What is needed is an ethic for the Anthropocene - not only a climate change ethics (Jamieson, 2014, 179)
This set of photos comes from a series I'm working on for an image essay with the working title 'Everyday landscapes of the anthropocene' (publisher, anyone?) The question I'm asking is how we can picture landscapes in this era where human activity is the dominant force of nature such that we better perceive and engage with ecological crises. As Paul Kingsnorth wrote in an essay on England (Guardian 14 March 2015):
'We live in a age of climate change and mass extinction, burgeoning cities, deepening immersion in technologies of distraction, the spreading ideology of mass consumption. The antidote to this global distancing of humanity from the rest of nature is the slow messy business of getting to know a landscape.'
But what do we understand by landscape and how can we 'know' it? Can picturing my landscapes of here and now, of Wales and London and Denmark and even of my own face, help me understand them? For society, how could such understandings reduce the distance between humanity and nature, here and now, elsewhere and in future, between us and them, between people and other species?
This set of photos comes from a series I'm working on for an image essay with the working title 'Everyday landscapes of the anthropocene' (publisher, anyone?) The question I'm asking is how we can picture landscapes in this era where human activity is the dominant force of nature such that we better perceive and engage with ecological crises. As Paul Kingsnorth wrote in an essay on England (Guardian 14 March 2015):
'We live in a age of climate change and mass extinction, burgeoning cities, deepening immersion in technologies of distraction, the spreading ideology of mass consumption. The antidote to this global distancing of humanity from the rest of nature is the slow messy business of getting to know a landscape.'
But what do we understand by landscape and how can we 'know' it? Can picturing my landscapes of here and now, of Wales and London and Denmark and even of my own face, help me understand them? For society, how could such understandings reduce the distance between humanity and nature, here and now, elsewhere and in future, between us and them, between people and other species?