Earth Anxieties

As things shifted, as a pressure built, we felt it more and more. There seemed to be moments of a reckoning. The earth was humming, a ubiquitous, invasive low-frequency sound emanating from somewhere unknown. In Taos, New Mexico, the hum was christened with its most famous place name, but similar reverberations filled the air in other places too: the United Kingdom and Australia. Only a few humans could hear it, but everyone heard about it. Questions floated. What on the earth was humming, or droning, buzzing? Or was the planet breathing? Were those who heard the hum elect to a resonance, chosen to witness a frequency? Did the earth speak directly to them? Were they sensitive to harmonies of some exquisite origin? Or maybe it was technological runoff, pollution, noise. Maybe it was the cryptic whispering of airplanes to submarines, maybe it was a secret military action. Maybe it was UFOs. Decades ago, I sat with a group of UFO experiencers who could shift their point of view to frame the earth through an alien gaze: the tender blue ball in space as seen in the photo taken beyond the atmosphere, vulnerable to invasion, lightly holding its inhabitants’ tender bodies, also vulnerable to so many invasive forces. People I knew years ago in UFO-believer communities said: Something is happening now on earth, some change is starting. We're being warned. Look at the signs, all these fires, all these floods. Maybe something's signaling humanity's self-destruction, maybe the danger comes from beyond, but whether the call comes from inside or outside the house, the earth is in trouble. At the time, I myself didn't quite see many extra fires or floods, but later, when they happened and happened, I remembered people all those years ago saying: This earth is mouthing off. How they talked about the Taos hum and asked: Who can hear the earth as it starts talking back? Years later on a hushed day, after a Zoom meeting with the Anthropology of Anxiety working group, I step outside to see a few masked neighbors. When we gather our mail at the curb, we give wry, exhausted waves. We chat from 6 feet of safe space. We all go for walks. The joggers exhale a miasma, and the walkers hold their breath until they pass. Graphics online make it visible: how far a cloud of exhaled breath extends before its danger goes inert. The familiar streets and yards fill with anxieties, undertones of dreads and longings, a layered sense of something more. As the third decade of the century took root, feeling surged before talk and then tried to become matter, to matter, in talk. Talk couldn't get the whole of it, though we tried to make a dent. “Weird times, yeah.” “It's chaos out there.” We chatted in lightly sardonic tones about “the beforetimes.” Was “now” already an aftertime? The small talk was patterned and repetitious, phatic and poetic, full of too many possible scripts. Anxiety rose to the top point on the arc of labeled feelings. But naming the anxiety didn't explain it. Like all anxiety, its meanings were overdetermined.1 The uneasiness was fueled by the many possible futures it might face and by so much of what already had happened before. It was emergent and residual and still constantly accumulating. In these months that were called the present by referring to memories of “beforetimes,” the increased interminglings of human and other living beings often filtered into ordinary life. More nonhuman animals entered the visible dimension, both overlapping and detached. These encounters filled the news. Bears sat on porches and wandered onto beaches. Wild hogs ran in organized militias to dig up yards. Foxes materialized. Raccoons slept in clothes dryers, one of the coyotes that were now everywhere in the suburbs sprang out of a supermarket freezer, a wildcat ran furiously up a suburban driveway. Mostly, people talked about deer. They were everywhere in my town, eating gardens, hanging out on front steps, peering into living room windows, and stomping their hooves with a silent message taken as a warning: This is my space. The bucks sparred in schoolyards with their antlers clicking, and the does slept in herds of eight and ten in lawns, running silent on the grass, clattering across streets and vanishing into a hedge as if they hadn't been there at all. The increasingly ubiquitous presence of nonhuman animals—even if just in media reports—seemed to mean something, but the meanings were feelings, compressed into the stories themselves. The stories were enough: This happened. Large language models seemed to emerge into the daily world as suddenly as the deer. Language created an endless loop, indexing language itself as it scraped up texts to recombine. It was nearly impossible for a human not to dream intention and agency into what the machine told us. But sometimes the machine was wrong, and it was just as hard not to dream perception into its errors. In mass media and social media, the word “hallucinate” soon was everywhere. Anxiety comes in guises. The meaning of the word hallucinate expanded from the familiar sense of distorted human sensory perception to its new meaning, describing the inscrutable errors made by artificial intelligence. AI hallucinated, inexplicably made things up, confabulated. Anxieties sparked and were quenched and sparked again with the quick flash of images as we scrolled, took in images and words. How did we know what was real anymore? How could we parse it? Epistemological questions that had been the dry esoteric stuff of philosophy became mundane and ordinary, but they also filled up with anxious feeling: How do we know what we know? What can we trust in our perceptions now? Like all anxiety, its object was the self. (And other more material questions kept pointing back to material earthly things. What human labor, and from where in the globalized world, was doing the invisible work that made this magic happen on our screens? What kind of enormous natural energy extraction did it require from the earth? How on earth—literally—was this working?) Some few people, we kept hearing, would soon leave this damaged sphere; some would colonize Mars. We saw Starlink in the night sky. Some people would go into luxury bunkers and live in a world of screens. As we talked about meandering animals, and as we talked to and about the changing landscape of AI, the question hummed below the surface of everyday life, like the hum of the earth itself: What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to live on this planet? We began, perhaps, to feel the earth itself as a place—a place with a history, a nostalgia, multiply coded, vertiginously uncertain. How could anxiety be otherwise