ABSTRACT
Big problems: scale in the anthropocene
Climate change, species extinction, toxic contamination, ocean acidification, habitat loss, pervasive plastics, genetically modified organisms, nuclear meltdowns, tailings ponds visible from space, fracking's temblors and flammable tap water, mountaintop removal, urban smog, suburban and exurban sprawl, e-waste: a litany of ever-proliferating environmental horrors is unfortunately simple to produce. We are surrounded by such events daily, not just in the news, but in our lives. Though environmental destruction is hardly uniform, even the most protected of "backyards" is presently under threat. And even if we do not see crises, we are continuously aware of our complicity in them. The catastrophe of the Albertan tar sands, to take a Canadian example, may not be literally in our backyards here in southern Ontario, but insofar as we drive, fly, run our oil or gas furnaces, use plastic containers, we participate in the devastation of these and other extractive practices, even as we, in our turn, produce carbon emissions and turn plastic products into waste (even if we delay that process by one or two cycles of plastics recycling). In such times, it is fairly easy to despair, to resort to chronicling the planet's demise or our melancholy in the face of it. After all, much as we might acknowledge our participation in the systems that we decry, it is often difficult to imagine doing anything differently—and often feels in any case futile. Divergences in scale—the individual on the one hand and the "climate" on the other—are the primary challenges of what scholars are increasingly calling "the Anthropocene," this epoch in which humankind has taken on the role of a geologic force, producing the "environment" that subsequently confronts us as though from the outside. As Timothy Clark usefully puts it, the Anthropocene is a Leviathan, "paradoxically, a total effect of innumerable human decisions," and yet seemingly "as imperturbably closed to human direction as is a hurricane or the tilt of the planet's orbit" (2015, 16). Even if we individual, earnest environmentalists, don the hair shirt of self-restraint, the scales at which destruction occurs so vastly outreach us, as the world rolls on, whether we walk or drive, huddle under sweaters and blankets or simply (a simplicity that hides, of course, its complexity) turn up the heat.
