Bomb Spike: Nicola Davison’s “The Anthropocene epoch: have we entered a new phase of planetary history?”

Nicola Davison is a freelance journalist based out of London. She has written for The Guardian, The New York Times, Vice, and CNN. Her articles focus on technological innovation and its impact on China and the greater world. The article we read, “The Anthropocene epoch: have we entered a new phase of planetary history?” appeared in The Guardian on May 30, 2019, and discusses the struggles of the scientific community, especially geologists such as Jan Zalasiewicz, in labeling the Anthropocene as a new geological epoch distinct from the Holocene. 

“The Anthropocene epoch: have we entered a new phase of planetary history?” is a piece of journalism that provides a timeline contextualizing the use of the term “Anthropocene.” Davison starts with Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen’s outburst in a meeting room in February 2000, claiming that scientists should “Stop saying the Holocene! We’re not in the Holocene anymore,” then moves us to the struggle among geologists to legitimize the term within the context of the Earth’s timeline. At the head of this struggle is Jan Zalasiewicz, a professor at Leicester University and notorious forward thinker in the geology community. In 2008, he was tasked with assembling a team of experts to find evidence of the Anthropocene as “stratigraphically real,” in order to submit a proposal to the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS). 

Most of the article then centers on this task force and the complications associated with determining the start of a new epoch on a scientific level. One of the largest issues Zalasiewicz faced was the lack of time for the Anthropocene to develop. “Without due time to form, the ‘rocks’ of the Anthropocene were little more than ‘two centimetres of unconsolidated organic matter,’ one geologist said.” The Anthropocene in purely geologic terms is a momentary event, and not enough to constitute a new epoch. Zalasiewicz’s solution was to bring in not only stratigraphers, but earth systems scientists, archaeologists, and an environmental historian. However, in bringing in these multiple perspectives, even more questions arose: determining the starting point for the Anthropocene became a big problem, as proposals to the ICS revolve around finding a “golden spike,” a clear geological marker of where one era ends and another begins. While the working group is still entertaining various options, there is one distinct one that’s emerged: the radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons, beginning with the United States’ Trinity test in 1945. 

Our class took note of what is left out when looking at the Anthropocene exclusively through a geologic perspective. Looking at the term in only geologic terms presents the issue of time, in that geologic time periods can only be studied after they’ve passed. In essence, “Geology is about things that have died, but we haven’t died yet.” The framing of the struggle against climate change must be one in which there is hope, and in implying that humanity is already gone, there is no room for change. The term “Anthropocene” isn’t without its own issues, though. Anthropos (Greek for human) and cene (suffix for geologic epochs) suggests that all of humanity is implicated in the same way. While it is true that everybody will inevitably be affected by climate change, the causes are not from humanity as a whole, rather a select group of people with a disproportionate amount of power and resources. To make the claim that humanity as a whole caused the onset of climate change is to do a disservice to the marginalized communities who will be at the forefront of its catastrophic effects. Davison’s article touches on this when it suggests “Capitalocene” as a more appropriate term for the epoch, but we discussed the fact that the name of the time period is one of the least important aspects of it, as unimportant as where the gold spike is locatedt: rather, if we accept that the Anthropocene is the reality we’re living in, the question becomes more about how we’re going to live in it. 

 (TC and AL)

Picture source: http://sydney.edu.au/environment-institute/blog/introduction-idea-implications-anthropocene/

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Paleo-Sangha: Jill Schneiderman’s “Awake in the Anthropocene”

Image
Jill Schneiderman is an earth scientist, an environmental justice activist and a Buddhist. She’s a professor at Vassar and author of four books, including The Earth Around Us: Maintaining a Livable Planet (2003) and Liberation Science: Putting Science to Work for Social and Environmental Justice (2012). A pioneer in work at the intersection of science and activism, she’s also a committed meditator. In 2009 she was a fellow of the Association for Contemplative Mind in Higher Education , where she helped develop curriculum on geologic time and contemplative practice. The essay we read, “Awake in the Anthropocene,” touches on many of these concerns. It appeared in 2012 in Contemporary Buddhism , an interdisciplinary academic journal.  The main argument of “Awake in the Anthropocene” is that Buddhist thought has something important to offer those who seek to respond effectively to problems of violence and anthropogenic climate change. Drawing on Rob Nixon’s ideas of “slow violence” and J
Read more

Saying Yes: Deborah Bird Rose’s “Shimmer: When All You Love is Being Trashed”

Image
  Deborah Bird Rose was a leader in multidisciplinary ethnographic research through her work in Australian Aboriginal cultures. With care and open mind, she immersed herself in the Northern Territory Aboriginal communities of Yarralin and Lingarra to work on her Doctor of Philosophy and returned frequently to these communities throughout the span of her life. In her essay "Shimmer: When All You Love Is Being Trashed" (from the collection Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene ), Rose explores the rich, pulsating beauty available throughout all symbiotic nature and specifically, how it can be seen in the joyful relationship between the great family of flowering trees known as Angiosperms and the flying foxes that pollinate them. “Shimmer” refers to the radiance of interaction among what Rose calls the “matrix of power, desire, and lures” across the biosphere. The concept of shimmer was first taught to Rose by the Aboriginal people in the Vi
Read more

Local Knowledge, Global Change: Heather Davis & Zoe Todd’s "On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene"

Image
  Heather Davis and Zoe Todd worked together to write their essay, “ On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene ” in ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies . This journal aims to provide a platform for critical work about “space and place” in the social sciences. Davis' collaboration with Todd was vital to the credibility of the entire article. In speaking about African slaves, Davis and Todd write, “We do not wish to appropriate these narratives.” As a white Canadian woman, Davis makes clear she doesn’t wish to appropriate the stories of black and indigenous people when writing about the subject. Todd can speak to her experiences as an Indigenous Canadian, but they both make clear the african experience is not their own.  Zoe Todd is of Métis descent. She learned about her Métis heritage through her father, and has gone on to include her ancestry in her studies.The central focus of her research is the relationship between humans and animals (pa
Read more