![]() On the upper stage stands Prospero enrobed, singing out magnificent poetry in the voice of Gandalf and Magneto: Listening with Anthropocene ears, we hear familiar old lines differently. It takes some imagination to conceive that the Age of Man started in 1610, but now that we know the date we can find the words. Image courtesy of the Folger Shakespeare Library under Creative Commons License CC BY-SA4.0 Lewis and Maslin name the 1610 date the “Orbis” spike, from the Latin for “world,” because its drivers are global: the worldwide movements of human and nonhuman populations, as well as other factors including “colonialism global trade.” As Dana Luciano noted in Avidly this past spring, this spike describes an Anthropocene that emerges not from industrial expansion but through such phenomena as the “concurrent history of the Atlantic slave trade.” The 1610 Anthropocene represents the early stages of what we now call “globalization.” What might a global Anthropocene that shares its era with Shakespeare and Pocahantas mean? ![]() These empty landscapes were visible evidence of the Anthropocene. The open vistas of the New World were not destiny’s gift to European settlers. The massive die-off of the human population and subsequent “cessation of farming and reduction in fire use” led to the “regeneration of over 50 million hectares of forest, woody savanna and grassland” (Lewis and Maslin). No period in recorded history matches this death toll on so vast a scale. Estimates vary, but the New World may have experienced the loss of nearly 50 million souls, out of an estimated pre-Contact population of roughly 60-65 million, during the century of first contact. The starkest consequence of this mixing from a human perspective was death on an unprecedented scale, primarily among Native Americans. Instead these scientists state that 1610 marks “an unambiguously permanent change to the Earth system” generated by the ecological mixing of the Americas with Afro-Eurasia. (I will take a few swings at triumphalist conceptions of this history in Shipwreck Modernity, out in December 2015 from University of Minnesota Press.) But Lewis and Maslin don’t base their claim for a 1610 spike on newly-recovered manuscripts of Lucretius or on the Baconian trio of print, gunpowder, and the compass. It’s a problem that choosing this date might advance the swerve into modernity narrative that’s been receiving much-needed pushback in recent years. When Sir Walter Raleigh graced Queen Elizabeth’s court and Shakespeare’s dramas were first staged, our Anthropocene nightmare began. Amid the glories of the English Renaissance sits an ecological spike. But the earlier date catches this Shakespeare professor’s eye: 1610 is three years after the founding of the Jamestown colony and one year before the first staging of The Tempest. The late twentieth-century date reflects the peak of radioactive particles in the atmosphere, which subsequently declined after the Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963. Maslin argue in the journal Nature that the clearest geological markers of human influence on the global climate appear in 19. The question of origins remains vexed: when did the Age of Man start? The most recent candidate for the Golden Spike, or GSSP (Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point), which marks the start of the Anthropocene is 1610. As humanist and post-humanist critics explore the era’s implications, scientific debate continues about its precise nature. ![]() ![]() Making a bid to replace the Holocene, or Age of the Present, as the scientific term for the geological era in which we live, the Anthropocene has caught the attention of scientists, scholars, artists, poets, theorists, and the general public. The Age of Man, or Anthropocene, has become the word of the day. I don’t believe in magic numbers, but this one has got me thinking. An earlier version of this post appeared in the Glasgow Review of Books on.
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