The Guardian - Robert Macfarlane
We are living in the Anthropocene age, in which human influence on the planet is so profound – and terrifying – it will leave its legacy for millennia. Politicians and scientists have had their say, but how are writers and artists responding to this crisis?
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| Illustration by Eric Petersen |
In 2003 the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht
coined the term solastalgia
to mean a "form of psychic or existential distress caused by
environmental change". Albrecht was studying the effects of long-term
drought and large-scale mining activity on communities in New South
Wales, when he realised that no word existed to describe the unhappiness
of people whose landscapes were being transformed about them by forces
beyond their control. He proposed his new term to describe this
distinctive kind of homesickness.
Where the pain of nostalgia arises from moving away, the pain of
solastalgia arises from staying put. Where the pain of nostalgia can be
mitigated by return, the pain of solastalgia tends to be irreversible.
Solastalgia is not a malady specific to the present – we might think of
John Clare
as a solastalgic poet, witnessing his native Northamptonshire
countryside disrupted by enclosure in the 1810s – but it has flourished
recently. "A worldwide increase in ecosystem distress syndromes," wrote
Albrecht, is "matched by a corresponding increase in human distress
syndromes". Solastalgia speaks of a modern uncanny, in which a familiar
place is rendered unrecognisable by climate change or corporate action:
the home become suddenly unhomely around its inhabitants.
Albrecht's coinage is part of an emerging lexis for what we are
increasingly calling the "Anthropocene": the new epoch of geological
time in which human activity is considered such a powerful influence on
the environment, climate and ecology of the planet that it will leave a
long-term signature in the strata record. And what a signature it will
be. We have bored 50m kilometres of holes in our search for oil. We
remove mountain tops to get at the coal they contain. The oceans dance
with billions of tiny plastic beads. Weaponry tests have dispersed
artificial radionuclides globally. The burning of rainforests for
monoculture production sends out killing smog-palls that settle into the
sediment across entire countries. We have become titanic geological
agents, our legacy legible for millennia to come.
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| Rainforest burning in Brazil, 1989. Photograph: Sipa Press / Rex Features |
The idea of the Anthropocene asks hard questions of us. Temporally,
it requires that we imagine ourselves inhabitants not just of a human
lifetime or generation, but also of "deep time" – the dizzyingly
profound eras of Earth history that extend both behind and ahead of the
present. Politically, it lays bare some of the complex cross-weaves of
vulnerability and culpability that exist between us and other species,
as well as between humans now and humans to come. Conceptually, it
warrants us to consider once again whether – in
Fredric Jameson's phrase – "the modernisation process is complete, and nature is gone for good", leaving nothing but us.
There are good reasons to be sceptical of the epitaphic impulse to
declare "the end of nature". There are also good reasons to be sceptical
of the Anthropocene's absolutism, the political presumptions it
encodes, and the specific histories of power and violence that it masks.
But the Anthropocene is a massively forceful concept, and as such it
bears detailed thinking through. Though it has its origin in the Earth
sciences and advanced computational technologies, its consequences have
rippled across global culture during the last 15 years.
Conservationists, environmentalists, policymakers, artists, activists,
writers, historians, political and cultural theorists, as well as
scientists and social scientists in many specialisms, are all responding
to its implications. A Stanford University team has boldly proposed
that – living as we are through the last years of one Earth epoch, and
the birth of another – we belong to "Generation Anthropocene".
Literature and art are confronted with particular challenges by the
idea of the Anthropocene. Old forms of representation are experiencing
drastic new pressures and being tasked with daunting new
responsibilities. How might a novel or a poem possibly account for our
authorship of global-scale environmental change across millennia – let
alone shape the nature of that change? The indifferent scale of the
Anthropocene can induce a crushing sense of the cultural sphere's
impotence.
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| Plastic and rubbish floating in the ocean. Photograph: Gary Bell/zefa/Corbis |
Yet as the notion of a world beyond us has become difficult to
sustain, so a need has grown for fresh vocabularies and narratives that
might account for the kinds of relation and responsibility in which we
find ourselves entangled. "Nature," Raymond Williams famously wrote in
Keywords (1976), "is perhaps the most complex word in the language." Four decades on, there is no "perhaps" about it.
Projects
are presently under way around the world to gain the most basic of
purchases on the Anthropocene – a lexis with which to reckon it.
Cultural anthropologists in America have begun a glossary for what they
call "an Anthropocene as yet unseen", intended as a "resource" for
confronting the "urgent concerns of the present moment". There, familiar
terms – petroleum, melt, distribution, dream – are made strange again,
vested with new resilience or menace when viewed through the "global
optic" of the Anthropocene.
Last year I started the construction of a crowdsourced Anthropocene glossary called the "Desecration Phrasebook", and in 2014
The Bureau of Linguistical Reality
was founded "for the purpose of collecting, translating and creating a
new vocabulary for the Anthropocene". Albrecht's solastalgia is one of
the bureau's terms, along with "stieg", "apex-guilt" and "shadowtime",
the latter meaning "the sense of living in two or more orders of
temporal scale simultaneously" – an acknowledgment of the
out-of-jointness provoked by Anthropocene awareness. Many of these words
are, clearly, ugly coinages for an ugly epoch. Taken in sum, they speak
of our stuttering attempts to describe just what it is we have done.The word "Anthropocene" itself entered the
Oxford English Dictionary
surprisingly late, along with "selfie" and "upcycle", in June 2014 – 15
years after it is generally agreed to have first been used in its
popular sense.
In 1999, at a conference in Mexico City on the Holocene – the Earth
epoch we at present officially inhabit, beginning around 11,700 years
ago – the Nobel prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen was
struck by the inaccuracy of the Holocene designation. "I suddenly
thought this was wrong," he later recalled. "The world has changed too
much. So I said, 'No, we are in the Anthropocene.' I just made the word
up on the spur of the moment. But it seems to have stuck."
The
following year, Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer – an American diatom
specialist who had been using the term informally since the 1980s –
jointly published an article proposing that the Anthropocene should be
considered a new Earth epoch,
on the grounds that
"mankind will remain a major geological force for many millennia, maybe
millions of years to come". The scientific community took the
Crutzen-Stoermer proposal seriously enough to submit it to the rigours
of the stratigraphers.
Stratigraphy is an awesomely stringent discipline. Stratigraphers are
at once the archivists, monks and philosophers of the Earth sciences.
Their specialism is the division of deep time into aeons, eras, periods,
epochs and stages, and the establishment of temporal limits for those
divisions and their subdivisions. Their bible is the
International Chronostratigraphic Chart,
the beautiful document that archives Earth history from the present
back to the "informal" aeon of the Hadean, between 4bn and 4.6bn years
ago ("informal" because vanishingly little is known about it). Being a
geo-geek, I sometimes mutter the mnemonics of the ICS as I cycle to
work, trying to get the sequences straight: Cows Often Sit Down
Carefully. Perhaps Their Joints Creak? – Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian,
Devonian, Carboniferous, Permian, Triassic, Jurassic, Cretaceous …
'What will survive of us is love', wrote Philip Larkin. Wrong. What will survive of us is plastic
The
Anthropocene Working Group of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy – a title straight out of
Gormenghast
– was created in 2009. It was charged with delivering two
recommendations: whether the Anthropocene should be formalised as an
epoch and, if so, when it began. Among the baselines considered by the
group have been the first recorded use of fire by hominins around 1.8m
years ago, the dawn of agriculture around 8,000 years ago and the
Industrial Revolution.
The group's report is due within months. Recent publications indicate
that they will recommend the designation of the Anthropocene, and that
the "stratigraphically optimal" temporal limit will be located somewhere
in the mid-20th century. This places the start of the Anthropocene
simultaneous with the start of the nuclear age. It also coincides with
the so-called "Great Acceleration", when massive increases occurred in
population, carbon emissions, species invasions and extinctions, and
when the production and discard of metals, concrete and plastics boomed.
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| Manila Bay in the Philippines covered with plastic bags and rubbish. Photograph: Joshua Mark Dalupang/EPA |
Plastics in particular are being taken as a key marker for the
Anthropocene, giving rise to the inevitable nickname of the
"Plasticene". We currently produce around 100m tonnes of plastic
globally each year. Because plastics are inert and difficult to degrade,
some of this plastic material will find its way into the strata record.
Among the future fossils of the Anthropocene, therefore, might be the
trace forms not only of megafauna and nano-planktons, but also shampoo
bottles and deodorant caps – the strata that contain them precisely
dateable with reference to the product-design archives of
multinationals.
"What will survive of us is love", wrote
Philip Larkin. Wrong. What will survive of us is plastic – and lead-207, the stable isotope at the end of the uranium-235 decay chain.
The
Deutsches Museum
in Munich is currently hosting "An Anthropocene Wunderkammer", which it
calls "the first major exhibition in the world" to take the
Anthropocene as its theme. Among the exhibits is a remarkable work by
the American writer and conservation biologist
Julianne Lutz Warren,
entitled "Hopes Echo". It concerns the huia, an exquisite bird of New
Zealand that was made extinct in the early 20th century due to habitat
destruction, introduced predators and overhunting for its black and
ivory tail feathers. The huia vanished before field-recording
technologies existed, but a version of its song has survived by means of
an eerie series of preservations: a sound fossil. In order to lure the
birds to their snares, the Maori people learned to mimic the huia song.
This mimicked song was passed down between generations, a practice that
continued even after the huia was gone. In 1954 a pakeha (a European New
Zealander) called RAL Bateley made a recording of a Maori man,
Henare Hkamana, whistling his imitation of the huia's call.
Warren's exhibit makes Bateley's crackly recording available, and her
accompanying text unfolds the complexities of its sonic strata. It is,
as Warren puts it, "a soundtrack of the sacred voices of extinct birds
echoing in that of a dead man echoing out of a machine echoing through
the world today". The intellectual elegance of her work – and its
exemplary quality as an Anthropocene-aware artefact – lies in its subtle
tracing of the technological and imperial histories involved in a
single extinction event and its residue.
Anthropocene art is, unsurprisingly, obsessed with loss and disappearance. We are living through what is popularly known as the
"sixth great extinction".
A third of all amphibian species are at risk of extinction. A fifth of
the globe's 5,500 known mammals are classified as endangered, threatened
or vulnerable. The current extinction rate for birds may be faster than
any recorded across the 150m years of avian evolutionary history. We
exist in an ongoing biodiversity crisis – but register that crisis, if
at all, as an ambient hum of guilt, easily faded out. Like other
unwholesome aspects of the Anthropocene, we mostly respond to mass
extinction with stuplimity: the aesthetic experience in which
astonishment is united with boredom, such that we overload on anxiety to
the point of outrage-outage.
Art and literature might, at their best, shock us out of the
stuplime. Warren's haunted study of the huia finds its own echo in the
prose and poetry of
Richard Skelton and Autumn Richardson.
Their work – sometimes jointly authored – is minutely attentive to the
specificities of the gone and the will-be-gone. Place names and plant
names assume the status of chants or litanies: spectral taxa incanted as
elegy, or as a means to conjure back. In
Succession (2013), Skelton and Richardson
studied palynological records to reconstruct lists of the grasses and
flowers that flourished in the western Lake District after the end of
the Pleistocene. The area "is still inhabited by the ghosts of lost
flora and fauna", writes Richardson, of which there are "traces that
even now, centuries later, can be uncovered and celebrated".
Diagrams for the Summoning of Wolves
(2015), a purely musical work, shifts from celebration to intervention:
it is intended as a performative utterance – a series of notes, rituals
and gestures that might somehow enable "the return itself".
Rory Gibb smartly notes that the work of Skelton and Richardson is different in kind from conventional eco-elegy: it evokes
"a more feral feeling of being stalked by ecosystemic memory".
Such a feeling is appropriate to the Anthropocene, in which we have
erased entire biomes and crashed whole ecosystems. Their writing often
moves back through the Holocene and into its prior epochs, before
sliding forwards to imaginary far futures. They send ghost emissaries –
foxes, wolves, pollen grains, stones – back and forth along these
deep-time lines. Instead of the intimacies and connections urged by
conventional "green" literature, writing like this speaks of a darker
ecological impulse, in which salvation and self-knowledge can no longer
be found in a mountain peak or stooping falcon, and categories such as
the picturesque or even the beautiful congeal into kitsch.
Perhaps the greatest challenge posed to our imagination by the
Anthropocene is its inhuman organisation as an event. If the
Anthropocene can be said to "take place", it does so across huge scales
of space and vast spans of time, from nanometers to planets, and from
picoseconds to aeons. It involves millions of different teleconnected
agents, from methane molecules to rare earth metals to magnetic fields
to smartphones to mosquitoes. Its energies are interactive, its
properties emergent and its structures withdrawn.
In 2010
Timothy Morton
adopted the term hyperobject to denote some of the characteristic
entities of the Anthropocene. Hyperobjects are "so massively distributed
in time, space and dimensionality" that they defy our perception, let
alone our comprehension. Among the examples Morton gives of hyperobjects
are climate change, mass species extinction and radioactive plutonium.
"In one sense [hyperobjects] are abstractions," he notes, "in another
they are ferociously, catastrophically real."
We exist in an ongoing biodiversity crisis – but register that crisis as an ambient hum of guilt, easily faded out
Creative non-fiction, and especially reportage, has adapted most
quickly to this "distributed" aspect of the Anthropocene. Episodic in
assembly and dispersed in geography, some outstanding recent non-fiction
has proved able to map intricate patterns of environmental cause and
effect, and in this way draw hyperobjects into at least partial
visibility. Elizabeth Kolbert's
The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (2014) and her
Field Notes from a Catastrophe (2006) are landmarks here, as is Naomi Klein's
This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate (2014). In 2015 Gaia Vince published
Adventures in the Anthropocene,
perhaps the best book so far to trace the epoch's impacts on the
world's poor, and the slow violence that climate change metes out to
them.
Last year also saw the publication of
The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins,
by the American anthropologist Anna Tsing. Tsing takes as her subject
one of the "strangest commodity chains of our times": that of the
matsutake, supposedly the most valuable fungus in the world, which grows
best in "human-disturbed forests". Written in what she calls "a riot of
short chapters, like the flushes of mushrooms that come up after rain",
Tsing's book describes a contemporary "nature" that is hybrid and
multiply interbound. Her ecosystems stretch from wood-wide webs of
mycelia, through earthworms and pine roots, to logging trucks and hedge
funds – as well as down into the flora of our own multispecies guts.
Tsing's account of nature thus overcomes what Jacques Rancière has
called the "partition of the sensible", by which he means the
traditional division of matter into "life" and "not-life". Like Skelton
in his recent
Beyond the Fell Wall (2015), and the poet
Sean Borodale,
Tsing is interested in a vibrant materialism that acknowledges the
agency of stones, ores and atmospheres, as well as humans and other
organisms.
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| Tom Hardy in Mad Max: Fury Road. Photograph: Alamy |
Tsing is also concerned with the possibility of what she calls
"collaborative survival" in the Anthropocene-to-come. As Evans Calder
Williams notes, the Anthropocene imagination "crawls with narratives of
survival", in which varying conditions of resource scarcity exist, and
varying kinds of salvage are practised. Our contemporary appetite for
environmental breakdown is colossal, tending to grotesque: from Cormac
McCarthy's
The Road (2006) – now almost an Anthropocene ur-text – through films such as
The Survivalist and the Mad Max franchise, to
The Walking Dead and the
Fallout video game series.
The
worst of this collapse culture is artistically crude and politically
crass. The best is vigilant and provocative: Simon Ings'
Wolves (2014), for instance, James Bradley's strange and gripping
Clade (2015), or Paul Kingsnorth's
The Wake
(2014), a post-apocalyptic novel set in the "blaec", "brok" landscape
of 11th-century England, that warns us not to defer our present crisis. I
think also of Clare Vaye Watkins's glittering
Gold Fame Citrus (2015),
which occurs in a drought-scorched American southwest and includes a
field-guide to the neo-fauna of this dunescape: the "ouroboros
rattlesnake", the "Mojave ghost crab".
Such scarcity narratives unsettle what we might call the Holocene
delusion on which growth economics is founded: of the Earth as an
infinite body of matter, there for the incredible ultra-machine of
capitalism to process, exploit and discard without heed of limit.
Meanwhile, however, speculative novelists – Andy Weir in
The Martian, Kim Stanley Robinson in
Red Mars –
foresee how we will overcome terrestrial shortages by turning to
asteroid mining or the terra-forming of Mars. To misquote Fredric
Jameson, it is easier to imagine the extraction of off-planet resources
than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.
The novel is the cultural form to which the Anthropocene arguably
presents most difficulties, and most opportunities. Historically, the
novel has been celebrated for its ability to represent human
interiority: the skull-to-skull skip of free indirect style, or the
vivid flow of stream-of-consciousness. But what use are such skills when
addressing the enormity of this new epoch? Any Anthropocene-aware novel
finds itself haunted by impersonal structures, and intimidated by the
limits of individual agency.
China Miéville's 2011 short story "Covehithe"
cleverly probes and parodies these anxieties. In a near-future Suffolk,
animate oil rigs haul themselves out of the sea, before drilling down
into the coastal strata to lay dozens of rig eggs. These techno-zombies
prove impervious to military interventions: at last, all that humans can
do is become spectators, snapping photos of the rigs and watching live
feeds from remote cameras as they give birth – an Anthropocene
Springwatch.
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| 'It's easier to imagine the extraction of off-planet resources than it is to imagine the end of capitalism' … Matt Damon in The Martian. Photograph: Moviestore/REX Shutterstock |
Most memorable to me is Jeff VanderMeer's 2014 novel,
Annihilation.
It describes an expedition into an apparently poisoned region known as
Area X, in which relic human structures have been not just reclaimed but
wilfully redesigned by a mutated nature. A specialist team is sent to
survey the zone. They discover archive caches and topographically
anomalous buildings including a "Tower" that descends into the earth
rather than jutting from it. The Tower's steps are covered in golden
slime, and on its walls crawls a "rich greenlike moss" that inscribes
letters and words on the masonry – before entering and authoring the
bodies of the explorers themselves. It gradually becomes apparent that
Area X, in all its weird wildness, is actively transforming the members
of the expedition who have been sent to subdue it with science. As such,
VanderMeer's novel brilliantly reverses the hubris of the Anthropocene:
instead of us leaving the world post-natural, it suggests, the world
will leave us post-human.
As the idea of the Anthropocene has surged in power, so its critics
have grown in number and strength. Cultural and literary studies
currently abound with Anthropocene titles: most from the left, and often
bitingly critical of their subject. The last 12 months have seen the
publication of Jedediah Purdy's
After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene, McKenzie Wark's provocative
Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene and the environmental historian Jason W Moore's important
Capitalism in the Web of Life. Last July the "revolutionary arts and letters quarterly"
Salvage
launched with an issue that included Daniel Hartley's essay "Against
the Anthropocene" and Miéville, superbly, on despair and environmental
justice in the new epoch.
Across these texts and others, three main objections recur: that the
idea of the Anthropocene is arrogant, universalist and
capitalist-technocratic. Arrogant, because the designation of the
Anthropocene – the "New Age of Humans" – is our crowning act of
self-mythologisation (we are the super-species, we the Prometheans, we
have ended nature), and as such only embeds the narcissist delusions
that have produced the current crisis.
Universalist, because the Anthropocene assumes a generalised
anthropos,
whereby all humans are equally implicated and all equally affected. As
Purdy, Miéville and Moore point out, "we" are not all in the
Anthropocene together – the poor and the dispossessed are far more in it
than others. "Wealthy countries," writes Purdy, "create a global
landscape of inequality in which the wealthy find their advantages
multiplied … In this neoliberal Anthropocene, free contract within a
global market launders inequality through voluntariness."
Perhaps the Anthropocene has already become an anthropomeme: its presence in popular discourse just a virtue signal
And capitalist-technocratic, because the dominant narrative of the
Anthropocene has technology as its driver: recent Earth history reduced
to a succession of inventions (fire, the combustion engine, the
synthesis of plastic, nuclear weaponry). The monolithic concept bulk of
this scientific Anthropocene can crush the subtleties out of both past
and future, disregarding the roles of ideology, empire and political
economy. Such a technocratic narrative will also tend to encourage
technocratic solutions: geoengineering as a quick-fix for climate
change, say, or the Anthropocene imagined as a pragmatic problem to be
managed, such that "Anthropocene science" is translated smoothly into
"Anthropocene policy" within existing structures of governance. Moore
argues that the Anthropocene is not the geology of a species at all, but
rather the geology of a system, capitalism – and as such should be
rechristened the Capitalocene.
There are signs that we will soon be exhausted by the Anthropocene:
glutted by its ubiquity as a cultural shorthand, fatigued by its
imprecisions, and enervated by its variant names – the "Anthrobscene",
the "Misanthropocene", the "Lichenocene" (actually, that last one is
mine). Perhaps the Anthropocene has already become an anthropomeme:
punned and pimped into stuplimity, its presence in popular discourse
often just a virtue signal that merely mandates the user to proceed with
the work of consumption.
I think, though, that the Anthropocene has administered – and will
administer – a massive jolt to the imagination. Philosophically, it is a
concept that does huge work both for us and on us. In its unsettlement
of the entrenched binaries of modernity (nature and culture; object and
subject), and its provocative alienation of familiar anthropocentric
scales and times, it opens up rather than foreclosing progressive
thought. What Christophe Bonneuil calls the "shock of the Anthropocene"
is generating new political arguments, new modes of behaviour, new
narratives, new languages and new creative forms. It asserts – as Jeremy
Davies writes at the end of his excellent forthcoming book,
The Birth of the Anthropocene
– a "pressing need to re-imagine human and nonhuman life outside the
confines of the Holocene", while also asking "how best to keep faith
with the web of relationships, dependencies, and symbioses that made up
the planetary system of the dying epoch". Systemic in its structure, the
Anthropocene charges us with systemic change.
In 1981 the research field of "nuclear semiotics" was born. A group
of interdisciplinary experts was tasked with preventing future humans
from intruding on to a subterranean storage facility for radioactive
waste, then under construction in the New Mexico desert. The half-life
of plutonium-239 is around 24,100 years; the written history of humanity
is around 5,000 years old. The challenge facing the group was how to
devise a sign system that could semantically survive even catastrophic
phases of planetary future, and that could communicate with an unknown
humanoid-to-be.
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| Construction of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico, an underground nuclear waste dump. Photograph: Eric Draper/AP |
Several proposals involved forms of hostile architecture: a
"landscape of thorns" in which 15m-high concrete pillars with jutting
side spikes impeded access; a maze of sharp black rock blocks that
absorbed solar energy to become impassably hot. But such aggressive
structures can act as enticements rather than cautions, suggesting here
be treasure rather than here be dragons. Prince Charming hacked his way
through the briars to wake Sleeping Beauty. Indiana Jones braved wooden
spikes and rolling boulders to reach the golden idol in a booby-trapped
Peruvian temple. Sometimes I wonder if the design task should be handed
wholesale to the team behind the Ikea instruction manuals: if they can
convey in pictograms how to put up a Billy bookcase anywhere in the
world, they can surely tell someone in 10,000 years' time not to dig in a
certain place.
The
New Mexico facility is due to be sealed in 2038. The present plans for
marking the site involve a berm with a core of salt, enclosing the
above-ground footprint of the repository. Buried in the berm will be
radar reflectors, magnets and a "Storage Room", constructed around a
stone slab too big to be removed via the chamber entrance. Data will be
inscribed on to the slab including maps, time lines, and scientific
details of the waste and its risks, written in all current official UN
languages, and in Navajo: "This site was known as the WIPP (Waste
Isolation Pilot Plant Site) when it was closed in 2038 AD … Do not
expose this room unless the information centre messages are lost. Leave
the room buried for future generations." Discs made of ceramic, clay,
glass and metal, also engraved with warnings, will be embedded in the
soil and the shaft seals. Finally, a "hot cell", or radiation
containment chamber, will be constructed: a reinforced concrete
structure extending 60 feet above the earth and 30 feet down into it:
VanderMeer's "Tower" made real.
I think of that configuration of berm, chamber, shaft, disc and hot
cell – all set atop the casks of pulsing radioactive molecules entombed
deep in the Permian strata – as perhaps our purest Anthropocene
architecture. And I think of those multiply repeated incantations –
pitched somewhere between confession, caution and black mass; leave the
room buried for future generations, leave the room buried for future
generations … – as perhaps our most perfected Anthropocene text.
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