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Towards a Librarianship of the Future: Fostering Cultural Adaptation to Climate Change

In Brief

The field of library science is paying increasing attention to anthropogenic climate change by exploring best practices for mitigating damage from environmental disasters and participating in climate action. This work is valuable, but it does not necessarily take on the cultural dimensions of climate adaptation. How are unquestioned ideas about time and decay supporting the carbon-heavy preservation of archival materials? How can libraries promote interspecies kinship, consider the legacy of industrial colonialism, and acknowledge the emotional impact of environmental destruction? To approach these questions, this article introduces thinkers from the environmental humanities and Anthropocene scholarship and applies their work to the field of library science. It explores alternatives to linear concepts of time, affective materiality of archival objects, palliative death ethics, and Indigenous perspectives of climate change as the legacy of industrial colonialism. The article concludes by suggesting ways that institutions can promote cultural adaptation to climate change.

By Nora Zahn

Introduction

Novelist Ursula K. Le Guin begins her 1985 epic, Always Coming Home, with a brief chapter titled “Towards an Archaeology of the Future.”1 The most likely intention is not to promote new standards to modernize the field of archaeology (“towards an archaeology for the future”), nor is it to envision or influence what archaeological practice may look like decades or centuries from now (“towards a future archaeology”). Rather, the book is a fictional ethnography of a people living in what we know as California’s Napa Valley thousands of years from the present day. What Le Guin likely means by the phrase is the most grammatically simple yet conceptually brain-melting interpretation: to replace the past with the future as the object of archaeological study. She is telling us to turn our heads and look in the opposite direction.

The dissonance of studying the ruins of a society that doesn’t yet exist is apt for approaching the Anthropocene, the Earth’s current, unofficial geological epoch characterized by the ecosystem-altering impact of Homo sapiens and resulting planetary disruptions.2 Since the term was coined in the early 2000s, scholars from various academic disciplines have considered its implications as a framework that elevates human behavior to the level of worldshifting ecological events.3 One such discipline is the environmental humanities, a field that emphasizes narrative and culture in approaching environmental challenges. Through an interdisciplinary lens combining the political, anthropological, literary, and/or philosophical, the field is united by the belief that humans and nature are intertwined. The environmental humanities welcomes traditionally excluded or undervalued perspectives into the discourse, with a particular openness to the voices of Indigenous scholars and activists. 

The field of library science is paying increasing attention to anthropogenic climate change. Librarians are exploring best practices for the logistical preparation of institutions for climate events like flooding and extreme heat4, advocating for reducing the environmental impact of industry-specific activities5, and discussing how libraries can promote and participate in climate action.6 This work is valuable as institutions physically adapt to an age of instability. However, it does not necessarily take on the cultural dimensions of climate adaptation that library science, with its predilection for the past and general focus on our own species, may need some nudging to address.7

How are unquestioned ideas about time and decay supporting the carbon-heavy preservation of archival materials? How can libraries consider the legacy of industrial colonialism, acknowledge the emotional impact of environmental destruction, and promote interspecies kinship? We need a librarianship of the future, in which librarians and archivists can build on theory from the environmental humanities to involve the public in thinking intergenerationally and imagining the possibilities for a world beyond the Anthropocene.

Time

Alternative concepts of time that have emerged within the environmental humanities challenge the prevailing ethos that archives exist to preserve the past for humans of the future. When we consider those humans in the context of the climate crisis, we are faced with blunt uncertainty.8  As Erik Radio puts it, a “continued existence of life,” or “one in which humans continue to act in a central role” or are “even recognizable as ourselves,” is in question.9 If the continuation of our species—either entirely, or with all the trappings of our current relationship with the planet—is not secure, then librarians must question the meaning of preserving materials for future humans who aren’t present or may not be able to access them.10 And of course, questioning the value of an activity should prompt us to consider the cost: in this case, the carbon-intensive resources used to preserve these materials for an uncertain human future.

Deep time, which places humanity in the context of the total 4.54 billion years of Earth’s existence, proliferates Anthropocene scholarship. Geographer Kathryn Yusoff suggests that the Anthropocene framing offers a “new temporality”11 by “embedd[ing]” our species in geologic time.12 This gives humans geological agency by placing us among the few entities that “possess the power of extinction”13 while “[shifting] the human timescale from biological life-course to that of epoch and species-life.” 

Establishing ourselves in this broader geologic context opens up imaginative doors. While discussing the causal role of fossil fuel extraction and use in facilitating species extinction, Yusoff notes that this way of positioning humans in time reveals our own potentially declining species as the “material expenditure of the remains of late capitalism.”  When we “[unearth] one fossil layer” to use as fuel for our machines, we “create another…that has our name on it.”14 By materializing humanity as a future fossil layer, Yusoff expands our idea of what the history and record of our species could entail moving forward.15 Radio gets at a similar notion in his effort to conceptualize archival documents in a posthuman world, suggesting that Earth is the “document that can serve as a contextual ground for all others,” and that therefore in the present libraries and archives should “strongly consider broadening their scope to incorporate the perspectives of geologists.”16

If Yusoff and Radio use geology to detach from anthropocentric concepts of time, then an emphasis on interspecies relationships within the environmental humanities offers a different approach. Potawatomi scholar Kyle Powys Whyte uses various Indigenous perspectives to inform what he calls “kinship time,” in which “time is told through kinship relationships that entangle climate change with responsibility”17 as an alternative to portraying climate change using the “ticking clock” narrative encouraged by the traditional Western, linear timescale.18

Whyte references Samantha Chisholm Hatfield et al.’s research on the connection between time and ecosystems among tribes like the Siletz in the Pacific Northwest, who have historically relied on ecological signals to track the passage of time. For example, an elder interviewed by Hatfield explains how the Siletz used to rely on the emergence of carpenter ants in the spring as a seasonal cue to start hunting pacific lampreys, a coastal fish species resembling eels, despite the fact that the two species are not ecologically related.  These days, though, the elder says that the “weather’s changed so much that you can’t mark anything like that” anymore. This example represents a broader trend from Hatfield’s research: multispecies relationships like the ones between humans, ants, and lampreys demonstrate a foundational way of telling time and connecting to the universe for the Siletz. When climate change threatens the ecosystem, it jeopardizes that “sense of order”19 and results in feelings of “abruptness and escalation.”20

This way of telling time based on environmental cues is part of what Whyte (2018) refers to elsewhere in his research as a “seasonal round system” employed by peoples like the Anishinaabe/Neshnabé, in which public life is  “organized to change and shift throughout the year to adjust to the dynamics of ecosystems.”21 He also describes “spiraling time,” which brings together ancestors and their descendants22, as well as Hatfield et al.’s explanation of time “based on a 3D construction” of ecological relationships.23 By using these visual metaphors, Whyte seeks to reject linear time in favor of worldviews prizing interconnectedness and responsibility.

Le Guin sought to do the same in her fictional ethnography Always Coming Home. The subjects of the book, far-future residents of California’s Napa Valley who are known as the Kesh, see all living things as people, and therefore “no distinction is made between human and natural history.”24 They conceive of time as less structured than Le Guin’s (likely Western) reader does; the ethnographer informs us that “time and space are so muddled together that one is never sure whether [the Kesh] are talking about an era or an area.”25 When the ethnographer tries to ask a Kesh librarian-historian of sorts for information about previous inhabitants of the region, it initiates a roundabout discussion that ultimately leads the ethnographer to conclude,

It’s hopeless. He doesn’t perceive time as a direction, let alone a progress, but as a landscape in which one may go any number of directions, or nowhere. He spatialises time; it is not an arrow, nor a river, but a house, the house he lives in. One may go from room to room, and come back; to go outside, all you have to do is open the door.26

This spatial conceptualization of time is directly tied to the Kesh’s assumptions of interspecies kinship. Their world is one in which human people live in balance, respect, and partnership with all others. Therefore they refer to us—that is, industrial Western civilization in the present day, which, per our linear perspective of time, existed long ago in their past and was ultimately destroyed by an intervening ecological apocalypse—as “the time outside,” and “when they lived outside the world.”27

If people of all species who exist in other millennia are just across the threshold, how does it change the way we connect to the earth and other beings? And what does it mean for a field like library science that is paradoxically oriented toward both past and future, where materials from the past are collected and preserved for the benefit of future generations? Is it possible to extract library science from linear time, like one might extract a glittering stone from a running stream?

Removing distance from our sense of time has some interesting implications for collections. Within the past-orientation, if people from many years ago are a short distance away, then age is less of a factor in deciding which of their objects or papers are worth preserving. If a British colonist named Gilberrt Bant living in 1690s Boston, for example, is just across the threshold then how important is it to keep a receipt from when his father left him money? 

Within the future-orientation, on the other hand, if people from later epochs are on the other side of the door, then it may incentivize concern for future beings in how we choose to preserve materials and consume resources. It’s the proximity principle: if we can see our descendants right there in our front yard, we are more likely to consider them as we choose what and how we collect and preserve.28

Clearly, this extreme shift in perspective requires intergenerational thinking. Kyle Whyte’s spiraling time encourages us to “consider ourselves as living alongside future and past relatives simultaneously” throughout our lives.29 Philosopher Julia Gibson takes it a step further in their discussion of palliative death ethics for climate change, suggesting that past and future life does not just surround us, but in fact, is present within us as individuals. This is because “the dead, the dying, the living, and those yet-to-be are not only distinct generations of beings along a linear sequence but coexistent facets of every being.” That is, outside of linear time, an individual occupies the past, present, and future all at once. As such, Gibson calls for rejecting the “‘us in the present’ vs. ‘them in the future’” dichotomy in climate change discourses.30

Intergenerational thinking gives librarians the opportunity to consider our entire way of determining the value of objects we collect and preserve. Is constantly cooling and dehumidifying the room where we store Gilberrt Bant’s receipt worth releasing the carbon that will threaten our descendants’—or our own—access to sufficient food, or livable temperatures, or safety from mega-storms? Is it worth contributing to the ongoing mass extinction of other species?

Mortality

Let’s consider the objects themselves. Archivist Marika Cifor calls on the rise of new materialism in recent feminist theory to inform what she terms the “liveliness” of physical matter in an archival setting. Building on Karen Barad’s “entanglement of matter and meaning,”31 Cifor writes that matter is “animate and imbued with a particular kind of agential and affective vitality.”32 To her, “humans and objects are fundamentally and crucially interrelated” in a way that cannot be fully expressed with words,  giving objects a “materiality” that “resists language.”33

Cifor experiences this first-hand in the archives when she encounters the bloodstained clothing that gay rights activist Harvey Milk was wearing when he was assassinated in 1978. Touching the clothes and their stains gives her an “intimate experience of horror in the archives that blatantly refuses intellectualisation” and makes her understand Milk in an entirely new way.34 The emotionally affective capacity of archival objects isn’t limited to horror, though. Cifor also visits Yale University’s Beinecke Special Collections Library to encounter the personal “Stud File” of Samuel Steward, a prominent gay figure from the twentieth century. She describes the feeling of disgust, the “messy space between desire and repulsion,” she experienced when she found pubic hairs taped to a couple of records in Steward’s homemade card catalog of sexual partners.35

Of course, as most librarians can attest, archival objects can also invoke less complicated feelings like awe. This is part of our motivation for preserving items like Bant’s receipt, or a 1796 Irish state lottery ticket, or a Neo-Babylonian cuneiform tablet from circa 626-539 BCE documenting the receipt of money and barley. Beyond their functional context or intended purpose, we keep them available for the pleasure of being in proximity to objects that are old. But preserving items because of their age ultimately undermines their liveliness and agency. This is because, per Cifor, archives are “in a state of constant flux, shifting with each new intra-action of the various and changing actors that constitute it.”36

Dani Stuchel discusses this in the context of physical, non-human actors like sunlight and moisture that interact with archival materials on a chemical level to prompt their gradual deterioration. Decay is an “expression” of archival entropy—the state of constant, ongoing movement and change that applies to all objects—because it “reveals aspects of materiality not visible in earlier states” as it goes on.37

Traditional preservation attempts to pause this process, leading to what, to me, is one of the many intriguing contradictions arising from this line of research: the attempt to delay the inevitable by keeping an object “alive” imposes stasis, while the process toward death indicates liveliness and vibrancy. Stuchel, though, makes a different and more nuanced point. Rather than decay implying “action” and preservation implying inaction, Stuchel argues that action takes place regardless:

[N]o archival [material] stays ‘pristine’ on its own: the appearance of stasis or sameness is continually constructed through archival action. Alongside these actions, we continually re-accept the renewed thing as ‘original’ or ‘authentic.’ The postmodern refrain of performativity echoes on here: an archival thing is constantly becoming an archival thing.38

If archival materials can make us feel things and are constantly changing, then perhaps letting them change can help us emotionally grapple with broader instability. Stuchel calls for “introspection” on “the psychological impulses which drive our need to keep, evince, retrieve, and preserve,”39 suggesting that a fear of letting objects decay—and therefore “forgetting” them from the cultural memory—indicates a broader fear of our own death.40 Le Guin suggests the same via her narrator in Always Coming Home:

Perhaps not many of us could say why we save so many words, why our forests must all be cut to make paper to mark our words on, our rivers dammed to make electricity to power our word processors; we do it obsessively, as if afraid of something, as if compensating for something. Maybe we’re afraid of death, afraid to let our words simply be spoken and die, leaving silence for new words to be born in.41

What happens emotionally if we let our resistance to archival entropy soften? Stuchel points to “very human feelings”42 that we miss when we reject the possibility of decay, since we can “mediate our grief about and connection to the past” through these “transitional or memorial objects.”43 When the archival object represents a way of life that climate change may take away, witnessing its death gives us an opportunity to engage with a broader mourning process.44

And in a culture whose mainstream discourse refuses to explore collective acceptance of change or publicly grieve the ongoing losses wrought by environmental destruction, engagement with these feelings is vital. In Gibson’s palliative death ethics for climate change and extinction, simply not looking away is critical. We must “[refuse] to neglect [our] ecological partners even as they are…leaving us.”45 Giving up the illusion of control is key here. As Cifor notes on materiality in archives, “affect disrupts the notion of an intentional and agential human subject in full control of the matter with which they engage.”46 This is true of both archival objects and our planet in the Anthropocene.

Finality

It is difficult, to say the least, to understand how the effects of anthropogenic climate change will play out and to glimpse possible futures as a result. This is due in part to what Rick Crownshaw calls the Anthropocene’s “problems of scale,” which he writes are “becoming something of a mantra” in memory studies in particular and the humanities and social sciences more broadly.47 Because it is “unfolding unevenly across time and space, matter and life (human and nonhuman), and through planetary systems and processes (engendering systemic feedback loops and crossing the threshold of systemic tipping points),” the Anthropocene’s effects are only discernible “through a ‘derangement’…of the scales of cognition, remembrance, and representation.”48 He considers the “‘humanist enclosures’ of cultural memory studies” to be “ill equipped” to manage these various scales.49

This dissonance is akin to the challenge of thinking intergenerationally when a person has only ever perceived oneself as existing within linear time. It is at play in efforts to conceive of archives in a future that may lack human cultural institutions as we know them today.50 It is the grand contradiction, daunting obstacle, and essential task of anticipatory memory, in which we attempt to envision the conditions of future beings in order to join them in retroactively observing our own time and remembering the critical period that took place between our present and theirs.51 That period is wrapped up, perhaps, with survival.

Of course, survival can be difficult to imagine when reports about record temperatures and points of no return stir up an anxious urgency that collides with broadly avoidant apathy52 and overwhelming inadequacy at the highest political levels. The outlook can seem rather bleak. However, as Gibson cautions us, there is a difference between “attending centrally to grief and death” and “becoming fatalistic,”53 and it is important to consider the implications of succumbing to the latter.

Whyte offers a useful perspective of survival as he considers dominant Western state-of-emergency or apocalypse narratives of climate change. From the perspective of Indigenous peoples, an apocalypse has already taken place. They have already experienced what the rest of us dread most about climate change—“ecosystem collapse, species loss, economic crash, drastic relocation, and cultural disintegration”—and are currently living in their ancestors’ version of a dystopia.54 Therefore, he argues, the state-of-emergency narrative is flawed because it veils the dominant culture’s continued benefit from colonization55, promotes a hasty reliance on solutions from the systems of irresponsibility that got us here in the first place and favor protecting the status quo56, and prevents humans from slowing down and prioritizing intra- and interspecies kinship in the process.57

Whyte highlights scholars Heather Davis and Zoe Todd’s view of industrial colonialism as a “seismic shockwave” that “compact[s] and speed[s] up time, laying waste to legal orders, languages and place-story in quick succession.”58 It caused the “violent, fleshy loss of 50 million Indigenous peoples in the Americas,” and now via climate change its “reverberations” are starting to impact the imperial nations that first started it.59 He urges readers to resist general narratives of “finality” and “lastness” put forth by non-Native climate advocates that conceptualize change as “describing movement or transition from stability to crisis—where crisis signals an impending end.”60 That’s because such narratives discount the already existing apocalyptic circumstances of Indigenous communities under settler colonialism explained above.

Whyte also argues that those portrayals belie the fact that, as uncomfortable as it is for these non-Native allies to admit, many are living in their own ancestors’ version of a fantasy. They are benefitting from both the generations-long destruction of Indigenous ways of life and the legal and moral justification of that destruction, while framing themselves as “protagonists” who can “save Indigenous peoples” from a newly and urgently precarious position—which, Whyte notes, “their ancestors of course failed to do.”61 By neglecting to acknowledge the legacy of industrial colonialism when approaching anthropogenic climate change, Western systems of power risk perpetuating it further.

A related critique that arises in environmental humanities scholarship takes issue with the Anthropocene’s implication that all human beings constitute a single, forceful entity. It may seem like a “neutral” concept, according to Kathryn Yusoff, but it is based on a politics that “universalises the inheritance and responsibility for fossil fuel consumption”62 despite that consumption’s uneven distribution across the globe. Davis and Todd read the Anthropocene as an “extension and enactment of colonial logic [that] systemically erases difference,”63 and they would rather acknowledge those varying levels of responsibility.64 This narrative flattening of numerous human communities existing across a broad spectrum of emissions, consumption, and culpability for climatic effects is a concern that white Westerners like me should consider when writing about the Anthropocene and its impact.

It may seem contradictory to reject finality as part of the Anthropocene narrative while advocating for palliative death ethics in our approach to climate change, so it is crucial to clarify the difference. Le Guin has an oft-quoted line: “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings.”65 Late capitalism, a phrase that has become ubiquitous on the Left in recent years, echoes Le Guin’s hopefulness. Both seek to transcend the imaginative shortcomings of linear time imposed on those experiencing it by giving language to the eventual end of an entrenched system whose mythology relies on perpetuity and endless expansion.66 

For those trapped in a linear time perspective, on the other hand, there is nothing “late” about our experience of capitalism because there is no end in sight. Considering how climate change works, it might alternatively be reasonable to wonder if it is too late, since we’re only now feeling the effects from carbon emissions decades ago, and the effects of today’s emissions won’t be felt for decades more. Too late for what, though? Perhaps it is too late for Homo sapiens; or perhaps, as Yusoff posits, capitalism may be what goes extinct instead of our species.67

This is the difference between mortality and finality. We can expect not to outlive capitalism while understanding that others will. We can acknowledge death intimately and locally while also thinking intergenerationally and acting with care for humans and other beings we may never meet. We can employ the “geographic imaginations”68 enabled by the Anthropocene to try to take on its problems of scale. The end of one person’s, or one society’s, or one species’s way of life is not an end to all.

Remembrance and Responsibility

Gibson emphasizes the act of remembrance as an “ongoing communal ethic” that “matters deeply” under conditions of environmental injustice.69 As some of the cultural spaces best positioned to attend to public remembrance, institutions like libraries and archives must try. Luckily, library science’s broad range of involvement with the public provides diverse opportunities to engage with this work.

For archives and special collections, Stuchel suggests that the ephemerality of cultural heritage objects can activate public care and remembrance. Stuchel advocates for geographer Caitlin DeSilvey’s concept of curated decay, in which an item’s “disintegration” is “incorporated into heritage practice.”70 This approach lets us “work with the entire ‘lifecycle’ of a thing”71 and consider its ecological context72 as it disintegrates. Incorporating decay into the public’s experience of materials could achieve the emotional engagement with mortality described above while also fulfilling what, according to Samantha Winn, is “both an ethical imperative and a functional exigency” of archivists to “develop practices which do not require infinite exploitable resources.”73

There are also plenty of opportunities for the public to engage with the issues discussed here via library programs that foster dialogue about death ethics, cultural adaptation to climate change, and alternative concepts of time. Oral history projects and time capsules are a great way to get patrons thinking more deeply about their position in time and space. So are traveling displays like A People’s Archive of Sinking and Melting, an art exhibit and global community archive that solicits objects linked to climate events from around the world. Public libraries can also take advantage of their genealogical resources to invite patrons to interrogate linear visualizations of time and participate in speculative dialogue with their ancestors and descendants.74 And many public libraries already engage mental health professionals to facilitate programming, so the scope of those sorts of programs could expand to include climate-related stress and anxiety.

There is also potential for public and academic libraries to facilitate public mourning and remembrance. They can create programming around Remembrance Day for Lost Species, an annual international observance started by U.K. artists in 2011 that takes place November 30th of each year.75 They can engage artists and activists to create physical memorials to extinct species onsite in and around library spaces. And they can host grieving rituals like the funeral for the Okökull glacier held by activists in Iceland in 201976, embroidery artist Kate Tume’s Hallowed Ground project embroidering critically endangered animals’ habitats while leaving empty space in the shapes of the beings themselves, and the nondenominational Earth Grief event that took place at Bombyx Center for Arts and Equity in Florence, Massachusetts in July 2024.

And then, of course, there’s fiction. There is a reason why so much environmental humanities scholarship overtly employs speculative fiction to theorize77; here Le Guin’s Always Coming Home informed an entire way of conceptualizing time. Fiction frequently serves as our only frame of reference for imagining our shared climate future. Its authors, through their extensive worldbuilding, provide kernels of possible detail about the conditions of our intergenerational reality that can help readers begin to reckon with the changes they are facing in the context of coexisting geopolitical and socioeconomic factors.78 Beyond devoting budgetary resources to purchasing speculative climate fiction for their collections, libraries can organize programming like book clubs and writing workshops to encourage their patrons to explore the genre further.

Donna Haraway, who is a bit of a celebrity among environmental humanists, advises us to envision the Anthropocene as “more a boundary event than an epoch” and reduce it as much as we can in order to move on to a future in which the trajectory has changed.79 Colebrook describes that next possible epoch as one in which “humanity might think beyond itself to a life of which it is only a contingent organic part.”80 But making this vital shift—the one that Rick Crownshaw believes cultural memory studies is “ill equipped” for—comes at a cost. 

Whyte calls that cost “[giving up] the underlying conditions of domination that dispossess Indigenous people.”81 Yusoff calls it the “sacrificial responsibility” to leave fossil fuels in the ground.82 Roy Scranton calls it “adapting, with mortal humility, to our new reality.”83

This piece seems critical, and it is where I intend to take this research from here. Perhaps, by more explicitly exploring library science’s relationship with time, commodity fetishism, and industrial colonialism, we can begin to parse the meaning of “mortal humility” for our field.84 Here and now, from our location within linear time, we must enact a kinship-based, mortality-embracing, finality-resisting, intergenerational way forward. We need a librarianship of the future.

Acknowledgments

I’d like to thank reviewers Katherine Witzig and Ryan Randall, as well as publishing editor Ian Beilin, for all of their work in preparing this piece for publication. Another huge thanks goes to Donia Conn for guiding me through the research and writing process; her willingness to say yes and her frank concern for the future of our planet have made me feel at home in this field. Thanks, also, to Eric Poulin, Jude Graether, Simmons University’s School for Library and Information Science,  and all of the friends and family who welcomed my conversations about time and trees and extinction in the summer of 2023 as I recovered from reading The Overstory by Richard Powers.

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Wallace-Wells, David. “The Uninhabitable Earth.” Intelligencer. New York Magazine, July 9, 2017. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/07/climate-change-earth-too-hot-for-humans.html. 

Whyte, Kyle P. “Indigenous Science (Fiction) for the Anthropocene: Ancestral Dystopias and Fantasies of Climate Change Crises.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 1, no. 1–2 (March 2018): 224–42. https://doi.org/10.1177/2514848618777621. 

Whyte, Kyle Powys. “Time as Kinship.” In The Cambridge Companion to Environmental Humanities, edited by Jeffrey Cohen and Stephanie Foote. Cambridge University Press, 2021.

Winn, Samantha R. “Dying Well In the Anthropocene: On the End of Archivists.” Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies 3, no. 1 (May 17, 2020). https://doi.org/10.24242/jclis.v3i1.107. 

Yusoff, Kathryn. “Geologic Life: Prehistory, Climate, Futures in the Anthropocene.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 31, no. 5 (October 2013): 779–95. https://doi.org/10.1068/d11512. 

  1. Le Guin, Always Coming Home, 3. ↩︎
  2. Lewis and Maslin, “Defining the Anthropocene,” 171. A committee of academics from the International Commission on Stratigraphy formally rejected the designation of the Anthropocene as an epoch in March 2024 after fifteen years under consideration. Its conceptual significance to disciplines beyond geology, however, was cemented during that time. See this update from Nature for more information on the committee vote and Lewis and Maslin’s article for further context on the Anthropocene and its geological markers. ↩︎
  3. Lövbrand et al., “Who Speaks for the Future of Earth,” 211. ↩︎
  4. See “American Archives and Climate Change: Risk and Adaptation” by Tara Mazurczyk et. al. and Amanda Oliver’s “Impact of Climate Change on Canadian Archives” for examples. ↩︎
  5. See “Toward Environmentally Sustainable Digital Preservation” by Keith L. Pendergrass et al. and Ben Goldman’s “Understanding and Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions in Academic Libraries” for examples. ↩︎
  6. See Michael Kornfeind’s “Advocacy and Action: How Libraries Across the Globe Are Addressing Climate Change” and “The Role of Academic Libraries in Climate Action” by Leo Appleton and Nick Woolley for examples. ↩︎
  7. See “Libraries and Archives in the Anthropocene,” a special issue of the Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies edited by Eira Tansey and Robert D. Montoya, as well as Bethany Nowviskie’s “Digital Humanities in the Anthropocene” for insightful examples of this kind of nudging. ↩︎
  8. Winn, “Dying Well,” 3. ↩︎
  9. Radio, “Documents for the Nonhuman,” 2. ↩︎
  10. See Winn and Radio, as well as Stuchel, “Material Provocations.” ↩︎
  11. Yusoff, “Geologic Life,” 781. ↩︎
  12. Yusoff, 785. ↩︎
  13. Yusoff, 781. ↩︎
  14. This and the preceding two quotations are from Yusoff, 784. ↩︎
  15. Along these lines, Claire Colebrook sees the Anthropocene as an “inscriptive event” whose impact depends on the “intensity of inscription” on our planet. Craps et al., “Memory Studies,” 507-508. ↩︎
  16.  Radio, “Documents for the Nonhuman,” 4-5. While perhaps unsettling to conceive of ourselves as the future material record itself rather than its interpreters, the blurred boundary between human and matter in an archival context should not come as a surprise; what Yusoff is positing is simply a different approach to what archivist Marika Cifor calls an “understanding of humans and matter as mutually constitutive.” Cifor, “Stain and Remains,” 8. Cifor considers the affective materiality of human remains in archival settings when she comes across late gay rights activist Harvey Milk’s ponytail in the GLBT Historical Society’s archives in San Francisco. What separates Milk’s hair from Yusoff’s fossilization of bone into rock due to the species-ending effects of fossil extraction is the scale of time in which the Anthropocene encourages us to place ourselves as we consider the historical record. ↩︎
  17. Whyte, “Time as Kinship,” 50. ↩︎
  18. Whyte, 39. ↩︎
  19. This and the preceding quotation are from Hatfield et al., “Indian Time,” 5. ↩︎
  20. Whyte, “Time as Kinship,” 53. ↩︎
  21. Whyte, “Ancestral Dystopias,” 228. ↩︎
  22. Whyte, “Ancestral Dystopias,” 229. ↩︎
  23. Hatfield et al., “Indian Time,” 5. ↩︎
  24. Le Guin, Always Coming Home, 169. The Kesh language does not broadly distinguish between humans and non-humans, but rather treats all beings with respect and agency. This was likely informed by Le Guin’s extensive research of Indigenous relationships with land in writing the novel. See Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass for more insight into animacy in Native languages and Le Guin’s “Legends for a New Land” speech to learn more about the novel’s inspiration and writing process. ↩︎
  25. Le Guin, 169. ↩︎
  26. Le Guin, 191-2. ↩︎
  27. Le Guin, 169. ↩︎
  28. Vinney, “Proximity Principle.” ↩︎
  29. Whyte, “Ancestral Dystopias,” 228-9. ↩︎
  30. This and the preceding quotation are from Gibson, “Practicing Palliation,” 228. ↩︎
  31. Barad, Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. ↩︎
  32. Cifor, “Stains and Remains,” 6. ↩︎
  33. Cifor, 9. ↩︎
  34. Cifor, 12. ↩︎
  35. Cifor, 16. See Ahmed, Cultural Politics of Emotion, 84 for more on this definition of disgust. ↩︎
  36. Cifor, 18. ↩︎
  37. Stuchel, “Material Provocations,” 15. ↩︎
  38. Stuchel, 15. ↩︎
  39. Stuchel, 4. ↩︎
  40. Stuchel, 18. ↩︎
  41. Le Guin, Always Coming Home, 576-7. ↩︎
  42. Stuchel, “Material Provocations,” 4. ↩︎
  43. Stuchel, 20. ↩︎
  44. For more on ecological grief, see Cunsolo and Ellis, “Ecological Grief;” Craps, “Guilty Grieving;” and Atkinson, “Mourning Climate Loss.” ↩︎
  45. Gibson, “Practicing Palliation,” 216. ↩︎
  46. Cifor, 18. ↩︎
  47. Craps et al., “Memory Studies and the Anthropocene,” 501. Here Crownshaw is applying Timothy Clark’s concept of “derangements of scale” to memory studies. Clark, “Derangements of Scale.” ↩︎
  48. Craps et al., 501. David Wallace-Wells sheds some light on these problems of scale in his New York Magazine piece detailing likely climate scenarios over the next century. Reasons for our “incredible failure of imagination” regarding this issue include “the smallness (two degrees), and largeness (1.8 trillion tons), and abstractness (400 parts per million) of the numbers,” as well as “the simple speed of change and, also, its slowness, such that we are only seeing effects now of warming from decades past.” Wallace-Wells, “Uninhabitable Earth.” He also explains multiple examples of the feedback loops Crownshaw refers to, including projections of melting permafrost and drought-induced rainforest fires releasing enormous amounts of carbon into the atmosphere and therefore continuing the cycle. The article, though accessible and informative, is not for the faint of heart.  ↩︎
  49. Craps et al., 501. ↩︎
  50. See Stuchel, “Material Provocations,” and Radio, “Documents for the Nonhuman.” ↩︎
  51. Craps, “Anticipatory Memory.” ↩︎
  52. As Wallace-Wells puts it so succinctly, “[A]version arising from fear is a form of denial, too.” Wallace-Wells, “Uninhabitable Earth.” ↩︎
  53. Gibson, “Practicing Palliation,” 228. ↩︎
  54. Whyte, “Ancestral Dystopias,” 226-7. Whyte cites various scholars and activists who have written or spoken about this general idea, including Lee Sprague, Larry Gross, Grace Dillon, and Conrad Scott.  ↩︎
  55.  Whyte, “Ancestral Dystopias,” 234. ↩︎
  56. Whyte, “Time as Kinship,” 45, 53. ↩︎
  57. Whyte, “Time as Kinship,” 54. ↩︎
  58. Davis and Todd, “Decolonizing the Anthropocene,” 772. ↩︎
  59. Davis and Todd, 774. The authors note the connections between their seismic shockwave concept and scholar Christina Sharpe’s “wake work,” a metaphor illustrating the ongoing effects of the transatlantic slave trade using the image of the ships’ wake. “In the wake, the past that is not past reappears, always, to rupture the present.” Sharpe, In the Wake, 9. Davis and Todd seek to “expand and pluralize collective understandings of the disasters of the Anthropocene” (772). ↩︎
  60. Whyte, “Ancestral Dystopias,” 236. ↩︎
  61. Whyte, 236. ↩︎
  62. Yusoff, “Geologic Life,” 784. ↩︎
  63. Davis and Todd, “Decolonizing the Anthropocene,” 769. ↩︎
  64. Davis and Todd, 772. ↩︎
  65. Le Guin, “Speech.” She spoke these words in 2014, when she was eighty-four years old, during her acceptance speech for the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. The context for the comment involves seeking accountability for the publishing industry’s greed and the pressure it puts on artists in its effort to maximize profits. Earlier in the speech she says, “Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom—poets, visionaries—realists of a larger reality.” ↩︎
  66. As labor expert Richard Yeselson told the Atlantic in 2017, “Let’s allude to the big, giant, totalistic system that is underneath everything. And let’s give it more than a hint of foreboding. Late capitalism. Late is so pregnant.” Lowrey, “Late Capitalism.” ↩︎
  67. Yusoff, “Geologic Life,” 782-783. ↩︎
  68. Yusoff, 782. ↩︎
  69. Gibson, “Practicing Palliation,” 210. ↩︎
  70. Stuchel, “Material Provocations,” 14-15. See DeSilvey, Curated Decay. ↩︎
  71. Stuchel, 18 ↩︎
  72. For further discussion of the ecological context of manuscripts and archival documents through an environmental humanities lens, see Calhoun, Nature of the Page. ↩︎
  73. Winn, “Dying Well,” 12. ↩︎
  74. Whyte, “Ancestral Dystopias.” ↩︎
  75. De Massol de Rebetz, “Remembrance Day.” ↩︎
  76. Atkinson, “Mourning Climate Loss,” 18. ↩︎
  77. Instances of this phenomenon cited in this article alone include Gibson, “Practicing Palliation;” Whyte, “Ancestral Dystopias;” Craps, “Anticipatory Memory;” Winn, “Dying Well;” and Haraway, “Making Kin.” ↩︎
  78. In one example, Tochi Onyebuchi’s Goliath considers the effects of gentrification on poor, Black residents of New Haven, Connecticut when Earth’s atmosphere is cleaned up and the global elite return from their outer space enclaves. In another, Yoko Tawada’s Scattered All Over the Earth puts a surreal spin on language and climate migration. I led discussions about both books with patrons for Lilly Library’s Climate Fiction Book Club in Florence, Massachusetts in 2023-2024. ↩︎
  79. Haraway, “Making Kin,” 60. ↩︎
  80.  Craps et al., “Memory Studies,” 80. ↩︎
  81. Whyte, “Ancestral Dystopias,” 237. ↩︎
  82. Yusoff, “Geologic Life,” 791. ↩︎
  83. Scranton, “Learning to Die.” ↩︎
  84. Nora Almeida and Jen Hoyer provide a model for this line of research in “Living Archives in the Anthropocene,” parsing the relationship between the Anthropocene, capitalism, and archival practice to highlight an alternative, decentralized “living” structure embodied by Interference Archive in Brooklyn, New York. ↩︎
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