{"id":7594,"date":"2019-11-28T16:34:06","date_gmt":"2019-11-28T16:34:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/?p=7594"},"modified":"2019-11-29T08:03:46","modified_gmt":"2019-11-29T08:03:46","slug":"anthropocene-capitalocene-plantationocene-chthulucene","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/2019\/11\/28\/anthropocene-capitalocene-plantationocene-chthulucene\/","title":{"rendered":"Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I've been reading Donna Haraway's Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin. \u00a0This was published in 2015 in Environmental Humanities<\/a>, vol. 6, \u00a0pp. 159-165<\/p>\n

This is how it begins:<\/p>\n

\"There is no question that anthropogenic processes have had planetary effects, in inter\/intraaction\u00a0with other processes and species, for as long as our species can be identified (a few tens\u00a0of thousand years); and agriculture has been huge (a few thousand years). \u00a0Of course, from the\u00a0start the greatest planetary terraformers (and reformers) of all have been and still are bacteria\u00a0and their kin, also in inter\/intra-action of myriad kinds (including with people and their\u00a0practices, technological and otherwise). \u00a0The spread of seed-dispersing plants millions of years\u00a0before human agriculture was a planet-changing development, and so were many other\u00a0revolutionary evolutionary ecological developmental historical events. \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

People joined the bumptious fray early and dynamically, even before they\/we were\u00a0critters who were later named Homo sapiens. \u00a0But I think the issues about naming relevant to\u00a0the Anthropocene, Plantationocene, or Capitalocene have to do with scale, rate\/speed,\u00a0synchronicity, and complexity. \u00a0The constant question when considering systemic phenomena\u00a0has to be, when do changes in degree become changes in kind, and what are the effects of\u00a0bioculturally, biotechnically, biopolitically, historically situated people (not Man) relative to,\u00a0and combined with, the effects of other species assemblages and other biotic\/abiotic forces? \u00a0No species, not even our own arrogant one pretending to be good individuals in so-called\u00a0modern Western scripts, acts alone; assemblages of organic species and of abiotic actors make\u00a0history, the evolutionary kind and the other kinds too.<\/em> ...\"<\/p>\n

She remains a challenging writer, but the essay has some fine lines and phrases in it: \"cheap nature is at an end\" \u00a0\"feral biologies\" \u00a0\"make kin not babies\"<\/p>\n

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At the end of the passage I quoted, Haraway asks: \"Is there an inflection point of consequence that changes the name of the \u201cgame\u201d of life on earth for everybody and everything?\" \u00a0In response, she quotes\u00a0Anna Tsing who suggests that the inflection point\u00a0between the Holocene and the Anthropocene might be the wiping out of most of the refugia\u00a0[1]\u00a0<\/strong>from which diverse species assemblages (with or without people) can be reconstituted. \u00a0Haraway says that \"Anna Tsing [2]\u00a0<\/strong>argues that the Holocene was the long period when refugia, places of refuge,\u00a0still existed, even abounded, to sustain reworlding in rich cultural and biological diversity\" and argues that\u00a0the Anthropocene is more\u00a0a boundary event than an epoch (like the K-Pg boundary between the Cretaceous and the\u00a0Paleogene). \u00a0She adds that the Anthropocene marks severe discontinuities and what comes after will not be like\u00a0what came before, but our job is to make the Anthropocene as short\/thin as possible and to\u00a0cultivate with each other in every way imaginable epochs to come that can replenish refuge. \u00a0She then explores a new name for all this, such as\u00a0Chthulucene which may or not catch on [3]<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

I wonder if making kin not babies will.<\/p>\n

...............................<\/p>\n

[1]<\/strong> This is Merriam Webster:\u00a0an area of relatively unaltered climate that is inhabited by plants and animals during a period of continental climatic change (such as a glaciation) and remains as a center of relict forms from which a new dispersion and speciation may take place after climatic readjustment<\/p>\n

[2]\u00a0<\/strong>Tsing, Anna. \u201cFeral Biologies.\u201d Paper for Anthropological Visions of Sustainable Futures, University\u00a0College London, February 2015<\/p>\n

[3]\u00a0<\/strong>It is not yet in Merriam Webster.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I've been reading Donna Haraway's Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin. \u00a0This was published in 2015 in Environmental Humanities, vol. 6, \u00a0pp. 159-165 This is how it begins: \"There is no question that anthropogenic processes have had planetary effects, in...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7594","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","category-news-and-updates"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7594","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7594"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7594\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7594"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7594"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7594"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}