"On the Poverty of Our Nomenclature"
Eileen Crist critiques the recent proposal to name our current geological epoch “the Anthropocene.”
Eileen Crist critiques the recent proposal to name our current geological epoch “the Anthropocene.”
Denis Byrne explores the 1880s reclamation of the Elizabeth Bay in Sydney Harbour, encountering historical influences such as sandstone wall constructions, buried objects, and colonial narratives. He argues in this article that archaeology has a role to play in bringing reclamations and other aspects of the Anthropocene into view.
Hornby draws attention to the work of Danish artist Olafur Eliasson, whose immersive installations aim to increase environmental awareness, arguing that Eliasson’s environments are fully orchestrated affairs that share the technologies and efforts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries’ militarization of climate control.
Through readings of the works of artist/sculptor Ilana Halperin and poet Alice Oswald, David Farrier explores the idea of Anthropocene as marked by haunted time.
Paul Gillen explores the role of conscious human agency leading up to the Anthropocene, suggesting that the development of sentience in the Phanerozoic eon exerted an influence on the interaction of minerals and life.
Greg Garrard, Gary Handwerk, and Sabine Wilke, editors of the special section titled “Imagining Anew: Challenges of Representing the Anthropocene,” introduce this collection of essays from diverse humanities disciplines.
In the special section “Imagining Anew: Challenges of Representing the Anthropocene,” Tobias Boes examines the hermeneutic and poetic operations by which we as human beings turn our very planet into a signifier for our collective existence as a species, a process he refers to as “planetary mediation.”
In the special section “Imagining Anew: Challenges of Representing the Anthropocene,” Alexa Weik von Mossner analyzes Dale Pendell’s speculative novel The Great Bay.
In the special section “Imagining Anew: Challenges of Representing the Anthropocene,” Wolfgang Struck’s essay examines the renewed attraction to the medium of the atlas in light of representational challenges raised by the model of the Anthropocene.
In the special section “Provocations,” Noel Castree reviews the growing stream of publications authored by humanists about the Holocene’s proclaimed end. He argues that these publications evidence environmental humanists as playing two roles with respect to the geoscientific claims they are reacting to: the roles of “inventor-discloser” or “deconstructor-critic.”