 Is this the microphone? This one. Can you hear me? Good, thanks. Thank you, Michael, for the wonderful introduction. And thanks to my friends, Margaret, Astinia and others. It's always a pleasure to come back and reconnect with what's going on here and sharing thoughts and learning from also what's going on here. Australia is very important in my life. It shaped me, but not just autobiographically or biographically, but also intellectually. And my climate work comes out of more of my Australian experience of the drought of the beginning of the century than my Indian experience. So what I want to talk about tonight is something that pertains to how we look on this moment in history when anybody who thinks about climate change and what it means becomes more aware of geological facts about this planet. And at the same time, if I may say so, they remain unaware that they are becoming more aware of these geological facts. So there's a funny way in which facts of deep history are always with us. For instance, there's no object in this room that doesn't actually take for granted that humans have opposable thumbs. Now that's an evolutionary fact. We just live with it, live around it, live with the help of it. We don't stop to think about it. Normally that's our relationship with deep history, that we don't stop to think about it. And because we have the habit of not stopping to think about deep history, we don't stop to think about it even when deep history stares us in the face and actually speaks to us in our own language. And there's a peculiar forgetting of the large scale that happens even in discussions of climate change. And really the question I'm asking tonight is what happens if we resist the forgetting and remember those aspects of deep history that come towards us. So just to give you an example, to frame the talk, it's one of the first things I did here after getting here this time was speak to a class that my friend Asi was teaching. It's an M.A. class. Most students are from the Far East, some Islanders last year. And most of them doing economics. They have heard something about climate change. And I asked them this question that when we say that there is excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, what does the word excess mean? Why is the word excess used? I mean excess in relationship to what? And of course they don't know and I don't blame them for not knowing. They will just know. So when I said excess means that part of carbon dioxide or greenhouse gases, but carbon dioxide that we can't recycle. I mean that's what excess is. So then I explained to them that in the normal course of things carbon dioxide emitted by the planet or us gets absorbed by the planet, by forests, by soil, by sea. And it's really what it cannot absorb. That's the part of carbon dioxide that constitutes excess. And they agreed. But I said, do you know that if you gave the planet a million years, it would absorb it all? And because the planet has a million-year-old carbon cycle. And then so I told them that it's only excessive from a human point of view. The planet doesn't work as fast as you would like it to. So it's really if we could sort of get the planet to accelerate its processes, to pace them up, then we will say, look, just absorb in 20 years what you normally would absorb in a million years. It's just too slow for us. And then they realized that when we say excess carbon dioxide, what we mean is that the normal scale of time which we use in our calculations to do human things, that sort of sense of time and that scale of time are now brushing up against much larger scales of time. So the word excess is a peculiar word through which what the planet does, the speed at which the planet does it, kind of comes to us and yet we don't see it because we don't think through the word excess. Similarly, when we say fossil fuel is not renewable, and so we talk about going over to non-renewables, fossil fuel is non-renewable, but if you could have the patients to wait around for 300 million years, the planet would make fossil fuels again. Fossil fuels are perfectly renewable on a planetary scale. They're non-renewable on a human scale. So when you think of climate change as a problem, even the way we discuss it, there are all these words that have this double function, almost contradictory function. They kind of at once reveal what you might consider the planetary to us. But then in the way that we don't think about it, they at the same time cover it up. So philosophically it's like what German philosopher Heidegger used to say that the question of being, the question of existence is something that it's come up into our view flittingly. We see it and then we get so absorbed in our particular life that we don't see it. But the interesting thing is that because climate change is a problem that happens on a very large scale, this is now constantly happening for anybody thinking about climate change. And in fact it is a... So I'll quickly show you some slides. The very problem of planetary climate change, the very problem of knowing that the question of knowing that there is a planetary climate system wouldn't have been possible before the Second World War. Big time, without the kind of space technology, satellite sort of measurements, sensors in the sea, all kinds of equipments and technologies that became possible after the Second World War. Without them we wouldn't have been able to formulate what climate change is. And so just to quickly take you through some slides, to get you up to a point where I want to... I'm really trying to introduce my propositions for this evening by talking about a paper that I'm not presenting. These slides belong to another paper. But I just sort of helped to give you a background and they're not organized for the purpose of this presentation. Now, am I doing something? I must be... So basically we are talking about two kinds. That's the moment we're talking about two kinds of world, or the globe. One is the globe of globalization. And that's what we've been talking about for the last 30, 40 years, which is in history, in terms of historians, we call it world history, how the world got connected, how it came together, the rise of European empires. This is roughly a 500-year-old history if you speak in terms of European imperialism. If you're interested in human civilization, it might be at the most a 6,000-year-old history. But the globe of global warming comes out of Cold War science, concerns about the Cold War, and eventually resulted... The particular climate science eventually comes out of a very young science called Earth System Science. And these days, often geology is described as Earth System Science. The first time a body was set up to study Earth System, that is the planet as a sort of geobiological system was 1983, NASA set up a subcommittee to study the planet as a system. So you can see how young this is. And so when you talk about globalization, humans are the protagonists of global history, and we're really sort of looking at our own society's histories from the bottom up. Looking at the planet as a whole belongs to a whole history, not the history of humans wanting to look at the planet as a whole. Now that itself is an old history. There's a Yale academic called Ayesha Ramachandran, who has written a very interesting book on human imaginations of the planet as a whole in the early modern period. One example of imagining viewing the planet from outside, for instance, is Marketer's plan, the maps we use, which of course was... I mean, those that vision of the planet also was accompanied by the idea that if you actually look at the world from outside, what you will see is harmony, because it's God's work. So you'll see design, harmony, things set in a particular order. The Roman emperor Cipio had a famous Cipio's dream, which is in his dream he floats up and looks at the world. So you could say that when the astronauts went up and looked at this planet, they were not imagining this planet from outside for the first time in human history. So there's a human history of imagining this planet being looked at from outside. But the distinction is that while most of these histories are actually looking at the planet with ordinary human eyes, so looking at the planet as the planet might seem, you'll all remember the blue marble photograph. That's what the planet looks like to humanize. But what has also happened with NASA and space science is that there's another way of looking at the planet from outside, where the planet is actually reconstituted analytically. So you find out abstract information about the planetary system. You find out abstract information about other planets, and you reconstitute it scientifically. In other words, you ask the question not how does it look, but you ask how does it work. So for instance, there you ask questions like what has allowed this planet to maintain oxygen at 21% of the atmosphere roughly for about 600 million years? Because if oxygen went up, everything would go up in flames. If it went down, you will all choke to death. And it's funny for the planet has been able to do this. So when you ask these sorts of questions, how does the planet function? Those kind of questions taking particular shape in Carl Sagan's explorations of the space in James Labelow-Guyer theory eventually mutated into what is now called Earth System Sciences, where they now understand this system only sort of being systemic in a very precarious way. If you look at the history of the planet, it's gone through very jerky movements, gone from one phase to another phase. We don't know why the transitions happen. One of the most interesting things I find as a social science historian of the lefty kind is that my Marxist friends, including myself and I was a Marxist, we would look at 200 years and feel absolutely certain that we know the causes of why something happens. And when you look at this 4 billion, more than 4 billion-year-old planet, things are so random that you realize that randomness actually has a much more important role in a lot of natural history than the kind of hostility that is warranted by the hostility that we express towards randomness while explaining social history, but I'll come to that point. So quickly to go through this slide, so let me, as I said, I apologize, the slides were not made for this talk, so I'll just quickly go to... Sorry, going to some geological slides to give you an... This is the one I wanted. So if you look at this slide, that shows you the jerky history of the planet. So the first slide, the first top picture is of the whole 4 billion years, the history of the planet from the beginning, and basically it takes a slice and then expands it. So the next one is 500 million years, 60 million years, and last 3 million, 60,000 years, and then that's the kind of slide that geologists produce to show the connection between geology and biology. And let me just... So these are basically... What happens is that in different phases, for instance, the planet shows different kind of systemic behaviors. So again, if I go back to this size, the second one, so that's 500 million years, the planet begins to show a certain cycle when there are phases when the planet has no ice caps, no ice, and that's often called the hot house state of the planet. And then phases when the planet has ice caps, they're called the ice house state of the planet. So even though we're experiencing global warming, it's happening in an ice house state of the planet. Now again, there's no explaining why the planet does these things, but what they realize is that these changes are connected. So in other words, you could say that the planetary history is one of different emerging levels of complexity. Just as in other words, if you add a level of complexity, life becomes more complex, or human becomes more populous, the planet then has to add something to its complex functioning, to make the functioning more complex, just as the university expands its administrators, which often does, and that's the expansion that often happens. Then the administrators will actually add layers of complexity to the university, party to justify their existence. So basically, the history of the planet is like emergent layers of complexities. And the move from one layer of complexity to another is often jerky, and why the planet changes, but they see that the emergent of complex cellular life, multicellular life, changes the nature of the planet. And from that, they argue that there is a kind of a planetary system which eventually works to keep temperature, oxygen at a certain point. Within that, there are glaciers and interglacials. We are an interglacial. And of course, now the... So this gives rise to... Now I'm sort of entering my today's conversation. I'll try to speak for another 40 minutes, and bring it to an end. So what happens is, it's in this context that they began to argue that thanks to greenhouse gas emissions, humans have now become a geophysical force. Why a geophysical force? Because the kind of force that you need to create the cycle of ice ages and interglacials, which is forces created by wobbles in the planet's orbit, often called Milankovic cycles, that kind of geophysical force is now being exerted by human beings or our civilization, because they argue we have fended off the next ice age. So we have broken away maybe from the glacial interglacial cycle and put the planet on a different trajectory in its own history. So the word anthropocene, which is my subject this evening, was coined to signal this transition, to bring it into popular consciousness. And as you know, the word actually goes back to 1926 to a Soviet scientist, Alexei Pavlov, who coined it, and was immediately popularized by another Soviet scientist called Vladimir Varnatsky. But the interesting thing about the word ease from 1926 to its recent revival by Paul Kratzen and others, is that even though the word anthropocene refers to the name of a geological epoch, an epoch is measured in tens of millions of years. So it refers to a certain kind of sense of geological time, and most geological histories in the past, and what we have, the planet is an archive, so what we have are relics of the past. So it refers to time, but instead the word entered popular imagination as a measure of the human impact on the planet. So the moment you think of anthropocene as a measure of human impact on the planet, the question of human impact cannot ever be separated from the moral point, or the question about whether or not we should have an impact on such a scale. So if you don't think of time, so again, the very word anthropocene is another word, geological time shows itself and then vanishes. Because instead of asking questions about geological time, we say this word signals the extent of the impact. Look, we are now able to shift this planet to a geological period. So much is our impact. Now, which means that anthropocene, as a word signaling the scale or a measure, even if we can't quantify it immediately, of human impact on the planet is always, by definition, a scientific and a moral word. Because as I said, there's no discussion of it that emerges, that separates itself from the moral concerns. And that's also very understandable in scientific terms because the same technology and equipments that allow you to measure human impact also allows you to measure the deleterious nature of that impact. So, and because the word has been moral, social scientists have picked it up. It is the first word ever in the history of geological periods that's been debated by so many humanists with absolutely no training in stratigraphy. It's an amazing feature that people with no sense of what geology is, some do but most don't, have been arguing bitterly with scientists as to from when it should be calculated, when should we say it started. So, some of the scientists said, okay, maybe it starts from the 1950s with the detonation of the first bomb, and they've been vigorous argument against it. And that's what people are saying. It's actually not anthropocene because not all humans did it. Only some humans, rich humans, rich nations did it. Therefore it should be called capitalocene. It should be called iconocene. It should be called plantationocene. Donna Haraway comes up with something that I can't even pronounce. But all sinful scenes are named in contestation. As a result of which, Jan Zalasiewicz was a stratographer who actually heads up the working group that's been set up to eventually make a submission to formalize this term. Recently came up with a fascinating article where he was arguing that, look, basically he was saying if you think of anthropocene as a measure of human impact, we will never be able to settle on actually its definition of when it started. So there's an Australian geologist, Andrew Glickson, who argues that it starts with the invention of fire by hominids. So because fire was invented before homo sapiens emerged by hominids. So he says that that was the first time actually a biological species had at its disposal more energy, thanks to fire, than its muscles could produce. And so therefore you could create more entropy. So his argument is we should date anthropocene back to the hominin control of fire. Some people take it back to megafauna extension. Now some people take it back to agriculture. Now these are people who are not very interested in debating capitalism. People who are interested in debating capitalism don't want to go beyond 500 years because then you can't blame it on capitalism. So they want to argue with European expansion in Southern America. 1610 is one date favored. And people who are archaeologists, in fact one of my colleagues now gone to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Kathleen Morrison, kind of wrote an article against me, but partly using my words to hoist me on my own petard, as it were, called Provincializing Anthropocene. And she was arguing that to say that European industrial nations caused it to make it Eurocentric, we should look at cultivation of rice, cultivation of wheat, many different places, so archaeological evidence must do it. And that, now, so unless of which then eventually argues in this recent article called the Anthropocene of an exciting strata or something, he argues that, look, if the word has to be formalized, then having so many different stories and all of those stories rising on political arguments basically won't work. I mean, then there's a politically kind of guided term, would not be acceptable to the International Geological Union. Now there are many geologists who actually argue, let's not formalize it. Andrew Blixen actually says, let's keep it an informal term, like ice house earth or hot house earth, these are informal terms, never formalized, but respectable and accepted by geologists. But if you want to formalize it, Zalasovic argues, then the real question is not who caused it. The real question is, is there enough evidence in the strata of the planet to suggest that we have exited the threshold of what defined the previous geological epoch, the Holocene, which is sort of roughly kind of equates with the invention of agriculture, but basically the ending of the Ice Ages and the new epoch. He actually says that we would have had a much easier time dealing with this term. If it were the case that humans had nothing to do with this, rats had caused it. If somehow this would then be caught up in arguments about capitalism, megafauna extinction, because the moral aspect of it wouldn't be there. And this is, you know, Sheila Justin of Ed Harvard actually says that many scientific and technical words come into public life as moral problems, and that's where we debate them. So long as they're not moral problems, we leave them to the scientists. So Zalassri which argues that the real thing to work out is whether or not there's enough evidence in the strata to say that one can logically argue that we are not in the Holocene anymore, because normally in geology you first look for evidence, like in any rational science, you first look for evidence, then name the problem. But here the problem was reversed. Paul Krutzen in Anger said anthropocene, the term caught on, and now you're going around looking for data to shore up the term. So it's like, you know, that Prandler plays six characters in search of a playwright. And he said because this process was reversed, there's this problem, but he also says that if you don't, if you don't forget who caused it, if you don't forget that it's a measure of impact, you will never see the passage of geological time. So therefore he actually then goes on to say that we need anthropocene needs a particular kind of thinking which he says should not be human-centered, but should be planet-centered form of thinking. Having taken you this far, I'm going to read from the paper. Not everything, but actually at least most of it. Most of the last sections of the paper. So Salasiewicz says, so let me begin from here, the quest for stratigraphic records proper to the anthropocene is centered on the question of whether or not it could be argued that there's enough evidence in the lithosphere and on the surface of the planet to support the proposition that the planet has exited the threshold of the Holocene epoch. The critical questions for the stratigraphers are not how globally important in human terms the new boundary is. Or when was the first sign of influence of some major new factor in the earth system. A question that understandably concerned many who debated the moral aspect of the idea. As Salasiewicz puts it, in terms of the definition of a stratigraphic anthropocene, what is at issue is the change to the earth system rather than a change to the extent to which we are recognizing human influence. And he goes on to say that name anthropocene carries no special literal or human significance for stratigraphers. Incidentally, most geological names are trivial. They come from trivial origins. They don't signify anything. So the name Cretaceous for instance is from the Latin word for chalk. Jurassic after the Jura Hills on the Franco-Swiss border. Triassic because across much of central Europe it had a tripartite character, two sandstone formations separately by distinctive limestone. Silurian from the name of an ancient British tribe. Cambrian after the Roman name for Wales. Dinovian after the English country of Devonshire. So you can see the geological terms he is saying they don't mean anything. So don't take anthropocene literally. If you don't take it literally and don't think that we are measuring human impact, you will see the point of stratigraphers that we've exited the Holocene. And then you will see what geological force is here. I should quickly summarize what I say in the early part of the paper that for people who want to make it into a story of what's happening in the debate about anthropocene just bear with me. I have to go back slide by slide back to my old okay let me just stay with this slide. So basically people who are debating that geologists use of the term anthropocene and saying and taking exception to the word Anthropos and saying it's class. What they're trying to do is to fold into 500 years of human history, world history right sort of the reconstitution of the planet that's happening on this side from the view from outside the planet the planetary histories and what a particular translation that they do otherwise you can't answer the moral question which is that they translate the geological word force. Humanity has become a geophysical force that word force is Newtonian it literally means the kind of pool that one body exerts on another body they translate that into sociological existential category of power and that's why they can say that what has caused humanity to be this force actually the power that rich people exercise right and that translation I will argue has all the problems of translation that we normally see and so what they so they don't deny the geological but they're actually trying to say well the geological will actually work if it matters to us and they have a point you know at the end of the day we are all individual human beings what we do with climate change will depend on a lot of decisions we individually make which is why often I mean I go and give this talk and I was giving a version of this talk in Sydney and people said to me before my talk a couple of people said to me and said Deepesh we don't want any more pessimism now pessimism and optimism are precisely two emotions that relate to human timescale because they come out of the question what can we do about it and these people therefore argue that if you think in geological terms geological things don't lend themselves to policy they lend themselves to politics so what do you do with that when actually the geological is staring back at you we are not so I would argue that there's something I thought I called on Holocene assumption I would argue that you dwell psychologically in the world of the Holocene as if you are living before we knew anything about climate change to the degree that you take deep histories for granted like as I give you an example the opposable thumb in other words these things you know but they don't matter as if that happened to somebody else so to the degree that I think of my pension funds and I don't think of climate change I actually live I dwell in the Holocene I don't dwell in the Anthropocene so there are actually effects which are appropriate to the Holocene affect but which when you transfer them to the question of Anthropocene because it's so large scale and seems and we see we feel outscaled by it becomes questions of pessimism and optimism or despair or people will say what can we do about you know can we do something and that results from the translation I'll come back to the question of translation but Zalasovic ends this article saying that from the stratigraphic perspective the Anthropocene is seen as a planet centered rather than a human centered phenomenon and that's why he actually disagrees that we should not think that we should think of Anthropocene as archaeological labels for age like bronze bronze age, stone age because they all refer back to human activities so he's saying if you want to see geological time you have to train yourself into thinking that this almost has nothing to do with humans even though he says it so happens our activities that has caused us to exit the Holocene so the last part the last part so let me then stay a little more with this distinction between planet centered and human centered forms of thought David Archer my geophysics colleague actually writes a book on climate change where he says that however impatient we get with the slow nature of earth cycles the carbon cycle the glacial cycles the planet will take its own time we can't hurry it along and therefore there are aspects to the climate problem that are simply not amenable to solutions on human time scales and there are aspects that are so it's like sort of facing cancer you know that certain things you can't do anything about but that doesn't stop you from doing things you can do about it geological time is not identical to absolute mathematical time there remains a material side of time for geologists for there is no geological time without there being geological objects ultimately for the purpose of our discussion this time is written into the strata of the planet and it is indeed these strata strata with their fly ash microplastics supermarket chicken bones and so on that form the core of the argument for the stratigraphic anthropocene but however we think of geological time and the argument I'm making is that human beings human beings actually have always think of time with affect now this is a point that was made beautifully by the German philosopher of history Reinhard Koselec when he says that when we think through world history historical time which is human historical time our time is always produced through the movement of two lines one he calls we are always caught between these two lines as it were one he calls the space of experience now the one is the horizon of expectation so human affect over time is created out of this and that's what causes despair hope they all come from this tension between what we experience and what our horizon of expectation is geological time that is very large scale time which of which humans have been aware for very long time doesn't produce that kind of effect because as I said we think of evolution having happened not really concerned with my lifetime except marginally but my point is that this however we think of geological time and over a long number of years Christian theology that is the very thought of looking at the nature as geology as the book of nature 17th and 18th century astronomy physics evolutionary biology and other thought have contributed to its history geological time belongs it belongs to a class of time that has always been seen long before geology as opposed to the sense or scale of temporality of human history St. Augustine saw this kind of time as expressed in numbers to which he said we cannot give a name before thought of it as time that I'm quoting did not conform to the limited powers of our intelligence so these are all statements about affect right these are about how humans feel confronted with this sense of huge expanse of time Darwin described its vastness as incomprehensible self-described geologist in the early 19th century came to accept it as something that was literally beyond human imagination even if no quantitative figures could yet be attached to it all these descriptions you will see do not speak of empty time so they actually speak of human affect they actually speak of how human beings comport themselves when they're faced with this whole question of deep time shown as such of human affect Augustine, Bufo, Darwin all speak of this time only in relationship to being human thus marking it as representing a limit to the time of historicality that is as a limit as a temporal place where meaning making the tension between the horizon of expectation and the space of experience ceases to work so you're actually facing a sense of time where human ceases to work which means that the narrative of world history has now collided in our thoughts with the much longer term geological history of the planet that is of the earth system and so you can now if I go back to the theme of translation before I get to the very last section so you can see what's happening with it what's happening with the translation when you convert geological force into social power now I say the human conception of power is both sociological and existential not in an arbitrary way if you read Steven Luke's The Old Sociologist who wrote a book called Power you will see that he thinks of power in the way we think of power power is like a thing or a liquid somebody has more of it, somebody has less of it somebody can get more of it you can empower you can make people more power you can share power, all of the power sharing arrangements if you read Foucault and particularly the first volume of history of sexuality the chapter called Methods you will find that Foucault actually engages in a very nominalist exercise about power where he defines power by what power is not this power is not this power is not that power is not he doesn't have a positive definition of power because for him power is an existential they can't be human beings without power power describes something about human existence so power is both sociological and existential but what happens is in the earth on this side where people develop earth system science what they are looking at is something that they see as a planetary system earth system Will Steffen once said in a lecture in Australia that when we said the rising temperature should not go beyond 2 degrees it was earth system science speaking policy but you know if earth system could hear if you could imagine a system with ears then Will Steffen and his likes the earth system science people would have loved to tell that system itself just calm down and bring the temperature down don't go above 2 degrees because humans are part of the earth system they are not the earth system itself in a laturian sense you can say that in the earth system all you are speaking to seeing is an it with distributed agency but when my anti-capitalist friend and marxist friend say it's capital of seeing some people caused it what do they do the place in the place of the it and I a subject called the class nation or even people who say humans should take responsibility and becomes stewards of the planet they are all from different points of view you can eat by n in german and I will deliberately use the german word ish why because as Lakan said talking about such displacement reworking Freud as Lakan said you remember he says where it was ish comes to be right so there is a deep display the second display in terms you can say that if you took the earth systems from the view of us then you see us as part of earth systems but people who actually want either humans to take stewardship of the planet or want capitalist or capitalist system to take the blame for it there is again this displacement it's like in Lakanian Lakan says you know it's as if the earth system is saying to you, to humans I don't see you from where you see me when these displacements are happening and just very quickly to give you the difference in the world, in world history perspective the story is told from human points of view humans are its protagonists really world history book the story of modernity is after 500 years from European expansion and imperialism the main thing driving it is identity and difference so question the racism slavery the main kind of politics eventually they expansion the last step of identity and difference would be bios and biopolitics on the right hand side I have put the word Zoe so bios refers in Aristotle according to Agamben good life in the city Zoe refers to natural reproductive life any kind of life so for people who are looking at the earth from the outside their look in geology and biology is very non anthropocentric you can't tell the story of life making human central we come so late and we are such Johnny come lately that they basically tell a non anthropocentric story and the most interesting thing is that when you read about climate change there is a deep conflict of human values going on there is one set of people who think that the most miraculous thing to have happened in the story of creation are humans and therefore humans have to be saved at all cost and there are others there are also humans Andrew Glickson is one of them who actually think that the most miraculous thing that has happened is the emergence of life and specially complex life so from Lovelock Glickson to Wally Broker John Langworth's beautiful book called to build a habitable planet their main concern is that if humans carry on with the business as usual we will not only we will actually leave this planet not only lead it to another extinction in two, three hundred years or three hundred to six hundred years but actually leave the planet less with biodiversity so the story is that after every great extinction biodiversity increased on the planet and their fear is that the wreckage is so much that if we have the sixth great extinction the planet might regress back to an earlier stage in the history of life on the planet and they have a word for it they call it planetesite so Andrew Glickson and a new come to the name they have written a book together where they coined this word planetesite and they said humans have no understanding that they are actually committing this sin of planetesite it's a debate between humans but you can see depending on your perspective for humans the question is sustainability this is a deeply human centric doubt you know the word sustainability one of the areas where it was introduced early in the 20th century was fissure and there's a Canadian biologist dead now there's a very... scientific articles are not funny but he has a funny article on the history of the word sustainability in his field which is fissure so when it was introduced in North America the idea was that every species had a harvestable surplus and you could they developed a formula in North Americans by which you could calculate the harvestable surplus of any species and the idea was that you would only fish the harvestable surplus the whole question of Canadian regulations how do you make sure that companies follow that blah blah blah but you just have to think about it that the concept that every species has a harvestable surplus can only be had by a species that regards itself as having no harvestable surplus if tigers were in charge I'm sure humans would look like they had a wonderful amount of harvestable surplus so this is a deeply anthropocentric concept for these guys on this side the critical question is habitability their question is what makes a planet habitable by complex life and this has actually given rise in physics to a new sub-discipline called astrobiology and these are the people who talk about exoplanets the Draty question and all of that stuff at the centre of their project is habitability which is habitability of life so people are saying we are committing to the planet side are saying we will leave the planet less habitable by life so now on to the my last pages then okay the last few pages the Anthropocene as the geographer Nigel Clark puts it confronts the political therefore with forces and events that have the capacity to undo the political now the whole debate about Anthropocene is really on this cusp because people like the French two authors who have written this book called the shock of the Anthropocene Fresno and Bonnet they actually argue that yes there may be geological time involved but we can't intervene politically in geological time so to think of geology is to anesthetize politics or Amjus Mam and Hornborg the Swedish scholars say it paralyzes politics and what I am saying is that when in order to keep politics alive you translate from history to world history you translate the geophysical conceptual physical force into power the socio existence so Nigel Clark is one of the few social scientists saying that let's then face it Anthropocene is actually a critique of the political it's showing the limits of being political so he says it confronts the political with forces and events with the capacity to undo the political and he invites humanists to embrace the fully inhuman in their thoughts putting them in sustained contact with times and spaces that radically exceed any conceivable human presence the Anthropocene in one telling is a story about humans but it is also in another telling a story of which humans are only parts even small parts how to inhabit this second Anthropocene so as to bring the geological into human modes of dwelling are questions that remain so I am trying to try to get an exercise not letting the question of being just reveal and hide itself so not letting the geological just come into our thoughts splittingly and then escape us how do we actually dwell in that moment when the geological stays as in the face through words like excessive CO2 renewable non-renewable everyday words it could indeed take decades even centuries writes just enough to accommodate to a revolutionary reframing of human nature relationships so one obstacle to contemplating such accommodation is of course the attachment in much contemporary thought to a very particular construction of what we call the political this attachment functions as a fearful and anxious injunction against thinking the geobiological lest we should end up anesthetizing or paralyzing the political itself so I am actually saying it's almost a neurotic anxiety one could read as a symptom this attachment and therefore one could say that being political could also be a form of denial in part of the predicament the task it has seemed to me for a while is not to give up on the political and our demands for justice between the more powerful and the less powerful but to resituate it within the awareness of a predicament that now marks the human condition the predicament is that we have to bring within the grasp of the effective structures of human historical time the vast scales of the times of geobiology that these structures do not usually engage our evolution did not prepare us for this task I am just currently reading a wonderful book by a German guy called Peter Wall-Leben The Hidden Life of Trees Tim Flannery has written a nice forward to it and if you read the first page it makes you sit up that he says trees can live for 800 years but for the timber industry 100 years is a mature tree and you fell at 100 years so normally that's how normally deep history comes to us we kind of acknowledge it and not acknowledge it so what does it mean to dwell to be political to pursue justice when we live out the everyday with the awareness that what seems slow in human and world historical terms may indeed be instantaneous on the scale of earth history I cannot fully or even satisfactorily answer the question yet but surely we cannot even begin to answer it if the political keeps acting as an anxious prohibition on thinking of that which leaves us feeling outscaled our sense of the planet has been profoundly based on what Edmund Husserl once famously called the ontic certainty of the world that human beings enjoy it the world is pre-given to us he wrote the waking always somehow practically interested subjects to live is to always live in certainty of the world waking life is being awake to the world and one self as living in the world actually experiencing the laban and actually effecting the ontic certainty of the world so he would repeat this point in the origin of geometry and he would go on to say the world we actually inhabit everyday what he calls ontic certainty with what I would call a Holocene assumption Husserl said this world doesn't move and it is because this world doesn't move that I know that I can go out of my home and walk to the telescope in my astronomy department and find the department to be there that I actually then can through the telescope look at the planet other planets and know that the world actually moves but the fact that the world actually moves doesn't impact has no impact on my everyday certainty of the non-moving world that I inhabit so he is saying it's because the world doesn't move that I can now talk about so he is saying that when I inhabit the world other planets don't come into view just as deep history doesn't come into view when I inhabit the world in the Holocene world but if I inhabit the world in the Anthropocene mode deep history then comes into view because geology beckons at us through those everyday words like renewable, non-renewable excessive or too and all that so just to quote a little bit of Husserl on this this earth Husserl asserts cannot move it is on this earth toward the earth starting from it and still on it that motion occurs the earth itself in conformity to the original idea of it does not move nor is it at rest it is in relation to the earth that motions and rest first have sense so it is not at rest either because motion is the opposite of rest it can only make sense only in my ontic certainty of the world I inhabit climate change challenges this ontic certainty of the earth that humans have enjoyed through the Holocene epoch and perhaps for longer our everyday thoughts have here have begun to be oriented thanks again to the current dissemination of geological terms such as the Anthropocene in public culture by the geological fact that the earth that Husserl took for granted as the stable unshakable ground from which all human thoughts even Copernican ones arose actually has always been a fitful and restless entity in its long journey through the depths of geological time it is not that we have not known of catastrophes in geological history of the planet we have but the knowledge did not affect our quotidian sense of an innate assurance that the earth provides a stable ground on which we project our political purposes the Anthropocene disturbs that certainty by bringing the geological into the everyday Nigel Clark makes this observation one of the starting points for a fascinating book in human nature by noticing how scientific facts can never entirely displace the visceral trust I'm quoting him in earth, sky, life and water that humans come to possess and yet see how all four of Clark's terms are under question today we do not know if the earth or earth system will honor our trust as we warm her up by emitting greenhouse gases into the sky if freshwater will run short if life as some predict will be threatened with a great extinction and here I must say you know so when we don't look at the geological and we only look at world history and find this whole question of what can we do about it and can we fix it can we fend it off can we integrate geoengineering, stewardship of the planet and the story that human beings can endlessly extend their sovereignty which you find in philosophers like Martha Nussbaum spheres of justice and many liberal thinkers actually would also say this it always reminds me of a chapter in Clark's Contest of faculties where Clark tells a nice joke about a doctor 18th century obviously a German doctor whose habit was always to encourage his patients to think that they were improving to have more optimism and this is in a chapter where Kant says will humans are humans capable of continuous improvement and then one day a patient walks into his surgery and the doctor says how are you doing my friend and the patient says I'm obviously dying of continuous improvement and having said this the doctor dispels out four conditions under which maybe humans will improve and one of those conditions for him was providence he says wisdom from above and maybe as the crisis gets deeper we will get wisdom from not from above but unfortunately on the through disasters and suffering the other thing is that he says if humans have an immeasurable amount of time available to them thirdly he says if humans are not replaced by another species so he has the fourth one I forget but these questions become relevant again as we as I say as the geological faces us really confronts us Wittgenstein once said we see men building and demolishing houses and are led to ask how long has this house been there and then he says but how does one come on the idea of asking that about a mountain for example and his assumption is that humans will never ask how long the mountains been there and that is what I'm calling the Holocene assumption so in this book called Uncertainty where he's arguing with G. Moore he says he asked this question so we ask the age of a house how old was it before it was demolished we ask this of mountains but now we do you read the literature on climate change age of mountains, age of seas all those things are actually at issue perhaps then history provides the answer to Wittgenstein's question a time has come when for humanists contemplating the Anthropocene questions about histories of volcanoes, mountains, oceans and plate tectonics of the planet in short have become as routine of critical thought as questions about capital and its necessary inequities thank you