Catastrophe: a representational history

I'm working on a project that leverages Dante studies to compute the magnitude of environmental collapse in the Anthropocene. The book that has helped me focus my thinking and writing is Tim Morton's Dark Ecology, which I've referenced before in this blog. There's a passage within it that quite casually asks us to think about a temporality of unfolding and nested catastrophes. I think it's brilliant. Here's why, plus a fun graphic to help us visualize time differently.

I'm in a masters program in Environmental Humanities these days. A point that was raised a couple days ago is 'any representation of time affects the way we live time.' This is phenomenology: reality is how we think it. And coming from geology and earth sciences, I've seen the GSA timeline over and over again. For a summer I had it tacked onto my wall so that I could quickly find when the Ediacaran Period happened (600 million years ago), for instance. It's incredibly useful for comparing apples to apples in modern scientific work, but it also pounded into my head the notion of time as something with rigid stratigraphic bounds between sequential periods, eras, and eons. This model of time is perhaps at the core of disagreements over the Anthropocene-as-geologic-era. If you believe that a single boundary marker must exist to separate epochs, and that an epoch must clearly 'replace' another one, the Anthropocene doesn't fit nicely.

And so we have other modes of representing time, too. I've seen the "deep time clock" on Wikipedia, and I've also seen spiral-like representations of time. These both twist the idea of linearity a bit, but they sill  preserve the same rigid boundaries.

Enter the concentric catastrophes model. (Click here for full size)

The model rests on the philosophical idea of ongoingness, taken up almost simultaneously by Tim Morton and Donna Haraway in 2016. Morton argues that our very existences are contingent on the effects of many nested catastrophes. For example, the Great Oxygenation Event of 2.3 billion years ago creates the air composition we now breathe today. The Anthropocene is an unfolding logic of existence nested within an unfolding agricultural logic, nested in an unfolding human cultural logic, nested within a human biology logic, and it's turtles (and snakes) all the way down. A concentric circle (radial) plot is able to represent at least the structural arrangement of this idea, if not the nuances of the philosophy underneath it.

Last night I gathered rough dates for many different catastrophes: the major ones, like the 'big five' extinction events; a couple less well-known ones that Morton singles in Dark Ecology, like the formation of Earth's magnetic field; and ones that dominate the human story, like the heterogenous emergence of what we'd recognize as modern society across the African continent; as well as the three major Anthropocene markers of colonization, industrialization, and acceleration.

Plotting them logarithmically and drawing circles gave the above form. I've added "false colors" to highlight the links of Anthropocene events and ensure that the boundaries are "fuzzy" and indeterminate. Even the nuclear age, from a human perspective, was a building wave of activity rather than an atomic instant. From a first-order glance, this also resonates with Indigenous histories that recognize the present as an ongoing catastrophe lingering from the onset of cultural domination.

With "now" at the center, there is no room in this two-dimensional plot to project the future. Unlike in linear time, where evolutionist forms indicate a better world just ahead, concentric catastrophes show the present as both contingent on the past and uniquely distinct from it. As there's a possibility space that, as Morton writes, "haunts the twelve-thousand-year present," surely it is with this sort of form that we open ourselves to it.