Culture and the Anthropocene

This article examines how 'safety case' experts working on Finland’s nuclear waste repository project at Olkiluoto summoned, conjured, or channeled memories of Seppo—a deceased colleague whose ‘specter,’ as some put it, still ‘haunts’ their scientific community. For some, Seppo’s postmortem presence manifested as gaps in knowledge left behind by an expert often reluctant to document the methodological assumptions underlying his knowledge-practices. For others, it manifested as anecdotes about Seppo’s stubbornness, irritability, and intellectual intensity as well as his more jovial demeanor during sauna nights, workplace parties, or trips abroad. Still others caught themselves asking ‘What Would Seppo Do?’ while troubleshooting at work. Inspired by anthropological and philosophical work on ancestors and haunting, the article unpacks how the multi-millennial time horizons of nuclear waste risk, the intergenerational time horizons of expert succession, and the everyday time horizons of a single expert life-course shared entwined fates. It focuses less on what knowledge disappeared when an expert’s body died – or how it could have been preventatively backed-up or managed – and more on what has lived on of the expert in and through surviving colleagues. Analysis of 'afterlives of expertise' like these can, it concludes, provide insights for a current moment of intergenerational transition in nuclear energy sectors in Europe, North America, and beyond.

ABSTRACT: Anthropocentrism has been claimed to be the root of the global environmental crisis. Based on a multidisciplinary (e.g. environmental philosophy, animal ethics, anthro - pology, law) and multilingual (English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese) literature review, this article proposes a conceptual analysis of ‘anthropocentrism’ and reconstructs the often implicit argument that links anthropocentrism to the environmental crisis. The variety of usages of the concept of ‘anthropocentrism’ described in this article reveals many underlying disagreements under the apparent unanimity of the calls to reject anthropocentrism, both regarding what exactly is the root of the problem, and the nature of the possible solutions. It highlights the limitations of the argument of anthropocentrism as the scapegoat of the environmental crisis and identifies two main challenges faced by attempts to go beyond anthropocentrism: an epistemological challenge regarding knowledge and the place of sciences, and a metaethical challenge related to values and cultural pluralism. Beyond the issue of an anthropocentric point of view, the core of the problem might be an intertwinement of views and as sumptions that work together to undermine attempts to protect the environment from the greed of some humans, such as the human−nature dichotomy, capitalism, consumerism, industrialism, etc. Finally, this article suggests that making the nuances and the presuppositions that underlie various versions of the anti-anthropocentric rhetoric explicit is necessary to foster constructive dialogue among different anti anthropocentrism proponents, as well as with their detractors.
KEY WORDS: Anthropocentrism · Non-anthropocentrism · Values of nature · Environmental ethics · Cultural pluralism · Intrinsic value

As the introductory essay for the Works on Water Inaugural Triennial 2017 catalogue essay, I argue that contemporary artists are taking to the water in response to ecological change, and compare this "Water Art" movement to the Land Art, Conceptual Art, and Performance Art movements of the late 1960s-1970s.

Principal co-authors: Gene Ray, Aurélien Gamboni, Janis Schroeder, Kate Stevenson. Additional co-authors: David Cross, Marguerite Davenport. Visual art contributed by artists Denise Bertschi, Ursula Biemann, Giulia Bruno, Chris Jordan, Armin Linke, Oliver Ressler, Luc Schuiten, Paulo Tavares, and Marie Velardi. Interviews with: Chiara Barberis, Martin Beniston, Mickaël Blanc, Antonin Calderon, Victorine Castex, Philippe Clerc, Hannah Entwisle Chapuisat, Thomas Descombes, Christophe Dunand, Dominique Ernst, Montserrat Filella, Delia Fontaine, Thierry Gaudreau, Denise Gautier, Justin Ginnetti, Raphael Gomez, Jacques Grinevald, Rachel Heaton, Pierre-André Magnin, Olivier de Marcellus, Michel Meyer, Abdallah Mokssit, Charlotte Nicoulaz, Pascal Peduzzi, Géraldine Pflieger, Anne-Cécile Reimann, Oliver Ressler, Philippe Roch, Philippe de Rougemont, Daniel de Roulet, Thibault Schneeberger, Denis Schneuwly, Arlène Shale, Nazhat Shameen Khan, Marie Velardi, Alain Yenni. TAAG Advisory Research Group: Iain Boal, Gabriella Calchi Novati, David Cross, Hannah Entwisle Chapuisat, Anna Grichting, Sacha Kagan, Armin Linke, Nils Norman, Catherine Quéloz, Grégory Quenet, Philippe Rekacewicz, Oliver Ressler, Liliane Schneiter, Paulo Tavares, Eddie Yuen, and the late Chris Wainwright.
The Anthropocene Atlas of Geneva (TAAG) is a long-term research project based at HEAD – Genève/Geneva School of Art and Design and funded (2017, 2018) by the Swiss National Science Foundation (Gene Ray, main applicant and project director).
Please visit the TAAG project website at: https://head.hesge.ch/taag/en/

A video intro trailer by Janis Schroeder can be seen on vimeo at: https://vimeo.com/user93523837/the-anthropocene-atlas-of-geneva-trailer-01

Straddling the genres of travelogue and critical essay, As We Used to Float explores Bikini Atoll as a space of fantasy and trauma. Situated in a remote region of the Pacific Ocean, between 1946 and 1958 its ‘paradise’ islands were subjected to twenty-three of the most powerful explosions in history—during Operation Crossroads, the U.S. nuclear testing program. Since then, their fate has been largely ignored. While toggling between a personal account of a sea journey, above and below water, and a critical investigation of postcolonial geography, As We Used to Float develops broader reflections on place and subjectivity. These spring from a series of narrative immersions, variously, taking on the psychological and aesthetic parameters of ultra-deep scuba diving, the abject poetics of sea craft, and the stakes of subaquatic image-making. Through its vivid account of concrete bunkers on white sand beaches, the decaying "Ghost Fleet" of World War II battleships, irradiated coconuts, and more, As We Used to Float is a sea-story for our times.

In the process of formally identifying a geological interval, it is crucial for stratigraphers to find the point at which strata reveal a significant, dramatic shift in the types of fossils and other geological markers being found. In the nomenclature of the discipline this point constitutes a “golden spike”. For the geologists advancing the proposition that the Anthropocene might be formalized as the Earth’s latest interval on the geologic time scale, this spike will be registered by the sudden appearance of a new sedimentary layer – one decisively marked by the presence of “technofossils”. From the proliferation of deep perforations of the strata by mining to the wide distribution of rare elements (aluminium, titanium, uranium) and novel compounds (plastics), for the geologists advocating the notion of the Anthropocene, the deposits of human technology buried in the Earth’s crust will not only be that species’ geological legacy, but the mineral markers of its emergence as a major geo-force. No doubt the logos of the technofossil is important for geologists making the case for the Anthropocene’s formalization as a geological interval; its pathos, however, is of equal import in building a public for it. In the hands of the Anthropocene’s stratigraphers the prospective mineralization of human activity is also the species’ anticipated memorialization: literally written in stone, the strata of the Anthropocene will be a memorial to human existence – to the era of its doing and undoing. In this, then, the technofossil is as much a memento mori as it is a heuristic for imagining a world after the human – a “world without us”. It is this conjuncture that this paper explores.

In 2013 – the year when CO2 emissions hit the 400 ppm threshold for the first time in human history – the annual State of the World report (Worldwatch Institute 2013) was devoted to understanding whether achieving a sustainable society is still possible. Part two of the report, Getting to True Sustainability, opened with a call for the re-engineering of cultures to create a sustainable civilisation. In her contribution to it, anthropologist Melissa Leach reflects on the difficulty of achieving sustainability due to path dependencies in infrastructure (oil refineries, combine-harvesters, fridge-freezers, etc.) and social systems (corporations, governments, habits, etc.). Leach (2013: 236)
writes: ‘The challenge is … to open up understanding and action around sustainability to reveal and empower alternative pathways that might currently be hidden, including those that emerge from the experiences, knowledge, and creativity of … citizens … in particular places’. In this chapter I take up Leach’s challenge by offering an ethnographic understanding of ‘quiet sustainability’ (Smith and Jehlička 2013) in the form of organic food consumption. Looking at organic foods in Palermo, Italy from a ‘post-Pasteurian’ perspective (Paxson 2012), I pay particular attention to those aspects concerned with the cultural perception of environmental problems and the role of science and technology in food production (Lien and Nerlich 2004). By doing so, I argue that the beliefs and feelings of people who eat organic foods allow a glimpse of the values that stem from a rejection of excess, which has several points of contact with the most recent sustainability theories of the Anthropocene (Moore 2016) and planetary boundaries (Wijkman and Rockström 2012).

The Anthropocene refers to the geological epoch where human activities have turned into a geological factor. The paper discusses some of the questions that emerge with this concept, related, especially, to antireductionism, transdisciplinarity and the modern notion of freedom. An important dimension is the eco-philosophical critique of modern knowledge systems and what is seen as exploitative and dominating forms of knowledge. In this literature, capitalist expansion, colonization and fossil fuel consumption are seen as historically connected and supported by scientific forms of rationality that have proven to be harmful. While sharing many of these eco-philosophical concerns, I argue that the sciences may still harbour the resources necessary to recreate themselves in response to contemporary challenges. One example is Terrence Deacon’s autogenic theory of life, where the relationship between life and non-life is seen as continuous and historical, not abstract and metaphysical. The notion of Anthropocene has also inspired many artists who work, sometimes together with scientists, at creating new forms and significations. Taking this as an opening for greater social transformations, the paper discusses how the Anthropocene can become part of a social movement while maintaining creativity, complexity and commitment to reason.

Contemporary post-apocalyptic fi lms portray a world ravaged by ecological catastrophes, and humanity on the brink of extinction. Such fi lms echo the urgent environmental discourses of the Anthropocene, while offering instances of a post-anthropocentric perspective and the new subject-formations it engenders. The article argues that the central rhetorical device that generates an ecocritical perspective in such fi lms is the post-apocalyptic landscape. Cinematic space shapes the meaning of all fi lms, and this is even more emphatic when setting is transformed into landscape (Lefebvre 2006). What is more, in the post-apocalyptic fi lms, the landscape becomes the main site of the fi lms' "rhetorical enviromentality" (McMurry 2017). The article examines the post-apocalyptic landscape in I Am Legend (2007) and Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) and how it articulates the entangled relation between humans and the collapsing world that surrounds them. Using Rosi Braidotti's (2013) post-human theory, I contend that these cinematic landscapes hint at an "eco-philosophy of multiple belongings" (Braidotti 2013, 49) and enact "a process of redefi ning one's sense of attachment and connection to a shared world" (Braidotti 2013, 219). Ultimately, I conclude that the affective appeal of these landscapes implicates the viewer in post-anthropocentric perspectives, thus prompting new modes of environmental consciousness.

This article begins with a climate poem and ends with a climate poem. In between, I explore what it means to do climate geopoetics. The first section addresses recent literary work that engages with climate change and the Anthropocene and outlines the geopoetic field as it is currently emerging as a subfield of the geohumanities. Next, I turn to examining climate narratives and frames; following the lead of many human geographers and environmental humanities scholars, I approach climate change as a social and cultural issue. I then discuss the methodology of this particular climate geopoetics project, commenting on and contextualizing some of my writing and thinking process for the climate poems that are woven throughout the article. By centering this article around three poems, I explore what it means to do climate geopoetics, the curious nature of the Anthropocene/Anthroposcene as a concept that both centers and de-centers the human, and the tensions on textual form that geopoetic practices create. It is my hope that this project may offer a fresh and unconventional approach to examining the multiple ways that climate change is framed, engaged, and contested.

Keywords: plough, Serres, Anthropocene, dust bowl, agriculture

This chapter has been prepared for inclusion in the Nick Holm and Sy Tassel edited anthology -

Ecological Entanglements in the Anthropocene: Working with Nature 

- as part of the Ecocritical Theory and Practice Series of Lexington Books.

This collection has been developed following the WORKING WITH NATURE, conference at Massey University in April 2015.

In contrast to the spectacle of large-scale projections onto urban architecture, digital eco-art offers intimate experiences in reciprocity with the largeness of the sensorial realm of nature. Digital eco-artists position work in natural settings for the exhibition of interactive computer generative sound and visual installation works. In doing so, they push traditional boundaries of urban public art to be more socially interactive, immersive, and inclusive of place they offer a means for re-visioning urban natural

Interview with Professor Anna Tsing in Helsinki October 2015 during the Biennial Conference of the Finnish Anthropological Society. Originally published in http://allegralaboratory.net/auto-rewilding-landscapes-and-the-anthropocene-interview-with-anna-tsing/

Anna Kavan’s final novel Ice (1967), published in the early years of the recently conceived Anthropocene epoch, presents the climatic disaster of a new ice age resulting from human action. Taking this as impetus and drawing from archival evidence of Kavan’s political and ethical outlook in the immediate post-war period, this chapter reads the novel alongside recent political and geological challenges to the concept of the Anthropocene. By considering how the novel’s temporal perversity and perspective of impossibility enact a similar conceptual experiment, it suggests that Ice might be Anthropocene fiction not in its midcentury foundations, nor in its representation of climatic change and planetary apocalypse, but in its experimental narrative form.

The contributions collected in this volume compare the views of phi- losophers, literary and cultural theorists, and political philosophers, con- cerning what in recent years has become a much discussed issue: the Anthropocene.
Although there are no longer any doubts about the reality of this new era, understood as the epoch of signi cant human impacts on the planet, a wide and controversial debate has developed around the use of this term and on the de nition to be given to it. The Anthropocene cannot only be understood as the perpetuation of an anthropogenic and anthropocentric perspective, it can also give rise to a critical paradigm of inquiry into a series of problems such as climate and geological changes produced by humans.
The complexity of the notion of Anthropocene can also be defined as a semi-empty signifer, which is once of the most interesting and stimulating aspects of the Anthropocene, one that invites and stimulates us, sometimes even provocatively, to imagine different scenarios and ho- rizons as alternatives to the present.
The contributions collected here speak to this richness and breadth, and also to the “irritating” nature of this term, Anthropocene.

While Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy has been read through the uncanny human traumas and tropes of “contamination” in its first novel, Annihilation, the trilogy’s radical ecological thought emerges more clearly through cosmic and transformative trauma in the final novel, Acceptance. Rather than some contaminated space, Area X is restoring Earth’s ecosystems to a “pristine” state, but in a process of guided succession that traumatizes human life as lived under ecologically destructive neoliberal economies of extraction. Reading the twinned falls of Saul and Control, this article shows how Acceptance reimagines uncanny trauma for a new form that is painful but also familiar, human but also posthuman, and utterly necessary for planetary survival.

Today, human activities constitute the primary environmental impact on the planet. In this context, commitments to sustainability, or minimization of damage, prove insufficient. To develop regenerative, futuring capabilities, architectural design needs to extend beyond the form and function of things and engage with the management of complex systems. Such systems involve multiple types of dynamic phenomena—biotic and abiotic, technical and cultural—and can be understood as living. Engagement with such living systems implies manipulation of pervasive and unceasing change, irrespective of whether it is valued by design stakeholders or actively managed towards homeostatic or homeorhetic conditions. On one hand, such manipulation of continuity requires holistic and persistent design involvements that are beyond natural capabilities of human designers. On the other hand, practical, political, or creative implications of reliance on automated systems capable of tackling such tasks are as yet underexplored. In response to this challenge, this paper considers an experimental approach that utilized methods of critical making and speculative designing to explore potentials of autonomous architecture. Presented experiments combined knowledge of animal architecture with intelligent behaviors of robotic devices.

The Dietz Site (35LK1529) is well known by most archaeologists, especially those attentive to late Pleistocene and early Holocene human presence in the American West.  This site’s concentration and distributed relationship of Clovis and Stemmed points in Oregon’s Alkali Basin continues to be of significant relevance.  Many may not be acquainted with the Alkali Lake chemical disposal site where, in 1969-1971, over 25,000 barrels of toxic residues from the production of pesticides, herbicides, including Agent Orange, were deposited, then buried. This visual and narrative essay, following emergent practices in geohumanities, explores these and other distinctive traverses and fluctuating uncertainties as aspects of the interrelated spatial and temporal features of the Alkali Basin landscape. In addition to the two sites mentioned, this essay examines a gunnery range, transmission lines, a threatened endemic fish, grazing allotments, a state airport, Highway 395, and the wave-cut terraces of Pluvial Lake Alkali.

This chapter is about how a virtue of hope is possible in the face of unfolding, impending, and irreversible anthropogenic global environmental change. A common approach defends the moral value of hope by appeal to its role motivating action to mitigate anthropogenic environmental damage. This makes the moral value of hope largely instrumental and derivative of consequences. I argue that saving historic nature (the ecosystems, biodiversity, and climate conditions characteristic of the Holocene) cannot be the object of the virtuous person's environmental hopes for the Anthropocene because such hopes involve denial. Nonetheless, a disposition to hope well is a virtue, and hopes about life on Earth under new and unstable environmental conditions should not be abandoned. I describe how a virtue of environmental hope for the Anthropocene is possible, but this requires that the objects and even the concept of hope itself be suitably adapted. We should embrace but pass through despair to grieve the loss of significant parts of historic nature, yet we must act as though we can save it. Then we should develop a radical hope akin to courage that human capacities for adaptation and flourishing, along with other systems of life on the planet, are resilient and up to challenges presented by novel and very difficult conditions of an emerging new ecological world order.

This essay examines climatic and ontological change within the Anthropocene among the Makushi in Guyana. During fieldwork in the Makushi village of Surama, the author was frequently told how the wet and dry seasons have become irregular, the temperature has increased, and ecological changes have occurred in the forests and savannas. These perceived changes impact Makushi subsistence practices and have emerged concurrent with the local development of eco-tourism and increased interactions with outside entities in Surama. The author examines local ontological shifts related to these expanded interactions with outsiders, who advocate concepts of ‘climate change’, ‘sustainability’, and ‘conservation’. Recent encounters with climate change and outside entities in Guyana provide an ethnographic case of the broader climatic and related changes occurring in Amazonia. This case is analysed herein through an ontological approach. Based on fieldwork data, the author examines how local transformations are situated within the greater dimensions of the Anthropocene.

It has been months since most of the world realized the gravity of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the privileged ones-who have the financial sources to maintain their lives without working outside-took shelter in their homes. With every passing day, we have a better understanding that what we are going through is not a short-term disaster, during which we will stay in our homes for a while and then go back to "normal." First and foremost, this worldwide phenomenon, with a sense of uncertainty surrounding the "defeat" of the virus, brings forth a unique dimension to our experience. As we feel closer to death and loss, we are also witnessing the deterioration of all the institutions, health systems being the most important, that we assume to be working along with the immutable nature of social inequalities "in sickness and in health." Furthermore, the already existing economic crisis will only deepen with unforeseeable consequences that increase worries about the future, even for those in the most privileged positions. We must also face the truth that the emergence of this pandemic cannot be considered independently from the current global climate crisis. We need to apprehend that our relationship with nature may pave the way for similar pandemics in the following years, perhaps leading to an age of viruses or other disasters. Thus, we cannot assume the current circumstance developed along with COVID-19 is an exception. Due to all these reasons, when the pandemic finally ends, we can only imagine "going back home" if we understand that "home is a place where you have never been," as poetically described by Ursula Le Guin in The Dispossessed (1994, 70). Even for those who, so far, has been safe and sound, the impact of this reality on daily life is indisputable.

Winner of the 2021 Cevdet Kudret Literature Award [Scroll down for English]
2021 Cevdet Kudret Edebiyat Ödülleri'ne layık görülmüştür.
https://www.everestyayinlari.com/kitap/iklimin-estetigi-eray-cayli/392705

Başta iklim değişikliği olmak üzere, ekolojinin politikası tartışılırken son yıllarda sıkça kulağımıza çalınan bir terim “Antroposen.” “İnsan Çağı” olarak da tercüme edebileceğimiz bu terim, içinde bulunduğumuz jeolojik devirde, dünyanın işleyişi ve fiziki yapısı üzerindeki en belirleyici etkenin “insanlık” olduğunu ima ediyor. Peki Antroposen’de bahsi geçen “insan” ve “insanlık” tam olarak kimdir? İklimin Estetiği, bu soruyu politik ve etik boyutlarıyla ele alırken, politikanın ve etiğin ete kemiğe büründüğü mecralar olan yapılı çevre ve sanatsal üretime odaklanıyor. Kitap “İnsan Çağı”na girildiğine yönelik söylemlerin, apolitik bir “insanlık” tahayyülüne meylettiğine dikkat çekiyor. Bu eğilimin, ekolojinin politikasına dair tartışılması gereken asıl çelişki ve yarılmaları gizlediğini savunuyor. Kitap, Antroposen’i toplumsal ve politik içerikten arındırılmış bir “insan” ile diğeri arasındaki, ya da homojen birer toplam olarak tahayyül edilen “insanlık” ile “doğa” arasındaki bir gerilim olarak değil, sömürgecilik, kapitalizm, ırkçılık ve ataerki gibi şedit siyasetlerin müellifleri ve karşıtları arasındaki çelişki ve yarılmalar ışığında ele alıyor. Yazar, bunu yaparken, odağına, hem etiği hem politikayı bünyesinde barındıran ve sanat kadar mimarlığın da başat mecrası olan estetiği koyuyor. Estetiğin, şedit tarihlerin kurumsallaştırılmalarında olduğu kadar sorgulanmalarında da rol oynayabileceğini gösteriyor.

["Anthropocene" is a term that figures prominently in current debates on the politics of ecology and especially on climate change. Translatable as the "human age," the term is the subject of a scientific thesis that posits the present geological era as one in which the Earth's workings and physical makeup are determined primarily by humanity. Precisely who are the "human" and "humanity" at work here? Exploring this question in terms of its political and ethical implications, the book focuses on aesthetics which is the common denominator of artistic and architectural practice and through which both ethics and politics become manifest. It argues that taking the idea of "the human age" at face value tends toward an apolitical imaginary of humanity and political ecology. This tendency, the book shows, conceals the kind of contradictions and cleavages that pertain to the politics of ecology and that require grappling with. The author approaches the "Anthropocene" as not a conflict among depoliticized and desocialized "human"s, or between "humanity" and "nature" each imagined as a homogenous entity, but rather as one between the proponents and opponents of violent political projects such as colonialism, capitalism, racism, and patriarchy. In so doing, he focuses on aesthetics as both politics and ethics and as the primary medium of both art and architecture, showing how it may serve to not only institutionalize violent histories but also challenge them.]

Ympäristömuutos haastaa kirjallisuudentutkimuksen merkitysperustaa. Kaisa Kortekallion artikkeli esittelee ympäristömuutosta haasteena ekokritiikin, antroposeenin, posthumanismin ja postkolonialismin sekä kirjallisuuden käytäntöjen näkökulmista. Erityisesti Kortekallio pohtii sitä, kuinka ympäristömuutoksen kirjallisuus haastaa moderneille kertomuksille tyypillisen keskushahmon eli antropoksen asemaa. Hän tulkitsee Antti Salmisen kokeellisia teoksia Lomonosovin moottori (2014) ja MIR (2019) ympäristömuutoksen kirjallisuutena, jossa antropoksen varmuutta murennetaan ei-inhimillisillä elementeillä ja kerronnallisilla keinoilla.

Viite:

Kortekallio, Kaisa 2022. Lahoava antropos Antti Salmisen Lomonosovin moottorissa ja MIRissä. Teoksessa Ympäristömuutos ja estetiikka, toim. Jukka Mikkonen, Sanna Lehtinen, Kaisa Kortekallio ja Noora-Helena Korpelainen. Helsinki: Suomen Estetiikan Seura, 354 - 391.

Koko teos (open access): https://helda.helsinki.fi/handle/10138/343564

In the 1980s, geographer Eugene F. Stoermer coined a term that has achieved pronounced attention in the 21 st century. Known as the Anthropocene, the conception refers to a geological period of time from the late 19th century to the present, in which the most profound force affecting change on the earth is the collective, often unconscious action of humanity (Crutzen, 17). In order for sound art to sustain meaning and functionality across epochs, new conceptions of time and materiality and their relationship to sound must be examined. In this text, I will use the conceit of the Anthropocene to provide a framework for envisioning and designing sound art that is informed by the prospect of the end of an era in which human activity is identified as being the primary agent of change on Earth. In doing so, I will outline strategies that can be put into place to evoke, for inhabitants of the far future, a very personal and aural sense of the contemporary moment.

If drowned cities are one likely future, island fortresses are another. As a wealthy nation with a tradition of environmental engineering, a strong centralized government, and the technological capacity to adapt, Singapore’s artificial technonature might provide a glimpse of the future for those lucky enough to survive the rising tides. Th is essay considers the possibility that Singapore is a model, as many scholars (e.g., Chua B. 2011) have claimed, but for very different and potentially conflicting practices: climate adaptation, sustainable urbanism, national greenwashing, and eco- authoritarianism.

What sort of coming belongs to a dream? Existing suspended, to come, now, is to place impossible faith in the possible: that passion for “something” which answers as closure, fulfilment, echo, return. The conditional tense, “to have given us to believe”, as though this were the very text we were each receiving. And I call you from dreams like the siren, and I am more of each line, the outwards spread which you circle to end, ellipsis, still typing, which you centre but do not settle. The anthropocene, this hypothetical epoch of the lived, the literal extinction, asks us (and could it) to see ourselves coming as pure expenditure, general economy, the discharge of species.1 And so I ate the lure and let me go. What sort of coming is the anthropocene, which already came, the old joke of the end
on our lips?

Symbiotic science is increasingly helping envision an ecological era. As I already view my ongoing ecological art practice in advocating ecological forestry (The Hollywood Forest Story, begun 2008), as fundamentally restoring symbiotic biodiversity, I recognise the critical importance of Australian farmer - philosopher Glenn Albrecht’s work for the planetary emergency. Albrecht’s 'Symbiocene' - an era that contrasts the Anthropocene, directly connects with symbiotic science that confirms that life survives and thrives through interrelated mutuality between many species. As Albrecht writes, ‘symbiosis has now emerged as a primary determinant of the conditions of life’. This article reviews Albrecht's emergent terms for an ecological age beyond the alienation and ecocide of the Anthropocene with reference to Albrecht's new book Earth Emotions: New Words for a New World (Cornell Uni., 2019). Also discussed are his terms solastalgia, soliphilia, sumbioregionalism as they relate to emergent durational ecological art practices - what I call 'eco-social art practice and Donna Haraway and others' terms.

A review article about Irish-based New Zealander Cathy Fitzgerald's doctoral creative practice research into an expanded ecological art practice, which she refers to as 'eco-social art practice'. This draws from review of pioneering ecological art practices and her own practice that explores new-to-Ireland continuous cover forestry. Cathy explains such practices as expanded, ethical social enquiries. She clarifies the critical position of creative activities in these practices and how such expanded durational practices are best collated and shared with audiences using blogging. Eco-social art practices are foremost open-ended question-based processes, inviting communities to explore their relationship to their places in the ecological emergency. Cathy concludes that eco-social art practices are memes for the Symbiocene - the new sustainable era that succeeds the Anthropocene. They contribute to The Great Turning on how to live well with the Earth and all its inhabitants.

This article appeared in Minding Nature, Vol. 12. No. 3 (Fall 2019), a publication of the Center for Humans and Nature (www.humansandnature.org).

Rethinking the Anthropocene.
Why we need perspectives from the Global South.
Colonial Anthropocene.

Aesthetizations of colonialism as something from a remote past became forms of anesthetizations: the inability to perceive the colonial present. The modality of coloniality (including its aesthetics), which we will focus on in this chapter, is not the spectral, but the real, and the one euphemistically called “Anthropocene.”
Unthinking Anthropocene’s eurocentrisms implies the need to look at it from the South. Since I will discuss Congo in particular, I will call this chapter “CONGOCENE.” The neologism will be the latest addition to the long list of -cenes, including Anglocene, Goracene, Blancocene, Eurocene, Occidentocene, Gringocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene, MisAnthropocene, Plantationocene, Homogenocene, Plasticene, Neganthropocene, Anthrobscene, AnthropoScreams, Neganthropocene, AnthropoScene, Symbiocene, Alienocene, Atomicocene, and White-Supremacy-Scene.
CONGOCENE shows that “decolonization,” rather than the colonial past, has been rejected, refused and amputated. This is visualized in a series of Congolese films on the mining area of Katanga, R.D. Congo. At stake here is not so much the “decolonization” understood as political and economic autonomy, but the undoing of the colonial relation to nature, which resulted in what is now known as the Anthropocene.

What follows are excerpts from a project I am calling Rooting into the Planthroposcene. Taking the impossible and nearly comedic form of a step by step guide to getting out of the Anthropocene, this project picks up recent calls for inventive forms of speculative fabulation. This form does well to channel both my rage about our current predicament, and my playful and loving, if also serious aspirations for dreaming worlds otherwise. Just to prepare you for what will follow: this is not so much a research paper, as an incantation. We have to remember that we are living under a spell, and this spell making it impossible for our more than human worlds to flourish. It’s time to cast another spell, to call other worlds into being, to conjure other worlds within this world.  It is clear that we are at the limits of language, at the edges of imagination. We need art, experiment, and radical disruption to learn other ways to see, feel, and know.

Portrayals of the anthropocene period are often dystopian or post-apocalyptic narratives of climate crises that will leave humans in horrific science-fiction scenarios. Such narratives miss the populations of people, such as Indigenous peoples, who approach climate change having already been through transformations of their societies induced by colonial violence. This essay discusses how some Indigenous perspectives on climate change can situate the present time as already dystopian. Instead of dread of an impending crisis, Indigenous approaches to climate change are motivated through dialogic narratives with their descendants and ancestors. In some cases, these narratives are like science fiction in which Indigenous peoples work to empower their own protagonists to address contemporary challenges. Yet within literatures on climate change and the Anthropocene, Indigenous peoples often get placed in historical categories designed by non-Indigenous persons, such as the holocene. In some cases, these categories serve as the backdrop for allies’ narratives that privilege themselves as the protagonists who will save Indigenous peoples from colonial violence and the climate crisis. I speculate that this tendency among allies could possibly be related to their sometimes denying that they are living in times their ancestors would have likely fantasized about. I will show how this denial threatens allies’ capacities to build coalitions with Indigenous peoples. [open access @ http://journals.sagepub.com/toc/enea/0/0]

This chapter presents an ecocritical reading of street artworks by Spanish artist Isaac Cordal.

The chapter is part of a larger project that focuses on environmental street art. The project will culminate with the publication of a monograph later in 2018.