The Geological Turn: The Anthropocene and Its Narratives

March 2, 2016, 5:30-7:00pm

Conrad A. Elvehjem Building, L140, 800 University Ave.

Scientists tell us the Earth has entered a new epoch: the Anthropocene. What we face is not only an environmental crisis, but a geological revolution of human origin. In two centuries, our planet has tipped into a state unknown for millions of years. How did we get to this point? Should we buy Anthropocene scientists' convenient story of an undifferentiated “human species” that upset the Earth system, unaware of what it was doing?

Stories matter for the Earth. The stories that the elites of industrial modernity have told themselves have been cultural drivers of the new geological regime we now live in. Similarly the kinds of stories we today tell ourselves about the Anthropocene can shape the kind of geo-historical future we will inhabit. This talk will cross-examine four grand narratives of the Anthropocene: 1) the naturalist narrative, currently the mainstream one; 2) the post-nature narrative; 3) the eco-catastrophist narrative; and 4) the eco-Marxist narrative.

Christophe Bonneuil is a senior researcher in history of science, science studies, and environmental history at the Centre Alexandre Koyré  (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) and teaches at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. His research explores the co-evolution of ways of knowing and ways of governing nature and the Earth. He has recently published a global environmental history of the Anthropocene (The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us, Verso, 2016 [2013 in french], with J-B. Fressoz) and edited The Anthropocene and the Global Environmental Crisis: Rethinking Modernity in a New Epoch, (Routledge, 2015, with C. Hamilton and F. Gemenne).

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