Understanding and shaping nature | Welcome to the Anthropocene
This is a chapter of the virtual exhibition “Welcome to the Anthropocene: The Earth in Our Hands”—written and curated by historian Nina Möllers.
This is a chapter of the virtual exhibition “Welcome to the Anthropocene: The Earth in Our Hands”—written and curated by historian Nina Möllers.
Libby Robin and Cameron Muir discuss representations of the Anthropocene in museums and events.
Through an ethnographic account about the use of an electromagnetic water system in the Amish community, Nicole Welk-Joerger explores the conceptual meeting ground between sacred and secular worldviews in efforts that address the Anthropocene.
Museum exhibitions offer a unique space for creating a three-dimensional experience of the systemic interconnectedness that characterizes the Anthropocene, as well as encouraging reflection and participatory discussion. The Deutsches Museum has decided to tackle the challenges of this new age head-on and become the first museum to create a major exhibition on the Anthropocene. While curating an exhibition, we also tackle the question of how to “curate” the planet in its literal sense of taking care of it and curing it.
In this special commentary section titled “Replies to An Ecomodernist Manifesto,” edited by Eileen Crist and Thom Van Dooren, Clive Hamilton examines Erle Ellis’ ‘good Anthropocene,’ an unlikely juxtaposition which has now been amplified into the idea of the “great Anthropocene” and set out in An Ecomodernist Manifesto.
With a focus on global cancer epidemics, Nina Lykke discusses biopolitics in the Anthropocene against the background of a notion of dual governmentality, implying that efforts to make populations live and tendencies to let them die are intertwined.
Manifesto for Living in the Anthropocene argues that the current climate crisis calls for new ways of thinking and producing knowledge, suggesting that our collective inclination has been to go on in an experimental and exploratory mode, in which we refuse to foreclose on options or jump too quickly to “solutions.”
Considering Caroline Wendling’s living artwork White Wood (2014) in northeast Scotland, the author examines the relationship between deep time, ecology, and enchantment.
The authors detail their experience of Puchuncavi, the largest, oldest, and most polluting industrial area in Chile. They approach it from a multidisciplinary viewpoint as an experience of the Anthropocene and advocate for an enhanced pedagogy of care born of our inherited pasts and of engagement, interest, and becoming as response-ability.
The project Everyday Futures explores the role museums can play in helping to make sense of Australia’s experiences during a time of rapid planetary change and global disruption.