Anthropocene and Environmental Justice (From Curating the Future: Museums, Communities and Climate Change)

The Anthropocene’s rising appeal as a story form results in part from mounting frustration over climate inaction at successive climate summits, frustration over the well-funded culture of anti-science in the US, and frustration over government inertia across the globe. But the Anthropocene also offers a response to a widespread exhaustion with the imagery and rhetoric of apocalypse. As Eddie Yuen has remarked, the terrain of catastrophe is “a crowded field”; “Environmentalists and scientists must compete in this marketplace of catastrophe, and find themselves struggling to be heard above the din.” 1 In 2013, Elizabeth Kolbert noted in the New Yorker that CO2 levels in Earth’s atmosphere have surpassed 400 parts per million, a threshold last crossed 21/2 million years ago. Kolbert noted, too, that this extraordinary planetary event “started out as terrifying and may now be described as terrifyingly predictable.” 2 In an apocalypse-weary world, the crossing of that dangerous threshold mustered, at best, muffled media coverage and no discernable policy changes.