Images of the future are increasingly cast on the widescreen of the Anthropocene: the planetary-scale shift from the comfy Holocene to an unknown and threatening new “operating space” for the Earth. How humanity inadvertently shifted the whole planet so radically and in such a self-damaging manner is now the subject of intense debate. Different narratives of blame locate relative responsibility with various sectors, activities and groups. Common candidates include farming, colonial plantations, industrialization and urbanisation, and the post-war acceleration in consumption and pollution. From a material perspective, there is a strong geological rationale for naming each as a major source of planetary-scale environmental and social impacts and “terraforming.” Indeed, this is how these various proposed starting dates for the Anthropocene have been identified: through the pursuit of widespread and sharp enough changes in the geological record to count as what geologists call a “Golden Spike”, the prerequisite for declaring a new epoch. Yet this search for the physical origins of the Anthropocene in the historical record needs to extend far past physical signals and their proximate causes to the visions, goals and assumptions underlying the activities involved, including what Ian Hacking would call styles of reasoning. Reading the Anthropocene in this light reveals many limitations within the outlooks, ideas and values that informed the activities mentioned above, including an often willful ignorance of the immediate impacts on people, nonhumans and the abiotic environment, as well as the “unknown unknown” of the long-term, accumulative changes being wrought.

In combing history for the sources of our present problems, it is easy to lament past generations’ failure to care about the future. Yet their ignorance of future effects should not be conflated with a disinterest in the future per se. In fact, past fixations with and assumptions about the future were core to the problematic styles of thought that enabled Anthropocene-inducing actions. Some of the proposed start dates for the Anthropocene are notable not just for the physical changes they mark, but for the ideas about the future with which they were associated. In the remainder of this essay, I consider three of them.

The earliest of the three is an increasingly prominent origin date for the Anthropocene: the beginning of the Colonial era, when certain Europeans began their Earth-changing project of finding, appropriating and exploiting lands, natures, and peoples across the planet. This “organizational transition,” as Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin call it, was essentially about creating a globalized economy. As they put it, “A new world order driven by the search for private profit was born.” Key to this globalized economy was merchant capitalism: the distribution of products around the world via increasingly long transport routes involving ships. Conducting business through long, ocean-faring supply chains demanded a new comfort with uncertainty, notably a new and positive calculative attitude toward risk. The dangers of merchant capitalism meant that the successful “creation of profits depended on foresight and planning.” This led to a new vision of time as “a commodity to be used, saved or sold to create profits, rather than something that was simply doled out by the creator”.

This reframing of the future as well as space as “a territory to be conquered or colonised” was amplified with the emergence of the industrial revolution, the second proposed start date for the Anthropocene that has a distinctive future orientation. Helped along by the same discipline of geology now looking to document the Anthropocene epoch, new sources of concentrated, underground, fossil energy were found and extracted, accelerating the ongoing terraforming of the Earth and the continual compression of the “turnover time” of capital. Society sought to break away from not only nature but also the past. Some groups and places were considered more successful at this than others and were ranked as “closer” to the future. Underpinning this modern imaginary was a still dominant linear sense of time that reinforced a sense of the future as something to pursue as quickly as possible.

Acceleration is also the key characteristic of the third Anthropocene start date to highlight: the “Great Acceleration” of the post-war era when production, consumption, and pollution all jumped in a frenzy of post-war world-making. Here, the shock of the wars, competing visions for what world should be rebuilt, and new computing technologies of the sort that eventually enabled the Anthropocene to be detected by Earth System Scientists, led to a different stance on the future. No longer was time understood as reliably linear or the future as single. Rather, a new profound uncertainty about what could happen led to a sense of the future as an array of multiple possibilities; a maze to be negotiated carefully, not just pursued blindly. Fittingly, the computer power that enabled this new stance on the future was a by-product of the atomic weapons program that led to the dropping of the world‘s first atomic bomb, a moment in July 1945 that is now proposed as a suitable Golden Spike for the Great Acceleration phase of the Anthropocene. In 1964, RAND Corporation scientists in the United States used the “massive data processing and interpreting capability that … created the breakthrough which led to the development of the atomic bomb” to produce a “general theory of prediction”, the aim of which was to “enable us to deal with socio-economic and political problems as confidently as we do with problems in physics and chemistry”. This “radical shift” in notions of the future … became known as “forecasting”’.

Forecasting is now ubiquitous, thanks in part to the radical uncertainty that the Anthropocene has ushered in. While consideration of the future is more important than ever, it is prudent to remember that the social origins of our assumptions about the future and the tools we use to perceive it are rooted in the very origins of the Anthropocene. Thus, how suitable they are for helping us understand and navigate the Anthropocene is open to debate. One group that contests the implicit determinism of futurists and their forecasts are futurologists, who argue instead for both a greater degree of openness to unexpected possibilities, and for a commitment to actively and inclusively choosing desirable futures. Many commentators of the Anthropocene similarly call for greater reflexivity about what futures humanity as a whole is now creating, knowingly or not. With the future recast in this way as less a territory to map and claim, and more a path to be carefully and painstakingly created, we may be witnessing yet another stance on the future emerging, one more attuned to the blind spots and responsibilities involved.