Surviving the Anthropocene through the Arts

Abstract

We are in the age of disasters, an era of climate change, of extreme and life-threatening weather disturbances, of flash floods and super-typhoons. But we are also in an age of voracious consumption of resources, an era of massive oil and nuclear energy use, an age of wastelands and carbon emissions, an age of steel, of plastic, and concrete, the age of GMOs, of soil alteration and water depletion. This is the age of what recent scholars call the Anthropocene, the era of how the human being becomes a geological agent changing the planet. This is where the project hopes to contribute: to come up with an instruction and policy potential material that would introduce some of the major concerns of the Anthropocene era (broadly put this would include Climate Justice, Modernity, Capitalism, Technology, Species-extinction, Urban Planning and Development, and Re-orientation of the Humanities and Social Sciences to meet the conceptual demands of this era). This material will consolidate the contribution of the Arts as vital to the exposure of the Anthropocenic design; the Arts as a way to understand the intricate realities of the anthropocene, arguably the revelation of last things.