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.
Find more
- England’s warmest June on record – the second warmest for the UK and Wales (Met Office, 1/7/26)
- Everything We Know About the Monster El Niño That Could Make the Whole World Even Hotter in 2026, Luis Prada (Vice, 11/5/26)
- 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”.
- Climate event on coping with extreme heat cancelled by extreme heat, by Eliana Nunes (Mirror, 23/6/26)
- Aerial photography of the Gudong Seawall of Shengli Oilfield, protecting the great sea wall of the oilfield, and beautiful scenery (iNews, 8/7/26)
- Geopolitical Outlook: 2025–2029 in the Trump Era (The GeoPolity, 7/1/26)
- Histories of Violence: On Suffering, by Brad Evans with Eugene Thacker (LA Review of Books, 1/2/21)
- Anthropocene Naturecultures: Where are the Boundaries? by Martin Mahony (ClimateCultures, 30/5/25)
- Irony (Wikipedia)
- Mapping fossil colonialism, by Shreya Khaund (Royal Geograhical Society, 2024)
- Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming, by Andreas Malm (Verso, 2016)
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!”
