This paper is written from the perspective of a writer: a creative practitioner who works playfully with words, dialogue, and story structure to tease apart and rebuild events in time to tell a story. Most stories have humans at the centre, or at least humanised creatures and objects. Pigs talk, people travel through time and inanimate objects such as stones, cars, and even sponges dance, sing, and live in human family groups.
Anthropogenic thinking bridges disciplines of geology and literature and combines culture and nature in a complex mesh of cause and effect difficult to unknot. Anthropogenic thinking is therefore woven with geological thinking. Dipesh Chakrabarty summarised this as a collision or convergence of three histories—the history of the earth system, the history of life on earth (including human life), and the more recent history of industrial civilisation.
Humans now unintentionally straddle these three histories that operate on different scales and at different speeds. The very language through which we speak of the climate crisis is shot through with this problem of human and in- or non-human scales of time.Footnote 1
I am inspired by Chakrabarty’s idea of three histories. I see them as three rivers each bringing material and chemistry down from different mountainous regions. Each flow differs in amount, pressure, rate, and route yet all meet in the watershed. It is here that story is created from such overlapping histories, and it is the role of the creative thinker to collect and translate their histories into one which a human mind can comprehend.
The stories arising from these histories—of the earth system, human life on earth, and industrial civilisation—pose significant challenges for traditional linear literary narrative. Contemporary scholars of the Anthropocene write of the difficulties in appreciating “derangements of scale”; the “mental and emotional repertoire [needed] to deal with such a vast scale of events”; and “uncanny hyperobjects that defy comprehension.” In these new times, we need new methods.
Implications of an unbalanced, unstable, contaminated, and entangled Anthropocene unsettle existing traditional disciplinary modes of enquiry. Anthropocentric thinking is a perspective that positions humans at the centre of significance, assessing and interpreting the world predominantly in terms of human values, needs, and interests, and it must not be confused with anthropogenic action or “human-caused effects on the world.”Footnote 2 But whether the Anthropocene is seen as a lens through which to view multispecies worlds or a time period of accelerated human-dominated global change, the key tenet remains what Amelia Moore calls “the breakdown of the division between Nature and Culture that has historically shaped the Western worldview.”Footnote 3 Ursula Heise summarises Chakrabarty’s themes of Nature/Culture here in her discussion of human agency:
The Anthropocene, by scaling up the human, undermines concepts of human individuality and sociality that have to date informed the way in which the stories of human pasts and futures are told. It challenges philosophers, historians, writers, and artists to design stories that accommodate human agency at the scale of the entire species, the entire planet, and geological epochs of time.Footnote 4
Anthropocentric thinking underlies anthropogenic action. It can result in behaviour that generates environmental transformations whose scale and temporal duration exceed conventional narrative frameworks. Heise argues the genre of science fiction is a crucial imaginative space which enables readers to confront the dissonance between human-centred viewpoints and the expansive temporal and planetary scales of the Anthropocene. As a writer, I propose there are more suitable narrative modes to tell stories of unimaginable scales—stories of the Anthropocene—than the traditional linear format of the novel (in Moore’s “Western worldview”), in addition to the commonly-chosen genre of sci-fi.
A brief note here about the differences between Moore’s “Western” narratives and indigenous narratives. It is useful to highlight Yuria Celidwen and Dacher Keltner’s point that qualitative and nonlinear narratives are a method of observing, evaluating, and documenting phenomena that give meaning to reciprocal relationships in Nature, including recognition of more-than-human agency and sentience.Footnote 5 Dekila Chungyalpa et al. go on to list alternative practices including storytelling, community-based research, elder knowledge, and land-based learning, suggesting that the active participation and contribution from community knowledge help to rethink “human-to-nature” connectedness in the Anthropocene, sometimes called a kincentric view.Footnote 6 Indigenous writers Topa Four Arrows and Darcia Narvaez suggest that a kincentric view of connection “fosters relational accountability, where humans hold responsibilities toward the land, waters, and more-than-human relatives rather than dominion over them.”Footnote 7 If telling stories is a way of making sense of the past to navigate the future, then all stories must be equally valued and shared.
1. Telling tales
Our lives are an unfolding bundle of stories. We add our personal tales to the existing stories of our families, neighbours, and environments. We layer contemporary experiences onto inherited and ancestral tales to make meaning of our own lives. This collective narrative is a way of making sense of the past in order to navigate our uncertain future.
Yet for many humans, the cold, blue glow of a screen has replaced the warm glow of a fireside. The digital hearth has transformed the way we share important stories. There are positives: online spaces provide connections across vast distances and communities; platforms such as TikTok allow younger generations to develop and share their own stories and find like-minded souls to engage with. Social media allows the rapid dissemination of information through personal testimony, enabling change at a faster rate than ever before. There is potential for literature and arts to offer widespread “crucial contributions…toward full understanding of the multiple, accelerating environmental challenges facing the world today.” As Lawrence Buell continues: “How a place gets imaged, what stories about it get told, how they are remembered—all this can clearly make a difference not just aesthetically but historically, for public values and behaviour.”Footnote 8
2. The “new” role of narrative
It is no longer the role of narrative merely to chronicle events or write simply as a diarising witness, and neither is it sufficient (or possible) to continue to measure and record scientific and numerical change alone without acknowledging the role played by humankind. Kate Rigby, writing in 2009, made a case for writing in the Anthropocene “in the mode of prophetic witness”:
Such writing would seek to disclose the catastrophic consequences of continuing on our current ecocidal path and awaken us to the possibility of another way of thinking and being: one that holds the promise of reconciling urban industrial society with the Earth.Footnote 9
Catastrophic consequences for humankind typically arise from extreme weather systems or geological events; however, the term “natural disaster” remains deeply unsatisfactory and, I would contend, fundamentally inaccurate. Rising temperatures result in changing weather patterns, which bring about hot, dry, flammable ground and sudden, sharp, heavy rainfall. Increased population and subsequent building of high-intensity infrastructure results in crowded communities established quickly on floodplains, unstable slopes or riverbanks. Pressure on resources (wood, fossil fuel, water, fertile soil) causes human suffering such as famine and communicable disease against the backdrop of the natural world. Initially such events were considered to be caused by the hand of a displeased God before they developed the label of “natural evil.” The progression to “natural disaster,” suggests Rigby, lets humankind off the hook of responsibility.Footnote 10
3. Witnessing
But where is the role of “prophetic witness” in the ecocatastrophes of the twenty-first century, and what role can narrative play in these? Large-scale, uncontrollable geophysical events are certain to continue to occur, and extraction of geological material is exacerbating the effect on humankind by causing and contributing to ecocatastrophe. While the lively lithosphere is not something humankind can influence, human responses to it are within our control. As Robin Wall Kimmerer writes, “The Earth asks us to change as everything changes…For if we do not change, we will, like all that does not change, perish.”Footnote 11 We must adapt.
Literary narratives are manifestations of world-building. In them, catastrophe or ecocatastrophe are not synonymous with the end of the world, but the end of that “world.” As James Berger explains: “The apocalyptic event, then, generates new meanings and new historical narratives as it obliterates old ones. Thus, as its etymology suggests, the apocalypse is a revelation, an unveiling.”Footnote 12 Terry Eagleton recalls the characters of prophet in religion as someone whose role, “is not to predict the future, but to remind the people that if they carry on as they are doing, the future will be exceedingly bleak.”Footnote 13
Here, then, is the place for the writer in the Anthropocene. Witnessing is no longer enough. Philippa Holloway and Craig Jordan-Baker state that, by acknowledging the Anthropocene, “cli-fi, nature or climate writing can represent an activist commitment to raise consciousness, speak truth to power, and explore the ‘nature’ of nature.”Footnote 14 In this role of eco-prophet writers are able to tell positive and useful narratives, encouraging readers to develop agency. Shared stories can change how we imagine and connect with the more-than-human world “by moving away from the current consumption-based thinking to a more relational understanding of the human place within the environment.”Footnote 15
4. Three genres: Graphic novel, film-poem, and eco-biographical memoir; layers, fragments, loops
A geological imaginary provokes reading and writing of fossils, landforms, literary forms, structures, traces, and futures. Noah Heringman suggests that this textual materiality in geological events is like writing in the lithic record, a suggestion strengthened by Bronislaw Szerszynski’s view of the “page-and-writing structure of strata and fossil through which Earth seems to write its own history.”Footnote 16
To sentences and to epochs belong punctuation marks, formed by pen or sediment, pixel or fossil. To narratives and to eons belong quiet plots, struggles against extinction or death, sedimented archives of story.Footnote 17
Let us consider textual forms that disrupt the linear narrative of geological time with the natural occurrences of unconformities. Unconformities are breaks in time, inscriptions in the layers between eons, eras, periods, and epochs, yet as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen notes: “its roiled flow will also reveal a tendency to curve back upon itself, engendering whorls.”Footnote 18 Geological history may be read as a spiral, coil, or helix, as one can read the Anthropocene, and the story of each of the human species. I suggest that the homo sapien story palette is limited in pattern by our inability to fully comprehend geological time.
5. Graphic novel: layers
Richard McGuire chose the medium of a graphic novel, Here, to tell the story of the human and the nonhuman in the Anthropocene. He used overlapping and fragmented illustration to tell simultaneous events, and the original six-page black and white graphic developed into a colour book of several hundred pages (albeit without numbered pages), an interactive e-book and a feature film.Footnote 19
The framing of the human lifetime against the lifetime of flora (trees) is deftly arranged solely through brief dialogue and illustration. There are many pointers towards the fragility of human life: 1986—a t-shirt emblazoned with the slogan FUTURE TRANSITIONAL FOSSIL; 1960—the record of George Gershwin (1898–1937) playing the lyric, The Rockies may crumble, Gibraltar may tumble. Footnote 20 The setting of Here is a human living room—not a bedroom, or bathroom, but a room specified as a place for life and living—and this space is shared with other human and nonhuman actors. By telling a narrative of 3,000,500,000 B.C.E. to A.D. 22,175, McGuire highlights the insignificance and transience of homo-sapiens on the geological landscape and tells the past, present, and future of human existence against a slow-changing scenery of landmasses, flora, and fauna.
In year 2111, floodwater fills the room; in year 2213 a tour guide explains to visitors: “In the twentieth century nearly everyone carried a few essential items…a small circular device that could approximate the hour of the day…called a watch because everyone looked at it so much.” In year 2313, the landscape is barren. A gloved hand holds out what could be a Geiger counter while in the distance figures in full hazmat suits peer at the ground.
The timeline then leaps to the year 22,175 and the scene is one of huge plants and strange animals. This landscape, free of the human, is not necessarily a movement forward in time but instead a loop backwards demonstrating the place of the human in a selection of overlapping events. In this way, the reader becomes the observer of a story that, while having no observable beginning, middle, and end, also has no fixed protagonists. It is not the humans, the living-room or even the land that could be considered as protagonist, despite the suggestion made by the novel’s title: I suggest the protagonist is time itself, layered and connected in a manner of the stratified sediment observed by James Hutton back in 1788.Footnote 21 McGuire himself said Here was not a specific place, despite his use of childhood memories: “it was never in a specific place because I wanted it to feel like just any place. It’s not the history, it’s like a tiny history. It’s working on both levels.”Footnote 22
Is it possible, then, that through the medium of a looped, networked, spiralled, or overlapped narrative a writer can disrupt this linearity of thought and therefore challenge linear conceptions of temporality and temporal processes? If so, narrative could affect how readers perceive the nonhuman, perhaps beginning to build an alternative idea of kinship.
6. Film-poem: fragments
In 2016, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Aberfan coal tip disaster, Welsh writer and poet Owen Sheers created The Green Hollow. Footnote 23 For writer Sheers, from the post-industrial Welsh Valleys, geological subsurface and time metaphors seem to be the most instinctive way to talk about the fatal coal-waste landslip. He explains:
Time is a natural smoother of grief’s roughest edges, but for many in Aberfan a gradual submersion of their bereavement under the years has been denied them, the pressure of anniversarial attention regularly drawing their sorrow to the surface, and with each breaching back into the air, returning them afresh to the point of their loss.Footnote 24
Like McGuire, Sheers experimented with form and layout of the printed word, commenting that the physical entity of the subsequent book emphasises many voices across generations, in fragments of recollection and replies. Utilising faded passages of text to emphasise the haunted memories of the survivors, and a stark black double-page spread “so that you can see the seam of coal coming,” Sheers aimed to “bring to life the idea of young voices in old bodies, which is where the idea of the lighter text came from.” In parallel with McGuire, Sheers intends time to be evident in the text. The voices of the present and the past flow like “the restless tide of time, pulling you back into the ignorance of the past—‘the luxury of easy time’—and thrusting you forward to the present of regret and the pain of knowledge and memory combined.”Footnote 25
7. Eco-biographical memoir: loops
Part memoir, part nature writing, Amy Liptrot’s The Outrun is eco-biography: a form which connects the human and their ecosystem highlighting their inseparability and ultimately decentring the human in the narrative.Footnote 26 Like memoir, which often reflects deep and established connections between people and place, eco-biography is attentive to not only the relationship between a human and one other (e.g., an animal, a tree, a geological formation) but to the entire surrounding ecosystem. In this manner, suggests Jessica White, the form can show the equal importance of both human and nonhuman in the ecosystem without centring either party.Footnote 27
Liptrot’s story has an interesting non-linear chronology for memoir. Circling between London and Orkney the narrative loops up and down Great Britain: bookended between the geologically and energy-minded chapters titled “Tremors” (chapter two) and the final chapter, “Renewables.” If proof were needed that The Outrun is an eco-biography which decentres the human in the narrative, then Liptrot’s form and arrangement of the story are it. Other chapter titles include “Drifting” and “Abandoned Islands” at the beginning when Liptrot is experiencing addiction, and “Personal Geology” when she is sober. In this way, Liptrot uses the geologic as a method of centring the protagonist more securely as she overcomes addiction, exploiting the renewable and relentless power of the wind and the waves to highlight human insignificance on the landscape. Removed from the instability of her life in London, she settles firmly in a place of geological nonhuman scale and renewable energy. Liptrot connects herself to the island through observations of human and nonhuman: as she says of the wind turbines dotted across the island, “the structures are our modern-day standing stones, cutting vertically across Orkney’s horizontal landscape.”Footnote 28 As the wind passes across the island’s geology, it passes across the turbines.
8. Summary
Some novels, including literary fiction, can be dangerously disengaged from the intersections of geological time and human history. As Amitav Ghosh notably wrote almost a decade ago: ‘the “manor house” of the canon is a delusional, unsustainable utopia that needs to be “contaminated” without delay by science fiction.’Footnote 29 My research shows that to some extent, this contamination of literary realist fiction, science fiction, and Anthropocene narrative is not yet achieving what Ghosh and others hope for; a raising of consciousness to induce a propensity to do something about climate change and environmental destruction in the Anthropocene.
Rob Nixon’s concept of slow violence is usefully relevant here. His belief in the need to engage in the incremental and accretive reflects the slow principles of geology and the Anthropocene: accretion is the method through which continents are made. Narrative “long-dyings” (Rob Nixon’s term for the “attritional catastrophes that overspill clear boundaries in time and space”) pose a challenge for contemporary literature, particularly the linear novel.Footnote 30 As long-held beliefs become unsettled it is challenging for realist texts to remain in sync with these new realities. Fiction about climate change has spawned a new genre—“cli-fi.” Digital video games, previously more concerned with the end of the world, resource management and surviving ecological breakdown are evolving. New research from Elena Shliakhovchuk et al. suggests that, “Applied gaming—using video games for purposes beyond entertainment—offers a promising approach to raising awareness and fostering engagement with climate issues.”Footnote 31 Current investigation and research into applied gaming would suggest so-called “ecogames” are thriving.Footnote 32
As readers and writers, we must move on. It is time to experiment with more playful and adaptive forms. In thinking like geologists, we may be more able to adapt to our current existence and inevitable extinction in the Anthropocene.
Author contribution
Conceptualization: L.G.
Funding Statement
The author’s PhD is funded by the AHRC (2022–2026) through the Midlands4Cities Doctoral Training Partnership.
Conflicts of interest
The author declares no competing interests.
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