Against the Anthropocene: visual culture and environment today, by T.J. Demos

The anthropogenic transformation of the earth by our species, unofficially designated the Anthropocene and ubiquitously referred to as ‘climate change’, has become perhaps ‘the’ defining problematic of the 21^st century. T.J. Demos asks how this epoch is politically represented through various visual media, in the way visual culture both abets and contradicts this evolving ecological crisis. Demos asks how artistic-activist practices both confirm and rhetorically present alternatives to the dominant view. Grounded in environmental arts and humanities, Demos provides compelling reasons why the Anthropocene’s legitimation as an ideological term must be strongly opposed, and to search for alternatives.

To develop such a political stance, Demos begins by presenting what the dominant hegemonic grand narrative of terraforming the earth via technological means: the so-called techno-fix of geoengineering that has now set its sights on space – the terraforming of the moon and Mars once life on Earth is no longer sustainable under the current socio-political forms of global capitalism, as supported by various forms of democracies, communisms, dictatorships, oligarchies, and kingdoms. The grand design is to control nature; nature in effect ‘disappears’. Demos points out the inherent contradictions of this project, showing the split between ‘ecomodernists’ who promote green technologies, biogenetic engineering, transhumanism, de-extinction and the like. Environmentalism (preservation of wildlife) for them is a foregone conclusion. The ‘good’ Anthropocene provides the next phase of capitalist expansion, a revolution in technology that is already well on its way through nanotechnolgies, biosensing, bioengineering and genomic manipulation. For Demos, visual images of terraforming and geoengineering from the vantage point of space provides such a god’s-gaze view of control.

Against such an ecomodernism are attempts to at least offer new visions. The alternative cultural forms Demos develops belong to the transnational alliances of environmentalists, NGO representatives and Indigenous activists who stage alternative media distributions, political theatre, alternative signage, blockades, civil disobedience and call on Indigenous ritual to stage difference and dissent, a ‘biopolitical assemblage’ (Deleuze). Against a petrocapitalist economy or the Anthropocene, Demos provides resistance to Alberta’s ‘Tar Sands’ and the building of the Keystone XL oil pipeline to transport this dirty crude oil (diluted bitumen) to Houston refineries. This pipeline will cover vast tracts of farmland and waterways. Built over Indigenous lands, it will inevitably be subject to pipeline leaks that will affect minority and low-income communities. The necessity to ‘indigenize’ the Anthropocene becomes obvious.

Demos, following Jason Moore, supports the term Capitalocene, which he believes to be more accurate in denoting what is happening to the vulnerable, Indigenous peoples, women, migrants and peoples of color. Demos brings out the paradox of what might be called the sublime beauty of powerful technologies in their destructive power; the paradigm example being the atom bomb. He accuses several photographers of industrial eco-devastation, namely, Edward Burtynsky and Louis Helbig, whose photographs of oil fields and Alberta Tar sands provide viewers with a paradoxical ambiguity of death and annihilation in relation to their aestheticized beauty of industrial terraformations, witnessing the capacity to ‘move’ the Earth. In contrast, Demos offers the example of Richard Misrach’s Petrochemical America, a photo exhibition (and book project with landscape architect Kate Orff) of the150-mile Mississippi River corridor between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. Misrach’s images document the devastation to the political economy of this area. His images are ‘up close and personal’ documentations of this ‘Cancer Alley,’ the environmental and human costs of Southern oil development, what Demos terms ‘petrocapitalism’s necropolitics of ecocide’ (p. 71, after Achille Mbembe).

Thus, the book brings into the spotlight the role of resistance activism in visual art, performance and Indigenous-led activism. Demos calls on Haraway’s Chthulucene, and various artists who push back petrocapitalism (Ursula Biemann, Terike Haapoja) and many forms of North and South American Indigenous activism (Amazon Watch). Finally, Demos enthusiastically embraces Climate Games, a climate-justice action-adventure game and its team, which has been successful in organizing global climate governance, creating international coalitions, working with global blockadia movements.

Demos’ short (110-page) book provides the reader with an overview of some of the major tensions that a contested view of the Anthropocene presents. He stays focused on visual culture to keep open a certain clarity and accessibility. His extensive footnotes provide the reader ample citations to further explore more nuances and explanations. If there are any clarifying points to be made regarding Demos’s overall thesis, it is to query his dominant use of Jason Moore’s Capitalocene at the expense of the Anthropocene itself. It is not a question of either-or, as Moore’s book title suggests: Anthropocene or Capitalocene? nor is it a complete conflation of the two. The entanglement of the Anthropocene with the Capitalocene should be thought on two levels. The first is to recognize that we have indeed entered into a new geological epoch; the science here is indisputable. As such, the Anthropocene far outdates capitalism. It studies fundamental shifts in the Earth System, far beyond the Holocene and the human impact on this system by various measurable indicators, such as CO₂ levels, artificial nitrogen, species extinctions, ocean acidification, sea level, holes in the ozone layer and population growth, each of which has a critical limit in relation to the sustainability of our species on this planet. The second level is to recognize, and concur with Moore (2016), that ‘t]he Capitalocene signifies capitalism as a way of organizing nature – as a multispecies, situated, capitalist world-ecology’ (p. 6). How the economy of capitalism hinders or intensifies the state of the Earth system is an overriding question in relation to the triggers that are generated that affect and effect the socio-political order. The Anthropocene remains an intensely problematic term.