Explaining the Climate, Explaining Away the Anthropocene: Probing the Use of Narratives

In addressing the difference between “climate history” and “Anthropocene history” as frameworks for history, I will argue that the two are informed by different senses of historicity and demand different historical approaches. Whereas narrative approaches may be instrumental in explaining climate change by seeing individual occurrences in larger patters of unfolding processes, the same operation may be detrimental to understanding the Anthropocene. Instead of explaining it, historical narratives of unfolding processes may explain away the Anthropocene, its novelty, its shock effect, and its entailed sense of urgency to act.

How so? To start with, historical approaches to the climate and climate history emerged prior to a widespread recognition of anthropogenic changes in the condition of the Earth system. To this day, their modes of expertise reflect premises, standards and scholarly procedures dating back to the institutionalization of history as a discipline. The operation of sketching historical narratives about unfolding long-term processes and developments is chief among them. As to the Anthropocene, in its formulation in Earth system science (ESS), the notion aimed at capturing the ongoing transformation of the Earth viewed as a single system, driven by human activity viewed as a natural force. Most importantly, the transformation does not occur as a developmental process but as an abrupt change brought about by threshold events – “unprecedented change” as I like to call it.

The narrativizing procedures of disciplinary history were designed to meet former challenges of a different kind. Should they now be put to use automatically, projecting processual schemes over evental transformations? Or does historical research need to invent new modes of historicization to adequately capture the Anthropocene? Spoiler: the latter. The recognition of the Anthropocene does not simply add a new dimension to existing climate histories; instead, it demands pioneering new kinds of non-narrative Anthropocene histories.