The Anthropocene & the Humanities: From Climate Change to a New Age of Sustainability.

Abstract

With The Anthropocene & the Humanities: From Climate Change to a New Age of Sustainability Carolyn Merchant, professor emerita of environmental history, philosophy and ethics at the University of California, Berkeley, aims to deepen understandings of the mutual shaping of the Anthropocene and environmental humanities. The latter, the author claims, has devoted less attention than economics, politics and historical studies to the apprehended environmental issues and climate change. The intended readership for this work needs to be stated straight up. Although written for ‘an educated public’ of reading clubs, ‘undergraduate courses and graduate seminars’ (p. xi), The Anthropocene & the Humanities read, to me, like a high-schooland early undergraduate-level take on human-made climate change, industrial capitalist economies and their depictions in art and literature. The work’s geographical bias, by no means an inherent fault, should have been flagged up; the perspective it is written from, and the putative readership it is intended for, are North American. This is because the aforementioned undergraduates are the sorts of students who, in the US, study in liberal-arts colleges or take comparative-literature courses whilst intending to pursue science majors. Such constituencies have shaped the choices Merchant has made. The intention of this book is to demonstrate how ‘the concept of the Anthropocene goes beyond earlier concepts and periodizations such as preindustrial, colonial, industrial, modern and postmodern by presenting a clear and forceful characterization of the future crisis humankind faces’ (p. xi) and to illustrate its impact upon literature, art and philosophy, and to a lesser extent the law. The six short chapters are scaled for the designated readership. The narrative is paced to allow for non-expert readers to absorb this important argument. The temporal scope of the book ranges from circa the sixth century BC to the present. Its spatial scope is predominantly northern-hemisphere and anglophone. Chapter 1 surveys the definition of the Anthropocene formulated by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer and the key figures and researchers who have advanced various conceptual terms inspired by the former. The book includes black-and-white images of the theorists whose ideas are discussed, from Donna Haraway to Dipesh Chakrabarty, Naomi Klein, Ian Angus, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Jason W. Moore. However, Greta Thunberg is missing from this line-up in a work purportedly aimed at younger readers. Surely she has impacted imaginations and the national environmental movements of the US? The next chapter details shifts in the spatial, scalar, social and material geographies of energy. Merchant steers us towards the topic of steam power, where we segue from