Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
A troubling but nonetheless instructive place to think about the relational spaces of the Anthropocene
is the North Pacific Ocean. Reports suggest that the ocean currents in the North Pacific (commonly
referred to as the North Pacific Gyre) have produced two huge trash vortexes (the Eastern and
Western Garbage Patches), made up of human waste products. Reports of the actual size of the trash
vortex vary greatly, with estimates ranging from 700,000 to 15,000,000 square kilometres (see Marks,
2008). This floating mass of micro-plastics, cigarette lighters and syringes inter alia has been linked
to the death of approximately 1 million seabirds every year and 100,000 marine mammals (Marks,
2008). The sheer scale of the North Pacific trash vortex provides a poignant place to think about
human impacts on the marine environment within the Anthropocene. Given the fact that the trash
vortex is formed by waste products that travel thousands of miles, from a multitude of places, before
collectively forming this floating island of debris, the North Pacific also provides us with an indication
of the complex relational processes in and through which environmental change is generated in
the Anthropocene.
Key readings
Marks, K. (2008) 'The world's rubbish dump', The Independent 5 February,
http://www.independent.co.uk/
(accessed 1 July 2013)
Also watch the chilling documentary film Midway: Message from the Gyre,
http://vimeo.com/25563376
(accessed 2 July 2013)
deserts of Los Alamos (the home of the Manhattan
Project and the nuclear bomb). It is about
understanding how certain places are both
instrumental in orchestrating current human-
environmental relations and at the same time
express the effects of those same relations. Studying
the ghost town of Pripyat in the Ukraine (and the
effects of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster there),
or Malakoff Diggins in California (and the
impacts of large-scale hydraulic mining, see
Chapter 2)
, or the Aral Sea in Kazakhstan and
Uzbekistan (and its gradual retreat and desicca-
tion), or the community of Bhopal, India (and the
associated consequences of industrial catastro-
phes), provide important starting points for us to
understand how collective forms of human-
environmental relations are expressed and resisted
in particular places. But locating the Anthropocene
is not simply about exploring its most extreme
geographical consequences. It should also involve
a concern for more mundane domestic places
such as the home, the suburb and the slum
(see Shove, 2003). Collectively, these places
constitute critical contexts within which human
relations with the environment get expressed and
normalized. Ultimately locating the Anthropocene
provides us with an opportunity to see if our
theories about its nature and form are accurate,
and the ways in which such general theories may
apply differently in different places.
The final key component associated with
geographical studies of human-environmental
relations is its particular concern with the forma-
tion and operation of spatial systems. Spatial
systems exist when geographical spaces of various
sizes come together to form interconnected
arrangements of coordination and support. Spatial
systems can include cities, regional economies,
nation states and even transnational economic
and political blocs. In Harvey's classic work on
