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Every year, human activity moves more sediment and rock than all natural
processes combined, including erosion and rivers. This might not shock
you. In fact, you’ve probably seen similar soundbites circulating
online, signals of the sheer scale of how we’re terraforming the planet
in the era of the Anthropocene. Natural and social scientists argue
passionately about almost everything Anthropocenic, from the nuances of
nomenclature to the start-date of the new geological epoch, but most
agree on one thing: the Earth will outlive humanity. What’s in doubt is
how long we will populate the planet, and under what conditions.
But who, exactly, are ‘we’?
Consider the cover of Nature in March 2015, in which two Earths, one
blue-green and one grey, are entangled in a human body. The title
emblazoned across the man’s six-pack invites us to see this body as
representative of ‘the human’. But there’s no such thing as a generic
human, of course; the image repeats the centuries-old conflation of
human with white man. Perhaps the artist sought to subvert such racist
overtones by obscuring the man’s eyes, making him an unseeing subject
blind to the damage he’s wreaked on his body and his planet. Still, the
image impels a common critique of the Anthropocene concept: it
attributes ecological collapse to an undifferentiated ‘humanity’, when
in practice both responsibility and vulnerability are unevenly distributed.
full:
https://aeon.co/essays/if-we-talk-about-hurting-our-planet-who-exactly-is-the-we
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