exploring cultural responses to environmental change
Inside the Museum
Welcome to the Museum of the Anthropocene, our student-led exploration of the role of specific objects and of material culture in this new planetary age.
Here you will find our growing selection of natural and cultural artefacts and beings contributed by students of the Human Geography in the Anthropocene third-year undergraduate course at the University of East Anglia, each with their own short essay. Our latest selection — which you will see first — come from the 2026 cohort, followed by six from 2025, four from 2024, six from 2023 students and an initial selection of eight pieces from 2022. We’ll be adding a new selection each year.
Please browse the collection, respond with your comments on any objects you find particularly interesting and share on social media.
Material culture: Marine debris – Laysan. Photograph Forest Starr and Kim Starr, 2013 (CC BY 2.0) https://www.flickr.com/photos/forest-and-kim/10080068753
There is a short introduction to the Museum of the Anthropocene where you can also find links to our posts from Dr Martin Mahony at UEA, introducing our annual selections from his Human Geography in the Anthropocene course. Please do leave comments there, on any aspect of the Museum project or the relevance of material culture to our understanding of the Anthropocene. And in our new Anthropocene Glossary, you can read short texts on some of the ideas introduced in our Museum of the Anthropocene objects.
If you’d like to explore examples of ClimateCultures members using different objects to investigate our relationships with the more-than-human world in this new, human-produced planetary age, do check out our series A History of the Anthropocene in 50 Objects.
Bethany Waite offers crochet, a seemingly peaceful crafting hobby whose materials and their labour and cultural meanings reveal creativity's environmental ...
Joanna Edwards celebrates a patchwork pride flag. Originally created to communicate queer identity and protest the oppression of queer communities, ...
Georgina Renny argues that witches - long marginalised for their gender, spiritual beliefs, or perceived threat to societal norms -- focus on rituals of resilience, healing and communal mourning of ecological loss. Deeply attuned with land, they provide a symbol of defiance against exploitation of the planet’s resources for profit.
Lauren Jacquemard's story of Taranaki Maunga, a mountain 'at the bottom of the world', counters Eurocentric narratives and charts complex relationships between colonial power, Indigenous rights and the ‘natural’ world. Sacred to Māori but captured in power and legal systems that objectify nature and people, it now possesses legal personhood.
Amy Patterson finds that, with a place for creativity and innovation in the Anthropocene, particularly in reconnecting us with the non-human, wool should have a future, although its story is complex. A history that encompasses land enclosure, trade protectionism, industrialisation and fluctuating global markets make wool a significant Anthropocene object.
Jasmin Evans highlights Pokémon cards as the product of globalised consumerism that blurs physical and digital worlds: “Gotta catch ‘em all”, but at what cost? They also reveal profound human relationships with the natural world, being born from their inventor's desire to share the joy of nature amidst rapid urbanisation.
Ciaran Shaffrey discusses how the beaver's extinction in Britain was closely linked to land enclosure, drainage and extraction, following earlier hunting for fur that drove frontiers to North America, devastating beaver populations there. With rewilding moves now seeing their reintroduction as landscape engineers, beavers offer controversial responses to the Anthropocene.
Kaya Lawes suggests the rat as a significant Anthropocene presence, transforming ecosystems wherever human colonisation has introduced them, taking the blame for the spread of plague and reflecting the challenges of unplanned urbanisation. Rats also demonstrate our attempts to understand the consequences of our actions, from toxicology studies to neuroscience.
For Pearl Johns, the diamond engagement ring - invented for Austrian nobility, popularised by the Victorians and marketed with the 20th Century slogan “A Diamond is Forever” to symbolise the durability of marriage - narrates Anthropocene contradictions, representing love and conflict, status and poverty, beauty and destruction, empowerment and misogyny.
Izzy Brooks finds in the ever-popular banana a ubiquitous and potent artefact of the imperialism and modern corporate power that gave us 'banana republics', worker exploitation and the human transformation of the natural world through standardisation of a monocultural crop with high chemical dependency and increased environmental vulnerability to disease.
Maisy Wyeth shares the first piece of art made in space, created in 1965 by Alexei Leonov, the first human to walk in space. His 'Orbital Sunrise' sketch signposts a key point in history: space race, Cold War, the heart of the Great Acceleration's mass consumption and rapid environmental transformation.
Will Gregory offers a replica 15th-century ship housed in a Canadian mall: the Santa Maria, on board which Columbus ‘discovered’ the New World in 1492, laying the foundation for colonialism in the Americas, new global trade routes, entrenched geopolitical conflicts and a turning point in human relationships with the environment.
Max Drabwell-Mcilwaine introduces the plantation garden as a marker of resistance to the Anthropocene's subjugation of both people and nature by colonisers, whose plantations strip places of variation and indigenous peoples of their social identity. In eras of enslavement, people nurtured biodiversity in private plots, fighting against the plantations' bio-normativity.
Reece Page proposes the lawn as Anthropocene object: this highly managed crop presents a clear contrast to intrinsic values of nature. An understated symbol of privileged living and suburban expansion with high environmental demands here on Earth, the lawn is also suggestive of future imaginations of the colonisation of space.
Josh Fowler suggests the pigeon as both the victim and the villain of the Anthropocene, acting at different times as symbols of colonialist extinction, of mass warfare and of relentless urbanisation and its aesthetics. A benefit when we needed them, a pest to be cast out now that we don’t.
Jake Kiddell shares the cotton t-shirt, representative of fashion clothing that has some of the shortest lifetimes ever known. Cotton helped start Britain's Industrial Revolution, with its 'ghost hectares' of colonial cotton plantations echoed today in environmental conditions of reduced water availability and quality where cotton is grown and processed.
Anna Wyeth offers Sweetgrass, a grass native to northern North America, where various indigenous communities have used it for hundreds of years in medicine, ritual burning of sacred herbs, and basket weaving. While industrial societies have detached from reciprocal relationships with nature, some indigenous knowledge systems demonstrate a mutual dependence.
Amelia Weatherall presents the Canary bird, a sentinel species co-opted into the global expansion of the industrial revolution. Employed up to the late 20th century as early warning systems in the often toxic atmospheres of coal mines around the world, canary birds saved thousands of human lives exposed alongside them.
Markus Martinez Burman presents Bishé, Zapotec poetry that's a legacy of a people and their pre-Columbian Mesoamerica empire. Colonized and subjugated, only touristic legacies of the Zapotec remain, the land exploited for neoliberal resource extraction: a forgotten land surrounded by Bishé, “a soul that is being taken by the devil.”
Jess Scragg explains how, originating in pagan religions and repurposed to celebrate Christianity, the Christmas tree has become a comforting image for many, becoming widespread with the Industrial Revolution and material accumulation. Mass production to fuel stimulated demand has led to 'commodity cities', which manufacture huge quantities of Christmas gifts.
Joanna Wanat's contribution of the Salviati Planisphere shows how 15th and 16th-century Europeans' creation of world maps, with large empty spaces inviting exploration of the 'New World', marked one possible start of the Anthropocene epoch and helps us to reflect on the global consequences of the ‘explore and conquer’ mentality.
Contributing a Native American Pocahontas 'fancy dress' costume to the Museum, Ruby Rae explores how the Columbian Exchange led to near eradication of cultures and ideals, and objectifying these concepts as a costume only enforces the victory of the colonisers and exacerbates a negative, historically selective concept of the Anthropocene.
Khilna Shuklaa contributes Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury's 1953 satirical novel on the relationship between humans and technology, published in the early days of an era that promotes consumers as patriotic citizens. Fahrenheit 451's spectacle of book burning reminds us how easily our knowledge and identities can be reshaped or destroyed.
Alise Miluna contributes Space Junk. With over a million derelict human-made objects left circling our planet from the early days of the Cold War and multiplying every year, near-Earth orbit is a museum of space exploration since the beginning of the Great Acceleration, a candidate start date for the Anthropocene.
Jessica Parry offers Roundup, a glyphosate-based herbicide that reflects the intimate ways chemicals flow between ecologies and our bodies in the age of the Anthropocene and how the dominance of a small number of corporations on our global food supply promotes a standardised package of GM herbicide-resistant seeds, herbicides, and fertilisers.
Alex Stone offers the mirror, an object infused with meaning yet taken at face value. With modern narcissism a driving force of consumerism and the Anthropocene, where all we see in the mirror are the technofossils we wear as clothes or jewellery, the mirror is a tragedy of the commons.
