The Anthropocene defines Earth’s most recent geologic time period as being human-influenced, or anthropogenic, based on overwhelming global evidence that atmospheric, geologic, hydrologic, biospheric and other earth system processes are now altered by humans.
The word combines the root “anthropo”, meaning “human” with the root “-cene”, the standard suffix for “epoch” in geologic time.
The Anthropocene is distinguished as a new period either after or within the Holocene, the current epoch, which began approximately 10,000 years ago (about 8000 BC) with the end of the last glacial period.
The main factors in deciding this new status is Nuclear testing and Pollution
“In a single lifetime we have grown into a phenomenal global force. We move more sediment and rock annually than all natural processes such as erosion and rivers. We manage three quarters of all land outside the ice sheets. Greenhouse gas levels this high have not been seen for over one million years. Temperatures are increasing. We have made a hole in the ozone layer. We are losing biodiversity. Many of the world’s deltas are sinking due to damming, mining, and other causes. Sea level is rising. Ocean acidification is a real threat. We are altering Earth’s natural cycles. We have entered the Anthropocene, a new geological epoch dominated by humanity.”
The Anthropocene is the most recent in a long culture of defining nature and our relationship to it. It has been said that conceptually nature has always been a product of humankind.
The aesthetics of the sublime revolved around the relationship between human beings and the grand or terrifying aspects of nature.
For Burke the sublime has a causal structure that is unlike that of beauty (which is passive). Its formal cause is thus the passion of fear (especially the fear of death) The material cause is equally aspects of certain objects such as vastness, infinity, magnificence, etc. Its efficient cause is the tension of our nerves; and are most often invoked through images of nature or natural events in Romantic painting.
This idea of Nature follows Hobbes Leviathan that was published in Britain 1651. The work concerns the structure of society and legitimate government, and is regarded as one of the earliest and most influential examples of social contract theory.
How is the Anthropocene Thesis […] abetted or contradicted by different kinds of visualization, and how might artistic-activist practices not only confirm but also provide compelling alternatives to this rhetoric?
World Of Matter– World of Matter is an international art and media project investigating primary materials (fossil, mineral, agrarian, maritime) and the complex ecologies of which they are a part.
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