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!
