A film by Steve Bradshaw
Source: Anthropocene the movie | A film by Steve Bradshaw
A few years ago I wrote a review article on the Anthropocene; even by then the term had become rather passé in academic circles. But, at least as viewed via Google Trends, popular interest in the Anthropocene is by no means waning:
[trends h=”400″ w=”850″ q=”anthropocene”]
This movie, to be shown as part of a Symposium on Physical Geography at our Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting (I’m a geographer), primarily interviews members of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy’s Working Group on the Anthropocene, who are debating whether to apply this moniker to our current geological epoch (as an entirely new epoch, or as a new age within the Holocene epoch). Of course, theirs is the realm of Fact: one key question they are addressing, for instance, concerns whether the notion is
…scientifically justified (i.e. the ‘geological signal’ currently being produced in strata now forming must be sufficiently large, clear and distinctive).
Yet the movie (at least the trailer!) moves the discussion willy-nilly to the realm of Value; e.g., key captions ask “Is it a comedy?…or a tragedy?,” and below the trailer, one sees the questions:
We’re living in the Anthropocene. Should we laugh or cry?.…Have we made the Earth a better or worse place for us to live?
I am not one (contra Gould) to purify these realms: reality comes at us as fact-values, value-facts. But there certainly are better and worse ways of engaging with such hybrids, and here (as in that “counting beyond two” post) I’m primarily disturbed by the levels of generality implied on both the fact and value sides: say, the Earth is now dominated by humans (that’s what the Anthropocene broadly implies), and it’s an unmixed tragedy (the most common moral to the story).
Let’s note one intriguing requirement for such sweepingly apocalyptic generalizations: virtually all proclamations of future doom rest on the premise that it is unprecedented. Perhaps the Anthropocene is, but arguably only as a matter of quantity, not quality. Somehow the words of Plato from the 5th century B.C.E. decrying rampant deforestation in southern Europe are forgotten; somehow too the much more recent 20th century, with its share of horrors. And surely there is some precedent for global environmental crisis that cannot be blamed entirely on we the anthropos: take, for instance, the current El Niño, a massively disruptive cyclical climate event with impacts felt on nearly every continent.
What does the Anthropocene look like if one places it in the history of events such as these? A set of challenges, to be sure; yet if we know anything from the past, there will be winners and losers, both human and nonhuman. This is a much more variegated future, no? Somehow bringing the Anthropocene into history may give us strength: we have seen both better and worse; this sort of thing has in various ways been around a long time; there is much to be done but no one plan we all must follow. Let us indeed consider the Anthropocene as what Latour would call a matter of concern, not just a matter of fact; and let us acknowledge that this matter of concern remains as wonderfully complex as the Earth we inhabit.
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