{"id":52,"date":"2014-01-29T12:48:02","date_gmt":"2014-01-29T16:48:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-acene\/?p=52"},"modified":"2014-02-01T09:41:20","modified_gmt":"2014-02-01T13:41:20","slug":"anthropocene-readings-for-13014","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-acene\/2014\/01\/29\/anthropocene-readings-for-13014\/","title":{"rendered":"Further orientations (continued)"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Photo:<\/a>

Photo: NASA<\/p><\/div>\n

1. Eileen Crist, \u201cOn the Poverty of Our Nomenclature<\/a>. Environmental Humanities 3 (2013), 129-147.<\/p>\n

In last week’s class we discussed the traditional separation of human and natural history for reasons such as the ontological distinction between Society and Nature, but also for the different time scales in which each take place.\u00a0 Eileen Crist, however, believes that in recognizing our hybridity, or the permanent intertwinement of humans and nonhumans, the Anthropocene, as both a scientific term and a social construct, promotes an anthropocentric view that buries the historical contradiction between human beings and \u201cthe entire breadth of Life\u201d (129).\u00a0 Since the geological impact of human beings is incontrovertible, the term Anthropocene is being more widely and positively heralded as a symbol of the final realization that human beings are integrated with broader ecologies.\u00a0 Moreover, because scientists have supported naming our current geological epoch the Anthropocene, this only further solidifies it as a \u2018proper\u2019 name.\u00a0 Crist warns that by equating the force of human beings to the scale of Earth\u2019s processes, human impact is seen as \u201cnatural\u201d, and not what she refers to as a \u201chuman species-supremacist planetary politics\u201d (130).\u00a0 Crist writes, \u201cThe Anthropocene discourse veers away from environmentalism\u2019s dark idiom of destruction, depredation, rape, loss, devastation, deterioration, and so forth of the natural world into the tame vocabulary that humans are changing, shaping transforming, or altering the biosphere, and, in the process, creating novel ecosystems and anthropogenic biomes\u201d (133).<\/p>\n

Does the Anthropocene underrate the true destruction by normalizing human impacts on Earth?\u00a0 Would we rather construct an epoch based on our freedom and agency instead of giving into the truth of our limits on this planet?\u00a0 Crist argues yes, that like a kind of \u201cPromethean self-portrait,\u201d calling our current period the Anthropocene gives us the prerogative to continue tampering with nature on large scales, rather than question our very relationship and engagement with the natural environment.\u00a0 \u201cThe very concept of the Anthropocene crystallizes human dominion, corralling the already-pliable-in-that-direction human mind into viewing our master identity as manifestly destined, quasi-natural, and sort of awesome\u201d (141).\u00a0 The Anthropocene might be the \u201cobvious\u201d choice for our current geological epoch, but Crist hopes for a nomenclature that steps beyond the mere \u2018scientific construction\u2019 of the term and for a name that presents a \u201chigher calling we must rise to meet\u201d (142).\u00a0 She calls for a term, perhaps like the ecotheologian Thomas Berry\u2019s \u201cEcozoic\u2019, that challenges us to integrate with nonhumans, wild nature, and ecological limits.\u00a0 Engaging with this wild nature, she hopes, means \u201ccatching \u201ca sideways glance of a vast nonhuman world that has been denigrated by the concepts, institutions, and practices associated with the \u2018human\u2019\u201d (143).<\/p>\n

What Crist seems to be suggesting is that the Anthropocene manifests this social tendency to think of technical solutions, rather than questioning the necessity to engage with the planet in the first place.\u00a0 Instead of viewing Earth as \u201can assortment of \u201cresources\u201d (or \u201cnatural capital,\u201d \u201cecological services,\u201d \u201cworking landscapes,\u201d and the like),\u201d we should strive for \u201ca cosmic and truer vision of Earth as a wild planet overflowing in abundance and creativity\u201d (144).\u00a0 Crist\u2019s view could perhaps be seen as romantic, or even seeking a state of nature that Bruno Latour would argue never existed, but her point is well taken that we have come to think of ourselves as the prime agent, sole proprietor, and main caretaker of the planet, when in fact we are only a small piece of a vast and diverse biosphere.<\/p>\n

2. Ben Dibley, \u201d \u2018The Shape of Things to Come\u2019: Seven Theses on the Anthropocene and Attachment<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0Australian Humanities Review<\/em>\u00a052 (2012).<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Anthropocene is both a geological epoch and a socially constructed discourse: the human species as a geologic force is an \u201cemergence that is simultaneously an emergency.\u201d\u00a0 Not only is it a geologic term to signal a new era in earth\u2019s course, but a term that has firmly entered discourse across the social sciences and humanities.<\/li>\n
  2. The Anthropocene bridges time scales that had previously kept geological and human history separate.\u00a0 Because the former was previously thought to be too slow moving to impinge on social processes, the rupture presented by the Anthropocene allows us to see this \u201cacceleration\u201d of change and this \u201cfolding of geological time and the time of capital.\u201d<\/li>\n
  3. The Anthropocene on the one hand is a discourse of limits, that is awareness of market externalities, the ecological price of freedom, and its significance not as a resource but as our \u201cvery life support system.\u201d\u00a0 On the other hand, there is another very distinct camp that sees the Anthropocene as a treatable condition: markets alone, with their engenderment of technoscientific fixes, geoengineering solutions, and liberal freedoms, are capable of moving us out of the crisis.<\/li>\n
  4. The modern distinction between society and nature is now dead, even though it was never the case to begin with.\u00a0 Neither the romantic \u2018we must leave the nonhumans alone\u2019 perspective, nor the enlightenment \u2018we can control Nature\u2019 framework will function to avoid this dualism any longer.\u00a0 We are made aware of the \u2018entanglements\u2019, \u2018naturecultures\u2019, and \u2018global hybrids\u2019 that Latour, Haraway, and others have identified.<\/li>\n
  5. Rather than characterizing our responsibility as that of retreating (avoiding further tampering) or mastery (technoscience will come up with a solution), we must realize our \u2018attachment, dependency and responsibility\u2019 to Earth.\u00a0 There is, at least in the near future, no other planet for us to migrate, and thus the Anthropocene hails us \u2018Earthlings\u2019.\u00a0 This is congruent with Eileen Crist\u2019s argument.<\/li>\n
  6. \u2018The emerging apparatus of the Anthropocene signals an increasingly thorough folding of ecology and economy, to which the financialization of the earth system is central\u2019.\u00a0 Not only do we have this emerging financial speculation and hedging against Earth\u2019s catastrophes and processes, but also capital now dictates biological, geological, and molecular solutions.\u00a0 Bioengineering of plants, optimizing the climate with aerosols, and designing bacteria are such examples of market technoscientific solutions that emerge from a system of capital that contributed to the crisis in the first place.<\/li>\n
  7. We are no longer afforded a utopian vision of the future, but rather must begin to compose the world with new relationships between humans and nonhumans.\u00a0 Enlightenment inspired freedom, with its ambivalence for nature\u2019s limits on human life, must necessarily be re-conceived to accommodate a cosmopolitical process: politics beyond the domain of the human.\u00a0 Life in the Anthropocene therefore has no certain future, only prospects that depend on our conduct in the present.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    1. Eileen Crist, \u201cOn the Poverty of Our Nomenclature. Environmental Humanities 3 (2013), 129-147. In last week’s class we discussed the traditional separation of human and natural history for reasons […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2102,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-52","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-acene\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-acene\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-acene\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-acene\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2102"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-acene\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-acene\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":66,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-acene\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52\/revisions\/66"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-acene\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-acene\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv-acene\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}