The question in turn elicits an endless and still-growing series of competing names for the clock’s time: Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Extractocene, Chthulucene, and more. The names matter. They shape the analytic, interpretive, and political dimensions of our response. But for me, a key benefit of the Anthropocene name is that it quietly leaves unanswered, and in this way, preserves a stubborn conceptual problem of modern thought: what particular conception of ‘the human’ is implied by the ‘anthropos’ of the Anthropocene? In my work, I try to rethink both scientific definitions of the human (esp. evolutionary anthropology) and the premodern Christian theological traditions with which secular discourses are often subtly entangled by showing how the transdisciplinary field of Black Studies exacts critical pressure upon both. By excavating the constitutive role of race, gender, sexuality, and disability in producing the humanist subject of ‘Man,’ Black Studies (to quote Alexander Weheliye) pursues “the transformation of the human into a heuristic model and not an ontological fait accompli…black studies provides a conceptual precipice from and through which to imagine new styles of humanity.” In the teeth of an interlocking and cascading “polycrisis,” we need new styles of humanity more than ever.

How does the Anthropocene play a role in your work?

One way into this is to notice that, in the recent rejection of the Anthropocene proposal by the geological scientists of the international Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy (SQS), the decisive problem was not determining whetherhuman agency has irreversibly impacted the planet. The problem is specifying when—as well as determining what physical site would best show this. That’s part of what humanities scholars like Jedediah Purdy saw coming years ago when they suggested that “the scientific debate about geological eras, supposedly rooted in hard facts, ironically reveals that the Anthropocene is not a simple question of fact at all…To define the Anthropocene is to emphasize what we think is most important in [the] relationship [between humans and nature]…” And so, he continues, “saying we live in the Anthropocene is not like saying the earth is 4.5 billion years old rather than 6,000. It’s more like saying the United States is a secular country, or a religious one. It’s not a statement of fact as much as a way of organizing facts to highlight a certain importance that they carry.”

Given this irreducibly hermeneuticaldimension of naming the time on the clock, the role the Anthropocene plays in my work is best captured by Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin’s insistence on 1610—the year of the Orbis Spike, marking when “the Columbian Exchange can be seen in geological sediments,” largely because over 50 million people died in a period of just a few decades as a result of the diseases Europeans carried to the Americas for the first time. As indigenous societies collapsed, forests reclaimed farmland so expansively—geologists tell us—that the growing trees absorbed enough carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to temporarily cool the planet, providing the last globally cool moment before the long-term warming of the Anthropocene. “The 1610 Orbis Spike,” they write, thus “marks the beginning of today’s globally interconnected economy and ecology, which set Earth on a new evolutionary trajectory…In narrative terms, the Anthropocene began with widespread colonialism and slavery: it is a story of how people treat the environment and how people treat each other.” In my first book, I examined how the long afterlife of this slavery and colonialism shapes how Christian political thinkers have received the massively influential thought of Augustine of Hippo, in part by leading them to downplay, disavow, or silence his central role in producing a Christian tradition of slaveholding. In my current work, I’m showing how these same forces—slavery, colonialism, and the role of Christian political thought in both producing and resisting their tenacious hold on western modernity—reshape the task of environmental ethics and climate politics in the Anthropocene.

What project(s) are you working on during your fellowship at the Forum Basiliense?

Working on a book provisionally titled, We Are Each Other’s Harvest: Remaking Solidarity as a Way of Life for the Anthropocene, which rethinks the theological concept of solidarity amid the immense environmental challenges of the Anthropocene. “Solidarity” animates Catholic social teaching, Protestant ethics, wider discourses of political ecology, and pragmatist philosophy; few concepts bring popes, pastors, environmental activists, and Richard Rorty into the same room like solidarity. Yet ubiquitous contemporary calls for solidarity of some group x (often ‘privileged’) with some other group y (often ‘marginalized’) tend to presume we know in advance what solidarity is, and the issue lies only with ‘applying’ it to various contexts. A deeper issue lies beneath these presumptions, to which both theological and scientific modes of inquiry can and ought respond: What sort of animal is the human creature, such that solidarity is possible to imagine, let alone enact? I’m also continuing work on a collaboration with Agustín Fuentes, an anthropologist at Princeton, in which we critically respond to recent scientific attempts to grasp the modern emergence of so-called ‘WEIRD’ (western, educated, industrial, rich, democratic) societies and the sources of their immense material prosperity without engaging the histories of settler colonialism, Atlantic slavery, and imperial extraction.