Zachary Caple

This research challenges the universalist narrative of the Anthropocene with a landscape study of the Holocene/Anthropocene boundary event. The book centers on the Bone Valley phosphate district in Florida, an epicenter of the global fertilizer industry. I investigate how 140 years of mining has fragmented the region’s long-established Holocene ecologies and unevenly replaced them with weedy Anthropocene landforms. In my study, I adopt a metabolic approach, charting how the industry “digests” the phosphate deposit and “expels” its wastes and, in doing so, produces a landscape of pits, tailings piles, and radioactive waste. Scattered within the mines are “Holocene fragments”––remnant ecological forms that survive in the ruins of the Anthropocene. The book also explores the fate of Bone Valley phosphates after they leave the mine. I investigate how phosphate discharges from industrial vegetable farms transformed a large shallow lake near Orlando. Zooming out to a planetary scale, I describe how phosphorus circulates through capitalist food systems and promotes the growth of the “human asteroid.” In contrast to the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs, the human asteroid is homegrown, emerging out of the Holocene earth system it now threatens to destroy. Bone Valley is key to its nourishment.