Reflection: Gabi

Over the course of the semester, I feel that I have developed a really nuanced and well-rounded picture of the Anthropocene. I had taken classes on the Anthropocene before and it was a concept I was familiar with, but I had never encountered it from so many perspectives and traditions of thought. While I have been fascinated by the idea of a new geologic epoch since I took Stephanie Wakefield’s class in 2017, I had criticisms about the white, Eurocentric narrative that always surrounded it. I never questioned, however, the way that the Anthropocene was used to justify the way that people in the industrialized world had become alienated from the earth and from nature. The complete disavowal that humans are also natural. I had grown used to hearing John Green’s voice describe the Anthropocene as the “human centered planet” on his podcast. 

In our first classes I was very taken by the way that we investigated and questioned the notion of the Anthropocene. I remember reading "The Anthropocene epoch" in our second week and the problems that the class raised in viewing the Anthropocene as a new epoch and attempting to determine the precise moment when this new epoch may have occurred. I wrote in my discussion post that the content of the article seemed almost absurdist given the nature of the other articles that had been assigned that week. “Learning to Die in the Anthropocene” presented a bleak reality that made the image of a group of aging scientists arguing about a difference of a hundred years in the Holocene ridiculous when faced with the reality of the overwhelming evidence of irreversible change to the Earth and our inability to stop it. It was especially frustrating to hear how some geologists were more concerned with reclaiming the term "Anthropocene" from the way it has been adopted by the humanities, as if the discourse was unrelated or useless to the discussion. I ended my discussion post that week saying, “the world burns while a bunch of men argue about whether the world is in fact burning and what to name the fire.”  

I think for me the most effective reading came in week 5 with Emily Raboteau’s “Climate Signs” and Yusoff’s “White Utopia/Black Inferno: Life on a Geologic Spike.” Raboteau’s piece affected me in a very emotional way as a native New Yorker. In my discussion post I wrote about her use of the word “solastolgia,” meaning “the desolation caused by an assault on the beloved place one resides; a feeling of dislocation at home.” This was exactly the feeling that was triggered in me reading her description of New York in 50 years. At the same time, she described how lucky we are on the east coast to still being talking about the effects of climate change at a distance. We are still only seeing climate change creeping up in the background of our lives and our plans for the future. What we are facing here feels much less immediate compared to the way the lives of people have been so violently altered in the "global south". 

Yusoff’s essay also most directly addressed the problems that we identified in “The Anthropocene epoch.” He proposes that the Anthropocene epoch began in 1610 with the arrival of European invaders in the Americas. The recharacterization of the “golden spike” as more than just a marker of global change that can identify a new epoch put into perspective the importance of recognizing the colonial and genocidal roots of the Anthropocene. In dismissing industrialization or any other markers as the beginning of the Anthropocene it also dispels that misconception that all humans are equally at fault for the destruction of the natural environment. Yusoff wrote, “This ‘Orbis Spike’ of systematic murder marks the instigation of Global-World-Space (an understanding of the world as a global entity that is open to the conquest of the entirety of its spatialized and subjective relations).”  

I also discovered through this class a new found appreciation for the ways that belief and religion intersect these ideas. In Heather Davis and Zoe Todd’s essay, “On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene,” I was introduced to a different way of thinking about the Anthropocene and acknowledging that many indigenous thought traditions could be used in radically changing the capitalist and imperialist systems that are destroying the natural world. The essay argues that using local knowledge, specifically indigenous “place-thought,” is our best resource in addressing global issues like climate change and dismantling the legacy of colonization. In viewing the Anthropocene and its effects on the earth as a totality, we should not fall into the trap of perceiving the human race as a monolith. Due to their unique connection to the land, indigenous people know how to maintain their land better than the imperial forces which expropriated it from them. Where settler colonialism has severed the relationship between humans and the land, Place-Thought allows us to expand our notion of the Anthropocene to envelope all those who have been dispossessed, including plants and animals. 

I think this realization came full circle in the readings from our last class. LaDuke's "In the Time of the Sacred Places" frames the settler-colonialist narrative from the perspective of the invaded. LaDuke confronts the society built upon stolen land that prides itself in conquering, exploiting, and taking from the land for the expansion of industry and empire with little regard for the lives and practices they are displacing. She wrote, "This is a story of a different society, one based on the notion of frontier. America is that society. it was born of a fifteenth-century-origin Doctrine of Discovery, a papal-justified European claim to entitlement to vanquish and destroy that which was indigenous, and an accompanying assertion that indigenous territories were terra nullius because no "Europe like civilization existed there." She described the ignorance and violence of settlers in infringing on and usurping sacred space. Of ignoring the existing relationships that had been created and maintained by indigenous communities because they are not willing to understand. I was moved by her description of many of the Wintu traditions and mythology which guide their relationship with their environment and the salmon that feed their community. They give the dignity and autonomy to beings that are usually only considered resources to be exploited in the eyes of Western societies. 

(GG)