Artist Michael Gresalfi shares new artworks using leaves, seeds and other natural materials to produce zoomorphic or anthropomorphic masks and sculptures that echo our early ancestors and an approach to the world that recognises, “We are all related.”
1,560 words: estimated reading time = 6 minutes
I am excited by an artistic theme I have been pursuing these past months. I have named the series ‘Flora-Persona.’
Using only natural materials, including plants, trees and associated leaves and seeds, and avoiding the use of any manmade materials during the creative process (such as paints, adhesives, and dyes), I purposefully manipulate plants and other flora in a zoomorphic or anthropomorphic manner.
Relying solely on Nature’s bounty is an artistic departure for me in some ways, yet a continuum of my focus on addressing the rising environmental damage, including climate-related disruptions, which our industrialized world has wrought.
Inspired by my research in support of my painting entitled ‘Wood-Wide Web’ (which I previously presented on ClimateCultures in my post with Eva Strautmann), I became acutely aware of the ability of various tree and plant species, along with fungi, to communicate and share resources with one another in a symbiotic manner.
‘Wood-Wide Web’ portrays a forest, field, or meadow not merely as a collection of competing individuals in a shared location, but rather as an interconnected community where resource sharing and communication play a significant role in the health and resilience of the entire ecosystem.
Mitakuye Oyasin: we are all related
My research led me to read about the Mother Tree Project. This large-scale, decade-long research effort led by Dr. Suzanne Simard at the University of British Columbia, revealed that neighboring trees and plants are in communication with one another via an underground network of fungi that resembles the neural networks in our brains.
I was astonished to learn that in one study, Simard documented that a Douglas fir tree that was injured by insects appeared to send chemical warning signals to a Ponderosa pine tree growing nearby. The pine tree then produced enzymes to protect itself against the nearby insect invasion.
To me, a form of collective consciousness was in play within the web of life, across at least two Kingdoms. In biological taxonomy, life forms are organized into hierarchical groups: Kingdoms are at the top, with phylum, class, order, family, genus, and species being progressively lower tiers.Fungi are in a separate Kingdom from trees and plants, yet they support one another in a mutually beneficial way.
Not so with respect to humanity, the alpha species in the Kingdom of Animalia. I began to see more clearly that we don’t support the interconnected web of life, and in fact we continue to disrupt the very symbiotic fabric that the wood-wide web illustrates.
During my daily walk in the woods behind my home, I began to consider more thoughtfully how alienated we all are from the natural world, and I began to ponder how a conscious wood-wide web of interconnected life that surrounds me might view humankind. Yes, not a comforting thought.
The artistic concept of ‘Flora Persona’ formed slowly. My evolving viewpoint was also informed by a Lakota phrase, “Mitakuye Oyasin” (“We are all related”). The phrase expresses the idea that every living entity shares the same divine origin and life force, and that humanity is part of a complex reciprocal web of existence, rather than separate from, or superior to, nature.
My artistic interest was thus stimulated by both non-Western and ancient beliefs concerning the shared web of life and by my newfound understanding that plants and trees have some form of elementary consciousness, as demonstrated by their ability to communicate across species, genus, families, and all the way up the hierarchical groups, to include across the two noted Kingdoms.
Reaching back to our roots in art
Both climate and human culture, including artistic expression, have intersected in many ways throughout our species’ course of time. In this evolving series, I delve deeply into our ancient past for artistic inspiration. I suggest that we have been creating art across the various climate epochs we have inhabited, since times immemorial. I believe that both the flora and fauna available in long-ago times provided source materials used to create art, back into earlier hominin eras.
It is reasonable to assume that humans have been making art from biodegradable materials, including masks, figurines, and sculptures, for more than one hundred thousand years.
Masks and sculptures have been my primary focus to date. My artistic goal is to present man-manipulated natural elements in a manner that harkens back to our early ancestors.
With respect to cave paintings, the earliest known artistic expressions for both Homo sapiens and Neanderthals, consisting of non-figurative symbolic markings, are more than 70,000 years old. They are still in existence today, due to their isolation and protection from the weathering elements. Other art, made from natural materials and not contained within caves, clearly has not been preserved.
One of my flora-persona series interests is using burdock (Arctium lappa) seed heads to create extinct local animals that were plentiful in my region of Maryland, USA during the Woodland and Archaic Periods — such as the wooly mammoth and the cave bear. It is my contention that such natural materials were used to create art by these ancient native ancestors, and indeed perhaps as far back as our early hominin ancestors.
Burdock plant and collected seed heads, as well as a few examples of my ‘Burr Art ‘, are presented below:
Plant masks: viewing how our relatives might see us
With respect to making human-like faces from plant leaves, I was inspired to begin this Flora-Persona series when pondering the wood-wide web and, particularly, the nascent consciousness documented via chemical communication networks formed between fungi, plants, and trees.
These leaf masks are not necessarily made to be worn. Rather, they are meant to present these wonders of nature as a member of our distant family, aligned with the Lakota phrase “Mitakuye Oyasin”: we are all related.
I continue to experiment with different plants, seeds, leaves, and tree bark, all picked up along my daily walks in my neighboring Black Hill Park. I find myself drawn to creating leaf masks that present the viewer with an unsettled view of how we humans might be viewed by our distant plant relatives, such as displaying sorrow, shock, disappointment, and anger. These sentiments seem very proper to me, considering the continuing harm we cause to the interconnected web of life.
Below are three photos. The first shows how I applied juice to several of my leaf masks, a natural dye from ripe purple pokeweed berries that I had gathered.
The final photos show a large 36” x 36” canvas I painted and then displayed, with four of my leaf masks within its four quadrants, followed by close-ups of the masks.
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 here and at our ClimateCultures & more Substack.
Michael — “I used Gemini AI as a background search tool — looking for other examples of both my ‘burr art’ and ‘leaf art.’ Frankly, not much out there — at least from my initial research.”
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Michael adds: “A young friend from Scotland, after looking at my burr art, brought to my attention the annual ancient event called the ‘Burryman,’ which happened to occur mid-August. The Burryman is a centuries-old Scottish folk tradition where a local man is covered head-to-toe in thousands of sticky burdock burrs and paraded through the area.” Find more at Wikipedia.
You can see Michael’s work with fellow ClimateCultures member, artist Eva Strautmann, in their post The Wood Wide Web – Fruitful Collaboration, which features both artists’ paintings on the topic.
This piece for the Ecological Disciple by Lenore Three Stars, The Way Forward: Mitakuye Oyasi — A Worldview (11/6/26) explores the value of an approach to our shared world that starts from the position that “We are all related” (Mitakuye Oyasi can also mean “All my relations.”)
More on the Mother Tree Project, founded by Dr. Suzanne Simard, can be found at The Mother Tree Project & Program, a research and outreach initiative housed in UBC’s Faculty of Forestry & Environmental Stewardship, rooted in the idea that forests are deeply interconnected systems, not just collections of individual trees.
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'.
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.
Artist and researcher Iain Biggs introduces two fictional-poetic works that offer ‘narrative deep mappings’ as explorations of places that are never static, always in process. This post accompanies Iain’s new essay for our Longer feature, ‘Wild’ Deep Mappings.
1,330 words: estimated reading time = 5.5 minutes
You can also read Iain’s new essay for Longer, ‘Wild’ Deep Mapping (after Gary Snyder). Longer is our feature sharing members’ works that offer a deeper exploration of a topic than is usually possible with our blog: essays, fiction or other forms that haven’t appeared online elsewhere and explore in more detail creative responses to our ecological and climate crisis. With each new Longer piece, the author introduces or complements it here with an original, related post.
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Where we live in the world is never one place…
– Naomi Shihab Nye, My Grandmother in the Stars
Until quite recently I always referred to Ursula K Le Guin’s Always Coming Home as the best fictional narrative flowing from the same mentalité as the deep mappings that most interest me. That changed when I came across Eavan Boland’s A Poet’s Dublin, edited by Paula Meehan and Jody Allen Randolph, an unusual combination of poetry, photographs and a conversation. I see the two books as trans-Atlantic cousins, surprisingly alike in some respects and quite unlike in others. Both celebrate a particular place in depth, and both were largely created by women whose work presupposes a poetic imagination. ‘Largely’, because both books are the product of active collaborations.
The title page of my beautiful 1986 copy of Always Coming Home — withdrawn from Shetland Library and bought second-hand — names Le Guin as author (she also drew the maps), but adds artist Margaret Chodos, composer Todd Barton and geomancer George Hersh as contributors. I get the impression that the poems in A Poet’s Dublin were selected by the editors, possibly with Boland’s assistance. It was certainly the editors who sent Boland out with a camera to gather images to accompany the chosen poems. The connections between the poems and the resulting photographs are not always obvious. They may even appear “like disjunctions”, as Randolph puts it in her Introduction, adding that this serves to remind us of something important: “that an imagined place is never static but always in process, always slipping away from its last definition into its next adventure of being imagined”.
Much the same could be said of the disparate, even disjunctive, elements in Le Guin’s book about “the Valley”. An imagined future region certainly, but one in no small part grounded in the various adult realities that surrounded Le Guin as a child. The reality of her mother’s work as author, anthropologist, and friend to and biographer of Ishi, the last surviving member of the Yahi people of North California. Also, of her father’s work as a highly respected cultural anthropologist and archaeologist, who later in life also served as a lay psychologist. Her father’s belief that genius arises out of culture at particular times, rather than being the isolated quality of a ‘great man’, would seem to have informed Le Guin’s detailed and diverse accounts of different aspects of ‘Valley’ culture and ritual, and to have informed the contrast between that culture, aligned to nature along the lines of the First Nations peoples in California, and that of the military and technologically-preoccupied Condor people.
‘Stammersong’, a poem by Ursula Le Guin from ‘Always Coming Home’ (1985), with illustration by Margaret Chodo-Irvine.
Narrative deep mappings: always more than one place at a time
Any literalist familiar with both books could instantly come up with reasons why my linking them is at best idiosyncratic. But then literalists believe that we live in the world one place at a time and are almost certainly immune to the pleasures and challenges of deep mappings. They’re also likely to be suspicious of an orientation described as “towards an archaeology of the future”, as Le Guin names the act of imagination that initiates Always Coming Home. While literalists might acknowledge some similarities between the polyvocal approach of Always Coming Home and certain deep mappings, I doubt they’d see an equivalent polyvocality in A Poet’s Dublin. A view that, to me, would suggest that they had either skipped or missed the point of Two Poets and a City: a Conversation,its final section.
Reading that conversation between Meehan and Boland turned me back to all that had gone before, alerting me both to the many generational and class tensions that haunt Dublin, and to the implications of their mutual sympathies as Irishwomen and poets. The relevance of all this to deep mappings is suggested by Paula Meehan’s observation that: “To all intents and purposes, our maps [of Dublin] shouldn’t overlap. What I love about poetry is that it makes sectarian or sectional stances redundant”. She adds that what she had initially mistaken as Boland’s use of the city as “a scenic backdrop for the working out of the drama of the self” was in fact an exploration of Boland’s relationship: “with the polis, with the power structures of the state as manifest in architecture, in statuary, in the suffering histories of the excluded as much as in the commemorated and sanctified official histories”. So, not polyvocal in the sense of the multiple intersecting narratives, images and scores of Always Coming Home, but a listening, conversational concern for the numerous worlds that make up Dublin at the intersection of the physical city with various popular and official imaginaries. A Dublin in which it is necessary to acknowledge that:
Small things Make the past. Make the present seem out of place.
– Eavan Boland, Once in Dublin.
Alongside the need to
… look again.
Into the patient face of the unhealed.
– Eavan Boland, Unheroic.
To miss the underlying tenor of that concern would be to miss all that makes Anna Liffey, here quite properly located between photographs of two Dublin bridges and perhaps the most moving and compelling of all Boland’s poems.
When I earned a living working as an artist/educator/researcher in a university, reading art criticism and theory was a necessity that stretched my thinking. Since retiring I’ve had less and less appetite for writing predicated on the presuppositions of the analytical mind. Like an animal sick from a diet lacking certain vital minerals, I’ve hunted out material to enable me to address that long-standing lack. Material that nurtures a more inclusive, holistic and relational understanding of the world. Poetry, Le Guin’s speculative fiction and her essays in Dreams Must Explain Themselves and Space Crone, along with various poets’ reflective work —Boland’s A Journey With Two Maps: Becoming a Woman Poet, John Burnside’s The Music of Time: Poetry in the Twentieth Century and Meehan’s wonderful (and wonderfully-titled) Imaginary Bonnets with Real Bees in Themhave provided rich and varied nourishment that reaches parts that criticism and theory cannot.
Why share this?
Because, like deep mapping, these two works (and others that flow from the same mentalité) help us to resist the toxic culture of possessive individualism and the culture industry that serves it.
Find more
Always Coming Home by Ursula K Le Guin (1985) is published by Gollancz (2016 edition).
Eavan Boland’s A Poet’s Dublin (2014, edited by Paula Meehan and Jody Allen Randolph) is published by Carcanet.
Iain’s new essay for our Longer feature explores ‘Wild’ Deep Mapping (after Gary Snyder) as an approach that offers many possible modes of address, where practitioners follow their particular, informed and sensitive intuitions about the complexity and relationality of place in time. Mapping that is diverse, ancient, and full of information.
An independent artist, teacher and researcher interested in place seen through the lens of Felix Guattari's ecosophy, working extensively on ‘deep mapping’, other projects and publications.
Writer Rod Raglin asks if Thrutopian fiction’s solutions-focused approaches to our climate predicaments address the real challenges. How to overcome our reluctance to make the sacrifices needed to get through the hardest times and towards a better future?
1,180 words: Estimated reading time = 4.5 minutes
Thrutopian is described as literature that avoids the pitfalls of both dystopian – paralyzing by depicting bleak futures – and utopian narratives – disconnected from the realities of current challenges. Instead, thrutopian stories are rooted in plausible solutions for getting through difficulties and towards a better future.
But do these thrutopian stories take into consideration economic realities, political expedience and an electorate that only considers their immediate needs? Do they address the reality of climate change that is already having a devastating effect on many parts of the planet?
Facing up to power …
For years, Canada has been struggling to meet the commitments it made in the 2016 Paris Agreement, involving reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The major policy initiative of federal government was to implement a carbon tax, a mechanism that puts a price on carbon emissions, aiming to encourage individuals and businesses to reduce their carbon footprint. A charge is levied on fuels like gasoline, diesel, and natural gas, increasing their cost to consumers to incentivize fuel efficiency and the use of lower-carbon alternatives.
In addition, it responded to public pressure about the environmental hazards of pipelines and introduced a strict environmental review process that discouraged further expansions.
That was until Donald Trump got elected and declared economic war on his neighbour.
In response to Trump’s tariffs and the impact on the Canadian economy, the first piece of legislation passed by newly elected Canadian Prime Minister, Mark Carney, was to eliminate the carbon tax. His rationale for axing the tax was to “make sure our companies are competitive, and the country moves forward … it’s focused on building this economy.”
Also being reviewed (and likely modified), is the government’s policy to have all Canadian car sales powered by a battery, fuel cell or plug-in hybrid system by 2035.
In addition, old plans to build other energy projects are being revived by giving provincial governments “the environmental authority to approve pipelines”.
Before you could say “what the frack!”, the BC provincial government had passed The Infrastructure Projects Act, giving itself broad powers to override existing environmental regulations and authorities and expedite approval of major projects, public and private.“We’re not in the business of turning away investment in British Columbia,” said the premier of the province, David Eby.
Just to make sure no investment is being turned away, The Ministry of Energy and Climate Solutions is undergoing a review of the policies and programs of CleanBC, the province’s climate strategy.
How do environmental principles stack up against economic realities? They don’t.
Nearly three-quarters of Canadians supported getting rid of the carbon tax and the renewal of pipeline projects. Apparently, the threat of becoming the ’51st state’ far exceeds that of a climate catastrophe.
… and climate realities
Though wildfires are a natural part of the Canadian boreal forest life cycle, higher temperatures and drier conditions, caused by climate change have resulted in more frequent and severe fires and a longer fire season.
This year’s fire season — the second worst since 2023 — has seen 3,092 wildfires that have consumed 5.17 million hectares (as of July 12, 2025). Officials with Public Safety Canada say the greatest fire danger is still to come and expected to be in the Northwest Territories, the Yukon and southern British Columbia.
I live on the west coast, and regularly wildfire smoke drifts in from the interior, making the sun appear as an orange ball and creating a haze that burns the eyes and throat. On some days, the air quality in Vancouver is the worst on the planet, and we’re advised to close windows and stay indoors. For inland communities, it’s far worse.
While Canadians worry about how tariffs will impact our economy generally, and their livelihood specifically, it’s not an existential threat, like having breathable air.
Like alcoholics, who must hit bottom before they’re motivated to sober up, Canada appears to not be there yet – environmentally speaking. As the results of our last federal election proved, we are still a society that prefers to pay less to fill up the family SUV than contribute to the mitigation of global warming.
Writing towards a better future
In the midst of this ‘reset’ of environmental priorities has emerged thrutopian literature with its “plausible solutions for getting through difficulties and towards a better future.”
A quick look at a few of the titles suggests that other than the name there’s little difference between this genre and eco-fi or cli-fi – other designations that have emerged for environmental fiction since I began writing it in 2010.
The difference between my books and these newer ones appears to be issues of subtlety and practicality. In my novels, environmental issues are not in the forefront but presented only as a subplot that must eventually be addressed in practical ways for the protagonist to achieve their goal. The few thrutopian titles I’ve reviewed flip this around, presenting the environmental problem foremost and the characterisation secondary. In my opinion, this approach makes the narrative more didactic than entertaining – usually a turnoff for the reader, though time will tell.
And though this new fictional category attempts to present possible solutions to mitigate the environmental crisis, I saw no evidence it addresses how to overcome our reluctance to make the sacrifices necessary to implement them.
This was the issue I set out to answer when researching my novel, The Triumvirate – Love for Power, Love of Power, the Power of Love. What I discovered was it’s a lot harder to create a better future than envision one – human beings notwithstanding. Political and economic issues take precedence over the environment, and it is only when “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”*, do we realize we’ve made the wrong choice.
I’m sure this new sub-genre will thrive. Who doesn’t want to choose hope over despair, the positive over the negative, delusion over reality? It’s easier to suggest that we still have time to prevent the worst-case scenario even while that scenario is playing out in front of us.
This is the reality of thousands of wildfire evacuees every Canadian summer (actually, fire season is now April through October, depending on where you live) as they idle away the hours in evacuation centres worrying if they’ll have a home, or for that matter, a community to return to.
Rod writes about his novel The Triumvirate in his previous ClimateCultures post, Power, Love, Religion & Climate Fiction: Life Imitating Art, discussing how a story about power, love and religion finds echoes in our unfolding climate crisis and how we try to come to grips with a hostile and uncertain future.
A journalist, publisher of an online community newspaper, photographer and writer of novels, plays and short stories that address the human condition and serious environmental issues ...
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 shares new artworks using leaves, seeds and other natural materials to produce zoomorphic or anthropomorphic masks and sculptures that echo our early ancestors and an approach to the world that recognises, “We are all related.”
As our online Anthropocene museum approaches its fifth year of student entries, UEA’s 
Artist and researcher 
Writer 
