Lester 1 Quinn Lester Prepared for JHU New Earth Workshop 04/10/2015 The Horror of the Earthbound Earthlings and Earthbound What does it mean to be a part of the New Earth, automatically assuming somehow that we are no longer part of that bad, “old” Earth? Was it worse though or actually better, in that as humans we did not need to question our self-evident place on it? We even had dreams of actually escaping the planet into the wide-open frontiers of space. Those dreams have turned into nightmares, however, and look more like an emergency exit than trekking through the stars. Whether we like or not, in the era of the Anthroposcene we all are stubbornly still stuck to this rock rolling around thermonuclear stars that we call Earth. In her afterword to the collection Making the Geologic Now Jane Bennett points out that humans have always been “Earthlings both in the sense that we need a host of other bodies (“the planet”) to live and in the sense that “we” are made of the same elements as is the planet” (Bennett 2013: 244). Despite our fantasies then humans have always been of Earth, literally (except for whatever bits of us came from meteorites in space). 1 In one sense then the Anthroposcene is new; in that it marks the moment humans emerge as geologic actors in our own right, yet we have never not been geologic. We come face to face with our own inner-geology, however, at the very moment where the Earth threatens to kick us little Earthlings off of it, an idea many of us are having a hard time stomaching. As Bennett argues, the geologic turn in the humanities and social sciences is motivated by “The idea of a deep belonging between human 1 Which is not to say we shouldn’t also seriously consider those bits of us that came from space. Dylan Trigg argues that in fact the possibility of extra-terrestrial origins for human life raises its own horrors for how we usually thinking of the connections between humanity and the Earth. See Trigg, The Thing (2014), 14-41.