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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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the unintentional and many would argue devastating reality on which this story of planetary change is based. Metaphors can act like condensed allegories (Donoghue, 2014) and the allegories lurking in the humans as a geological force metaphor are not just about meteorite strikes and fate, but mythical battles and perceived achievements. In particular, the emergence of humans as a geological force lends itself to the dominant Western Progress version of what Carolyn Merchant calls the Recovery Narrative, the teleological Judeo-Christian Garden of Eden story about humans’ struggle to remake Heaven on Earth and thus restore their position as God’s chosen ones, following their expulsion into the earthly wilderness (Merchant, 2003). Through its association with power, the metaphor also easily, if inadvertently, helps naturalise the Christian model of human dominion over the rest of nature (White, 1967). In contrast, the other major Anthropocene metaphor — humans as planetary stewards (e.g. Steffen et al., 2011b) — arguably resonates with the other major Christian model of the human—Earth relationship — stewardship — as well as with a more Declensionist reading of the Recovery Narrative (Merchant, 2003). The point is that the different metaphors arising out of the Anthropocene idea reflect and revitalise ancient myths and theological debates about humanity’s role in the world, illustrating the contemporary relevance of what geographer Justin Tse calls ‘grounded theologies’ (Tse, 2014). Besides stratigraphy, the other discipline central to the scientific Anthropocene concept is Earth System Science (especially if it is taken to encompass ‘global environmental change science’) (see also Castree, 2015). The inflections Earth System Science brings to the humans as a geological force metaphor are quite distinctive. To begin with, the idea that humans are like a real geological force is supported by the mass of observational data, time-series, and modelling that now collectively points to human influence extending into virtually all subsystems of the Earth (of which geology is one cross-cutting aspect). More precisely and significantly, this work points to human influence into the Earth system as a whole. Critically, the idea that the Earth is a single dynamic system is itself a metaphor, as mentioned by Lovelock and Robbins above. While some of Lovelock’s additional, provocative metaphors about the Earth (notably renaming it after the Greek Goddess Gaia) remain unpopular with many scientists, and Geographical Research * 2015 while underlying images of the Earth as either machine or organism remain in tension, Lovelock and Lynne Margulis’s basic insight that the Earth functions as a dynamic complex system is gaining broader acceptance (Hamilton and Grinevald, 2015). This growing acceptance and the separate but vital hypothesis that this system has fundamentally shifted phases, is a vital part of the context in which humans are increasingly imagined as a geological force. Indeed, arguably the metaphors Earth as a complex system and humans as a geological force are mutually reinforcing. In the latter, the term ‘geological’ becomes a metonym for planetary. That humans have become an increasingly impactful force also resonates with the idea of the Great Acceleration, the exponential growth in industrialisation in the post-war period that is thought to have decisively changed the Earth’s functioning (Steffen et al., 2015; see also Cook and Balayannis, 2015). Fittingly, the phrase Great Acceleration captures a sense that not only are humans exerting a pressure on the mass of the Earth but are doing so in an accelerating manner, thereby achieving the status of a Newtonian force (formulated in physics as Mass x Acceleration). The focus on industrialisation more broadly gestures to our geological character by highlighting that our modern bodily and social existence is rooted in the extraction, combustion, and consumption of fossil fuels, as Kathryn Yusoff among others underlines (Yusoff, 2015). In contrast to stratigraphy, Earth System Science has a strong future-orientation, which, combined with expectations from policy makers, encourages it to slip from descriptive claims about the past and present into ascriptive claims about how things will be (Baskin, 2015). One of the effects this has is to extend the historically specific idea that we are now a geological force into a more universal sense that we are now and forever a geological force (or have always been). That is, our geological and force-full nature becomes an ontological statement about humanness, both in relation to our place in the planetary system but more generally. It also resonates with pride that we now apparently have in our power the technological and scientific know-how to be a geological force in an intentional, positive sense. This is where the other main Anthropocene metaphor — humans as planetary stewards — again comes into play. Reframing humans as stewards reflects not only the fact that we influence the world but the contemporary assertion that we, as enlightened and moral beings, now have the © 2015 Institute of Australian Geographers