Keep breathing

Up again, another record year, and we know mitigation efforts will be reduced in the coming years... It's hard not be disheartened, and to harden one's heart in reaction. What can be done?

I have the privilege of teaching a course on religion and ecology next semester. I haven't taught that class in five years, and more than global annual temperature has changed. We've had four years of decisive response to the climate crisis. But the class starts the day after the inauguration of the new-old president, and as he signs a sheaf of reactionary executive orders many of which will promote the climate crisis-denial shared by his gang of thugs.

This iteration of "Religion and Ecology" will explicitly engage Buddhist perspectives, and they may help us keep our hearts soft. As I've worked out the syllabus, I've made more central than in any past class how we'll be building a community through shared practices.

Uncharted territory

Sunday was the hottest day on the surface of the earth in recorded history - possibly since the start of the last ice age 100,000 years ago! But records exist now only to be broken; that one lasted just a day.

Global heating

Could it be the same story? 

That didn't age well

So that's that? Has the Anthropocene party ended? It's not so simple... 

to qualify for its own entry on the geologic time scale, the Anthropocene would have to be defined in a very particular way, one that would meet the needs of geologists and not necessarily those of the anthropologists, artists and others who are already using the term.

That's right and proper; I've felt for a while that there was a translation problem between geological and humanist categories. We've never had to bring them in converation with each other before - part of the challenge of the Anthropocene, some might say! - which doesn't mean it's not worth doing. Stratigraphers' debates if there was an anthropogenic Holocene-ending "era" or "epoch" or "age" or "event" definable in their term, what to call it and and where to locate its "golden spike," have made for interesting watching. They've also clarified that the work of humanists, policy makers and others (even religionists!) is distinct from this, and appropriately so. When the Anthropocene Working Group made its final recommendation for a "golden spike" last year I found myself ready for this phase to finish so we could move onward to a multi-pronged multidisciplinary engagement with the challenges of living in these times. 

if approved, this does mark the end of a chapter in the story of the Anthropocene. Maybe we leave behind the pretense that the meaning of the Anthropocene for us and our kin is determined by the specificity of the golden spike, a methodological contrivance, if a valuable one.

Today's article makes clear that many of the geologists share that sense that the stratigraphical question doesn't and should be taken to settle the broader historical and moral questions, whose urgency none of them denies.

Off the charts

Heat exhaustion

It's hard to get the full picture of the climate anomalies happening across the planet. A few days ago, video of frightening flash floods from North India jostled with others from Turkey, Japan, England and New England. Terrifying maps of oceans whose surface water is as warm as a hot tub bespeak a global phenomenon. Meanwhile, killer heatwaves beset places that don't always report each other's calamities. Aljazeera, thanks.

Anomalies is a technical term but in its everyday sense it's the wrong word. The Anthropocene means the "nomos" is no more. As for the records being broken daily, we're only getting started. As the New Yorker's Jia Tolentino put it in article on climate emotions, And this, today, is as good as it will ever get within our lifetimes: every day that we step out into the uncanny weather, we experience a better and more stable climate than any we will ever experience again.

Why mention it in this blog, then? I'm not sure. The thought that at some point we'll look back at now with envy curdles the blood.

End of an era

The Anthropocene Working Group has made its recommendation for a "golden spike," the geological site which provides clearest evidence of a geological shift. It's a deep lake in Ontario called Crawford which, meromictic but not anoxic, sediments everything that falls into it, making clear annual bands as calcites precipitate out of summer algal blooms. The bands, widening because of human fertilizer use, mark the c. 1950 turning point the AWG was seeking to anchor, and the captured sediment also contains fly ash pollution with traces of plutonium from atmospheric nuclear tests, burning of fossil fuels and other geologically discernible effects of human activities.

The local fertilizer aside, none of these were the result of human activities nearby, helping cement the claim that these mud bands mark changes of planetary significance. A dozen candidates were considered; it took several votes. The other finalists, a glacial lake in China and a seabed off Japan, offered similar traces but less clearly. Now the proposal goes to other bodies for approval, which is not a given.

Discussions over the last 14 years within the AWG, originally collegial, apparently became less so as they moved from recommending that we recognize an anthropohenic cause to the end of the Holocene to pinpointing a precise marker. As the majority moved from focusing on the industrial revolution to the mid-20th century, when the "Great Acceleration" began, two advocates of earlier datings resigned. Today a third did. In his letter of resignation ecologist Erle Ellis writes

To define the Anthropocene as a shallow band of sediment in a single lake is an esoteric academic matter. But dividing Earth’s human transformation into two parts, pre- and post- 1950, does real damage by denying the deeper history and the ultimate causes of Earth’s unfolding social-environmental crisis. Are the planetary changes wrought by industrial and colonial nations before 1950 not significant enough to transform the planet? The political ramifications of such a misleading and scientifically inaccurate portrayal are clearly profound and regressive. ... 

I have many fond memories and I retain my respect and admiration for all my colleagues in AWG. I remain hopeful that the Anthropocene as a concept will continue to inspire efforts to understand and more effectively guide societal interactions with our only planet. I no longer believe that the AWG is helping to achieve this and is increasingly actively accomplishing the opposite.

These concerns about the ramifications of tying the Anthropocene to particular times and processes, which I've explored in my classes, will doubtless persist. No geological term has ever had implications for "guiding societal interactions within our only planet" - human history is too recent to have registered before. Now that we have, it's unlike that public policy discussions will be bound by the political implications of the stratigraphers' definition of evidence, not to mention artists and religionists.

But, if approved, this does mark the end of a chapter in the story of the Anthropocene. Maybe we leave behind the pretense that the meaning of the Anthropocene for us and our kin is determined by the specificity of the golden spike, a methodological contrivance, if a valuable one. And/or maybe we learn to learn from Crawford Lake, which preserves evidence not just of the last few decades but of the coming and going of First People villages, the Little Ice Age, the arrival of European settlers. As the AWG itself notes

The sediments show how local, historical anthropogenic impacts can be differentiated from those that mark the proposed geological time interval of the Anthropocene, which is concerned with a globally synchronous, broad-scale transformation in Earth’s history.

Earlier research in Crawford's sediment found evidence of a 15th century CE village which has since been rebuilt - a decolonial opportunity which the other finalists would not have afforded.

Religious Anthropocene

I've been trying to write a short article about religion and the Anthropocene for a magazine of environmental science and policy. It's a fun assignment but proving to be difficult. The subject is of course one I've thought and taught about for years, but always in a religious studies or religious studies-adjacent context, and in a seminar liberal arts college context to boot, where everything's open-ended. Framing its questions for this different audience is proving clarifying. I'm also realizing I've moved a bit on the subject.

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.

Against brain chauvinism

In a text just published by the always wonderful Robin Wall Kimmerer, a wondrous rethinking of thinking from beneath a white pine:

Where is intelligence situated? Our conceptions of intelligence are based on animal models and a kind of “brain chauvinism.” Every animal, from the flatworm to the black bear, has a brain, central meeting place of sensation, and coordinated response. Because animals are mobile autonomous beings who must pursue their food, the brain must itself be compact and portable. 

But a centralized brain is not needed for plant intelligence. Rapid movement is not necessary when the food comes to you. For an autotrophic, sessile being, bathed in the needed resources, networked in intimate relationships with myriad others above and below ground, a very different system of sensation and response might well evolve, which looks nothing like the animal model. 

If food becomes abundant, no animal can grow more legs to chase after it or a new mouth to eat more. In times of shortage, most cannot cast off a limb that it has no energy to sustain. The whole organism is static in form and flourishes or suffers within those constraints. Not so for plants, who can adaptively alter their circumstances by growing additional parts or losing unneeded ones. Decision-making at tree pace looks like passivity to us herky-jerky animals, accustomed to our own short lifespan. But pine behavior is a slow-motion pursuit of adaptive solutions. Plant intelligence or “adaptively flexible behavior” may be manifest in their extraordinary capacity to change form in real time by altering their allocation of carbon to different functions in response to changing needs. 

This slow dance of parts emerging and disappearing is the tree-paced equivalent of movement. Branches expand into light-filled gaps and retreat from dense shade, adjusting their architecture to optimize light capture. Roots are deployed in new directions to follow changing gradients of water and minerals, not randomly but with purpose. They are hunting light and grazing for phosphorous by differential deployment of apical meristems. 

Plasticity is possible because trees have myriad growing points, or meristems, a reservoir of adaptation poised to respond to changed circumstances. Tissues that animals never dreamed of, meristems—like totipotent stem cells—can be modified into the new tissues that best suit the conditions. Trees like white pine also have a lateral meristem, the vascular cambium, which gives rise to the cells that increase the diameter of the stem. It is an entire body stocking of meristematic tissue, perpetually embryonic. This nexus of nutrients and hormones and sensory chemicals, and creative cell making, is perhaps a fertile location to search for the decentralized seat of pine intelligence.

Myopic animals mistaking our herky-jerkiness for intelligence!

(Yes, the picture of the white pine above leaves out most of the tree's brain...!)

Saecula saeculorum

My old friend and colleague C came to the "Job and the Arts" class yesterday to help us think about Shakespeare's King Lear - a story sufficently like and unlike Job's to raise lots of interesting questions. She showed clips from two very different productions, and we had students break out and compare them and reflect on what actors and directors bring to this or other plays concerned with human suffering. Lots of issues came up, but I was floored by an aside in C's response to a group which had pointed to the questions of aging posed by Lear. In affirming the importance of that theme she said getting old before we are wise was only more relevant a concern today and for them, considering that many of you will live into your hundreds.

I'm not sure why but this aside took my breath away. I guess I've accepted that changes in lifestyle and environment mean that human lifespans have topped out... but when you consider that there are people living into their hundreds right now, there are surely young people I know now who will do the same. One folks I know will certainly see the twenty-second century. This is obvious when you think about it but somehow I had not thought about it. This seems a massive sort of failing given that I work with young people - and supposedly think about the Anthropocene. What's so unthinkable about this? C has college age children; I felt exposed as a part of the "childless left." (But when I told two students about C's remark today and asked if they expected to live into their hundreds they balked too.) 

As it happens, thinking in terms of 100 year Liberian lifespans is encouraged also by a passage in Rebecca Solnit's Orwell's Roses, which I am reading with gusto. In a section reprinted in the Guardian Solnit writes

There’s an Etruscan word, saeculum, that describes the span of time lived by the oldest person present, sometimes calculated to be about 100 years. In a looser sense, the word means the expanse of time during which something is in living memory. Every event has its saeculum, and then its sunset when the last person who fought in the Spanish civil war or the last person who saw the last passenger pigeon is gone. 

Solnit mentions this in the context of reflecting on the different ways of experiencing time which trees afford us - and the ways they also connect us to to people who lived before or will live after us. Someone may have planted the tree under which we find shelter today - and someone may find solace under a tree whose seed we plant today. Solnit's rhapsodizing on an observation of Orwell's in a similar register: every time you commit an antisocial act, to make a note of it in your diary, and then, at the appropriate season, push an acorn into the ground.

But today I was thinking about the human acorns all around me and the blighted world they will be inhabiting long after I am gone. (Long?) Those whose lives will be rendered precarious by global heating, ecological collapse and the rest aren't strangers in the future - not that strangers in the future should have less claim on our concern. For that matter, just like those already centenarian today, this precarity isn't just a thing of the future but a present reality for many. These are all things I know, or thought I knew. Anthropocene apocalypses are not just notional events in the future but present and, indeed, have happened already manu times to the people of indigenous worlds. C's comment made me realize I haven't really taken in the enormity of it. 

FOOL: 

            Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise. 

King Lear Act 1, Scene 5

On the move

One of my favorite writers, the trenchant and eloquent Rebecca Solnit, gave a talk as part of Cooper Union's contribution to New York Climate Week. It was delivered (virtually of course) on Monday, and is now available on youtube! The talk was called "Climate Momentum: The Things That Keep Me Cheerful In the Face of the Worst Problem Ever" and it offers ten reasons to remain motivated and hopeful at a time when climate doomsayers counsel resignation, despair or desperate measures. Her brother later summarized it in this graphic but you really should watch the talk. It's genuinely uplifting.

Great chicken acceleration

Anthropocene writers sometimes mention that the bones of the broiler chicken might be a candidate for the geological marker of the new epoch. Here's why. The red junglefowl Gallus gallus, a small long-lived bird from Southeast Asia, was brought to Europe already in Roman times. But it's only the results of the competition launched by the Texaco-sponsored Chicken of Tomorrow film of 1948 that gave us the chicken we know today, the combined mass of whose c. 23 billion specimens at any given time exceeds that of all other birds on the planet combined. The new ones grow much bigger much more quickly, reaching a full size unimaginable to their forebears within 6 weeks. (They couldn't survive much longer if they tried; Gallus gallus can live happily for ten years.) Mass produced and mass consumed, their bones are mass discarded, without time to decompose - optimally fossilizeable: their bones even have a special signature from the chemically-fertilized crops they're fed. A chicken in every pot turns out to be a recipe for disaster.

(Image and details from Strata and Three Stories, 29)

Solastalgia for summer

There’s a dark joke about this year’s extreme temperatures that has been haunting me for weeks, this article begins: This is the coldest summer of the rest of our lives. Soumya Karlamangla, who covers California issues for the New York Times, reports that the asked som climate scientists “Is every upcoming summer going to be even hotter than this one?” The short answer was: Yes, generally. One puts it particularly compellingly:

“The climate that your children are going to experience is different than any climate that you have experienced,” Paul Ullrich, a U.C. Davis professor of regional and global climate modeling. “There was no possibility in your life span for the types of temperature that your children are going to be experiencing on average.”

We've been staggering breathlessly from one new record to the next record, each effacing from the record books the apparent finality of the last. This dark joke offers some unwelcome perspective. "Hottest" is different from "hottest yet," and offers a false promise that things might return to some earlier normal. It shifts the perspective to the future we need to plan for, from whose vantage these times, which seem unbelievably hot to us, will instead look cool. This shift in perspective is upsetting, but in a good way...

Knock at the door

How to begin this post? On Tuesday in "Anthropocene Humanities" we discussed ongoing disasters - fires in the West, a hurricane called Ida that had just hit Louisiana, recalling other fires and other floodings too - and I said we could probably start each class with similar calamity. Later I mentioned a student in the Chinese version of the class whose hometown is in Henan. After Henan was hit with deadly rains, he told me that now he understood why the course mattered. Well, thanks to Ida nobody's in any doubt why this course matters... 

Or I could say that not quite two weeks ago, while we were in Beacon, New York City was visited by a storm called Henri which dumped an incredible and record-breaking 1.94 inches of rain on Central Park in just one hour. (This was right at the end of a scheduled "homecoming" concert in the Park celebrating the City's return to a semblance of normalcy after months and months of covid-related restrictions, which was fortunately cut short before the inundation.) But Ida blew that record away by over 60% last night, when an unfathomable 3.15 inches fell within an hour in the Park. 

Or I could say that the news cycle has been reminding me of the bad old Trump days, of an endless sequence of disasters and Republican horrors bending the arc of history out of shape. Most recently the leaders of the state  of Texas, abetted by a Trumpian Supreme Court, have not only tried to ban all abortions - no exceptions - but has essentially commissioned every citizen (and not just of Texas) to enforce it through legal vigilantism. The same state Republicans think voting is too good for most citizens, and that God wants people walking around with concealed firearms. What strange world of theological delusion do they live in, where such cruel absurdities are permitted or even thought necessary? How can we live in the same world?

But really I'm heartsick and confused. I'd rather not be able to craft a clever way to the Anthropocene showing up at our doorstep. 

People died in their basement apartments in my city, in their cars.

As people did in flash flooding in Tennessee, and Germany, Japan, the Indian Himalaya and China. And Sibera burns along with the American West and all around the Mediterranean. Not fun, and it's not going to stop. President Biden calls climate change "one of the great challenges of our time" but it's not just our time. The Anthropocene isn't a topic you can move on from. It knocks at our door with ever greater ferocity. Wherever we go it'll be knocking at that door too.

A kind of memoir

In our one on one meetings on Thursday, two of my first year students mentioned John Green's The Anthropocene Reviewed, a title I'd seen but not followed up, so I took advantage of Amazon Prime and got myself a copy I could brandish when class officially begins Tuesday. (It's even signed!) 

Green, Wikipedia helpfully informs me, is "an American author and YouTube content creator." He's written bestselling books, several of them for young adults, and with his brother Hank created a small menagerie of more than a little hyperactive geeky YouTube programs. (I've seen some.) More recently he created a monthly podcast for WNYC called "The Anthropocene Reviewed," with a much more laconic style, and it's a condensation of these podcasts which appeared in book form a few months ago. I'm a latecomer to his prolific multi-platform oeuvre, and arrive just in time for something of a shift.

This latest project, Green tells us, was an attempt to share more of himself. The project riffs on a remark made by his wife Sarah about the reviews which have become ubiquitous online.

She explained that when people write reviews, they are really writing a kind of memoir - here's what my experience was eating at this restaurant or getting my hair cut at this barbershop. (6)

One of Green's first jobs was writing 175-word reviews for BookList, so this is a kind of return. Also from BookList, but in conversration with all those online reviewers, he's ended each of his brief chapters with a score from 1 to 5. But unlike in his BookList days, these judgments are explicitly personal: memoir. Sarah also observed that in the Anthropocene there are no detached observers, as the earlier kinds of reviews like BookList's imagined, just participants. The score isn't intended to decide for us but to invite us to experience things for ourselves. 

You get a sense of the sorts of things reviewed from the first few - "You'll never walk alone," Humanity's Temporal Range, Halley's Comet, Our Capacity for Wonder, Lascaux Cave Paintings, Scratch 'n; Sniff Stickers, Diet Dr Pepper, Velociraptors, Canada Geese - but not for the little ruminations they inspire, which include personal anecdotes, unexpected histories, quirky factoids, and perfectly placed nuggets of wisdom from luminaries. How poignant is the thought that our young species is wiping out species many times its age? That, having discovered that our breathing damages them, we agreed to close the Lascaux caves and created a simulacrum next door? That Canada geese are thriving, in part because the seeds of Kentucky bluegrass we cultivate in all our lawns are a favorite food for them? That Scratch ' n' Sniff stickers, which never quite smelled like what they claimed to, might outlast the things they don't quite smell like? "Canada Geese," by the way, was the start of the project. He'd written a "review of Canada geese" as a lark and told his brother about it. "Hank said, 'The Anthropocene . . . REVIEWED.'" (5) And John was off. His working definition of Anthropocene, incidentally, is a lived paradox. 

I wanted to understand the contradiction of human power: We are at once far too powerful and not nearly powerful enough. We are powerful enough to reshape Earth's climate and biodiversity, but not powerful enough to choose how we reshape them. We are so powerful that we have escaped our planet's atmosphere. But we are not powerful enough to save those we love from suffering. (6) 

But as an individual I don't feel that power. I can't decide whether a species lives or dies. I can't even get my kids to eat breakfast. (58)

The essays - I've only read the ones I mentioned and a few near the end - are essentially personal essays. Green marshals considerable erudition but wears his knowledge lightly. When a great insight appears, it's always credited to someone else - like Sarah or Hank - and the modesty seems genuine. He has a good eye for suggestive and resonant images and anecdotes. And, so far at least, he likes what he writes about. The scores of those first chapters, respectively, are 4.5, 4, 4.5, 3.5, 4.5, 3.5, 4, 3 and 2. At the book's end he makes clear that what he's exploring and sharing is his love for the world, something he tells us he came to only reccently. Also at work is what he calls radical hope. Overwhelmed though we are we mustn't despair. 

For most of my life, I've beleived that we're in the fourth quarter of human history, and perhaps even the last days of it. But lately, I've come to believe that such despair only worsen our already slim chance at long-term survival. We must gifght like there is something to fight for, like we are something worth figfhting for, because we are. And so I choose to believe that we are not approaching the apocalypse, that the end is not coming, and that we weill find a way to survive the coming changes. 

"Change," Octavia Butler wrote, "is the one unavoidable, irresistible, ongoing reality of the universe." And who am I to say that we are done changing? (20-21)

In a postscript he mentions that the title of the German translation of the book is Wie hat Ihenen das Antrhopzän bis jetzt gefallen? (How have you enjoyed the Anthropocene so far?) and runs with it. That the book appeared in translation first is the sort of chronology-defying twist he specializes in.

How have I enjoyed the Anthropocene so far? It is wondrous! In high school, my best friend, Todd, and I went to the dollar movie theater every Wednesday. We watched whatever movie was playing on the frigid theater's single screen. Once, a werewolf movie staring Jack Nicholson and Michelle Pfeiffer played at the theater for eight straight Wednesdays, so we watched it eight times The movie, which was terrible, got better and better the more we watched it. ...

How have I enjoyed the Anthropocene so far? It's awful! I feel that I am not evolved enough for this. I have only been here for a little while, but already I have seen my kind extinguish the last remaining member of many other kinds ... "I smell the wound and it smells me," Terry Tempest Williams writes in Erosion. I live in a wounded world, and I now I am the wound: Earth destroying Earth with Earth. (273)

You get a sense of his wry style, tenderness and unassuming eloquence.

But I had to see how the German edition of The Anthropocene Reviewed - it's been out longer than the English one - was reviewed. What would German book reviewers make of this scattershot essayistic episodic project? After initial misgivings at the seeming crassness of the scoring at each chapter's end, the reviewers seem all to have been won over by the profundity of the book's lightness. Many play along and give it a score, 4 or even 5.

I'll need to read more, but for now I find myself intrigued by something I haven't encountered before: an engagement with the Anthropocene that's entirely outside the world of academia (or art or religion). The materials I'm familiar with are urgent and impassioned, high-minded debates about what the Anthropocene is, what it means, who is responsible and what is to be done. This is something entirely different. The 1 to 5 scoring seems like a bemused, even consumerist stance detached from the world, but in Green's use is really an effort at sustaining a grounded and hopeful participation in it.

Flood flash

My enthusiasm over Jeremy Davies' take on Noah's dove led me to an exciting new study of the importance of Noah's flood to emergent western thinking about humanity's place in the planetary environment. 

After the Flood confirms something I'd ambiently known - that the Flood was understood by many European thinkers in the early modern period to have been the cause of great natural devastation - and spells out its new salience for the challenges of our own time. 16th-18th century debates about the Flood make it a kind of precursor to the Anthropocene discovery of the human species as a geological, planetary agent. The "age-old humanist distinction between human history and natural history" which Dipesh Chakrabarty thinks the Anthropocene disrupts isn't that old; in Flood narratives, the two are closely entwined, natural disorder the consequence of human acts.

But Lydia Barnett goes further. The idea of humanity as a planetary force emerged as a by-product of debates between and among Protestants and Catholics over questions about sin, salvation, and free will. (4) The story of the Flood makes necessary (and possible) a "universal history" of all of humanity and its spread over the whole earth - a history haunted by sin and the degenerative consequences of its punishment. The resulting accounts, speculating about what human bodies were like in Eden, about how the world was resettled after the Flood, and about the great Apocalypse denouement when this story ends served the interests of mission as well as imperialism, and fed fateful ideas of racial difference (the "curse of Ham"?!) and climatic determinism. Discussing the Flood this way was largely abandoned for the three centuries leading to our own time but, Barnett argues, it leaves an imprint on the ways we now fumble to make sense of the Anthropocene. It is perhaps no accident, she suggests, that diluvian language remains pervasive, as in Laudato Si´ description of a world "flooded" with human-caused disturbance. Further,

the images that tend to predominate, at least in popular and public-focused portrayals of anthropogenic climate change, are all of water: of icebergs melting, sea levels rising, waves lapping at the coast, and cities being inundated. This language and imagery, I suspect, derives considerable force from its recollection and reactivation of deep cultural myths about the awesome power of floods to ruin the world as the unintended result of human behavior. (19)

Human beings have not actually been planetary agents before (speaking non-biblically...), but in the "long seventeenth century" some relatively cosmopolitan Europeans imagined such agency. Since some of today's thinking about about our species' new status is probably subliminally guided by the Flood template, we'd do well to be aware of its "baggage."

There's so much to enjoy in After the Flood, not least the vindication of the excitement of early modern history (once my stomping ground) and of the possibility that religious and scientific thinking might be able to work together: when modern thought is ignorantly and ahistorically secularized it becomes brittle and proud. 

But Barnett's argument is a little different from what I find myself wanting to argue about pre-Anthropocene imaginings of the entwinement of human and natural history. Naturally the kind of agency the Flood narrative imagines really has nothing to do with the actual agency IPCC reports confront us with; ours is not triggered by some extramundane force putting the kibosh on us, though there are ways its insidious and unintended effect resonates with earlier understandings of sin, and the richer Aristotelian understandings of causality of premodern Europe. Barnett would have us notice both the unexpected parallels and deeper differences such as this as ways of learning to free ourselves from the power of these "deep cultural myths," engaging though they may be.

I'm more inclined to want to reclaim early and pre-modern ideas. We were not "planetary agents" in the Anthropocene sense, but we knew we lived in dynamic exchange and relation with the more than human world. Stories like the Flood were extrapolations from more local experiences of entwinement and the unsuspected consequences of our cupidity. The Flood itself grounds a shared history of humanity in relationship with the rest of life if not the Earth, elaborated in well-intentioned ways by irenic early modern scholars, but it may not be one to reclaim for the reasons Barnett makes clear, and others too: I can't help seeing the post-Flood resettlement of the world as a template for a settler colonial understanding of human (read: European) history reclaiming terra nulls, for instance. 

Dipesh mode

In the book-length elaboration of his influential 2009 essay "The Climate of History: Four Theses," Dipesh Chakrabarty reproduces the original essay, "revised and renamed." Some changes are larger and some smaller, but one of the smaller seeming is large indeed. It involves the very first "Thesis":

Anthropogenic Explanations of Climate Change Spell the Collapse of the Age-old Humanist Distinction between Natural History and Human History 

This was the original formulation (2009: 201). Revised (2021: 26), it omits the phrase "Age-old." It might seem no more than a rounding error, it but it betokens Chakrabarty's discovery, over a decade of criticisms and debates, that the "humanist distinction between natural history and human history" isn't perhaps so very old at all. Unchanged is a more cautious claim to long-standing status:

In unwittingly destroying the artificial but time-honored distinction between natural and human histories, climate scientists posit that the human being has become something much larger than the simple biological agent that he or she always has been. Humans now wield a geological force. (206/30)

Chakrabarty's concern is the discipline of history as it developed in Europe, and he traces the distinction to Vico (1668-1744), although he notes Vico's ideas didn't really shape historiography until the 20th century with Croce and Collingwood. Still, it's significant that he casually referred to the distinction as "age-old" in 2009 and then reconsidered. 

The much-cited line "Humans now wield a geological force" can be taken in two ways. One, that of the "climate scientists," claims to describe a very recent development: while human beings have shaped our biological environments for thousands of years, we haven't affected the biogeochemical earth system until now. The other way of taking the claim, Chakrabarty's own, asserts that this new status - once recognized - ust scramble all our inherited ways of understanding our place in nature. Never before have we even imagined that the human species might be a "geological agent."

This latter claim turns out not to be true - and the "time-honored" distinction may be no older than, well, the age of the Anthropocene! When did we imagine humanity might be a geological agent before?

A common myth among moderns (who think we make do without myths!) is that premodern people were incurious about the world, chalking everything up to some generic divine plan. But this is how modern people understand divine plans. Early modern and premodern Europeans knew that the divine plan was multifaceted, came in several steps, and had encountered obstacles - and one of these was human. We all know the story that God sent a flood because human sin was too great, and wonder what ancient inundation is recorded in this memory-become-myth. But we have forgotten that the mass of the floodwaters was thought to have reshaped the earth, whose contours and history premoderns, too, used their best available resources to try to understand. It looked disordered to them, and they came to understand it in relation to the human penchant for disorder. 

Then as now human beings confronted in geology the sign and effect of their sinfulness. This geological agency was indirect or unintended, of course, but that makes it more, not less, like the agency of which the Anthropocene makes us aware. Perhaps one of the stories we need to tell is how (western) people forgot their potential for wielding geological force! The "age" of this not-so "time-honored" distinction may be that which Bonneuil and Fressoz in ch. 9 of Shock of the Anthropocene provocatively call the Agnotocene, a recent era of produced "zones of ignorance."

Dipesh Chakrabarty, "The Climate of History: Four Theses," Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter 2009): 197-222; The Climate of History in a Planetary Age (Chicago, 2021)

Fire and ice

I tore through this book - a new Anthropocene novel which happens also to be authored by a colleague - last week but didn't have a chance to tell you about it. It's terrific, incredibly well written and often outrageously fun. (I wouldn't have throught a "California noir" about the making of a movie, one of whose stars is inspired by Lindsay Lohan, could have captured my interest but I was hooked.) But it also left me devastated in ways I couldn't quite articulate. I can't say much now either without spoilers, but let me say this much. Kleeman doesn't just write snappy dialogue interspersed with pitch-perfect set pieces but has an amazing gift for describing sensory experiences, from sights and sounds to smells and textures - so precise and apposite you realize that we share a sensory world. So when some people in the novel come down with an (of course anthropogenic) illness which destroys their capacity to name and even distinguish their experiences, you mourn the loss of every detail of the shared world her language has illuminated for us.

Through the roof

A fascinating new article by Jeremy Davies, whose work on deep time I already commend whenever I can,  offers the story of Noah's Ark as a framework for Anthropocene thinking - but not the Noah's Ark you think you know. Like several other important things, the story of the Flood appears doubled in the Hebrew Bible, and Davies concentrates on the one scholars trace to "J," the "Yahwist." Unlike the other one by the later priestly "P," J's God doesn't undo the very process of creation through the Flood but merely "sterilised" the earth of all life, while saving its essence in the Ark as a sort of seed bank. While P provides details on how the animals will be fed, etc., J's story provides no such detail: time stands still. With Davies' help we understand that being in the Ark was no picnic, but an experience of literally suspended animation. And where P's has a window, J's is just a box with a small hatch on the roof - the one through which Noah, utilizing an ancient navigational technique, eventually lets a dove out to see if land is near. Without even a window, the passengers had no way of seeing what was going on, no horizon.

In order for life to continue, it can't watch from the safety of distance but has to risk part of itself. Davies' article is called "Noah's Dove," because the reconnection to the world comes with the dove's three flights - first, returning with nothing; then, after a week of Noah's care, returning with an olive branch - proof that plants had survived or recovered; and finally, after another week on the Ark, flying away not to return. He makes beautiful poetic sense of this.

A venerable exegetical tradition treats the dove as an archetype of faithfulness. It twice returns to Noah and its mate, in the same way that, as Matthew Henry put it, ‘a Gracious Soul [. . .] returns to Christ as to its Ark’ (1707, s. v. Gen. 8:6–12). And yet on its third flight the dove departs, never to look back. That third flight bears witness to a fidelity deeper than faithfulness: to an affect that penetrates the dove’s being even more deeply, like the fidelity of water to the pull of gravity. The dove is the first creature to fall in love with the postdiluvian world. (344)

Life and the earth belong together, something Anthropocene discussions often bracket or even forget. And our interdependence on other forms of life isn't only about us - the dove, without whose aid we might still be in the box, ultimately finds its own home. We belong to the world, a world greater than us. Davies likens the dove to J's God who, once his rage has assuaged by an offering from Noah, decides "in his heart" not again to destroy life, and restores the cycles which weave our lives and the world's together: seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night (Gen 8:22). But this is "in his heart": unlike P's Noah, J's Noah isn't told. 

The most striking thing of all about his affirmation is that it does not take the form of a promise or a covenant. Yahweh does not say anything to Noah. He is inscrutable, outside of relation or communication. He makes his vow only ‘in His heart.’ This is a musing, ruminative divinity, who lets go of his vengeful anger as a child might. Even as he dedicates himself to sustaining the world, Yahweh withdraws into his own meditations. He is seen at once in the most personal terms – he is susceptible both to fury and to mollification – and as fundamentally impersonal. In this moment, he is less a lawgiver or patriarch than he is the universe’s heartbeat. Just like the dove, he fulfils his purpose through a certain absence. The world that he affirms is the world of the dove: the world of systemic interconnection, experienced first of all through a sense of belonging that precedes any determination of where or how life belongs on the earth. (346)

It's a beautiful reading, and a useful counterweight to environmental humanities readings of Genesis focused on humans being created in the image of an unearthly God and given an analogous "dominion" over the rest of creation. I can't wait to share it with students. But I'll also have to tell them that no readers of the Bible before the 19th century prised apart the "J" and "P" versions as if one could, or should, stand on its own. Still, the "J" vision was there throughout, if often silenced by the less ecologically wise "P" one. And it's enchanting...

Burning house

Images of a house burning, and burnt, by the still roaring Dixie Fire two weeks ago - part of a spread of fire pictures from California, Turkey, Greece and Russia... Just in time for the newest IPCC report, released today. The Times' laconic title: A Hotter Future is Certain, Climate Panel Warns. But How Hot Is Up to Us. IPCC's home page features art by Alisa Singer called "Changing."