Tag Archives: Anthropocene

Historic Range

Historic Range – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week on the Wednesday Blog, why our conversations about ecology and culture are grounded in loss. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane
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This week on the Wednesday Blog, why our conversations about ecology and culture are grounded in loss.

Over this past weekend I was in Denver for a cousin’s wedding, a joyous event on Sunday evening that was beautiful to be a part of. Besides the two evening events on Saturday and Sunday I had the weekend to myself to spend some time in one of my favorite cities in the United States. My first stop on Saturday morning then was to my old favorite Denver haunt, the Museum of Nature and Science in City Park. Longtime readers of the Wednesday Blog will remember this museum from my two-part post from the pre-podcast days of June 2021 titled “Sneezing Across the West,” in which I described my return to this museum as an adult 22 years after visiting as a young child.

The Denver Museum of Nature and Science excels in its collection of dioramas, scenes from the natural world of taxidermied animals in their own habitats recreated in several halls on two floors for the public to experience a snapshot of wild life in its element. These dioramas capture my attention today far more than most paleontological exhibits, as while I enjoy seeing the dinosaurs and their fellow fossils, I’m now more drawn to the recreations of modern lifeforms, particularly mammals, that dioramas offer.

The DMNS’s koalas.

On this Saturday morning stroll through the museum, I stopped in front of a display of a puma, North America’s famed mountain lion, one of our more enigmatic megafaunal predators. I haven’t seen any mountain lions in the wild, though on one occasion a decade ago while hiking to a cave to shoot an ill-fated short film adaptation of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave in Pike National Forest I could swear our party was being watched from the ridgeline several hundred feet above us by a puma. I’ve only ever seen and encountered pumas in zoos and museums, behind wire fencing or glass. I got to know the resident puma in the Ross Park Zoo in Binghamton rather well, to the point that it would slow blink at me as I approached it, a sign among domestic cats of acceptance.

With my own limited experiences of pumas in the wild, it struck me to see the ubiquitous line on the diorama’s plaque which read “Historic Range” on the key to a map which showed how most of this continent was once puma country. I paused in my stroll at that point, and it occurred to me that our entire narrative of conservation and the preservation of human diversity in North America goes back at some point to a story of historic loss and the subsequent poverty for certain pieces in the continent’s ecology. For one thing, we lack large predators in much of North America west of the Rockies today, so especially in the great eastern woodlands the deer population is often higher than it ought to be.

Still, there is this core truth to our continental story, let alone the collective history of our hemisphere which tells of a black mark in our soil dividing the present age born in imperial colonialism and the time which came before. Like the K-T Boundary which can be seen in rock strata dividing the fossilized remains of creatures who lived at the time of the dinosaurs below in the Cretaceous Period and in the Tertiary Period after the asteroid impact which saw the demise of those reptiles 66 million years ago, this line demarcates a clear beginning of a modern world in the Americas warts and all. Before the arrival of Europeans into each distinct region of the Americas, each valley even, life on these continents developed in a very different manner, responding to circumstances which existed perfectly well without all the new flora, fauna, and bacteria which my European forebearers introduced after 1492.

I’ve always felt grief at the idea that so much of the life on these continents once flourished and now lies far diminished, shadows of their former selves. We could say that nature has been lost in the drive for conquest, to paraphrase a key point in Betty Meggers’s 1996 book Amazonia: Man and Culture in a Counterfeit Paradise, in our desire to realign nature around us to fit our own interests, we replace a tortured ecosystem with a corrupted egosystem which pales in comparison to its former glory. Nature is something we can try to control yet never fully overcome, for in spite of ourselves we remain a part of the natural world we seek to command to our will. Like Cnut in his greatest legend, we cannot command the tide to turn, nor can we even really ask, we can only observe and embrace the patterns of nature as they have developed over eons.

On Sunday, I turned from the beauty of the natural world to the beauty of the artistic world. That morning I paid my first visit to the Denver Art Museum, and was astounded by the seven stories of galleries, each designed around not only the art they contained but with strategically placed windows which opened the objects within to the cityscape and distant peaks of the Front Range and the Rocky Mountains beyond. I was most moved by the gallery containing art from the Old West, the period in my own home region’s history just before my ancestors arrived in places like Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Nebraska, and North Dakota at the turn of the last century. At the peak of what we call the Wild West, most of my ancestors who were living in the United States were farmers in Bureau County, Illinois, today located along Interstate 80 and the BNSF line that Amtrak’s Southwest Chief rolls along each day from Chicago to Los Angeles.

I grew up with a very romantic view of the Old West, of the cowboys and ranches, the wide open spaces of the prairies and the wild mountain landscapes of the Rockies which I visited as a child in the 1990s and early 2000s on annual summer trips to a dude ranch in Pike National Forest (the same property where I shot that film in 2013). Like many kids at that age, at the height of my love for the Old West, I wanted to be a cowboy paleontologist, pairing that historical fascination with my equally powerful love for dinosaurs. While I was in Binghamton, I enjoyed driving the 75 miles west to Corning, New York to visit the Rockwell Museum which specializes in this same American Western art, in order to get a taste there in the East not only of my childhood love for the West, but a sense of my own home region as it once was, a slight pill for my ever-present homesickness. Yet while the Rockwell Museum highlighted the effects of Manifest Destiny and westward expansion on the Native Americans and Mexican settlers who were already there, topics I’ve taught about in the U.S. History survey courses I’ve TAed before, it wasn’t until I wandered through that gallery on the 7th floor of the Denver Art Museum that I really began to understand how the romantic adventure stories of my childhood were also laments of the conquest of the world known and loved by the people who were already here.

On my way to Denver on Friday evening, I read a story in Smithsonian Magazine about the donation made by the Choctaw in the 1840s to help my own people, the Irish, during the Great Hunger caused by the potato blight that struck Europe at the time. I’d known about that donation for many years ever since I read about it in an Irish history book titled The Famine Ships when I was in middle school. Yet this article telling of two Choctaw students using an Irish Government program to travel to UC Cork to study and coming into direct contact with people whose lives and history were impacted by such unexpected generosity generations ago. My 3rd and 4th great grandfathers Keane were the ones who lived during An Gorta Mór, and on the Irish side of my mother’s family, my Irish 4th great grandparents came to America in the same decade after participating in the 1848 Young Irelander Rebellion. Like the Irish participants in the Smithsonian article, I too feel some of the kindness offered to my ancestors in one of their greatest times of need.

This empathy helps me to see less of the romance in the art from the Old West depicting the lonely native warrior standing proud and defiant against the conqueror, and more of the common cost of colonization which both my own ancestors in Ireland and the native peoples of these continents have faced down the generations. We all have our historic range, like the pumas in my life, we all have the limits to our modern lives cast in iron by the will of others seeking to control far further than their own borders. Denver today holds some of that Old West spirit that once defined it and Colorado at its core, yet the many voices which have written that city’s history and continue to define its present and future remain strong. In the Museum of Nature and Science I noticed how the remaining older exhibits were monolingual, with plaques written only in English, while all of the newer materials there and in the Art Museum are bilingual in English and Spanish.

We can learn from each other, and perhaps even restore some of the memory of our histories if we learn to listen to each other speak in our own words. The relationships we have with our relatives, friends, and neighbors alike will change with time, yet it is up to us what those changes will be.

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Homo Sapiens

A particularly bumbling specimen of the species.

Homo Sapiens – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, a bit of self-reflection. The Man from Earth website The Man from Earth trailer

On Monday last week, I sat down to watch the 2007 film The Man from Earth for the second time. You may remember hearing or even reading my reflections provoked by that film. I said I’d probably watch the sequel, The Man from Earth: Holocene soon, and well I did just that. Compared to the original, Holocene lacks some of the powerful dialogue, and the gripping storytelling. The Man from Earth felt like it was a story being told in real time, while Holocene, its sequel, seemed more like a TV pilot that was turned into a feature. Both films feature some wonderful actors that I recognize from the many Star Trek series I’ve seen in the last few years, notably John Billingsley and Richard Riehle in the first film, and the great Michael Dorn himself makes a wonderful appearance in the second film.

If I were to draw any deep arguments out of the second film, Holocene, it would be something to do with how we identify ourselves. We humans call ourselves Homo sapiens, a scientific designation that we’ve given to ourselves to distinguish us from our hominid cousins including the Neanderthals. Homo is Latin for human; it is the genus which represents all hominids as a subset of primates. Sapiens on the other hand is more interesting. It is a Latin participle based on the 3rd conjugation verb sapiō, sapere which is used to mean many things from “to taste,” “to have flavor,” to the more innate concept of being able to sense or discern things, all of which is necessary for knowledge. Homo sapiens then means we distinguish ourselves from our hominid cousins by our abilities to understand ideas. Now there’s evidence today that other early humans could think and create in ways that are similar to us, evidence for example that Neanderthals created art of some sort in ancient Europe, so in many ways the fact we designate we humans as Homo sapiens is as much a way of patting ourselves on the back as anything else.

This brings me back to The Man from Earth: Holocene. It’s a film that introduces the core conflict when a group of inquisitive undergrads start to wonder about their professor who they soon realize is the same 14,000-year-old man from the first film. Only now he’s begun to age in slow but noticeable ways. This film made me question the idea that we are Homo sapiens for the personifications of humanity in this film, the four students seeking the truth about their professor, make a series of terrible decisions that prove as book smart as they might be they are clueless to so many other factors of life. Homo sapiens indeed.

In my own research I study the introduction of Brazilian flora and fauna into European natural history through the writings of several French explorers dating to the 1550s through the 1580s. And while I came into my research thinking I would have some fun writing about sloths and parrots and dyewood trees, I have found that the story I’m trying to tell is as much a warning to our present and our future as it is anything mundane about Renaissance natural history. There is a theory, an idea that is introduced late in The Man from Earth: Holocene called the Anthropocene, a concept that is widely discussed today which argues that human interventions and influence upon nature have become so great that we have shifted the course of Earth’s natural development from the Holocene, the current geological epoch defined by our planet’s warming by the Sun over the past 11,650 years, making for the perfect conditions for the development of life as we know it today into a new geological epoch where we humans, the Anthropoi in Greek, are now the prime movers of Earth’s natural course. In the film this becomes an understated note of caution, yet in my own research I find the Anthropocene to be a fundamental piece of the story of the European exploration, conquest, and colonization of the Americas largely ignored until recently.

We call ourselves discerning, we call ourselves wise, and yet we allow our own demands on nature to outstrip what nature can provide. It’s a curious balance we need to maintain, one which I am just as guilty of destabilizing as anyone else. It’s curious to me that we call ourselves wise when we think of all we have done with our home. We are one of maybe only a handful of species (leaving room here for other hominids at least) that has created beautiful art and weapons of mass destruction all with the same innate tool: our brains. We have just as much an ability to love as to fear, and in a given day I think it’s safe to say we act on those emotions without often really realizing it. 

Through it all we’ve survived and thrived on this planet of ours. There are 7.9 billion of us today, and while our population growth is a marvel of our ingenuity and ability to adapt to everything that this planet has had to offer so far, our own exponential growth may be the thing that drives the planet to the point of no longer being able to care for us the way we have been. If we don’t eat, we starve, yet if we eat too much we will run out of food and then starve. As the Man from Earth himself said in the first film, it’s the species that live in balance with nature that survive.

I argue in my dissertation that the Anthropocene really began when two different gene pools of life, one Afro-Eurasian the other American intersected in a large scale for the first time in thousands of years following Columbus’s accidental stumbling on land and people on this side of the Atlantic in 1492. That was the moment when human endeavors began to triumph over natural barriers, when a new global world was first conceived out of the collective products of a series of old worlds on every inhabited continent. It’s fair to call ourselves sapiens, discerning and wise, for the fact that it was humans who bridged that gap through innovation and technology. Yet it’s also fair to say that it was humans too whose innovation and technology created the great climate crisis we find ourselves in now. While the pessimists among us would end the story there, in a way that is in vogue to do these days, I want to continue the story, to contribute a verse to the poetry of life and say to you here and now today that it will be our innovation and technology, our discerning and wise nature that will figure out a way out of this crisis and that will lead us to adapt again to a new life in this new world we’ve created in our own image.

The Man from Earth speaks to me of the potential of humanity and of how at the end of the day we’re still just telling each other the same sorts of stories around a campfire. Like our ancient ancestors before us we see what we know and imagine what could be out there beyond the light of our knowledge. Unlike our ancestors we today are comfortable in a world we’ve created for ourselves, or at least some among us are comfortable in that world. We don’t need to innovate quite so greatly as past generations; we can let our minds become lazy and unimaginative. Like the big wigs from every time just before a storm we can be content and let the tides overcome us, but some among us will be hit more fiercely by those tides than others, and they’ll be the ones to stand up and say we can do better for ourselves. We will always stumble and fall, like those four characters from The Man from Earth: Holocene but we will always find a way of getting back up.

At the end of the day, we’ve created this new world where we are at its center, the keystone species around which all others exist in a new balance. I personally find that balance more precarious than I’d like, and personally I’d rather not be the one holding the entire balance of nature up like some modern Atlas. Yet over generations of decisions for good or ill this is what we’ve decided to do, and who we’ve decided to become. All we can do now is live up to the task and make the burden less strenuous for our descendants.

Natural History

Fremont culture petroglyphs, Dinosaur National Monument. Photo by the author.

Natural History – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I'm thinking about how we humans fit into the structures of natural history.

There’s a big problem with a lot of older anthropology exhibits in natural history museums around the globe, namely that they were built in the last two centuries often using either old and out of date information about the peoples they seek to describe, or like the old bronzes depicting the variety of humanity in the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, they were inherently racist to begin with.

Museums like San Diego’s anthropology museum have sought to rectify this with rebrandings and reorganizations. The museum in question, located in the California Tower building in Balboa Park, has recently renamed itself from the Museum of Man to the Museum of Us. Others like the Musée de l’Homme in Paris have worked to reassess how they display older historic anthropological exhibits like those old bronzes, so that today their primary message is one of “this is how people used to think, but not how we think anymore.” They’ve gone from being scientific teaching tools to historical artifacts.

There needs to be a very fine balance between lumping individual ethnicities with the rest of the natural world and actually considering humanity as a whole as part of nature. We are, after all natural beings, no matter how far we try to remove ourselves from nature with the edifices of civilization we’ve built up around ourselves. In case you’re wondering, this is a pretty central theme to the dissertation that I’m writing. In older generations, the idea of “natural humanity” was inherently understood to mean different peoples who were less civilized than others. It was used in the idea of the savage as a means of demeaning and describing the native peoples of the Americas following the beginning of the Columbian Exchange in 1492 (borrowing a term from one of my favorite historians, Alfred Crosby, here).

I’ve often thought of the world natural as being something good. Natural, or organic, food often tastes far better than the processed stuff. Natural soaps and such are less likely to harm our bodies. There’s even a style of music that I’ve called “natural” before, but only to myself. The liturgical music written by the St. Louis Jesuits, or the album Adiemus by Karl Jenkins would fall into this category.

So, if we’re natural beings, why then shouldn’t we be included in the kaleidoscope of life studied under the big tent of natural history? I for one have developed my own professional career from being an intellectual historian of the Renaissance to being a historian of late Renaissance natural history. That means I study natural history texts written between 1550 and 1600, in particular those which introduced new species from the Americas to audiences in Europe. At the time, natural history was closely related to another field called Cosmography, which while originally a theological study of the Cosmos had by the Renaissance become essentially the study of everything natural and human under the Sun. The first great proto-encyclopedias of our own modern age were descendants of the cosmographies of people like Sebastian Münster and my own focus of study, André Thevet (1516-1590), whose Cosmographie Universelle (1575) basically sought to describe everything, and yes I mean everything, that he knew about.

Today, we live at a turning point in human history. It seems like the last vestiges of the post-World War II order are finally beginning to break off, letting whatever the current century will bring be hatched from that shell born of the last century. Every century’s generations live in the shadows of their forebearers and have to figure out how to deal both with the benefits and the problems those generations left them. So, for us today talking about natural history we have the terrible realities of racism and bigotry which cloud this field and all its constituent studies. I do think humanity ought to be considered a part of natural history, ought to be studied like any other animal, but if we are going to speak of ourselves in those sorts of terms then it ought to do it in the same language across the board for all humanity, recognizing that we are all equal.

Today though, even more than any other time in our past, humanity has a critical role in the future of nature, and the stories that will be told someday in natural history. We’ve entered the beginnings of a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, when we are the greatest influencers on the natural order of things. I’m seeing this in how many natural history and science museums have extensive exhibits on climate change, and even the handful of older ones on human biology, like my personal favorite at the Natural History Museum in London. We can try to ignore our part in shaping life on Earth, but at the end of the day as much as we’ll ignore it, we’ll end up like the proverbial unicorns who missed the boat. At that point, we will fall victim to our own pride, to our own endless thirst for more raw materials until the nature we need to survive has been stripped away. Human history has always been a part of natural history. Perhaps that’s a key to solving our current crises and all potential crises in the future: we must reckon with nature and our place within it.