Scales: close, far, fast, slow & all in your face

Elspeth Probyn

Scales have been objectified and sedimented by certain strands of geography and geology and expanded to measure humans and separate sociality from nature. As such they are not that useful for thinking of the multiple embranglement (Subramariam 2024), and the twisting and shaking of our times. I want to reframe scale as a way of figuring out relations that are not measured by and through the human. Scale can make us feel the proximity and distance of what’s happening, what has happened in the world, and what might. Scale can enable new insights into more-than-human, complexly layered relationality.

It is widely debated whether the Anthropocene is a new geologic epoque. In 2024, the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) said it didn’t qualify as a new chronostratigraphic unit – it is “an event” (ICS 2024). Nonetheless, the Anthropocene has spurred an unprecedented geologic turn in the social sciences and humanities (Yusoff 2024). “Most academic discourse related to the Anthropocene lies outside of both geology and the physical sciences” (Henderson and Vachula 2024, 3).

Many have argued that these debates in the humanities and social sciences tend to reproduce the Anthropos as centre stage. After all, the possibility of holding a rock imprinted by “us” is seemingly more compelling than contemplating other ‘-cenes’. My mother, a geography teacher, was particularly fond of the Canadian Shield, the product of the Precambrian or late Paleoproterozoic epoch some 4.2 billion years ago (‘cene’ is merely the suffix for epoch). Driving to the Muskoka in Ontario, Canada – home to the Anishinaabek and other tribes for more than 10,000 years – mum would instruct us to focus on the seemingly unremarkable landscape. Some 200 kilometres down in southern Ontario lies Crawford Lake, recently voted by the international authority of the Anthropocene Working Group as the global illustration of the Anthropocene (MPIG 2023). Some label the first age of the Anthropocene, Crawfordian. The deep sinkhole’s sediments record spikes in plutonium from H Bomb tests in the early 1950s, as well as evidence from the start of the mass use of fossil fuels, and nitrates from the use of chemical fertiliser.

My mother’s excitement in the 1970s about the Canadian Shield was due to seeing the “unremarkable” landscape overlain in her mind’s eye by the high mountains thrust up billions of years ago by Cambrian exuberance and then worn down by the elements – she loved it because it was profoundly not human. In contrast, Crawford Lake draws the interest of geologists, and now “Anthropocene tourists”, because cores taken from its depths tell stories of how humans imprint themselves into the geology and reveal scales of modernity. The first site has nothing to do with humans and the second is all about “us”.

Mark McGurl argues that the Anthropocene presses us to think of “the bizarrely humiliating length of geological time” (McGurl 2011, 381). Increasingly, scholars argue that scales “are not ‘things’ – ontologically stable entities” (Sayre 2005). Peter Taylor frames geographical scale “as an organising principle [that can] emphasise the relations between scales’ (Taylor 2017, 33). Archaeologist Håvard Kilhavn and colleagues flag “the historical intricacies of human-environment relationships, across time and space, and in a vast array of scales” (Kilhavn 2024). Scales are compelling precisely because they refer us to the relations between and among geological temporality and spatiality as well as the speed at which they move and interrupt. This framing reveals “the human as anachronistic in the strict sense – as living in disjunctive time scales” (Clark cited in Woods 2014, 166). As Nils Bubandt ventures, there is a “geological possibility that humans are the graptolites of the future, fossil colonial animals” (Bubandt 2017, 137). The Anthropocene, he writes, “dreams of the present as seen from the future [and] … geology becomes the political history of the present” (137). Nothing is far away, or close. Stacey Alaimo states, “Disturbing futures have suddenly arrived” (Alaimo2022, 88).

We confront the excruciating exigency of having to think of everything at once. In his article on “Derangements of scale”, the literary critic Timothy Clark argues that the “overall force of an implosion of scales, [can] implicat[e] seemingly trivial or small actions with enormous stakes while intellectual boundaries and lines of demarcation fold in upon each other” (Clarke 2012, p. 152). As an example, he offers the “situation in which it is not irrational to connect a patio heater in London immediately with the slow inundation of Tuvalu in the Pacific” (Clarke 2012, p. 154).

The latter is not irrational perhaps, but not of great help. If we can’t use claims of crazed causality between scales to embarrass people about their lack of Anthropocene etiquette (your outdoor heater is going to cause suffering somewhere you’ve never been), what can we do? To use a cliché, I suggest we stay with the trouble of deranged scales.

In what follows, I outline what I find useful to thinking with and about scale/s. In our current project on the extracting the ocean platform (extractingtheocean.org), we (Ali Groves, Dongyang Li, Susan Reid, Morgan Richards) organise stories, our analytic arguments, translations, different art and literary genres, scientific and popular reports on forms of marine extractivism, legal documentation, and more – into a section called “Eddies and Scales”. Some of them include “Tales about Fukushima’s Nuclear Wastewater Discharge”, “The Logic of Extraction: Flow and Accumulation”, “Quarrying the Deep Seabed: via the Common Heritage of ‘Mankind”, “Combustible Ice Sets off Global Battle for Seabed Resources”, “Derelict Nets as Proxy Predators”, and extracts from Golden Fish, African Fish (Senegal, 2018), collaborator Thomas Grand’s film about small pelagic fish like sardinella, which were the mainstay of West African food security until they were fished by Chinese and other industrial trawlers to be made into fish meal, to feed farmed fish for the tables of the global north. This juxtaposes events marked by different spatial and temporal scales.

In an adjacent section called “The Net” we figure the scales, depths, volumes, spaces and temporalities of the ocean descending the different zones of the ocean: the sunlight zone (epipelagic), the twilight zone (mesopelagic), the midnight zone (bathypelagic), the abyssal zone (abyssopelagic) and the hadal zone (trenches). Along the way, we intersect visuals and short narrations of what’s happening in, across, and among each zone or scale. In this way, we emphasise the relations between and among scales across the bewildering complexity of the ocean. This relationality undoes the conceit of scales such as oceanic zones as static, as nested dolls. For instance, tiny plankton migrates daily from the depths to the surface to feed, crossing several scales as they provide fifty per cent of our oxygen and become the fuel for many ecosystems.

This is an ambitious project that could consist of large teams with a big budget, but we have neither. Nonetheless, we see aspects emerging of current extraction that overlap with ancient practices such as fishing. The gold rush for rare and critical minerals needed for electric vehicles (as well as iPhones, computers and everything we would find hard to live without) has followed oil mining but gone deeper into the ancient ocean seabeds. Nodules perhaps millions of years old, are invariably in the gush both of companies and in more critical description called “potatoes”. These incredibly slow-growing polymetallic forms are depicted as lying on the ocean bottom some 6000 metres deep, just waiting to be plucked. Containing cobalt, manganese, nickel and other elements, in the jubilant words of the CEO of a minerals company, they are “batteries in a rock”.

In a deranged temporal scalar logic these nodules are to replace the diminishing terrestrial reserves of rare and critical minerals in places like the DRC and Chile. The enthusiasts of deep-sea mining boast that their mining will not cause the human harm it has in the global south – it is postcolonial; it is aqua nullius. No mention is made of the fact that the prime areas for mining exploration and mining are undertaken in the jurisdiction of places like Nauru, a small island nation that was decimated by British, German and Australian phosphate mining in the late 19^th and 20^th centuries. No apologies are made for the degradation of flourishing ecosystems about which we know so little. Far away, too old to care about. Triumphantly, EVs will obviate the need for fossil fuel, the coal that formed some 260 million years ago. However, in many places such as Australia electricity is still majorly fuelled by coal – a situation that doesn’t seem to change across the short temporal span of governments of different colours.

To conclude, scales can be useful if they take us into the slow and fast, distant and close, human and not relations within the great derangement (Ghosh, 2018); to make us question “how do we articulate and analyse the condition of living across multiple rates of change?” (Highmore 2020, 33) Rethinking scale is daunting but so necessary. As Anna Tsing puts it, interruptions of scales “elicit more stories” (Tsing 2015, 37). For instance, in her research on how the Caribbean is scaled by slavery, Vanessa Agard-Jones writes of how the black sand in Martinique ingrains colonialism, slavery, history and place: “what the sands remember” (Agard-Jones 2012). Scales can lead us to stories that desperately need to be told.

References

Agard-Jones, Vanessa. 2012. “What the sands remember.” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 18 (2–3): 325–346.

Alaimo, Stacy. 2022. “Deep Sea Speculations: Science and the Animating Arts of William Beebe, Else Bostelmann, and John Wyndham: ICFA 42 Guest Scholar Keynote.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 33 (3): 69–91.

Bubandt, Nils O. 2017. “Haunted geologies: spirits, stones, and the necropolitics of the Anthropocene.” In Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, edited by Anna L. Tsing, Nils Bubandt, Elaine Gan and Heather Anne Swanson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Clark, Timothy. 2012. “Derangements of scale.” Telemorphosis: Theory in the era of climate change 1: 148–166.

ICS (International Commission on Stratigraphy). 2024. “Joint statement by the IUGS and ICS on the vote by the ICS Subcommission on Quaternary Stratigraphy.” Released March 21. https://stratigraphy.org/news/152.

Ghosh, Amitav. 2018. The Great Derangement: Climate change and the unthinkable. London: Penguin.

Håvard Kilhavn, Julie Shipp, Anastasia Bertheussen. 2024. “Comment to the ICS Anthropocene decision: From stratigraphy to storytelling.” Quaternary Environments and Humans 2 (6): 100036.

Henderson, Emma D. and Richard S. Vachula. 2024. “Geologic limitations on a comprehensive Anthropocene.” Anthropocene 46: 1–7.

Highmore, Ben. 2020. “Disjunctive constellations: on climate change, conjunctures and cultural studies.” New Formations 102: 28–43.

McGurl, Mark. 2011. “The new cultural geology.” Twentieth Century Literature 57 (3/4): 380–390.

MPIG (Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology). 2023. “Anthropocene Working Group proposes Crawford Lake as GSSP candidate site of the Anthropocene series.” Published July 12. https://www.shh.mpg.de/2347073/anthropocene-working-group-crawford-lake-candidate-anthropocene-site.

Sayre, Nathan F. 2005. “Ecological and geographical scale: parallels and potential for integration. Progress in human geography 29 (3): 276–290.

Subramaniam, Banu. 2024. Botany of empire: Plant worlds and the Scientific legacies of Colonialism. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

Taylor, Peter J. 2017. “A materialist framework for political geography.” In Politics: Critical Essays in Human Geography, edited by John Agnew and Virginie Mamadouh. London: Routledge.

Tsing, Anna L. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World. On the Possibility of Life
in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Woods, Derek. 2014. “Scale critique for the Anthropocene.” The Minnesota Review 83: 133–142.

Yusoff, Kathryn. 2024. Geologic Life: Inhuman Intimacies and the Geophysics of Race. Durham: Duke University Press.