Daoist philosophy takes as axiomatic that the constant transformation of things in the world is not to be deprecated, but rather celebrated as the basis for the mutual flourishing of the myriad things. This view contains both cyclical and linear conceptions of time and is predicated on a view of a porous body that does not simply occupy blank space or time, but rather is transformed by and also transforms space and time. The porosity and pliability of our cosmos suggests that we should value what is soft and weak rather than what is conventionally hard and strong. This leads to the formulation of an ethic of “plasticity” that governs our responsible engagement with our planetary context.

The sixth chapter focuses on a decisive common dimension in Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and Against the Day, namely, their treatment of anthropocenic and planetary concerns. These related concepts have featured prominently in recent literary studies, but studies of Pynchon’s relation to the Anthropocene are still largely absent. Moreover, recent discussions in literary criticism of anthropocenic and planetary concerns are primarily centered on works published in the twenty-first century, but the chapter shows that the concerns are extensively prefigured in the early novels of Pynchon’s global trilogy. The notion of planetarity is often seen as incompatible with the idea of globalization, but the chapter shows that the anthropocenic and planetary themes in Pynchon’s novels grow naturally out of the global and world-historical issues discussed in Chapters 1–4. At the same time, it demonstrates that Pynchon’s ideas of humanity’s harmful exploitation of the planet draw on a long tradition in American literature and on the ecological ideas of the 1960s. The chapter concludes with an analysis of how Pynchon depicts language as a significant force in the Anthropocene, and with a discussion of the trilogy’s recurring portrayal of giants as ancient planetary avatars poised to reclaim the Earth.

Planetary Pynchon: History, Modernity, and the Anthropocene has three interrelated agendas: (1) It establishes Thomas Pynchon’s three longest novels – Gravity’s Rainbow, Mason & Dixon, and Against the Day – as an ambitious, world-historical trilogy about the emergence and global spread of European modernity and thus presents a groundbreaking new understanding of one of the most important contemporary novelists. (2) On the basis of the analysis of the trilogy’s profound engagement with global history, it presents an elaborate discussion of Pynchon’s historical methods, which refines our understanding of Pynchon as an author of historical fiction and challenges prevalent notions of his relation to literary postmodernism. (3) It charts Pynchon’s early anticipation of anthropocenic and planetary ideas, including their close connection to modernity’s and globalization’s demand for constant growth. In so doing, it constitutes an important corrective to other recent studies of literature and the Anthropocene, showing how literary fiction is not merely a belated reflection of scientific debates about the Anthropocene, but has taken an early and active part in establishing the contours of the current discussions.

The diverse water systems and ecologies of the places that would become Australia’s capital cities sustained Aboriginal peoples for thousands of years because of two key factors: Aboriginal knowledge of water and associated wetland and riparian ecologies, and respect for life-sustaining water as a central tenet of Aboriginal cultures. For millennia, and often enduring in the wake of the violent rupture of colonisation, Aboriginal peoples understood the affordances and risks of different forms of water and preserved these understandings in robust oral traditions. This enabled them to follow seasonal abundances of water and avoid its seasonal hazards. For all Australian Indigenous cultures, water is a storied medium that connects the past and present in the ‘long now’: a living and lively substance that sustains their Country.

Starting in 1860, there have been many attempts to document levels of ancient biodiversity using the fossil record. I review four attempts, starting with John Phillips in 1860, followed by Jack Sepkoski’s classic study from 1984. John Alroy’s 2008 work updates Sepkoski’s work but presents problems of its own. The final review is of a study by Fan et al. (2020) who used a supercomputer to produce the most detailed analysis of ancient biodiversity so far. The four studies taken together demonstrate how palaeontologists are using increasingly sophisticated statistical techniques and an improved geological time scale to address the limitations of the fossil record. But more than that, they reveal mass extinctions as powerful agents of biotic change. These events directly influence not only the level of the planet’s biodiversity, but also the composition of its biota.

The book sets today's defaunation event into its historical setting. The best source of information available to do that is the fossil record. Unfortunately, the fossil record has some inbuilt limitations that affect any analysis that uses it. This chapter starts by outlining these limitations and what we can do limit them. I then look at how the extinction and origination (evolutionary appearance) of species are recorded in the fossil record. This is important as the pattern of extinction and origination of species over deep time forms the basis of the geological time scale that is used throughout the book. Finally, I examine the beginnings of modern extinction studies and the recognition of the Big Five mass extinctions.

This chapter proposes a lithic environmental humanities that explores entanglements where rocks and humans mesh as mutually affective agencies and materialities, and humans are seen as "walking, talking minerals." Situating rocks as a cornerstone of contemporary geohumanities, the chapter engages a range of disciplinary perspectives, from the role of rocks in nature writing and poetry that contest a "whitening of deep time" to an "animaterialist" ecophilosophy’s view of stone as lively matter, from an emerging theory of mineral evolution to a speculative archaeological and neuro-aesthetic view of rock as the originating medium of human symbolic expression. Emphasizing touch and haptic thinking, the chapter combines materialist and mystical relations to rocks, and concludes by presenting a contemporary turn on the ancient art of viewing stone appreciation, conceived as a contemplative practice with rocks.

This chapter explores a selection of new nature writing by Robert Macfarlane, Kathleen Jamie, Adam Nicolson, David Gange and Amy Liptrot, which features Scottish islands at the British archipelago’s farthest Atlantic edges. These accounts speak to the cognitive and imaginative challenges of the Anthropocene, bringing deep time and planetary interconnections into view, evoking temporal scales that range from 600 million years in the past to millions of years in the future, oceanic tides that move to the pull of celestial bodies, and animals whose migrations trace lines across the globe. They also enable us to think through more elusive Anthropocene effects – its uncanniness, and the way in which it requires us to imagine ourselves as spectres haunting the deep time of the future. At the same time, these works offer a glimpse of alternative, interim narratives in which we learn to be better ancestors for human generations still to come.

To a God Unknown has typically been viewed as one of John Steinbeck’s most problematic novels, not least because of the its jarring mixture of realistic and fantastic elements. This chapter reevaluates Steinbeck’s early novel by placing it in the context of emergent ideas about race and climate in the American West. To a God Unknown is an experimental work that attempts to fuse realist and symbolic modes in ways parallel to the genre of magical realism, which first developed in post-Expressionist art of the 1920s. By exploring Steinbeck’s thinking during his composition of the novel, particularly his interest in “race psychopathology” and his reading in early climate science, we discover how Steinbeck’s magical realism is a pioneering attempt to understand and represent the aridity and drought that define the climate of the West and have profound implications for the kind of human society it can sustain. Through formal analysis in historical context, the chapter lays the groundwork for considerations of Steinbeck as a writer of the Anthropocene and of environmentalist critique.

Our standard accounts associate modernism with the new, the now, the punctual. This chapter reckons with a countervailing type of modernist temporality: moments when the contemporary is perforated, displaced, or haunted by deep time. Such moments can look back on the present from a time to come, or they can peer back from the present into pre-modern or pre-historic times. After tracing an array of literary modernist engagements with deep time, particularly in Virginia Woolf’s novels, the chapter turns to the work of O. G. S. Crawford, the British archaeologist and former RAF observer who used aerial photographic techniques honed during World War I to discover and study Neolithic sites during the 1920s and 1930s. In Crawford’s crossing of cutting-edge flying and seeing technologies with long human and pre-human timelines, we encounter an invitation that Woolf and other modernists accepted: to close the gap between punctual and longitudinal time.

Woolf calls Hardy “the greatest tragic writer among English novelists,” and I argue that she shares his tragic sense. Both a “Dionysiac” view of time as unceasing flux (the view held by Friedrich Nietzsche, Jane Ellen Harrison, and Henri Bergson) and a mathematical view of time as abstract continuum (the view held by Bertrand Russell) make for tragedy in Woolf’s fiction. Her novels are devoid of the ritual and mythic consolations so often misattributed to ancient drama. Woolf’s Dionysiac time is severed from Dionysiac rituals’ cyclical renewals. Woolf’s mathematical time is severed from redemptive myth. Like Darwin, Woolf makes tragic chance inseparable from the theater of life. Woolf depicts the nonteleological, nonanthropocentric change and persistence of nonhuman nature, as well as the inhuman permanence of Russell’s “universals.” To the Lighthouse and The Waves set the “still space” of characters’ most cherished moments against “the waste of ages and the perishing of the stars.” Woolf’s fiction accentuates time’s passing and models characters’ Sisyphean resistance to it.