projects of world production, even if this interaction does not always lead to mutual understanding.
The declaration of the Anthropocene as the current geological epoch has left substantial consequences for defining the temporal conditions for a planetary history. On the one hand, the anthropocentric regime requires expanding the temporal boundaries that we humans have been using for narrating our past so far. Equating the Anthropos to the erosive capacity of wind and water, or even to the destructive creation of volcanic eruptions and tectonic activity, means expanding the history of humankind and incorporating it into the history of geological processes. It is the ultimate assertion of the post-humanities:
the recognition of humans, non-humans, or even other-than-humans, as equally central agents in what Bruno Latour (2017) has assertively named the “geostory”—the story of our common, but also divergent, worlds. Such recognition does not mean either a naturalization of humans nor a humanization of nature. It merely recognizes that the history, the narration of humankind in
the world, is intrinsically related to the incommensurable forces, 49 elements and agents of Gaia, that complex self-regulating system that James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis ([1973] 2016) described as the interaction among living and non-living agents constantly transforming the biosphere.1
The Anthropocene, on the other hand, also implies compressing the temporal range considered for geological epochs—together with the necessary time for geological transformations at a large scale—by incorporating a little fraction of the history of the Earth into the annals of the geostory. Processes of carbon concentration in the atmosphere that used to take millennia are now happening in the span of years. The last time that the CO2 in the atmosphere hovered at the current levels—around 400 parts per million (ppm)—was during the Pliocene 2.5 million years ago. After the last big ice age around 12,000 years ago, and with the beginning of the Holocene, carbon concentration fluctuated between 260 and 285 ppm, with variations of less than 5ppm in the past millennium. In recent decades, CO2 levels have been rising by 2ppm every year (Dlugokencky et al. 2019).
When the beginning of the geological and climatic capacity of humans and their technological apparatus took place, however, is still a matter of discussion (see Povinelli 2016). The same way as a magma chamber can take years, centuries, or even millennia, to accumulate the required amount of pressure for a volcanic eruption, the geological influence of humankind can be diverse depending on which development is considered to be the beginning of such influence. While some scholars emphasize the invention of agriculture and with it the first population boom during the Neolithic period 12,000 years ago, others like Paul
1 Gaia, according to Latour (2017), is more than a simple metaphor to understand the interconnections among entities in the planet. It is the self-regulated entity that mobilizes all actors, whether humans and other-than-humans, in the same geostory. To recognize the equal protagonists of all the entities within the Earth system is to recognize their agency, whose assemblage is delegated to—and coordinated by—Gaia.
50 Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer (2000), who popularized the term Anthropocene, put their cards on the beginning of the Indus-trial Revolution in the eighteenth century. Authors like Timothy Morton (2013, 7) even go further by arguing that the end of the world took place when James Watt patented the steam engine in 1784—“an act that commenced the depositing of carbon in Earth’s crust (…) and the inception of humanity as a geophysical force on a planetary scale.” Some scientists stress that the detonations of atomic bombs in 1945 by the US army—first as part of the Trinity Test in New Mexico and later with the nuclear bombing in Hiroshima and Nagasaki—and the progression of nuclear tests in the Pacific in the following decades showed us that the Earth was something that could eventually be destroyed by human action (Zalasiewicz et al. 2015).
Discussions on the inauguration of the Anthropocene make one thing clear: the boundaries between this epoch and its pred-ecessor, the Holocene, are not clearly discernible. These disagree-ments over defining the inaugural event of the Anthropocene have little to do with scientific inconsistency. It is mostly a matter of narrative, and how the different disciplines have agreed on temporal standards for its definition. The Anthropocene is much more than the liberation of massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere and the polluting of the earth and the sea.
It is the foundation of one of the most decisive philosophical, anthropological, political, and even religious epochs of human history (Latour 2017)—a definition that is intrinsically influenced by how the existence of humankind and its interconnections with its environment are narrated and acted out in the present. If we assume the Anthropocene is an epoch of multiple narratives and geopolitical interests, where humans and man-made technologies are meant to have different impacts on the Earth, would not this also imply the assumption of an era with multiple temporalities and localities? Should it not be better to talk about a geological period of time with several beginnings and, even-tually, endings?
In what follows, I explore these questions by analyzing how dif- 51 ferent narrations of the past might lead to—apparently—irrec-oncilable understandings of climatic disasters, and how we can deal with such differences without neglecting them. First, the article expounds some theoretical discussions regarding the notion of memory regimes, and how these could help us to explore discussions on causes and responsibilities in times of the Anthropocene. This accomplished, I present two cases of climate controversy in Ancash, Peru: those of Lake 513 and Lake Palcacocha, using them to exemplify the divergences that heterogenous explanations of climatic events might entail.
These cases are analyzed based on the findings of ethnographic fieldwork I conducted from November 2019 to March 2020 in the region, which included in-depth interviews with local actors, participant observation, and document analysis. Building on the notions of boundary objects and ontological disputes, the article concludes by recognizing the Anthropocene as an arena of dis-crepancies—an invitation for overcoming the idea of a unified world with a homogeneous past.