‘If humans now author the rocks, atmosphere and oceans with anthropogenic signatures, then the inhuman (as nature, earth, geology) becomes decidedly changed as a result.’ (Kathryn Yusoff) If geoscience is to be pressured to recognize the historical and social condition of possibility of its truth claims, it is no less important that social scientists and humanities scholars acknowledge that their own core concepts and categories have geophysical conditions of possibility.
An anthropogenic marker in the rock record, in which melted plastic associated with campfires and bits of nylon rope have bonded beach pebbles and sand to form a new kind of rock: plasticglomerate
(Patricia Corcoran, Charles J. Moore, and Kelley Jazvac)
In search of definition:
The Anthropocene is the first geological era to include humans as defining influences. The concept was first proposed in 2000 by the Nobel prize-winning geochemist Paul J. Crutzen and the limnologist (oceanographer of lakes) biologist Eugene F. Stoermer.. For Crutzen, the Anthropocene is a key concept to explain the gravity of our current situation. According to his obituary in Anthropocene (!) magazine, Crutzen “pioneered a new view of nature and of ourselves, with his hypothesis that human beings can change the Earth in such profound and lasting ways that they usher in a new chapter in its history—the geological epoch of human beings”
For the humanities and culture at large, the term Anthropocene can seem to be yet another contribution to the proliferation of “buzzwords,” especially those vague ones that can mean all things to all people. But most importantly from a theoretical point of view, the concept amalgamates Earth science issues with critical social thought into a geo-historical account, one that projects into the future. For critical thinking, it is important to understand the Anthropocene’s role in combining both the sciences and the humanities, and it is vitally important for understanding current dangers to life on Earth.
Currently, the Anthropocene provides a catchy label for a common curiosity and anxiety about the state and future of Earth after the ‘end of Nature’ – i.e. the end of ‘the idea of Nature as pure place untouched by human hands, that has been so central to modern environmentalism.” For one wag, “the Anthropocene has catalyzed the Anthropo-scene” approaching it as a scientific question, intellectual zeitgeist, ideological provocation, new ontologies and science fiction. (Lorimer)
The uncontroversial claim that the traces of the Anthropocene will last for thousands, if not millions of years places it among the extremely long durations of geological time. One effect of this latter thought has been to spawn a genre of geo-historical writing that extrapolates from the present to the future, and looks back to the present day from the far or near-distant future. (see below) While an official body exists to consider the question of the Anthropocene, ‘The
Geological Time Scale is held dear by geologists and it is not amended lightly’
Of course, tracing the genealogy of this line of thought pales in importance compared to the stakes involved: basically the habitability of the Earth, for all its forms of life. (In its particular way, the concept directly addresses a core research program of this hypertext document, and resembles ideas of chaos, which started this inquiry in the first place.)
What is most shocking about the concept of the Anthropocene today is the conjunction of an extremely brief period of human history, known as “The Great Acceleration” (since 1945), and its potential ramifications in geological time and scale.
We are officially still in the Holocene epoch of the Quaternary period, Cenozoic era and Phanerozoic Eon. The Holocene epoch dates from the last glacial retreat, some 11,500 years ago, which inaugurated a stable geological epoch in which human civilization expanded and flourished. That brief civilization-friendly span of exceptionally clement and stable climate that has reigned on this planet ever since the violent climatic vacillations of the Pleistocene eased off.But
Human impacts associated with the “Great Acceleration” since 1945 mark a phase change, a rupture from the mild conditions of the Holocene that undermines the optimistic and hubristic dreams of those calling for new rounds of enlightened anthropocentrism. For the major irony of the Anthropocene is that, though named as that era in the planet’s natural history in which humanity becomes a decisive geological and climatological force, it manifests itself to us primarily through the domain of the ‘natural’ becoming, as it were, dangerously out of bounds -- in extreme or unprecedented weather events, ecosystems becoming simplified or trashed, die-back or collapse. The irony of the Anthropocene is that we are conjuring ourselves as ghosts that will haunt the very deep future. (David Farrier).
As a scientific question, the definition and starting date of the Anthropocene is currently being considered by the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS). The ICS has the authority to establish the Anthropocene as a geological epoch (an act of “bureaucratic nominalism”) . They still have to reach agreement on the starting date, and on an unambiguous, global, isochronous, stratigraphic marker: the so-called “golden spike,” more technically known as a Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP) (perhaps a reference to the completion of the transcontinental railroad) that will allow specialists throughout the world to recognize its beginnings in the rocks.
Example of a Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP), or “golden spike, marking the base of the Ediacaran Period. Located in Ediacara, South Australia. (from Ellis, Erle C.. Anthropocene: A Very Short Introduction ).
The current leading candidate for that marker was deposited in the immediate aftermath of WWII. As of July 16, 1945, the clear radioactive signals left by atomic explosions offer a serious candidate for the “golden spike:” a thin layer of dust, easy to detect throughout the world in sediments of rocks and in ice cores, that may well allow the geologists to reach consensus. Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia : Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, Polity Press, 2017.
Note: While a clear stratigraphic boundary is a scientific convenience, the base layer of the Anthropocene can be an ongoing boundary formation which “emerges from the mixture rather than the division, of geological and human.” The Japanese term jinji described the porous unconformity separating the predominantly human-made layers of reclaimed land from from earlier strata. It was particularly vulnerable to seismic tremors, tsunamis, and nuclear meltdown in Fukushima.
But there is a growing concern in some parts of the scientific community that the knowledge practices (and valued objectivity) for periodisation in geology are being stretched – perhaps beyond their utility – to answer what are fundamentally novel political and speculative questions — that formally defining the Anthropocene “would encourage a mindset that will be important not only to fully understand the transformation now occurring, but to take action to control it." (through geoengineering?) Presumably, for some scientists at least, this is a step too far. For others, this may precisely be the point. Another sore point is that the working group made a decision on when to set the boundary, even though it had not yet settled on a golden spike in the stratigraphic record. “It is an imposition of ideas onto matter, shaping evidence to fit, but it should be the other way around,” and perhaps the issues around the term itself are distractions from the job at hand. In this view, the evidence that humans are causing potentially catastrophic changes to Earth’s functioning as a system is rich, multifaceted, detailed, and robust—the product of decades of research. There is no need for an Anthropocene epoch to understand or recognize these changes.
Another unprecedented dimension in the geology of the Anthropocene, is referred to as “anticipatory geology,” in which forensic imaginary precedes the evidence, like the idea of “pre-crime” investigation.
The human sciences and humanities in general do not have mechanisms for achieving consensus. In fact they thrive on the invention of new concepts. Political and speculative differences are more the norm than is consensus. “The Anthropocene is the sign of our power, but also of our impotence.” (Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene.)
For the humanistic disciplines, the choice of beginning date – from very remote (since the appearance of Homo faber) to quite recent (since the industrial revolution) or extremely recent (since the Second World War) – correlates with profound political and moral differences. The more remote the date, the less the current forms of capitalism are at issue and thus the more responsibilities are diluted. In fact, some authors propose a completely different name, with a focus on the environmental history of capitalism.
The environmental historian and Marxist critic Jason W. Moore asks, “Are we really living in the Anthropocene – the ‘age of man’ – with its Eurocentric and techno-determinist vistas? Or are we living in the Capitalocene – the ‘age of capital’ – the historical era shaped by the endless accumulation of capital? In the words of literary theorist Tom Cohen, the very idea of the Anthropocene ‘seems the epitome of anthropomorphism itself – irradiating with a secret pride invoking comments on our god-like powers and ownership of the planet’ VBut it is equally important to remember that Earth systems are inherently changeable, with or without human influence.
Be that as it may, theorists of the Anthropocene generally agree that it is underway, but debating its starting date. Moore argues for an earlier starting point than most scientists. For Moore, if we “Start the clock in 1784, with James Watt’s rotary steam engine, we have a very different view of history – and a very different view of modernity – than we do if we begin with the English and Dutch agricultural revolutions, with Columbus and the conquest of the Americas, with the first signs of an epochal transition in landscape transformation after 1450. That transition marked a turning point in the history of humanity’s relation with the rest of nature.”
While Moore’s insights into the rapacious appetites of Capitalism for “free” resources and labor show clear links between that particular politico/economic system and its indifference towards the environment, it is hard to imagine scientists agreeing on referring to this same time frame as the Capitalocene, which provides so little crossover or alignment between the earth sciences and human activity.
Another contentious issue is the choice of the prefix anthropos. The term ascribes agency to humanity as a whole, and it provides a single subject for “Global Nature” of “Planet Earth”. The Anthropocene proposes a new socio-geological order, in which “Only One Earth” is inhabited by a single human community — in which Global nature and Global humanity are two entangled parts of a fragile system. In this dispensation, ‘Sustainability” stands for that moment when the planet turned into a total global environment. But any critic worth her salt will be quick to point to the ideological dimension of this pairing of the earth and humanity as illustrated, for example, in the title of a film about the American space program, “For All Mankind”, that omits all reference to the geo-poitical rivalry between the US and the USSR. Nonetheless, the global environmental movement serves as an aspirational model for the politics of the global community, and polycentrism might be a means for organizing it.
Critics of ascribing agency to humanity as a whole rather than to particular groups, such as corporations or Western elites, claim that “Major sociologists and philosophers have decided to jettison from ‘Spaceship Earth’ the whole analytic, explanatory, and critical arsenal of the human and social sciences.… Whole books can now be written on the ecological crisis, on the politics of nature, on the Anthropocene and the situation of Gaia, without so much as mentioning capitalism, war, or the United States, or even the name of one big corporation.” In this view, inequality, commodification, imperialism, patriarchy, racism and much more – all have been cleansed from ‘Humanity’, the Anthropocene’s point of departure. (Jason Moore) At stake is how we understand capitalism in the web of life – which in turn shapes emancipatory strategies. for Jason Moore, “anthropogenic arguments obscure capitalogenic realities.”
And according to Bruno Latour, “It would be absurd in fact to think that there is a collective being, human society, that is the new agent of geohistory… because there is no way to unify the Anthropos as an actor endowed with some sort of moral or political consistency, to the point of charging it with being a character capable of acting on this new global stage…But here we are: what could have been just a passing crisis has turned into a profound alteration of our relation to the world. It seems as though we have become the people who could have acted thirty or forty years ago – and who did nothing, or far too little.” ( Latour, Bruno. Facing Gaia : Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, Polity Press, 2017.)
For Dipesh Chakrabarty, the emergence of humans as geological agents in the context of global warming leaves behind their historical experience as biological subjects. Naomi Oreskes reminds us (readers) that “human activities were insignificant compared to the force of geological process. And once they were. But no more.” As Chakrabarti points out, “To call human beings geological agents is to scale up our imagination of the human.” If geoscience is to be pressured to recognize the historical and social condition of possibility of its truth claims, it is no less important that social scientists and humanities scholars acknowledge that their own core concepts and categories have geophysical conditions of possibility.
Is there a species We?
Humans are intellectually transformed when considered a species. E.O. Wilson recommends that we achieve self-understanding “in the interest of our collective future”, but we humans never experience ourselves as a species. (Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Climate of History, Critical Inquiry / Winter 2009) Nor, for that matter do any other life forms.
With paleobiology, the species is an immense, discrete entity: “mankind” in the words of Crutzen and Stoermer. On this macroscale, there are humans and non-humans, with the human species emerging in the Anthropocene as a global agent, the master of the planet over eons of time.
But through the lens of microbiology, “the human species” is dramatically less coherent. A microbiological view of “the human” forces historians to grapple with the idea that each “individual” is better understood as a collectivity of species, and “humanity” as an archipelago of multiple, dependent life forms. The microbial part of us evolves more rapidly than the non-microbial part of us and can respond more quickly to environmental changes. The human body contains trillions of microorganisms—outnumbering human cells by 10 to 1… the distinction between “us” and “them,” human and microbe, has eroded away on this biological scale.
Clark, Timothy. Ecocriticism on the Edge : The Anthropocene As a Threshold Concept, Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2015
Today, historians and cultural critics reject any “universalizing spirit” or single homogeneous civilization in favor of “many specific, material and pragmatic practices” of a humanity polarized into rich and poor. Clearly scientists who advocate the idea of the Anthropocene are saying something quite to the contrary. (Chakrabarti, p. 214)
nonetheless, it is still possible to consider anthropos as an expression of cosmopolitanism, encapusulated in Socrates’ expression, ““I am not an Athenian or a Greek, but a citizen of the world.” This ideal is neither simplistic nor reactionary. The Anthropocene still calls for a global subject, and perhaps for effective global political institutions.
Material Artifacts
One way of identifying the material qualities of the Anthopocene would be to identify materials that did not previoiusly exist. Here are some examples of material artifacts specific to the era.
Trinitite Glass formed by nuclear test in Almagordo
While glass itself is not a new material, the processes that produced trinitite were altogether unprecedented: namely nuclear testing that resulted in glass pieces scattered over the desert floor that had fused its sand into glass. In this respect, one can think of trinitite as the materialization of the “golden spike”.
New materials specific to the Anthropocene that fuse rock and plastic concretely manifest the fusiion of natural processes with human production that characterize this new geological period. “Plastiglomerates” are already found on beaches (see illustration above)
corium ‘Elephant’s Foot” Chernobyl
Another material specific to the Anthropocene is Corium. It has only been produced five times in the core meltdowns of Three Mile Island, Chernoblyl, and Fukuyama. Corium is "a lot like lava, a blackish-oxide material that gets very viscous as it cools.” (see Chernobyl “elephant’s foot”) The exact composition of a particular corium flow can vary, but it will remain radioactive for centuries. In a real nuclear reactor core meltdown, such as occurred at both the Chernobyl and Fukushima Dai'ichi plants, the molten uranium dioxide melts and reacts with the zirconium metal cladding on the fuel rods, and with the surrounding steel and concrete structure, forming a lava which scientists have called corium.
Shahar Livne, Lithoplast Material Samples
Experimental geo-materials are currently being developed, like the one pictured here. This particular design response to the call for predictive geology is an experimental material called Lithoplast, developed by the designer Shahar Livne. Lithoplast combines waste products from industrial processes, treating them as resources rather than pollutants. It emulates the geological process of metamorphism, but in highly accelerated form, in which bits of plastic can be fused into rocks. Livne imagines a time when plastic is no longer produced, but might be mined. Her project is fueled by a desire to shift the perspective on such waste materials, especially plastic. Shahar suggests that instead of responding to and treating them as pollutants, we think of them as precious materials that might one day be mined in the future.
Other materials are being developed from living materal such as bioplastic made from algae in the work of Eric Klarenbeek and Maartje Dros. (See also their 3D printed mycelium chair in Christian Hubertm “Building on the Ruins.”
So what is distinctive about the humanistic concept of the Anthropocene? It seems to elevate mankind into the dominant global actor, whether humans are ready or not. But it may instead function as an ironic signpost for a coming moment when the earth’s bill comes due, in the form of major system collapses.
Donna Haraway sees the Anthropocene as a boundary event, like the K-Pg boundary between the Cretaceous and the Paleogene, “The Anthropocene marks severe discontinuities; what comes after will not be like what came before. I think our job is to make the Anthropocene as short/thin as possible and to cultivate with each other in every way imaginable epochs to come that can replenish refuge. Right now, the Earth is full of refugees, human and not, without refuge.
Technofossils
Like dinosaurs, who left their bones and footprints behind for future generations to discover, humans will also leave a footprint behind – one made up of material goods unique to mankind that are so different from anything else produced by animals in the history of the Earth that they deserve their own name: technofossils. Humanity's equivalent of the dinosaur's footprint will be in the form of a wide array of technofossils such as motorways, cities, airports, toothbrushes, ballpoint pens and mobile phones – everything that we build or manufacture. "Millions of years from now, long after humans have gone, technofossils will be the defining imprint on the strata of the human epoch that people increasingly call the Anthropocene. If any palaeontologists were to appear on – or visit – the Earth in the far geological future, they will think the technofossil layer more weird and wonderful, by far, than dinosaur bones” (Mark Williams)
Geohistories, Geofictions
For many geologists, the Anthropocene is already part of normal science (see paradigm), at least informally. For these scientists, “Everything can be seen in the rocks: the modification, by dams, of the sedimentation of rivers; changes in ocean acidity; the introduction of previously unknown chemical products; the changes in the rhythm and nature of erosion; variations in the nitrogen cycle; the continual growth of atmospheric CO2, not to mention the widespread disappearance of living species that biologists are resigned to calling the “sixth extinction.” (see biodiversity)
“The question is whether we will be able to adapt and reinvent ourselves once nature, as we currently know it, is not there anymore.” The Anthropocene provides a projective, or even predictive dimension for geology: What makes it all the more perplexing is that stratigraphers are attempting to simultaneously observe and anticipate both the trace and cause of the geological record, for rock to be admissible as primary evidence of human geomorphic agency. As Bruno Latour puts it, “It is as though the stratigraphers, transporting themselves into the future through an effort of imagination, were undertaking a thought experiment that allowed them to deduce retrospectively, from the rock layers that are beginning to accumulate, what the so-called human epoch had been like. “ This is in fact, the basic premise of The Earth After Us, by “Mr Anthropocene” himself, the geologist Jan Zalasiewicz. In his account, millions of years from now non-human geologists might seek to reconstruct our era from the geological record. in what he calls the “Human Event Stratum”, revealing [...] compressed outlines of concrete buildings, some still cemented hard, some now decalcified and crumbly: of softened brick structures: of irregular patches of iron oxides and sulphides representing former iron artefacts from automobiles to AK-47s: of darkened and opaque remnants of plastics: of white, devitrified fragments of glass jars and bottles.” (p.189)
With titles like The Earth after Us or The World without Us, It seems that the whole genre of geo-historical writing on the model of Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backwards is a response to the fears and uncertainty that hang over the prospects for the future of humanity. The world’s population seem to be hastening its own demise. The addictions of consumer culture, the turn to authoritarian (aka populist) politics, and increases in the divide between rich and poor at every scale, all conspire to promote feelings of impotence and alienation even among the rich and powerful populations of the world. Perhaps these forecasts are a return of the repressed: the repressions of truth that enable denialism, or the repressions of shame and guilt that underlie consumerism today.
While the Anthropocene attributes new forms of geo-power and responsibility to humans, the premise of The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman, is in a sense the Anti-Anthropocene. The book is a “thought experiment” outlining the future of the earth if humans suddenly disappeared, leaving the planet otherwise unchanged. That future extends from the following week, when New York subways flood, to millennia later, when Mount Rushmore is still recognizable, and the cut from the Panama Canal still exists, even if the canal itself is long gone. Weisman’s account highlights the inexorable and often disconcertingly rapid return of non-human life forms in places that humans have abandoned, those “no man’s lands” such as the landscape around Chernobyl, along the Green Line in Cyprus, or in the Korean DMZ. Here human absence is an opening for regrowth and renewal, or a refuge for wildlife – if humans stay out of the picture. For the most part, Weisman describes a rewilding and slowing of extinctions, with some exceptions (human head lice that would starve to death without their hosts). Otherwise, the world would go about its business, relieved of its human infestation, and traces of human inhabitation would disappear, some more quickly than others. For Weisman, this process would take the form of recovering lost ground and “restore Eden to the way it must have gleamed and smelled the day before Adam”. (p.5)
Without mentioning it by name, The Ministry for the Future points to ways of ending the Capitalocene. In the story, many of the dire possibilities of climate change – lethal heat waves, fires, flooding – are currently taking place. Humanity’s capacity to decarbonize, to actually reduce greenhouse gases, and to act collaboratively in the face of existential threat of climate change are in question.
The story focuses on two people, one a traumatized survivor of a lethal heat wave in India, and the other the director of a government agency, the Ministry for the Future, which is charged (and wildly underfunded) to address the survival of future generations.
The narrative is punctuated by explicitly didactic passages that encapsulate contemporary critical thought. In fact, the book is dedicated to the cultural critic Frederic Jameson. It is a primer on how to transition to a society healthier for the planet and all forms of life that inhabit it. But rather than being a story of the triumph of peace and love, the techniques call for both the carrot and the stick. The latter includes out-and-out terrorism and sabotage aimed at changing human behavior, including “Crash Day,” the destruction of all commercial flights on a single day by swarms of drones. While it too has its own black wing, the Ministry for the Future employs financial persuasion through taxes and the creation of a new currency (the carbone) based on actual decarbonization. Over the course of the book, central banks (“the actual rulers of the world”) come to support these efforts to save humanity from itself, by virtue of their own interest in self-preservation.
It is important to note that the techniques employed in this effort rely for the most part on existing technologies repurposed for new goals. They include some hypothetical geo-engineering, such as slowing down the flow of glaciers to the sea by using equipment from the petroleum industry to pump out water from under the glacier itself, but these techniques are developed through careful experiment before they are scaled up. Through the initiatives of the Ministry, human societies move towards forms of social organization along the lines of Polanyi’s concepts of polycentrism, in which organizations are structured around abstract ideals. (the health of the biosphere and human survival, in this case.)
The Rupture of the Anthropocene
The Australian ethicist Clive Hamilton pushes back against scientists and others who see the Anthropocene as a continuation of landscape or ecosystem change going back centuries or millennia.
For Hamilton, the Anthropocene does not begin when humans first play a significant role in shaping the earth’s ecosystems. It begins when humans first play a significant role in shaping the Earth, that is, the Earth that evolves as a totality, as a unified, complex system comprised of the tightly linked atmosphere, hydrosphere, biosphere and geo-sphere. Earth System Sciences provide a new scientific paradigm of systematic thinking with a new object of study: the Earth System. The geological time of the Anthropocene requires the evidence that humans have caused a dramatic shift in the dynamics of Earth systems.
Thus the Anthropocene concept represents a ruptucre in Earth history and captures the significance and changed nature of the human impacit on the Earth System. For Hamilton, if it is presented as the continuation of previous changes and divorced from modern industrialization and the burning of fossil fuels, the Anthropocene is deprived it of its dangerous quality. According to Hamilton, “Earth has now crossed a point of no return,’ a ‘rupture’ in Earth’s functioning that ‘should frighten us”.
“The point of proposing a new geological epoch is that we are not witnessing continuous change but rupture – a rapid transition to a new geological epoch, or perhaps an era, that is permanent. In short, the Earth System is now operating in a different mode and nothing humans can do now, even ending the burning of fossil fuels in short order, can turn the geological clock back to the Holocene. (Clive Hamilton, “The Anthropocene as rupture”, The Anthropocene Review 3(2): 93–106. 2016). The future planetary conditions of the Anthropocene will most likely be radically different from the past, emerging on a planet marked by tipping points, positive feedback loops and spiraling and uncontrollable trajectories of nonlinear change. (see above: The Earth After Us)
“I think the issues about naming relevant to the Anthropocene, Plantationocene, or Capitalocene have to do with scale, rate/speed, synchronicity, and complexity. The constant question when considering systemic phenomena has to be: when do changes in degree become changes in kind?” Donna Haraway. “To know and not to act is not to know.” Latour
In their conclusion to The Great Acceleration, J.R. McNeill and Peter Engelke distinguish between the Anthropocene in earth’s history, and the Anthropocene in human history by pointing out that “The Earth is now in a new epoch, the Anthropocene. Human history, likewise, may be in a new period, the Anthropocene, but that is less clear.” The distinction they draw is between the consensual structure of science, with its established structures of authority, and the anarchic professional communities of human historians. For McNeill and Engelke, the acceptance of the Anthropocene as a period in human history is more dependent on “whether humankind will find ways to pursue its customary routines in the context of a more turbulent climate and biosphere”. This is the political issue that divides the two dispensations and makes some geologists question the term. McNeill, J. R.. The Great Acceleration. Harvard University Press.
The a number of earth systems are usually called out with the suffix “sphere.” These include the lithosphere, the hydrosphere, along with the biosphere (sometimes the noösphere) and more recently, the technosphere. For Peter Haff (“Technology as a geological phenomenon: implications for human well-being”), the technosphere is an emerging global paradigm, a quasi-autonomous system and emerging geological process that has entrained humans as essential components that support its dynamics.
Further developments of the earth’s monitoring system could enable the “Knowledge infrastructures” for the Anthropocene not only to monitor and model the technosphere’s metabolism of energy, materials and information, but also to integrate those techniques with new accounting practices aimed at sustainability… Blending social ‘data exhaust’ with physical and environmental information, an environmentally focused logistics might trim away excess energy and materials in production, find new ways to re-use or recycle waste, and generate new ideas for eliminating toxic byproducts, greenhouse gas emissions and other metabolites.” (Paul N. Edwards, “Knowledge infrastructures for the Anthropocene” )
And yet, from the viewpoint of human history, the Anthropocene requires humanity not only to acknowledge its destructive power, but also to visualize and implement possible remedial action. Would “Earth System governance” need to be part of the Anthropocene? Prosperous nations have reasons to want more governance on a world scale, but they do not want the increased obligations and demands for legitimacy that may follow in its wake….Does it require a Geo-government of scientists? For some of the more ideologically suspicious, the Anthropocene is a “master narrative”, and “there is some reason to suspect… that the knowledge and discourse of the Anthropocene may itself form part, perhaps unknowingly, of a hegemonic system for representing the world as a totality to be governed.”( Christophe Bonneuil, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz The Shock of the Anthropocene). In this sense, is the Anthropocene an instrumentalism of the whole world? In Capitalocene, Jason Moore is even more forceful, claiming that Anthroposcenic thinking “is captive to the very thought-structures that created the present crisis.”
Inside a transit mixer. Lucy Raven, “Readymix” video, The Dia Foundation, Chelsea
Beyond the nature / culture distinction?
“The Anthropocene is the sign of our power, but also of our impotence.” (Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene.)
“In the Anthropocene, the survival of nature as we know it may depend on the control of nature [by humans]—a precarious position for the future of society, of biological diversity and of the geobiological circuitry that underpins the Earth system” (Daniel Schrag)
“Geohistorical forces ceased to be the same as geological forces as soon as they fused at multiple points with human actions… We have to get used to it: we have entered irreversibly into an epoch that is at once post-natural, post-human, and post-epistemological! We are no longer living in the Holocene!” Latour goes on to claim that “The global itself, our ideal notion of the Globe, has to be destroyed, so that a work of art, an aesthetic, can emerge, provided that you agree to hear in the word “aesthetic” its old sense of capacity to “perceive” and to be “concerned” – in other words, a capacity to make oneself sensitive that precedes all distinctions among the instruments of science, politics, art, and religion.” (Bruno Latour, Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime)
For Latour, this is what it means to live in the Anthropocene: “sensitivity” is the term he applies to “All the actors capable of spreading their sensors a little farther and making others feel that the consequences of their actions are going to fall back on them, come to haunt them. There is probably no better solution than to work at disaggregating the customary characterizations until we arrive at a new distribution of the agents of geohistory – new peoples for whom the term human is not necessarily meaningful and whose scale, form, territory, and cosmology all have to be redrawn. To live in the epoch of the Anthropocene is to force oneself to redefine the political task par excellence: what people are you forming, with what cosmology, and on what territory?”
"Becoming is an equilibrium-seeking system at a crisis point where it suddenly perceives a deterministic constraint, becomes " sensitive" to it, and is catapulted into a highly unstable supermolecular state enveloping a bifurcating future. "
For Latour, what is at stake in the Anthropocene is this order of understanding — a hybrid of geology and anthropology. “We have to slip into, envelop ourselves within, a large number of loops, so that, gradually, step by step, knowledge of the place in which we live and of the requirements of our atmospheric condition can gain greater pertinence and be experienced as urgent”.
Is Gaia an idea to be preferred over the Anthropocene? “Gaïa clearly heralds — the very meaning of what I call her “intrusion” — that those who believed they were at the center desperately mess up what they, and many other earthly critters, depend on.” Isabelle Stengers looks at Gaia as a force, which, for her, both suggests a way out of the “reign of man” and “intrudes upon the use of the Anthropocene in trendy and rather apolitical dissertations.
Is it accurate to think of Gaia as an organism? Despite Gaia’s historical ability to self-regulate, this may not be useful..especially when the effects of the Anthropocene exceed those capacities.
questions about the Anthropocene:
If the science of geology is being stretched to accommodate the Anthropocene, is the agency of humans being unrealistically simplified? Does that agency need to be rethought with a view to a desirable future for the web of life?Do the rigorous requirements for the adoption of a “golden spike” unnecessarily limit the inclusion of historical events and interpretations?
“Who is Anthropos?” (Isabelle Stengers) Is the Anthropos a subject with intent and responsibility? Is the Anthropocene part of a masculinist narrative? A polar bear might consider humanity as a unified species destroying its habitat, but humans make many more distinctions within Earth’s human population, all with significant differences in energy footprints, and very different capacities for redress. These include rich and poor (North and South), growth oriented economies (the Capitalocene), men and women, human and non-human..Is the idea of a unified humanity a self-delusion on the part of richer nations?
What role does the separation (duality) of humans from other species play here? Is it important to find ways of overcoming that dualism and establishing kinship with non-human forms of life?
What does adopting the Anthropocene concept mean for the potential scale of human intervention? What actors are in a position to respond? If climate change can be considered “geo-engineering without design”, does the present situation call for more active large-scale measures in the form of intentional manipulation of the Earth system to control anthropogenic climate change? Is Geoengineering “a bad idea whose time has come”? Who would decide? A geo-government?
What would geo-design consist of? What issues could it realistically address? Would it be possible to make design proposals that are explicit about their desirable and long-term consequences? What would some of these be?
some criteria for evaluatimg design in the Anthropocene:
What time scales are relevant to design in the Anthropocene? Is it important to slow down and extend the time design addresses? Should design address geological time? How? Should there be a great deceleration?
Should design thinking for the Anthropocene adopt the same point of view as the examples of geo-fiction described above: that of looking back from a distant future (The Earth After Us, Latour)
What impacts can Anthropocenic design have? Will it provide habitability during a period of climate change? Can it create “arks” to protect the web of life? Where might they be located?
What role would advanced technologies play in design? How might design address differences in wealth? Would technologies exacerbate inequalities?
Is design in the Anthropocene simply an extension of the “green” / sustainable ideas of today? What building materials would make sense? What energy / food systems? Would cities function differently
Paolo Soleri: Arcosanti Arcology = architecture + ecology
“composite ruins of vast infrastructures unlike anything that came before”
see Anthroposcenic
Anish Kapoor and Zaha Hadid UK Holocaust project 2017