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CHAPTER 1
The Anthropocene
The Promise and Pitfalls of an Epochal Idea
Rob Nixon
Time gets thicker, light gets dim
Allen Ginsberg, "The Gates of Wrath"
What does it mean to imagine Homo sapiens as not merely a historical but a geological actor, a force of such magnitude that our impacts are being written into the fossil record? What does it mean to acknowledge that, for the first time in Earth's history, a sentient species, our own, has shaken Earth's life systems with a profundity that paleontologist Anthony Barnosky has likened to an asteroid strike? How does that perceptual shift disturb widespread assumptions about the deep past and the far future, about planetary history, human power relations, and the dynamics between humans and nonhuman agents of Earth's metamorphosis? If our actions have become geologically consequential, leaving an enduring archive that will be legible for tens or even hundreds of millennia to come, what will that archive disclose about social relations, above all, about the unequal weight of human communities possessing disparate earth-changing powers? And, in terms of the history of ideas, why now? Why has the idea of Homo sapiens as a fused biological-geological force gained traction in the second decade of the twenty-first century, when in the twentieth century geologists typically dismissed our species' occupancy of this planet as not just ephemeral but as geologically trivial?
Such consequential questions follow from the turn to the Anthropocene, a hypothesis advanced by Nobel Prize–winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and paleoecologist Eugene Stoermer in 2000. Stoermer had been using the term "Anthropocene" informally since the 1980s, but it only achieved academic prominence when the Nobel Prize–winning Crutzen threw his weight behind it and, together with Stoermer, gave the term an interdisciplinary reach and urgency. Crutzen and Stoermer argued that the Holocene was history: the earth had entered a new, unprecedented geological epoch, triggered by human actions. The Anthropocene has many disputed beginnings: some date its emergence to the rise of sedentary agricultural communities roughly 12,000 years ago, others to 1610 and the colonization of the Americas, others still to the onset of Europe's industrial revolution circa 1800 or to the Trinity nuclear test of 1945.
Crutzen and Stoermer favored placing the golden spike — locating the Anthropocene break — in the late eighteenth-century beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, and this remains the most broadly cited position. According to their dominant Anthropocene script, over the past two and a quarter centuries we have been laying down in stone a durable archive of human impacts to Earth's geophysical and biophysical systems. Those long-term impacts have become particularly acute since 1945 during the so-called Great Acceleration. We have decisively altered the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle, and the rate of extinction. We have created unprecedented radionuclides and fossilized plastics. We have erected megacities that will leave an enduring footprint long after they have ceased to function as cities. We have changed the pH of the oceans and have shunted so many life forms around the globe — inadvertently and intentionally — that we are creating novel ecosystems everywhere. Of vertebrate terrestrial life, humans and our domesticated animals now constitute over 90 percent by weight, with less than 10 percent comprised by wild creatures. Over the past century the global temperature has risen ten times faster than the average rate of Ice Age–recovery warming. Over the next century that rate is predicted to accelerate at twenty times the average. What kinds of signals will all these momentous changes leave in the fossil record?
The Anthropocene's Interdisciplinary Energy
When Crutzen and Stoermer (2000) advanced their hypothesis, they couldn't possibly have imagined what an immense, omnivorous idea it would become. It took a while, but by the millennium's second decade those enthralled and appalled by the Anthropocene were being sucked, in their interdisciplinary masses, into its cavernous maw. Enthusiasts and skeptics poured in from paleobotany and postcolonial studies, from nanotechnology and bioethics, from Egyptology, evolutionary robotics, feminist psychology, geophysics, agronomy, posthumanism, and druidic studies. The classicists arrived alongside the futurists, where they mingled with students of everything from plastiglomerates to romantic prosody, from ruins to rewilding.
This has arguably been the most generative feature of the Anthropocene turn: the myriad exchanges it has stimulated across the earth and life sciences, the social sciences, the humanities and the arts, bringing into conversation scholars who have been lured out of their specialist bubbles to engage energetically with unfamiliar interlocutors. The Anthropocene, at its best, has prompted forms of interdisciplinary exchange that didn't exist before, giving impetus to creative collaborations across intellectually debilitating — dare one say fossilized — divides. Despite some of the nefarious uses to which it has been put, the Anthropocene paradigm can be used productively to pose large questions about the ways we partition knowledge and delimit being.
The humanities and arts have become vital to the conversational mix over what the Anthropocene can and should convey, which is as it should be. For the Anthropocene — or at least the iconoclastic part of it — began as a provocation, an exhortation, a shock strategy of a kind that we are attuned to in the arts and the humanities. What will the world look like if you change the frame, scramble the view, upend the perspective, in pursuit of some startled state of sensory and imaginative vitality? A quest for creative disturbance is one impulse behind the Cabinet of Curiosities, which gives body to a conviction that rarefied theorizing needs to be grounded in intimate encounters. For there is a real risk that the Anthropocene at its most compendious can be diminishing, promulgating — ironically, for a theory of expanded human agency — a mood of inaction, quietism, nihilism, inertia.
To give any version of the Anthropocene a public resonance involves choosing objects, images, and stories that will make visceral those tumultuous geologic processes that now happen on human time scales. The lively array of object-driven stories assembled for the Cabinet of Curiosities affords immense biomorphic and geomorphic changes a granular intimacy. Encounters with the granular — as opposed to the grandiose — world, can, depending on one's perspective, conceal or reveal. Imaginative revelations may prompt modest moments of self-transformation, but they need not be limited to that, as we have seen in the ever more dynamic relations emerging between the visual arts, the performing arts, and the climate justice movement, a dynamic that has helped shift political and ethical sightlines. Above all, to insist on the value of imaginative encounter — be it with a fossilized Blackberry, a cryogenic zoo, a jar of sand, a cement mixer, or the lonely mating call of an extinct bird — is to refuse the quantifiers ownership of the Anthropocene, to insist that the immeasurable power of storytelling and image making is irreducible to the metrics of human impacts. Indeed, the arts and humanities can serve a restraining order on the runaway hubris of technocratic Anthropocene expertise by resisting the political logic of Team Future, whereby those who crunch the numbers are first in line to engineer the new worlds.
If the Anthropocene is reverberating across the humanities, this makes another kind of sense, for it shakes the very idea of what it means to be human. To invest a young species like Homo sapiens with geologic powers — to open up the human to what in the postenlightenment would be considered inhuman time scales — is a tectonic act. We're simply not accustomed, maybe even equipped, to conceive of human consequences across such a vastly expanded temporal stage, across which we stride as (more or less) ambulatory rocks. To revisit Barnosky's asteroid trope, what does it mean for the "being" in "human being" to depict us as a hurtling hunk of rock that feels?
The novelist Amitav Ghosh, in a series of perceptive lectures, has suggested how the Anthropocene turn can help us recognize the imaginative limits of the forms — from the arts to urban planning — favored by enlightenment modernity. Ghosh (2016) observes how the legacy of enlightenment modernity's attachment to linear progress has suppressed modernization's contradictions, hindering the imaginative and strategic responses to the Anthropocene and the global climate crash. The realist novel that fed off and advanced an idea of linear progress typically centered on a small cast of characters and a delimited landscape that became background to the unfolding action. But the Anthropocene has made the environment as background to the growth of character untenable, as it becomes increasingly difficult to ignore the inconceivably vast forces emanating from the environment, forces entangled with human actions but scarcely subordinate to them. The realist novel, in contrast to a form like the epic, has proven ill-equipped to make the vast scalar leaps across space and time that the Anthropocene demands, leaps from the cosmological to the microbial, from the deep past to the remote future. Moreover, the design of enlightenment forms like the realist novel and the colonial city downplayed the irruptive powers of nonhuman actors: the unruliness of volcanoes, rivers, locusts, rats, shape-shifting leopards, and moody mountains, all of which in the epic speak to the arrogant limits of an isolationist view of human development.
Rational enlightenment forms like the realist novel and the colonial city, Ghosh suggests, have suppressed vital intuitions about the vulnerability of human designs to forces that other art forms and other cosmologies have kept alive through an awareness of human precariousness before the powers exercised (for good and ill) by nonhuman actors. Indeed, the refusal of the human-nonhuman distinction — by now such a central theme of Anthropocene thought — has persisted in many cultures in a state of contradictory entanglement with developmental modernity. Could the rise of animal studies be linked in this way to climate chaos, to a disillusionment with a separationist, hubristic ideology of hyperationality, and to a renewed fascination with the instinctual, the bodily, the ineluctable connectedness between us and the biota that permeate our lives? And could it be, as Ghosh argues in a suggestion of direct pertinence to the Cabinet of Curiosities, that digital culture's reassertion of imagistic power over the enlightenment's elevation of the word has created a hybridized image-word milieu that is more responsive to the challenges of Anthropocene representation than the word-besotted, linear forms that the enlightenment extolled?
The imaginative questions that the Anthropocene provokes are accompanied by historical ones. The Anthropocene has profound implications for the meaning and object of history, reframing the future by rethinking the past as shaped by a fused biological-geological actor. Crutzen and Stoermer's neologism is both historically belated — suggesting that people possessed planetary geomorphic powers long before they realized it — and anticipatory. For if our actions have indeed propelled us beyond the Holocene, the new epoch we have set in motion is in its infancy. The Anthropocene thus pulls us simultaneously into deep pasts and deep futures that are unfamiliar, uncomfortable terrain for historiography.
The implications of the Anthropocene for history making are inseparable from the history of technology. New technologies of detection have generated new geophysical archives of inquiry that are reshaping — across the sciences, the social sciences, the humanities, and the arts — assumptions about what stored knowledge looks like, about archival reading practices, and about the interdisciplinary literacy such readings may require. The advent of paleoclimatology and dendroclimatology, our ability to posit tree growth rings, ice cores, deep sea cores, and fossil soils as proxies for past climates, the rise and spread of drones, and ever more elaborate satellite imaging all allow us to generate more varied perspectives, newly minute and newly vast, on planetary life and time.
But if new technologies of detection have proven crucial to the Anthropocene's burgeoning authority, the technological dimension can mask relations of power. Who gets to don the white coat of expertise? Who becomes central, and who marginal, in the contest over narrative authority? As Susan Schuppli (2014) observes in her work on material witnessing, traces of the apparently inanimate world can be given voice by increasingly sophisticated technologies. But there is inevitably conflict over what stories those material traces release in, for example, a war tribunal or a truth commission. Who gets to dragoon those traces into delivering certain kinds of stories as opposed to others? Such questions pertain with equal force to the contouring of the Anthropocene grand narrative. From the perspectives of anticolonialism, feminism, multispecies ethnography, queer ecologies, and environmental justice, among others, we are seeing the emergence of a kind of strategic witnessing, a pushback against the risk that the Anthropocene may become a resurrected selective enlightenment in disguise, an apparently novel but potentially regressive Age of Man.
Anthropocene Pitfalls
To gauge the promise and pitfalls of the Anthropocene we need to position the proposed epoch in the history of ideas. As has been noted, Crutzen and Stoermer's theory had several partial precursors. But there is a more recent history that has been overlooked. Crutzen and Stoermer began promoting the Anthropocene together in 2000, but for almost ten years it achieved very little public resonance. The debates over the merits of the term were rarely heard outside narrow intellectual corridors, dominated by a handful of earth scientists, life scientists, and archaeologists. How do we explain the belated emergence of a more public Anthropocene? How do we explain the paradigm's lost decade?
Less than a year after Crutzen and Stoermer launched their explosive vision of humanity as geological actor, 9/11 happened. Then in 2002 the Bali bombings killed 202 people (Australian tourists comprising the largest number), followed by the Bush-Blair invasion of Iraq in 2003, the 2004 Madrid train bombings, and the 2005 bombings in London. Of course, greater numbers of people were killed elsewhere — by state and nonstate actors — but those bombings were the ones that most viscerally shook Westerners' faith in history's continuity, catapulting them into a feeling that "people like us" had entered a new age of violent vulnerability. Against this backdrop, time shrunk. And the efforts of an atmospheric chemist and a paleoecologist to expand time — or, metaphorically, to explode our temporal norms — was no match for the bomb-dominated temporal frameworks of the day. The vast scales of geologic time, even the more modest intergenerational times scales of accelerated climate change, were inimical to the dominant perceptions of catastrophe. In a news cycle fixated even more than usual on instantaneous violence, a preoccupation with Islamic extremism marginalized efforts to dramatize how extreme climate change and extreme extractive practices (tar sands, cold-water deep-sea drilling) would incrementally inflict untold human and ecological casualties. The 2008 Great Recession reinforced this bias toward instant crisis, especially in the United States, where Big Carbon bankrolled the zero-sum ideology of jobs versus the environment as part of its perpetual war on climate science. In short, during the millennium's first decade, both the long emergency of the climate crisis and the even longer emergency of the Anthropocene struggled to gain urgency in an inhospitable political and temporal frame.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Future Remains"
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