Some call this age, our age, the Anthropocene. It means that in this age, human activity is exerting the dominant influence on Earth. Humans have changed everything from the carbon cycle to the water cycle, and have completely disrupted the Earth’s systems and functions. We have transformed every ecological niche on earth, and in most cases, not for the better.
No one can deny that humans have had an outsized role in the terraforming, manufacturing, standardizing, and domination of the world. This fact — that humans have had the ability to transform and leverage so much of the environment for our uses, has led us to have a subtle but pernicious understanding of ourselves: that we are separate from nature somehow, like demi-gods on Earth with the power to transcend our limits, exceeding beyond any other creature. But as Lewis Mumford wrote, “man is nevertheless no god.”
So, what is this… anthropos? What are humans, really? What are the key qualities that make us — this animal that has so much potential for creation and destruction? That is what we explore in this film, laying down a conceptual and philosophical framework that will inform the rest of our work in upcoming episodes of Death in The Garden.
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