From Atomic Hopes to Anthropocene Anxieties

The project explores the implications of understanding our current historical situation as the Anthropocene for understanding and dealing with the current environmental crisis.

The Anthropocene has been proposed as a new epoch in Earth's history to reflect the fact that humans are now outstripping the influence of all natural forces on the planet. By proclaiming a new human geological epoch, the concept shifts the modern understanding of history and who makes history, as it blurs the modern separation of human and natural history. However, it seems deeply contradictory as it proclaims a human epoch at a time when human control over the world seems highly questionable and environmental debates increasingly point to the significant influence of non-human beings in the making of the world that has been ignored for centuries.

The aim of the current project is to investigate this contradiction by analyzing the historical constructions of nature-culture relations in the Anthropocene discourse in the broader context of the atomic age and Charles Darwin's theory of evolution. It pursues the hypothesis that the contradiction in the concept of the Anthropocene reflects how culture in the tradition of the European Enlightenment simultaneously appears as part of natural history and as opposed to it. The Anthropocene would thus be simultaneously right and wrong, and understanding this simultaneity would be the critical challenge.

To test this hypothesis, the project will first analyze how the historical relationship between culture and nature is constructed in the Anthropocene discourse. Secondly, it will place these historical constructions in relation to how the historical relationship between culture and nature was constructed in the debate on nuclear energy production between the 1950s and 1980s. This contextualization will allow us to examine whether the Anthropocene actually reconceptualizes the culture-nature story in a way that adequately problematizes human dominance, or whether this is not the case. The assumption of the project is that the nuclear energy debate reflects how humans act in the belief that they alone produce history and that the Anthropocene perpetuates this assumption, but its material, historical conditions refute it. Thirdly, the project will investigate the extent to which Darwin's theory of evolution represents an approach for an alternative understanding of the Anthropocene and our current environmental situation, which enables the contradictory characteristics of the Anthropocene to be put into perspective in a new way without ignoring the contradictions.

The project thus develops a conceptual history of the Anthropocene as a mediation of the historical relationship between culture and nature.