Gravid with the ancient future
Cloud Atlas and the Politics of Big History
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4387650 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Paul A Harris (0000-0002-1744-2011, Loyola Marymount University), Casey Shoop, C Robert Shoop (Loyola Marymount University), Dermot Ryan (0000-0002-4115-7376, Loyola Marymount University) |
| Year | 2015 |
| Volume | 44 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 92-106 |
| Publication date | 2015-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | SubStance (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0049-2426 • E-ISSN: 1527-2095 |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1353/sub.2015.0011 |
| OpenAlex | W4254398264 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 6 |
I One of the striking generic features of the emerging field of Big History is a closing glance toward the future. Summed up by the title of Fred Speir’s Big History and the Future of Humanity (2010), this generic gesture shows up in the “Big History Project,” a free online course for secondary schools, whose final unit is entitled “The Future” and features Henry Louis Gates and Bill Gates offering their prognostications on the future of the earth over the next 50 years (Big).1 The concluding chapter of Daniel Lord Smail’s Deep History and the Brain, entitled “Looking Ahead,” offers this final admonition: “The deep past is also our present and our future” (202).2 The convention of turning back to the future can be explained, in part, by the environmentalist origins of the field. Big History grows out of the green politics of US sixties counter-culture, which first finds its expression in projects like the Whole Earth Catolog and Earth Day. The scale of Big History promises to bring into stark relief the environmental impact of our species on the planet. In a cautionary note echoed by many contributors to the discourse, Cynthia Stokes Brown opens Big History: From the Big Bang to the Present (2012) by sounding on the negative ecological consequences of human activity: “the actions people have taken to keep their offspring increasing have put the planetary environment and its life-forms in grave jeopardy” (xii). As its title “What Now? What Next?” implies, the conclusion of Brown’s study pushes the book’s historical narrative beyond the title’s nominal temporal limits (from the big bang to the present) out into the future. Offering the computer modeling of Meadows, Randers, and Meadows’ The Limits to Growth (1972) as an appropriate scientific resource for playing out possible “short-term scenarios” for humanity’s future, Brown maintains that the best place to explore our “middle-range future” is in works of science fiction like George Stuart’s The Earth Abides (1949), Walter
Atlas (anatomy) · Cartography · Cloud computing · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Geography · Humanity · Meaning (existential) · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Earth Systems and Cosmic Evolution · Environmental, Ecological, and Cultural Studies · Geology · History · Law · Paleontology · Philosophy · Space Science and Extraterrestrial Life
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,22 |
| Citation span | 2017 - 2018 (2) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |