Anthropocene

Through readings of the works of artist/sculptor Ilana Halperin and poet Alice Oswald, David Farrier explores the idea of Anthropocene as marked by haunted time.

Denis Byrne explores the 1880s reclamation of the Elizabeth Bay in Sydney Harbour, encountering historical influences such as sandstone wall constructions, buried objects, and colonial narratives. He argues in this article that archaeology has a role to play in bringing reclamations and other aspects of the Anthropocene into view.

Hornby draws attention to the work of Danish artist Olafur Eliasson, whose immersive installations aim to increase environmental awareness, arguing that Eliasson’s environments are fully orchestrated affairs that share the technologies and efforts of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries’ militarization of climate control.

In episode 58 of Nature’s Past, a podcast on Canadian environmental history, Sean Kheraj discusses key questions concerning the development of the field of Canadian environmental history with seven environmental historians.

Greg Garrard, Gary Handwerk, and Sabine Wilke, editors of the special section titled “Imagining Anew: Challenges of Representing the Anthropocene,” introduce this collection of essays from diverse humanities disciplines.

In the special section “Imagining Anew: Challenges of Representing the Anthropocene,” Tobias Boes examines the hermeneutic and poetic operations by which we as human beings turn our very planet into a signifier for our collective existence as a species, a process he refers to as “planetary mediation.”

In the special section “Imagining Anew: Challenges of Representing the Anthropocene,” Thomas Lekan offers a postcolonial critique of recent environmentalist literature and exhibitions that frame the Anthropocene using the NASA Apollo mission’s Earthrise (1968) and Blue Marble (1972) photographs from space.

In the special section “Imagining Anew: Challenges of Representing the Anthropocene,” Alexa Weik von Mossner analyzes Dale Pendell’s speculative novel The Great Bay.

Andrew Whitehouse considers the semiotics of listening to birds in the Anthropocene by drawing on Kohn’s recent arguments on the semiotics of more-than-human relations and Ingold’s understanding of the world as a meshwork, and comparing the work of Bernie Krause with responses to the the Listening to Birds project.

In the special section “Imagining Anew: Challenges of Representing the Anthropocene,” Wolfgang Struck’s essay examines the renewed attraction to the medium of the atlas in light of representational challenges raised by the model of the Anthropocene.