Drift in an Anthropocene: On the work of terrain

Abstract

As geographers confront the manifold challenges of an Anthropocene, so the framing of geography as the critical study of space – a framing that took hold of theory and practice in the 20th century and that searched for antecedents as well as prognostications – is increasingly splayed across the long durée of geography as the interrogation of the nature of human being as well as the Earthly environment and the constitutive relations between these. While the prospect of a new geologic epoch situates these Anthropocene challenges as the conjunction of a human history with the deep time of the planet, it also suggests, for example, the entanglement of the geopolitical and the geophysical, an entanglement that the (colonial and imperialising) discipline of geography has helped to articulate and produce even while proffering an explanation of the same. In pivoting back once more to the knotty matter of geopolitics and geophysics, what concepts and lexicons might be productive? Here, and thinking through the work that terrain has done and can do, I offer the multi-agential, survey defying, taxonomically mutable, drifting geographies of drift that have been so perturbing to a solid geology and its stratigraphic tempo, and hence can, perhaps, provide another resource from which to construe the political materialities of an Anthropocene.

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