Telling it like it is

In the Guardian, so valuable a corrective for the narrowly US-aligned coverage in American news sources, an apocalyptic postcard scene of the record-breaking fires in Turkey - had you heard about them? A piece on heat records in Greenland spells out global consequences.

Queer family

Hello, family! Today is the Feast Day of Mary, Martha and Lazarus of Bethany - special friends of Jesus. Maybe even more special than we're told. (This early 16th century Valencian family portrait is a rarity.) Kittredge Cherry, whose QSpirit updates I follow, directs us to a reflection from MCC Moderator Nancy Wilson.

Jesus loved Lazarus, Mary and Martha. What drew Jesus to this very non-traditional family group of a bachelor brother living with two spinster sisters? Two barren women and a eunuch are Jesus’ adult family of choice. Are we to assume they were all celibate hetero-sexuals? What if Mary and Martha were not sisters but called each other ‘sister’ as did most lesbian couples throughout recorded history?

My friend M reminds me that sibling-language has been used in all sorts of ways (not least by Jesus), but this suggestion delights me. Whatever their relationships, the household of Lazarus, Martha and Mary is a unit, complete. Jesus felt at home there, and so can we.

Jitters

My first appointment back on campus is four weeks from tomorrow, the Thursday of Orientation Week. By that time I'll have officially confirmed my vaccination status (everyone on campus - students, faculty and staff - must be vaccinated unless eligible for an exemption), and will also somehow have tested myself for covid and, presumably, tested negative (required within 7 days of first arrival back on campus). The reality of what being back in person will

demand is just dawning on us. At present, all classes are to be held in person, even though a Faculty Senate survey conducted in early June - when the outlook was rather brighter than it is today - recorded considerable apprehensiveness. I was among 28% who would be happy with a 50/50 split of in-person and remote teaching, part of the majority resistant to the idea of going fully in person. I don't know how students feel but at least some surely share our caution.

PoGitA

Trying to keep the demands of the upcoming semester at bay (it's going to be a dusey, running two programs, teaching three courses, and participating in five reviews - among other things), I've been working on my "Problem of Good in the Anthropocene" essay. Not as straightforward as I hoped, but writing's never been easy for me. 

I think I have my story worked out at least. It's tempting, when reading Anthropocene stories, to conclude that our shift out of the steady regularity of the Holocene into the spiraling unpredictability of the Anthropocene makes all previous human thought obsolete, including of course religions. But that's too quick. While relatively stable compared to what preceded and is following it, the Holocene was no picnic, and our forebears knew disruptions and displacements; their imaginations were full of world-destroying events in past (the flood?) and future (yugas?). 

The sense that the world is in fact stable enough to be taken for granted is an artifact of a much more recent experience, modern science and industrialization, primed perhaps by late developments of western Christianity and turbocharged by capitalism, but subsidized by the vast uncompensated labor and resources of enslaved and colonized non-western peoples and lands - and the life force of the ancient forests that became fossil fuels. Oblivious or reconciled to the worlds being destroyed to make its spread possible, moderns imagined endless progress and prosperity, a world where nature presented no limits to human ingenuity and expansion. (Their ecomodernist progeny aren't the only ones to continue to see things this way.)

All this was never sustainable, and critics were aware of at least some of its costs from the start, but we need to understand that much of modern western culture was fueled by the rush of power and control of this moment. This includes modern understandings of "religion," and it is this understanding and experience of religion that the Anthropocene renders obsolete. Setting things up this way allows us to expect to find ways of living sustainably with the rest of nature in most of human history. It aligns with Jan Zalasiewics and Julia Adeney Thomas's call: 

Anthropocene stories are not just about how we got here, but also about how things might have been otherwise; a way of reading the past against the grain of the present in order to open up new possibilities for realigning our values, politics, and social practices to live within planetary constraints. (Strata and Three Stories, 8)

The planetary constraints are new - Zalasiewics and Thomas have the influential and urgent essay "Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene" in mind - but thinking in terms of constraints, and in relation with the more than human community, is not. Still, getting (back) to these ways of thinking isn't easy. My argument is that one way to do so is to liberate our religious thinking from the "problem of evil." What's the connection? 

As the natural world came to seem more stable and usable, and as humans seemed more able to have their way with it, religion lost the world. It was about the universe ("absolute dependence") and the individual soul. It wasn't about order and purpose in the world but opened up in moments when things didn't work out, on large scales and small, and pointed, well, beyond the world. To the ultimate, to emptiness, to the infinite depths of the individual human soul. In religious studies we call this "Protestant," and in other settings "secular" - it's just the kind of religiosity which allows the modern nation state to do its thing undisturbed and unchallenged. In Charles Taylor's influential account of A Secular Age, this is the world of the "buffered self," which can imagine itself separate from all this-worldly dependence and entanglement, though I think this analysis needs supplementing with the experience of urbanites and settlers.

In any case, the widening gyre of the Anthropocene might seem like a bonanza for the problem of evil. The reservoir of moral and natural evils seems to be growing, qualitatively as well as quantitatively - not least because climate-provoked calamities have in turn been affected by human agency. That these are rarely the humans suffering the calamity adds another datum. All this may help explain why religion seems resurgent - and perhaps why the forms this resurgence takes are not those of modern religion. But the "problem of evil" has never been about particular evils which, of course, require particular remedies. It's from the lofty perspective of the buffered self. Anthropocene woes happen at many scales at once, though diffusely.

My argument is abut the concurrent, Anthropocene-facilitated rediscovery of what I call the problem of good. What is the problem of good? It's not the mirror image of the problem of evil, though influential formulations have presented them in parallel. The existence of good isn't a problem in the way evil is, which needs to be responded to. We want more, not less good - though the more we have, as folk tales from around the globe tell us, the more we take it for granted. The problem is that good is so good for us (I mean this in a simple and also a profound way) that when it is destroyed we don't know what hit us, we wonder how we can go on. In fact, the problem of evil, once you come down from 30,000 feet, is the problem of good. Why and how was this good compromised? How could it hurt so? How could it have been so fragile? One problem with good is that we often become aware of it only in heartbroken retrospect. What if we worked to become and remain aware of it all the time, as indigenous practices of gratitude and reciprocity do?

The Anthropocene is one episode after another of finding something we thought we could take for granted - something, that is, that we did take for granted - no longer there, from seasons to landscapes to species. We know more losses are on their way. Approaching this through the problem of evil seems unhelpful, especially because human agency is one of the causes of the chaos - and can let things get worse or try to slow down and even restore things. Better to come at it from the problem of good, where we can mourn and mitigate, and face the chastening planetary constraints together.

So that's where I want to end up, but I'm not sure this is the way to get there. I'm also not sure quite what level argument I'm making. I'm used to describing other people's ideas and experiences, historical and contemporary and even conjectural, but this comes a bit closer to a normative argument. This is what we ought to do, because this is what we are as human denizens of this planet. That is, this is what I think life demands of us. It's an argument and a plea, not just a description, an analysis. I'm not sure how to do that...

Audible gasp

"We humans are constrained not just by our limited senses but by our perception of time," observes Jennifer Ackerman in The Bird Way.

"In the bird world, things happen fast, sometimes too fast for us to see. To make this point in talks, Mike Webster of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology shows a real-time video made by biologist Lainy Day of a male black manakin displaying in the forests of Guyana. In the film, the male manakin looks like it's simply hopping up and down. Then Webster plays Day's high-speed video, which shows hundreds of frames per second, as the female manakin would see it. Jaws drop, and there's an audible gasp from the audience. Between the little hops, the male completes a full-body, 360-degree flip, a high-speed somersault too quick for us to see." (219) We're so slow...! 

(I tried to find Lainy Day's video online, without success, but discover I'm actually OK not seeing it. I don't need to - the manakin's somersaults are not meant for me, anyway. It's more fun to leave these flips imperceptible to me, except as a sense of wonder-filled awareness of a world ever pulsing beyond my ken...!)

Splash of color

Belvedere

In search of late summer diversion, we watched the hightest ranked James Bond film, 1964's "Goldfinger." The story is appalling, but what caught me was this scene in Switzerland. That's the Hotel Belvedere at the Rhonegletscher (the glacier of the Rhône river) in Switzerland, a place connected to a branch of my family, and one we often visited while hiking in the Wallis valley. My sister had a summer job there and, if I'm not mistaken, it was the destination of my very first trip, shortly after being born. I might be bemused that I'm recognizing family history in a famed movie landscape when, in fact, millions of people - starting even before I was born - must have been recognizing the movie in the landscape! But this unexpected reencounter gave me occasion to confirm something I'd heard - that the glacier of the Rhone, caverns in which you could once enter right from the hotel, has melted so far back that it's not even visible from the hotel any more. A drone film shot a year ago confirms this. Vertigo! 

Satori

I guess I never posted a picture of this sculpture, which was erected in Morningside Park in May. Called "Reclining Liberty," it light-heartedly combines a familiar New York character with an ancient Buddhist pose. Artist Zaq Landsberg lets viewers decide what it means. (Many younger ones also climb all over it.)

I had the pleasure yesterday of showing it to a friend who happens to be a Buddhist, and has just been through a really rough year. I didn't tell him what we were going to see, and had us approach from the right. We saw Lady Liberty's feet before we knew whose they were, or what she was doing. "It's the Buddha!" he gasped, happily astonished.

Land of big numbers

This graphic is from the South China Morning Post. As unthinkable amounts of water fell (the huge cube is just the city of Zhengzhou), 33 deaths have been announced. That's a number a Shanghai friend taught me appears often in official disaster reports and means: many, many more. 

And more rain is in the forecast.

Diluvian

A student in the class just finished responded to my comments on her final paper and added: Recently, the extreme weather in Henan Province caused by climate warming has completely disturbed the original urban order, which has aroused my deep reflection. The Anthropocene is indeed a topic that should be paid attention to.

(Image)

Anthropocene stories

Storytime! Stories were a major theme in the "Anthropocene Humanities" course, building on Julia Adeney Thomas' typology of historical narratives for the Anthropocene and Amitav Ghosh's critique of realist novels for telling the wrong kinds of stories for the Anthropocene. The humanities contribute to Anthropocene reflection an appreciation for the indispensability of stories to human life and history - and a critical awareness of the possibilites opened, and closed, by stories of various kinds. The midterm paper (due in the fourth session, 9 days in!) was about what sorts of stories the Anthropocene demanded. And of course our final session, anchored in Donna Haraway's "Camille Stories," generated a half dozen remarkable "speculative fabulations" of our own. But a few students also availed themselves of the option of writing a story as their final paper.

These were each thoughtful and creative and - being stories - don't really lend themselves to being summarized! But let me try to describe them anyway, starting with the more conventional and moving toward the more complex. Individually and together they evoke worlds of gloom, concern and hope.

A few of the briefer ones tell of post-apocalyptic worlds familiar from science fiction, in worlds ravaged by anthropogenic disasters and viruses. One tells of a farmer whose field hands fall ill; it turns out to be a new virus, borne by mutated wheat, which devastates the human population. Two others describe a world where only select few can be saved (under a "Dome" in Australia in one story, an "Ark of Doom" in the other) - but what one calls "the ugliness of human nature" is revealed as people fight to enter or, having made it in, turn on each other. As humanity approaches its inevitable death the only peace is found among Tibetan monks chanting sutras in the Himalayas. Another tells of a pair of siblings at a time when a lethal virus is killing people all around. The few uninfected people are called to shelter for the future of humanity, including A - but his sister B is ill. She tells him to leave her but he insists on taking her with him to the shelter where, although her condition has improved with their shared hope, she is turned away. This is the right thing to do, the student writes, but let's do what we can to ensuer we never find ourselves in that situation. 

Abortive hope appears in a few others. One takes the form of a letter, written by the last surviving human on the planet: if you're reading it, perhaps you're a descendant of the people who left in 10 space ships in search of a new planet? The letter describes how humans destroyed the earth, and darky worries that, should any of the shape ships find another planet to inhabit, will probably take it to Anthropocene too. Another tells of a scientist whose years of efforts to develop a plastic-consuming plant have been fruitless, even as plastics, piling up everywhere and ruining the oceans, have started to mutate. Suddenly he notices a spot of green - a leaf from what turns out to be a fast-growing plastic-decomposing plant! It ends up preventing the plastic apocalypse but, the storyteller concludes, As people are buried in joy, a tremendous carcass of a dead whale is floating in the sea, whose body is occupied by new unknown organisms and materials. 

Salvific green appears in another, more elaborate story. Two explorers - conveniently named Mark and Mary - are part of a series of teams called "Oasis," dispatched to the desertified world outside a domed human settlement for signs of surviving biological life. Their supplies are running out, and they seem likely to join the past teams who never returned. 

“Mary, how much food do you have?” Mark asked.

“A little. I believe no more than you,” Mary's electronic voice came from his mask. “Well, I think enough for two days at most.”

“Shit! Mary, do you know what we eat? Plastic, they even added plastic to our food! They said it’s specially produced, and we can digest it! How come they don't eat the plastic themselves?” 

“Mark, what can they do? They even can’t feed people inside there… I, I have already despaired. Only god can help us. Or I should say, it’s god that is punishing us.”

“You are right. God abandoned humans. He didn’t protect us anymore. Please…”

“Stop, Mark! Lift your left foot! What’s that?”

Mark raised his left foot. He couldn’t tell what the object was immediately, but the color hit him violently. It’s green! He wasn’t sure whether it’s a plant at once, but it’s green! “Mary, is it a plant? Is it a plant?! Oh, I can’t, I can’t…” 

“Be careful, Mark! Stay clam! Don’t step on it! Ok, back away slowly…let me see…” 

Mary got close to the green object, and observed it for a while, then said, “yes, it’s a plant.” She tried to say it peacefully, but her voice still trembled. Mark wanted to say something, but he found had had lost his voice. It suddenly came to him that there might be other plants nearby. He started looking for them. And so did Mary. Sure enough, they quickly found a second one, a third one, a fourth one…then, they found a large area of green, a large area of plants.

It is indeed an Oasis, with trees and birds ... but then the narrative shifts to two other characters, named Ben and Jack, who are revealed to be programmers of an expensive virtual reality game called Oasis. Life inside the dome is so awful - searches for life outside it all unsuccessful - that more and more people are seeking escape in this game, spending all their money. 

What will humans' future be like?  No one knows. 
 

The protagonist of another remarkably rich story is named Sarah, who finds herself perhaps the last human being on a planet terrorized by human-eating zombies and robots. The robots have revolted against a humanity which has produced wave upon wave of climatic destruction in short-sighted efforts to mitigate the harm they've already done. The robots were created to control the zombies resulting from leaked nuclear waste and are programmed never to harm humans. But other people as well as zombies are nowhere to be seen - until Sarah meets someone she recognizes, Dr. Fang, the original creator of the robots. Or so it seems: he's actually been taken over by the robots, and has sought her out as the last surviving human. He explains that the zombies, having completed their work, have been eliminated. Robots want to be the masters of the Anthropocene, being humankind's greatest work. But there's still a system in place, which only a human being could trigger, to resume plans to restore the earth - plans interrupted because humans feared war. If she activates it, all robots and zombies will be destroyed and she can complete humanity's revenge: how about it? A complicated psychological tug of war ensues, but at the end Sarah decides to let the robots inherit the earth. Putting her gun to her temple she spoke the lat human words: "Long live the Anthropocene."

Before turning to my favorite bunch of stories - many involving a similar self-sacrificing nobility - I should mention that one story, just a paragraph (a few students misunderstood the final prompt and tried to respond hurriedly to all three prompts), is optimistic. It takes place in 3021, when all is well. Science has solved all the Anthropocene problems, even making life better for humans and other life forms: there's no need to panic. But the students who chose to write a story had more complicated feelings. 

The remaining three stories all involve the sea. The simplest is a "fable" told of a boy growing up in a coastal village which hunted whales; the student explained she wasn't trying science fiction as its technological gewgaws can distract from the human meaning of things. At one point the boy rows a boat out into the sea by himself and finds himself surrounded by whales. To his surprise, they are curious but unthreatening. He's enchanted by their songs and by a young female, whose body is purest white. The boy is punished for venturing out on his own, and is soon old enough to join the hunt, forgetting what he knew, though the sight of the body of a slaughtered whale, a young white female, briefly gives him tremors. Eventually, grown up, he rows out to sea again to hear the whale songs but there is only silence, the last whale having been killed.

A little more complicated, even conflicted, is the story about a self-doubting young Siren named Argel. He (Greek sirens are half bird half woman but these sirens have fish tails and at least this one is male) wonders why sirens are thought to be ugly, and why they have to tempt sailors to their doom. Did god create them to kill? He's drawn to human beings, though only one boy smiles at him. But at the same time the boy smiles, other humans are dumping colorful plastics in the ocean. Argel notices that sirens cause more shipwrecks when humans dump more plastics, but doesn't want to be evil. He dives deep into the sea, passing shoals of colorful fish and even more colorful plastics, until his last breath is spent. There was a little turtle lying on the reef where Argel left, the story ends. It turned over on the reef, and its four feet were wrapped with fishing nets which were as green as its shell. The student explained that she left Argel's questions unanswered for the reader to ponder.

The last story, finally, is about a mermaid - yes, the narrator says, a mermaid: they really exist! This one never knew her parents but was raised in the middle of the Pacific by her grandfather - also a mermaid! He taught her to swim, but also about human language and civilization; he said a stranded sailor had taught him. One day a tanker crashes on a shoal. Her grandfather tries to help the fish and birds dying in the spilled oil, and the mermaid helps him; when the ship collapses on them, he shields her with his body. She wakes up on a beach where someone is talking to her - a human! "I know you talk," he says, and asks if she wants to know how her grandfather is doing. She learns that he's died - but the man says he can be revived - by science! They'll be able to make her human, too - won't she come along? She agrees but asks to have a final look at the ocean, and escapes into the waves. Why did she run away? asks the narrator rhetorically, Because the sea was too beautiful.

And why do I know this mermaid? Because I am her. My grandfather is a knowledgeable scientist, and my parents used to be researchers in the "Human-fish gene exchange" laboratory in the human world. Grandfather discovered that the purpose of my parents' research was to create the so-called "Mermaid", so that human beings could plunder the ocean more wantonly. My parents' research had been successful but my grandfather thought that a great disaster was coming, and finally they had a conflict. The accident led to the death of my parents. In order to stop the plan, my grandfather absconded with me and the core achievements in the laboratory. In order to avoid capture, he turned me and himself into mermaids, managed to erase all my memories, fled to the sea, and destroyed all the research findings. The people who found us have been searching for us for a long time. The arrogant guy who talked to me wanted to persuade me to go back to the human world in order to continue the research of "Human-fish gene exchange" on me. He was so smug that he let me escape easily, probably because in his mind, human life has infinite charm. After that, I continue to travel through the ocean, always doing the last thing my grandfather and I did together - saving the endangered lives in the ocean with my own tiny power. I am a mermaid, although without much power, but still adhere to protect my home.

I think Scheherezade would be impressed by all these stories, and cyborg prophetess Haraway too; I know that I am. I want to find a way to use some of them in my fall course - optimally not only with the writers' permission but with their participation too! Stories are able to capture complicated emotions, to explore the ways in which humans (and others) might respond to calamitous and dehumanizing times, in solidarity with the whole fragile world. 

Bootleg AQI

We had weird weather here today, the sky a dirty yellowish white, the buildings on the horizon a soupy grey and  and the sun a fuzzy orange. The light reminded me of Shanghai so I checked the AQI index and saw we were in unhealthy territory. By evening it reached 167.

But where could all that fine particulate matter be coming from? Eventually we learned the reason. We'd read that the Oregon Bootleg fire was generating its own weather, smoke in a satellite view streaming eastward... should have remembered it could reach us! 

Finale

I've made my way through all the final papers for the Renmin summer school. Most are impressive, considering they're written in a second language, in a field far from the student's major - and, of course, a field full of polysyllabic neologisms like "Anthropocene"! The consensus of most of the essay writers seems to be that Chinese tradition has the resources to offer a way out of the Anthropocene. This wisdom was frequently presented in terms of a seamless tradition asserting the unity of humanity and nature (天人合一) stretching from ancient Taoism (not the Daoism I gave them some materials about) and Confucianism to contemporary ideas of "ecological civilization" - so frequently and so seamlessly that I sense the presence of a shared source. Occasionally the Chairman of Everything is even named, though not as often as his wooden slogans about the "community of life" and the "green waters and green mountains [which] are also gold mountains and silver mountains."

The more interesting papers made more complex arguments. One each discussed "ecological socialism" and "historical materialism" by name (who knew the young Karl Marx had anticipated the Anthropocene in distinguishing "free nature" from "humanized nature"!) One suggested that what united the apparent differences between Daoists, Confucians and Legalists (only mention of this important school!) is a civilization-defining "pragmatism" on display also in recent appropriations of socialism and capitalism. One responded to Roy Scranton's argument  that the Anthropocene demands we learn to die as a civilization (based on the old saw that to philosophize is to learn to die) with a knowing deployment of Confucius' agnosticism about the afterlife: "how can we know death if we don't know life?" And one exquisitely compared Chinese landscape paintings with western Renaissance perspective to demonstrate the "liquid ecology" James Miller had shown us at work in Daoism, one which dissolves not only the boundary between the human and natural worlds, but between both of these and the supernatural. 

One brilliant essay traced a famous ancient folk tale (愚公移山) about a man who thought he could move a mountain with the help of his future descendants, his naive faith rewarded by the gods who granted his wish, from ancient times through a famous discussion of Mao's (the people take the place of the gods) and into the present (where technology lets us do the work of the gods ourselves) through discussion of two recent Chinese sci-fi movies! At the end of the story of "Yugong Moves the Mountain", the Emperor of Heaven was moved by Yugong's sincerity and ordered the two sons of Kua'e to carry on the two mountains. But what the story does not tell us is what is left after the mountain was removed. Is it magnanimous? Is it a gravel wilderness? Or a bottomless abyss?

Another suite of essays introduced me to contemporary Chinese art works, novels and even a fashion collection engaged implicitly or explicitly with the Anthropocene. These works were anguished about the extent of ecological devastation, and less sanguine about the possibility of restoring harmony" Song Chen's "Healing Land," an installation assembling polluted soil samples from around the world in giant "soil babies" on "soil placentas"; the "Story Behind" series of Xu Bing, which recreated traditional landscape scenes out of garbage (I saw two of them in Beijing); Chen Qiufan's astonishing "near Anthropocene" novel Waste Tide (the English translation of which I've started reading); another novel actually called Anthropocene (人类世) by one Zhao Defa (not available in translation but it sounds fascinating); and the Spring Summer 2021 collection of Chinese designer Mithridate, also called "Anthropocene," and presented with great drama at the Serpentine Gallery in London. Students also commended western works, from Ian Angus to Peter Berger's Introduction to Sociology to a BBC series called "Human Planet."

But perhaps the most interesting were the stories which not quite a fourth of the students chose to write - which I'll tell you about tomorrow. 

With relish

it's nice to be back in New York, with its always striking sartorial variety, endless audible and inaudible grooves, deadpan humor ... and limitless appetite for coffee!

Mosquito-cene

Taking my time, I've made it through two-thirds of the final papers for my Renmin summer school course on "Anthropocene Humanities." Filtering out the platitudes about "ecological civilization" which many students felt obliged to include, there's lots of interesting stuff and some really insightful arguments. Several students opted to write stories, and they are all wonderfully creative and revealing - I'll share some of them when I've finished all the papers. 

But for now, here's something on a lighter note, a second-hand story:

When I mentioned the concept of the Anthropocene to my friend, she summed her opinion up with a short story. She said that summer had arrived and mosquitoes were popping up in her dorm room. She was bitten all over, and once, woken up at night because of the buzzing noise, she accidentally heard a mosquito say to its fellows: “We have sucked the life out of that large mammal and she can not defend herself. I declare this dormitory to have entered The Times of Mosquitoes!” The rest agreed, and began to recount the feats of their people since the days of warmer weather... My friend went back to sleep. She knew that mosquitoes would disappear with just a spray of insecticide, or at latest, come winter, would no longer exist, so she thought these were no different from the now-dead mosquitoes she had seen before, except that they had named the age of mosquitoes before dying. 

Before returning to her own argument, the student wryly concludes:

Clearly she is one of the people who agree with the claim that man is nothing compared to nature.

For my part, I'm thrilled that she's telling her friends about the class!

Apocalyptic

A breached quarry in Erftstadt-Blessem, in the south of my mother's native Nordrheinwestfalen, shows the deadly force of floodwaters.

How it looked before it became a hellmouth.

Long time no see, New York!

It's always a thrill to see the Manhattan skyline, even when the air is not so clear...

Au revoir, Del Mar!

And just like that, my lovely month in California has drawn to a close...

More speculative fabulation

Here are three more stories, starting 75 years from now, by students in my Chinese summer school class. 

By 2096, I am living on a very different planet -- a planet that is much harder to live on. I have seen the process of rising sea levels, higher temperatures, and more extreme weather events. The areas suitable for human survival have further shrunk, and many island countries have been lost or disappeared altogether. Tropical rain forests were further reduced, glaciers shrank, and as mining and arable land were developed, there was less fertile land, and it became more difficult to extract food/wealth from the soil. Many species that had existed for thousands of years became extinct in the last 75 years. Continued global warming is making catastrophic weather more frequent, sea levels are rising to varying degrees around the world, and New York has built levees to keep out the water. Some coastal cities, such as Houston or Shanghai, have been abandoned due to hazardous weather. 

I was watching the news at home that something was going to get flooded again, and I couldn't but remember how I had to move away from my hometown by the sea and escape to live on the mainland. Watching my town disappeared in the water wasn’t easy to accept. TV hosts repeatedly stressed that there is no greater threat to the environment, that it is inevitable that cities will be submerged, and that there are precedents in all countries, but it was like the first half of my life had lost its meaning.

Thanks to rapid advances in artificial intelligence and robotics, as well as the promise of biological and nanotechnology, the impact of the climate crisis may be mitigated. Artificial intelligence is increasingly becoming involved in government and corporate public services and control, providing detailed predictions of weather and climate models. Although many have doubts about the use of AI in social affairs, the threat of climate is more immediate so we have to rely on AI's timely warning and social resource allocation to reduce the impact of climate disasters. 

The idea of the Anthropocene has become familiar, in order to improve living conditions and survive against a backdrop of gradual environmental degradation. In these 75 years human beings have begun to take measures to slow down the negative impact of human beings and the deterioration of the environment, but this has only slowed down the speed of environmental deterioration. We need to use technology to find a more effective approach. And I hope that I can return to my hometown one day beside the beautiful beach.

Seventy-five years on, the earth's environment has deteriorated and is no longer suitable for human life. Some of the selected humans escaped from Earth in a spacecraft and multiplied on the spacecraft. There are only machines and humans on the spaceship, and humans rely on technology to get material from the universe to survive. Jack saw the image of the earth in the past when looking for information, and had a great yearning for the forest and other natural landscapes. He secretly took a small spaceship to leave the space base and return to the Earth, and searched for the green according to the content of the image. After painstaking efforts to find the target, he finds it is just a projection, an image of green plants. Still Jack decides not to return to the ship, but to stay with the projection and die on Earth.

Today is July 14th, 2096. As a surveillance camera, I stayed quietly on the street and recorded 75 years of life and witnessed 75 years of changes. About 70 years ago, I recognized the word “Anthropocene” from the way humans shaped their mouths, which seems like a very bad time. As the years went by, the streets became less crowded and the corners I could record became more and more dilapidated. By the time I reached my durable years, no one remembered to replace me. I had a vague question: Why did this street go from prosperity to ruin? Why are there fewer and fewer trees in the streets and the whole world changing from green to yellow? Why are there fewer and fewer people? Until, by chance, I connected it all to the word “Anthropocene”. Maybe the Anthropocene is the end of the world, like security cameras that will have reached the end of their lifespan and will have to be disposed of. The beginning of the Anthropocene also means the end of humanity. The emergence of the concept of the Anthropocene was a wake-up call for human beings, but they did not seize the opportunity to change, so their era ended.

If any of the stories individual students have submitted as final projects inspire me the way these do, I'll share them too!

Speculative fabulation

The last session of my Summer School class was a blast. I spent the first half synthesizing themes from the past sessions and contextualizing the final reading, the "Camille Stories" at the end of Donna Haraway's Staying with the Trouble. Lots of good stuff, a final fireworks display celebrating the contributions the humanities make to living into the Anthropocene (and what Haraway sees as its more hopeful successor, the "chthulucene")! But the real fun came next. I'd started the class with student groups proposing definitions of the humanities, and wanted to end it with their voices, too. 

The midterm paper had asked them to reflect on storytelling in the Anthropocene and the "Camille Stories" are a bravura work of storytelling Haraway calls "speculative fabulation." The "Camille Stories" emerged from the collaboration of three people at a weeklong seminar (at Cérisy), tasked with crafting a narration spéculative extending five generations into the future, and the result brought the concerns of all the participants together into a story whose "possible futures" reflect back to us "implausible but real nows" - possibilities we might not otherwise have seen. We had less time and bigger groups but I wanted them to work together one more time.

The prompt asked them to tell a story which starts in 75 years - a span I chose because it would be near, or just beyond, the ends of their lives. (This is a year with lots of centennial posturing in China so I abandoned the initial 100.) I didn't know what they would do - the prompt is pretty minimal, and thirty minutes not a lot of time - but they've worked together well over past sessions, and I'd been making much of the fact that our six groups always generated excitingly different, if consonant, projects. And they didn't disappoint.

Group 1 told of an Anthropocene Museum, built in a submerged state building. A variety of visitors respond in different ways - a bored child eager to return to its robot puppy, an architect nostalgic for the cultural spirit and connotation of the buildings of the past, unlike the functional structures which have replaced them. A middle aged man is briefly bothered and then comforts himself with the thought that surely his generation will escape a similar fate, while an older man, who had moved from a submerged country in the Pacific Ocean decades before worries that lessons haven't been learned. And one more: I'm a cyborg. My body is metal, but I have a human heart. How time flies, the once tall building is now just a ruin. My metallic body has no memory of these ruins. But why is my human heart beating so fast, it seems extremely sad. I'm not a fully human, but disasters still make me feel down.

Group 2 imagined that, by 75 years from now, 90% of the population will have lost their home town and, unless they can find another place to reside, are put by the authority into a deep sleep. They have consciousness, they are still alive, but they can only act in their dreams, where they are scientists developing new time and space technologies and spend their spare time in a VR (virtual reality) game. High-level decision makers are divided into two factions. The power faction advocates the continuation of high-tech industrial production for the purpose of capital. In industrial production, people living in real life are either laborers or managers. While industrial production is ostensibly about keeping the earth running with an artificial ecosystem self-cycling, it is actually about sacrificing a portion of the labor force to meet the needs of the frozen people, because the frozen people need energy replenishment in Cyberspace, in the VR scenario game. The leaders of this part of the labor force advocate revolution, eventually overthrowing oppression, gaining a voice, achieving communication with the frozen scientists, and seeking a solution for coexistence.

Group 3's protagonist was born on a garbage island, and, having seen most of the rest of the population die of thirst as water sources dry up, decides to pack up their bits of copper wiring and radioactive steel waste and leave the island for a better life. Suddenly, all the people who had fled stopped. They saw the scene across the sea bridge - fire and ruins. People's sanity began to collapse, and they began to run aimlessly. What exactly is the Anthropocene? Look at the world now and I just hate it. It starts with human beings and eventually feeds back to human beings. If, I mean, if we had controlled our desires earlier and taken more precautions, would we have seen a different human world?

I'll share the other three groups' stories with you tomorrow. All the stories are a little dystopian, as the topic demands! But they also surface "implausible but real nows," introduce us to imaginaries different from but consonant with those my American students might generate. A good number of the students have also availed themselves of the option to write a story as their final paper (many assuring me they've never written one before), so I look forward to even more!

Frying pan

Wish I could superimpose a temperature map on the itinerary of our trip, so you could see how we went from 77˚ on the coast to 116˚ in a few hours on Friday (with a stop in 99˚ Temecula), then back, from 112˚ to 79˚ today (with stop in 100˚ Hemet). This scary map (from WaPo), with counterintuitive colors (the flame colors are 60s to 80s, 100 is ashen but the treacherous 120s are green!), gives an idea... 

Desert heat

Palm Springs, destination of the final little trip of our California sojourn, hit a new record for the day today: 120˚ F (49˚ C). We took refuge in the dark coolness of a movie theater - remember matinées? By the time night fell, misting made the nice mostly outdoor French place we went for dinner almost bearable. Still 108˚!

Bleak beauty

Marooned hammocks

The topic of the latest session of "Anthropocene Humanities" was "Descularizing the Anthropocene," a subject not only dreadfully polysyllabic but, for China, a little delicate. I didn't say "religion" - but then I didn't talk about religion or the religions. I talked about those experiences of surplus feeling, especially in places of complicated interaction with other-than-human forces, which across history have taken the form of spirits. We ended with Bronislaw Szerszynski's brilliant typology of "gods of the Anthropocene" - superhuman agencies arising in ostensibly secular theories of the Anthropocene - but the way in was more subtle. 

I started with a brief review of some of the last session's material on apocalypse - which can mean the end of the world but also the uncovering of great knowledge, something new and more true than the "world" which is ending. Apocalyptic times might be the dawning of something radically different, but the main experience is vertiginous, of the collapse of all we've come to think we know. Roy Scranton was our representative Cassandra: our civilization is dead! We're doomed, now what? This is terrifying, a presentiment of the loss of worlds of so many indigenous peoples across the planet, and many more are experiencing it every year - like those discovering that along with hundreds of humans, a billion marine animals were "cooked to death" in the recent heat dome over western Canada. 

For others, including presumably most of us in my class, though, it's still just over the horizon, like the steady drumbeat of unassimiliably awful news like that of the Canadian crustacean Apocalype. (A good account of that diffuse unease is Jenny Offill's Weather, an excerpt of which I gave the class to read last week.) To engage these gentler, if also unsettling, experiences I introduced the concept of "solastalgia." 

This term, coined by Australian environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht, characterizes the psychic distress attending the experience of environmental change, especially in the place you live. It's the paradoxical "homesickness you have when you are still at home." This includes the mourning attending the awareness of things that are no longer present - you used to be able to see X here, there used to be a Y here but it died - but shades into a foreboding about the future, the sense that more loss is certain.

I shared a short video some students at Oxford produced a few years ago, where students used their immobilized faces as canvases for images of widening environmental destruction in the environs where they grew up. (At top, a man from North Dakota depicts nitrification of rivers from industrial agriculture; the woman above is hearing reports on how the air in Seoul will in coming years become harder and harder to breathe. At the end, they reveal their faces, quickly wiping off most, but not all of the paint.) Their mute witness is very powerful, and in many senses brings the Anthropocene home. I asked students in their groups to reflect on why and how this little film was made, and if they had any similar memories. One reported:

The trees near my house were gradually cut down. The buildings replaced the previously heavily wooded area. When I was a kid, I loved tying the hammock to trees and sleeping in them, but now it is hard to find two adjacent trees to tie the hammock. When summer arrived, the whole area was very hot and dry, and everyone was reluctant to go out.

I suppose something like solastalgia is common for most people in China, whose landscape has been transformed beyond recognition with wave upon wave of urbanization. It's not quite the shock at environmental change Albrecht had in mind, but I'll take the image of the child without a second tree to tie his hammock to.

Our discussion proceeded from these disturbed human faces to the "Prophecy" photos of Fabrice Monteiro, where materials found in various pollution and climate-impacted areas in Senegal are brought together (with the help of fashion designer Doulcy) in the form of jinns - spirits defined as much by pain as by power. It's an interesting way into religious imagination, the human form stretched painfully beyond itself. We'll talk next class about some Daoist ideas: more religions. In the meantime, a student shared some images by contemporary Chinese photographer Wan Yunfeng, which employ similar means - that's him, below - to make environmental devastation real to us.

Early morning at the beach

Abuzz

Post-apocalyptic

As we started the second half of the "Anthropocene Humanities" course today, the tables turned. We'd wrapped up the first half, which canvassed debates about the nature and timing of the Anthropocene cataclysm among scientists and historians with Clive Hamilton's dark warnings about the godlike pretensions of ecomodernists and Roy Scranton's reuminations on "learning to die in the Anthropocene," since "our civilization is already dead." Pretty depressing stuff, all!

Today's class started with Joanna Zylinska's eerie photo film "Exit Man," included with her book The End of Man: A Feminist Counterapocalypse, in which a digitally altered voice with no inflection or recognizable gender challenges us to see the Anthropocene as the welcome end of the failed experiment of the "stand-alone subject" of modern ethics and politics and a "subjectivity that is pinned to a competitive, over-achieving and over-reaching masculinity." Zylinska's "feminist counterapocalyptic agenda promises liberation" from such distortions and "opens up to the precarious lives of human and non-human others." New possibilities are disclosed in those whose existence has long been rendered precarious by "man": "women and those of nonbinary gender, animals, fungi, microbes."

 

Students had read two essays. One was a critique of the continued fantasies of control and mastery in the naming of the Anthropocene - man did this, man has to address this! - which led to an overview of queer ecology, the sense that all things are entangled and entangling in ways transgressing our categories and fantasies of boundaries. The other was an argument for dating the Anthropocene to 1610's "Orbis Spike" to signal that its ultimate cause was not capitalism or the industrial revolution (let alone human nature) but colonialism's destruction of indigenous worlds, a severing of relations with the natural world in service of universalizing reason that is now affecting the colonizing cultures, too. This isn't the first Apocalypse.

I ended with a list of alternative names proposed for the Anthropocene, each connected to an account of its nature and origins and to a program for the future. Each adds a further dimension of trouble and even horror, and calls for mourning and perhaps repentance. Yet while haunted by post-apocalyptic trauma they may also disclose ways of surviving, models for the "staying with the trouble" called for by Donna Haraway (final reading of our course). 

Was this awkward material to present to a class of mostly (85%?) female Chinese students as a white settler American man? You betcha.

Swell loom

Happened on this gorgeous picture today in the gallery of locally based celebrity photographer Aaron Chang, "Wild Coast," shot recently at Point Reyes, a little north of San Francisco. Mesmerizing! It may be because it shares a color palate with a hand-woven rug a friend brought me years ago from El Salvador, but it looks to me like a 

tapestry. Indeed it also evokes the movement of weaving on a loom, a living rug woven and unwoven like Penelope's shroud, the pattern endlessly changing but always beautiful. That's how the surf feels, of course. Chang, building on a long career as a surfing photographer, knows how the waves feel when you're in them, moving with them.

And then of course there's that insouciant seagull...

Dreaming of electric sheep

I asked my Renmin students, divided into six groups, to come up with works of art which might be illuminating for the Anthropocene: three per group. The specificity of "works of art" got lost in the scramble, but the resulting list is still intriguing - especially the science fiction! 

I'm familiar with one of the three Chinese works proposed, I read and enjoyed Hao Jingfang's "Folding Beijing" when its English translation won a 2016 Hugo award. The Waste Tide, has apparently just appeared in English, too: I'm adding it to my reading list (and maybe to the syllabus of my fall Lang first year seminar!). The third has an English title but I'll need to ask the students more about it; although it seems the author, Hui Hu, has won prizes for several works, English language searches are revealing little. About the author of The Waste Tide, the preternaturally pretty Chen Qiufan (a k a Stanley Chan), meanwhile, there's more, including a factoid to confirm just what a brave new android world some of my students are confronting: 

Chen’s recent short story “The State of Trance,” which includes passages generated by AI, nabbed first prize in a Shanghai literary competition moderated by an artificially intelligent judge [!!!!!!], beating an entry written by Nobel Prize in Literature winner Mo Yan.

头破血流

Well, my Renmin summer school course made it through the big centennial hoopla without incident. It certainly was a little strange meeting students the mornings of the days immediately before and after the grand celebration, but I decided it best not to mention it... and none of the students did either. (They had returned to their hometowns from Beijing just as commemorations climaxed.) Instead, they worked in groups to compile a list of works one might consult to make sense of the Anthropocene, which ranged from Rachel Carson's Silent Spring to Michael Jackson's "Earth Song" to Werner Herzog's "Grizzly Man" by way of western and Chinese science fiction (on which more anon). Of recent Chinese history or thinking nothing.

I was most intrigued to learn of the work of conceptual artist Zhuang Hui (above), a years-long series of documented wanderings and deliberately futile actions in the desolate Qilian mountains near where he spent his youth. Zhuang’s work helps us to seek the balance between human and the world through the artist's personal behavior, a student (graduate in fine arts) explained, and discusses whether art can act as a lever to close the gap between human, civilization, nature and the universe. Online I found documentation of a solo exhibition of Zhuang's work - it just closed last week - which reminded me of the vitality of Beijing's arts scene, despite party bombast. In the show Zhuang linked to information about five remote sites he visited through QR codes, versions of which he also painstakingly carved in stone on site. A press release explains:

These sites lie deep within the Qilian Mountains, thus rendering the QR codes mysterious cultural “relics” for anyone who stumbles upon them, now or in the future, much like the large installation works created earlier by Zhuang Hui and which he chose to abandon in the Gobi Desert in 2014. The QR codes are functioning, not merely decorative, both in situ and in the gallery ...