The Birth of the Anthropocene by Jeremy Davies (review)

The problem of the Anthropocene has hit the academy like a wave, as scholars far beyond the hard sciences are coming to grips with the implications that humanity is not just leaving a polluting mark on the earth but altering the very workings of the earth system. Davies has written an excellent commentary, which will serve both committed scholars and early undergraduates equally well.

The Anthropocene, defined by the point at which the agency of humanity began to irretrievably intervene in the dynamics of planetary atmosphere, geosphere, and biosphere, was first advanced in 2000, and is now under consideration by an international committee for adoption as a formal period in geological time. The presumption is that the committee will establish a formal date, a “golden spike,” for the beginning of the Anthropocene at 1945, with the detonation of the atomic bomb or, more broadly, with the radioactive chemistry embedded in sediments around the world in the nineteen years between the first detonations and the last open-air tests in 1964. But Davies rightly suggests that humanists need to take a much longer view about the implications of an “anthropogenic” geological period in light of the deep chronology required by the idea of geological time, and about the complexity of environmental change throughout planetary history, the “wild drama of deep time” (12).

Davies’ foils are not just climate change deniers but also committed environmentalists (Brower in particular), who romanticize a perfect organic harmony of planetary life disrupted by the Industrial Revolution.¹ Davies proposes a more engaged and complex understanding of our place in the geohistory of the planet. Davies’ most impressive accomplishment in this book is his ability to ease readers into the key contemporary debates. In Chapter 1, “Into Deep Time,” he sketches the modern intellectual revolution that has moved geology from a rigid, virtually atemporal, gradualism to a historical, punctuated neocatastrophism, showing how humanity’s hand might be driving the rapid regime shifts that geologists now see in deep time.

Chapter 2, “Versions of the Anthropocene,” examines the paradox of planetary time and historical time, as explored by Dipesh Chakrabarty, as well as the global justice critique that views the “Anthropocene” as a “Capitalocene” in which the drivers and culprits are the specific actors reshaping the world economy. Davies resolves both of these issues in stressing a “Gaian” role of the biosphere in mediating and reshaping the geophysical planetary structure and proposing that we need to understand intentional economic action as similarly geophysical.

Chapter 3, “Geology of the Future,” opens with a gentle critique of the emerging conclusions of the Anthropocene Working Group to suggest—with the political ecologists—that a “golden spike” at 1945 is simply one possible marker of a longer “end of Holocene event” reaching back to the destabilizing of the medieval world and the launching of European voyages of “discovery” and expropriation.

Davies’ first three chapters are a particularly useful discussion of the Anthropocene debate. His final two chapters, which take us into the specifics of deep time, can elicit a few quibbles. Diving into geological time in Chapter 4, “Rungs on the Ladder,” Davies restricts himself to the last 570 million years, the “Phanerozoic,” which he recounts in terms of the five mass extinction events preceding our anthropogenic “sixth extinction.” He might have done well to explore briefly the evolution of the atmosphere back to earth’s origins 4.6 billion ago. Moreover, a review of Phanerozoic geohistory in terms of Fischer’s Greenhouse and Icehouse epochs would have extended and simplified his account, providing a means to contextualize our reaching a CO₂ concentration of 400 parts per million (which Hansen places 35 million years ago in the Oligocene, not 3 million years ago in the Pliocene).²

Davies’ final chapter, “An Obituary for the Holocene,” suffers from an unnecessary millennium-by-millennium review of the contingencies of human history since the Ice Ages, before turning to the simplifying organizing structure of the Early, Mid-, and Late Holocene. Nonetheless...