Mineral evolution (ME) is a geologic paradigm postulating that Earth’s minerals formed sequentially and have interacted with life forms for billions of years. The evolution of Earth and its minerals is therefore entangled with the evolution of life. This “Provocation” ponders the implications of ME for the environmental humanities in general and for Anthropocene narratives in particular. ME relies on non-Darwinian evolutionary principles. In common with other branches of Earth system science, it also destabilizes prevailing ontological categories. Life becomes more material, matter more alive. This essay suggests that the development of sentience in the Phanerozoic eon exerted an emergent, autonomous influence on the interaction of minerals and life. Conscious human agency and its effects on planetary transformation are therefore the culmination of a very long process. However, the control that our conscious agency can exercise upon planetary transformation is very limited even over human time scales, let alone geologic ones. (Text from author’s abstract)

中文翻译：

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矿物演化注意事项

矿物演化（ME）是一种地质学范式，它假定地球的矿物是依次形成的，并且已经与生命形式相互作用了数十亿年。因此，地球及其矿物的进化与生命的进化纠缠在一起。这种“挑衅”考虑了自我管理对于一般环境人文科学，特别是人类世纪的叙述的意义。ME依赖于非达尔文进化原理。与地球系统科学的其他分支一样，它也破坏了流行的本体论类别。生活变得更加物质，物质变得更加生动。这篇文章表明，在生代世代中智力的发展对矿物与生命的相互作用产生了一种新兴的自主影响。因此，自觉的人类活动及其对行星变迁的影响是一个非常漫长的过程的高潮。但是，即使在人类时间尺度上，我们有意识的机构可以对行星变迁执行的控制非常有限，更不用说地质尺度了。（摘自作者摘要）