ANNAELIESE HARDMAN

The Roles Of Embodied Experiences And Visualizations Of The Anthropocene In Overcoming Climate Change Denial

The term, Anthropocene, can evoke an immense scale of calamity and at times be more comfortably suppressed than felt. This combination of emotional discomfort and difficulty of comprehension can lead to what Bruno Latour calls “climate change denial.” Latour applies this term to not just to a specific political party, but also to the entire movement of individuals who deny that “nature is becoming something that we have never seen” (Magnason, 11). The rest of this essay will focus on what climate change denial is, the stakes of not addressing it, and how to counter its existence through Anthropocenic visualization.

For the purposes of this short essay, Anthropocenic visualization refers to the act of envisioning the highstake effects of climate change. This essay will focus specifically on the creative forms of visual art and literature, which effectively transmit embodied experiences related to climate change. The examples of JMW Turner’s The Scarlet Sunset and Frederic Edwin Church’s The Icebergs will analyzed according to their ability to capture early versions of the Anthropocene. In addition, John Freeman’s edited work, Tales of Two Planets: Stories of Climate Change and Inequality in a Divided World is a direct response to the need of visualizing effects of the Anthropocene on an individual level. By engaging with these forms, climate change denial is undermined, the Anthropocene is made apparent, and an elusive issue becomes relevant.