Mining an Anthropocene in Japan: On the making and work of geological imaginaries

Geology firmly underpins Anthropocene debate, and in particular an Earth Systems Science (ESS) rendering of how lithic and yet-to-be-lithified (or ‘drift’) material, including the tangible evidence of a state-sponsored carbon capitalism, is reconstituted by anthropogenically ‘forced’ physical processes. The prevalence of this approach hinges in large part on the authority afforded Geology as a science that names, classifies and explains these materials and their spatio-temporalities (such as the stratigraphies that undergird eras and epochs). We argue that this deployment can: (1) simplify how Geology has diversely framed and explained a planetary history, while glossing over the complex power relations that Geology drew upon as the authoritative narrator of this history, and which it enabled and furthered; and (2) foreclose how the lithic and the drift might be otherwise imagined as part of an Anthropocene condition. We ground this argument by introducing a particular moment of Geological practice: the discovery of a fossil floating fern in a Hashima (Japan) Prospecting Pit. Following an outline of Geology’s place within Anthropocene debate we provide an expanded sense of this science by situating this moment within a series of Geological imaginaries, from a state-sponsored extractive gaze and ‘romantic’ idioms to a grassroots, practice-based Geological movement in Japan. Our own practice draws on the latter, and adapts two well established Geological mapping techniques, the Geological Cross-section and the Geological Stereonet, to visualise not the ordering of materials out of chaos, but their transmogrification. Such speculation as to how the lithic and the drift might be reworked as an Anthropocene material outside of a chronostratigraphy helps create space, we suggest, for a Critical Geology that delves into the dynamic relations between people, the lithic and the drift, identifying not only key problematics but also the resources that can be drawn on to help build a response.