Survival

Survival

Volume 44, Numbers 1 & 2, Spring/Summer 2016
Cynthia Chris, Matt Brim
Excerpted from the Editor’s Note

In recent decades, professional organizations representing the Earth sciences have debated adoption of the term Anthropocene as a new geological epoch—and when such an epoch may have commenced. Most broadly, some argue that the term should pertain to an era of intensified human impact on the environment since the development of agriculture, some twelve thousand or so years ago, thus replacing the currently used term Holocene. Others suggest that we need a new term to mark the intensification of that impact since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the eighteenth century. Still others date the Anthropocene to the nuclear bomb tests that preceded the U.S. atomic attack on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945, and there are also arguments for dates including 1492, 1610, and 1964…

In contrast, this issue of WSQ approaches survival at micro levels, tracing the risky business of survival among individual bodies, resistant subjects, and intimate, sometimes audacious acts. Nevertheless, the specter of large-scale, world-historical survival is never, and never can be, entirely out of the picture.