Reading in the Anthropocene
In 2007, I was teaching a course called Introduction to Classical Cultures at Brooklyn College in which we were reading Book 18 of the Iliad , the description of Achilles ’ shield. As readers of the Iliad may remember, the surface of the shield is emblazoned with a representation of the cosmos in miniature:
ἐν μὲν γαῖαν ἔτευξ᾽, ἐν δ᾽ οὐρανόν, ἐν δὲ θάλασσαν,ἠέλιόν τ᾽ ἀκάμαντα σελήνην τε πλήθουσαν,ἐν δὲ τὰ τείρεα πάντα, τά τ᾽ οὐρανὸς ἐστεφάνωται,Πληϊάδας θ᾽ Ὑάδας τε τό τε σθένος ὨρίωνοςἌρκτόν θ᾽, ἣν καὶ Ἄμαξαν ἐπίκλησιν καλέουσιν,ἥ τ᾽ αὐτοῦ στρέφεται καί τ᾽ Ὠρίωνα δοκεύει,οἴη δ᾽ ἄμμορός ἐστι λοετρῶν Ὠκεανοῖο.
As we read this passage, one of the students asked me if the ancient Greeks had a better imagination than we do: when he looks into the night sky, he sees nothing, or occasionally a few stars, for instance, the three that constitute Orion’s belt. He wanted to know whether the ancient Greeks saw the people, gods, and monsters that populated their night sky more fully in the stars, or whether they had a deeper imagination and could fill in the blanks themselves. This was fundamentally a phenomenological question about how people’s experience of nature in the ancient world differed from that in the modern era, a question that led us to a discussion of the environmental circumstances that contribute to this meaning making process of gazing at the night sky and, through this, to what we see when we look at the environment compared with what our pre-modern ancestors saw.[Hephaistos] made the earth upon it, and the sky, and the sea’s water, and the tireless sun, and the moon waxing into her fullness, and on it all the constellations that festoon the heavens, the Pleiades and the Hyades and the strength of Orion and the Bear , whom men give also the name of the Wagon, who turns about in a fixed place and looks at Orion and she alone is never plunged in the wash of the Ocean.1
I didn’t have a very good answer about the starry imagination of the Greeks at the time, but the question lingered, troubling me even after the semester ended. But that summer I stumbled across an article in The New Yorker entitled “The Dark Side: Making War on Light Pollution” by David Owen.2 In it, Owen writes about how Galileo was able to stand in the center of Padua, a major city in the seventeenth century, and make, with his handmade telescopes, startling astronomical discoveries, including the momentous one that the Milky Way was made up of individual stars. This moment is often conceived as a landmark in human scientific progress, and we wonder at the new discovery Galileo made with such limited technology; I, however, was concerned not with the new discovery, but with the previous belief it displaced: before 1610, no one knew the Milky Way was made up of individual stars. The night sky was so dark, so full of stars, and the Milky Way, which today is virtually invisible and which certainly none of my students could see from their homes in New York, was so bright that it seemed solid. Indeed, by way of comparison, Owen notes that “[t]oday, a person standing on the observation deck of the Empire State Building on a cloudless night would be unable to discern much more than the moon, the brighter planets, and a handful of very bright stars—less than one per cent of what Galileo would have been able to see without a telescope.”3 It was no wonder that the student in my class had asked about the difference in night skies: he was seeing something vastly different than had the ancient singers and their audiences.
This light pollution, Owen writes, “deprives many of us of a direct relationship with the nighttime sky, which throughout human history has been a powerful source of reflection, inspiration, discovery, and plain old jaw-dropping wonder.”4 The invention and ubiquity of electric lights marked a paradigm shift in the way in which humans perceive nature: as Paul Bogard notes, “Until well into the twentieth century, what passed for outdoor lighting was simply one form or another of fire—torches, candles, or dim, stinking, unreliable lamps.”5 That is, the sky by day or night had appeared the same and followed the same cycles of brightness and darkness for the entirety of human history, up until several decades ago.
This was my first encounter with the pedagogical consequences of the Anthropocene, a term that gained widespread acceptance after the Nobel Laureate and atmospheric scientist Paul Crutzen popularized the term.6 The Anthropocene is, in the words of Jedediah Purdy, “a slogan for the climate change era,” one that proposes the demarcation of a new period in geological history since, according to Purdy, “we have entered a new era of the earth’s history, when humans are a force, maybe the force, shaping the planet.”7 The concept of the Anthropocene, however, has less to do with the division of stratigraphy and geologic time than with contemporary politics and policies and the ideologies that undergird them; in her Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene, Joanna Zylinska notes that “my own use of the term ‘Anthropocene’ in this book is first and foremost as an ethical pointer rather than as a scientific descriptor. In other words, the Anthropocene serves here as a designation of the human obligation towards the geo- and biospheres, but also towards thinking about the geo- and biosphere as concepts.”8 Thus to accept the Anthropocene as a category for measuring time is to acknowledge a set of causal claims about (often destructive) human engagement with the shaping of the materiality of the world, couched in historicized language about the classification of geo-historical time. More importantly, however, it requires that we accept the necessity of a new ethical relationship with that materiality and a new set of behavioral practices for ameliorating the harm already done and, hopefully, the cultivation of an ethics and praxis of sustainability and reparability. The Anthropocene thus requires, according to Purdy, an awareness of the ways in which faulty human thought processes and environmental ideologies lead to destructive behavior: “The Anthropocene finds its most radical expression in our acknowledgment that the familiar divide between people and the natural world is no longer useful or accurate. Because we shape everything, from the upper atmosphere to the deep seas, there is no more nature that stands apart from human beings.”9 For Purdy, the Anthropocene is marked by the blurring, breaking down, or complete dissolution of the boundaries between society and nature, between nature and culture, between humans and nature. Indeed, this is what I saw in the classroom with this student’s question: a lack of awareness about the entangled ways in which humans and nature veer towards one another, rendering any strict dichotomy meaningless.
In the years since, the pedagogical consequences inherent in accepting the Anthropocene as a categorical framework for thinking about the contemporary historical moment have led me to the inescapable conclusion that environmental, technological, economic, and political considerations of this period—exemplified by those that have led to the proliferation of lights and, thus, light pollution; about urban density, sprawl, and car culture;10 about population control, crime, and public safety;11 and about increased economic activity through extended commercial hours12—have effectively created certain environmental ideologies and lived experiences among Anthropocene readers that have shaped our worldview before we even open a book, and that this has influenced our interpretation and literary analysis of texts composed 2500 years ago. Global warming, climate change, light and noise pollution, deforestation, urbanization, agribusiness and industrial farming, species extinction, and the other environmental consequences of the Anthropocene have already entered the classroom whether we like it or not, whether we are ready to engage with it or not, and they are already warping our perception of ancient texts: we can no longer see the starry night, literally or as depicted in pre-modern literature, as previous generations of scholars did, much less as the original authors and audiences of pre-modern texts did.
This new environmental context requires a new language, a new set of concerns, for thinking about scholarship in general (anthropogenic climate change and its various causes, manifestations, and possible solutions have become virtually all-consuming in atmospheric sciences, oceanography, and related hard sciences) and in thinking about literary criticism and humanities scholarship in the Anthropocene, and the issue of light pollution has become something of a metaphor for the way I read the past: we are operating not only at a temporal remove from pre-Anthropocenic literature, but also at an ideological, aesthetic, and phenomenological remove. To this list, too, one could add the emotional experience of the Anthropocene,13 as the environments we know and cherish die,14 as the glaciers we visited as children melt, as the forests we love are killed by disease or fire or are cut down and replaced with urban sprawl, as the stars we used to see are obscured by increased light. At the same time, we revel in the thrills the Anthropocene offers to some of us:15 expanded opportunities to visit faraway places and see new biomes, the de-extinction (that is, reviving species previously made extinct) of plants and animals through genetic modification.16 It was this distance between environments past and present that concerned me as a professor and scholar of the past: pre-Anthropocene audiences must have looked at the night sky with real jaw-dropping wonder, something that we, with much brighter skies, cannot really fathom.
Perhaps, I thought, Owen’s insight might be more widely applicable. As light pollution has obscured the stars, so too have automobiles, airplanes, and ...