This had its pleasures too - the last voices students heard were each other's, in more or less collaborative group presentations, working our way through the concentric circles of the project: Planet, Place, Partners, Persons, Practice. Each student got to choose a chapter they were particularly drawn to to discuss, but they also had to reflect together on their volume's range of texts, why they thought they were arranged as they were, how the volume fit into the larger series... and whether and how the Anthropocene was mentioned and thematized.
.., which, by and large, it wasn't! I didn't know this when I created the course, the Kinship books having not yet been published, but it's fine with me. The Anthropocene was in the background of many pieces, students found, not referred to by that name but clearly an animating concern. Indeed, they remarked, Kinship's responses got beyond the meta-level discussions about nomenclature which made up the first part of our class, and dissolved the panicked paralysis which those discussions can produce. Instead of "Anthropocene," the word that kept coming up: "hope."At the beginning of this semester, the concept of the Anthropocene felt too large and burdensome for me to acknowledge in a way that lacked panic or avoidance. Through our first assignment of locating ourselves in the Anthropocene, I was able to use the anecdote of my grandfather's birdwatching hobby to look at the Anthropocene through a binocular-like lens. By connecting our humanity to the climate crisis, I've noticed our class discussions fill with fewer sighs and more declarative statements of hope or productivity.
I do have hope, although I also still hold a lot of doubt as well, but I can face the unknown outcome with acceptance now instead of just a cesspool of dread and absolute terror.Throughout the course I’ve been sort of tormented by being pulled in both the directions of pessimism and optimism. It was a little bit easier pre this class to embrace willfully ignorant optimism, to believe no matter what I heard or thought to myself that things are going to get better. Now matter how awful the outcome is looking, and much closer we are to the clock above Union Square running out, somehow things would sort themselves out. ... Being aware of the fact that we were aware of what we were doing is just heartbreaking and humiliating. It makes me want to unironically scream. But a lot of the stuff in this class shifted me, ever so slightly, into a better point of view.
I used to harbor this cynical sense of hatred, guilt, and culpability in relation to the Anthropocene but through plenty of course material and looking within myself, I now choose to avoid complacency and remain active in my protests against imperialism, consumerism, pollution and human waste in the many ways I can in the choices I make.
It was encouraging to be finishing with the Kinship volumes, each of which is an invitation to a community of ecological artists and scholars and activists - many of them members of Indigenous communities throughout the world - who have devoted careers to what Gavin Van Horn, one of the co-editors, calls "kinning":The English language is noun dominant, and in comparison to many Indigenous languages, the animacy and agency of other beings and processes often receives less emphasis. ... the voices in these volumes point us toward an alternative perspective: kinship as a verb.
Perhaps this kinship-in-action should be called kinning. ... In this understanding, being kin is not so much a given as it is an intentional process. Kinning does not depend upon genetic codes. Rather, it is cultivated by by humans, as one expression of lifeamong many, many, many others, and it revolves around an ethical question: how to rightly relate?
While the Anthropocene isn't mentioned, this project dovetails with some of the most important engagements with the Anthropocene that we read earlier in the semester, notably Amitav Ghosh's challenge to find ways to narrate our forgotten interdependence with the non-human, Heather Davis and Zoe Todd's argument that colonialism and its Anthropocene afterlife is all about a fatal "severing of relations," and Donna Haraway's call for us to learn to "make kin." The more perceptive students noticed that the sequence of essays I'd had them write had been moving in this direction from the start.So it all came together in a fragile hope!
But I have to say that I feel a little uneasy, as if any hope under the circumstances is a false one, as we live not only on borrowed time but stolen land where many relations have been irrevocably severed. There's much more to ponder - including the wisdom in making sure thinking about the Planet is always anchored in, and anchors, Practice! Courses wrap, but not this material. As it happens I'll have chances to work more on all this, as the students' responses moved me to decide to run "Anthropocene Humanities" again next Fall - and Renmin's just come through with a chance for me to repeat the condensed summer school version for Chinese students, too.
