This chapter introduces the concept of the proposed new geological epoch, and the main paradoxes and dilemmas that follow. The Anthropocene requires us simultaneously to see human beings as occupying a position of unprecedented responsibility for the ecosphere, and as a tragically blundering species, caught by the unforeseen consequences of previous actions. Further uncertainties derive from the current interim state in which urgent warnings coexist with stubborn normality. Ecological threats such as global warming and the extinction crisis defy representation because, in the words of Timothy Clark, they present us with ‘derangements of scale’, displacing the timescape of conventional narrative and challenging our habitual sense of what is trivial and what is important. Through close readings of essayists Kathleen Jamie, Jessica Gaitán Johannesson, Richard Smyth, Rebecca Tamás, and Jean Sprackland, the chapter examines the implications of these ideas for the form, style, and content of the contemporary environmental essay.

Drawing on the work of Jacques Derrida, this chapter argues that we should think about democracy in a provisional key. Democracy is provisional because it puts itself into question. It does so when we take the question “what is democracy?” to be part of democracy, which means that we must ask “what is the demos?” and “what is rule?” We end up with a conception of democracy whereby the people is at once prior to and a result of the rule of the people, and so we never arrive at a final answer to the questions “who is the demos?” and “what is rule?” Treating democracy as provisional does not necessarily solve major challenges such as the environmental crisis and inequality, but it allows us to approach these challenges from a new and more fruitful angle. I discuss this with particular attention to current debates about the climate crisis.

The conclusion contextualizes the gendered materiality and the provisionality of same-sex love under precarious, postcolonial conditions and within informal female friendship networks that are largely marginalized from the global economy. It situates the meanings and shifting grammar of supi, the Ghanaian term for a same-sex girlfriend, in the wider context of Africa and its diasporas in a postcolonial world. “Doing supi” implies a capacity to “hustle,” improvise and operate on different registers. In this context where fixity in word and action appears to be both undesirable and unaffordable, a practice of negotiating multiple positions and identifications is vital to carving out personal space and foster wayward intimacies and subjectivity. Within this social fabric, the erotic emerges as a powerful resource and site of knowledge production. Thus, approaching the discursive culture of “knowing women” requires the decolonization of disciplined categories of knowledge with their inherent power relations.