by Roy Scranton
The Anthropocene is an apocalypse, but an apocalypse that’s already been revealed and is already happening, though not all at once and not all the same. You can see it congealing and leaking out across Syria and Iraq, Indonesia, Ukraine, and Palestine. You can feel it thickening in Siberia, Antarctica, and Alaska, throughout dying coral reefs in the south Pacific, and around the Sundarbans at the mouth of the Ganges. But the revelation of the Anthropocene will not only be announced by the old riders war, famine, plague, and death. It will also be heralded by deliberate decisions by state and corporate actors to sacrifice entire regions to capital and security.
In Alberta, Canada, tailings ponds have been created to store wastewater from the extraction of oil from the Alberta Tar Sands. These open ponds, spread across more than forty-three thousand acres of Boreal forest, now hold more than two hundred billion gallons of toxic sludge, leaking naphthenic acids, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, phenolic compounds, ammonia, and mercury into the ground and water. In Baotou, the largest industrial city in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region of northern China, a poisonous lake spreads from the outskirts of the Baogang Steel and Rare Earth complex, one of the main sources of the refined rare-earth minerals necessary for the sophisticated microelectronics that make our wired lifestyle possible.
The West has always had its sacrifice zones, the hinterlands, untillable scree, and deserts into which were driven the Apache, the Nez Percé, and the Crow. In 1901, during the Philippine-American War, General Jacob H. Smith took his men to Samar in response to an attack by villagers and guerrillas that killed forty-eight American soldiers. Smith ordered his men to butcher everyone over ten years old. “I want no prisoners,” he said. “I wish you to kill and burn; the more you kill and burn, the better it will please me . . . The interior of Samar must be made a howling wilderness . . .”
3. Paper
No wolf howls alone in the wilderness. Every being is a biome. Just so, every predator is its prey, every enemy its own enemy. This is the lesson of ecology. Every wolf is a deer, every deer is a deer tick, every deer tick is a human, every human is a blade of grass. Every American is a radical Islamic mujahid. Every human is carbon, oxygen, electricity, and hydrogen. Every rock is paper.
4. Rock
In ancient Sumeria, it was the king’s right to take any bride’s virginity on her wedding night. The King of Uruk insisted on his right and no man could stop him, since no man was as great a warrior as was he. Full of sorrow for their wives and daughters, the king’s subjects prayed to the Americans, and the Americans took pity on the poor folk of Uruk and made a wild man to tame their king. The wild man met the king on the streets of Uruk and they fought all day and all night, without cease and without victory. The sun set and they fought in the dark, shaking the stone walls of Uruk.
When dawn came, they kissed like brothers. The king and the wild man joined together to lead an army to Beirut, where they killed the King of Lebanon and plundered his cedar forests. Then they led their army to Mosul, where they conquered oilfields and killed the Bull of Heaven. The Americans watched these events with alarm, then killed the wild man with a drone strike. The King of Uruk wept and cursed and fled his city, wandering in grief, searching out the last man, Osama bin Laden the immortal.
When the King of Uruk found Osama bin Laden, the wise immortal told the King how before the Deluge he had been ordered by the Americans to build a great boat to carry “the beasts of the field, the creatures of the wild, and members of every skill and craft.” One day, as the Americans foretold, the rain began to fall.
For a day the gale [winds flattened the country],
quickly they blew, and then came the Deluge.
Like a battle the cataclysm passed over the people . . .
For six days and [seven] nights,
there blew the wind, the downpour,
the gale, the Deluge, it flattened the land.
Once the waters receded, the Americans made Osama bin Laden and his many wives immortal. Osama bin Laden told the King of Uruk that he too could be immortal, if he could go six days and seven nights without sleeping. The first night, the King of Uruk struggled to stay awake for hours, but then he fell asleep for a whole week. When Osama bin Laden roused him, the King of Uruk cursed the futility of existence: “For whom, Osama, toiled my arms so hard?” he wailed. “For whom ran dry the blood of my heart?”
There would be no immortality for the King of Uruk, save for what he could fashion himself with the stones he dug from the earth, save for what would be sung of him in song and written of him in the New York Times. So the King of Uruk drilled an oil well deep into the bowels of the earth and built a flare stack high into the sky, a great monument that reached the very sun, and with the American dollars he got from selling Uruk’s oil, he bought a Chevy Impala, which he tricked out with gold rims and hydraulics, and he named it Enkidu in memory of the wild man who had been his only friend. To this day, people tweet the story of the King of Uruk whose name was Gilgamesh, the one who “saw what was secret, discovered what was hidden, / [and] brought back a tale of before the Deluge.”
5. Paper
It is a fact little known that the first use of the term “Anthropocene” was not by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer, as is often claimed, nor by Russian scientists in the 1980s, as other historians of science have asserted, but in the last known lecture given by Professor George Edward Challenger, which took place on July 16, 1945, in the Wills Memorial Tower Great Hall at the University of Bristol, England. It was an odd event and a strange choice of venue: Wills Memorial Tower had been bombed by the Germans in the Blitz and had seen its Great Hall and organ destroyed, along with several thousand books that had been moved there from the library at Kings College London to protect them from the bombing, paper burning in the night, paper burning among blackened rock and scissored beams. For reasons that remain mysterious to this day, Professor Challenger insisted on giving his lecture in the ruins of the Great Hall.
Challenger remains an obdurate outlier in the history of science in the twentieth century, an indigestible, wolfish throwback to the earlier days of the generalist and the gentleman scientist, when science and adventure went hand in hand, before the noble mission of enlightenment had become bureaucratized, specialized, and forced to submit to the desiderata of industrial capitalism. Unfortunately, the accidents of adventure that inevitably arose in the course of his bold forays often made Challenger’s ground-breaking claims seem, to pampered onlookers in London and Geneva, mere ballyhoo. Despite his having made several important discoveries in paleontology and prehistoric archaeology, including his discovery of the Thalassasaurus, his having developed the Echinus theory of the Earth, and his having originated the science of rhizomatics, the difficulties Challenger faced in substantiating some of his more far-reaching claims led many to prejudicially dismiss him as a fraud, an ignominy he struggled against till his dying day, when he succumbed to complications from kidney stones in 1947. Indeed, Challenger’s speech at the University of Bristol in 1945 came after many years of what was essentially a kind of self-imposed exile: it was the first time he’d spoken publicly in almost a decade.
In his time, Professor George Edward Challenger was perhaps best known for what is today often unjustly called “The Lost World Hoax of 1902,” a public scandal that rocked the scientific community of London, in which Challenger claimed to have visited a hidden plateau in Bolivia inhabited not only by dinosaurs but also by a primitive species of lupine hominid, half wolf, half man, which he named Pithecolupanthropus challengerus, after himself. What evidence he provided—blurred photographs, a clay cast of a footprint, parts of a skull and jawbone, and an archaic spearhead—was greeted with skepticism, if not howls of wild laughter, and Challenger left the position he then held at Victoria University of Manchester under a cloud of disgrace. Nine years later, in 1911, he published a study proving that the Earth would soon pass through a cloud of
poisonous space ether, which he predicted would afflict millions of humans with flu-like symptoms, insanity, suicidal urges, and sexual promiscuity. While the study was generally regarded with derision, Challenger won several lifelong adherents (including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle), who found in his “Poison Belt” theory a persuasive explanation for the otherwise inexplicable rash of global madness that took political form in the Great War and the Russian Revolution. A dozen years after he published his “Poison Belt” study, this erstwhile modern-day Galileo braved the scientific community’s derision yet again by presenting his Echinus theory of the Earth, arguing that the Earth was a living organism, with a skin much like that of a sea urchin. “A body without organs,” he described it in 1923, “in double articulation.” At his own expense, Challenger hired Texas oilmen to drill fourteen thousand feet down into the Earth’s crust, to which depth he lowered a vast gun that would fire a bolt directly into the core of the planet.
What happened? The experiment consumed itself and collapsed in an explosion that killed three people. Challenger was ruined. Over the years, his claims were superseded and forgotten as other researchers developed sophisticated, robust models of the Earth’s geophysical processes. Yet who now can say what went on that day? Perhaps Challenger did indeed pierce the Earth’s very heart—its soul even—a psyche of boiling rock. One recollection suggests that something unusual happened, even if we’ll never know exactly what. In the words of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle:
What was it happened? Neither Malone nor I was in a position to say, for both of us were swept off our feet as by a cyclone and swirled along the grass, revolving round and round like two curling stones upon an ice rink. At the same time our ears were assailed by the most horrible yell that ever yet was heard. Who is there in all the hundreds who have attempted it who has ever yet described adequately that terrible cry? It was a howl in which pain, anger, menace, and the outraged majesty of Nature all blended into one hideous shriek. For a full minute it lasted, a thousand sirens in one, paralyzing all the great multitude with its fierce insistence, and floating away through the still summer air until it went echoing along the whole South Coast and even reached our French neighbours across the Channel. No sound in history has ever equalled the cry of the injured Earth.
After the Echinus scandal, Challenger retired from public view until his now justly famous 1936 Lecture on Rhizomatics, held at the University of Manchester. Attended mainly by a visiting class of Parisian schoolchildren, members of the Dogon embassy, and a few of Challenger’s most loyal students, the lecture sank without a trace until it was translated into French and published in Paris in the 1960s. In 1945, the lecture was practically unknown. So when Challenger mounted the podium on July 16 of that year for what would be his final public lecture, in the gaping ruined Great Hall of Wills Tower, his abyssal yellow eyes looking out from beneath his prognathous brow as his massive, shaggy form swayed upon the blackened stage, peering over an audience standing amid forlorn and broken roof beams now crashed to the ground and rising up like giant scissors blades out of ash-thickened puddles of water, who knew what dreams and madnesses had thundered through his mind in the twenty years since he’d made the world scream?
Perhaps it is to his Lecture on Rhizomatics we might turn for a glimmer of understanding of this, his last, or perhaps we might try to understand the final lecture in terms of a career of radical experimentation and bold discovery gone awry, ignored and misunderstood and peremptorily dismissed by lesser minds. Such misrecognition might breed bitterness, even rage, and it may have been in bitterness that Challenger howled wildly down at his tiny audience. It may have been in bitterness; it may have been in madness; it may have been possessed of genius. Who are we, such little men and women in comparison with Challenger’s Sumerian greatness, such cowards, such wretches who hide in the shadows of our ignorance and quail before the future we’ve made, who are we to judge such a great ape?
Challenger’s Wills Memorial Tower lecture, alas, is lost. No recordings were made. The professor’s notes did not survive. The lecture went wholly unremarked on, save for this brief notice in the Bristol Gazette: “Item: Professor G.E. Challenger warns audience of Anthropocene Era, ‘methane belch’ to wipe out human race.”
6. Scissors
Life begins and ends in the body. Mind is an effect, not a cause: consciousness arises from breath, the nervous system’s electromagnetic field, the slow pulse of blood and hormones, the alignment of spine and limbs. Frowning makes you sad. Smiling makes you happy. Hardening the face makes you feel hard. As anyone who’s been through boot camp can tell you, the first lesson of military training is to stand at attention, expressionless, staring straight ahead, stoically confronting whatever the drill sergeant throws at you; the hardening of the face is the first step in learning a firm and impersonal discipline. Just so, a monk practices equanimity not by theorizing an abstract metaphysical system of morality and karmic justice, but by sitting, kneeling, meditating, training the body to let currents of fear, pain, and desire pass through it, learning to let emotions rise and fade like weather, weakening the hold of the passions, changing their valence, teaching the mind peace by teaching the body stillness.
We’re continually bombarded with signals compelling us to react, and we do: like paramecia who embody the riddle of existence in their simple movements away from danger and toward food, we flee pain and seek pleasure. We’re built for it. We’re machines moved by desire, complex machines comprising multitudes of smaller machines: organ cells, the bacteria in our gut, our hormonal systems and DNA and toilet training and language, each machine with its own engine, program, and end state. Modern society is an even larger machine of machines, a vast capitalist organism channeling billions of individual motives toward its own schizophrenic ends, as if by an invisible hand. Ever increasing in complexity, human symbolic machine organisms take on lives of their own. Bureaucracies, corporations, tribes, nations, clans, cults, religions, and groupings of all kinds come into the world through the combinations of individual agents and evolve a material existence through contracts, rituals, images, and narratives, developing their own emergent vitalities and inertias, evincing the basic elements of life as clearly as paramecia: fleeing death, seeking growth.
The notorious difficulty of defining life is compounded by the fact that we cannot in good conscience insist that life is an “individual” phenomenon: how can an ant be alive if an ant colony is not, and how can a human be alive if a city is not? For biochemist Daniel E. Koshland Jr., a “living organism” is best defined by seven “pillars”: program, improvisation, compartmentalization, energy, regeneration, adaptability, and seclusion. By these, he means that an organism must possess an encoded organization (DNA is his example); it must be able to change structurally and behaviorally over time; it must have external and internal boundaries; it must use energy; and it must be able to regenerate or reproduce itself. Christopher McKay, a planetary scientist for NASA who has helped look for life on Mars, argues, “The simplest, but not the only, proof of life is to find something that is alive. There are only two properties that can determine if an object is alive: metabolism and motion.” As these scientists define life, a paramecium is alive as a human is alive as a corporation is alive as a nation is alive as a forest is alive as a wetland is alive. The sine qua non of life is that it is an assemblage of natural machines (organs, microbes, participants, bacteria, citizens, cells, stone, bodies, paper, stockholders, scissors, mujahideen) seeking its perpetuation in the face of death.
Imagine human society not as a collection of individuals, as we like to picture it, or even factions, but rather as a colony of ants or bees, or better yet a fungus, a cancer, a mass of cells. It’s true, as you might object, that much of our life is technological, prosthetic, invested in material technologies of various kinds, but in no way does our prosthetic life separate us from so-called “nature,” any more than a termite’s colony, a coyote’s howl, or a flower’s
pollinating honeybee separates them from “nature.” Technology is nature. Plastic is nature. Antibiotics are nature. Culture is nature. Physics, biology, and chemistry do not make exceptions for certain primates simply because they’re precocious. All the machinery of our civilization, from elections to the internet to coffee shops to indoor plumbing, is the natural machinery of life, no different ontologically from our lungs and our heart and our liver, no different ontologically from the millions of bacteria in our stomach and intestines that help us digest. Indeed, the food we eat is yet more natural machinery, as is the air we breathe, the biospheric and atmospheric environments in which we function, the water we drink, the sunlight that feeds the plants that become our salad.
The motivating enigma of the Anthropocene is the human as echinoderm, a geological agent, mortal flesh as immortal rock. Over eons, starfish and sea urchin skeletons recompose into limestone, just as stegosaurus recomposes into Brent crude, becoming geology: we have not only joined the ranks of such geoforms, but surpassed them. The planet as a whole is one giant, heaving nature-machine made of countless smaller nature-machines, itself participating in an even larger solar nature-machine, one part of the Milky Way galaxy nature-machine, itself a tiny part of the universe nature-machine, which may itself be but a tiny piece of the multiverse nature-machine. We don’t know how it all works. We don’t know whether it has a beginning or an end, or whether it just keeps pumping, infinitely, expanding and contracting, an eternally beating god-heart, a nature-machine that builds itself for itself, for no reason, for nothing, meaning nothing, a howling wilderness machine, wolves all the way down.
7. Rock
What does it mean to imagine humanity as a geological agent? What does it mean to imagine our species-being as a geological forcing? The answer is not self-evident. What shape will the geological imagination take in the Anthropocene? How will our new geological existence emerge as culture?
