Capital “R” Romantic metaphors abound in the collection of essays Love Your Monsters, named for Bruno Latour’s allusion to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Dr Frankenstein, obsessed with the acquisition of knowledge and the power of technology created a wretched being, which became an evil creature once it was abandoned by its creator. Likewise, humans have advanced our technology, creating new Earth systems and possibly even a new epoch called the Anthropocene with our obsession with “progress.” As we have seen, the classic environmentalists from the 1960s and 1970s thought this was catastrophic. They feared that our technology caused us to overshoot the safe level of impact we have on our planet and that we were headed for the apocalypse.
Forty-some years later, the world in fact has not ended and many of the writers and scientists featured in Love Your Monsters present evidence to suggest that the general state of things has improved drastically in the past several decades and this improvement in quality of life for HUMANS may very well continue. This evidence suggests that instead of causing the end of the world, our technology has a leading role in the perfection of the planet (from a purely human standpoint). Bruno Latour and many of the other essayists featured in LYM reject the fear of technology instilled in us from the “limits to growth” thinkers, and argue that we should embrace the technology that made brought us to this place in 2014.
Is the Anthropocene something that we want? Does it mean the end of “nature”? The Anthropocene suggests that the systems that have been fundamental to our species and the ecosystems in which we live and have thrived are changing in a geo-hydro-chemical way. Will the changes in the systems support our species? Will these systems eradicate the any or all of the biodiversity found on our planet today? The concept of the Anthropocene seems to bring many more questions and uncertainties than answers and knowns. A new epoch of Earth is a departure from the systems that humans have utilized, studied, and predicted. As if the future wasn’t hard enough to predict, now even the Earth’s fundamentals seem unpredictable.