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Dim and wonderful is the vision I have conjured up in my mind of life spreading slowly from this little seed bed of the solar system throughout the inanimate vastness of sidereal space.
-H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds
>> Great Disillusionments
Let us begin with the opening paragraph of The War of the Worlds. It was published in 1898, almost exactly halfway through the Anthropocene so far. Before quoting it, let me stress the strangeness of being able to write "halfway through the Anthropocene," let alone "almost exactly." The strangeness is a function of this essay's topic, the state of criticism in the shadow of climate change. Moreover, the debate within geology and the humanities as to the start of the Anthropocene is happening because the time of the Anthropocene is strange-it seems to gather within itself a series of concentric loops of temporality that include the last two centuries, and the uncanny normality known as nature, a normality that at least one geologist (Jan Zalasiewicz) takes to be a function of the periodic cycling of earth systems since the advent of human intervention in the biosphere at a scale sufficient to affect them as a whole. Nature was always, and literally, an artificial construct. In this essay, I show that the supposed normality of this periodic cycling was already something alarming. It is just that now we are witnessing the loga- rithmic acceleration of this alarming tendency.
Wells articulates the weirdness of seeing on different scales at once:
No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinized and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinize the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human...