Thin black line in a cliff…
A friend of mine, the musician Ken Slaven, took the fatalistic view, whenever prospects seemed more than usually dire, that, in the end, we’re all just a thin black line in a cliff. I have always respected Ken’s wisdom. It has an appropriately secular and grounded sense of eternity.
It seems, according on a recent article on BBC Radio 4’s Material World programme (30th Jan 2008), that geological stratigraphers are embarked on a project to assert a new benchmark in the fine Vernier gradations on the world-cliff by declaring the end of the Holocene period and the dawning (around 1815) of the Anthropocene, the geological period during which ‘future geologists’ will discern the fingerprint sworls of human industry and social organisation on the geological record.
The distinctive darkness of industrial society’s thin line is, as in all geological discourse, characterised by differences in the composition of sedimentary deposits. What endures is an elemental flavour of metals, radiogenic elements and whatever persists over time of granulated polymerised hydrocarbons. There will, allegedly, be a lot of concrete – reef-like rashes of structure, accretions and agglomerations here and there – Shanghai, New York, Rio - and fossil remnants in drifts, one imagines, like a sea-bed litter of ammonites, trilobites and molluscs.
I question, however, the appropriateness of the term anthropocene. The distorted sedimentation patterns described are not the consequence of human activity per se (which has chuntered along for a million years or so before 1815) but of a process called capitalism (private or statist). It is this ‘social’ process, deemed as self-actualising and inevitable as climate in most current discourse, which drives the redistribution of metallic elements, the creation of plastics, the concentration of CO2 and the accretion of concrete. Wouldn’t we be better calling the epoch the Capitalocene? Given the unsustainability of an infinite process of expansion, Capitalism, in a world of finite resources, this at least has the virtue of bounding the epoch, imagining an upper bound on this stratigraphic layer.
The contributors to the programme, at one point, embarked on a somewhat silly debate over whether the anthropocene marked the end of geological history – after all, what could come after? Either we persist till the end of time (or we evolve) in the anthropocene or it ends with us. Presumably the aggressive colonising arthropods from the planet Zarg will not use this term to describe the preceding era (if indeed nomenclature is part of their ‘culture’). Anthropocene, Holocene, Cenozoic – the whole slab of marble will be binned in the same debacle.
At least Capitalocene, containing as does Capital its intrinsic limits, provides humanity with a get-out clause, a glimmer of hope that there is a paler phase beyond this lateral smudge of heavy metals, dioxins and polyurethane. Adoption of the term Anthropocene suggests a short-sightedness which ill-behoves geologists. Come on guys! Give us a break!
Posted: February 1st, 2008 under Pre-2009.