the anthropocene means the age of humans. It is often understood as the time when humans have made a
lasting imprint permanent imprint on the earth, at a time where human impact is everywhere and human
activities is a major driver of climactic and environmental processes.
We associate the anthropocene with this kind of stuff: plastic pollution, industrial agriculture,
mining, oil extraction and so on. I could have put on many other pictures for instance of
deforestation, plantation forestry, traffic and travel, cruise lines, containerised
transportation and many other things as well. Usually the term anthropocene also often points to
the effects of all these these
Disturbances as well, so things like drought, wildfires, floods, smog, species extinction and so on. So is
extreme weather events of various kinds but also pollution, toxicity, radiation, exposure, chemicals
ocean, acidification, coral bleaching, thawing of the permafrost and so on and so forth.
In some it is the age of humans and crucially it is the age when human impact reaches everywhere
even in the places where we appear to be completely absent, it's the age when even in the most remote
and inhospitable spots on the planet there's a plastic bag right, and it has been much discussed
in the last few years I think that for a wider public
debates, the anthropocene can be useful, because it sort of gives us a term for the contemporary kind
of environmental change and a term the presents more than just climate change, that encompasses climate
change but also all of these other things. So the anthropocene is climate change but it is so much
more, it accomplices climate change but also all of those other anthropogenic interventions and
effects.
So the concept of the anthropocene started out as a technical concept in the field of geology, it is
first of all a proposed geological epoch, but the concept also has some wider purchase and it
has become a widely used term in anthropology and in many other social sciences and
Humanities, and these two versions of the anthropocene. ?someone? called them the two lives of the anthroposcene
the first is sort of life that the concept has within the field of geology, and then the second
life is the life that the term has in other fields, and in the wider public
Consciousness. So the anthropocene is the proposed geological epoch, so for geologists the earth is
still in the ?whole of scene, hollow? which is the period that began after the last ice age but in recent years
many geologists have had called for us to officially move into a new epoch the
anthropocene, so a group of scientists called the anthropocene working group was established some
years ago to find out or to figure out whether or not there's enough geological evidence to
officially say that we are now in a new epoch the anthropocene, and
which epoch the world is in is something that's formally decided by the international union of
geological scientists and as far as I know the latest from them is that so that they
passed an internal vote among their members where the consensus was that yes we are indeed in the
anthropocene, but it hasn't been formally passed yet by this international union. So you
might be wondering what does it take for such a decision to pass for
Such a decision that we are in a new geological epoch, and for geologists the criteria
to determine this has to do with whether human activity has definitely left a lasting imprint or
mark on the stratigraphic record. So the stratigraphic record refers to the layers of rock that
solidify over time and the question for geologist is whether or not the
climactic and environmental changes of the present will leave a mark on the earth's
layers of rock, you might say the question is have we impressed ourself on the mountains, have we
written ourself in stone as a species. A couple of things have been debated and one of them is
whether or not we can find the so-called "Golden Spike"
and another is whether we can document the correlation between the deposits in the Rock on the one
hand and human activity on the other, so a golden spike would be a legible point in the
stratigraphic record that is kind of starting point for the anthropocene, and as you read in the
Davis and Todd article this question when did the anthracene start is quite a contested one.
We can look for a starting point but we can also look for correlations between what we can
measure in the natural world on the one hand, and development in human activity on the
other. So here are the so-called famous J-curves of the anthropocene and Swanson mentions
them briefly I think, so what you see here is that massive spikes in various human
activities so on the right side here socio-economic trends, these massive spikes in human
activities map onto and correlate with massive spikes in various environmental indicators. So
socio-economic trends such as population growth, water use, paper production, tourism these things
correlate with earth system strengths such as CO2 in the atmosphere temperature and ocean
acidification.
and what you can also notice that these curves here sort of suggest a golden spike on their
own, a starting point and that Golden Spike would be around 1950 that's sort of the point where
most of these indicators start their dramatic upward rise, and it's not all of them right of course
for instance domestication of land which is one of these curves here on the left side, it has a
different
pattern it didn't rise around the same period and time, but most of them arise
dramatically from around 1950 and this period from the 1950s is often referred to as the great
acceleration. It is a time when a lot of things grew and accelerated with a tremendous kind of
speed, and another interesting starting point or Golden Spike that has been suggested is even more
more specific than this a a nuclear testing and one suggestion has been that the first
nuclear blast in 1945 pinpoints the beginning of the anthropocene.
All right so let me just try and impress on you what kind of a momentous assertion the idea of the
anthropocene is about the world and about humans. Say that human activities have caused an epochal
change right, formally and officially we're still in the holocene and the holocene began
after the last ice age a little bit more than 10,000 years ago. The period
that came before the holocene the Pleistocene is however in certain ways quite similar to
the holocene so the pleistocene which spans two and a half million years or something like that
is an Epoch that's saw several cycles of glaciers and thawing, so several cycles of glaciation and
several ice ages that came and went, and the holocene is the period following the last of
Those ice ages so the holocene is quite similar to one part of those
oscillations between colder and warmer climates that characterises the pleistocene.
Now the anthropocene is something completely different. The anthropocene is a departure not
just from the Holocene but perhaps from a pattern that the earth has been in for two and a
half million years, so if the Holocene in a certain way is the continuation of a pattern going back
more than two million years then for humans to have caused something qualitatively new is
quite a big assertion and this is all a matter of what we might
Call geological time right, these are the time scales at which mountains are formed, these are the
time scales on which the seemingly eternal and unchangeable immutable parts of the Earth
are formed, and so to say we're in the anthropocene is to say that human activities have an impact on
these vast timescales of the very formation of the earth. The history
in our human history intersects with glacial and geological time and this is where it gets
especially interesting for social scientists, and this is where we get to the second life of the
anthropocene the life it has to beyond the field of geology.
To say that anthropologists have taken an interest in the anthropocene is an understatement, so
writings on the anthropocene have virtually exploded over the last 10-15 years. Here's a few
examples on the slide and there's literally hundreds more out there it's like
everyone's themes to these days to put the anthropocene in the title of their papers or their books it
seems everyone like pivots their inquiries and the
Research in some way to concern the anthropocene and you know this is not because we are incredibly
interested in rocks as anthropologists, a few people are but most of us are
interested still in people and I think this interest in the other person lies in the fact that
the anthropocene now can be a kind of diagnosis of the Contemporary so we use it in a way
to scale up to sort of say that this one thing that I'm looking at well it's part of something
bigger and as such we use the anthropocene in much the same way that we use concepts like modernity
and neoliberalism as a way to say that this little thing that I'm studying over here in this
particular part of the world is part of something bigger a larger phenomenon such as neoliberalism
or the anthropocene.
So compared to the geologogical concept of the anthropocene the social scientists anthropocene is
at the same time more limited and also broader in scope, so we are less concerned with those very
very long time spans but we also don't narrow ourselves to just looking at rocks we try and set to
find characteristic patterns in anthropocene activities for instance and we look at life
in the anthropocene, how it feels to live in changing times how new kinds of attachments to nature
are formed or how attachments are severed, and how our ways of thinking might change and so on.
The anthropocene then might be another way for us to do what we've always done to diagnose
and understand life in the contemporary world.
It's not just that it's also something different, it's also kind of a new imaginative
resource away for us to nudge and destabilize our thought a way for us to take our assumptions and
thinking in a new direction sort of a prompt for us think in new ways.
It can if you can disturb some old assumptions for instance for one thing about time and space
so our everyday actions and lives today are entangled with the long ecological time you
know our local activities are linked and materially tied to places really far away like we talked
about last session, and in these ways the anthropocene can force us to think differently about
ourselves my actions don't just occur locally and they don't just occur
in the present and they occur over large time scales long time scales on vast distances and so you
know the anthropocene is a world where people in one place of the world like people in the US
can see and smell the smoke from wildfires in Australia it's a world where our evening sky
sometimes are reddened by smoke from wildfires in California, it's a world where Norwegian reindeer
reindeer where they still have in their bodies the imprint of nuclear fallout
from the Chernobyl accident. You know knowing all this and being reminded of this over and over might
change the way we think.
In the anthropocene we live with the traces and manifestations of our own and others
people's actions over the last few decades and more we talked about how the local isn't really ever
local in class last week right and the anthropocene points this out very clearly too. Any place is
stretched out both in time and in space.
Our weather today right is it's part of the manifestation not of the cars that drive around right
now today but of the cars and the air travel and the extractive industries and all sorts of
things of the recent past so it's like we live within the sedimentations of a near past but we also
live in the future of live through our anticipation of what our actions today might cause
So we act today in the light of near future that we anticipate will manifest our actions of today right. So
the anthropocene can affect I think how we think about time and space it sort of stretches out the
present in a way, and the anthropocene can also affect how we think about nature and culture or nature
and society or nature and humans, the anthropocene can make it make it really really difficult to
think of ourselves that's outside of time or
it might help us destabilize the notion that we are ever outside of nature right, you read Ingold
A few weeks back and Ingold criticizes this classic western understanding that places the
environment that's external to us and the concept the anthropocene can disturb this nature cultural
divide in a similar way, so if my actions today will materially linger in what the weather will be like
twenty years from now it can make my involvement with nature very conspicuous, very difficult to miss.
Not only can it make me think of time as more stretched out it can make me think of myself as
physically imprinted on the fabric of the earth and so the anthropocene gives us experiences that
disturb the idea that the environment is something out there apart from us, the environment is us
also it is made from
many things including the traces of my actions and I am the environment in a sense my actions become
part of the environment and become part of the environment that me and also other people in the
future will have to live in, and so everywhere we look we would find these hybrids and mixtures
things that are inescapably both human and nature.
If the concept of the anthropocene is useful to rethink ingrained assumptions it might also come
with some problematic assumptions, and this is what Davis and Todd are concerned with. The
anthropos part of the anthropocene means human but does it or should it refer to all humans
equally do we want an anthropocene concept that sort of distributes responsibility equally across all
of
humankind. That's the question right and then the name and the date of the anthropocene
consequently is it's not just a matter of putting the right name to an external reality it's also a
political matter in the sense it's a naming that makes the difference a naming that will ease
certain actions and make other things harder to do. And the problem with the anthropocene is that it
tends to implicate all humans equally under the sign of the anthropos humans this is the age of humans, it
doesn't differentiate between certain humans and others and this universalizing tendency
to lump all humans together is a reason why according to Davis and Todd is especially important
to think carefully about what we take to be and what we communicate about the starting date of the
anthropocene.
There might be starting dates that can help to correct or undermine this universality. So when
did the anthropocene start? well the anthropocene started to become an official geological epoch needs a
starting date right and geologists have debated this and in Davids and Todd's article that you are
reading it was meant to be an intervention into the deliberations of the anthropocene
working group who was working on establishing whether or not we are in the anthropocene, and so
several starting dates have been suggested for the anthropocene, and here's the four main
contenders. The birth of Agriculture, the Industrial Revolution, 1610 and the colonisation
of the Americas and the mid 20th century which we touched on already a little bit. And
so we might ask of each of them not just are they a geologically accurate but what do they direct
attention to, what is brought into view by each of them what what is implied by each of them what
sort of actions and what sort of politics might they enable and let me briefly say
something about these two because these are not the main contenders so to speak
these are the two that have been debated the least or or have been not quite as seriously considered
as the other two. So first the birth of Agriculture this would many would say it's not nearly
specific enough. Agriculture is also very very difficult to define
is also far back in time, it's way further back in time than most would
think is reasonable for the anthropocene to have started and in it might also suggest the kind
of inevitability a sense that once people started to cultivate plants in their environment we were
already irreversibly set upon the path towards destruction
and the industrial revolution on the other hand might seem like a better candidate but I think
these also seems to be too narrow in scope and the sort of a problem here it is that it might
suggest technological determinism, that's the driving force to the anthropocene is the
technology itself.
It does something that the birth of our culture doesn't do which is to bring attention to
extraction and to certain humans rather than humanity as a whole so in that sense it will help avoid
some of the universalizing tendency. Now these two are the ones that have been most openly debated
and the geologist favour number four here the mid-
20th century and one reason for this is that this starting point as I mentioned earlier for this one
we can clearly see measurable changes in the Earth's system indicators and we also get a clear
Golden Spike this point with would definitely be visible on the stratigraphic record. Davis and Todd
And many others meanwhile favour the 1610 starting point which is
is the early period of colonization in the Americas
and so with that one with 1610 the anthropocene and colonialism are inseparably tied together, this
starting point very clearly does not apportion responsibility equally to All Humans
and we might also make the argument that early colonialism is visible on the stratigraphic record
and this is kind of shocking or at least it was shocking for me and when I learned about
it first. By some measures the indigenous population in South and Central America fell by 90%
in the first 100 Years of colonization, 56 million people died many of them from diseases that
Europeans brought over
so in a sense what we might say is a genocide led to changes in land use because people weren't
alive to use the land anymore which led to more regrowth which then led to a dip in the CO2 content
in the atmosphere and this deep in CO2 which is most noticeable around 1610, can be measured today by
scientists by looking at the Antarctic ice cores.
In other words so many people were killed and then so much vegetation that previously would have
been used or harvested was able to grow that it changed the composition of the atmosphere so many of
the indigenous people were killed in the Americas in the first hundred years of colonisation that it
had an impact on the earth's climate, that's shocking.
This is sort of the argument then all the horrors of 20th century the
environmental crisis of today this is not disaster it just seems like it from a certain
European perspective Instead this is the aftershock this is the reverberation of colonial violence
us here in Europe we think the disastrous is happening right now right, but this is just a time when
it's coming around to
Effecting us or that's the that the argument. So to name the current period the anthropocene then is a
political act is something that opens up for action it directs attention to certain things rather
than others, but deciding when it began is also a political act. The different starting dates give
basis for different kinds of thinking and acting in the world
they each point to some people processes, governments and ideologists more responsible
than others there are differences in complicity according to which starting point you choose.
Different starting points also invite different people into the debate and the third point that
Davis and Todd points out and this is really important
our question is which start date is best suited to help us undermine the conditions that drive the
anthropocene.
What are those conditions? well what they say is that these conditions like in universalising
the logic, the anthropocene is an era and the phenomenon that the anthropocene points to so the world
that we live today is is shaped by universalizing logics. These are patterns of thought and
assumptions that underlie actions and patterns of thought that render place and locality
irrelevant that universalise across different places and they are logic that seek to overcome local
specificity that create these kind of global and cosmopolitan ecologists that stretch across the
globe and have no concern for what's local and so these are patterns
of thoughts that erase local specificity and contribute to severing relations between people
and place and ultimately we need a concept that helps undermine the processes that cut people off from
the world and a concept that helps us make the alternatives more visible, and the 1610 starting
point according to Davis and Todd is the best one for those purposes.