LAUSR

gical time as part of a broader modernizing dynamics of western cultures (Michael Northcott and Yves Cochet, respectively), and what Jean-Baptiste Fressoz argues has been a process of ‘losing the Earth knowingly’ through modes of thought (e.g. economics) that have become disconnected from – even uninterested in – the material basis of production. The challenges of the Anthropocene can hardly be overstated, and Biermann tackles them in full acknowledgement that his proposals would be perhaps the biggest overhaul of multilateralism since the UN was created. It is a call to reform – in the original sense of taking a new form – institutions that seek the consent of the governed in full view of the conditions under which global governance must now proceed. Echoing the need to face the Anthropocene in its fullest sense, Isabelle Stengers offers a thought-provoking chapter in which she argues, drawing a nuanced distinction between notions of Gaia and declarations of the Anthropocene, that the positioning of scientific, public and private networks must be faced in their totality, and for the often very different ways in which they come to understand reality. Her argument both sounds out the ways in which different networks decamp from complexity into their preferred silos, and calls for a renewed urgency to rethink precisely the movements and materials that shape responses to the Anthropocene. These two books call attention to numerous critical dimensions of environmental politics in the Anthropocene. Whether through a careful appraisal of existing institutions and their prospects for renewal, or academic and political thinking to pace the geological accelerations that human impacts now warrant, both are recommended as environmental politics enters a new epoch. Perhaps the most startling and shared feature of these books is the paucity of space and attention given to the many postcolonial and de-colonial voices that demand to be heard before geology is wielded to shape global institutions. These voices, along with the many forms of secular society that have emerged in reference to religions other than Christianity, must certainly be given more place – arguably priority – in environmental politics in the Anthropocene.