Eric Paglia, “Not a proper crisis,” The Anthropocene Review 2, no. 3 (2015), 247–61
Should we say that the world is currently experiencing an environmental crisis? Only in a certain sense of the word, Paglia argues. Continue reading “Crisis? What Crisis?”
The Birth of the Anthropocene comes out on Tuesday. You can read the first 17 pages on Google Books. If you’re tempted, and you’re in North America, you can buy it direct from the publisher for $30. Here in the UK, it looks as if prices start at just under £17 at the usual place the Book Depository has it at £16.56 inc. postage, with quicker delivery than Amazon proper, as of this writing. Enjoy!
Graham Harman says at the start of Prince of Networks that he “normally avoids ‘acknowledgments’ sections in books from fear of making his readers feel bored or excluded.” I think that attitude has a lot to be said for it. Even so, I’ve written an acknowledgements section on both of the occasions when I’ve had a chance to do so. But I kept both of them brief.
The internet, though, gives you room to stretch. So this seems like a good chance to say, a bit more fulsomely than on the first page of the book itself: thank you very much indeed to the many people who’ve helped to bring The Birth of the Anthropocene into the world. Continue reading “Thanks”
The third of the new AWG articles is a long review essay with a colossal scope, by Mark Williams and 24 others: “The Anthropocene: a conspicuous stratigraphical signal of anthropogenic changes in production and consumption across the biosphere.” It’s open-access in Earth’s Future.
The title refers to the Anthropocene as a signal, not as an epoch. To think about the current catastrophe as the emergence of a new geological epoch is to credit it with a pretty huge scale: the catastrophe would have to be something unprecedented for thousands, maybe millions, of years. But this article is an invitation to think about the Anthropocene as an even more radical novelty. That’s not (necessarily) as an alternative to the Anthropocene-as-a-new-epoch way of looking at things: many of these 25 authors have been to the fore in proposing the idea of an Anthropocene epoch. But discussions of golden spikes take a back seat here. Maybe, in order to really understand the ecological presence of human modernity, you have to interpret it as something “more fundamental” still. Continue reading “New papers from the Anthropocene Working Group (part 3)”
Treptichnus pedum is a trace fossil produced by a soft, wormlike creature, a creature that wasn’t necessarily an “animal” in any conventional sense of the word. The traces that the worm left behind have been picked out to represent one of the most important turning points in the geological time scale, between Precambrian time and the Phanerozoic eon. The Precambrian is the entire interval from the formation of the earth to the emergence of macro-scale life (it divides into three geological eons, Hadean, Archean, and Proterozoic). The Phanerozoic eon is the rest: the eon of “visible life,” the last 541 million years. T. pedum, the bearer of the distinction between the two, can be a way to think about the meaning of geological time divisions as such. Geological intervals—the Anthropocene among them—should be understood as figures of difference, not as a series of essences. Continue reading “Treptichnus”
The second of the new AWG articles is Jan Zalasiewicz et al., “The geological cycle of plastics and their use as a stratigraphic indicator of the Anthropocene,” online-only as yet in Anthropocene.
The paper’s aim is to put “current knowledge about the environmental behaviour of plastics into a general geological perspective,” write the 17 authors. So how do you think about plastic waste not so much as litter or as pollution, but as a geological phenomenon? By fading out on a foreground image of plastic bags flapping in hedgerows, and tuning in to something deeper and wilder and stranger: by another one of those vertiginous changes of scale that are so characteristic of thinking about the Anthropocene. Thinking geologically about plastics means considering them both as a single huge global stockpile and as trillions of tiny threads, sun-decayed, wave-shredded, and surviving for geological ages in beaches and deltas and seabeds. Continue reading “New papers from the Anthropocene Working Group (part 2)”
Made Ground 