This is a piece about failures. My failures, mostly, as a thinker and a scholar, but also the failure of my field and the failure of all of us to think what will come in the next ten, twenty, thirty, hundred years.

On geological timescales, human civilization is an event, not an epoch. Humans are now living in a new geological epoch of our own making: the Anthropocene. Or so we’re told.

Tens of thousands of Londoners died of cholera from the 1830s to the 1860s. The causes were simple: mass quantities of human waste and industrial contaminants were pouring into the Thames, the central waterway of a city at the center of a rapidly industrializing world.

It brought riches to Britain and many other European nations; played a major role in enslaving more than 10 million Africans; and created the first global markets in cotton, tobacco and sugar. But now colonialism has been accused of having an even greater influence.

For decades, as astronomers have imagined advanced extraterrestrial civilizations, they categorized such worlds by the amount of energy their inhabitants might conceivably be able to harness and use.

As a planetary astrobiologist, I am focused on the major transitions in planetary evolution and the evolving relationship between planets and life.

­­The conditions that obtained when life had not yet emerged from the oceans have not subsequently changed a great deal for the cells of the human body, bathed by the primordial wave which continues to flow in the arteries.

It’s our 50th episode!  To celebrate we sit down with four members of the Anthropocene Working Group: the scientists and experts who are deciding whether or not we formally adopt the Anthropocene into the geologic time table.  We discuss what makes the Anthropocene boundary different from all of the other boundaries in geologic history, how they deal with the increased public attention to this particular boundary, and some cultural ripple effects of the Anthropocene dealing with the Law of the Sea.  As we wrap up, the Generation Anthropocene producers take a minute to reflect on all of the rapid changes we’ve witnessed over the past 50 episodes.

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If you enjoyed this episode, you might also like:

1. Conservation in the Anthropocene

2. Welcome to the… Technosphere?

3. The rock hard truth of mass extinctions

Contributors

Jan Zalasiewicz

Jan Zalasiewicz is a Lecturer in Geology at the University of Leicester, and before that worked at the British Geological Survey.  He is a field geologist, palaeontologist and stratigrapher, and researches fossil ecosystems and environments across 500-million years of Earth history.  Jan is also the convenor for the Working Group on the ‘Anthropocene’ and has published many scholarly works on the topic.  Along with Mark Williams, he is the author of the popular science book The Goldilocks Planet.

Davor Vidas

Davor Vidas is the director of the Law of the Sea and Marine Affairs Programme at the Fridtjof Nansen Institute (FNI).  As an expert dealing with the Law of the Sea, Davor is currently investigating how international laws, all of which were written during our previous and stable geologic epoch, need to adapt to better fit the unstable environment of the Anthropocene.

Mike Ellis

Mike Ellis is the head of climate change science at the British Geological Survey.  Mike has worked all across the world researching the intersection of plate tectonics and landscape evolution, the environmental impacts of climate change, and the Anthropocene.

Mark Williams

Mark Williams is a reader in paleobiology at the University of Leicester.  His work deals primarily with the interactions between the biosphere and other Earth systems.  Mark also studies climate proxies and the application of numerical climate models.  Along with Jan Zalasiewicz, he is the author of the popular science book The Goldilocks Planet.

Interviewer

Miles Traer

For biographical information on Miles Traer, please click here.

http://web.stanford.edu/group/anthropocene/cgi-bin/wordpress/anthropocene-working-group-roundtable/

Just after World War II, when the atomic bombs fell and our thirst for coal and oil became a full-blown addiction, Earth entered the Anthropocene, a new geologic time when humanity’s environmental reach left a mark in sediments worldwide.

This talk was delivered as the plenary paper for The 11th Interdisciplinary Social Sciences Conference, Imperial College, London, 2nd August 2016. You can find the full content of the talk beneath the slides in the comments section, or click the gear icon below and select ‘Open speaker notes’ It is presented here under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence – please use as you wish, but always reference and refer back to this post or the slide show.

“Any sufficiently advanced civilisation is indistinguishable from its garbage.” – Bruce Sterling

Additivism Talk at Spike Island, Bristol (11th July 2016)On July 11th at Spike Island, Bristol, Daniel Rourke will present his ongoing collaboration with Morehshin Allahyari: The 3D Additivist Manifesto and forthcoming Cookbook. A call to push 3D printing and additive technologies to their absolute limits and beyond, into the realm of the speculative, the provocative and the weird.Drawing metaphoric connections between Additive manufacturing and Geological processes, Daniel will talk about plastic, deep time and the incidental production of ‘pseudomorphs’ – destined to outlast the humans that create them.“The fate of ‘man’ in the Anthropocene is not that he will be erased, but that he will be made immortal, as a trace preserved forever in the rock.”- Bronislaw Szerszynski, The End of the End of Nature: The Anthropocene and the Fate of the Human, (2012) Book your place!This event is part of Point Line Time, a drawing research project led by artist and writer Tamarin Norwood as part of her twelve-month residency at Spike Island, Bristol. Throughout her residency, Norwood is working with a network of researchers and practitioners including an animator, a 3D print engineer, a choreographer and a sign language translator to explore the acts of drawing and writing in relation to time and three-dimensional space. She hosts a series of public conversations, presentations and live experiments as she develops a new body of work.

“Human activity is leaving a pervasive and persistent signature on Earth.” So begins one of the more depressing scientific papers I’ve ever read.

In the 21st century, we are inundated with news about human-induced climate change. But perhaps human-produced media are not the only source of information.

According to a new study, humankind is now entering the “Age of Plastic”. The research investigates the evidence that we are living in the Anthropocene, a time in which humanity is the main geological force.

“Your Shiny Plastic Future Is a Load of Crap”: #Additivism interviewed for HyperallergicGretta Louw interviewed us for Hyperallergic:It was hugely important to us that the manifesto undermine the position from which it is situated. We tried to show the limits and contradictions in our own thinking. The manifesto performs a critique of itself through irony, contradiction, and self-ridicule. The language of the manifesto breaks down and degrades, just like any system accelerated to its limits. Andrea Young’s amazing sound design for the video was also paramount in performing that quality.But I’m going to try to answer your question from more of a perspective of personal experience. One of the things that I have thought about the most in the last couple of years is the new potentials of species-being that new technologies facilitate. As a woman from the Middle East, I interact with a heteropatriarchy, capitalist, colonialist world, and so much of that experience creates a certain kind of alienation that is unique to my very personal/political experience. I deeply connect with a sentence in the Xenofeminism Manifesto — “If nature is unjust; change nature” — and Donna Haraway’s command to “Make Kin Not Babies!” For me, these two are about many things from the past that I want to resist and rebuild. With #Additivism, we want to explore ways of turning alienation into expressions of power.↪ Read the full interview here

Sign up: Sonic Acts #Additivism Workshop (29 Feb - 1 Mar, 2016)

There are still places available for our #Additivism Workshop at Sonic Acts Academy, on the theme of ‘Post-Nature’. Sign up!Workshop The 2-day 3D Additivism workshop, which will take place immediately after the Sonic Acts Academy (29 February & 1 March), will be presented as an expanded lecture and as a workshop. During the workshop participants will be encouraged to reconsider the terms under which human-centric technologies affect the ongoing transformation of nature into ‘post-nature’, as well as the moral and philosophical implications of actively seeking to steer our technologies towards this end.  Participants will be guided through the processes of additive design with the aim of producing speculative ‘post-natural’ objects for possible inclusion in the forthcoming 3D Additivist Cookbook. Questions such as: “How do we imagine structures of knowledge and action that exist outside or beyond human beings and our technologies?” and: “Is it possible to ‘write’ into, to ‘design’ alternate futures, without limiting what they (and we) might become?” will form a red threat.   

There is now compelling evidence to show that humanity’s impact on the Earth’s atmosphere, oceans and wildlife has pushed the world into a new geological epoch, according to a group of scientists.

Additivism Workshop @ Sonic Acts, Amsterdam (Feb/March 2016)We are excited to announce a 2 day #Additivism Workshop as part of Sonic Acts Academy, Feb/March 2016

The Sonic Acts Academy relates to topics that are connected to the ‘dark matter’ theme Sonic Acts is currently investigating with its projects such as Dark Ecology and The Geologic Imagination, informed by the realisation that we live in the Anthropocene, and questioning how this forces us to rethink concepts of nature, culture, technology, and ecology. The workshop is open to artists, theorists, designers, engineers, scientists, thinkers, doers and makers who are interested in alternative approaches to theory-led forms of practice. Participants are ideally filled with fears and enthusiasm for the future. To apply please send a short bio, a motivation why you would like to attend, and your expectations to masterclass[@]sonicacts[.]com.

Humans were once a fairly average species of large mammals, living off the land with little effect on it. But in recent millennia, our relationship with the natural world has changed as dramatically as our perception of it.  

The significance of the idea of the Anthropocene epoch is centrally about the understanding of human intervention into and extraction from nature, and one that can be signalled in the geological record.