Month: April 2016

Timothy Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept (London: Bloomsbury, 2015)

The word Anthropocene can mean lots of different things. One of the many good things about Timothy Clark’s new book is that he spells out exactly what he means by it. This isn’t another of those books called Such-and-such in the Anthropocene where “in the Anthropocene” just means “recently (and I’m interested in the environment).” Ecocriticism on the Edge is a crucial book for thinking about the relationship between artistic representation and the theme of the Anthropocene, because for Clark the Anthropocene is nothing if not a problem of representation.

Here’s Clark’s “Anthropocene”: Continue reading “Disproportional Representation”

Another preliminary: the image that appears above, and on the cover of the book, needs explaining. It’s the Ivy Mike nuclear test shot, the first thermonuclear explosion. Mike and its successors left a tracery of plutonium-239 in sediment layers around the world, and for a mass of reasons that I discuss in the book, I think that that spike in plutonium levels might be the most appropriate symbolic marker for the beginning of the Anthropocene epoch.

Ivy Mike was detonated on a Pacific coral atoll on the morning of Saturday November 1, 1952 (local time; for most of the world it was still October). The transition between any two geological epochs is of course a lengthy process, but 1952, the first year of the H-bomb era, might be a good point at which to fix the nominal end of the Holocene epoch and the equally nominal beginning of the Anthropocene epoch. Alternatively, the switch-over could be located with even more specificity at the very moment of the Ivy Mike explosion. That moment is an emblematic one and nothing more, of course. But what an emblem! Continue reading “November 1, 1952”

Colin N. Waters et al., “The Anthropocene is functionally and stratigraphically distinct from the Holocene,” Science 351 (January 2016)

Jan Zalasiewicz et al., “The geological cycle of plastics and their use as a stratigraphic indicator of the Anthropocene,” Anthropocene (online January 2016)

Mark Williams et al., “The Anthropocene: a conspicuous stratigraphical signal of anthropogenic changes in production and consumption across the biosphere,” Earth’s Future 4 (online February 2016)

There’s only one place to start this blog, really. Since I finished drafting the book, there have been three big review articles published by members of the Anthropocene Working Group. (The AWG is the panel set up within the International Commission on Stratigraphy to consider whether or not to recommend that a new epoch with the name Anthropocene be added to the geologic time scale.) Continue reading “New papers from the Anthropocene Working Group (part 1)”

Imagine a birth with the force of an explosion, far out in the middle of the ocean. Altogether new, like nothing ever recorded by human hands. An opening, incalculable, to a dream of the remotest future. And yet a birth that is also a burial, to life as a fossil, enmeshed in stone. A turn in which the whole sequence of planetary time returns to view, to call for reckoning. The birth of the Anthropocene.

This is a blog about how to take the measure of the environmental crisis. I’ve spent the last couple of years writing a book on that same topic, The Birth of the Anthropocene, coming out in May with the University of California Press (it’s available for pre-order now, and you can read the first few pages on Amazon). The Anthropocene is a proposed new geological epoch—very new, as geology goes: you could say that it started in 1952. The book explores how the idea of the Anthropocene epoch can help to make sense of the world’s ecological crisis, by putting that crisis in the context of the earth’s distant past.
Continue reading “Preliminaries”