she returns once more to the Westernised capitalist discourse which
further dislocates the individual from useful action. As Jeff Vandermeer
(2018) rightly states, Westerners ‘don’t particularly care about geologic
time [or, the definition and implications of it], because it doesn’t concern
us’, yet what is to be said for second-world countries like Costa Rica
where immediate change to livelihoods is caused? This is rarely touched
upon in millennial writing. Gaia Vince explored Costa Rica, which had
to act to improve its fate as ‘one of the most deforested nations in the
region’. Vince writes that ‘Costa Rica is a country that chose what sort
of Anthropocene it wanted and set out to deliver it’ – thus reclaiming the
‘self-indulgent’ power condemned by Haraway. This is the action Haraway
did not define; it is the ‘control’ that Sam Solnick suggested humankind
did not have. Costa Ricans ‘protect more than 25% of its land and half
its coastline […] runs its national grid almost entirely on renewables’
– it is a once third-world country whose attitude is not once of defeat
or privileged spectatorship, its story is not over in the Anthropocene
- rather it is adapting in order to survive. Millennial texts need these
attitudes, this ‘collaborative ingenuity and survival’ (McFarlane, 2016)
rather than gloomy post-catastrophic narratives like Miéville’s and
ultimately solution-less theory like Haraway’s to widen the discourse.
The Anthropocene need not inspire narratives of passive reflection,
perpetuating helplessness for something too far gone. The universalism
of the Anthropocene can be means for optimism and positive inspiration,
not resigned inaction.
Millennial writers like Haraway and Miéville use the newly-defined
Anthropocene to mostly reflect Euro-centric attitudes of distance and
fatalism towards environmental disaster. These attitudes are ultimately
defeatist, seeing the Anthropocene as something mankind now cannot
change. Haraway illustrates the small seed of optimism for a revolting
collaborative, but ultimately this is quashed by the weight of her discourse
on capitalism – a similarly crushing factor in contemporary culture. Whilst
there is the space for meaningful and multicultural narratives within
literature of the Anthropocene, employing the term’s very universality, it
appears that at present millennial writers prefer to express apocalyptic-
like scenarios wherein nature is out of the control of humans once again.
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