Benjamin Morgan
Concepts of scale have become central to critical discourse about the Anthropocene both because the Anthropocene aspires to name a new scale of human agency and because the discussion asks us to resituate historical consciousness in relation to an expanded scale of geological time. The question of how one might reconcile or move between vastly divergent scales— by no means guaranteed— is a central matter of concern. Responding to the climate crisis is challenging, according to Dipesh Chakrabarty, because it requires us to think across the “rifts” between human scales of ethics and politics and non-human scales of deep time.1 Mary Stiner and colleagues argue that we ought to understand the Anthropocene narrative in the context of a long history of scalar leaps in population and energy use that extends deep into prehistory; and Julia Adeney Thomas argues that the Anthropocene requires historians to scale their conception of the human both up to the level of the species and down to the level of the microbiome.2 Making sense of the climate crisis, in all of these cases, requires significant engagement with problems of scalar multiplicity and incommensurability.