//Artificial Natures

The Night is Never Dark in the the Anthropocene Epoch

"There is a sense of nature that is historical," said David Gissen in his lecture today at the California College of the Arts. By historical, he means it is constructed. For example, a park, as a version of nature, is a reconstruction of a historical perspective of what nature is.

In essence, (nature != natural). Natural is moot. Everything is artifice. Called the anthropocene epoch, this is an age where we as humans have significant agency in the direction of evolution.

But are we in denial of this? Timothy Morton, a professor of English (Literature/Environment) at UC Davis thinks so. "Right now we're zombies. Nature has been dead for 50 years. We need to celebrate it - only then can our history begin again." Think organic food and recyclable paper bags: all tokens of a retro vision far removed from the reality of our ecology.

This epochal change could be traced to two periods in history: both related to booms in human populations and technological agency. The 1800s and the Industrial Revolution, and more recently, 1945 and the Nuclear Bomb. One examples of this post-nature ecology given by Francoise Roche is hermaphrodite polar bears, the result of mutations that allow then to procreate with their diminished numbers.

The Mars trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson frames this nicely. Mars, having been colonized by humans, becomes virgin territory that is the arena for ideological battle: do we remake mars in the image of earth (terraforming) by oxygenating the atmosphere and flooding the barren land? Or do we allow a unique culture on mars to evolve, forcing ourselves to live in the confines of oxygen tanks (aeropany)? It assumes we have the agency to do both: one is a fossilized form of culture, in stasis as we knew we liked it. The other as a form of cultural safari.

I am still halfway through the trilogy (Green Book), and so cannot say further. So I will bookmark the end here. Any thoughts?