The Bloomington conference on religious perspectives on the "age of humans" has finished. Is there a new field of Religion and Anthropocene whose birth I got to be part of? I'm not sure. Lots of religion wasn't represented (narry a non-North Atlantic tradition mentioned, if I can include Native North American traditions in that rubric). And we didn't really get into the argument about good or bad Anthropocene. So what did we do? We discussed industrial food production, paradigms of environmental ethics, science fiction, TEK (traditional ecological knowledge), transhumanism, ecological grief, eco-anxiety and hope, with scattered references to Donna Haraway, Clive Hamilton, Bruno Latour and - why not? - Hannah Arendt. (I mentioned Haraway in my futurist Job, too.) We also watched a rather appallingly fun movie.What stayed with me was a talk by a British geographer Kathryn Yusoff, who pointed out that discussions of the Anthropocene are almost exclusively the province of white people. Every speaker had problematized "Anthropocene" for a thoughtless universalizing, lumping together the privileged few who are the drivers of anthropogenic change with the powerless many who suffer the brunt of the damage. We'd heard from Native scholars who observed that the dystopic lifeworld collapse the Anthropocene may portend for all of humanity has already been lived by colonized, indigenous and enslaved people for centuries. These were familiar arguments, but Yusoff framed her comments shatteringly with lines from Audre Lorde's poem "Litany for Survival":
And when the sun rises we are afraid
it might not remain
when the sun sets we are afraid
it might not rise in the morning
... and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid
So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive
The Anthropocene theorists I've been engaging all assume we were meant to survive. But we're the same people who didn't mean for everyone to survive, who accepted the displacement and impoverishment of many others as the price of progress. We beat our breasts about the many others who will suffer more displacement and impoverishment because of climate change, extinction cascades, rising seas and the like. (Ugolino uncannily appropriate, indeed!) But in discussing the Anthropocene we assume the place of the future scientist looking back on this stage in earth's history (a morally chilling detachment we got to witness in the film's interviews with members of the stratigraphic commission): we assume we'll be among the survivors, or at least that the survivors will be like us.
And I was giving a talk presuming that the Book of Job will still be read, that there will still be people who identify with Job's story! As D. J. A. Clines has observed, there is hardly any text which more perfectly speaks of and to rich people trying to face down the thought that they might one day no longer be lords of the earth. While my projected future Job made room for others - animals (my Harawayan moment was "make kin, not babies"), and the hidden laboring classes of the world, symbolized by Mrs. Job - but the last, especially, sound like an afterthought. While claiming to mourn them as others don't, I still defaulted to the view that Job's first children were never meant to survive. I was still assuming that the story that matters is Job's. I have work to do!
(The picture is the cover of a book by a Finnish speaker. The title translates as Going to Hell? Environmental Attachment and Hope.)
