How the Earth Feels

Geochronologically speaking, the Anthropocene lacks the status of fact, but its power as fantasy has been undeniable. The idea of including an epoch on the geological timescale defined by significant and long-term human impact on earth systems emerged around the turn of the century; in 2008, the International Commission on Stratigraphy, the body that oversees that timescale, formed an interdisciplinary working group to consider the question. The concept quickly garnered both academic and popular attention, and for a decade and a half, debates raged over both the value of the concept and the events and objects that might define it. And then in 2024—just a few weeks after the publication of my monograph How the Earth Feels: Geological Fantasy in the Nineteenth-Century United States—the working group’s formal proposal was soundly rejected (by a 2:1 margin) by the IGS’s Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy. The Subcommission agreed that humans had profoundly altered earth systems, and not for the better—but contended that that impact could not be charted precisely on a calendar. Instead, they suggested it carried the status of an event—a more loosely defined term in geohistory, one that raises questions about its own significance.

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When I identify the Anthropocene as geological fantasy, then, I don’t mean that it’s not true. I mean, as I explain in How the Earth Feels, that it seeks to create meaningful connections between the geological and the human. The late eighteenth-century emergence of modern geology—distinguished by an expansive timescale and a diligent attention to ordering and explaining the events that took place within it—radically and permanently altered the relationship between humanity and the planet on which we live. Geological fantasy is a response to that shift, a way of reinventing that relationship. My understanding of fantasy is derived from Lauren Berlant’s analysis of national fantasy: it designates not a falsehood, but the means by which we construct truth. Berlant stresses that fantasy is bound up with “the unconscious continuities we project that allow us to trust the world enough to test it and change ourselves and it.”¹ For over two centuries, we’ve heard the daunting heft of the geological past described in an awe-inspiring, even traumatizing way: it is said to eclipse human history, knocking any human-centered world off balance. Geological fantasy is a means of proposing modes of connection between the figures supposedly estranged by geology—planet and human; it turns a disinterested and diminishing planet into a world we can work with.

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How The Earth Feels is an inquiry into some of the ways Americans have engaged geology as a means of worldmaking. The period I explore in my book—the six or seven decades after modern geology recognized its own birth in the “discovery” of the planet’s immensely long history—saw the rapid expansion and accumulation of geological fantasy in response to that altered relationship. Discussions of geology proliferated well beyond the bounds of scientific publications. The new field of study appeared fascinating and even “fashionable” as it narrated a planetary “history so in­ter­est­ing, that the most splendid fictions of the ­human imagination sink into insignificance when compared with it.”² Yet as I show, the stories that geology permitted people to tell about the human world, the arrangements it allowed them to imagine, made the science more valuable still. These alternating narratives were often brought together in a mode that I call, drawing on Freud, the geological fort/da game. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud outlines fort/da as the game children do where they throw an object away (that’s fort, German for “gone”) and then contrive to get it back (“da,” German for here) usually by making an adult bring it back to them. Freud situates fort/da as the way children deal with their inability to control the world. In much the same way, a popular and long-lived strain of geologic fantasy played with time and history to stabilize Man as the proper subject of modernity. Fort is represented by the oft-cited disempowering effect of the planetary timescale—Stephen Jay Gould’s description of it as “the great temporal limitation imposed by geology on human self-importance,” for instance³—sometimes shadowed by the possibility of human extinction. Yet the human is also repeatedly retrieved and set on firmer ground—da—in celebrations of the knowledge to be gained by confronting those limits. Cuvier predicts the research that would be catalyzed by his own discoveries thus: “Man, to whom has been accorded only an instant on earth, would have the glory of reconstructing the history of the thousands of centuries that preceded his existence, and of the thousands of beings that have not been his contemporaries.”⁴ 

In such forms, I argue, geological fantasy often constitutes far more than an attempt to come to terms with new scientific facts—it is bound up with the development and global sedimentation of racial capitalism. Geology, I argue, has a role in the emergence of that prototypically Western, imperially-oriented figure that Sylvia Wynter calls “Man overrepresented as if he were the human itself,” as well as the expropriation and reorganization of the lands that materially sustained those who identified with this form.⁵ Even as practical geology abetted colonial conquest by fueling the drive to appropriate subterranean “resources”—gold, silver, coal, petroleum—geological fantasies about the “conquest” of the unexplored regions of planetary history as testimony to the superiority of Man grounded the self-image of the modern West. 

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But the creative possibilities associated with what Walt Whitman evocatively calls the “infinite go-before of the present” manifested in other ways as well. Geology, in the nineteenth century, offered a new perspective on the world, lending it awe and complexity. In the second half of my book, I think through some examples of geological worldmaking that sought not dominance but freedom: the use of fossil traces to imagine the earth as a recording device bearing eternal witness against injustice; the expansion of possibilities for women’s sexual- and self-expression; the volcanic shifts that would eradicate the slave system and the incremental construction of new modes of Black social life. In such cases, the novelty of geology enlivened and expanded the imagination of alternate modes of being.   

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The global environmental crises that inspired and animated the Anthropocene have put us in a situation similar to the one created for the science-informed Western subject by the emergence of geology. Once again, our relationship to the planet has been radically, perhaps permanently, altered: once again, we need to find ways of coming to terms with it, of living our relation to Earth and to one another differently. In illuminating past efforts to bridge the gap between planet and human, How the Earth Feels seeks to provide both caution and inspiration to our own.

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Notes

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1. Lauren Berlant, “Intensity Is a Signal, Not a Truth: An Interview with Lauren Berlant,” by Nicholas Manning, Revue Française d’Études Américaines 154, no. 1 (2018): 114.

2. “Review of Professor Hitchcock’s Report on the Geology, &c. of Massachusetts,” North American Review 42, no. 91 (1836): 425.

3. Stephen Jay Gould, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time (Harvard University Press, 1988), 1.

4. Georges Cuvier, “Preliminary Discourse,” in Georges Cuvier, Fossil Bones, and Geological Catastrophes: New Translations and Interpretations of the Primary Texts, ed. Martin J. S. Rudwick (University of Chicago Press, 1997), 185.

5. Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337.