Excerpt: As a global epoch and as a critical-theoretical center of gravity, the Anthropocene is big, amorphous, and daunting, not only because of its scale but also because of its trajectory. Its scale is massive, comprehending the entire human history of intervening in and imposing on geologic and ecological processes. Somewhat like the inception of the witchery in the Laguna Pueblo writer Leslie Marmon Silko’s novel Ceremony, the Anthropocene’s origins are hard to date with specificity, but the more urgent concern with both the witchery and the Anthropocene is not when they began but how and whether they will ever end. Certainly, one of the most challenging characteristics of the Anthropocene is that it has come to seem unstoppable as its present course arcs, with plausible inevitability, toward doom.
settler colonial studies blog 