The Anthropocene concept arose within the Earth System science (ESS) community, albeit explicitly as a geological (stratigraphical) time term. Its current analysis by the stratigraphical community, as a potential formal addition to the Geological Time Scale, necessitates comparison of the methodologies and patterns of enquiry of these two communities. One means of comparison is to consider some of the most widely used results of the ESS, the ‘planetary boundaries’ concept of Rockström and colleagues, and the ‘Great Acceleration’ graphs of Steffen (...) and colleagues, in terms of their stratigraphical expression. This expression varies from virtually non-existent (stratospheric ozone depletion) to pronounced and many-faceted (primary energy use), while in some cases stratigraphical proxies may help constrain anthropogenic process (atmospheric aerosol loading). The Anthropocene concepts of the ESS and stratigraphy emerge as complementary, and effective stratigraphic definition should facilitate wider transdisciplinary communication. (shrink)

Bailey Willis was the second major American geologist to undertake reconnaissance research in China--in the years 1903-04. Together with the stratigrapher Eliot Blackwelder, topographer Harvey Sargent, and guide Li Shan, he travelled first in Shandong Province, then from Peking to Xian, thence across the mountains into Sichuan, and then by river via the Yangzi Gorges to Shanghai. It was hoped that they would discover the primeval ancestor of trilobites in China, but the search proved unsuccessful. Willis's stratigraphic findings are (...) described, as are his structural interpretations of what he observed in China. His work in China gave rise to some unfounded speculations about the possible causes of lateral Earth movements, due to rocks of different densities being adjacent to one another in the Earth's crust. These ideas were followed by several other 'theories of the Earth' during Willis's later career, some of which were also probably related to his experiences in China. He seemingly practised the formulation of 'multiple working hypotheses'. The paper also discusses the influence of Willis's survey and stratigraphic work on the subsequent development of Chinese geology, with particular attention given to the various meanings of the term 'Sinian System'. Mention is made of later work in China on Lower Cambrian stratigraphy. (shrink)

This paper examines the emergence of a new approach to stratigraphic complexity, first in geology and then, following its creative appropriation, in paleobiology. The approach was associated with a set of models that together transformed stratigraphic geology in the decades following 1970. These included the influential models of depositional sequences developed by Peter Vail and others at Exxon. Transposed into paleobiology, they gave researchers new resources for studying the incompleteness of the fossil record and for removing biases imposed (...) by the processes of sedimentary accumulation. In addition, they helped reconfigure the cultural landscape of paleobiology, consolidating a growing emphasis on fieldwork and eroding the barrier that had been erected in the 1970s between “paleontology” and “paleobiology.” This paper traces these developments, paying special attention to the simulation models of stratigraphic paleobiologist Steven Holland. It also considers how the integration of sequence and event stratigraphy and paleobiology has begun to influence long-running discussions of incompleteness and bias in the fossil record. (shrink)

The article is an ethnographic travelogue of time spent in Oman in 2018 with the Ediacaran subcommission. This is a collective of Earth scientists who globe-trot in search of particular rocks that might be reliable markers for subdividing the long stretch of the Ediacaran period (which lasted ninety-four million years) into intervals that mark global transformations in Earth history. To do so, these scientists are reliant upon the amenability of Petroleum Development Oman, which Omanis credit with ushering Oman into “modernity.” (...) In recent years, critical theorists, cultural historians, and science-and-technology-studies (STS) scholars have argued for the necessity of forging new ways to tell stories that can scale between planetary history and the more familiar scales of human political action. In this article, I do not suggest that geological thinking is the right way to periodize sociopolitical or cultural history. Rather, I intend it as a provocation for us to recognize that periodization—and in particular the work required to nominate periods of duration and succession, unconformity and break—is a theory already built into the world, one which has disseminated across it to correlate time to place unevenly. As such, stratigraphy functions doubly in this article. First, stratigraphy is an object of inquiry: I address where geological timescales come from, and how stratigraphers calibrate eras, epochs, and periods dividing planetary history. Second, it is also an analytic with which I interrogate how thinking stratigraphically might inform how we, as critical theorists, historians, and the like, might think about those problems of periodization. (shrink)

‘Hitherto want of accuracy and definiteness have often been brought as a charge against geology, and sometimes only with too much justice’, wrote Archibald Geikie in a review of Sir Roderick Murchison'sSiluria(1867). ‘We seem now to be entering, however, upon a new era, when there will be infused into geological methods and speculation, some of the precision of the exact sciences’. Geikie's judgement echoed an appeal made some thirty years earlier by William Hopkins (1793–1866) that the science of geology needed (...) to be ‘elevated’ from a level of ‘indeterminate generalities’ to a rank among the stricter physical sciences. This paper aims to analyse, in the context of broader trends favouring measurement and mathematics in British scientific practice, Hopkins' role in the promotion of dynamical geology as a major new complement to stratigraphical geology such that, for example, in the first edition of Geikie'sTextbook of Geology(1882) the dynamical and stratigraphical components each filled 376 pages. (shrink)

In its explicit engagement with the possibility of human extinction, the Anthropocene thesis might be seen as signalling a ‘crisis of natality’. Engaging with two works of fiction – Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces – the article explores the embodied, affective and intimate dimensions of the struggle to sustain life under catastrophic conditions. Though centred on male protagonists, both novels offer insights into a ‘stratigraphic time’ associated primarily with maternal responsibility – involving a temporal give-and-take (...) that passes between generations and across thresholds in the Earth itself. If this is a construction of inter-corporeality in which each life and every breath has utmost value, it is also a vision that exceeds the biopolitical prioritization of the organismic body – as evidenced in both McCarthy’s and Michaels’ gesturing beyond the bounds of the living to a forceful, sensate and enigmatic cosmos. (shrink)

In the Parthenon frieze, the time of mortals and the time of gods seem to merge. Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued that with the advent of the Anthropocene the times of human history and of the Earth are similarly coming together. Are humans entering the ‘monumental time’ of the Earth, to stand alongside the Olympian gods of the other geological forces? This article first looks at the cultural shifts leading to the modern idea of separate human and Earth histories. It examines (...) the changing use of monuments to mediate between human and other temporalities. It explores the use of ‘stratigraphic sections’ as natural monuments to mark transitions between the major time units of Earth history, and the erection of intentional monuments nearby. It suggests that the Anthropocene, as a geological epoch-in-the-making, may challenge the whole system of monumental semiotics used to stabilize our way of thinking about deep time. (shrink)

This book presents a philosophical journey into the Anthropocene that views this geological epoch as the potential métarécit of our age and the planetary framework within which technology becomes the environment for human life. The appropriate name for this epochal phenomenon is, as a result, not Anthropocene, but Technocene.

Mit dem Begriff des Anthropozäns kehrt der in der Folge des Poststrukturalismus lange verrufene Begriff des Menschen wieder in die Geisteswissenschaften zurück. Der Band betrachtet den Beitrag der philosophischen Anthropologie zur Anthropozändebatte, diskutiert das Verhältnis der Kategorie "Mensch" zu jener des "Anthropos" und der "Spezies" und untersucht "negative Anthropologie" als mögliche Zwischenstellung zwischen Post- und Neohumanismus.

The proposed new geological era, The Anthropocene (aka Age of Humans, Age of Man), marking human domination of the planet long called Mother Earth, is truly The Age of the Motherfucker. The ecocide of the Anthropocene comes from Man, the Western- and masculine- identified corporate, military, intellectual, and political class that masks itself as the exemplar of the civilized and the human. The word motherfucker was invented by the enslaved children of White slavemasters to name their mothers' rapist/owners. Man's strategic (...) motherfucking, from the personal to the planetary, is invasion, exploitation, spirit-breaking, extraction and toxic wasting of individuals, communities, and lands, for reasons of pleasure, plunder, and profit. Ecocide is attempted deicide of Mother Nature-Earth, reflecting Man's goal to come the god he first made in his own image. The motivational word Motherfucker further reveals the Anthropocene with a flip side signifying an outstanding, formidable, and inexorable force. Mother Nature-Earth is that "Mutha'" -- one defying translation into heteropatriarchal classifications of gender, one capable of overwhelming Man and not the other way around. Drawing upon Indigenous and African American scholarship, ecofeminism, ecowomanism, green activism, femme, queer, and gender non-binary philosophies, literature and arts, Afrofuturism, and popular culture, Call Your "Mutha'" contends that the Anthropocene is not evidence of Man's supremacy over nature, but that Mother Nature-Earth, faced with disrespect, is going away. It is imperative now to call the "Mutha'" by decolonizing land, bodies, and minds, ending rapism, feeding the green, renewing sustaining patterns and affirming devotion to Mother Nature-Earth. (shrink)

This book places the philosophy of Simone Weil into conversation with contemporary environmental concerns in the Anthropocene. The book offers a systematic interpretation of Simone Weil, making her ethical philosophy more accessible to non-Weil scholars. Weil's work has been influential in many fields, including politically and theologically-based critiques of social inequalities and suffering, but rarely linked to ecology. Kathryn Lawson argues that Weil's work can be understood as offering a coherent approach with potentially widespread appeal applicable to our ethical relations (...) to much more than just other human beings. She suggests that the process of 'decreation' in Weil is an expansion of the self which might also come to include the surrounding earth and a vast assemblage of others. This allows readers to consider what it means to be human in this time and place, and to contemplate our ethical responsibilities both to other humans and also to the more-than-human world. Ultimately, the book uses Weil's thought to propose a decreative ecological ethics that decenters the human being by cultivating human actions towards an ecological ethics. This book will be useful for Simone Weil scholars and academics, as well as students and researchers interested in environmental ethics in departments of comparative literature, theory and criticism, philosophy, and environmental studies. (shrink)

Environmental Narratives in the Huainanzi and the Anthropocene analyzes the Anthropocene periodization using the Huainanzi, an eastern Eurasian text from the second century BCE. This book argues that the Anthropocene concept inhibits the transformative change needed to address global crises such as climate change and mass extinction.

Tout animal, chaque fois qu'il surmonte une difficulté, éprouve en retour une satisfaction, que son organisme lui procure sous forme de récompense. Rien de plus universel. Mais l'homme est cet animal singulier qui a appris à jouir pour lui-même de son plaisir cognitif. Ce qui n'était qu'un instrument est devenu un but en soi, qui a libéré l'homme de son environnement tout en l'enchaînant à sa propre quête de jouissance. Il en découle une thèse historique aux conséquences capitales. Depuis que, (...) à l'aube de sa préhistoire, l'homme a découvert son aptitude au plaisir, le devenir des civilisations n'a obéi qu'à une seule logique, profondément addictive : l'intensification de ce plaisir. Le processus de très longue durée qui est alors enclenché s'appelle l'anthropocène. Car les sociétés humaines ont toujours avancé dans une même direction, mais elles le faisaient à leur insu : non pas en visant ce progrès de la civilisation qu'idéalisaient les philosophes des Lumières, mais entraînées par la poussée invisible de leur libido cogitandi. Si Ben que, de la révolution néolithique jusqu'à notre mondialisation effrénée, leur course a toujours été une course folle, ignorante de la force qui l'impulsait."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

This article is about a start-up problem in scientific practice. Specifically, it is about the problem of justifying paleontological correlation—the practice of using fossils to establish time relations among fossiliferous rocks. Paleontological correlation was the key to assembling a geological timescale during the nineteenth century and remains an important practice in stratigraphic geology to this day. Yet contrary to philosophical expectations, this practice lacked a robust theoretical justification during the first half of the nineteenth century. This article examines what (...) this lack of justification amounted to, as well as how the method of paleontological correlation was justified in practice. (shrink)

James Geikie's Great Ice Age first presented to the geological public the Pleistocene. modern interpretation of alternating mild and cold periods during the Though it was supported by geological evidence, Geikie's view of the Ice Age was based on a theoretical framework supplied by the climatic physics of James Croll. Mid-nineteenth-century British geologists had encountered great difficulty in making sense out of the varied and complicated glacial deposits, or ‘drift’, and had formulated the ‘iceberg’ theory to account for the apparent (...) chaos of the drift, an explanation which discouraged its stratigraphic study. The reaffirmation of faith in continental glaciation by several Scottish geologists in the 1850s brought with it a belief in an eventful Pleistocene, but it remained difficult to discover the events of Ice Age history from study of the glacial deposits. In 1864 Croll presented a detailed climatic history of the Ice Age deduced from astronomy and physical geography. By 1871 James Geikie was using Croll's scheme of Ice Age history as the basis for his impressive synthesis of Pleistocene data from throughout the world. (shrink)

If the Anthropocene represents a new epoch of thought, it also represents a new form of materiality and historicity for the human as strata and stratigrapher of the geologic record. This collision of human and inhuman histories in the strata is a new formation of subjectivity within a geologic horizon that redefines temporal, material, and spatial orders of the human. I argue that the Anthropocene contains within it a form of Anthropogenesis – a new origin story and ontics for man (...) – that radically rewrites material modes of differentiation and concepts of life, from predominantly biopolitical notions of life toward an understanding of life’s geophysical origination. Here, I use the term Anthropogenesis to suggest that two things explicitly happen in the nomination of the Anthropocene: 1) the production of a mythic Anthropos as geologic world-maker/destroyer of worlds, and 2) a material, evolutionary narrative that re-imagines human origins and endings within a geologic rather than an exclusively biological context. In contrast to the homogeneous geomorphizing of the Anthropocene, I suggest that socializing the strata needs a more nuanced notion of ‘geologic life’ that challenges the construction of the Anthropocene as an undifferentiated social stratification. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Breaking EarthAlexis Rider (bio) and Paul A. Harris (bio)“He takes all that, the strata and the magma and the people and the power, in his imaginary hands. Everything. He holds it. He is not alone. The earth is with him. Then he breaks it.”― N. K. Jemisin, The Fifth SeasonBreaking Earth, a collection of visual and written essays brought together for this special issue of SubStance, is a disruptive (...) engagement with concepts and terms that have become touchstones for the geologic/planetary turn in the inhumanities. The project took initial inspiration in conversations the co-editors had about N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, in which geologic and human power interweave in complex webs among bodies born of chiasmic crossings of Anthro-progeny and Geo-orogeny. Conceived as a companion almanac to Jemisin’s trilogy—though references to that work are intentionally oblique—the volume pursues new ways of reading, and being with, the geos of this planet. In doing so, Breaking Earth seeks to reframe and deepen the discussions, both historical and philosophical, around the relationship between geology and humanity.The notion of the Anthropocene has, for several decades, monopolized said discussions. Since its articulation in the early 2000s, the concept has been equal parts galvanizing and problematic in thinking with the Earth (Crutzen). Proposed by an atmospheric chemist, incorporated (with caveats) into the geologic deep time of the planet by geologists, and taken up with vigor by humanists, social scientists, and artists, the Anthropocene has, for better or worse, broken significant new ground in Earth-oriented thought.The term’s core proposals—that humans are a geologic force and we have entered a wholly new period of Earth history—has compelled scholars to engage with a geologic tradition of mapping and classifying the history of said forces along a temporal scale. This tradition—exemplified in the International Chronostratigraphic Chart (ICC) below (Figure 1)—relies on the translation of messiness and difference into abstracted orderly categories of strata and type. Of course, no geologist would claim that the ICC is a direct representation of the materiality of the rocky Earth we live on, so full of faults, fissures, and unconformities. But as writers, [End Page 3] artists, and activists have made clear, the repositioning of humans-as-strata is far riskier than imposing abstract order on a cliff face: it dangerously flattens out the messiness of human history and difference—obfuscating the uneven histories of extraction and oppression to which the mining of geophysical energies and resources is so clearly bound. The Anthropocene has therefore helped reveal the immense pitfalls of conflating a species with the geologic, and made clear the need for humanists—both within the academy and beyond—to develop a language and method for thinking about the changing Earth. Click for larger view View full resolutionFigure 1.International Chronostratigraphic Chart (ICC), International Commission on Stratigraphy, 2023, www.stratigraphy.org.At the same time, the very act of attempting to identify the Anthropocene within stratigraphic nomenclature has usefully challenged old and brittle binaries. Contemporary rhetoric around how to conceive of change—backed often by disciplinary boundary-keeping—exemplifies such divisions. Take, for example, the grammatical distinction between political, social forces and physical, environmental forcings (Hulme). These seemingly inane suffixes recast agency and allow the natural and social worlds to exist in two separate spheres (albeit ones that overlap via extraction) where human action is more wholly filled with intent. Breaking this distinction via a reconceptualization of geologic agency underpins [End Page 4] what scholars, including Pratik Chakrabarti and Kathryn Yusoff, have been articulating so clearly: rocks have politics. To unpack this carefully and fully, however, requires moving beyond the collapse of anthropos into geos: there is too much texture, history, and action lost in such a sweeping and simple formulation.This collection takes these problematics of the Anthropocene as self-evident: it critically engages with the chronostratigraphic logic that implicitly upholds a view of time, history, and knowledge which operationalizes the extractive carbon capital economies fueled by colonialism and slavery. This assertion bears emphasizing, given the announcement from the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) in the summer of 2023 that the origin of... (shrink)

The main theoretical issues in the study of the history of the Archaean Controversy in Britain, which arose in the first three papers of the present series, are summarized and discussed—in particular the problem of stratigraphical work in rocks where no fossils can be discerned. The ‘Archaean’ geologists showed some leanings towards Neo-Neptunism and this, together with the fact that their work challenged the Murchison/Survey view of British geology, was one of the reasons for the controversy. At a deeper level, (...) however, the question concerned the doctrine of uniformitarianism: Were metamorphic rocks to be found at any part of the stratigraphical column, or were they confined to the earliest period of the Earth's history? The establishment of the concept of Precambrian rocks and a suitable stratotype boundary is essentially a social question that has to be determined within the geological community. Some of the social processes whereby these matters are decided internationally are considered, and it is noted that the best location of the ‘Golden Spike’ for the Precambrian/Cambrian boundary has only just been settled . The paper also explores some nineteenth-century ideas about the nature of metamorphism, and the early conditions of the world. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Queer Coal:Genealogies in/of the BloodKathryn YusoffIntroductionAn inhuman equationA genealogical account of coal ± a solar line of descentSolar -/- plant -/- coal ≤ plant minor/miner ≠ bloodlineFossil fuels are dark and patient and have a history that is in/of the blood. Fossil fuels are pockets of sunshine that have a solar line of descent. Fossil fuels are a chemical “blood knowledge” (Cixous 1991, 103) that coheres at the seam, (...) coal face, plant, and picket line.A genealogical account of coal in the Anthropocene must go in two directions: into the specificities of bodies, sites, and political formations in which coal comes to matter and through inhuman agency and its continuance notwithstanding the human (as if the human, like Bataille has claimed, is a roundabout for energy, a mere diversion of the forces of the cosmos). If the global claim for geologic force in the Anthropocene is realised through the liberation of vast standing stocks of fossil fuels by major powers, then slicing through Anthropocenic monumentality requires a deliberately minor/miner cut, which is made here through underground passages, sexual politics, and queer solidarities to explore the inter-implications of substances and subjects in coal mining; explicitly, mining is considered as an aesthetics, method, and epistemology that elaborates on an inhuman sociality of the blood; it is a sociality whose passages are specifically located within the 1984–85 miners’ strike in Britain. I focus on these minor (Deleuze and Guattari 1983) stories of solidarity and violence amidst the broader landscape of coal as a defining social materiality in political, judicial, and class powers. While Anthropocenic [End Page 203] discourses claim a global instantiation on behalf of humanity, the planet, and the species-being, this blood knowledge of coal can be considered as an instantiation or a fleshy reminder of the geontological forces of black rocks and their inheritances; what René Char called “its reality of earth, its matter-emotion” (Char quoted in Blanchot 1995, 108) in the corporeal impregnation of an incorporeal universe. In these messy personal-political subjectivities that are entangled with fossil fuels, something might be said about how to begin to apprehend the geontological coordinates of the Anthropocene and the possible forms of sociality that the inhuman enacts (and incites) in ways that eschew its universalising claims.In this process of joining coal to its somewhat unexpected sociopolitical formations—in terms of queer and minoritarian support for the British coal miners—I want to say something about a biopolitics that is subtended by geology (and this is why there is/and will be/blood). This is a biopolitics that moves away from the governance of life and death into a consideration of how the geosocial formations of fossil fuels constitute the very possibilities for certain types of social, sexual, political, and labor arrangements. To study the geosocial matrix as it pertains to both power and possibility is not to add the geologic (or inhuman) as a supplement to an already existing biopolitical conceptualization. Rather, it is to register that the geologic is a mode of material expression that is already active within these formations, yet often bracketed out, and its political potential as a dynamic power within socialities, underplayed. Such an understanding of the permeable materiality of fossil fuels might just bear on the reconceptualization of the Anthropocene as an epoch characterized by a differentiated corporeal geology of/in the blood, rather than as a universal stratigraphic trace in some future geologic record.Against the Promethean trust of the Anthropocene, I follow Hélène Cixous’s dream in The Book of Promethea of “writing fire in the fire” (Cixous 1991, 134); an account made in proximity to the desirous intersection of experience. Such a mode of feminist geophilosophy seeks out the form of the underground—the underground as a way of being or a “thing state” (Lispector 2014, 109)—closing the gap between writing and being written. What follows is a fragmented genealogy that begins in the general conditions of inhuman matter and ends up in the specifics of the British coal mining strike in the 1980s. First, some mining methodology and Anthropocene drill sites.Some Drill Sites... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Comparative Critical Perspectives on the AnthropoceneAn IntroductionAdeline Johns-Putra (bio) and Xianmin Shen (bio)Ever since Eugene Stoermer coined the term Anthropocene in the 1980s and Nobel Prize laureate Paul Crutzen identified the present period as the Anthropocene, this ecological and geographical concept has been adopted in other disciplines beyond the realm of science and has taken on particular resonance in the environmental humanities. This is because the advent of the (...) Anthropocene not only connotes a physical phenomenon, that is, a possible new geological epoch in which the damaging effect of the human species on all other species and on our planetary home has become so great as to leave a mark in the planet's fabric. It is also a revelation of human liability and responsibility, in which that stratigraphical scar must be recognized and the global socioeconomic dynamics of exceptionalism and exploitation that it belies reckoned with. This reckoning is one between those with the greatest responsibility for that impact, who are also the ones who will feel that impact least, and those with the least responsibility, who will feel that impact most. Moreover, those vulnerabilities lie with both human and nonhuman individuals: the Anthropocene demands that human-nonhuman as well as intra-human injustices are dealt with, that the ways in which global systems are interlocked with planetary ones are properly understood.Such questions of justice require a critical response, in various senses of the word and its origins. This encompasses a measure of scrutiny and critique; an honest judgment and even criticism of faults and shortcomings; and an awareness of urgency and crisis. With this in mind, and with both planetary and global questions of justice before us, we have [End Page 1] sought with this special issue of Intertexts to bring together analyses of sociocultural representations and discourse in the widest sense (not just literary or other artistic texts, but political events). We asked that these analyses consider how such discourse has been shaped by global workings now taken for granted—the trappings of modernity and the impulses of capitalism—and also to ponder the potential for reshaping those dynamics as part of a collective consciousness.Anthropocene Criticality: The Planetary, the Global, and the WorldWhat kind of Anthropocene criticality would be both an act of recognition of human responsibility and a reckoning across boundaries (whether intra- or interspecies) of agency, power, and vulnerability? How, in other words, do we take full stock of what is signified by anthropos in the term Anthropocene? We invoke here a range of frames for understanding the place of anthropos both as and within the collective that experiences—altogether but not all the same—the Anthropocene. We call these the "planetary," the "global," and the "world."1 We are not the first to distinguish between these terms and to employ them as devices for (re)framing and (re)visualizing the web of human-nonhuman as well as human-human relationships. In 1999, Gayatri Spivak spoke of the "imperative to re-imagine the planet" and, in this talk and updates of it in 2012 and 2014, outlined the need to contemplate "planetarity" instead of "globalism" (An Aesthetic Education, 335–50). In the fields of comparative literature and world literature, debates have occurred over what Pheng Cheah suggests is the encroachment of ideas of "globalization" on to notions of "worldliness" (28), with the question complicated more recently by what Sarah Nuttall sees as the possibility for a "planetary literature" (924–41). What we offer here adopts and adapts these conversations, and as we define and deploy our terms below we will indicate how these overlap.Under the rubric of the "planetary" we place Anthropocene discussions of how to truly comprehend the human as species and as geological agent, that is, both as one species of many and as a species that has occupied an outsized positionality alongside any other species (even [End Page 2] the idea of an "alpha species" seems hardly to do justice to the magnitude of anthropogenic effect on every inch of the biospheric fabric, from the deepest oceans to the upper levels of atmosphere, lasting for millennia). This is not merely about sentimental catch-phrasing... (shrink)

The Anthropocene debates are rooted in epistemological differences. Geologists seek temporal markers of spatially even anthropogenic impact. Thus, they favor geologic data that fit this category. Humanists and social scientists, on the other hand, tend to focus on the negative effects of spatial unevenness. Without linking the Anthropocene’s temporal and spatial components, the official designation, ultimately determined by geologists, will be a futile exercise that will not make good on the Anthropocene Working Group’s intention for it to be useful for (...) wider segments of society. However, if the Anthropocene is divided into an Early, Middle, and Late Anthropocene, each defined by geologic evidence, the uneven spatial distributions of anthropogenic damage can be traced to specific events in human history, thus actualizing the predictive value of geology. Further, this diachronic scheme, unlike the synchronic ones thus far proposed, makes more legible two fundamental dynamics between human and natural trajectories: the intensification of global inequity coterminous with the intensification of natural damage; and humanity’s ever more audacious attempts to control the environment. This ethos, wielded as the prime justification for taking over that which belonged to cultures not espousing it, has resulted in anthropogenic damage disproportionately affecting the most economically and historically vulnerable peoples. However, their alternative modes of coping with the damages—an ineluctable responsiveness to, rather than control over, environment—enables them to survive. As such, they could lead the way through the Anthropocene, modeling adaptation and mitigation strategies, and obviating the global North’s unsound hope for a technological solution. Three metropolitan architects, Rem Koolhaas, David Adjaye, and V. Mitch McEwen, look to global Southern urbanisms––improvisational, creative, minimalist praxes grounded in indigenous lifeways––for alternate modes of inhabiting anthropocenic modernity. Likewise, New Zealand’s government has materially and ethically mitigated its legacy of settler colonialism by combining Western scientific data with indigenous knowledge to formulate more adaptive, responsive, integrative approaches to environment. By expanding the data beyond the stratigraphic, coordinated interdisciplinary research can measure variegated effects of––and responses to––the Anthropocene, thus better equipping humanity to adapt to and/or mitigate climate change and to eschew unsustainable practices. (shrink)

Die stratigraphischen Einheiten, durch welche heute die Erdgeschichte untergliedert wird, haben eine unterschiedliche und zum Teil recht komplexe Entstehungsgeschichte, wie hier am Beispiel des Keupers gezeigt werden soll. Das Wort ‘Keuper’ geht auf einen volkstümlichen Namen für bunte Tongesteine im Raum Coburg zurück. In den geologischen Sprachgebrauch wird es 1822 durch Leopold von Buch eingeführt, der es noch als Gesteinsnamen verwendet und die entsprechenden Schichten dem Buntsandstein zuweist. Die richtige Einstufung dieser Schichten über dem Muschelkalk gelang erstmals Ludwig Hausmann und (...) Peter Merian um 1820. Doch erst nachdem in den nachfolgenden Jahren deren Ergebnisse durch die Arbeit etlicher anderer Forscher bestätigt wurden, fand die neue, bis dahin unbenannte Formation aus bunten Mergeln und Sandsteinen breite Anerkennung. Als stratigraphischer Begriff, der auch Sandsteine und Gips umfaßt, wird die Bezeichnung Keuper erstmals von Friedrich Hoffmann im Jahre 1823 verwendet und von Christian Keferstein 1824 in die Literatur eingeführt. Eine wichtige Rolle spielten die Arbeit an den ersten geologischen Übersichtskarten Deutschlands und die Aufnahme der neuen Formation in die erste internationale Formationstabelle durch Keferstein . Mit der Integration des Keupers in die neue Formation ‘Trias’ durch Friedrich August von Alberti 1834 bekommt diese Einheit ihren seither festen Platz in der Stratigraphie.Geologic time is commonly subdivided by a set of stratigraphic terms, which all have their individual and sometimes complex histories. ‘Keuper’, now used as a stratigraphical term for the Upper Triassic, originated from a popular rock name of the Coburg area in southern Germany. The term ‘Keuper’, though still as a rock name, was first introduced into geological usage by Leopold von Buch in 1822, when he designated varicoloured marls and claystones, of what he thought to be Bunter Sandstein, as ‘Keuper’. In a stratigraphical sense, the term ‘Keuper-Formation’ was coined by Friedrich Hoffmann in 1823, who was the first to include sandstones and gypsum rocks with this notion. A year later it was introduced into the literature by Christian Keferstein. At this time, the existence of a distinct formation between Muschelkalk and Lias was already accepted by a number of geologists, though it had not yet been named. This ‘new’ formation has formerly been confused with Buntsandstein and even Carboniferous deposits by various authors until it was set into its right position by Ludwig Hausmann and Peter Merian in 1820. In the following years, the work of several geologists confirmed their results and led to general acceptance of the Keuper Formation as a separate entity. An important impetus came from the compilation of the first small-scale geological maps of Germany edited by Keferstein in the early 1820s, and from his international stratigraphical table , which already included the ‘Keuper-Formation’ as an integral part. In 1834, Friedrich August von Alberti included the ‘Keuper’ as part of the new Formation ‘Trias’ and thus defined its place in modern stratigraphy. (shrink)

The Anthropocene Working Group of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy, of the International Commission on Stratigraphy, has been active since 2009. Its primary role is to consider the Anthropocene as a potential formal addition to the Geological Time Scale. Unusual in composition because many members work in disciplines other than stratigraphic geology —the Anthropocene incorporates geological, historical, and instrumental records— it initially needed to establish whether the Anthropocene could be the basis of a valid chronostratigraphic unit. That task achieved, (...) work then focused on gathering evidence from 12 sections in different geological settings around the world, to establish which of these might be proposed as a Global boundary Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP, or ‘golden spike’) to define the Anthropocene formally. The Group aims to submit a formal proposal on this in 2023. (shrink)

The figure of Antonio Stoppani (1824–91), an Italian priest, geologist and patriot, has re-emerged in the last decade thanks to discussions gravitating around the ‘Anthropocene’ – a term used to designate a proposed geological time unit defined and characterized by the mark left by anthropogenic activities on geological records. Among these discussions, Stoppani is often considered a precursor for popularizing the term ‘Anthropozoic’, which he used to describe and characterize the latest ‘era’ of Earth's geological time. His writings, largely unknown (...) to an international audience before the ‘Anthropocene saga’, have been particularly in the spotlight after Valeria Federighi translated excerpts of his main geological work, Corso di Geologia, originally published in three volumes between 1871 and 1873. In the first edition of Corso di Geologia, namely Note ad un Corso Annual di Geologia, or simply Note, published between 1865 and 1870, Stoppani characterized the Anthropozoic in stratigraphic terms. In particular, Chapter 15 of the second volume of Note (1867) represents the first stratigraphic characterization that the author provides of the Anthropozoic. Our contribution here brings, for the first time, a translation of Chapter 15 to a broader international audience, accompanied by a critical commentary elucidating the broader social, political, religious and scientific context wherein the notion of Anthropozoic emerged in Stoppani's writings. The text of the original document and its translation can be found in the supplementary material tab at https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087422000590. (shrink)

An account is given of early geological researches in the Malverns, the Church Stretton area, and the Wrekin. The reconnaissance work of Murchison suggested that each of these areas had Silurian sediments, intruded by igneous rocks . The early Survey maps were compiled on this theoretical basis, with the result that the Silurian sediments were regarded as the oldest rocks in Shropshire and the Malverns. Local geologists, working in the three areas, and with sufficient time to study the exposures in (...) detail, began to develop the idea of ‘islands’ of Precambrian rock , having younger sediments deposited thereon. This Archaean model was taken up and actively developed, and the stratigraphical details worked out, with the island model being gradually modified. Debates were stronger between members of the ‘Archaean’ fraternity than with the Survey. Traces of trilobite remains were found by Callaway at Comley, near Caer Caradoc, and were identified by Lapworth as Olenellus, enabling the underlying Wrekin Quartzite to be established as the base of the Cambrian, in agreement with ideas developed in North America and Scandinavia. Arguments are detailed concerning the relative ages of the ‘Uriconian’ and ‘Longmyndian’ rocks, and their constituent units. Both were agreed to be Precambrian, but the evidence in terms of field mapping, in relation to the Wrekin Quartzite, is not complete. The problems of stratigraphical work in unfossiliferous rocks are displayed, and also the efforts to achieve correlations with areas such as Pembrokeshire and Anglesey are described. Though consensus has been reached on the Precambrian status of the Malvernian, Uriconian and Longmyndian rocks, radiometric age determinations and other evidence throw doubt on some aspects of the consensus, and research continues. (shrink)

Since its origin in 15th century European imperialism, the globe has been an object of conquest involving regimes of territorial exclusion and various forms of land abstraction now known as nationalism, colonialism, capitalism, and industrialism. Coming to think like the Earth system and generating politics grounded in it could pose a welcome disruption of these systematically controlling orders only if such planetary thinking is grounded in a nondominating orientation. We propose that this grounding be geological wonder, the open consideration of (...) Earth as a system exceeding human narcissism. Following Dipesh Chakrabarty's distinction between the globe and the planet, we articulate planetarism in an emerging cosmology decentering human life while emphasizing human limits. Globality, by contrast, is a modern, narcissistic formation that geological wonder unsettles. We draw on Martha C. Nussbaum's politics of wonder to articulate a postglobal, disruptive virtue. (shrink)

The view that religious orthodoxy stifled geological progress has had many distinguished exponents, one of the earliest being Georges Cuvier. To Cuvier, however, efforts to combine Genesis with geology ended before the middle of the eighteenth century, and opened the way not for progress but for wild speculation. We may admire the genius of Leibniz and Buffon, he declared, but this should not lead us to confuse system-building with geology as ‘une science positive’. While Cuvier's younger contemporary, Charles Lyell, agreed (...) that ‘extravagant systems’ had retarded progress, he insisted that ‘scriptural authority’ had had a similar effect until late in the eighteenth century. (shrink)

Hutton made a geological collection to illustrate his theory of the Earth, and frequently cited phenomena displayed by specimens in it to support his arguments. His followers also considered that the evidence provided by the collection would help to establish his views. After Hutton's death it was given to the Royal Society of Edinburgh which, however, under the terms of its charter, was obliged to lodge it in the Natural History Museum of the University. The Museum's curator, the Wernerian, Robert (...) Jameson, thought the collection of little account, and neither displayed it nor kept it together. By the mid-1830s most of it had been dispersed or thrown away, and nothing is known of it since. The list of specimens compiled by its first trustees has also disappeared. By piecing together information in Hutton's writings and letters, and in those of his friends, we learn something about the contents of the collection and how it was formed, and also add to our knowledge of his acquaintance. The final section of the article brings together all Hutton's descriptions of his rocks and minerals and, in doing so, demonstrates the weight of proof that he rested on careful visual analysis of hand specimens. (shrink)

In this article we investigate whether long-term radioactive waste management by means of geological disposal can be understood as a social experiment. Geological disposal is a rather particular technology in the way it deals with the analytical and ethical complexities implied by the idea of technological innovation as social experimentation, because it is presented as a technology that ultimately functions without human involvement. We argue that, even when the long term function of the ‘social’ is foreseen to be restricted to (...) safeguarding the functioning of the ‘technical’, geological disposal is still a social experiment. In order to better understand this argument and explore how it could be addressed, we elaborate the idea of social experimentation with the notion of co-production and the analytical tools of delegation, prescription and network as developed by actor-network theory. In doing so we emphasize that geological disposal inherently involves relations between surface and subsurface, between humans and nonhumans, between the social, material and natural realm, and that these relations require recognition and further elaboration. In other words, we argue that geological disposal concurrently is a social and a technical experiment, or better, a long-term socio-technical experiment. We end with proposing the idea of ‘actor-networking’ as a sensitizing concept for future research into what geological disposal as a socio-technical experiment could look like. (shrink)

In this age of interdisciplinary interaction, we probably owe one another disclosures of our qualifications for commenting on each other’s profession. And you might well wonder why a philosopher would be asked to address this distinguished society of professiona l geologists. So, let me give what information I can about my qualifications to talk this evening about, of all things, the ethics of water geology.

My aim in this essay is to lead the reader through the complexity of Hegel’s philosophical understanding of organic nature by highlighting its distinctive theoretical features and by examining these historically, both against the background of the approaches, achievements and trends of the empirical sciences of his time and in light of their scholarly reception.1 First, I focuss on Hegel’s definition of the ‘universal form’ of life, pointing to what the connection is, in his philosophy of nature, between the structure (...) of conceptual and living processes in the path to the individualization of matter. Second, since Hegel calls animal life “the truth of organics,” 2 I shall try to explain how in the philosophy of nature the Idea of life comes to differentiate itself into certain essential characteristics of immediate, finite and individual animals, passing through the stages of geological nature and vegetable organisms. (shrink)

The 1850s through early 60s was a transformative period for nascent studies of the remote human past in Britain, across many disciplines. Naturalists and scholars with Egyptological knowledge fashioned themselves as authorities to contend with this divisive topic. In a characteristic case of long-distance fieldwork, British geologist Leonard Horner employed Turkish-born, English-educated, Cairo-based engineer Joseph Hekekyan to measure Nile silt deposits around pharaonic monuments in Egypt to address the chronological gap between the earliest historical and latest geological time. Their conclusion (...) in 1858 that humans had existed in Egypt for exactly 13,371 years was the earliest attempt to apply geological stratigraphy to absolute human dates. The geochronology was particularly threatening to biblical orthodoxy, and the work raised private and public concerns about chronological expertise and methodology, scriptural and scientific authority, and the credibility of Egyptian informants. This essay traces these geo-archaeological investigations; including the movement of paper records, Hekekyan’s role as a go-between, and the publication’s reception in Britain. The diverse reactions to the Egyptian research reveal competing ways of knowing the prehistoric past and highlights mid-Victorian attempts to reshape the porous boundaries between scholarly studies of human antiquity. (shrink)

Abstract:This essay argues for lyric as an anthropomorphic pattern of thought which shapes our readings of poetry and Earth. Theorizing what I call "lyric geology," the essay foregrounds two critical conjunctions: (1) the historical co-emergence of the normative lyric subject and the human species as geologic agent; and (2) the anthropomorphic genealogy of literary criticism called "lyricization" as it dovetails with Sylvia Wynter's account of the "over-representation" of colonial man as "the human itself." Reading across a seemingly eclectic archive—Charles Lyell, (...) Robert Knox, Richard Owen, and a maroon known in the Mauritian imperial archive as Simon—I show how the colonial anthropos as self-consciously theorized in and across the nineteenth century materially effectuates on a planetary scale the very racialized anthropomorphosis fallaciously naturalized as lyric. So understood, man's generic "over-representation" and lyric are co-constitutive projects. Together, they proliferate a human fantasy whose flat speciesism at once reproduces and effaces white supremacist violence and colonial dispossession. (shrink)

Vertebrate paleontology was not readily incorporated into interdisciplinary activities at the University of Chicago. During the university’s first forty years serious disputes arose over the subject’s parameters and departmental affiliation. Only after World War II did a cooperative, interdisciplinary program emerge. Changes in biology and geology influenced that development, but even more important were local research and educational initiatives that provided the impetus and resources to create an innovative program.

This article argues for the relevance of mythical signification in our geological epoch. More than this, it contends that we need to revise our assumptions about media and communication systems in order to grasp the importance of myth in an era where the future of human and nonhuman life on the Earth is entirely uncertain. To make this case, I focus on the growing consensus in the sciences and theoretical humanities that mythical stories about geological and planetary processes cannot simply (...) be disqualified or disregarded because they do not conform to the norms of modern scientific epistemology. Whether these stories come to us from pre-modern civilizations and attempt to give... (shrink)

Abstract:This article examines how two American theorists, Gayle Rubin and Judith Butler, deploy geologic language during the 1990s moment when their feminist careers morphed into queer careers. I argue that the precise composition of this institutional shift – methodological, material, and epistemological – is both reflected and refracted in the figure of the rock. A symbol that connotes fixity in short time spans, but dynamism in long ones, the rock oscillates between facticity and dissolution, mirroring shifting notions of sex and (...) gender in the 1990s. In her retrospective account of the emergence of queer theory, Rubin’s use of a fossil metaphor ushers the field toward a non-reproductive and non-procreative genealogy, illuminating a different temporal texture to such seemingly fixed structures as sex, gender, and sexuality. Butler’s inherited geologic language conceives of gender as the process of sedimentation that resists the biological determinism of identity-based feminist politics. Examining the rock provides crucial readings of Butler’s materiality, one that oscillates between fixed being and dynamic becoming, stability and change, surface signification and depth excavation. (shrink)

In 2012, the Geological Time Scale, which sets the temporal framework for studying the timing and tempo of all major geological, biological, and climatic events in Earth’s history, had one-quarter of its boundaries moved in a widespread revision of radiometric dates. The philosophy of metrology helps us understand this episode, and it, in turn, elucidates the notions of calibration, coherence, and consilience. I argue that coherence testing is a distinct activity preceding calibration and consilience, and I highlight the value of (...) discordant evidence and trade-offs scientists face in calibration. The iterative nature of calibration, moreover, raises the problem of legacy data. (shrink)