I’ve found it impossible to keep up with the many books and monographs that have accrued around the emerging idea that Earth and its inhabitants have entered a geological epoch shaped by humans — the Anthropocene.
This is the case even though (and partly because) I am a member of the Anthropocene Working Group, the body created by the Subcommission of Quaternary Stratigraphy of the International Commission on Stratigraphy “to examine and debate the case for formalizing this term within the Geological Time Scale.” (Yes, that is a mouthful.)
That’s why I was attracted to a fascinating tour of the expanding array of conceptions and critiques of this proposed epoch written by Robert Macfarlane for The Guardian last week. Macfarlane, a much-lauded writer who directs English studies at Cambridge University’s Emmanuel College, calls himself a student of “cultural environmentalism.”
I encourage you to read the entire essay. The link is below. But here are a couple of my favorite excerpts, followed by a brief note about some unmentioned voices.
Macfarlane first explores how the sweeping dimensions of the Anthropocene, in time and geography (and I’d add uncertainty), make it a tough fit for conventional narrative or mental models:
The idea of the Anthropocene asks hard questions of us. Temporally, it requires that we imagine ourselves inhabitants not just of a human lifetime or generation, but also of “deep time” – the dizzyingly profound eras of Earth history that extend both behind and ahead of the present. Politically, it lays bare some of the complex cross-weaves of vulnerability and culpability that exist between us and other species, as well as between humans now and humans to come. Conceptually, it warrants us to consider once again whether – in Fredric Jameson’s phrase – “the modernization process is complete, and nature is gone for good,” leaving nothing but us.
There are good reasons to be skeptical of the epitaphic impulse to declare “the end of nature.” There are also good reasons to be skeptical of the Anthropocene’s absolutism, the political presumptions it encodes, and the specific histories of power and violence that it masks. But the Anthropocene is a massively forceful concept, and as such it bears detailed thinking through. Though it has its origin in the Earth sciences and advanced computational technologies, its consequences have rippled across global culture during the last 15 years. Conservationists, environmentalists, policymakers, artists, activists, writers, historians, political and cultural theorists, as well as scientists and social scientists in many specialisms, are all responding to its implications. A Stanford University team has boldly proposed that – living as we are through the last years of one Earth epoch, and the birth of another – we belong to “Generation Anthropocene” [link].
Literature and art are confronted with particular challenges by the idea of the Anthropocene. Old forms of representation are experiencing drastic new pressures and being tasked with daunting new responsibilities. How might a novel or a poem possibly account for our authorship of global-scale environmental change across millennia – let alone shape the nature of that change? The indifferent scale of the Anthropocene can induce a crushing sense of the cultural sphere’s impotence.
Given that he has a lexicographic bent (most notably in “Landmarks“), it’s not surprising that Macfarlane’s essay has a section on evolving Anthropocene vocabularies:
Projects are presently under way around the world to gain the most basic of purchases on the Anthropocene – a lexis with which to reckon it. Cultural anthropologists in America have begun a glossary for what they call “an Anthropocene as yet unseen,” intended as a “resource” for confronting the “urgent concerns of the present moment.” There, familiar terms – petroleum, melt, distribution, dream – are made strange again, vested with new resilience or menace when viewed through the “global optic” of the Anthropocene.
Last year I started the construction of a crowdsourced Anthropocene glossary called the “Desecration Phrasebook,” and in 2014 The Bureau of Linguistical Reality was founded “for the purpose of collecting, translating and creating a new vocabulary for the Anthropocene.” Albrecht’s solastalgia is one of the bureau’s terms, along with “stieg,” “apex-guilt” and “shadowtime,” the latter meaning “the sense of living in two or more orders of temporal scale simultaneously” – an acknowledgment of the out-of-jointness provoked by Anthropocene awareness. Many of these words are, clearly, ugly coinages for an ugly epoch. Taken in sum, they speak of our stuttering attempts to describe just what it is we have done.
That section has an amusing coda on some contemporaneous neologisms that have accompanied “Anthropocene” into dictionaries:
The word “Anthropocene” itself entered the Oxford English Dictionary surprisingly late, along with “selfie” and “upcycle”, in June 2014 – 15 years after it is generally agreed to have first been used in its popular sense.
Click here to explore all of the words in the O.E.D.’s Class of 2014, which also include “bloatware” (?), “hip-hopping” and “pescatarian.”
Toward the end, Macfarlane describes the varied challenges to the idea of an Anthropocene epoch:
As the idea of the Anthropocene has surged in power, so its critics have grown in number and strength. Cultural and literary studies currently abound with Anthropocene titles: most from the left, and often bitingly critical of their subject. The last 12 months have seen the publication of Jedediah Purdy’s “After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene,” McKenzie Wark’s provocative “Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene” and the environmental historian Jason W. Moore’s important “Capitalism in the Web of Life.” Last July the “revolutionary arts and letters quarterly” Salvage launched with an issue that included Daniel Hartley’s essay “Against the Anthropocene” [link] and Miéville, superbly, on despair and environmental justice in the new epoch [link].
Across these texts and others, three main objections recur: that the idea of the Anthropocene is arrogant, universalist and capitalist-technocratic. Arrogant, because the designation of the Anthropocene – the “New Age of Humans” – is our crowning act of self-mythologization (we are the super-species, we the Prometheans, we have ended nature), and as such only embeds the narcissist delusions that have produced the current crisis.
Universalist, because the Anthropocene assumes a generalised anthropos, whereby all humans are equally implicated and all equally affected. As Purdy, Miéville and Moore point out, “we” are not all in the Anthropocene together – the poor and the dispossessed are far more in it than others. “Wealthy countries,” writes Purdy, “create a global landscape of inequality in which the wealthy find their advantages multiplied … In this neoliberal Anthropocene, free contract within a global market launders inequality through voluntariness.”
And capitalist-technocratic, because the dominant narrative of the Anthropocene has technology as its driver: recent Earth history reduced to a succession of inventions (fire, the combustion engine, the synthesis of plastic, nuclear weaponry). The monolithic concept bulk of this scientific Anthropocene can crush the subtleties out of both past and future, disregarding the roles of ideology, empire and political economy. Such a technocratic narrative will also tend to encourage technocratic solutions: geoengineering as a quick-fix for climate change, say, or the Anthropocene imagined as a pragmatic problem to be managed, such that “Anthropocene science” is translated smoothly into “Anthropocene policy” within existing structures of governance. Moore argues that the Anthropocene is not the geology of a species at all, but rather the geology of a system, capitalism – and as such should be rechristened the Capitalocene.
There are signs that we will soon be exhausted by the Anthropocene: glutted by its ubiquity as a cultural shorthand, fatigued by its imprecisions, and enervated by its variant names – the “Anthrobscene,” the “Misanthropocene,” the “Lichenocene” (actually, that last one is mine). Perhaps the Anthropocene has already become an anthropomeme: punned and pimped into stuplimity, its presence in popular discourse often just a virtue signal that merely mandates the user to proceed with the work of consumption.
I think, though, that the Anthropocene has administered – and will administer – a massive jolt to the imagination. Philosophically, it is a concept that does huge work both for us and on us. In its unsettlement of the entrenched binaries of modernity (nature and culture; object and subject), and its provocative alienation of familiar anthropocentric scales and times, it opens up rather than foreclosing progressive thought. What Christophe Bonneuil calls the “shock of the Anthropocene” is generating new political arguments, new modes of behaviour, new narratives, new languages and new creative forms. It asserts – as Jeremy Davies writes at the end of his excellent forthcoming book, “The Birth of the Anthropocene” – a “pressing need to re-imagine human and nonhuman life outside the confines of the Holocene”, while also asking “how best to keep faith with the web of relationships, dependencies, and symbioses that made up the planetary system of the dying epoch.” Systemic in its structure, the Anthropocene charges us with systemic change.
Please explore Macfarlane’s essay in full in The Guardian.
There’s no way, as I said at the outset, to keep track of the full flow of literature around this subject, so it’s not surprising that Macfarlane’s overview left out some important voices, including Christian Schwägerl, a Berlin-based science journalist and author of “The Anthropocene: The Human Era and How It Shapes Our Planet,” which was recently published in a revised English edition. The book is valuable for its dispassionate account of how this concept arose. (He also doesn’t mention the much-discussed “An Ecomodernist Manifesto.”)
I also recommend “Was the Anthropocene Anticipated?” — a paper valuably demonstrating that the modern concept of the Anthropocene, focused on disrupted Earth systems, is very different from earlier conceptions, some dating to the 1800s, of a human-shaped environment. That paper is by Clive Hamilton, an Australian environmental ethicist who chastised me and others for proposing that a “good” path could be found in this era of human-dominated Earth systems, and Jacques Grinevald, a historian focused on the interface of environment and technology and member of the Anthropocene Working Group.
Just to prove how fast things are moving, I have to add another vital new reading to the list: “Framing the Anthropocene: The good, the bad and the ugly,” in the April issue of The Anthropocene Review. This paper is an engaging deconstruction of the many emerging views of this age (including mine) by Simon Dalby, a CIGI chair in the political economy of climate change at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario.