The Travels of Protean Biologies

We live in an era in which our anxieties are kept well stoked by the media.The effects of climate change are becoming increasingly apparent as fire and water rage out of control in numerous places and food production has dropped catastrophically.In June 2017 in the Antarctic the Larson C ice shelf cracked, creating an independent iceberg with a size equivalent to Wales, or to Prince Edward Island, Canada.This imminent major planetary event had been carefully monitored for over a decade with some trepidation, and sadly, further even more such events are in store.As of September 2016, we have been living in the Anthropocene.Designation of this new epoch was initiated in the 1980s by the ecologist Eugene Stoermer, and taken up again in 2000 by the atmospheric chemist and Nobel Laureate, Paul Crutzen at a meeting in Mexico.By 2013 over 200 peer-reviewed articles had been published about the looming, epochal transition, and Elsevier had launched a journal titled Anthropocene, followed by an e-journal Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene.The historian Dipesh Chakrabarty points out the peculiarity of this new epoch: "the Anthropocene spells the collapse of the Kantian distinction between natural history and human history".Thus we are now in the first geological epoch in which the force transforming the globe -human initiated activity -is supposedly self-conscious about what it is doing, with profound implications for politics and the allocation of responsibility (2009: 3).For a decade or more arguments have taken place as to whether the Neolithic revolution, or possibly even earlier changes brought about by humankind, evinced the beginning of the Anthropocene.The position of ecologist Erle Ellis ( 2015) and his colleagues is that the transition commenced 10,000 years ago when land clearance for agriculture and irrigation began to have a global effect on vast swaths of land.In recent centuries colonization has further reduced the biodiversity of the planet to a fraction of what it was formerly.Others argue that the industrial revolution that commenced in the late 1700s, epitomized by the steam engine, was the singular moment (Jórgensen and Jórgensen 2016).Humans have manufactured numerous mineral compounds, including more than 500 million metric tons of pure aluminium since World War 2, much of which has sedimented into earth's layers.Even more striking are "mineraloids" -glass and plastics -300 million tons of which are made annually and are present everywhere on the earth's crust and in all the oceans.Since the 1950s nine billion tons of plastic have been created.Concrete, a rock of our own making, encases much of the globe today.Human detritus is ubiquitous, principally in the form of CO2, nitrogen fertilizer, pesticides, diesel fuel, and electronic trash and mineraloids that have accumulated as toxic waste around the globe.

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