As I get back into teaching about the Anthropocene mode, I'm appreciating The Anthropocene: A Multidisciplinary Approach by two British paleobiologists and an American intellectual historian of Japan. They insist on a "multidisciplinary" rather than "interdisciplinary" approach because the different disciplines we need to make sense of things aren't convergent in their methods and forms of argumentation, and we're best off learning from each as well as from the frictions between them. They write accessibly about complicated methodological issues like different understandings of scale and causality: how can one begin to make sense of vast biogeochemical changes and the fact that they have largely taken place within the span of single human lifespan, or that human efforts over the next lifespan will have far far far-reaching consequences?! This humble insistence on plurality allows them to push back against totalizing responses, whether scientistic or nihilistic, while holding on to the Anthropocene language as a reminder that all these phenomena are part of one "predicament." (They prefer "predicament" to "problem," which gets us looking for a single solution and inclines us to accept a single discipline's way of deciding it. Historians and geologists both accept periodization as a useful organizing principle but know how not to let it displace the interlocking complexity of actual causality.)
This graphic (from 2019) doesn't appear in their book but complements their warnings about too-consistent views, and in an arresting way makes real one of the Anthropocene's mind-blowing numbers they cite: Our "anthropomass" (as Vaclav Smil calls it), combined with the mass of our domesticated animals comprise an astounding 97% of the total zoomass of terrestrial animals. (Almost as overwhelming as Our strangely unfamiliar planet now has more than 193,000 human-made "inorganic crsytalline compounds," which vastly outnumber Earth's ˜5,000 natural minerals!) Livestock are a big part of the footprint of a surging and increasingly meat-consuming human population, major drivers of CO2 as well as rainforest destruction; their care - grazing land as well as land growing feed for them - now takes up 27% of land mass!! But that's still an unassimilibale abstraction, detached from the local realities that comprise it. This map from the vastly informative Our World in Data (they also have country-by-country breakdowns) makes that 27% real in an irreverent way - equivalent to the whole Western Hemisphere!! And it contains other delicious provocations too. The counterintuitiveness of placing "built-up areas" in North Africa, or "freshwater" in Mongolia - not to mention placing Europe in "barren land" - shakes up our unthinking intuitions about geography, geopolitics and history. Once you've aggregated Anthropocene-scale phenomena - you can't just go back to the tired truisms of periodized world history and human geography.
