Re: [geo] Geo-Engineering the Anthropocene
An interesting piece indeed that would be more useful if it offered proposals as well as raising questions. One gets the impression that the author's idea of appropriate visuality would be a 24/7 loop of the destruction of the global environment by fossil fuels. But it's hard to see how such a visuality against the Anthropocene could be created without an elaborate global media industrial complex which presupposes that which it it supposedly critiques. One could argue that the visuality of the Anthropocene began at Lescaux: indeed, that the essence of the Anthropocene *is* this Lescauvian (?) ability to see nature as something outside ourselves... There are actually are a lot of useful conversations that this group could have about visual communication strategies for SRM and CDR. All of us of who have written for popular or policy audiences have had the experience of providing illustrations for reports. Certain things work better as illustrations than others, this tends to produces an implicit visual bias. There is an extensive literature about how climate science findings are communicated and (mis)understood. Let me ask the group for some free thought: what are the 10 Commandments for visual communication about geoengineering? What are some images that should never (again) be used? What are some best practices? On Thu, May 14, 2015 at 5:22 AM, Andrew Lockley andrew.lock...@gmail.com wrote: Poster's note : An unusual piece, notably discussing the visual depiction of geoengineering http://blog.fotomuseum.ch/2015/05/ii-geo-engineering-the-anthropocene/ II. Geo-Engineering the Anthropocene By T.J. DEMOS Published: 13. MAY 2015 “A daunting task lies ahead for scientists and engineers to guide society towards environmentally sustainable management during the era of the Anthropocene. This will require appropriate human behaviour at all scales, and may well involve internationally accepted, large-scale geo-engineering projects, for instance to ‘optimize’ climate.”[1]—Paul Crutzen, 2002 The Anthropocene thesis, as presented in the increasingly expanding body of images and texts, appears generally split between optimists and pessimists, especially when it comes to geo-engineering, the deliberate intervention in the Earthʼs natural systems to counteract climate change. As the Anthropocene appears to imply the necessity of geo-engineering—as Crutzen, one of the inventors of the term makes clear—the battle lines have been drawn between those who think “we” humans confront an extraordinary opportunity to bio-technologically remake the world, and others who opt for hands-off caution and would rather modify human behavior instead of the environment in addressing the climate crisis. For instance, ethics philosopher Clive Hamilton, participating in “The Anthropocene—An Engineered Age?,” the 2014 panel discussion at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), breaks the world down into techno-utopians and eco-Soterians. The former are today’s “new Prometheans,” intent on creating a new Eden on Earth, and the latter, named after Soteria, the ancient Greek personification of safety and preservation, remain pledged to the precautionary principle, respectful of Earth’s processes and critical of human hubris, the very same hubris, they argue, that got us into the environmental crisis in the first place.[2] For sociologist Bruno Latour, we must not disown the contemporary Frankenstein we’ve created—the contemporary Earth of the Anthropocene—but rather learn to love and care for the “monster” we’ve created. Meanwhile for activist Naomi Klein, arguments like Latour’s are dangerously misguided: “The earth is not our prisoner, our patient, our machine, or, indeed, our monster. It is our entire world. And the solution to global warming is not to fix the world, it is to fix ourselves.”[3] In fact, the visual culture of the Anthropocene, whether delivered photographically or via remote-sensing technology, is riven by exactly this tension. Its iconography both portrays the remarkable extent of the human-driven alteration of Earth systems (with ample photographic and satellite-based imagery of large-scale mining, oil drilling, and deforestation projects), and documents the dangers of the unintended consequences of such ventures. Ultimately, however, imaging systems play more than an illustrative role here, as they tend to grant viewers a sense of control over the represented object of their gaze, even if that control is far from reality. In other words, Anthropocene imagery tends to reinforce the techno-utopian position that “we” have indeed mastered nature, just as we’ve mastered its imaging—and in fact the two, the dual colonization of nature and representation, seem inextricably intertwined. That is, even while these geo-engineering projects are generally done by corporations and heavy industry, certainly not identical to the “human” subject of the Anthropocene
[geo] Geo-Engineering the Anthropocene
Poster's note : An unusual piece, notably discussing the visual depiction of geoengineering http://blog.fotomuseum.ch/2015/05/ii-geo-engineering-the-anthropocene/ II. Geo-Engineering the Anthropocene By T.J. DEMOS Published: 13. MAY 2015 “A daunting task lies ahead for scientists and engineers to guide society towards environmentally sustainable management during the era of the Anthropocene. This will require appropriate human behaviour at all scales, and may well involve internationally accepted, large-scale geo-engineering projects, for instance to ‘optimize’ climate.”[1]—Paul Crutzen, 2002 The Anthropocene thesis, as presented in the increasingly expanding body of images and texts, appears generally split between optimists and pessimists, especially when it comes to geo-engineering, the deliberate intervention in the Earthʼs natural systems to counteract climate change. As the Anthropocene appears to imply the necessity of geo-engineering—as Crutzen, one of the inventors of the term makes clear—the battle lines have been drawn between those who think “we” humans confront an extraordinary opportunity to bio-technologically remake the world, and others who opt for hands-off caution and would rather modify human behavior instead of the environment in addressing the climate crisis. For instance, ethics philosopher Clive Hamilton, participating in “The Anthropocene—An Engineered Age?,” the 2014 panel discussion at Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), breaks the world down into techno-utopians and eco-Soterians. The former are today’s “new Prometheans,” intent on creating a new Eden on Earth, and the latter, named after Soteria, the ancient Greek personification of safety and preservation, remain pledged to the precautionary principle, respectful of Earth’s processes and critical of human hubris, the very same hubris, they argue, that got us into the environmental crisis in the first place.[2] For sociologist Bruno Latour, we must not disown the contemporary Frankenstein we’ve created—the contemporary Earth of the Anthropocene—but rather learn to love and care for the “monster” we’ve created. Meanwhile for activist Naomi Klein, arguments like Latour’s are dangerously misguided: “The earth is not our prisoner, our patient, our machine, or, indeed, our monster. It is our entire world. And the solution to global warming is not to fix the world, it is to fix ourselves.”[3] In fact, the visual culture of the Anthropocene, whether delivered photographically or via remote-sensing technology, is riven by exactly this tension. Its iconography both portrays the remarkable extent of the human-driven alteration of Earth systems (with ample photographic and satellite-based imagery of large-scale mining, oil drilling, and deforestation projects), and documents the dangers of the unintended consequences of such ventures. Ultimately, however, imaging systems play more than an illustrative role here, as they tend to grant viewers a sense of control over the represented object of their gaze, even if that control is far from reality. In other words, Anthropocene imagery tends to reinforce the techno-utopian position that “we” have indeed mastered nature, just as we’ve mastered its imaging—and in fact the two, the dual colonization of nature and representation, seem inextricably intertwined. That is, even while these geo-engineering projects are generally done by corporations and heavy industry, certainly not identical to the “human” subject of the Anthropocene, a distinction that potentially pushes the neologism to its breaking point Following up on this latter point, critics and commentators (including those taking part in the HWK discussion) have asked important questions about the ethical implications of Anthropocene geo-engineering. For instance, should humans undertake such projects when they acknowledge that massive geologically interventionist processes will inevitably involve unforeseen consequences and unanticipated effects? What system of ethics governs the use of such technology? And who has the right—which individuals, nations, or corporations—to conduct these experiments? If rights generally derive from nation-states, then what legitimate body can grant permission to geo-engineering projects operating on a global scale? Consider the case of rogue American entrepreneur Russ George, who released around 100 tons of iron sulfate into the Pacific Ocean off the west coast of Canada in 2012 to catalyze an artificial plankton bloom as large as 10,000 square kilometers. The goal of this pet-geo-engineering project—the largest of its kind worldwide to date—was to test the absorption of carbon dioxide by plankton who will then sink to the ocean floor, a sequestration procedure from which George, CEO of Planktos Inc., hopes to massively profit. In the process, he has transgressed various international agreements, including the UNʼs convention on biological diversity, and violated the trust of the Haida First