Against the Anthropocene

Environmental protection has occupied an important place in landscape architecture practice and research since its professional formation in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. This orienting principle has never been greater than it is today, given our growing awareness of human-induced global climate change and environmental decline. It is in this light that the Anthropocene—a proposed geological epoch in which humans have become a dominant driver of Earth system change—holds significance for landscape architects and planners. Attributing a new chapter in Earth history to humans, anthropos, has in turn generated considerable scholarly debate.

Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and the Environment Today, by T. J. Demos, offers a polemical critique of images and texts that the author associates with Anthropocene rhetoric, arguing that they enable the “military-state-corporate apparatus to disavow responsibility for the undifferentiated impacts of climate change, effectively obscuring the accountability behind the mounting eco-catastrophe and inadvertently making us all complicit in its destructive project” (p. 19). To support this thesis, Demos, an endowed professor of art history and visual culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz, draws upon photography, video, satellite imagery, and webpages as the primary objects of analysis.

Given the prominence of visual media in an increasingly digital world, Demos’s expertise in visual culture is a timely perspective; it is also relevant for landscape architecture, in which graphic communication of current conditions and alternative futures is foundational. Demos notes, for example, that the adoption of high-resolution satellite imagery in Anthropocene discourse is detached from people’s lived experience and therefore diminishes our capacity to perceive the “attritional scenes of slow violence” (p. 13) associated with climate change. Moreover, remote sensing technology gives the impression of being hyper-legible and informative, when in fact the imagery rarely addresses the implications of the renderings or the political and economic structures that underpin their production and use. According to Demos, this type of imagery conflates human activity with the activities of corporate industry, and it has a universalizing effect that obfuscates the latter’s principal responsibility for environmental decline.

Demos also laments that photographic and satellite-derived aerial imagery of human-altered Earth systems—such as large-scale mining, drilling, deforestation, and oceanic dead zones—leads to the “the dual colonization of nature and representation” (p. 28). He further suggests that these modes of landscape visualization foster “techno-utopian” hubris in the mind of the viewer. Edward Burtynsky’s largescale prints of industrial landscapes and Louis Helbig’s photographs of Albertan tar sands exemplify this type of iconography, which, according to Demos, portrays “petrocapitalism” as natural, inevitable, and even sublime.

To exemplify a more constructively critical approach to visualization of such landscapes, Demos highlights the work of the photographer Robert Misrach and landscape architect Kate Orff in Petrochemical America (2012). This book features Misrach’s images of the 150-mile Mississippi River corridor between Baton Rouge and New Orleans—also known as “Cancer Alley”—together with maps, infographics, and flow charts from the “Ecological Atlas,” developed by Orff and her design firm SCAPE. The latter materials catalogue a cornucopia of pollutants produced by petrochemical industries as well as associated health problems along the corridor, while Misrach’s photos document the ecological and social ravage that has disproportionately undermined the health of African American and working-class white communities who lacked the resources to move to cleaner environments.

For Demos, the term Anthropocene is itself highly problematic, if not illegitimate, in that it connotes a neo-Promethean stance (exemplified through large geo-engineering proposals and projects) and foregrounds environmental effects instead of socio-political causes. Hence, the contrarian title of his book. In this spirit, Demos highlights alternative constructs and the visual means through which they are articulated. His personal preference is the Capitalocene, the age of capital, because it “has the advantage of naming the culprit” (p. 86). Another is the Chtulucene proposed by Donna Haraway, in which humans and nonhumans are inextricably linked in “symbiogenesis” and interspecies practices of co-becoming. Other proposals include the Gynecene, rooted in gender-equalized, anti-patriarchal ethics; the Plantationocene, demarcating European colonialization of the Americas, including slavery, globalized commerce, and intensified land usage; and the Plasticene age of plastics.

Notwithstanding these alternatives, the Anthropocene has gained substantial traction across scholarly disciplines and in popular discourse, and it is currently being considered as a formal period of geological time by the International Commission on Stratigraphy. A sub-committee of this commission, the Anthropocene Working Group, has recommended that an Anthropocene designation coincide with the Great Acceleration commencing after World War II. This period is characterized by both global socioeconomic trends such as exponential growth in urban populations, real Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and transportation, as well as Earth system trends including but not limited to dramatic increases in carbon dioxide and methane emissions, surface temperature, ocean acidification, marine fish capture, and tropical forest loss. This period is also demarcated by the emergence of nuclear weapons and the Atomic Age (Steffen et al., 2015).

Demos’s sociopolitical analysis of how visual media shapes our understanding of anthropogenic impacts upon local and global environments is insightful and thought-provoking. This is especially true for an audience of landscape architects and planners, for whom visual representation of current conditions and alternative futures lies at the heart of the profession. But this book should be approached as a supplemental source for students and scholars of the Anthropocene as the narrative is highly polemical and overlooks important themes that undergird a holistic understanding of the subject. The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene (Lewis & Maslin, 2022) and Anthropocene: A Very Short Introduction (Ellis, 2018)—reviewed in Volume 40, Issue 2 of this journal—are solid primers.