the beach, thwarted by that aforementioned irreversibility, watching the
Anthropocene metaphorically ‘lay eggs’ like Miéville’s oil rigs on the sea
bed of a tainted future. This is precisely what Donna Haraway condemns
as ‘defeatism, […] self-fulfilling predictions like the “game over, too late”
discourse’ (2016, p. 56), but for Miéville this is the most common attitude
towards environmental decline in the Anthropocene, one which ‘accepts
the limits of human agency’, one which accepts the ‘remains of a grander
[Earth] fallen apart to time and the civil war and to economics, fallen
ultimately with permission’.
This defeatist acceptance lends itself easily to the common stereotype
of millennials as selfish and unthinking – the thing has happened, we
cannot change it now. Even U.S. President Donald Trump echoes this
sentiment in his recent rejection of the Paris Climate Agreement to protect
fossil fuel profits, on the basic ‘nihilistic viewpoint that we’re screwed
and nothing we do matters’. Herein lays problems with definitions.
The word ‘Anthropocene’ itself places humans – in typical ‘millennial’
fashion – as an egocentric force of nature against the geology of the
Earth. Yet, paradoxically, the word itself seems to denote something that
has been rather than will be, as mankind now struggles to be a force
for environmental good after its destruction. As Sam Solnick crucially
poses, ‘to influence is not to control’ (2016, p.6), and millennial writers
such as Miéville and Haraway illustrate mankind’s ignorance of this
after the influencing is done. Solnick echoes Vermeulen’s call that the
Anthropos need to ‘come to terms with finitude’ (2017, p.870), yet the
self-indulgently titled ‘Anthropocene’ suggests an enduring humanity on
Earth, which only perpetuates the attitude of diminished responsibility in
contemporary culture – we will always be around, eventually things may
be fixed. Miéville has his oil rigs spawning out of control, resurrecting
from ‘dead’ states and ‘ris[ing] up against civilisation’ (Ellingsen 2018,
p.6), and therefore overturns this presumption – we cannot control the
effects of mankind’s negative impact on the environment; environmental
disaster will endure, even if humanity doesn’t.
Haraway, in her essay ‘Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene,
Cthulucene’, also criticises the title ‘Anthropocene’ as ‘human
exceptionalism and individualism’ (2016, p.30), but rather than aligning
herself with Miéville’s pessimism, appears to use the Anthropocene as a
call to action. Haraway harnesses the very same exceptionalism of the
term and extrapolates the need for movements, rather than cynicism,
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