Hope in the Age of the Anthropocene

Brian Treanor

Today we are faced with all the traditional reasons to despair: poverty, loneliness, loss, tragedy, death, and the like. And, for many, this despair is exacerbated by either the modern disenchantment of the world, or a postmodern suspicion regarding grand narratives (especially those speculating about transcendence), or both. The news of the day sounds a relentless drumbeat of woe. As I write these words on a rainy morning in southern California—itself a depressing reminder of the apocalyptic drought my state is suffering, and the anthropogenic climate change that is likely to make such droughts more common and more severe—the headlines include: the ongoing brutality of the “Islamic State” in Iraq and Syria; increasing tensions between Russia and the West, including frightening near-misses involving unregistered military aircraft; the stillsmoldering catastrophe of Ebola Zaire in West Africa (and parallel, though much less publicized, stories of MERS and H5N1, either of which, in a pandemic form, would give us all personal insight into the experience of medieval villagers facing the Black Death); epidemics of sexual assault and rape in both India and on North American college campuses; and stories about the widening economic inequality, and the possibility of another global economic downturn.