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Its Not The Anthropocene, Its The White Supremacy Scene, Or, The Geological
Color Line.
Nicholas Mirzoeff
Forthcoming in Richard Grusin (ed.), After Extinction (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2016).
This essay is by way of a provocation and an opening to a broader discussion. It is the result
of asking: what does it mean to say #BlackLivesMatter in the context of the
Anthropocene? As is now common knowledge, the Anthropocene is the proposed name
for a new geological era, the recent human era. This understanding relies on the
identification of a single physical manifestation of a change recorded in a stratigraphic
section, often reflecting a global-change phenomenon.1 This ability to perceive and agreed
upon a visible and graphic distinction in physical phenomena is inevitably and persistently
imbricated with concepts of race and racialization from the very formation of what is now
called Earth system science.2 In short, my question is: what kind of man is meant when
we say Anthropocene? Given that the Anthropos in the Anthropocene turns out to be
our old friend the (imperialist) white male, my mantra has become: its not the
Anthropocene, its the white supremacy scene. Many within academia might find such
terminology too crude or extreme. For #BlackLivesMatter activists, however, white
supremacy is a given. Since the events in Ferguson, even mainstream figures like Hillary
Clinton have been speaking of systemic racism, using the phrase coined by social scientists
Joe Feagin and Sean Elias.3 In the timeframe of the Anthropocene (whichever one uses), that

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system can only mean white (Euro-American) domination of the colonized and enslaved
African, Asian and Native populations of the world.
In this context, moreover, the term life is the key. The concept of extinction itself
was part of the transformation of natural history into life science (biology) in the era of the
revolutions of the enslaved and abolition (1791-1863). In the current paradigm shift to Earth
systems (everything prefaced with geo-), what is the place of Black and other colonized life,
human and non-human? Has the political failure to enact change in relation to the crisis of
the Earth system not been motivated precisely by systemic racism? This racism has
numerous dimensions: the vastly higher CO2 emissions per capita in the U.S. than any other
nation (with the exception of small oil-producing countries); the pollution hot-spots in
people of color communities within the U.S.; the ecological disaster of mass incarceration
that has been called prison ecology,4 and so on. This constellation has not escaped scholarly
attention at all.5 I want to add to this discussion by proposing that the very concept of
observable breaks between geological eras in general and the definition of the Anthropocene
in particular is inextricably intermingled with the belief in distinct races of humanity in the
first instance and the practices of (neo)colonialism in the latter, centered on questions of the
definition of life, how to make distinctions and how to see difference. A climate politics
would, in turn, need to begin by being anti-racist and anti-colonialist.
In what follows, I concentrate on the two moments of definition: the formation of
the concept of extinction and geological eras in the age of abolition and the revolutions of
the enslaved; and the ongoing and contested debate over the Anthropocene. In the first
section, I show how geology and race theory combined to produce a color line enshrined in
natural history rather than law in the wake of the abolition of slavery. No sooner had the

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concept of extinction been announced by Georges Cuvier in the early nineteenth century
than its founder was hard at work trying to define an essential and visible difference between
Africans and Europeans in the wake of the revolution of the enslaved and the abolition
movements. In the second section, I engage with the spectacular and public ongoing debate
in present-day geological stratification as to whether the Anthropocene was the result of
intentional, if misguided, world-shaping by Euro-Americans; or the unintended consequence
of colonial and imperial ambition. The former now seems to have the bureaucratic
advantage, and, as it were, sets in stone the history of white supremacy as geology. In so
doing, the Anthropocene has become a measure of human time, rather than a marker of
physical processes. Humans are now claimed to be geological masters, a term that should
give us pause in the context of slavery and racism. 6
There is now a substantial body of humanities scholarship being produced in
response to the combined impact of the Anthropocene turn, the material turn and the nonhuman turn. It is an inspiring and important development. We should nonetheless recognize
that the cumulative effect has been to generate a turn away from understandings of race,
white supremacy, colonialism and imperialism, which undermines the possibility of a politics
of resource use and allocation, also known as the commons.7 In the introduction to their
important 2003 volume on race and nature, Moore, Kosek and Pandian argued: Race
provides a critical medium through which ideas of nature operate, even as racialized forces
rework the ground of nature itself.8 One of the key themes of Anthropocene writing has
been the idea that nature has been replaced or overdetermined by human activity. In that
over-writing, the central function of race within the framing of the Earth system has been
displaced. This discursive move is not (of course) intentionally racist, except insofar as it is a

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mark of a certain privilege to be able to overlook race. My anxiety with the material, nonhuman and universalist turns in academic discourse is, then, how quickly we seem to forget
all the work that has been done to establish how and why so many people have been
designated as non-human and bought and sold as material objects. Take a canonical
example: the 1857 Supreme Court decision Dred Scott v. Sanford that enshrined the legal
distinction between the dominant race and the subordinate and inferior race of beings
known as the negro African race, to use the terms of Chief Justice Taneys ruling opinion.9
For Taney a perpetual and impassable barrier existed in the laws of the Thirteen colonies
between the two groups, meaning that the Declaration of Independences assertion of liberty
for all could not apply to those who were simply an article of property. Enslaved people
were always and already not part of any universal. They were, however, objects (in the eyes
of the enslavers). This barrier or break was a palpable, if now discredited and displaced,
part of framing life sciences such as geology.
This awareness of the enslaved as non-human objects is not visibly a part of those
whose work is indispensable for everyone now thinking about the Anthropocene. In Jane
Bennetts instant classic of the non-human turn Vibrant Matter, for example, there is no
discussion of race in relation to vital materialism. Race is, of course, still present, because it
cannot not be. It arises symptomatically. The denial of agency to matter central to Bennetts
agenda (and with which I am sympathetic in itself) is equated via a quote from Bruno Latour
to the moment when the Founding Fathers denied slaves and women the right to vote.10
Quite apart from the false equation of slavery and the right to vote, what happened to
understanding the chattel part of chattel slavery, so central to Dred Scott? An enslaved person
was an article of property, an object, non-human and commodified. Whether we agree

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with this classification or not, we must accept its immense and continuing significance. Race,
in Bennetts account, is a problem only for what she calls political ecology not the theorizing
of materialism.11 The costs of sidelining this politics are clear in her book, when she endorses
Garret Hardins statement in his Tragedy of the Commons essay that freedom in a commons
brings ruin to all. 12 While we should note his neo-liberal misrepresentation of common
stewardship of the land, let us concentrate here on whom Hardin blamed for the population
crisis he envisaged as tragedy. Writing in 1968, of all years, he disparaged those whose
cries of rights and freedom fill the air. Hardins fear of the commons was more exactly
fear of a black planet.
This is not just an issue of priorities. For the historian Dipesh Chakrabarty, among
the first humanists to use the term, in the era of the Anthropocene, we need the
Enlightenment (that is, reason) even more than in the past. This reason identifies humans
as a species, an identification that we cannot experience but only intellectually comprehend
or infer. Thus he calls for a new universal history to comprehend the species. It is often
said that climate change affects everyone but it does not do so equally. During Hurricane
Sandy in October 2012 there was undoubtedly tragic loss of 67 people in the United States,
who died as a direct result of the storm, and a further 38 indirect deaths.13 By contrast,
Typhoon Haiyan in November 2013 caused somewhere between six and ten thousand
deaths in the Philippines. That is to say, while climate change certainly affects the entire
planet, its impact is very different in different places, consistent with the usual indicators of
wealth. Further, as Jacques Rancire has put it: democracy can never be identified with the
simple domination of the universal.14 Further, the formation of the idea of one world can

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be seen as the connection of Christianitys belief in the human dominion of nature (including
non-human humans) with capitalism.

So we should ask how such universal history might be written. C.L.R. James declared
that the enslaved field workers in Saint-Domingue (later Haiti) were the first modern
proletariat in 1938.15 The historian and politician Eric Williams connected capitalism and
slavery in his book of that title in 1944.16 It has taken more than a half a century for
mainstream (white) history to come around to this point of view, based on studies of the
vital place of cotton in developing the U. S. economy that provided a rocket booster to
American economic growth.17 In an additional twist, former enslavers in Britain used the
compensation they received when slavery was abolished to launch themselves as capitalists.
The British prime minister William Gladstones family benefited to the equivalent of 3
million in present-day money, while the enslaver Nathaniel Snell Chauncy directed in his
1848 will that all his property in the Caribbean should be sold and invested in railways.18 If
universal history is the history of how capitalism has produced globalization, that history in
turn is also the history of enslavement, which, together with the transatlantic exchange of
plants, goods, people, animals and viruses caused by the triangular trade is newly central to
understanding the Anthropocene, as we shall see. Cash-crop cultivation in the Caribbean and
Indian Ocean was itself responsible for some of the first systemic anthropogenic
environmental catastrophe on islands such as Barbados, Jamaica and Runion.19
Further, as the Brazilian scholar Denise Ferreira da Silva has shown, the
Enlightenment thought that creates the concept of universal history itself depends on what

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she calls the core statement of racial subjection: while the tools of universal reason (the
laws of nature) produce and regulate human conditions, in each global region it establishes
mentally (morally and intellectually) distinct kinds of human beings, namely, the self determined subject and its outer-determined others, the ones whose minds are subjected to
their natural (in the scientific sense) conditions.20 That is to say, in the Enlightenment
concept of universal reason, certain people are produced by nature as those worthy of
being colonized or open to being enslaved. There is, then, no innocent nature that was
later despoiled by the Anthropocene: the very idea of nature is inextricably entangled with
race. As da Silva argues, the Enlightenment project is to create both a scene of regulation,
which introduces universality as the juridical descriptor and a scene of representation in
which only the colonizer has the interior judgment capable of recognizing and interpreting
representation. As Marx famously ventriloquized this view, they cannot represent
themselves, they must be represented. Such representation engages both meanings of the
term: political representation and visual or cultural depiction are interfaced aspects of the
same violent relationship. securing the stage of interiority in order to render judgment on
what is exterior.21
Section I: The Geological Color Line
This scene of representation has a clear counterpart in modern geology, which has stressed
the need to find visible points of transition from geological epoch to the next. The resulting
geologic time scale has been hailed as one of the great achievements of modern science. At
the same time and in the same historical moment, the tendency to stress a hypervisible point
of distinction was formed in the racist effort to define extinction after the abolition of
slavery as part of a system that sustained the concept of separate species of human being.

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Stratigraphy was shaped by the doubled desire to mark the historic eras of Earths history
and to trace a systemic boundary between races as a means of containing and displacing
abolition and revolution. This break was conceptual but visibleat least to its protagonists,
who insisted on the special and refined form of visual observation required to perceive it.
The line they saw was one derived from neo-classical painting and enshrined in photography
that continues to structure our observation today. Here are a cluster of examples from key
figures in modern science, who both made remarkable breakthroughs in understanding and
sought to insist on racial distinction.
I.
Georges Cuvier, who is usually credited with defining extinction described it as a form of
revolution in 1807, immediately following the independence of Haiti in 1801. His concept
was part of his reconsideration of natural history as the science of life. This turn to life was,
as Michel Foucault long ago noted (and an army of followers since), foundational for
modern sciences and societies. Cuvier elaborated on his study of the conditions of
existence in his 1802 study of The Animal Kingdom. Cuvier outlined his theory of extinction22
and then developed his race theory. He broke humans into three varieties of which: The
Negro race is confined to the south of Mount Atlas. It is marked by a black complexion,
crisped or wooly hair, compressed cranium, and a flat nose. The projection of the lower
parts of the face, and the thick lips, evidently approximate it to the monkey tribe; the hordes
of which it consists have always remained in the most complete state of utter barbarism.23
In the very next sentence after his assertion of African barbarism, he continues the race
from which we are descended has been called Caucasian, the euphemism still used for white.
There was, then, a doubled line to be seen. It marked both extinction and barbarity. Often

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the deduced barbarity would be held to justify separation and slavery. Its logic implied that
extinction would result, whether by human or natural process, leading Cuvier to
notoriously define native Africans as The most degraded of human races, whose form
approaches that of the beast and whose intelligence is nowhere great enough to arrive at
regular government.24 This despite the fact that a majority African population had just done
that in Haiti, a former French colony, of which Cuvier could not possibly be ignorant. For
Cuvier, then, one cannot even make the phrase Black lives matter make sense. Black life
for him was a variety of animal life, whose outcomes might be the subject of curiosity but
not moral engagement. It was this same Cuvier who engaged in the dissection of the
deceased Sara Baartman, a Khoisan woman (from present-day South Africa) and preserved
her genitalia for the collections of the Museum of Natural History.
II
For the slave-owner turned naturalist Jean-Jacques Audubon (also known as John James
Audubon; Jean-Jacques La Fort; and John James La Forest),25 these interconnections were
very personal. Born in Saint-Domingue to an enslaver father and a Jewish servant mother
Jeanne Rabin, he became a refugee from post-independence Haiti, haunted by abolition and
the extinction of birds and of the Native populationwhom he saw as doomedand
indeed of the American wilderness. He turned to writing about birds after his debt-funded
purchase of slaves to work at his Kentucky mill ended in bankruptcy in 1819, writing in his
1826 Mississippi River journal that so Strong is my Anthusiast to Enlarge the
Ornithological Knowledge of My Country that I felt as if I wish myself Rich again.26 His last
human property rowed him down the Mississippi to New Orleans, where he sold the two
men.

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His famous drawings of birds were less original than most of us think. Their large
format and action poses were in fact standard at the time in French (if not North
American) ornithology.27 Audubons scenes were not taken from life but drawn using dead
birds suspended by wires, a technique he claimed to have derived from the studio of the
great neo-classical painter Jean-Louis David. Davids style certainly centered on the depiction
of line to create form, just as Audubons work does. And by claiming the lineage of the great
artist, Audubon displayed the instinct of the showman that he certainly was. His originality
was to express the tensions between race, colonization, and extinction in non-human but
evocative form, which is to say, birds.
Late in his life, Audubon sought to explain why he had become a bird artist in his
autobiographical sketch Myself:
My mother had several beautiful parrots and some monkeys; one of the latter was a
full-grown male of a very large species. One morning, while the servants were
engaged in arranging the room I was in, Pretty Polly asking for her breakfast as
usual, the man of the woods probably thought the bird presuming upon his rights
in the scale of nature; be this as it may, he certainly showed his supremacy in strength
over the denizen of the air, for, walking deliberately and uprightly toward the poor
bird, he at once killed it, with unnatural composure. The sensations of my infant
heart at this cruel sight were agony to me. I prayed the servant to beat the monkey,
but he, who for some reason preferred the monkey to the parrot, refused. I uttered
long and piercing cries, my mother rushed into the room, I was tranquillized, the
monkey was forever afterward chained.28
As a primal scene of the white supremacist imagination, this can scarcely be bettered. It
centers on the doubled figure of the man of the woods (Homme de la fort), that is to say,

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on the orangutan and Audubon himself, who also used the name La Fort. Then again,
young Audubon is also in the scene directly, witnessing the death of the parrot Migonne,
who, as Christopher Ianinni observes, is a symbol for either his birth-mother or his adopted
mother. It can also be seen as a transposition of the enslavers view of the Haitian revolution
into the not-quite human world. The ape, in this view, kills the feminized representative of
European refinement. 29 The French-speaking parrot loses its life to the simian claiming his
rights. Neither of the Audubons quite gets what he wants. The orangutan is not whipped
and do we not see here a desire for the whipping of an enslaved person, transposed (not very
far in the racist imagination) from Africans to apes? If La Fort is the monkey, he loses by
being clapped in chains, like a punished enslaved person. In this unresolved set of sexualized
and racialized fantasies, it is the scale of nature that becomes the measure of the different
standing of the different persons. The point is precisely the failure of such a scale to measure
up, letting down all the different threads.30
It might be said that this reading goes too far. Yet it was a repeated figure in
Audubons work. In his Ornithological Biography published as a textual accompaniment to the
famous pictures, he had already concocted a similarly bizarre fantasy. Lost in the Louisiana
woods, Audubon claims to have encountered a maroon31 (whom he calls a runaway slave)
living in a cane brake with his family. Here is yet another homme de la fort, or as Audubon put
it, mixing racialized metaphors: a perfect Indian in his knowledge of the woods.
Developing his story, Audubon tells how this man had been resold following the bankruptcy
of his first owner, separating his family. He memorized the destination of his wife and
children, and after he himself had escaped, rescued them and, with the co-operation of those
still enslaved, made camp in the woods. The bankruptcy and family breakup again echo
Audubons personal, rather than ornithological, biography. He devised a fantasy ending in

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which the maroons obeyed him because of their long habit of submission, and returned
with him to their original plantation, where Audubon persuaded the new owner to take them
all into his ownership. He ends his little reverie with the inaccurate statement that since this
time it has become illegal to separate slave families without their consent. The pursuit and
biography of birds led Audubon to imagine personal and political reconciliation within racial
hierarchy and restored slavery, as if the Haitian revolution had never happened.

III
On the other side of the Atlantic world, another Francophone naturalist was defining a
different form of extinction by means of precise observation. The Swiss naturalist Louis
Agassiz studied the glaciers in the Alps and came to define the Ice Ages. His work was
always interfaced with a curious obsession with creation and extinction that became specific
around race. Like the other protagonists in this brief survey, Agassiz claimed to have what
one might call hypervision. He recommended a special diet for naturalists in order that
even the beating of his arteries may not disturb the steadiness of his gaze, and the condition
of his nervous system be so calm that his whole figure will remain for hours in rigid
obedience to his fixed and concentrated gaze. 32 By observing striations on rocks, polished
surfaces and unusual locations of so-called erratic boulders shaped, smoothed and moved
by glacial action, Agassiz was able to deduce the past presence of the Ice Ages. The key was
the observation of striations, faint scratches on rocks that could not have been produced by
water, which tends to polish, but indicated the result of past friction. For all his claims to
insight, the extended glacier theory was first suggested by a peasant named Perraudin, who
told the idea a professor named Jean de Charpentier, who in turn relayed it to Agassiz.33
Agassiz realized that these expanded glaciers were the cause of past extinctions. He came to

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theorize extinction (disparition) as a repeated event: There is therefore a complete scission
between current creation and those which have preceded it. Resemblances between living
species and extinct ones is a matter of progeniture or they are simply identical species
recreated.34
Glaciers, he noted, cannot simply be seen by looking.35 Their history is deduced like
faint traces on a lithographic stone,36 a literally fossilized photograph,37 creating an intriguing
co-incidence with the concurrent attempt to create photography, realized by both Daguerre
and Talbot in 1839. Agassiz proposed that these epochs of creation and disappearance could
be represented as a pattern in which a sudden catastrophic drop in temperature was followed
by a later warming, although not to the same high temperature as before. At each upturn,
there was a new moment of creation. Agassiz drew a curious pseudo-graph to illustrate this
dynamic, consisting of straight lines connected by the reversed letter J to convey this sense
of catastrophic transformation. These revolutions were visible only as a prerogative of the
scientific observer, who can tie together in their mind facts which appear without
connection to the mob.38 For any nineteenth-century European bourgeois reader, the mob
was itself always connected to revolution. The revolution was, by extension, blind, lashing
out wildly in what Thomas Carlyle called in his contemporary History of the French Revolution
chaos, in which dim masses, and specks of even deepest black, work in that white-hot
glow of the French mind, now wholly in fusion and confusion.39 Bad as this was, it paled
next to Haiti, Black without remedy.40 Oddly, Agassizs concept of irregular evolution was
not entirely as eccentric as it might seem. One of the most widely discussed ideas in recent
studies of evolution has been that of punctuated equilibrium, proposed by Niles Eldredge
and Stephen Jay Gould.41 Based on observation of the paleontological record, Eldredge and
Gould argued for periods of dramatic change (over the course of 50-100,000 years) followed

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by extended stasis. Gould, of course, was a legendary debunker of scientific racism, whose
classic Mismeasure of Man included a pioneering documentation of Agassizs racism.42
Like Cuvier, Agassiz soon turned his observational gaze towards race. As is wellknown, having moved to the United States to be a Harvard professor, he commissioned the
daguerreotypist J.T. Zealy to take a series of shots of enslaved Africans in South Carolina in
1850. Rediscovered in the Harvard library in 1973, these pictures are among the first known
photographs of the enslaved. Agassiz expected to see in these bodies incontrovertible visual
evidence of racial difference such that a sophisticated (white) person would be able to
distinguish their nations, without being told whence they came and even when they
attempted to deceive him,43 just as he had detected the presence of the Ice Ages and
catastrophic climate change. As Molly Rogers has pointed out, this claim to see a persons
origin at a glance was a common trope of racial discourse in the slavery period. The
naturalist Samuel Morton also claimed to able to deduce ethnicity from skulls with a single
glance of his rapid eye. It was not simply part of pro-slavery propaganda. The abolitionist
and minister John Bachman (who collaborated with Audubon in a study of quadrupeds)
noted We have for many years past been in the habit of detecting their origin at a glance. 44
Zealys photographs for Agassiz were forgotten precisely because the project failed. When
they reemerged, photographic historian Alan Trachtenburg hailed their universal
humanness,45 looping the desire for visible distinction back into the (white/colonial)
universal. Others have followed Brian Wallis in seeing the enslaved refuse all co-operation
with the measuring project.46 Although Agassiz professed to oppose slavery, he continued to
believe in separate and distinct races of human beings, as a corollary to his theory of
repeated creation and extinction. His notion of the Ice Age is part of common sense
knowledge today but we cannot neatly separate it from his racial convictions.

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III
In 1839, the traditional founding date for photography, British naturalist Richard Owen
identified the moa as an extinct flightless bird from one bone found in New Zealand. He
again used a form hyperdescription that connects such natural history to the classic realist
novel of the period: The exterior surface of the bone is not perfectly smooth, but is
sculptured with very shallow reticulate indentations; it also presents several intermuscular
ridges. One of these extends down the middle of the anterior surface of the shaft to about
one-third from the lower end, where it bifurcates. 47 While this was a remarkable insight,
Owen went on to deduce the existence of over 80 species of moa, where we now think there
were perhaps eleven. Unwilling to accept theories of evolution, Owen argued that the moa
was a degeneration from earlier winged species, following Buffon and Lamarck. He
produced an extraordinary volume of hyperreal, almost three-dimensional lithographs of
moa bones, in which the drawings extend out of the covers of the book to a length of two or
three feet. Mostly produced by James Erxleben (c.1830-1880), these works are masterpieces
of a certain kind, an astonishing precision and detail in the service of not seeing.
For Owens work came to center on denying evolution and claiming that Man is the
sole species of his genus, the sole representative of his order and subclass.48 By the same
token: we have not a particle of evidence that any species of bird or beast that existed
during the [P]liocene period has had its characteristics modified in any respect by the
influence of time or of change of external influences.49 In defense of these ideas, Owen was
led into a series of debates and defeats with Thomas Huxley, in which he attempted to claim
that first the teeth and then the brain of humans marked them out as distinct from all apes
and simians. Owen had come to this conclusion as early as 1845 when he attempted and
failed to deduce the physiological possibility of the development of the Hottentot from the

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chimpanzee.50 Like Cuvier, Owen assumed that the Khoisan peoples were the most
primitive of humans and therefore ought to be most easily connected to the apes. If that
failed, Owen reasoned, then all such linkage failed. Racialized separation and distinction was
constitutive of the highly precise visual and verbal taxonomy produced both to create
remarkable new forms of knowledge from extinct birds to the Ice Ages and then-present day
natural history and to support white supremacy, racial hierarchy and colonization. The place
where these two taxonomies met was the line: the color line and its double, the geological
boundary between one era and the next.
IV
The civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage
races throughout the world. At the same time, the anthropomorphous apes . . . will
no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be
wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope,
even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of, as now,
between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (London: 1871: 172 73).51
Drawing the Line Today
If this concept of a break was, as it were, built-in to geology, life science and the
understanding of life on earth, and then sanctioned by Darwin himself, it continues to be
active even among present-day disputes in Earth system science. Humanists have mostly
debated what to call the new geological era.52 However, at the time of writing in 2015, an
extraordinary and quite virulent debate has broken out among geologists and other Earth
system scientists as to whether the Anthropocene should be bounded in time or by physical
markers. As Simon and Mark Maslin, two of the leading protagonists have observed, these

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issues involve geological, philosophical and political paradigm shifts.53 Their proposal in
Nature of March 2015 for how to place the Global Boundary Stratotype Sections and Points,
or G.S.S.P.s, colloquially known as the golden spike marking the stratigraphy of the
Anthropocene, points directly at colonialism and imperialism as its markers.54 Geologists
cannot accept, they argue, the beginning of the Industrial Revolution (following Paul
Krutzens suggestion that the Anthropocene began when James Watt invented the steam
engine in 1784) as a golden spike because there is no clear stratigraphic marker and because
the shift was not systemic but local. By contrast, they propose a new date in 1610 because:
the arrival of Europeans in the Americas also led to a large decline in human numbers.
From 61 million people, numbers rapidly declined to about 6 million people by 1650 via
exposure to diseases carried by Europeans, plus war, enslavement and famine. The
accompanying near-cessation of farming and reduction in fire use resulted in the
regeneration of over 50 million hectares of forest.55 While the European genocide (my term,
not theirs) of the indigenous population is well-known,56 it now appears to be coupled to a
visible golden spike in terms of a sharp drop in atmospheric CO2 caused by reforestation.
The Anthropocene began with a massive colonial genocide, in short. The implications are
wide-ranging. It seems no coincidence that it was in 1619 that enslaved Africans first landed
in Virginia, a needed labor force in the absence of the indigenous. The virgin forest so
often lamented in its disappearance by Audubon and others had overtaken the
anthropogenic grasslands and forests created by the Native populations. Depictions of the
European settlement have often represented America as a virgin Native woman ( as in Jan
van der Straets Discovery of America (Metropolitan Museum) 1587-89). It seems that it was
more like necrophilia.

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For Lewis and Maslin, it should be stressed, the key to their preference for this date
was not human mortality but the visible human-caused exchange of species from viruses to
plants and animals across the world that followed encounter in the Americas: The longterm change to the Earths trajectory is the irreversible cross-continental movement of
species, and between disconnected oceans, for example, seen as maize fossil pollen at ~1600
in a European marine sediment.57 Known to historians as the Columbian exchange, Lewis
and Maslin reinforce their analysis with reference to Immanuel Wallerstein and other
historians of world systems: the key definition of the Anthropocene has become crossdisciplinary in fascinating ways. Their second possibility for the golden spike is the 1964
peak in radiocarbon caused by atmospheric nuclear weapons tests. Here the imperial struggle
between the US and USSR for what they perceived to be world domination was the issue.
Again, however, the spike was an unintended consequence of that contest, one that was
marginal to it but significant to the Earth system.
However, by the time you read this in 2016, the Anthropocene Working Group
(AWG) of the International Commission on Stratigraphy will have formally recommended
that the new geological era be seen to begin at 05:29:21 Mountain War Time (+/- 2s) on July
16, 1945, the instant that the U. S. military exploded a nuclear device at the Trinity site in
New Mexico.58 Whereas geological time was once seen to divide across a visible line in the
material substrate of the Earth, the official proposal now intends to begin the human era
with a specific moment of human activity. This type of marker, known as Global Standard
Stratigraphic Age or GSSA, is commonly used for more recent geology. The AWG sees this
as a clear, objective moment in time from which to date the Anthropocene. To an
outsider, this might seem like a case of moving the goalposts from physical markers to
moments in time. Fully anticipating such responses, supporters of the AWG argue that a

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paradigm shift has occurred from distinct sciences to the Earth system that understands
processes as interlocked and interrelated cycles. For Australian professor of public ethics
Clive Hamilton, Lewis and Maslin have a golden spike fetish that prevents them from
understanding the force of this shift. Hamilton argues that selecting the Trinity test signaled
unambiguously the dawn of the era of global economic domination by the United States of
America, which was intimately tied to the economic boom of the post-war years and so the
rapid increased [sic] in greenhouse gas emissions and associated warming.59 Hamilton is
referring here to what is known as the Great Acceleration, the takeoff in CO2 emissions
and other markers of human alteration of the Earth system post-1945. As is evident both
from data visualizations of the Great Acceleration and a minimal review of post-1945
history, that outcome was far from self-evident in July 1945. It shows that however the
Anthropocene is to be defined, whether by time or geological marker, interpretations of
world history will be bound up with it. Scientists may need to be instructed in resisting the
temptations of teleology.
Whatever the Anthropocene may be, it is not now being defined by the observation
of data but by interpretation, the traditional task of the humanist. Perhaps what have been
called the post-humanities ought to also involve the post-sciences. While geologists and
Earth system scientists are making a decision as to which index to use, whether temporal or
stratigraphic, the rest of us do not have to do so. Rather we should use both spikes as a
way to triangulate the modern, to reframe industrial capitalism and to periodize our
investigations into the Anthropocene. Unlike the geologists we do not need to be obsessed
with the split second but we should consider the relay between time and geological marker as
itself a new cultural formation. We should do so in the clear understanding that it is not all

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people that are indicted by the onset of the Anthropocene but a specific set: colonial settlers,
enslavers, and would-be imperialists.
To set the Anthropocene boundary in 1610 indicates that human action was part of
the transformation of the planet but not all of it. Trees and other vegetation contributed to
the drop in CO2 , while viruses like smallpox caused the bulk of immense mortality of the
native peoples. The key development for Lewis and Maslin is the so-called Columbian
exchange that brought different animal, plant and virus populations into contact for the
first time, with world historical and Earth system consequences. J. R. McNeill has shown
that European conquest of the Americas was accidentally facilitated by the spread of viruses
to which the local populations had no immunity.60 He follows up by pointing out that late
eighteenth century independence movements and revolutions in the Americas were also
successful in part because armies sent from Europe to pacify them succumbed instead to
yellow fever, malaria and other diseases to which the hybrid American populations had
acquired resistance.61 Lewis and Maslin point to the irreversible cross-ocean movement of
species in the Columbian Exchange as a near-permanent change to Earth.62 Humans here
act as vectorswhat they do has immense consequences but ones that they do not foresee.
At the same time, this interpretation minimizes the role of colonized and enslaved peoples in
that change. Enslaved Africans, for example, both brought plants with them to the Americas
and knew how to cultivate them. Perhaps the most notable example was rice, long cultivated
by West Africans. Forcibly removed to North America, they brought this understanding
with them, as Judith Charney explains: the development of rice culture [in America] marked
not simply the movement of a crop across the Atlantic but also the transfer of an entire
cultural system, from production to consumption.63

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By contrast, to date the Anthropocene from the first atomic weapon is to give a
certain set of humans far more deliberate power. As the director of the Manhattan Project,
Robert J. Oppenheimer, put it at the Trinity site: I am become Death, the destroyer of
worlds. This Nietzschean becoming paradoxically places the future of the planet solely in
human hands. As Ellen Crist has described such suprematism is increasingly common: In
the Anthropocene discourse, we witness historys projected drive to keep moving forward as
historys conquest not only of geographical space but now of geological time as well.64 This
brave new era is well captured in the title of Clive Hamiltons 2013 book: Earthmasters. Who,
though, are these masters? Not people as a whole, so much as an elite minority. Put
bluntly, it seems that white supremacy, not content with being the ber-mensch, has settled
on the ultimate destiny of being a geological agent
For the AWG choice is not just for humans over the non-human, as salient as it is to
make this point. Lewis and Maslin have themselves pointed out the Anthropocentrism of
the AWGs new timing.65 It is for a certain highly privileged group of humans over all other
humans and the non-human, as reflected in the AWG itself. Lewis and Maslin tallied the
public positions of AWG members against the new collective position to show that it is in
fact a minority view.66 This objection led to a change in attribution from the electronic
posting of The Anthropocene Review debate to its printing. The response to Lewis and Maslin is
now attributed to Members of the Anthropocene Working Group.67 To reinforce this
point, it is noticeable that all 35 members of the group are from North America and Europe,
with the exception of one Brazilian, one South African, one Chinese and one Kenyan
scientist.68 Only three are women, including the redoubtable Naomi Oreskes, author of the
classic Merchants of Doubt about climate deniers and corporate funding, who is notably not a

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DRAFT: Not for citation without permission of the author, please do not assign for classes
signatory to the AWG response to Lewis and Maslin. Can this group be said to be
representative? Of course, Lewis and Maslin are white male scientists from the U.K. as well.
The point is ultimately not the identity of the decision makers but the interpretation of
history their choice enshrines.

To Change It
The formation of a discourse of extinction was an entanglement of hypervision and
description designed to negotiate and negate the era of abolition and revolution by
generating lines of force that separated and distinguished permanent races in the human and
non-human world, which tended towards extinction by virtue of their positioning in the
hierarchy of what Donna Haraway has called natureculture. The break between eras was
matched and reinforced by the breaks between races. To envisage the Anthropocene as
the white supremacy scene is, then, simply to articulate its own logic. What is required is not
just an analysis but a politics that challenges such hierarchy, as in the occupation of the
Museum of Natural History on the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X by
Black Lives Matter activists. Following a tour of the museum for young Muslim women by
Malcolm himself in 1961, #BlackLivesMatter activists showed in their anniversary tour how
the museum structures certain forms of interpretation of nature that favor white
supremacy. Art historian Yates McKee narrates: the tour concluded with a poetic ritual at
the Hall of North American Forests. The centerpiece display of the hall is a majestic 1400
hundred-year old tree ring from a giant Sequoia chopped down by loggers in 1891 and
annotated by the museum with series of markers pertaining to the supposedly universal
human history that had unfolded since the tree first began to grow. Against the grain of what
she described as the naturalization of history, [Cherrell Brown] the tour guide used the tree-

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ring as an opportunity to meditate on the etymological resonance between the words root
and radical.69 After reprising the Yoruba greeting and praise word ashe, or life force,
activists fixed a banner reading White Supremacy Kills to the statue of Theodore
Roosevelt that dominates the entrance to the Museum. Indeed, the Museum of Natural
History was an outspoken supporter of eugenics in the early twentieth century, visually
depicted in the statue as Roosevelt towers over half-naked figures of an African and a
Native.
In her recent account of climate change, activism and capitalism, This Changes
Everything, Naomi Klein concludes by drawing parallels between the abolition of slavery and
the struggle against fossil fuel capitalism.70 It seems exactly the right comparison to make. It
implies considering what kind of activism is required to end fossil fuel dominance. Here I
have argued that recognizing the Anthropocene as part of the structures of white supremacy
is a key first step. The action in the Natural History Museum shows that anti-racism
challenges presumed allies within the climate movement and the usual capitalist suspects
alike. Until and unless this deficiency is addressed, with all its ancillary questions from
pollution exposure to prison ecology, there will not be a climate movement of sufficient
force to challenge the current interaction of fossil fuels, capitalism and limited democracy. At
the same time, Kleins parallel raises a second question. In his classic Black Reconstruction,
W.E.B. Du Bois showed that slavery fell because of the general strike of the enslaved, not
Northern abolitionism. Half a million of the enslaved upped and left the Confederacy ending
slavery by default two years before the Emancipation proclamation in 1863. Those of the
strikers who joined the Union armies are now accepted to have helped swing the Civil War
against the South. It is fashionable to say that it is harder to imagine the end of capitalism
than the end of the world. On the contrary, it is far easier to envisage a mass resistance of

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DRAFT: Not for citation without permission of the author, please do not assign for classes
those designated not human by white supremacy against fossil fuel capitalism. Slavery was
ended by the transnational resistance of the enslaved that grew from local actions to the
Haitian revolution and the general strike against US slavery. The year before Haitis uprising,
ending slavery was as improbable as ending fossil fuel capitalism sometimes seems today. It
is up to all of us to see that history repeats itself, not as tragedy or farce, but as the sequel
that is better than the original.

Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin, Defining the Anthropocene, Nature Vol. 519 (12 March

2015): 172.
2

To quote the 2001 Amsterdam Declaration of Earth System Science: The Earth system

behaves as a single, self-regulating system comprised of physical, chemical, biological and

Joe Feagin & Sean Elias, Rethinking racial formation theory:

a systemic racism critique, Ethnic and Racial Studies (2013):36:6, 931-960.

See http://nationinside.org/campaign/prison-ecology/.

See Kavita Philip, Doing Interdisciplinary Asian Studies in the Age of the Anthropocene,

The Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 73 no. 4 (November 2014): 975-987; Elizabeth Johnson and
Harlan Morehouse, After the Anthropocene: Politics and geographic inquiry for a new
epoch, Progress in Human Geography (2014) vol. 38 (3): 439-56; and Phoebe Godfrey (ed.),
Race, Gender & Class And Climate Change, Race, Gender & Class vol. 19 no.1/2 (2012): 311 and passim.
6

Clive Hamilton, Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 2013).

DRAFT: Not for citation without permission of the author, please do not assign for classes

See Marisol de la Cadena, Uncommoning Nature, (August 22, 2015)

http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/uncommoning-nature/
8

Donald Moore, Jake Kosek and Anand Pandian, Introduction: The Cultural Politics of

Race and Nature: Terrains of Power and Practice, in Race, Nature and the Politics of Difference
(Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 3.
9

60 U.S. 393 Scott v. Sandford, 406-7. Posted at

https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/60/393#writingUSSC_CR_0060_0393_ZO
10

Bruno Latour quoted in Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A political ecology of things (Durham:

Duke University Press, 2010), 109.

Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 111.

12

Bennett, Vibrant Matter , 27.

13

Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report: Michelle Murti Deaths Associated with

Hurricane Sandy OctoberNovember 2012 Weekly, May 24, 2013 / 62(20);393-397.

Jacques Rancire, Hatred of Democracy (New York: Verso, 2006), 62.

15

C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins (London: Allison and Busby, [1938] 1968).

16

Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Raleigh NC: University of North Carolina Press,

(1944) 1994).
17

Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American

Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014), xix. See also Walter Johnson, River of Dark
Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge MA: Belknap Press, 2013).

25

DRAFT: Not for citation without permission of the author, please do not assign for classes

18

Catherine Hall, Nicholas Draper, Keith McClelland, Katie Dinington and Rachel Lang,

Introduction, Legacies of British Slave-Ownership: Colonial Slavery and the Formation of Victorian
Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 4.
19

Richard H. Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens and the Origins of

Environmentalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 71 et seq.

Denise Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press, 2007), xiii.

Da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race, xxxix.

22

Defined by Cuvier a few pages earlier: Every organized being reproduces others that are

similar to itself, otherwise, death being a necessary consequence of life, the species would
become extinct, Animal Kingdom, 17.
23

Georges Cuvier, The Animal Kingdom: Arranged in Conformity with Its Organization, trans. H.

MMurtrie (New York: Carvill [1812] 1832), 50. This translation is more violently racist than
the one used most often today. I cite it because it was the one in circulation in the United
States in the periodthe copy digitized by Google comes from Harvard Libraries.
24

Cuvier, G., Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles, Vol. 1, Paris, Deterville, 1812; quoted by

Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, 2nd ed., Penguin, London, 1997, 69.
25

Richard Rhodes, John James Audubon: The Making of an American (New York: Alfred A.

Knopf, 2004), 4-5.

Audubon, Writings, 47.

27

Linda Dugan Partridge, "By the Book: Audubon and the Tradition of Ornithological

Illustration," Huntington Library Quarterly, vol. 59 no. 2/3 (1996): 269-301.

John James Audubon, Writings and Drawings, Christopher Irmscher (ed.) (New York: The

Library of America, 1999), 261.

DRAFT: Not for citation without permission of the author, please do not assign for classes

Christopher Iannini,

29

Fatal Revolutions: Natural History, West Indian Slavery, and the Routes of

American Literature (Raleigh: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 261.

John James Audubon, Ornithological Biography (Edinburgh: Adam Black, 183139), volume

2, 2732.
31

Sylviane A. Diouf, Slavery's Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons (New York: New York

University Press, 2014), 87.

Quoted by Christoph Irmscher, Agassiz on Evolution, Journal of the History of Biology 37,

no. 1 (Spring 2004): 205-207.

Edouard Desor, Excursions et sjours dans les glaciers et les hautes rgions des Alpes de M. Agassiz et

ses compagnons de voyage (Neuchtel: J-J Kissling, 1844), 10.

Louis Agassiz, Discours, Actes de la Socit helvtique des sciences naturelles, runie Neuchtel les

24, 25, et 26 juillet 1837, 22e session (Neuchtel: Imprimerie de Petitpierre, 1837), xxxi.
35

Agassiz, Etudes sur les glaciers (Neuchtel: Ol. Petitpierre, 1840), 19

36

Agassiz, Etudes, 241.

37

See Joanna Zylinskaya, this volume.

38

Agassiz, Etudes, 241.

39

Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution (Boston: Dana Estes [1837] 1892), Vol. II 46

40

Carlyle, French Revolution, II: 219.

41

Niles Eldredge and S. J. Gould. Punctuated equilibria: an alternative to phyletic

gradualism, in T.J.M. Schopf, ed., Models in Paleobiology. (San Francisco: Freeman Cooper,
1972), 82-115.
42

Stephen Jay Gould. The Mismeasure of Man (New York: WW Norton, 1981), 74-82.

43

Agassiz quoted by Molly Rogers, Delias Tears: Race, Science, and Photography in Nineteenth-

Century America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 281.

DRAFT: Not for citation without permission of the author, please do not assign for classes

44

Rogers, Delias Tears, 219.

45

Allen Trachtenburg, Reading American Photographs 60 cited by Molly Rogers, Fair

Women Are Transformed Into Negresses (2012), http://mirrorofrace.org/fairwomen/#4a.

Brian Wallis. Black Bodies, White Science: Louis Agassiz's Slave Daguerreotypes.

American Art. Vol. 9, No. 2 (Summer, 1995), 38-61

Richard Owen. Memoirs on the Extinct Wingless Birds of New Zealand With An Appendix on

Those of England, Australia, Newfoundland, Mauritius and Rodriguez. Vol. II. II vols. ( London:
John Van Voorst, 1879), vol. I, 73
48

Richard Owen, On the Classification and Geographical Distribution of the Mammalia (London:

John W. Parker, 1859), 103

Owen, Memoir, 202

50

Richard Owen, quoting a review by Richard Owen Sr., The Life of Richard Owen by His

Grandson the Rev. Richard Owen (London: John Murray, 1894), 251.
51

52

My emphasis. Quoted by da Silva, Toward, 110.

Chthulucene: Making Kin, Environmental Humanities, vol. 6, 2015, pp. 159-165

Mark A. Maslin and Simon L. Lewis, Anthropocene: Earth System, geological,

philosophical and political paradigm shifts, The Anthropocene Review 2015, Vol. 2(2) 108116.
54

Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin, Defining the Anthropocene, Nature (12 March 2015),

Vol. 519: 171-80.

Lewis and Maslin, Defining, 175.

28

DRAFT: Not for citation without permission of the author, please do not assign for classes

56

See Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (New York:

Vintage, 2006).
57

Lewis and Maslin, A transparent framework for defining the Anthropocene Epoch, The

Anthropocene Review (August 2015), Vol. 2, no. 2, 128146; 134.

Jan Zalasiewicz et al.,When did the Anthropocene begin? A mid-twentieth century

boundary level is stratigraphically optimal, Quaternary International xxx (2014): 1-8.

Clive Hamilton, Getting the Anthropocene So Wrong, The Anthropocene Review (August,

2015), vol. 2 no. 2, 102-7; 104.

J. R. McNeill, Mosquito Empires: Ecology and War in the Greater Caribbean 1620-1914

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

McNeill is a signatory to the Anthropocene Working Groups rebuttal to Lewis and Maslin

so he might not approve of the use of his work in this context. See below n.59.
62

Lewis and Maslin, A transparent framework, 144.

63

Judith A. Charney, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas

(Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 2.

Eileen Crist, The Poverty of Our Nomenclature, Environmental Humanities 3 (2013): 132.

65

Lewis and Maslin, Anthropocene, 109.

66

Lewis and Maslin, A transparent framework, 143.

67

Members of the Anthropocene Working Group: Jan Zalasiewicz, Colin N Waters,

Anthony D Barnosky, Alejandro Cearreta, Matt Edgeworth, Erle C Ellis, Agnieszka

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DRAFT: Not for citation without permission of the author, please do not assign for classes

Wagreich, Mark Williams, and Alexander P Wolfe, Colonization of the Americas, Little Ice
Age climate, and bomb-produced carbon: Their role in defining the Anthropocene,
The Anthropocene Review (August 2015) vol. 2 no 2: 117-127.
68

http://quaternary.stratigraphy.org/workinggroups/anthropocene/

69

Yates McKee, Strike Art: Contemporary Art and the Post-Occupy Condition (New York: Verso,

forthcoming). My thanks to the author for sharing his MS in advance.

Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate (New York: Simon and

Schuster, 2014), 455-57.

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