OF ROCKS AND STONES
1. Finally, after around 16 years of research and deliberation, the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy, the body working under ICS (International Commission on Stratigraphy) reviewed the report by the Anthropocene Working Group and in March 2024 declined accepting the current geological epoch as ‘Anthropocene’. The working group’s aim was to find and present evidence as to how the recent impact of humans on the earth system deviated from the characteristics of the last designated epoch of Holocene of the roughly last 11.700 years, and that it is by now necessary to name a new epoch starting around 1950s with the atomic tests and subsequent accumulation of varied other human impact (great acceleration) on geological stratum. (1) The stratigraphic evidence that the AWG submitted include accumulation of new (synthetic) ‘minerals’, plastics and other human made compounds whose variety exceeds 200.000. Other evidence include accumulation of ‘novel rocks’ (mostly concrete), ‘techno fossils’, carbon deposits and new chemicals (mostly from fertilizer use). Yet even other categories are climate and sea level evidence that concern many other scientists from different fields and also the so called biostratigraphic data that involve warming oceans that lead to a change in the marine biomass, as well as the broiler chickens which make up two thirds of the total bird biomass on earth. Thinking of the timescales that the science of geology involves, it is possibly understandable that the naming of a new epoch is not accepted. After all, it took the ICS fifty years to name the ‘Quaternary Period’ whose last epoch is the Holocene. Probably, the new and still ‘soft’ layer run counter to the workings of geological nomenclature which is not accustomed to deal with accelerated history. But then the term anthropocene is widely embraced by journalists and by public at large, which, according to Bruno Latour inevitably bring natural and social sciences and art into the realm of politics. The comparison is the case of Galileo Galilei facing the inquisition, to that of the earth system science and climate scientists against the climate (and anthropocene) scepticism (and denialism) of global corporations, governments and political actors of the established order.
2. For the purposes of comprehensible geochronology, instead of billion(s) years geologists speak of hundreds and thousands of millions when observing the earth’s age, key events and forces that shape the so called critical zone, namely rivers glaciers, volcanos, plate tectonics and else. For the first time, human impact is on a par in comparison to cataclysmic events that shaped the earth, seas and the atmosphere physically and chemically for millions of years. Meanwhile, it was mostly the modern historians that were humbled by the fact that human presence on the planet comprise only a last few seconds of the last minute of a ’24 hour earth,’ that is 4600 million years compacted into a day for the sake of analogy. Archaeology of Anatolia and the Fertile Crescent goes back to the late Paleolithic and early Neolithic that coincide with the start of the interglacial period, the Holocene, and the beginnings of farming and the settled life. What avoids us to think of the stratigraphy of the Anthropocene as an object of future archaeology is possibly the scale of time involved, and indeed the uncertainty in the future survival of humankind as a species. As with fossils, we expect the techno-fossils to be petrified remains rather than the common artifacts of archaeology as we know, and the Anthropocenic stratum to be compacted into a few centimeters in some thousands of years. Will the future archaeology be inclusive of, for example, oceanic and atmospheric chemistry? If so, then we expect the site of archaeological excavation to be the entire ‘critical zone,’ the thin layer on earth’s surface. More importantly, it is the convergence of realms of knowledge and the now defunct separation of nature and culture, as Latour writes, that define current situation. It is time that history and agency be reconsidered to be inclusive of all beings, past and present. In the history of the science of geology, stretching back to antiquity and concentrating in the last three centuries of the establishment of the field, Gaia is commonly included as the last chapter in understanding the causes and effects of great forces. (2) What had been considered ahistorical (nature) should be abandoned as a given: “… It is “nature” that was universal, stratified, incontrovertible, systematic, de-animated, global, and indifferent to our fate. But not Gaia, which is only the name proposed for all the intermingled and unpredictable consequences of the agents, each of which is pursuing its own interest by manipulating its own environment.” (3) The respective positions of object and subject are subverted.
3. As of 2007, world civilization “… runs at 17 terawatts (of energy) 24 hours a day…. comparable to the expenditure of energy of volcanos and tsunamis…”(4) And this not including the production and possible (future) release of concentrated energy in the form of explosives, nuclear or conventional. As it was in Hiroshima, today part of this energy is released in a genocidal campaign on Gaza, a tiny strip of land that was home to more than two million Palestinians. Any talk of physical re-shaping of the earth’s surface in such an instance becomes irrelevant (obscene?) when facing more than forty five thousand dead (and counting) including children, women, elderly and other innocents. At the same time, an Israeli-Zionist contingent already began planning for a clean and sterile future development in Northern Gaza, architectural renderings and bird’s eye views and all. Architecture had always been about destruction as much as it aimed at construction, sometimes irreverent of (complex) lives and livelihood outside the ‘cyclical’ economy of its own and of the immense quantities of energy and materials it engenders and consumes. The ‘tectonic’ in the much aspired design qualities of the ‘architectonic’ takes its cues from matter and form in geological formations. It also alludes to shaping physical world as a kind of ‘second nature’ created to equal or surpass forces that move the earth. Less architectonic and more opportunistic and shameless are the remarks by a Turkish minister after the 2023 earthquakes in Southeast Turkey that killed thousands, maimed thousands more and devastated entire cities. He had the audacity to say that in near future the survivors will be “even glad” that their new homes to be built by the government are going to be incomparably nicer than what they have lost. A cataclysmic event, turned into a human disaster by corruption and shoddy construction, within which an insult is added to injury.
4. In civilized (Western) reasoning, art and science had occupied separate spheres, adding a layer of complexity onto the ‘Two Cultures’ (5) of natural science and humanities. That was almost seventy years ago when a part of humanity was so confident of overpowering the earth. Once the concepts ‘nature’ and ‘environment’ are left behind in favor of ‘Gaia,’ a whole new epistemic field opens up for the artist. The sensitized critical zone, to use Latour’s words, with the use of instruments, probes, measurements by the scientists leads to a fundamental change in ontology and to a newly ‘aestheticized’ life, provided one is not bogged down in sheer data. The proposition “… the earth is moved” (6) in response to human action requires a fundamentally new artistic enterprise, to be in the world with nonhumans. When one claims that all art is political, the dialectics (of materialism) has to be fused into the cybernetic systems, feedback loops, homeostasis and the idea of the biosphere shaping the earth for the benefit of all life. The lines of battle suggested by ‘thresholds’ ‘tipping points’ ‘extinction’ ‘climate catastrophe’ are to be directly linked to ‘the class war’ ‘inequality’ and ‘free market’ and democracy has to be inclusive of the rights of all life, human and nonhuman, and so do the courts judging ‘crimes against humanity’ and ‘genocide.’ The creative artist probing into her identity to find that deep down it is riddled with the entanglement of all beings past and present, sharing a similar fate on an altered planet: that is a revelation. And the demons that once haunted the unconscious of the artist now take shape as hyperobjects in a genuine nightmare.
January 2025
(1) https://eartharxiv.org/repository/view/6853/
(2) David Oldroyd. Thinking about the Earth: A History of Ideas in Geology, Harvard Un. Press, Boston 1996
(3) Bruno Latour. Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime, Polity Press, Cambridge 2017, p.142
(4) Eating the Sun (2007) by Oliver Morton, quoted in Latour, ibid. p.115
“… If the entire planet lived in the American manner, an expenditure of 90 TW would be required.The energy released by tectonic plates (heat and movement) is estimated, in comparison, to be 40 TW, while primary energy – of biological origin, on earth and in the oceans – is estimated at 130 TW…”
(5) Charles Percy Snow. The Two Cultures, Cambridge Un. Press, London 1959
(6) The Natural Contract (1995) by Michel Serres, quoted in Latour, ibid. p.59
“… Science won all the rights three centuries ago now, by appealing to the Earth, which responded by moving. So the prophet became king. In our turn, we are appealing to an absent authority, when we cry, like Galileo, but before the court of his successors, former prophets turned kings: “the Earth is moved.” The immemorial, fixed Earth, which provided the conditions and foundations of our lives, is moving, the fundamental Earth is trembling.”