Reflection: Quinn

The New Gods of the Anthropocene

This summer, I had the privilege to visit the Redwood forest of Big Basin Redwoods State Park. Within Big Basin lies one of the oldest preserved stands of old growth Redwoods, some trees are even older than the Roman Empire. It was one of the most beautiful places that I’ve ever been. 

Big Basin pre-CZU Fire There was a moment while I was hiking, when my boyfriend and I decided to be completely silent. We stopped and listened to the forest. Redwoods are so tall, that the life in the canopy is almost silent to those on the ground. In the crowns of the forest, there is an entire ecosystem. On the forest floor, it is almost unnoticeable. Ferns grew perfectly framed by little triangles of sun that made it through the forest, and a thick carpet of loam covered all the walking trails. 

A couple of weeks after I left Big Basin, I began ‘Religion in the Anthropocene’, a class which has ultimately expanded my view of God, as well as helped me to understand the importance of the Anthropocene in my own religious practice. We read “Awake in the Anthropocene” by Jill Schneiderman around the same time that I learned that Big Basin had been devastated by the CZU Lightning Complex forest fire. I was so devastated, I thought back to my silent moment in the Redwoods, and how that silent moment, which I had formulated as a place in itself, is gone. The forest floor was decimated, as well as animal life that couldn’t take refuge in the Redwood’s crowns. “Awake in the Anthropocene” gave me an important tool that I could use to process this incredible loss. “Awake in the Anthropocene” encourages people to think about deep time, and how we can use the experience of deep time to think about the planet. 

Schneiderman takes a geologic lens to examine the island of Barbados:

recently I lived on a tiny coral island in the Atlantic Ocean. There in Barbados, everywhere I looked with my geologist’s gaze I saw evidence of changed landscapes and past climates. A coral island that rose roughly 1200 feet above sea level in the last one million years, Barbados is a geological infant. Though some sandstone and shale form the island’s nucleus, more than 85% of the exposed land consists of limestone— broken debris of ancient coral reefs naturally lithified by calcareous cement derived from seawater. The island is unique in the Caribbean. Unlike the islands of the Bahamas that consist largely of windblown sand grains cemented together by the action of rainwater, or other Caribbean islands so vividly volcanic, Barbados is comprised of nothing more than subaerial remnants of coralline communities and submarine fringes of currently living colonies of organisms.

Barbados is a culmination of a (relatively short lived) coral community that has, over time, been pushed above the surface of the ocean. If Schneiderman were to time travel, deep into Barbados’ past, eventually she would be in the middle of the open ocean. 

I wanted to apply this framework to Big Basin. If I were to sit in one place in the park for eternity, I would witness dramatic environmental change. At first, I would witness the regrowth and restoration of old growth Redwood forest, perhaps the area would continue to be ravaged by forest fires (which has become more common in California’s location in the Anthropocene), but eventually, I would be sitting in countless, unrecognizable landscapes, without having moved at all. In this way, deep time allows us to move through different environments and landscapes, without the accompanied geographic movement. 

The only thing that has remained constant in the Earth’s history, is radical environmental change. Schneiderman argues that in the modern era, we need to expand our understanding of environmental changes beyond our own limited lifetimes, “environmental changes... are out of sync with human lives lived in an age characterized by nano-second attention spans."

At the same time, this year has been a year of radical social change. COVID has utterly changed the mechanisms of society, because it has changed the way that humans interact with one another. I personally have experienced what feels like an immobilizing amount of change, my friendships have changed, I have lost a family member to COVID, I have struggled to write, and to create. Reading Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler was so hopeful for me, because Lauren (the protagonist) was able to redefine change, 

All that you touch

You Change. 

All that you Change

Changes you.

The only lasting truth

Is Change.

God

Is Change.

In Parable of the Sower, Lauren is able to use change (in a social and environmental context that is eerily similar to our own) to her advantage. She spends much of Parable of the Sower preparing for life outside of her ‘safe’ walled neighborhood, and so when she does leave, she can focus on converting people to Earthseed. In responding to change, and by deifying it, Lauren survives, finds a new home, and establishes new social norms in the face of a changing environment. 

Earthseed was incredibly appealing to me, because I wanted to be able to respond to change, and to recognize the internal changes that have mirrored the changes of 2020. However, I think I was most drawn to Earthseed because it understands a tactile relationship with God. I have always wanted God to embody nature, because I have always had a very tactile relationship with nature. Understanding the mechanisms of human induced climatic change did, to an extent, make me feel that I also understood how we were interacting with God. “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene” by Steffen et al outlined the interconnected feedback loops that influence the “glacial–interglacial cycle of the past million years." “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene” also frames the interconnected planetary climate system as “The Earth System”. Having a way to reference the bounds of “The Earth System” at once granted me the opportunity to view God as a culmination of different environmental cycles, but it also limits the multiplicity of God into one concept. 

Only recently have I allowed myself to synthesize religious experiences from different traditions into my own spiritual practice. In the past, I have tried to exclusively practice Theravada Buddhism (which I began practicing in Thailand), but then, I started believing in God. When I first started believing in God, I felt that I was betraying my Buddhist practice in a lot of ways, but God’s presence was undeniable. I felt like God was showing me beauty, showing me that beauty could exist, within the ecosystem of New York City. It almost felt romantic, but ultimately, my experience with God is really new. This class has encouraged me to think about the multiplicity of God, while also helping me understand the danger of ‘oneness’. For instance, “Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene” clumps countless natural systems together, and names it “The Earth System.” “The Earth System” is a very accessible idea, but it also rests upon the “logic of the universal.” Heather Davis and Zoe Todd talk about the “logic of the universal which is structured to sever the relations between mind, body, and land” in their “On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene.” Decolonization has a lot to do with reframing. Colonialism, if viewed as a representation of human nature, states that the “ecocidal logics that govern our world” are also a part of human nature. If we decolonize the anthropocene, then we assign “ecocidal logics” as “the result of a series of decisions that have their origins and reverberations in colonization.”

Davis and Todd argue that the Anthropocene project “serves to re-invisibilize the power of Eurocentric narratives, again re-placing them as the neutral and global perspective.” Because Eurocentric narratives of the Anthropocene determine how we perceive our creation of the climate crisis, we cannot attribute any sort of agency to natural systems, because European thought does not attribute any sort of agency to natural systems. Recognizing the agency of the climatic and environmental systems of the Earth is a really important part of interacting with God. If we start our analysis of the climatic and environmental systems of the Earth from a European point of view, then we are also doing so from a Christian point of view, which has too many interactions with Colonialism to be unbiased in the ways that it deals with the world. A universalist view of the Anthropocene, where we, the powerful humans have wronged the Earth, which God created for us, denies and negates any sort of ‘natural response’ that the Earth may have to the Anthropocene. 

Bronislaw Szerszynski in his “Gods of the Anthropocene: Geo-Spiritual Formations in the Earth’s New Epoch” argues that “[t]he very nomenclature of ‘the Anthropocene’, or the ‘age of humans’, seems to suggest that the planet is becoming a mere echo chamber in which the human being will be the only source and telos of agency.” Whereas in reality, “[t]he so-called ‘Anthropocene’ will be dominated not by the will of ‘man’ but by a growing entanglement of heterogeneous human and non-human agencies within the body of the Earth.” 

In short, the Anthropocene (according to Szerszynski) will be an epoch of multitudes of interactions between humans, and spirits. We must remember that the Earth is in a constant state of change, and that our short human lives limit us from this understanding. We cannot assume that human society is the only mechanism of environmental change, because if we do assume so, then we are completely doomed. Szerszynski depicts ‘spiritual entropy’, “historically contingent ‘suturings’ of the Earth ... that achieve some level of coherence between material and energetic flows, the organization of society, and the world of spirits.” And argues that “we need to attend to the way that advective flows can involve the redistribution of ‘entropy’ or disorder both along and orthogonal to the line of flow.” In capitalism, imports to the global north have to be either energy rich, or potentially productive, which creates a flow of energy from the global south to the global north that both embodies, and follows ‘spiritual entropy.’ Szerszynski outlines different Gods (including Anthropos, Capital, and the Sun) that mediate, and interact with human and natural systems. Global trade for instance, works within the ‘spiritual entropy’ of the god of Capital, “the device of money as a ‘general equivalent’, all flows become decoded and deterritorialized and directed into production for production’s sake.” So, in society, the God of capital (by mechanism of spiritual entropy) directs high energy products from the global south to the global north, and it also changes the way that the environment in both places interact, and sustain themselves. 

I would like to propose a more hopeful approach to the Gods of the Anthropocene, and this is where I will conclude. If we examine a polytheistic system, like Old Norse mythology, we can find new ways to ‘refind’ or to ‘recommunicate’ with different pathways of ‘spiritual entropies.’ Freyja for example, is a goddess of many things, including love. However, love itself doesn’t come from Freyja, instead, Freyja is a vessel of love. 

If we think about the Anthropocene like this, where ‘The Gods of the Anthropocene’ are not themselves the power which they represent, but rather, vessels of different spiritual undercurrents, then a whole new realm of desecularization, and of multiplicity opens. If a practitioner of Nordic Witchcraft wants to invoke love, then they invoke Freyja, but, if they find a different embodiment of love, a different spirit to invoke, then they should absolutely do so! Freyja herself is not love itself, we have the ability to tap into spiritual entropy, just as the environment around us does. Perhaps in doing so, we can find new gods, new spirits, and new currents of energy that our society can interact with.

I think that this will be a personal project for me. I want to explore the different pulls to different energies, some discovered, some new, in order to find different manifestations of God, in order to find spiritual agency. Ultimately, I believe that we have to change our way of life, we absolutely need to decolonize the Earth, we need to change the behaviors that caused the climate crisis in the first place, we need to make decisions informed by an understanding of natural agency, and we need to do so with the knowledge that the Earth will never revert to its ‘pre industrial’ or ‘pre colonial’ environment. We also need to understand that environmental change is a good thing, but that the environment can also change in ways to make the Earth uninhabitable for people. Nature is not fragile, but we absolutely are. At the same time, the climate crisis reveals to us that we do have a say in the way that natural systems interact with themselves, and with our daily lives. I believe that if we begin by imagining new gods, new spirits, informed by gravitational pulls towards currents of ‘spiritual entropy’, especially currents of ‘spiritual entropy’ that reflect the work of decolonization, and desecularization, perhaps society will follow suit. 

Image by Quinn Luthy