Computational media and environmental epistemologies

The notion that the environment has changed continuously throughout the history of the Earth is a given in geology. Yet in the popular understanding, the environment is still something stable and unaffected, separate from humans, which, however, is under threat from human impacts. These notions are a legacy of the postwar environmentalism, though a longer prehistory can certainly be discerned.11Paul Warde, Libby Robin, and Sverker Sörlin, The Environment: The History of an Idea. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018, p. 7. The fact that the environment has been changing throughout the history of Earth does not, however, elide the threat to life on this planet caused by human activities, and particularly by those of Western industrialized societies. But now we find ourselves in a historically new situation where our knowledge about and impact on the environment—and thus its process of change—coalesce in the Anthropocene. This is a dire predicament and one in which responsibility, equity, and justice are essential. But in order to make room for these dimensions we also need a better understanding of how and why humans change their environments. Finding a geologically-qualified set of markers to designate this new epoch of human driven environmental change is an important step in that process, but it is also an act of human-Earth interaction that itself merits closer scrutiny and should be understood as part of a longer history.

Environmental knowledge has long evolved in tandem with new media technologies. This has been true since early modern knowledge of the environment which relied on the emergence of various print media, cartographic and pictorial techniques, as well as new instruments for data gathering and processing, particularly in the marine environment. Since the postwar era, however, and in parallel with the onset of the “Great Acceleration” and the proposed starting date of the Anthropocene, environmental knowledge has rapidly evolved through new approaches and techniques of modeling, computation, and global networks of data collection.22Adam Wickberg and Johan Gärdebo, “Where Humans and the Planetary Conflate: An Introduction to Environing Media,” Humanities vol. 9, no. 3 (2020): pp. 1–12;  Sabine Höhler, Spaceship Earth in the Environmental Age, 1960-1990. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2015; and Stefan Helmreich, “From Spaceship Earth to Google Ocean: Planetary Icons, Indexes, and Infrastructures,” Social Research vol. 78 (2011): pp. 1211–1242.

This process of large-scale quantified knowledge production also entails that we have moved successively further from in situ observations of particular environmental phenomena to ever more mediated forms of knowledge, ones increasingly automated to such an extent that we may speak of a mediated planet, understood as an interconnected, increasingly detailed, and continuously updated data-driven view of Earth and the life it supports. Jennifer Gabrys calls this process the “becoming environmental of computation” and points to how the multifaceted process of sensing environments is produced through exchanges of energy, materialities, relations, and milieus.33Jennifer Gabrys, Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. This is not just the process of Earth as an environmental object of observation and study, which already emerged in the first Globalization after 1500,44Peter Sloterdijk, In the World Interior of Captial: Towards a Philosophical Theory of Globalizaton. London: Polity Press, 2013. but rather of novel ways of perceiving, understanding, and experiencing environments contingent on data and large scale computation.

The co-evolution of computation and environmental knowledge rests on the same military complex which has acted as the dominant technological and scientific driving force since the Second World War. The cybernetic revolution that took off in earnest to meet the military needs of observation and control in the postwar era at the same time fed into advances in meteorology, climate science, and subsequently Earth system science.55Paul Edwards, A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data and the Politics of Global Warming. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013; Will Steffen, Katherine Richardson, Johan Rockström, et al., “The emergence and evolution of Earth System Science,” Nat Rev Earth Environ vol. 1 (2020): pp. 54–63. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43017-019-0005-6 This development of a mediated planet is not only synchronous to, but also co-evolved with the Great Acceleration and the planet’s entrance to the Anthropocene.66Will Steffen, William Broadgate, Lisa Deutsch, et al., “The trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration,” The Anthropocene Review. vol. 2, no. 1 (2015): pp. 81–98. doi:10.1177/2053019614564785 It is even possible to argue that knowing the environment by computational means since the postwar era has been the primary driver of a twofold process whose parts stand in deep tension, if not a paradox. On the one hand, knowledge accumulating from environmental data contributed to the emergence of a conception of the environment as something out there in need of our protection as we could see the harmful effects of human-made products, as it revealed the increased anthropogenic pressure on the environment.77Paul Warde, Libby Robin, and Sverker Sörlin, The Environment. On the other hand, the same technology, providing ever more detailed information about the environment, fueled a growing extractivism, which has enabled the Great Acceleration of resource depletion.88Christoph Rosol, Benjamin Steiniger, Jürgen Renn, and Robert Schlögl, “On the Age of Computation in the Epoch of Humankind,” Nature Outlook, Theme Issue: Digital Transformation (2018): https://www.nature.com/articles/d42473-018-00286-8 The paradox of the technosphere means that the same technologies and concepts that allow us to assess the planetary state through computed knowledge production in Earth system science have also played a part in driving the global environmental change we are observing.99Peter Haff, “Humans and technology in the Anthropocene: Six rules” The Anthropocene Review vol. 1, no. 2 (2014) : pp. 126–136, doi:10.1177/2053019614530575.

German media theorist Erich Hörl has developed a way of understanding a shift in the ontological status of environment and ecology that have emerged since the birth of cybernetics and as a result of ubiquitous computation. For Hörl, this process implies a conception where environment and ecology are no longer strictly tied to nature understood as the other of technics or culture. Such a philosophy has a lot of bearing on the unfolding world order of the Anthropocene, where an intimate connection exist between technology as driver of anthropogenic change and environment as something no longer separate from human endeavors.

According to Hörl, the cybernetic and computational process leading up to what he calls the environmentalitarian situation today entails that environments are no longer just surroundings. Instead, they are part of a new techno-ecological condition in which human and non-human entities “concretize,” so that all worlding [welten] become transworlding [umwelten], encompassing change and collapsing the surrounding/surrounded distinction at the heart of the traditional understanding of the environmental concept.1010Erich Hörl, “The Environmentalitarian Situation: Reflections of the Becoming Environmental of Thinking, Power and Capital,” Cultural Politics vol. 14, no. 2 (2018): pp. 153–173. Like Jennifer Gabrys, Hörl draws on the work of the philosophers Albert North Whitehead and Gilbert Simondon, who both developed strong conceptions of environment/milieu and technology in mid-twentieth century that can be productively used to understand the co-constitution of computation and environment today.

The main task of these theoretical efforts is to overcome the understanding of nature as static and separate from culture and to replace it with an understanding of how environments and non-human ecosystems come into being, which now include the technologies of digital computation and sensor networks of various scales. This, I argue, is precisely what is at stake in the concept of the Anthropocene in general, and in the very act of finding and formalizing anthropogenic markers, which can be productively understood in terms of environing media. The concept of a mediated planet encapsulates this new ontological condition of knowing and doing environments in the twenty-first century.

Chronostratigraphy of the Anthropocene as environing media

It goes without saying that naming and dating a new geological epoch is a complex enterprise. So far, all geological time units have concerned the distant past, and so deducing their signal has been a structural matter of looking into geological archives, such as rocks and sediments, and assessing their temporal distance from the present.1111Jan Zalasiewicz et al., “Stratigraphy and the Geological Timescale”, in The Anthropocene as a Geological Time Unit: A Guide to the Scientific Evidence and Current Debate, eds. J. Zalasiewicz et al. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019, p. 11. The Anthropocene is different: it belongs to the present and very recent past, or perhaps even mostly to the future. This fact creates a complex feedback loop between epistemology and the material world, where our intellectual concepts, which build on documented signals in the spheres that make up the outer layers of our planet, will in turn likely lead to new interventions in response. This feedback loop is paradigmatic of the theoretical concept environing media which concerns the way in which environments shape and are shaped by humans.1212Adam Wickberg and Johan Gärdebo, “Where Humans and the Planetary Conflate.” Much in line with the collapse of the nature/culture distinction we’ve come to associate with the Anthropocene from a humanities and social sciences perspective, the verb form environing signals that the environment is something processual, a doing that is in a constant process of change, rather than a stable surrounding “out there.”1313Sverker Sörlin and Nina Wormbs, “Environing Technology: A Theory of Making Environment,” History & Technology vol. 34, no. 2 (2018). Media, in turn, here refer to the means by which humans come to know and change this environment. They are material processors of information which shape the conditions of possibility for knowing the world at any given time, and thus of engaging in processes of environing.1414John Durham Peters, Marvelous Clouds: Towards a Philosophy of Elemental Media. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2015.

Over the last few decades, the presence of satellite remote sensing technology and autonomous oceanic floats like the Argo program have, for instance, made it possible to determine sea level rise with high precision.1515Cross ref. Ian Fairchild et al. “The Anthropocene Signal Amidst the Noise”: https://www.anthropocene-curriculum.org/anthropogenic-markers/anthrobiogeochemical-cycles/contribution/the-anthropocene-signal-amidst-the-noise; Susanna Lidström, Adam Wickberg, and Johan Gärdebo, “Ocean Environing Media: The Argo Program,” in Environing Media: Changing Human-Earth Relations. London: Routledge, 2022. Environing media technologies, such as the Argo satellites, in turn build on knowledge production from earlier projects of oceanographic advances, for example the activities during the international geophysical year 1957–58, which saw the first comprehensive sea floor maps produced by geologist Bruce Heezen and cartographer Marie Tharp. Funded by US defense agencies for military strategic reasons, these maps subsequently became essential components of newly established environmental knowledge, playing an instrumental role in the acceptance of the theory of plate tectonics.1616Ronald E. Doel, Tanya J. Levin, and Mason K. Marker, “Extending modern cartography to the ocean depths: military patronage, Cold War priorities, and the Heezen–Tharp mapping project, 1952-1959,” Journal of Historical Geography, vol. 32 (2006): pp. 605–626; Jessica Lehman, “Making an Anthropocene Ocean: Synoptic Geographies of the International Geophysical Year 1957-1958” Annals of the American Association of Geographers, vol. 110, no. 3 (2020): pp. 606–622, doi: 10.1080/24694452.2019.1644988. Without sea floor maps, we could not know for certain to what extent sea levels are currently rising due to anthropogenic climate change.

In the same way, establishing historical change in Earth’s climate presupposes a reasonably stable record with which to compare. The practice of interpretation of past climate from the character of rocks and sediments changed in mid twentieth-century with the development of mass spectrometry technology, which uses isotope dating of samples from sea floor sediments (and subsequently ice cores), an adoption that historically coincided with increasing computing capacities for numerical modeling.1717Colin Summerhayes, Paleoclimatology: From Snowball Earth to the Anthropocene. London: Wiley, 2020, p. 81. Without the advent of these technical media—taking samples from the sea floor to the laboratory for analysis, and then into computed modeling—, we would not be able to say that our climate is now changing faster than ever before.1818Christoph Rosol, “Data, models and Earth History in Deep Convolution. Paleoclimate Simulation and Their Epistemological Unrest,” Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte vol. 40 (2017): pp. 120–139.

A global media infrastructure of scientific data processors comes together to form the basis of our current environmental epistemology, allowing for the determination of a rapid change in the scale of global environmental change attributable to anthropogenic factors. The effect of this rapid change of scale, for example, in the appropriation of primary energy sources, is such that it pushes the Earth system out of the Holocene and into the Anthropocene, with the first geological impacts of this transition becoming visible around 1950.1919Jaia Syvitski et al., “Extraordinary Human Energy Consumption and Resultant Geological Impacts Beginning around 1950 CE Initiated the Proposed Anthropocene Epoch,” Communications Earth and Environment vol. 1, no. 32 (2020): pp. 1–13. The fact that we have left the quasi-stable conditions of the Earth system in the Holocene and have to adapt to new conditions for life may be the most important takeaway of the Anthropocene, making the stratigraphic recognition of its beginning merely a formal exercise.

Although primarily a geological time unit, within the wider community of Earth system scientists the Anthropocene has rapidly come to encapsulate many of the anthropogenic changes occurring in the global climate, oceans, and biota. To the wider discussions in academia and news media, the Anthropocene has largely come to signify the human experience of these changes to the Earth system, such as mass extinction of species, desertification, ocean acidification and of course climate change (though Julia Adeney Thomas has repeatedly spelled out the importance of understanding the difference between them).2020Julia Adeney Thomas, Mark Williams, and Jan Zalasiewicz, The Anthropocene: A Multidisciplinary approach. London: Polity Press, 2020, Ch. 4. “The Anthropocene and Climate Change.” Thus, the ontological concept resulting from the aggregated computed measurements of anthropogenic change—the ontic operations—has already created a new conception of the environment as one in which humans and their technologically enhanced forms of living are inseparable from the biosphere and the Earth system as a whole; humans do not just act as external forcings, but as internal drivers of change. This process of environing—the establishment of anthropogenic forces as drivers of change in the Earth system formalized as the Anthropocene—is now engendering new interventions responding to this altered environmental epistemology. In this way, the Anthropocene encapsulates the feedback loop of environing media: data gathering, processing, and transmission give rise to new conceptions of the environment, which in turn trigger new physical alterations of the observed epistemic object.

The composition of gases commonly known as air can be understood as an environing medium in several ways.2121Cross ref. Eva Horn, “The Case of Air”: https://www.anthropocene-curriculum.org/anthropogenic-markers/critical-environments/contribution/the-case-of-air While often considered in terms of pollution or pathogens, the atmosphere is also a part of the global nitrogen and carbon cycles which are currently drastically altered by human activities. The natural cycling of nitrogen, an essential component for the functioning of the biosphere, is radically changed by synthetic fertilizer use, a perturbation scaling up decisively with the proposed mid-twentieth century boundary of the Anthropocene.2222Jan Zalasiewicz, Colin N. Waters, Mark Williams, and Colin P. Summerhayes, The Anthropocene as a Geological Time Unit: A guide to the Scientific Evidence and Current Debates. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019, p. 17. A key point that these cycles make clear is that it is not necessarily the earliest appearance of a given marker (the Haber-Bosch process was invented at the beginning of the twentieth century, for example) that constitutes the best signal for the start of a new epoch, but rather the clearest, most recognizable, and most nearly synchronous signal (the uptake in global use of fertilizer decades after the Haber-Bosch process made it possible). This is an important difference between history, which is human centered, and geology, which is Earth centered. The challenge of the Anthropocene, however, is to find integrative scientific paths to consider history and geology together without eliding their inherent differences. As such, it is essential to understand anthropogenic environmental change in a longer historical perspective than just within the short interval around 1950, even while acknowledging that this boundary is indeed, chronostratigraphically speaking, the best qualified candidate.

Coming back to the air of the atmosphere, whose composition of gases like nitrogen and carbon dioxide is rapidly changing, this very knowledge and any responses to it are made possible by the environing media infrastructure that underpin this new “epistemic evolution,” a concept used by Jürgen Renn to describe our new phase of cultural evolution in which a specific type of knowledge economy has turned from an accidental to a necessary condition for preserving, sharing, and developing the achievements of cultural evolution on a global scale.2323Jürgen Renn, The Evolution of Knowledge: Rethinking Science for the Anthropocene. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020, p. 323. This epistemic process of insight into the perturbations of the Earth system that characterize the Anthropocene in turn drives new interventions on the part of humans. These can take the shape of large-scale climate or geoengineering projects to technologically mediate a desired climatic effect, or smaller scale initiatives, like local rewilding of farmlands and marshlands in order to turn them into carbon sinks rather than sources.

The deep history of environing: Amazonia

The word environing may call to mind gardens, fields, and other domesticated landscapes shaped by humans. Reaching further back in history, it also describes the very process of interacting with and thus shaping one’s natural surroundings. Environmental change is inherent to life on Earth, and anthropogenic environmental change seems, just as it is for many other species on this planet, a given feature of human dwelling, as suggested by niche construction theory.2424Kevin Laland, Blake Matthews, and Marcus Feldman, “An introduction to Niche construction theory,” Evolutionary ecology vol. 30 (2016): pp. 191–202. For a perspective on humans as niche constructors see, Renn, Evolution of Knowledge, pp. 348–349. Humans have impacted their immediate surroundings throughout the Holocene, a fact that led William Ruddiman to suggest that the Anthropocene should start with the Neolithic Revolution in what has been called an Early Anthropocene Hypothesis, since these events already effectively had a planetary impact and affected the climate on Earth.2525William Ruddiman, “The Anthropogenic Greenhouse Era Began Thousands of Years Ago,” Climatic Change vol. 61 (2003): pp. 261–293. The idea to start the Anthropocene with this event has been deemed unsuitable geologically, because of the lack of wide-scale global environmental change necessary for a formal GSSP, which the interval around 1950 marks much more clearly.2626Jan Zalasiewicz, Colin Waters, et al., “A Formal Anthropocene is Compatible with but Distinct from its Diachronous Counterparts:  a Response to W.F. Ruddiman’s ‘three flaws in defining a formal Anthropocene,’” Progress in Physical Geography: Earth and Environment vol. 43, no. 3 (2019): pp. 319–333.  As an expression of more general anthropogenic environmental change, the emergence of agriculture, facilitated by new climatic conditions, is however, unambiguous.2727See Franz Mauelshagen’s “Historical Assessment of the ‘Anthropogenic’ Factor”: https://www.anthropocene-curriculum.org/anthropogenic-markers/novel-materials-and-technofossils/contribution/historical-assessment-of-the-anthropogenic-factor. From that period on, tool-being, in Heidegger’s sense, became part of the human predicament. That humans started to depend on technologies and technological practices for their survival was a key point in the evolution from hunter-gatherers to subsistence farmers, and could be considered an early example of environing. The fact that, according to Ruddiman, the spread and increase of agriculture across the planet also helped to uphold the favorable climatic conditions and offset the next glaciation through the increased release of greenhouse gases as an effect of land use change only reinforces this point.

The case of Amazonia is illustrative in this regard, and may shed some historical light on our understanding of anthropogenic markers and the history of anthropogenic environmental change. The popular image of this region is one of a dense rainforest, populated with an abundance of species, making it a true hotspot for conservation efforts. Often presented as the last remaining pristine land untouched by humans, this popular image of “the Amazon” is a trope building on the garden of Eden in combination with the Western colonial perception of the Americas, which reached its full expression with the twentieth century postwar concept of the fragile environment.

Traditional historical, archaeological, and geographical accounts hold that the Amazonian cultures were determined by how well they adapted to their environment. In this view, the environment is a stable object to which human societies adapt or fail to adapt to. But new research from historical ecology shows that anthropogenic influence has been a key factor in shaping the region’s biodiversity and environmental health.2828Clark Erickson, “Amazonia: The Historical Ecology of a Domesticated Landscape,” in: The Handbook of South American Archaeology, ed. H. Silverman and W.H. Isbell. New York, NY: Springer, 2008. Much of Amazonia was, in fact, occupied by dense populations of urbanized societies who practiced intensive agriculture over long periods of time, using a variety of relatively large-scale techniques to transform landscapes for subsistence purposes, including seasonal field burning and flooding.2929Clark Erickson, “The domesticated landscapes of the Bolivian Amazon,” Time and Complexity in Historical Ecology: Studies in the Neotropical Lowlands, ed. William Balée and Clark Erickson. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2006, pp. 235–278.

Many scholars now argue that much of the tropical rainforest of Amazonia is the result of a rebound effect following the removal of humans and their domesticating practices through colonial diseases, war, ethnocide and slavery in the sixteenth through seventeenth centuries.3030S.Y. Maezumi, D. Alves, M. Robinson, et al., “The legacy of 4,500 years of polyculture agroforestry in the eastern Amazon,” Nature Plants vol. 4 (2018): pp. 540–547, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41477-018-0205-y. As it happens, this event has also been proposed as a candidate for an Anthropocene GSSP with reference to a marked dip in atmospheric CO² concentrations likely connected to the CO² uptake of rapid regrowth of abandoned farmland.3131Simon Lewis and  Mark Maslin, “Defining the Anthropocene,” Nature vol. 519 (2015): pp. 171–180, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14258; Alexander Koch, Chris Brierley, Mark M. Maslin, and Simon Lewis, “Earth System Impacts of the European arrival and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492,” Quaternary Science Reviews vol. 207 (2019): pp. 13–36. The idea has been named the Orbis hypothesis, but as a formal starting date for the Anthropocene it has been deemed unsuitable by the Anthropocene Working Group. Just like in the case of the rise of agriculture during the Neolithic revolution advanced as an Early Anthropocene Hypothesis, the Orbis hypothesis is a clear example of anthropogenic change having an effect on the Earth system, but not necessarily one that is globally visible in stratigraphic terms. The historical process leading to the collapse of pre-Columbian civilizations and dramatic change in land use was facilitated by early modern environing media. New cartographic and nautical techniques, for example, allowed for the first time global empires to form which connected the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans; subsequently, these connections worked to mix biotas between continents in the course of what the historian Alfred W. Crosby has termed the Columbian Exchange.3232Adam Wickberg, “Plus ultra: Coloniality and the mapping of American natureculture in the empire of Philip II,” NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies, vol. 7, no. 2 (2018): pp. 205–227, https://doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/3447. The fact that the main driver of the mass death of the indigenous American population was pathogens—where humans acted as vectors of disease—does not make the following land use change less anthropogenic, where anthropogenic would have to implicate human agency.

These examples are an important background for the proposed mid-twentieth century boundary for the Anthropocene. The historical development from the sixteenth century leading up to the Great Acceleration in the twentieth can be understood as a successive intensification and scaling up of different environing media processes. Here, the finding, dating, and naming of the new geological epoch itself forms an important part, leading to new mediated environmental epistemologies, new worldings, and new cosmological visions.

The paradox of the technosphere

We may not usually think of Antarctic ice sheets and ocean sediments as sites of human environing, that is, sites of the willful shaping of one’s surroundings for subsistence or profit. But the Anthropocene changes that. Humans have increasingly come to change the Earth system to the degree that even the process of anthrobiogeochemical cycles, in a certain sense, can be understood as a process of environing. In this context, the unintended side effects the use of particular energy sources have for the global environment coincide with ever-more precise knowledge of these effects, so that they can be monitored in real time. Finding accurate anthropogenic markers to designate a new geological epoch and naming it the Anthropocene is therefore by itself an environing media process. This should be understood through the long history of human knowing and changing the environment, an intricate feedback loop for which scale changing techniques and abstract knowledge are today essential. This environing process starts with the material operations of sifting out clear signals from the background noise of natural fluctuations, using a range of highly specialized instruments like mass spectrometers for isotopic analysis. It then progresses into producing new epistemologies and ontologies that come to change how we think of our way of being in and part of the environment. This epistemology and ontology will, in turn, lead us to both better understand these processes, and perhaps also to try to take control of them in one way or another. This last step is likely going to create new fault lines in the geopolitical struggles over the fate of life on this planet in the near future.

The media technologies that form the condition of possibility for knowing large-scale anthropogenic change in the Earth system thus come to impact the ontological status of the environment itself. It is therefore not just a matter of understanding that a strict separation between nature and culture was a philosophical detour of the moderns, but more so that the rise of computational media since the 1960s was part of a historical process that conflates humans with the planetary: computational technologies intensify the anthropogenic pressure on Earth, and at the same time render this impact technically, epistemically, and discursively visible. This is the paradox of the technosphere; the more we use large-scale computational technologies powered by non-renewable energy sources to know and manage human life on Earth, the deeper into the process of hard-to-manage environmental change we get.

According to certain voices in the modernist fraction of the Anthropocene debate, at this point the only way forward for human and non-human life on this planet is for humans to use more and better technology to assume planetary stewardship and steer the complex Earth System processes onto a path of managed stability. Suggestions range widely, from applications of synthetic biology to gene-edit threatened species for their conservation to the release of calcium carbonate particles into the stratosphere to manage solar radiation on Earth.3333Bill Adams and Kent Redford, Strange Natures: Conservation in the Age of Synthetic Biology. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021; “Scopex: Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment,” Keutsch Group at Harvard, https://www.keutschgroup.com/scopex; National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Reflecting Sunlight: Recommendations for Solar Geoengineering Research and Research Governance. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press, 2021, https://doi.org/10.17226/25762. Other voices protest these experiments, and instead propose a human withdrawal to decrease anthropogenic pressure by, for instance, setting aside half the planet for rewilding or changing our extractive economic system.3434Edward O. Wilson, Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life. New York, NY: Liveright Publishing, 2016; Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin, “Universal Basic Income and rewilding can meet Anthropocene demands,” The Guardian, June 12, 2018: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/jun/12/universal-basic-income-and-rewilding-can-meet-anthropocene-demands.

Regardless of which path humans ultimately embark on, the onboarding of anthropogenic global environmental change seems irreversible, making the Anthropocene poised to become a geological fact. Even if the AWG’s current endeavor is deemed unsuccessful and the material signs in Earth’s recent strata do not convince the bodies responsible for the formal ratification of the Anthropocene epoch, the anthropogenic perturbation of the Earth system will clearly leave its mark in the future. There is no path back to a more innocent and Edenic human-Earth relation.

Adam Wickberg is a researcher at the KTH Environmental Humanities Lab and a Visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. His work focus on media and environment from Early modern colonial context to current implications of digitization and AI for sustainable development.

Please cite as: Wickberg, A (2022) Anthropogenic Markers as Environing Media. In: Rosol C and Rispoli G (eds) Anthropogenic Markers: Stratigraphy and Context, Anthropocene Curriculum. Berlin: Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. DOI: 10.58049/ABXC-JK28