Noah’s Dove: The Anthropocene, the Earth System and Genesis 8:8-12

This essay reads the Flood narrative of Genesis 6–8 as a myth for the geological present. Discussions of the Anthropocene have turned in part on questions about the relationship between life and the nonliving world. Here, I assess Dipesh Chakrabarty’s interventions in those discussions, especially his celebrated essay on ‘The Climate of History,’ in the light of recent Earth system science. I counterpose Chakrabarty’s account of the life/world relationship to the version of the Flood story recounted in the Yahwistic source of Genesis. The Yahwist envisages a primordial complicity between the organic and the telluric. I examine the Yahwist’s narrative in detail, focusing in particular on the motif of the dove whose disappearance shows that the deluge has abated. The Flood myth might provide a starting point for an environmental politics that goes beyond a ‘green’ concern for the biosphere to a concern with the Earth system itself.