What I want to emphasize is that the concept of the "Anthropocene" is a charged one, and to be approached with care. It's qualitatively, not just quantitatively, different from the language of environmental crisis and climate change. It asserts an irrevocable break from the stability of the Holocene, the result of things (some) human beings have done and are doing. Even if we get our act together, we will be living with the consequences of human events for as long as we survive. We're part of the fate of the rest of life on this planet, too, even if we don't precipitate the Sixth Extinction.
I want to suggest that this makes the Anthropocene a religiously resonant category.
You can think of Anthropocene as religious in the somewhat flip sense that, as some advocates of a "good Anthropocene" would have it, we are the "god species" now, responsible for cleaning up our mess and taking care of the planet. Stewart Brand famously said that "we are as gods and might as well get good at it." Many critical appraisals of the concept of the Anthropocene warn against this apotheosis. The understanding of God assumed here - and of human beings as created in his image - was decisive in creating the practices which led us to this impasse in the first place, they argue, and the idea of humanity taking charge of creation offers it new life just as we've learned how harmful it has been.
While some (mostly white male scientists) seem confident that they can play god here and are indeed called to do so, the growing consciousness that our species has hastened the end of the Holocene has more complicated religious resonances. The kind of "planetary agent" the Anthropocene anoints us isn't like any human agency we know. This haplessness is deepened by our evident incapacity for concerted response. Arguably the Anthropocene then takes or returns us to a world in which human actions are thought to have cosmic significance - but not one we understand or control.
This predicament can seem more akin to ancient tragedy than the order and comfort offered by most religions. Indeed, the old religions' promise of restoration, redemption or balance from some rule or ruler beyond us starts to seem an artifact of the stabler, now irrevocably lost world of the Holocene. Religious hope, couched in terms that rang true in the Holocene, now seems a delusion and a dangerous distraction. It's not surprising that theologians are largely avoiding the language of the Anthropocene. Few theists recognize the paradigm shift as candidly as Timothy Beal in When Time Is Short.
But while Holocene certainties and their divinities wobble, the scope and strain of the Anthropocene challenge secular pieties too.
Amitav Ghosh has described the Anthropocene world as newly "uncanny," where unfathomable causality jumbles time and space and scale, and where the fingerprints of estranged human agency are detected or suspected everywhere. Ghosh thinks this might reconnect us to ancient practices of myth, a cosmos with many agents.
I'm taken by Bronislaw Szerszynski's kindred suggestion that the experience of living in the Anthropocene is already generating new religious ideas, what he calls "Anthropocene gods" - superhuman powers impinging on human destiny in almost person-like ways. The earth, perhaps conceived of as a more or less conscious Gaia, is one. The newly ecological God of Pope Francis' Laudato Sí, with his dark double in apocalyptic movements yearning for the end of the world, is another. Others aren't theorized as gods until you think about it: the sun, Capital, the Cosmos. Beyond these "high gods," conjured or manifested by human beings who feel entitled to speak for humanity as a whole, Szerszynski describes new demons and spirits showing up in the chaotic margins and shadows of global change.
Szerszynski couches his argument in an only partly fanciful phenomenology of geospiritual flows, but it seems clear there are many powerful subterranean energies coursing beneath the surface of the idea of the Anthropocene. We shouldn't assume we are immune to their pull. While the realities recorded in the geological category of the Anthropocene are incontestable, as these realities sink in we can yet challenge those unthinking understandings of human agency which exacerbated the crisis in the first place.
Do we need religion for this? Ghosh thinks already transnational religious organizations and religious ideas, which confront us with limitation, may be our best hope.
