I'm rereading an early classic essay on - against - the Anthropocene, Eileen Crist's 2013 "On the Poverty of our Nomenclature." The essay refuses the name on the basis that it accepts as fact what is really a normative matter: human dominion over the rest of life on earth. What right have we to claim such dominion? "Anthropocene" discourse makes a fact of what should really be challenged, allowing us to imagine only better and worse forms of dominion. It won't even let us consider renouncing dominion for something better. It's a prophetic provocation, and I find I needed its reminder that "Anthropocene" has a fatalistic acquiescence in human (mis)rule built into it. (It redoubled my intention for the upcoming first year seminar on "Anthropocene Humanities" to end with new work on kinship with other than human nature, about which more anon.) I'd forgotten also where Crist's fussy-sounding title comes from - Henry David Thoreau's indignation, in Walden, at the presumption of a man named Flint who proudly named the pond next to his farm after himself.
Such is the poverty of our nomenclature. What right had the unclean and stupid farmer, whose farm abutted on this sky water, whose shores he has ruthlessly laid bare, to give his name to it? Some skin-flint, who loved better the reflecting surface of a dollar, or a bright cent, in which he could see his own brazen face; who regarded even the wild ducks which settled in it as trespassers; his fingers grown into crooked and horny talons from the long habit of grasping harpy-like;—so it [Flints’ Pond] is not named for me. I go not there to see him nor hear of him; who never saw it, who never bathed in it, who never protected it, who never spoke a good word for it, who never thanked God that he had made it.