The Book of Job makes an uncredited appearance in Jeremy Davies' extremely helpful The Birth of the Anthropocene. It comes at the very end of the chapter describing the dramatic sorts of climate-related changes which will be gathered up in the idea of the Anthropocene:
Some of the trans- formations now taking place are, precisely, biblical in scale. Over a quarter of Hong Kong's urban land ... has been reclaimed from the sea. China's South-North Water Transfer Project will, if completed, carry forty-five billion cubic meters of water a year across a vast stretch of the country ... The first hurricane ever recorded above the warming waters of the South Atlantic made landfall in Brazil in 2004. Above the most inaccessible land on earth, East Antarctica, snowfall is increasing in the context of a general poleward shift in precipitation patterns.
Some of the trans- formations now taking place are, precisely, biblical in scale. Over a quarter of Hong Kong's urban land ... has been reclaimed from the sea. China's South-North Water Transfer Project will, if completed, carry forty-five billion cubic meters of water a year across a vast stretch of the country ... The first hurricane ever recorded above the warming waters of the South Atlantic made landfall in Brazil in 2004. Above the most inaccessible land on earth, East Antarctica, snowfall is increasing in the context of a general poleward shift in precipitation patterns.
And God said: who shut up the sea with doors, when it brake forth, as if it had issued out of the womb? Who hath divided a watercourse for the overflowing of waters, or a way fr the lightning of thunder; To cause it to rain on the earth, where no man is; on the wilderness, wherein there is no man?
And Man said: I did, actually.
(University of California Press, 2016), 40
citing the King James Version's Job 38:8, 25-26
