How do millennial writers use
the Anthropocene to reflect
contemporary attitudes toward
environmental catastrophe?
An essay by Harriet Barton, submitted as part of ENGL301: Millennial Literature and Culture.
The start of the geological period which Paul Crutzen and Eugene
Stoermer formally coined the ‘Anthropocene’ at the start of the new
millennium 1 – wherein mankind’s impact on the Earth’s atmosphere
has become too significant to ignore – has long been in contention.
Some geologists consider the conquering of the Americas and the
subsequent Columbian Exchange as the true beginning, whilst some
mark the Industrial Revolution and others the nuclear acceleration of
the 1950s. Despite these temporal disagreements, the common factor
is that such a period has been ongoing for over half a century – so why,
environmentally, has nothing bettered? In fact, humankind’s influence
on the shape of the Earth’s geology has only caused destruction: the
level of CO2 in the atmosphere is rising at the fastest rate for sixty-six
million years. In this essay, ‘environmental catastrophe’ will refer not to
one single apocalyptic event, but to the gradual and irreversible decline
of such environmental features. It appears that contemporary attitudes
to these catastrophes is one of unprecedented passivity: the scale of
disaster is simply too much bigger than the individual human for one
to effect change, and, therefore, it will hardly be attempted. Millennial
writers address what Donna Haraway (2016, p.35) calls a period of
‘unprecedented looking away’ and Robert MacFarlane (2016) defines
as our ‘intimidat[ion] by the limits of individual agency’ , through both
works of fiction and critical theory to explore capitalist culture, passivity,
and optimism in – seemingly - the most cynical epoch humankind has
experienced. By examining the work of China Miéville and Donna
Haraway I will explore two attitudes to the Anthropocene, eventually
culminating in a questioning of the definition of the word itself.
1 Crutzen and Stoermer jointly published an article in IGBP Newsletter in 2000 considering
greenhouse gases and the invention of the steam engine as significant enough forces to
prompt a new geological epoch.
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