The atmosphere of anxiety concerning the Anthropocene amplifies when considering how its eerie and unwieldy forces affect our bodies. Across posthumanist, science studies, and new materialist discourse, the concern about corporeal impacts seems to huddle around a particular set of words: porous, permeable, vulnerable, sensitive. These are invoked as scholars seek to describe the status of bodies threatened by invisible, global, and pernicious toxins.<\/p>\n
In a looping story of strata and sediment and edible rocks, this essay similarly seeks to articulate the material instabilities of bodies in an epoch that itself resists clear definition. Through the generative space of contradictions, it serves as a somewhat experimental back-and-forth between permeable anthropos bodies and the epoch defined by the materials transgressing those bodies; between tangible forms of evidence and ephemeral ones; between precision and porosity.<\/p>\n The term \u201cAnthropocene\u201d has become more of a socio-cultural (and I would argue even <\/span>aesthetic) term in academic discourse, known best, perhaps, for its many critiques. Scholars have debated the origin of the Anthropocene, arguing that the term falsely attributes ecological harm to \u201call humans\u201d (<\/span>anthropos) as a homogenous species-wide entity, drawing attention, instead, towards specific systems of harm. These debates are not inconsequential: the lived reality of any such epoch is built not just from scientific data, but from the social construction of the epoch as well. However, as a student of New Materialism, I cannot ignore the material processes driving scientific nomenclature and their real-world impacts. Despite the significance of the Anthropocene\u2019s critiques, its validation remains the authority of geologists; specifically, a sub-group of the International Commission on Stratigraphy (known as ICS; a governing scientific body of geologists) who has voted on its nomenclature. Francine McCarthy, Professor of Earth Sciences at Brock University and a member of the ICS\u2019s Anthropocene Working Group, explained the significance of the vote to officially ratify the term: \u201cIt matters if the world\u2019s institutions formally recognize this era as a <\/span>new earth systems reality,\u201d she said. If countries and institutions were forced to recognize that the world has moved to a fundamentally different bio-geo-chemical reality, it would follow that they can\u2019t necessarily regulate the environment like they used to, leading to potential changes in policy.<\/span><\/p>\n Geologists define planetary history in eons, with subdivisions in eras, periods, epochs, and ages. Any transition between these tracts of time (which each might span tens of millions of years) could be nothing but fuzzy and porous, as one species may linger longer, or certain climatic changes could occur quite gradually. Yet geologists must formalize the distinctions between segments of time with something exact, and in fact, a single thing\u2014one impossibly useful fossil or rock or line in a cliff face somewhere on Earth that acts as a global reference point, known as a Global Boundary Stratotype Section and Point (or GSSP). GSSPs mark the beginning of each new unit of geologic time. They tolerate a level of arbitrariness in their exact location in order to prioritize a map of deep time without overlaps, gaps, or inconsistencies. For the geologists advocating for the Anthropocene\u2019s ratification, stratigraphic changes from the Holocene, thus, must be demonstrated through a single GSSP\u2014in this case, a sediment core taken from Crawford Lake in Canada.<\/p>\n Photograph of a dried sediment core from Crawford Lake taken in January, 2024. Image by Author.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n In 2024, I attended an interdisciplinary symposium that included ICS members at Brock University, just 50 miles from where scientists dredged their proposed GSSP from the depths of Crawford Lake. This sediment core is considered the strongest evidence for a new epoch, encapsulating the Great Acceleration\u2014a sharp uptick in a host of environmental changes that all coincided around 1950. These changes are, importantly, visible in the cores taken from the lake, in a near-ideal compilation of Anthropogenic \u201cGreatest Hits:\u201d a spike in plutonium from the first nuclear bomb tests, fly ash particles from fossil fuel combustion, increased atmospheric CO\u00b2, heavy metal concentrations, microplastics, nitrogen, and biotic signals (such as changes to phytoplankton from acid raid, or changes in microscopic pollen phytoliths depicting declines in plant species due to human activity).<\/p>\n Microscopy image of a microplastic particle found in Troy, NY tap water in 2024. Image captured by Author in collaboration with Sarah Cadieux, Earth Science Professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, through a project supported by NATURE Lab and the Sanctuary for Independent Media.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Martin Head, the Chair of the ICS Sub-commission on Quaternary Stratigraphy, explained the Crawford Lake core as a \u201csensitive proxy\u201d for the epoch. Perhaps because of my background in sensory experience and embodied art practice, I immediately pictured sensitive bodies\u2014ones that could sense and feel the evidence of environmental changes. I realized that each of us, too, \u201csediment\u201d Anthropogenic markers within our bodies, from elevated levels of lead to the pesticides, PFAS, and microplastics accumulating in our blood. If proxies are that which can take the place of something else,, in this case, then bodies are the place where materials are continually taking place(s) across entities, human and the more-than-human.<\/p>\n While certainly not reliable as a stratigraphic marker for the purposes of geologic science, bodies might make a more appropriate representation of the Anthropocene exactly for their lack of discrete boundaries\u2014for their porosity and permeability to the same substances demarcated by the sediment core at Crawford Lake\u2014which so characterizes eco-bio-chemical phenomena since the 1950s. We are similarly stratified by these material agents.<\/p>\n This idea has precedent in Feminist New Materialist Stacy Alaimo\u2019s concept of transcorporeality, in which \u201cthe human is always inter-meshed with the more-than-human world.\u201d In her figuring, transcorporeality \u201cinsists that the human is always the very stuff of the messy, contingent, emergent mix of the material world.\u201d This inseparability is evident as pollutants and waste, while they pose unforeseen and \u201cmessy\u201d problems ecologically, sometimes also emerge in the very flesh and blood of human bodies, as is the case with DDT, PFAS, heavy metals, and microplastics. For whatever material transformations geologists seek to verify, our bodies are similarly transformed, bearing their own bio-geo-chemical evidence of the Anthropocene, accumulating the materials which are also accumulating in the earth\u2019s rock record.<\/p>\n The tools of stratigraphic knowledge were developed for much greater spans of time than the proposed Anthropocene (beginning in 1950), and a host of personal and political ambiguities make it difficult to collapse bio-geo-chemical phenomena into one discrete truth at such a resolution. Furthermore, the transcorporeal Anthropocene body might exist at odds with conventional earth science epistemologies, as it simultaneously confers material evidence with validity (bodies as sedimentations of anthropogenic materials) at the same time as it insists on a constant, fluid, shape-shifting unknown. As Alaimo outlines, transcorporeality \u201centails a rather disconcerting sense of being immersed within incalculable, interconnected material agencies that erode\u2026 even our most sophisticated modes of understanding.\u201d Both individuals and society strain to reckon this ambiguity, as it requires contending with the altered materiality of the body as well as with \u201cthe invisibly hazardous landscapes of risk society.\u201d This complicates what and how we \u201cknow\u201d environmental truths. The body-as-proxy haunts our understanding of selfhood, as well as our understanding of geologic time and the types of positivism which scaffold it. Many Anthropocene phenomena restore a sense of ambiguity in earth science epistemology; they seem to ask us to tolerate paraconsistent logics, producing contradictory double truths: plastic is not edible \/ we are eating plastic.<\/p>\n These \u201cdisconcerting\u201d or unnerving destabilizations of self-and-other are not actually novel; humans have long contended with the potential horrors and ambiguities of material permeability in the everyday practice of eating. Food is an intimate and relational encounter with the environment, as it is the way that our bodies figure, transform, and re-make landscapes through our interior. The permeability of the body is most evident in consumption, digestion, and metabolism\u2014processes that transform ecological materials into the self.<\/p>\n Left: Untitled (Kaolin Clay Mine), glice\u00e9 archival print, 24\u00d716, 2024. The author bites off a piece of a kaolin clay rock in a clay mine in Southern Georgia\u2014a type of chalky clay which is eaten in some places across the southern United States. Right: Edible kaolin clay purchased from an online retailer of edible earth. Image by Author.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n One of the most contested substances in the realm of consumption is earth itself\u2014clay, dirt, and chalk have been consumed by cultures on every continent, and the practice is thought to date to human\u2019s prehistory. It is, however, pathologized in the United States as a disorder called pica, and is heavily stigmatized along racial and class lines. So at the same time that our bodies are becoming a kind of accelerated strata, scholars are also struggling to understand those who engage in the intentional consumption of layers of earth. The clay, chalk, and rocks eaten by geophagists fall outside cultural codes for \u201cfood\u201d (on the scale of the raw and the cooked, they may not qualify as either), seeming to force an uncomfortable closeness with the environment.<\/p>\n The desire to consume dirt or clay rocks, while ancient, seems to hold a peculiar force in the Anthropocene, as is suggested by Iemanja Brown: \u201cEating dirt in the midst of climate change brings the state of things directly into the body. This may be the case with all that is ingested, but with dirt, the human is especially vulnerable because the body becomes, like dirt itself, a container for industrial byproduct.\u201d Brown figures the similarities between soil and bodies for the byproducts of the Anthropocene, and the body not just as a passive proxy, but as conductive matter, through which unseen dangers of late industrialisms may flow, transgress, and engender transformations.<\/p>\n Various edible clay rocks, served to guests at the author\u2019s exhibition Asphaltos\u2014Metabolizing Time at EMPAC in Troy, NY in 2023. Image by Author.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The act of eating earth intervenes into scientific knowledge-making practices that otherwise lay claim to defining the Anthropocene. Stratigraphy defines an epoch through distant, extracted sediment cores, yet geophagy allows direct, embodied contact with layers of sediment itself, which are accumulating the detritus of humankind\u2014a kind of strange anthros terroir. Though undervalued in scientific discourse, the chemical senses (taste and smell) can produce environmental knowledge in relation to earth matter. Studies have shown that soil odor was a reliable method to assess soil fertility and toxicity, individuals\u2019 detection of odor in tap water was proven more sensitive for identifying toxins than scientific instrumentation, and some geologists use taste to identify rocks.<\/p>\n While research on the potential medical benefits of geophagy is plagued by inconsistency, one of the more generally accepted medicinal uses of edible clay is, in fact, as a way to reduce the porosity to toxins of one\u2019s body. Bentonite clay enhances intestinal mucosal integrity, as it fortifies an important physical and chemical shield protecting the rest of the body from absorption of high levels of potential toxins or harmful substances. Edible clay is often suggested in alternative health spaces (with varying degrees of credibility) as a \u201cdetoxifying\u201d remedy for microplastics, pesticides, metals, or other anthropogenic materials in the body.<\/p>\n Detoxification is often framed as an escape from the perils of the Anthropocene, skirting the deep inequalities that truly define the problem. And while detox protocols can encompass worthy holistic health practices, absolute detoxification as a goal is shot through with purity politics\u2014a false hope for pure bodies that obfuscates inequality at its best, and perpetuates xenophobia at its worst. As if to demonstrate that detoxification is a false promise in the Anthropocene, many individuals have, instead, exposed themselves to harm through geophagy practices. In a curious twist of fate, one might find herself nervously consuming the same earth we have irrevocably changed, seeking futilely to prevent anthropogenic toxicity from taking hold of her interior landscape, too.<\/p>\n This paradox represents the desire for purity in a world where we must accept already-altered life where the materials we put into the earth may also be digested back into our own bodies. Heightened anxieties around purity may in fact be symptoms of the unique ontological challenges of the Anthropocene. I will leave this story with all its loops and contradictions, resisting a satisfying conclusion which might cheapen the complexities at play. Instead, I offer encouragement to notice the paraconsistent and embodied porosities of the Anthropocene. Noticing practices, such as those offered by Anna Tsing, are a way to cultivate intimacy with the environment; perhaps they could provide intimacy with the changes, vulnerabilities, and porosities of our bodies, too, generating a commitment to sit-with the unnerving ambiguities that arise. At the site of consumption and digestion, for example, we might stop to consider forms of repair or harm our food is endorsing, or what physical transformations result from a choice in eating, to a distant landscape or to the bacteria in our gut. What negotiation of risk and repair are being made? Our bodies, like sediment cores, may archive the Anthropocene, offering a visceral, everyday means of understanding this epoch through the act of eating.<\/p>\nA Derelict Epoch<\/h2>\n
Deep Time\u2019s Lithic Punctuation Marks<\/h2>\n
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<\/p>\nOur Bodies as Proxies for the Anthropocene<\/h2>\n
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<\/p>\nAnthro-Terroir<\/h2>\n
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