I'm not sure critique of the hubris of the "Anthropocenologists" (Bonneuil and Fressoz's term) is qualitatively different from arguments which have been made for many years now about the ecological dangers of certain kinds of monotheism, and of the patriarchal colonialist capitalist forms of thought with which it was allied in recent centuries and which perpetuate its dangers. What is new - that some of our shameless shenanigans might be leaving a trace discernible by future geologists - isn't obviously important, when (some) humans have been devastating human and other-than-human worlds for half a millennium. Indeed, the supposed novelty of the Anthropocene can serve as a distraction from longer term ecological problems folks have been thinking and organizing about for decades. From this perspective the arrival of "Anthropocene" discourse is an unwelcome reaffirmation of human exceptionalism (the Man!) just as the extent of colonial damage and the delicacy of our entanglement with other species are coming into focus.
Beyond understanding and redressing the forms and structures of devastation (some) humans have wreaked, I find promise in the effort to articulate the "Anthropocene" change in (some, my) people's sense of the harmonizability of human plans with earth and its systems and communities. Isabelle Stengers describes as the "intrusion of Gaia" the experience of a planet no longer content to let (some) humans instrumentalize and exploit it, a world which hurts us back. The experience of the Anthropocene isn't near-invisible layers of geological residue in the future but a widening gyre of devastation from fire and flood and storm right now. This is not the Anthropocenologists' safely sublime experience of newly discovered power - who knew we could be so baaad! - but one of what seems a new difficulty and resistance, frustration and confusion. Bronislaw Szerszynski has suggested that these experiences are giving rise to new "gods" and "spirits," as the no longer safely secular background of the natural world becomes feisty foreground - powers which demand devotion and sacrifice. But Stengers' Gaia can't be placated. The world may seem newly unruly because of what (some) humans have done, but it's not interested in repairing its relationship with us.
At at that conference in Indiana three years ago I tried linking this sense of a nature grandly but disconcertingly oblivious to our concerns to the theophany of Job - other scholars had too - but it didn't take. That ancient text may somehow recall an earlier time when human beings were less confident of their place at the table of the world. The Holocene was in fact a lot less stable than it seems to us now in retrospect to have been! But the pertinence of any ancient text now seems open to question. I'll keep bringing Anthropocene questions to Job but only because I'm already working with Job; I don't want to be arguing that this is a text folks not already so oriented should turn to. Its intrusion of Gaia is contained within a relationship, however sublime (a command performance is hardly an intrusion!), with an ordering care that addresses us by name, and, more troublingly, the story is very much one of a solitary human master of the universe experiencing a (passing) crisis of privilege. The former seems important to work through, within a Christian theological framework, but the latter is a formidable problem in this time of clarity. And I realize neither is what I want to bring to the broader Anthropocene and religion discussion. (Even in Indiana I was really rewriting the book to make it less anthropocentric, its form less cyclical.)
But a few days ago I had an idea for a contribution I might be the one to make, a possibility at least. It would connect to arguments I made way back when about the problem of evil - and the problem of good. The main argument then was that until modern times the problems of good and evil were engaged together. The most profound responses, to me at least, linked them - evil was understood as the privation or destruction of good, whose vulnerability was as heartbreaking as its existence was gratuitous. What happened to make the problem of evil so eclipse the problem of good that we don't even hear about the latter anymore was, in part, that the world came to be experienced as stable, habitable, controllable. Order became a background we could take for granted, not a precious or precarious gift, and it was the disruption of order, always the more urgent "problem," that came to monopolize attention. Thus could a Schopenhauer turn the old argument that philosophy begins in wonder on its head and say it had always been wonder at evil that was the source of thought. Modern thought has indeed been fed by and feeds the problem of evil, but I argued that reflection on evil without good was ultimately a hollow thing, undermining the claim of the good as well as our understanding of its nature. (That there is a good - not just varied and competing fancies about ultimately valueless reality - seems to me one of the unnoticed implications of the certainty that there is a universally acknowledged problem of evil.)
Here's the new idea. What if Stengers' "intrusion of Gaia" marks the wobbling end of that confidence in a natural order we felt we could take for granted? Objectively speaking, the Anthropocene centuries (and millennia) ahead will be less stable than the centuries (and millennia) of the Holocene which cradled the development of human civilizations. But until the era when modern science, technology, and fossil fueled fantasies of transcending biological cycles made it feel stable, the Holocene world order, too, felt precarious. Widespread belief that the world order was breaking down may now look to us like part of a deep confidence in cycles of death and rebirth - a confidence no longer warranted! - but they report experience of failing rather than resilient order. As even Job knew, hope has always been hope against hope. It's not clear that all fruits of Holocene culture are rendered obsolete by the Anthropocene, when not indeed complicit in it. The damage wrought by the Anthropocene is vast but recent. Popular and scholarly attention is drawn by "indigenous" traditions thought to have a better grasp of how to live with our non-human kin in a disrupted world, but as Frédérique Appfel-Marglin's "reverse anthropology" reminds us, most people in history - and even today - lived outside the deadly imaginings that drive the Anthropocene. There are many, not few, resources for living on a "damaged planet" if we look beyond colonial capitalist western modernity.
Arguing about periodization isn't a game I want to play. But I'm sensing it might be an intriguing way to dislodge the sense of Anthropocene doom to restore the complementarity of the problems of evil and good. I'd have to venture a historical story, as I sketch above, but what would make it interesting is the resonance the problem of good might now again have. My main work would be evoking how good was conceived and experienced before it became background noise - precious and precarious and mysterious - and then bringing this into conversation with contemporary fumblings with ontology and recoveries of wonder. Gaia will remain implacable, but perhaps we can find better ways to find and sustain refuges from the deceptive claims and compromises of Anthropocenology.