Abstract

The Anthropocene, as theorized by Dipesh Chakrabarty and Timothy Morton, attempts to name the fact that the human has become a geological actor. Much of the contemporary discourse around environmentalism and climate change calls for humans to act in particular ways to avoid a catastrophe in an imagined future. Even as a case can be made that the catastrophe has already happened, my point of departure in this chapter will be this simple claim: that thinking human action can avert climate-related catastrophe is, in the most obvious way, a re-assertion of the human’s status as geological actant. The earth is not “ours,” even to save.