Will there be geologists to read the traces of Anthropocene in the strata of the far distant future? If so, is there any chance they will be our human descendants? Where are we in this Anthropocene and how long will it last in the frame of planetary time? Of course no one knows, but from our near-sighted and anthropocentric perspective the concept appears to be ushering in a new sensitivity to the context of a ‘long now’11A term credited to Brian Eno: http://longnow.org/essays/big-here-and-long-now/ in which humans understand their existence past, present, and future in the narrative scope of the Earth’s entire historical arc. In such a ‘now’ things seem both unforgivingly urgent and exhaustively remote, a geo-logic that serves to remind us that our behavior regarding climate change or any other macro-scale phenomena will also directly affect human and non-human life well into all possible futures. The question of when are we really becomes a matter of who are we – how, as diverse participants in this supposed Anthropocene, we live life. But of course what ‘we’ and which humans does this essay, or the Anthropocene concept itself, even presume to speak on behalf of? Is the idea a kind of conceptual panda – a faddish ‘charismatic meta-category’22A term that appears in a blog post by Elizabeth Reddy: http://blog.castac.org/2014/04/what-does-it-mean-to-do-anthropology-in-the-anthropocene/ as well as in the essay ‘Multispecies vs Anthropocene’ by John Hartigan in Somatosphere: Science, Medicine, and Anthropology. Dec. 12 2014. of popular culture akin to the ‘charismatic mega-fauna’ that draw attention away from the more numerous and more pressing (but less spectacular) species of concern?

In late November of 2014 over one hundred people gathered at the Anthropocene Campus at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin to wrestle with all of this. The aspiration was to experiment with approaches that might help make novel sense of this novel moment. It was a multifarious, and at times frenetic, event. In a makeshift effort to capture something of its closing momentum I conducted in-person microinterviews with over 35 participants on the last day of the Campus, of which this zine is a selection. The interviews reflect perspectives of architects, historians, scientists, and artists coming from diverse geographic, intellectual, and personal standpoints. It spans views of those like climate expert and Anthropocene advocate Will Steffen, to the incisive questions raised by cultural critic Maya Kóvskaya; from people engaging directly with agricultural impacts in Africa such as ecologist Moses Kamanda, to Amita Baviskar who studies the complexities of natural resource conflicts in South Asia.

Extract from Andrew Yang, “a n t h r o p o z i n e # 0. Views from the Anthropocene Campus – HKW, 2014,” 2015.