The Petrified Anthropocene

Introduction

The image in Figure 1 of an object included in a major exhibition on the Anthropocene – the term proposed to suggest that the earth has entered a new epoch, dominated by humanity’s environmental impact at a planetary scale – neatly captures the tension this article wishes to address. The exhibition, held throughout most of 2015 and part of 2016 at the Deutsches Museum in Munich, included a specially arranged Anthropocene Cabinet of Curiosities (see Mittman et al., 2018). The object, titled ‘Extinct Device’ and created by the historian Jared Farmer, is a fossilised BlackBerry Curve 8300. Introduced in 2007, only one year before efforts to formally define the Anthropocene got under way, the Curve 8300 has practically gone extinct in less than a decade. This despite the immense popularity of the device, which has been responsible for huge quantities of technological waste. Interestingly, for it to become visible as an anthropogenic device that highlights the contradictions between the speed of technological renewal and the frugality demanded by the current environmental crisis, the author had to turn the device into stone. OPEN IN VIEWER

This gesture illustrates how geologists in charge of formalizing the Anthropocene have engaged with the concept after it was popularized by the atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen and the ecologist Eugene Stroemer in 2000. Although to a number of science and humanities scholars the Anthropocene corresponds to a present reality calling for immediate action, geologists leading the efforts to formalize the term have adopted a particularly cautious attitude, withholding their acceptance of the reality of this epoch. In the eyes of geologists, formalizing a new geological unit requires establishing an isochronous boundary, that is, a single geological marker, consistently stratified across the globe. Accordingly, the recent impact of human society on earth’s processes – which environmental scholars outside of geology are quick to highlight as proof of the Anthropocene’s reality – has to become stone before geologists can consider it part of earth’s history. In other words, for human waste to be regarded as valid proof contributing to the formalization of the Anthropocene, it needs to become what is known as a technofossil in contemporary geology (Zalasiewicz et al., 2014). This emphasis on solid strata has so far prevented geologists from taking important political actions, such as including the term in the International Chronostratigraphic Chart, the official geological time scale used to coordinate earth sciences research around the world.

In what follows, I untangle the contrast between these different temporal attitudes, arguing that the conservative tendency among geologists to ground knowledge on solid strata corresponds to what I describe, in reference to the philosophy of Henri Bergson, as a fossilized view of becoming. Unlike the forward-looking attitudes of a number of scholars involved in discussions about the Anthropocene, geologists tend to hold a retrospective and punctuated understanding of change. This understanding, I argue, is related to a particular view of earth’s history as a buried sequence of platforms, onto which traditional disciplinary boundaries are mapped. In turn, this view coincides with, I suggest, a traditional separation of earth and sky, onto which dualisms of matter and meaning have been traditionally mapped in the Western intellectual tradition (Ingold, 2011). I argue that such a division resonates with the contrasting attitudes of humanity scholars and geologists in their reactions to the Anthropocene proposal. Moreover, the contrast between a solid earth and a fluid atmosphere also marks the differences between the geologists leading the Anthropocene formalization efforts and the members of the Earth System Science (ESS) community who originally proposed the term. While geology tends to concentrate on solid facts that are buried below ground, ESS cares about phenomena that flow in-between, but mostly above ground, before they have precipitated into stone.

In developing this argument, I show that geology does not behave monolithically and that geologists, including stratigraphers leading the formalization of the Anthropocene, are not all trapped exclusively in an emphasis on retrospection when it comes to earth history. Attending to the development of time concepts in the history of geology, two contrasting attitudes towards earth history will be identified as co-existing in the discipline. These attitudes, which I term chronological and imaginative, respond respectively to the identification of petrified chronologies in stratigraphy and the enaction of earth history in imagination. Whereas the former ties to the appropriation of resources through a capacity to map earth history – as it occurred with mining, a field that grew historically alongside geology – the latter results from the cultivation of a capacity to follow the earth’s flow. Yet, I show that in the Anthropocene context geological imagination often looks like a cinematographic act, of fictional qualities, that tends to distance viewers from the present.

In closing the argument, I show that both the ESS community and humanity scholars have not been exempted from similar, yet contrasting, emphasis on retrospection, fractured along the lines that separate what is solid and fluid in earth history. Moving beyond the tendency to reduce the Anthropocene’s formalization to the identification of ‘Petrified Earth Process’ (Zalasiewicz et al., 2017), I return once more to geology to argue that in order to address the political challenges imposed by this new epoch, stratigraphers need to radically open their thinking and methods to the more-than-solid flows of environmental change, in which there ultimately takes place a planetary history that is simultaneously geological, organic and social. Earth’s history should not deal solely with a solid past, but equally concern itself with the current flow of said past into the future. This, I conclude, should help enliven our sense of earth’s history.

Formalizing the Anthropocene

The term ‘Anthropocene’ has sparked the interest of numerous scholars across the sciences and the humanities, provoking a vast array of responses (Lorimer, 2017). Particularly significant among humanities scholars has been the call to rethink the relationship between human and earth sciences, insofar as geological and human temporal processes have suddenly come together. Not only has the impact of human activities on geophysical processes reached unprecedented levels, as data from the environmental sciences reveal (Crutzen, 2002; Steffen et al., 2011; Rockström et al., 2009). There is also a growing realization across the sciences and the humanities that even in the long term, human history and the earth’s history have been more closely coupled than once thought, which invites modern societies to revaluate once again their place in nature. Understanding the Anthropocene requires challenging the traditional fracture between the deep evolutionary history of the human species and the much shorter history of human civilizations which, in the past centuries, led to uncontrolled industrial development (Chakrabarty, 2009, 2014, 2017). These two histories are traditionally seen as responsible for the co-existence of two sides to what is regarded as human, normally referred to with the expressions ‘humankind’ and ‘humanity’ (Ingold, 2000: 68). The former term refers to a species ruled by the ‘laws’ of evolution, particularly the need to survive amid scarce resources. The latter refers to a cultural being capable of redirecting its future through, for instance, critical thinking. These two histories, of humankind and of humanity, are normally studied by scholars interested in what in the Western intellectual tradition has been regarded, respectively, as natural and cultural in humans (Latour, 1993). The Anthropocene is blurring this duality in the human condition (Pálsson et al., 2013).

Correspondingly, some scholars have reflected on the term to question the ways in which different forms of knowledge have traditionally been divided in Western academic thinking, which is also marked by a separation between nature and culture (see, e.g., Hulme, 2010; Latour, 2014; Irvine, 2014; Clark, 2014, 2017). As Clark and Yusoff (2017) propose in their introduction to a recent special issue of Theory, Culture & Society, the Anthropocene calls for a double movement to simultaneously socialize the geological and geologize the social, bearing in mind the deep entangling of the earth’s and society’s becoming. These geosocial formations, as they describe them, require us to acknowledge that human history and politics can no longer be considered an epilogue, divorced from the vast history of the earth that precedes them. Knowledge of deep time depends on sociality which, in turn, grows alongside geological forces. Accordingly, all history should be regarded as geohistory. Similarly, all politics should be understood as geopolitics (Clark, 2017).

Despite its promises, the concept of the Anthropocene has not remained untouched by controversy. Particularly significant are the complaints, raised by humanities scholars, noting that scientific discourses on the Anthropocene tend to rely on homogenizing words such as ‘we’ or ‘human’, which have the power to dilute responsibility and hide the complex and multiple environmental stories that exist within this epoch. Although all human life has resulted from precarious ecological entanglements reaching way beyond the human (Haraway, 2015; Tsing, 2015), humans are not all the same all the time, which is to say that not everyone shares the same level of responsibility (e.g. Malm and Hornborg, 2014). In some ways, the concerns raised by humanities scholars reflect the persistence of the above-mentioned distinction between the natural and the cultural in humans. As natural scientists convert human agency into a geological force – speaking of humans as a homogeneous kind, whose behaviour is driven by universal laws – humanities scholars defend a view of humanity that is always heterogeneous and local (see Chakrabarty, 2018). It is as if natural scientists were still content with the view that, while cultures are by definition diverse, all humans belong to the same species. The latter despite that the heterogeneity advocated by humanities scholars – often inspired by non-Western forms of knowledge – is simultaneously natural and social (e.g. De la Cadena, 2015; Tsing, 2015; Ingold, 2000).

From a different angle, although the ‘Anthropocene’ is seen by many scholars across the sciences and the humanities as a tool for political action, its validation process in the hands of geoscientists has been described as conservative. This point was raised recently in a 2015 issue of the journal Nature dedicated to the Anthropocene. According to Martin Head, marine stratigrapher at Brock University in St. Catharines, Canada, and current head of the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy: ‘You are messing around with a timescale that is used by millions of people around the world. So if you’re making changes, they have to be made on the basis of something for which there is overwhelming support’ (cited in Monastersky, 2015: 147).

Formally establishing the Anthropocene as a geological unit involves a number of steps, the first of which was taken in 2008 with the creation of an Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) within the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy, the entity that oversees the formalization of time units of the most recent ice ages (Zalasiewicz et al., 2008). Unable to establish a unit on its own, the Subcommission depends on the International Commission on Stratigraphy, which in turn answers to the International Union of Geological Sciences. For the Anthropocene to be established as a formal geological unit, all three of these organizations need to be persuaded. As leading members of the AWG suggest, ‘it is unlikely that the Anthropocene will have an easy and uncontested passage through the various committees’ (Zalasiewicz et al., 2010: 2229). ‘The Geological Time Scale is held dear by geologists (because it is fundamental to their work), and it is not amended lightly’ (2010: 2228).

In practice, formalizing the Anthropocene entails identifying a Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP), a marker of a geological event in stratified material, such as rock, sediments or glaciers, that is identifiable across the globe – something which geologists refer to, colloquially, as a golden spike. Alternatively, if a single marker cannot be identified, a Global Standard Stratigraphic Age (GSSA) – that is, an agreed-upon date in the historical calendar – could be proposed after a substantial review of the stratigraphic evidence, although a golden spike is always preferable. There have been a number of candidates proposed to mark the start of the Anthropocene, including the use of fire to clear forests in the Early Pleistocene, the extinction of megafauna between 50,000 and 10,000 years ago, the origin of farming around 11,000 years ago, the arrival of Europeans to the Americas in 1492, the mass burning of fossil fuels at the start of the Industrial Revolution, and the great mid-20th-century acceleration in population growth and the use of land, water, mineral and energy resources, which coincides with the world’s first nuclear bomb tests. Each of these candidates would provide potential markers in the stratigraphic record (Lewis and Maslin, 2015). If one of these candidates is selected as a winner, a literal golden spike would be placed at a location where a representative token of the corresponding global stratigraphic marker is visible. This historical monument would likely be accompanied by a bronze plaque with an explanatory text, marking the time when the epoch would have started (Szerszynski, 2017).

Although a substantial body of literature on the Anthropocene already exists, to date the term remains no more than a proposal among geoscientists, for whom the reality of the Anthropocene depends on the identification of solid facts. As stated by AWG chair Jan Zalasiewicz, in an article on the ‘Stratigraphy of the Anthropocene’, published in collaboration with other leading members of the group, ‘if the Anthropocene is to take place alongside other temporal divisions of the Phanerozoic, it should be expressed in the rock record with unequivocal and characteristic stratigraphic signals’ (Zalasiewicz et al., 2011; also Zalasiewicz, 2015). This cautious view would contrast with how humanities scholars use the term as a political reality (see, e.g., Latour, 2014; Haraway, 2015; Tsing, 2015), a reality that for some leaves no room for ‘dittering’, in that it calls for immediate action (Hornborg, 2017). For geoscientists, on the other hand, the political scope of the Anthropocene seems to lie somewhere in the future, in that signals need to become fossils. These contrasting temporal orientations reaffirm the contrasting coexistence of what ultimately appears to be two academic cultures of the Anthropocene, fractured somewhere along lines that were first drawn by Enlightenment philosophers and which continue to divide fast-changing cultures from a slow-moving nature. While for scholars in the humanities the Anthropocene would point forward into an open-ended future, to be debated in the political arena, the term’s usage in the geosciences would hold back political action, waiting for the past to solidify. In a rather literal sense, the production of solid facts in the hands of stratigraphers has occurred at a radically different pace than the soft political action advocated by humanity scholars; a contrast that comes despite the fact that experts involved in the formalization of the Anthropocene, such as Zalasiewicz (2008), speak often of politics with urgency, while pointing to the speed with which the earth is changing.

It is worth noting that in the current political climate speed is relational and contextual, varying depending on the point of comparison and the situation. For instance, the speed at which politicians operate might contrast with the speed of change humanity scholars advocate regarding environmental justice. An example of this contrast is illustrated by what Nixon (2011) characterizes as slow violence – that is, environmental calamities that unfold slowly, affecting mostly those who do not have the monetary resources to make their voices heard. The speed at which casualties occur in this type of violence is normally out of synch with the swift seasons of electoral change, with the result that politicians often deal with slow violence as critical, yet not urgent.

Petrifying Earth Process

The cautious attitude of the institutions behind the Anthropocene’s formalization is not a recent phenomenon. As a relatively recent example, it took 53 years for the Holocene – our current geological epoch, which might potentially be followed or replaced by the Anthropocene (Lewis and Maslin, 2015) – to secure the approval of the International Commission on Stratigraphy after a proposal was submitted by the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (Chakrabarty, 2009).¹ In the case of the Anthropocene, deliberations could carry on for some time, considering how long it normally takes for changes in planetary processes to become stratified. Compared to previous cases, candidates to mark the start of the Anthropocene are characterized by their proximity to the present. Indeed, most changes introduced by humans into earth processes over the past two centuries, after the industrial revolution began, will take millions of years to produce distinctive signals. Moreover, only a small fraction of them will eventually become set in stone, as the stratigraphic record is by definition incomplete.

AWG members are well aware of the above-mentioned challenges involved in formalizing the Anthropocene. As Zalasiewicz and colleagues (2017) point out in a recent publication, radio waves and microwaves, for instance, which allowed the West to globalize the world through advances in transport and communications, will leave no trace in the earth’s stratigraphy. In this publication – also part of the special issue of Theory, Culture & Society coedited by Clark and Yusoff – AWG members took the opportunity to reflect on the irregularities of the stratigraphic record, to highlight different styles among the scientific disciplines represented within the group. Particularly significant is the relationship between the ESS community that originally identified and proposed the term and the geologists leading the efforts to formalize it. According to the authors, ‘there is difference between the research styles and philosophies that deal with formal stratigraphy and with ESS’ (Zalasiewicz et al., 2017: 86). Beyond naive caricatures, the difference ‘may be symbolized by the rapid adoption of the Anthropocene concept by the EES community’ (Steffen et al., 2004) by contrast with the more cautious and sceptical approach shown among the formal stratigraphic community’ (Zalasiewicz et al., 2017: 87). ‘The former [the stratigraphic community] are overwhelmingly concerned with ancient, pre-human rock and time, while the latter [the ESS community] have, as a strong central focus, the analysis and understanding of contemporary global change’ (Zalasiewicz et al., 2017: 85).

According to the authors, the stratigraphic record, crucial to the Anthropocene’s formalization, is unlikely to reflect, any time soon, most of the changes in earth processes that the field of ESS has identified, including those that led Crutzen and Stroemer to propose the Anthropocene epoch in the first place. Processes highlighted by the ESS community include changes in climate, population growth, land use, ocean acidification, ozone depletion, nitrogen and phosphorous cycles, fresh water use, biodiversity loss, chemical pollution and energy use, among others. The article discusses two significant contributions from ESS, namely work by Rockström and colleagues on ‘planetary boundaries’ and Steffen and colleagues’ graphs on the ‘great acceleration’ of humanity’s environmental impact, initiated in the 1950s. Addressing the incomplete nature of the stratigraphic record, the authors set themselves the task of breaking with the traditional tendency in geology to infer past changes in earth processes from single stratigraphic signals – as occurred in the formalization of most geological units prior to the Anthropocene. Instead, they propose investigating whether the earth processes currently studied by the ESS community could be identified in stratigraphy.

The above-mentioned argument offered by Zalasiewicz and colleagues clearly suggests an effort within the geological community to open their modes of inquiry beyond the exclusive focus on solid facts. As the authors themselves confess, so far the ‘exercise [of formalizing the Anthropocene] has mainly been rock-focused’ (Zalasiewicz et al., 2017: 86). This effort can be regarded as partially the result of the historical context and particular composition of the AWG. As Lorimer rightly points out, the unfamiliar and often uncomfortable spotlight cast over the AWG is ‘propelling and compelling geologists and earth system scientists to pronounce on planetary processes and relations well beyond their qualified specialisms’ (2017: 132). Indeed, AWG members are in a particularly awkward situation. Doubly exposed, they not only have to respond to the charges of fellow geologists who might criticize them for being insufficiently neutral. They also have to respond to critical social thinkers who might expect more political nuance and incisiveness on their part (Clark and Yusoff, 2017: 7). The AWG is the first body tasked with defining a stratigraphic unit to incorporate members of the ESS community. Due to their initiative in proposing the term, ESS scholars are now well represented within the group (Zalasiewicz et al., 2017).

Clark (2017), in the same special issue, welcomes the convergence of stratigraphic geology and ESS illustrated in the proposal by Zalasiewicz and colleagues (2017). According to Clark, the dialogue between geology and ESS resonates with the ‘more speculative philosophical engagements with strata’ he calls for, to which the argument developed in this article is most sympathetic (2017: 224). Clark – inspired by the philosophies of Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 1996) – proposes an emphasis on indeterminacy and contingency in earth’s history, according to which ‘thinking through strata affirms an excess of possibility rather than determination’ (2017: 224). The latter in that, for instance, ‘it is from the encounter with geological strata and their freight of petrified life that modernizing Europeans gained an early sense of the potentialities of the planet they inhabited’ (Clark, 2017: 219).

Despite Clark’s enthusiasm, it seems to me that geoscientists are only partially accommodating their practice to the phenomena investigated by the ESS community. Rather than generating a symmetric dialogue between geology and ESS, the argument developed by Zalasiewicz and colleagues (2017) suggests that the styles and concerns of ESS are being assimilated into the more conservative stratigraphic effort to formalize the Anthropocene by looking at a petrified earth history. Indeed, as the title of Zalasiewicz and colleagues’ article reveals, the quest has been about not so much liquefying earth history but rather ‘Petrifying earth process’ (2017, emphasis added). Accordingly, although Clark is right to suggest that speculation has historically been an essential part of geological thinking, it seems to participate only tangentially in the current practice of formalizing the Anthropocene.

Let me expound on this last point by distinguishing between two co-existing attitudes at the core of geology. The first corresponds to what can be described as the imaginative attitude. This attitude – aligned with Clark’s speculative view of strata – was responsible for sparking a fascination with deep time in 19th-century Europe, and it inspired early modern geologists such as Hutton, who imagined the solid masses of Scotland, a postglacial landscape, flowing once again (Macfarlane, 2004; Simonetti, 2017). Such an attitude contrasts with the second, which might be described as the chronographic attitude, where the emphasis is not on the ongoing flow of earth’s history but on identifying and representing what comes earlier and later in the geological record. Both attitudes are visible in the writings of leading AWG members, although each tends to flourish in contrasting styles of writing. The imaginative attitude tends to thrive in books addressing a general audience, where geologists allow more room for speculative storytelling. For instance, Zalasiewicz (2010) imagines earth’s history as starting from a pebble, looking at minerals contained within it. The chronostratigraphic attitude is more noticeable in journal articles on the establishment of a starting date for the Anthropocene, such as the above-cited works authored by AWG members.

A distinction between these two attitudes is to an extent artificial, in that both have grown together and are inseparable in contemporary geological thinking. Chronostratigraphic work was key to the expansion of biblical time, for instance, when in 1858 human remains were discovered in the famous Brixham cave, fossilized next to extinct megafauna. Knowing that those human and megafauna remains were contemporary required what in earth sciences is known as relative dating. Yet since the development of techniques for absolute dating, such as radiometric dating introduced in 1907, contemporary geology has turned progressively to boundary work, which is the practice of fixing the start and end dates of different geological units in stratigraphy. In what follows, I argue that, although inseparable and necessary to the practice of contemporary geology, the current obsession with boundary work tends to shape geological imagination in ways that emphasize a punctuated and retrospective view of change.

Cinematographic Becoming

My aim here is not to deny that scientists involved in efforts to define the Anthropocene are aware of the term’s potentials as a political statement, a point often highlighted in their publications. Despite recent criticisms by humanities scholars, geologists seem conscious, for instance, of the uneven distribution of responsibility for the current global environmental crisis, as well as the political implications of choosing a start date for the Anthropocene (e.g. Waters et al., 2016; also Latour, 2014; Clark and Yusoff, 2017; Lorimer, 2017): the latter if we bear in mind how, for instance, signals related to the great acceleration could easily single out northern hemisphere nations as driving the changes that mark the dawn of the Anthropocene. Similarly, I should note that my aim is not to suggest that scientists should abandon either the task of formally studying the Anthropocene or the necessary caution they should apply when conducting their research. My hope, rather, is to illuminate some of the temporal images that run through geological understandings of the Anthropocene, which are by definition historical in nature and, therefore, incapable of providing a purely formal narrative of earth’s history, told as if from nowhere.² Geologists’ emphasis on a petrified past is not just conservative. More importantly, its emphasis on the need to base objectivity exclusively on solid rock suggests a punctuated image of earth’s history that can only be accessed retrospectively by a select group of experts with the authority to determine the existence of buried events and their current implications.

Historically, this view is based on a traditional understanding of earth’s history, according to which time and space tend to be dissociated into vertical and horizontal axes (Simonetti, 2018). In this view, earth’s history is often illustrated as a vertical sequence of flat horizontal platforms. Each platform along the diachronic sequence is mapped synchronously as a surface that is supposedly surveyed synoptically from everywhere at once. In this case, while spatial movements are across horizontal surfaces, temporal movements would cut through these surfaces, as if scientists were able to travel in time and outside space simultaneously. This vertical alignment would match traditional hierarchies among disciplines that excavate the past, in that different platforms mark the boundaries of different forms of knowledge. Geologists, biologists and archaeologists would stop at different platforms along the stratigraphic record when excavating down to the original surfaces where the histories of the earth, life and humanity begin. In the particular case of archaeology, a discipline placed literally at the interface between earth and human history (Edgeworth, 2014), such a boundary is colloquially referred to as ‘the natural’ – a surface, normally left untouched by archaeologists, that marks the point where a site was first transformed by humans (Simonetti, 2018). Similarly, although with an unprecedented eye for human events occurring at a planetary scale, the AWG’s task of formalizing the Anthropocene looks like an effort to discern a ‘single time surface, a precisely synchronous level that can be traced all around the earth’ (Zalasiewicz et al., 2015). In such an endeavour, earth’s history turns into a punctuated sequence of layers, accessed retrospectively only after facts have become petrified.

My inspiration for the description of geology’s punctuated and retrospective view of change as a fossilized view of becoming derives from what Bergson described, almost a century ago in his critique of evolutionism, as the ‘cinematographic habits of the intellect’ (1998: 312). Bergson’s critique specifically addressed the work of Spencer, who coined the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ and who had a key role in popularizing Darwin’s work. According to Bergson, evolutionism’s most distinctive feature is its tendency to reconstruct evolution retrospectively with fragments of the evolved, following a long intellectual tradition started by Greek philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle, and subsequently adopted by modern science (Bergson, 1998: 364). Evolution becomes fragmented as a result of its need to measure and record critical events that could explain the transition from one form of the evolved to another, such as the shift from instinct to reason that is normally associated with humanity’s emergence. As occurred with Zeno’s paradoxes – supposedly demonstrating the impossibility of change through an endless fractioning of movement into discrete components – fragments would be frozen in time, like still frames in a film, to be animated through an exterior device only after the original movement has ceased. The more science progresses, the more frames tend to be inserted in the film, in the need to identify the beginning of critical events in evolution. Yet reconstructing becoming from those solid fragments resembles, in the eyes of Bergson, a child trying to trap smoke by clapping its hands (1998: 308).

Over the past centuries, physics – a science on which earth and life sciences have historically modelled their access to knowledge – has contributed in particular to this punctuated understanding of change through its reliance on clock-time, a device designed to partition time into small units of measurement. This can be seen in the influential debate between Bergson and Einstein, which, according to Canales (2015), was a significant driver of the division that has grown between the sciences and the humanities. In the debate, Bergson accused Einstein of proposing a view of change, built around clock-time, that was irreconcilable with our sense of time’s passage. According to Bergson, time was irreversible as a result of duration, a core concept of Bergson’s that refers to ‘the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances’ (1998: 4). Time in Einstein’s relativity was the result of probability and, therefore, fundamentally reversible. This reversibility resulted in a static view of the universe that, according to Prigogine and Stengers (1984), matched the principles under which Newton’s universal gravitation was built, like a clockwork mechanism. Using the image of the cinematograph, Bergson again criticized Einstein for fragmenting time (Canales, 2015).

The geosciences have traditionally suffered from what Frodeman (2003) describes as physics envy (also Massey, 2005). Indeed, the very discovery of deep time in early modern geology was informed by advances in physics. Lyell, to whom stratigraphers of the AWG attribute the origins of their field (Zalasiewicz et al., 2017), directly compared the expansion of earth’s history to the earlier expansion of space led by physicists, and the title of his magnum opus, The Principles of Geology, is a direct reference to Newton’s Principia Mathematica (Rudwick, 1990).³ Moreover, Lyell held a reversible view of earth’s history in which extinct species could eventually reappear in the future, a point on which Darwin disagreed (Rudwick, 2005a).

Although both geology and physics seem to have moved beyond reversibility – partially based on the irreversible models established for Darwinian evolution and energy flow in thermodynamics, according to Prigogine and Stengers (1984) – both disciplines seem to replicate a punctuated view of time in their reliance on measurement and representation to understand change. Yet, in the case of geology the emphasis on retrospection becomes ever more salient given that the discipline’s traditional object of study is nothing other than a petrified past deeply buried in stratigraphic sequences. Interestingly, a remarkably unsurprising cinematographic image of earth’s history was offered recently by Zalasiewicz in an interview on the Anthropocene. In response to a question on how he sees the future, taking into account human impact on the planet, Zalasiewicz suggested the following:

In many ways, it is a question which a geologist would turn on its head, because as a geologist I live in the past. And I feel that as a very real past. When I walk upon strata it is like walking on landscapes or seafloors, which we know were present on earth a million, or five million or five hundred million years ago. And there is a whole succession of these which we can build up cinematographically almost.⁴

It is worth noting that the social sciences and the humanities are not an exception in their attempts to fracture the flow of time. Bergson’s (2001) early work was specifically a reaction against emerging sciences of the mind and sociality that, at the time, were attempting to solidify the flow of consciousness. Indeed, social scientists and humanities scholars’ participation in debates on the establishment of a starting date for the new epoch has come without necessarily attending directly to the punctuated and retrospective view of time that chronological thinking perpetuates (also Chakrabarty, 2018). Similarly, the ESS approach to earth processes could be described as cinematographic – for instance, in how it regards climate change as a punctuated process, which the foundational distinction between climate and weather would suggest. According to climate sciences, climate results from plotting averaged measurements in precipitation, temperature and humidity. Weather, on the contrary, relates to how it feels being immersed in rain, heat and moisture. Knowing climate scientifically, therefore, depends on taking an epistemic distance from weather. Something similar could be argued regarding the notion of planetary boundaries, which are dependent on a normalized image of climate. The notion seems to propose a nostalgic view of change, as scientists contemplate ways to reverse climate to the supposed stability in which humanity flourished during the Holocene by bombarding the atmosphere with chemicals (Hulme, 2010). In resonance with what I argued above with regard to boundary work in stratigraphy, the efforts of the ESS to set planetary boundaries depends also on a punctuated view of change (Simonetti and Ingold, 2018). Yet compared to numerous humanities and ESS scholars involved in discussions about the Anthropocene, geologists’ particular account of earth’s history seems marked by its focus on stratified rock, which entwines with a tension between solidity and fluidity in the Western intellectual imagination. It is to this tension that I now turn.

Solid Fluidity

The implicit fractures between geology and both humanities and ESS seem to respond to a punctuated understanding of earth’s history common among geologists, which I have described as a fossilized view of becoming. According to this view, earth’s history resembles a vertical sequence of horizontal platforms that can only be accessed retrospectively. Such a retrospective emphasis would transform the reality of the Anthropocene epoch into a fictional phenomenon not of the present but of a future past. Correspondingly, this fracture relates to how Western knowledge has divided nature and culture along the categories of solidity and fluidity. Such a division would be mirrored in the much more profound divide between earth and sky. In line with Ingold (2011), this is unsurprising considering how in the West mind-matter dualisms have mirrored a division between a solid earth and a fluid atmosphere, which are respectively fixed below and suspended above the ground. Nowadays, this image is enhanced by a common understanding of the ground as a solid boundary, as found in urban environments dominated by asphalt and concrete surfaces. These surfaces have helped to create literally an impermeable limit between substance and media, one which normally suffocates the organic growth of nature below solid infrastructure. Accordingly, while earth’s history would be reduced to what is being recorded in earthly rocks, the historical continuation of sociality and earth systems would take place primarily along processes that occur above ground. The atmospheric flow of sound waves – responsible for the continuation of sociality – and the atmospheric flow of CO₂, temperature, precipitation, humidity and other variables – which are key for the continuation of earth systems – resemble each other when contrasted with the dead past that geologists seek in rocks. Unlike geologists, whose attention rest below ground, humanities and ESS scholars detect already a funny smell in the air.

Yet as I argued above, geologists do not concentrate exclusively on solidifying the past in stone. A capacity to imagine flowing solids has also been key to the expansion of geological thinking. These are the attitudes which I described above respectively as imaginative and chronographic. In light of the tension between solidity and fluidity, these attitudes could also be described as tending towards opposite spectrums of a solid-fluid continuum that intimately constitutes geological thinking. While the imaginative attitude tends to liquefy the solid by contemplating it in deep time, the chronological attitude tends to solidify the flow of earth processes by fracturing them in punctuated chronologies. Put differently, while the former emphasizes becoming, the latter emphasizes being.

This distinction overlaps partially with that which Deleuze and Guattari make between ‘major’ (or ‘royal’) and ‘minor’ (‘nomad’) sciences, two co-existing types, characterized respectively by their capacities to ‘reproduce’ and ‘follow’ becoming. While the former seeks to formalize processes in the name of national interests, the latter follows processes on the move. Bearing in mind the tension between solidity and fluidity addressed here, Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction matches, in turn, another introduced by the philosopher Michel Serres, in his book The Birth of Physics (2000), to differentiate between ‘solid’ and ‘hydraulic’ models. The former – associated with the view that modern physics was born in the Renaissance with Galileo – relates to the mechanics of solids falling to the ground, in which fluids are a rare, special case. The latter – associated with Lucretius’ writings on the Stoics, particularly Epicurus, as well as Archimedes – models physics on the behaviour of fluids, including those that command the flow of atmospheric change, which can hardly be explained with classical dynamics (also Simonetti and Ingold, 2018).

Although these sciences are qualitatively different, royal sciences – to use Deleuze and Guattari’s terminology – normally seek to reduce nomad sciences by quantifying and formalizing the heterogeneous flow of matter which nomad sciences follow. An example of royal science in geology can be found in the origins of geological cartography. Smith’s first geological chart of England, created for a prize offered by the British crown for a map of its mineral riches, helped craft the above-mentioned dissociation of time and space common in geological thinking, and on which the current formalization of geological units relies (Simonetti, 2018). Minor science, by contrast, would be characterized by its mobility and corresponding unwillingness to solidify phenomena in time and space, as occurred with Hutton’s early impulse to envision the flow of earth’s history through the solid masses of the Scottish landscape. Recalling Hutton’s (1795) famous words, in earth’s history there is ‘no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end’.

Bearing in mind how Smith crafted his map using colours to synoptically offer a view of England’s mineral riches at a single effortless glance, it is worth noting how, according to historian of geology Martin Rudwick (2005b: 84), geology grew closely alongside mining. As in geography’s tendency to reproduce a view of space as a fixed cartography, after centuries of imperial annexation of indigenous territories (Massey, 2005), geology’s chronological attitude has grown alongside efforts to appropriate mineral resources cartographically – efforts driven by the ambitions of both nation-states and international mining corporations.

Nowadays, the chronological attitude would be further enhanced by the accounting system that currently dominates the impact agenda inside neoliberal universities, where curiosity is often sacrificed by a tendency to revise pre-established problems. Boundary work, a field where rules and players are clearly demarcated, constitutes a perfect niche for such a tendency. As Lane has pointed out in the context of physical geography – whose arguments presumably apply to other neighbouring fields such as geology – this has resulted in the establishment of a political economy, where ‘Labour (academics) and Resources (research questions and finances) [are] both needed to fuel the means of production so as to produce Surplus [scientific articles]’ (Lane, 2017: 89). Lane’s critique, developed in correspondence with Stengers (2018), calls for slow science and is accompanied by an invitation to redirect the ways science relates to its subjects of inquiry. Slowing down in this context should not be seen as contrary to what I have argued here in terms of challenging geology’s retrospective approach to earth history. Indeed, the speed at which scientists rush nowadays trying to add pieces in precut puzzles is also a symptom of retrospection. In solving such problems, science tends to replicate the very same conditions of the neoliberal agenda under which it operates, which prevents it from cultivating a more curious, that is open-ended, relationship to knowledge.

Yet, contrary to the tendency in chronology formalization to cancel out curiosity and imagination, earth’s history cannot be reduced to what solidifies in the ground. Indeed, despite being ‘rock-focused’, as Zalasiewicz and colleagues put it (2017: 86), much of the work done by stratigraphers who are members of the AWG would be unthinkable without an understanding of the fluid transport and deposition of particulate matter, as well as the study of unconsolidated depositions, such as lake sediments (see, e.g., Waters et al., 2016). Moreover, the history of the earth and the creatures that live on it has depended on a continuous exchange between what is momentarily fixed below and what is momentarily suspended above the ground. Without that continuous exchange across the ‘solid’ lithosphere and the ‘fluid’ atmosphere – not to mention the flows of the hydrosphere – the fluid-filled bodies that compose the biosphere could not have existed on this planet. Indeed, if earth systems had literally been separate spheres, formed in isolation and prior to their ongoing interaction, there would be no trace of organic life in the fossil record for geologists to follow. Nicolas Steno, a great grandfather of early modern geology, would have been unable to formulate the principle of superposition had there not occurred a continuous exchange between earth (including both land and sea) and sky. Similarly, fire – perhaps the most distinctive element of the Anthropocene epoch – would be extinguished immediately were geology’s petrified image of earth’s history to materialize not just in charts but on the planet itself. According to the historian Stephen Pyne (2012), fire is neither solid nor fluid, neither natural nor cultural, in that its very existence depends on the entangling of earth and atmosphere. Fire’s participation in earth’s history would not exist were such an entangling prevented. Accordingly, and in a fundamental sense, earth’s history is nothing but the product of matter perpetually moving, back and forth, from solid to fluid states. Conversely, in such a view, the ground is not a boundary but a zone for the exchange of matter, energy and nutrients, which are essential for the continuation of life. Ultimately, ours is neither solid nor fluid but a solid fluid world in constant becoming. Therefore, tracing the line that divides what geologists describe as earth’s history and earth processes becomes superfluous (Zalasiewicz et al., 2017).

To conclude, in erasing the more-than-solid flows of environmental change from our understandings of earth’s history, we run the risk of missing an aspect central to most accounts of the Anthropocene coming out of the social sciences, the humanities and the ESS – namely, the continuity of life on earth. Embracing the more-than-solid flows of earth history could push geology to back away from its traditional emphasis on a deep past, opening the way to an encounter with life’s deep futures. No longer fictional, an emphasis on life’s deep futures should run in continuity with the present. Hopefully, in turn, decisions regarding such deep futures will be taken as slowly and responsibly as geoscientists have so far advocated for considerations of the earth’s deep past. Yet through an emphasis on deep futures, the past would no longer be a couch for academics to lie down on and debate its petrified existence, but a spring board for transforming its coming into being.