Timothy Morton interview: Humans have long been a ‘geophysical force on a planetary scale.’ That’s neither good nor bad.
Timothy Morton is an enigmatic character. An English professor at Rice University, but one that specializes in ecology and the way it interacts with cultural issues, and a leading member of the object-oriented philosophy movement. Their latest book “Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology” explores how religion overlaps with science in strange and surprising ways, while another recent project involved working with Andrew Melchior of U.K. trip-hop collective Massive Attack and MIT’s Kiyoshi Masui to make music about fast radio bursts.
They are also known — by their own admission rather embarrassingly — as “the prophet of the Anthropocene.” We spoke to them ahead of the HowTheLightGetsIn festival in London, which takes place this weekend (Sept. 21-22), about how they got this title, what the Anthropocene means, and why we need to stop trying to define when it started and accept that we’ve been in it for millennia.
Alexander McNamara: You’ve been described as the “prophet of the Anthropocene.” Can you explain what the Anthropocene is and how you got the title?
Timothy Morton: It’s the title of an article about me in the Guardian newspaper that showed up in 2017. This guy [Alex Blasdel] interviewed me and my colleagues and friends for about half a year and produced this huge think piece called “The Philosopher Prophet of the Anthropocene” and that’s me.
At that point there weren’t that many people in humanistic scholarship actually looking at this [the Anthropocene]. I had been going around the world talking about a concept I developed called Hyperobjects, which many people found very engaging as a way to think, talk, and also make art about global warming. It’s a thing that’s so big and so vast, it’s hard to see it. You can visualize it, you can understand it, but you can’t see “it.” It’s got this kind of sinister, multi-dimensional quality to it, and the Anthropocene is a similar thing.
It is a geological period — and I’m going to give the strict definition of the Anthropocene — there is a layer of human-made materials in the top layer of Earth’s crust that goes back to roughly 10,000 B.C. And that’s the Anthropocene that geologists are talking about. This layer is everywhere.
It’s a hard concept for people to get their head around. It’s a fiercely contested period right now because they [the Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS), which approves new geological time periods] decided to nix the concept.
All we have to do is realize that there’s something happening to the biosphere, human beings are doing it, and it’s happening on a massive scale.
Timothy Morton
Since that happened, I’ve been on the case. I wrote a piece about how rejecting this concept is a terrible mistake. It is scientifically imprecise to reject the fact that there is a layer of human-made materials of plastics fused with concrete fused with pottery within the top layer of Earth’s crust.
The fact that there’s this stuff everywhere shouldn’t be a testimony to human being’s greatness in any way whatsoever, it’s just the case that humans became a geophysical force on a planetary scale. From a scientific point of view, that’s neither good, nor bad. That’s just a thing, right?
AM: So when did the Anthropocene start?
TM: This is hard to get a handle on unless you realize that an event is more like an explosion or a ripple in a pond than a dot on a Wikipedia [time]line. In fact, I’m going to be very firm here and say, it isn’t a dot on a line, it’s in motion.
[When] humans started to settle across Earth, there was a sort of mild global warming that caused scarcity of food, so people started to build cities, which were in effect gigantic granaries for human beings. And this gave rise to measurable effects.Then, in 1945 there was this “golden spike,” where suddenly all the Earth systems go haywire. There had been build-up points [prior to this day] but then there’s this uncanny fact that after [the Second World War], there’s a layer of radio nucleotides and stuff like that in the Earth’s crust, [which] is another moment of the Anthropocene people call the great acceleration.
AM: Why is it so important that we drop this idea that we have to find a definitive point, and just accept that we’re in the Anthropocene?
TM: To a certain extent, who cares when [the Anthropocene] started? Who cares even why it started? All we have to do is realize that there’s something happening to the biosphere, human beings are doing it and it’s happening on a massive scale. I don’t have to waste time proving when it happened, when it started or who did it.
It’s sort of like this with global warming. Rule number one of surviving a shocking thing is knowing you are in a shocking thing. This has happened. Rubbernecking how it happened and when and why is one thing, how to get the hell out of there is another, right?
We’re all small people in relation to the planet. Part of our inhibition is that we’ve been reduced to teeny tiny people watching grown-ups in the form of [oil companies], committing crimes upon our bodies and the bodies of other life forms and it’s deeply disturbing and shocking. When you are in a state of traumatic shock, [you put your fingers in your ears and say] it’s not really happening or it’s not happening yet. But there is a kind of relaxation in knowing it’s already happened.
I think that’s another reason why people have trouble with the Anthropocene; it’s telling you that the bad thing has already happened. Human beings did a thing, and have been doing it for 12,000 years, in particular for the last 50 years [by] burning so many fossil fuels. I want to help people acknowledge that we did it. It’s caused by fossil fuel emissions. Let’s motivate ourselves to stop those fossil fuel emissions. It’s amazing that the solution is very simple. You just stop burning them. Why aren’t we doing it? That is the complicated question.
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