LANDSCAPES OF THE ANTHROPOCENE - Rethinking Invasion Ecologies from the Environmental Humanities - page 65

on the east coast of New Zealand's South Island was first settled by Polynesian
peoples within the last few hundred years. The nature of their footprint contrasts
with the dramatic change wrought by Europeans since the 1840s, when indigenous
forests were transformed into improved landscapes of sown grass. The chapter is
shaped by a broad question: What can be learned from this place about the ways
in which people have exercised and are coming to terms with what Gibson-
Graham and Roelvink describe as our 'gargantuan agency' and 'almost unbearable
level of responsibility' in the Anthropocene (2009: 321)? It concludes with a
discussion of the concept of 'middle landscapes' as one means by which the
planetary dominion of humanity might be tempered with a realization of its
dependence on terrestrial ecosystems for continued survival.
Landscapes of the Anthropocene
Since the term 'Anthropocene' was first proposed by the Dutch atmospheric
chemist Paul Crutzen in 2000, it has been widely adopted as a dramatic, informal
metaphor of the effect of human agency in global environmental change dynamics.
In 2008, members of the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of
London asked: 'Are we now living in the Anthropocene?', and concluded on the
evidence of changes to physical sedimentation, carbon cycle perturbation and
temperatures, biotic extinctions and migrations and surface ocean acidity, that there
was sufficient grounds to recognize it 'as a new geological epoch' (Zalasiewicz et
al ., 2008: 8). This potential recategorization was discussed at a one-day meeting of
the Geological Society in 2011. More formally, it was placed before a working
group of the International Commission on Stratigraphy, which is due to report by
2016.
The issues that concern this group include when and with what criteria the
boundary should be drawn with the Holocene, that period of post-glacial
geological time that ushered in conditions suited to the development of human
agriculture and rapid population expansion. Most commentators agree with
Crutzen's original use of a social as well as scientific marker, being the onset of the
European Industrial Revolution from the late eighteenth century. Significantly,
this begins to give content to the 'Anthropocene' in specific and living ways, taking
it well beyond the geological into other disciplinary realms. The 2008 study cited
human landscape transformation as the cause of an observable increase over the last
200 years in the denudation rate, above that of 'natural sediment production by an
order of magnitude' (ibid.: 8). The nature of this landscape transformation has
attracted the attention of historically minded scholars for just as long, but crucially
this has been framed by how the concept of landscape itself is understood.
Landscape is an ambiguous word, loaded with a range of meanings, but with
the consistent function of acting as a lens through which the relations between
human cultures and nature are scrutinized. As a geographical term, Wylie (2011)
proposes that work on landscape can be identified within three broad traditions:
landscape (1) as material record; (2) as a way of seeing; and (3) as dwelling. The