Anthropocene

To describe the Anthropocene is to deploy a Victorian lexicon. This is perhaps most obvious in relation to the epoch's titular agent: the Anthropos. No aspect of the Anthropocene debate has been more provocative, or controversial, than the effort to align the differential histories of capitalism, empire, and industrial modernity with planetary time and the evolutionary history of the human species. In attempting to date the Anthropocene, stratigraphers are looking for the “signature” of human action, the mark of a single species operating as an agent at the level of planetary systems. In that endeavor, “human action” serves as a distinguishing marker from other forms of causality, whether atmospheric, lithic, or biological. However, humanists and social scientists have been quick to point out that human action is not uniform. There are vast disparities between humans in terms of both ecological impacts and vulnerability to the Anthropocene's manifold catastrophes, from rising sea levels to antibiotic resistant diseases. Those most at risk from ecological collapse are, consistently, those least responsible for it. Thus, while the Anthropocene has already been extremely generative for scholarship in the humanities (e.g., Chakrabarty, Menely and Taylor), other humanists remain skeptical and argue that the concept masks inequality and perpetuates ecological injustice and have proposed terms like “Capitalocene” (Malm, Moore) or “Plantationocene” (Haraway, Tsing et al.) to foreground the new epoch's inherently exploitative character.¹ Dating geologic agency to the industrial shift from water power to coal in the 1830s, historian Andreas Malm describes this new force as “the very negation of universal species being,” in that the forces disrupting Earth systems are the same ones responsible for the divergence in human fortunes.² However, from a stratigraphic perspective, distinguishing one species from others (or from non-biological forces operating within the hydrosphere, lithosphere, or atmosphere) operates as a specifying designation rather than a universalizing one. Even if the “Anthropos” includes only a tiny subset of humanity, or arises through the exploitation (or even extermination) of some human groups by others, Anthropocene history is predicated upon the legibility of the human within the Earth's archives, as one species among many preserved in the fossil record.³ Thus, despite these trenchant critiques, the species designation is inherent in the Anthropocene concept, particularly as it appears in the stratigraphic debate over whether to designate it as a formal epoch of geologic time.

In this regard, the Anthropocene debate revisits an earlier encounter with a similar set of questions, namely Victorian debates over evolution and the age of the earth, in which scientists, theologians, philosophers, writers, and artists grappled with the implications of rethinking the human in species terms. In this project, Victorian evolutionary theory's misdeeds are every bit as vital as its insights for understanding the Anthropocene as an epoch fraught with inequity. The challenge (and opportunity) for Victorian studies in the Anthropocene, then, lies not simply in looking for nascent ecological insights in historical artifacts, but rather in taking seriously the prospect that the Victorian era aligns with the historical period during which the Anthropocene emerged. Whereas Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer originally proposed dating the Anthropocene to the Industrial Revolution, a recent announcement by the Anthropocene Working Group proposes locating the Anthropocene's lower boundary in the mid-twentieth century.⁴ That shift means the long nineteenth century, or the period between 1784 (the steam engine) and 1945 (the nuclear bomb), marks the boundary period between the Holocene and the Anthropocene, an intermediate space in which to trace the Anthropocene's emergence. While the question of dating the Anthropocene customarily focuses on the question of origins, the Victorian era offers a glimpse of the Anthropocene in medias res, from the midst of still-unfolding, slow-motion catastrophe. If the Anthropocene is “the very negation of universal species being” then the long nineteenth century is precisely the geohistorical space within which that negation took place. It is also the period in which many of the conceptual tools and rubrics—from the stratigraphic method, to the greenhouse effect, natural selection to anthropogenic extinction—were articulated. The Anthropocene thus performs an uncanny inversion of many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century debates and anxieties.⁵ A key question for Victorian studies in the Anthropocene, then, is how to understand the alignment between these conceptual rubrics and epistemological frames and the broader ecological impacts within which they occurred. After all, this is the history that we must undo if we are to survive its aftermath.

For Victorianists, the problem of the Anthropocene is not simply the question of how (or indeed whether) a period anchored on the reign of a single British monarch retains coherence in the face of planetary catastrophe on the one hand and deep time on the other. Instead, it arises from the uncanniness whereby so many Victorian artifacts seem to speak to the Anthropocene in ways that belie the historical remove that separates them from our own moment. Put differently, the question is not so much why the Victorians didn't understand the Anthropocene, as tracing the multitudinous ways in which they did, framing the Victorian era in terms of what Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz call the “modernizing unconscious.”⁶ Perhaps these two issues are not so far removed after all. Glimpsed from a distant future, in which all that remains of human society is a compressed stratigraphic trace and radically different climate, the Victorians become our contemporaries. Their words are still with us, just as the carbon spewn from their chimneys lingers overhead. As readers, writers, and teachers we are the speakers for the dead, the living media through which our Victorians interlocutors can speak to the shared predicament of a depleted, overheated world.