Scales

1What is the image of the Anthropocene? How do things enter the cinematic image? By being framed in a certain way. And one central aspect of framing is the question of field size, which according to a basic definition “determines the scale of the shot, signals point of view, and contributes greatly to how we understand or feel about what is being shown” (Corrigan/White 109). But many shots from Anthropocene: The Human Epoch, the 2018 film by Jennifer Baichwal, Edward Burtynsky and Nicholas de Pencier, begin with images where we cannot tell what is being shown. Images that we cannot sort in questions of size, distance or depicted objects. Where we do not know what to think or feel.

2Beginning with its enigmatic vision of flames in a dark void and continuing with many other shots of landscapes, traces, artificial structures, the film initially presents us with abstract, two-dimensional surfaces, patterns without figure and ground – let alone human bodies. Colors, lines and shapes. Only gradually, most often through a backward movement of the camera does a recognizable spatial dimension of the image appear that reveals to us what it is that we are seeing and from what angle and what distance we are looking. By constantly repeating this procedure over its course, Anthropocene: The Human Epoch makes us perceptually aware of the fact that the Anthropocene is a scaling problem.

3The Anthropocene is a scaling problem on two levels: the first level regards it as a geological epoch which results from the way actions by human beings that happen on local, temporally limited scales have an impact on a scale that is global and extends into deep time structures (Cf. Chakrabarty 2021). What must be understood, is that these actions are not simply adding up in a linear fashion, they change their nature in a qualitative sense as we move from the scale of everyday perception to the spatial scales of the global and the extended temporal scale of geology. In this sense the Anthropocene is basically a geological thought experiment. What happens if in 100 million years an alien species lands on our planet, starts to dig and reaches the strata that mark our present day? Will they recognize our presence as a signal in the geological record? (I use the pronoun ‘we’ in this context in order to refer to people from the western industrialized societies and the interweaving of an everyday use of technologies and infrastructure based on fossil energy and a certain heterogenous but still largely coherent cultural and epistemological framework that goes along with it. This ‘we’ is connected to, but distinguishable from a ‘we’ comprising human and non-human, contemporary and future beings that are all impacted by the climate crisis and biodiversity crisis, yet in different degrees and temporalities.)

4The second level of Anthropocene as a scaling problem has to do with understanding the clash between different ideas of what actually is the ‘Anthropos’ in the Anthropocene as a problem of thought and imagination. The image of human activity as the activity of human beings that the film presents – mostly individuals and small groups of people working, with some leisure activity (and the only appearance of a mass of people being a congregation at a Nigerian megachurch) – clashes with the image of human activity on another scale, namely the human as species and as an assemblage of humans, technology and non-human agents and materials that forms a global force.

5The problem is not that this or that action produces CO₂ or causes pollution here or there or destroys this part of that habitat. (Of course, each of these actions is problematic, but they do not in themselves constitute grounds for proclaiming a geological epoch or questioning what the ‘Anthropos’ is or does.) Nor is it the mere adding up of emissions, contaminations and extractions: the problem is that the underlying structure of relations, the scale of the underlying ecology is beyond the grasp of individual everyday perception and the traditional categories of acting, making and working in our political or social theories.

6There is a permanent clash of scales between the perspectives of the sciences and technology and the interwoven worlds of politics, ethics, and interspecies-relationships. And it is no coincidence that scale and scaling have recently become a focal point in many environmental interventions in academia (Clark, Woods, Opperman, Chakrabarty 2020, Dürbeck/Hüpkes to refer only to a few titles). What emerges from this clash is the realization, as Hannah Arendt has anticipated with the beginning of the space age, “that man can do, and successfully do, what he cannot comprehend and cannot express in everyday human language” (Arendt, “The Conquest of Space” 270, emphasis in the original).

Scaling-up: The whole picture?

7The question of scaling-up (or down) is highly precarious if it is considered not just as a mathematical, statistical procedure but as an aesthetic problem. If the relation between two scales is the relation between two styles of perception, then the act of scaling up or scaling down makes these styles interfere in each other’s horizon, makes them question each other’s framing. Therefore, one can agree with Nelson Goodman that scalability is always an act of world-making. Since world-making is always a re-making of the patterns, perceptions, symbolic systems and exemplified feelings of previous worlds, the movement from one scale to another is not a simple decrease or increase of frame and size of something that exists independently of this transformation. On the contrary, as Horn and Bergthaller put it, the world in which that something can appear is created by the logic of this transformation itself: “Scaling is not merely a strategy for representing the world, but rather a fundamental mode of producing it.” (Horn and Bergthaller: 149).

8That is why it is important to look at the poetic logic of a film like Anthropocene: The Human Epoch, the filmic world that it produces, and to see how it thinks the relation of an embodied seeing and hearing to the Anthropocene. How does the temporal, spatial and epistemological scaling problem of the Anthropocene enter audiovisuality? Whereas Robert Sinnerbrink affirms the film as an example of what he calls the poetico-argumentative approach and states that it succeeds in “bringing together massive scale and singular instances” (294), I am more hesitant and understand the film’s relation between the massive and the singular to be more ambivalent.

9On the one hand, one can say that Anthropocene: The Human Epoch takes seriously what Eva Horn and Hannes Bergthaller have identified as the three consensual purposes of art for the Anthropocene following Davis and Turpin:

In the first place, art is supposed to make the abstract concept ‘Anthropocene’ thinkable and perceptible. […] Secondly, art is thought to provide forms of expression that offer an alternative to the discourse of science and politics, […] In other words, art should mobilize and ‘raise awareness’, conveying a sense of urgency in the face of the ecological crisis. Thirdly, art is supposed to provide new conceptual tools for approaching the problem. (Horn and Bergthaller 96)

10But Horn and Bergthaller also argue that more than these extrinsic forms of intervention, an aesthetics of the Anthropocene should focus on the problem of form – or as I would say: art should not only be considered under the category of aesthesis as a mode of knowledge but also of poetics, of world-making.

11And Horn and Bergthaller cite three problems that an aesthetics of the Anthropocene must confront:

(1) latency, the withdrawal from perceptibility and representability; (2) entanglement, a new awareness of coexistence and immanence; and (3) scale, the clash of incompatible orders of magnitude. (Horn and Bergthaller: 102)

12The view from above that Anthropocene: The Human Epoch takes up again and again, is one way of tackling the problem of latency, which means that the crisis resides exactly in those dimensions of size and in those places removed from our habitation that we normally do not and cannot see and that are only accessible by taking up the unusual vantage points of helicopters, drones and satellites. Only from these distances, in which the human figure disappears, can the destruction and the force of human agency actually be seen.

13Many argue that this aesthetic re-invents the mode of the sublime as it was theorized by Kant: no longer demonstrating the superiority of the rational over sensibility but rather a strange conflation of humanity as a force of nature (see for example De Luca 79). The film taps into this mode of sublimity that provides us with an uncanny strangeness of the world. As Jennifer Fay explains, "The film intentionally defamiliarizes vision, perhaps in the service of shocking us into states of misrecognition.” (Fay 48). This means that images like the concentric circles of the pot-ash mines, the aerial views of toxic landscapes that look like watercolor paintings or city-scapes that blur into fine-meshed pattern have the potential to unsettle the sense of reality that underpins our everyday world. They look as if they come from another world, from a fantasy universe. But then they are re-scaled as familiar places of industry or labor and in this clash, we come to realize “that the sprawling city—the status quo—is the horror that threatens the norms of climatological variability” (Fay 48, emphasis in the original). But in some scenes Anthropocene: The Human Epoch follows other procedures of scaling-up that do not make the scales clash, transitioning smoothly between different ‘orders of magnitude. Scaling-up is then presented as a solution to the problem, implying a neutral position from which the “whole” is graspable.

14Perhaps the best-known example of this idea of linear scaling, of changing points of view according to a purely mathematical process is the short film Powers of Ten by Charles and Ray Eames. Itself inspired by Kees Boeke’s book Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps, it replaces the ‘jumps’ necessary to the print medium and replaces them by a continuous movement from a picnic blanket up and outwards to a 100 million light years and down to the shiver of quarks within a carbon nucleus, not only smoothing out the different scales but also literally dissolving the difference between the photographic and the animated media that it uses.

15The problem is that this view of looking down implies an abstract, disembodied view form some point in the universe, a ‘cosmic view’ that according to Hannah Arendt has direct consequences for our action: “We have found a way to act on the earth as though we disposed of terrestrial nature from outside” (Arendt, “The Conquest of Space” 279). This disconnection of viewing and acting – not being-in and towards-the-world but having the world as an object of contemplation and manipulation – is the object that Anthropocene: The Human Epoch has as its topic. But it is also to a considerable part its own poetic logic, its cinematic world view. And this is problematic in three ways:

16First, the moments of continuously zooming out to the extreme long shot do not include the qualitative shifts that happen between the scales. They imply the possibility of linear movement from the micro scale of individual agency and social milieus to the macro scale of the human species without acknowledging the qualitative leaps. Second, they occlude the underlying structures and relations of the Anthropocene, as Derek Woods points out:

So long as the smooth zoom and the human/nature gap dominate writing on the Anthropocene, a scaled up, abstract notion of the human mystifies the agency of terraforming assemblages. (Woods 140)

17Many argue that the term “Anthropocene” itself occludes these structures as well as the stark differences between the collectivities that are most responsible and the Most Affected People and Areas. Therefore, some interventions have been made to replace it by more precise terms like “Capitalocene” (Moore), that single out the fundamental principle of the crises’ causation, or more productive concepts like the “Chthulucene” (Haraway 2016), that try to intervene in our self-understanding by better framing the ecological condition of interdependence. And third, the imagination of a neutral position outside of the earth and outside of the plurality of worlds–which paradoxically also concerns the very mode of scientific methodology that provides us with our knowledge about the climate and biodiversity crisis–is part of the problem, is part of the mind-set that produces the ecological crises. Arendt explains:

All the theoretical perplexities of the new physical world view intrude as realities upon man’s everyday world and throw out of gear his “natural”, that is, earthbound common sense. (Arendt, “The Conquest of Space” 274)

18We have unhinged the planet itself, epistemologically and perceptually but also quite literally shifting its axis (Hall). And that is why one should be at least ambivalent if not skeptical with regard to these images, because the act of mastery that they enact, by privileging the awesome over the awful, the beautiful over the ugly, the dramatic over the banal, offers a rather perverse mode of enjoyment.

19About the photographic work by Edward Burtynsky, T.J. Demos reaches a strong judgment:

The logic reminds me ultimately of Walter Benjamin’s oft-quoted insight about fascist aesthetics: ‘Its self-alienation has reached the point where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure.’ (Demos, “Against the Anthropocene” 70)

20But even without going so far in this comparison, the abstraction and universalization that Anthropocene: The Human Epoch uses as a mode of audiovisual world-making, is – following Kelly Oliver – a part of the problem: “The fantasy of the whole earth allows us to continue with illusions of mastery and globalism, but now in the service of saving, rather than destroying, the planet” (Oliver 24). For example, the micro-level structure of the scene covering deforestation in British Columbia is built as a triptych of ‘idyll-destruction-desertification’: first a smoothly flying drone shot and a couple of static, serene images present the forest as untouched, pristine in its moist, dark green. The music is light and enigmatic. Then the noise of a chainsaw suddenly interrupts. In a close up we see it cutting through a tree trunk. One tree after the other falls as the editing accelerates and the camera is more and more unstable until with a sudden jump we are moved to a distance. We see the clearing, forestry workers and their machinery, and finally the camera floats again, but now over something that resembles a battlefield, moving further up until the industrial scale of lumbering becomes an abstract pattern. In this poetic logic, the film thinks humanity as a whole as an intervening force from outside, destroying an equilibrium, and not as beings that have always been and always are ecological, in good ways and in bad ways.

21Apart from at the film’s very end, and I will come back to that later, the sparse voice-over of the film neither addresses us spectators directly nor mentions specific agents but talks about humans as a third party, as a curious biological species in which the commentator or the film seems to have no particular affective investment. But the film forgets that this way of talking about humans is not only the result of our destructive actions, the conclusion at which we arrive when thinking about the Anthropocene, it is also the cause of the crisis. The current crisis is the effect of us applying the universalizing point of view from outside the earth in order to achieve exactly those technological advancements that as a consequence make it necessary to look at ourselves as a biological-geological process. And finally, the film also does not spell out that these “human activities” are mostly the activities of corporate industry and the military-industrial complex and that they are deeply rooted in racist (and misogynist and classist) oppression (Yusoff).

22While the commentary talks about the human species as an abstraction and the interview scenes present us with human individualities, there are at least a few moments where the film does indeed find images for the intermediate scales that account for the fact that ‘humans’ can only do the things ‘humans’ can do because they are entangled with technology and other, non-human entities (Woods). For example, the shot below (Figure 6), taken from the sequence on open-pit coal mining in Germany, in which the giant blade wheel is reflected in the screen. It is seen to be digging not only into the soil but also re-shaping and working at the figure of the human operating the excavator, making the distinction between the human and the technological a secondary abstraction of a de facto intertwined relational being.

23Thus the Anthropos in the Anthropocene consists of other qualities than you or me as individual human beings, other qualities than just belonging to or encompassing all homo sapiens, as Woods explains:

The subject of the Anthropocene is not an individual or species-based ‘intelligence’ that, without mutation, projects across scales to shape the matter of the Earth. […] By contrast, scale critique shows that the subject of the Anthropocene is not the human species but modern terraforming assemblages. (Woods: 138)

Clashing Scales

24Scale critique, the demonstration of a clash of scales can show how the seemingly same kind of human activity appears as something else when it happens on a different scale: this is what the film aims at by showing humans mostly at work, in the act of making things or of handling the world of man-made things: craftsmanship, factory work, agricultural work, operating machines but also digging in waste.

25For Hannah Arendt, a central facet of our human condition, the vita activa, is the fact that the action of work consists in building a shared world of things (maintained by repetitive labor) as a basis for shared political action and for transmitting action and thought over generations, linking past, present and future (Arendt, “The Human Condition”). The film shows how this making of a shared world of things is linked to the destruction of that same world of things and of the life-giving basis of earth.

26One wonders whether the workers at the Gudong Seawall in China are aware of the irony of using blocks of concrete (which emit large amounts of CO₂ in production) in order to protect the production of fossil fuels in an oil field (which will lead to further CO₂ emission) from rising sea-levels (which are caused by CO₂ emissions raising the global temperature). The fact that the film does not foreground this irony of a disproportion between potency on the one hand and loss of control over unintended consequences on the other hand is perhaps itself meta-ironic – or it is a serious omission on the side of the filmmakers.

27Overall, these kinds of connections and ramifications are seldom spelled out in the film. The three scenes grouped under the chapter Climate Change are a rare moment where the film develops a kind of narrative in which an ordinarily imperceptible entanglement becomes visible: we move from the concrete seawall to images of Venice under high water, the sea slowly moving up, forcing people to build improvised lanes out of planks, boats driving over St. Mark’s Square and then we jump underwater, where structures not built by man but by other species are shown to suffer, in this case bleaching corals. What we are made to see is something that we usually do not see: how the worlds we choose and make interact with earth as the unchosen ground of our choices and actions – a kind of latency that is not made evident by moving smoothly to the higher picture but by a clash of montage, by adjoining images and their scope of meaning.

28The third scene repeats the structure of ‘idyll-destruction-desertification’ that we have already seen in the passage on deforestation. But here the human agency is not an intruder from outside, it is an uncanny, invisible force. It is not depicted or represented in the images. It is a force within the temporal structure of the image. And this scene is different from all the other scenes in this film in an important way: it is the only moment in which the film is scaling-down. After a few shots of colorful fish and corals and then a turtle with its sad eyes (from an anthropomorphic point-of-view), we are moving closer and into this one coral at the center of the image. And as we move closer and closer the film shifts into time lapse speed that makes the false-color imagery pulsate in tune with a dissonant, vibrating sound cluster. As the coral loses color and the sound cluster slowly fades out, we see a series of bleached corals in almost deserted underwater landscapes. In the audiovisual temporality of a suspenseful deferral – no longer healthy, not quite dead yet – this scene makes us experience a ‘tipping point’.

29Paradoxically, by showing how this one coral reaches its individual breaking point, the film develops an audiovisual idea of a clash of scales that leads to the global tipping points of the earth system: One coral dies, a world dies. And so, one world after the other, earth becomes desert. The oblivious business of the Chinese workers and the amused coping of the people of Venice fall into stark contrast with this image of irretrievable loss.

30The productive clash of scales in Anthropocene: The Human Epoch seems to be situated less in the cases of spatial or temporal scales but rather in a different structure of clashing that the film at several instances confronts us with: a clash of meanings and affects. The film repeatedly uses cuts within episodes in order to create images of stark contrast and of incongruence in mood which lead to feelings of disturbance or absurdity:

31Big machines heaving big chunks of marble out of a mountain while the soundtrack plays big opera (Mozart’s Don Giovanni) – and all this …only for endless copies of Michelangelo’s David for rich people’s gardens. Train travel in the Gotthard base tunnel depicted as a space odyssey by the camera rotating on its z-axis and… a performance of yodeling. Scientists with powerful computers and glossy, high-definition weather charts … and rubber boots on wooden planks. Waste … and abstract expressionism.

32Anthropocene: The Human Epoch works precisely in those moments when the shift from abstraction to concreteness lingers on the threshold, when it is unclear, at which scale and from what perspective we are looking. Here the qualitative shifts of scaling up are acknowledged. And for Jennifer Fay these perceptual and conceptual insecurities of terror and beauty, of art and extraction are central to the way the film “turns questions of art into problems of judgment and intention” (Fay 50). The artistic intervention of this film lies in the way it makes art graspable and productive as an error of judgment, where we mistake destruction for beauty and vice versa. The irony of enormous potency and loss of control becomes the condition of our own perceiving, feeling and thinking in this new mode of sublime imagery. And what seems to be a natural wonder turns out to be manmade, again and again, echoing Arendt’s remark that it is “more unlikely every day that man will encounter anything in the world around him that is not manmade and hence is not, in the last analysis, he himself in a different disguise. (Arendt, “The Conquest of Space” 277). These structures of clashing scales, of incongruence and bewilderment have the potential to let us feel the entanglement of the many worlds of human cultures and non-human agents with the life-giving earth. But Anthropocene: The Human Epoch in the end tends to emphasize less the images of plurality and emergence and more the move to abstraction, distance, control and the illusionary wholeness of “a conquering gaze from nowhere” (Haraway 1988, 581). In contrast, there are many other ways to explore the clash of scales in audiovisual dynamics that are explored in different films. The opening of 2040 (AUS 2019, dir. Damon Gameau) for example re-imagines a single-family home as the oikos of the planet, playfully miniaturizing the problematic structures instead of trying to give a view of the whole – but in doing so it also risks down-playing the urgency.

33Another approach lies in having the scales clash in the imagination of the spectator, in the gaps between the depicted locales and agencies. The documentary film ThuleTuvalu (SUI 2014, dir. Matthias von Gunten) alternates between the afflicted communities of Greenland and the island nation in the south pacific, evoking a planetary dimension by showing how the ice that melts here is drowning the shoreline there, addressing the causes in the cuts in between.

Missing Links

34Finally, one also has to ask, what is (largely) missing in Anthropocene: The Human Epoch and why? Although the film commendably showcases very diverse human actors as talking heads and as the experts of their ordinary lives, it is striking to me that the film completely ignores consumer culture in the western societies. These kinds of agents are only partially “in” the picture as onlookers, observing animals at London Zoo or attending the weird opening ceremony of the Gotthard base tunnel. Consequently, the film portrays the driving force behind the extractions, emissions and pollutions as mere neglect or whim rather than acknowledging the intricate interplay between corporate business, ideology, and the prevailing way of life defined by comfort and the exploitation of cheap labor and cheap energy. The film also visually works completely without scientific modes of presentation and exposition, the exposition of evidence as practiced by films like An Inconvenient Truth (USA 2006, dir. Davis R. Guggenheim), The Great Warming (USA 2006, dir. Michael Taylor), The 11^th hour (USA 2007, dir. Leila and Nadia Conners) or Climate Change: The Facts (UK/USA 2019, dir. Serena Davies). Only its sparse commentary delivers some “evidentiary-argumentative perspective” (Sinnerbrink 294).

35It does not go into economic and political ideologies and apart from the narrative bracket of burning elephant tusks it does not feature grass-roots political activism as do films like Awake: A Dream from Standing Rock (USA 2017, dir. Myron Dewey, Josh Fox, James Spione), Une fois que tu sais (FRA 2020, dir. Emmanuel Cappelin) or the Ugandan episodes of Dear Future Children (GER/UK/AUT, dir. Franz Böhm). Anthropocene: The Human Epoch does not try to find images that tie art as error of judgment to collective solidarity, “where aesthetic pleasure is wedded to politically directed disobedience guided by ethical conviction and radical demands” (Demos, “Beyond the World’s End” 170), nor does it relate to the tedious work of intergovernmental negotiations like Guardians of the Earth (AUT/GER 2017, dir. Filip Antoni Malinowski) or The Island President (USA 2011, dir. Jon Shenk). And it does not explicitly project into the future, neither as a dystopian warning like The Age of Stupid (UK 2009, dir. Franny Armstrong) nor as utopian solution like 2040. No accusation, no causality, no sense of guilt, no fear. If there are conclusions to be drawn, we as spectators have to do it ourselves.

36While documenting the extent of the human-driven destabilization of the earth and thereby propagating change we are also at the same time granted distance and control over this destruction by the film. Just like the act of looking at animals is historically and structurally connected to their ongoing endangerment and extinction (Smaill). There is a hint of this inherent contradiction, this paradoxical splitting up of us spectators, in the words of a Kenyan park ranger: “We are protecting wildlife and at the same time we feel like we are the enemies, because we are humans and humans are the poachers.” But by universalizing this split in every human being, the film glosses over the very tangible injustices, divisions and antagonisms. And it also relegates non-human agencies of plants, animals and fungi, air, water and soil, with whom human life is intrinsically intertwined, as well as the economic, technological and political connections, into the background. This is not only a question of what is depicted in the images but a question of the dominant modes of visual patterns and textuality: it certainly is a problem that a lot of its images of dirt and pollution are actually clean images, symmetrical, balanced, in slow motion, with interesting color palettes, beautiful to look at. And last but not least the musical score of the film is mostly unobtrusive and soothing, enigmatic but calming in a way that numbs rather than transmits the emotional impact of the voice-over and the visual depiction of the disaster that is our business-as-usual.

Tipping points

37The film’s final scene epitomizes the inner disunity of Anthropocene: The Human Epoch: On the one hand, the tipping of the camera (really for the first time) acknowledges in its work the problem of shifting scales between geological deep-time and the present. It makes us feel the tipping point of earth’s systems and the tipping point between one scale and another. It makes us see ourselves as a layer in the rocks.

38Only in this epilogue does the commentary say “us” and “we” instead of “humans” or “the human species.” Robert Sinnerbrink notes the problem with this approach:

Having articulated both the massive scale of the Anthropocene and the localized effects of its unfolding across the globe, the film needs to return to the human scale, the social reality of our shared world, with an ethical reorientation toward what can be done. (Sinnerbrink, 301-302)

39But who is that “we” anyway? Is it again the human species as an undifferentiated whole since the film says that “we are all implicated”? Or is it the citizens and consumers of western societies, as the voice-over goes on to add: “some far more profoundly than others”? Over the course of the film, this “we” has learned to see itself from the perspective of a virtual, abstract point of view, like future geologists from outer space. But there is still another sense in which “we” have to learn to see differently, as Kelly Oliver states:

No longer maverick space cowboys desperately holding on to the fantasy of the autonomous self-contained individual, species, nation, we can embrace the fact that “plurality is the law of the earth.” (Oliver: 29, citing Arendt , “The Life of the Mind” 19)

40When we start to see “earth” differently we start to see other worlds not just as worlds to be mastered and conquered but as limits to our world that cannot be assimilated. If we conceive of the earth as a network of dynamic, living relationships, then we also change the way we “see” ourselves. This means that individuals, species, and nations are fundamentally interconnected. It means that relationality is primary rather than secondary to who we are and what we can do.

41And there are more and more films that try to achieve this by evoking and including indigenous ecological knowledge and post-anthropocentric perspectivism like Awake: A Dream from Standing Rock, Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change (CAN 2010, dir. Zacharias Kunuk and Ian Mauro) or The Condor & The Eagle (USA/GER/CAN/PER/ECU/FRA 2019, dir. Clement Guerra and Sophie Guerra).

42With this tipping point of the camera, we reached a point where the entanglement of human and non-human becomes visible from the other side. The rocks are now the protagonists, the human figures nothing more than the reflections of this entanglement. This is how it looks, when the world is looking at us (Ivakhiv 209). Then the voice over continues however and it cuts back to the promethean, overwhelming flames of the beginning and instead of using them as forceful warning, the words re-frame them as symbol of a vague techno-utopian solution: “But the tenacity and ingenuity that helped us thrive can also help us to pull these systems back to a safe place for all life on earth.”

43And that is what framing the Anthropocene as an epoch also means: it tips the scales towards the illusion of a new normal, instead of framing it as a succession of crossed thresholds into the unknowable and unforeseeable, of tipping points that are not so easily restabilized.

44So, is a good “Anthropocene” possible? Not if we think of it as a technological problem to be solved but only as an intervention in our relation to other worlds on this earth. In this sense, a critique of the Anthropocene-condition should not just follow the diverse diagnostics of geology and other sciences but emphasize contradiction and resistance: the post-apocalyptic earth of biological lifelessness that we are heading towards is the result of humans descending into worldlessness, into disregard for human worlds as relationships that include the non-human. For this reason, the demand is voiced with increasing urgency that communicating the multi-crisis in film and the other arts and media should be directly tied to questions of radical activism and to the framework of climate justice that addresses both the injustices between the Global North and the Global South, between the present and future generations, between humans and more-than-human beings as well as between the rich and the poor. For Ziser and Sze, for example:

The proper response of the humanities to the GCC [global climate change] crisis is not to find aesthetic equivalents to late capitalism’s radically posthuman environmental effects, but rather to produce narratives […] that make palpable the largely ungraspable complexity of contemporary environmental and economic networks. (Ziser and Sze, 407)

45But how can I re-scale myself as a film viewer? How does my implication in the environmental crisis become a mode of intervention through images? How can we start to look at the human as a species, as a large-scale force in the earth systems and at the same time at the social, political and cultural worlds? Is a genuine perspectivism as an audiovisual poetics possible? A perspectivism that de-centers the Anthropos without retreating to a standpoint outside of earth and world? A perspectivism that makes us care for radically distant futures and kinships of radical alterity? Moments of recognition are one thing and it certainly is true that “recognizing and re-imaging our dominant signal is the beginning of change”, as the final words of the voice-over say. But the emphasis should be on the re-making of our ways of world-making, a different (audiovisual) poetics of the Anthropocene. Such a poetics must account for the clash of scales, find images for our diverse entanglements, connections and divisions.

46As a final point, the knowledge and understanding that can be gathered both from taking note of the findings of the natural sciences, from climatology, biology and medicine on the one hand and from listening to the voices of indigenous activists and MAPA-representatives on the other hand, leaves us scholars working in the humanities with the question of what to do with this understanding other than to pass it along in teaching and writing. In this sense I would follow the incitements to leave passivism behind and to start using all non-violent tools that are to our disposal, following Keilbach and Pabiś-Orzeszyna’s exhortation that:

The necessity to act now touches also on the understanding of our academic discipline. If everything has to be done to shake things up, should we then declare climate emergency, and consequently get involved in climate communication or even activism? We think that we should. (Keilbach and Pabiś-Orzeszyna, 110)

47Understanding the scale of human activity is only half the picture, the other is to understand that some of it is just plain wrong.