Unmanned

Pulling together the syllabus for my new course on "Religion and the Anthropocene" is turning out to be quite a challenge. This is not just because the literature on religion and anthropocene is sparse (though that on religion and climate change is vast), but because other anthropocene discussions are talking about all sorts of different things. Some focus on threats to human life and civilization present and future, some on the world of symbiont species we're learning about just as it's being destroyed, some on geology, some on history... I don't want this just to be another of those courses where students leave sated but frustrated, "I took a course on X but I still don't know what X is." (Like, year on year, "religion"!) But I'm less persuaded that "Anthropocene" is worth keeping as a moniker, for reasons well - if unwittingly - revealed by this image, designed for the cover of "Nature magazine. The imagined Anthropos of much of the discussion, its protagonist whether hero or antihero, is a white man.