Author: David R Cole

Dipesh Chakrabarty

https://doi.org/10.1177/00699667211065081

Abstract

By drawing on the phenomena of anthropogenic climate change and the pandemic as two examples of the geologists’ idea of the Anthropocene, this article seeks to explain how the Anthropocene leads to a plurality of overlapping but conflicting temporalities for humans. This problem of time makes it difficult to imagine any globally concerted effort to deal with the Anthropocene or climate change as such.

Keywords 

The Anthropocene, bio-politics, COVID-19, the human, the non-human

I Introduction

The pandemic and the climate crisis are connected phenomena. One could say that they both speak of Anthropocene times. The story of rapid global economic growth—the history of capitalism in all its different varieties, imperial, liberal and neoliberal—is common to narratives that underpin discussions on both crises. They both arise from what has been called the period of Great Acceleration in Global History when the human realm expanded over the 20^th and the 21^st centuries and especially from the 1950s. In an increasingly extractive relationship to the earth, this expansion claimed more and more of the products of the biosphere of the planet, from what Bruno Latour and others, following scientists like Timothy Lenton, have called ‘the critical zone’ of the earth, the part of this planet that immediately sustains life (Latour and Weibel 2020). The key to this expansion, as we all know now, was electricity that flowed from cheap and plentiful energy extracted from coal and then oil and gas, all of them different kinds of fossil fuel. More than 87 per cent of the total consumption of fossil fuel by humans and their institutions has taken place in the period from reconstruction of the industrialised economies after the Second World War to the present. This is why the Great Acceleration is dated by historians and Earth System scientists from 1950 (Zalasiewicz 2020: 16; see also, McNeill and Engelke 2015).

The 20^th century became ‘a time of extraordinary change’ in human history. ‘The human population increased from 1.5 to 6 billion [nearly four times], the world’s economy increased fifteenfold, energy use increased from thirteenfold to fourteenfold, freshwater use increased ninefold, and the irrigated areas by fivefold’ (Goudie and Viles 2016: 28). To add some more dramatic figures, the world’s urban population increased in the same century by 12.8 times, industrial output by 35 times, energy use by 12.5 times, oil production by 300 times, water use by 9 times, fertiliser use by 342 times, fish catch by 65 times, organic chemical production by 1,000 times, car ownership by 7,750 times and the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rose by 30 per cent (Ponting 2007: 412). The very well-known ‘Great Acceleration’ graphs produced by Will Steffen and others show that for most of these figures, the growth became exponential from around 1950, rising even more steeply from the 1980s when China and India liberalised their economies and joined the race for industrialisation and modern consumption with greater efforts (Ripple et al. 2021; Steffen et al. 2015).

There is, in addition, a telling recent (2017) survey from the Brookings Institution which reports that there has been an acceleration of the human consumption of resources as well. It was ‘only around 1985 that the [global] middle class reached 1 billion people, about 150 years after the start of the Industrial Revolution in Europe’, but it only took ‘21 years, until 2006, for the middle class to add a second billion’, much of this reflecting the extraordinary growth of China. ‘The third billion was added to the global middle class in nine years. Today we are on pace to add another billion in seven years and a fifth billion in six more years, by 2028’ (Bergthaller 2020: 78). No wonder that humans also emerged in this period as the biggest geomorphological agent on earth, shaping its landscape and the continental shelves in the oceans, and as a geological force changing the climate system of the whole planet, ushering in, as some scientists suggest, the new geological epoch of the Anthropocene.¹

The German scholar Hannes Bergthaller (2020) in an essay on Asia and the Anthropocene writes the following:

The principal reason why all the curves of the ‘Great Acceleration’ are still pointing relentlessly upwards (with the notable exception of that for population…) is the spread of middle class consumption patterns around the world, if by middle class we understand people with a household income sufficient to purchase consumer durables (such as refrigerators, washing machines or motorcycles), to spend money on entertainment and on the occasional vacation. (ibid.: 78)

As recently as 2000, Bergthaller (ibid.) adds, ‘about 80% of this “global middle class” was living in Europe and North America…’. But by 2015, ‘their share had dropped to about 35%, due largely to the rapid expansion of the middle class in Asia’. Bergthaller reports that by 2030, ‘the Asian middle class’ is expected to be ‘at least three times larger than that of the old “West,” and will account ‘for two thirds of the world’s total…’ (ibid.).

The Anthropocene thus produces a peculiar sense of historical time, something I have referred to here as its ‘chronopolitics’. I owe this word to the use of it by three younger scholars—Tobias Becker, Christina Brauner and Fernando Esposito—who organised an online conference by this title on 16–18 September 2021 and glossed it to mean ‘[the] time of politics, politics of time, politicized time’.² I, however, mean something slightly different. Because of the multiple ways in which the planetary environmental crisis we call the Anthropocene plays out on different scales of time and space, both human and non-human, the Anthropocene, it seems to me, fragments human futures in unprecedented ways. One could, for instance, tell the story of the Anthropocene as that of a crisis of neoliberal capitalism, a crisis of the industrial and consumption-oriented ways of human life, as a crisis of biodiversity leading to a sixth Great Extinction of species, or as a story of how humans fended off the next ice age by many, many thousands of years. These futures do not all happen on the same scales of time and space. The Anthropocene itself, being a geological epoch, may last much longer than humans—a point that raises a question about whether it could at all be used as periodising device for human history. But the Anthropocene also produces very short-term futures for humans—so short-term that one could think of them as ‘the present’. Our sense of the time of the pandemic contains particular and entwined figures of the historical present and the historical future. Much talk about post-pandemic futures is in nature nostalgic, expressing a desire to return to the ease and comfort of the pre-pandemic times; but the politics of and the demand for ‘equal access to vaccination’ convert this time into a present that we want to fully—and equally—inhabit (leaving aside those who voluntarily resist vaccination). What I explore in this article is the figure of the pandemic as a time of the present, one that makes the future hard to imagine.³

II The pandemic and the great acceleration of human history

We are now being told by infectious diseases specialists that we live in an ‘era of pandemics’. Pandemics and epidemics have accompanied humans ever since the invention of agriculture and the domestication of animals. Hunter-gatherer communities also suffered infectious diseases but, as some virologists put it, ‘like the sparse populations of our primate relatives, they suffered infectious diseases with characteristics permitting them to persist in small populations, unlike crowd epidemic diseases’ (Wolfe et al. 2007: 281). Agriculture with the concomitant domestication of animals played ‘multiple roles in the evolution of animal pathogens into human pathogens’ (ibid.). It took humans thousands of years to strike equilibrium with these zoonotic diseases. But the difference today is this. These crises of the past ‘were once separated by centuries, or at least many decades’, write the infectious diseases specialist David Morens and his co-authors in a recent paper (Morens et al. 2020a), but the emergence of these diseases is now becoming a more frequent phenomenon.

Starting to count from the year 2003, Morens and his colleagues tell of the outbreak in 17 years of at least five pandemics or potential pandemics in the world: severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS, 2003), ‘a near pandemic’; an influenza pandemic (H1N1 pdm, 2009), a chikungunya pandemic (2014), a Zika pandemic (2015) and over 2014–15, a ‘pandemic-like extension of Ebola over five African countries’. They grant that ‘the meaning of the word “pandemic” has recently been reinterpreted according to differing agendas’, and yet conclude with a sentence that sums up the risks of our times: ‘It [is] clear that we now live in an era of pandemics [emphasis added], newly emerging infectious diseases, and the return of old contagious foes’ (Morens et al. 2020a: 1). A more recent paper by David Morens and his colleague Anthony Fauci, Director of the Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the United Sates, come to the same conclusion:

Newly emerging (and re-emerging) infectious diseases [emphasis removed] have been threatening humans since the [N]eolithic [R]evolution, 12,000 years ago, when human hunter-gatherers settled into villages to domesticate animals and cultivate crops…. Ancient…diseases with deadly consequences include smallpox, falciparum malaria, measles, and bubonic/pneumonic plague. … [But] the past decade has witnessed unprecedented pandemic explosions: H1N1 ‘swine’ influenza (2009), chikungunya (2014), and Zika (2015), as well as pandemic-like emergence of Ebola fever over large parts of Africa (2014 to the present…. One can conclude from this recent experience that we have entered a pandemic era [emphasis added] ….

(Morens and Fauci 2020: 1077)

All of the pandemics named here—and the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) that entered into humans from dromedary camels in 2012 that is not named—are zoonotic in origin, that is, they are infections that have resulted from viruses and bacteria switching hosts from wild animals to humans, sometimes via other animals, in recent times. A 2005 inquiry found that ‘zoonotic bugs accounted for 58 percent’ of 1,407 ‘recognized species of human pathogen’ (Quammen 2012: 44). A 2012 review of the 6^th International Conference on Emerging Zoonoses, held in Cancun, Mexico, on 24–27 February 2011 with 84 participants from 18 countries noted that ‘some 75 percent of emerging zoonoses worldwide’ were of ‘wildlife origins’. Global trade in wildlife and the continuous destruction of animal habitats contributed to the problem (Kahn et al. 2012: 7).

‘Human beings are the ultimate causes of pandemics’, assert Morens and his colleagues. They point out that it is ‘deforestation, agricultural intensification, urbanization, and ecosystem disruption’ that ‘bring people into contact with wildlife and their potentially zoonotic pathogens’ (Morens et al. 2020a: 4). ‘To put the matter in its starkest form’, says David Quammen (2012), the science-writer, ‘Human-caused ecological pressures and disruptions are bringing animal pathogens ever more into contact with human populations, while human technology and behavior are spreading those pathogens ever more widely and quickly’ (Quammen 2012: 40). He mentions the critical factors at work here. Humans are

[causing] the disintegration…of natural ecosystems at a cataclysmic rate. Logging, road building, slash-and-burn agriculture, hunting and eating of wild animals,…clearing forest to create cattle pasture, mineral extraction, urban settlement, suburban sprawl, chemical pollution, nutrient runoff to the oceans, mining the oceans unsustainably for seafood, climate change,…and other ‘civilizing’ incursions upon natural landscape—by all such means, we are tearing ecosystems apart. (ibid.)

Second, ‘millions of unknown creatures’ that inhabit such ecosystems—including viruses, bacteria, fungi, protists constituting what virologists call ‘the “virosphere”,—are affected by these developments that increasingly unloose such microbes into the wider world’ (ibid.: 40–41). ‘Spillover’ is the term used by ‘disease ecologists…to denote the moment when a pathogen passes from members of one species, as host, into members of another’ (ibid.: 43).

The United Nation’s Environment Program’s Preventing the Next Pandemic: Zoonotic diseases and how to break the chain of transmission (UNEP and ILRI 2020) and The Loss of Nature and the Rise of Pandemics (Jeffries 2020) published by World Wide Fund for Nature support these conclusions. They see the following ‘major anthropogenic drivers of zoonotic disease emergence’: (1) increasing demand for animal protein particularly in Asia and in Sub-Saharan Africa; (2) unsustainable agricultural intensification, in particular of domestic livestock farming that ‘results in large numbers of genetically similar animals’ that are more vulnerable to infection (swine flu being a case in point); (3) increased use and exploitation of wildlife; (4) unsustainable use of natural resources accelerated by urbanisation, land use change and extractive industries that include mining, oil and gas extraction, logging etc. encouraging ‘new or expanded interactions between people and wildlife’; (5) the increasing amount of human travel and trade; (6) changes in food supply chains driven by ‘increased demand for animal source food, new markets [including “wet” markets] for wildlife food, and poorly regulated agricultural intensification’; and (7) climate change as ‘many zoonoses are climate sensitive and a number of them will thrive in a warmer, wetter, and more disaster-prone world foreseen in future scenarios’ (UNEP and ILRI 2020: 15–17). The conclusions drawn in the World Wide Fund report are very similar:

Human activities are causing cataclysmic changes to our planet. The growing human population and rapid increases in consumption have led to profound changes in land cover, rivers and oceans, the climate system, biogeochemical cycles and the way ecosystems function—with major implications for our own health and well-being…. Land-use change, including deforestation and the modification of natural habitats, are responsible for nearly half of emerging zoonoses. (Jeffries 2020: 14)

That we did not have this tragic global pandemic a decade or so ago now appears to have been purely a matter of human luck. A team of scientists in Hong Kong warned the scientific community some 13 years ago, in 2007, that since Coronaviruses were ‘well known to undergo genetic recombination’ that could lead to the following:

[New] genotypes and outbreaks[, the] presence of a large reservoir of SARS-Co-V-like viruses in horseshoe bats, together with the culture of eating exotic mammals in southern China, is a time bomb. The possibility of the reemergence of SARS and other novel viruses from animals or laboratories and therefore the need for preparedness should not be ignored. (Cheng et al. 2020: 683)

The above warning was not heeded (Morens et al. 2020b: 955). Quammen reports scientists as guessing since 2012 or thereabouts as to when a pandemic, the ‘Next Big One’ with ‘high infectivity preceding notable symptoms’, would come (Quammen 2012: 207–8). For, as Quammen puts it, ‘If you are a thriving population, living at high density but exposed to new bugs, it’s just a matter of time until the Next Big One arrives’ (ibid.: 290). But nobody was listening in either 2007 or in 2012.

III The pandemic as presentism

One could say that the pandemic produces for us a present in which all talk of moving beyond the pandemic to a ‘normal’ future sounds like a desire for a backward movement, to go back to what we had before. This is not the presentism, then, that François Hartog (2003) wrote about in his celebrated book, Regimes of Historicity, where he describes a post-war Europe experiencing the collapse of all futures into its war-weary present. In the pandemic, the future arrives as nostalgia. A present without a future that is also not at the same time about moving back to the past. A present that is ever present in that sense, not the vanishing present one usually reads about in modern discussions of the past, present and future. It is also a present that all humans can fully inhabit—cognitively and affectively—as their ‘now’. When we ask for a just distribution of vaccines through the world—or even when we resist vaccines on secular or religious grounds—we inhabit that present. We look at the past pandemic of 1918 to ask how long this one might last. That expected duration—a few years, four years the last time—defines this present.

But the pandemic has also registered a profound shift in the constitution of the ‘everyday normal’ for the late-modern and urban humans of the post-antibiotic period in medicine,—the ‘heirs of the industrial and imperial impetus’, as Pierre Charbonnier describes us (Charbonnier 2020: 77). The simultaneous acknowledgement and forgetting of deep, geobiological histories of life and of the planet, of the ocean of microbes that is both inside and outside our bodies, were often contained in the phatic aspect of our everyday exchanges. When we greeted each other with a remark on the weather, we acknowledged, as it were, the work of the sun, clouds, wind, trees, plants, light and shade—the planetary, in short. But only for a brief moment before transitioning on to what Roman Jakobson called ‘informative communication’ that was much more closely tied, in our practices, to the more important business of advancing our individual and collective human ends, considered in separation from what we usually seek to contain in the phatic.⁴ I say ‘the late-modern and urban’ human, for, clearly, for someone in a rural or indigenous context, a deficit of sunshine or rain would have more immediate and palpable consequences.⁵ The phatic utterance in the case of the late-modern, urban, post-antibiotic person was a measure of the cultural distance or indifference they ‘normally’ experienced from the deep-historical work of all that sustains life on the planet.

A ‘normal’ moment for us, then, is one that allows us to forget or ignore the life-supporting work that microbes do even when we are not in a position, intellectually, to deny their presence. I owe this insight to some fascinating observations that historian Arvind Elangovan kindly shared with me on reading my book The Climate of History in a Planetary Age published earlier this year (Chakrabarty 2021). He recalled how common it was, in his experience, for letters written by 20^th-century Indians to carry news about the physical illness of the writer or the recipient even if that did not constitute the main point of the letter (Elangovan is a historian of the Indian constitution; see Elangovan 2019). ‘[I]n many of the writings that I have seen of nationalist leaders, such as Ambedkar’s papers or letters written by B N Rau or Shiva Rao even’, he wrote, ‘a frequent… [part] of the letters was… [where] they would note how sick they were or how they were recovering or… [asked after] the health of the recipient of their letters’. ‘Indeed, in Tamil’, he added, ‘the first sentence that my mother would always write in those (good old!) Inland letters to me or to my relatives was “Nalam, nalam ariya aaval”—literally translated as “Fine, yearning to hear that the same is true of yours”’.

‘These moments’, Elangovan wrote,

[s]eem to me to register a cognition at the barest minimum…an acknowledgment of the microbial, bacterial, and/or the viral (but, of course without a conscious recognition of the same, mostly). But it was just that. Immediately, that polite enquiry was succeeded by the main intent of the letter. It is as though every letter began with a parenthetical acknowledgment of the species aspect of our lives, to be quickly swept away and transitioned to the human aspect of our lives! Unless, of course,…the person was seriously sick,…[when] the question immediately got translated in institutional terms—to questions such as ‘what did the Doctor say?’, or ‘what is the Hospital saying?’, etc.….⁶

We will not get involved here in debates on whether phatic speech—first commented on by the great anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski in 1920—signifies ‘communion’ between humans (an overcoming of a threatening silence) or merely a matter of communication.⁷ We will simply register that the pandemic connotes a time when our recognition of the microbial world we live amid cannot any longer be contained within the phatic and thus forgotten as we go about our everyday lives. The question, ‘How are you?’ cannot today, in the present situation, be a simple, conversation-starting statement. We often indicate this by making the phatic part of our communication routinely register the strangeness of our times. Almost every new email I receive these days begins with an expression of concern about the ‘strange’ or ‘disturbing’ times we are passing through. In fact, today, it would be considered impolite to begin a new email message without an expression of this concern.

The fact that the offending virus today can no longer be contained in the structure of the phatic has some ironical implications both for the history and the theory of bio-politics as it was enunciated by Michel Foucault in the 1970s. Let me remind you of a particular day in 1978— 8 February. Foucault was already engaged in giving a series of public lectures at the College de France elaborating on his idea of bio-power and the governmentalisation of the state. Everything apparently was going well until this day arrived when Foucault felt unwell as he stood—at the lectern or pulpit (as the French say), I imagine—to begin the fifth lecture of the series. He had a touch of the flu. He began with an apology: ‘I must apologize, because I will be more muddled than usual today. I’ve got the flu and don’t feel very well’. Yet he wanted to proceed with the lecture as he had ‘some misgivings’ about first letting his audience gather and then telling them to leave ‘at the last minute’. So, he decided to talk ‘for as long as [he could]’ and asked in advance for forgiveness for both ‘the quantity as well as the quality’ of what he had to say (Foucault 2007: 115).

Think, then, of what is happening to Foucault’s categories today. Bio-politics was about securing the biological life of a ‘population’, an extension of Montesquieu’s anticipation that ‘politics [was] really about making life last a little longer’ (Latour and Weibel 2020: 75). Foucault was clear that the category ‘population’ brought the question of ‘nature’ into politics. He began his 1978 lectures at the College de France on 11 January with this following statement:

This year I would like to begin by studying something that I have called, somewhat vaguely, bio-power. By this I mean a number of phenomena that seem to me to be quite significant, namely, the set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of political strategy, of a general strategy of power, or, in other words, how, starting from the eighteenth century, modern Western societies took on board the fundamental biological fact that human beings are a species.⁸ (Foucault 2007: 1)

Reading him today, I find his use of the word ‘species’ a little misleading, for he was not speaking of humanity constituting a biological species as such; nor was he writing a Darwinian version of evolutionary history of species in which something like natural selection would have been a determining factor (see the brief discussion in ibid.: 77–78). That deeply natural-historical dynamic was beyond what interested Foucault. He was thinking of humans individually carrying certain evolved needs and capacities—the need to eat, the propensity to sustain life, to procreate, to age, to suffer diseases—that they owed to the fact of their being members of a biological species. Yet it was through his observations on the political development of strategies for governing the health and lives of ‘populations’—managing demographics—that the deeply natural-cum-biological history of the human species entered Foucault’s meditations on power.

The growth of cities and problems of overcrowding leading to ‘more diseases’ and ‘more deaths’ were central to Foucault’s formulations. ‘It seems to me’, he wrote

[t]hat with this technical problem posed by the town…we see the sudden emergence of the problem of the “naturalness” of the human species within an artificial milieu. It seems to me that this sudden emergence within the artifice of a power relation is something fundamental… [to] what we would call biopolitics, bio-power. (ibid.: 22)

The concern with the governance of lives meant that states had to evolve strategies to deal with crop failures, climate, and the supply of grains for the management of epidemics, diseases, famines, and mortality, all of this making ‘population’ into a category that would never lose its ‘naturalness’ for Foucault. It would almost acquire an autonomous, ‘natural’, thing-like item in Foucault’s understanding of the state’s political calculus, something that had to be managed by a discursive-institutional regime stretching well beyond the issue of political sovereignty (ibid.: 36, 67–75, 96).

Foucault was very clear, though, that while the natural entered the political via the category ‘population’, his account of the bio-political was not a piece of natural history. After all, humans’ theories of nature, he argued (mistakenly, it seems, from today’s vantage point), did not affect nature: ‘It goes without saying that the fact that since a certain point of time we have known that the Earth is a planet has had no influence on the Earth’s position in the cosmos’ (ibid.: 276).⁹ But not so with ‘population’ as a ‘reflexive prism’ of the state. The ‘prism’ affects human-institutional practices and their object, ‘the population’. In that sense, ‘population’ is a category like ‘forests’, something to be managed by humans. Like ‘forests’, ‘population’ is a piece of nature refracted through strategies of power, it does not belong to the deep history of evolution. For Foucault, then, natural history remains, ultimately, separate from human history. As with the statement by Dr Elangovan’s mother in her letters, the virus that afflicted Foucault on the day of his fifth lecture comes to us only as a trace of something that registered its presence and yet remained unacknowledged in the phatic overtures of Foucault’s prose.

What we have with the pandemic, however, is the fact that the phatic cannot contain the 2019 novel coronavirus or SARS-CoV-2 anymore. As I have noted, we cannot at present ask anyone how they are with complete indifference to the virus. The intensification of bio-power or bio-politics—the unbridled, accelerated, and extractive mobilisation of the planet’s biosphere for use by a rapidly growing number of humans for their pleasure and profit alone—has now resulted in a crisis in the governance of human lives, a crisis of bio-power itself. More importantly, it has brought into view the connections or rather the entanglements that exist between our lives and the deep, evolutionary history of microbes.

The pandemic is thus not an event in our global history alone. It is not merely an example of the great acceleration of human flourishing. It is also an event that shows, in the form of the unfolding of a drama often tragic for humans, how our increasingly global existence reveals to us the deep-historical (or planetary) aspects of our lives. The novel coronavirus is evolving. What we hear about the Delta-variant or other variants of the virus is about its biological evolution. Everything we throw in the path of the virus to disrupt its journey has the potential to become an evolutionary pathway for the virus. The human body itself is now one such pathway.

Lynn Margulis and Dorian Sagan reminded their readers of the following some decades ago:

[Our] species [are] not…lords but…partners: we are in mute, incontrovertible partnership with photosynthetic organisms that feed us, the [microbial] gas producers that provide oxygen, and the heterotrophic bacteria and fungi that remove oxygen and convert our waste. No political will or technological advance can dissolve that partnership’. (Marglis and Sagan 1997: 16)

Researchers on infectious diseases have for long been aware of this aspect of the deep and always-present history of humans. David Morens, Gregory Folkers and Anthony Fauci opened a 2004 article examining the challenge of emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases by remembering the warning that Richard M. Krause, the Director of the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases from 1975 to 1984, issued in his 1981 book, The Restless Tide, that ‘microbial diversity and evolutionary vigour were still dynamic forces threatening mankind’ (Morens et al. 2004: 242).¹⁰ They ended their article by referring to the role that the evolution of microbes played in the history of infectious diseases. ‘Underlying disease emergence are evolutionary conflicts between rapidly evolving and adapting infectious agents and their slowly evolving hosts’, they wrote. ‘These are fought out’, they added, ‘in the context of accelerating environmental and human behavioral alterations that provide new ecological niches into which evolving microbes can readily fit’. This is an ongoing, unending battle in which humans are forced constantly to improve and upgrade their medicines and technology while the microbes evolve and manage, often in situations precipitated by human actions, to switch hosts. In concluding their essay, Morens et al. observed the following:

The challenge presented by the ongoing conflict between pathogenic microorganisms and man has been well summarized by a noted champion of the war on EIs [emerging infections], [the Nobel laureate] Joshua Lederberg: ‘The future of microbes and mankind will probably unfold as episodes of a suspense thriller that could be entitled Our Wits Versus Their Genes’. (ibid.: 248)

Morens and Fauci returned to this theme in their recent reflections on the current pandemic in an article published in Cell in September 2020. ‘In the ancient ongoing struggle between microbes and man’, they write, ‘genetically adapted microbes have the upper hand in consistently surprising us and often catching us unprepared’ (Morens and Fauci 2020: 1078). Even the technologies we invent to fight microbes generally end up creating new pathways of infection and evolution. Invented in the 1930s, antibiotics did give rise to the feeling in the 1960s that, as Richard Krauss put it:

[there] seemed little left to do in the battle against infections other than begin a mopping-up operation. It appeared that only a few stubborn serious infections resisted the two-pronged attack of antibiotics and vaccines. No one anticipated the microbe guerilla actions that were to break out from enclaves in the rear. (Krause 1981: 11)

And there lies the story of antibiotic-resistant bacteria. ‘For example’, wrote Krause in early 1980s, ‘it takes 40 times as much penicillin to treat some infections today as it did to treat those same infections when penicillin was introduced during World War II’. ‘What of the future’, he asked wearily, ‘if bacteria can elude our best efforts in this fashion?’ (ibid.: 12).

Medical strategies for fighting microbes end up as stories of their evolution. ‘The emergence of novel pathogens’, write the virologist Nathan Wolfe and his colleagues, ‘is now being facilitated by modern developments exposing more potential human victims and/or making transmission between humans more efficient than before’. They mention how methods of blood transfusion have acted as avenues for the spread hepatitis C, the commercial bushmeat trade leading to the circulation of retroviruses, industrial food production to bovine spongiform encephalitis (BSE), international travel spreading cholera, intravenous drug spreading HIV, vaccine production leading to outbreaks of Simian virus 40,—all these and other similar developments creating ‘susceptible pools of elderly, antibiotic-treated, immunosuppressed patients’ (Wolfe et al. 2007: 282).

A particular evolutionary advantage that coronaviruses have over humans is the ‘genetic instability of microorganisms allowing rapid microbial evolution to adapt to ever-changing ecologic niches’ (Morens and Fauci 2020: 1080, emphasis removed). This, Morens and Fauci say,

[is] particularly true of RNA viruses such as the influenza virus, flaviviruses, enteroviruses, and coronaviruses, which have an inherently deficient or absent polymerase error-correction mechanisms [no proof-reading capacity, in other words, as they reproduce themselves] and are transmitted as quasi-species or swarms of many, often hundreds or thousands of, genetic variants’ [a fact that makes it difficult for humans to fight them]. (ibid.)

This is fundamentally an evolutionary struggle. It reminds us that humans, the species called Homo sapiens, for all their mastery of technology, are not outside of the Darwinian history of life and evolution that unfolds on this planet. Infectious diseases in humans are about microbial survival ‘by [their] co-opting certain of our genetic, cellular, and immune mechanisms to ensure their continuing transmission’ (ibid.: 1078). Morens and Fauci refer to Richard Dawkins on this point: ‘evolution occurs on the level of gene competition and we, phenotypic humans, are merely genetic “survival machines” in the competition between microbes and humans’ (ibid.). Human flourishing leads to the degradation of the environment. This creates opportunities for coronaviruses of various strains to switch hosts by moving from their reservoir hosts to various mammalian species, whereby they get pre-adapted to human cells by working inside other mammalian bodies. ‘…viruses have deep evolutionary roots in the cellular world’, Morens and Fauci write (ibid.: 1980). ‘Evidence suggests’, they add, ‘that there are many bat coronaviruses pre-adapted to emerge, and possibly to emerge pandemically’ (ibid.: 1981).

Infectious diseases are about the deep evolutionary connections that exist between our bodies and other bodily forms of life (one reason why we can develop vaccines by testing them first on other animals). Zoonotic pathogens, responsible for 60 per cent of human infections, are ‘those that presently and repeatedly pass between humans and other animals’. The other 40 per cent, including smallpox, measles, and polio, ‘are caused by pathogens descended from forms that must have made the leap to human ancestors sometime in the past’ (Quammen 2012: 137). David Quammen, from whose book Spillover I have cited these words, makes a telling point about the dotted-line relationships that connect human bodies to other mammalian bodies through which these microbes travel: ‘It might be going too far to say that all our diseases are ultimately zoonotic, but zoonoses do stand as evidence of the infernal, aboriginal connectedness between us and other kinds of host’ (ibid.).

Richard Krause’s rhetoric of a permanent war between humans and microbes seem outdated and wrong. But his other question, ‘What is the nature of this microbial sea, constantly lapping at the shores of man’s dominion?’ still resonates (Krause 1981: 17). ‘It may be a matter of perspective [as to] who is in the evolutionary driver’s seat’, remark Morens and Fauci,—microbes or humans. Microbial forms of life have persisted on this planet for 3.8 billion years. Homo sapiens have been around for 300,000 years. ‘This perspective’, say Morens and Fauci, ‘has implications for how we think about and react to emerging infectious disease threats’ (Morens and Fauci 2020: 1078).

IV Provincialising the political

Something of an unstated assumption in the constitution of the urban and global modern—to borrow the language of Bruno Latour—has broken down when we cannot any longer acknowledge and at the same time contain the microbial world in the domain of the phatic (Latour 1991).¹¹ Our sense of the temporal quality of the everyday has changed. Microbes are the oldest and the most important inhabitants of the planet and they play a far more critical role in the maintenance of life on it than humans have ever done or ever will. (If anything, we have created the prospect of another great extinction of life.) ‘The overwhelming majority of life on Earth is microbial!’, writes Paul Falkowski in his book, Life’s Engine: How Microbes Made Earth Inhabitable. ‘In fact, there are far more species of microbes than there are of plants and animals combined’ (Falkowski 2015: 39). In her introductory book on viruses, Dorothy Crawford writes the following:

Microbes are by far the most abundant life form on Earth. Globally, there are about 5 × 10³⁰ bacteria, and viruses are at least ten times more common—thus making viruses the most numerous microbes on Earth…. The oceans cover 65% of the globe’s surface and, as there are up to 10 billion viruses per litre of sea water, the whole ocean contains around 4 × 10³⁰– enough, when laid side by side, to span 10 million light years. (Crawford 2011: 17–18)

In addition, they play a vital role in ‘maintaining life on earth’ (ibid.: 18). The oceans’ floating population of plankton is made up of viruses, bacteria, archaea and eukarya. One group of planktons, the phytoplankton (plants), consist of ‘organisms that use solar energy and carbon dioxide to generate energy by photosynthesis’. They produce almost half of the world’s oxygen (ibid.), the oxygen without which we struggle to survive when infected with SARS-CoV-2 virus or its variants.

This gives us a glimpse into the ironical nature of the crisis of the bio-political that we are living through. Bio-power, as Foucault formulated it, was about securitising human life. Health, food and housing are part of it. But a frenzied expansion of bio-power over the last several decades—the great acceleration of human history—has undone that security. The story of antibiotics encapsulates this irony. Indiscriminate overuse of these drugs has allowed antibiotic-resistant bacteria to evolve. As Ed Yong puts it in his book on the human microbiome: ‘Much of modern medicine is built upon the foundations that antibiotics provide, and those foundations are now crumbling’ (Yong 2016: 128). We may have entered an era of pandemics that we will have to match with newer and newer vaccines. Yet we debate only bio-power and sovereignty—as if the virus could still be contained within the phatic—when we debate the politics of pandemic management internal to and between nations. Did Donald Trump or Narendra Modi or Scott Morrison mismanage the pandemic? Is Biden better then Trump? Should those resisting vaccination on grounds of religious considerations be treated leniently? These questions are questions of bio-politics. From this perspective, the crisis is a failure of bio-power, and questions of income, racial, gender, sexual, nutritional, digital and other inequalities come up as legitimate issues. We also discuss questions of sovereignty (distinct analytically, as Foucault said, from bio-power) when issues of global versus national management of pandemics are raised and, by implication, the very question of global governance itself receives some attention.¹²

But a larger question from the history of life stares us in the face through this pandemic. Homo sapiens are a minority form of life while they, the microbes, comprise the majority forms of life. They have also been the architects of life on this planet and are central to its maintenance. Their presence inside our bodies makes us what we individually are. They and humans—and there is no ‘human’ without a functioning microbiome—constitute together a ‘whole living being’ that Lynn Margulis, combining three Greek words (hólos for ‘whole’, bíos for ‘life’ and óntos for ‘being’), referred to as a holobiont (Reitschuster 2020: 353; Yong 2016: 157).

To think of individual humans and their microbiome as constituting a ‘whole living being’ is to think about the limits of the received traditions of modern political thought. For that thought has defined the human as a political subject by bracketing—putting in the container of the phatic—the work of deep history, of the geo-biology of the planet including the work that microbes do. Our crisis leaves us exposed to a fact that biologists and infectious disease specialists have known for a long time: that we are a minority form of life that has behaved over the last hundred or so years as though the planet was created so that only humans would thrive. If all forms of life were human-like—and we sometimes do use our human imagination to think our way into the experiential-moral worlds of animals and birds (think of the imaginative, philosophical work of Vinciane Despret [2016])—then humans would be like the Whites in South Africa during the apartheid regime, a racist minority dominating the majority with utterly selfish ruthlessness and imperilling everybody in the end. We would wonder if it were possible for humanity as a whole to look on themselves as a ‘minor’ form of life and work towards minoritarian forms of political thought, of the kind that Arendt or Deleuze on Kafka have educated us in, thoughts that would want to avoid ‘majoritarian’—ironical, in the case of a minority—dreams of domination. If viruses and bacteria were human or human-like, our knowledge of them would look like ‘colonial knowledge’, knowledge of the other that we acquire with a view to—and in the process of—dominating them. Even Ed Yong’s otherwise informed and judicious discussion of the human microbiome ends with an all-too-human, a parochially and provincially human dream of ‘controlling’ them ‘for our benefit’:

We see how ubiquitous and vital microbes are…. They sculpt our organs, protect us from poisons and food, break down our food,…and bombard our genomes with their genes…. We see how we might start to control these multitudes for our benefit, transplanting entire communities from one individual to another, forging and breaking symbioses at will, or even engineering new kinds of microbes. (Yong 2016: 264)

Yong wrote these words before the pandemic broke. If there is anything the current moment of the COVID-19 pandemic has taught us, it is that such a Promethean understanding of what it means to be human is seriously misplaced. The pandemic speaks not only to the global history of capitalism and its destructive impact on human life, it also represents a moment in the history of biological life on this planet when humans are acting as the amplifiers of a virus whose host reservoir may have been some bats in China for millions of years. Bats are an old species, they have been around for about 50 million years; viruses for much, much longer. In the Darwinian history of life, all forms of life seek to increase their chances of survival. The novel coronavirus has, thanks precisely to the intensification of bio-power of the humans, jumped species. It has now found a very effective agent in humans that allows it spread worldwide. And that is because humans, very social creatures, now exist in very large numbers in big urban concentrations on a planet that is crowded with them, and most of them are extremely mobile in pursuit of their life-opportunities.

Our history in recent decades has been that of the Great Acceleration and the expansion of the global economy in the emancipatory hope that this will pull millions of humans out of poverty. Or at least that has been the moral justification behind the rapid economic growth in certain nations in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. From the point of view of the virus, however, the environmental disturbance this has caused, and the fact of human global mobility have been welcome developments. This is no doubt an episode in the Darwinian history of life. And the changes it causes will be momentous both in our global history and in the planetary history of biological life.

The pandemic thus speaks of our being embedded in deep history and of our entanglement with both animal and microbial lives. The virus mediates the latter two. There is, however, a tension between our human concerns with bio-political forms of power—concerns that are amenable to human politics—and our knowledge of our connections with microbiome, connections that unfortunately cannot create (at least not yet) an extra- or post- human collective political subject that would be both human and nonhuman at the same time. Yet if the argument that both planetary climate change and the pandemic are problems that arise out of unprecedented expansion of the human realm in the period of the Great Acceleration is accepted, then the question of ‘what is to be done?’ by humans to mitigate ‘the era of pandemics’ is one that naturally arises for us.

This is where it may be useful to recall a point that Latour has made in many places and in different versions, one of the most recent being a passage in his lectures titled Facing Gaia. Human pursuit of wealth and prosperity in the period of the Great Acceleration has amounted to an undeclared war—but on what? Latour writes with his tremendous gifts of imagination: ‘With the Anthropocene, the Humans are now at war not with Nature but with…in fact, with whom? I have had a lot of trouble settling on a name for them’. He finally decided, putting it ‘in the style of a geo-historical fiction’, that ‘the Humans living in the epoch of the Holocene are in conflict with the Earthbound of the Anthropocene’ (Latour 2015: 247, 248). ‘Humans’ refers to humans as they saw themselves in the Holocene as separate from Nature while ‘Earthbound’ are the entanglements of the human, the nonhuman, and the planetary that the Anthropocene revealed and of which the former ‘humans’ are an inextricable part. The war, however, cannot be won, for while the Earthbound and the Earth are powers that will not dominate, they cannot be dominated either (ibid.: 281). We, particularly the human subjects who still pursue modernisation and act as though we were still in the Holocene need, then, to practise what Latour has called diplomacy. Since humans and the Earthbound cannot meet as negotiating subjects, I suggest that what modernising and global humans need to practise is one-sided diplomacy—somewhat akin, in my memory, to the Chinese unilateral withdrawal in their war with India in 1962—by imagining and then implementing a process of scaling back the realm of the human-modern.

Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish lawyer whose family was destroyed in the Holocaust, coined the word, ‘genocide’ (Lemkin 2012). Humans are on the verge of committing what sociologist and writer Danielle Celermajer calls ‘omnicide’, the killing of everything. (The word was first coined during the anti-nuclear movement of the last century.) You may legitimately ask, which humans? Why not specify those responsible? Oftentimes, it is possible to do so. You can point to politicians, financial institutions, businesses, governmental failures, with reason. There are indeed times when it is easy to identify those who kill, destroy, and maim others intentionally. But, as Celemajer points out, responsibility or culpability is not always easy to assign. Five hundred million wild animals died just in the first month of the Australian firestorms of 2020. Nobody actively schemed it. Most people did not even desire it. But it happened because of the changes that follow from what we call ‘anthropogenic climate change’.¹³

Celemajer tells a story to explain the situation: ‘When I was growing up, my parents used to play a Bob Dylan song called “Who Killed Davey Moore?” [modeled on the children’s rhyme, “Who Killed Cock Robin?”]’. Davey Moore was a boxer who died in the ring when he was 30 years old. If you remember the song, you will know that the coach, the crowd, the manager, the gambling man, they all said, ‘Not I’. And then they explained, as Calermajer puts it, that ‘[they were] just doing what it is that [they] do’.¹⁴

We, the privileged humans of today, do what we do to keep the human realm expanding, behaving as though we believed—even if we did not—that the earth was created so that only humans would thrive. We all partake of the changes that the Great Acceleration induced in the human condition. Anthropogenic climate change and the pandemic are connected to that acceleration. It is up to us humans to find ways to scale the human realm back without losing sight of questions that speak either to issues of intra-human injustice or to those of the inextricable entanglement of the human with the nonhuman captured in Latour’s figure of the Earthbound.

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this article was presented as the inaugural lecture of a series of annual lectures sponsored by SAGE Publications and the Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi. I am grateful to the editors of the Contributions for the original invitation to give this lecture. I also acknowledge with pleasure and gratitude the comments made on the lecture by Professors Rita Brara and Awadhendra Saran and by members of the audience. This article draws on my short piece ‘An Era of Pandemics? What is Global and What is Planetary About COVID-19’, posted on the Critical Inquiry blog on 16 October 2020.¹⁵

Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Notes

1.For more on this, see ‘Introduction’, in Chakrabarty (2021).

2.For more on this conference (online), see https://zzf-potsdam.de/en/veranstaltungen/chronopolitics-time-politics-politics-time-politicized-time (accessed on 16 November 2021).

3.My thoughts here owe a recognisable intellectual debt to François Hartog’s discussion of presentism (Hartog 2003, 2020).

4.See Jakobson (1960: 5). That Jakobson may not have read much Malinowski and may have taken the idea of the phatic function of language from the Egyptologist Alan Gardiner is discussed in Rebane (2021). The original Malinowski essay is titled ‘The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages’ (Malinowski 1923).

5.In recent email communication (8 October 2021), sociologist Amita Baviskar made the following illuminating comments to me (I am grateful to Professor Baviskar for permission to cite her email.):

I thought you might like to read this Facebook post that I wrote in early May [2021], when we were in the thick of the second wave here in Delhi: ‘वाच रया? Staying alive?’ In the early 1990s, living in the Narmada valley, I found that when Bhil and Bhilala adivasis met acquaintances at the weekly haat [market] or elsewhere, they greeted each other with the enquiry: वाच रया? It was a shortened form of ‘पुरिया वाच रया?’ Literally translated into Hindi, the phrase means ‘बच्चे बच रहे हैं? Are the kids alive?’ Not ‘How are you?’ But this much more basic concern: ‘Are your kids staying alive?’ Among people who lived with hunger and malnutrition, where health care was hardly there, where every mother I knew had watched her infants die, and everything from diarrhoea to snakebite added to the tiny graves dotting a hillside in each village, ‘वाच रया?’ was the right thing to ask. ‘Are they staying alive?’ Because untimely death sat at one’s shoulder, a constant companion to life. Little did I think that, 30 years later, I’d be asking this question in my circle of the urban elite. वाच रया?

6.Email from Arvind Elangovan, 24 May 2021. Thanks to Professor Elangovan for permission to cite his email.

7.See the discussion in Senft (2009).

8.The editors of this volume point out that Foucault (2007: 24, n.1) had used the expression ‘bio-power’ in his 1975–76 lectures on ‘society must be defended’.

9.But then it is true, as Latour remarks, that ‘when our idea of the position of the Earth in the cosmos is modified, a revolution in the social order may ensue. Remember Galileo: when astronomers declared that the Earth moves around the Sun, it felt as though the whole fabric of society was under attack’ (Latour and Weibel 2020: 13).

10.For biographical details on Richard Krause (1925–2015), see Morens (2016).

11.Bruno Latour famously speaks of ‘the constitution of the modern’ in his book We Have Never Been Modern (1991).

12.On these issues of sovereignty, see the discussion in Wolfe (2011: 212–15, and chapter 12). Wolfe writes on the assumption that while more viral storms may indeed be coming, the constitution and assemblage of the powerful institutions of the world will remain the same.

13.Celemajer, Danielle. 2020. ‘Omnicide: Who is responsible for the greatest of all crimes?’. ABC (Australia) Religion and Ethics blog, 3 January. Available at https://www.abc.net.au/religion/danielle-celermajer-omnicide-gravest-of-all-crimes/11838534 (accessed on 16 November 2021).

14.Ibid. Emphasis removed.

15.Available at https://critinq.wordpress.com/2020/10/16/an-era-of-pandemics-what-is-global-and-what-is-planetary-about-covid-19/ (accessed on 16 November 2021).

References

Stephen W. Sawyer

https://doi.org/10.4000/transatlantica.7344

1No doubt this time it’s different.

2This planetary crisis requires us to reconsider our relationship to narrative. A new sense of the scale and impact of human settlement has convinced humanists and social scientists that it is time to engage with the Anthropocene. What follows offers an attempt to sketch out some of the narrative ramifications of this engagement and our growing literary and historical interest in this novel age in which humans have become a global geophysical force. I hope to offer up some hypotheses situated at the crossroads between social scientific investigations of the Anthropocene and a dramatic shift in the scales of time and space that have been motivating both literary and social scientific investigations in recent years—toward deep time and global spatial contexts. Due to the tremendous scope and scientific implications of these fields, my ambition is reduced to providing some remarks about new potential areas of collaboration between historians and literary scholars around a nascent but galloping interest in scholarship on the Anthropocene and a resurgence in the interest of deep time as well as the longue durée. In particular, I would like to emphasize the potential for developing longue durée narratives in this moment of questioning around the agents and effects of geological change.

3What follows also builds on the new attention among literary and historical scholars to the legacy of the Annales school—the historical school that developed the most sustained theoretical reflection on thinking historical continuity and change across the longue durée. This resurgent interest is in part a push to overcome ostensibly damning disciplinary trends as well as transformations in higher education and the call for new engagement by intellectuals in public life. As David Armitage and Jo Guldi have noted, “in many realms of historical writing, big is back.”1 In their recent History Manifesto, Armitage and Guldi credit Fernand Braudel, leader of the second generation of the Annales School, with developing one of the most sustained reflections on the longue durée.2 However, in spite of the major contributions of Braudel and his colleagues in this area during the 1950s and 1960s, Armitage and Guldi argue that thinking across long time scales slowly disappeared from the historian’s radar in the 1970s-2000s. “The reasons for its retreat,” they suggest, “were sociological as much as intellectual”; “the motivations for its return are both political and technological.” (Armitage and Guldi, 2013, 9) Technologically, they argue, we have acquired new analytical tools that have contributed to creating a new “ecosystem” rooted in “the abounding sources of big data” that are of “ecological, governmental, economic, and cultural nature, much of it newly available to the lens of digital analysis.” (ibid., 9) The attempt to expand the breadth of temporal scale has also been part of a response to a political shift: the slow but steady breakdown of the nation as the dominant paradigm in literary and historical studies and an attempt to find new territorial scales of scientific inquiry more adapted to thinking across the long term. In short, a temporal solution has been provided to a spatial problem. “All the uses of the longue durée reflect efforts to stretch the concept of the time period, to get away from the rigidity of periodization thinking in units of decades and centuries,” writes Sandra Gilman in her “Oceans of Longue Durée” (330). Similarly, Wai Chee Dimock’s Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time has suggested, “some historical phenomena need large-scale analysis. They need hundreds, thousands, or even billions of years to be recognized for what they are: phenomena constituted by their temporal extension with a genealogy much longer than the life span of any biological individual, and interesting for just that reason.” (5) Building on this perspective, Edward O. Wilson has attempted to restore the pertinence of categories of deep history by defining it as a study in which “human behavior is seen as the product not just of recorded history, ten thousand years recent, but of deep history, the combined genetic and cultural changes that created humanity over hundreds of [thousands of] years.” (In Search of Nature, ix-x) Writing across temporal and spatial boundaries, then, it has been argued, will fulfill a professional, political and even moral imperative for historians and literary scholars to finally undermine the stranglehold of methodological nationalism as well as get back in touch with a larger public audience by responding to some of the fundamental concerns of our day. Or, in the words of Armitage and Guldi, “the longue durée has an ethical purpose,” to the extent that “it proposes an engaged academia trying to come to terms with the knowledge production that characterizes our own moment of crisis, not just within the humanities but across the global system as a whole.” (Armitage and Guldi, 2013, 37)

4But for all of the rising tides of big history and literary studies of deep time, this renewed push toward the longue durée, and even “universal history,” has met with some rather tepid reactions among scholars.3 Social scientists in a forum around David Armitage and Jo Guldi’s article in the Annales such as Lynn Hunt have noted that for all its merits, merely clamoring for a return to the longue durée is insufficient for developing a critical perspective on some of the broader trends in higher education, particularly the impact of new university structures after the slow democratization of higher education that pushed historians toward greater specialization. Historians have also launched a stinging critique against Bill Gates’s overwhelming financial support for a high-school history curriculum rooted in “Big History.”4 Meanwhile, literary scholars like Sandra Gilman have also expressed concerns, noting

What are the limits of the longue durée ? The very ubiquity of the term, detached from the Braudel context, free-floating and multiplying, suggests that it has become something of an automatic response, by now a gesture half empty that formulaically extends conventional chronological divisions without asking new questions about them or their assumed primacy. In this context the language question is often approached by historians and literary critics alike as an add-on, relegated to footnotes on sources and editions, decoupled from space and time, whether the time is that of the longue durée or any other chronological unit. (Gilman, 331)

5In other words, while there appears to be a general consensus that it is time to move toward new forms of trans-national and trans-temporal history, the critical implications of this enterprise have remained highly unsatisfying. For the time being, clamoring through manifestos that “big is back” proves more descriptive than prescriptive to the extent that it is a promise that remains unrealizable within our current conceptions of the longue durée.

6Key, then, to any return to the longue durée is a more serious reconsideration of the social scientific foundations of the longue durée in its previous manifestations and an acknowledgement of the limitations of these earlier formulations for thinking about longer time scales and beyond national boundaries today. In short, the question remains: Given that there is a renewed interest in the longue durée among historians and literary scholars alike, especially through the category of deep time, how might this new concern be different from the one developed in the civilizational studies of a Toynbee or the Annales histories of Braudel? The answer, I would like to argue, resides in considering the temporal imperatives brought on by narrating in the Anthropocene.

The longue durée and geo-history

7In their call for the return of the longue durée, Armitage and Guldi pay only passing attention to the scientific foundations for investigating deep historical time. It is striking that for all of their insistence that we must move beyond studies of a few generations or even a few centuries, they show exceedingly little interest in the actual scientific arguments that grounded earlier theories of the longue durée, and Fernand Braudel’s in particular. As a result, instead of attempting to root the longue durée scientifically, they focus on long-term historians’ capacity to engage with a wider public on salient issues. From this perspective, the short-term histories that reigned throughout the 1960s-1990s, they suggest, broke with a longer tradition that had guided the birth of modern historical consciousness: “What we think of as modern western historical writing,” Guldi and Armitage argue, “began with the desire to shape the present and the future derived from classical models.”5 Our focus on a few decades, they insist, has left this engagement behind through a provincialization of temporal and territorial scales, reduced to the exceedingly petite.

8It is certainly true that previous generations of scholars before the 1960s drew upon longue durée perspectives in order to shape public opinion in the present and for the future. One has only to look so far as Toynbee’s postwar collection of essays, Civilization on Trial, to appreciate the potential of a longue-durée history for assessing the prospective problems of contemporary society. As one of his reviewers wrote in 1949: “Civilization on Trial is oriented toward the future as much as toward the past.” He continued, insisting on Toynbee’s attempt to root his work in the deep past: “Toynbee tries to hammer into the reader’s consciousness his conviction which no one will seriously dispute, that the five or six millennia of civilized history are but a small fraction of the 600,000 or more years ascribed by scientists to the human race, the 500 to 800 million years of the existence of life on earth and the 2,000 million years which seem to have passed since the appearance of our planet.” (Baron, 1949, 111) But for all of its ambition, it was not long before Toynbee’s approach came under fire in the famous critiques of Pieter Geyl and Hugh Trevor Roper in the 1950s.6 Of course, Toynbee did seek to provide a longue-durée perspective on the present and future—along the lines called for by Armitage and Guldi. But in so doing, his critics insisted, he also succumbed to a baroque messianism that was entirely unfit for the post-war social scientific approach to history. At the very least, such critics of Toynbee should serve to remind us that any call for a return to the longue durée must move beyond a simple nostalgia of historians who dug deep to look forward.

9Indeed, there were already voices in the 1950s who attempted to rescue long scales of history by responding to the criticisms leveled at historians like Toynbee. It was precisely in the context of the rebirth of post-war social science in Europe in the late 1950s—just as Geyl and Trevor-Roper were hastily burying Toynbee—that Fernand Braudel attempted to provide a more rigorous foundation for the longue durée. Instead of focusing on an idealist, quasi-hegelian ideal of civilizational progress as the key concept animating the human longue durée, Braudel attempted to root the longest time scale in a deeply revised conception of the relationship between history and human geography.7 Braudel launched his campaign against the standard uses of temporality in history by arguing that the longue durée required a different consideration of the relationship between human time and the more invariable rhythms of the natural world. His ambition, as he stated it, was to explore the imperceptible relationship between man and his environment: “a history in which all change is slow, a history of constant repetition, ever-recurring cycles.” (Braudel, The Mediterranean, 20) This emphasis on man’s relationship to nature therefore introduced “an almost timeless history,” he insisted. However, the key word to this approach was “almost”; for there was change over time, even if it was change that had been so slow as to be invisible to the previous historian’s gaze. Reintroducing this longer scale of temporality broke with the vacuous idea of geography as a mere unchanging backdrop upon which human activity took place.

10Braudel explained this approach more thoroughly in his 1958 article on “La longue durée.” He insisted that our histories had been so shortsighted as to focus on the high frequency and rapid shifts in politics at the expense of other time frames: “it is undeniable that, in general, historians of the last 100 years have concentrated almost entirely on politics, focusing on the dramas of ‘great events,’ and working in the shortest time scales.”8 He therefore established a sharp dichotomy between the short time frame of political decisions in the realm of policy and the longest-term geological time that structured those decisions. “Man has been prisoner for entire centuries of climates, vegetation, animal populations, cultures; in other words, a slowly constructed equilibrium that one cannot challenge without threatening everything.”9 As a result, he insisted, it was the semi-immobile structures of human existence that had yet to be explored by historians: “all of the levels, all of these thousands of levels and thousands of ruptures in historical time may be understood through this profound, semi-immobility. Everything gravitates around it.”10

11This attempt to demonstrate the interaction between human time and geological time had deep roots in Braudelian historical perspective. Braudel was of course aware of the tradition of the civilizational approach to history. He, however, would provide a renewed social scienticity by elaborating a more robust methodology. In a set of conferences given while he was a prisoner of war in Germany for his fellow soldiers, he provided the basic structure of his vision apropos of his native Lorraine:

In the eighteenth century, Lorraine experienced multiple transformations, almost an awakening. If we pay close attention to the villages, we see that almost all of them increased the size of their arable lands […] You know the traditional villages in the Lorraine […] Village, field, forests, three zones of life […] the soup, daily work and the exceptional occupation of woodcutting […] In the eighteenth century the boundaries of the forest that had remained unchanged since the thirteenth century were attacked at multiple points and large isolated farms were created.11

12
Introducing the impact of long-term environmental conditions on the immediate political events of the French Revolution, Braudel argued that this longue durée of soil occupation and agricultural activity had finally given birth to the tremendous growth in population enabled by the expansion of arable land in the eighteenth century. As a result, the region could play a central role in the French Revolution. He concluded: “I am not suggesting that this history of the East is to be entirely deduced from the increase of new arable land, from this small geographical sign…, of course not. But this example, chosen as an illustration, demonstrates rather a geographical aspect of the large movement of history.”12

13Braudel’s historical project gave birth to what he famously titled “geo-history.” Such an approach required paying particular attention to man’s immediate and more short-term political and cultural production through their interaction with the longue durée of nature. Employing this methodology, he opened his magisterial book on the Mediterranean with over 75 pages on the mountains, bodies of water, climate and trade routes on sea and land. Insisting on the hostility of its climate, soil, and natural rhythms, Braudel argued that the story of Mediterranean civilization was a story of conquest and suffering, in which man was pitted against the overwhelming force of this recalcitrant and stubborn natural world. “It was necessary to conquer hostile swamps, protect oneself from devastating floods augmented by unforgiving winters and expel malaria.”13 He concluded, “we are witness to a difficult, precarious life; any equilibrium often came at the expense of man.”14

14It was precisely this difficulty—the overwhelming challenge of the natural context of the Mediterranean—that revealed the peculiar alignment of the short-term political events and the long-term geological and geographical situation of historical actors. The peculiarities of this world were understood by examining how political possibilities took form based on natural constraints. This geo-history therefore required understanding the natural conditions with which a given society was in contact.15 As Braudel himself defined it in his programmatic article “Géohistoire : la société, l’espace et le temps,” it was “the study of a double liaison, from nature to man and man to nature, the study of an action and a reaction, combined, mixed, confounded, renewed endlessly in the reality of the everyday.”16 As Guilherme Ribeiro has noted (Ribeiro, 340), the relationship between man and nature in this conception went in two directions. On the one hand, there were the natural conditions that controlled or constrained human endeavors. On the other, there was the story of the human triumph over these same conditions, as in for example the construction of a boat that is stable enough to conquer the seas or break out of a given area in spite of seasonal difficulties (Braudel, “Géo-histoire,” 102-103). These facts belong to different categories and take place at different speeds, notes Ribiero: there is the “immobile, or almost immobile” history, “indefinitely repeated under the same conditions,” and on the other hand is a history that is “very, very slow in spite of the insistent push toward progress.” (Braudel, “Géo-histoire,” 107-109)

15It was this approach to the longue durée that pushed Braudel to claim that history could only be properly written by building bridges to the other social sciences. Braudel accepted that his vision of historical study had an imperialist relationship to other social sciences. As he made clear in his article on the longue durée, his approach included an attempt to bring them all under the great tent of history. But what is of particular interest for us is that this attempt to unite the contributions of other social sciences under the helm of history was rooted in history’s privileged position to combine multiple temporalities into one narrative.

16Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology held a special place in this push toward a united social science. In Braudel’s view, Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism provided a social scientific theory of the longest, almost unchanging reality of human existence. “Claude Lévi-Strauss is an excellent guide, let’s follow him,” Braudel argued persuasively. By breaking down myths into signs, Braudel insisted that Lévi-Strauss was able to provide a micro-sociology that opened up toward the ostensibly constant forms of everyday existence. Braudel recognized this important contribution; he suggested however that these long-term structures uncovered by Lévi-Strauss needed to be confronted with the “encounter between the infinitely small.” (Braudel, 1958, 747)

17To be clear, Braudel was not critiquing Lévi-Strauss’s use of history; he was not suggesting the replacement of one time scale for another. In fact, he was doing quite the opposite by arguing that Lévi-Strauss had provided an essential contribution to the social sciences by moving beyond an analysis of “events,” however great that might be. But in Braudel’s view, uncovering the extended and ostensible timelessness of the structures of myths was only a portion of the story. If historians had erred through an overwhelming emphasis on the short term, the anthropology of Lévi-Strauss fell on the opposite end of the spectrum. What was necessary within the social sciences was the ability to combine the two. Unlike Armitage and Guldi’s recent call for a return to the longue durée, Braudel did not mathematically replace a short-sighted history with a long-range one. The two were not locked in a zero-sum game. Instead, as Braudel argued: “the final effect then is to dissect history into various planes, or, to put it another way, to divide historical time into geographical time, social time, and individual time.” (Braudel, The Mediterranean, 21)

18Braudel’s breakthrough then was to develop a methodology that allowed for the intersection of multiple time scales in response to a specific historical problem. His argument that history could serve to unite the other social sciences was rooted not only in its relationship to time, but most importantly in its ability to weave natural time and cultural time together into one narrative. “Whether it is a question of the past or the present,” wrote Braudel, “an awareness of the plurality of social time is indispensable for a common methodology between the human sciences.”17 So instead of replacing the short with the long, or simply calling for a new commitment to the longue durée, he attempted to ameliorate working conceptions of time within history, anthropology, and geography to establish a more sustained dialogue between the human and the natural. Any given historical enterprise needed to investigate the clashing of the multiple time scales generated by the interaction between human time and natural time.

Multiple temporalities in the Anthropocene

19One of the major motivations for returning to the longue durée has been the methodological implications of climate change in humanities and social sciences and in particular the advent of the Anthropocene. Armitage and Guldi, for example, place climate change at the center of their manifesto, insisting that “we need long-term data on the climate and economy to tell us when someone notices that the earth is changing.” (History Manifesto, 64) And yet, for all of its political value, this call for a long-term attention to climate change seems to lack a larger scientific motivation in their manifesto beyond simply making historical study more relevant to a wider audience and other public problems. By these standards, climate change is just one among many types of problems that historians should explore to continue to make their works more relevant. As a result, their discussion of the importance of longue durée histories for coming to terms with climate change and their dissatisfactions with the current state of the art in this area sidestep a larger need to consider the impact that climate change and specifically the Anthropocene may have on the very relationship between culture and nature in our (historical) narratives.

20Armitage and Guldi argue that “history’s relationship with the public future lies in developing a longue-durée contextual background against which archival information, events, and sources can be interpreted.” (117) Their argument that the long time scale remains a “contextual background” upon which events can be analyzed or situated is fine as far as it goes. However, it does leave aside one of Braudel’s essential contributions for thinking about the relationship between the long and the short—the longue durée was more than a mere backdrop. It was a scale of history with its own rhythm that intermingled and combined with the short and medium term. The vast introduction to The Mediterranean was precisely an attempt to break down the idea that Mediterranean civilization sat on top of the natural world like oil on water.

21The relationship between natural time and human time has been given new salience in the age of the Anthropocene. In his “The Climate of History,” Dipesh Chakrabarty has noted for example that Braudel’s position “was no doubt a great advance for the nature-as-backdrop argument” to the extent that “nature played an active role in modeling human actions.” (205) And yet, Chakrabarty lamented, it remained insufficient for coming to terms with the new context of the Anthropocene because it did not understand humans as geological agents like other natural features surrounding them—humans interact with nature through culture, not as geological agents like volcanoes, rivers, or tectonic plates. In their recent work on the Anthropocene, Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz have highlighted a similar break from the Braudelian method, suggesting that Braudel wrote in a context of “the separation of domains and time between nature and society inherited from industrial modernity that left profound scars in history writing.”18 While these works are correct that Braudel did not rearrange the separation between nature and culture, by denouncing his apprehension of nature, they also ignore the broader methodological structure that supported his historical analysis. While his understanding of the relationship between nature and culture has become radically dated in the context of the Anthropocene, his attempt to use narrative to recombine multiple temporalities may still have much life left in it. In short, while considering Braudel’s attempt not merely to combine nature and culture into one narrative, but more importantly to use narrative to combine multiple temporalities, we should be careful of throwing out the proverbial baby with the bathwater.

22So right as these clarifications are, what needs attention is what our new human geological age means for the interaction of the multiple temporalities of the short, medium and the longue durée, or precisely how political and economic events and decisions interact with the climate and nature to generate a new kind of historical narrative. From this perspective what is needed is not simply a reconsideration of the role of man in climate change and the relationship between the natural and cultural, but a somewhat mind-bending reorientation of the temporal scales that makes up a sophisticated historical method. Indeed, in the Anthropocene, just as culture no longer sits upon a natural context or backdrop, the short term does not sit upon the long term, but quite the opposite: it is the short term that governs the long. This could have important consequences for how we construct historical and literary narrative.

23The temporal realignments of this new geological age provide an increasingly useful framework for taking into account, and integrating into our accounts, a new longue durée—one that does not ally the long and the short along the divide between nature and culture. In particular, it forces us to reconsider the relationship between the human and the natural that was at the heart of the Annales’ attempts to introduce thinking about long expanses of time. Historians and social scientists have launched both methodological and theoretical analyses based on the new recognition that humans may have become the most important geological force on the planet. What has emerged is a broader combination of scientific and moral conviction that the implications of this new geological age necessarily blur the boundary between the excruciatingly slow passage of geological time and the staccato pointillism of human history.

24We may then reconsider Chakrabarty’s thoughtful investigations of the implications of the Anthropocene where he suggests that “anthropogenic explanations of climate change spell the collapse of the age-old humanist distinction between natural history and human history.” (201) In a context where the distinction between human and natural histories has come undone,19 the question, however, remains: Do we have the proper methods and narrative tools to come to terms with the implications of this extraordinary transformation? Or, in other words, Chakrabarty’s assessment that the Anthropocene requires a reconsideration of “our capacity for historical understanding” (201) leaves us with what may be an equally important next step: How does the undoing of the distinction between the human and the natural realign the temporal categories for making sense of our past, present, and future?

25Inspired by Braudel’s attempts to rethink the historiographical relationship between human activity and the environment across the longue durée, it would seem that the advent (or rather the discovery of the advent) of the Anthropocene should transform the scholar’s conception of multiple historical time frames once again. In the age of the Anthropocene, human political and cultural decisions have not just been a short-term process structured by long-term trajectories. Instead, since the eighteenth century, the short-term political decisions as well as cultural transformations of human settlement have played an increasingly primary role in shaping the very environment that previously structured it. In other words, if humans have become the dominant geological force since the industrial revolution, it is insufficient to understand the multiple temporalities of this revolution as taking place on the backdrop of “almost timeless” temporal frames of nature. Rather, we must consider how the short-term decisions have set humans on a new environmental course that will no doubt last thousands of years.

26Steffen, Crutzen and McNeill have argued for the Anthropocene by suggesting that the industrial revolution has brought on “underlying global change [through] human-driven alterations of i) the biological fabric of the Earth; ii) the stocks and flows of major elements in the planetary machinery such as nitrogen, carbon, phosphorous, and silicon; and iii) the energy balance at the Earth’s surface.” These vast transformations are “pushing the Earth into planetary terra incognita.” (Steffen, Crutzen and McNeill, 614) From the perspective of writing narrative, the human impact on the very organizational structure of the planet in the Anthropocene means that we may need to attend to the inversion of temporalities that this new condition implies. Or, as Latour has recently argued: “through a surprising inversion of background and foreground, it is human history that has become frozen and natural history that is taking on a frenetic pace.” (“Agency,” 12)

27This disorienting circularity is precisely what needs to be considered in our return to the longue durée. Building on Braudel’s critique that he was unsatisfied “with the traditional geographical introduction to history that often figures to little purpose” including “descriptions of the mineral deposits, types of agriculture, and typical flora,” (Braudel, The Mediterranean, 20) the emergence of the Anthropocene would seem to suggest that we can no longer content ourselves with remarking that the human is now a geological force that potentially generates or permanently removes the very mineral deposits, types of agriculture or typical flora that shape it in return. The advent of the Anthropocene seems to have added a troubling element to the magisterial history of the climate introduced by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Braudel’s successor within the Annales: How might we write a history over the longue durée that integrates an understanding of the multiple temporalities resulting from the fact that humans are both victims and agents of (de)glacialization?

Narratives of the longue durée

28So, in at least one important sense, Braudel’s project remains relevant. This is hardly a question of saving soldier Braudel. It is however a question of recognizing that the return to the longue durée must move beyond a somewhat thin re-invocation that our histories should cover more than a few generations. Braudel built his conception of the longue durée on an attempt to combine the temporalities which each of the social sciences had specialized in—the synchronic approach of sociology, the longue-durée almost immobile structures of structural anthropology, the geological time of human geography and the short durée of traditional political history—into a common narrative. In so doing, he was breaking down the barriers between social sciences. Today, I would suggest, our contemporary attempt to reactivate longue-durée analysis in the context of the Anthropocene needs to pay more than passing attention to the Braudelian project and consider its relationship to other social sciences and humanities. It is all the more true as historians, cultural theorists, literary scholars and anthropologists have engaged in a radical questioning of the traditional limits between nature and culture.

29Recent anthropological investigations have both reaffirmed and recalibrated how the relationship between nature and culture might be understood. In fact, the radical reformulation of the culture/nature distinction in contemporary anthropology has, for the first time, opened the door to a history of continuity between the human and the natural. Such a history undermines the opposition between culture and nature as structural to social scientific investigation to the extent that it denies the a priori distinction between the two realms. As Philippe Descola has demonstrated, the very separation between nature and culture that Braudel’s longue durée relied upon is only one way (among the four that he charts) in which this relationship has been constructed across the globe.20 Par delà nature et culture offers a critical perspective on the nature-culture relationship as it has been developed in structural anthropology and the social sciences to present and argues that far from being a universal mode of investigation that is available for understanding all relationships between a given culture and its natural environment, it is one compromise among many, “the singular expressions of which must be examined, just as we must seek to discover the rules of their perpetuation and distribution.” (119) Although he never mentions Braudel, in this description of the traditional opposition between nature and culture in the social sciences, Descola captures the implicit understanding of Braudel’s notion of the two-way relationship between nature and human culture. Indeed, Braudel remained prisoner to the nature-culture distinction that Descola refers to as naturalism and that emerged out of Western European modernity. Braudel’s understanding of nature and culture as constraint (e.g. poor soil) on the one hand and the overcoming of natural limitations on the other (e.g. a solid boat for stormy seas) was indeed rooted in the same conception that Descola unmasks and questions: “either culture is shaped by nature—shaped by genes, instincts, neuronal networks or geographical constraints, or nature only takes form and relief as a potential reservoir of signs and symbols that culture draws upon.”21 Challenging this vision, Descola suggests that dependence on this dualist cosmology is increasingly problematic faced with the multiple other modes for considering the nature-culture relationship.

30More recently, Edouardo Kohn’s investigation into How Forests Think has taken up the challenge of exploring the continuity between the human and the natural world. In his explorations of “the challenges posed by learning to live with the proliferating array of other kinds of life-forms that increasingly surround us,” he pursues “a precise way to analyze how the human is both distinct from and continuous with that which lies beyond it.” (9) Kohn examines how the Runa of the Ecuadorian Amazon reveal and operate within the semiotics of forest life, uncovering a form of thought that, while distinct from the human, still shares fundamental elements with humans. It is the agentive capacity of the forest itself and not simply the forest as backdrop for human activity that Kohn targets. Such studies, he insists, are particularly important for our current age: “if we are to survive the Anthropocene,” Kohn concludes, “we will have to actively cultivate these ways of thinking with and like forests.” (227)

31Such a post-human anthropology opens the possibility that the Anthropocene is not just a recognition of the human role in contemporary climate change, but is more fundamentally part of a readjustment of the relationship between the human and the natural world that breaks down the traditional “European” paradigm of naturalism brought forward by Descola. From this perspective, one might redirect Braudel’s assessment of Lévi-Strauss toward the work of Descola and Kohn. For as far as they have gone in uncovering very different modes of conceptualizing the nature/culture relationship and demonstrating that the European or “Western” social science conception is not universally applicable (and even increasingly irrelevant, if not dangerous), like Lévi-Strauss, they remain tied to the immobility of these conceptions of the relationship between man and nature. In short, they do not emphasize the historical transformations in this relationship that our growing commitment to the Anthropocene logically demands. That is, they do not emphasize the change across time within a given culture/nature construction and how such change might actually transform the understanding of the relationship between the human and what surrounds it. I would contend that their work, however, as well as calls for the Anthropocene more broadly, demand precisely such a shift. In other words, instead of building our histories on a stable temporal relationship between man and nature, the Anthropocene invites us to consider the very possibility that the temporalities of such a relationship may also change over time, and indeed, even rather suddenly. To quote Braudel for our contemporary purposes, we might suggest that the Anthropocene situates man’s relationship to the natural world precisely at “the meeting point between the infinitely small and the very longue durée.” (Braudel, 1958, 747)

32As I have tried to make clear, this does not mean a simple return to Braudel. Rather it means building on his attempt to articulate the long and the short time scales in one common narrative. Bruno Latour has attempted to demonstrate the need to push beyond Braudel’s conception, while also recognizing its contribution through his term, “geo-story”. Building on Chakrabarty’s notion of the earth as agent, Latour argues that “this time we encounter, just as in the old prescientific and nonmodern myths, an agent which gains its name of ‘subject’ because he or she might be subjected to the vagaries, bad humor, emotions, reactions, and even revenge of another agent, who also gains its quality of ‘subject’ because it is also subjected to his or her action.” (“Agency”, 5) Such a perspective responds directly to the critical approach of Descola on the multiple modes of conceiving the relationship between man and nature. Not only must one have a critical perspective on the naturalist conception of the nature-culture distinction, one must also consider the capacity of the earth itself to become an agent, interacting with the human with its own agency. Far from a set of constraints to be dealt with or overcome in the Braudelian mode, geo-story requires a recognition that humans, river beds, earthquakes and tides all share the agentive capacities necessary for temporality and even historicity, let alone narrative.

33The increasing emphasis on the agentive capacity of nature suggests that the traditional conception of the nature/culture within our social sciences (growing as it did out of Western naturalism) is undergoing a fundamental transformation that may only become fully clear as we begin to reinvest the terrain of the longue durée. As Latour argues, “humans are no longer submitted to the diktats of objective nature, since what comes to them is also an intensively subjective form of action. To be a subject is not to act autonomously in front of an objective background, but to share agency with other subjects that have also lost their autonomy.” (“Agency”, 5) In this age of the Anthropocene, Latour states, we can no longer place the Earth at a distance, removing or repositioning human societies here and there on a bluish-white orb, as we would have, according to Descola’s definition of Western naturalism. Instead, we must reconsider our most basic social scientific assumptions about how human decisions have interacted with their natural environments over time. “One of the main puzzles of Western history,” Latour suggests, “is not that ‘there are people who still believe in animism,’ but the rather naive belief that many still have in a deanimated world of mere stuff; just at the moment when they themselves multiply the agencies with which they are more deeply entangled every day. The more we move in geo-story, the more this belief seems difficult to understand.” (“Agency” 7)

34Seen through the lens of Latour’s geo-story, not only is our relationship to nature a way of understanding the longue durée, but we might understand that the very relationship between nature and culture has a history with its own syncopation of multiple temporalities. Latour’s remark that “the great paradox of the ‘scientific world-view’ is to have succeeded in withdrawing historicity from the world, and with it, of course, the inner narrativity that is part and parcel of being in the world—or, as Donna Haraway prefers to say, ‘with the world,’” (“Agency”, 13)—suggests that we must recognize with Eduardo Kohn that forests, seas, animals and other elements beyond the human are also capable of action in the short durée just as humans are capable of setting the conditions for the longue durée of geological time.

35The natural agency implied by the Gaia hypothesis, for example, provides a perspective on how we might be forced to reconsider our traditional conceptions of a deep natural time in opposition to the short-term cultural adaptations of the human. According to the Gaia hypothesis, as presented by Peter Westbroek, life has evolved on earth for over three billion years without interruption. He draws the conclusion that this may mean that the biota itself seeks the establishment of the ideal conditions for perpetuating life that may or may not include the human.22 Such a hypothesis is not only intriguing for what it tells us about the Earth as agent (Gaia), it also suggests that the temporalities of Gaia are as variable as any other agent. There is no long and steady geo-stability which structures a longue durée, but rather regulatory mechanisms that may or may not counteract disturbances according to time frames beyond the human that unfortunately remain entirely unknown as of yet.

Conclusion

36Coming to terms with the reversals of agency and its attending temporalities means resisting the call to de-animate nature and therefore render its temporalities one-dimensional. We may then engage with Kohn’s ambition that thinking and knowing are not exclusively human affairs and begin to consider what impact this may have on narrating our understandings of society, culture, and our world across time. As he reminds us, seeing the “myriad ways in which people are connected to a broader world of life” necessarily changes “what it might mean to be human.” (6) The question of longue-durée narrative today is not simply to engage more directly with current public concerns but to consider: first, the fact that our social sciences and literary studies seem to be capable of overcoming the categorical distinctions between nature and culture that gave birth to them; and second, in order to do so, they must engage with a new multiplicity of temporalities that necessarily emerge within an attempt to challenge the delimitation of a socially constructed reality.

37Indeed, if the Anthropocene teaches us anything for our future narratives, it is that time and historicity itself are not specifically human. We may not build our interaction with nature by claiming a monopoly on the short term any more than we may hive off the long-term onto a world beyond the human without agency or “thought.” In short, our understanding of how humans relate to that which we previously defined as “non-human” requires a temporal analytic that situates “us” (that is the human as well as that which is beyond it) in time. As Latour has provocatively argued: “the problem for all of us in philosophy, science, or literature becomes: how do we tell such a story?” (“Agency,” 3)

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Notes

1 David Armitage and Jo Guldi, “The Return of the Longue Durée: An Anglo-American Perspective,” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, forthcoming. In French, see the forum “La longue durée en débat,” Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales. See also David Armitage, “What’s the Big Idea? Intellectual History and the Longue Durée.”

2 So does Dimock in her Through Other Continents: “What would happen if we go beyond 1776 and 1620, if we trace threads of relation to the world that antedate these allegedly founding moments? What would American literature look like then, restored to a longue durée, a scale enlargement along the temporal axis that also enlarges its spatial compass? Scale enlargement is, of course, most eloquently proposed by Fernand Braudel and by historians of the Annales school, as an alternative to standard national histories, organized by dates and periodized by decades, if not by years.” (Dimock, 4)

3 On a return to universal history, see David Christian, “The Return of Universal History.”

4 See Andrew Ross Sorkin, “So Bill Gates Has This Idea for History Class…”

5 As they suggest, “Long-term visions of the past remained bound up with policy-making and public conversations about the future, and that was a motive to go long.” (History Manifesto, 20)

6 Pieter Geyl, Debates with Historians; Hugh Trevor-Roper, Encounter. On the current return of interest in Toynbee, see Kumar Krishan, “The Return of Arnold Toynbee?”

7 For a brief comparison of the longue-durée perspectives of Toynbee and Braudel, see Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Civilizations, Culture, Ambition, and the Transformation of Nature and Harold R. Alker, “Pour qui sont ces civilisations ? II”.

8 “C’est un fait que, dans son ensemble, l’histoire des cent dernières années, presque toujours politique, centrée sur le drame des ‘grands événements’, a travaillé dans et sur le temps court.” (Braudel, 1958, 729) (Author’s note: all translations are by the author unless otherwise specified.)

9 “L’homme est prisonnier, des siècles durant, de climats, de végétations, de populations animales, de cultures, d’un équilibre lentement construit, dont il ne peut s’écarter sans risquer de remettre tout en cause.” (Braudel, 1958, 731)

10 “Tous les étages, tous les milliers d’étages, tous les milliers d’éclatements du temps de l’histoire se comprennent à partir de cette profondeur, de cette semi-immobilité ; tout gravite autour d’elle.” (Braudel, 1958, 734)

11 “Au XVIII^e siècle, la Lorraine va connaître de multiples changements et presque un éveil. Si l’on est attentif à ses villages, on s’apercoit que tous ou presque tous ont alors augmenté la superficie de leurs terres labourables […] Vous connaissez les classiques villages de Lorraine […] Village, champ, bois, trois zones, trois genres de vie […], la soupe, le travail journalier, les occupations exceptionnelles du bûcheronnage […] Au XVIII^e siècle, la ligne des bois, demeurée inchangée depuis le XIII^e siècle, est attaquée en des points multiples et c’est alors que sont fondées ces grosses fermes isolées.” (Quoted in French in Gemelli, 35)

12 “Je ne dis pas que cette histoire de l’Est soit à déduire de l’augmentation de l’espace des terres labourées, de ce petit signe géographique…, non bien sûr. Mais cet exemple, choisi à dessein, nous montre assez bien un aspect géographique d’un large mouvement d’histoire.” (Quoted in French in Gemelli, 35)

13 “Il a fallu la conquérir sur les marais hostiles, la protéger des fleuves dévastateurs, grossis par l’hiver impitoyable, exorciser la malaria. Conquérir les plaines à l’agriculture, ce fut d’abord vaincre l’eau malsaine. Ensuite, il fallut amener l’eau à nouveau, mais vivante celle-ci, pour les irrigations nécessaires.” (Braudel, La Méditerrannée, 27)

14 “Nous sommes en présence d’une vie difficile, souvent précaire, dont l’équilibre se fait en définitive régulièrement contre l’homme.” (Ibid., 40)

15 “La vie d’une société est dans la dépendance de facteurs physiques et biologiques […] en symbiose avec eux, ils modèlent, aident ou gênent sa vie, donc son histoire…’” (Braudel, “Géohistoire : la société, l’espace et le temps,” quoted in Ribeiro, 339)

16 “ […] l’étude d’une double liaison, de la nature à l’homme et de l’homme à la nature, l’étude d’une action et d’une réaction, mêlées, confondues, recommencées sans fin, dans la réalité de chaque jour. C’est même la qualité, la puissance de cet effort qui nous oblige à renverser l’approche habituelle du géographe.” (Braudel, “Géohistoire,” 102)

17 “Qu’il s’agisse du passé ou de l’actualité […] une conscience nette de cette pluralité du temps social est indispensable à une méthodologie commune des sciences de l’homme.” Braudel continues : “Je parlerai donc longuement de l’histoire, du temps de l’histoire. Moins pour les lecteurs de cette revue, spécialistes de nos études, que pour nos voisins des sciences de l’homme : économistes, ethnographes, ethnologues (ou anthropologues), sociologues, psychologues, linguistes, démographes, géographes, voire mathématiciens sociaux ou statisticiens, – tous voisins que, depuis de longues années, nous avons suivis dans leurs expériences et recherches… Peut-être à notre tour, avons-nous quelque chose à leur rendre. Des expériences et tentatives récentes de l’histoire se dégage […] une notion de plus en plus précise de la multiplicité du temps et de la valeur exceptionnelle du temps long. Cette dernière notion, plus que l’histoire elle-même – l’histoire aux cent visages – devrait intéresser les sciences sociales, nos voisines.” (Braudel, 1958, 727)

18 “Cette séparation des domaines et des temps entre nature et société, héritée de la modernité industrielle, a laissé des séquelles profondes dans l’écriture de l’histoire.” (Bonneuil and Fressoz, [Kindle location] 541)

19 Frederik A. Jonsson has similarly highlighted the importance of reconsidering such fundamental historical transformations as the Industrial Revolution in the light of the Anthropocene: “the onset of the Anthropocene will probably also transform our understanding of the place of knowledge in the Industrial Revolution,” he writes. (695)

20 Descola identifies four different modes of thinking the nature/culture relationship: totemism, analogism, animism, and naturalism. He places western social sciences under the category of naturalism.

21 “[O]u bien la culture est façonnée par la nature, que celle-ci soit faite de gènes, d’instincts, de réseaux neuronaux ou de contraintes géographiques, ou bien la nature ne prend forme et relief que comme un réservoir potentiel de signes et de symboles où la culture vient puiser.” (Descola, 120)

22 “This means that the conditions in the biosphere cannot have changed very dramatically, because life can flourish only within a narrowly circumscribed range of physical and chemical states.” (Westbroek, 93) “passive regulation is very unlikely to produce conditions precisely adapted to the requirements of the biota. Instead, […] the environment in the biosphere is actively modulated by the biota itself. The earth would be homeostatic, with the biota seeking the establishment of optimum conditions for life. In the course of organic evolution an elaborate system of global biological regulatory mechanisms has emerged, capable of counteracting the adverse effects of major disturbances. The idea is known as the ‘Gaia hypothesis,’ after the Greek goddess of the earth.” (Westbroek, 93-94)Haut de page

Stephen W. Sawyer, « Time after Time: Narratives of the Longue Durée in the Anthropocene », Transatlantica [En ligne], 1 | 2015, mis en ligne le 08 janvier 2016, consulté le 03 août 2022. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/7344 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/transatlantica.7344

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• Gayo, Eugenia M.. McRostie, Virginia B.. Campbell, Roberto. Flores, Carola. Maldonado, Antonio. Uribe-Rodriguez, Mauricio. Moreno, Patricio I.. Santoro, Calogero M.. Christie, Duncan A.. Muñoz, Ariel A.. Gallardo, Laura. (2019) Geohistorical records of the Anthropocene in Chile. Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene, 7. DOI: 10.1525/elementa.353

Stephen W. Sawyer

American University of Paris

Droits d’auteur

Creative Commons – Attribution – Pas d’Utilisation Commerciale – Pas de Modification 4.0 International – CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

• Zuleyha Keskin & 
• Mehmet Ozalp 

Abstract

Islamic literature to date has focussed on the human role of vicegerent (caliph) on earth with the duty to look after the environment including other life forms. There is, however, a need to further develop this literature towards action and the broader concept of a just and ecologically sustainable peace. This chapter examines the three concepts of potential, value and interdependent purpose from an Islamic perspective to illustrate that the earth with all its inhabitants and its ecosystems is an intrinsic part of God’s plan. These three concepts apply to humans, animals and the broader environment from a theological perspective. This worldview generates affinity and empathy towards all of creation, whereby seeking its protection becomes a natural response. Creation displays the infinite creativity and beauty of God, and everything in the natural world worships God in a unique way. Furthermore, just like humankind, animal species along with the ecosystems they inhabit form communities and have a right to live peacefully within their communities. Hence, all forms of life on earth must be preserved and humans are charged with that responsibility. Ultimately, the Islamic concept of accountability in achieving justice and balance on earth charges human beings to establish a just and ecologically sustainable peace.

Introduction

The need for positive change in the world is becoming more topical each day. While various global issues are often dealt with independently, it is time to stop compartmentalising the various issues and start seeing the strong common currents that run through them all. Not only will this lead to synergy as we seek to address growing global problems, but it will also facilitate the establishment of a worldview which benefits every inhabitant that calls this earth its home.

The number of wars and conflicts in the world in the last century is of grave concern, with 108 million people being killed due to war in the twentieth century.¹ With the advancement in technology, the ease of killing a mass number of people in a short period of time becomes easier than ever before. Conflicts are emerging frequently in almost all parts of the world, leaving negative effects for years and even decades after they emerged.

However, peace in itself is not sufficient. Justice is also needed whereby every individual enjoys the rights they deserve. While human rights are often spoken about at the local and global level, many atrocities take place around the world. Out of many statistics, two will suffice to highlight the extensive problems and inequalities that exist globally: 66% of the world’s population lives in poverty and 12 million women, men and children are enslaved around the world with 600,000–800,000 being trafficked each year.²

The need to protect the environment is also pressing. The main stimulus for a call for action in this area is the findings of climate science on the alarming harm human activity is causing on the planet to such an extent that geologists have named the present era the Anthropocene, an epoch where human activity has reached the scale of affecting the very geology of the planet.³ The level of environmental awareness is at its peak: growing attention on environmental and climate science and its findings is widely covered in the media, and included in the educational curriculum.

When global issues are collectively analysed through an Islamic theological lens, the need to change one’s worldview becomes apparent. It is not sufficient to simply attempt to ‘fix’ problems that have been created over the years, but to change the way one views every part of creation that exists on this earth. This would lead to justice and an ecologically sustainable peace. In the light of this, this chapter will discuss the notion of a God-centric worldview which aims to connect all of creation to the Creator. In this way, the potential, the value and the purpose of creation become elevated since everything is seen in the name of the Creator.

Potential

The potential embedded in all of creation is an important element of Islamic theology and spirituality. Everything is perceived through what it can be, not only through what it is. This perspective not only applies to human beings, it also encompasses all living things including the natural environment.

According to the Qur’an, the potential for human development is far reaching, ‘Verily We have created humankind in the fairest form (ahsan al–taqwim), then sent him down to the lowest of the low, except for those who believe and do good deeds.’⁴ The verse underscores the variable nature of human beings and the possibility of attaining the ‘the fairest form’ (ahsan al–taqwim) suggesting that humans have the potential to grow and attain perfection. The natural human disposition (fitra) has been created in such a way that it can move its way up from the ‘lowest of the low’ to express ‘the fairest form.’

The description of the fairest form has been understood in different ways by exegetical scholars. According to Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Ṭabari (d. 923), humankind has been created as having the best character and a beautiful form.⁵ Fakhr al–Din al–Razi (d. 925), has a similar understanding, describing the fairest form to be inner and outer beauty.⁶ Both these explanations stress the beauty found within human beings. Ismail Haqqi Bursawi (d. 1725) focusses more on the value of human beings rather than their beauty when commenting on this verse. He upholds the value of human beings to such a level that he asserts human beings have the highest intrinsic worth of all creation on earth.⁷

The fact that Muslim scholars have used the tree analogy to discuss the human potential has multiple implications. This analogous comparison is significant as it is a connecting point between human beings and the natural environment. The tree analogy is used by the theologian and mystic Ibn Arabi (d. 1240), where the tree denotes the universe.⁸ This perspective resonates with Qurtubi’s (d. 1273) exegesis of the Qur’anic verse which describes human beings as created in the fairest form. Qurtubi describes human beings as like a small universe in order to highlight the potential inherent within them.⁹ Twentieth-century Muslim scholar Said Nursi (d. 1960) uses the tree analogy to describe the potential found within human beings: ‘Yes, however many degrees there are from a seed to a huge tree, the abilities lodged in human nature are more numerous.’¹⁰ The tree analogy is useful to express the tremendous potential in human nature as the reader can appreciate the vast range of development involved from a seed to a fully grown majestic tree. The analogy, at the same time, highlights the tremendous development within a natural object like a tree and by extension in all created forms.

This inherent potential is understood to apply to all human beings. That is, every single individual on this earth is viewed as a seed which has the potential to become a ‘tree.’ This approach to human beings creates a platform where every person should have the opportunities it needs to grow and realise their potential. This is only possible in a peaceful environment where their human rights are also protected. Just as a seed cannot grow unless it has the right environment, no human being can grow unless they live in a peaceful and just environment.

The shared potential between humans and other living beings also creates a genuine connection between human beings and the environment since one identifies with a tree or other plant life in a way that fosters a sense of empathy. Every person would be devastated if their freedom to unleash their potential were to be prevented or, worse, destroyed. Similarly, seeing a tree, which has a similar potential, not realise its potential and flourish would be equally painful, as though one were seeing their own potential being impeded. Such powerful analogies, where the environment is seen as overlapping with the needs and desires of human beings, are a crucial part of the conversation needed in acting to protect the environment. Highlighting the great potential of human beings may appear to have limited ecological benefits, but when that potential is so intimately connected to the environment, it changes the way the environment is perceived.

An appreciation for the environment is not just effected through these powerful analogies. Just like human beings, all living things are understood to have a potential yearning to be fulfilled. As Nursi points out, all of creation goes through the process of ‘expanding from the potential to the actual, through great effort and exertion.’¹¹ This principle of realising potential is visible throughout the entire universe and is referred to as the ‘divine practice’ (sunnatullah) where everything is given an opportunity to experience eagerness and pleasure in fulfilling its natural duty.¹² The pleasure experienced by all beings, animate and inanimate, is due to the ability to perform their duty through the potential that has been instilled within them. It resembles a ‘wage’ given to all beings that makes them eager and motivated to fulfil their duties .¹³

Nursi explains that even seeds have a natural urge to realise their duty by sprouting and germinating: ‘Like someone imprisoned in a constricted place longs to go out into a garden or open space, such a longing, such a joyful state, is also apparent in seeds, in their duty of sprouting.’¹⁴ The personification of a seed is exceedingly powerful as it instils feelings not only towards human beings, but also towards all living beings. This is an approach that does not normally appear in works of theology, but when it is done, it makes a compelling case. It makes it much more difficult to violate the rights of any person or thing as they are all seen as entities yearning to realise their potential.

Discussion of the potential that exists in all life forms naturally raises the notion of the value inherent in all beings.

Value

In the Islamic tradition, attaining knowledge of God is seen as one of the most important aspects of faith. This is indicated by the Qur’anic verse: ‘I have not created the unseen beings and humankind but to (know and) worship Me (exclusively).’¹⁵ While worship is given as the prime purpose, the exegete Ali Unal (b. 1955) explains that knowledge of God and love of God is entailed in the bounds of worship.¹⁶ That is, quality worship of God is not truly possible if knowledge and love of God is not present preceding the act of worship. For this reason, there has been extensive literature written throughout Islamic history about how one can attain knowledge of God. In this goal, creation, particularly the natural environment, plays a critical role as it mirrors God’s names and attributes. All parts of the natural world have an instrumental value because they facilitate knowledge of God. This approach to creation, by which it is connected to the Creator , strongly influences, and perhaps completely changes, the way the environment is viewed.

In Islamic theology, God is not of the substance of this universe. He is unembodied and has an essence unlike any of His creation. In Qur’anic stipulation, ‘none is like Him.’¹⁷ A famous statement with regard to God’s nature has dominated Islamic theology for centuries: ‘Whatever comes to your mind about His nature, God is different to that.’¹⁸ A prominent Islamic theologian, Imam al-Tahawi (d. 935), states: ‘Imagination cannot attain Him, comprehensions cannot perceive Him, and creatures do not bear any similarity to Him.’¹⁹ The only aspect of God we are introduced to in the Qur’an is the names of God, ‘God – there is no deity save Him; His are the All-Beautiful Names (asma al–husna).’²⁰ Thus, while it is God’s essence (dhat) that is unknowable, knowledge of God is possible through appreciating God’s names and attributes. ‘God’s relationship with the creation is mediated by “His beautiful names”…the pillars upon which the phenomenal world rests.’²¹

The names of God are an important means to conceive, conceptualise and understand an otherwise transcendent God, to garner an opportunity to relate to Him. Humankind is believed to have a particularly important role, as humankind was created in ‘God’s own image’ or, translated more literally, ‘upon His form.’²² Furthermore, the Qur’anic verse ‘Then He proportioned him, and He blew into him of His spirit’²³ has been interpreted by exegetes to mean that the human being has the greatest potential to mirror the names of God. This concept of relating to God through divine names is also prevalent in the work of Ghazzali (d. 1111). Ghazzali states the path for conceptualising God is through understanding His names by their manifestation on humankind: ‘it is conceivable for man to be characterised (by these names) to the extent that they may be spoken of him.’²⁴ Humans are given this great ability to perceive and understand the names of God by witnessing them but also by being the most comprehensive entity which can mirror the names of God.

This approach to humankind naturally leads to the idea that all human beings have utmost value since every single person was created ‘upon His form.’ Holding this worldview leads to a desire to fulfil the rights of all individuals and ensure social justice is implemented at its best.

Furthermore, the Qur’an conjoins the Beautiful Names of God as glorifications expressed in the cosmos and the earth: ‘He is God, the Creator, the All-Holy Maker, the All-Fashioning. To Him belong the All-Beautiful Names. Whatever is in the heavens and on the earth glorifies Him. He is the All-Glorious with irresistible might, the All-Wise.’²⁵

The manifestations of God’s names occur in the form of detectable signs in the environment. Interestingly, the Qur’an uses the word ayat (signs) to refer to the actual verses of the Qur’an as well as the signs God has placed in the natural world for the reflecting human mind:

…And it is He who spread out the earth and set thereon mountains standing firm and (flowing) rivers: and fruit of every kind He made in pairs: He draws the night as a veil over the Day. Behold, verily in these things there are signs (ayāt) for those who think and reflect.²⁶

The environment contains signs of God and the universe (particularly the natural environment), acts as the third element linking humanity and God. As stated by Ghazzali, God gave humankind an ‘abridged form that brings together every sort of thing found in the universe’²⁷ so that the universe acts as a mirror, with all objects within it reflecting and manifesting God’s names and attributes.²⁸ On this point, Nursi adds that a single living thing manifests or mirrors as many as twenty names of God.²⁹ It is the natural world where the greatest creativity of God is displayed and witnessed by humans. This makes the earth, together with its inhabitants and ecological environment, the greatest mirror to God’s names and therefore is the most important source of attaining knowledge of God. This renders earth and its lifeforms extremely valuable within the divine plan of the universe and human capacity to relate to God .

In this context, life including the environment is an arena where God displays valuable works of art. By virtue of art being valuable, this theological perspective supports the protection of life as a show of respect towards the Artful Maker, God. In the words of Yunus Emre (d. 1321), a famous mystic and poet, ‘we love the created, for the Creator.’³⁰ There is a natural human affinity towards all of creation as it has an intrinsic value as a result of being the creation of the Creator . This enhances the relationship between the Qur’an, the universe and humankind, making everything sacred because it is fulfilling the duty of mirroring³¹ or manifesting God’s names. When creation is viewed with this lens, what is witnessed is no longer an easily destroyable worthless thing so that peace becomes the natural state that one seeks to be in. A tree is no longer a ‘wooden skeleton but an artwork made by God,’³² and a flower is no longer a natural entity which can be destroyed but a beautiful creation reminding the observer of the Creator’s Beauty.

The value of all creation is further supported by the Qur’anic verse which states, ‘The seven heavens and the earth, and all beings, therein, declare His glory: there is not a thing but celebrates His praise….’³³ In other words, everyone and everything is praising God within the bounds of its own natural disposition, making them all valuable creations of God. The Hadith ‘God is beautiful and He loves beauty’ further reinforces this point. God describes Himself as loving beauty and therefore loving the cosmos. ‘Hence, there is nothing more beautiful than the cosmos.’³⁴ Knowing that God loves the universe leads to a natural inclination for humankind to also love the universe and therefore value it. Since the creation (humankind, animals and plants) displays the creativity of God and is a mirror to reflect God’s names and attributes, it needs to be protected. When people are killed, animals become extinct and the environment is harmed, we deprive future generations of the opportunity to get to know God at a deeper level.

The concepts of potential and value are intrinsically linked to the idea that all of creation has an interdependent purpose. This supports a call to action that moves from protecting the environment to ensuring a just and ecologically sustainable peace.

Interdependent Purpose

In the Qur’anic cosmology purpose plays a crucial part and is linked to the potential and value of creation. The Qur’an declares, ‘And We did not create the heavens and earth and that between them in play and fun. We only created them for a purpose….’³⁵ Everything has a purpose which it yearns to fulfil, and serving that purpose renders it valuable. In Islamic theology, God’s plan for creation elicits an interdependent design of life by establishing ecosystems of flora and fauna, much in the way that humans develop interdependent communities.

In the wake of Hossein Nasr’s (b. 1933) earlier work, one of the most important steps taken in Islamic environmental thinking has indeed been in the area of its teaching and attitudes with regard to animals.³⁶ The Qur’an clearly talks about living beings existing in ecological systems: ‘No living creature is there moving on the earth, no bird flying on its two wings, but they are communities like you.’³⁷ The comparison of animal species with human communities is significant. Since human societies are complex systems made up of numerous interdependent individuals, this comparison points to the modern concept of ecosystems. The phrase ‘communities like you’ positions ecosystems in the same league as human societies. The existence of plural ‘communities’ leads to the conclusion that there are many concurrently existing and independent ecosystems. Responsible treatment of ecosystems and exerting an effort to prevent their damage or destruction can be seen as part of the general Qur’anic prohibition against causing corruption on earth .

While Islam treats the life of all creatures as valuable and recognises ecosystems as communities worthy of protection, it allocates status of a higher degree to human life. Human beings have been ‘honoured with goodness’³⁸ in that men and women are created with the innate capability to recognise goodness and to respect virtue. Human beings are created with a sound ‘natural disposition (fitrah) of God upon which He has modelled the humans.’³⁹ Ultimately, human beings are created as a ‘vicegerent (khalifah) on earth’⁴⁰ with the power and privilege of exercising command over earth’s life forms and utilising its resources. Not only are they charged with the responsibility of protecting the rights of others through peace and social justice but they also have the responsibility of protecting the natural world so that corruption is not caused on earth⁴¹ by destroying either its order or its beauty. Whenever the Qur’an puts responsibility onto humans, it comes with an obligation to follow through with the responsibility and the resultant accountability before God. Hence, humans should expect to be judged on how they treat other living creatures and the environment .

Linked with the discussion on potential and value, there is an acknowledgement that all of creation has an interdependent purpose which needs to be maintained in order for there to be ongoing harmony on earth. This is only possible with peace. What unites all three concepts is the Islamic notion of harmony and balance which transcends any one creation or entity. Balance is important in the Islamic worldview and is a key to providing a just and ecologically sustainable peace.

Towards an Islamic Just and Ecologically Sustainable Peace

A key part of understanding a just and ecologically sustainable peace is to understand justice in the Islamic context which can be defined as ‘putting a thing in its proper place’ ⁴² or as ‘balance, equilibrium balance; harmony and equilibration.’⁴³ A Qur’anic verse which emphasises the importance of balance and maintaining balance is as follows:

And the heaven – He has made it high (above the earth), and He has set up the balance. So that you may not go beyond (the limits with respect to) the balance. And establish weight in justice and do not make deficient the balance.⁴⁴

This verse brings together four elements of justice and balance and underscores human responsibility in ensuring that balance and justice is achieved and maintained in all domains of life. Bursawi quotes Prophet Muhammad when explaining this verse: ‘The Prophet said justice is a pillar of the earth and heaven’⁴⁵ thereby highlighting the strong link between balance and justice when dealing with earth and its inhabitants. Qushayri interprets this Qur’anic verse to mean that justice must be implemented in all acts of life. He also understands it to mean that one must be sincere, truthful, in that one must have equality outwardly and inwardly.⁴⁶ This is particularly important in social justice where the rights of all are fulfilled whether it be for individuals within one’s community or outside one’s community. Therefore, it is necessary to have a sincere desire to maintain the balance that exists within the universe, striving towards a peaceful world which offers justice for all.

Justice is a very strong theme in the Qur’an, so much so that it became customary to repeat the verse: ‘Behold, God enjoins justice, and devotion to doing good, and generosity towards relatives, and He forbids you indecency, wickedness and vile conduct. He exhorts you (repeatedly) so that you may reflect and be mindful!’,⁴⁷ an exhortation which is said at the end of every Friday sermon in all mosques in the Muslim world. It would suffice to note within the scope of this chapter that the way humankind and animals are fairly dealt with has been the topic of Muslim scholars for centuries. A large part of Islamic law and jurisprudence deals with human transactions known as muamalat (dealings).⁴⁸ The legal and ethical discussion of human rights and animal rights is based on hadith (narrations of Prophet Muhammad). One such example of protecting animals is when the Prophet’s companions took baby birds from a nest, to which Prophet Muhammad said: ‘Who has hurt the feelings of this bird by taking its young? Return them to her.’⁴⁹

Such examples emphasise the great importance of justice, equilibrium and balance that exist on earth through ecosystems and the need to maintain them. Nursi notes that justice ‘is the principle by which the whole universe and all beings act’ and therefore if humankind acts against this justice, they become the ‘object of anger and disgust’⁵⁰ of the universe. This equilibrium and balance can be found on earth at the micro- and macro-level where everything is ‘ordered and weighed with so sensitive a balance, so fine a measure, that the human mind can nowhere see any waste or futility.’⁵¹ Such balance and order is seen as a manifestation of God’s name All-Just.⁵² Therefore, destroying peace and justice in the human domain and destroying the ecosystem could be seen as distorting the manifestation of God’s name, All-Just which would be a profound violation towards God.

Furthermore, humans, as the most comprehensive mirrors of God, need to be able to manifest God’s name All-Just by being just in their treatment of everything that surrounds them so that the equilibrium set out on earth is not irreversibly tampered with.

When creation is viewed with its intrinsic value and potential, the way it is treated is positively affected. No longer can a single human life be discarded so easily since it has such great value in the eye of the Creator, as well as creation. The Qur’an verse ‘whoever kills a soul…it is as if he had slain humankind entirely. And whoever saves one – it is as if he has saved humankind entirely’⁵³ reinforces this notion. In a way, this Qur’anic verse is suggesting that a single soul is equal to all of humankind, without any mention of the faith or ethnicity of the individual. This makes justice an essential part of one’s worldview where all human life is sacred .

Human life is not the only end. All of creation is seen to have a purpose, a value and a potential to be realised. All life is a way of expressing this value and potential. Such a theological understanding will provide the foundation needed to establish a just and ecologically sustainable peace for humans and all other living beings on earth.

Conclusion

An Islamic theological assessment examining three concepts of potential, value and interdependent purpose illustrates that the earth, with all its inhabitants and its ecosystems, is an intrinsic part of God’s plan for humans in realising their potential, garnering their value and achieving their purpose. While seeing the potential in all humankind leads to a desire to establish peace and justice, seeing the potential in the environment generates affinity and empathy towards the environment, so that seeking its protection becomes a natural response. Creation displays the infinite creativity of God; everything in the natural world worships God in a unique way. Furthermore, not only humankind but also animal species along with their ecosystems form communities and have a right to live peacefully within their communities.

Humans are endowed with intelligence and ingenuity to exert power over the rest of the creation. With this power comes accountability in the treatment of all living creatures and the environment. Hence, all forms of life on earth must be preserved as extremely valuable and humans are charged with that responsibility. Ultimately, the Islamic concept of accountability in achieving justice and balance on earth charges human beings to establish a just and ecologically sustainable peace.

Notes

1. Chris Hedges, What Every Person Should Know About War (New York: Free Press, 2003), 1.
2. Social Justice Resource Centre, https://socialjusticeresourcecenter.org/facts-and-figures/ (accessed 1 September 2019).
3. Jan Zalasiewicz et al., ‘The Anthropocene: A New Epoch of Geological Time?’ Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A 369 (2011): 835–1111.
4. Qur’an, 95:4–6.
5. Muhammad ibn Jarir Tabari, ‘Tafsir al-Tabari’ [Tafsir of Tabari], http://www.altafsir.com/Tafasir.asp?tMadhNo=1&tTafsirNo=1&tSoraNo=95&tAyahNo=4&tDisplay=yes&UserProfile=0&LanguageId=1 (accessed 15 July 2019).
6. Abu ʿAbd Allah Muḥammad Razi, ‘Mafatih Al-Ghayb’ [The Keys to the Unseen], http://www.altafsir.com/Tafasir.asp?tMadhNo=1&tTafsirNo=4&tSoraNo=95&tAyahNo=4&tDisplay=yes&UserProfile=0&LanguageId=1 (accessed 15 July 2019).
7. Bursawi, ‘Ruhu’l-Bayan,’ https://www.altafsir.com/Tafasir.asp?tMadhNo=3&tTafsirNo=36&tSoraNo=95&tAyahNo=4&tDisplay=yes&UserProfile=0&LanguageId=1 (accessed 15 July 2019).
8. Said Mentak, ‘The Tree,’ in Islamic Images and Ideas: Essays on Sacred Symbolism, ed. John A. Morrow (USA: McFarland & Inc. Company Publishers, 2014), 128.
9. Qurtubi, ‘al-Jami’ li-Ahkam al-Qurʼan,’ http://www.altafsir.com/Tafasir.asp?tMadhNo=1&tTafsirNo=5&tSoraNo=95&tAyahNo=4&tDisplay=yes&UserProfile=0&LanguageId=1 (accessed 15 July 2019).
10. Said Nursi, The Flashes, trans. Şükran Vahide (Istanbul: Sözler, 1995), 104.
11. Nursi, The Flashes, 171.
12. Ibid.
13. Cüneyt Şimsek, ‘The Problem of Animal Pain: An Introduction to Nursi’s Approach,’ in Justice and Theodicy in Modern Islamic Thought, ed. Ibrahim M. Abu-Rabiʻ (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 121.
14. Nursi, The Flashes, 171.
15. Qur’an, 51:56.
16. Ali Unal, The Qurʼan with Annotated Interpretation in Modern English (Somerset, NJ: The Light, 2006), 1062.
17. Qur’an, 112:4.
18. Oliver Leaman, The Qurʼan: An Encyclopedia (London: Routledge, 2006), 36.
19. Ahmad ibn Muhammad al-Tahawi, The Creed of Imam al–Tahawi, trans. Hamza Yusuf (USA: Zaytuna Institute, 2007), 50.
20. Qur’an, 20:8.
21. Colin Turner, The Qur’an Revealed: A Critical Analysis of Said Nursi’s Epistles of Light (Berlin: Gerlach, 2013), 22.
22. William Chittick, Sufism A Beginner’s Guide (Oxford: Oneworld Publications, 2008), 94.
23. Qur’an, 32:9.
24. Abu Hamid Ghazzali, Ninety–Nine Names of God in Islam, trans. Robert Charles Stade (Ibadan: Daystar Press, 1970), 39.
25. Qur’an, 59:24.
26. Qur’an, 13:3.
27. Mishkat al–Anwar, edited and translated by David Buchman as The Niche of Lights (Provo, UT: Brigham Young University Press, 1998), 31.
28. Said Nursi, The Words, trans. Şükran Vahide (Istanbul: Sözler, 1993), 221.
29. Ibid., 655.
30. Yunus Emre in Zekeriya Baskel, Yunus Emre: The Sufi Poet in Love (Lanham: Blue Dome Press, 2013), 56.
31. According to Jami, everything is a coloured window by which everything mainfests itself depending on its colour, but the source of light is God Mirsad al–Ibad, ed. Muhammad A. Riyahi (Tehran: Bungah-i Tarjama wa Nashr-i Kitab, 1973).
32. Salih Yucel, ‘Said Nursi’s Approach to the Environment: A Spiritual View on the Book of Universe,’ The Islamic Quarterly 55, no. 1 (2011): 3.
33. Qur’an, 17:44.
34. Chittick, Sufism A Beginner’s Guide, 79–80.
35. Qur’an, 44:38–39.
36. Richard Folz, Animals in Islamic Traditions and Muslim Cultures (London: Oneworld Publications: 2014); Al-Hafiz Basheer Ahmad Masri, Animal Welfare in Islam (Markfield: The Islamic Foundation, 2016); Sarra Tlili, Animals in the Qur’an (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
37. Qur’an, 6:38.
38. Qur’an, 17:70.
39. Qur’an, 30:30.
40. Qur’an, 2:30.
41. Qur’an, 2:27, 5:32.
42. Bilal Kuşpınar, ‘Justice and Balance in Creation,’ in Justice and Theodicy in Modern Islamic Thought, ed. Ibrahim M. Abu-Rabiʻ (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 228.
43. Nursi, The Flashes, 400.
44. Qur’an, 55:6–9.
45. Bursawi, ‘Ruhu’l-Bayan,’ http://altafsir.com/Tafasir.asp?tMadhNo=3&tTafsirNo=36&tSoraNo=55&tAyahNo=7&tDisplay=yes&UserProfile=0&LanguageId=1 (accessed 15 July 2019).
46. ‘Abd al-Karim Qushayri, ‘Laṭa’if al-Isharat’ [Subtleties of the Illusions], http://altafsir.com/Tafasir.asp?tMadhNo=3&tTafsirNo=31&tSoraNo=55&tAyahNo=7&tDisplay=yes&UserProfile=0&LanguageId=1 (accessed 15 July 2019).
47. Qur’an, 16:90.
48. Refer to Mohammad Hashim Kamali’s ‘Chapter 13 Maslahah Mursalah (Considerations of Public Interest),’ in Principles of Islamic Jurisprudence (Cambridge: The Islamic Texts Society, 2011) for details.
49. Abu Dawud, Book 18, Hadith 1610.
50. Nursi, Flashes, 402.
51. Ibid., 401.
52. Al-Adl (The Just), ‘Questions on Islam,’ https://questionsonislam.com/article/al-adl-just (accessed 10 July 2019).
53. Qur’an, 5:32.

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Charles Sturt University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

Zuleyha Keskin & Mehmet Ozalp

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Correspondence to Mehmet Ozalp .

Cite this chapter

Keskin, Z., Ozalp, M. (2020). An Islamic Approach to Environmental Protection and Ecologically Sustainable Peace in the Age of the Anthropocene. In: Camilleri, J., Guess, D. (eds) Towards a Just and Ecologically Sustainable Peace. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-5021-8_6

• Andrea Westermann
• Original article from Anthropocene Curriculum

Considering Migrant Labor and Petrochemical Feedstocks in the Future History of Plastic

Plastic and its waste are eye-catching and culturally laden materials. Given that their histories have become entangled with the notion of the technofossil, how can we resist the temptation to aestheticize this material legacy which is accumulating in the rock record? Guiding us through the historical roots, current excesses, and future imaginations of plasticulture in Germany, Spain, and Brazil, historian of technology Andrea Westermann highlights the interconnection of health and environmental hazards as well as consumerism and the exploitation of migrant labor. She calls for including mining and mineral resource issues into future histories of plastic.

The technofossil notion and its aesthetic dimensions

Early on, researchers of Earth’s crust first suspected, then found, that the hard rock masses were “a register on which all physical forces acting upon the earth had mapped their successive deeds.” By the 1820s, the fossil-bearing sediments had become, “so to speak, a second control register where organic life had inscribed the various phases of its own parallel development.”August Christoph Carl Vogt, Lehrbuch der Geologie und Petrefactenkunde. 1846; repr. Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1866, pp. 9–10. Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines a fossil as “a remnant, impression, or trace of an organism of past geological ages preserved in the earth’s crust.” Examples include stone imprints of plant stems, leaves, and animal structures (bones, shells), fossilized traces that animals had left behind, and objects preserved in amber. Fossils have long been eagerly collected and much admired. Geology and paleontology have depended, in their study of fossils, on the epistemics and aesthetics of ruination, that is, the material process of decay. Minerals such as petroleum, coal, and metal ores counted as fossils well into the nineteenth century, but have since been removed from the “fossil record.” Still, both the figurative dimension of fossils and the economic value of mineral ores or fossil fuels (note the vestigial semantics!) were crucial in creating the field of geology.

Today’s Anthropocene geologists examine not only the fossil-bearing rock records but also the ongoing accumulation processes in unconsolidated media that might one day turn into crustal matter. They extrapolate the compact lithosphere of the far future from an utterly diverse biosphere, hosting innumerable flows and cycles, actions, organizations, species, and artifacts. Jan Zalasiewicz et al., “The Technofossil Record of Humans,” Anthropocene Review, vol. 1, no. 1: p. 36; Jan Zalasiewicz et al., “When Did the Anthropocene Begin? A Mid-Twentieth Century Boundary Level Is Stratigraphically Optimal,” Quarternary International, vol. 383: p. 199; Nigel Clark et al., “A Solid Fluids Lexicon, Theory, Culture & Society, September 13, 2021: https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764211030976. From these cycles, geologists have picked up on plastic as a candidate for becoming, in Earth’s deep future, an index fossil or technofossil of modern societies—emerging in the stratigraphic record alongside growing carbon dioxide emissions, nuclear radiation, and highly intensive global species exchange and extinction. The 2013 presentation of geologically recycled plastic waste in the form of what has been called “plastiglomerate,” in particular, seemed to corroborate the idea and was widely noticed by the scientific community and the wider public. This stonelike entity found on Kamilo Beach in Hawaii is comprised of melted plastic, beach sediment, basaltic lava fragments, and organic debris. Geologist Patricia Corcoran and others have described plastiglomerate as a “marker horizon of human pollution” in the making. Also using the notion “fossilized” for plastics are: Patricia Corcoran and Charles J. Moore, “An Anthropogenic Marker Horizon in the Future Rock Record,” GSA Today, vol. 24, no. 6 (2014): pp. 4–8; Zalasiewicz et al., “The Technofossil Record of Humans,” pp. 33–43; Sarah Gabott et al., “The Geography and Geology of Plastics: Their Environmental Distribution and Fate,” in Plastic Waste and Recycling: Environmental Impact, Societal Issues, Prevention, and Solutions, ed. T. M. Letcher. New York: Elsevier, 2020, pp. 33–63. The notion of the “marker”—as used in the preceding phrase and in the title of this collection (Anthropogenic Markers)—has had a much more inconspicuous history when compared to the concept of the “technofossil.” For fossils not only feature in the geological record but they also have made recurrent appearances in the history of material culture. In 1866, for instance, the geologist Bernhard von Cotta explained the methodological parallels and affinities he identified between history and geology: “Just like the historian draws his conclusions by interpreting the position and nature of age-old instruments, the geologist draws his conclusions by interpreting the position and nature of the fossil remains of organisms.” Bernhard von Cotta, Die Geologie der Gegenwart. Leipzig: J. J. Weber, 1866, p. 273. Rather than a modern historian, von Cotta here might be referring to an archaeologist. One year later, Karl Marx put the analogy between fossils and the “relics” of tools or machines from the past to work in the social sciences, as did archaeologist and art historian George Kubler, in his longue durée “history of things,” in 1962, when he described man-made artifacts as “fossilized actions.” Andrea Westermann, “A Technofossil of the Anthropocene: Sliding Up and Down Temporal Scales with Plastic,” in Power and Time: Temporalities in Conflict and the Making of History, ed. Dan Edelstein et al. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020, pp. 124, 130.

This entrenched and layered semantics made scholarly claims of plastic, and its fragmented and partly decomposed waste, becoming a globally discernable trace in the rock record of future Earth instantly plausible to many people. Plastic’s material traces would come to indicate past economic actions and cultural activities of by then lost societies. The ongoing interest in plastic things and their nonbiodegradable refuse amassed at lake shores and in marine environments is testament to the persuasiveness of the argument. Contemporary artworks made out of the flotsam and marine waste of mundane plastic commodities and single-service containers even add form and make palpable future technofossils. Julie Decker, ed., preface to Gyre: The Plastic Ocean. London: Booth Clibborn Editions, 2014, p. 12; Heather Davies, “Life & Death in the Anthropocene: A Short History of Plastic,” in Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies, ed. Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin. London: Open Humanities Press, 2015, pp. 347–58. I discuss some artworks in Andrea Westermann, “A Technofossil of the Anthropocene.” See also, for example, coverage of the marine plastic waste art by photographer Thirza Schaap: Jennifer Lichnau, “Schrecken der Meere,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, September 30, 2021: https://sz-magazin.sueddeutsche.de/kunst/thirza-schaap-kunst-90703. They infuse the concept with beauty and imagination.

Today’s plastic artists join the ranks of their mid and late twentieth-century art and design counterparts who first worked with these new materials. Artists and designers exposed their new synthetic, readily customizable properties, or they benefited from the ability of plastic to assume any desired form without putting particular emphasis on the how and why of their expanded resource base. In the 1960s and 1970s, plastic was definitely defining Western pop culture. The inflatable chair Blow, made by Zanotta out of transparent vinyl, for instance, came to shape the visual and visceral world of things as much as did British model Twiggy wearing a tightly cut vinyl dress. The sonic history of plastic added important nuances, too: think of vinyl as in vinyl records. Elodie Roy, “Another Side of Shellac: Cultural and Natural Cycles of the Gramophone Disc,” in Audible Infrastructures: Music, Sound, Media, ed. Kyle Devine and Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021): https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190932633.003.0010. Environmental design, on the one hand, and artwork created from salvaged debris found in the environment, on the other, shared pop culture’s fascination with plastic while taking a more critical stance, gaining momentum in the 1970s and 1980s. Together, the latter two represent a second thread substantiating and feeding into the renewed wave of plastic “art in the Anthropocene.” See Davis and Turpin’s edited volume Art in the Anthropocene.

There is much to gain from studying the aesthetic history of both plastics and fossils to illuminate how the technofossil metaphor serves as a tool of creative commensuration. Technofossils are aesthetically configured scaling devices: they allow people to slide up and down temporal scales and meditate on the long-term future via the still recognizable “archaeological” state of things. For while the pollution of the global environment with persistent toxins, novel materials, and radioactivity is real, most human-made materials, plastics among them, will, in all likelihood, not be preserved in an artifact-like form as the notion suggests. In other words: the technofossil metaphor offers a shortcut approach to the deep-time imaginary that relieves natural and social sciences scholars as well as the public at large from radically following geologists through the complexities of assumed sedimentary deposition and lithification processes and the metamorphic changes to the chemical structure and properties of plastics. For more details, see Andrea Westermann, “A Technofossil of the Anthropocene.” Like with any scaling operation, the epistemic benefit gained from this scaling device is due to imposing “a filter through which the system is viewed.” It inevitably comes with distractions and topical omissions. Simon A. Levin, “The Problem of Pattern and Scale in Ecology,” Ecology, vol. 73, no. 6 (1992): p. 1,943.

For alternative analyses of plastic’s role in the Anthropocene, historians could turn a blind eye to its aesthetic allure and instead pay attention to the circumstances of its chemical fabrication. Consider, for instance, the photograph (top) that documents not the eventual deposition but the original composition of plastics. It forms part of a marketing publication on vinyl from 1956 whose cover—thick, colored, and soft—was made of the same plastic its pages described in more detail. The men in the photo are bagging recently polymerized polyvinyl chloride powder (PVC or vinyl). We see a busy distribution hub for bulk plastic, where the vinyl powder coming through the tubes on the left and right is repacked in standardized sacks bound for PVC processing plants. We distinguish the brand name. The polymer was (and still is) called Vestolit, produced by Chemische Werke Hüls in Marl, Germany, and now part of a Mexican conglomerate.

The floor, workers’ clothes, and machines are covered in dust; the air is heavy with particulates. In a conventional strategy of industrial photography, the picture makes aesthetic use of the blurred lighting effects caused by air pollution. This technique is used both indoors and outdoors. See, for example, the urban works of Claude Monet around France, and of the Ruhr region, the paintings of Richard Gessner. See also Jesse Oak Taylor, The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016. In doing so, it obscures the fact that the workers were inhaling the dust that had this immediate visual effect of softening the contours of the depicted men and machinery. Through repeated exposure, the dust also had imminent deleterious effects on a worker’s respiratory system. The health effects of PVC particles might manifest and progress many years after exposure has ceased. Moreover, at this point in the history of polymerization technology, considerable quantities of monomer vinyl chloride remained in the finished commodity powder. As was shown in 1973, this monomer was a cancerogenic agent that can induce different types of liver cancers. Andrea Westermann, Plastik und politische Kultur in Westdeutschland (Zurich: Chronos, 2007), 237–314. Given the worldwide production of plastics, vinyl chloride occupational health hazards were detected, denounced, and then studied internationally. From the early 1970s to the late 1980s, the media, consumers, and governments dealt with these unintended health consequences almost as prominently as they do with plastic gyres in the oceans today. This first major crisis for the plastic industry intersected with the more slowly mounting critique of plastic waste. Both problems, new at the time, highlighted and exacerbated each other.

Today, we see a return of the very same reassessment: abundant plastic recast as a health hazard. Plastic-filled ocean gyres have gone from being considered massive accumulations of modern refuse, foreseen and feared by environmental activists since the late 1960s, to epitomizing how societies have cast away their waste only to get it back in due time via Earth’s hydrological, atmospheric, and biochemical cycles. To achieve plastics’ desired properties and functionalities, producers add catalysts, polymerization solvents, plasticizers, metals, dyes, flame retardants, UV stabilizers, antioxidants, and antimicrobials. John N. Hahladakis et al., “An Overview of Chemical Additives Present in Plastics: Migration, Release, Fate and Environmental Impact during Their Use, Disposal and Recycling,” Journal of Hazardous Materials, vol. 344 (2018): pp. 179–99. Once sunk in the ocean, plastic fragments not only leak (some of) these ingredients but also attract free-floating chemicals such as persistent organic pollutants stemming from various sources. Arguably, the potential health and environmental hazards plastics carry are nearly as varied as the polymer chains that form the structure and repository of their material characteristics.

For one thing, we can expect that plastic patches in the oceans and their implications and risks will initiate a wave of political and economic histories that tell how they became objects of bio(geo)chemical research and legal regulation within specific activist and scientific communities around the world. Max Liboiron, Pollution Is Colonialism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021. For an insightful insider’s outline of the emerging field of microplastics research in marine science and its challenges, see Juliana A. Ivar do Sul, “Why It Is Important to Analyze the Chemical Composition of Microplastics in Environmental Samples,” Marine Pollution Bulletin, vol. 165 (2021): https://doi.org/10.1016/j.marpolbul.2021.112086. The LABPLAS—Land-Based Solutions for Plastics in the Sea project is a current collaboration among various scientific laboratories working on plastics pollution funded by the European Commission, and it is no doubt worth analyzing from a science and technology studies perspective; for more, see https://www.aircentre.org/labplas/. Moreover, I have found additional plastic concentrations of a terrestrial dimension likewise in need of historicization—one observed, one invented: the first the so-called mar de plástico in southeastern Spain, accumulated by Andalusia’s horticulture since the 1970s, and the other the fantastically rich plastic deposit discovered in the Amazonian subsoil, called “the Matacão,” in Karen Tei Yamashita’s novel Through the Arc of the Rain Forest from 1990. The three geographic sites highlight each other’s similarities and dissimilarities, entanglements, and shared genealogies. To the afterlife of plastic as lingering waste, I join an episode of plastics put to industrial work as well as a glimpse into the mining history of plastic. While in this essay my attention is captured, once again, by the imaginary power these sites exude, I suggest thinking, via the example of the Plastic Sea dealt with in the next section, about the interdependency between plastic materials and migrant labor. In the case of the fictitious Matacão, discussed in the third section, I call for studying past and present changes in plastics’ resource base that have too long bypassed historical consideration.

The landbound “Mar de Plástico” in southeastern Spain: Histories of migrant labor

Find here the concise exposure of both the surface phenomenon and the social fact the Plastic Sea epitomizes. “From the lens of a passing satellite, Almería province is one of the most recognizable spots on the planet. The roofs of tens of thousands of closely packed plastic greenhouses form a blanket of mirrored light beaming into space,” historian and journalist Giles Tremlett writes in his 2005 report for the Guardian. Intensive agriculture, he continues,

“turned one of Spain’s poorest corners into Europe’s largest greenhouse. An area so arid and dusty that it provided the backdrop for spaghetti westerns, Almería has made a fortune by covering itself with a canopy of transparent plastic. Above all, it is a monument to the way we now grow our food. Almería, and the area around it, is Europe’s winter market garden.” Giles Tremlett, “Spain’s Greenhouse Effect: The Shimmering Sea of Polythene Consuming the Land,” Guardian, September 21, 2005: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/sep/21/spain.gilestremlett. For a forthcoming book-length study, see Arvid van Dam, “Designing the Desert: Making and Unmaking Landscape in the Arid Southeast of Spain” (PhD diss., University of Leeds, 2020). I thank the author for sharing his work.

Today, the largest stretch of Almería’s Plastic Sea extends over 22,000 hectares (or 42,000 soccer pitches) in the Campo de Dalías district. Already 20,000 hectares in 2001, it had nearly reached its current size twenty years ago. The second largest accumulation of plastic greenhouses is a little further east, in the Campo Níjar y Bajo Andarax district, and extends over 9,100 hectares. Consejería de agricultura, ganadería, pesca y desarrollo sostenible, Secretaría General de Agricultura, Ganadería y Alimentación, Cartografía de invernaderos en Almería, Granada y Málaga, 2020: https://www.juntadeandalucia.es/export/drupaljda/producto_estadistica/19/06/Cartografia%20_inv_AL_GR_MA_v201127.pdf, pp. 11–12; Francisco Entrena-Duran, “Expansion of Greenhouse Farming in the Area of El Ejido: A Case Study on the Environmental and Social Consequences of Agroindustry in Southeast Spain,” in Food Production and Eating Habits from Around the World: A Multidisciplinary Approach, ed. F. Entrena-Duran. New York: Nova Science Publishers 2015, pp. 29–44. In the first half of 2021, Almería accounted for 19.8 percent of Spain’s total export value, amounting to 2 billion euros. Numbers from “Peppers led Almeria’s fruit and vegetable exports in the first half of 2021,” HortiDaily.com, August 25, 2021: https://www.hortidaily.com/article/9349198/peppers-led-almeria-s-fruit-and-vegetable-exports-in-the-first-half-of-2021/. On the current market, see Fruit Logistica, European Statistics Handbook, 2020: https://www.fruitlogistica.com/FRUIT-LOGISTICA/Downloads-Alle-Sprachen/Auf-einen-Blick/European_Statistics_Handbook_2020.pdf. Interspersed between the greenhouses of the roughly 15,000 growers are over ninety shanty towns, provisionary settlements housing hundreds of migrant day laborers and their families. Seen from a distance, the settlements add to the canopy but are like hothouses in a distorted mirror: the hovels are provisionary setups, made from vegetable packaging, timber, metal, and discarded and foraged plastic sheeting, without electricity, running water, or sanitation.

Unlike the ocean garbage patches, the greenhouse plastic concentration does not mark the end of the material’s value chain. It is accumulating while under heavy use and at the crossroads with the value chain of horticulture that makes its way into German, British, and French supermarkets—Lidl, Tesco, Aldi, Sainsbury’s, and Asda. In many respects though, it is the landbound analog to the ocean plastic gyres. Spain’s tide of plastic gradually rose and lapped against the desert inland of Almería after 1970. The development of Campo de Dalías started in 1956. The first greenhouse was constructed in 1963, turning out impressive yields: compared to free-air agriculture, the growth rate was 358 percent for tomatoes, 465 percent for bell peppers, and 362 percent for cucumbers. Greenhouse-grown produce doubled and tripled the gains from open-air-grown vegetables, too. When Almería saw its first regional conference on plastics in agriculture in 1969, the word “plasticulture”—designating such forms of growing produce—had not yet been invented. Greenhouse construction really took off in the early 1970s. Funds started to flow for growers who were dependent on state-sponsored loans; incorporating hothouses and any consequent innovation or technical changes into their operations required a huge investment for peasant families. José Rivera Menéndez, La política de colonización agraria en el Campo de Dalías (1940–1990). Almería, Spain: Instituto de Estudios Almerienses 2000, pp. 52–54.

Satellite pictures confirm the terrestrial dimensions of plastic-supported intensive agriculture. The terrestrial aspects are enhanced and grounded because the plastic infrastructure unites the landscape’s three natural elements. In a 1981 analysis, two agricultural engineers described Almería as both “a desert and an orchard”: “It is curious—and worth emphasizing—that it is precisely the new discovery of this trinity—soil, water, and sun—to which Almería owes its recent progress.” Odón Fernández Lavandera and Antonio Pizarro Checa, “Almería: la tecnica del ‘enarenado’ transforma un desierto,” Revista de Estudios Agrosociales, vol. 115 (1981): pp. 35, 44–46. The environmental embeddedness of greenhouses is argued by Arvid van Dam with the help of the notion “vernacular modern” (“Designing the Desert,” p. 146). According to Van Dam’s research, farmers still appreciate this embeddedness. They argued that Almería agriculture reinvented the region’s soils by putting the once hostile sand to work: farmers covered and padded the planted fields with a layer of sand. As far as I could find out, it was actually beach sand that was mostly used, not inland “desert” sand, referring to yet another Anthropocene problem: sand mining. This prevented the rapid drying out of soils, increased the soil temperature, repelled many insects, and combated the salinity of the soil below. Fernández Lavandera and Pizarro Checa, “Almería: la técnica,” 36; David Tout, “The Horticulture Industry of Almería Province, Spain,” Geographical Journal, vol. 156, no. 3 (1990): pp. 304–12 (on drip irrigation, see p. 306); Rivera Menéndez, La política de colonización agraria. Almería’s farmers clearly also discovered its hidden underground water resources. Moreover, the report’s authors felt that Almería’s agriculture industry had “discovered the new Sun.” Fernández Lavandera and Pizaro Checa, “Almería: la técnica,” 36. The sun was a curse that parched the soil and scorched the plants, but, mediated by plastic, it also allowed farmers to ripen crops in winter time. Plastic protection covers (abrigos) enabled them to “benefit maximally from the temperatures in winter that nature only provided in summer.” Fernández Lavandera and Pizaro Checa, “Almería: la técnica,” 44. The plastic envelopes were also set up to protect the plants from the typically strong winds. Today, hothouse constructions and their sheeting ensure the microclimate and influx of air are strictly regulated: the sheeting catches and maintains the warmth of the sunlight at an optimal temperature range (the opaque plastic roofs are temporally whitened to reflect heat), thus accelerating, intensifying, and optimizing plant growth. The result is earlier, multiple, and higher overall yields. Vinyl tube systems were added for drip irrigation to save water extracted from the aquifers and retain the nutrients within the soil. Fertilizers are also applied via the tubes. For a long time now, the beach sand has taken turns with vinyl mulch to cover the soil in greenhouses. David Tout, “The Horticulture Industry,” 306.

Vinyl was the earliest and counts among the most important types of thermoplastic used in postwar Western Europe. Take West Germany, for instance. A growing range of plastic commodities and the reconstruction of societal infrastructure with plastic helped remodel and furnish the country as a consumer democracy after 1945. Andrea Westermann, Plastik und politische Kultur. The “plastic revolution” or “miracle” in Spain’s fruit and vegetable production jumped in a little later and its arrival stocked West German supermarkets with an affordable year-round offer of once exotic and previously seasonal produce. Both West Germany’s consumer democracy and Spain’s agricultural export politics were plastic-engineered. They also relied on migrant labor. Within Spain, the plastic revolution changed Andalusia’s perceived status from that of an underdeveloped periphery in need of improvement to a political and economic heavyweight. Regional farmers had benefited from internal colonization and development politics that, since the early 1950s, had made abundant groundwater accessible and constructed villages to attract and house people. On the diagnosis of the underdevelopment of southern Spain’s arid landscape, or “desert,” see Eric Swyngedouw, “Modernity and Hybridity: Nature, Regeneracionismo, and the Production of the Spanish Waterscape, 1890–1930,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 89, no. 3 (1999): pp. 443–65, https://doi.org/10.1111/0004-5608.00157; on the Franco regime’s politics of improvement, see Rivera Menéndez, La política de colonización agraria en el Campo de Dalías. This mid-twentieth-century agricultural version of Spain’s long history of “regeneration” after imperial decline in the nineteenth century ties into intellectual histories of underdevelopment in Eastern Europe and Latin America; see J. L. Love, Crafting the Third World: Theorizing Underdevelopment in Rumania and Brazil. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996. See also James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998.

In both countries, the year 1973 marked a turning point regarding plastic and migrant workers. In March of that year, the German Communist Party’s factory newspaper at Dynamit Nobel AG, with a circulation of 7,000, featured the headline: “Mysterious health hazards in PVC production.” Andrea Westermann, Plastik und politische Kultur, 240. In this chemical factory, located in Troisdorf near Bonn, “guest workers” (Gastarbeiter) were disproportionately assigned dirty jobs. These workers had to climb into the not yet fully automatized autoclaves to scrape off caked-on pieces of vinyl from the inner walls and stirring paddles. The workers’ and migrant workers’ health hazard concerns were embraced by their colleagues, their city, and the national press. The many governmental and industrial institutions dealing with occupational health hazards, usually working under the public radar, suddenly came under close scrutiny.

Concurrently, Almería’s new status within Spain and beyond included an inversion of migration flows to and from the region for both domestic and international reasons. In 1973, just when Spanish state funds began to support the construction of plastic greenhouses and the plasticulture boom really took off, Northern European countries shut down their labor migration programs one by one, with West Germany setting the example: “This changed the direction of Alpujarra emigration. The new destination was now Campo de Dalías, where people purchased land or worked on the horticultural farms.” Purificación Ruiz Sánchez, “La inmigración al Poniente Almeriense. Alpujarreños y africanos en el Ejido,” in Anuario Etnológico de Andalucía 1995–1997, 1999, p. 109. Germany set the precedent with its 1973 recruitment ban (Anwerbestopp); see the labor ministry’s instruction: “Anwerbestopp 1973,” Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, November 9, 2011: https://www.bpb.de/geschichte/deutsche-geschichte/anwerbeabkommen/43270/anwerbestopp-1973; José Francisco Jiménez Díaz, “Procesos de desarrollo en el Poniente Almeriense: Agricultores e inmigrados,” Revista de Estudios Regionales, vol. 1 (January 2011): p. 189. Plasticulture’s development increased the demand for manpower and readily absorbed the numbers of workers flocking to Almería “to work seasonally in the greenhouses when they were needed for crop growing activities.” Francisco Entrena-Duran, “Expansion of Greenhouse Farming in the Area of El Ejido,” p. 32.

Migration from the Alpujarra region down to the coast in the 1970s and 1980s was followed first by North then West African labor migrants, as well as workers from Romania. Population growth in Plastic Sea cities like El Ejido and Roquetas de Mar followed suit: in El Ejido, from 30,000 residents in 1980, to 55,000 in 2001, and 83,000 by 2020, and in Roquetas de Mar, from 30,000 in 1990 to 100,000 by 2020. In both cities today, migrants represent around 30 percent of the residents. Social integration remains poor. In 2017, a workers’ guide for Almería stated that most of Europe takes for granted the supermarket shelves full of fruit and vegetables from southern Spain. Hardly anyone knows the working and production conditions that are endured: the hard, often underpaid work and the health consequences. Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung (Brussels Office), Guía laboral para el sector del manipulado almeriense trabajo realizado: colectivamente por compañeras y compañeros del Soc-Sat de Almería, 2017, p. 3. This guide is available for field-workers. Documented or undocumented, many migrants work without proper contracts.

Almería’s very own greenhouse effects have been labor migration as well as radical environmental change. Labor migrants suffer from the very same transformations they have helped bring about. Andrea Westermann, “Migrations and Radical Environmental Change: When Social History Meets the History of Science,” NTM Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Wissenschaften, Technik und Medizin, vol. 27, no. 3 (2019): pp. 377–89. Like in the ocean environment with the garbage patches, vinyl and polyethylene in Almería act as media and attractors of chemical compounds, causing hazards in the greenhouses’ microclimates and interacting with pesticides in particular. See a mid-1980s example in F. J. Barahona and J. M. Gomez Vasquez, “Influence of Pesticides on the Degradation of Polyethylene Film Greenhouse Cladding on the Andalusian Coast,” Plasticulture, vol. 65 (1985): pp. 3–10. In 1987, the pesticide residues in vegetables jumped onto Northern European supermarkets’ radar; David Tout, “The Horticulture Industry,” 310. In 2005, toxic plastics were still an urgent problem in workplaces and homes according to Tremlett, “Spain’s Greenhouse Effect.” For workers living in slums, the situation can be more dangerous due to constant exposure. It doesn’t get hot only inside the greenhouses but also inside their shanties. People fear inhaling the toxic fumes the plastic sheeting releases. Furthermore, rainstorms, fires, and government decisions have repeatedly destroyed and dismantled various settlements. Ofelia de Pablo et al., “‘We Pick Your Food’: Migrant Workers Speak Out from Spain’s ‘Plastic Sea,’” Guardian, September 20, 2020: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/sep/20/we-pick-your-food-migrant-workers-speak-out-from-spains-plastic-sea; “El asentamiento chabolista de Níjar vuelve a ser pasto de las llamas,” Almería Hoy, May 23, 2021: http://www.almeriahoy.com/2021/05/el-asentamiento-chabolista-de-nijar.html; “Desalojan hoy a 60 personas y destruyen 28 chabolas en el paraje Tierras de Almería,” Diaro de Almería, April 29, 2015: https://www.diariodealmeria.es/almeria/Desalojan-destruyen-chabolas-Tierras-Almeria_0_911909390.html. For what happened after the eviction, see Iñigo Mas, “Cientos de inmigrantes viven en chabolas encerrados tras las vallas de fincas agrícolas de Almería,” elDiaro.es, March 27, 2014:s https://www.eldiario.es/andalucia/enclave-rural/cientos-inmigrantes-encerrados-tierras-almeria_1_5002356.html. Industry’s disregard for occupational health, safety, and environmental issues were interpreted as white-collar crimes during the occupational cancer crisis faced by vinyl producers in Western Europe: for years, state bureaucrats had downplayed the company abuses brought to their attention. Given the small-owner status of most farmers, exploitation and violence in the plasticulture context were, by contrast, summarized in 2016 as if belonging to “labor rules […] of another era.” Ana Carbajos, “El cortijo de los desposeídos,” El País, March 9, 2016. For an analysis of the family business sector compared to the migrant labor they employ, see F. Entrena-Durán and J. F. Jiménez-Díaz, “Reacciones y protestas de agricultores e inmigrantes en El Ejido: un municipio español inserto en las dinámicas de la globalización,” Mundo Agrario, vol. 17, no. 34 (2016): http://www.mundoagrario.unlp.edu.ar/article/view/MAv17n34a08. On international rivalry, price pressures, and farmers’ long dwindling competitive advantages, see Fernando Martínez, “El milagro de los invernaderos de Almería, en sus horas más bajas,” El País Economía, June 25, 2010. Despite their knowledge, employers, local and state governments, and the served supermarkets and consumers continue to ignore the health hazards and social injustices inherently incorporated in Almería’s agriculture. Field-worker and union activist Spitou Mendy, who emigrated from Ghana, has repeatedly spoken of slave labor conditions: “I have been working here and struggling for 19 years, many of them under plastic. I have to say the main change in this time is: nothing.” Spitou Mendy, quoted in Clare Carlile, “Campaign: The Fight for Agricultural Workers’ Rights in Southern Spain,” Ethical Consumer, October 1, 2020: https://www.ethicalconsumer.org/ethicalcampaigns/agricultural-workers-rights-almeria. For current labor protests and the fight for new contracts in the fruit and vegetable processing and packaging sector, see the campaign “Formulario adhesión por un convenio digno en el campo y manipulado en almería ‘por un convenio justo ya,’” circulating as a Google Form at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSepTAb1OreGuskT1wWFjcuC-AERY73P7KcuoJ_ieP2-W0Lc4Q/viewform. The reason for this may be no labor shortage has ever occurred. In 2020, more than 5,000 refugees reached Almería’s shores by boat: the lowest number in a long time, but still enough to bring newcomers into the industry.

Agriculture in Almería is toxic for people. It is problematic for the environment, too. It has caused elemental change on a regional scale and feeds into global environmental degradation. Climate change combined with underground water resources exhausted by agricultural and population growth has forced a heavy reliance on desalinated seawater. Under the imminent threat of extensive landscape desertification in southern Spain, geoengineering has become a routine that must be endured. Alyssa McMurtry, “Soil to Sand: Spain’s Growing Threat of Desertification,” Andalou Agency, July 19, 2019: https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/soil-to-sand-spain-s-growing-threat-of-desertification/1535951; Juan García Latorre, Andrés Sánchez Picón, and Jesús García Latorre, “The Man-Made Desert: Effects of Economic and Demographic Growth on the Ecosystems of Arid Southeastern Spain,” Environmental History, vol. 6, no. 1 (January 2001): pp. 75–94, https://doi.org/10.2307/3985232; E. Swyngedouw and J, Williams, “From Spain’s Hydro-Deadlock to the Desalination Fix,” Water International, vol. 41, no. 1 (2016): pp. 54–73, https://doi.org/10.1080/02508060.2016.1107705. Moreover, the plastic sheeting on each greenhouse has to be replaced every four to six years. For decades, companies have disposed of them on nearby dried riverbeds and beaches—estuaries of the Plastic Sea, if you will; winds and heavy downpours then drive them into the Mediterranean. Activist and institutional plastic waste initiatives spurred by discussions on the ocean garbage patches have resulted in collection and recycling projects for agricultural waste in recent years. Now, 85 percent of the 33,000 tons of plastic waste accumulating each year are said to be recycled, which leaves 5,000 tons untreated. Nacho Sánchez, “Los plásticos de la agricultura inundan Almería,” El País, November 6, 2020: https://elpais.com/america/sociedad/2020-11-06/los-plasticos-de-la-agricultura-inundan-almeria.html. Earlier and more recent videos of such waste deposits show what has accrued over time; they do not show what has so far been lost to the sea. For 2015, see Emilio González, “Mar de plástico,” Serbal, September 10, 2015: https://serbal-almeria.com/noticias/94-mar-de-plastico; for 2021, see Manuma Manuel Mata Oliver, “Ayer grabamos este video Gianella y yo,” Facebook, October 26, 2020: https://www.facebook.com/manumafotografia/videos/3279839662127309.

Entomologists and agricultural scientists are indeed working toward adapting to global warming and the imperative to use fewer pesticides. Miguel Giménez–Moolhuyzen et al., “Photosynthesis Inhibiting Effects of Pesticides on Sweet Pepper Leaves,” Insects, vol. 11, no. 2 (2020): p. 69, https://doi.org/10.3390/insects11020069; Antonio Mendoza-Fernández et al., “The Role of Technology in Greenhouse Agriculture: Towards a Sustainable Intensification in Campo de Dalías,” Agronomy, vol. 11, no. 1 (2021): p. 101, https://doi.org/10.3390/agronomy11010101. One entomologist employed by the fruit and vegetable producers in Almería moreover sees a favorable trade-off for the region:

“The contribution of the total horticultural sector, including the supply and commercial industry, is rising to 40 percent of Almeria’s GDP. An impressive figure, considering that this agricultural system only covers 3.4 percent of the provincial territory, allowing a major part of the province to be respected as mostly protected, natural areas.” Jan van der Blom, “Greenhouse Horticulture in Spain: Well On Its Way to Sustainability,” europeanseed blog, April 2019: https://european-seed.com/2019/04/greenhouse-horticulture-in-spain-well-on-its-way-to-sustainability/.

However, as I showed in this section, budgeting and balancing the economic value of natural resources against environmental protection captures only half the problem when it comes to solving future sustainability issues, as it ignores the topic of labor justice.

The invented geology of the Matacão plastic deposit: Histories of petrochemical opportunities

Speaking of natural resource budgeting: while the Plastic Sea accrues during the most productive phase of plastic’s lifecycle and the oceans’ plastic gyres represent the end of plastic’s economic life and value, the third terrestrial concentration deals with an imagined plastic geology and the extraction of plastic as a raw material. Karen Tei Yamashita’s huge plastic deposit, discovered in the second half of the twentieth century in the Brazilian Amazon, is the text-generating (and world-making) entity at the center of her ironic and melodramatic novel Through the Arc of the Rain Forest, which is full of sharp ideas on science, consumerism, postcolonialism, and environmental degradation. One day, reckless deforestation combines with heavy rains to wash away the soil and lay bare a strange, impenetrable underground substrate. The spacious surface is slick and shiny and becomes known as the Matacão: a generic name meaning “boulder” in Portuguese. People first suggest that it is “the earth’s mantle rising to the surface or the injection of a cement layer by a powerful multinational.” Karen Tei Yamashita, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1990, p. 17. But early on in the novel, scientists find the Matacão to be a “polyurethane polymer.” Like ore deposits, coal seams, and oil-bearing formations, it is a “fossil” not in the paleontological sense of discrete objects but in the now mostly lost, more encompassing eighteenth- and nineteenth-century usage of the word that also designates the lumped-together, mass-like forms of earth products. Eventually, it becomes clear that the deposit is a technofossil made out of plastic waste. Its genesis has run even quicker than current geologists’ thought experiments that fast-forward time to project the possible emergence of technofossils. In the space of less than a hundred years, plastic waste has turned into rock (many insist on not only a geological but also a spiritual miracle). The fictitious rock masses make recycling dreams come true on an unhoped-for scale. Karen Tei Yamashita, Through the Arc, p. 97. Scientists assert:

“[The Matacão] had been formed for the most part within the last century, paralleling the development of more common forms of plastic, polyurethane and styrofoam. Enormous landfills of nonbiodegradable material buried under virtually every populated part of the Earth had undergone tremendous pressure, pushed ever farther into the lower layers of the Earth’s mantle. The liquid deposits of molten mass had been squeezed through underground veins to virgin areas of the Earth. The Amazon Forest got plenty.” Karen Tei Yamashita, Through the Arc, p. 202. Also see p. 95 of the novel: “The Matacão has been […] a source of curiosity and confusion in the scientific world. Geologists, astronomers, physicists, archaeologists, and chemists were suddenly thrown into an unsettling prerevolutionary state where the basic parameters of scientific truth were undergoing a shift similar to that experienced when Einstein redefined the Newtonian World.”

Like how real-life ocean currents have concentrated global waste streams in garbage patches, in Yamashita’s novel, terrestrial currents and undercurrents entangled in geological processes have mustered the entirety of the globe’s plastic waste into one deposit. A reader might interpret that there was still enough pristine nature in the Amazon Forest worth blemishing, once and forever. At the same time, the reader might come to think that the new plastic deposit is in its rightful place: within the (subterranean) wealth of Amazonas, the world’s exquisitely filled treasure trove. The philosopher Roland Barthes enthused, with uncanny pleasure in 1957—along with most plastic engineers—that plastic ultimately would top all other materials. The Matacão, in its properties (it is even magnetic!) and utmost versatility, outmatches any of the other resources available in the Amazon and considered valuable up until its discovery: lumber, iron ore, gold, manganese ore, and rubber. Karen Tei Yamashita, Through the Arc, pp. 97, 141. Earth has pragmatically adapted to the rhythms of modern history, it seems. It presents to the world a truly cooperative, win-win solution—from the pen of magic realism! The novel is explored in environmental humanities and Asian American studies. See these worthwhile studies: Ursula Heise, “Local Rock and Global Plastic: World Ecology and the Experience of Place,” Comparative Literature Studies, vol. 41, no. 1 (2004): pp. 126–52; Aimee Bahng, “Extrapolating Transnational Arcs, Excavating Imperial Legacies: The Speculative Acts of Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rain Forest,” MELUS, vol. 33, no. 4 (2008): pp. 123–44; Matthew S. Henry, “Nonhuman Narrators and Multinatural Worlds,” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, vol. 25, no. 3 (2018): pp. 566–83.

This powerful literary genre, first popularized in the early twentieth century, early on exposed Europe’s colonialism. In Yamashita’s novel, the “Brazilian ministry had to create a department to keep track” of public and private mining projects targeting the Matacão. Parliament argues for strict control of this natural resource: “Brazil had once before emptied its wealthy gold mines into the coffers of the Portuguese Crown and consequently financed Britain’s Industrial Revolution; this time, if there was any wealth to be had, it should remain in Brazil.” Karen Tei Yamashita, Through the Arc, p. 96. There is much wealth to be gained: everything from money, body implants, and nature to cities are recast in plastic. Yet the end comes to the Matacão boom as quickly as it began. Hardly a decade or so into this new “plastic age,” a bacterium infests the Matacão deposit, causing its slow but definitive corrosion. “Everything else made of Matacão plastic” is gnawed down too. The world is left in shambles and complete disarray; luckily for the world, though, a return to old materials seems “viable.” Karen Tei Yamashita, Through the Arc, pp. 205–08.

What I find so interesting about the Matacão is that it brings plastic’s resource base to the forefront. If the definition of the Anthropocene as Earth’s socially induced historical present hinges on extrapolations of future interactions between terrestrial and societal scales of change: what, then, about the real-world future of plastic, and its raw material base, for that matter? We currently see a global urge to mitigate or balance interactions between terrestrial and societal scales: new legislation prohibits plastic packaging and individual service containers in the EU and countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia. China is no longer accepting others’ waste exports. This has led to a renewed attempt in Europe to create a more financially attractive political economy of recycling. Costas Velis, Global Recycling Markets: Plastic Waste. A Story for One Player – China. ISWA Globalisation and Waste Management Task Force, September 2014. Even more encompassing is an international push to create a binding global agreement to address the life cycle of plastics, calling for an UN treaty that commits the world to the reduction of household plastic, efficient plastic waste treatment across all geographies and sectors (agriculture and heavy industry included), and the substitution and detoxification of plastics’ compounds. It also demands that funding be made available to poorer states so they can contribute meaningfully to these plastic reduction efforts. The resolution plans have gained traction. Rwanda and Peru recently presented a draft resolution in Geneva, and seventy-five states have signaled their willingness to start negotiations, envisioned for the spring of 2022. Gegen Plastikmüll, “Mehr als 70 Staaten für weltweites Abkommen,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, September 2, 2021; Nils Simon et al., “A Binding Global Agreement to Address the Life Cycle of Plastics,” Science, vol. 373, no. 6550 (2021): pp. 43–47, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abi9010. These efforts, however, are counteracted by trends that experts see creating an overall increase in plastic waste. Roland Geyer et al., “Production, use, and fate of all plastics ever made,” Science Advances (2017): 3(7):e1700782, https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.1700782; Laurent Lebreton and Anthony Andrady, “Future scenarios of global plastic waste generation and disposal,” Palgrave Communications, vol. 5, no. 1(2019): p. 6. This is the case because implementing laws is a difficult political feat. The Basel Convention, on controlling transboundary movements of hazardous waste and their disposal, defines waste from products made out of polyethylene (PE), polypropylene (PP), and polyethylene terephthalate (PET) as freely tradable commodities, because these substances are in high demand on recycling markets. Yet this demand does not automatically prevent their export to unmanaged waste disposal sites in Asia, as a recent Greenpeace study has shown. Greenpeace Southeast Asia, “The Recycling Myth 2.0: The Toxic After-Effects of Imported Plastic Waste in Malaysia,” Greenpeace, June 2, 2020: https://www.greenpeace.org/southeastasia/publication/4058/the-recycling-myth-2-0-the-toxic-after-effects-of-imported-plastic-waste-in-malaysia/.

Another issue is superseding the question of how and why our governments’ fail to regulate plastic waste. It is now fundamental that we find a way for all these regulating efforts to incorporate an understanding of the plastic industry’s own perceived constraints and expectations when it comes to decarbonizing economies. Current analyses highlight this point; see “Revealed: Businesses and Banks behind Global Plastic Waste Crisis, Minderoo Foundation, May 18, 2021: https://www.minderoo.org/plastic-waste-makers-index/news/revealed-businesses-and-banks-behind-global-plastic-waste-crisis. It is time to study the mining industry, petrochemistry, and the materials and engineering sciences as powerful actors and close collaborators in the histories of plastics. One fact to keep in mind is that plastics are one of big oil’s most successful commodities. Big oil companies are contingent on geological expertise. They have, in turn, contributed to organizing and shaping the Earth sciences’ research infrastructure. These interdependencies are worth studying. Annual plastic output has nearly doubled since the beginning of the millennium. Roland Geyer et al., “Production, Use, and Fate of All Plastics,” supplementary material, Table S1 (until 2015). Global plastics production totaled 368 million metric tons in 2019, according to “Annual Production of Plastics Worldwide from 1950 to 2020,” Statista, June 2021: https://www.statista.com/statistics/282732/global-production-of-plastics-since-1950/. Arguably, plastic production will continue to grow exponentially. Currently, “368 million metric tons of virgin plastics are produced annually, with production expected to double by 2040.” Nils Simon et al., “A Binding Global Agreement,” p. 46 (corresponds with the Statista source in the previous footnote). By all accounts, plastic’s future looks bright as ever. If burning fossil fuels for energy production is radically regulated and reduced, then more fossil fuel will be available for plastics production. According to International Energy Agency assessments, petrochemicals will soon become the largest driver of global oil consumption: “They are set to account for more than a third of the growth in oil demand by 2030, and nearly half by 2050.” International Energy Agency, The Future of Petrochemicals: Towards More Sustainable Plastics and Fertilisers, 2018: https://www.oecd.org/publications/the-future-of-petrochemicals-9789264307414-en.htm. This fossil fuel feedstock may or may not become more expensive; views differ in this respect and might be assessed against earlier episodes in the history of plastics.

Writing the history of the Anthropocene—and the future role of plastics in it

I started this essay with a call for resisting the aesthetic allure of both fossils and plastics when it comes to writing the history of the Anthropocene. Let me end with two thoughts: one about the history of science’s role in writing this history; the other about the future, alternative role of plastic in it. To historians of science, geologists’ efforts to distinguish between “anthropocenic” and “anthropogenic” markers while formalizing the stratigraphic boundary of the new geological present conforms to the logics of the geological time scale—logics that the suggestion of an Anthropocene epoch has already stretched considerably. At the same time, the Anthropocene Working Group’s need for societies’ “long enough” reach into Earth’s possible future amounts—inadvertently, perhaps—to nullifying the political attention and consequences that Anthropocene discussions have had so far. From a history-of-science perspective, for instance, it is obvious that the high political stakes involved have turned into a sine qua non for carving out the emerging field of Anthropocene geology.

In turn, the methods and scope of the history of science are being affected by Anthropocene discussions as well. I expect further blurring of the boundaries that set it apart from social, economic, and political history, or critical geography and anthropology. Historians of science and environmental historians already study the disciplinary politics within the Earth sciences and, concurrently, analyze societal politics as their flip side and context. They study geological concepts while at the same time using them to better chart and explain those historical spaces where societal actions have started to intersect with terrestrial processes. See the insightful essay Benjamin Steininger, “Ammonia Synthesis on the Banks of the Mississippi: A Molecular-Planetary Technology,” Anthropocene Review, vol. 8, no. 3 (2021): pp. 262–79. Yet another attempt is Andrea Westermann, “Enrichment and Dilution in the Atacama Mining Desert: Writing History from an Earth-Centered Perspective,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft, vol. 46, vol. 4 (2020): pp. 634–61. Just like other historians (think of Dipesh Chakrabarty as the historian of subalternity) and social scientists, they have started to reframe the inspiring questions Earth scientists have posed according to their own professional standards and interests—because historical and Earth historical times have been co-evolving for a while now and will continue to do so. For the different social sciences, see, for instance, Nigel Clark and Bronislaw Szerszynski, Planetary Social Thought: The Anthropocene Challenge to the Social Sciences. New York: Polity, 2020; Andrea Westermann and Sabine Höhler, “Writing History in the Anthropocene: Scaling, Accountability, and Accumulation,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft, vol. 46, no. 4 (2020): pp. 579–605; Andrew Bauer et al., “Anthropocene: Event or Epoch?,” Nature, vol. 597 (September 16, 2021): p. 332. See also Adam Bobbette’s contribution to the Anthropocene Markers project, “A Javanese Anthropocene?”: https://www.anthropocene-curriculum.org/contribution/a-javanese-anthropocene/

• When control mechanisms fail: German plastic waste is not sent to Malaysia for recycling purposes only. It also lands in local landfills. © all rights reserved Fred Dott/Greenpeace

Activists, scientists, artists, schoolchildren, and many other people around the world have collected plastic waste from the oceans’ garbage patches and from their local beaches. Over the past decade, they have come to interpret such fragments as fossilized cultural objects. Making plastic waste a marker of the Anthropocene has helped establish a better understanding of the cumulative and persistent effects of societal action. This waste-centered—mostly post-consumer-waste-centered—account has sidelined, though, the many histories of (migrant) labor that are, in their own ways, entangled with the histories of mining, production, and industrial uses of plastic; histories this essay has sought to call to mind. In so doing, it attends to the imperative voiced within Anthropocene studies to consider both terrestrial and societal scales, assess historical and political accountability, and combine phenomena of economic and biogeochemical accumulation. Andrea Westermann and Sabine Höhler, “Writing History in the Anthropocene”; Sara Wylie, Max Liboiron, and Nicholas Shapiro, “Making and Doing Politics through Grassroots Scientific Research on the Energy and Petrochemical Industries,” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society, vol. 3 (2017): pp. 393–425. Also see the initiative directed by historian Michelle Murphy, Talking the Land and the Refinery; more information is available at “Talking The Land and the Refinery,” Technoscience Research Unit, March 31, 2020: https://technoscienceunit.org/2020/03/31/talking-the-land-and-the-refinery/. Each of the three pileups of plastic analyzed in the preceding sections makes clear that environmental sustainability and socioeconomic justice are two faces of the same coin. This becomes even more obvious when these two issues are considered together. The myriad alliances of consumer citizens, workers’ unions, migration organizations, ocean activists, and environmental health activists, but also state regulators and other institutions of political decision-making are currently working toward this recognition.

There are historical precedents for the co-construction of the future of plastics—precedents that come with some caveats. In the case of West Germany fifty years ago, plastic waste and the health hazards discovered to be linked to the production of vinyl inspired people write to newspaper editors, confront the authorities regarding the need for industry regulation, and remind manufacturing companies of their responsibilities to consumers. Andrea Westermann, “When Consumer Citizens Spoke Up: West Germany’s Early Dealings with Plastic Waste,” Contemporary European History, vol. 22, no. 3 (2013): pp. 477–98. West Germany, like many European states, saw an astonishing upsurge in consumer protection and environmental laws in the 1970s and 1980s. Matthew Hilton, Prosperity for All: Consumer Activism in an Era of Globalization. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009, pp. 153–84; Andrea Westermann, “When Consumer Citizens Spoke Up.” However, these improvements in health and safety excluded large parts of the global population.

The plastics industry reacted with containing the damage any such regulation politics could have for sales growth. Recycling has been one answer companies were forced to pursue. As has become clear over the years, they did so half-heartedly and, in all likelihood, also deceptively. Citizens and social scientists alike have recurrently noted that recycling has remained just the latest promise attached to plastics that’s “always just about to happen.” Andrea Westermann, Plastik und politische Kultur, p. 314; Samantha MacBride, Recycling Reconsidered: The Present Failure and Future Promise of Environmental Action in the United States. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. Through the carefully entertained utopianism of recycling, the oil and chemical industries together with industrial plastic users have succeeded fairly well in preserving self-regulation over politically binding restrictions, as well as fostering consumers’ wishes to buy and further entrenching their habits to throw away, by appeasing public concerns for plastic’s unwanted effects. Andrea Westermann, “When Consumer Citizens Spoke Up,” pp. 493–97; Bartow J. Elmore, Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism. New York; W. W. Norton, 2016; Laura Sullivan, “Plastic Wars: Industry Spent Millions Selling Recycling—to Sell More Plastic,” NPR, March 31, 2020: https://www.npr.org/2020/03/31/822597631/plastic-wars-three-takeaways-from-the-fight-over-the-future-of-plastics. I thank Kate Brown for reminding me of this strategy and its political consequences. I think that visions of future plastics markets should no longer conform to the interests of corporate protagonists in the petrochemical sector and its downstream industrial users alone. The recycling markets of plastic are already up for political discussion and public scrutiny; but so are the feedstocks, production, and commercial uses of plastic.

Andrea Westermann earned her PhD in History from the University of Bielefeld with a dissertation on Plastic and Political Culture in West Germany. She specializes in the history of earth sciences, environmental history, environmental migration, and the history of material culture.

1 August Christoph Carl Vogt, Lehrbuch der Geologie und Petrefactenkunde. 1846; repr. Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1866, pp. 9–10.

2 Jan Zalasiewicz et al., “The Technofossil Record of Humans,” Anthropocene Review, vol. 1, no. 1: p. 36; Jan Zalasiewicz et al., “When Did the Anthropocene Begin? A Mid-Twentieth Century Boundary Level Is Stratigraphically Optimal,” Quarternary International, vol. 383: p. 199; Nigel Clark et al., “A Solid Fluids Lexicon, Theory, Culture & Society, September 13, 2021: https://doi.org/10.1177/02632764211030976. 

3 Also using the notion “fossilized” for plastics are: Patricia Corcoran and Charles J. Moore, “An Anthropogenic Marker Horizon in the Future Rock Record,” GSA Today, vol. 24, no. 6 (2014): pp. 4–8; Zalasiewicz et al., “The Technofossil Record of Humans,” pp. 33–43; Sarah Gabott et al., “The Geography and Geology of Plastics: Their Environmental Distribution and Fate,” in Plastic Waste and Recycling: Environmental Impact, Societal Issues, Prevention, and Solutions, ed. T. M. Letcher. New York: Elsevier, 2020, pp. 33–63. 

4 Bernhard von Cotta, Die Geologie der Gegenwart. Leipzig: J. J. Weber, 1866, p. 273. Rather than a modern historian, von Cotta here might be referring to an archaeologist. 

5 Andrea Westermann, “A Technofossil of the Anthropocene: Sliding Up and Down Temporal Scales with Plastic,” in Power and Time: Temporalities in Conflict and the Making of History, ed. Dan Edelstein et al. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020, pp. 124, 130. 

6 Julie Decker, ed., preface to Gyre: The Plastic Ocean. London: Booth Clibborn Editions, 2014, p. 12; Heather Davies, “Life & Death in the Anthropocene: A Short History of Plastic,” in Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies, ed. Heather Davis and Etienne Turpin. London: Open Humanities Press, 2015, pp. 347–58. I discuss some artworks in Andrea Westermann, “A Technofossil of the Anthropocene.” See also, for example, coverage of the marine plastic waste art by photographer Thirza Schaap: Jennifer Lichnau, “Schrecken der Meere,” Süddeutsche Zeitung, September 30, 2021: https://sz-magazin.sueddeutsche.de/kunst/thirza-schaap-kunst-90703.

7 Elodie Roy, “Another Side of Shellac: Cultural and Natural Cycles of the Gramophone Disc,” in Audible Infrastructures: Music, Sound, Media, ed. Kyle Devine and Alexandrine Boudreault-Fournier (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021): https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780190932633.003.0010. 

8 See Davis and Turpin’s edited volume Art in the Anthropocene. 

9 For more details, see Andrea Westermann, “A Technofossil of the Anthropocene.” 

10 Simon A. Levin, “The Problem of Pattern and Scale in Ecology,” Ecology, vol. 73, no. 6 (1992): p. 1,943. 

11 This technique is used both indoors and outdoors. See, for example, the urban works of Claude Monet around France, and of the Ruhr region, the paintings of Richard Gessner. See also Jesse Oak Taylor, The Sky of Our Manufacture: The London Fog in British Fiction from Dickens to Woolf. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016. 

12 Andrea Westermann, Plastik und politische Kultur in Westdeutschland (Zurich: Chronos, 2007), 237–314. 

13 John N. Hahladakis et al., “An Overview of Chemical Additives Present in Plastics: Migration, Release, Fate and Environmental Impact during Their Use, Disposal and Recycling,” Journal of Hazardous Materials, vol. 344 (2018): pp. 179–99.

14 Max Liboiron, Pollution Is Colonialism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021. For an insightful insider’s outline of the emerging field of microplastics research in marine science and its challenges, see Juliana A. Ivar do Sul, “Why It Is Important to Analyze the Chemical Composition of Microplastics in Environmental Samples,” Marine Pollution Bulletin, vol. 165 (2021): https://doi.org/10.1016/j.marpolbul.2021.112086. The LABPLAS—Land-Based Solutions for Plastics in the Sea project is a current collaboration among various scientific laboratories working on plastics pollution funded by the European Commission, and it is no doubt worth analyzing from a science and technology studies perspective; for more, see https://www.aircentre.org/labplas/.

15 Giles Tremlett, “Spain’s Greenhouse Effect: The Shimmering Sea of Polythene Consuming the Land,” Guardian, September 21, 2005: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2005/sep/21/spain.gilestremlett. For a forthcoming book-length study, see Arvid van Dam, “Designing the Desert: Making and Unmaking Landscape in the Arid Southeast of Spain” (PhD diss., University of Leeds, 2020). I thank the author for sharing his work.

16 Consejería de agricultura, ganadería, pesca y desarrollo sostenible, Secretaría General de Agricultura, Ganadería y Alimentación, Cartografía de invernaderos en Almería, Granada y Málaga, 2020: https://www.juntadeandalucia.es/export/drupaljda/producto_estadistica/19/06/Cartografia%20_inv_AL_GR_MA_v201127.pdf, pp. 11–12; Francisco Entrena-Duran, “Expansion of Greenhouse Farming in the Area of El Ejido: A Case Study on the Environmental and Social Consequences of Agroindustry in Southeast Spain,” in Food Production and Eating Habits from Around the World: A Multidisciplinary Approach, ed. F. Entrena-Duran. New York: Nova Science Publishers 2015, pp. 29–44.

17 Numbers from “Peppers led Almeria’s fruit and vegetable exports in the first half of 2021,” HortiDaily.com, August 25, 2021: https://www.hortidaily.com/article/9349198/peppers-led-almeria-s-fruit-and-vegetable-exports-in-the-first-half-of-2021/. On the current market, see Fruit Logistica, European Statistics Handbook, 2020: https://www.fruitlogistica.com/FRUIT-LOGISTICA/Downloads-Alle-Sprachen/Auf-einen-Blick/European_Statistics_Handbook_2020.pdf.

18 José Rivera Menéndez, La política de colonización agraria en el Campo de Dalías (1940–1990). Almería, Spain: Instituto de Estudios Almerienses 2000, pp. 52–54.

19 Odón Fernández Lavandera and Antonio Pizarro Checa, “Almería: la tecnica del ‘enarenado’ transforma un desierto,” Revista de Estudios Agrosociales, vol. 115 (1981): pp. 35, 44–46. The environmental embeddedness of greenhouses is argued by Arvid van Dam with the help of the notion “vernacular modern” (“Designing the Desert,” p. 146). According to Van Dam’s research, farmers still appreciate this embeddedness.

20 As far as I could find out, it was actually beach sand that was mostly used, not inland “desert” sand, referring to yet another Anthropocene problem: sand mining.

21 Fernández Lavandera and Pizarro Checa, “Almería: la técnica,” 36; David Tout, “The Horticulture Industry of Almería Province, Spain,” Geographical Journal, vol. 156, no. 3 (1990): pp. 304–12 (on drip irrigation, see p. 306); Rivera Menéndez, La política de colonización agraria.

22 Fernández Lavandera and Pizaro Checa, “Almería: la técnica,” 36.

23 Fernández Lavandera and Pizaro Checa, “Almería: la técnica,” 44.

24 David Tout, “The Horticulture Industry,” 306.

25 Andrea Westermann, Plastik und politische Kultur.

26 On the diagnosis of the underdevelopment of southern Spain’s arid landscape, or “desert,” see Eric Swyngedouw, “Modernity and Hybridity: Nature, Regeneracionismo, and the Production of the Spanish Waterscape, 1890–1930,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 89, no. 3 (1999): pp. 443–65, https://doi.org/10.1111/0004-5608.00157; on the Franco regime’s politics of improvement, see Rivera Menéndez, La política de colonización agraria en el Campo de Dalías. This mid-twentieth-century agricultural version of Spain’s long history of “regeneration” after imperial decline in the nineteenth century ties into intellectual histories of underdevelopment in Eastern Europe and Latin America; see J. L. Love, Crafting the Third World: Theorizing Underdevelopment in Rumania and Brazil. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996. See also James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998. 

27 Andrea Westermann, Plastik und politische Kultur, 240. 

28 Purificación Ruiz Sánchez, “La inmigración al Poniente Almeriense. Alpujarreños y africanos en el Ejido,” in Anuario Etnológico de Andalucía 1995–1997, 1999, p. 109. Germany set the precedent with its 1973 recruitment ban (Anwerbestopp); see the labor ministry’s instruction: “Anwerbestopp 1973,” Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, November 9, 2011: https://www.bpb.de/geschichte/deutsche-geschichte/anwerbeabkommen/43270/anwerbestopp-1973; José Francisco Jiménez Díaz, “Procesos de desarrollo en el Poniente Almeriense: Agricultores e inmigrados,” Revista de Estudios Regionales, vol. 1 (January 2011): p. 189. 

29 Francisco Entrena-Duran, “Expansion of Greenhouse Farming in the Area of El Ejido,” p. 32.

30 Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung (Brussels Office), Guía laboral para el sector del manipulado almeriense trabajo realizado: colectivamente por compañeras y compañeros del Soc-Sat de Almería, 2017, p. 3. This guide is available for field-workers. Documented or undocumented, many migrants work without proper contracts. 

31 Andrea Westermann, “Migrations and Radical Environmental Change: When Social History Meets the History of Science,” NTM Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Wissenschaften, Technik und Medizin, vol. 27, no. 3 (2019): pp. 377–89.

32 See a mid-1980s example in F. J. Barahona and J. M. Gomez Vasquez, “Influence of Pesticides on the Degradation of Polyethylene Film Greenhouse Cladding on the Andalusian Coast,” Plasticulture, vol. 65 (1985): pp. 3–10. In 1987, the pesticide residues in vegetables jumped onto Northern European supermarkets’ radar; David Tout, “The Horticulture Industry,” 310. In 2005, toxic plastics were still an urgent problem in workplaces and homes according to Tremlett, “Spain’s Greenhouse Effect.” 

33 Ofelia de Pablo et al., “‘We Pick Your Food’: Migrant Workers Speak Out from Spain’s ‘Plastic Sea,’” Guardian, September 20, 2020: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/sep/20/we-pick-your-food-migrant-workers-speak-out-from-spains-plastic-sea; “El asentamiento chabolista de Níjar vuelve a ser pasto de las llamas,” Almería Hoy, May 23, 2021: http://www.almeriahoy.com/2021/05/el-asentamiento-chabolista-de-nijar.html; “Desalojan hoy a 60 personas y destruyen 28 chabolas en el paraje Tierras de Almería,” Diaro de Almería, April 29, 2015: https://www.diariodealmeria.es/almeria/Desalojan-destruyen-chabolas-Tierras-Almeria_0_911909390.html. For what happened after the eviction, see Iñigo Mas, “Cientos de inmigrantes viven en chabolas encerrados tras las vallas de fincas agrícolas de Almería,” elDiaro.es, March 27, 2014:s https://www.eldiario.es/andalucia/enclave-rural/cientos-inmigrantes-encerrados-tierras-almeria_1_5002356.html. 

34 Ana Carbajos, “El cortijo de los desposeídos,” El País, March 9, 2016. For an analysis of the family business sector compared to the migrant labor they employ, see F. Entrena-Durán and J. F. Jiménez-Díaz, “Reacciones y protestas de agricultores e inmigrantes en El Ejido: un municipio español inserto en las dinámicas de la globalización,” Mundo Agrario, vol. 17, no. 34 (2016): http://www.mundoagrario.unlp.edu.ar/article/view/MAv17n34a08. On international rivalry, price pressures, and farmers’ long dwindling competitive advantages, see Fernando Martínez, “El milagro de los invernaderos de Almería, en sus horas más bajas,” El País Economía, June 25, 2010. 

35 Spitou Mendy, quoted in Clare Carlile, “Campaign: The Fight for Agricultural Workers’ Rights in Southern Spain,” Ethical Consumer, October 1, 2020: https://www.ethicalconsumer.org/ethicalcampaigns/agricultural-workers-rights-almeria. For current labor protests and the fight for new contracts in the fruit and vegetable processing and packaging sector, see the campaign “Formulario adhesión por un convenio digno en el campo y manipulado en almería ‘por un convenio justo ya,’” circulating as a Google Form at https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSepTAb1OreGuskT1wWFjcuC-AERY73P7KcuoJ_ieP2-W0Lc4Q/viewform. 

36 Alyssa McMurtry, “Soil to Sand: Spain’s Growing Threat of Desertification,” Andalou Agency, July 19, 2019: https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/soil-to-sand-spain-s-growing-threat-of-desertification/1535951; Juan García Latorre, Andrés Sánchez Picón, and Jesús García Latorre, “The Man-Made Desert: Effects of Economic and Demographic Growth on the Ecosystems of Arid Southeastern Spain,” Environmental History, vol. 6, no. 1 (January 2001): pp. 75–94, https://doi.org/10.2307/3985232; E. Swyngedouw and J, Williams, “From Spain’s Hydro-Deadlock to the Desalination Fix,” Water International, vol. 41, no. 1 (2016): pp. 54–73, https://doi.org/10.1080/02508060.2016.1107705. 

37 Nacho Sánchez, “Los plásticos de la agricultura inundan Almería,” El País, November 6, 2020: https://elpais.com/america/sociedad/2020-11-06/los-plasticos-de-la-agricultura-inundan-almeria.html. 

38 For 2015, see Emilio González, “Mar de plástico,” Serbal, September 10, 2015: https://serbal-almeria.com/noticias/94-mar-de-plastico; for 2021, see Manuma Manuel Mata Oliver, “Ayer grabamos este video Gianella y yo,” Facebook, October 26, 2020: https://www.facebook.com/manumafotografia/videos/3279839662127309. 

39 Miguel Giménez–Moolhuyzen et al., “Photosynthesis Inhibiting Effects of Pesticides on Sweet Pepper Leaves,” Insects, vol. 11, no. 2 (2020): p. 69, https://doi.org/10.3390/insects11020069; Antonio Mendoza-Fernández et al., “The Role of Technology in Greenhouse Agriculture: Towards a Sustainable Intensification in Campo de Dalías,” Agronomy, vol. 11, no. 1 (2021): p. 101, https://doi.org/10.3390/agronomy11010101. 

40 Jan van der Blom, “Greenhouse Horticulture in Spain: Well On Its Way to Sustainability,” europeanseed blog, April 2019: https://european-seed.com/2019/04/greenhouse-horticulture-in-spain-well-on-its-way-to-sustainability/. 

41 Karen Tei Yamashita, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 1990, p. 17. 

42 Karen Tei Yamashita, Through the Arc, p. 97. 

43 Karen Tei Yamashita, Through the Arc, p. 202. Also see p. 95 of the novel: “The Matacão has been […] a source of curiosity and confusion in the scientific world. Geologists, astronomers, physicists, archaeologists, and chemists were suddenly thrown into an unsettling prerevolutionary state where the basic parameters of scientific truth were undergoing a shift similar to that experienced when Einstein redefined the Newtonian World.” 

44 Karen Tei Yamashita, Through the Arc, pp. 97, 141. 

45 The novel is explored in environmental humanities and Asian American studies. See these worthwhile studies: Ursula Heise, “Local Rock and Global Plastic: World Ecology and the Experience of Place,” Comparative Literature Studies, vol. 41, no. 1 (2004): pp. 126–52; Aimee Bahng, “Extrapolating Transnational Arcs, Excavating Imperial Legacies: The Speculative Acts of Karen Tei Yamashita’s Through the Arc of the Rain Forest,” MELUS, vol. 33, no. 4 (2008): pp. 123–44; Matthew S. Henry, “Nonhuman Narrators and Multinatural Worlds,” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, vol. 25, no. 3 (2018): pp. 566–83. 

46 Karen Tei Yamashita, Through the Arc, p. 96. 

47 Karen Tei Yamashita, Through the Arc, pp. 205–08. 

48 Costas Velis, Global Recycling Markets: Plastic Waste. A Story for One Player – China. ISWA Globalisation and Waste Management Task Force, September 2014. 

49 Gegen Plastikmüll, “Mehr als 70 Staaten für weltweites Abkommen,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, September 2, 2021; Nils Simon et al., “A Binding Global Agreement to Address the Life Cycle of Plastics,” Science, vol. 373, no. 6550 (2021): pp. 43–47, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abi9010. 

50 Roland Geyer et al., “Production, use, and fate of all plastics ever made,” Science Advances (2017): 3(7):e1700782, https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.1700782; Laurent Lebreton and Anthony Andrady, “Future scenarios of global plastic waste generation and disposal,” Palgrave Communications, vol. 5, no. 1(2019): p. 6. 

51 Greenpeace Southeast Asia, “The Recycling Myth 2.0: The Toxic After-Effects of Imported Plastic Waste in Malaysia,” Greenpeace, June 2, 2020: https://www.greenpeace.org/southeastasia/publication/4058/the-recycling-myth-2-0-the-toxic-after-effects-of-imported-plastic-waste-in-malaysia/. 

52 Current analyses highlight this point; see “Revealed: Businesses and Banks behind Global Plastic Waste Crisis, Minderoo Foundation, May 18, 2021: https://www.minderoo.org/plastic-waste-makers-index/news/revealed-businesses-and-banks-behind-global-plastic-waste-crisis. 

53 Roland Geyer et al., “Production, Use, and Fate of All Plastics,” supplementary material, Table S1 (until 2015). Global plastics production totaled 368 million metric tons in 2019, according to “Annual Production of Plastics Worldwide from 1950 to 2020,” Statista, June 2021: https://www.statista.com/statistics/282732/global-production-of-plastics-since-1950/. 

54 Nils Simon et al., “A Binding Global Agreement,” p. 46 (corresponds with the Statista source in the previous footnote). 

55 International Energy Agency, The Future of Petrochemicals: Towards More Sustainable Plastics and Fertilisers, 2018: https://www.oecd.org/publications/the-future-of-petrochemicals-9789264307414-en.htm. 

56 See the insightful essay Benjamin Steininger, “Ammonia Synthesis on the Banks of the Mississippi: A Molecular-Planetary Technology,” Anthropocene Review, vol. 8, no. 3 (2021): pp. 262–79. Yet another attempt is Andrea Westermann, “Enrichment and Dilution in the Atacama Mining Desert: Writing History from an Earth-Centered Perspective,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft, vol. 46, vol. 4 (2020): pp. 634–61. 

57 For the different social sciences, see, for instance, Nigel Clark and Bronislaw Szerszynski, Planetary Social Thought: The Anthropocene Challenge to the Social Sciences. New York: Polity, 2020; Andrea Westermann and Sabine Höhler, “Writing History in the Anthropocene: Scaling, Accountability, and Accumulation,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft, vol. 46, no. 4 (2020): pp. 579–605; Andrew Bauer et al., “Anthropocene: Event or Epoch?,” Nature, vol. 597 (September 16, 2021): p. 332. See also Adam Bobbette’s contribution to the Anthropocene Markers project, “A Javanese Anthropocene?”: https://www.anthropocene-curriculum.org/contribution/a-javanese-anthropocene/. 

58 Andrea Westermann and Sabine Höhler, “Writing History in the Anthropocene”; Sara Wylie, Max Liboiron, and Nicholas Shapiro, “Making and Doing Politics through Grassroots Scientific Research on the Energy and Petrochemical Industries,” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society, vol. 3 (2017): pp. 393–425. Also see the initiative directed by historian Michelle Murphy, Talking the Land and the Refinery; more information is available at “Talking The Land and the Refinery,” Technoscience Research Unit, March 31, 2020: https://technoscienceunit.org/2020/03/31/talking-the-land-and-the-refinery/. 

59 Andrea Westermann, “When Consumer Citizens Spoke Up: West Germany’s Early Dealings with Plastic Waste,” Contemporary European History, vol. 22, no. 3 (2013): pp. 477–98. 

60 Matthew Hilton, Prosperity for All: Consumer Activism in an Era of Globalization. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009, pp. 153–84; Andrea Westermann, “When Consumer Citizens Spoke Up.”

61 Andrea Westermann, Plastik und politische Kultur, p. 314; Samantha MacBride, Recycling Reconsidered: The Present Failure and Future Promise of Environmental Action in the United States. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. 

62 Andrea Westermann, “When Consumer Citizens Spoke Up,” pp. 493–97; Bartow J. Elmore, Citizen Coke: The Making of Coca-Cola Capitalism. New York; W. W. Norton, 2016; Laura Sullivan, “Plastic Wars: Industry Spent Millions Selling Recycling—to Sell More Plastic,” NPR, March 31, 2020: https://www.npr.org/2020/03/31/822597631/plastic-wars-three-takeaways-from-the-fight-over-the-future-of-plastics. I thank Kate Brown for reminding me of this strategy and its political consequences. 

Published online by Cambridge University Press

Timothy Morton

Abstract

Not a day goes by in the 2010s without some humanities scholars becoming quite exercised about the term Anthropocene. In case we need reminding, Anthropocene names the geological period starting in the later eighteenth century when, after the invention of the steam engine, humans began to deposit layers of carbon in Earth’s crust. Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer’s term has been current since 2000.1 In 1945, there occurred “The Great Acceleration,” a huge data spike in the graph of human involvement in Earth systems. (The title’s Kubrick joke stems from the crustal deposition of radioactive materials since 1945.) Like Marx, Crutzen sees the steam engine as iconic. As this is written, geologists such as Jan Zalasiewicz are convincing the Royal Society of Geologists to make the term official.

Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 1 , Issue 2 , September 2014 , pp. 257 – 264

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/pli.2014.15

The term is remarkable: it names the intersection of human history with geological time, as Baucom argues. Anthropocene ends the concept nature: a stable, nonhuman background to (human) history. Should this not be welcome for scholars rightly wary of setting artificial boundaries around history’s reach?

The term has arisen at a most inconvenient moment. Anthropocene might sound to post-humanists like an anthropocentric symptom of a sclerotic era. Taking their cue from the anti-humanism of Foucault and to some extent Derrida, others may readily recall the close of Foucault’s The Order of Things: “man” is like a face drawn in sand, eventually wiped away by the ocean tides.² Foucault, grandfather of post-humanism, appears less upset than the Matthew Arnold of “Dover Beach” at the prospect of this construct’s obliteration.

What a weirdly prescient image of global warming, with its rising sea levels and underwater government meetings.³ But how ironic, given that humans evidently created global warming, an entity massively distributed in both time and space, an entity persisting for one hundred thousand years.⁴ There we were, happily getting on with the obliteration business, when this term shows up. Within it, the human returns at a far deeper geological level than mere sand.

Moreover, global warming’s erasure of the human by Earth systems such as the water cycle happens in a grittier way than the “discourse of man,” which is what Foucault meant. It is more than a semiotic obliteration. Gladly to use Anthropocene is not simply to talk of power-knowledge institutions disposing humans, nor even of dispositifs that include nonhumans. What Anthropocene names is mass extinction—the sixth one in the four-and-a-half-billion-year history of life on Earth. This is indeed an inconvenient truth for scholars convinced that any hint of talk about reality smacks of reactionary fantasy.

The Sixth Mass Extinction Event, caused by humans—not jellyfish, not dolphins, not coral. The panic seems more than a little disingenuous, given what we know about global warming, and given what we humanities scholars think we like to say about the role of humans in creating it, as opposed to, say, Pat Robertson or UKIP (the UK Independence Party). A Fredric Jameson would perhaps smile somewhat ruefully at the dialectic of scholars who refuse the very concept of reality and totalization, while global mega-corporations frack in their backyards.

One simply cannot just palm off global warming on other beings or even on a particular group of humans, or argue that the Sixth Mass Extinction Event doesn’t really exist. The humanities have often argued via Foucault via Heidegger via Kant that there are no accessible things in themselves, only thing-positings, or thingings of Da-sein, or thing discourses. Only things insofar as they correlate to some version of the (human) subject. The blank screen on which these fantasies are projected turns out not to be blank at all, but rather to consist of unique, discrete entities (a new philosophical movement, derived from the obverse of Heidegger, calls them objects) with a “life” of their own no matter whether a (human) subject has opened the epistemological refrigerator door to see whether they are lit up in the clearing. And some entities formerly known as blank screens (and violently treated as such) are overwhelming human beings.

Foucault’s image of the sandy face is a metaphor for what some now call correlationism.⁵ Correlationism asserts that reality cannot be seen directly, but can only be correlated with something like a (human) subject. The “man” episteme begins for Foucault in 1800. To say the least, this is ecologically uncanny. The year 1800 is the moment of the steam engine—the veritable engine of the Anthropocene; it is also the moment of Hume and Kant, whose thought inaugurated correlationism: Hume by arguing that cause and effect was a construct based on a congeries of associations, Kant by grounding this argument in synthetic judgments a priori in a transcendental subject (a subject that isn’t “little me”). At the very moment at which philosophy says you can’t directly access the real, humans are drilling down ever deeper into it.

But what is this “human”? Evidently the term as used here is not essentialist, if essentialist means metaphysically present—here I do align myself with Kant and his subsequent lineage holders, including Heidegger, who inspired Lacan, who taught Foucault. This presence derives ultimately from a persistent default ontology in the long moment in which the Anthropocene is a rather disturbing fluctuation. This is the ten-thousand-year “present” I call agrilogistics, the time of a certain logistics of agriculture that arose in the Fertile Crescent and went viral, eventually requiring steam engines and industry to endure.⁶ The algorithm of Fertile Crescent agriculture consists of numerous subroutines: eliminate contradiction and anomaly, establish boundaries between the human and the nonhuman, maximize existence over and above any quality of existing. Now that agrilogistics covers most of Earth’s surface, we can see its effects as in a polymerase chain reaction: they are catastrophic.

Social space is in a sense physical, lived philosophy. So it might be important to get at what is driving the Anthropocene and its global warming. The metaphysics of presence is intimately caught in the history of global warming. Derrida and Heidegger were rightly determined to perform some form of Destruktion upon it. Reverse engineering agrilogistics, one discovers its occluded inner logic. A piece of that logic asserts that to exist is to be constantly present. Here is the field, I can plough it, sow it with this or that, or nothing, yet it remains, constantly. The entire system is construed as constantly present, rigidly bounded, separated from nonhuman systems—despite the obvious existence of nonhumans to maintain it (try to ignore the cats). To achieve constant presence, not just in thought but also in social and physical space requires persistent acts of violence, and such an achievement is itself violence.⁷ Why? Because it goes against the grain of (ecological) reality, which consists of porous boundaries and interlinked loops, rather like Derrida’s arche-writing, subtending the very scripts that underwrite agrilogistical space, with its neatly ploughed lines of words, many of their first lines pertaining to cattle—a one-size-fits-all term for anything a (male) human owns. Patriarchy, rigid social hierarchies, and general conditions approaching near death (Agamben’s bare life or Derek Parfit’s bad level) were the almost immediate consequence, yet the virus persisted, like an earworm or a chair, no matter how destructive to the humans who had devised it.⁸

Humans, not lemons, generated the logistics of agriculture that now covers most of Earth and is responsible for an alarming amount of global warming emissions all by itself. Its generation had unintentional or unconscious dimensions. No one likes having their unconscious pointed out, and ecological awareness is all about having it pointed out. That alone explains some negative reactions to Anthropocene.

That I claim humans exist and made the Anthropocene by literally drilling into rock does indeed make me a kind of essentialist. Because my essentialism is without a metaphysics of presence, however, I am a weird essentialist, in the lineage of Irigaray, an avatar of this line of (non-agrilogistical) thought: to exist is to flicker with nothingness, defying the supposed law of noncontradiction hardwired into agrilogistical space.

Such a thought seems as ridiculous as the idea that I might be suggesting that we regress to a pre-agrilogistical time. One of the rituals of theory class is that as a condition of inclusion one is expected to convey something like “Well, I’m not an essentialist”; “Well, I’m not endorsing that French feminist biological essentialism.” Inert as that characterization is—of Irigaray, Cixous, and essentialism—this is something that comes out of our mouths as easily as things come out of an Easy Bake Oven.

Likewise, the ridicule with which the idea of social spaces that are not agrilogistical (hence not traditionally capitalist, communist, or feudal, or any manner of formations over its ten-thousand-year span) is greeted, as is the inverse variant, the insistence that humans should exert enough violence to “return” themselves to a pre-agrilogistical existence (John Zerzan, archivist of the Unabomber Ted Kaczinski). Such reactions are both symptoms of agrilogistical space as such—both assume that to have a politics is to have an enormous, overarching, Easy Think concept. So one is derided as a primitivist or an anarchist. The editing of laughter out of thought is curious and should be studied. “Of course, I’m not advocating that we actually try a social space that includes nonhumans in a noncoercive and nonutilitarian mode. That would be loopy.” Or “Eliminate the evil loops of the human stain. Anyone with prosthetic devices such as glasses is suspect. Return to year zero.” A taboo against loops operates in both cases. This is significant because loops characterize ecological systems—and ecological awareness, which takes an uncanny noir form as the detective with the fancy gizmos finds out that he is the criminal—having used the fancy gizmos to make fancy gizmos to perceive that very thing.

Aside from claims of anthropocentrism and essentialism, let us examine more closely the modes in which denial of the Anthropocene speaks.

First of all, colonialism: the Anthropocene is the product of Western humans, mostly Americans; the term unjustly lumps together the whole human race.

Although the desire for it emerged in America first, chronologically, it turns out that everyone wants air-conditioning. On this issue, I am in perfect accord with Dipesh Chakrabarty.⁹ Likewise, obesity is not simply American, for the same reason. Desire is the logical structure of consumerism, and desire is logically prior to whatever “need” is (as Lacan argues)—histories of consumerism notwithstanding, histories that tend to repeat fall narratives not unrelated to ecology: “First we needed things, then at point x we wanted things, and that put us into an evil loop.” Neanderthals would have loved Coca Cola Zero.

Secondly, racism: the term implies that humans altogether are responsible. Yet the term really means white humans, and they go unmarked: blaming all people for a white problem whose whiteness is suppressed.

Yet human need not be something that is ontically given: we can’t see or touch or designate it as present in some way (as whiteness, or not-blackness, and so on). There is no positive content to the human that one can directly perceive. So Anthropocene isn’t racist. Racism exists when one fills in the gap between what one can see (all kinds of beings starting car engines and shoveling coal into steam engines) and what these entities are with some kind of aesthetic putty, such as whiteness. Racism effectively erases the gap, implicitly reacting against what Hume and Kant did to reality (hence Heidegger hence Derrida and so on). Since Kant, there has been some kind of irreducible rift between what an entity is and how it appears, such that science handles data, not actual things.

It should now be evident that I am myself a correlationist. I do not believe that the finitude of the human–world correlate is incorrect; I do not claim that it can be burst asunder, for instance by mathematics.¹⁰ I merely hold that we should release the anthropocentric copyright control on correlationism, allowing nonhumans like fish (and perhaps even fish forks) the fun of being incapable of accessing the in-itself, whether by knowledge or by perception or by some other means, such as physical proximity.

Anthropocene may not be colonialist or racist, but surely it must be a blatant example of speciesism? Is it not claiming that humans are special and different in having created it?

Indeed, humans and not dolphins invented steam engines and drilled for oil, but this is not a sufficient reason to suppose them special or different. Etymology notwithstanding, species and specialness sharply differ. Darwin’s Origin of Species is ironically titled. There are no species—and yet there are. They have no origin—and yet they do. A human consists of nonhuman components and is directly related to nonhumans. Yet a human is not a fish. A swim bladder, from which lungs derive, is not a lung in waiting. There is nothing remotely lunglike about it.¹¹ A life-form is what Derrida calls arrivant, or what I call strange stranger: it is itself, yet uncannily not itself at the same time.¹²

The Darwinian concept is precisely not the Easy Think, Aristotelian tool for telling telologically what species are for: ducks are for swimming, Greeks are for enslaving barbarians. . . . Marx adored Darwin for that.¹³ Because species in this sense does not coincide with me, an actual human being as opposed to a pencil or a duck, it is not speciesist. Like the racist, the speciesist fills the gap between phenomenon and thing with a kind of paste, an easy-to-identify content. That is precisely what one is incapable of seeing, yet there are ducks and spoonbills, which are not humans.

Species appears superficially easy to think: after all, contemporary texts from Sesame Street (“We Are All Earthlings”) to Live Aid’s “We Are the World” seem to convey it, along with racism and speciesism.¹⁴ Yet for me to know, through the very reasoning with which I discern the transcendental gap between phenomenon and thing, the being that manifests this reasoning, might be like a serpent swallowing its own tail, putting itself in a loop. What appears to be superficially the nearest—my existence qua this actual entity—is phenomenologically the most distant thing in the universe. The Muppets and so on inhibit the necessary ecological thought—the uncanny realization that every time I turned my car ignition key I was contributing to global warming and yet was performing actions that are statistically meaningless. When I think myself as a member of the human species, I lose “little me”—yet it wasn’t tortoises that caused global warming.

Fourthly, there is the idea that Anthropocene is hubristic. Yet the term deploys the concept species as something unconscious, not as some entity that can ever be totally explicit. Humans did it, but they did it with the aid of prostheses and nonhumans such as engines, factories, and cows—let alone viral ideas about agricultural logistics living rent-free in minds. So Anthropocene is not hubristic at all. It means humans—already a mess of lungs and bacteria and nonhuman ancestors and so on—along with their agents such as cows and factories and thoughts, agents that can’t be reduced to their merely human use or exchange value. For instance, these assemblages can violently disrupt both use and exchange value in unanticipated (unconscious) ways: one cannot eat a California lemon in a drought.

So the Anthropocene is the first truly anti-anthropocentric concept. The fact that it is far from hubristic is also why geoengineers are incorrect, if they think it means we now have carte blanche to put gigantic mirrors in space or flood the ocean with iron filings. Earth is not just a blank sheet for the projection of human desire: this desire loop is predicated on entities (Earth, coral, clouds) that also exist in loop form, in relation to one another and in relation to humans. The argument for geoengineering goes like this: “We have always been terraforming, so let’s do it consciously from now on.”¹⁵ Yet making something conscious doesn’t mean it’s nice. We have always been murdering people. How is deliberate murder more moral? Psychopaths are exquisitely aware of the suffering they consciously inflict. In relation to life-forms and Earth systems, humans have often played the role of the Walrus concerning the oysters:

“I weep for you,” the Walrus said:

“I deeply sympathize.”

With sobs and tears he sorted out

Those of the largest size,

Holding his pocket-handkerchief

Before his streaming eyes.¹⁶

Consider the Freudian-slip absurdity of James Lovelock’s analogy of Jekyll and Hyde for science and engineering: “Only big science can save us. We know big science has been like Mr. Hyde for the last two centuries, but please know, we have a kindly inner doctor Jekyll. Let us be Jekyll. Please. Please trust us, trust us.”¹⁷ Unaware of its tone, Lovelock’s sentences sound exactly like Mr. Hyde, as does Jekyll’s own self-justification in the eponymous novel. Moreover, one can’t get rid of the unconscious that easily. Here is an example: “I know I’m an addict so now I’m going to drink fully aware of that fact.” And being aware of “unconscious biases” is a contradiction in terms.

The concept unconscious is profoundly related to the notion of interdependence, the ecological fact par excellence. It is weird, which is to say, in a loop: weird derives from the Old Norse, urth, meaning twisted or entwined.¹⁸ Be nice to bunnies and you are not being nice to bunny parasites. I am far from asserting that we should not care because we cannot get ecological action perfect: quite the opposite. In an ecological age, cynical reason collapses into just another form of hypocrisy. Ecological awareness is about becoming friendly with hypocrisy, not because one doesn’t care but because one does.¹⁹

There are some substitutes. For instance, why not call it Homogenocene? This is just a euphemism. The substitute is true insofar as the logistics driving the Anthropocene depend upon an implicit ontology of the Easy Think Substance. In a more urgent sense, however, the concept is false and truly anthropocentric. The iron deposits in Earth’s crust made by bacteria are also homogeneous. Oxygen, caused by an unintended consequence of bacterial respiration, is a homogenous part of the air. Humans are not the only homogenizers.

Having attuned to an Anthropocene we humanities scholars might accept, let us consider some significant aspects of the Anthropocene that are highly congruent with the humanities.

Crutzen himself is now having cold feet about 1784, his initial dating. He sees the data spike of 1945 called The Great Acceleration, and believes, like most good scientists, in the law of non-contradiction. The data spike looks present and self-evident in that metaphysical way objected to previously. The boundary between this true beginning and what came before must be rigid and thin. There cannot be two boundaries at once, or a fuzzy boundary, but mathematicians, philosophers, literature scholars, and artists are not bound by this law. (Nor indeed are contemporary young quantum theorists, who are beginning to assume that there is not a boundary between the classical and quantum levels.)²⁰

One could imagine The Great Acceleration differently. One could see it as a catastrophic yet logical extension of the smooth-seeming periodicity of agrilogistics. In the humanities we have been thinking for a while about how historical moments are never rigidly bounded. Yet feudalism is not capitalism. The Renaissance is not post-modernism. Rather, they exist but are retroactively posited and necessarily contested, and not thin and easy to identify. More fundamentally, time as such cannot be established as an Easy Think Substance, as a linear succession of atomic now-points, no matter how large or small; otherwise Zeno’s paradoxes arise. The present can be defined to arbitrary size: one nanosecond, a billion years. We are living “in” a present moment that includes, to name a few, the Anthropocene and agrilogistics and the catastrophe (if you are anaerobic) called oxygen: an ever-widening set of concentric temporalities. The reader will immediately note the congruence with Baucom’s essay.

There is a finite already, a sort of longtime-already (as opposed to an always-already). Agrilogistics began as a smooth wave that lurched into the Anthropocene. Earth systems were in a harmonious-seeming periodic cycle for ten thousand years.²¹ We have become accustomed to call the periodic cycling of Earth systems nature; the term’s ecological value is dangerously overrated. Nature as such is a ten-thousand-year-old human product—not just a discursive product, but also a geological one. Its wavy elegance was simply revealed as inherently violent, as when in an epileptic fit one’s brainwaves become smooth right up until one goes into seizure.

Yet alongside the longtime-already, there may indeed be an always-already. How did humans fall for agrilogistics in the first place? There must be something in the structure of thought that locks onto the human desire to abolish anxiety and know where the next meal is coming from. Humanities scholars, supposed experts in what human being might be, need to examine the structure of thought. How did human minds get behind a scheme now known as both cockamamie and seemingly incontestable?

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Footnotes

Timothy Morton is Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English at Rice University. He gave the Wellek Lectures in theory at University of California–Irvine in 2014. He is the author of Hyperobjects, The Ecological Thought, Ecology without Nature, nine other books, and one hundred essays on philosophy, ecology, literature, food, and music.

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References

1

Crutzen, Paul and Stoermer, Eugene, “The Anthropocene,” Global Change Newsletter 41.1 (2000): 17–18Google Scholar Check for full text.

2

Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House, 1994)Google Scholar Check for full text, 387.

3

I refer to the action performed by the government of the Maldives in 2009.

4

I call such entities hyperobjects. Morton, Timothy, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013)Google Scholar Check for full text.

5

Meillassoux, Quentin, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. Ray Brassier (New York: Continuum, 2009)Google Scholar Check for full text, 5.

6

Morton, Timothy, Dark Ecology (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015)Google Scholar Check for full text.

7

Derrida, Jacques, “Violence and Metaphysics,” Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (London and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 79–153Google Scholar Check for full text.

8

Diamond, Jared, “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race,” Discover Magazine (May 1987), 64–66Google Scholar Check for full text. Parfit, Derek, Reasons and Persons (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 381–390Google Scholar Check for full text, 419–441.

9

Chakrabarty, Dipesh, “The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35 (Winter 2009): 197–222Google Scholar Check for full text.

10

Meillassoux and Ray Brassier hold this position.

11

Darwin, Charles, The Origin of Species, ed. Gillian Beer (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996)Google Scholar Check for full text, 160.

12

Derrida, Jacques, “Hostipitality,” Angelaki, trans. Barry Stocker with Forbes Matlock, 5.3 (December 2000): 3–18Google Scholar Check for full text; Morton, Timothy, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 14–15Google Scholar Check for full text, 17–19, 38–50.

13

Gillian Beer, “Introduction,” in Darwin, The Origin of Species, vii–xxviii (xxvii–xviii).

14

Street, Sesame, “We Are All Earthlings,” Sesame Street Platinum All-Time Favorites (Sony, 1995)Google Scholar Check for full text; USA for Africa, “We Are the World” (Columbia, 1985).

15

See for instance Robinson, Kim Stanley, Red Mars (New York: Random House, 1993)Google Scholar Check for full text; Green Mars (New York: Random House, 1995); Blue Mars (New York: Random House, 1997).

16

Carroll, Lewis, Alice Through the Looking Glass in The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition, ed. Martin Gardner (New York: Norton, 2000)Google Scholar Check for full text, 187.

17

Lovelock, James, The Revenge of Gaia: Earth’s Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity (New York: Basic Books, 2006), 6–7Google Scholar Check for full text, my paraphrase.

18

Oxford English Dictionary, weird, adj. http://www.oed.com, accessed April 9, 2014.

19

Morton, , Hyperobjects, 134–158Google Scholar.

20

See for instance Aaron O’Connell et al., “Quantum Ground State and Single Phonon Control of a Mechanical Ground Resonator,” Nature 464 (March 17, 2010): 697–703.

21

Jan Zalasiewicz, presentation at “History and Politics of the Anthropocene,” University of Chicago, May 2013.