Cabinet of Curiosities & The Anthropocene Guide to the Galaxy

Every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation — every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake.

– Douglas Adams

As Douglas Adams with such insight describes it in the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy, the smallest object can be of great importance to the world, or the history of the world. The exhibits featured objects or pictures that are to help us with the dating of the Anthropocene, but I can’t help wondering what these objects are actually trying to tell us. Are they really representing the start of the Anthropocene, or the Anthropocene as such? Especially regarding the objects in the cabinet of curiosities, seem to paint a picture of the course of the Anthropocene rather than the starting point. They could therefore be categorized as such.

The Anthropocene could be said to start in different places at different times, for instance, it would start earlier in western civilizations compared to developing nations, as we, the western people tend to use the earth and its resources to a higher extent. However, in the same way as the concept of the Anthropocene has spread from geosciences to humanism and other disciplines (Castree, 2014), the effects of the Anthropocene often affect the whole world. It is inevitable for developing nations to be affected by our use of the planets resources.

I would say that the pictures and the texts in the exhibits tell the same story, at least within each exhibit, but there are many versions of the same story to be told. As indicated by Foley et al. (2013) the debate around the start of the Anthropocene is impossible to miss. The evolution of the Anthropocene moves at a fast and exponential scale, and I would like to argue that in a couple of hundred years, it might not matter when the Anthropocene started, only that it did start. The time passed up until now will likely have had such a small effect on the Anthropocene as a whole, that it might be insignificant. The division of the Anthropocene into smaller subsets might be needed to accurately describe several parts of the Anthropocene in the future.

If the starting point of the Anthropocene was to be set at a different time point, for example 1969, different artifacts would be needed to mark this period of time. I would also argue that the artifacts used should mark the actual start of the Anthropocene, i.e. the year or the action that is the start, rather than the course of the Anthropocene. I would therefore like to see objects related to for instance the moon landing, such as moon stones or a tv/radio which was likely used to view the moon landing.

Reference:

Adams, D. (1980) The restaurant at the end of the universe. Pan books, UK. ISBN: 0-345-39181-0.

Castree, N. (2014). The Anthropocene and the Environmental Humanities: Extending the Conversation. Environmental Humanities, 5, 233–260. Retrieved from http://environmentalhumanities.org/arch/vol5/5.13.pdf

Foley, S. F., Gronenborn, D., Andreae, M. O., Kadereit, J. W., Esper, J., Scholz, D., … Crutzen, P. J. (2013). The Palaeoanthropocene – The beginnings of anthropogenic environmental change. Anthropocene. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ancene.2013.11.002