As introduction, a line from the outro of a 2018 post:
....Three related points:
1) If you remember your geologic timescales the divisions of time on earth run from "eons which split into eras, which break into periods, which divide into epochs and then all the way down to ages." That's from Inverse who note the powers that be decided to call the present age the Meghalayan referring to the drought-caused worldwide collapse of civilizations 4200 years ago rather than the much-championed Anthropocene (human influenced) age.....
And from the Journal of the History of Ideas, November 29:
by Alec Israeli
Joyce E. Chaplin is the James Duncan Phillips Professor of Early American History at Harvard University. Specializing in the histories of science, climate, colonialism, and the environment, she is the author of An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730-1815 (1993), Subject Matter: Technology, the Body, and Science on the Anglo-American Frontier, 1500-1676 (2001), The First Scientific American: Benjamin Franklin and the Pursuit of Genius (2006), Round about the Earth: Circumnavigation from Magellan to Orbit (2012), and The New Worlds of Thomas Robert Malthus: Rereading the Principle of Population (2016, with Alison Bashford). She has also been the editor of several other volumes and written numerous reviews and essays.
Contributing editor Alec Israeli interviewed Professor Chaplin about her latest article in the Journal of the History of Ideas, “Historians of Ideas Rush in Where Stratigraphers Fear to Tread,” which reviews six new books on the concept of the Anthropocene.In Part One of this two-part interview, they discussed how the environment has been incorporated into the study of the (human) past, and the shifting of disciplinary boundaries and collaborations prompted by scholarly engagements with the ongoing climate crisis.
Alec Israeli: Unlike most articles in an academic history journal, your piece directly addresses a major contemporary issue: climate change. In the past year, its impacts have made themselves painfully and acutely felt by many in the Global North, perhaps for the first time—wildfires raged, smoke choked the skies, and summer months routinely broke temperature records. I noticed from the footnotes that some of the websites you cite were accessed in July this year; was all that was going on at the time influencing your approach to the review? At what point, and why, did you decide to review these books all together?
Joyce Chaplin: I actually inherited this gig! At some point, I think in 2022, but it may have been the year before, the JHI’s editors got in touch, saying they’d been planning a review essay on the Anthropocene concept but that the original reviewer had for some reason bowed out. I agreed to step in—gladly. At that point, I added a couple of books to an original number the editors or the original reviewer had compiled, though I don’t remember which books I added, and which were original to the task.
Given this timing, I can’t say that the recent fires and floods influenced the review. I’ve been aware of climate change since the 1980s (truly: I’ve never owned a car, for instance). And, with respect, I think the idea that there wasn’t much evidence of climate change earlier isn’t helpful. There’s been a lot of evidence for decades. People in places that had flooding and fires, starting in the second half of the twentieth century, and even in the northern hemisphere, have been exposed to a lot of evidence of climate change, but the response, again and again—for decades—was denial. Northern Italy is a famous example. Despite catastrophic flooding in Venice in 1966, and continued evidence that sea-level rise and environmental degradation were on a collision course around the Veneto, it took decades for the city’s guardians and planners to admit that climate change itself was a factor. Venice’s famous MOSE barrier against its seasonal flooding (acqua alta) had to be retrofitted to take some aspects of climate change into account. So, the crisis has been gaining visibility for some time. All the books I reviewed were conceived, written, and published before this summer’s in-your-face events, for instance.
The books show that a growing number of academics who hadn’t been closely engaged with environmental topics are now addressing the climate crisis. In part, this is because the topic is becoming unavoidable. But I also think that because the Anthropocene is a concept, an idea or hypothesis, it was legible to historians of ideas, including scholars of political and economic ideas who’d maybe not thought a lot about the environment, but for whom the Anthropocene concept raised essential questions about governance and economy. This past summer’s events, therefore, didn’t prompt the books, the review, or how I reviewed the books, but I sure hope they focus attention on this kind of study and inspire more of it. The events are part of what climate observers call visibilization, making it clear to various kinds of denialists that, yes, there is a crisis. And so, I think the summer of 2023 will definitely affect how people read and respond to the review.
Oh, finally, the citations in the review that are very up-to-the-minute reflect how I was tracking news of the Anthropocene Working Group of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy, organized by the International Union of Geological Sciences. (These are the stratigraphers of my review’s title.) In spring 2023, the working group announced its decision to use data from a site in Canada—Crawford Lake—to designate a geologically significant anthropogenic alteration of the Earth’s atmosphere and stratigraphy. I wanted to keep track of any possible updates, though the next big news (rejection or ratification of the working group’s report) probably won’t come until 2024, with a vote by the International Union of Geological Sciences.
AI: The introductory portion of your review—and the title itself—suggests that the interest of humanists in the “Anthropocene” as a concept is related to remaining uncertainty among geologists about whether yet to officially admit humanity into the ambit of geologic forces. Here, to me, the muddling of the disciplinary division of labor paralleled the current muddling of the specific historical distinction between humanity and nature that emerges in the course of Western modernity these books describe.
JC: Yes, absolutely. Because I’ve focused on premodern history in the global West for a lot of my career, I know that people in that time and place tended to assume they were embedded in a larger natural world and that they were subject (often tragically) to its forces, with limited capacity to resist the worst that nature might throw at them. The perceived (and hypothetical) split between humanity and nature is much more recent, emerging gradually, along with a rising confidence in human ability to control or resist natural forces, definitely by the seventeenth century, and more clearly during the industrial revolution. Only in the twentieth century did there begin to be some serious rethinking of this, with revival of some earlier ways of thinking about limits of human control over the nonhuman....
....MUCH MORE
And Part Two.
