Anthropocene: Epoch of Erasure

“This is now our planet, run by humankind for humankind”^[1]

By Dacia Price

In order to give a thing a name agreement must be reached on the terms for the thing itself; which is an easy task when the thing which requires naming is, say, a piece of fruit, but becomes much harder when that thing is less tangible; when the thing we want to name is all around us, stretching as far as we can see in every direction. Perhaps we could name it now but there is time to consider as well. When is now? And how does it relate to the nows that came before and to those which will most certainly come after? If now is now, what was then? The problem, as Professor Oak Taylor put it, is “the impossibility of seeing the ocean when one is stuck inside it” and yet that is exactly what we are doing in naming the Anthropocene: we are trying to define a thing from the inside. Of course, the naming of anything is a uniquely human practice and so it is not surprising that humanity would choose to name an era after themselves -- the Human Epoch -- inspired by the story of human activity on the earth itself.

If we are to look at a rock wall it is easy to see geological time played out like chapters in a novel in bands of contrasting colors, the type and depth of sedimentary material reveal the story hidden inside. We can point to these bands and say, “there, a thing happened” and understand that that “thing” indicates the beginning or end of a chapter -- an age or epoch -- of earth’s history. And yet, it is equally possible to read changes in these chapters through an absence of “things.” We understand that the age of the Dinosaurs -- the chapter in which they are found -- ended not with the appearance of new fossils, but through an absence of those which had been present. Humanity calls this moment The Great Extinction; a catastrophic event that caused the mass and immediate disappearance of nearly 95% of all species from the fossil record, its band on the rock wall is conspicuously empty and marks a chapter -- or epoch -- that is new and different from the one before. In this band life has been erased.

The Great Extinction does not exist in isolation. There have been five mass extinction events in Earth’s history, each identifiable in the rock wall by the same absence of fossils, a distinct band that separates one epoch from the next. So as we consider the thing which we are naming after ourselves, we must also consider its boundaries using the same terms of erasure or abundance. When our rock wall is examined, what band will they point to as our Anthropocene? And what might it say about the age of humanity?

Where We Draw the Line

The Orbis Spike

Beginning the Anthropocene with the birth of the modern world tells a story of a… new geological epoch built from slavery and colonialism… The human epoch is a story of domination^[2] 

According to Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin, authors of The Human Planet, sometime toward the end of the 20th century scientists began to notice fundamental changes to the world around them. These changes seemed indicative of a permanent shift in the global ecosystem created either directly or indirectly by human activity. Or, to extend Oak Taylor’s metaphor, they began to notice the ocean.

Why use a metaphor though, when we can rely on science for explanation? Because humans are narrative creatures; we can’t help but construct stories, whether they’re spoken, written, performed, or depicted. Every culture, regardless of location or technological advancement, creates stories as a way to explain something complicated, to pass on historical information, or to help imagine a future that is different from the present. Describing the Anthropocene as an ocean and humanity as adrift in its center aligns with these storytelling traditions. It allows us to frame our understanding in a way that feels both personal and immediate.

But before we can describe the ocean, we must first find out where it began, and here too we’ll rely on narrative to express its importance. The story of the Orbis Spike according to Lewis and Maslin is describe like this:

Following Columbus’ 1492 arrival, approximately 50 million people in the Americas perished… removing billions of tonnes of carbon out of the atmosphere and into… trees. This is shown as a dip in levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, beginning in 1520… with the lowest point being at 1610… (which has become) known as the Orbis Spike.”^[3] 

The Orbis Spike itself -- that dip in carbon dioxide -- is the band in the rock wall that indicates the new Anthropocene chapter but without the narrative of colonialism in the Americas; the movement of diseases and the history of wars and famine, understanding the erasure of those 50 million lives as represented by the Orbis Spike, would be impossible.

Our examination of the Anthropocene as an epoch of erasure will rely on similar contextualization of the human narrative in order to understand conspicuous absences in the rock wall of geological time. Inspired by the metaphor so often used in storytelling to convey complicated ideas, histories, and imagined futures, our examination will be structured around traditional narrative conflicts, beginning with Human versus Human.  

Human v Human

Erasing the Human Other

^[4]

The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.^[5]

The erasure of 50 million indigenous lives as the event that  signals the beginning of our Anthropocene chapter seems appropriate when we consider humanity’s lengthy history of othering those who differ from the dominant culture. That 400 years after the Orbis Spike humanity continues to confront its history of colonialism and inequality speaks volumes to the depth of its impact.

Joseph Conrad’s canonical novel Heart of Darkness offers a glimpse into this legacy during the moment of its unfolding, depicting the atrocities in the Belgium conquest of the Congo, despite the abolishment of slavery and the European belief in enlightenment. Conrad describes an enslaved and brutalized Congolese people using a narrative voice that perpetuates the racist and dehumanizing belief system which encouraged this brutal and dehumanizing behavior. While his narrative is polarizing to modern readers, the work remains representative of an ideology of domination that was widely held at the time; the belief that one race of people is superior to another and that this superiority entitles one to more of earth’s resources and subsequent wealth.

Ursula le Guin re-imagines Conrad’s Congo in her futuristic novel The Word for World is Forest. Her narrative centers around a future in which empire building now extends beyond the planet Earth using the same patterns of dominance over resources and minoritized populations. Le Guin seems to suggest that our need to dominate through usurpation is a staple feature of humanity, and will therefore evolve alongside our technology as we progress towards her imagined future, rather than vanish. The natural way in which she portrays a human colony charged with resource extraction othering a new indiginous alien race of Athsheans, offers many features familiar to readers of Conrad: enslavement, violence, and subjugation.

You know the … (Althsheans) you’re studying are going to get plowed under, and probably wiped out. It’s the way things are. It’s human nature, and you must know you can’t change that.^[6] 

We can see in both these narratives a conflict between dominant and minoritized cultures in their pursuit of land and resources, but also present is the domination of man over woman. La Guin writes, “... I saw a woman… she lay down in the path … to ask for life, and he stepped on her back and broke her spine, and then kicked her aside as if she was a dead snake.”^[7] This multilayered supremacy over groups of people, then again over women, makes the plight of women compounded: an underscoring of the intersectionality present for marginalized women everywhere.  

Women

Erasing Our Future

^[8]

Some extinctions began this way, first the females disappear, vanish with their wombs full.^[9] 

It was in Mayra Montero’s novel, In the Palm of Darkness where I was first able to see the Anthropocene as an epoch of erasure, though my epiphany didn’t come as a result of an obvious depiction of brutality in the way of Conrad and le Guin. It came instead, from the slow, everyday violence found around the novel’s edges, “That’s a defect of mine” Montero’s narrator Thierry writes, “when people tell me something: I always keep track of the ones in the background, the ones who disappear for no reason, the forgotten ones.”^[10] In this novel I felt as though I was also Thierry, taking note of the women who vanished, the ones who were beaten and raped, the ones claimed by the novel’s men then left behind to die. None of their stories were part of the novel’s narrative of frog extinction, and yet it is through their voicelessness that I was able to understand its significance in the context of Athropocenic erasure.

All species -- plant, animal, and human -- depend on sexual reproduction as a means to propagate, and sexual reproduction requires both a male and a female. If the females in a species are in decline; if they are beaten and abused, neglected and starved, if they are infected with disease and removed from the places they call home, if they are poisoned and abandoned, there will be fewer offspring born and a population will decline. If this is done to enough females a species’ population will be beyond a place of renewal, and extinction is guaranteed.

Although Montero’s novel uses a frog as an example for this gradual extinction, the human equivalent can be seen throughout her narrative, threaded in between setting and protagonist backstory, “... thirty-two corpse were found… seven… were women, and two of them were pregnant”^[11] (about a cache of corpses on the mountain where the last frog lives) “when a woman is a pig she always pulls the man down with her”^[12] (speaking about a woman trafficked and held as prisoner by one of the white male characters) “sooner or later a woman is grief”^[13] (about the burden a woman is to a man, when he is no longer interested in her sexually.) Individually, these quotes represent single points of violence or subjugation against characters unimportant to the novel’s protagonists, but when examined together they paint a picture of the same gradual extinction of the novel’s human women as that of its frog.  

There’s a beautiful juxtaposition of plant and animal that really underscores this threaded human metaphor for the erasure of women, found in a conversation between the novel’s two biologists, “I’m looking for the Pereskia quisqueyana… that’s a cactus, there are only three or four left in the whole world, all of them male. We need a female specimen” and then, “Eleutherodactylus sanguineus… it’s a purple frog, not many of them left, and if there are any they’re probably all male.”^[14] 

Montero’s characters understand that it’s the males in a species that survive, but it’s the females that ensure the survivability of a population.

Human v Nature

Erasing the Living World

^[15]

You want to know where the frogs go, I cannot say, sir, but let me ask you a question: Where did our fish go? Almost all of them left this sea, and in the forest the wild pigs disappeared, and the migratory ducks, and even the iguanas for eating, they went too. Just take a look at what’s left of humans, take a careful look: You can see the bones pushing out under their skins as if they wanted to escape, to leave behind that wear flesh where they are so battered, to go into hiding somewhere.^[16]

In David Attenborough’s A Life on Our Planet, he says:

Our imprint is now truly global… Our blind assault on the planet has finally come to alter the very fundamentals of the living world. We have overfished 30% of fish stocks to critical levels. We cut down over 15 billion trees each year. By damming, polluting, and over-extracting rivers and lakes, we’ve reduced the size of freshwater populations by over 80%. We’re replacing the wild with the tame. Half of the fertile land on earth is now farmland. 70% of the mass of birds on this planet are domestic birds. The vast majority, chickens. We account for over one-third of the weight of mammals on earth. A further 60% are the animals we raise to eat. The rest, from mice to whales, make up just 4%. This is now our planet, run by humankind for humankind. There is little left for the rest of the living world.^[17]

The erasure of the natural world and the biological life within it is perhaps the most obvious way in which humanity has altered the planet and will likely also be the absence most identifiable in our Anthropocene band on the rock wall of the future. It has been suggested that the era of humanity is also the era of the chicken, because of the volume of domesticated birds used to feed an ever expanding human population. Yet even in a statement of abundance like this, there is erasure. These fossilized chickens can only exist in the space left behind by the absence of something else.

Helon Habila’s novel, Oil on Water applies narrative to this environmental catastrophe by setting his story in the oil rich Niger Delta, where extraction is done by foreign corporations at the exploitation of indigenous land and populations. His novel’s flashpoints include the legacy of colonialism as well as its future, the subjugation of women, and the decimation of an entire ecosystem for financial gain: “I imagined huge rising cliffs of smoke and giant escarpments of orange flame rising into the atmosphere, and thousands of gallons of oil floating on the water, the weight of the oil tight like a hangman’s noose around the neck of whatever life-form lay underneath.”^[18]

Habila’s is a modern adaptation of Conrad, in which it’s not only people who are violated, but the land itself, “... the ever-present pipelines crisscrossing the landscape, sometimes like tree roots surfacing far away from the parent tree, sometimes like diseased veins on the back of an old shriveled hand, and sometimes in squiggles like ominous writing on the wall.”^[19] In Habila’s novel, separating the human from the landscape is impossible; one is part of the other and this entwining acts as both a reminder of our own animal origins, and the destiny of erasure we’ve set into motion through the extraction and destruction of the world in which we live.

Attenborough says, “we are facing nothing less than the collapse of the living world. The very thing we rely upon for every element of the lives we lead. No one wants this to happen. None of us can afford for it to happen.”^[20] And yet it continues to happen, in the world around us as well as the novels we write.

Human v Ourselves

Erasing Morality

^[21]

If I don’t have real answers, it is because we still don’t know what questions to ask. Our instruments are useless, our methodology broken, our motivations selfish.^[22]

With the exception of small groups of indigenous or intentionally altruistic societies, it can be argued that modern humanity consists of consumers and exploiters; from raw materials to inexpensive goods, to land and its animals, to other humans, we are a population that always demands more without much regard to where that more comes from. There is a trash pile afload in the Pacific Ocean that is 1.6 billion square kilometers, the last Northern White Rhino is under armed guard 24 hours a day because the demand for its horn is greater than the value of its life, indigenous women continue to disappear in North America without investigation, and over 600,000 women and girls are trafficked every year worldwide. Each of these individual acts requires a suspension of, or disregard to morality, they demand we compartmentalize, that we shift responsibility to something or someone else.

 ...if they weren’t burning piles of trash, they burned old furniture or tires, sometimes the bodies of dead animals were set on fire. That afternoon it was a burro, and I had the strange impression that the animal was moving its legs while it burned. I stopped to watch, a boy standing beside me laughed..^[23]

This moral erasure may not be visible on our Anthropocene wall, but it is a necessary component to all other erasures, and seems to be entangled with the idea of being human, “The fact is, the only time a man is really and entirely a man is when he’s just had a woman or just killed another man.”^[24] Each of the narratives discussed contains a moment of reflection, a moment when the protagonist becomes aware of their willingness to erase their own morality. Above, le Guin’s character of Davidson acts as the antithesis of the novel’s moral lesson, Habila’s Theirry acts as the embodiment of moral suspension, and Conrad’s character of Marlow reflects that “...the conquest of the earth… is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.”  As each of these characters is faced with a moral, they each -- in various ways --  willingly erase this morality in order to avoid responsibility or demand change.

Nature v Human

Erasing Humanity

^[25]

It is the nature of existence. A thing is created, it blooms for a while if it is capable of blooming, then it ceases to be.^[26]

Nature, in the Anthropocene, is a character equal to humanity, and although we’ve discussed the epoch so far only in human terms, it’s important to recognize Nature’s dominance over the earth in geological time. We began this investigation by discussing mass extinction events in which most of biological life is erased and yet in each of these cases new life always emerges. It is a cycle of growth, destruction, and renewal that has been playing out for almost the entirety of earth’s existence. So we must assume this cycle will continue; that no matter how much of the biosphere is erased by human activity, something else will eventually take its place -- including humanity itself.

This last chapter (the Anthropocene)... may have given the impression that somehow man is the ultimate triumph of evolution, that all these millions of years of development have had no purpose other than to put him on earth. There is no scientific evidence whatsoever to support such a view and no reason to suppose that our stay here will be any more permanent than that of the dinosaur.^[27]

Amitav Ghosh’s novel The Hungry Tide offers a window into this cycle of renewal through his depiction of the Indian Sundarbans, “... in the tide country transformation is the rule of life: rivers stray from week to week, and islands are made and unmade in days… mangroves can recolonize a denuded island in ten to fifteen years… nothing escapes the maw of the tides; everything is ground to fine silt, becomes something else.”^[28] Rich descriptions of the margin between human and nature is the foundation of Ghosh’s narrative of endangerment which transcends the novel’s dwindling dolphin population to include the humans that share its habitat. Ghosh suggests a precarious balance, a blurring of distinction between the natural and the human, but in his narrative, Nature always seems to triumph. From the mangroves mentioned above to the island’s tiger species to the water itself, it is humanity that lives on the brink, while Nature continues to reclaim its space.

Ghosh offers potential for reclamation where the other narratives emphasize destruction but he does so using the same method of erasure, reversed. This is emphasized through his telling of a sunken ship, the Royal James and Mary that ran aground in the Sundarbans:

What would be the fate of such a shipwreck in the benign waters of the Caribbean or the Mediterranean? I imagined the thick crust of underwater life that would cling to the vessel and preserve it for centuries… but here? The tide country digested the great galleon within a few years. Its remains vanished without a trace.^[29] 

Human narrative here acts as a reminder that our time on Earth is finite, that our actions will eventually be reversed, but, like all effective calls to action, a reversal visible only to those who survive long enough to see it.

Where We Go From Here

What Needs To Be Preserved

^[30]

What remains? What stays intact? What needs to be preserved? These questions inspire me. Last autumn, with the education team at SITE Santa Fe, we asked nearly 500 schoolchildren what they thought needed to be protected. We compiled thousands of words, and in rewriting them, I created this mural in the education wing of the museum. The answers are poignant, funny, and profound.^[31] 

As I was completing this exploration of erasure I came across Nina Elder’s photographic essay, Inspiration and Adaptation: Art in the Anthropocene and felt inspired by this preservation activity. By asking children what they want to keep safe, Elder implies that these items are at risk, that the things these kids treasure have the potential to vanish. Her decision to write them on a wall, an engraving of their treasured things, underscores the vulnerability of these things while simultaneously offering each one a kind of permanence -- engraving has the opportunity to enter the fossil record where intangibles like ‘human rights’ and ‘community’ do not.

Elder’s work feels like an articulation of all the ways in which the Anthropocene erases humanity, the natural world, marginalized cultures and populations, as well as our own implication in this erasure, and yet it leaves me feeling hopeful. Perhaps by writing these things down, by telling the story of all we are losing and all we have lost, we can reclaim what’s left and work towards a world in which balance is possible.