Climate change stories and the Anthroposcenic

Matless, David

doi:10.1038/nclimate2862

“…In the Fall of 2013, Ellie Irons taught a course in art practice on the ‘Artist in the Anthropocene’ at the City University of New York. In 2014, at the Taipei Biennial, curator Nicolas Bourriaud subtitled the entire exhibition ‘Art in the Age of the Anthropocene’ and noted, in an interview, that ‘the sphere of interhuman relations cannot be conceived any more without its environmental and technological sides.’ In March 2015, a panel discussion and exhibition were organized at the University of Miami entitled ‘AnthropoScene: Art and Nature in a Manufactured Era,’ and in 2016, David Matless recommended the use of the term ‘anthroposcenic’ as a semantic term for telling stories about changing landscapes. In Berlin, the Haus der Kulturen der Welt carried out a 2‐year long project involving music, the arts, intellectual debates, and workshops around the Anthropocene theme…”

Section: What Then Is the Art Of The Anthropocene?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Visual climate change art 2005–2015: discourse and practice

Nurmis

¹

2016

WIREs Climate Change

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During the last decade (2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)(2011)(2012)(2013)(2014)(2015), artists from all over the world have taken on climate change as the subject matter of their work. Encouraged by activists (most notably Bill McKibben), artists have appropriated climate change as a social problem and decided that they too, alongside journalists, scientists, and activists, were called upon to engage with this issue. Dozens of noteworthy exhibitions, most notably in Boulder (2007) (2015), have placed climate change art on the map as a new and timely genre, displaying relevant artworks both alongside climate negotiations and in dedicated gallery spaces such as the Barbican in London. I argue that much progress has been made in appropriating climate change art as an essentially artistic, rather than propagandistic or activist practice. Although caught in the net of many criticisms, climate change art plays a crucial role in allowing the public to rethink the role of human beings' everyday activities in irrevocably altering the climate system. In effect, climate change art makes the Anthropocene a cultural reality. However, the review points out a strong artistic trend toward the imagery of apocalyptic sublime, which results in art that may be poignant, but falls out of step with the self-professed motivations of artists and curators alike.

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“…Interest in unfolding the origin and nature of the Anthropocene has trespassed geohistorical sciences, and has also been approached by anthropologists, politicians, artists, philosophers and educators who embrace manifold connotations about the interaction between environment, society and culture (see Autin, 2016;Descola, 2013;Lewis and Maslin, 2015;Matless, 2016;Toivanen et al, 2017). As a consequence, there is a pressing need to prioritize a cross-disciplinary agenda for answering contingent questions such as: how did we get here?, are there regional expressions of the Anthropocene?, how do these regional manifestations add up to a global phenomenon?, how have idiosyncratic behaviors contributed?…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Geohistorical records of the Anthropocene in Chile

Gayó

¹

,

McRostie

²

,

Campbell

³

et al. 2019

Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene

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The deep-time dynamics of coupled socio-ecological systems at different spatial scales is viewed as a key framework to understand trends and mechanisms that have led to the Anthropocene. By integrating archeological and paleoenvironmental records, we test the hypothesis that Chilean societies progressively escalated their capacity to shape national biophysical systems as socio-cultural complexity and pressures on natural resources increased over the last three millennia. We demonstrate that Pre-Columbian societies intentionally transformed Chile’s northern and central regions by continuously adjusting socio-cultural practices and/or incorporating technologies that guaranteed resource access and social wealth. The fact that past human activities led to cumulative impacts on diverse biophysical processes, not only contradicts the notion of pristine pre-Industrial Revolution landscapes, but suggests that the Anthropocene derives from long-term processes that have operated uninterruptedly since Pre-Columbian times. Moreover, our synthesis suggests that most of present-day symptoms that describe the Anthropocene are rooted in pre-Columbian processes that scaled up in intensity over the last 3000 years, accelerating after the Spanish colonization and, more intensely, in recent decades. The most striking trend is the observed coevolution between the intensity of metallurgy and heavy-metal anthropogenic emissions. This entails that the Anthropocene cannot be viewed as a universal imprint of human actions that has arisen as an exclusive consequence of modern industrial societies. In the Chilean case, this phenomenon is intrinsically tied to historically and geographically diverse configurations in society-environment feedback relationships. Taken collectively with other case studies, the patterns revealed here could contribute to the discussion about how the Anthropocene is defined globally, in terms of chronology, stratigraphic markers and attributes. Furthermore, this deep-time narrative can potentially become a science-based instrument to shape better-informed discourses about the socio-environmental history in Chile. More importantly, however, this research provides crucial “baselines” to delineate safe operating spaces for future socio-ecological systems.

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“…Many studies have similarly cautioned against uncritical acceptance of the utility of traditional knowledge in the face of the "nonlinear and stepped changes" associated with climate change (Adger et al, 2011, p. 764;Wittrock et al, 2010). A mounting body of research within this field has nonetheless suggested that the integration and co-production of traditional and scientific knowledge can be a valuable mechanism in raising awareness of, and dealing with, climaterelated uncertainty, and for reconciling the global scale of climate change with local-scale entanglements of weather and place (Brace and Geoghegan, 2011;Flint et al, 2011;Matless, 2016;Nakashima et al, 2012).…”

Section: Pathways Of Change and Responsementioning

confidence: 99%