ABSTRACT
From the Sputnik panic of the mid-twentieth century to the STEM fever of today, talk of the diminishment of the humanities in academic institutions and public life is nothing new. What is new-and newly paradoxical-is the disjuncture between the various external pressures to scale back the humanities and the call to scale up our understanding of humans as a species, increasingly seen as having altered the physical processes of the planet. Yet to many ears, Anthropocene species talk is a troubling new universalism that disregards the highly uneven roles that different groups of humans have played in the transformation of the planet, and the uneven distribution of risk and resilience in confronting this humanmade world. Newfound interest in geological stratification threatens to displace attention to social stratification.
