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Micro-Landscapes of the Anthropocene

Reflection (Matthew Gurney)

Natalie and Simon’s reflection on the concept of “plant-blindness” inspired me when the mentioned the “myopia” of language used to describe the plant world as competitive and survivalist. Their use of “myopic” – literally short-sighted – made me think of Polyphemus from Homer’s Odyssey, who is one-eyed and then blinded. This made me think of plant blindness in relation to not being able to perceive depth – and in this sense we could consider how we limit natural spaces by “bubble-wrapping” them as Natalie and Simon mentioned. It seems in the Anthropocene we are not only plant blind in terms of recognising plants and understanding their importance, but also in the space we provide for them. Their interest analogy to making nature wallpaper moves nature from the third to second dimension, and this can be linked to what happens in zoos, where the idea of an animal’s indigenous habitat is squashed to fit into a closed environment, and in some cases the trauma this causes the animals is visible, such as in the polar bear hotel in China. It would be interesting to explore this depth-blindness, or “cycloptic vision”, and opposingly, plant-depth awareness, further.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/12/chinese-hotel-with-polar-bear-enclosure-opens-to-outrage

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2. Athabasca Oil Sand (Matthew Gurney) Reading the close reading in ‘Marginal Worlds’ made me think about anthropogenic environments that do not fit in the binary of nature and culture, places “caught in a sort of a halfway point between the two”. Worlds like this also exist beyond the marginal: they exist out of the limelight, where human existence, and our imaginations, do not dwell. It is as if they exist in a dark, other world, beyond anthropocentric focuses of the natureculture. The image is a flock of Canada Geese flying over a surface mine in the Athabasca, Canada oil sands. This environment is clearly unnatural and yet uninhabitable for humans too, subverting natureculture – there is no culture in this land, it is turned up and destroyed to preserve a culture that is spatially far away. The mining companies have not thought of what this means for the geese. It is hard to imagine what these birds perceive of their world, it can only to them be an uneasy, hostile expanse. These sorts of images make me think what will exist in these empty spaces, and what the significance of empty expanses like this are in the future.

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