Christmas in the Anthropocene
Right, it’s Christmas, and it’s nearly 2018. But why? About two millenia later, the first Christmas defines the date for many of us. It’s not often that an event makes people mark time in such a radical way: history (for a large part of humanity, though by no means all), after the fact, is divided into two sections — BC and AD. We may take the date for granted, but this kind of division between past and future is a big deal, and it matters right now how we deal with it.
People make lines in the sand: pre and post. That is pre-that; this is post-this. Post-9/11; pre-internet; post-colonial; pre-Roman; post-industrial. Epoch making puts chapters into history. They can be tiny too. 2017 is dead, long live 2018. Epoch-makers — be they men and women, or machines — are held up as agents, not just of change, but of transformation. Everyone is implicated, and there is no going back.
So if we weren’t already in enough trouble, here comes the Anthropocene. In drawing a line between geological eras, the Anthropocene does something unusual — it widens the frame of reference to deep time.
The problems with the totalising, zooming-out effect of drawing the line in this way have been well rehearsed, but the line itself is interesting in comparison to others. Despite the huge frame of reference involved, this new era shares things with those other lines in the sand. They are cultural and political: we project our fear of death and our hope in salvation on to them. They often point us towards urgent, transformative action. They invite critical responses: rival –cenes (from Capitalocene to Chthulucene) that acknowledge the fundamental sense of a transformation, but frame it differently.
Another critical response is to point out the unevenness. Who is responsible? Where are the impacts felt? Is the Anthropocene like the future — here, just not very evenly distributed?
The point of all this is not to decide whether a new era is here or not. The point is why we do this and what happens to our frame of reference when we do. Can we understand our story in other ways too, in order to shed different kinds of light on it?
For example, how do we understand the kinds of changes are happening to humans caught up in their relationships to other living and non-living creatures? Isn’t this also a story about mingling, reacting, interacting, reinforcing and undermining? Do we talk in terms of decay and entropy; of death and rebirth; of hope in the dark; of active and intentional transition; of irreversible transformation, as from a man to a monster; of a techno-utopian future; or of complex cultural transformations with deep roots and swirling currents?
The story of human-environment relations is also a story of tensions and conflicts and imbalances. You may think injustice is an idea that cannot be measured. But its effects can be seen, sometimes hidden in plain sight. Air and water pollution, at all times all around us, are forms of pollution that are by their nature unjust: in them polluting elements are mobile, and therefore the victim and the polluter are always separated by distance and time. They illustrate the problem of agency in environmental harm: it doesn’t only matter that pollution exists, or even that it hurts people, it matters who is doing it, and why.
As we enter from a traumatic year into the hope of a new one, yes, it’s important to say, humanity is doing this. But that’s not specific enough. We need to break it down. As we do so, as the nights get shorter and the days get longer, new alliances and relationships come to light and new ideas can flourish.
