The Shape of Things to Come’: Seven Theses on the Anthropocene and Attachment

Ben Dibley

Anthropocene as epoch and as discourse: As epoch and as discourse it would seem the Anthropocene has arrived. For it is a term that supplies an arresting image of a daunting development: the advent of a geological era of humanity’s own making. For the earth system scientists who have championed the notion, the Anthropocene signals a geological interval since the industrial revolution, where, through its activities, through its numbers, the human species has emerged as a geological force now altering the planet’s biosphere. Because of these developments the relatively benign planetary conditions of the Holocene—the previous 12,000 years, which enabled the establishment of agriculture and the rise of urban civilizations—are in the process of transformation.The exponential growth in the human population and the associated resource intensive practices on which this is contingent have produced various stratigraphical signals. For earth system scientists the most obvious of these sedimentary layers is Anthropocene rock—the concrete, steel and bitumen of the planet’s cities and roads (Zalasiewicz et al., ‘New World’); while the most enduring are anthropogenic biochemical processes—emission of greenhouse gases, acidication of the oceans, modication of soils, destruction of biota and relocation of genetic stocks and increasingly codes. All of these are now in the process of permanently altering the earth’s systems and the evolutionary trajectory of planetary life (Zalasiewicz etal. ‘Are We Now?’; Steen et al.). For the term’s advocates it is the emergence of the human species as this geological forcing agent that signals the close of the Holocene and the opening of a new epoch.The notion of the Anthropocene, then, vividly captures the folding of the human into the air, into the sea, the soil and DNA.1 As a force imperilling ‘the 1 Here then, the notion of the Anthropocene might be seen as an implicit criticism of the hegemony of the climate crisis at the level of public discourse—in as much as the latter, in its staging in policy and popular imaginaries and, indeed, those of humanities and social science scholars, frequently neglects the couplings of the earth’s systems. In this, the Anthropocene serves as a reminder that the resolution of the climate crisis will safe operating space for humanity with respect to the earth system’, it is an emergence that is simultaneously an emergency (Rockström et al. 475).2 As a pithy appellation the Anthropocene is a term increasingly entering public and policy discourses, and indeed, the lexicon of the humanities and social sciences.