Ecopoet Helen Moore discusses the importance of econarratives and ethical leadership for how we interact with each other and the more-than-human, and how a new free online programme can help us find the new stories to live by.
1,550 words: estimated reading time = 6 minutes
In January 2026, the UK government published a report entitled Global Biodiversity Loss, Ecosystem Collapse and National Security, which linked the deleterious state of local and global ecosystems and biodiversity loss with the increasing risk of ecosystem collapse and threats to national security.1 Despite its huge significance, the report received very limited media attention, and this goes for much of the scientific research that sounds the alarm about the climate and wider ecological emergency. Research led by Stockholm Resilience Centre has stated the importance of remaining within planetary boundaries and describes how “transgressing one or more planetary boundaries may be […] catastrophic […] to human well-being”, and that of countless other species.2
At current consumption levels, seven of the nine boundaries have been exceeded: Climate Change, Biosphere Integrity, Land System Change, Freshwater Use, Biogeochemical Flows, Novel Entities, and Ocean Acidification.3 Given the perilous situation we collectively face, effective forms of environmental communication are urgently needed to support community resilience, ecosystems regeneration and deep adaptation.
Econarratives for planetary life
Fundamental to human communication are the stories that influence how we interact with each other within the ecosystems that sustain us and that we influence. Pioneering work by my colleague (and fellow ClimateCultures member) Arran Stibbe, Professor of Narrative Ecology at the University of Gloucestershire, has shown how stories play an important role within the global ecosystems that life depends on, by shaping how humans conceptualise and act in the world — some stories encouraging people to destroy the ecosystems that life depends on, other stories encouraging attention, care and protection of the natural world.
Home page for The Search for New Stories to Live By
Building on his 2024 book, Econarrative: ethics, ecology and the search for new stories to live by,4 Arran led a team of colleagues at the University of Gloucestershire and a wider international team as part of the CLADES project (Critical Language Awareness, Democratic Engagement and Sustainability, funded by the European Commission under the Erasmus+ programme), to develop a free online 8-part course The Search for New Stories to Live By. In this course,which included my own contribution on ecopoetic activism in part 4, guiding themes are econarrative and ethical leadership.
Econarrative is defined as stories which see humans, more-than-human species and the physical environment in interaction with each other, while ethical leadership is defined as shaping how others perceive themselves and the society around them based on an ecological vision. As Arran Stibbe encourages, “We can all be ethical leaders, in our lives, our families, our communities, our companies, or our countries. All we need is a clear ethical vision, critical awareness of the stories that underpin our unsustainable society, the ability to seek out new stories to live by, and to communicate those stories in inspiring ways.”
The Search for New Stories to Live By examines the use of narratives by ethical leaders who are doing just that work. They include community elders, writers, poets, activists, campaigners, scientists and politicians, all of us storytellers in one way or another. The course also examines the stories we tell and how we tell them, seeking out ways of imagining a radically different society and bringing that society into being. My own contribution, which focuses on Ecopoetic Activism, looks at how ecopoets challenge the stories we live by and create new stories to transform social reality. There is a prevailing cultural narrative, maintained by literary gatekeepers, that ‘good’ poetry should not convey an apparent message. However, this is often a privileged position, arising from people who have high levels of material security and who occupy a part of the world (I’m writing here in the UK) which has yet to be severely impacted by the intersecting climate, ecological and social crises.
Acknowledging that all art is essentially political (being ‘apolitical’ is in itself a political position) and recognising the urgency of the challenges we collectively face, ecopoetry charts another course, a consciously activist stance, seeking to raise awareness, witness, mourn, commune, speak truth to power and vision new ways of living and being, among other approaches. Frequently, the work of ecopoets critiques extractivist Western attitudes and behaviours towards the ecosystems on which humans depend, along with the neocolonial exploitation of people in the Global South. Understanding that we humans are part of ‘nature’, ecopoetry may also seek to re-enchant our relationship with the more-than-human world. Or an ecopoem may narrate the restoration of a polluted river, such as the Merse in Tuscany, which the Italian ecopoet, Massimo D’Arcangelo describes, and which I explore on the course.
The search for new stories
Course units in the Search for New Stories to Live By
Designed for anyone who is aware of the trajectory of society towards collapse under ever-growing inequality and environmental destruction, and who wants change at the only level that can make a difference, The Search for New Stories to Live By is a self-study course, where participants work their way through the eight parts — the introduction, Creation Stories, Identity, Ecopoetic Activism, Enchantment, Ethics, Emotions, Apocalypse – watching video talks, reading notes, completing exercises and looking through the detailed PowerPoint slides. Educators are also welcome to use the materials for their courses, and there is advice on teaching in the extra materials section, with stated course goals being for learners to develop critical awareness of the stories that underpin our current unsustainable civilisation, to develop skills in using language in inspiring ways to convey new stories to live by, and to contribute to bringing a new sustainable civilisation into being.
Finally, it is worth noting that this course builds on a previous course, The Stories We Live By, which explores the dominant stories that drive industrial civilisation and which have contributed to creating the destruction and far-reaching interconnected issues we currently face. Given sufficient time and interest, that first course could be explored before The Search for New Stories to Live By.
Helen mentions an earlier course, The Stories We Live By, which builds on an awareness that the issues the world faces are so severe they call into question the stories that our societies are based on. Through topics such as Ideologies and Discourses, Framing, Metaphor, Evaluations, Identities, Convictions, Erasure and Salience, it provides tools for revealing the stories we live by, questioning them from an ecological perspective. You can access that here — and read a ClimateCultures review of the early version of that course.
In a previous ClimateCultures post, Ecopoetikon: Global Ecopoetries for a Cultural Tipping Point, Helen celebrates global ecopoetries through a new project gathering poets from Global South and North. Ecopoetikon offers a powerful indicator of intersecting crises and inspiration for a tipping point in our relationship with the living world.
Helen’s latest ecopoetry collection, The Last Lighthouse in Rising Seas (Palewell Press, May 2026), explores ‘petronarcosis’ (fossil fuel addiction) and the links between forced migration and the climate crisis and has been celebrated as confirming her “as the most imaginative and committed ecopoet of our time.” In this piece for our Creative Showcase — which includes one of the poems in full — Helen reflects on the book and the genesis of the poem, which conveys hope in how we can resist the forces of destruction and seek Thrutopian paths forward.
You can read a review of her 2024 collection, river / run, by fellow ClimateCultures member and poet Fiona Moore, here.
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From 2026, ClimateCultures is inviting members to say a sentence or two about how they use AI in their work and in their posts for us. We will be exploring this in future posts here and at our ClimateCultures & more Substack.
Helen — “I am deeply suspicious of AI for multiple reasons, including the ecological and social impacts of data centres; the disproportionate power and influence wielded by the techbro oligarchs; growing evidence of biases within AI, which one study reveals only reinforce Islamophobia, sexism, racism etc; research also evidencing it as a form of technocolonialism; the impact it has on our critical thinking and writing skills; and, last but not least, because of its theft of creative work by often poorly remunerated artists and writers.
“I have not used AI in compiling this article, although some of the text is recycled from the online course blurb. The occasional use that I do make of AI is when researching a topic, and then only where it pops up freely as part of a Google search.”
Geographer Martin Mahony introduces our fifth annual selection of Museum of the Anthropocene student essays: objects that shift shape through lenses that question Anthropocene ironies, contradictions and oversimplifications, and maybe help point to a new ethos of care.
1,340 words: estimated reading time = approximately 5.5 minutes
It’s midsummer, and England has just experienced its hottest June since records began.1 Temperatures have been topping 40oC across Europe, while in the eastern Pacific Ocean a ‘monster’ El Nino is developing,2 with its effects already being felt in places like Papua New Guinea.3 London recently paid host to ‘London Climate Week’, at which the UN Secretary-General highlighted that London was not just ‘Calling’, but ‘Cooking’, perhaps starting to bear out at least some of the apocalyptic vision of The Clash’s post-/punk classic.4 But several Climate Week events couldn’t go ahead; most notably perhaps, a panel discussion at the London School of Economics on improving the management of extreme heat was called off due to — you guessed it — the extreme heat.5
Anthropocene ironies
‘The Anthropocene’ seems to be an age of irony. The term describes a period in Earth’s history when (some) humans have seemingly become a dominant, controlling, world-making force, and yet our knowledge of the future implications of that agency are shrouded in uncertainty. This is an age of melting polar ice giving access to more fossil fuels; of urgent defences against rising seas being wrapped around fossil fuel infrastructure;6 of the clear need for more global cooperation just at the moment that geopolitical worlds seem to be pulling apart.7 And meanwhile, experts on dealing with the heat can’t talk to each other because it’s too hot.
As the philosopher-poet Eugene Thacker put it in a 2021 interview:8
There is a tragic irony in the Anthropocene idea. We do matter after all. The evidence? We have created the conditions for our own extinction. I suppose that is an achievement, of sorts. So convinced are we as human beings that we matter that we are willing to sacrifice the planet for our own species-specific self-importance.
This year’s submissions to our evolving online Museum of the Anthropocene capture this sense of Anthropocene ironies. Like last year, some deal with collapsing boundaries,9 with things which are neither one thing nor the other, or which seem to be something but which are in reality something else.10 As we move through them, we move in many respects from identifying the problems and violences of the Anthropocene towards the moves we might make to undo them. But that spectrum of knowledge and action is implied in all of them, in different ways.
Katya Boinvoisin points us towards the ironies and contradictions of the clean energy transition, showing how the rare earth mining frontier — producing materials which are vital for ‘clean’ energy tech — is pushing into northern Scandinavia and repeating many of the political and environmental violences we tend to associate with fossil colonialism11 and fossil capitalism.12
This year’s collection features a range of shape-shifters; objects whose meanings and attachments seem to shift radically when viewed through the lens of the Anthropocene. Izzy Laws’ account of the rubber duck shows how a cute children’s toy can also contribute to marine plastic pollution; but in a further twist, how an accidental spillage of thousands of the things helped scientists piece together new knowledge of ocean circulation — crucial to helping us better understand future changes in the ocean-atmosphere system.
Maisie Royal offers us a cup of matcha, and places the latest coffee shop trend in a deeper historical and geographical context. Once used to aid meditative contemplation of the beauty of human-nature coexistence, now it is a fully-fledged global commodity and challenging coffee as the chemical enhancer of choice for exhausted minds labouring under late capitalism. Nonetheless, Maisie suggests that matcha still embodies a deep desire for (re)connection with nature, even as its cultivation in Japan is increasingly challenged by changing weather patterns.
Bethany Waite similarly explores the juxtapositions of beauty and industry through the lens of crochet. She traces the mechanisation of this craft skill and its increasing entanglement with ‘fast fashion’ and synthetic fibres, but points too to emerging craftivism movements by which crochet, as a form of “slow, handmade work” is interjected “into fast, industrialised spaces, disrupting the speed and disposability that define modern fashion systems”. In so doing, crochet promotes a new ethos of care, community and sustainability.
Lastly, Joanna Edwards also examines the tension between materiality and meaning. Their object is a handmade Pride flag, stitched together from fragments of industrially-produced cloth to produce something fundamentally different: a defence and a celebration of queerness. Drawing on notions of ‘queer ecology’, Joanna diagnoses the Anthropocene as an age defined by the rejection of the inherent queerness of both natural and human worlds, and by the enforcing of boundaries and hierarchies. By gathering around Joanna’s flag, we can see how fighting against the Anthropocene requires solidarities that cut across the categories industrial modernity has bequeathed to many of us.
Queer ecology — looking beyond categories
Oversimplifications abound in corporate and state environmentalism, from deeply performative nature-culture dualisms to the rendering of wild spaces in one corner of the world fungible and exchangeable with wildness elsewhere, through mechanisms of offsetting and substitution. Queer ecology reminds us of the inherent strangeness, intimacy and interdependencies of the world, which cut across the Western philosophical ‘operating systems’ that, since the 16th century or so, have dominated how the nonhuman world is comprehended and apprehended.
In this age of irony, it is plain to see how these categories contain their own contradictions within them; spotting and talking about those ironies, then, might be the key to undoing their violences.
Papua New Guinea at risk of food shortages as El Niño brings frost and drought, Rebecca Bush (The Guardian, 25/6/26)
London’s Calling, by The Clash: “…the sun’s zoomin’ in // meltdown expected // the wheat is growing thin” (Joe Strummer and Mick Jones, 1979). Some travellers on the Central Line this week might nonetheless welcome the idea that the “the ice age is coming”.
You can find all five new entries in Inside the Museum, along with Martin’s selections for 2022 to 2024 – a growing collection of objects and entities that shine new lights on the Anthropocene and ask important questions of us. And we bring together all of Martin’s introductory essays in the main Museum of the Anthropocene page. Do also check out our earlier project, A History of the Anthropocene in 50 Objects, where CimateCultures members discuss the objects — real or imagined — that illustrate the emerging planetary age for them.
To mark the first four years of our online Museum of then Anthropocene, we recently hosted a conversation between the Museum’s co-ordinator, UEA’s Dr Martin Mahony, and fellow ClimateCultures member, GroundWork Gallery’s director and curator, Valerie Sekules. Do read Our Anthropocene Museum — A Curator Conversation On Our First Four Years for an exploration of how collections such as this enhance- our understanding of our planetary age.
This short piece by Ingrid Bååth for studio ClimateCulture (not related to ClimateCultures) discusses how Queer Ecology offers “a framework for seeing — and living — differently. It reminds us that the binaries we inherit are not inevitable. That nature is not static.”
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From 2026, ClimateCultures is inviting members to say a sentence or two about how they use AI in their work and in their posts for us. We will be exploring this in future posts here and at our ClimateCultures & more Substack.
For his recent post with Veronica Sekules, Martin said: “I occasionally find AI useful for doing things like identifying key literature on new topics I’m interested in, but have so far shied away from using it in my writing. I’ve experimented with talking to an AI about an idea I had for a book and it was very complimentary and encouraging, which was nice, but I’m aware that that might be a deliberate design feature!”
A human geographer interested in the politics of the Anthropocene, historical development of environmental sciences and technologies, and how futures are imagined, constructed, represented and contested.
As our online Anthropocene museum approaches its fifth year of student entries, UEA’s Martin Mahony and GroundWork Gallery’s Veronica Sekulesdiscuss the collection through a professional curator’s perspective and how it enhances our understanding of our planetary age.
3,380 words: estimated reading time = 13 minutes
ClimateCultures editor Mark Goldthorpe sets the context for this conversational post from Martin and Veronica.
We launched our online Museum of the Anthropocene in 2022, drawing directly on Dr Martin Mahony‘s work since 2018 with 3rd-year undergraduate students on his ‘Human Geography in the Anthropocene’ course at the University of East Anglia. Each year, the current cohort has submitted short essays on objects or entities that speak to some aspect of the nature of this new planetary age and our own species’ role in shaping it. Alongside each year’s selection for the ClimateCultures Museum of the Anthropocene, Martin has written an introductory post for us, reflecting on the ideas that emerge from the students’ pieces.
As we approach publication of our fifth set of contributions — coming soon to ClimateCultures — Martin and I discussed how we might draw out some of the themes and topics that have emerged so far from the series. We quickly settled on the notion of bringing in a professional curator’s voice and were delighted that Veronica Sekules generously took up the challenge. Not only is Veronica the founder and director of the GroundWork Gallery, where she has been responsible for showcasing the work of a great many artists and researchers who bring unique perspectives to the critical issues of the Anthropocene, but her background in education — and with the Sainsbury Centre in particular — brings significant experience to the notion of a collection such as this. And, of course, Veronica has contributed her own object-based insights into our planetary age for ClimateCultures, through her writing on three objects for our series, A History of the Anthropocene in 50 Objects. So it’s a great pleasure to host this conversation between Veronica as our ‘guest curator’ and Martin as instigator of the Museum of the Anthropocene.
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Seeing beyond the strata
Veronica: I have been thinking about the Museum of the Anthropocene for a few days now. I must at first say thank you — yes — it is wonderful and so rich in its approach and the range of its content. Congratulations on putting together such a very thought-provoking and original collection of ideas and discussions. Before I read it, I must say that I had been thinking about the Anthropocene — tutored, as it were, by Colin Waters who gave a talk about it at one of our GroundWork events — as a geological phenomenon. What stuck in my mind rather persistently after his talk was that we were creating a geological layer, including increasing quantities of giant chicken bones and tungsten from ball-point pen points, and of course, plastics. So it is utterly refreshing that you have opened up the subject so much, to be very much more cultural and, indeed, historical.
Martin: Thanks so much Veronica! It’s really lovely to hear such a positive response from a bona fide curator, arts practitioner and museum educator. And yes, that ‘geological’ version of the Anthropocene has become a dominant story which is told, and it is a striking and compelling one. Geologists like Colin have done amazing work in quantifying the sheer amount of stuff that we’re leaving behind and which will be our record in the rocks for millennia to come. But geologists as a whole have a tricky relationship to the notion of the Anthropocene, embodied most clearly perhaps in the recent decision of the International Commission on Stratigraphy not to confirm the Anthropocene as an official geological epoch. The reasons for that are many and interesting, but does it represent the death of the Anthropocene as a useful concept? I don’t think so. The term originated not in geology but in Earth System Science — not the people concerned with our record in the rocks, but the people concerned with how humanity is perturbing things like the climate and the biosphere. In recent years it’s become more common to think of the Anthropocene not as a geological age or epoch, but as an event, and a process. As process, it is something which is unfolding unevenly across space and time. As event, it is something which could, on geological timescales, be relatively fleeting. Which is quite a hopeful way to think about things! Either way, this new way of thinking scientifically about the Anthropocene sits much more comfortably with how social scientists, historians, artists and others like to think about it — as a set of processes with some coherence, perhaps with an identifiable beginning and hopefully an end, but which is highly geographically uneven. It’s not all ‘we’ and ‘us’, but some people, some systems, some ways of doing things which are powerful, but not unmovable.
Veronica: Indeed. As your defining terms in your very useful glossary, and several of the museum exhibit entries suggest, it is not just the Great Acceleration we need to concentrate on as the main culpable era, but that the beginning of the Anthropocene can arguably be traced back — as in the so-called Columbian Exchange — to the first expansionist, colonialist ventures, prospecting for more plants, land and resources. I think in fact it goes potentially much further, and your texts lead the way to thinking very much more broadly than previously, not only about the origins and conditioning factors for the Anthropocene, but about how it is defined. The medieval map and the Santa Maria replica ship both highlight those issues.
Martin: Absolutely, and that’s something we spend time talking quite a lot about. While the stratigraphers wanted an easily identifiable, globally synchronous ‘big bang’ moment they could point to as the start of the Anthropocene, historians, geographers and the like are more interested in tracing root causes of change, which might mean thinking about how the transformations of the Great Acceleration had their roots in early European colonial expansion or, as you suggest, perhaps even further back, in moments like the rise of settled agricultural communities, or in the emergence of particular attitudes to the natural world.
Veronica: Exactly — as the authors and you frequently suggest, there is also the whole persistent question about nature and humans’ attitude to it, and what role that is playing in, not so much the current concerns with mass extinctions, but exploitation and the wielding of power. There are moral nature-culture questions about the canary, the pigeon, the rat and the beaver, but also in different ways for plant species — the suburban lawn, the Christmas tree and Sweetgrass. There seems to be a persistent tension between the human desire for control as exploitation and the exertion of power, and for its more apparently benign purpose to create order. Time and again, while reading the museum entries, I was thrown back on thinking not only that everything is connected in complex ways, but that the earth is riddled with, as you put it Martin, ‘unequal geographies’.
Martin: I think that’s really key. And we can trace the origins of those unequal geographies both in material processes of transformation (e.g. in the economic contributions of the transatlantic slave trade to the rise of industrialism in Great Britain), and in moments of ‘geo-cultural’ change, as Jason W. Moore puts it. That’s what I think is so fascinating about the whole debate around the Anthropocene. Suddenly we’ve got historians and ethicists talking to earth system scientists and geologists about human-nonhuman relationships in a profoundly generative way, in a manner which didn’t really happen when we were ‘just’ talking about climate change, air pollution, or other environmental crises that have now been bracketed together under the term ‘the Anthropocene’. That bracketing can be problematic as it leads to abstractions and blindspots. But it also draws attention to some big, consequential questions about our relationship to nature, the legacies of empire-building, about cultural change, and so on.
Our planetary age through objects and processes
Veronica: In fact, I think, the kinds of exhibits and concerns brought to light in the museum are leading me to think that we need a whole new definition of the idea of the Anthropocene, beyond geology and what we are physically laying down and altering on the globe. For much of what is being discussed is not so much about what the world is becoming physically, but by what moral, ethical and economic forces it is being, and has been influenced and shaped.
Take for example the Mirror — one of the artefacts of earliest origin — which highlights the problems of self-regard, vanity, narcissism and the confusion of nature-culture that we see or don’t see in our reflections. That author suggests that the Mirror-cene could be a relevant concept. That entry, and quite a few others touch on aspects of the original sins — pride, vanity, greed. Also, the Lawn, Fast Fashion, the Diamond Ring, Banana, the Pocahontas costume — but in each case, go much further to illuminate the subtleties of exploitation, appropriation of identity, commerce, corruption and consumerism, and the special poisons of corporate greed that have increased the scale of the problems these artefacts represent. But for all the evils of their proliferation, it also struck me forcibly when reading these, that the fact remains that humans are vulnerable to being exploited on a mass scale and to that end, culpable as consumers, not quite equally, but not without power as such, to change things — in either direction.
Martin: You’ve touched on a really tricky and fascinating point which is shot through all of this — how to talk about things like cultural values, norms, behaviours etc. in a way which prompts new forms of reflection, but which also doesn’t lay the blame for what’s going on at the feet of individuals? There have been a few occasions where students have chosen an object which connects to something they love — like a hobby or a sport they’re keen participants of — and then when they start to unpick all the ‘Anthropocene’ aspects of it, they’re left feeling their object is a Bad Thing. I warn them about the risks of that at the outset, but also try to emphasise that the world, our systems of production, our shared values and so on are determined to a large extent by forces outside of our control. We can change them, but not just by being better consumers, or by no longer taking joy from the plastic Christmas tree or enjoying a picnic on a manicured lawn. Again, history is powerful here, because it shows how contingent things are. Our rapacious version of consumer capitalism wasn’t inevitable — it was very deliberately engineered as a way of dealing with a crisis of overproduction following World War II. That’s what the archives show, and industries like marketing and PR developed precisely to get that new consumer economy going. Once one knows that, it’s possible to see how things could be otherwise. And that’s about collective action, political work, and imagination work. And on the latter is where the arts and museums can be so important.
Learning from the Anthropocene museum
Veronica: That leads me to think more about the state and status of the museum currently — it is a wonderful collection of stories as well as artefacts, and stories which manage at the same time to be quite depressing as a collection of observations about the harm we have done to the Earth, and enlightening in unpicking the forces and circumstances that led us there. There are plenty of positive statements too, about the desire for care for nature and nature as a refuge, and how this sometimes develops in surprising ways, as in the story of Pikachu, or more straightforwardly, Sweetgrass and the tribute to Robin Wall Kimmerer’s famous book. I also very much liked the positive reframing of the Witch as a bringer of ecological wisdom, as a counter to her conventional portrayal as a frightening practitioner in black magic and as a force to be reckoned with against the patriarchal and colonial creators of the Anthropocene’s problems. I also liked the ones that took us above and beyond Earth into space — as indeed that exploitation is going to be the next goal for the greedy prospectors — you just need to look at who the main ones are…
The museum educator in me began thinking about how the museum could be further activated educationally. Of course, it was created with an educational purpose, which in itself is extremely interesting. Conventionally the museum curator is the one who selects and essentialises the stories, whittling down to the uber-story that the display elucidates. When I worked as a museum educator, I always maintained that it was then our job to re-assemble the rich detail that lay at the heart of those distilled curated stories and then from there to explore the wider field that had provided the context — which embedded the story potentially much more deeply again and led to wider areas to discover. That in a sense is what your exhibitors have already done. However, I think there could be an interesting metacognitive exercise to re-dissect their themes, pick up on their keywords, to examine each aspect of their detail, and then to see where the further connections and alliances are between the different exhibits. Where, for example does ‘ecological wisdom’ occur — perhaps between the Witch, Sweetgrass and Pikachu? I am not entirely sure where this would lead, but it might be fun to do. And it might be a way to think about the cumulative effects of the phenomena you are faced with, and maybe come closer to thinking about how to address some of those thorny issues of inequality, resource exploitation, geographical power imbalance. For I do feel that you and the students are onto something in terms of reframing the debates around the Anthropocene and potentially coming up with some positive proposals to counter them.
I know you have frequently started your conversations with the Sainsbury Collection, and I used to have a whole repertoire of workshops whereby we would have a deck of words or phrases on card — which might have come from either a random source or a specific one and we would place them near an object with which we thought there might be some kind of connection. It wasn’t always enlightening in terms of being true to the cultures of origin of some of the artefacts, but always led somewhere interesting because of peoples’ desire to make new sense of things, and was a way to open up new questions… I always found the Sainsbury Collection tremendously valuable in encouraging questioning and I am sure that, plus its global range and variety of kinds of artefact, made it an ideal starting point for you and the students.
Martin: It’s really interesting that you say that. In Week 1 of the module we do an exercise with some ‘keywords’, to prompt some discussions of what the Anthropocene ‘means’ and what it ‘demands’. This always yields really interesting insights into how the students feel about environmental change and, essentially, what appetite for revolution they have! Revolution of various kinds — economic, cultural, technological… Bringing some of our previous museum entries into that conversation could be really generative too. I’ve learned so much from the education team at the Sainsbury Centre about how to do good object-based learning, and getting students thinking in those terms right from the get-go could have some interesting implications for the kinds of objects and entities they ultimately chose to focus on.
Veronica: I was wondering what difference it might have made had you begun with a more conventional museum, the kind that claims to provide answers and ‘factual’ information and a more taxonomic approach to its collecting. Perhaps you might have got a more conventional range of essays…
Martin: Quite possibly! Via the wonders of YouTube we engage with how other museums around the world have engaged with the Anthropocene, like the Deutsches Museum in Munich or the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh. In both cases I think the notion of the Anthropocene has challenged their curatorial practices, whether that’s poking the notion of natural history or challenging the boundaries of a museum focused on human technology — the type of museum that tended (until recently!) to tell a rather celebratory story of technological change. I think there’s something interesting about curating as a geographer rather than a historian too — I try to get them to think about difference, inequality, about what Anna Tsing calls the ‘patchy Anthropocene’. I think that leads to some differences of emphasis, as well as an always-fascinating range from the mundane and the everyday to the spectacular and the unique. But a perennial challenge is to find the grounds for hope in all of this — via these objects to identify historical contingency, to spot those spaces where different worlds are being built and ultimately, I hope, to help students discover their own agency in all this — not as self-flagellating, guilt-ridden consumers who must make better choices, but as agents of collective change equipped, I hope, with some useful knowledge and, more importantly, with persuasive stories to tell.
Museum of the Anthropocene entries – the first four years, 2022-25
Find more
You can explore all 24 student entries over our first four years of our Museum of the Anthropocene, Inside the Museum. And Martin’s essays accompanying each new cohort are:
The Museum also has a small Anthropocene Glossary, briefly exploring some of the terms introduced in the students’ essay, with links to further reading: Coloniality, The Columbian Exchange, Epistemic communities, The Great Acceleration, The Malthusian Hypothesis, Technofossil, The Technosphere, The Tragedy of the Commons.
GroundWork Gallery in King’s Lynn, Norfolk, is all about art and environment. As well as a full programme of exhibitions, events and residencies, their site has an extensive collection of resources: “writing linked to, or inspired by our campaigns. All of them have been connected with exhibitions and/or with artists’ work. Everything that GroundWork Gallery displays or exhibits aims to connect with a particular environmental message and these resources are grouped into themes, which have emerged through our discussions.”
From 2026, ClimateCultures is inviting members to say a sentence or two about how they use AI in their work and in their posts for us. We will be exploring this in future posts here and at our ClimateCultures & more Substack.
Veronica — “I use AI sometimes almost inadvertently (in that Google offers it automatically) to gather information and make lists of issues to follow up for further investigation. I only use it purposefully to adapt and/or shorten the long texts I write for exhibitions, mostly to produce press releases — which AI does admirably and I hate to do, so for that function I am grateful. It produces very odd press contact lists, though! And it is completely hopeless at producing blurbs for events etc — it makes anything sound utterly cheesy and gushing.”
Martin — “I occasionally find AI useful for doing things like identifying key literature on new topics I’m interested in, but have so far shied away from using it in my writing. I’ve experimented with talking to an AI about an idea I had for a book and it was very complimentary and encouraging, which was nice, but I’m aware that that might be a deliberate design feature!”
An art curator, educator and writer with a background in the environmental movement, who has created GroundWork Gallery to showcase art and campaign for the environment.
A human geographer interested in the politics of the Anthropocene, historical development of environmental sciences and technologies, and how futures are imagined, constructed, represented and contested.
Geographer Martin Mahony introduces our new selection of student contributions to our Museum of the Anthropocene, asking important questions about the meaning of ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’, the politics of drawing boundaries and the relations that cut across them.
1,770 words: estimated reading time = 7 minutes
It’s a great pleasure to open the loading dock again and install six more exhibits in our online Museum of the Anthropocene. These have been selected from the 30 or so which formed part of this year’s pop-up museum at UEA, as part of our ‘Human Geography in the Anthropocene’ module.
This year we had many excellent submissions which dealt with the relations between human and nonhuman beings, perhaps inspired by our close engagement with Anna Tsing and colleagues’ Feral Atlas. While last year our subset of submissions dealt with questions of “who owns what”, “how has that changed over time?”, and “what even is ownership anyway?”, our six entries this year each in their own way explore vital questions about the meaning of the ‘natural’ and the ‘cultural’, and crucially about the politics of drawing boundaries between those two spheres.
Drawing boundaries, severing connections
The notion of naturecultures, developed by thinkers like Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour, emphasises the primacy of “relatings over related beings”. As a theory of relationality, it holds that things are defined less by their individual essences and more by their relations with other entities. Nonetheless, across those relations, we are always drawing boundaries, putting things into categories, and severing connections – both materially and philosophically.
Enquiring into naturecultures involves both recognising the endurance of those relations, and attending to the process of “coming into being of bounded subjects, objects and domains such as the natural and the cultural”. How are these domains constructed, and how are different subjects and objects allocated to them? Iris van der Tuin prompts us to study “how, where and for whom boundaries are drawn”.[1]
We can read the history of the Anthropocene as being a process of drawing boundaries and severing connections — of declaring ‘nature’ to be fundamentally separate from humanity and human culture, and thereby positioning it not as a bundle of relations which holds and sustains us all, but as a pool of resources to be exploited and put to work. As historians and geographers like Jason W. Moore and Kathryn Yusoff have reminded us, this philosophical category of ‘nature’, as it emerged in Early Modern Europe, was made to include many parts of humanity as well, with hierarchies of race and gender constructed and used to justify institutions like chattel slavery and patriarchal capitalism.
Does the heralding of the ‘Anthropocene’ represent the final triumph of such boundary-making and hierarchy-constructing? Or does it represent the end of the illusion of such boundaries? That’s not just a philosophical question, but arguably also the crux of the collective choices ‘we’ need to make to steer a course through the Anthropocene.
For naturecultures thinkers, the heralding of the Anthropocene shows just how illusory any nature-culture boundary has always been. We can no longer ignore our entanglements and relations, and indeed the key to dealing with the fall-out of modernity’s pretensions of human separateness from nature is precisely to re-orient our politics and ethics towards care for those relations.
Navigating naturecultures
Our six contributions this year show a range of ways in which we can grapple with these indeterminate nature-culture distinctions, their troubled histories, and their yet-to-be-determined futures.
Kaya Lawes examines a critter with a long history of living closely with humans, of being a key part of some of our most cherished institutions (most notably science), but of also being despised by many of its human neighbours — the rat. She traces the history of the assumed relationships between rats and pestilence, between rats and urban change and inequality, and the more loving relationships that still flourish between some humans and some rats. The contradictions of the intertwined history of rats and people tell us a great deal, Kaya contends, about wider human-nonhuman relationships in the Anthropocene.
Another member of the rodent family is equally evocative of shifting human-wildlife relations. Ciaran Shaffrey recounts the history of the beaver as a species almost lost in Europe to land drainage and enclosure, pursued across North America for its fur by early colonisers — often in the service of emerging fashion trend-setters — and now sitting at the heart of heated debates about ‘re-wilding’ and finding ‘natural solutions’ to habitat degradation and flood management. With both official and guerilla beaver re-introductions gathering pace, are we trying to turn back the clock to a primordial past, or are we seeing the emergence of a new kind of collaborative world-making which cuts across boundaries of species and nature/culture?
Jaz Evans takes us into the virtual sphere, where the slogan “Gotta catch ‘em all!” became synonymous with the cultural phenomenon of Pokémon. But while the slogan might evoke histories of exploration, hunting and accumulation, Jaz shows us how Pokémon was born of grief for the depleted ecologies of Japan, with the creator of the game keen to give children a new means of experiencing “the joy of searching, finding, and collecting”. New augmented-reality versions of the game have brought players back outside, and hopes have been expressed that it could be a new way to reconnect people with the outdoors and even, through its own fantastical naturecultures, to foster interest in conservation.
Amy Patterson traces another story of the natural and the synthetic through her recounting of the complex place of wool in systems of production and trade. Wool, we tend to forget, was central to the early stirrings of the industrial revolution, as well as being a key motivator for the privatisation and enclosure of huge swathes of agricultural land. Amy points to the paradoxical place of wool in contemporary economies — as a raw material it can be worth too little for farmers to bother transporting it to markets; at the same time, it is marketed as a luxury fabric, a cut above its synthetic pretenders. However, a revival of interest in wool is underway, uniting crofters and crafters in building a new kind of garment economy.
This story of shifting value and values has surprising resonances with Lauren Jacquemard’s piece on Taranaki Maunga, a mountain on the North Island of Aoteroa New Zealand. Sacred to Māori tribes of the region, the mountain was nonetheless claimed by the British crown in 1865. The slopes were stripped of many of their ‘natural resources’, eventually leading to efforts at conservation. Nonetheless, this was a form of conservation that enacted an abrupt “division between the human world and the natural world”, thus severing the cultural and spiritual connections of local Indigenous communities to the mountain. Nonetheless, Taranaki Maunga has recently been granted the legal rights of a person. The mountain is now legally considered a living being, and Māori have the authority to speak on its behalf. It has become iconic of a growing, global ‘rights of nature’ movement which seeks to undo the legal and philosophical structures that, for several hundred years now, have calved the ‘human’ off from the ‘natural’, with all the consequences we can now see before us.
All of which brings us, lastly, to the figure of the witch, and to Georgina Renny’s discussion of the history of gendered persecution and more recent revivals of witchcraft as an ecological practice. When early capitalism was busy dividing the world into ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, and ‘productive men’ and ‘domestic women’, the figure of the witch straddled these boundaries in newly problematic ways. Cue the early modern witch-hunts which spread across Europe and North America as those regions were being re-made both by the social transformations of early capitalism and by the environmental trials of the ‘Little Ice Age’. Georgina points to the revival of interest in witchcraft as an example of new feminist, anti-capitalist and anti-colonial environmentalisms, which seek to trouble modernity’s philosophical boundaries anew and to cultivate new means of relating across natural-cultural boundaries.
A better Anthropocene?
Together, we hope these pieces prompt reflection on the importance of paying attention to boundaries, boundary-drawings, and to the relations that cut across. Despite the best boundary-drawing efforts of various villains of the Anthropocene story, these contributions to the Museum of the Anthropocene show that boundaries are always porous, and are spaces of connection and movement as much as they are things that hold us in/back/apart.[2] Recognising and cultivating these entities and relations that cut across philosophical, political and material boundaries may be the very thing that can help us cultivate a better Anthropocene.
Find more
[1] Iris van der Tuin, 2018, ‘Naturecultures’, in Braidotti, R. and Hlavajova, M. eds. Posthuman Glossary. London: Bloomsbury, p. 269.
[2] Thanks to Mark Goldthorpe for this wonderful phrasing.
The Museum of the Anthropocene forms the centrepiece of Martin’s third-year undergraduate course ‘Human Geography in the Anthropocene’, which he’s been running at the University of East Anglia since 2018. The Museum is built collaboratively each year, with each student selecting an object that they think is particularly eloquent of the historical, political and cultural processes that have led us into the Anthropocene, or which helps us imagine a world beyond the Anthropocene. The Museum is staged around two-thirds of the way through the 12-week course, before students then complete a longer essay on their chosen object.
Step Inside the Museum to view all six of the new objects submitted to the Museum of the Anthropocene this year — as well as 18 contributions from previous students on the course. The main Museum of the Anthropocene page provides introductory reflections and is where we bring together Martin’s annual posts – see below. And there’s also our Anthropocene Glossary, where we offer brief explorations of some of the terms that appear in our Museum entries — such as Coloniality, the Columbian Exchange, the Great Acceleration, Technofossils, the Technosphere and the Tragedy of the Commons.
Martin mentions Feral Atlas: The More-Than-Human Anthropocene, a site curated by Anna L. Tsing, Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena and Feifei Zhou to explore the ecological worlds created when nonhuman entities become tangled up with human infrastructure projects.
Martin’s previous posts in our Museum of the Anthropocene series are:
Object-based Learning in the Anthropocene: exploring the material and intellectual challenges of thinking about human-environment relationships in our new planetary era (our 2022 selection).
Centrifugal Stories in the Anthropocene: how our Museum of the Anthropocene stories resist casting all of humanity together as progenitors of our new planetary age (our 2023 selection).
Objects, Ownership and the Politics of the Anthropocene: objects that suggest ‘ownership’ as a theme in narratives of this age and expand this notion in a startling view from beyond earthbound perspectives (our 2024 selection).
A human geographer interested in the politics of the Anthropocene, historical development of environmental sciences and technologies, and how futures are imagined, constructed, represented and contested.
Artist Michael Gresalfi introduces the personal value to him of adopting the ancient philosophy of Stoicism and its principles in his quest to “live a life worth living”, and to do so in a more environmentally sensitive manner.
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Hello fellow Climate Cultures members and readers.
As our editor, Mark Goldthorpe, has explained in the introductory section of our network’s website: “…we haven’t got very far agreeing what ‘climate change’ means, what the priorities are, what they need from us, what we can actually do.”
Yes indeed, we face a complex set of environmental, social and economic problems that seem insurmountable and frankly, very worrisome. Again, as Mark states: “…the ‘problem’ is not merely a technical one, or a political or an economic one, or a social one — or even a simple mix of these. It seems somehow bigger and more fundamental: a predicament of the imagination.”
Perhaps, like me, you, my fellow ‘creatives’, are also busy activating your imagination through the arts. I suspect, like me, that many of you are also open to exploring new ideas and new ways of thinking about how to personally respond to these human-induced climate change interdependencies that portend an unsettling future.
We are facing multiple existential crises, from the damage and disruption of life-supporting atmosphere, water and land resources and associated seasonal cycles, to the interwoven balances of the natural world, and increasing social inequality. These crises are driven by an unsustainable form of market-based economy that promotes excessive material consumption by the few, at the expense of the many.
For me, exploring classical philosophies has been an element of my personal journey. I have found reading books by ancient, medieval and contemporary philosophers to be an excellent method for activating my imagination, particularly with respect to living a more environmentally sustainable life.
Perhaps you are familiar with the following inscription from around 700 BCE that was displayed at the entrance to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, the site of the Greek oracle: “Gnothi Seauton” (Know Thyself).
The Temple of Apollo at Delphi Skyring, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
A number of well-known and competing philosophies have assisted my personal growth over the past decades. They have helped me to understand myself better, and to reveal, or at least reconfirm, my own character strengths and weaknesses. My goal remains to correct, or at least minimize, my assorted character deficiencies and become both a better person and a better steward of planet Earth.
A life worth living, not simply one to be endured
One philosophy in particular has been of great assistance to me, with respect to my attempt to live in a more minimalist and eco-sustainable manner. Stoicism has helped me to know myself better, and has provided me with constructive methods to practice behaviors that are better aligned with my personal quest to “live a life worth living” – and to do so in a more environmentally sensitive manner.
A short historical review of stoicism reveals that it is a philosophy of Hellenic era origin. It was established by a Phoenician named Zeno of Citium around 300 BCE. Zeno and other like-minded philosophers of antiquity were clearly influenced by the teaching of Socrates and Plato. In the centuries to follow, this maturing philosophy was refined through the texts of various Roman citizens, to include Seneca, Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. Contemporary authors and present-day philosophers of stoicism include Massimo Pigliucci, Christopher Gill, Nancy Sherman and Ryan Holiday, to name but a few.
Unfortunately, in our present times, the word stoicism (and its derivatives) has been poorly defined as “the endurance of pain or hardship without the display of feelings and without complaint.” This is not at all an accurate definition of the philosophy, which is centered on providing its practitioners with a moral-based path toward becoming a more ethical and ‘virtuous’ person.
To the ancient Greeks, becoming more virtuous embodied a range of character improvements, that through earnest practice, led to a more ethically-based “authentic human life.” Through the practice of stoicism, the ultimate goal is to truly live a life worth living, to the benefit of all.
Striving to become virtuous, Stoics contend, is essential to living a meaningful and deeply satisfying life. While stoicism is based on improving both individual ethical behavior and personal decision-making, it also requires its practitioners to ensure their efforts are supportive of their respective society’s increasing virtue as well. It is my belief that the Stoic’s philosophical emphasis on becoming more virtuous through the principles of practical wisdom, temperance, moral courage and justice, is intrinsically linked to becoming both a more sustainable individual, and over time, a more sustainable world — in all its forms and dimensions.
“The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control. Where then do I look for good and evil? Not to uncontrollable externals, but within myself to the choices that are my own …” Epictetus, Discourses 2.5.4–5
Reading and practicing the principles of stoicism has helped me and countless others to become more fully aware of what is within our span of personal control and what is outside of our personal control, and how to more successfully navigate our journey towards a less stressful and more content life.
Stoicism — an active life
Stoicism is a philosophy that is focused on living a meaningful and virtuous life, in accordance with our human nature; which includes applying our inherent capacity for reason (practical wisdom) for the improvement of ourselves, our society, and the world at large. It encourages us all to participate as active members of society, and to do so with a moral obligation to both express virtue towards other peoples, and to care for all creation.
With respect to sustainable development, the four above-noted principles of virtue, while excellent individual goals, also, if practiced by enough members of a society, over time, may well demonstrate that humanity does not require limitless growth to flourish, and that we can live in harmony with our fellow life forms, in a more complementary manner.
In conclusion; from my personal journey as a practicing Stoic, I believe the following:
That through the practice of the four noted principles of virtue, we can make more environmentally sustainable, and less material-consuming decisions.
That we can improve both ourselves and our communities, as well as the world at large.
That we can become more responsible stewards of the natural environments that all forms of life rely upon.
That humanity does not require limitless growth to flourish.
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You can explore the history of Stoicism and its development from ancient into modern thought in its Wikipedia entry, which explains that the name itself “derives from the Stoa Poikile (Ancient Greek: ἡ ποικίλη στοά), or ‘painted porch’, a colonnade decorated with mythic and historical battle scenes on the north side of the Agora in Athens where Zeno of Citium and his followers gathered to discuss their ideas, near the end of the 4th century BC. Unlike the Epicureans, Zeno chose to teach his philosophy in a public space. Stoicism was originally known as Zenonism. However, this name was soon dropped, likely because the Stoics did not consider their founders to be perfectly wise and to avoid the risk of the philosophy becoming a cult of personality.”
The Stoic Fellowship — a worldwide network with a mission to help build, foster, and connect communities of Stoics around the world — has a collection of resources on both ancient and modern Stoicism.
In his first post for the ClimateCultures blog, “Where Have All The Birds Gone?”, Michael shares an artwork that uses repurposed materials dating from before our mass communications ‘information age’ to witness the extensive decline of bird species and populations in his local area and the loss of natural spectacle.
You can see three of Michael’s other environment-themed artworks in our Creative Showcase, including “What Man Has Wrought”, a seven-panel installation that offers an opportunity for self-reflection, making creative use of styrofoam with melted wax, acrylics and a heat gun to reflect humanity’s darker side and visions of a world we risk if we fail to make restoring our Earth our shared priority. Our Changing Planet, a video presentation of his artworks with his own narration, offers educators and advocates one example of personally communicating the science of climate change through a creative medium. And most recently, in Mother’s Lament— his painting of past, present and possible future states of our coral ecosystems, the ‘rainforests of the seas’ –- he finds inspiration in the “elegant tit-for-tat” coral-algae relationship of shelter, food and, photosynthesis: “the algae also paint their coral hosts with their famous colors — the riotous colors of a reef are actually a symbol of one of the world’s oldest alliances.”
An artist who seeks to incorporate art with climate change data, and whose work in encaustic medium, glass paint, oils and acrylics includes 'Our Changing Planet'.
Ecopoet Helen Moore discusses the importance of econarratives and ethical leadership for how we interact with each other and the more-than-human, and how a new free online programme can help us find the new stories to live by.
Geographer 
As our online Anthropocene museum approaches its fifth year of student entries, UEA’s 
Artist 
