Today is Earth Day, a day on which we demonstrate our support for environmental protection across the world. More than 1,5 billion people participate in environmental awareness-raising events in more than 190 countries. Like Earth Hour, which took place a month ago, Earth Day is a symbolical and educational event, intended to make us think about what we can do to protect the environment. In his new book The Genius of Earth Day, environmental historian Adam Rome writes about the origins of Earth Day. He brings to life a time when environmentalism was a new and exotic part of our everyday lives. In 1970, when the first Earth Day took place in the United States, the environment was generally a local concern. The idea came from the American Democratic senator Gaylord Nelson, who thought a national “teach-in” could help create engagement and awareness for environmental issues among young people. This was the beginning of the 1970s wave of environmentalist organizations, institutions, laws and regulations that swept over the entire western world. Today, environmentalism is no longer exotic. The environmental movement is broader than ever, but also shallower. We all like and care about nature, but it is often the “Like” of Facebook – it’s easy, it feels positive, and doesn’t require all that much from us. “The environment” itself, on the other hand, includes everything, from our own backyards to phenomena that can only be understood on a planetary scale. What can a largely symbolical event like Earth Day teach us in such a context, if anything? We suspected in 1970 that we were in trouble, and that our own choices as a society were to blame. 43 years later, we are pretty much sure of this. The world now seems a much more complicated place than in the early 1970s. In this series of blog posts for the Researcher Blog, I have explored the environmental implications of the Anthropocene,…

Over the last year or two, I’ve noticed how both Neanderthals and the distant human past have started appearing over and over again in discussions of life in the modern world. At the core of this Paleo-revival is a belief that the distant evolutionary past holds lessons for how we should live today. Since evolution works on very long and slow time-scales (the theory goes), our bodies are quite simply not well adapted to life in the Anthropocene. All we need to do is to copy the diet/lifestyle/habits of Stone Age man and we can avoid the negative effects of the modern world on our bodies. Neanderthals, on the other hand, seems to have become a kind of evolutionary noble savage, a distant and exotic Other upon which we can project our ideals and wishes for how a simple life outside of the Anthropocene might be. A red thread running through this argument is pure nostalgia, a desire to go back to when things supposedly were simpler and when the problems we had to deal with were not quite as wicked. If the current state of the world is a result of human activities, then Paleolithic man is only marginally complicit, having existed at a time when we still had a choice. The Neanderthals, on the other hand, are completely innocent and can not be blamed for the Anthropocene. The illustration below – one of many “evolution of man” spoofs that circulate on the internet – demonstrates this idea wonderfully. The Paleolithic age, more commonly called “the Stone Age” started about 2,6 million years ago and ended about 10000 years ago, during which humans evolved from Homo habilis to Homo sapiens sapiens, in other words what is fundamentally modern humans. Today, consumers can emulate Stone Age life in many ways. For instance, the Paleolithic diet started appearing as a modern nutritional plan in the 1970s, and its proponents argued that…

Today I’d like to take you out for a field trip. My intention is not just to take you to some of the most scenic natural and technological locations in the Anthropocene, but also to reflect a bit on the increasing entanglements of nature and technology. One of several project ideas I’ve been exploring the last year or so is a study of the ways in which “nature” and “the digital” have become intertwined since the 1960s, more or less. I say “nature” because there are, in fact, many natures. Some we see. Others we eat. Some we travel through. Some are hidden from us. Our idea of nature has expanded quite dramatically as a result of both new scientific instruments and new nature management regimes. The natural world becomes both bigger and smaller at the same time, extending out in space and down into our own bodies. We know from science studies that we generally can’t know this “nature” directly. This idea of nature is becoming very hard to separate from the digital tools and media we use to observe, interpret, and manage it. Our ideas, our standards, for what is natural is distributed and maintained in digital tools and media like databases, computer models, geographical information systems, and so on. I can point to Paul Edwards’ prize-winning book on computer modeling and climate change, A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming as one recent example of studies really highlighting this perspective. Such a perspective on nature pulls us in a few different directions. Up, towards abstraction and global management systems, like Edwards and his vast machines. But also down, out into the field, to the bodily experience of nature. I call these distant and close natures, directly borrowing from Stanford literature professor Franco Moretti’s ways of reading literature on different scales. And in what I have chosen to call annotated landscapes, the close and the distant overlap. If we think…