Heather DavisThinkers

The Anthropocene is a term that beckons environmental justice thinking, asking what worlds we are intentionally and inadvertently creating, and what worlds we are foreclosing while living within an increasingly diminished present.

The Anthropocene is an era of intensity.

The Anthropocene is an invitation to learn to think with the anthropocene is to learn to adopt a comportment to the fragility of encounters, shared but separated, incommensurate but not lamentable for being so. It is not a mere exercise in fatalistic thinking.

The Anthropocene is not just about human activities. It is also about the modern ethos underlying those activities (i.e., heightened hierarchical relations of humans vis-a-vis the environment and each other, the continued violence of white supremacy, colonialism, patriarchy, heterosexism, and ableism).

The Anthropocene is primarily a sensorial phenomenon. It is the experience of living in an increasingly diminished, damaged, and toxic world.

The Anthropocene is so built in to our senses that it determines our perceptions, hence it is aesthetic.