Earth Art

Anthropocene Alliance is a Work of Art

Our staff are engaged in creative work. They are imaginative and experimental and follow whatever path leads to a solution. When they’ve helped one of our members get support or win a battle, it’s beautiful, a work of art.

Did you just cringe? I understand. The word ART is used so often, to describe so many different things that it’s meaning has gotten lost. But I’d still insist on using it to describe the activities of A2 for two reasons. First, because we aim for performativity, a term sometimes used in contemporary art, which means turning words into deeds. When a community leader organizes a protest, fills a town hall, brings a lawsuit, or mobilizes the press, actions follow. And second, because we at A2 take inspiration from actual artworks — paintings, sculptures, prints and photographs.

We display art on our website (see The Anthropocene in Pictures) to serve as catalysts for environmental justice initiatives. These artworks provide historical and critical perspective, suggesting alternate ways of seeing and doing. Some art from the past highlights struggles for environmental or social justice that failed or were suppressed. However, it’s important to remember that no social movement for liberation is ever defeated; it simply goes underground for a while and re-emerges when the time is right. Oppression breeds resistance. When we are pushed down, we get back up and fight. And when we fight long and hard enough, we win.

The Anthropocene In Pictures

Introduction

The gallery that follows comprises an episodic, visual narrative of the rise and development of the Anthropocene, the geologic and historical epoch during which human activity, guided by the capitalist drive for profit, began to direct the course of earth systems. The period has been marked by unprecedented environmental degradation and global warming, that if left unchecked, will lead to the mass extinction of species (“ecocide,”) and the collapse of civilization itself. We have only a few years remaining to reverse course.

Though it is now generally agreed that the Anthropocene began after World War II, when capitalist, industrial production skyrocketed, there were premonitions of it far back in the past, in the Medieval and Early Modern periods in Europe, between about 1100 and 1600 CE. That’s because some of the characteristic practices and attitudes that gave rise to the Anthropocene, arose during those five centuries. Chief among these was “enclosure,” which at its core means taking for yourself what rightly belongs to everyone in common. Enclosure was essential to the rise of capitalism and is still ongoing; unless we can stop it, we are doomed.

Whenever an oil company, a mineral company, a plastics manufacturer, or a meat processor pollutes the air, water, or soil, they are encroaching upon and fouling the commons that belong to all of us. When a timber company clearcuts a forest, thus destroying an ecosystem that is also a carbon sink, it’s an act of enclosure. When corporations or very rich individuals — by deed or indifference — emit CO2, methane, and other climate-warming gasses, they are endangering the diversity of life and the future of human civilization. They are committing an act of enclosure and stealing from the commons. Images of that theft abound in European art.

Gislebertus, The Last Judgment, West Tympanum at Autun Cathedral, c. 1130

Gislebertus, The Last Judgment, West Tympanum at Autun Cathedral, c. 1130.

Enclosure began in the late Middle Ages. During that time, there existed a system of “feudalism” whereby one set of people, called “lords” or “nobles”, succeeded in getting a much larger set of people, called “peasants” or “serfs,” to do work for them, especially farming. There was nothing exceptional about these lords or nobles except their claims: that they were better than others (smarter, wiser, braver, and more beautiful) and that their authority was ordained by kings, princes, and God himself. In fact, they deployed the very ordinary tools of bribery, trickery, and physical coercion, to get their way. 

These lords were also supported by a large class of Christian clergymen and women who dominated cultural life and controlled great swathes of land. Their claim to wealth and power was based upon their self-appointed roles as interpreters of God’s will and as intercessors between earthly and divine realms. They demanded and received tribute both from the small number of lords and the large number of peasants. The former paid to ensure that prayers would be said upon their deaths and sometimes even in perpetuity. The latter were required to regularly pay a tax, rent, or tithe, and to labor without payment on enclosed church lands. Failure to tithe or perform required labor could result in punishment (fines, flogging and worse) and denial of religious blessing, meaning ex-communication and the threat of damnation. 

But not everything was bad for peasants during the feudal period. They had access to large, open parcels of common land which they could use to graze their own animals, gather fuel (usually wood), collect grain left in the fields after a harvest, and sometimes hunt or trap animals. Also, they had a lot of time off, especially in the winters when fields were left fallow. That relative freedom, including broad access to the commons, meant that a large quantity of human and natural resources remained available for expropriation.

To ensure protection of their wealth, and the stability of the feudal hierarchy, kings, lords and clergy had recourse to various powers: knights, who used violence in the service of their masters; laws, which bound everyone except the king, who was literally above the law; taxation, which made the rich richer and more powerful, and the poor, poorer and weaker; and ideology, a set of commonly held ideas and beliefs that made the feudal system seem timeless, essential and un-challengeable. Art and architecture were instruments that generally supported the reigning ideology, but sometimes permitted doubts to be expressed. Permitted criticism of the system could relieve pressure upon it. 

With their stone walls, towers, arches, buttresses, and pinnacles, feudal palaces and churches dominated the surrounding countryside and overawed the dispersed populations that resided nearby. The churches and cathedrals of the Romanesque period (c. 1100-1300) were so big that few were ever expanded, even as the population grew, and so sturdy that many survive to this day. Money generated from the traffic of pilgrims to these churches paid for their upkeep, as well as supported the sometimes-lavish lifestyles of resident priests and nuns. The churches were also supported by bequests from noble patrons who required in return that benedictions be said for their souls.

One of the most vivid, artistic expressions of this feudal order, which also contains a subtle criticism of the system, is found in the 12th Century pilgrimage church of St. Lazarus at Autun in France. There, carved into the stone that comprises the building, is a representation of the clergy’s authority over the faithful, and their governance of the interlocking rites of penance and burial. Both concern the anticipated Last Judgment, when Christ himself, according to believers, determines who goes to heaven and who to hell. 

The main portal on the West side of the church at Autun, facing the cemetery, features a large, semi-circular relief sculpture or “tympanum”, that depicts the Day of Judgement. The main figure in the center is Christ, his arms extended at his waist in a gesture that says: “‘Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world….You that are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” (Mathew 25:34; Matthew 25: 41) 

In the central zone of the tympanum at right is visible the weighing of souls by angels at left, and demons at right. Note that one leering demon is cheating; he is pulling down the balance to make sure the tormented soul within the basket is cast down to hell. That person was likely guilty of greed, considered by early Christian churchmen the worst of the seven cardinal or deadly sins: “You cannot serve both God and Mammon.” (Matthew 6: 24). (Mammon is the biblical name for the evil demon of money or wealth.) There is some irony in this because the cathedral at Autun, like many other Romanesque churches and cathedrals, was a great engine for enclosure and the greedy accumulation of wealth, and thus a building block for early, mercantile capitalism. 

Greed was in a sense, made holy at Autun. At the bottom of the tympanum is a horizontal band called a lintel where the local bishop is shown twice, holding a staff or crozier; he assumes Christ-like powers, greeting people released from their tombs and quickly sorting them – some will be sent to heaven and other straight to Hell. A large payment could guarantee the former; no payment meant the latter. Like the demon pressing down on the scales, the bishop cheated; he was guided by avarice when he judged who would be blessed and who damned. It is unclear if Giselbertus was subtly criticizing or sanctifying the role of money in the salvation of souls. 

Matthew Paris, “St. Francis Preaching to the Birds,” Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, Chronica Maira, c. 1250

Matthew Paris, “St. Francis Preaching to the Birds,” Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, Chronica Maira, c. 1250.

Saint Francis of Assisi dedicated his life to poverty and restoration of the commons. He was born Giovanni di Pietro di Bernardone, in 1181 or 1182, the child of a wealthy, local cloth merchant. His mother was French — thus the child’s nickname “Francis” or “Francesco” meaning “Frenchman.”  At the end of the 12th Century, Assisi and Perugia went to war, one of several regional contests between self-governing urban polities that sought to gain control of their rural adjacencies. What this meant — and why it was so important in the formation of the future Saint Francis — was that the common lands so characteristic of the feudal order in other parts of Italy and Europe, were largely absent in Umbria. Instead, there was a constant battle between manufacturers, merchants, artisans, and rural magistrates over land and resources. Peasants were bound by share-cropping contracts that limited their access to common lands.  In this pre-capitalist emphasis on owning rather than sharing, using up rather than protecting, and taking rather than giving, lies the ideological origin of the Anthropocene.

Francis saw these struggles close-up. Before his religious conversion, he was a knight, captured and imprisoned following the Battle of Collestrada in 1202. Upon his release a year later, he began a slow course of personal education and penance that eventually led to the life of an itinerant preacher. (He was never an ordained priest.) What he taught was not only subservience to God, but resistance to the accumulation of wealth and power, embrace of religious toleration, and support of the commons. Francis instructed his followers: “Give to all who ask…and whoever takes what is theirs, let them not seek to take it back.” “Nothing belongs to us,” he wrote, “except our vices and sins”. 

The most influential of Saint Francis’s writings is his famous Canticle of the Sun. It’s also his most politically suggestive. It includes the lines: 

Praised be You, my Lord, with all your creatures;
especially Brother Sun, who is the day, and through whom You give us light….

Praised be You, my Lord, through Sister Moon and the stars;
in heaven You formed them clear and precious and beautiful….

Praised be You, my Lord, through Sister Water,
which is very useful and humble and precious and chaste….

Praised be You, my Lord, through Sister Mother Earth,
who sustains us and governs us and who produces
varied fruits with colored flowers and herbs.

The text approaches pantheism (the idea that everything is imbued with holiness) and treats the physical world — sun, moon, water, and earth — like brothers and sisters, part of the intimate commons of the family. 

Early representations of St. Francis show him giving away his possessions, tending to the sick, and preaching to the birds of Spoleto: “My brother birds,” he’s reported to have said, “you should praise your Creator. He gave you feathers to wear, wings to fly, and whatever you need. God made you noble among His creatures and gave you a home in the purity of the air.” The subject is shown by Mathew Paris in a marginal illustration from his Chronica Maira (c. 1250) which depicts the saint at left wearing his hooded tunic and leaning on his staff while preaching to an apparently enraptured heron, crane (or stork), hawk and two songbirds.

Master of the Dark Eyes, “When Adam Delved…” Speculum humanae salvationis, c. 1485-1509. British Library

Master of the Dark Eyes, “When Adam Delved…” Speculum humanae salvationis, c. 1485-1509. British Library.

By the middle of the 14th Century in England, many of the most arable parts of the country were farmed by means of an “open field system” through which peasants had access to two or three strips of land that they planted and harvested in rotation. This system protected the fertility of the land and enabled villagers to graze their animals on the fallowed fields. Peasants shared the cost of the teams of oxen needed to plow the often-heavy clay soil. It was a good system, and sustainable, even when populations grew. 

But wealthy landowners began to privatize and control these open lands and convert them to pasturage, which was more profitable for them; however, that restricted or ended common rights. Whole villages were sometimes depopulated as a result. The centuries long transition from tillage to pasturage and increased enclosure was challenged by peasants, artisans, some village officials, and sympathetic clergy. Sometimes they rose in revolt, as in the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, Jack Cade's rebellion of 1450, and Kett's rebellion of 1549.   

During the 14th Century Peasant Revolt, men and women of Essex rose and threatened the very foundations of the state, demanding lower taxes, guaranteed rights to food, water, and clothing, and an end to serfdom — in other words, restoration and expansion of the commons. The rebels marched to London, where they killed the Lord Chancellor and Lord High Treasurer, threw open the prisons, burned palaces and destroyed legal documents. They even attacked and seized the Tower of London, thought to be impregnable. The rebellion was only ended by subterfuge, the murder of the peasant leader, Wat Tyler and the arrest and execution of the radical priest, John Ball. But some of their goals, including abolition of the poll tax and an end to legal serfdom were accomplished, albeit latter and more gradually than the rebels demanded. The slogan of the Peasant Revolt, repeated in John Ball’s speech to the rebels, revealed how fundamental and natural was their cause: “When Adam delved and Eve span/Who was then the gentleman?” When humanity was young, according to the bible, there was no overseer, no boss, no serfs, and no slaves; nor was there profit — everything was held in common. The slogan was illustrated in a manuscript from around 1500 in the British Library, called the Speculum humanae salvationis (Mirror of Human Salvation) and subsequently then in innumerable other printed prayer books of the same type. The text was enormously popular and could be tailored to popular and elite audiences alike. In the latter, the slogan “Adam delved…” would be omitted and Adam’s labor treated as essential and unceasing.

Quenten Massys, The Money Lender and his Wife, 1514, Louvre

Quenten Massys, The Money Lender and his Wife, 1514, Louvre.

In Quenten Massys’ painting, The Money Lender and His Wife, the artist shows us one of the new class of businesses that emerged in Antwerp, Flanders, in the decades following the eclipse of Bruges as the leading port city in northern Europe. Products from all over the world, including silk and porcelain from China, pearls from the India Ocean (depicted at the bottom left of the picture), and gold and silver from the Americas began to flood into the city, and with them arose the need for money lenders to facilitate the exchange of money and goods, and painters like Massys to memorialize the transactions. But the painter does so with some trepidation. While the man weighs the value of specie (money whose value derives from the metal from which it is made), his wife turns away from her prayer book — opened to a page showing the Virgin Mary and Christ child — to gaze wide-eyed at the variety of coins from across the known world. Her sacred devotions are disrupted by the exchange of filthy lucre, the product of Mammon. The picture of maternal love and domesticity in her prayer book — the image of a caring economy and a thriving commons — is challenged by a wider world focused upon enclosure and possession.

That social and political conflict is also signaled by the convex mirror in the foreground which shows the money lender’s client reading, while a leaded glass window above provides a view to a blue sky and church steeple in the background. The proximity of church and money lender invokes the New Testament narrative (found in all four gospel books) of “Christ Chasing the Money Lenders from the Temple,” also painted by Massys. The moral lesson again is obvious — that a focus on worldly matters risks alienating people from God. A Netherlandish proverb of the day states: “a usurer, a miller, a money-changer, and a tax-collector are Lucifer’s four evangelists.” (Millers were sometimes seen as swindlers, profiting excessively from the processing of grain into flour.) That the two main figures in Massys’ painting are wearing costumes from almost a century earlier further transports the image into the domain of religious metaphor and away from historical reportage. It isn’t just money that’s being weighed here, it’s souls, just as in the Last Judgement tympanum at Autun.

Frontispiece illustration to Thomas More’s Utopia, 1516, Latin edition; first English edition, 1551.

Frontispiece illustration to Thomas More’s Utopia, 1516, Latin edition; first English edition, 1551.

By the time the English Thomas More wrote his famed Utopia in 1516, about a mythical but ideal land, the word “enclosure” was widely understood to mean theft by the rich from the poor: Robin Hood in reverse. The swindlers might be millers, money lenders, priests, or nobles. And if they were priests or nobles, they often had unwitting accomplices: sheep. Sheep ate men, as More wrote: 

Your shepe that were wont to be so meke and tame, and so small eaters, now, as I heare saye, be become so great devowerers and so wylde, that they eate up and swallow down the very men them selfes. They consume, destroye, and devoure whole fields, howses and cities . . . Noble man and gentleman, yea and certeyn Abbottes leave no ground for tillage, thei inclose all into pastures; they throw down houses; they pluck down townes, and leave nothing standynge but only the churche to be made a shepehowse.

Sheep farming meant enclosure, privatization, and profit from the sale of animals and land. But it also meant the end of tillage for local consumption. Common property must be restored, the book argues, to prevent immiseration and the triumph of pride, greed, and exploitation. Yet despite the communalism of his fictional Utopia, More was in fact no champion of the poor. He condemned the German Peasant Revolt (1524-25) waged in support of the commons, and opposed Protestant reforms that would have limited the authority of priests. That didn’t stop a number of subsequent peasant and worker uprisings in England.

Kett’s Rebellion in 1549, was explicitly a revolt against the fencing of common lands and the enlargement of holdings by wealthy nobles and professionals. The Norfolk rebels tore down fences and hedges, filled in ditches, and for while even succeeded in capturing and holding the city of Norwich, then the second largest city in England. It required an army or 14,000 — including German mercenaries — to dislodge and defeat them. Partially in response to the uprising, the English monarchy in 1563 established the 39 Articles of the Church of England which included one that read: “The Riches and Goods of Christians are not [held in] Common.”

During the following three centuries in England, pasturage was expanded much further. In the early 17th Century, about a quarter of English lands (almost 10 million acres) — meadows, pastures, woods, heaths marshes and moors — were available as commons. By 1825, Parliamentary enclosure acts reduced that amount by half. The number of landless laborers soared, and political resistance to the pillage naturally rose as well. An early expression of resistance to the growing enclosure movement came during the English civil wars of (1639-51). At that time, defenders of the commons found powerful and articulate spokesman among the Ranters, Levellers and Diggers, whose words still resonate today. In “The True Levellers Standard Advanced” (1649), Gerard Winstanley, said that humans had allowed “selfish imagination” and “covetousness” to dominate their five senses: “And hereupon, The Earth (which was made to be a Common Treasury of relief for all, both Beasts and Men) was hedged in to In-closures by the teachers and rulers, and the others were made Servants and Slaves: And that Earth that is within this Creation made a Common Store-house for all, is bought and sold, and kept in the hands of a few.”

Unknown artist, John Taylor, The World Upside Down, London, 1647

Unknown artist, John Taylor, The World Upside Down, London, 1647.

In an English woodcut called “The World Upside Down” from the period of the English Civil Wars, we see a man’s hands where his feet should be, and vice versa; a rat chases a cat; a rabbit pursues a dog; fish fly; and a horse drives a cart. More ominously for the ruling classes, is another hierarchical inversion — a castle is turned upside down. If this revolution succeeds, the woodcut says, everything will be turned upside down, including the power of lords in their manors. The last shall be first and the first shall be last. The image is meant as a warning against levelling, but the very need for such an image indicates that the ideal of the commons as a movement for equality continued to grow. By the end of the 18th Century, Thomas Paine, one of the key thinkers of the American Revolution, could write with conviction that “the earth is the common property of the human race,” and that the rich dispossessed the poor by violence, “the agrarian law of the sword.”

Pieter Bruegel the Elder,Tower of Babel, c. 1563, Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum

Peter Bruegel the Elder, The Tower of Babel, c. 1563 Kunsthistorisches Museum.

In the Low Countries (Holland and Flanders) in the 16th and 17thcenturies, there also arose an intense set of oppositions to enclosure and destruction of the commons. One basis was the bible. According to the Book of Genesis(11:1-9), humans once spoke a common language. Believing themselves both clever and invincible, they decided to build a great city with "a tower whose top is in the heavens." But God punished them for their hubris by confusing their languages and scattering them “over the face of all the earth.” The story became popular in the early modern period because it is about the loss of the commons — about a people who were initially united but who fell out because of their vaunted ambition and greed.

In Pieter Bruegel’s painting, The Tower of Babel, King Nimrod of Shinar, surrounded by his retinue, oversees the work of thousands of engineers, masons, carpenters, and unskilled laborers. It’s immediately clear that the picture is about the conflict between the people who work and the people who give orders — in other words, between elites and commoners. Bruegel was an artist keenly aware of class divisions and of the suffering of the poor at the hands of the rich and powerful. His Massacre of the Innocents (1565-7), for example, was updated from the time of King Herod to contemporary Brabant. The soldiers wear the costumes of local police, German mercenaries, and royal Habsburg officials.

Partly made from brick and stone and partly from the mountain itself, Bruegel’s Tower resembles the ancient Roman Colosseum, which was an early-modern symbol of corruption and violence. That’s where gladiators slew the early Christians as well as myriad animals. But unlike the ancient amphitheater, the Tower is a spiral with irregular and unstable arches. In addition, the sea at lower right is perilously close to the base of the tower. When a storm surges, the foundation of the tower will be inundated, and the edifice will collapse. What started out as a collective endeavor — the product of the commons — quickly became a wasteful and risky private enterprise — a house of cards. Bruegel’s allegory was a warning against greed and pride, directed at the rich and powerful Antwerp bankers and merchants of his day. (Their ships are anchored in the harbor, and stevedores are shown unloading bricks from barges.)  But his picture also addresses the boomerang of nature — the idea that exploitation of the environment for purposes of vanity or profit will finally lead to humanity’s own destruction. When natural surplus is exhausted, nature takes its revenge.

Frans Hals, The Regentesses of the Old Men’s Home in Haarlem,1663, The Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem.

Frans Hals, The Regentesses of the Old Men’s Home in Haarlem,1663, The Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem.

Frans Hals was a painter who lived in the 17th Century during what has been called the “Dutch Golden Age.” It’s called that because The Netherlands at the time had greater economic and political power than any other country in the world, excepting China. It was in short, hegemonic. That means its manufactured goods were cheaper and of higher quality than those of any other country, allowing them to penetrate and dominate the global market. In addition, its merchants controlled trade with the resource-rich Baltic states and exercised a monopoly on exchange with Asia. Private wealth, based upon manufactures and the trade of valuable commodities, was the basis of Dutch hegemony, and there was little space for the commons. Hegemony however is hard to attain and even harder to keep, and by the time of Hals picture, England and France had begun to challenge Dutch military power and undercut its economic dominance.

Dutch men and women of the age used some of their wealth to buy paintings, leading to a flourishing of the art form as almost never before. Rembrandt van Rijn, Johannes Vermeer, and Frans Hals were the three greatest painters of the Dutch Golden Age, though only one of them, Rembrandt, was fully recognized at the time for his genius. What he, Vermeer and Hals did in different ways was to recognize that Dutch Capitalism (they wouldn’t have used that word) generated poverty as well as wealth, and that the unyielding desire for profit took a toll on the body and soul. It destroyed the idea and reality of the commons.

Consider the painting above. It represents the women who run an alms house (a kind of retirement home for the destitute) of the sort the 80-year-old Hals himself depended on at the end of his life. He shows them in their typical costume — black gowns with starched collars and cuffs, and lace caps — in a dark interior. The artist reveals their dignity and perhaps kindness, too. Note the faint smile (is it benevolence?) of the third woman from the left. Hals clearly wanted to please his sitters — after all, they were paying for the picture. But he can’t help also depicting the emotional distance between the women and the artist/observer, the sense that they look at him as a subject of charity. See particularly the haughty regard of the second woman from the right. And what are we to make of the landscape picture in the background — decidedly un-Dutch in its topography? It represents a place of escape, a realm in which the conflict between rich and poor, power and powerless, are to an extent absent or obviated. That’s where the commons may be found.

William Blake_The Marriage of Heaven and Hell_plate 24_c 1790-4_Fitzwilliam Museum

William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, plate 24, c. 1790-4, Fitzwilliam Museum.

More than a century after the English Civil Wars, the English poet and artist William Blake, sought to revive the spirit of rebellion in the wake of a revolution in France that overturned the monarchy. He did so, in a splendid, handmade book The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. There, God (the father) is condemned for being judgmental and rule bound. And Satan is praised for his energy and imagination: “Exuberance is beauty!” Blake writes. His archetypal image of monarchy shows mad and deposed Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, crawling on hands and knees. [“Thy kingdom is departed from thee…and thy dwelling shall be with the beasts of the field: they shall make thee to eat grass as oxen” (Daniel 4:30-32.)]  Blake’s contemporaries knew he was referring not so much to the Babylonian monarch as the English one, King George IV, whose bouts with dementia were a source of scandal and concern. Elsewhere Blake wrote: “The whole business of man is the arts and all things common.” By that he meant that business — making things for the sake of profit, not need — is inhuman; only creative work, performed for the sake of the community — the commons — represents fundamental human nature.

Philip James de Loutherbourg,Coalbrookdale at Night, 1801, London, Science Museum

Philip James de Loutherbourg, Coalbrookdale at Night, 1801, London Science Museum.

Coalbrookdale is a village in Shropshire, England famous for its ironworks. Prior to about 1700, iron was smelted there using charcoal made from burning wood. After that, coke (derived from locally mined coal) was used, permitting greatly increased production. And it was iron — used for building steam engines, trains, rails, ships, and farm machinery — that created the Industrial revolution. Most of the ironworks at Coalbrookdale are now closed but the Iron Bridge (1777) crossing the River Severn remains as testimony to the industrial ambitions of the era.

De Loutherbourg’s painting of Coalbrookdale at Night is at once a celebration of the energy unleashed by a coke-fired blast furnace and an early reckoning with its environmental consequences. The orange flames from the furnace suggest a natural cataclysm like the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, described then as “sublime.” But the adjacent landscape is shown as blighted — largely emptied of trees, shrubs, meadows, and any other traces of the commons, what William Blake at the time called England’s “green and pleasant land.” “This destroys that”, the painting says, but the artist was not yet clear whether this constituted progress or regression.

“Les mystères de l’Infini", J.J. Grandville, Un Autre Monde, (Paris: H. Fournier), 1844

J.J. Grandville,  “Les mystères de l’Infini", Un Autre Monde, (Paris: H. Fournier), 1844.

Grandville was among the most imaginative artists of the 19th Century. His first successful book, Metamorphosis of Days (1828-29), illustrated animals in human costume enacting what the novelist Balzac called “The Human Comedy.” It was probably unfair of him to depict animals as vain and selfish — humans alone are guilty of those sins. But in doing so, he revealed the corruption of his times better than any conventional journalist could have. Soon in fact, he became a kind of a journalist, a political caricaturist, and one so effective he caught the attention of the state censors who put a stop to his work. After that, and until his premature death in 1847 at the age of 44, he was a book illustrator of an unusually creative kind: he at once faithfully illustrated the texts he was given (Don Quixote,Gulliver’s TravelsRobinson CrusoeFables of la Fontaine, etc), and took such license that the images stand free of the texts that surround them, as if they were free renderings of dreams. If Freud had been alive in France in the 1840s, he would have asked Grandville to be his collaborator! “I don’t invent,” Grandville wrote, “I just juxtapose dissimilar things and interweave discordant and incongruous forms.”

Grandville’s next to last book, Un Autre Monde> (Another World) was not an illustration of another writer’s work — it was his own, extended dream. The story is barely coherent. It concerns three people: a con man, a sailor and a composer who set off, like the crew of the Starship Enterprise to discover new worlds. And they do, but each is a kind of inversion of Earth. In one, trans culture is the rule; in another, women ogle men; and in a third, it is the French who are considered exotic beings while the Chinese are the metropolitan elite. (This was during a period of virulent, European racism.) In the plate shown here, the various worlds are tied together by a modern bridge. The universe has become a single community composed of interlinked member-chapters that stretch on into infinity. In this book, Grandville was not only a satirist, he was a utopian, imagining a restored commons in which nations and people joined together despite their differences and imaginations ran free,. “Another world is possible” was the slogan of anti-globalist and anti-capitalist protestors beginning in the 1990s, and climate activists today. Grandville would have stood shoulder to shoulder with them.

Robert S Duncanson_Landscape with Rainbow 1859_Smithsonian American Art Museum

Robert S Duncanson_Landscape with Rainbow 1859_Smithsonian American Art Museum.

By the middle of the 19th Century, the idea of the commons was often represented by the image of nature. At a time when more and more of the natural world in Europe and America was being bought, sold, divided, and subdivided for the sake of exploitation and profit, artists and writers emphasized the beauty and timelessness of the natural world. They proposed, as the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau had, that “the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody." For the African American landscape artist and abolitionist Robert S. Duncanson, nature was the place where a harmonious relationship between people and nature, or just people and people, could be pictured. His >Landscape with Rainbow, painted in 1859, just as the storm clouds of Civil War gathered, was the image of a generous land, governed by people who appreciated it for its majesty — mountains, lakes and even a rainbow — not for its value as an investment.

Currier and Ives, Across the Continent: Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way, 1868.

Currier and Ives, Across the Continent: Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way, 1868.

Nathaniel Currier and James Ives were not artists but entrepreneurs who styled themselves “the Grand Central Depot for Cheap and Popular Prints”. Their business, begun 1835, consisted of acquiring the rights to existing paintings or commissioning new works, reproducing them via lithography (a relatively new reproductive technology), and selling them as cheaply as possible to as many people as possible consistent with a reasonable profit. They were enormously successful, and by the time their firm folded in 1907, they had published at least 7,500 lithographs. Currier died in 1888 and Ives in 1895.

Their subjects of Currier and Ives prints were generally popular and easily understood: fires, battle scenes, (the Civil War made them rich), sporting events, natural disasters, crimes and patriotic subjects. One of their most successful and best known prints was Across the Continent: Westward the Course of Empire Takes its Way (1868),  representing a stop in the Pacific (sometimes called Trans-Continental) Railroad. As the coal-powered train at right belches smoke, men at lower left harvest timber, women hold babies, children go to school, and covered wagons at left depart to establish additional settler communities. All the while, the Native Americans at right (they probably represent Great Plains tribes, including Comanche, Kiowa, Southern Cheyanne, and Arapaho), watch from a respectful distance. The completion of the railroad a year later was understood at the time and often still today, as a milestone in the establishment of a fully continental United States. But in the light of the Anthropocene, the picture must be understood as representing a catastrophe. The completion of the railroad enabled the rapid exploitation of western water, timber, mineral and soil resources, and the decimation or extinction of countless plant and animal species. Moreover, the traditional culture and society of the Native Americans shown in the lithograph was nearly destroyed by an industrial capitalist order that demanded the ruthless expropriation of nature and exploitation of labor.

Finally, the finished railroad fostered the attitude, inimical to the traditional beliefs of the Native Americans in the picture, that nature’s bounty was limitless and that fortune and fame lay just around the next bend in the tracks. That was of course true for some, but even in the 19th Century, great wealth often engendered great poverty as well as the ravishing of the landscape. Today, the failure to live sustainable — to restore to the land the nutrients taken from it, protect the purity of air and water, and respect native populations — has created a crisis that threatens the survival of human civilization itself. Currier and Ives “Westward the Course of Empire” — a token of “Manifest Destiny”, the idea that white men were fated to control the American continent — is at the very least, a quaint image; it may amore properly be considered a tragic picture, connoting a future that is deeply imperiled.

Gustave Courbet, The Wave, Museum of Fine Arts, Lyon, 1869

Gustave Courbet, The Wave, Museum of Fine Arts, Lyon, 1869.

In mid 19 century France, experimental artists such as Gustave Courbet depicted mountains and cliffs, grottos, oak trees, and even an ocean wave as expressions of resistance to the expropriation of nature and exploitation of labor. In 1871, Courbet supported the Commune, the ill-fated revolt of communitarian Parisians against a repressive state. Two years before, his painting The Wave was an artistic revolution. It shocked audiences by its failure to provide a stable point of view or perspective. Instead, viewers are buffeted by the force of wind and tide. Nature has seized control, and no monarch, minister, government, or corporation dare challenge it. Such was the inspiration of nature at a time was political freedom was threatened. That dialectic remains powerful today; conservation equals emancipation!

Camille Pissarro, Apple Picking at Epte, 1888. Dallas Museum of Art

Camille Pissarro, Apple Picking at Epte, 1888. Dallas Museum of Art.

In the generation after Courbet, the French Impressionst Camille Pissarro went further than any other artist of his time in proposing the idea of a natural commons. Conversant with the writings of the French geographer Elisee Reclus, as well as the Russian anarchist geographer Peter Kropotkin, Pissarro created a number of majestic figure paintings, such as Apple Pickers at Epte that configure the fragile balance of humans and nature. In these works, Pissarro deployed an arcing horizon line to describe the vastness of the earth itself and the interconnection of all its parts. They recall Reclus’ summation of the ecological principle: “Man is nature becoming self-conscious,” and the utopian dream of harmony between laboring humans and the natural world.

Wheatfield in Rain, Vincent van Gogh, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1889

Wheatfield in Rain, Vincent van Gogh, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1889.

Van Gogh excelled at the conventional genres of art (portraits, still lives and landscapes) but he painted in an unconventional manner. He selected his colors based not so much upon their relation to the thing seen, but to the world felt. As a result, his landscapes are highly expressive and even abstract, like the landscape shown here, painted from the artist’s window in the asylum of St-Paul-de-Mausole in St. Remy, (Provence) France in November 1889. The rain is depicted with long strokes of grey-black paint set against the blue-grey sky and hills above, or as diagonal strokes of blue-grey against the green and aqua of the rows of plants in the walled garden below. The rain falls in sheets, as if it were the biblical Deluge.

Because of his institutionalization at St. Remy and subsequent suicide, Van Gogh is often considered to have been mentally ill and a solitary genius. The first proposition is unlikely, though evidence permitting a firm diagnosis is absent. (He may have suffered from a type of epilepsy or temporal lobe seizures.) But the second is demonstrably untrue; he sought to create a community of artists to realize his dreams of community and mutual support. That was his goal of coming to Provence in the first place in the fall of 1888 — to create in collaboration with the artist Paul Gauguin and others, a “Studio of the South”. Together, they would constitute a team or council, fighting for their right to fair treatment by the art establishment in Paris and for adequate resources — food, housing, artist’s materials — with which to thrive.

Wheatfield in the Rain is in part a concession of the failure of that collective dream. But the elevated perspective — the view from “higher ground” — announces that it may be possible to see beyond the current darkness to a new order in the future. The riot of greens and blues in the walled field, and the exuberant paint handling, suggests a dream of future abundance.

The Fourth Estate, Also known as "The Path of Workers", Giuseppe Pelizza da Volpedo, Museo del Novecento, Milan, 1901

The Fourth Estate, Also known as "The Path of Workers", Giuseppe Pelizza da Volpedo, Museo del Novecento, Milan, 1901.

Volpedo’s grand picture (almost 10’ high by 18’ long) was painted as a response to Georges Seurat’s >A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of the Grand-Jatte (1886, The Art Institute of Chicago). Whereas the latter was concerned with the middle and lower middle-classes, the former was focused on workers. And whereas Seurat used small, bright points of complementary colors to celebrate the relaxation of men, women and children on their single, weekly day of rest, Pelizza deployed color dots to highlight the solidarity of industrial workers (all dressed in drab brown and grey) on a day when they have walked off the job, striking for better wages and working conditions, or perhaps for ownership of the business enterprise itself. Several of the people depicted in the imagined scene were family or friends of the artist, including at right, Teresa Bidone, the wife of the artist, holding their baby.

Because of its incendiary subject matter, conservative Italian arts officials for decades refused to exhibit the picture, but after World War II, it was taken out of storage and displayed at the Museum of Modern Art in Milan. Today, it is one of the best known of all modern paintings and is understood to represent the aspiration — if not the reality — of modern workers banding together to challenge the greed and frequent violence of modern, capitalist production. More broadly, it is seen as an expression of the very idea of solidarity — of the sacrifice of individual ego for the protection of the commons. That’s why the picture has so often been copied, imitated and adapted by progressive movements — women, indigenous or marginalized communities, and workers all over the world, as in the two examples here from Volpedo, Italy, and the Dominican Republic.

The Fourth Estate, Settimio Bendusi, Dominican Republic, 2012

The Fourth Estate, Settimio Bendusi, Dominican Republic, 2012

The Migrants of Vopledo, Federica Castellana, 2015

The Migrants of Vopledo, Federica Castellana, 2015

Claude Monet, Waterloo Bridge: Fog Effect, 1903, St. Petersburg, Hermitage Museum

Claude Monet, Waterloo Bridge: Fog Effect, 1903, St. Petersburg, Hermitage Museum

In the winter of 1900, the Impressionist artist Claude Monet made a series of trips to London to paint Waterloo Bridge, Charing Cross Bridge, and the Houses of Parliament. He loved the city and its monuments, he wrote, “but what I love, above all, is the fog.” In all, he completed 37 pictures of London including Waterloo Bridge: Fog Effect, which is one of his most abstract and nebulous.

Despite the Gershwin song, (“A foggy day”), London is not naturally foggy. Its murky reputation is derived from the fact that until passage of the Clean Air Act in 1956, the city was heated mostly with low-grade, sulfurous coal. The resulting smoke, combined with countercyclonic winter winds and moisture, produced a thick burning smog that choked eyes and mouths and could even be fatal, as it was for more than 10,000 people during the Great Smog of early December 1952.

The weather during Monet’s visit in the Winter of 1900 was especially damp, contributing to the formation of smog that at its heaviest, obscured the contours of the Houses of Parliament, Charing Cross and Waterloo Bridge. No wonder Monet loved the fog — it was an Impressionist landscape even before he painted it! Waterloo Bridge illustrates what may be called the “pre-Anthropocene,” when local ecologies were transformed and degraded by human activity, but the climate of the earth as a whole remained out of human reach.

“From every Southern town, migrants left by the hundreds to travel North.”, The Migration Series, No. 3, Jacob Lawrence
1940-41, The Phillips Collection, Washington D.C., Acquired 1942

“From every Southern town, migrants left by the hundreds to travel North”, The Migration Series, No. 3, Jacob Lawrence, 1941, Phillips Collection, Washington D.C.

Lawrence’s series of 60 painted panels tells the story of the migration of African Americans from the South to the North from about 1910 to 1940. The migrants fled crop failure, unemployment, poverty and most of all racism and violence. Though lynching peaked in the 1890s, it continued well into the 20th Century, and in 1915, the Ku Klux Klan was revived, following its positive depiction in D.W. Griffith’s epic film, The Birth of a Nation. Twenty-five years later, as Lawrence was contemplating his series (and completing sets of paintings dedicated to Harriet Tubman and Frederic Douglas), Gone with the Wind (directed by Victor Fleming), was given an Academy Award, helping perpetuate the myth that the Civil War was a noble “Lost Cause” waged by Southerners to protect a way of life, instead of a war to perpetuate slavery. Lawrence’s series was cinematic in its own way. Each vividly colored panel follows the next like shots in a movie, and the narrative pivots between past and present, rural and urban, agriculture and industry, and oppression and liberation.

The panel shown here represents the Migration as a force of nature. The migrants form a pyramid, echoing the shape of the hills beyond them and the migrating birds above. The panel thus also reminds us that the Migration was both a response to an existing ecological crisis and precipitated a new one. Reliance by southern land holders upon just a few crops, especially cotton, led to a crash when the weevil devastated cotton crops during the first two decades of the 20th century, increasing Black migration. On the other hand, the movement north, permitted acceleration of the fossil fuel economy — coal, oil and gas extraction, and concrete, steel, and automobile manufactures — that set the stage for the Anthropocene, the present age when release of greenhouse gases (especially CO2 and methane) has warmed the planet to the point of catastrophe. We are already seeing a new “great migration” of climate refugees, from the southern to the northern hemisphere, and in the U.S. from flooded areas on the coasts to higher ground inland.

Marian Anderson, opera singer, singing with hands clasped and wearing a pin in the shape of the Royal Canadian Air Force pilot’s wing pin badge (detail), Photographer Unknown, 1942

Marian Anderson, opera singer, singing with hands clasped, wearing a pin of the Royal Canadian Air Force. Photographer Unknown, 1942

The child of working-class parents and the granddaughter of an enslaved man, Marian Anderson’s early life in Philadelphia was marked by hardship and discrimination. Despite possessing extraordinary vocal talents, she was denied a place in a local music academy due to the color of her skin. She nevertheless persevered, and with the love and support of family, friends, her Baptist Church, and later benefactors including Julius Rosenwald and Eleanor Roosevelt, she attracted the attention of major composers, conductors, and impresarios. By the late 1930s, she was generally considered among the greatest vocalists in the world.

Nevertheless, Anderson continued to face prejudice at home. In 1939, the racist Daughters of the American Revolution denied her the opportunity to sing at Constitution Hall in segregated Washington D.C. The refusal led to mass demonstrations and the hasty organization of a triumphant recital on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial before 75,000 people. That event was partially reprised 24 years later when Anderson sang on the same spot as part of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, best known as the civil rights rally at which Martin Luther King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech. Anderson performed an immensely moving version of the Black spiritual, "He’s Got the Whole World in his Hands."

He’s got everybody here in His hands
He’s got you and me, brother, in His hands
He’s got you and me, sister, in His hands
He’s got everybody here in His hands
He’s got the whole world
He’s got the whole world in His hands

Though the pronoun “He” refers to God or Jesus Christ, the imagery is not so much of divine munificence as of human unity and mutual aid — the commons — conveyed by the imagery of cradling hands. That same message was reiterated a little later of course, by King when he said he dreamed that: “one day right down in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.”

The photo of Marian Anderson, part of the U.S. Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information collection at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C., shows the singer frontally and nearly half-length, with hands clasped together, the better to sing from the chest or diaphragm. But the gesture of interlocked hands, a motif with a long history in art, was not only about vocal discipline. It also suggests prayer, hopefulness, interdependence, and mutuality. Mutual aid is not charity — the bestowal of something of value by the rich to the poor. It’s an expression of the idea, also expressed in King’s speech, that “we cannot walk alone,” and that the freedom of one is dependent upon the freedom of all. That sentiment is even more essential today as we confront a global environmental and climate crisis.

 

Haverstraw, New York. Interracial activities at Camp Christmas Seals, where children are aided by the Methodist Camp Service. Camp buddies, Gordon Parks, Library of Congress, August (?) 1943

Camp buddies Haverstraw, New York. Interracial activities, Camp Christmas Seals, Methodist Camp Service., Gordon Parks, Library of Congress, August (?) 1943

Gordon Parks was one of the great, photographic chroniclers of mid and later 20th Century American life. After World War II, he worked for Life, where his photo essays on a gang leader in Harlem (1948) and segregated black life in Alabama (1956) earned him international renown. He went on to photograph celebrities and political leaders including Marilyn Monroe, Stokely Carmichael, Malcom X, Muhammed Ali, and Barbara Streisand, compose music, write an autobiography (The Learning Tree, 1963; made into a film in 1969), and direct the classic, “blaxploitation” film, Shaft, (1971) starring Richard Roundtree.

Parks took up photography in 1937 at the age of 25, and three years later was asked to join the Farm Service Administration (FSA) and work alongside Walker Evans, Dorothea Lang, Carl Mydans and others to document the nation’s dire economic and social conditions. These were the last years of the Great Depression, and as bad as conditions were for white Americans, they were even worse for African Americans who suffered from violence, employment and housing discrimination, and legal segregation across the U.S. South. Parks himself suffered from race-based abuse during his time with the FSA in Washington, D.C. from 1942-1945. “In this radiant, historic place,” he wrote, “racism was rampant.”

In 1943, just after the FSA was disbanded, Parks was assigned by the Office of War Information to travel to upstate New York to take pictures at an experimental, integrated Boys Scouts of America camp. The results are some of the most optimistic and poignant of Park’s long life. Black and white children are shown together swimming, playing sports, eating and just enjoying each other’s company. The photograph shown here is remarkable for its low perspective, making the two girls at the center of it appear heroic. The white child gazes out with an appraising glance while the black child at right offers a penetrating gaze into the camera-eye. Nearly all the photos of children and adults at Camp Christmas Seals reveal a casual, physical and emotional closeness between black and white that Parks rarely saw elsewhere.

Andy Warhol, Campbell’s Soup Cans, New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1962

Andy Warhol, Campbell’s Soup Cans, New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1962

Andy Warhol is as widely recognized as any artist who ever lived. The reason is that he helped establish the very cult of celebrity that made him famous. In addition to his portraits of Jackie, Elvis and Marilyn (no last names needed), Warhol depicted consumer products like Campbell’s soup. The 32 cans shown here are all individually hand painted, an ironic allusion to the mass production that was the real basis of capitalist production and consumption. (Later in 1962, Warhol embraced the silkscreen process and dropped the irony.)

Warhol was perhaps the first artist of the Anthropocene. He began his career in advertising, the archetypal industry of the new epoch because it stimulated vastly increased demand for consumer products – new homes, automobiles, appliances, electronics, entertainment and air travel — that relied upon fossil fuels.

In the decades after 1950, a period named by US climate researcher Will Steffen, “The Great Acceleration,” energy and water consumption, population, tourism, fertilizer use, and transportation all grew by orders of magnitude. At the same time, atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane, stratospheric ozone, tropical forest loss, and ocean acidification grew in lockstep. And the last few years have seen a succession of record breaking global temperatures. Warhol depicted the commodity culture that as much as anything else accelerated climate change.

Pioneer Plaque, designed by Carl Sagan & Frank Drake; artwork by Linda Salzman Sagan, 1972

Pioneer Plaque, designed by Carl Sagan & Frank Drake; artwork by Linda Salzman Sagan, 1972 

In 1972, the unmanned Pioneer 10 space probe was launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida. Its mission was to photograph and collect data from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, the planet Jupiter, and then the furthest reaches of the solar system. After that, it would depart the solar system — the first human made object to ever do so. The probe continued to send diminishing quantities of signals for another 30 years, until it went silent on January 23, 2003.

A plaque attached to the spacecraft was intended to provide basic information about the Pioneer mission and the civilization responsible for it, in case it was discovered by intelligent life. It depicts the electromagnetic activation of hydrogen, the most abundant element in the universe (upper left); the position of the sun within the galaxy (center left); the figures of a man and a woman (center right); and the movement of Pioneer 10 through the solar system (bottom). The astronomers Carl Sagan and Frank Drake conceived the plaque and Linda Salzman Sagan — an artist and writer married to Carl Sagan — created the design. She did a great job, but why does the man (not the woman) raise hand, and why does he have genitals but she doesn’t? And what about intersex people, old people, and children? No other animals? No plants?

The Pioneer Plaque was the product of a utopian-humanist tradition that extended back to Leonardo’s so-called Vitruvian Man which shows a man inscribed within a circle and a square, attesting to the consonance of human and ideal geometric forms. Other such monuments include astronomical drawings by Copernicus and Galileo and studies of human proportion by Albrecht Durer and Andreas Vesalius. But the plaque design seems more closely related to the Swiss architect Le Corbusier’s drawing called The Mudulor (1943), which also shows a man with one arm raised. That design was intended to become a universal basic measure for architectural proportion. 

All of these designs had in common the idea that there existed in nature certain forms and ratios that superseded cultural difference. If we could but identify them, we could establish a formal language that could unite the world, as if the Tower of Babel had never been built. In 1972, four years after the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, and as the Vietnam war still raged, the need for such unity was manifest. Perhaps celebration of Earth Day in 1970 and establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency the same year, meant that a new, global consciousness was at last arising? Clearly, the plaque was designed for earthlings, not aliens from other worlds. 

In the mid twentieth century, the ecologist Rachel Carson in her essential book, Silent Spring, described the ignorance and greed that allowed government and business to unleash a barrage of insecticides on the earth that not only destroyed agricultural pests, but birds, animals, and human health along with them. A few years ago, the young, environmental activist Greta Thunberg in a speech at the United Nations decried the drive for mammon that enabled corporations and their government sponsors to destroy the very future of civilized human life on earth: “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words….We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you.” Her language is biblical, and the imagery — dreams, childhood, theft, and money — recalls the representation of last days on the tympanum at Autun.

Every succeeding revolution or liberation struggle, including the U.S. Civil Rights, anti-War (1966-73) and Environmental movements (1954-present). generated their own motivating imagery. Here are two from 1967-1970 that speak for themselves.

Lorraine Schneider, War is not healthy for Children and other Living Things, 1967. Private Collection

Lorraine Schneider, War is not healthy for Children and other Living Things, 1967. Private Collection.

Walt Kelly and Swamp Yankee Studios, “We have met the enemy and he is us,” 1971. Private Collection

Walt Kelly and Swamp Yankee Studios, “We have met the enemy and he is us,” 1971. Private Collection

Bill Anders, Earthrise, NASA, 1968

Bill Anders, Earthrise, 1968. Photo: NASA

This dramatic, color photograph, usually called Earthrise, was one of several taken on December 24, 1968 by astronaut Bill Anders as part of the NASA Apollo 8 mission to circle the moon and return safely to Earth. Anders described the picture’s genesis:

After the first two-and-a-half to three orbits… we rolled [the lunar capsule] over, heads up and turned around, going forward, like you would be driving a car around the moon. I don’t know who said it, maybe all of us said, ‘Oh my God. Look at that!’ And up came the Earth. We had had no discussion on the ground, no briefing, no instructions on what to do. I jokingly said, ‘well it’s not on the flight plan,’ and the other two guys were yelling at me to give them cameras….and we started snapping away.

Though photographers on piloted balloons and airplanes had long taken photos of the land from the sky, nobody had ever before taken a photo of the Earth from the moon. Seeing the Earth in this way – its living colors suspended over the bleak grey-brown of the surface of the moon – told a story that had been gathering force since the late 18th Century: that planetary life was a rare and precious thing, and that it must be protected and nurtured.

The modern environmental movement is often said to have been started by Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring, which described how uncontrolled pesticide and herbicide use had decimated bird populations and created springtimes without any songs. It also specified the toll on human health of chemical pesticides. But the Christmas Eve, 1968 Apollo 8 photograph from the moon may have had an even bigger impact. Two years later, the US Environmental Protection Agency was formed and two years after that. The first Earth Day was celebrated in 1970 and Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth were established in 1971.

Today, in the age of climate change, the photograph has gained even greater poignancy. It reminds us that the fate of life on Earth is now in human hands and that people everywhere have the capacity and responsibility to join together to protect the commons. Anthropocene Alliance is part of that global effort.