Objects, Ownership and the Politics of the Anthropocene

Geographer Martin Mahony returns with new student contributions to our Museum of the Anthropocene that suggest ‘ownership’ as a theme in narratives of this age – and expands this notion in a startling view from beyond earthbound perspectives.

1,200 words words: estimated reading time = 5 minutes

It’s a great pleasure to introduce the latest additions to our online Museum of the Anthropocene. These four exhibits featured in the latest iteration of our pop-up museum at UEA a few months ago and, while diverse in subject matter, speak to some common themes of ownership, consumption, and enduring coloniality.

This year the students and I experimented with some new methods of collective curation, inspired by visits to two excellent and highly relevant exhibitions at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, which happened to coincide with our module: The Stuff of Life and Sediment Spirit. After compiling a number of proposals for how we should group together our Anthropocene objects, we arrived at:

1. Detonators — featuring coal, the Manhattan Project, the Great British pound, and more.
2. Mobilising the World — featuring the internal combustion engine, Concorde, a shipping container, and more.
3. Life amid the Technosphere — featuring an iPhone, the Las Vegas Sphere, a WiFi router, an encyclopedia of bodybuilding, and more.
4. The Afterlives of Stuff — featuring a disposable vape, a plastic straw a single-use coffee cup, and more.

This gave a nice narrative structure to the exhibition, moving from some of the key causal processes that ignited and set the Anthropocene in motion, through questions about what it might be like to live in our technologically-mediated world, and ending with encounters with the things we leave behind. Next year I will try and encourage more entries which engage with questions not only of the causes and problems of the Anthropocene, but also of how we might live differently (and better) in the Anthropocene.

Does it all come down to who owns what?

The four objects arrayed for you offer different narratives of the Anthropocene and its implications, but they also cohere around some shared questions. Paramount, I think, is that of ownership. Many historians will tell you that transformations in notions and practices of ownership, particularly in relation to land and resources, were key detonators of the Anthropocene (we take the notion of ‘detonators’ from Anna Tsing’s work, such as Feral Atlas). Early modern land enclosures in western and northern Europe fuelled urbanisation as well as revolt, while enabling wool to become a newly international commodity and creating a land-owning class with increasingly expansive economic ambitions. John Locke’s famous formulation of ownership rights being linked to productive use of land helped justify European colonisation and settlement of regions like North America. In the present day, the question of who owns what — oil reserves, exploration and drilling licences, land for carbon sequestration, genetic material, and so on — drives so much of the politics of climate change and other environmental crises. This brute political economy is often forgotten about in favour of a view of environmental politics which holds that that consensus can nonetheless be achieved through scientific persuasion and reasoned deliberation.

Will Gregory’s analysis of the replica of Christopher Columbus’s ship, the Santa Maria, inside Canada’s West Edmonton mall speaks to the early modern transformation of ideas of ownership, and of colonial land- and resource-grabs. The replica ship neatly ties together this imperial history with the more recent rise of consumer capitalism, and draws our attention to their historical linkages.

Izzy Brooks’ banana picks up on some of these themes, exploring how plantation monocropping has shaped Anthropocene landscapes and ecosystems. In her case, private companies have become not just owners of lands and commodities, but de facto governments, drivers of indentured labour, and owners of profitable genetic material.

Pearl Johns turns this question of ownership onto the gendered aspects of environmental violence. Responding to academic literature which shows how male violence towards nature has frequently gone hand-in-hand with violence against women, Pearl takes the diamond engagement ring as an object which is powerfully expressive of deeply gendered notions of ‘ownership’ over bodies, labour and reproductive rights. Yet diamonds themselves also tell wider stories of colonialism and extractive capitalism, and of how social relationships are written into the rocks we heave from the earth.

Finally, Maisy Wyeth’s analysis of the deeply evocative ‘Orbital Sunrise’ sketch by cosmonaut Alexei Leonov offers a more hopeful story of things held in common. She links the sketch — the first piece of art produced in space — to the wider story of a dawning environmental consciousness during the Space Race, and to new recognitions of the fragility and shared destiny of humanity and Planet Earth.

Common ownership and a common future

Amid ongoing debates about who can lay claim to own and exploit things like minerals on the moon or rare earth elements on asteroids, Maisy’s piece is a timely reminder that there are some things that are just better off held in common.

Find more

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 four of the new objects submitted to the Museum of the Anthropocene this year — as well as 14 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: Centrifugal Stories in the Anthropocene (2023); Object-based Learning in the Anthropocene (2022). 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 The Stuff of Life and Sediment Spirit exhibitions at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich. Both were part of their season: Planet for our Future: How do we adapt to a Transforming World? aimed at empowering art to address fundamental societal challenges. The season also includes an exhibition in spring 2025: How do we resuscitate a dying sea? 

Feral Atlas, co-curated by Anna Tsing, Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena and Feifei Zhou, explores the ecological worlds created when nonhuman entities become tangled up with human infrastructure projects. Featuring field reports from scientists, humanists, and artists, it’s an invitation to recognise ‘feral’ ecologies that have been encouraged by human-built infrastructures, but which have developed and spread beyond human control: infrastructural effects that are the Anthropocene.

Martin Mahony

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.

Read More