Searching for the Anthropocene

A Journey into the Environmental Humanities

Christopher Schaberg

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781501351822
• eBook ISBN: 9781501351853
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism & Nature
• Index: Literature

Debated, denied, unheard of, encompassing: The Anthropocene is a vexed topic, and requires interdisciplinary imagination. Starting at the author's home in rural northern Michigan and zooming out to perceive a dizzying global matrix, Christopher Schaberg invites readers on an atmospheric, impressionistic adventure with the environmental humanities. Searching for the Anthropocene blends personal narrative, cultural criticism, and ecological thought to ponder human-driven catastrophe on a planetary scale. This book is not about defining or settling the Anthropocene, but rather about articulating what it's like to live in the Anthropocene, to live with a sense of its nagging presence--even as the stakes grow higher with each passing year, each oncoming storm.

Part I

Home Sick

Flying over Lake Michigan, if you are heading eastward and you have a window seat, you may be lucky enough to see them: Lurching against crashing surf, several humpback formations made of sand. Millennia in the making.

Sleeping Bear, Still Moving

The Legend of the Sleeping Bear is that there was once a family of three bears who lived in northern Wisconsin. One year there was a terrible wildfire that swept across the state. The bears were driven to the eastern border of the state, where Lake Michigan stretches out to the horizon. The inferno was pressing down on the bears. The mother bear took to the lake, swimming across the wide expanse. Her cubs dove into the surf and swam, too, following their mother’s path through the increasingly treacherous swells. Alas, when the mother bear reached the far shore, in Michigan, the cubs were still far behind. The mother bear, exhausted, laid down to rest and wait for her cubs. And she is lying there still, waiting for them: she is the vast Sleeping Bear dune. The cubs are the North and South Manitou Islands, which sit more than 10 miles offshore, their own sandy cliffs visible from the beach. The story is left in strange suspense, as if the islands might one day join the shore. And, of course, given glacial timescales, perhaps they one day will.

Growing up I heard this story countless times, always with slight variations. Another version has it that the bear family was migrating to look for food, and that the cubs drowned—and as the mother bear mourned their deaths, the islands rose from the lake almost as gravestones.

This story tugs at the heartstrings of the listener, full as it is of the sadness of exodus and loss, disaster and migration. The legend of the sleeping bear also has curious philosophical implications. One might be tempted to dismiss the story for its brash anthropomorphism, with both the land and the bears imbued with all too human emotions and affects. As if everything is measurable by a human yardstick. And yet, as Jane Bennett points out in her book Vibrant Matter, “A touch of anthropomorphism … can catalyze a sensibility that finds a world filled not with ontologically distinct categories of beings (subjects and objects) but with variously composed materialities that form confederations” (99). Following Bennett, lingering with the myth of the Sleeping Bear we might find more here: more than just the human—and importantly less, too.

The myth of the Sleeping Bear blurs the radically different elements involved therein. The dune ecosystem is imagined and animated as an ursus, yet through the story the black bears themselves are transmogrified back into the landforms that they appear to be in the present moment of the story as it is being told. The listener too becomes absorbed in the story, observing the observant sleeping bear, acting as another animal in mortal transit, perhaps as ethereal as the ever-changing clouds above, just on a different timescale. It is a slippery tale, then, where scales shift as dramatically and rapidly as its characters change form. Far from being a quaint legend, this story initiates a comportment of wonder that might be harnessed for generously imagining the myriad existences in this region—and beyond.

What’s interesting about this legend is that the sleeping bear is always still moving. The prevailing winds blow this massive “perched” dunescape slowly toward the northeast, changing the makeup of the topography gradually but noticeably over time. I remember the steep slope of one particular sand bowl when I was a child, running down it. Now in the same place I see an entirely different curvature, fading off in an obscure way, dune grass encroaching. But is it even right to call this “the same place,” moving as it is? Whatever “place” is trembles in this fable, comes to vibrant life.

Likewise, from my family’s home across Good Harbor Bay I used to be able to look out at Pyramid Point and see a wide swath of sand; now, some twenty-five years later, that area is patchy with junipers and aspen trees forming redoubts where enough soil has mixed with the moving sand. This view awes and inspires, humbles and intimidates. It is a glimpse of the constantly changing planet, and it renders human pursuits minuscule. Yet, in a reflexive turn, like the retransformations of the Sleeping Bear, it can also animate: it is a stunning arc of shoreline that beckons and yields, calls for, and resists interpretation.

Figure 1 The Sleeping Bear Dunes shoreline invites and resists. Illustration by Lara Schaberg.

Closer up, being right in them, the dunes take on liveliness in other ways. There are ghost poplar forests in eerie sand canyons, tendril-like marram grassroots grasping out where a cliff has fallen away, and weird, almost vertical bluffs where the sand plummets down into skeins of wild grapevines or bittersweet snarls, ancient cedar and poplar stumps suddenly exposed. And nearly everywhere on the dunes, if you pause, you can feel the sand gently pelting you. It gets into your hair and covers your scalp if you sit for a mere few minutes. Many months later, back in New Orleans, I’ll discover small heaps hidden in my backpack or shoes. The dunes are still moving, in many senses of the word.

And just when the view over the lake looks pure, the dunes framing the blue-green lake in perfection, a long dark freighter will slide into view—exhaust belching from its pulsing engine, whose strange reverberations can be felt in the body from miles away. And if I look down, I’ll see other things: plastic shards and tangled synthetic strands. Not so pure, after all. To wander the Sleeping Bear is to invite strange crossings and visions, to become disoriented in what is at once a pristine and tattered edge of the Anthropocene. If this last word is unfamiliar to my reader, please be patient. I won’t define Anthropocene immediately, but gradually and provisionally. It’s a search, one that starts here on the dunes.

Backstory

About 1,200 miles to the south of the Sleeping Bear Dunes: When I walked into the jet bridge for the first time in New Orleans in January 2009, on the seam between airplane and tunnel, this place immediately felt like home. The thick New Orleans air, even in midwinter, poured into the jet bridge and enveloped me.

One of the things I have noticed about living here for ten years now is the unsettling blend of decrepitude and rejuvenation, grittiness and new construction. These dualities always have their upsides and downsides, depending on where you are on any given night or day—not to mention where you have to sleep. Yet the overall sensation, at least for me, has been a vivid feeling of existing where things are on the verge. The verge of … something else. And it is hardly certain whether this something else is a sublime sunrise or a tropical storm, a bright future or a smoldering ruin. This probably sounds like a depressing way to inhabit a place. But it’s also been a dynamic place in which to teach college, which is my occupation. Most of my students exhibit a keen sense of living in this culturally rich and ecologically fraught region.

As my colleague John Biguenet often remarks about New Orleans: “The future arrives here first.” I love to walk and bicycle around New Orleans, teach my classes outside in the thick air, and watch as the city embarks on all sorts of rebuilding and city planning for the twenty-first century—including building a new airport, something that has been happening as I have been writing this book and which I discuss in some detail, in pages to come.

But there’s another place that serves as my second home (or first, really). This is where I’m from in the northwest corner of lower Michigan, the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. My parents live there, and two of my siblings live nearby with their own families. The dunes are one part of the Leelanau Peninsula, which is the pinky finger of Michigan construed as a mitten: over 100 miles of sand dunes and lakeshore, the western side (where my home is) facing Wisconsin. After many years visiting this place in the summers as a young child, my parents spontaneously bought a small wedge of land and a house right on the edge of the national park. They moved my family up from suburban southern Michigan, and I came to know the area in a whole new way—in all seasons and weather, down the backroads and two-tracks, the textures of the tree bark, dappled light coming through the canopies, and the feel of lichen underfoot.

I return with my own family to this place in the summers, and sometimes in the winter too. It’s a relatively quiet, wilderness supplement to our school-year urban life in New Orleans. I spent a sabbatical there in 2016–17, and I told some stories from that year in my book The Work of Literature in an Age of Post-Truth. In some ways, this book is a follow-up to that one.

I’m often homesick for this place during the school year. I long for the dunescapes and pine forests, the fern valleys and rolling meadows. For the sweeping shoreline of Lake Michigan, with all its overwhelming drama and ever-changing moods. It’s this home that I’m sick for. Yet “home” has become so much more complicated, with the Anthropocene in mind. I can’t honestly claim this place as any kind of removed, bracketed-off space or region. I know too well that it is a privileged realm, that the feeling of it being more natural is in fact artificial. But still, I long for being up in Michigan, hoping that it can serve as a point of orientation in the dizzying awareness that I am an agent of the Anthropocene.

In his recent book Down to Earth, Bruno Latour writes about the conundrum of how to grasp and adjust to the reality of human-caused damage incurred on a planetary scale: “Each of us thus faces the following question: Do we continue to nourish dreams of escaping, or do we start seeking a territory that we and our children can inhabit? Either we deny the existence of the problem, or else we look for a place to land” (5). For me, Leelanau has always been this place to land. But it has also become a more complicated location as any stable sense of the local has become inextricable from global dynamics: pollution, extreme weather patterns, hyper-consumerism, the drive to be “connected” everywhere and always, and so on.

For a long time, I wanted to write a book about this place—but it kept eluding me. I’d make inroads, jot down notes and essayettes—but then I’d get lost or find myself back where I started. I even abandoned that book at one point. Then, several years later, as I began to think more about the Anthropocene, I realized that this was what I had been writing about all along, as I reflected on Michigan. It’s how the comforting idea of a familiar place gets uncomfortable—even haunted—as one accepts the idea that humans are laying waste to the planet, enough to affect things like species populations, rising ocean levels, and climate patterns.

I had originally been conceiving of my Michigan book as a sort of twenty-first-century Walden—with full knowledge and awareness of the complexities and oddities of that book, and Thoreau’s rather ambiguous project of living somewhat “simply” out in the woods. I was trying to write a book about place that acknowledged the vexed history and complex landscape of North American nature writing. I was trying to write about a place I know in a way that I could derive eco-critical lessons that were translatable beyond the geographic boundaries of the place itself. I didn’t want it to be merely a regional book that appealed only to those who had spent time there; I wanted it to travel, indeed to travel with all the baggage of contemporary life in tow. But that ended up meaning the Anthropocene, too. So what is this place? Because, now, it has found its way into this book—a quite different, more scattered tale.

I spent my high school years exploring the woods, lakes, shorelines, and rivers of this region: foraging for morel mushrooms, catching bass and pike in crystal clear inland lakes, and walking the lakeshore after storms sifting through assorted amalgams of plastic six-pack holders, driftwood, deflated balloons, dead minnows, beach glass, zebra mussels, firework rocket nosecones, and glacial rocks. I worked seasonal jobs in some of the dives and fancy resorts that pepper the peninsula. I return to some of these places and memories throughout the first part of this book, even though it is not the Michigan book I set out to write many years ago. I also reflect on new developments, observations, and experiences of the towns and cultural nodes throughout the landscape. But then, Michigan becomes just another locus amid the sprawling growth of this late North American country (and the world at large) mired in the Anthropocene.

***

The place I call home, where my parents bought a small wedge of land in 1991, sits directly on the boundary of Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore: 35 miles of sandy beaches, steep cliffs, and rolling juniper-dotted dunes that back up into pine and aspen transition zones, which then lead to deep rolling hills of maple and beech forests.

When I was in high school I watched some of my favorite hillsides get logged, cleared, and built on: gaudy luxury summer mansions thrown up double-time, echoing disjointed architectural dreams from other regions, distant coasts. Around that time, I read Edward Abbey’s novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, and I relished fantasies of sabotaging the Caterpillar earthmovers that decimated the giant northern red oak and white ash trees.

A couple years later, at a small liberal arts college in southern Michigan, where I majored in philosophy and English, I was introduced by my professor Pete Olson to the writings of Gretel Ehrlich, Gary Snyder, and Barry Lopez, among others. I began to draw connections between bioregionalism and poetics—or how we tell stories about the places we live, and in turn how habitats and ecosystems get into the stories we tell. But one of my favorite courses in college (and easily the hardest) was a biology class called Michigan Flora—thank goodness for a strict yet open liberal arts common curriculum. There were two of us students in the class (2!), and we spent hours seeking out and identifying various species of plants, trees, and shrubs in the surrounding scrub forests and roadside ditches next to vast monoculture cornfields. I took this scientific knowledge back up north with me the following summer, and my sense of the place I called home became even more ingrained, if also overlaid with Western scientific identification practices.

Later in college I spent two summers in Wyoming, where I worked as a river guide on the Snake River within the wild, 27-mile corridor between Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Park called the J. D. Rockefeller Memorial Parkway. This was a beautiful place, but the lodgepole pines did nothing for me compared with the lusciously soft white pines back in Michigan, and the tourism industry of the American West made my woes about northern Michigan tourists seem quaint. My second summer in Wyoming, I worked a stint on a trail crew for the National Forest Service and got to know a good portion of the Bridger-Teton National Forest, clearing brush and maintaining remote trails.

After college I was drawn back to this region, in part due to my forays into the literature of the American West; I wanted to move to a mountain town. After working another river guiding job in Arizona for a season, I found my way to Bozeman, Montana, where I had been accepted into a master’s program in English. When I wasn’t reading for graduate seminars, working on essays, or teaching freshman writing, I fished—often with my professor and friend Greg Keeler—in the creeks and rivers that course through the Gallatin Valley and eventually form the Missouri River.

In graduate school, guided...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Dedication Page
• Also by Christopher Schaberg
• Title Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Part I Home Sick
• Part II Jet Lag
• Acknowledgments
• Reprint Acknowledgments
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright Page