ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author draws on Andreas Malm’s conceptualization of the Anthropocene as a change in the Earth’s relation to the Sun that arises when fossil fuel economies draw on and release, only to trap again, the stored energies of solar years past. The author asks what has not changed in the Earth’s relation to the Moon and considers the persistence of the multiple, secondary seasons that, determined by the Moon’s monthly rotation around the Earth, remain embedded, and continue to make epicycles, within the Earth’s single annual rotation around the Sun. Early twenty-first century work on the Anthropocene can thus be understood as a belated and uneasy recognition of the Earth’s power to assume a task which European philosophy might once have assigned exclusively to culture: that of archiving human history by becoming the storage house for non-erasable anthropogenic deposits.
