‘Theorists, academics, and artists who could have cared less in the past are now raising the rubble and unleashing a virtual avalanche of the inert. They have found a touchstone in geology, a bedrock of materiality, and want to ride it as a rocky life raft into a world of rising sea levels.’ (89)
‘The reason for this ascendancy of geology is not mysterious. It is attributable to its place in discussions of the Anthropocene.’ (90)
‘Unmoored from science, the Anthropocene has become shorthand for the larger condition of anthropogenic climate change amid a vast range of other environmental violence, disasters, catastrophes, or whatever your preferences may be on a Calamity Scale. Discussions of the Anthropocene have become so generalized that they often occur where little or no mention is made of the geology underfoot. Indeed, this would be the preferable situation: geology provides the backstory then steps back so the plot can be developed with greenery. Geology has contributed to the confirmation of anthropogenic climate change and, along with other sciences, located causes and culprits; its further refinements should see it reduced to a bit part but instead it is cast as a protagonist.’ (90) – links to Yusoff’s points about geology not having the scope to deal with
Dissertation narrative of firstly understanding why, even for humans, the Anthropocene is problematic, and then widening out into how else we could approach it from a flatter ontological point of view
‘Actual geologists are integral to the fossil fuel industries at the crux of global destruction, so once the connection is made between geology (the study or discourse on the earth, so proscribed) and geologists (the people who do geology), then the geologic of the geological elicits a description of pure political deracination.’ (91)
‘Floating a geology without geologists is the only way that that geology per se could be granted a pride of place within ecological debates.’ (91)
‘The myth of Icarus needs to be reversed. Icarus does not fly into the Sun; the Sun descends onto him. His waxwings do not melt under the Sun’s heat, casting him into the sea where he drowns; glaciers and polar ice caps melt and seas rise to engulf him where he stands. He has not ignored the instructions of his father, Daedalus; it was his father who broke the bond with the Earth that brought the Sun down and sent the seas washing onto land. Daedalus too will drown or succumb to the ills of overheating before water fills his lungs. The Sun indiscriminately passes judgment on everyone and everything, sets on the species and claims its full dominion over Earth.2 The revised myth does not have a happy ending, since my first obligation was to Greco-Roman myth as a genre, most of which never ends well, rather than catastrophism as a genre.’ (92)
‘Fossil fuels can be understood as old sun, their exhumation as a cycling of the sun, and global warming as retribution from the sun for presenting a burning corpse within its body of live energy. So the heliologic is a good way to sort through rocks. It would be a way for geologists to tell which are the deadly ones, which ones not to disturb. It will keep separate too a study of the earth and the burning of the earth, i.e., geology and geologists.’ (92-93)
‘And for people who use geology to extract the foundations of deep-time, they can extrapolate instead upon a larger cycling of the sun that does not separate them from the present. Their blue- sky would come from above, a less deadly energy source. If they continue to look down into the rocks they will become wedged into a geocentrism that itself is an iteration of a self-cancelling anthropocentrism, as long as a geology-without-geologists is still employed.’ (93)
‘Our way of life introduces the possessive of a presumptive we connoting different socio-geological strata, those being us reservoir engineers, we in the employ of the fossil fuel industries, or we who have benefitted in our standard of living from fossil fuel use and those who have not, the last fracturing along default lines revealing valuable veins of socioeconomic class.’ (94) – v relevant to Yusoff
Anna Harris 