The Holocene was not a blank canvas upon which human societies could express themselves. Its climate was not a dull, fixed reality, safely in the background and separate from human history. On the contrary, states and cultures have always been intimately shaped by complex, changeful feedback loops between politics and climate. (150)
I've found myself referring to this narrative frequently. I planned to use it in the last iteration of "Religion and the Anthropocene" (it fell in the week I gave exhausted students off), and want to use it for the upcoming Anthropocene Humanities courses, too. I share Davies' sense that many Anthropocene discussions are weakened by thoughtless representation of the Holocene as a stable "Eden," paying even less attention to the great changes preceding it. (The map above shows The Last Glacial Maximum, 23,00-16,500 years ago, whose ebbing ushers in the Holocene.) In fact the Holocene, the context in which all human "civilizations" emerged, was stable only relative to what preceded - and will follow - it. The flows of human history are shaped by often quite sudden swings in temperature, droughts, the effects of changed oceanic currents, wiggles of the magnetic poles, and much else. (And civilization wasn't an "Eden" for most people; Davies reminds us that hunter gatherers led longer, healthier lives than their sedentary successors, civilization benefits only elites.)
Davies' argument is that we can better live into the Anthropocene if we recognize what it's displacing - that the "birth of the Anthropocene" coincides with the end of the "Holocene" - and that this can help us accept our place in the complicated feedback loops of human and other than human forcings that have always shaped human destiny. The Anthropocene poses new challenges - a more unstable context than humans (or other life forms) have known for 12,700 years - but it's not our first rodeo. We've been variously on the make since before the Holocene began... Here's how he starts his story:
The dawn of the Holocene saw ice and permafrost retreat from Europe, as hazel, birch, juniper, deer, and boars spread north (a temperature rise of seven degrees Celsius can expand a tree species’ range a thousand kilometers toward the poles). Humans followed, hunting the forest mammals with bows and arrows, gathering hazelnuts, and catching eels in wicker traps. The richest center of this Mesolithic culture was probably Doggerland, a low-lying territory of marshes and narrow valleys on the northern edge of the continent. Wetlands expanded rapidly in the tropics, attested to by rising levels of atmospheric methane. Pottery, still unknown in the Fertile Crescent, was already a widespread and long-standing technology for cooking and display among the hunter-gatherers of China, Japan, and northeast Asia. The ceramics of the Jomon hunter-gatherers of Japan—whose diets involved acorns, fish, and smoked pork—grew increasingly sophisticated in this millennium as their first year-round villages emerged. Villages were established in North China as well; their inhabitants hunted deer, processed seeds, made tools of bone and antler, and may or may not have adopted sedentary lifestyles. Domesticated food plants, dissimilar to their wild progenitors, evolved in the Americas: nomadic cultivators in coastal Ecuador and the Colombian Andes domesticated squash and arrowroot, respectively. (164)
My use of Davies' "epic" of the Holocene has been a little different. The week I'd assigned it for in "Religion and the Anthropocene" last Fall was the one in which we were also to read the Dao De Jing. The idea was that it makes sense to understand things in terms of flows and oppositions - at every level from the cosmic to the personal - as Daoists do when you realize that the Holocene wasn't a featurelessly stable background to human endeavor, that balance or harmony are processes, and far from automatic. Relatedly, I've referred to Davies' "epic" in connection with the Book of Job, a reminder that the wild and barely tamed world of the theophany records experiences of the natural world as anything but a stable backdrop. The intrusion of Stengers' Gaia isn't new, and some of our most venerable traditions know all about it, if we can learn to hear what they're saying.
More broadly, I've been recalling Davies' "epic" in the effort to convince myself that the religious legacies of the "world religions" (and others, of course) aren't all automatically and obviously obsolete because they take for granted a Holocene stability which no longer obtains. The Holocene was more stable than the Anthropocene will be, but it didn't allow human beings to be so unaware of contingency, catastrophe and irrevocable change as to make them pollyannaish in taking natural harmony for granted. Increasingly I'm thinking that that blithe pollyannaishness is part of the Anthropocene problem: the transformed experience of human power over (and independence of) nature made possible by the force - unconnected to the cycles of living interaction which previously structured all life including our own - of fossil fuels.
Davies' exercise is a little contrived of course, and perhaps - despite its emphasis on unexpected changes at many levels - too coherent.
The pace of both technological and climatic change accelerated dramatically in the seventh millennium (3700–2700 B. C.). It could be called the Hieroglyphic millennium: writing was among the period’s many innovations. The changes in climate were ultimately driven by the changing geometry between the earth and sun. Ever since the Pastoral millennium [8700-7700 B. C.], the amount of summer sunlight striking the Northern Hemisphere had slowly decreased. The decline in summer heating steadily weakened the force behind Northern Hemisphere monsoons, but the monsoons’ feedback relationships with vegetation cover (among other things) meant that rainfall patterns often altered not gradually but in sudden, localized jumps. The seventh millennium saw a great cluster of these regional jumps to much drier conditions. In essence, it witnessed the emergence of the modern world’s arid belt above and around the Tropic of Cancer, from the southwestern United States to the deserts of the Sahara, the Middle East, and Central Asia. It is tempting to link these climatic changes to social ones, and to see the struggle to cope with desiccation in the monsoon belt as the common factor behind the (very) approximately simultaneous emergence of complex societies on three continents. Grand paradigms like that always work better as provocations than as dogma, but the widespread socioecological reorganizations of the Hieroglyphic millennium, like the temperature anomaly of the Diluvian millennium [6700-5700 B. C.], undoubtedly constitute a major landmark for the view from the Anthropocene. (172-73)
As a literary scholar he would admit this, no doubt: every narrative is, well, a narrative! But rereading it with a class of Chinese students in mind, I notice in a new way that, while Davies includes the history of civilizations on all continents (and the Austronesians who settled the islands of the Pacific), the epic is anchored by a focus on the Fertile Crescent, the only part of the world on which there's a near continuous spotlight. He admits this, too, when explaining how he chose names for the Holocene millennia. He explains that this region, a hub of three continents, happens also to be one whose "development is (uniquely, for now) well enough understood to allow for detailed discriminations between each millennium" (162). The other data points he offers suggest but don't supply alternative, let alone plural, narratives. I don't know if those students, rooted in "5000 years of Chinese civilization," have a different sense of "deep time"... perhaps we can talk about it! Maybe Daoism will return, even!
