In the Dark that Nourishes. A Dark Guide to Dark Times: Ursula Le Guin and Ethics in the Anthropocene

International audienceBrad Tabas (ENSTA Bretagne, France) started his presentation, “In the Dark that Nourishes. A Dark Guide to Dark Times: Ursula Le Guin and Ethics in the Anthropocene,” by mentioning how Le Guin never used the word “anthropocene” publicly, to his knowledge. For him, this absence is significant, as she encountered the term during the conference “Art of Living on a Damaged Planet: Anthropocene” (University of California Santa Cruz, 2014) where she gave a keynote address. He argued her answer to the concept could be found in the trope of darkness in her work, especially in the Earthsea novels. Like Adsit-Morris, he highlighted messiness as a creative concept and discussed the problems of the word “anthropocene,” preferring the expression “becoming a man,” from The Wizard of Earthsea, as a way to learn how to live through the ecological crisis