There is increasing agreement within geology, oceanology, biology and other hard sciences that we have entered the Anthropocene (Crutzen and Stoermer 2000), although other concepts, such as Capitalocene (Moore 2015) and Chthulucene (Haraway 2016) have also been proposed. This era is already lodged in the sediments of the Earth, in the form of plastics, ash, metals, pesticides, or as fallout from thermonuclear testing in the late twentieth century (Waters et al. 2016). In the present moment, and even more so in the predictable future, the Anthropocene produces various states of precarity; in the global south where what Rob Nixon (2011) has termed “slow violence” impacts the lives of the poor; among thousands of species that, as Elisabeth Kolbert (2014) shows, are going extinct; and also inside all human bodies when chemicals accumulate in our fat tissue and when our microbiomes – our vital gut bacteria – are depleted by poor diets and an overuse of antibiotics.

From the perspective of the hard sciences, the Anthropocene is a human-induced era generated by the release of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and by various pollutants and chemicals into the environment. However, this process, and humanity’s current and glaring inability to address the conflict, must also be understood as a cultural or ideological problem. As several humanities and social sciences scholars have observed (see e.g. Lorimer 2015, Tsing 2015, Chakrabarty 2016), the Anthropocene has been enabled by the anthropocentric notion that humankind is somehow apart from nature, and that nature exists to be governed by humanity. The relationship between modern humanity and the planet has thus been one of (colonial) ownership, not of friendship or love, or even of collaborative co-habitation. This prompts the questions: How can humanity, as Eben Kirksey (2018) has asked, learn to extend friendship and love across the barriers constituted by that geography, nationality and species?

With this question in mind, this talk explores new scholarly writing, art, literature and film that attempt to reimagine relations between human beings, and between human and non-human species. The talk thus surveys stories that recognize that humans are inevitably inside the planetary ecosystem, and also inhabited by a range of species vital to their survival. In this way, the talk investigates how visual and textual narratives imagine (interspecies) love and friendship as possible even in an age of conflict and extinction.

Chakrabarty, D. (2016) “Humanities in the Anthropocene: The Crisis of an Enduring Kantian Fable” New Literary History 47(2&3).

Crutzen, P, and Stoermer, E. (2000) “The Anthropocene”. IGBP Newsletter 41.

Haraway, D. (2016) Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. (Durham: Duke UP).

Kirksey, E. (2018) “Queer Love, Gender Bending Bacteria, and Life after the Anthropocene” Theory, Culture & Society 0(0): 1-23.

Kolbert, E. (2014) The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. New York: Henry Holt.

Moore, J. (2015) Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital. New York: Verso

Nixon, R. (2011) Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge MA: Harvard UP.

Tsing, A. (2015) The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton UP).

Waters, C. et al. (2016). “The Anthropocene is functionally and stratigraphically distinct from the Holocene” Science. 351(6269):aad2622-1-11

Lorimer, J. (2015) Wildlife in the Anthropocene: Conservation after Nature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.