“‘I asked him if there was a great fire somewhere? For the streets were so full of dense brown smoke that scarcely anything was to be seen.’ ‘Oh dear no, Miss’ he said, ‘This is a London Particular.’ I had never heard of such a thing. ‘A fog, miss.’ ‘Oh indeed!’” (42). This exchange between Charles Dickens's Esther Summerson and Guppy, her guide through the London of Bleak House, rose to mind this summer as wildfires raged across the West Coast and I experienced a weird reversal of Esther's confusion. Looking out my window into the smoke-shrouded middle distance, I found it hard to shake the notion that it was merely foggy, a normal fall day in Seattle, arrived a few weeks too early: Is that a fog? No, there is a great fire somewhere. This Dickensian reprise was hardly the only suggestion that 2020 had plunged the world into a Victorian atmosphere. Photos on social media juxtaposing San Francisco's apocalyptic skies with paint-swatch sheets in multiple shades of orange unintentionally mimicked actual nineteenth-century smoke-monitoring techniques, whereby regulators would compare the smoke from a factory's chimney to a color-coded card. Brown or gray smoke was acceptable, but black indicated that the factory was releasing too many particulates and unburned coal, thus failing to meet the nineteenth-century equivalent of carbon-capture standards, an injunction to “consume your smoke” (Thorsheim 124–25). Evidently orange really is the new black.

No matter how much time you think you spend thinking about climate change, it's different when you smell the smoke, when you feel it lingering in your throat. Such palpable experience is a marked departure from the largely invisible “slow violence” of most environmental harm (Nixon). It is hard to deny the immediacy of a world on fire, literally or figuratively. The resemblance between Dickens's London and 2020 Seattle suggests a kind of teleconnection, in which seeming coincidence is actually a sign of distributed causation. In the atmospheric sciences, teleconnections refer to strong correlations across large distances of time and space. They reveal patterns within the Earth system and are key to understanding the nonlinearity of the climate system. Wai Chee Dimock's theory of “resonance” as a mode of “diachronic historicism” offers a literary-historical equivalent (1061). In its musical sense, resonance depends on wave patterns: actual, physical disturbance of the atmosphere as energy passes through it to produce uncanny action at a distance. The convergences of 2020 suggest that we need to think of these alignments not as separate events but rather as evidence of an expansive planetary synchrony, one that takes account of the way historical change is mediated by, and resonates within, the Earth system.

To leave the atmosphere out of our accounts of history is to succumb to the delusion of separation, to forget that we can only understand history from the inside out. This insight helps us situate the year 2020 in relation to the emergence of the Anthropocene. To qualify for the Global Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP), or “golden spike,” which would make the Anthropocene an official designation within the Geologic Time Scale (GTS), the trace that marks the new epoch must be not only durable in geological time but also globally synchronous, occurring everywhere at once (Davies; Menely and Taylor; Lewis and Maslin, Human Planet). While counterintuitive from a humanist point of view, such synchrony is possible in stratigraphy because a single “event” within the GTS can last thousands, even millions, of years. The uncanny convergences that mark Anthropocene history are the clues by which events become legible in this expansive sense, in which causes and effects may be radically distributed across time and space, only to return with a suddenness that merely seems to defy causal logic.

Last spring, I was teaching a course on the realist novel and the Anthropocene when a major cyclone, Amphan, hit the Sundarbans. At the time, we were reading Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide (2004), a novel in which (spoiler alert) a major cyclone hits the Sundarbans. We followed Ghosh's Twitter feed, which was full of images and videos of the devastation, either because he was posting them himself or because other people were tagging him in order to comment on the resonance between the scenes unfolding before their (and our) eyes and The Hungry Tide. It was as though we were part of a global conspiracy to bring the novel to life. One of my students commented on the “omnipotence” of their instructor, who could conjure up such real-world examples of the reading. I responded that their instructor must be pretty evil. The joke would've hit close to home even if I hadn't been teaching from my back porch. After all, I am complicit in the destruction wrought by tropical storms whose compounding force is strengthened by the rising concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide for which I bear a far greater responsibility than those in the storm's path. And that complicity is accentuated, both ethically and materially, when I watch the cyclone unfold in my laptop and share it with my class by way of an energy-intensive virtual refuge sustained by devices dependent on rare earth elements extracted from the conflict-ridden Congo rainforest. (Oh yes, we were reading Joseph Conrad too.) Hence, that complicity generally feels like the opposite of agency, a reminder not of my own power but of the vast, inequitable systems of which I am the reluctant beneficiary (Robbins).

Such moments are an all-too-common feature of Anthropocene history, which is replete with seeming coincidences between events and the conceptual rubrics that might explain them. Perhaps the most acute example is the fact that global climate modeling was developed from technologies designed to track nuclear fallout (now nominated for the GSSP by the Anthropocene Working Group) at the same time that the Great Acceleration sent greenhouse gas emissions through the proverbial roof (Masco). However, there are many more: the science of stratigraphy emerged from mines and railway cuts, while early conceptions of the Earth as system were modeled on the steam engine (see Taylor). What my students and I experienced, then, was a glimpse into the uncanniness of the Anthropocene, the way it seems to invert the relation between causes and effects, ideas and things, past and future, fiction and the world. Ghosh describes his own version of this predicament in The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016), recalling his horror at seeming to have forecast the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, which hit six months after the novel was released: “the images that had been implanted in my mind by the writing of The Hungry Tide merged with live television footage of the tsunami in a way that was almost overwhelming. I became frantic; I could not focus on anything” (34). I too have been frantic and struggling to focus this year, though I don't have fictive premonition as an excuse. Similarly, Kim Stanley Robinson seemingly forecast Hurricane Sandy in his novel Forty Signs of Rain (2004), now collected in the omnibus Green Earth (2015). In an interview, Robinson downplayed the apparent impossibility of such predictions: “If you write enough science-fiction novels, you are going to end up with a handful of uncanny coincidences.” Aside from the name (his superstorm was also called Sandy), this strikes me as too modest: if you do enough research you're more likely to be right. What makes Robinson's work so compelling is not its speculation but its realism. He writes persuasively about the future because he understands the terrifying determinism of history in a time of climate change. The uncanny accuracy of such scenes doesn't derive from random shots in the dark hitting their marks, like a monkey typing Shakespeare; rather, it proves that the scenes are small-scale manifestations of a broader systemic condition. To feel surprise at the coincidence of a cyclone hitting the Sundarbans at the same time we were reading the novel is to overlook the fact that the real storm is already here. The year 2020 has seen more named hurricanes and cyclones than any year in history, but that record won't stand for long.

The depiction of such extreme weather events in fiction offers a direct correlate to the climate models that forecast ever more prevalent, and extreme, tropical storms as a result of warming temperatures. These models trouble our attachment to the contingency of history and the tangibility of the real, since grasping the reality of the situation demands attending to the simulated world of the model even when it seems to contradict direct experience of the world. Writers who are paying attention, like Ghosh and Robinson (or Dickens, for that matter), know that such events are inevitable features of a future that is not only imminent but the immanent: the expansive present that is life on a dynamic planet in the midst of a cataclysmic event. They only seem to predict what they in fact describe. A combustive mix of carbon, capital, and accelerating global connection, the “London Particular” was already a planetary condition. As Andreas Malm has forcefully argued, global warming is an overwhelmingly historical condition not simply because it derives from historical events but also because it both accentuates and literalizes the past's determinative hold on the future:

As many have noted, 2020 is not a “bad year” (though the smoke taint promises to linger in the wine).Footnote ¹ Rather, it marks the (not yet final!) “falling in of history on the present.” None of the crises that mark 2020 as distinct, from white supremacy and police violence to the global pandemic, from superstorms and wildfires to the dumpster fire of American politics, are particular features of this seemingly interminable year. Like the Anthropocene itself, they are all manifestations of historical processes that have been observed (and contested) many times before (Bonneuil and Fressoz). There is nothing new here. None of this should come as a surprise. We've been warned, repeatedly. What sets 2020 apart is the immediacy, the palpability not just of the smoke in the air or the tear gas in the streets but of the pervasive entanglement of our lives. After all, when I stepped outside to walk the dog under smoke-filled skies I was already wearing a mask.

It is through breath, above all, that being is shared. Even at rest, the average human partakes of the atmosphere somewhere between ten and twenty times per minute. Every action accelerates your atmospheric interaction. The more you do, the more you breathe, and each inspiration has been someone else's before. COVID-19 really is a global conspiracy, in the most literal sense of that term, a great breathing together. In this regard, the people arguing that masks are an infringement of individual liberty are onto something: we need masks because we aren't really individuals in the first place. By that measure, it's not surprising that climate deniers would be antimaskers, and vice versa. Both groups are attempting to shore up the idea of the individual as impervious and self-contained, to deny the atmosphere as the condition of shared existence and the ultimate horizon of life. Earth's atmosphere is a byproduct of the biosphere, and the biosphere couldn't exist without the atmosphere. That truth is affirmed every time we take a breath. Rolling coal, coughing on your political opponents, and firing tear gas at protestors are all ways of weaponizing the atmosphere, rendering collaborative inspiration impossible by way of toxic exhalation. Then again, so is daily life within a fossilized world system that condemns all future life to an overheated world. Misogyny, xenophobia, and climate denial were all alive and well in the United States long before they helped propel Donald Trump to the White House. Trump just ripped off the mask. How telling, then, that the movement in defense of Black lives has coalesced around the phrase “I can't breathe.”

One of the great challenges facing the Anthropocene humanities is to think about how the planetary horizon relates to, and plays out within, ongoing histories of intrahuman violence along the fault lines of race, gender, sexuality, and the legacies of empire. In this regard, it becomes particularly notable that Christina Sharpe turns to an expansive conception of “weather” in order to register the expansive historicity of Black experience. As Sharpe explains, “[I]n my text, the weather is the totality of our environments; the weather is the total climate; and that climate is antiblack” (104). This definition allows her to argue that slavery was not a “singular event” but rather “a singularity—a weather event or phenomenon likely to occur around a particular time, or date, or set of circumstances” (106). I will admit that this equation of weather and climate initially struck me as counterintuitive, even mistaken, since from an atmospheric point of view, weather refers to local conditions, while climate refers to prevailing regional patterns or global averages. In this sense, weather and total climate are fundamentally different phenomena, which is why any given snowstorm is not evidence against global warming, no matter how many snowballs Jim Inhofe brings to the Senate floor. Sharpe's alignment of weather and climate inverts this relation, foregrounding the lived experience of that totality, the capacity for planetary conditions to coalesce in the immediacy of extreme weather events, indeed the inevitability that they will. It is this experiential dimension that Sharpe captures in turning to the weather as the figure for the cumulative history of slavery as a “singularity” in which the violence of antiblackness is pervasive, even if one doesn't know exactly how, when, or where it will play out, a dialectic between certainty and contingency that is its own form of terror and that bears directly on the unequal distribution of climate impacts, and on the need to see history as a sequence of nested, interacting scales. The weather doesn't go away, even in a time of climate change; indeed, it is usually the weather that kills.

The atmosphere is at once a space of dissolution, in which “all that is solid melts into air,” and of memory (Menely 97). Nearly two hundred years ago, Charles Babbage wrote that “the air itself is one vast library” that will bear witness to the crime of slavery even “when man and all his race shall have disappeared from the face of our planet” (413). Dana Luciano has recently connected this promise of an atmospheric reckoning to Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin's “Orbis Hypothesis,” which dates the Anthropocene to the deaths of some fifty million Native Americans precipitated by European conquest, leading to extensive reforestation indexed by a dip in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels around 1610 (Luciano; Lewis and Maslin, “Defining”). As Luciano suggests, the Orbis Hypothesis invites us to speculate on what it means to think about colonial violence as stratigraphically legible and “the kinds of material reading or sensing practices” necessary to account for the traces of that violence, most notably the air bubbles frozen in polar ice caps (113). What Babbage's idea of an atmospheric archive leaves out is that the atmosphere is not a passive record but an agent capable of its own violence. Instead of recording the “cruel mandate of the tyrant” in a ledger for future justice (Babbage 118), the atmospheric burden of history all too often perpetuates historical violence, returning it magnified to planetary scale in what Bill McKibben calls the “iron rule” of climate change: “the less you did to cause it, the more and quicker you suffer.”

In what is perhaps the most fascinating Twitter thread I've ever seen, written on the eve of the 2020 presidential election, Latif Nasser, of WNYC's Radiolab, unpacked the resemblance between the blue “swoosh,” running across the mostly red South on American electoral maps since the 1970s, and the southern coastline of North America in the Cretaceous Period. What initially looks like an impossible coincidence betrays long-term causation: “To start, let's go back to the Cretaceous. The oceans are hotter and higher than they are now. Picture millions of plankton minding their own business, just off the shore. When they die, their tiny corpses fall to the ocean floor and get buried by other debris” (“To start”). The planet cools. The oceans recede, and all that biomass is compressed into “extra alkaline, extra organic” soil, ideal for growing cotton (“Eventually”). What was once coastline would become the heart of plantation slavery in North America. “And yes, since most African Americans vote and have voted Democrat, the reason the swoosh appears election after election for the last 50 years is … the descendants of enslaved people,” newly enfranchised after the Voting Rights Act (“And yes”). As Nasser sums it up, “The Black Belt story is painful but profound. The death of plankton led to the life of cotton, which led to the bondage of enslaved people who harvested it, which led to the freedom of the voters who descended from them. Death leads to Life leads to Bondage leads to Freedom” (“Black Belt”). Nasser's analysis is an intriguing example of looking at planetary history as a project that traverses many scales. However, this elegant summation is misleading, because no part of the sequence of events he lays out is inevitable. While the fertility of the soil enabled and participated in the plantation regime, it hardly necessitated it. The historical violence of enslavement, including driving the Indigenous inhabitants off the land to make way for the plantations (which Nasser includes), derives from human choices. The blue swoosh is as much the inscription of an ongoing struggle for justice on the part of those long excluded from the category of the human and its forms of political sovereignty, their labor treated as an extractable resource, as it is the inscription of planetary history (Yusoff 71).Footnote ² The challenge is how to tell both stories at once. As Ian Baucom argues, the struggle for justice in the Anthropocene demands that we think about “what it means to make history, to fashion a future, in circumstances inherited from a near, a middle, and a deep past, and from an equally deep future” (116). After all, the consequences of the blue swoosh could be as long-standing as its causes: this election, this decade, this expansive moment is our last best chance to avert climate catastrophe that will alter Earth's future for millions of years to come. With this in mind, we can turn Babbage's call for future redress on its head, and say that if we counter injustice in the present, Earth will remember.

The year 2020 is what the Anthropocene looks like from the inside out. The convergence of acute climate change, a global pandemic, ongoing forced migration, and protests in the streets offers glimpses into the terrifying synchrony, or singularity, of the Anthropocene as a single calamitous event, unfolding in planetary time. The year 2020 feels like an epoch because it is. Like period, which refers to both duration and punctuation, epoch describes both a phase in Earth's history and the event that marks the transition from one phase to another. Understood as a singular event within the Earth system, the convergence of acute climate change and a global pandemic illustrates both the disruptive potency of nonhuman actors and the catastrophic consequences of pushing planetary systems beyond Holocene norms. It is also an inflection point, a critical juncture at which it might be possible to tip the complex adaptive system onto a new trajectory. To my mind, this encapsulates the central project of the humanities in the Anthropocene: making the inhuman planetary horizon an injunction to self-knowledge, incorporating our Earthly internality into our understanding of history, and our visions of the future.

Like many teachers, I have struggled to rethink my pedagogy during the pandemic. In particular, I have found myself suddenly suspicious of argumentation. Advancing a thesis in the midst of this turmoil (even if it were possible) seems like a mistake because the pervasive uncertainty renders all conclusions provisional. Thus, I have tried to redesign my assignments around archive building, curation, or what Joseph Conrad called “rescue work” (13). In the spring, a number of my students prepared an “Anthropocene Edition” of The Mill on the Floss, with notes, an introduction, and further reading designed to explore what it means to read Eliot's novel as an account of this phase shift within the Earth system. While I can claim little credit for it, I found this project extremely compelling, in part because it meant encountering the students’ ideas and interpretations in the novel, rather than the other way around, a difference that struck me as akin to seeing an animal in the wild instead of at the zoo, thus expanding the novel's resonance in the present rather than containing it. In the autumn quarter, I asked my students to compile “Anthropocene Backpacks,” modeled on Ursula Le Guin's essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction” (1986), Donna Haraway's reminder that “it matters what stories tell stories” (35), and the fascinating digital project the Feral Atlas (Tsing et al.), which Anna Tsing described at one of the last events I attended on campus before the pandemic. These “backpacks” are collections of quotations, images, and excerpts from course readings interwoven with the students’ own observations. It is explicitly a salvage project—packing for a journey into a new world, and deciding which scraps of the old might be useful. Like Robinson Crusoe gathering materials from a ship wrecked by the climatic tumult that marked the late seventeenth century, and from which the modern world order (and the realist novel) emerged (see Parker), my students will need to think about what fragments from this wrecked modernity they want to salvage to enable their work as the storytellers who will shape the new epoch.

I've been wrestling with a similar set of questions in my administrative role, as director of undergraduate studies. We are redesigning our major. What I initially thought of as a largely bureaucratic task of moving credits around has proved more intellectually rich (and complicated) than I anticipated. What will an English major mean in the coming years? What should it be? What will it be good for? These questions can't be answered by just pointing to what we've done in the past. They also can't be answered by compiling a list of things everyone should have read. With a finite number of courses, each representing an all-too-short ten-week quarter, one simply can't do everything. You have to pick and choose. Despite their problems, periodization and the canon helped organize the curriculum, providing the structure within which knowledge could become recognized as such (Underwood). Such internal logic is what enables a field to become a discipline. Hence, redesigning a major isn't merely a question of moving courses around but of constructing new infrastructures of knowledge and praxis. Our new major will be organized around three overlapping categories: historical depth, attention to power and difference, and a reflexive understanding of form, genre, and method. We don't know if it will work (or even be approved). However, I'm optimistic that it provides an infrastructure that we can grow into, one that privileges adjacency and interconnection over linear sequences. As such, it seems well positioned to enable the kind of nonlinear thinking necessary to produce the new disciplinary formations that the current moment demands. Moving these revisions forward in the midst of a pandemic, protests, wildfires, the election, and all the rest has been challenging. However, it has also been beneficial, in part because it helps concretize 2020 not as a state of exception from which we will return to normal but as a year that makes an epoch: the point after which things will be different.

2020 is just a year. It will be over by the time this essay appears. But it is also a window into the broader phase shift within the Earth system, an ongoing event that will encompass all our lives, and that we can still redirect away from its calamitous trajectory. The Feral Atlas invites us to think about the various Anthropocene start dates not as events but as “detonators,” or ongoing historical conjunctures: “Invasion, Empire, Capital, and Acceleration,” all of which remain constitutive features of the present (Tsing et al.). A similar approach is needed for understanding 2020 as both a set of compounded crises and the potential detonator that may yet prove to have tipped the system in a new direction. In this protracted instant, the best response seems to lie in various forms of salvage, seeking lines of convergence and solidarity, asking what must be jettisoned, but also what might be repaired, or repurposed to make something new: releasing stories into the wild to “go feral,” find new niches, and found new communities in the world to come.