Planet Human: Reading and Writing the Anthropocene

Catalog description

“Anthropocene” is a new and still unofficial term, but a mind-blowing one. It signifies we are living at a moment both exhilarating and terrifying: The dawn of a new historical epoch in the 4.5 billion-year history of Earth. For the first time, just one of the 8.7 million species on this planet will determine (though not necessarily “control”) the fate of all the rest. We humans are not only reshuffling the kaleidoscope of life forms on Earth, we are also altering the chemistry of its sky and oceans, and terraforming its surface as easily as if it were made of Play-Doh. All of this is occurring at an accelerating pace that has now overwhelmed the various non-human forces that shaped our planet until now, forces like natural selection, plate tectonics, glaciation, volcanism and orbital variation. Can there be a more powerful concept, or a more frightening one? Yet the scientists, philosophers, essayists and activists who have looked deeply at the concept of the Anthropocene (most of them, anyway) tell us that this is not about apocalypse. The end is not near, if by “end” we mean the imminent destruction of our planet and ourselves. The Anthropocene is a transformation, and where it will lead is both unknowable and entirely dependent on the choices we humans make, both individually and collectively. Our inability to know our future does not leave us powerless, however, because a rich body of scholarly and popular work has already scouted this terrain, and can assist us in our own explorations. In this class, we will mine this work, approaching the Anthropocene as both a scientific and cultural construction. We will read, research and write, and most of all we will think—all with the goal of understanding how we got here, and where we might go next.