Another Neurodivergent Queer Writes A Blog!

Shifting into a new geological epoch [The Guardian] in our earth’s history is no small thing. Previously we were in the Holocene, but the scale of human-induced change is so huge at this point that it has become part of the geological record as a distinct shift.

But there is a bit of controversy here [Nature]: When did the Anthropocene begin? [Scientific American] Was it the late 1800s when we began industrializing with fossil fuels? Or was it farther back? Or is this new epoch only a few decades old, when the effects in the geological record began to appear unambiguously—perhaps with the Trinity Test (July 16, 1945)?

There is a case to be made for tracing it back many millennia. For the perfect example, look to the area currently called Iraq: this was once a lushly fertile place. But the land was salinated over several centuries by farmers greedily irrigating their fields with salty water, because the two great rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates, carry salt in their water picked up in Türkiye and Northern Iraq, and then that water was spread across the once-fertile crescent. Now it is desert.

And lest you think they didn’t know what they were doing, the anthropologist who spoke of this years ago during a seminar I’d attended emphasized that these farmers knew what was happening because they kept expanding their fields to make up for reduced harvests.

Likewise, long ago around Jericho there was once a massive pine forest, but the residents decided that they needed to whitewash their walls every year. To melt down the lime for that you need tremendous heat, and to get that heat they burned an ancient forest, log by log. What is happening in the Amazon now shows us that there is a tipping point beyond which a forest cannot recover, something we are also witnessing in North American forests that have been appropriated into urban areas.

These actions altered the ecology of entire regions. Do they not count toward the Anthropocene?

Surely there is a case to be made in favor of thinking that the entire swath of human history since the settlement in Mesopotamia, along the Indus River, and along the Yellow River in China, counts for the beginning of the Anthropocene. But I think it is a weak case in the end.

Yes, there are tremendous examples of humans altering their regions, but never until the 1880s when we began to burn coal at an industrial scale has our species altered the entire planet and every system at every scale along with it. Burning fossil fuels at this scale has radically changed the foundations of our climactic systems such that even the least connected tribe cannot but notice the changes.

Geological-scale alterations have tended to play out very slowly, imperceptibly, but now change is occurring over the course of a single generation’s lifetime. If you grew up in the 60s or 70s, you grew up in an impossibly different climactic regime from your children. You knew stability. You knew a world so stable that you never had to try to imagine any part of it changing; that natural world seemed like it would always be there as the background of your life. Even I, growing up in the 90s, knew the last vestiges of the Holocene’s stability. We are so far from even that world I knew only a few decades ago; we are exponentially farther still from the world known three decades before that.

So at least the debate is correctly focused between the 1880s and the (near-)present. The search for any earlier anthropogenic change is not only folly but furthermore serves to excuse the tragic errors of the last 140 years—unbelievable as it is that we’ve been on this planet for hundreds of thousands of years but in only the last 140 years has a portion of our species, namely industrial capitalists (we must name the Devil for what it is), single-handedly destroyed the systems that sustained us.

By the way, there’s another more specific term in circulation: Homogenocene, the epoch of homogeneity, i.e. the epoch of the monoculture and the biodiversity loss that entails. [Link to lecture by Charles C. Mann]

I’m struck each time I come back to this song by what Sophocles has to say about ingenuity. He’s right. Our own belief in our ingenuity will be our undoing if we are not more critically thoughtful about things.

Holding the ingenuity of invention
as something clever beyond expectation,
now to the bad he goes, other times to the good.

367-369

Because you found a way to do something, does that mean you ought to do it exactly that way every time from then on? Obviously not. Yet we have been, and there are no signs of change: the so-called ‘green revolution’ has proven to be every bit as destructive as those other previous ‘revolutions.’ Lithium mining and processing [The Guardian]. Bauxite mining and processing [The Washington Post]. Mining this and mining that, like common dragons. May we only cling to the good, learning to recognize the bad when we see it.

On a final note, Sophocles ends this song at our present need: community. We are a communal species incapable of solitary existence. But our communities are not merely of mortal humans. In La vie des images grecques [publisher link], Tonio Hölscher introduces the idea of ‘conceptual communities,’ incorporating not only gods but also ancestors and heroes, all present through artistic representations alongside living mortal humans. To that list I would include also the other life around us, the other animals and plants and fungi. But anyway it is interesting that Sophocles is making a communitarian claim at the end of his song, connecting actually back to the tragedy around it, in which a solitary girl defies a new authoritarian ruler who conducts himself as if he were the community while the community itself silently supports that lone girl, who is after all only doing what is right according to the gods’ laws, which naturally supersede any human edict. His song also reminds us that our strength is our numbers. “Resourceless he comes to naught.”