A Post-Mortem for the Anthropocene

This year, despite vociferous internal protest, the Subcommission on Quarternary Stratigraphy denied the existence of an Anthropocene epoch as a formal unit of the Geological Time Scale, opting for the looser geological concept of an “episode”. What began with a bang ended with a whimper—this was an inauspicious end to a period where so much ink has been spent on a geological concept in the social sciences and the humanities.

Or was it not an ending at all? While geology has formalized timekeeping procedures, the life of a concept in critical scholarship tends to be irresolute, more valued for the questions it raises than the matters it puts to rest. In the name of the Anthropocene, renewed attention to capitalism’s terraforming force emerged. New approaches to the multiple temporalities of history and more-than-human assemblages have been devised; new anthropogenic ecologies have been imagined; the boundaries between life and nonlife have become critical problematics. The traffic between earth science and social and humanities scholarship went in several directions. In selecting a “golden spike” for the Anthropocene, geologists trying to extract a sediment core from a Canadian lake were embroiled in controversies over Indigenous cosmologies and land stewardship, settler colonization, and nuclear fallout.

As the dust settles, this panel conducts a post-mortem inquiry for the Anthropocene. Does the geological rejection of the term matter for how humanists should think about relations between the social and the planetary? What did the Anthropocene debacle reveal about epistemic power relations? And where to go now?

• Leah Aronowsky, Assistant Professor of Climate at Columbia University
• Elizabeth Povinelli, Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University
• Sophia Roosth, Associate Professor at New York University

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This event is part of the New York History of Science Lecture Series.

Sponsoring Organizations:

• Columbia University in the City of New York
• NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study
• The Graduate Center, City University of New York
• The New York Academy of Medicine
• The New York Academy of Sciences

Host or Publisher The Center for Science and Society