Anthropo-scenes and Apocalypses

Back from DC and the conference. Writing a last-minute blog entry. Typing in phrases rather than clauses. Wishing all of my students would understand the difference between phrases and clauses.

Let's see...this morning I went to a session with three big scholars (one of whom is a friend from grad school) talking about the anthropocene. The anthropocene is of course the unofficial name for the current geological period (age, technically--from biggest to smallest it goes superera, era, eon, epoch, period, age). A range of scientists and historians from multiple fields point to the unprecedented impact on the biosphere and climate that human civilization has had. Debate about exactly when this age begins ranges from 10,000 or so years ago (when agriculture began) to the Industrial Revolution (where evidence of human-caused pollution appears in the worldwide geologic record) to 1945 (when radioactive isotopes specific to atomic bombs appears in the geologic record).

My friend, writing from her specialty of performance of/by/for indigenous peoples of the Americas, pointed to the year 1610, where we can register a lull in the rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Why? The evidence points to the reforestation taking place in the Americas due to the eradication of native populations in those places--a sobering observation.

My friend also made the point--new to many there (I'd encountered it before)--that our (Western-white-colonial) fear of apocalypse needs to be placed alongside native people's actual experience of something like apocalypse already. Indigenous communities today have survived the end of the world already, and they likely have a perspective that the people of colonizers can learn from.

This is a point I learned from Charles C. Mann's 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. Mann points out that the "Columbian Encounter"--the meeting of Europe with what we now call the Americas--precipitated an ecological catastrophe. Europeans, for example, brought over barrels of soil used for ballast in their ships. Those barrels carried earthworms, which had been largely eradicated from North America in the previous ice age. The re-introduction of earthworms gradually altered the soil, changing the kind of trees that made up North American forests. Today, only a few places in the northern USA retain the old kind of forestation.

It's a riveting book. It made me realize just how seismic a change colonization was, not only (and not least) for the indigenous people here but for the ecology of the planet. The Columbian Encounter heralded the dawn of globalized capitalism. Lifeforms from one side of the world found a place on the other side as exotic products and/or invasive species. New modes of mass agricultural production--the plantation in particular--ushered in a new and dire mode of human misery and enslavement. I love sugar, but that book makes me a little queasy thinking about the suffering its globalization and ubiquity relies on.

More than anything, though, I picked up from Mann how, 200 years after Columbus landed on a Caribbean island, 90% of the extant indigenous population was gone.

Remember, I tell my students, whenever you see an old-timey Western where brave white cowboy heroes battle Indians, you're seeing a post-apocalyptic movie told from the perspective of the alien invaders. Indigenous people today have survived the apocalypse. As we worry about the catastrophic futures that global warming portends, it would behoove us to recall that this won't be the first time humans have endured awful, way-of-life-threatening events.

I wonder, does that knowledge make the grim future of rising water, extreme weather, and shrinking resources more palatable? Does it give any hope? That seemed to be a common refrain across the papers: the desire for something less than utopia but more than nihilism, something like a pragmatic perseverance in the face of apocalypse.