• A Humane Vision
• Andy Horowitz (bio)

Composite true color multispectral satellite image of Enewetak Atoll, Marshall Islands. The large Ivy Mike crater, where Elugelab used to be, can be seen at the top of the atoll with the smaller Castle Nectar crater adjoining it. Photograph from NASA/USGS.

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Page from the Federal Disaster Assistance Handbook for Members of the United States Senate and the House of Representatives, ca. 1965. Pamphlet held in the Louisiana Research Collection, Tulane University, photographed by the author.

on november 1, 1952, the United States detonated a hydrogen bomb on Elugelab, a small island in a chain of coral islands in the Pacific Ocean called Enewetak Atoll. As the mushroom cloud cleared, two F-84 jets flew over the site. Their cameras documented an absence. Elugelab was gone. In its place was a crater nearly the size of the Pentagon. Within about a week, a thin layer of plutonium—fallout from the explosion—covered the entire earth.¹

This radioactive film defines the current epoch in the world's history. Or, at least, that seemed to be the consensus among the geologists who comprised the Anthropocene Working Group when they gathered in New Orleans in November 2019. To dig into the ground and observe its stratigraphic layers is to travel through time, and the band of plutonium lying just beneath the earth's surface from the Elugelab explosion and other nuclear tests from that period offer the earliest definitive, uniform, and ubiquitous mark of the human hand on the earth's geology. Thus, the scientists name our era "the Anthropocene"—the age of humans—and announce this nuclear dust as heralding the arrival, in a geological sense, of human history.²

The Anthropocene Working Group meeting was planned to coincide with an international conference of artists and scholars who convened that fall at Tulane University, where I work, to consider the Mississippi River. In order to focus attention on the ways that human action has reshaped the river, the German institutions that organized the conference dubbed the Mississippi an "Anthropocene [End Page 6] river." The Choctaw-speaking people native to the place, however, knew and know the river as Bulbancha, "a place for foreign languages." That name suggests that the river has long been a site of cosmopolitan encounter, and more broadly, as the Houma writer T. Mayheart Dardar puts it, "as with all Indigenous Peoples, our existence and identity is tied to the land and waters that have given birth to us."³

While the geologists met, I was across the Tulane campus, engaged in a stratigraphic excavation of a different sort. I was in the library. Specifically, I was sifting through the papers of F. Edward Hébert. The papers themselves were fragile in my hands, and the writing on them blurry, because after the floodwall that ran alongside the 17th Street Canal collapsed on August 29, 2005, during Hurricane Katrina, the force of gravity pulled Lake Pontchartrain's water across New Orleans and into the basement of Jones Hall, drenching the Hébert papers and thousands of boxes of other archival materials in the university's Louisiana Research Collection. Many of the materials documented centuries of effort meant to forestall precisely such a flood. Now they also documented the inadequacy of those efforts. Whether their scars reflected a natural disaster or a human failure remains a matter of some debate.

Hébert represented Louisiana's First Congressional District in the House of Representatives from 1941 to 1977. Even with the flood damage, his papers revealed a career dedicated to increasing funding for military weapons like the hydrogen bomb that put a Pentagon-sized hole in the middle of an ocean named for peace, and to pursuing federal spending that might benefit the white residents of his district while blocking federal spending that might benefit the Black residents.

In 1965, for example, after Hurricane Betsy overwhelmed New Orleans's Industrial Canal, flooding the city's Ninth Ward, Hébert rebuffed Black flood victims who sought his help securing federal disaster relief. "The time is not one to...

• 人文视野
• 安迪·霍洛维茨（生物）

马绍尔群岛Enewetak环礁的合成真彩色多光谱卫星图像。在环礁的顶部可以看到大型的常春藤迈克陨石坑，以前是Elugelab，旁边是较小的Castle Nectar陨石坑。图片来自NASA / USGS。

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美国参议院和众议院议员的《联邦灾难援助手册》中的页。1965年，在杜兰大学路易斯安那研究馆举行的小册子中，作者合影。

1952年11月1日，美国在Elugelab爆炸了一颗氢弹，Elugelab是太平洋上一系列珊瑚岛中的一个小岛，名为Enewetak环礁。随着蘑菇云的清除，两架F-84喷气式飞机飞越该地点。他们的相机记录了一次缺席。Elugelab不见了。取而代之的是一个接近五角大楼大小的火山口。在大约一周内，爆炸造成的薄薄一层ed覆盖了整个地球。^1个

这部放射性电影定义了世界历史上的当前时代。或者，至少，这似乎是构成人类世工作组的地质学家在2019年11月聚集在新奥尔良时所达成的共识。要深入地面并观察其地层，就要穿越时空，当时Elugelab爆炸和其他核试验所产生的lying就位于地球表面以下，这是人类对地球地质的最早确定，统一和普遍存在的标记。因此，科学家将我们的时代称为“人类时代”，并宣布这种核尘是从地质意义上预示着人类历史的到来。^2个

人类世间工作组会议计划与那个秋天召开的艺术家和学者国际会议同时举行，他们是在我工作的杜兰大学（Tulane University）召集会议审议密西西比河的。为了将注意力集中在人类行动重塑河流的方式上，组织这次会议的德国机构将密西西比河称为“人类世[End Page 6]河流”。然而，这个地方的讲乔克托语的人知道并知道这条河是Bulbancha，“外语的地方”。这个名字表明这条河长期以来一直是国际大都市的交汇地，更广泛地说，正如侯马作家T. Mayheart Dardar所说，“与所有土著人民一样，我们的生存和身份与拥有土地和水域的土地和水域息息相关。生下了我们。” ³

地质学家见面时，我在图兰（Tulane）校园对面，从事另一类地层挖掘工作。我在图书馆。具体来说，我正在筛查爱德华·赫伯特（F. EdwardHébert）的论文。这些文件本身在我手中很脆弱，而且它们的文字模糊，因为在2005年8月29日卡特里娜飓风期间，沿着第17街运河旁的防洪墙倒塌后，重力将庞恰特雷恩湖的水拉过新奥尔良和进入琼斯·霍尔（Jones Hall）的地下室，浸透了Hébert论文以及该大学路易斯安那研究馆藏的数千箱其他档案材料。许多材料记录了数百年来为防止此类洪水而付出的努力。现在他们还记录了这些努力的不足。

赫伯特（Hébert）从1941年到1977年在众议院代表路易斯安那州的第一国会区。即使遭受洪水破坏，他的论文也显示出他的职业生涯致力于增加对氢弹等军事武器的资金投入，氢弹在五角大楼的中间放置了一个五角大楼大小的洞。海洋以和平命名，并追求可能使该地区的白人居民受益的联邦支出，同时阻止可能使黑人居民受益的联邦支出。

例如，在1965年，贝蒂飓风淹没了新奥尔良的工业运河，淹没了该市的第九区，赫伯特拒绝了黑人洪水受害者，他们寻求他的帮助来确保联邦救灾。“时间不是要...