Contemporary Studies Network roundtable: responding to Robert Macfarlane’s ‘Generation Anthropocene’

In April 2016, The Guardian published ‘Generation Anthropocene: How humans have altered the planet forever’ by the celebrated academic and nature writer Robert Macfarlane. Reflecting on the article’s importance as a critical experiment and, perhaps, a vital form of public engagement, Contemporary Studies Network (CSN) asked six of its members, working across very different areas of literary and cultural studies, to respond to and extend Macfarlane’s article, mapping the different ways in which literary scholars might approach the age of the Anthropocene. Conducted via email, this roundtable conversation asks to what extent the Anthropocene marks a new era in literary criticism, how exactly it extends preexisting strands of ecocriticism and trauma studies, and what the global scope of the term might be beyond the confines of the Western literary canon. Discussion ranges from issues of temporality to genre and form and it also addresses Macfarlane’s rhetoric, his call to arms for those working in the humanities, for a more comprehensive investigation in to the roles of literature and art in responding to and representing what may become a new epoch.


Introduction
The Anthropocene is generally understood as our current geological epoch, a period in which human activity has become the dominant force on climate and environment. While Bruno Latour describes it as 'the best alternative we have to usher us out of the notion of modernization' (Latour 2015: 145), as a concept the Anthropocene blurs conventional distinctions between human and geological history and, as a result, it has been investigated and defined differently across natural and social sciences disciplines as well as more recently in the humanities.
When the celebrated nature and travel writer Robert Macfarlane published 'Generation Anthropocene: How humans have altered the planet forever' in The Guardian in April 2016, it felt like an important moment to many scholars working in literary studies. This is partly because the Anthropocene has been a ubiquitous point of reference in literary scholarship for the last three or four years. 1 In just under 6,000 words, Macfarlane builds on his 'Desecration Phrasebook' and, moving discursively from John Clare to Frederic Jameson, discusses critical terms that are routinely attached to the Anthropocene: 'solastalgia', 'deep time', 'apex-guilt', 'shadowtime', and 'stuplimity'. Most importantly, perhaps, he also recognises the dangers of the Anthropocene's 'ubiquity as a cultural shorthand' and of the already evident phenomenon of commentators becoming 'fatigued by its imprecisions' -a problem that seems endemic with many trends in cultural criticism. 'Generation Anthropocene' is, in this sense, an ambitious, impactful, and notably accessible essay that feels important precisely because Macfarlane interrogates the burgeoning critical lexicon of the Anthropocene whilst also attempting to identify how cultural texts might represent or engage with this formulation of our current geological age. 1 For recent and existing scholarship on the Anthropocene see Trexler (2015) and Clark (2015), as well as special issues of Environmental Humanities ( Generation Anthropocene: How humans have altered the planet for ever 3

Robert Macfarlane
We are living in the Anthropocene age, in which human influence on the planet is so profound -and terrifying -it will leave its legacy for millennia. Politicians and scientists have had their say, but how are writers and artists responding to this crisis? com/books/2016/apr/01/generation-anthropocene-altered-planet-for-ever (Last accessed 31 January 2017). The article is reproduced here with permission from The Guardian."

Sykes et al: Contemporary Studies Network Roundtable 6
Illustration by Eric Petersen.
In 2003 the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined the term solastalgia 4 to mean a 'form of psychic or existential distress caused by environmental change'.
Albrecht was studying the effects of long-term drought and large-scale mining activity on communities in New South Wales, when he realised that no word existed to describe the unhappiness of people whose landscapes were being transformed about them by forces beyond their control. He proposed his new term to describe this distinctive kind of homesickness.
Where the pain of nostalgia arises from moving away, the pain of solastalgia arises from staying put. Where the pain of nostalgia can be mitigated by return, the pain of solastalgia tends to be irreversible. Solastalgia is not a malady specific to the present -we might think of John Clare 5 as a solastalgic poet, witnessing his native flourished recently. 'A worldwide increase in ecosystem distress syndromes', wrote Albrecht, is 'matched by a corresponding increase in human distress syndromes'.
Solastalgia speaks of a modern uncanny, in which a familiar place is rendered unrecognisable by climate change or corporate action: the home become suddenly unhomely around its inhabitants.
Albrecht's coinage is part of an emerging lexis for what we are increasingly calling the 'Anthropocene': the new epoch of geological time in which human activity is considered such a powerful influence on the environment, climate and ecology of the planet that it will leave a long-term signature in the strata record. And what a signature it will be. We have bored 50m kilometres of holes in our search for oil. We remove mountain tops to get at the coal they contain. The oceans dance with billions of tiny plastic beads. Weaponry tests have dispersed artificial radionuclides globally.
The burning of rainforests for monoculture production sends out killing smog-palls that settle into the sediment across entire countries. We have become titanic geological agents, our legacy legible for millennia to come.
The idea of the Anthropocene asks hard questions of us. Temporally, it requires that we imagine ourselves inhabitants not just of a human lifetime or generation, but also of ' deep time' -the dizzyingly profound eras of Earth history that extend both behind and ahead of the present. Politically, it lays bare some of the complex cross-weaves of vulnerability and culpability that exist between us and other species, as well as between humans now and humans to come. Conceptually, it warrants us to consider once again whether -in Fredric Jameson's 6 phrase -'the modernisation process is complete, and nature is gone for good', leaving nothing but us. Last year I started the construction of a crowdsourced Anthropocene glossary called the 'Desecration Phrasebook', and in 2014 The Bureau of Linguistical Reality 8 was founded 'for the purpose of collecting, translating and creating a new vocabulary for the Anthropocene'. Albrecht's solastalgia is one of the bureau's terms, along with 'stieg', ' apex-guilt' and 'shadowtime', the latter meaning 'the sense of living in two or more orders of temporal scale simultaneously' -an acknowledgment of the out-ofjointness provoked by Anthropocene awareness. Many of these words are, clearly, ugly coinages for an ugly epoch. Taken in sum, they speak of our stuttering attempts to describe just what it is we have done.

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The word 'Anthropocene' itself entered the Oxford English Dictionary surprisingly late, along with 'selfie' and 'upcycle', in June 2014 -15 years after it is generally agreed to have first been used in its popular sense.
In 1999, at a conference in Mexico City on the Holocene -the Earth epoch we at present officially inhabit, beginning around 11,700 years ago -the Nobel prizewinning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen was struck by the inaccuracy of the Holocene designation. 'I suddenly thought this was wrong', he later recalled. 'The world has changed too much. So I said, 'No, we are in the Anthropocene'. I just made the word up on the spur of the moment. But it seems to have stuck'.
The following year, Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer -an American diatom specialist who had been using the term informally since the 1980s -jointly published an article proposing that the Anthropocene should be considered a new Earth epoch, on the grounds that 'mankind will remain a major geological force for many millennia, maybe millions of years to come'. 9 The scientific community took the Crutzen-Stoermer proposal seriously enough to submit it to the rigours of the stratigraphers. The group's report is due within months. Recent publications indicate that they will recommend the designation of the Anthropocene, and that the 'stratigraphically optimal' temporal limit will be located somewhere in the mid-20th century.
This places the start of the Anthropocene simultaneous with the start of the nuclear age. It also coincides with the so-called 'Great Acceleration', when massive increases occurred in population, carbon emissions, species invasions and extinctions, and when the production and discard of metals, concrete and plastics boomed. Plastics in particular are being taken as a key marker for the Anthropocene, giving rise to the inevitable nickname of the 'Plasticene'. We currently produce around 100m tonnes of plastic globally each year. Because plastics are inert and difficult to degrade, some of this plastic material will find its way into the strata record. Among the future fossils of the Anthropocene, therefore, might be the trace forms not only of megafauna and nano-planktons, but also shampoo bottles and deodorant capsthe strata that contain them precisely dateable with reference to the product-design archives of multinationals. 'What will survive of us is love', wrote Philip Larkin. 12 Wrong. What will survive of us is plastic -and lead-207, the stable isotope at the end of the uranium-235 decay chain. of all amphibian species are at risk of extinction. A fifth of the globe's 5,500 known mammals are classified as endangered, threatened or vulnerable. The current extinction rate for birds may be faster than any recorded across the 150m years of avian evolutionary history. We exist in an ongoing biodiversity crisis -but register that crisis, if at all, as an ambient hum of guilt, easily faded out. Like other unwholesome aspects of the Anthropocene, we mostly respond to mass extinction with stuplimity: the aesthetic experience in which astonishment is united with boredom, such that we overload on anxiety to the point of outrage-outage.
Art and literature might, at their best, shock us out of the stuplime. Warren's haunted study of the huia finds its own echo in the prose and poetry of Richard Skelton and Autumn Richardson. 17 Their work -sometimes jointly authored -is minutely attentive to the specificities of the gone and the will-be-gone. Place names and plant names assume the status of chants or litanies: spectral taxa incanted as elegy, or as a means to conjure back. In Succession (2013), 18 Skelton and Richardson studied palynological records to reconstruct lists of the grasses and flowers that flourished in the western Lake District after the end of the Pleistocene. The area 'is still inhabited by the ghosts of lost flora and fauna', writes Richardson, of which there are 'traces that even now, centuries later, can be uncovered and celebrated'. (2015), 19 a purely musical work, shifts from celebration to intervention: it is intended as a performative utterance -a series of notes, rituals and gestures that might somehow enable 'the return itself'.

Diagrams for the Summoning of Wolves
Rory Gibb smartly notes that the work of Skelton and Richardson is different in kind from conventional eco-elegy: it evokes ' a more feral feeling of being stalked by ecosystemic memory'. 20  we have erased entire biomes and crashed whole ecosystems. Their writing often moves back through the Holocene and into its prior epochs, before sliding forwards to imaginary far futures. They send ghost emissaries -foxes, wolves, pollen grains, stones -back and forth along these deep-time lines. Instead of the intimacies and connections urged by conventional 'green' literature, writing like this speaks of a darker ecological impulse, in which salvation and self-knowledge can no longer be found in a mountain peak or stooping falcon, and categories such as the picturesque or even the beautiful congeal into kitsch.

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Perhaps the greatest challenge posed to our imagination by the Anthropocene is its inhuman organisation as an event. If the Anthropocene can be said to 'take place', it does so across huge scales of space and vast spans of time, from nanometers to planets, and from picoseconds to aeons. It involves millions of different teleconnected agents, from methane molecules to rare earth metals to magnetic fields to smartphones to mosquitoes. Its energies are interactive, its properties emergent and its structures withdrawn.
In 2010 Timothy Morton 21 adopted the term hyperobject to denote some of the characteristic entities of the Anthropocene. Hyperobjects are 'so massively distributed in time, space and dimensionality' that they defy our perception, let alone our comprehension. Among the examples Morton gives of hyperobjects are climate change, mass species extinction and radioactive plutonium. 'In one sense [hyperobjects] are abstractions', he notes, 'in another they are ferociously, catastrophically real'.
Creative non-fiction, and especially reportage, has adapted most quickly to this ' distributed' aspect of the Anthropocene. Episodic in assembly and dispersed in geography, some outstanding recent non-fiction has proved able to map intricate Tsing takes as her subject one of the 'strangest commodity chains of our times': that of the matsutake, supposedly the most valuable fungus in the world, which grows best in 'human-disturbed forests'. Written in what she calls ' a riot of short chapters, like the flushes of mushrooms that come up after rain', Tsing's book describes a contemporary 'nature' that is hybrid and multiply interbound. Her ecosystems stretch from wood-wide webs of mycelia, through earthworms and pine roots, to logging trucks and hedge funds -as well as down into the flora of our own multispecies guts. by a mutated nature. A specialist team is sent to survey the zone. They discover archive caches and topographically anomalous buildings including a 'Tower' that descends into the earth rather than jutting from it. The Tower's steps are covered in golden slime, and on its walls crawls a 'rich greenlike moss' that inscribes letters and words on the masonry -before entering and authoring the bodies of the explorers themselves. It gradually becomes apparent that Area X, in all its weird wildness, is actively transforming the members of the expedition who have been sent to subdue it with science. As such, VanderMeer's novel brilliantly reverses the hubris of the Anthropocene: instead of us leaving the world post-natural, it suggests, the world will leave us post-human. And capitalist-technocratic, because the dominant narrative of the Anthropocene has technology as its driver: recent Earth history reduced to a succession of inventions (fire, the combustion engine, the synthesis of plastic, nuclear weaponry). The monolithic concept bulk of this scientific Anthropocene can crush the subtleties out of both past and future, disregarding the roles of ideology, empire and political economy. Such a technocratic narrative will also tend to encourage technocratic solutions: geoengineering as a quick-fix for climate change, say, or the Anthropocene imagined as a pragmatic problem to be managed, such that 'Anthropocene science' is translated smoothly into 'Anthropocene policy' within existing structures of governance. Moore argues that the Anthropocene is not the geology of a species at all, but rather the geology of a system, capitalism -and as such should be rechristened the Capitalocene.
There are signs that we will soon be exhausted by the Anthropocene: glutted by its ubiquity as a cultural shorthand, fatigued by its imprecisions, and enervated by its variant names -the 'Anthrobscene', the 'Misanthropocene', the 'Lichenocene' (actually, that last one is mine). Perhaps the Anthropocene has already become an anthropomeme: punned and pimped into stuplimity, its presence in popular discourse often just a virtue signal that merely mandates the user to proceed with the work of consumption.
I think, though, that the Anthropocene has administered -and will administera massive jolt to the imagination. Philosophically, it is a concept that does huge work both for us and on us. In its unsettlement of the entrenched binaries of modernity As a performance-maker and researcher of performance, it is probably not surprising that I invest in modes of expression that might be beyond the reach of or outside the range of the written word. In the act of performance, the quality and rhythm of the movement of the body, its occupation of space, as well as, for example, combinations of light, sound and image on stage can communicate as powerfully as the words spoken by a performer. This is particularly true in much contemporary or 'postdramatic' performance, where, as Hans-Thies Lehmann describes, 'text. . . is considered only as one element, one layer, or as a 'material' of the scenic creation, not as its master' (Lehmann, 2006: 17). What differentiates this project from others that I have seen is the introduction of a new critical vocabulary, though I did find myself wondering about the utility of these terms which run the risk of coming off as somewhat gimmicky. However, these attempts to recast language -Macfarlane's link to the 'Bureau of Linguistic Reality' is a key example here -show a striking and admirable ambition to deliver a 'jolt' to the human imagination. that is, that humankind has become a global geological force in its own right' (Steffen, Grinevald, Crutzen & McNeill, 2011: 843). The Anthropocene Working Group, part of the International Commission on Stratigraphy, has recently voted to recommend the formalisation of the term as a new geological epoch (Carrington, 2016).
Scott: I agree with Diletta that I would not necessarily view the Anthropocene as a strand of criticism, though clearly, as Macfarlane demonstrates, it can be used as a critical tool -in grouping, characterising and analysing a set of related artistic responses. It also seems to differ slightly in tone from the broader field of ecocriticism, in that, as the article suggests, the Anthropocene is specifically characterised  ' (Lavery and Finburgh, 2015: 4). In many ways, this approach reverses the focus of much theatre and performance making and study, which has often directed its attention to the human, whether that is the body of the actor or the means through which that body and its staging can represent and communicate another human's experience. An anti-humanist approach prompts us to pay attention to the non-human in the act of performance, as well as modes of performance that explore the world's agency and energy outwith and beyond our human perception of it. This seems to me to be a really productive way of responding to the Anthropocene.
Its ' enormity', as Diletta points out, its evocation of ' deep time' and a different temporality, as well as the culpability-vulnerability dualism Macfarlane suggests, create a constellation of quite powerful ideas, which have the capacity to prompt us to think about and make creative work in new and refreshed ways. understanding of that requires expertise from multiple disciplines. We need to understand both the material effects of human culture (on the landscapes we inhabit; on the species with which we share the Earth; on the climate) and the human causes of those material effects. Sometimes, literature-science studies can speak rather imperialistically for and about science without inviting dialogue (without, for instance, 39 The term, the 'two cultures', as it is used here, originates with the scientist and novelist C.P. Snow's 1959Rede Lecture (Snow, 1961, in which he argued that a gulf had arisen between scientific and literary intellectuals. He argued that the Sciences are central to society but undervalued and deeply misunderstood by those outside the Sciences. The literary critic, F.R. Leavis, disputed this view, arguing that the work of the Humanities, particularly an English School, are at the heart of the modern university (Leavis in Yudkin, 1962).
engaging with how scientists respond to the models of science we posit when we talk about science's place in the culture, or without considering how contemporary sciences, like those of the mind, might challenge or develop the models of mind with which we operate), but there might be useful things to learn from the Sciences here and projects on which productively to collaborate. Sokal and Jean Bricmont argue that humanities scholars frequently misunderstand science and misrepresent its truth claims as culturally arbitrary. 41 Used as a noun, 'sonder' is the realisation that each random passer-by is living a life as vivid and complex as your own. Though its origin is obscure, it seems to have originated from a popular -sustainability are beginning to gain a global reach -for example, Bhutan's trumpeting of its achievement in being the world's first 'Carbon negative' country. 42 The ideas are getting out, so perhaps the language will follow.
De Cristofaro: As Daniel King remarks, as a new epoch of geological time the Anthropocene cannot but be conceived as a global concept. Yet, as Macfarlane underlines, one of the criticisms that we can level at the concept is that it presupposes a universal human nature that ignores inequalities and historically rooted dynamics of oppressions. The ' anthropos' implied by the term Anthropocene is often that of the Global North. Carbon emissions trading, which is supposed to relieve climate change, has been accused of ' carbon colonialism' (Bachram, 2004), and the Anthropocene affects the Global North and South differently precisely because of those historically-rooted dynamics of oppressions. Thus, a fruitful use of the term would acknowledge the differences between the North and the South, because, as China Miéville puts it, 'we fight best by embracing our not-togetherness' (Miéville, 2015).
Leading on from King's discussion of language, I am intrigued by Jason W.
Moore's suggestion that 'Capitalocene' (Moore, 2016) would be, as a term, more useful than 'Anthropocene', as it would presuppose and foreground the differences within capitalism. As ever, though, the problem is who has access to, and interest in, these concepts and debates -is it just academia, and in particular the Humanities and Social Sciences? Especially given that a scientific commission is deliberating on the term 'Anthropocene', not 'Capitalocene'? Scott: I agree with Daniel and Diletta about issues of accessibility to these debates and with the universality that the ' anthropos' implies, which is problematic. Though and mostly fictional -online word blog, 'The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows' in 2014 and has since made its way into semi-common usage, including art reviews for The Guardian and assorted 'word list' articles in The Independent. 42 Arthur Nelson, 'Bhutan has "most ambitious pledge" at the Paris climate summit', The Guardian, the term itself by its geological nature is global, the ideas and discourses that surround it feel like they sit very much in the domain of the academic. Having said that, there are ideas within the article, that Macfarlane connects to the Anthropocene, which feel very resonant and real and relatable. As referenced above, Albrecht's notion of 'solastalgia' (Albrecht, 2012), for instance, is one that I recognise and feels like it probably has relevance to people living in a range of contexts, urban and rural, in the Global North and South. The causes for the changes in landscape and the divisions and oppressions they indicate can and should be rigorously debated.
The homesickness you feel for the landscape, which has changed around you and beyond your recognition, is something that could be shared. This felt sense of the Anthropocene could also be a productive point of departure for discussing how we address our varying and unequal levels of culpability for and vulnerability to these transformations.
Srivastava: Dipesh Chakrabarty has recently taken on the notion of the Anthropocene in his contribution to a multi-authored debate on 'The State of Postcolonial Studies' in New Literary History. He finds the Anthropocene to be an influential notion for changing the way we are thinking about social justice and political radicalism in the context of postcolonial studies, because it radically questions the power of the human subject to affect transformation (Chakrabarty, 2012: 1). I would tend to agree -for me the most significant thing about taking stock of the (irreversible) impact of humans on the Earth's environment is that it does away with teleology completely and introduces the notion of extinction, rather than hope or utopian ideals as the end-point of our imagining of the future. Calling the present era 'the Anthropocene' raises the interesting question of how we can reformulate a progressive ethics and politics for our present time, given the irreversible disappearance of natural resources. How do we combat capitalism when we ourselves are doomed to extinction?
Rowcroft: For me, the Anthropocene could benefit enormously by being tied to Marxism. Leerom Medovoi has recently argued that eco-critical approaches, 'perhaps the youngest of contemporary literary hermeneutics', 'can and should be dialectically assimilated to the project of a Marxist literary and cultural criticism' (Medovoi, 2009: 122). Arguing that ecocriticism requires a much more precise historical and material specificity, Medovoi argues that bringing ecocritical approaches within the fold of Marxist dialectics would allow ecocriticism to move beyond its characteristic weakness: 'its utter incapacity to theorize itself as anything other than a thematic criticism that passes ethical judgment on the depictions of either nature or built environments' (Medovoi, 2009: 133).
My point here is that Marxism, unlike other theories, argues the unity of theory and praxis -distinct, as Fredric Jameson notes, from 'the implied autonomy of the philosophical concept' (Jameson, 2009: 11) -and proposes the completion of objectives outside of philosophy. A minimal first step towards solving these problems here would be achieving a truly social democratic movement and the legitimation of a Marxist intellectual presence in public discourse. I think the Anthropocene could be a powerful aid to that, and also effective in fostering a more co-operative approach to the use of the world's resources.
Cordle: As Daniel and Diletta say, by definition this is a planetary concept, though like Daniel I'm not confident I can step outside my perspective, rooted in the West and Global North, to speak of its relevance for others. If it's useful for them, they'll find ways to make it speak.
Neelam and Andrew provide good examples of how their own theoretical perspectives might shape understanding of aspects of the Anthropocene and how these could forge communities of understanding, but I'd be wary of attempts to appropriate it within a single theoretical perspective. It's a tool that can be put to work usefully in different critical perspectives, for specific ends (and vice versa: those perspectives help us access different facets of the Anthropocene), but we have to leave room to be challenged. This is an exciting, new concept and we have to have the courage to allow it to unsettle not only our sense of ourselves (in the West; in the Global North), but also the theoretical lenses through which we view the world.

Macfarlane frames his discussion as a call to arms -what would you say
is the political potential of essays like this and/or the Anthropocene texts he demands?
De Cristofaro: There is a certain paradoxical element to the notion of the Anthropocene. On the one hand, this era is inherently about human agency powerfully affecting the planet. On the other, as Neelam underlines, the Anthropocene also raises the issue of human impotence in the face of the irreversibly nefarious human impact on the Earth. As Clive Hamilton, Christophe Bonneuil, and François Gemenne put it, the Anthropocene is the ' age in which the irreversible must somehow be governed' (Hamilton et al., 2015: 11). If pieces like Macfarlane's are to have political resonance, they need to confront this paradox. Issues of accessibility are also key. As repeatedly emphasised in previous answers, the style of Macfarlane's piece is helpful in popularising the term and reaching a wider public than traditional academic analyses. Cultural products, by giving narrative form to theoretical insights on the Anthropocene, may also be effective in raising awareness and stimulating a broader debate, as well as political action itself.
King: Macfarlane's article is engaging, informative, and clearly aimed at some kind of political galvanising in his readers. It is this overtly political aim that makes it all the more significant, and it is notable that The Guardian allowed him so much room for his engaging, but complex, article. This is clearly a political kind of scholarship, aimed at a productive kind of 'Impact'. 43 With this kind of engaged scholarship and the very compelling argument that Macfarlane offers his readers comes a tremendous potential to influence people's thinking on these issues and get the term into circulation beyond the academy, since newspaper publication gives his work a wider reach than much scholarship can honestly claim. This returns us, however, to the 43 The precise nature of academic impact is a matter of debate among scholars but the definition from the HEFCE site itself reads: 'The Research Excellence Framework [2014] was the first exercise to assess the impact of research outside of academia. Impact was defined as ' an effect on, change or benefit to the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality of life, beyond academia'' (http://www.hefce.ac.uk/rsrch/REFimpact/). issues raised by several responders about Macfarlane's deployment of neologisms and a certain kind of jargon. These terms, useful and interesting as they may be to traditionally academic audiences, may prove to be a stumbling block towards more widespread acceptance of the ideas of the Anthropocene.

Cordle:
The key word is 'potential'. Macfarlane's essay doesn't formulate a coherent political position, but that's neither its purpose nor its value. What it does do is make visible and communicate a concept that helps us reconceptualise and think through the contemporary epoch. The political efficacy of the Anthropocene lies then in how we use this critical tool -say, to read the significance of the texts he cites, or of others that we consider to be Anthropocene texts.
I don't think the politics is straightforward, and if we simply appropriate the Anthropocene for our pre-established political positions without accepting that it might challenge or change them, then we're likely to miss some opportunities. As Diletta suggests, the issue of human agency is a complex one. Certainly, there's not much point in formulating a politics if we think we're impotent, so it has to be a politics based on hope, even if that hope doesn't translate into confident expectation. Ultimately, it has to be a global politics too, albeit one that works through the complex resonances between local and global perspectives and actions.
Rowcroft: I agree with the previous comments but would posit a further distinction between the ethical and the political to explore these debates more fully. Žižek's reading of Lenin is helpful here. For Žižek, the ethical is a duty of care to that which remains -perhaps even a sense of resignation to the inevitable or that which is ultimately out of our hands. In turn, the political recognises the importance of practical decisions and accepts the consequences of action (Žižek qtd in Callinicos, 2007: 21).
These are of course not static definitions, and Macfarlane's article doesn't fit into either neatly. What is important, however, is that we begin with ' a massive jolt to the imagination', one that will build upon the process of its own formation as the concept takes up wider public appeal. thinking about our place in the world, acknowledging, as Diletta points out, the complexity of this in relation to human agency. It seems to me that it is this fresh and 'unsettling' way of understanding where we are that Macfarlane offers, rather than a call to arms, as such. If it is indeed a call to arms, it does not really give a sense of how we should arm ourselves or whom we would be fighting, if not ourselves. What we make of it then, whether that is art or action or both, is, I suppose, up to us. a politically motivated act against communities and populations that deserves to be represented in fiction. Macfarlane's is not an expert's take on climate change -it is a call to arms to take charge of our own destiny again as humans. We have created the very real potential for self-destruction, and it is up to us to try and reverse it. But this needs to be an ethical and political message -albeit one grounded in scientific facts -and perhaps the best way to do this would be to mobilise the role of literature in such an ' environmental revolution'. I do think that the most interesting by-product of this discussion on climate change has been the reflection on, and change in, creative forms -I'm thinking especially of cinema (the vivid evocation of an Earth slowly suffocating due to the effects of the dust bowl in the 2014 film Interstellar comes to mind here), but also land art. Perhaps it is up to literature and art -quintessentially man-made media -to kick-start a revolution in thinking about our planet. Then again, this might be very optimistic. I'd also like to see us broaden our sense of an Anthropocene canon beyond fiction. I mentioned the documentary film Into Eternity in response to a previous question, but if we also embrace the potential to build an Anthropocene reading list that places science writing -whether that's popular science writing or certain kinds of scientific papers -alongside conventional literary works, that could be tremendously exciting.

Finally
Rowcroft: I agree with the above suggestions; certainly that we can look outside of fictional texts for inspiration -I would also include theoretical texts here, although, once again, reception and dissemination play their part. Kim Stanley Robinson's science-fiction epic The Mars Trilogy (1993-9) might offer a useful conceptual starting point. The three bulky novels detail the process of terraforming -making a planet hospitable to human life -and the competing political factions that seek to treat the new planet differently -Reds 'no terraforming', Greens 'planetary change', Transnational Corporations 'planet as resource to be exploited'. In a future age -although not too far ahead of our own -settlers and nationals are given a political agency that often seems lacking in debates about the Anthropocene. Articulating the process of utopia -which is often bitterly contested and fought for -the end of the novel gives a glimpse of a human and non-human species in greater dialogue with the environment. For Robinson, the road ahead is difficult, but not impossible.  (1957). Through this imagery, a deep and unspeakable sense of humanity as a furious, but failing endeavour is evoked. Heiner Goebbels' Stifter's Dinge (2012) does without the human body at all -this installation of 'sounds, amplified voice-overs, machinic and visual arrangements, objects and materials, instruments and sound machines, light and filmic projections. . . performs itself' (Birringer, 2012: n. pag.). Johannes Birringer describes how the installation 'resonates through a wide register of impressions of time, history, location, landscape, art and politics, memory, autobiography, ethnographic field recordings, contours of aural and sensorial materiality, noise and music, harmonies and disharmonies', and ultimately 'performs our moving into the indescribable thing we don't know' (Birringer, 2012: n. pag.). Cambridge, suggested that the Anthropocene epoch had the potential to 'inaugurate even more marvellous eras of evolution' as humans are forced to look beyond their existence to the possibilities of the 'post-human'. What seems clear, both from these articles and the contributions made above, is that the Anthropocene provides a potent lens for refracting our contemporary moment through our industrial past and increasingly contingent future. In Rees' hopeful article, the twenty-first century emerges as what he calls a 'special' moment from a cosmic time-perspective, and throughout our 'roundtable' discussion, the possibilities of the cultural and critical responses to the Anthropocene proved more exciting than its depressing origins might imply. while Diletta De Cristofaro suggested alternative terms, Moore's 'Capitalocene' being one, that might 'leave room' to challenge both the concept and our work as scholars, which is an idea that Dan Cordle also emphasised.
Overall, our 'roundtable' discussion suggested that, as a concept, the Anthropocene feels both old and completely new, emptying out older literary categories and unsettling discussions of the speculative or futuristic through the definitive declaration of humanity's final, catastrophic impact on and possible removal from the Earth. We might therefore conclude that, as a concept, the Anthropocene has emerged as a theoretical lens through which to view the existing world, one which might, as Daniel King puts it, be 'somewhat gimmicky' but through which our contributors have suggested dynamic, inventive, and ultimately unexpected routes for present and future inquiry.