In his new book The Genius of Earth Day, environmental historian Adam Rome writes about the origins of Earth Day. He brings to life a time when environmentalism was a new and exotic part of our everyday lives. In 1970, when the first Earth Day took place in the United States, the environment was generally a local concern. The idea came from the American Democratic senator Gaylord Nelson, who thought a national “teach-in” could help create engagement and awareness for environmental issues among young people. This was the beginning of the 1970s wave of environmentalist organizations, institutions, laws and regulations that swept over the entire western world.

Today, environmentalism is no longer exotic. The environmental movement is broader than ever, but also shallower. We all like and care about nature, but it is often the “Like” of Facebook – it’s easy, it feels positive, and doesn’t require all that much from us. “The environment” itself, on the other hand, includes everything, from our own backyards to phenomena that can only be understood on a planetary scale. What can a largely symbolical event like Earth Day teach us in such a context, if anything?

We suspected in 1970 that we were in trouble, and that our own choices as a society were to blame. 43 years later, we are pretty much sure of this. The world now seems a much more complicated place than in the early 1970s. In this series of blog posts for the Researcher Blog, I have explored the environmental implications of the Anthropocene, the Age of Man. As we have become increasingly aware of the interconnectedness of everything – ecology, politics, economy, culture, technology, and the sheer mass of humans living on Planet Earth – we are also realizing the difficulty of untangling the many issues and agendas that comprise what we call environmental problems.

The largest environmental challenges we face now are what we can call wicked problems – problems that have no easy solution, no readily identifiable cause, and no bad guy to blame. Global climate change is a perfect example – it is everywhere, yet it is hard to pin down to one particular place or factor. We face a strange mix of overly large global environmental problem and countless smaller problems that seem like individually insignificant first-world problems. Is there a mismatch between the stakes at hand and the means we have to meet the environmental problems of the Anthropocene?

I do not have the answer to that question – if it was that easy, then it wouldn’t be a wicked problem after all. Merely criticizing others for not taking serious action is not the way to go, however. The real challenge, I believe, lies in actually finding things that we can do, in asking what serious action is and can be. We cannot take for granted a steady relationship with Nature: instead, it’s complicated. Perhaps we need to keep in mind the original intention of Earth Day that Rome describes: it is an occasion for reflection and learning. One Earth Day may not change the world, but the Anthropocene calls for a future full of Earth Days, exploring what it is in our power to do, as individuals and as a society.

A red thread running through this argument is pure nostalgia, a desire to go back to when things supposedly were simpler and when the problems we had to deal with were not quite as wicked. If the current state of the world is a result of human activities, then Paleolithic man is only marginally complicit, having existed at a time when we still had a choice. The Neanderthals, on the other hand, are completely innocent and can not be blamed for the Anthropocene. The illustration below – one of many “evolution of man” spoofs that circulate on the internet – demonstrates this idea wonderfully.

The Paleolithic age, more commonly called “the Stone Age” started about 2,6 million years ago and ended about 10000 years ago, during which humans evolved from Homo habilis to Homo sapiens sapiens, in other words what is fundamentally modern humans. Today, consumers can emulate Stone Age life in many ways. For instance, the Paleolithic diet started appearing as a modern nutritional plan in the 1970s, and its proponents argued that since Paleolithic humans did not seem to have suffered from the affluence-related illnesses, their diets must have been much healthier. The Paleo diet encourages lean meat, fish, vegetables, fruit, roots and nuts as the mail food groups, while cereals, dairy products, salt and processed fat and sugar should be avoided.

In her book Paleofantasy: What Evolution Really Tells Us about Sex, Diet, and How We Live, Marlene Zuk dissects this modern Paleolithic dream. Zuk writes:

Julie Holland, a psychiatrist writing in Glamour magazine, counsels that if you ‘feel less than human,’ constantly stressed and run-down, you need to remember that ‘the way so many of us are living now goes against our nature. Biologically, we modern Homo sapiens are a lot like our cave woman ancestors: We’re animals. Primates, in fact. And we have many primal needs that get ignored. That’s why the prescription for good health may be as simple as asking, What would a cave woman do?’

This is a good question indeed. How would a cave woman deal with the Anthropocene? What would a Neanderthal man see if we managed to de-extinct this extinct species? We can only speculate, and both scientists and science fiction writers have done so recently. For instance, in David Brin’s at times mindboggling novel Existence, dealing with the question of life in the universe, we have succeeded in bringing Neanderthals back from extinction. They are very few, and do not play a major part in Brin’s book, but they represent a different perspective, a somewhat alien wisdom that Homo sapiens seems to have lost. They know what we have forgotten, and thus becomes a model for how we can move forward.

The problem is that we don’t know much about the Neanderthals. Scientists have quite recently finished the first draft of the Neanderthal genome map. From this we know that due to interbreeding, most modern humans (that is, us) have 1-4% Neanderthal in our genomes. What does that mean? There has also been much interest in trying to figure out who the Neanderthals were and how they interacted. Some scientists tried to decipher the social lives of the Neanderthals from the size of their skulls and eye sockets. For instance, some researchers at the University of Oxford theorized that the Neanderthals devoted less of their brain mass to social cognition. In other words, they could not handle social complexity well and had much smaller social networks than modern humans. Other scholars have criticized such theories as crude attempts at paleo-phrenology (after the thoroughly discredited and, frankly, racist early 19th-century pseudo-science of classifying people based on their head shape).

We are in other words dealing with some strange kind of futuristic nostalgia for a past that we really can’t say all that much about (which is a familiar working situation for many historians). The modern Paleofantasies and Neanderthal nostalgias illustrate how we tend to think things were better in the past, bemoaning the modern condition. Such a mindset has its roots in ideas of technological progress, I think. We seem to depend more and more on increasingly advanced technology. Progress becomes an arrow that moves from the past and into the future. The only way to resolve the problems caused by this progress becomes to look to the past. As I see it, the problem with such an approach is that we tend to forget the actual progress we have had. Life expectancy is so much better than it used to be, for instance. The cavemen that our Paleofantasies revolve around had a life expectancy at birth of 33 years. Children’s mortality rates have plummeted. And so on. So did things really use to be better? They certainly were different, and perhaps less complicated in some ways, but then again, perhaps they were not.

We can only speculate about the lives of Neanderthals based on genetic traces and found material artifacts. But through this speculation, particularly the kind that takes place in popular culture, we can find another interpretation of the Anthropocene: human evolution is over, and devolution has begun. It’s certainly true that lifestyle-related health issues have become a massive problem in the Anthropocene. Diabetes and obesity have replaced starvation in the western world (though poverty remains an important cause for all). Sitting is the new smoking, or, as Neal Stephenson so strikingly calls it, arsebestos. The wave of standing desks that have appeared in my department over the last year is an indicator of this trend.

The debate over human evolution and the distant past has much in common with the ongoing discussion of rewilding and de-extinction that I wrote about here last week. Rewilding, and ecological restoration for that matter, is an attempt to bring nature back to how it used to be, before something – most likely humans – ruined it. Again we see how the ideal and the baseline we use to evaluate environmental change, becomes a nature without people. Is Neanderthal nostalgia simply a dream of life on Earth without people? Are Paleofantasies in essence a dream of life without technology? If so, how useful are these concepts for resolving the wicked problems of the Anthropocene?

The past holds its lessons, but there is no going back. The past is past, and every day that passes is another day beyond the point of no return. The Anthropocene is full of problems and opportunities, of loss and creation, but we can only move forward, through problems and into the future. Having the wisdom and mandate to step right, on the other hand, is an entirely different matter. What are we to do with ourselves, with each other, with the world of the Anthropocene? A wicked problem indeed, and one where we need to look for possible answers in small details and large narratives, in the everyday and the extraordinary. More on this in my next post.

Originally published 5 April 2013 at the Umeå University researcher blog.

We know from science studies that we generally can’t know this “nature” directly. This idea of nature is becoming very hard to separate from the digital tools and media we use to observe, interpret, and manage it. Our ideas, our standards, for what is natural is distributed and maintained in digital tools and media like databases, computer models, geographical information systems, and so on. I can point to Paul Edwards’ prize-winning book on computer modeling and climate change, A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming as one recent example of studies really highlighting this perspective.

Such a perspective on nature pulls us in a few different directions. Up, towards abstraction and global management systems, like Edwards and his vast machines. But also down, out into the field, to the bodily experience of nature. I call these distant and close natures, directly borrowing from Stanford literature professor Franco Moretti’s ways of reading literature on different scales. And in what I have chosen to call annotated landscapes, the close and the distant overlap. If we think about how we often navigate landscapes now, accessing these invisible digital layers of information that annotate the landscapes as we move through it, using a handheld GPS-enabled device (finding out our direction, speed, altitude, routes, weather forecasts, notable attractions and their history, where’s the nearest Starbucks, etc.), we are simultaneously moving in both natures at once, both the immediate and physical on one hand, and the digital and distributed. It is in this loop of circulating natures that we experience and navigate the world around us.

What does this mean for the way we experience nature in the Anthropocene? First, it means that we only rarely access and experience nature directly, unfiltered and unprocessed by any form of technology. Second, there is no ”nature” without technology (and by that I mean our ideas about nature, the combination of the nature in our head and the nature ”out there”). In other words, the digital distribution of nature is just one more example of how hard it is to talk about a ”pure” nature in the Anthropocene. We could explore this entanglement of digital media, technologies, and the natural in many different ways, but since my blog posts here at Forskerbloggen have a tendency to get rather long, let us limit ourselves to one aspect of digital mapping that aims to really mediate the experience of the places they depict.

Touring the world on Google Maps

I think we all know know Google Maps, and most of us have probably also used Google Street View. You may perhaps even have seen the Google Street View car, a logo-filled Toyota Prius with a large black ball on a pole on the roof (I have seen it 3-4 times – and if you skip to the bottom of the post, you can see what happened when the car saw me as well). We have come to take the road-based street view scenes more or less for granted, a logical extension of GPS-based driving instructions. Still, many were upset when Google took Street View off the road and into what we consider natural areas. In 2012, Google added a walking tour of the Grand Canyon National Park, one of the most impressive nature tourism destinations in the world. The critics argued that such a digital representation of this area could not possibly give the right impression of one of the most sublime natural scenes in the world, and that Google thus shouldn’t even try to do it.

If we take a longer view of this development, what Google is doing is no different from what the pioneering tourist explorers of the 1800s did. They more or less walked by foot to every corner of Scandinavia (and elsewhere), identifying scenic locations and bringing them back to other people through writing, painting, and eventually taking pictures of these places. Many went further in even developing travel infrastructures, with roads, maps, and lodging near the tourist destinations that they identified, as a way of making it all more accessible. These were the kind of people who started the various national trekking associations worldwide, including Svenska Turistföreningen in 1885, to develop national nature-based tourism. In doing so, they cultivated a particular visual genre of appreciating nature (there is a much larger backstory about changing the idea of nature from a desolate wasteland to a sublime and valuable experience, as well as one of national romanticism). In this new genre, accessibility was just as important as authenticity.

So let us start our virtual field trip, going across the world. Below you can find a collection of Google Street View scenes – they can all be navigated using your mouse: you can pan and zoom around, and even walk around. As this collection can be quite taxing for your computer, I have only included a few examples below, but if you visit the Google Street View Gallery, you can find an amazing collection of scenes, including World Heritage Sites, mountains, railroads, underwater locations, and so on. I can also recommend the Google Sightseeing blog (with the charming slogan ”Why bother seeing the world for real?”).

EMBEDDED STREET VIEW SECTIONS HAVE BEEN REMOVED FOR TECHNICAL REASONS

Let us be clear – such virtual field trips are not meant to be a replacement for the bodily experience of being in a particular place. I wouldn’t call it an inferior experience either. Instead, it is a different way of experiencing particular places, most of which we will never get to see in person (and if most of us did get a chance to do it, the places would most likely be changed beyond recognition – the so-called tourist’s dilemma). The question is whether these Street View experiences make us appreciate places we’ve never experienced in person, if they make us more or less aware of diversity, of development, of environmental change, and so on. Is it possible to use virtual field trips such as these in teaching, for instance? If we manage to move beyond the simple ”it’s not real nature”-level of criticism, what can Google Street View tell us about the world?

Finally, as a bonus for those of you who managed to read the entire post – a portrait of the author on Google Street View, outside St. Olav’s Hospital in Trondheim. I apologize for my somewhat rough look – my youngest daughter had been born just a few days ago, and I think I had spent the night on a couch in the hospital. The Google car took me completely by surprise.

Note that I chose to call this a narrative about nature. This is not the same as saying that these problems are fictional and thus don’t exist (they do). Narratives are storytelling mechanisms that organize and connect events in time and space. They are one of the ways in which we attempt to make sense of the world around us, as individuals and as societies. If we want to make any headway with the environmental problems that we face in the Anthropocene, we need to think critically about the narratives we tell to ourselves and to others about nature and culture.

At the core, narratives about environmental decline begin with the idea of nature as once whole, pristine, and untouched. Once upon a time there was an environmental baseline that we not only measure, but also judge environmental change against. If there are people in the story, they tend to live in harmony with nature, knowing their place in the ecosystem. Environmental degradation often follows with the introduction of new technologies or when people start showing up in places where they don’t belong. For example, one of the big discussions in environmental history has been whether the exploitation and degradation of nature came with European settlers to the American continent. While the coming of the Europeans dramatically changed the scale and speed of the exploitation of natural resources, the American continent was far from pristine before 1492. Native Americans were as thoroughly entangled with their environments as the Europeans were, altering ecologies and ecosystems in ways that were not necessarily sustainable.

Few narratives have been as powerful for the environmental movement as the one about wilderness. It is such an evocative word, wilderness, making us think of large untouched areas of pure, undisturbed nature where people haven’t messed up things yet. The Anthropocene does not reach into the wilderness, making it a place or perhaps a state of mind where we can go to escape the frustration of wicked problems. Prominent environmental historian Bill Cronon stirred up much debate when he challenged this idea of untouched wilderness in his essay “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature” in the 1990s. He argued that by setting aside “real” nature as a place without humans, we “leave ourselves little hope of discovering what an ethical, sustainable, honorable human place in nature might actually look like.” In the wide-ranging “great new wilderness debate” that followed, many found it hard to give up the idea of untouched nature.

So how useful is this idea of a once-pristine world as a baseline for fields like conservation biology, restoration ecology, or just for environmentalists in general? Not very, argues science journalist Emma Marris. Her book, Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World, is a powerful vision of new natures that are hybrids of “wild” nature and human management. New natures are being born all around us, every day, but these don’t always fit our image of “wild” nature. Urban ecologies, de-extinction, species reintroduction, re-wilding – all these are just some examples of new, hybrid forms of “nature” in the Anthropocene. So do invasive species that move into new areas as a result of urbanization, development, or climate change. How are we to say what belongs and what does not?

What kinds of new natures can we find in Västerbotten or around Umeå? Well, we can look at animals and species, as Dolly Jørgensen explores in her current research project and that my colleague Erland Mårald wrote about in VK not long ago. We tend to think of particular kinds of wildlife as belonging in particular landscapes. These become native species, whereas others are “alien” or “invasive.” The problem is that animals have their own interests: they move around, trying to find places with food, potential mates, or other things that interest or attract them. The recent controversy over the Junsele wolf is a good example – this unruly wolf simply doesn’t want to stay put in the place that we have designated as an appropriate and culturally acceptable habitat for it. Another example is the raccoon dog (Nyctereutes procyonoides) that Erland Mårald wrote about, an ”unwanted” species that is currently moving into Scandinavia from the east. We need to be prepared for an increasing number of such uneasy encounters with animals and other organisms as the Northern climate continues changing.

Maciej Zaremba provided us with another example in his stunning article series for Dagens Nyheter (and subsequent book) on clear-cutting practices (“kalhygge”) in Swedish forests. The problem with most Swedish forest is that it is a natural resource in both meanings of the word. The forest is one of the natural settings that most people appreciate and actively use for recreation. But at the same time, the forest is a resource managed by forestry companies over fascinatingly long time-scales, to be harvested when the trees are ready. Put somewhat simply, one group sees the forest, while the other sees the trees. Swedish forests can be considered one big organic factory, but since the production time stretches over several generations, people start thinking about the factory forest as natural forest, one that has been there for as long as they can remember and that thus should continue to be there in the future. The big problem arises when we start thinking of the naturalness of the forest as an either/or condition, when it is actually both. I suspect that this paradox at the core of Zaremba’s narrative makes us as uncomfortable as his exposure of unethical forestry practices.

More than 20 years ago, the ecologist Daniel Botkin wrote that “nature in the twenty-first century will be a nature that we make; the question is the degree to which this molding will be intentional or unintentional, desirable or undesirable.” We can’t understand the changing world of the Anthropocene without simultaneously considering our own place in this world . But to do this, we need to be open for new natures as well as our traditional understandings of nature. As Bill Cronon concluded in his wilderness essay, “if wildness can stop being (just) out there and start being (also) in here, if it can start being as humane as it is natural, then perhaps we can get on with the unending task of struggling to live rightly in the world—not just in the garden, not just in the wilderness, but in the home that encompasses them both.”

Second, we can observe how many products make claims about nature, naturalness, and connections to place. “100% Natural,” “Ecological,” “Sustainable,” “Green,” “Biodynamic,” ”Organic,” “Pure,” “Authentic,” “Local,” “Short-traveled” – the list goes on and on. We can’t help but care about such claims since they speak to the very direct relationship between the products we buy, the place they come from, and our bodies. By claiming to be natural, the food promises to be good for us, or at least not to be directly harmful.

The American writer Nathanael Johnson explored the tensions between “naturalness” and technology in his brand new book All Natural*: *A Skeptic’s Quest to Discover If the Natural Approach to Diet, Childbirth, Healing, and the Environment Really Keeps Us Healthier and Happier. In his interpretation, we suffer from “ecological anxiety,” a vague but insistent feeling that despite all the obviously good things about modern society, something has gone wrong on the way. We are missing something that we used to have, know, or feel, back when things used to be “natural.” As a result, we are drawn to products, solutions, and lifestyles that claim to be “natural.” Others eschew “natural”, aiming instead for the clinical reliability of modern technology. This fundamental divide becomes particularly obvious in healthcare, but we can also find it in food. Michael Pollan has, for instance, written a whole series of books about natural and technological food systems, or as he calls it, “real food” and “edible, food-like substances.”

Johnson sensibly argues that both views, when taken to an extreme, can be dangerous, and that we need to decide on a case-to-case basis, using the available scientific knowledge, whether the “natural” or the “technological” is the best or most appropriate solution. Another example is what sociologist Andrew Szasz calls “inverse quarantine”, where people buy bottled water, organic food, and so on, hoping to protect themselves from harmful substances. His book Shopping Our Way to Safety argues that this individualist approach to environmental protection takes away attention from the larger, global, and structural issues at hand. Szasz says “consumers believe these products will protect them, which creates a kind of political ‘anesthesia’ that severely reduces their willingness to participate in collective political action to generate real change.”

In this span between natural and technological, local and global, known and unknown, safe and dangerous, we find the real challenge of addressing the bundle of issues that we call the Anthropocene. If consumers are to participate in “collective political action”, what is it exactly this action should target and what qualifies as “real change”? Here, I should be clear that I’m not asking this question to say that everything is hopeless and that we shouldn’t try to do anything. I am particularly interested in this as a research question: how can people (whether we call them consumers or citizens) know that their individual actions matter for what we increasingly understand as global problems? This was one of the more fundamental questions I explored in my book on bottle recycling.

In my previous post here at Forskarbloggen, I defined the Anthropocene as a whole cluster of wicked problems, intersecting and interlocked with each other, entangled and unruly. Tracing and measuring the effects of our actions through such a complex web of relations is beyond the capabilities of any individual person. Instead, we need to rely on – and trust – scientific knowledge and the technological infrastructures that surround us. Now, there are many indications that with food safety, blind trust is not a wise strategy.

The alternative is going all local, of personally knowing the origins and the paths the food we eat take. We can do this by growing our own food, using seeds that we trust, in soil we know is not contaminated, using clean water and clean air – as we can see, ensuring absolute certainty and purity becomes very tricky. Or we can trace the origins of our food in other, more technological ways. Origin marking of food has become more and more specific, where it is no longer sufficient to know the country of origin, but even the region or individual farm where the food comes from.

One possible logical endpoint of such origin marking is QR-tagged food that you can scan with your smartphone in the store to see videos of and other information about the particular animal you are about to eat, happily cavorting about with its friends in “natural” surroundings. We may not raise our own pigs in our gardens anymore, but at least we can know that the bacon we’re about to eat came from a pig that lived a good life. Such scenarios are halfway feel-good and halfway creepy (the talking cow recommending choice cuts of meat from its own body in Douglas Adams’ Restaurant at the End of the Universe comes to mind), but it also represents the extreme privilege of affluent consumers who can pick and choose. Very few of us can afford that luxury, and if we are to be serious about “collective political action” and “real change” we need to think carefully about how proposed or imagined solutions scale up.

In other words, it seems hard to escape the dilemma of ecological anxiety that Nathanael Johnson describes. It is getting increasingly harder to separate the natural from the technological, and the nature “out there” does not necessarily match up with the ideas of nature we have in our heads. Perhaps it is better to settle for 68% natural than 100% natural – it just doesn’t make for a very strong slogan (”Try this brand new sausage – it’s 68% natural!”).

I’ll continue this discussion in a special Easter post on ”new natures” during the Easter weekend.

How can we understand an event such as Earth Hour? What is the point of such events? What are the motivations of the people who observe Earth Hour, and of those who don’t?  Which problems are they trying to deal with and which values do they attempt to live up to? Earth Hour started by WWF in Australia in 2007, and spread worldwide from 2008. Today it is a more or less global event, visible from space. Earth Hour co-founder Andy Ridley stated that “Any movement of change begins with symbolism – it’s a needed step to prove enough people care about an issue.”  The goal of Earth Hour is to make a difference, but not through any actual reduction in electricity usage during this one out of  the 8760 hours in a year. By turning off the lights, we may shine a light on ourselves and the ways in which we have chosen to live our lives.

Many say that Earth Hour is pointless since it doesn’t actually reduce emissions by much, and in some cases might potentially increase emissions and damage the electricity network. They are completely right, yet they have also missed the point entirely. The only problem is that we can say more or less the same thing about those who believe that Earth Hour can have a positive effect as a symbolical action. They are completely right, but they are also missing the point. It gets even more interesting when we consider that we can find people who consider themselves environmentalists in both camps.

The problem of Earth Hour illustrates well the challenges for environmentalism in the Anthropocene, the Age of Man. The Anthropocene indicates the time when man has had a significant effect on global ecosystems, in other words when we have markedly reshaped the global environments and ecologies we live in in ways that may or may not be permanent. The world has become a relatively small place, where more and more places are connected to each other. The environmental consequences of human activity on the planet have become increasingly obvious. We struggle with global climate change, species extinction, “spillover” virus epidemics, natural resource conflicts, and a host of other social, political, scientific, and environmental challenges.

At the same time, the world is still a big place, full of interlocking and interdependent processes that we don’t completely understand and may never be able to. The environmental and social problems we face can’t be reduced to a single issue, easily resolved by social or technological fixes. The world is a tangled mess, and all of the challenges I listed above can be called wicked problems, in other words problems to which there are no simple solutions, no single end we can pull to unravel the problem. As a result, the debate on the Anthropocene tends to focus on the problems, on how our actions over time have irrevocably changed the Earth at a geological level, and how hard it is getting to maintain our current ways of living. We can see consequences of our actions around us (or at least endlessly speculate and debate them), but they are hard to trace back to any particular factor, action, or actor.  As a result, effective action becomes near impossible. Who should act? What should they do? What should we do? How can we know that any action has any effect, be it Earth hour, bottle recycling (which I wrote a whole book about), carbon credits, global climate treaties, or simply withdrawing from modern society to live off the grid in a small house in an imagined wilderness? We are in the dark in more ways than one, when we turn off the lights for Earth Hour. We are trying to answer a call for action, but the best course of action is by no means illuminated and clear for us.

What I want to do with this series of blog posts over the next two weeks is to explore the Anthropocene hypothesis and what it means for us, thinking about the ways in which nature has become entangled with us. I don’t think anyone will disagree if I say that we have been dependent on nature for as long as we have existed as a species. But we have become so many and so involved in ecological processes that nature now also depends on us. Though, it is more correct to say “Nature”, capital N, a historical and cultural construct full of human values, aesthetics, and politics. The Nature that depends upon us is our Nature, the one that we are part of. It is a nature that exists as much in our heads and in our shared and contested history as it exists “out there.” If we live in a world where we have influenced ecosystems and environments to the degree that they can no longer be said to be “natural”, what does that say about the Earth we live on and our place on it? If we were to suddenly disappear, as the journalist Alex Weisman speculated in The World Without Us (2008), some kind of nature would continue to exist, benefiting other species, but it would not be what we think of as nature today. In short, we may care about the planet, but the planet doesn’t necessarily care about us.

The idea of the Anthropocene raises a whole series of interesting and important implications. It is a classic Big Idea, perhaps one of the biggest we have at the moment, that touches upon more or less everything, and that requires perspectives from the humanities, the social sciences, the natural sciences, and medicine to fully grasp. How can we understand a big idea as the Anthropocene on an empirical level? Scholars often see as their role to untangle, to sort things out, and to put things neatly in the right boxes: “Society” goes over here, “Nature” goes over here. The Anthropocene doesn’t work like that. Instead, we need to seek out the wicked entanglements, the sources of friction, and where things get messy.

This brings us back to the problem of Earth Hour. Is it best to observe the Anthropocene by candlelight or by the soft glow of standby indicator lights in the dark or by the bright LED lamps of a giant flatscreen TV? Turning off the light for an hour will not change the world out there, but it may shine a light on the Nature in our heads, on the way we think about our place in the world.