1. For more information and registration
sydney.edu.au/sei
Human beings now control the very life processes of the Earth;
we have moved from being serial depleters of local environments
to becoming a geophysical force that shapes the planet. While
geologists make their case to formalize and adopt this epoch, the role
of environmental humanities and social sciences has become crucially
linked with our allies in the natural and technological sciences in
seeking to understand and meet the challenges and changes thrown
up by the new epoch.
Our role is to help interpret the impacts, understand the implications,
and engage the public in developing alternative ways forward. How
to do all this will be explored and debated in the conference and its
related events and workshops.
ENCOUNTERING THE ANTHROPOCENE
THE ROLE OF ENVIRONMENTAL
HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES
CONFERENCE
26–28 FEBRUARY 2014
Image: The Banker, Jason de Caires Taylor
ABN: 15 211 513 464. CRICOS number: 00026A.
SPEAKERS INCLUDE
Jan Zalasiewicz
University of Leicester
Sverker Sorlin
KTH Royal Institute of Technology,
Sweden
Libby Robin
Australian National University
Kate Rigby
Monash University
Kirsten Wehner
National Museum of Australia
CONTACT DETAILS
Michelle St. Anne
michelle.stanne@sydney.edu.au

2. Day 1 Perspectives of the Anthropocene
Wednesday 26 February
8.30 – 9.30 Register & Welcome to Country
9.30 – 11.00 Double Keynote:
Libby Robin, The End of The Environment: Apocalypse, the Anthropocene
and the Future
Jan Zalasiewicz, TBA
11.00 – 11.20 morning tea
11.20 – 12.50 Double Keynote:
Sverker Sörlin, TBA
David Christian, TBA
12.50 – 1.50 lunch
1.50 – 3.20 Double Keynote:
Nikolas Kompridis, Receptivity as Answerability: A Normative Response
to the Challenges of the Anthropocene
Kate Rigby, Narrative, Ethics, and Bushfire in the Anthropocene
3.20 – 3.40 afternoon tea
3.40 – 4.40 Double Keynote:
Roderick J. Lawrence, Applying Transdisciplinarity for Sustainability
Giovanna di Chiro, TBA
4.40 – 5.00 Wrap Up
5.00 – 7.00 Book Launch: w/ Iain McCalman
Global Population, Alison Bashford
Rethinking Invasion Ecologies, Jodi Frawley and Iain McCalman
The Future of Nature, Libby Robin,Sverker Sörlin & Paul Warde
Day 2 Caring for Country
Thursday 27 February
9.00 – 10.00 Keynote: Deborah Bird-Rose, TBA
10.00 – 10.15 morning tea
10.15 – 11.45 Panel Discussion: TBA
Stephen Kinnane, Bruce Gorring, Anna Dwyer
11.45 – 1.15 Panel Discussion: TBA
Jennifer Newell, Jacklyn Lacey,Lumepa Apelu, Leah Lui- Chivizhe
1.15 – 2.00 lunch

3. 2.00 – 3.30 Panel Discussion: ‘Country and the Anthropocene’
with
Jessica Weir, Stephen Mueke, Danie Mellor
Chair Ross Gibson
3.30 – 3.50 afternoon tea
3.50 – 5.30 in the foyer with Artists
The Shape of Things to Come: Art and Geoengineering, Josh Wodak
& Dr onacloV
Janet Laurence
Mandy Martin
Conference Dinner – Venue to be Advised
Day 3 Animals, Plants and Food
Friday 28 February
9.00 – 10.30 Double Keynote:
Richard Nelson, The Forgotten Voices: Natural Sounds and the Lost Art of
Listening
Thom Van Dooren TBA
10.30 – 10.45 morning tea
10.45 – 12.15 Panel Discussion:
Alison Pouliot, Encountering the (Fungally-Entangled) Anthropocene
George Main, Mobilising Materiality: Food Histories, Museum Objects, and
the Resilience of Place
Kirsten Wehner TBA
12.15 – 1.15 Keynote: Phillip Hoare TBA
1.15 – 2.00 lunch
2.00 – 3.30 Panel Discussion:
Fiona Allon, Welcome to the Anthropocene: a cultural politics of scale,
temporality and the future
Ben Dibley The enigma of the geomorphic fold
Rowena Braddock Refiguring Disaster: Différance of the Anthropocene
3.30 – 3.45 afternoon tea
3.45 – 4.45 Keynote: Tim Entwistle, Curing plant blindness and illiteracy
4.45 – 5.00 Wrap Up

4. Speaker abstracts and biographies
In order of presentation
The End of The Environment: Apocalypse, the Anthropocene and the Future
Libby Robin
If we can say “the environment” began in 1948, the advent of the Anthropocene in 2000 marks its
end. This talk will explore the metaphorical potential of the Anthropocene to transform possibilities for
the future as humanity enters the new millennium where the last vestiges of a sense of controlling “the
environment” are disappearing. The environment was born with apocalypse, and crisis is still a key
mode for environmental discussions. This talk will argue that the Anthropocene might be adapted as a
mantra for more-than-human life on Earth to adapt to escalating change. Science has been prominent
in defining and managing the environment, as well as being the chief voice of Earth’s future. But as
we move beyond management, and into surviving change, we must draw on a broader spectrum of
thinking, including the humanities and social sciences. No longer can we afford to limit our thinking to
‘probable’ futures: they are too grim. Finding possibilities for living with the Great Acceleration is the
greatest human problem of our time. The Anthropocene offers a metaphor to stimulate the
imagination.
Libby Robin FAHA is Professor of environmental history, Fenner School of Environment and
Society, Australian National University, and Senior Research Fellow, National Museum of
Australia. Since 2011, she is Guest Professor, KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory,
Stockholm, Sweden. In 2013 she was elected to the Australian Academy of Humanities.
She is author of How a Continent Created a Nation (UNSW Press), winner NSW Premier's
Prize in Australian History 2007 and Flight of the Emu (MUP) winner Vic Premier's literature
prize for science writing 2003, and co-editor of Boom and Bust: Bird Stories for a Dry Country
(CSIRO) winner Whitley Medal for Australian zoology 2009, and Future of Nature (Yale
2013).
Libby’s current projects include Collecting the future: museums, communities and climate
change (National Museum of Australia and American Museum of Natural History), The
Culture of Weeds (Australian Research Council LP1202000472, ANU, NMA and Royal
Melbourne Botanic Gardens), and Expertise for the Future (ANU, KTH Stockholm, University
of East Anglia, Cambridge Centre for History and Economics)
Jan Zalasiewicz
Sverker Sörlin
David Christian
David Christian (D.Phil. Oxford, 1974) is by training a historian of Russia and the Soviet
Union, but since the 1980s he has become interested in World History on very large scales.
He taught at Macquarie University in Sydney from 1975 to 2000 before taking up a position at
San Diego State University in 2001. In January 2009 he returned to Macquarie
University. He has written on the social and material history of the 19th century Russian
peasantry, in particular on aspects of diet and the role of alcohol. He has also written a text
book history of modern Russia, and a synoptic history of Inner Eurasia (Russia, Central Asia
and Mongolia). In 1989, he began teaching courses on 'Big History', surveying the past on the
largest possible scales, including those of biology and astronomy; and in 2004, he published
the first text on 'Big History'. At San Diego State University, he taught courses on World
History, 'Big History', World Environmental History, Russian History, and the History of Inner
Eurasia.
He is a member of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the Koninklijke Hollandsche
Maatschappij der Wetenschappen [Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities],
Affiliates Chair for the World History Association, and a member of the editorial boards of the

5. Journal of Global History and the Cambridge History of the World. In 2008, he was appointed
as a James Marsh Professor-at-Large at the University of Vermont, and also accepted
appointments as a Research Fellow at Ewha Women's University in Seoul and as a Professor
of History at Macquarie University in Sydney.
In 2009 David Christian received an ARC grant to support research on the second volume of
his history of Inner Eurasia, which will cover the history of Russia, Central Asia and Mongolia
from the Mongol Empire to the present day. Over the ne
Receptivity as Answerability: A Normative Response to the Challenges of the Anthropocene
Nikolas Kompridis
In this paper, I adduce the reasons why a diversity- and climate challenged world is in need of a
change in the normative stance from which it responds to these challenges, challenges which are
intrinsically linked to one another. The normative stance I propose, receptivity as answerability, is a
multi-faceted normative position that comes to terms with the virulent critiques of anthropocentrism
and humanism without succumbing to scepticism about human agency and the possibility of
disclosing alternative possibilities of caring for and altering the conditions of the human and non-
human world.
Narrative, Ethics, and Bushfire in the Anthropocene
Kate Rigby
This paper brings a material ecocritical perspective to the phenomenon of wildfire, with specific
reference to the potentially catastrophic firestorms of southeastern Australia, which are set to become
more frequent and intense as the planet warms and droughts lengthen and deepen in this part of the
world. The discussion will focus on Colin Thiele’s February Dragon, first published in 1965 with the
support of the Bushfire Research Council of South Australia. As a work of children’s literature (8+),
this story by one of Australia’s best-known authors of children’s literature, affords consideration of the
educational potential of narratives of eco-catastrophe for young readers. In particular, the paper will
address the ways in which this text discloses the complex inter- and intra-action of human and
nonhuman actors and factors in the aetiology, unfolding and aftermath of bushfire disasters, as well
as raising ethical questions about human relations with (other) animals in contexts of shared
vulnerability.
Kate Rigby is Professor of Environmental Humanities in the School of Languages,
Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University and a Fellow of the Australian
Humanities Academy and of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Her research ranges
across German Studies, European philosophy, literature and religion, and culture and
ecology. She is a Senior Editor of the journal Philosophy Activism Nature, and her books
include Gender, Ecology and the Sacred (co-edited, 1999), Topographies of the Sacred: The
Poetics of Place in European Romanticism (2004), and Ecocritical Theory: New European
Approaches (co-edited, 2011). Kate was a founding member of the Australian Ecological
Humanities (http://www.ecologicalhumanities.org/about.html), the inaugural President of the
Association for the Study of Literature and Environment (Australia-New Zealand)
(http://www.aslec-anz.asn.au/), the founding Director of the Forum on Religion and
Ecology@Monash (http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/fore/) and she is currently a member of
the Mellon Australia-Pacific Observatory in Environmental Humanities.
Applying Transdisciplinarity for Sustainability
Roderick J. Lawrence
Many initiatives dealing with climate change and extreme weather events, loss of biodiversity and
increasing deforestation, or poverty reduction and increasing socio-economic inequalities are not
leading to effective outcomes. Since the 1960s, international organizations, national governments,
non-government organizations (NGOs), private enterprises and the mass media have considered
these kinds of anthropogenic challenges without major progress. Today, data, statistics and other
kinds of information show alarming trends. It is important to take stock of the obstacles, the
shortcomings and the challenges facing the United Nations post-2015 agenda. This presentation will
provide a broad overview of these challenges and how they have been interpreted. The author will

6. argue that current responses are not capable of dealing with the complexity or the interrelated nature
of these challenges because they are too frequently defined by the narrow concerns of national
sovereignty, financial profits, scientific short-sightedness and self-interest. The current deadlock that
has blocked effective implementation of widely shared and highly commendable objectives should be
understood. The author suggests that, in general, the notion of sustainable development has not been
a catalyst for more effective implementation at the international and regional levels because there is
too little consensus about what it means and how it can be achieved. A broader multi-layered
interpretation that applies an inter-sector framework supported by stronger political commitment and
improved societal awareness is urgently needed. These are the foundations of a transdisciplinary
approach that can help deal with the complexity of these challenges.
Roderick J. Lawrence graduated from University of Adelaide (Australia) with First Class
Honours. He has a Master’s Degree from the University of Cambridge (England) and a
Doctorate of Science from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale, Lausanne (Switzerland). In
January 1997 he was nominated to the New York Academy of Science. In 1999 he was
nominated Professor in the Faculty of Social and Economic Sciences at the University of
Geneva. He currently is Head of the Human Ecology Group at the Institute of Environmental
Sciences. He is the founding Director of the Certificate of Advanced Studies in Sustainable
Development and Agenda 21 since 2003. He is also Director of the Global Environmental
Policy Programme at the University of Geneva in partnership with UNEP since 2010. His
biography has been included in Marquis Who's Who in the World and Who's Who in Science
and Engineering.
For further information:
http://www.unige.ch/ecohum/Collaborateurs/Lawrence.html
Giovanna di Chiro
Deborah Bird-Rose
Steve Kinnane has been an active researcher and writer for more than 20 years as well as
lecturing and working on community cultural heritage and development projects. His interests
are diverse encompassing Aboriginal history, creative documentary (both visual and literary),
and tensions surrounding the ideals of sustainability and the relationships between
individuality, community, country, economy and human development.
Bruce Gorring is a kartiya (non-Aboriginal person) of Asian and European heritage. He was
born in Awabakal Country (Maitland, NSW) and raised in Wiradjuri/Waveroo Country
(Albury/Wodonga, NSW/Victoria). Apart from a short residence in Whadjuk Noongar Country
(Fremantle, WA), Bruce has lived in Yawuru buru (Broome, WA) since 1998. He received a
Bachelor of Arts (Hons) in geography and sociology from the University of Newcastle and a
Master of Social Sciences (Environment and Planning) from RMIT University in Melbourne.
He is profoundly interested in the reflexive relationship between ‘Country’, people, and the
sustainability of complex cultural and natural landscapes.
Bruce worked for the Kimberley Land Council from 1998 to 2005, as a Project Development
Officer and then Manager of the Native Title Services Unit. From 2006 to 2009, he was the
Assistant Director of the Land Branch in the WA Department of Indigenous Affairs in Perth. In
October 2009, he was appointed Research Coordinator in the Nulungu Research Institute at
the Broome campus of the University of Notre Dame Australia. Currently, he is the Acting
Director of the Nulungu Research Institute.
Anna Dwyer is a Karajarri woman. Her traditional country is extends from the ocean to the
desert and is located 190 kilometers south of Broome in the Kimberley region of Western
Australia. Her first language is ‘Karajarri’. Anna studied at St Mary’s Primary School in
Broome, Broome District High School, and Pundulmurra College in Port Hedland.
Anna’s professional background is an Interpreter and linguist. She holds an Advanced
Diploma of Australian Languages and Linguistics Studies from the Bachelor Institute of
Indigenous Tertiary Education. In 2013, Anna completed further studies in oral history at

7. Nirrumbuk Aboriginal Corporation and gained AHCILM404 - A Record and Document
Community History; a nationally accredited unit of competency.
While Anna has lived in Bidyadanga, Broome, Kalumburu, and Halls Creek, most of her time
has been spent living in Derby, Western Australia. Previously, Anna has worked for the
Kimberley Aboriginal Law and Cultural Centre and Kimberley Land Council. She was also a
Project Officer for the Kimberley Older Indigenous People’s Health Project in Derby. Since
June 2009, Anna has been a Researcher in the Nulungu Research Institute at the Broome
Campus of the University of Notre Dame Australia. As Researcher, Anna’s primary interest is
working closely with her people and undertaking further research in Karajarri country.
Jennifer Newell
Lemepa Apelu
Leah Lui-Chivizhe
Jacklyn Lacey
‘Country and the Anthropocene’
The Indigenous concept of ‘country’ is an enormously rich and expansive set of ideas. Key among
them is an insistence human lives are connected to land and other living beings, and each must care
for and respond to the other. The Anthropocene is the name for a geologic age of our own making,
based on the proposition that human activity has driven change at a planetary level. The idea of
country, then, with its insistence that people are not the main force at work on a passive world,
provides critical insight and fresh perspectives into the concept of the Anthropocene.
Chair
Professor Ross Gibson
Presenters
Dr Jessica Weir
Professor Stephen Muecke
Dr Danie Mellor
Ross Gibson is a university professor concentrating on multi-modal approaches to
writing. He was the inaugural Creative Director at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image
and a Senior Consultant Producer for the establishment of the Museum of
Sydney. Works include the books Seven Versions of an Australian Badland (2002)
The Summer Exercises (2009) and 26 Views of the Starburst World (2012).
Danie Mellor. Born in Mackay, Queensland, Danie Mellor has lived, worked, travelled and
studied in Australia, England, Scotland and South Africa. His award winning work and
research addresses the complex histories of Australia's Indigenous, Colonial and Settler
communities, and has been regularly shown in significant exhibitions, including Story Place,
Queensland Art Gallery and Primavera, Museum of Contemporary Art, Culture Warriors and
unDisclosed at the National Gallery of Australia, and has been showcased at Sakahàn, the
inaugural international survey of Indigenous art at the National Gallery of Canada. Future
projects include a major 10-year survey at University of Queensland Art Museum in 2014. His
work is represented in permanent collections including the National Gallery of Australia,
Museum of Contemporary Art, Queensland Art Gallery, National Gallery of Victoria, Art
Gallery of South Australia, Art Gallery of Western Australia, Australian Museum and the Kerry
Stokes Collection. In 2009, Mellor won the 26th National Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander
Art Award for his work From Rite to Ritual. Danie is a Senior Lecturer in Theoretical Enquiry
at Sydney College of the Arts, the University of Sydney.
Stephen Muecke is Professor of Ethnography at the University of New South Wales, Sydney,
where he is part of the Environmental Humanities programme. He has written extensively on
Indigenous Australia, especially in the Kimberley, and on the Indian Ocean. He is a Fellow of
the Australian Academy of the Humanities and a Faculty member, Global Center for
Advanced Studies, Switzerland. Recent books are Butcher Joe, for Documenta 13, Hatje
Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern (2011) and Contingency in Madagascar, with photographer Max Pam
(2012).

8. Jessica Weir is a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Culture and Society. Her
research is part of the critical intellectual work of the Environmental Humanities, and her book
Murray River Country (2009, Aboriginal Studies Press) is internationally recognised as
outstanding scholarship in this field. Jessica’s research collaborations with Indigenous people
examine how western binaries and Indigenous knowledges interact to circumscribe and
transform our understandings of environmental issues and their governance.
Janet Laurence
The Shape of Things to Come: Art and Geoengineering
Joshua Wodak
Models of climate change trajectories show the shape of things to come for the biosphere and its
inhabitants this century. Scientific organisations worldwide overwhelmingly maintain that the window
to avoid runaway catastrophic climate change is closing fast: being one decade…at most. In turn,
highly reputed climate scientists and scientific organisations are now proposing radical ways to
engineer the world’s climate through bioengineering and geoengineering. This presentation explores
this reversal of agency: from being shaped by things to come, to how humans may shape things to
come through climate engineering interventions designed to separate existing lifeforms from six
degrees of catastrophe.
Dr Josh Wodak is an interdisciplinary artist & researcher whose participatory projects and
interactive installations explore ecological sustainability and climate change. Formally trained
in Visual Anthropology (University of Sydney) and Interdisciplinary Cross-Cultural Research
(Australian National University), his work has been presented as performances, screenings,
installations and exhibitions in art galleries, museums, theatres, performative spaces,
cinemas, and festivals across Australia. His ongoing body of work, Good [Barrier] Grief (2011-
present), uses participatory practice in photomedia, video art, sound art and interactive
installations to explore the development of post-fossil fuel futures in relation to energy
production and climate change. He is currently an Honorary Research Fellow at the Faculty of
Architecture, Design & Planning, University of Sydney.
Dr onacloV
Mandy Martin
The Forgotten Voices: Natural Sounds and the Lost Art of Listening
Richard Nelson
For thousands of generations, humans carried out their lives in a quiet world, interwoven with songs
and whispers. Hunters and gatherers, fishermen, gardeners, and pastoralists paid careful and astute
attention to the language of bird voices, the rustle of animals in thickets, the murmurings of wind and
water. But now, our industrial civilization has splintered the ancient silence, with a cacophony that
drowns out most natural sounds. At the same time, we have turned our attention increasingly inward,
becoming largely oblivious to voices other than our own. These changes have taken place at the far
edge of our consciousness, and yet they have profoundly altered our relationship to the earth and to
our home country. This presentation will draw from my experiences as an ethnographer living with
Inuit, Koyukon, and Gwich’in people in northern Alaska, and from my work as a natural sounds
recordist and radio producer in Alaska and Australia.
Richard Nelson is a writer, cultural anthropologist, and radio producer who has spent most of
his life in Alaska. His books include Hunters of the Northern Ice, Shadow of the Hunter, and
Make Prayers to the Raven (which became an internationally broadcast television series),
and two award-winning books about the natural world—Heart and Blood: Living with Deer in
America, and The Island Within. He is the originating producer and narrator for Encounters, a
nationally broadcast public radio program about the natural world. He is infatuated with the
outdoors and his special passions are the wild country of Alaska and Australia.

9. Thom Van Dooren
Encountering the (Fungally-Entangled) Anthropocene
Alison Pouliot
For many, the word fungi means a mushroom, especially one that we can pop in our mouths. Wild
harvesting and commercial production of edible mushrooms has an extended and expansive history.
However, fungi in their entirety represent something way more than food, but rather, the very
infrastructure that binds terrestrial ecosystems – including the systems that produce our food. Fungi
underpin the functioning of the biosphere.
In this presentation I expand the concept of this kingdom and its matrix of interconnectivity. I argue
that considering a fungal future in all its manifestations is one of the challenges of the Anthropocene.
Thinking beyond the human, and even the mammalian, is a project for the Environmental Humanities.
I explore both scientific and cultural perspectives on fungi in developing a thesis about their ecological
and cultural significance. Imagining and engaging with fungi might enable us to move beyond
discussions of issues of the Anthropocene and catalyse outcomes for change. That is, change that
includes all life-forms in understanding the journey of biodiversity through the Anthropocene.
It seems the Anglophone world has little interaction with this kingdom, yet the 5000+ year old Ötzi the
Iceman discovered on the Austro-Italian border two decades ago indicates ancient human-fungal
associations. Indeed, in his first aid kit was the birch polypore fungus known for its antibiotic and
styptic effects. That such curative properties may have been recognised in the Neolithic period yet
have been forgotten by present-day Anglophone societies is a conundrum. Fungi have also truly been
the forgotten kingdom of present-day biodiversity conservation. Will an entire kingdom of organisms
also slip through the interdisciplinary cracks of the Environmental Humanities?
Alison Pouliot is an ecologist and environmental photographer. Her work melds scientific
and artistic approaches in representing and communicating environmental issues. She is
currently undertaking a PhD exploring fungal-human relationships at the Australian National
University.
Kirsten Wehner
Mobilising Materiality: Food Histories, Museum Objects, and the Resilience of Place
George Main
Industrial culture drove the pastoral and agricultural colonisation of inland Australia during the
nineteenth century. The establishment of a modern farming landscape imposed profound
environmental erasure and disruption. At odds with Aboriginal modes of tending country to foster
ecological resilience and the wellbeing of land and people, a new food production system that utilised
wire fences, agricultural machines, and railways to generate produce and feed the residents of distant
urban centres relied upon cultural processes that devalued the local and the particular. The
emergence of agricultural science as a distinct discipline in the late nineteenth century consolidated a
modern stance towards Australian farmland as material terrain devoid of agency and story, as blank
surfaces upon which to apply abstracted scientific and industrial imaginings.
Agriculture connects everyone ‘in the most vital, constant, and concrete way to the natural world’
wrote Donald Worster.
i
Across the inland slopes and plains of Australia, dynamics of history and
culture hid such intimate ties. The establishment of a modern Australian agricultural landscape in the
nineteenth century, and its operation into the present, created an array of ‘shadow places’, a term
used by environmental philosopher Val Plumwood to define those ‘places that provide our material
and ecological support, most of which, in a global market, are likely to elude our knowledge and
responsibility’.
ii
The obscuring of material and ecological ties that nourished Australians and recipients
of exported food throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries involved a cultural process of
dematerialisation, through which people could not easily identify or take responsibility for the material
and ecological dynamics that sustained them.
Today, might materiality itself be mobilised to uncover deep histories of human embeddedness within
material and ecological networks? Can the repositioning of museum objects within rich contexts of

10. particular places and their histories enable and vitalise understandings of human ties to productive
terrains? At this time of unfolding climatic chaos and its cultural challenges, could embodied and
imaginative encounters with material particularities of rural places and historic agricultural objects
allow storytelling that instils resilience within land and people?
George Main is an environmental historian and a curator in the People and the Environment
program at the National Museum of Australia. His work explores the capacities of ecological
ways of understanding and engaging with land and materiality to bolster the resilience of
places and people, and to foster the productivity of rural and urban terrains.
Philip Hoare
Welcome to the Anthropocene: a cultural politics of scale, temporality and the future
Fiona Allon
In The Order of Things Foucault expresses his 'profound relief' that Man is only a recent invention and
that he will disappear again as quickly as he appeared. Ironically, the concept of the Anthropocene
confirms this sense of relief as both prescient and as somewhat optimistic. In this respect, and in
many others, the idea of the Anthropocene seems beset by a range of paradoxes: about time,
agency, scale, life and matter, and in particular by a human centredness that decades of critical
thought have sought to decentre. If the past is the key to the future, as much of the literature on the
Anthropocene suggests, how are we to understand the folding together of multiple temporalities in
both the strata of the past and the possible futures to come? Such ambiguities of temporalisation
seem to have been lost in the urgency of recognising the fossil-fuel based economies of industrial
capitalism as the key source of anthropogenic climate change. Conventional categories of time and
the future, likewise, seem unable to adequately apprehend the ‘derangements of scale’ (Clark 2012)
in the era of climate change. This paper addresses the disavowals that underpin narratives of
industrial capitalism as a promise that has now become threat; as salvation that is now peril. Rather
than positing fossil fuels as either promise or threat, this paper suggests that what needs to be
acknowledged is their full imbrication and co-existence in shared forms of life in order to better
understand the possibilities of living otherwise. It also argues for more nuanced models that can
reflect the unevenness of space and time in the context of differentially climate-changed futures.
Fiona Allon is ARC Future Fellow and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Gender and
Cultural Studies at the University of Sydney. Her research areas include urban and suburban
cultures, communities and belonging, and environmental humanities. She is currently working
on environmental sustainability and everyday life.
The enigma of the geomorphic fold
Ben Dibley
While no doubt a pithy appellation for humanity’s folding into the Earth’s system, the notion of the
Anthropocene nevertheless remains an enigma. Enigmatic, I contend, since this concept is at once
inescapably anthropocentric, and yet works tirelessly to de-centre the human that it would seemingly
enthrone. That is, it announces a human exceptionalism in which humans, not just figuratively with
words and signs but literally with their tools and animals, are changing the Earth. Yet the processes
that the Anthropocene designates – climate change, ocean acidification, mass extinction and so on –
and the temporal scale in which these are enmeshed necessarily decentre the human as sovereign
subject and planetary master. Ironically then, the concept of the Anthropocene puts the anthropos at
the centre of the world and being at precisely the moment when the impossibility of disentangling the
human and the nonhuman is recognized. At the same time it confirms the human as central to a
temporal scale whose geological and cosmic span can only demonstrate the relative insignificance of
human life, and thus of the interval in which it appeared and, most likely, will disappear. It is this
enigma that this paper seeks to explore.
Ben Dibley is a Research Associate at the Institute for Culture and Society, the University of
Western Sydney. He has research interests in social and cultural theory, particularly around
questions of colonialism and the environment. His has recent publications in Australian
Humanities Review, History and Anthropology, New Formations, and Transformations.

11. Refiguring Disaster: Différance of the Anthropocene
Rowena Braddock
The concept of the Anthropocene as discursive phenomenon produces an eschatological narrative
that functions as an apocalyptic warning. The narrative forecast of the end of the human promises a
disastrous self-fulfilling; humanity will before long, with its own hand, sign the end of its time. And so,
tragically it goes – the pernicious technology of human mastery or intentionality (agency, sovereignty,
subjectivity) that has, in philosophical time, long elevated and distinguished human singularity from
myriad other life-worlds and systems of meaning, programmes its destruction. The Anthropocene
moment raises the spectre of the humanist dream of universality and natural totality by highlighting
the impossibility of a making sense of or bringing the world to order. The human species – in
Derridean terms always already auto-immune – faces at its limit the awful and awe-inspiring end of
the meaning and representation it knows. Crucially, it is in the radical thinking produced at and of this
limit, in the very inadequacy of ethical responding and the defiance of reason, that our (anti-liberal)
freedom lies. The psychic conundrum of the Anthropocene, the alarm and despair of doom and its
inevitable melancholia, in giving rise to a generative panic allows hope for and wonder at the
recognition and generation of other modes of non-exclusive and complex material engagements. To
this end my paper will argue that anticipating the tomb-stone of the Anthropos, as fossil record or
mineral momento mori in the geological strata, gives passage to new modes of inscription and new
non-ideal refigured forms of meaning and reading beyond the paysage moralisé, and thus gestures to
the différantial survival of the human-impossible.
Dr. Rowena Braddock is Lecturer in the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies at The
University of Sydney. Rowena’s research interests include contemporary continental
philosophy, feminist philosophy, nineteenth and twentieth century literature and poetry,
rhetoric, psychoanalysis and cultural studies. She is currently preparing a manuscript based
on her recently completed PhD thesis examining Derrida’s late concept of unconditional
hospitality as a risky interior poetics of the subject. Rowena has a number of articles on
different Derridean and other animals forthcoming in Mosaic, SubStance and Humanimalia.
Curing plant blindness and illiteracy
Tim Entwisle
Humans display symptoms of two potentially life-threatening diseases: plant blindness and plant
illiteracy. We either take plants for granted, viewing them as a kind of green wall-paper, or we fail to
appreciate just how important they are to life on Earth. Botanic gardens have always celebrated plant
life, displaying its variety and beauty. Now they must do more. Without losing their whimsy and charm,
botanic gardens have a job to do. In my role as Director and Chief Executive of Royal Botanic
Gardens Melbourne I look after two truly iconic botanic gardens. In 1969, the Melbourne Gardens
were described as 'the most beautiful of their kind in the southern hemisphere and perhaps the world'
and last year the newly opened Australian Garden at the Cranbourne Gardens was said to be 'after
the Opera House [in Sydney]...the most stunning piece of design in Australia'. Our National Herbarium
of Victoria is the oldest, and historically and scientifically richest, collection of preserved plants, algae
and fungi in Australia. More recently we established the Victorian Conservation Seedbank as an
insurance policy and investment bank for our State’s flora, complementing Sydney’s PlantBank and
contributing to a national partnership supported by Royal Botanic Gardens Kew’s Millennium Seed
Bank in London. Add to that more than two hundred staff, volunteers and associates who are experts
in horticulture, systematics, ecology, conservation and education. With assets like these the Royal
Botanic Gardens Melbourne is not only well placed to contribute to a cure, it must surely be obliged to
do so. I’ll explain how botanic gardens worldwide will help us survive the Anthropocene, and why its
plants, algae and fungi that are really in control of this planet.
Tim Entwisle was appointed Director and Chief Executive of Royal Botanic Gardens
Melbourne in March 2013. He has a Bachelor of Science (with Honours) from The University
of Melbourne and a PhD from La Trobe University. His botanical career began at Royal
Botanic Gardens Melbourne, as writer and co-editor of the Flora of Victoria then Research
Manager. He moved to Sydney in 1998 to become Director of Plant Sciences, then Executive
Director for eight years, of Sydney's Royal Botanic Gardens and Domain Trust. Prior to
returning to Melbourne, Professor Entwisle moved to London for two years to be Director of
Conservation, Living Collections and Estates at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. He has

12. published extensively on the systematics and ecology of freshwater algae, being honoured in
2013 when a new genus (Entwisleia), family and order of algae were named after him.
Professor Entwisle is a prolific communicator of science, including a five-year-old blog Talking
Plants, and frequent contributions to radio, television, print and social media. He is a Visiting
Professor at Durham University and Honorary Professor at Sydney University.
i
Donald Worster, The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination, Oxford
University Press, New York, 1993, p. 50.
ii
Val Plumwood, ‘Shadow Places and the Politics of Dwelling’, Australian Humanities Review, Issue 44, March
2008.