First Draft Essay

How does the proposition of an ‘Anthropocene’ impact on new media ecologies?

Humanity Vs Nature

In Moore’s essay ‘The Capitalocene: Part I’ he explores the roll of historical events and philosophies that underpin our shared perception of the human species as a largely homogenous acting unit (‘the human enterprise’); ‘commodification, industrialisation, imperialism, globalisation, patriarchy, inequality, racism’, what Moore describes as ‘the Anthropocene’s point of departure’.

From the Anthropocene dialogue it can be considered that the industrial revolution was the origin of ecological crisis due to its succeeding disunion of Humanity and Nature. Moore expresses the Anthropocenic syllogism as: ‘fossil fuels = capitalism = more fossil fuels = climate catastrophe’. For early modern materialism, the point was not only to interpret the world but to control it: ‘to make ourselves as it were the masters and possessors of nature’ (Descartes 2006, 51). Animals become machines, machines and resources become things abstracted from socio-ecological relations (Marx 1977, 512–513). Such a discourse highlights the origins of the domestication and thus separation of ‘Humanity’ and ‘Nature’, an idea that Moore calls ‘Green Arithmetic’, whereby nature becomes but a factor, a variable, a part of the story. Seeing human relations as not only distinct from nature, but as effectively independent of the web of life, has shaped social thought for two centuries (Moore, 2017). Hence, the premise of capitalism rests on the separation of Humanity and Nature; that we inhabit something called Society, and act upon something called Nature. This is the problem of alienation, shaping everything from the structures of work to the structures of feeling (e.g. Marx 1977; Braverman 1974; Williams 1977).

Capitalocene

T.J. Demos argues in ‘Against the Anthropocene’ that such a proposition whitewashes the “sheer complexity and multiple dimensionality of our geo-politico-economic formation” distracting public perception of the greater disparity issues at hand. Instead, he agrees Moore’s suggestion of a ‘Capitalocene’ thesis can best translate a world structure “where all will not be blamed for the activities of a few and where culpability for ecocide is assigned to those responsible so that the future becomes not only possible but guaranteed”. Accordingly, Moore states: “The Capitalocene thesis foregrounds how capitalism evolved within and against nature's web of life…the crisis of climate change, according to this perspective, owes not simply to a substance like oil or coal, or to a chemical element like carbon - and certainly not to humanity's species being - but to complex socio-economic, political, and material operations, involving class and commodities, imperialisms and empires, and biotechnology and militarism.” Such an idea is best exemplified through diamond trade. As the new aspects of the technosphere developed, after 91 million years, the hardest known substance on earth could now be extracted and sold. Humans who owned machines over geological matter, giving rise to a hierarchy and feeding the formation of cities, corporations and institutions (Green, 2015). Thus, was established a legal infrastructure that favoured mining, and a social infrastructure that established race-based disenfranchisement.

The contextual origins of colonial and imperialist social structures within the technosphere establish a clear origin and subsequent rise of a plantationocene and homogenocene, both terms coined as subcategories of a capitalocene. The former refers to “the commodification of nature” as a result of the 18th and 19th century Spanish-mission-led colonialisaiton of California, the cotton and sugar slave-worked plantations in North and South America of the same era, and the current sites of biogenetically assisted industrial agriculture in Argentina, India and Indonesia (Demos, 2017). Furthermore, the plantation system intensified the oppression of women and the regimentation of normative racial and gender codes, supressing interspecies co-becomings and naturalcultural mutualities (Tsing, 2012) giving rise to a Homogenocene of genetically and industrially induced monocultures, at the cost of mass extinctions, identifying the de-biodiversifying effects of globalisations reduction of nature to the commodity form via corporate-extravist-strip-mining-oil-drilling-monocrop-planting-dam-building neoliberalism (Suckling, 2015).

Thus, the accumulation and advancement of such social structures is what ultimately formed the fossil-fuel burning civilisation we see today, where energy autonomy is the highest form of power in our globalised system. If we attempt to gain perspective on the issue, we see that parliamentary debate of the last decade discusses three-hundred-million-year-old subterra, and whether or not to fracture the shale from Carboniferous. Here, those running the Anthropocene precariously seek to claim an ignorant understanding of numbers beyond their comprehension.

The industrial humanities have created structures of claiming things that are not ones to claim, such as the four (western) elements of fire, water, air and earth and the five (eastern) elements including metal and wood and (ancient cultures) fifth of void (space). In turn, the West began the exploitation of poorer areas to feed their development. Consequently, the resourcing of everything on earth for commodity production permits companies to assert dominance over areas to gain power through resource gathering. Accordingly, we see the more fragile economies turn to multinational corporations, like the African National Congress, ‘who hopes for an economic revolution strong enough to starve off rumblings of political revolution’, choosing as its allies the oil companies Shell, Chevron, Falcon and Bundu (Green, 2015). Western European colonialism which exploited indigenous people and natural resources, enriching the colonising countries, contributing to the current environmental and demographic stresses, are an apt example of the consequences of pathology of dominator hierarchies (Desser, 2007; Wilber, 1995). Such arguments present the effects of commodification of nature and colonialism that are still affecting today’s media ecologies.

The impact of an Anthropocene driven epoch on human environments can be catastrophic when considering the increasing globalisation of the planet. Embodied by GATT and NAFTA and the homogenisation that globalisation entails, biodiversity and cultural diversity will diminish, and this loss of complexity will be ecologically (and therefore evolutionarily) devastating. (Desser, 2007). Surely a future where everyone is the same means we are disregarding generations of heritage and thought that came before and replacing it with a techno-driven monoculture that can only benefit those in charge of this singular top-down economy.

Linear Capitalism

When discussing the visuality of the Anthropocene, Moore notes the social origins of environmental consequences as the ‘strikingly linear view of history’ provided by charts, that link a ‘direct casual line from the steam engine to global warming’, once more emphasising the rigidness of capitalist thought and depiction. Nicholas Mirzeoff advances this structural perception of capitalism through the idea of ‘countervisuality’, a form of resistance to capitalism that does not move in a linear, tactile fashion (Mirzeoff, 2014). Countervisuality, being the challenger against the confidence in European cultural superiority, which helped regulate the increasingly complex geographic scope of colonial power (InVisible Culture, 2012) is not just a different way of seeing or a looking at images, but the tactics to dismantle the visual strategies of the hegemonic system (Baetens, 2011). As such, it is important to note the Anthropogenic visuality of ‘Anthromes’ (Ellis et al. 2010) – ecosystems that are dominated by humans, and therefore not ‘wild’ – that has been contextually engraved in public mentality, denoting the separation between ‘the human enterprise’ and the natural world. Still, Anthropocene scholars cannot escape the conclusion that humans, too, are a ‘geophysical force’ that operates within nature (Steffen et al. 2011b, 741), and so new media ecologies should seek to present the coexistence and essentiality of nature that sustains human existence, instead of championing the through-the-window perspective that separates us. 

Commodity Culture

Through the current production driven new media ecologies, the proposition of an Anthropocene can thus be seen as an aid driving the progression of today’s commodity culture. Such a notion of modern commodification is epitomised by philosopher Amié Césaire’s equation of “Colonisation = thingification”, first coined in 1955. This point is furthered by the idea of “necropolitics”, a term from philosopher Achille Mbembe describing ‘the replacement of reciprocity with commodification between humans, and in human relations with the geospheres’. Accordingly, Lesley Green, writing for e-flux journal, concludes that ‘the geological effect of a necropolitial technosphere, on a planetary scale, is the Anthropocene.’ Thus, illustrating the illusory qualities of such terminology to mask the disruption of natural processes being implemented for economic gain to satisfy the current globalised capitalist commodity culture. Hence, when Moore rationalises the ‘Capitalocene’ epoch he too notes a ‘Necrocene’ – a system that not only accumulates capital, but drives extinction (McBrien 2016; also Dawson 2016) – explaining the importance of public acknowledgment of the relationship between the reality of capitalist development and its deep exterminism, and that exterminism is not anthropogenic but capitalogenic (Moore, 2017?).

Green goes on to use the inorganic material cement as a way of alluding to greater issues associated with the Anthropocene mentality, such as the man-induced division between economics and ecology; ‘such an irrational belief in the power of cement confers upon modern minded humans the power to enact upon the earth the transformation of liquid to solid…the separation of human activity from ecological and planetary systems…the planet’s history is that of flows between states of matter…[it is not being confined to a particular space]…In cement, the geophilosophy of human exceptionalism is cemented: the self-image of moderns is thus denatured, dematerialised, and separated from the planet itself.’

Petrocapitalism

From a theological viewpoint, Sprangler argues that the uprise of traditional religious practices pushed by ‘patriarchal social structures’ gives ‘sacredness overtones of authority, power, distance and maleness’ subsequently shifting the societal focus from ‘a sense of the living earth’. He thus argues that such practices take for granted ‘an immanent, accessible sacred presence pervading all things’.

The Anthropocene’s colonialist imperialism inflicts bigoted structures onto powerless cultures who otherwise prioritise natures value within their ideologies, as opposed to industry and commodification. As such, the perceived alienated ideals of the western world are inflicted in places they historically have no domain, exploiting resources of native land, giving rise to a homogecene of culture that would otherwise not exist. North America’s indigenous groups are a great example of less dominating ways of life suffering the consequences of prejudice practices giving way to an ecocide of culture.

The existent on-the-ground effects of the petrocapitalist inflictions is seen in Alberta, where Eriel Derganger, activist and spokesperson for the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, talks on the catastrophic effects on the native communities suffering the brut of its impacts. Best exemplified through the Tar Sands Exposed Tour organised by climate group 350 Maine, who documented the ‘biblically-proportioned devastation and dire human cost of industrial tar-sands oil extraction – a form of strip-mining considered the most ecologically destructive resource extraction project on the planet’. Such a threat on indigenous communities means entire lives are dedicated to fighting the policies of the dominant white male concerned only with petrocapitalist motives, in order to preserve their livelihoods, ‘and their traditional, sacred connection to the land and water – even as that land and water is poisoned, posing legal threats to their health' (Stephenson, 2014). Deranger speaking in Boston affirms “we will fight to the highest levels of law…All we need is the political will to change the course of where we’re going, and respect those who are so impacted by out-of-control, psychotic, bottom-of-the-barrel resource development…I don’t want my children to have to be the sacrifice for humanity to wake up”. Such a statement raises questions of a necropolitics that is shaping cultural sustainability, whereby otherness is not fostered in capitalist policy. These communities become collateral to an oppressive, over-dominating centralised government that values industry over environmentalism. A powerhouse that dampens the smaller voices and is intolerant of other ways-of-being. Resultantly, it is the local communities that have lived amongst this previously untouched expanse of natural landscape for generations, whose sacred land is so deeply embedded into their heritage, that are threatened. They are not the stories covered by mainstream media outlets, they have no voice if equated to the magnitude of the issue. Thus, it can be argued that to propose an Anthropocene simply gives way for this tight nit group to justify their actions to the rest of the world.

Maya Lemon, a spokesperson for NacSTOP (Nacogdoches Stop Tar Sands Oil Permanently), explains to The Nation Journal the extent of this ecocide; “we live alongside drilling, pipelines, fracking, compressor stations and chemical storage tanks. Because my family doesn’t own our mineral rights, Exxon has been able to do pretty much whatever they want on our land…my father was diagnosed with leukaemia, a cancer with known links to petroleum production”. Here we see a Marxist capitalist mode of production, whereby a disparity exists which favours dirty fossil fuel extraction “at the expense of human health, in what are mostly communities of colour”. She further outlines the importance of a united movement (that is otherwise separated by the mainstream media outlets) as the key tool for improving the conditions and circumstances set out by ‘climate change and runaway industry development’. Hence, it is important to note the ways new media ecologies generalise grassroots issues, whitewashing the extent to which thousands of livelihoods are being threatened. The scale of news that media outlets now cater for in this globalised system fail to present accurate narratives as they must both simplify and embellish for a broad spectrum of audience, as well as being controlled by those whose interests are not with local communities. Lemon asserts that “the ongoing, daily work of my community’s resistance to tar sands is completely left out of conversations that centre only around the concept of the National Keystone fight”.

As such we see how the growth of new media ecologies to cater for far-reaching audiences, covering larger demographics than ever before due to the globalised world and all-inclusive social media platforms. The issue here being they cannot communicate the localised issues that would evoke sympathy –and thus change– to a listening audience. Instead, the intricacies of the problems abridged, telling only an overarching version that becomes out of reach for the individual to fully understand or act upon.

This point is accentuated by the embedded law recognised in the areas not reached by historical colonialism, whereby the government acknowledge the beliefs and ethics of their indigenous populations, and value the preservation of ‘Mother Earth’ as an entity that supports all existence, and thus all worldly progression. In 2010 legislation was passed in Bolivia that would give the planet legal standing and rights, defined as an "indivisible community of all living systems and living organisms, interrelated, interdependent and complementary" (Bolivia’s Framework Law for Mother Earth and Holistic Development to Live Well, October 2012). The "Law of the Rights of Mother Earth" was an ethical commitment to vivir bien (living well), defined as "adopting forms of consumption, behaviour and conduct that are not degrading to nature. It requires and ethical and spiritual relationship with life. Living Well proposes the complete fulfilment of life and collective happiness" (WorldTruth.TV 2012). Drafted by Unity Pact, the law represented all of the country's 36 indigenous groups and a total of 3 million people (Mirzeoff, 2014). Such a law that defines Mother Earth as a living system with rights, instead of an object open to unlimited exploitation, is a key example of the imperialist global divide, in which entire structures, ecologies and theologies differ so much that it is somewhat unimaginable that a similar law could –and would– be passed in a western society. The adoption of these beliefs into a country’s law by a sovereign power gives hope that such practices can be sanctioned and endorsed into all societies.

Yet, for now we remain dominantly in a Petrocapitalist Anthropocene, an epoch where nature is made visible only as a ‘natural capital’ in economic trade-offs, or as a backdrop to a techno-optimism that places our collective fate in the hands of markets and technology (Forrester, 2016). The market will not solve our problems; nor will technology, ethical consumerism, or romantic anti-technology primitivism. Rather we need ‘to create the space within which very different kinds of knowledge and practice might meet,’ including ‘economic, technological, political, and cultural transformations’ and ‘new ways of organising knowledge’ (McKenzie Wark). Thus, in order for a global transformation in the name of ecojustice, we must shift our perspective to align new priorities for our evolving new media ecologies.

Petrocapitalist Design

Beautiful Destruction is a book by Louis Helbig published in 2014, “with stunning imagery of the industrial development in the forests of Northern Alberta” (beautifuldestruction.ca). Such juxtaposing language somewhat masks the significance of the overarching topic, shifting the focus away from those accountable. The book also includes “16 essays by prominent individuals with contrasting ideas about this highly controversial issue” providing a broad-scale insight of both pro- and anti- industry and environment contributors including that of politicians, artists, journalists and energy companies. Fittingly so, those from a pro-industry perspective, including CEOs and former presidents of energy producers, highlight the tar sands' value in providing energy security for North America. One commentator, Ezra Levant, Canadian media personality, conservative political activist, writer, and broadcaster (Wikipedia.com) goes as far as to describe the pictures to be that of “a liberal, peaceful, democratic society" based on "ethical oil" distinct from the "conflict oil" of Middle East Dictatorships (Demos, 2017) a comment that simply furthers to the socio-political East versus West divide. Nevertheless, the variant outlooks comprised in the publication allows exposure of the political corruption enabling petrochemical Canada, as Duff Conacher of Democracy Watch defends, stating “all speaking to the fact that is ‘conflict oil’ exists anywhere at all it is here.”

Helbig endorses his work, declaring that the oil/tar sands “lend themselves to aerial photography” as it is “not possible to see, interpret and understand them as effectively from the ground”. However, as Demos comments; ‘the aerial shots isolate the poisonous industrial exploitation from its larger socioeconomic and politico-cultural environment’ and that such an abstraction is then exploited for commercial gain via art galleries and online shopping (of his book). Demos furthers his point stating the distance between the capturer and subject ‘displaces the scenes from the misery of those living in or near the industrial apocalypse’. The effects of this ‘disorientating perspective’ produces ‘wrongful sensations of visual pleasure’ which in turn alienates the viewer, aiding a ‘perverse enjoyment’ of ultimately images of ‘our own annihilation’. Mirzeoff further comments on this idea of translating scenes of destruction into compositions of aesthetic beauty, stating the visualisations of the Anthropocene which ‘comes to seems natural, right, then beautiful’ anaesthetises ‘the perception of modern industrial pollution’.

Such ‘disturbing and seductive imagery’ is further seen in the works of Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky whose large-scale prints of industrial landscape further display ‘environmental toxicity transformed photographically into visual splendour’. Burtnysky’s, who captures the extensive views of human-altered landscapes in his artistic practice, has a latest endeavour; ‘The Anthropocene Project’. Clarifying his intentions, Burtynsky proclaims to the British Journal of Photography “scientists do a pretty terrible job of telling stories, whereas artists have the ability to take the world and make it accessible for everyone. We are having a greater impact on the planet than all the natural systems combined. I’m trying to let people know that.” His intentions for the photographs to be “attractive to the eye” whilst still recognising “beneath the surface there’s always a bigger, deeper environmental issue” offers a somewhat oxymoronic statement in its effectiveness of communicating to an audience such a catastrophic issue.  The Anthropocene Project includes photographs of the biggest terrestrial machines ever built in Germany, concrete seawalls in China that now cover 60 per cent of the mainland coast, and psychedelic potash mines in Russia’s Ural Mountains. Seeking to capture the largest examples of extractions of the planet, he visited 20 countries over five years (Kelly, 2018). Similarly with Helbig however, ethically must we consider the offset of our carbon footprint even when trying to deliver a greater message; surely there are other ways of capturing a message without aiding the pollution and destruction at the core of the topic’s discussion.

Nonetheless, it is easy to miss the expression of environmental violence from such ‘monumental’ and ‘awe-inspiring’ photographs; a violence defined not only locally in terms of the damage to regional landscapes, but also globally in relation to the contribution of industrial fossil fuel production to climate change (Demos, 2017). Consequently, he constructs ‘the petro-industrial sublime’, and such depictions become interpreted as scenes of modern development masked under the idea of an ‘American Dream’; "when I first started photographing industry it was out of a sense of awe at what we as a species were up to. Our achievements became a source of infinite possibilities". However, in conjunction with Moore’s Capitalocene thesis, such a statement by Burtynsky furthers the ruse of universal responsibility for climate disruption, diverting attention from corporate petrocapitalism’s enormous economic influence on global politics that keeps us locked in its clutches (Demos, 2017). Hence, despite the ‘awesome visuality’ the images merit, it must not be overlooked what they depict.

However, visual literacy protesting the petrocapitalist agenda is both present and strong, fusing material and design to aestheticise the Anthropocene in a more productive and environmentally ethical way, not whitewashing the bigger picture, or naturalising petrocapitalism in the name of commercialism. The Subterrafuge was a multi-tower mixed-media installation built in 2014 for the AfrikaBurn festival, and burned in a 2015 event, that commented on the logic of shale gas. Situated deep in the Karoo, it sought to reference the tall infrastructure required to turn the area into an extractive economy. Its creative name combines ‘sub’ (under or below) ‘terra’ (land or territory) and ‘fuge’ (expelling or dispelling), to play on the word ‘subterfuge’ meaning deceit used in order to achieve one’s goal. Its ultimate comment being then that gas, water, rock, earth, and air are commodities extracted for the purpose of economic growth measured in capital, which is assumed to “trickle down” through layers of stratified humans. Such subterfuges continue to divide the necropolitical from an ecology of life across all spheres (Green, 2015).

Such design is further exampled through the ‘unique’ collaboration between photographer Richard Misrach and landscape architect Kate Orff, in their publication Petrochemical America, which depicts the evident on-the-ground environmental destruction and human cost of the fossil fuel industry along the Mississippi River (Demos, 2017). The book’s documentation of ‘Cancer Alley’, one of America’s most industrialised regions, highlights the Southern oil development’s necropolitical agenda of ecocide. Cancer Alley’s politics is one of clear inequality, as Demos notes its impacts on ‘certain populations more than others’, including ‘formally enslaved low-income African-Americans and working-class white communities, without resources to move to cleaner areas or lacking the resolve to abandon their homes, [are the ones who] bear the brunt of petrochemical exposure, while corporation enrich distant shareholders [live] safely in clean, affluent environments’. As such, the publication’s powerful context encourages its viewers to participate in opposing fossil-fuel extraction and its unevenly distributed effects. ‘A political relationality’, Demos says, that would be ‘otherwise absent in Anthropocene discourse’.

Unlike the work of Helbig and Burtynsky, this somewhat dystopian example of design, details the polluted apocalyptic landscape, focusing on the damaging socio-environmental causes and effects of oil industry development, rather than the aesthetical abstract qualities of it. Instead, Petrochemical America acknowledges the ‘complex cultural, physical and economic issues of the region’ and advocates for ‘bioregional and globally interlinked comprehensive approaches for a post-petrochemical culture of sustainability’. In its ‘Glossary of Terms and Solutions for a Post-Petrochemical Culture’ (attached to the back of the book) case studies, tools, and practices are brought together that offer models for change, such as suggestions for citizen action networks, green chemistry, sustainable agriculture, public transportation and environmental law that reject the linear, mechanistic and distributed waste in favour or looped and living paradigms centred on human energy and renewable resources (scapestudio.com). Thus, instead of another populist artist narrative on the issue, this ‘joint enterprise’ uses a municipal of creative skill and the power of concrete aesthetical design, to effectively communicate to an audience the issues surrounding the petrochemical industry and ‘our society, which has become inextricably intertwined with its output.’ The result being a narrative whereby the visualisation of the Anthropocene is not just transparent but principled.