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Title: Metaphor and the Anthropocene - Presenting Humans as a Geological Force (June 2015) Collection Type: Directories and Documents Collection Name: Tanis Thorne Native Californian & Nisenan Collection Author: Lauren Rickards Published: June 2015 # of Pages: 9 Download PDF: User Login Required Download OCR Text: User Login Required

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Clive Hamilton (Hamilton, 2015; Hamilton and Grinevald, 2015) suggests that the Anthropocene is a radical idea because it stems from an emerging paradigm shift away from ‘global environmental change’ towards thinking in terms of a single dynamic and phase-shifted Earth System. To the extent this is the case, it amplifies the sense that the concept — and this period in which it is emerging — possesses what Castree rightly calls ‘a symbolic charge — a certain grandeur if you will’ (p. 2). In this essay, I reflect on this “symbolic charge’ by exploring the metaphors and other rhetorical tropes used by some scientists in presenting the concept. This is not to question or criticise these scientists or to undermine the scientific validity of the Anthropocene concept. For one thing, it is not as if a purer form were possible. Metaphors deeply pervade all human cognition, scientific analysis included (Lakoff and Johnson, 2003). Metaphors are now also recommended to scientists as a communication and collaboration aid, serving as a ‘boundary object’ (cf. Star and Griesemer, 1989; Devadason, 2011). Rather than indicting the use of metaphors, my purpose here is to highlight some of the pockets of meaning they fold into the Anthropocene concept. By expanding our view of Nature to the planet, the Anthropocene concept recycles, reworks, and gives extra rhetorical force to a number of existing metaphors of the human-—nature relationship, namely humans as stewards (which has deep roots in Christian theology) and humans as system mechanics (which has roots in cybernetics). But it is the metaphor about humans as a geological force that is the most force-full in all senses. Below I begin to rustle through some of the baggage of this particular metaphor to gain a better understanding of what meaning it carries for the Anthropocene. The meaning of metaphors A metaphor gives new meaning to an ordinary word by equating it to an unexpected one, ‘carrying over’ a word “from its normal use to a new use’ (Richards 1929, in Donoghue, 2014, 1). Humans as acancer, for example, is a long-standing metaphor in some quarters of environmentalism. It is one that may be revived with the recent proposition that Cold War atomic weapons testing should signify the start of the Anthropocene because — by riddling the Earth with novel radioactive nucleotides — it provides a temporally precise stratigraphic signal synchronous with the Great Acceleration period and its apparently decisive Geographical Research * 2015 impact on Earth system functioning (Steffen et al., 2015; Zalasiewicz et al., 2015). A powerful shorthand for encapsulating the pervasive and negative effects of human impacts (Robbins, 2013), the humans as a cancer metaphor invites us to imagine humans in a different ontological, spatial, and moral light. While humans as a cancer is Clearly a provocative, political proposition, many metaphors are far more mundane and difficult to detect. As Robbins (2013) notes: because there is no way to practically and effectively describe and know the world in total [. . .] itis far more succinct and powerful to think about it as if it were a ‘system’, a ‘network’ or a set of ‘functions’. But even when unremarkable, “each metaphor is also inevitably and profoundly political’ (Robbins, 2013, 308). Not only does a metaphor illuminate some parts of the world rather than others and add various hues, it shapes our subsequent actions, as J.K. Gibson-Graham outlined so effectively in their analysis of how we imagine and thus revere ‘the Economy’ (Gibson-Graham, 2006). For example, the idea that the Earth is sick — a cancer patient — leads almost inevitably to solutions conceived through related medical notions of cure. Exemplifying this are recent geoengineering propositions to manage climate change by administering violent stratospheric ‘injections’ of sulfur in the name of (chemo) therapy (Nerlich and Jaspal, 2012). While metaphors can deeply structure our understanding and actions, the meaning of any given metaphor is inherently ambiguous, especially when the terms are only loosely specified. This means that the value of a metaphor is not simply a matter of how accurately it depicts the world, but of what insights, storylines, emotions, and aesthetics it offers. As Donoghue (2014) notes (quoting Stern (1931)): The metaphor expresses shades of thought and feeling which could not otherwise be formulated in speech, or not so concisely and precisely formulated. The value of a metaphor lies in the adding of new attributes to a referent, its placing in a web of new complex relations, through which it is brought into a new light, receives peculiar emotional values and is comprehended more vividly and completely than before (p. 53). The aesthetic, expressive quality of language that metaphors represent is familiar to geography, which began with a strong interest in marrying © 2015 Institute of Australian Geographers