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How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Term Anthropocene

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 June 2014

Timothy Morton
Timothy Morton*
Affiliation:
Rice University
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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.

Keywords

AgrilogisticsAnthropocenecorrelationismecologyglobal warminghyperobjectsKant
Type
Forum on the Anthropocene
Information
Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 1 , Issue 2 , September 2014 , pp. 257 - 264
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2014 

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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.

References

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

2 Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House, 1994)Google Scholar, 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.

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

6 Morton, Timothy, Dark Ecology (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015)Google Scholar.

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

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

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

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, 160.

12 Derrida, Jacques, “Hostipitality,” Angelaki, trans. Barry Stocker with Forbes Matlock, 5.3 (December 2000): 3–18Google Scholar; Morton, Timothy, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 14–15Google Scholar, 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; 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; 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, 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, my paraphrase.

18 Oxford English Dictionary, weird, adj. 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.