This paper will explore the idea that climate change actually spells the end of nature in ways that are relevant to the debate on geoengineering and climate change. However, it is important to understand properly what the end of nature means – an issue that the paper tries to make clear. Above all, it refers to the fact that nature and society are entangled in deep, complex, and irreversible ways. Nature is not independent from human beings anymore, since the former has been deeply humanized by the latter. The mixture of the natural and the human is thus increasingly seen as the dominant feature of socionatural relations, as though it were the logical conclusion of a historic process of mutual imbrication. Yet this statement of fact does not necessarily lead to a normative endorsement of the human dominion of nature. On the contrary, it can be taken as a realistic starting point for the gradual transition towards a sustainable society. Then again, neither it prescribes the opposite solution, i.e. going back to some sort of socionatural harmony via a human ‘retreat’ from nature. It is precisely in this context that geoengineering should be normatively weighed as a social tool against climate change, instead of just being rejected outright for being a human invasion of ‘the natural’. If nature has already been deeply humanized, why should geoengineering be deemed unacceptable or undesirable? Is there a limit beyond which human intervention on nature becomes non-ethical, or the problem with geoengeenering has to do with uncertainty and risk, i.e with its hubristic character? On the other hand, who is going to decide about that in a liberal-democratic context? This paper will try to answer to these questions and will suggest that there is a place for geoengineering within a post-natural understanding of sustainability.
