Chapter 2 - Humanities and Social Sciences: Human Stories and the Anthropocene Earth System

Summary

How does the Anthropocene change human stories? In a word, drastically. Many people don't want our altered planet to alter their stories. This group, in the spirit of "anything goes," ignores or attacks the science and sometimes the scientists as well. But more and more, writers, social scientists, and humanistic scholars are beginning to engage seriously with Anthropocene science and its radical vision. This engagement results in two new types of narrative. The first kind is the singular collective story of humans from our ancestral species moving out of Africa through all our evolutionary permutations until we became a global force, an Earth System agent, in the mid-twentieth century. The other way of telling human stories in response to Anthropocene science is to acknowledge our species as an Earth System agent, but to point to the many textured, contingent, and small-scale human stories. Some of these are congruent with the overall global narrative; others point to alternatives. This essay takes the reader on a tour of how humanists and social scientists are responding to the Anthropocene through three kinds of stories: those that deny scientific evidence; those highlighting humanity as a collective planetary force, and those focusing on diverse alternative histories within planetary limits.