Narrating the Anthropocene

While still unknown to some, the term “Anthropocene” has sparked a veritable explosion of discussion in and across corners of the sciences, humanities, and arts over the last few years — not unlike a (climate-change exacerbated) wildfire sweeping through a disheveled and volatile landscape. It is “an immense, omnivorous idea” according to the environmental historian and postcolonial theorist Rob Nixon, one that is currently sucking its adopters and detractors alike, “in their interdisciplinary masses,” into “its cavernous maw.” [1]

Introduced to the public debate by the atmospheric chemist Paul J. Crutzen and biologist Eugene F. Stoermer in 2000, the basic assertion is that we’ve entered an unprecedented epoch, one in which humans are altering Earth systems at the planetary scale, and moreover in ways that are being inscribed in the geologic record. [2] People have reshaped the land and its “resources” for millennia, but this has intensified markedly in the 20^th century through activities including widespread deforestation, urbanization, dam construction, over-farming/-fishing, and increasingly drastic measures for extracting minerals, oil, and gas. Many scientists believe that our impacts are now penetrating broad, global systems (e.g., jet streams, atmospheric and oceanic chemistry) and deep geological layers (e.g., anthropogenic earthquakes caused by hydraulic fracturing, commonly known as “fracking”). This represents a categorical difference from the past — what we might call a thoroughly “post-natural” condition.

Origin Stories

Fierce debate has ensued about the origin of this purported new age, with competing proposals (e.g., the collision of Old and New Worlds in 1492, the 19^th-century Industrial Revolution, the first atomic blast in 1945) rendering very different stories about who we are as humans (anthropos) and how we relate to other species, to the material world, to vast time scales, and so on. [3] Indeed, we might think of the Anthropocene as a narrative device, asking what perspectives it opens or, conversely, forecloses. The most trenchant resistance to the concept has come from those who pinpoint its universalizing tendency to lump humanity into one, cohesive entity and thereby to obscure the specific causes of planetary-scale environmental crisis as well as its starkly uneven distribution. The human ecologist Andreas Malm succinctly argued earlier this year that “humanity is… far too slender an abstraction to carry the burden of culpability.” [4] Already, the feminist historian of science, Donna Haraway, had declared “Capitalocene” a more accurate, and politically useful, descriptor. [5]

Out of this maelstrom emerged twinned events on May 13, 2015, at ETH and the University of Zurich, both organized by Environmental Humanities Switzerland, a fledgling, interdisciplinary group made up of mostly Zurich-based historians, geographers, ecologists, philosophers, and artists. [6]

Who is this “Man” at the Center?

In her keynote talk, “Geopower: Genealogy After Life,” the radically inventive and renowned geographer Kathryn Yusoff (Queen Mary University of London) proposed that the focus on beginnings (and potential endings) in many Anthropocene conversations has been excessive, drawing attention away from another line of crucial questions. Who, for instance, is this “man” at the core of the Anthropocene, itself a “new life story of the human”? How is “he” related to previous constructions of the human, especially since the Enlightenment? How is human life constituted by and through geologic life? How might we move from thinking in terms of bio-politics (a term borrowed from the philosopher Michel Foucault) to geo- (as in geological, Earth-based) politics? Like Malm, Haraway, and others, Yusoff is keen to unsettle the invocation of a collective figure of humanity (and the colonial legacies associated with it), and instead to forge more fractured and stratified notions of human subjectivity, with issues of power always close in mind.

Anthropocene Slam: Meeting an Uncertain Environmental Future Halfway

If Yusoff’s lecture was highly theoretical, the “Anthropocene Slam” that followed was downright playful, even festival-like. [7] The host, artist Juanita Schläpfer-Miller, served red and green beverages in vials from a laboratory along with coasters representing different soil types as personalities [8]; the evening ended with a mock debate — with geographer Philippe Forêt as prosecutor and the audience as jury — about whether or not the Earth should be held accountable for failing to provide limitless resources without acting up, of late. In the Call for Participation, “slammers” had been invited to engage “fundamental questions about the future of our society in a time of limits to growth, climate change and over-exploitation of ecosystems” by way of short inputs, and the selection of an object to bring/contribute to a fictitious “survival kit for an uncertain environmental future.”

From Plastiglomerates to Anthropocenic Glasses

Extra-Scientific Imaginings of the Present-Future

It was refreshing to see this group of primarily highly specialized (and accomplished) scientists wrangle with an “out of the box” format for public presentation, one that called less for expertise than for imaginative, speculative, and/or poetic approaches to some of the most pressing circumstances of our day. Indeed, it seems increasingly clearer that there is much at stake — potential worlds to be shaped or dashed — in the stories we build about the present, future, and future perfect (what will have been).