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Biography, Volume 35, Number 1, Winter 2012, pp. 170-189 (Article)
DOI: 10.1353/bio.2012.0008
For additional information about this article
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/bio/summary/v035/35.1.kennedy.html
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HUMANITY
’
S FOOTPRINT
:
READING
RINGS OF SATURN
AND
PALESTINIAN WALKS
IN AN ANTHROPOCENE ERA
ROSANNE KENNEDY
. . . walking is a subversive detour, the scenic route through a half aban-
doned landscape of ideas and experiences.
—Rebecca Solnit,
Wanderlust
(12)
This article approaches the fruitful contradiction suggested by “posthuman
lives” from the perspective of the “Anthropocene era.” Introducing this geo-
logical concept to the public in 2011, the German magazine
Der Spiegel
pro-
claimed: “Global warming, rising sea levels, mass extinction of species: Man-
kind is changing the planet to such an extent that an increasing number of
scientists wants to proclaim a new geological epoch” (“Dawn”). Humans are
no longer simply biological agents; they are now recognized as “geological
agents” who are shaping the planet’s future (Chakrabarty 206). Climate sci-
entist Walter Dodds cautions readers that an “insidious explosion of human
population growth and resource use is creating a shock wave that is rever-
berating through our global environment for the first time in the history of
humanity” (xi). He uses the metaphor of “humanity’s footprint” to describe
the “cumulative effect of these influences” (xi). The magnitude and gravity of
the current environmental crisis, which includes but is not limited to climate
change, challenges the anthropocentrism that has traditionally underwrit-
ten the humanities. The concepts of the Anthropocene and the posthuman,
to which I will return, have originated in distinct fields of knowledge—the
sciences and humanities. Yet, both concepts invite humanities scholars to re-
think the place of the human in relation to non-human others, and ultimately
to the planet and to the planet’s future. Posthumanism is a useful designation
for critical work on these matters.
Biography 35.1 (Winter 2012) © Biographical Research Center
Kennedy, Humanity’s Footprint in an Anthropocene Era
171
As an anthropocentric genre, autobiography, and the approaches critics
develop to read it, could play a critical role in rethinking the concept and
place of the human, and humanistic understandings of “the world.” Since its
emergence in the Enlightenment as a modern genre concerned with narrating
the development of a unique self, autobiography has contributed to the “gen-
eralized presumption of human exceptionalism” that underpins the humani-
ties (Pettman 30).
1
It is now widely recognized that the presumed autonomy
of “man” has been achieved through oppositional thinking in which one term
in a dualism—mind/body, nature/culture, human/animal, male/female—is
valued and naturalized, while the secondary term is repressed. In the past
forty years, feminist, working class, ethnic, postcolonial, and disability stud-
ies approaches have all attempted to extend the “bios” of autobiography to
include categories of humans (women, non-whites, working class, disabled)
who have traditionally been excluded. But the challenge posed by the global
environmental crisis is of an entirely different order—it extends beyond the
human to encompass non-human species, living organisms, things, and the
earth itself. Animal studies scholar Cary Wolfe proposes developing a mode
of inquiry that rejects the oppositional thinking of self and other, human and
animal, human and land, in which one term dominates the other. He asks
whether a new era in humanities—posthumanities—can respond to the chal-
lenges of rethinking the place of the human in the world, which appears in-
creasingly vulnerable to technological and environmental changes. How can
life writing studies, as a field traditionally concerned with the development of
personhood and identity, contribute to the posthumanities?
2
I propose that the lens of the Anthropocene, coupled with critical insights
on ecology, embodiment, and walking as a practice, might enable us to find
in the literature of memoir the seeds of an alternative recognition of the hu-
man, not autonomous, but embedded in the natural and physical world. This
conception simultaneously engages both sides of the binary—human/animal;
nature/culture; mind/body. It positions the human not in splendid autonomy,
but as dependent on other species and on the natural world. I use the phrase
“humanity’s footprint” to signal both the effects of humans on the natural
history of the planet, and walking as an embodied practice of engaging with
time and space. These insights and concepts concerning the Anthropocene
and posthumanism will shape my reading of two “walking” memoirs, W. G.
Sebald’s
Rings of Saturn
(1995; 1998), and Raja Shehadeh’s
Palestinian Walks:
Notes on a Vanishing Landscape
(2007
3
). These memoirs do not use terms such
as “climate change” or “global warming” or “the anthropocene”—far from it.
And yet, through their rich evocation of vanishing and ruined landscapes, they
capture some of the effects of humanity’s footprint on the planet. In this re-
gard, they exemplify characteristics of a posthuman sensibility, and engage the
172
Biography 35.1 (Winter 2012)
reader in thinking differently about the human and its responsibility. They
also counteract the tendency of autobiography to focus exclusively on hu-
man life, and thereby naturalize anthropocentrism. But these memoirs differ
in ways that may be instructive. As Wolfe points out, there are humanist and
posthumanist ways of doing posthumanism—and, I would add, of engaging
with the Anthropocene. While both
Rings of Saturn
and
Palestinian Walks
convey the effects of human activity on landscapes and species, Sebald writes
the Anthropocene in a posthumanist key, whereas Shehadeh retains a mode
of thinking that remains rooted in Enlightenment traditions. Sebald decen-
ters the human by gesturing towards a species view that imagines the human,
like other species, as facing possible extinction. By contrast, for Shehadeh,
who is engaged in an ongoing struggle for Palestinian statehood, the human
remains central to the struggle for social justice. Although he embraces a plan-
etary view of human transience as an escape from the disappointments of po-
litical losses, his commitment to Palestinian self-determination leads him to
sustain humanist precepts.
GEOLOGICAL TEMPORALITY AND HUMAN HISTORY
:
CONVERGING IN CRISIS
In 2001, the Dutch chemist and Nobel Laureate Paul J. Crutzen argued the
case for designating a new geological era—the Anthropocene (the “age of
man”)—to describe the far-reaching effects of humans on the earth’s natural
history. In geology, time is measured by geological eras that correspond to dis-
tinct layers of the earth’s sediment. The present age, the “Holocene,” is dated to
approximately 12,000 years ago, and represents a mere sliver of the earth’s his-
tory. Among geologists, the concept of the Anthropocene remains controver-
sial. Some geologists are skeptical of the sudden onset of a new geological era,
pointing out that “the soil contains evidence of the influence of man since the
Stone Age” (Schwagerl and Bojanowski). By contrast, geologists who advocate
¨
the concept of the Anthropocene generally agree that if the effects of human
activity, especially in the last two hundred years, are evident in a layer of the
earth’s sediment, a new geological era should be designated to reflect human-
ity’s footprint.
4
What might, in times past, have been an obscure geological
debate has migrated from the leading scientific journal,
Nature,
to high impact
media outlets such as
The Economist, The New York Times,
and
Der Spiegel.
Scientists and journalists alike value the term because of its elasticity and capa-
ciousness. According to geologist Jan Zalasiewicz, the term “provides a sense
of the scale and significance of anthropogenic global change. It emphasizes the
importance of the Earth’s long geological history as a context within which to
better understand what is happening today” (“Dawn”). Humanities scholars
now consider the implications of the Anthropocene and the threat of climate
Kennedy, Humanity’s Footprint in an Anthropocene Era
173
change for their disciplines, indicating just how far this concept has travelled.
Before turning to Humanities scholarship, however, it is worth examining how
“the human” features in geological discussions of the Anthropocene.
Geological debates concerning the Anthropocene reveal a tension regard-
ing the status of humans, and human rationality. Some geologists and climate
scientists stress the negative influence of humans on the environment—for
instance, the growth of human populations and human activity has contrib-
uted to the extinction of other species. “Humans are causing one of the few
major extinction events that have occurred over the past billion years,” Dodds
contends; “We are living in an ecological holocaust. . . . Extinction is forever,
and humans are executioners in this current extinction spasm” (70). On the
other hand, many scientists and others regard human rationality, science, and
technological innovation as the source of solutions to the problems we face;
Nature,
for example, views the concept of the Anthropocene as heralding a
“new era of responsibility,” and adopting it “would encourage a mindset that
will be important not only to fully understand the transformation now oc-
curring but to take action to control it” (Schwagerl and Bojanowski). A simi-
¨
lar tension regarding human rationality and technological innovation occurs
in debates about “the posthuman” in cultural and literary studies. Wolfe, for
instance, identifies posthumanism as coming before and after humanism—
before in that it recognizes the biological conditions that enable human evo-
lution, and after in that we are living in a moment in which the human is
being decentered. Arguing that the human/animal dichotomy is achieved by
“transcending the bonds of materiality and embodiment altogether,” he is
critical of transhumanism, which advocates a technologically enhanced hu-
man. Wolfe regards transhumanism as an intenstification of, rather than a
break with, humanism (xv). A fundamental conceptual issue in both the nat-
ural sciences and the humanities, then, is whether Enlightenment humanism,
with its anthropocentrism and its celebration of reason and technological in-
novation, is part of the problem or the solution—or both.
The concept of the Anthropocene, embedded in the conceptual frame-
works of geology and the natural sciences, confronts humanities scholars with
some fundamental challenges to their conventional frameworks. In a compel-
ling essay, Dipesh Chakrabarty considers the “profound, even transforma-
tive, implications” of scientific propositions about climate change “for how
we think about human history,” and particularly, the emergence of moder-
nity (198). As a post-colonial and post-imperial historian of globalization,
he acknowledges that the task “requires us to bring together intellectual for-
mations that are somewhat in tension with each other: the planetary and the
global; deep and recorded histories; species thinking and critiques of capital”
(213). He argues that the Anthropocene implies a fundamental change in

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