Have a Heart for the Holocene: The Politics of Ark Activism, Collaborative Conservation, and Sponsored Survival at Museums (original) (raw)

Science should never fully rest upon settled consensus, even though intense conflicts at key conjunctures in many scientific research programs often trigger such demands. Proponents of the Anthropocene thesis in various disciplines and different countries are lobbying hard now to force a consensus about its actuality, believing that the dire changes associated with this new epoch will alarm inventors and industrialists enough to slow rapid economic development and destructive climate change. Other geoscientists, however, doubt they should declare this moment in time as the close of Holocene epoch, which demarcates the last 11,000 to 12,000 years of the current Quaternary period in geological time. Furthermore, they are reluctant to rule that the planet now is so fatally ensnared by rapid anthropogenic climate change that this new geological epoch of humanity's making, namely, "the Anthropocene" definitely exists. Such forced settlements do not adequately conform to the methodical practices of prevailing geoscience research; and, even if they did, few believe the declaration would make much difference in the workings of human life on Earth. At the same time, the suggestive powers of the Anthropocene concept for many other intellectuals, scientists, and writers beyond the sciences have become almost irresistible (Lidskog and Waterton, 2018: 25-46). Its rapid proliferation in many cultural and scientific networks through their everyday spoken and written communication is a rolling daily plebiscite that leans toward ignoring the old rules. Professor Jedediah Purdy at Duke University's law school, for example, opines that human beings do, in fact, now inhabit "a new nature" since "the Anthropocene adds nature to the list of things we can no longer regard as natural," which transforms, in turn, the management of this "new nature" into "a political question because the Anthropocene future is, unavoidably, a collective human project" (Purdy, 2018). Soaking in the heated froth spraying from such rhetorical whirlpools, other thinkers also find an expansive remit to speculate more concretely about the current moment "as if " the Anthropocene epoch has become a reality during "the Great Acceleration" of economic and technological change since 1945 (McNeill and Engelke, 2014: 1-5). There are groups of museum professionals, who are also have decided to sail on this rhetorical tide by steering their institutions into the largely uncharted waters of these controversies (Newell, Robin, and Wehner, 2016; and, Möllers, 2013). The catastrophic effects of rapid climate change are significant, and they do impact more than the taxonomic conventions of stratigraphers, geologists, or botanists about deep time. This study suggests nothing better exemplifies such add-on effects from these scientific debates than a few efforts by museums and other cultural institutions, first, to map new channels being cut by the currents churning up in debates about the Great Acceleration, and, second, to explore various rocks and ripples rising out of these discursive currents.