open up the categories of social thought to a deeper understanding of earth processes. This includes attempts to consider how social and political agency is both constrained and made possible by the forces of the earth itself. It also involves efforts to think beyond existing dependencies of social worlds upon particular geological strata and to imagine alternative ‘geosocial’ futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern western political thought revolves around globality, focusing on the partitioning and the connecting up of the earth’s surface. But climate change and the Anthropocene thesis raise pressing questions about human interchange with the geological and temporal depths of the earth. Drawing on contemporary earth science and the geophilosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, this article explores how geological strata are emerging as provocations for political issue formation. The first section reviews the emergence – and eventual turn away from – concern with ‘revolutions of the earth’ during the 18th- and 19th-century discovery of ‘geohistory’. The second section looks at the subterranean world both as an object of ‘downward’ looking territorial imperatives and as the ultimate power source of all socio-political life. The third section weighs up the prospects of ‘earth system governance’. The paper concludes with some general thoughts about the possibilities of ‘negotiating strata’ in more generative and judicious ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Responding to claims of Anthropocene geoscience that humans are now geological agents, social scientists are calling for renewed attention to the social, cultural, political and historical differentiation of the Anthropos. But does this leave critical social thought’s own key concepts and categories unperturbed by the Anthropocene provocation to think through dynamic earth processes? Can we ‘socialize the Anthropocene’ without also opening ‘the social’ to climate, geology and earth system change? Revisiting the earth science behind the Anthropocene thesis and drawing on social research that is using climatology and earth systems thinking to help understand socio-historical change, this article explores some of the possibilities for ‘geologizing’ social thought. While critical social thought’s attention to justice and exclusion remains vital, it suggests that responding to Anthropocene conditions also calls for a kind of ‘geo-social’ thinking that relates human diversity and social difference to the potentiality and multiplicity of the earth itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to the United States (US) Energy Information Administration (EIA), the annual US natural gas consumption is forecast to grow from 25.6 trillion cubic feet (TCF) in 2012 to 31.6 TCF in 2040 (1 CF≈28.3 L). The main component of natural gas is methane, a potent greenhouse gas (GHG). As the natural gas supply chain grows, there is increased scrutiny over leaks and losses that occur during the multiple stages from development to end users. West Virginia University's (WVU) Center for Alternative Fuels, Engines, and Emissions conducted leak and loss audits at five natural gas compressor and storage facilities in the Barnett Shale region of Texas. We have reported elsewhere on the site-specific total leak and loss rates.[11-13] This article provides an environmental and economic assessment of the total methane (natural gas) losses at these facilities. Other studies report the methane emissions in terms of tons per year, whereas this paper examines the environmental impact of these emissions through an equivalent CO2 emissions rate using multiple global warming potentials. This paper also examines the lost revenue from these leaks and the overall social cost of carbon (SCC) that could be assessed to these facilities under a proposed carbon tax. The methane leaks and losses from these sites result in CO2 equivalent emissions of over 70 000 and 24 000 metric tons annually, using a 20-year and 100-year global warming potentials (GWPs), respectively. Using a SCC of $37 per metric ton, this would result in annual costs of $2.6 million and $ 915 000 for these sites based on the respective GWPs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, earth scientists have been discussing the idea of the ' Anthropocene' - a new geologic epoch defined by human geological agency. In its concern with the crossing of thresholds in Earth systems and the shift into whole new systemic states, the Anthropocene thesis might be viewed as the positing of a disaster to end all disasters. As well as looking at some of the motivations behind the Anthropocene concept, this article explores possible responses to the idea from critical social thought. It is suggested that the current problematization of planetary 'boundary conditions' might be taken as indicative of the emergence of a new kind of 'geologic politics' that is as concerned with the temporal dynamics and changes of state in Earth systems as it is with more conventional political issues revolving around territories and nation state boundaries: a geo-politics that also raises questions about practical experimentation with Earth processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Early engagement with geoengineering by social scientists indicates a certain suspicion over the motives and modes of operation of scientific research in the field. In part, this reflects the prominence of the critique of the politics of emergency in recent social and political thought: a thematisation that links securitisation measures with foreclosures of the political. This paper turns the attention back on the social sciences, arguing that recent styles of ontological and political thought do not prepare us well for engaging with geologic issues in general, and geoengineering in particular. It is suggested that, rather than viewing geoengineering discourses and imaginaries as a retreat from politics, we might view them as playing an important role in opening up new kinds of politics oriented towards earth systems and their dynamics. This new 'geologic politics' involves a turn from issues hinging on territorial divisions of the earth's surface toward the strata that compose the deep temporal earth. As a political challenge, the question of how to live with dynamic and stratified earth systems not only promises to extend the scope of politics, but also points to the 'inhuman' limits of the political per se. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical inquiry into the relationship between natural hazards and disasters has raised pressing questions about the uneven exposure and resilience of different social groups. This paper argues that human-induced climate change and its implication in a range of extreme events extends and complicates the pursuit of justice in the context of differentiated vulnerability to hazards. But the challenge of living with natural hazards can provoke and inspire the idea of global environmental justice in other ways. Sustained consideration of the unpredictability of physical environments draws us into engagement with the temporality and spatiality of earth processes. It points to the ways that any extended place-based inhabitation must involve demanding accommodations to environmental uncertainty - raising questions about how to 'do justice' to these achievements. Confronting forms of hardship that are triggered by the dynamics of the earth itself can also be taken as a prompt to conceive of environmental justice not only in regard to what others deserve or are entitled to, but in terms of what might be offered simply in response to their suffering. In this way, the paper proposes, thinking through natural hazard and disaster might play a part in re-imagining the very concept of environmental justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The abrupt climate change thesis suggests that climate passes through threshold transitions, after which change is sudden, runaway and unstoppable. This concurs with recent themes in complexity studies. Data from ice cores indicates that major shifts in global climate regimes have occurred in as little as a decade, and that for most of the span of human existence the climate has oscillated much more violently than it has over the last 10,000 years. This evidence presents enormous challenges for international climate change negotiation and regulation, which has thus far focused on gradual change. It is argued that existing social theoretic engagements with physical agency are insufficiently geared towards dissonant or disastrous physical events. Wagering on the past and future importance of abrupt climate change, the article explores a way of engaging with catastrophic climatic change that stresses the inherent volatility and unpredictability of earth process, and the no-less-inherent vulnerability of the human body. Drawing on Bataille and Derrida, it proposes a way of nestling the issue of environmental justice within a broader sense of immeasurable indebtedness to those humans who endured previous episodes of abrupt climate change, and considers the idea of experimentation and generosity without reserve. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today, concern about population displacement triggered by climate change is prompting some sovereign states to tighten security measures, as well as inciting ethically and politically motivated calls to relax border controls. This paper explores resonances between the current climate predicament and events in the mid-Holocene. Paleoclimatic and archaeological evidence is reviewed, suggesting that an abrupt turn to cooler, drier weather in the 4th millennium BCE triggered high volume migration to fertile river valleys—most fully documented in Mesopotamia but also visible in other regions around the world. This unprecedented agglomeration of bodies has been linked to the emergence of intensive irrigated agriculture and the rise of city-states. In conversation with the ancient Sumerian Gilgamesh epic, this paper draws upon archaeological research to conceptualize urban wall building and emergent practices of graphical notation as different forms of mediation. Both city walls and early writing, it is argued, deal with the interplay of mobilism and sedentarism, and both 'media' entail tactile, plastic use of local materials—namely riverbank clay. This paper addresses the paradox that the underpinning of 'civilization' by these once experimental media may now be fundamentally restricting socio-political, cultural, cognitive and embodied capacities to engage effectively with climate-driven upheaval. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper scrutinizes the assertion that knowledge gaps concerning health risks from climate change are unjust, and must be addressed, because they hinder evidence-led interventions to protect vulnerable populations. First, we construct a taxonomy of six inter-related forms of invisibility (social marginalization, forced invisibility by migrants, spatial marginalization, neglected diseases, mental health, uneven climatic monitoring and forecasting) which underlie systematic biases in current understanding of these risks in Latin America, and advocate an approach to climate-health research that draws on intersectionality theory to address these inter-relations. We propose that these invisibilities should be understood as outcomes of structural imbalances in power and resources rather than as haphazard blindspots in scientific and state knowledge. Our thesis, drawing on theories of governmentality, is that context-dependent tensions condition whether or not benefits of making vulnerable populations legible to the state outweigh costs. To be seen is to be politically counted and eligible for rights, yet evidence demonstrates the perils of visibility to disempowered people. For example, flood-relief efforts in remote Amazonia expose marginalized urban river-dwellers to the traumatic prospect of forced relocation and social and economic upheaval. Finally, drawing on research on citizenship in post-colonial settings, we conceptualize climate change as an 'open moment' of political rupture, and propose strategies of social accountability, empowerment and trans-disciplinary research which encourage the marginalized to reach out for greater power. These achievements could reduce drawbacks of state legibility and facilitate socially-just governmental action on climate change adaptation that promotes health for all. • Use invisibility to explore biases in understanding of climate-health risks. • Review invisibilities linked to marginalization of peoples, places, diseases. • Contend that invisibilities arise from structural imbalances in power and resources. • Tension shapes whether the benefits of being seen by the state outweigh the costs. • Propose strategies to enable the marginalized to reach for greater power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]