Abstract
Deep Time, Dark Times: On Being Geologically Human by David Wood is a brief yet diverse contribution to environmental philosophy that began as a series of lectures for ‘Thinking Out Loud: The Sydney Lectures in Philosophy and Society’. The book responds to the concerns of climate change, the Anthropocene thesis and the fate of humanity by rethinking some basic assumptions about life, ‘Man’ and time. It does this by asking who ‘we’ are, what agency, responsibility and subjectivity have come to mean in our current circumstances, how to respond to the affective resonance that is produced by the climate crisis, and, ultimately, what can be done now. The book draws on, and furthers, the work of Heidegger, Derrida and Nietzsche with a geological slant, to promote an extended sense of history that incorporates a geological consciousness. In doing so, it begins to play with nonlinear temporalities and moves towards an expanded sense of the planet’s stakeholders which incorporates nonhuman species. Its cogent deconstruction of the term ‘Man’, and the exploitative practices that are legitimated in the name of humanity, sets the tone for the book and is one of many provocative analytical vignettes that appear throughout. Much of the book is dedicated to an exploration of affect, attunement and the passions that ‘play an indispensable role of binding us to the cosmos, reminding us of what matters, as well as impeding our response to the challenges that face us’ (pp. 45–46) and provides fascinating insights into, to name a few, post 9/11 America, the Great Depression of the 1930s, and reactions to Jeremy Corbyn. Through this framework, it reflects on our failure to respond adequately to the damning predictions of climate science. As such, the book will be of interest to anyone interested in finding new insights into contemporary politics and the crisis of climate change. More specifically, scholars interested in affect and environmental politics will no doubt find this an enjoyable and complementary read. The book is more attentive to the Dark Times of its title, and, perhaps owing to its brevity, hovers tantalizingly on the surface of the conceptual terrain that further interest in deep time could offer. Indeed, relatively few pages are given to discussing new materialism or the potential contribution of geophilosophy, which would seem at home among the questions posed by the author. The book finishes by discussing some potential solutions to the climate change crisis, which are divided into two: the unthinkable and the impossible. Having disregarded the unthinkable, the impossible solutions discussed become increasingly conventional and limited, and seem to lack the theoretical insights developed earlier in the book. The challenge to anthropocentrism and the move to a more radical understanding of agency and terrestrial responsibility begins to fall away and is replaced by the conclusion that ‘without life there is no value’ (p. 133). This is a position which ultimately fails to attend to the increasingly diminishing boundary between life and nonlife that the geological concept of the Anthropocene itself proposes.
