The Third Age of the Anthropocene

The morphology of cities was one of the coolest early presentations during my days of graduate work in urban and regional planning at Eastern Washington University. How humanity has conquered the land, our land-use decisions, changes in culture because of land use, and the either in-synch-with-nature or out-of-synch processes in how we construct our dwellings and physical space, all has a transformative process on our lives, our thinking, and our culture. (For more on this topic, check out “The new social morphology of cities” by Guido Martinotti, University of Milano, www.unesco.org/most/wien/guido.htm.) The landscape of planning professionals has morphed over the past 20 years into understanding sustainability. We’ve reached a point where architecture seeks complete carbon-neutral design — living buildings that use systems from nature to generate energy, collect waste, and reuse and recycle. Biomimicry is another area planners, designers, builders and engineers incorporate as they try to match nature’s evolutionary design. (Visit www.biomimicryinstitute.org for more) All of these concepts have catalyzed thinkers to ponder the value of creative force – art – to reflect and direct urban and suburban design. We’ve got natural bridges for understanding the artist’s role in reflecting or cataloguing humankind’s worth in the person of William Fox, a Nevada art museum director-curator who has for decades deposited himself into deserts and open-scapes to understand the power of reflection. Fox, who heads the Center for Art and Environment in Reno, spoke this week at Eastern, Spokane Falls Community College and NMAC. He’s studied and written about how art, culture, environment and human interferences and interventions can create fluid and sometimes frenetic equations to inform our society through visual reality, and ponders how artists follow a need to find some equilibrium between each respective environment or space and art, design and functionality. His presentation also concerned the human endeavor we are currently a part of – the Anthropocene period, a term coined by Nobel Prize recipient Paul Crutzen, who helped identify the components of ozone being ripped apart from human pollution – CFCs and fluorine. Crutzen and peers have been lambasted for propositions tied to geo-engineering and the earth’s climate and ecosystems. (Read about this discussion here and here.) Crutzen’s human-centered timeline has been adopted by many who see direct connections between humanity’s practices (mostly burning coal and other hydrocarbons, and deforestation) and global warming, ecological collapse, and the Sixth Mass Extinction. Fox’s work is tied to the arts, giving visual voice to visionaries who work side-by-side with the science of this Anthropocene era. Fox prefaced his talk by showing how the last two centuries of population growth, technological expansion and increased consumption have set us up for this new age, the Anthropocene Era. It included James Watt’s steam engine in the 1790s, which required huge gashes into earth for coal harvesting. Ice core scientists today can show flecks of carbon in ice layers, and determine that combustible material came from places like Wales, coal’s epicenter in the early 1800s. We’ve been burning coal and oil and natural gas since. That was the first period of what Cruzen calls this current Anthropocene Era – where humans began to change earth’s natural systems, from weather to the death of wetlands, giant plastic gyres in the Pacific and dead zones, to million-year half-life radioactive isotopes in places like Hanford. The next Anthropocene era was the Great Acceleration of the 1950s, when the U.S. and others began sprawling, driving, and burning more fossil fuels for cachets of more stuff. Much of the world followed. Fox calls this current epoch the phase of the Anthropocene Era, or “Earth Systems Science” period. It started in the 1990s when it was clear that humankind was responsible for holes in the ozone layer, accelerating extinctions, driving more heat into climate and pushing moisture into weather systems, leading to melting snow and glaciers, which in term pushes ocean levels higher and higher. His talk moved from Alexander von Humbolt’s expeditions and drawings, through this movement of new topographics, when artists and thinkers began to look at the earth and the work of man by creating visual arguments of what we are doing to the environment, and space. Audiences saw earth sculptures by James Turrell, who Fox calls an artist “creating a cognitive event” as people lay down in a man-made crater and go into celestial vaulting – the feeling of falling upwards you might get out on Steptoe Butte. (See some of his images here) Then Fox brought in Michael Heizer’s work, whose sculpting incorporates deep trenches and sculpturesin south-central Nevada. (See his images here) Heizer’s father worked on surveying the Olmec archaeological site, La Venta in Mexico, and his work incorporates some of that into the complex. We saw Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field, 400 20-foot tall stainless-steel poles in southwest New Mexico. And minimalist work of Richard Long (www.richardlong.org), what he calls art made by walking in landscapes. The work and the visions of artists, scientists, architects and others is Fox’s passion, and he fights against what C.P. Snow calls two sometimes opposing cultures – the humanities and sciences. He sees the world of art (humanities) and science (technology) as working together to inform each on how we might live in this Period of Man, or as Tim Flannery calls us, “The Weather Makers.” We have billions living with very limited resources, and it’s up to the humanities and sciences to compel us to adapt and thrive. The very idea of minimalism, in art and in design, seems to be one lynchpin. He featured water collectors from Ecuador, which never has had recorded rainfall, but continuous fog. Little screens were set up on denuded cliffs, and moisture was able to germinate seeds that have been dormant for centuries. Fox seeks remoteness, isotropic places where you get turned around, where the desert floor is 130 degrees in the shade, where whiteness and expansiveness blinds and grows insanity. He describes his region, one of only four deserts in the United States: “The only way to understand the enormous space of the Great Basin is to invest time in your experience of it. Slowly your eyes will adjust to the extended reach of vision, and your ears become accustomed to hearing only the wind and your heartbeat. You will learn to read your way around, cutting across the grain of the land instead of following it in order to find your bearings. “ Artists and scientists everywhere are learning to find the art in earth systems sciences. It’s only a matter of how far the imagination can carry one. Since my roots are in poetry, Latin America, and the transformative mind tied to work by Neruda, Borges, Garcia Marquez and others, I’ll end with one of Fox’s cool experiences. He actually walked the length of the world’s longest line of poetry – geographically-speaking – placed in Chile’s Atacama Desert, titled, “ni pena ni miedo” (neither pain, nor fear). This is a tribute to the Inca Road, as well as the modern Pan-American Highway. (Read more about it here). Words, earth, our globe’s vastness, the symbolism of human desecration, cultural and geographic rhetoric, are all the heart of what William Fox is working toward. (Check out his poem and his published works here in the attached document)