#Terraformers definition full#

7 These real and possible timespaces are not named after SF writer H.P. I am calling all this the Chthulucene-past, present, and to come. Maybe, but only maybe, and only with intense commitment and collaborative work and play with other terrans, flourishing for rich multispecies assemblages that include people will be possible. 6 I also insist that we need a name for the dynamic ongoing sym-chthonic forces and powers of which people are a part, within which ongoingness is at stake. Thus, Anthropocene, Plantationocene, 5 and Capitalocene (Andreas Malm's and Jason Moore's term before it was mine). So, I think a big new name, actually more than one name, is warranted.

#Terraformers definition full#

Right now, the earth is full of refugees, human and not, without refuge. I think our job is to make the Anthropocene as short/thin as possible and to cultivate with each other in every way imaginable epochs to come that can replenish refuge. 4 The Anthropocene marks severe discontinuities what comes after will not be like what came before. I along with others think the Anthropocene is more a boundary event than an epoch, like the K-Pg boundary between the Cretaceous and the Paleogene. Perhaps the outrage meriting a name like Anthropocene is about the destruction of places and times of refuge for people and other critters. Anna Tsing argues that the Holocene was the long period when refugia, places of refuge, still existed, even abounded, to sustain reworlding in rich cultural and biological diversity. 3 Vast investments and hugely creative and destructive technology can drive back the reckoning, but cheap nature really is over. 2 This is kin to the World-Ecology Research Network coordinator Jason Moore's arguments that cheap nature is at an end cheapening nature cannot work much longer to sustain extraction and production in and of the contemporary world because most of the reserves of the earth have been drained, burned, depleted, poisoned, exterminated, and otherwise exhausted. Recursion can be a drag.Īnna Tsing in a recent paper called “Feral Biologies” suggests that the inflection point between the Holocene and the Anthropocene might be the wiping out of most of the refugia from which diverse species assemblages (with or without people) can be reconstituted after major events (like desertification, or clear cutting, or, or. The constant question when considering systemic phenomena has to be, when do changes in degree become changes in kind, and what are the effects of bioculturally, biotechnically, biopolitically, historically situated people (not Man) relative to, and combined with, the effects of other species assemblages and other biotic/abiotic forces? No species, not even our own arrogant one pretending to be good individuals in so-called modern Western scripts, acts alone assemblages of organic species and of abiotic actors make history, the evolutionary kind and the other kinds too.īut, is there an inflection point of consequence that changes the name of the “game” of life on earth for everybody and everything? It's more than climate change it's also extraordinary burdens of toxic chemistry, mining, depletion of lakes and rivers under and above ground, ecosystem simplification, vast genocides of people and other critters, etc, etc, in systemically linked patterns that threaten major system collapse after major system collapse after major system collapse.

But I think the issues about naming relevant to the Anthropocene, Plantationocene, or Capitalocene have to do with scale, rate/speed, synchronicity, and complexity. People joined the bumptious fray early and dynamically, even before they/we were critters who were later named Homo sapiens.

1 The spread of seed-dispersing plants millions of years before human agriculture was a planet-changing development, and so were many other revolutionary evolutionary ecological developmental historical events. Of course, from the start the greatest planetary terraformers (and reformers) of all have been and still are bacteria and their kin, also in inter/intra-action of myriad kinds (including with people and their practices, technological and otherwise). There is no question that anthropogenic processes have had planetary effects, in inter/intra-action with other processes and species, for as long as our species can be identified (a few tens of thousand years) and agriculture has been huge (a few thousand years).