The Anthropocene

Key Issues for the Humanities

Eva Horn, Hannes Bergthaller

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138342460
• eBook ISBN: 9780429800900
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The Anthropocene is a concept which challenges the foundations of humanities scholarship as it is traditionally understood. It calls not only for closer engagement with the natural sciences but also for a synthetic approach bringing together insights from the various subdisciplines in the humanities and social sciences which have addressed themselves to ecological questions in the past. This book is an introduction to, and structured survey of, the attempts that have been made to take the measure of the Anthropocene, and explores some of the paradigmatic problems which it raises.

The difficulties of an introduction to the Anthropocene lie not only in the disciplinary breadth of the subject, but also in the rapid pace at which the surrounding debates have been, and still are, unfolding. This introduction proposes a conceptual map which, however provisionally, charts these ongoing discussions across a variety of scientific and humanistic disciplines.

This book will be essential reading for students and researchers in the environmental humanities, particularly in literary and cultural studies, history, philosophy, and environmental studies.

1 Introduction

February 2000, Cuernavaca, Mexico. By the afternoon session of the annual meeting of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, the vice-chairman has had it. All day long, the atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen, who won a Nobel Prize in 1995 for his work on the ozone layer, has been listening to his colleagues lecturing on the profound changes that the Earth is currently undergoing. They keep referring to the present as the Holocene. Crutzen finally interrupts them: ‘Stop using the word Holocene. We’re not in the Holocene anymore. We’re in the … the … the Anthropocene!’ His outbreak is met with puzzled silence. But during the following coffee break, the scientists talk of nothing else. Shortly afterwards, Crutzen publishes a brief, programmatic paper with Eugene Stoermer, a freshwater biologist who has already been using the term informally for some time. Two years later, Crutzen publishes another much-quoted article in Nature. The two pieces not only describe the end of the Holocene; they also identify humans as a ‘geological force’ whose impact can be observed on a planetary scale (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000, Crutzen 2002).

Crutzen’s intervention came at the right time and in the right place. The International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) had been established in 1987 to study the human impact on the biological, chemical and geophysical processes of the Earth system. It was the most important international forum for the development of the new and rapidly developing field of Earth system science, focused on what was then innocently called ‘global change’. If the purpose of the program was to establish a whole new way of looking at the Earth, this had been achieved by the time it came to an end in 2015. But the discussion which started during that coffee break in 2000 is still going on, and drawing ever wider circles.

The propagation of the term ‘Anthropocene’ is not only the result of an interruption. It is itself an interruption. The concept encapsulates an ecological state of affairs which, in many of its fundamental aspects such as climate change, had been widely recognized for decades, but had been drowned out in the cacophony of bad news. It gives a name to the insight that humans are profoundly changing the ecology of the planet, and that they are doing so on a global scale. More than just a crisis which may come to an end at some point in the future, the Anthropocene—the ‘new’ (καινός) brought about by the ‘human’ (ἄνθρωπος)—designates an ecological threshold. It encompasses a vast number of different factors and locations, ranging from global climate change to disruptions in oceanic and atmospheric currents, the disturbance of the water cycle and of other important chemical cycles (e.g. of phosphorus and nitrogen), soil degradation, the rapid loss of biological diversity, pollution with toxic and non-degradable substances, all accompanying a continuous growth in the number of humans and their domesticates. Human activity moves more earth, sand, and stone worldwide than all natural processes together (Wilkinson 2005). Plastic has spread throughout the world, not just in the form of towering garbage dumps and plastic waste in the seas and rivers, but also in the form of microplastics which suffuse soil, water, and the entire food chain (Waters et al. 2016, Orb Media 2017). Since the Industrial Revolution, the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere has increased by 44%, causing not only climate change but also the acidification of the oceans, profoundly transforming the living conditions of all marine organisms (Hönisch et al. 2012). Populations of wild fish, birds, reptiles, and mammals have shrunk by an average of 58% over the last 40 years (WWF 2016), and there is considerable evidence that the number of insects has also plummeted (Hoff 2018). Wildlife today accounts for only 3% of the biomass of terrestrial vertebrates, the rest being composed of humans (30%) and livestock (67%) (Smil 2012).

It has become more and more obvious that the Earth is entering a ‘no-analogue state’ (Moore et al. 2001)—a state for which there is no precedent in geological history. Many of the signs that we are crossing a geological threshold, however, are far from being recent discoveries. Since the 1960s, there have been frequent warnings that modern industrial societies were headed for ecological catastrophe. The public at large has known about climate change for more than 30 years. The ecological movement’s mantra has long been that ‘we cannot go on like this’, but even if environmental politics has more or less successfully tackled some of the symptoms of the crisis, the last few decades have shown all too clearly that things could and did go on as before. Our present is the future that the environmental movement has been warning us against. And today there is no going back.

This is why the Anthropocene is more than just a crisis—it is a radical break: a break from the unusually stable ecological conditions that characterized the Holocene. The Holocene provided the environmental conditions for everything we have come to call human civilization: sedentariness, agriculture, cities, trade, complex social institutions, tools and machines, as well as all of the media that are used to store and disseminate human knowledge. The Holocene, in other words, was the well-tempered cradle of civilization. And this inevitably leads to the question: What will a departure from these conditions mean for human civilization—for human culture, social organization, and technology, and, in a more fundamental sense, for humankind’s relation to the world? The Anthropocene heralds a future for humanity, the contours of which we are only just beginning to apprehend.

Ironically, although the Anthropocene concept was launched in the context of Earth systems science and is epistemically based on it (see Ch. 2: Definitions), the first discipline to take it on in systematic fashion was geology—a discipline that deals with the deep past of the Earth’s history. If the Anthropocene is to be defined as a new geochronological epoch which follows the end of the Holocene, stratigraphic markers must be found to demonstrate the impact of human activity in a range of locations across the planet. In order to investigate these markers, the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) was founded in 2009, under the direction of the renowned British geologist Jan Zalasiewicz. As a research group within the Subcommission of Quaternary Stratigraphy, the AWG’s main goal is to examine the evidence for formalizing the Anthropocene as a geochronological epoch. In August 2016, it presented its recommendation in favor of a formalization of the Anthropocene to the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS). This was unique in the history of the discipline: never was an epochal threshold set in the present, rather than with a delay of at least a few millennia. Predictably, the AWG’s recommendation (which is only a first step along the way to formal acceptance) was hotly debated among scientists in the field. Some geologists went so far as to argue that by formalizing the Anthropocene, geology would be giving up on its scientific standards and surrendering to politics or, worse yet, pop culture (Autin and Holbrook 2012, Finney and Edwards 2016).

Another unique characteristic of the AWG is its interdisciplinarity. The group includes not only geoscientists (in particular stratigraphers and sedimentologists), but also atmospheric chemists, oceanographers, biologists, archaeologists, historians of science, environmental geographers, environmental historians and lawyers. Clearly, it is not only the geochronological formalization of the Anthropocene that calls for an approach which transcends traditional geological practice; the concept as such demands a new form of transdisciplinary exchange. Even if the AWG’s ongoing research is of paramount importance for a deeper understanding of the Anthropocene, its defining factors and starting dates, the relevance of the concept does not hinge solely or even primarily on whether it is adopted into official geological nomenclature. In the past ten years, the Anthropocene has become much more than just a specialized topic for scientists. The questions the term raises will not go away even if the geologists ultimately decide against its formalization. It has become a shorthand for some of the most pressing and most wickedly complex issues of our time.

That is why the term—despite its unwieldiness—rapidly entered popular usage. In 2011, The Economist dedicated its title page to the topic with the headline: ‘Welcome to the Anthropocene.’ National Geographic and Nature soon followed suit. The Economist’s editorial began: ‘Humans have changed the way the world works. Now they have to change the way they think about it, too’ (The Economist, 26 May 2011). This neatly encapsulates the challenge presented by the Anthropocene: it is about taking stock of the present and redefining our relationship to the world. Since the 2010s, a rising tide of popular and scholarly publications on the subject has swept across many different fields, encompassing the natural sciences, the social sciences and the humanities.

The humanities in particular have enthusiastically embraced the Anthropocene, along with the arts, film, and literature. The term not only attracts artists and curators, but also a growing lay audience. Exhibitions revolving around the concept have drawn huge crowds: the two-year Anthropocene Project at Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, the Anthropocene exhibition at Deutsches Museum in Munich 2014–16, Bruno Latour’s curated ‘thought exhibition’ Reset Modernity! 2016 in Karlsruhe, The Anthropocene Project conference at Tate Modern, London, in 2015, Ed Burtynsky’s Anthropocene exhibitions in Toronto and Ottawa, the Museum of the Anthropocene project in Indianapolis—to name just a few. Universities have started to include the topic in the curricula of diverse academic disciplines—not just in history and literary studies, but also in geography, law, architecture, and economics. They are also forming their own networks and research groups on the Anthropocene. While in the art world the term Anthropocene has become a buzzword signaling topicality and political relevance (see Ch. 7: Aesthetics), in academia it has not only opened up new perspectives within individual disciplines, but has been received as a call for a new, transdisciplinary order of knowledge. Tellingly, it was financial support from a cultural institution, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, as well as from the Max-Planck-Institut in Mainz, which provided the initial funding for the stratigraphic work of the AWG.

What the arts, academia and politics share in common in their engagement with the Anthropocene is the awareness of ‘living on a damaged planet’ (Tsing et al. 2017). This entails a consciousness of the present as the moment of crossing a boundary or facing a common danger. The historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, one of the first scholars to open up the Anthropocene debate for the humanities (Chakrabarty 2009), set out to capture the specificity of this consciousness in his 2015 Tanner Lectures. Drawing on the term ‘epochal consciousness’ coined by the German philosopher Karl Jaspers, Chakrabarty sought to develop ‘a shared perspectival position that can inform—but not determine—competitive and conflicted actions by humans when faced with the unequal and uneven perils of dangerous climate change’ (Chakrabarty 2015, p. 143). An epochal consciousness for the Anthropocene is the consciousness of a threat common to all humans, or, more precisely, a communality that derives from a global threat affecting all humankind. By definition, it precedes all cultural, political, and economic differences. Such an epochal consciousness does not offer solutions but rather tries to articulate their preconditions. It indicates a shared destiny, an ethical challenge which defines our situation and sets the stage for political action: ‘it is what sustains our horizon of action’ (ibid., p. 146).

An essential part of this epochal consciousness is the realization that many of the categories used to grasp the relationship between humans and nature have become obsolete. ‘Sustainability’ or ‘environmental conservation’ have long been seen as political issues among many other, seemingly more pressing, concerns, such as social welfare and economic or political stability. The Anthropocene requires us to rethink these priorities, along with the terminology we use in order to articulate them. A ‘politics of nature’ (as Bruno Latour puts it) is not just one political issue among others but deals with the very foundations on which any political community can exist. What is nature when it is fundamentally transformed by human impact? What is culture when it can no longer be understood as a human-made and locally circumscribed environment but has to be seen instead as something that interferes with the forces of nature at a planetary scale? What is humankind, if it is understood as a dominant species whose behavior profoundly affects the Earth system? What is human consciousness if it has endowed humans with a power that eludes conscious control? And what is politics if it must deal with these problems not on a national but on a global level? This book maps out some of the most important questions and ongoing debates revolving around the Anthropocene. But mapping an object that is changing so rapidly is like surveying an avalanche in full fall. What we offer, therefore, can be little more than a snapshot—albeit one that highlights structural elements and thus provides a guide for readers trying to find their way into Anthropocene thought.

In contrast to many recent books authored by members of the AWG (Zalasiewicz 2008, 2019, Ellis 2018, Lewis and Maslin 2018), this book does not come from a natural science perspective but addresses the Anthropocene from the point of view of the humanities. We nonetheless start from the assumption that the insights of the natural sciences form an indispensable basis for an adequate understanding of the Anthropocene. Quite a few contributions from the humanities tend to either ignore the scientific debates or even reject the sciences as inherently technocratic and hegemonic. Yet without some models and concepts from the sciences, neither ‘nature’, nor ‘history’, nor the human impact on the planet can be adequately grasped. Nature, for instance, can today no longer be conceived of as ‘wilderness’ or as being in a ‘natural balance’; it must be understood as a self-regulating system in a dynamic (and therefore fragile and ever-changing) equilibrium, as first outlined in Lovelock and Margulis’s Gaia Hypothesis and further elaborated by Earth system science. Likewise, a historical approach to the Anthropocene as an epochal threshold needs to take into account geostratigraphic data and debates about the starting date of the epoch which, in turn, draw heavily on environmental and colonial history (see Ch. 2: Definitions). Without models from Earth system science such as ‘planetary boundaries’ (Rockström 2009), or a basic understanding of scale problems in biology, ecology, and physics, some of the essential difficulties of thinking the Anthropocene must remain incomprehensible.

The Anthropocene therefore also challenges the traditional separation between the ‘sciences’ and ‘humanities’, famously encapsulated in the catchphrase of ‘the two cultures’ (Snow 1959). It calls for a new cooperation between academic fields, be it in the form of a mutual exchange of data, concepts and hypotheses, or in the form of complementary approaches to shared problems. As Jürgen Renn has argued, we need a new ‘knowledge economy’ which would be able to integrate heterogeneous forms of knowledge beyond disciplinary boundaries (Renn 2018). In this regard, the Anthropocene Working Group, although dominated by geologists, provides a model with its inclusion of historical and legal perspectives, and by being explicitly open to cooperation with the humanities. (As we write this, for example, the geologist Jan Zalasiewicz is co-authoring a book with the historian and Japanologist Julia Adeney Thomas.)

In the humanities, a similar move towards more interdisciplinary perspectives is underway under the banner of the ‘environmental humanities’. The ascendancy of the term runs almost exactly parallel to that of the Anthropocene: the publication of a manifesto on the ‘ecological humanities’ by a group o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• Part I: Stratigraphies
• Part II: Metamorphisms
• part III: Fault lines
• Index