Volume 16 (2022): Issue 2 (December 2022)

Humankind’s relationship with nature has been evolutionary. Nature’s agency initially overpowered human agency, limiting what people could do in their quest for survival. Ever so slowly people domesticated material things, such as fire and wood, and they made tools to assist them from bones, wood, and stone that gradually became more sophisticated. These tools became the principal link between humankind and the material world, and as human communities became more complex, people produced sophisticated tools worthy of being called technologies. Ships, mills, weapons, buildings—each invention and innovation increased human agency, and nature slowly gave way before it, a process visible through landscapes. This essay focuses on North America, where between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, human commodification of nature and the side effects of their technologies ultimately became so complex and complete that they ate away at the planetary ecosystem on which their own existence depends. Today, the Anthropocene encapsulates the idea of the age of humans, and nature’s agency seems to crumble as an independent force in the face of human actions.

This essay explores the concept of the Pandemicene, a proposed elaboration of the Anthropocene tailored to account for the COVID-19 pandemic and the world it is making. The Anthropocene itself is a new geological era defined by human industrial activity as the dominant shaping force on the planet and its resources. Humans have already created the conditions for nonhuman animal to human disease spillover, exemplified by the emergence and global spread of SARS-CoV-2. The bimodal impact of climate change is crucial: leading to a rapid and large-scale species die off, while also reconfiguring ecosystems and placing more and more species into close contact. The results are hard to predict, just like a pandemic, but epidemiologists working on spillovers are alarmed—even if climate change were to slow down, the acceleration is underway. The Pandemicene offers a useful articulation of the Anthropocene, a concept that too often floats freely without coming to the ground in the form of specific disasters, in specific places, killing real people. With COVID in mind, we know the Pandemicene as well as we know anything, and it has reshaped human society, economies, and geopolitics in only three years-time. Building on a body of interviews conducted for the COVIDCalls podcast, this essay digs deeper into the Pandemicene, exploring ways that it elaborates the Anthropocene, and the new research questions it raises.

This article explores innovations in biomaterial ingestion that would seek to solve ecological harm in the Anthropocene. Focusing on ocean ecologies and marine life, we follow several case studies that examine the paradigm of digestion to consider how efforts to eat the harmful by-products of the Anthropocene spark multifaceted interventions including, the development of novel cuisines, dieting tools, the invention of new animal feed additives, and an array of biotechnologies that would digest or otherwise sequester plastic pollutants. In doing so, we explore how this paradigm of digestion and associated bioscientific interventions are shifting relations between humans and nonhumans, exacerbating the conditions of an “uncanny” Anthropocene. We ask: Can the moving of “strange” surroundings and digestible objects through our bodies better hold us to account for the colonial and calculative epistemes that forged the Anthropocene? Or will these dreams of a circular, digestive economy only extend the promise of the never-ending extraction, valuation, and manipulation of nonhumans as a means of locating solutions to planetary precarity?

The Anthropocene hypothesis brings into play a set of paradoxes and virtually incommensurable spatial and temporal dimensions. Drawing on these debates, the present text will try to analyse experimental artistic productions and actions, particularly in indigenous contexts in Brazil, framing them in a broader discussion on the relations between art, anthropology and ecology. The concept of the Anthropocene will be unfolded into at least three sub-problems that it necessarily raises: the redefinition of the hegemonic concept of nature, the redefinition of the hegemonic concept of humanity, and the redefinition of the dichotomous division between these two concepts.

Historians have long recognised that DDT’s fame began with extraordinary propaganda late in the Second World War, yet heroic narratives that centre the chemical still shape historical understanding. Two false assumptions inform much of the existing scholarship on wartime insect control: one is that without DDT the Allies had no protection from malaria and typhus; the other is that DDT was significantly more toxic than any alternative insecticide available. This paper tells a very different story of wartime insecticides. We recontextualise DDT in the wider wartime technological landscape and in so doing show the enduring significance of the natural insecticide, pyrethrum. DDT was never solely responsible for protecting troops and civilians from malaria and typhus and its deployment did not render all existing insecticides obsolete. Claims about the significance of DDT often work by writing out the existence of alternative methods of controlling vectors or by downplaying the efficacy of existing materials and practices.

The theory of image formation in a microscope proposed by Ernst Abbe changed the scientific approach to microscopy. Though the theory had many detractors, his new approach led to a technological revolution in the design and construction of high-quality microscopes. It paved the way for new discoveries in the fields of biology and medicine. Joaquín María de Castellarnau, was a contemporary connoisseur of Abbe’s ideas who decided to disseminate them in Spain through various publications and training courses. In his lectures, he used various devices for practical demonstrations that allowed some concepts of the new theory to be better understood. At the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales in Madrid (MNCN–CSIC), one such original and unusual instrument designed by Abbe and used by Castellarnau has been preserved in perfect condition. Castellarnau used this instrument for various experiments that helped clarify the most complex points of Abbe’s theory. In this work, we explore how the context in which science developed in Spain favoured practical activities to demonstrate new scientific theories, such as Abbe’s in the early twentieth century.