Every day without fail Google Alerts delivers to my inbox summaries of the latest news reports on selected subjects including climate change, sea level rise, droughts and floods, NASA, NOAA and the Hadley Centre, and more.
At first they were a treasure trove of material for blogging. That's no longer the case. What used to be attention-catching, sometimes alarming, is now our "new normal." It has almost become mundane.
How concerned might you be if I told you about the latest research that finds Arctic sea ice is disappearing at a faster rate than we had foreseen even just a couple of years ago? How many consecutive months of that very same report can you endure before it all becomes just a blur? Even I am coming to react with "oh no, not again."
Creeping normalcy has set in. We've become inured to these reports. Ho hum. We tune out. We direct our anger and indignation to some petty political squabble or other distraction.
Always looking for something fresh, I was pleased to stumble across a new description of the Anthropocene, the man-made geological epoch. See if this doesn't put it in a more helpful perspective:
“Anthropocene” as “the new epoch of geological time in which human activity is considered such a powerful influence on the environment, climate and ecology of the planet that it will leave a long-term signature in the strata record.”
Macfarlane continues:
Is this our new normal? If it is then why do we cling to structures that would have been relevant a century ago but no longer?
It's said that we're transiting from a former steady state, the Holocene, to a new steady state, the Anthropocene, only we're not there yet. For some reason I'm fixed on the image of people going downhill on a roller coaster with their eyes shut.
Yet we cannot simply shut our eyes but neither can we convey our new reality, our new normalcy, with words from a time past. Macfarlane writes that we need new words, a new lexicon that descrbie "just what it is we have done."
Yet as the notion of a world beyond us has become difficult to sustain, so a need has grown for fresh vocabularies and narratives that might account for the kinds of relation and responsibility in which we find ourselves entangled. “Nature,” Raymond Williams famously wrote in Keywords (1976), “is perhaps the most complex word in the language.” Four decades on, there is no “perhaps” about it.
Projects are presently under way around the world to gain the most basic of purchases on the Anthropocene – a lexis with which to reckon it. Cultural anthropologists in America have begun a glossary for what they call “an Anthropocene as yet unseen”, intended as a “resource” for confronting the “urgent concerns of the present moment”. There, familiar terms – petroleum, melt, distribution, dream – are made strange again, vested with new resilience or menace when viewed through the “global optic” of the Anthropocene.
Last year I started the construction of a crowdsourced Anthropocene glossary called the “Desecration Phrasebook”, and in 2014 The Bureau of Linguistical Reality was founded “for the purpose of collecting, translating and creating a new vocabulary for the Anthropocene”. Albrecht’s solastalgia is one of the bureau’s terms, along with “stieg”, “apex-guilt” and “shadowtime”, the latter meaning “the sense of living in two or more orders of temporal scale simultaneously” – an acknowledgment of the out-of-jointness provoked by Anthropocene awareness. Many of these words are, clearly, ugly coinages for an ugly epoch. Taken in sum, they speak of our stuttering attempts to describe just what it is we have done.
Yet we cannot simply shut our eyes but neither can we convey our new reality, our new normalcy, with words from a time past. Macfarlane writes that we need new words, a new lexicon that descrbie "just what it is we have done."
Yet as the notion of a world beyond us has become difficult to sustain, so a need has grown for fresh vocabularies and narratives that might account for the kinds of relation and responsibility in which we find ourselves entangled. “Nature,” Raymond Williams famously wrote in Keywords (1976), “is perhaps the most complex word in the language.” Four decades on, there is no “perhaps” about it.
Projects are presently under way around the world to gain the most basic of purchases on the Anthropocene – a lexis with which to reckon it. Cultural anthropologists in America have begun a glossary for what they call “an Anthropocene as yet unseen”, intended as a “resource” for confronting the “urgent concerns of the present moment”. There, familiar terms – petroleum, melt, distribution, dream – are made strange again, vested with new resilience or menace when viewed through the “global optic” of the Anthropocene.
Last year I started the construction of a crowdsourced Anthropocene glossary called the “Desecration Phrasebook”, and in 2014 The Bureau of Linguistical Reality was founded “for the purpose of collecting, translating and creating a new vocabulary for the Anthropocene”. Albrecht’s solastalgia is one of the bureau’s terms, along with “stieg”, “apex-guilt” and “shadowtime”, the latter meaning “the sense of living in two or more orders of temporal scale simultaneously” – an acknowledgment of the out-of-jointness provoked by Anthropocene awareness. Many of these words are, clearly, ugly coinages for an ugly epoch. Taken in sum, they speak of our stuttering attempts to describe just what it is we have done.
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