On an unusually snowy Thursday morning in The Netherlands, we attended a special meeting titled “Rethinking History in the Anthropocene,”which took place as part of the History of Knowledge seminar series at Utrecht University. Organizers Lukas Verburgt and Elske de Waal assembled perspectives from numerous disciplines and from around the world to showcase the prospects and tools available to historians in tackling the global transdisciplinary challenges of the Anthropocene. Frozen tracks and icy roads couldn’t stop the hyperlink from taking 65 interested scholars to this digital meeting.
The symposium, which took place on February 11th 2021, centered around two main concepts: the ‘history of knowledge’ and the ‘Anthropocene.’ The influence of both concepts on current scholarly debates are worth noting here, as they both dispute long established disciplinary boundaries. The emerging discipline of the history of knowledge has recently challenged the former monopoly historians of science had over the historical study of ‘knowledge’ and its creation. Historians of knowledge have indicated that the range of methods applied to produce legitimate knowledge widely surpasses the scope of the “scientific.” By doing so, they challenge the historiographical boundaries between what would normally be considered dichotomous concepts, such as: the sciences and the humanities, Western and non-Western knowledge, and academic and non-academic knowledge.
The notion of the Anthropocene, has, likewise, made scholars aware of the problematic nature of some of their dichotomies. As the presentations of the day demonstrated, determining where ‘nature’ ends and ‘human’ or ‘culture’ begins has proved to be difficult. Even concepts such as ‘historical’ and ‘geological’ could no longer be treated as separate under the Anthropocenic umbrella. The rationale that the actions of human beings can fundamentally change the very nature of our planet was captured under the term ‘Anthropocene’ by scientist and Nobel Prize winner Paul Crutzen in 2000. Consequently, scholars from the humanities and the sciences have become aware of the unavoidable entanglement of humans with non-human nature. They have come to understand that even the small actions we take as humans have the power to change the future trajectory of Earth as we know it.
Throughout the day, the presentations of ten scholars (see here for the full program) showed, among other things, how various fields of inquiry may overlap in the context of the Anthropocene. By combining different methods of analysis, new perspectives and innovative historical narratives emerged. The result was a fascinating display of narrative tools at the disposal of the historian, such as personification or playing with scales of time. We were shown how the concept of time varies between disciplines, how the tradition of North African belly dancers intertwined with migrating saltwater clams, and that planet Earth itself illustrates emotional characteristics such as blue, black, and angry. By the end of the afternoon, we found ourselves reflecting on the difference between writing history and writing stories, and on many other questions inspired by the event: what is the power of historical storytelling? Can it assist in creating new futures? Which actors should be featured in our new stories? And is the Anthropocene concept any more than just a new framework within which we tell stories?
Time in the Anthropocene
Geologists haven’t yet decided whether the era of the ‘Holocene’ is a thing of the past. Yet, Jürgen Renn (MPIWG, Berlin), in his keynote talk “Another Challenge of the Anthropocene: Turning History into a New Science of Time,” declared the Anthropocene as “a new geological epoch.” Within it, geological time has become ‘entangled’ with human historical time. According to Renn, once they accept the fact that human interventions have brought the ‘Earth System’ to a tipping point, historians should start explicating the causal chain of events that brought about this exciting moment of the Anthropocene for both people and planet. Ultimately, Renn presented the Anthropocene as an opportunity for historians to ask the right questions for guiding necessary scientific, political and ideological interventions. For example: “How did humanity, and the cultural and technological systems it has both shaped and been shaped by, spur the emergence of the Anthropocene? What were the stages of historical development that led to the present, impossible to ignore entanglements of humans and the Earth system?”
Fig. 1 From Renn’s talk: the spheres that compose the ‘Earth system’ or ‘Geosphere.’
One way of tackling these questions, raised by Renn and many of the other speakers, is to discard any naive intuitions of time; we can no longer use time as a stable background for an unchangeable nature, since it interacts with the changeable world system. By linking geological time with human time, Renn encouraged us to think of past, present and future as entangled. Time can no longer be referred to by historians as a linear, neutral backdrop to historical narratives; each complex system has its own intrinsic time which must be reconciled in a shared temporal dimension from which the myriad entanglements of Earth spheres or species can be properly investigated. By achieving this, Renn envisioned, historians could become “scientists of time.”
To help us achieve this impressive title, Boris van Meurs (Radboud University Nijmegen) also focused on the notion of time, discussing Paul Ricoeur’s ‘incising of time’. In a talk titled “The ‘Now’ and the ‘Instant’ in Earth History,” van Meurs described how most scientists — for the sake of objectivity — keep an arm’s length from their subject matter by treating time as anonymous; it is merely a metric by which the succession rate of instants can be measured. But does our confinement to a linear flow of time, which moves us inevitably from one moment into the next, also divorce us from the ‘past’ that constructed our ‘present’? Whilst Renn presented this layered view of time as something that is new to historians, van Meurs showed us that this view has always distinguished historians from scientists. For historians, the past remains present. Ricoeur asserts that historians work reflexively, making sense of the ‘nows’ in which they are situated by stringing together characters, artefacts and events that they deem to be relevant for today, no matter how great the distance between ‘then’ and ‘now.’ Through reconciling geological durations with more fleeting human durations, every instant becomes an expansive moment that is lived through, shared and consequently has no fixed duration. Historians, therefore, have the upper hand in that they already deal with entanglements of past with present and they understand that the pictures we generate of the past are bound to influence our future.
This ability was further exhibited by Kunzhang Guo (Université de Technologie de Troyes). Guo, a former petroleum engineer turned historian, zoomed in on the fossil records lining the 1800-kilometre-long and 2500-year-old Chinese Grand Canal. She explored the history of the oldest and longest artificial river in the world and zoomed into controversies surrounding the use and misuse of natural resources which reappeared in the course of several dynasties. Guo argued for extending historical narratives across larger temporalities by pointing out the enduring character of environmental concerns. She highlighted 16th-century debates between state engineers and communities whose landscapes had been destroyed by technologies used to control the waterway, and claimed that these debates mirrored current ones. By connecting historical discussions with contemporary ones, Guo exemplified how past environmental harms remain alive and should act as a warning, or at least be considered, when guiding future policy. Instances of ancient environmentalist campaigns puts to bed the notion that such concerns have become urgent only recently. Furthermore, her presentation demonstrated how ancient actors from as far back as the 6th century might also be implicated in the Anthropocene.
Scope, Scale, and Characters of Narrative
At historians’ disposal is the power to tell stories. A high degree of creativity is required to handle the vast spatio-temporal magnitudes and array of actors involved in the Anthropocene and the symposium acted as a receptacle of resources for forging such narratives. Throughout the course of the day we were treated to a dazzling array of scales, not only of time, but also of space and the relationships between human and non-human actors.
Personification of non-human actors was a tool employed by most speakers: In her talk “But Which Earth? The History of Earth-Images as Iconography of the Anthropocene,” Rachel Hill (Goldsmiths, University of London) exhibited how advancements in space imaging technologies have agency in the characterization of the planet we call home and, by extent, influence our understanding of humanity’s position within it. The impaired first colored portrait of Earth, referred to as ‘Glitched Marble’ (fig. 2), initially displayed how our planet’s mood can be determined by the quality of an image. Hill noted that the image inadvertently gained the title of ‘Angry Earth’ due to the image’s harsh, distorted lines. Subsequently, the familiar placid and untouched ‘Blue Marble’ image of our planet (fig. 3) was criticized for creating the impression of a lonely and uninhabited planet. As a response to our planet’s loneliness, Hill presented the most recent ‘Black Marble’ image (fig. 4) which traces artificial light as an indication for proximate human activity. The qualitative difference between the two imaging technologies eventually leaves us with the choice between either viewing humanity as inconsequential to the surface of the Earth (Blue Marble) or floating in space on an isolated planet, like lonely astronauts (Black Marble). Hill’s presentation thus clarified how technicalities, such as the variation of imaging technologies, may unintentionally lead to psychological projections and personification of our planet.
Interspecies intimacy and their codependent relationship with their environment were beautifully demonstrated by choreographer, performer, and theorist Adham Hafez’s (New York University) gripping talk “Of Songs and Fish”. Hafez chose the creation and inauguration of the Suez Canal, alongside the inauguration of the Khedivial Cairo Opera House, as one Anthropocenic event which vividly entwined histories of colonialists, slaves, Suez singers, Zar belly dancers, fish, and sand. According to Hafez, the biodiversity that disappeared following the opening of the Suez Canal, which caused the migration of fish and clams north into the Mediterranean, cannot be understood merely in biological terms. He explained that this story encompassed cultural entities as well as biological ones, such as traditional work songs and Zar dances. By expanding the contents of biodiversity to encompass cultural artifacts, Hafez exposed the European settlers’ treatment of the enslaved locals as biological replaceable artifacts (fig. 5).
Fig. 5 From Adham Hafez’s talk: Schematic drawing of a construction site, where Egyptian slaves are depicted as tools amongst other mechanical contraptions.
Hafez’s presentation illustrated the power of transdisciplinary storytelling: The colonialists changed the North African landscape by paving Parisian streets and erecting their European cultural establishments, such as the Opera House. As the local scene took on a European character, the soft sand that once guided the original movements of a traditional dance disappeared and the once celebrated dancers and singers were scorned and often criminalized. On the other hand, the saltwater clams looking for the hardened edges and rocks of the Red Sea in the soft sands of the Mediterranean resorted to latching onto the hard exterior of docked British ships, and provided poetic justice for the grave oppression displayed towards the locals. Hafez’s utilization of histories of harm, suffering and vulnerability provided an evocative way to visualize the otherwise abstract entanglements of human and natural spheres that had been presented by Renn earlier in the day.
Another entangled Anthropocenic interaction between human and non-human actors was presented by Raf de Bont (Maastricht University). In his talk “Living With Animals: Heini Hediger, History and the Anthropocene,” De Bont showed us that even seemingly small decisions, like where we build roads, have a dramatic impact on animal behavior. His presentation covered the changing relations between humans and non-human animals, providing us with some tools to tell both their stories. By basing his study on the sensibilities that zoo pioneer Heni Hediger developed towards animal behavior, de Bont revealed the subjective world of wild animals and the many ways they interact with different types of human infrastructure. How would an elephant relate to urban gardens, highways, sewer systems or landfills?
Action-Oriented History
Many of the frames and tools showcased in this event were already available to historians before the notion of the Anthropocene was invented; for example, history of science is adept, as Hill showed us, in fleshing out the epistemic agency of scientific instruments or, as de Bont showed us, the co-evolution of non-human animals with human owners. So, one can question whether the label of Anthropocene is necessary, or preferable, for histories of non-humans to be written or championed. Furthermore, the concept has several problems: first, it is not properly defined, in that there is no consensus on when it is supposed to have begun. And second, as Guo’s presentation showed, it has yet remained unclear which span of humanity is to be held responsible for bringing about this epoch. The challenge, therefore, is to justify whether the notion of the Anthropocene, despite these problems, has provided something valuable to historical scholarship.
But we do see a lot of opportunities. Events like this provide spaces for historians committed to foregrounding relations typically sidelined or forgotten by an ignorant or ambivalent Anthropos; spaces where historians can come together and share resources for writing new futures. Chaotic responses to current health and climate related crises show that narratives from storytellers of all kinds — historians, politicians, scientists, priests, researchers and fortune tellers — are often insufficient for capturing nature’s turbulence. For that reason, narrative tools need to be freed from within their disciplinary walls.
The challenge raised by the history of knowledge to the boundaries of the history of science was mirrored by the diverse presentations, notably Guo’s and Hafez’s, which displayed how seemingly divergent scholarly practices could cross-pollinate within the context of the Anthropocene. Since the concept’s inception, the Anthropocene epoch — the age of humans –– has faced scholars from diverse backgrounds with the awkwardness and arbitrariness of the conceptual and disciplinary boundaries within historical research. The history of knowledge and the Anthropocene concept are both meant to encourage historians to expand their scope, implement new theoretical tools and experiment with narrative structures for novel ends. Many of the speakers presented the audience and each other with a call to action, urging that historians must help in this time of climate related crisis. It is within the framework of Anthropocene that historians can shed antiquarian inclinations to shape new futures by furnishing the present with novel stories. Stories that aren’t just about Anthropos that finds itself in the Anthropocene, but about the entities it has so regretfully dragged here, or rather, realizes it shares the Earth with. By articulating the entangled relations between human and non-human, dialogues within the “Anthropocene” framework can ensure that struggles for survival, recognition and justice are facilitated. Such are the stories historians must learn to tell.