Seal Visions: Time and Agency in Same and Multi-Species Relationships

Abstract

In the year 2000, an article by environmental scientists Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer popularized the term ‘Anthropocene.’ This mode of marking time asserts that global human impacts have reached the point where they define the geologic record; that humanity's collective ability to permanently alter Earth has overturned the Holocene with a new, formal, geologic epoch. The discipline of geology emphasizes that it strives towards an objective lens, and yet ‘Anthropocene’ primarily advances a narrative which inspires social action. This has led to considerable debate across academic fields. This paper seeks to complicate some of these notions of Anthropocene, particularly the ways in which they may universalize humanity as an agent independent from the rest of the natural world. One of the lenses this thesis uses in order to examine this paradigm is the manner in which the terminology of Anthropocene inadvertently positions human agency as able to act upon a static and undifferentiated creation. By the nature of its use of origin, scholars utilizing the term Anthropocene prioritize specific historical narratives over others; highlighting a linear model of time based on progression. Those who utilize the Anthropocene model often highlight Earth as being on the verge of collapse, and prioritize one mode of mitigating this precarity; that human beings are the sole agents empowered to change the world. This thesis forms connections from an unlikely juxtaposition of scholars in order to re-examine the terminology of Anthropocene; primarily the educator Paulo Freire and the Anishinaabe environmental theorists Vanessa Watts, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and Kyle Whyte. This work begins to deconstruct the concept of humanity as a singularity - and claims that individuals have differing systems of relations within human and natural landscapes - those of the human and other-than-human alike.